The Zen rebels: obscure hermits and existential reformers (part 25) - Shinkichi Takahashi

(Images from the public domain)

A young man still in need of guidance to tamp down his impulsive and rash ways, Shinkichi Takahashi begins to attend Shizan Ashikaga the famed Rinzai master at his temple.  Rushing head long into the strictness of the Rinzai Zen discipline; which includes the shouting to encourage the pupil to understand awakening as an detachment from the self, also included random slaps on the back with the Keisaku stick whilst in sitting meditation.  After the intensiveness of the Koan practice,  known as the Zen riddles, Takahashi, had a nervous breakdown, collapsing in one of the temple hallways.  To which after he is promptly sent home, once again,  back to his small fishing village.  In isolation for over three years, he begins a solidarity process of writing his poems.

Takahashi years later, after isolating himself from the world, completed an extensive collection of writings, eventually returning back to Shizan Ashikaga who offered him no reprieve in the process of gaining enlightenment under the Zen discipline and of course under his watchful eye as Takahashi's master.  This time in his early thirties, Takahashi maintains the course of Zen practice throughout the 1930s and during the conflict of World War Two, by 1951 he is granted his inka, the disciplinary seal of a Zen pupil.  Working at a newspaper in Tokyo, he went onto to publish many of his poems, marrying also in the same year that he became a Zen disciple, to which during the mid to late 1950s the couple had two daughters.  Interest in Takahashi's Zen poems and also his early rendition of the Dadaist prose, began to be noticed.  And by the 1970s, his prominence in the West grew significantly when the first edition of his books were translated into English.  Takahashi was a prolific modern day poet and probably the last of the Zen writers in the sense that he held a registered Zennist discipline, but he is certainly not the last of the poets, both in Japan and the rest of the world.  Who write within their own degrees of suffering, in all of its pleasure and pain of the human creative, that  transpires as the discipline of expression.  A personal journey, that at times, is cryptic within its narration of the past and present; yet sincere in its delivery.  As Zen over the years from the 1970s into the 21st Century, being an age old discipline from the great Ch'an masters of China from the 5th and 6th Centuries, to the recent Japanese Zen Masters that offered to the West a unique Buddhist perspective cultivating the stillness of the dhyāna.  

Zen may have fallen out of favor within Japan and Western Countries over recent times. However, the discipline of the Zen is to know the self as a detachment from the self, the poet, he or she, when mastering the greatness of words and expression, for that brief moment of focus they are not at any particularly place in  time.  They have detached from the burden of the self, without a master or knowing the Zen discipline.  This is the beauty of Zen Buddhism, to be aware is to be unaware and to be unaware is to be aware.

Shinkichi Takahashi passed away in June 4th 1987. I have picked out a collection of my favorite Takahasi's poems: 

Collapse

"Time oozed from my pores,
Drinking tea I tasted the seven seas.
I saw in the mist formed
Around me The fatal chrysanthemum, myself. Its scent choked, and as I Rose, squaring
My shoulders, the earth collapsed."


Destruction

"The universe is forever falling apart— No need to push the button,
It collapses at a finger’s touch: Why, it barely hangs on the tail of a sparrow’s eye.
The universe is so much eye secretion,
Hordes leap from the tips
Of your nostril hairs.
Lift your right hand: It’s in your palm.
There’s room enough
On the sparrow’s eyelash for the whole.
A paltry thing, the universe: Here is all strength, here the greatest strength.
You and the sparrow are one
And, should he wish, he can crush you.
The universe trembles before him."


Sea of Oblivion

Future, past, the sea of oblivion, with present capsized.
Sun splits the sea in two— one half’s already bottled.
Legs spread on the beach, a woman feels the crab of memory crawl up her thigh. Somewhere her lover drowns.
Sand-smeared, bathing in dreams, the young leap against each other.

Clay Image

Near the shrine, humped back, bird on pole—eyes, warm as folded wings, reflect the penumbra of the universe.
On the horizon, a cylindrical building, once bird, now mud and stone.
Birth’s a crack in the ground plan.
Since universe is no bigger than its head, where’s the bird to fly?
Who says bird’s eyelashes are short?
A lump, time rolled from nostril.
Cooling the bird’s hot tongue, the unglazed red clay image.
Its eyes dark, and in their cavities— minute vibrations, earthquakes.

Stone Wall

Flower bursts from stone, in rain and wind dog sniffs and aims a leak.
Butterfly-trace through haze where child splashes.
Over the paper screen, a woman’s legs, white, fast.
No more desire, I’m content.
Later I saw her, hands behind her back— repulsing nothing really, welcoming sun between her thighs.
Near the stone wall, a golden branch.