There is an American poet, Charles Reznikoff, who does this kind of thing very well. He has a poem exhorting the reader not to despise a shining green jewel simply because it happens to be a traffic light.

  This is very good indeed.

  Do not despise…

  That could be a credo.

  Yes.

  At different times in my life I have returned to Basho’s frog haiku, Furuike ya…. I have written about it excessively. But then even the inestimable Dr Suzuki has been driven to excess in discussing it. He told me once that he thought the little leap of the frog was just as weighty as Adam’s Fall from the Garden of Eden, for here too was a truth revealing the secrets of creation.

  I nodded, sagely, then I laughed, and he asked why.

  I said there had been some execrable translations, especially of that untranslatable last line.

  The best, I said (and worst), going for full onomatopoeic effect, was Waterish splish-splosh. It makes it sound as if Basho has fallen in.

  Suzuki gave a low chuckle, did his best to pronounce the line.

  Waterish splish-splosh.

  There goes Adam, I said.

  Nevertheless…

  The power of the poem persists. Like a koan it opens out, expands beyond itself.

  Furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto

  The old pond:

  A frog jumps in –

  The sound of water

  The pond is old, in an old garden. The surrounding trees are ancient, the trunks green with moss. The silence is timeless, it reaches far back beyond man and all his noise.

  A frog jumps in.

  The silence is broken. The whole garden, the whole universe is contained in one single plop! It is the soundless sound, a sound that is beyond sound, and silence, and yet, and yet, it is the sound of the water of the old pond.

  In my Zen in English Literature I gave a laboured explanation of the poem, covering eight pages. I have changed my mind.

  My translation obscures something fundamental in the original, something that belongs to the Japanese mind and language.

  The empty spaces in pictures.

  The absence of things in rooms.

  The silences in conversation.

  This something is a lack of division and separation, a sense of the whole when dealing with the parts.

  What was it Basho omitted to say?

  When he heard ‘the sound of water,’ the sound of this water, he heard the sound of all nature.

  This might be better, more true.

  The old pond:

  The sound

  Of a frog jumping into the water.

  But Basho’s real and imagined experience might be rendered:

  The old pond:

  The-sound-of-a-frog-jumping-into-the water.

  Or perhaps the best rendition after all would be simply:

  The old pond:

  A frog jumps in –

  Plop!

  There. Let that be an end of it.

  Plop!

  I have written much (some would say too much) on my love of haiku. They have been a consolation and a joy. But in my later years I have to say I have loved senryu even more, in their ability to thumb the nose at humanity, to cock a snook at authority, to laugh in the face of adversity (and of prosperity).

  And after all, solemnity and sanctimoniousness are not, let us hope, inevitable to religion.

  Thank God.

  (And I do actually believe God laughed the Universe into being).

  In the beginning was the joke.

  A blockhead bit by fleas put out the light,

  And chuckling, cried, ‘Now you can’t see to bite!’

  Zen is the religion of disrespectful respect and respectful disrespect. It has something of Sam Weller in it, and nowhere more so than in senryu.

  A good senryu is no respecter of persons, or rather it respects all persons utterly and not at all. It is most definitely no respecter of rank and position and privilege.

  The T’ang Emperor Genso was the most powerful man of his age, and his concubine the Princess Yokihi was regarded as the most beautiful woman in China (and therefore in the world).

  Here they are, pinned to the page.

  The Emperor Genso

  Sobs and sobs,

  Picking his ears.

  Princess Yokihi,

  Her beautiful face,

  Eating pork chops.

  And a wry look at their relationship, rendering them as everyman and everywoman:

  Making him grateful to her

  That she loves him

  More than her own life.

  Of course no poet of the time could have written these lines and kept his head, unless, perhaps the Emperor Genso and the Princess Yokihi were blessed with a sense of humour. And it seems to me humour is a kind of practical transcendence. It raises us above the mundane while keeping us grounded in it.

  And yet I doubt if senryu will ever be as popular as haiku. After all, who can object to haiku? They are small and inoffensive, are generally about nature. (And who does not profess a love of nature?) So haiku are allowed, even admired, by people whose lives are diametrically opposed to the haiku way of living (as long as they can keep their television set, their luxury home, their fast car…)

  Senryu are something else again – scathing, satirical, often downright vicious. They do not make comfortable reading.

  The husband –

  When his wife dies,

  He sends a letter to the other.

  The other here is, the other woman.

  It was ever thus.

  Of course there is a danger inherent in senryu, that they may descend into vulgarity, as waka can descend into sentimentality and haiku into insipidity and inanity.

  Them’s the risks.

  I find myself once again thinking of Thoreau..

  How hard it is to remember

  What is most memorable.

  We remember how we itched,

  Not how our hearts beat.

  But then again, perhaps in itching we are most fully alive.

  There was a young lady from Natchez,

  Whose clothes were in tatters and patches.

  When asked to digress

  On the state of her dress,

  She replied, ‘When I itches, I scratches.’

  Did I write that? What it lacks in profundity it gains in vigour.

  Let me turn once more to senryu.

  The weaknesses of men –

  They escape from them

  To the graveyard.

  I can no longer remember who wrote that, but the translation is my own. As is this:

  The way back from the cemetery.

  How far away…

  How long ago…

  And this:

  Watching the stream

  Watching

  My life.

  Have I become jaded and cynical in my old age? Or have I always been so?

  Whatever the truth of it, I have to say my favourite senryu is this:

  Someone trying his sword

  On a chance wayfarer –

  Jizo looks on, calmly

  An arrogant disaffected samurai has purchased a new sword. To test the quality of the blade, he tries it out randomly on some hapless innocent who just happens to be passing by, cutting him down and killing him without a qualm. A statue of Jizo looks on, impassive. Jizo, the god of mercy, patron saint of travellers and children.

  I suppose what I like in the poem its serene detachment and, simultaneously, its savage irony. (Or its serene irony, its savage detachment).

  Master Ummon said this: When you meet a swordsman, meet him with a sword. Don’t offer a poem to anyone but a poet.

  The sword, sadly, is mightier than the pen.

  It is written that those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword. But there are times when the opposite holds good, and those who draw not the sword shall also perish by the sword, dragging down the innocent and the guilty alike to share their doom.

  I have watched Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai thee or four times and even though I am a lifelong pacifist I find it thrilling. When I think of the film there is one particular scene that comes to mind. It features the character Kyuzo, the stern-faced Zen warrior, a master swordsman, played by Seiji Miyaguchi. In the scene in question, Kyuzo is on guard at the edge of the village he is trying to protect against marauding bandits. From the quality of the light it is late afternoon, moving towards evening. He is seated beneath a tree, still and unmoving as if in zazen. He is surrounded by small white flowers. He lets his gaze rest on them. He reaches out and touches one, acknowledging its presence, its being. Two bandits, perhaps thinking he is asleep or daydreaming, have been creeping up behind him, ever closer. Alerted by the slightest sound he responds. All-in-one-movement he is on his feet, sword drawn, all-in-one-movement he cuts his enemies down. His concentration is total, his focus one-pointed. Flashing blade.

  This is the Sword of Manjushri, the sword of discrimination, cleaving ignorance.

  I asked Suzuki about this symbolic nature of the sword, and he said it was twofold. One function is to destroy anything that opposes the will of the sword’s owner. The other is to sacrifice the instinct of self-preservation. The first relates to the spirit of patriotism or militarism, while the second has a deeper, religious connotation of loyalty and self-sacrifice. In the first, the sword may mean destruction pure and simple, the symbol of force, sometimes devilish. It must therefore be controlled and consecrated by the second function. Then destruction is turned against the evil spirit. The sword comes to be identified with the annihilation of things which lie in the way of peace, justice, progress, and humanity. It stands for all that is desirable for the spiritual welfare of the world at large.

  I wrote all of this down in a little notebook, intent on recording what Suzuki actually said on the matter. The danger, of course, is of glamourising or fetishising the actual swordblade, glorifying the actual hacking to death of actual human beings.

  Suzuki has been accused of this kind of mythologising, condoning violence. And yes, in these times he too has his critics, many of them hostile in the extreme. They point to his writings on Bushidō, the way of the warrior. He has praised the samurai spirit, the virtue of Hagakure, translated as Hidden under the Leaves, the ideal of working selflessly for the good of mankind. But he is accused of conflating this with ideas of military conquest, pan-Asian expansion, colonisation. He is even accused of sympathising with the Nazis, identifying with their reliance on the Will.

  Yet when the Pacific War came to an end, he spoke of the conflict as useless and meaningless, caused by the ambitions of ignorant and power-thirsty militarists.

  At the outset of that war, he wrote – memorably, I think – that all things move along a line of the inevitable, and mere human powers are altogether helpless to shape their own course.

  For my part I have already put it on record that Suzuki is the sanest and wisest man I have ever known.

  He operates from a level of understanding rarely encountered, where the immanent and the transcendent are one. He knows that everything is relative, and that at the same time everything is absolute. He understands the void in the full and the full in the void.

  Does he contradict himself?

  (He is small, he contains multitudes).

  I must take time in these pages to attempt the almost impossible and pay tribute to what Suzuki-sensei has meant to me. He has been an unfailing guide, mentor, friend, and I have always found it difficult to disagree with anything he wrote – well, almost anything, and if I have ever ventured to criticise him, it has simply been biting the hand that fed me. (No more could I disagree with anything Mozart composed, or Paul Klee painted, or DH Lawrence wrote). A great writer is great in every sentence. A great man is great in every action, as the sea is salt in every drop. Dr Suzuki is a great man, in every cell, in every atom.

  There are some Zen practitioners I have met who seem – how can I put it? – not sufficiently human. They are lacking in human warmth. Oh, they are transcendental all right, but there never seem to have any emotion to transcend. Dr Suzuki is a notable exception.

  He has been criticised (of course he has) for not engaging in political discourse. But I believe his wisdom transcends all opposites, including political differences.

  I once asked him if the human race is more taken up with war than peace? And has there always been more war than peace in our world? And if that is the case, what is the zen man to do?

  His eyed narrowed under those bushy brows and he replied, Zen does not bring about peace or war. How could it do that? Instead it shows us how to live properly in either.

  Sadly the universe was not made for happiness. Our lives may have peace, but they must also have sorrow.

  Man was made for joy and woe

  And when this we rightly know

  Through the world we safely go.

  To rightly know is the whole story.

  Bob Aitken wrote to me, years ago, about hearing Suzuki speak during a lecture tour of the US.

  He said the Master would begin, in a quiet voice, and with a raising of those ferocious eyebrows, Lately I have been thinking…

  And the audience would immediately be attentive, alert, leaning forward in their chairs.

  What? What is it he’s lately been thinking?

  I knew exactly what Bob meant. I experienced it every time I heard Suzuki talk. His every utterance felt like the beginning of an adventure. There was a narrative that led the listener on, ever deeper. Come along with me and let’s see where this leads, through twists and turns and chance encounters, challenges and reversals, puzzles and insights and moments of dazzling illumination. And where does it end? With luck, back where we started, in the here and now, ready to begin again.

  Begin again.

  Suzuki is the hub of a great wheel of interconnectedness. He is a one-man Indra’s Net, extending beyond time and space, linked to everything everywhere, and, or so it seems, to everyone.

  I recall him speaking of his former pupil at Gakushuin, Yanagi Soetsu, who had founded the Folk Art Museum in Seoul (the very one I had visited with Akio and Shinki so long ago). Yanagi had opened a similar museum in Tokyo, the Mingeikan in Komaba. At one stage, not long after the war, there had been a move by the occupying forces to requisition the building (and indeed Yanagi’s house next door) as a residence for the Dutch military attache. This would have been an act of cultural barbarism and I added my voice to the widespread protests which in the end were successful.

  On one occasion Suzuki himself took me to the Mingeikan. He told me he thought Yanagi and I had much in common, in our eclecticism, in our borrowing from East and West, our efforts to bridge the gulf between the two.

  For example, he said, he is inspired as much by Blake as by Dogen.

  This was intriguing, but what really caught me was the actual quality of the work. I picked up a little tea-bowl (and that in itself was telling, the fact that I could pick it up – it was not in a glass case as some of the rarer items were). It had a simple rightness about it, the roughness and texture of the glaze, the weight, the perfection of the not-quite-perfect shape, comfortable (and comforting) in the hand.

  I told Suzuki it reminded me of the cheap, everyday bowls I had bought in the markets in Seoul. This had the same feeling of being made for use – form following function – but shaped by something more, the artist’s hand and eye, his consciousness.

  Suzuki nodded and said he was sure Yanagi-san would agree. Then he led me through to a back room and introduced me to the man himself who was bright-eyed and intense, stocky-built with a wide clear forehead, a swept-back mane of thick iron-grey hair. He bowed then shook my hand vigorously, said he was very happy to meet me. He laughed when Suzuki told him what I had just said about the pottery. Yanagi was particularly delighted by the Seoul connection.

  For too long, he said, the heavy hand of Japanese militarism had lain on the Land of Morning Calm.

  I thought of Akio Fujii, refined and cultured, secure in his certainties.

  Yanagi had countered what he called this cultural imperialism by opening that small museum in the old palace building.

  I was there! I said. I went with a colleague.

  Yanagi smiled. It was a place where politics could be left at the door and people could meet together to discuss the things that really matter.

  Art, love, truth and beauty, I said.

  Exactly so!

  Over tea – which I had to drink – a smoky, fragrant bancha he said was from the 200-year-old Ippodo teahouse in Kyoto, served, of course, in exquisite bowls – he spoke with great enthusiasm about his aesthetics, his philosophy. (They were one and the same thing).

  Beginning with the tea – he took a sip, savoured it – he said Cha-no-yu, the art of tea was the way of tea. They could not be separated from each other, or from the craftsmanship involved.

  True craftsmen, he said, work without ego to create a kind of natural beauty. They make things that are plain and simple but marvellous.