Matsuo Basho's most celebrated work, The Narrow Road [sometimes translated as "Narrow Journey" ] to the Interior (Jap. Oku no Hosomichi) is also a prosimetrum of sorts, based on a travelogue. In Japanese poetics, this form of hybrid prose-poetry form is called the haibun and is based on the alternation of prose ruminations and compressed poetic thought. To put it more succinctly, Basho's haiku poetry represents the distillation of insight based on the experiences recounted in the prose that surrounds it. While Boethius uses prose and poetry as a sort of formal dialogic device in the Consolation, and in Vita nuova Dante very subtly and disingenuously plays up his poetic authorship, Basho systematically crafts a poetic in which the subjectivity of both writer and reader seem to fuse with pure objectivity. The images Basho sees do not come from outside himself; rather, based on the Buddhist idea of co-dependent origination (pratityasamutpada) the images he sees are not in any way separate from himself.
The notion of co-dependent origination represented aesthetically is present in Basho's work from its start; though the narrative is based on the experiences of a very personal journey (both literal and allegorical) undertaken during a period of hardship in the poet's life, Basho announces that narrative with a reference to the movements of celestial bodies: "The moon and sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home" (Hamill 1). By beginning an ostensibly personal narrative with a reference to celestial bodies, Basho imbues his text with a sense of pantheism that epitomizes the "undoing" characteristic of a haiku's kireji or "cutting words." A reader confronts the poetics of haiku in a similar way as a Zen student confronts a ko'an, a spiritually-productive paradox such as the famous "what was my face before my parents were born?" Basho's personal travelogue is simultaneously an unraveling of the very notion of an independent self.
For the next two weeks we will be reading personal narratives whose ideology challenges the very notion of the integrated, diachronic self. Through the practice of zazen and ruminating on ko'ans which push logic to its very limits, Zen forces a practitioner to question his or her identity before ultimately concluding that such an identity, in fact, does not exist. Ontologically, this stance poses a clear threat to the practice of autobiography. How do you think Buddhist ideology and the genre of autobiography can be reconciled, if at all?
