Pierre Hadot has discussed the deep connections between ancient Western philosophy and spiritual exercises. The author appreciates these connections, but he explains why he explored a different path. He began to write haiku as a form of spiritual practice. He wanted to use these short verses to become more mindful, present, and responsive – in his life and in his work in bioethics. After comparing traditional haiku and modern haiku, the author gives some examples from classical sources. Then he considers (...) how reading and writing haiku might help bioethics to focus less on deliberation and choice, and more on attention and perception. Haiku might help bioethics to attend to the contexts, life conditions, and lifeworlds that shape and situate people’s lives. These short poems might even illuminate some of the backgrounds and existential grounds of ethical life. At the end, the author presents some haiku that he wrote about modern life, young children, older adults, illness, medicine, and death. (shrink)

Le haïku est une poésie japonaise de seulement 17 syllabes. Le Japon compterait 10 millions de haïkistes principalement non professionnels. Chacun compose des haïkus et les montre à des confrères en recherchant une reconnaissance. Mais est-il judicieux de qualifier le haïku d’activité d’amateurs?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Haiku and Analysis:Ryokan and WhiteheadTokiyuki Nobuhara and Jonathan A. SeitzRyokan is famous for his haiku below:焚くほどは風がもて来る落ち葉かなtaku hodo wakaze ga motekuruochiba kanafor my firethe wind brings enoughfallen leavesI believe there is manifestly in Ryokan’s wind poem his faith in the Grace supporting his life and career as a mendicant friar. You could compare this haiku with the last sentence in Alfred North Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality: “In this (...) way, the insistent craving is justified—the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.”1According to my Whiteheadian wind theology, there are four types of wind: wind of Grace; wind of Understanding; wind of Adventure; and wind of Compassion, which very interestingly correspond to Whitehead’s famous four creative phases,2 which might be expressed in my own way in terms of No → bodies language (in the sense that we exist insofar as Nothingness negates itself (No →) in such a way that we exist physically in ourselves (être-en-soi) (→ bodies). Accordingly, the four types of wind might be expressed as follows:wind of Grace: No → bodieswind of Understanding: No → bodies ←wind of Adventure: No → bodies ← →wind of Compassion: No → bodies ← → ← [End Page 199]Here, → or ← signifies opus Dei. I mean that God works in the universe as wind or winds. It is interesting to know that Ryokan has all four types of wind in his poetry—haiku, tanka, and Chinese poems included.Tokiyuki NobuharaKeiwa College, Japan (emeritus)notesTwo books by Tokiyuki Nobuhara treat the work of Ryokan: Ryokan in a Cosmic Age Revisited: In Sync with a Whiteheadian Wind Theology (Niigata: Kokodo Shoten, 2014), and Ryokan in a Cosmic Age: In Sync with Ecological Theologian Thomas Berry (Niigata: Kokodo Shoten, 2013).1. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 351.2. See ibid., pp. 350–351. [End Page 200]Copyright © 2014 University of Hawai‘i Press... (shrink)

The paper concerns a form of experiencing time which is specific for haiku poetry. Haiku is an expression of the momentary glimpse of time. Haiku poetry treats the moment uninstrumentally, neither as a result of the past nor as a transition to future deeds. Seen this way, the moment arises on the stream of time as a unique, existential experience. It is my attempt to explain the phenomenon of this experience of “now” as I explore the metaphors of “background”, “figure” (...) and “composition”. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es volver la mirada a un oficio intelectual y a un producto literario del que se podría decir que no ha enfrentado aún los desafíos que plantea la crítica literaria. El culto y el cultivo del haikú en escritores colombianos reclama hoy horizontes de comprensión propiamente literarios, ya que ante todo son, como cualquier otra expresión literaria, palabra, lenguaje, comunicación y sentido; hay en ellos campos semánticos y visiones de mundo, como hay epistemología, fenomenología (...) e ideología. Poder involucrar todo este andamiaje de reflexión y análisis no desapropiará el haikú de los escritores colombianos de su vínculo con la experiencia sensible e intuitiva recogida de la tradición japonesa. (shrink)

Richard Wright gave a series of lectures in Europe from 1950 to 1956, collected in the following year in the volume, White Man, Listen! One dominant theme in all four essays is that expanding the moral imagination is centrally important in repairing our racism-benighted globe. What makes Wright’s version of this claim unique is his forthright admission that expanding the moral imagination necessarily involves pain and suffering. The best place to hear Wright in regard to the necessary pain of expanding (...) the moral imagination, I would argue, is his poetry collection, This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner. To wit, for Wright the necessary pain of expanding one’s moral imagination is the loneliness that results from delegating to others—in the etymological sense of “deputizing or committing”—one’s whiteness qua privilege or social capital. In conclusion, lonely delegation constitutes an imperative template from Wright regarding the painful expansion of our own moral imagination, in the service of social justice for economically oppressed communities of color across the globe. (shrink)

単眼・一点透視の“遠近法”ではなく、複眼・多様性の“遠近法”の「図式語彙」で読み解く。“図式語彙”による作品解釈の新しい地平。.

In any focus on an aesthetic experience one may find both sensational and cognitive qualities, referred to as the scene and scenario respectively. Hence, an experiencer tries to decipher the scenario —a narration—by sensing the scene —space—through the spatial atmosphere. Thus, space starts to transform into a poetic experience. Japanese architecture, on account of a number of inherent qualities, has the capability to convey such narrations in spaces. In Japanese examples, an experiencer tries to derive the narration that emanates from (...) explicit qualities—sensational, such as textual, visual, audial, or tactile phenomena—with his/her implicit qualities—cognitive/intellectual abilities. The article examines the layer of narration of Japanese architectural structure through haiku 俳句 and haiga 俳画 examples, in doing so, utilizes the layers proposed on behalf of the explicit and implicit qualities: nature-based and feeling-based. (shrink)

Present article tries to give insight into the ways in which Estonian haiku models its author and communicates with the reader. The author thinks that while Japanese haiku is a predominantly autocommunicative piece of literature, where even a fixed point of view is not recommended, Estonian literary conventions are oriented towards openly communicational texts, which convey a fixed axiology and rely on abundant use of pronouns and rhetorical questions, addresses and apostrophes. While there is a considerable amount of Estonian haiku (...) that depend on Estonian literary conventions, most of the Estonian haiku texts, however, are oriented to the Japanese model. These texts have been labelled “the catalogues of landscape”, as they are constituted by naming different landscape objects without developing a line of narration. Thereby every landscape element in poetry is granted its own voice, and through this multitude of voices inside the text, the reader is forced to enter an autocommunicative process of remodelling him/herself. (shrink)

This article explores how the notion ofordinary aestheticscan stem, as well as the one ofordinary ethics, from thatrevolution of the ordinarystarted by Wittgenstein and further developed by philosophers like Cavell and Diamond. The idea ofordinary ethicsemphasizes the importance of everyday life and the particular details of our experiences. This concept can be extended to aesthetics, forming the basis of a modality of aesthetic appreciation that recognize values and importance in the details and nuances of everyday experience. One example of suchordinary (...) aestheticscan be found in thehaikupoetry of Bashō. Bashō’s poetry often focuses on the ordinary and mundane aspects of life, such as the changing of seasons, the sound of rain, or the sight of a bird in flight, but also on that lower world made of insects, rotten foliage, and excrements. Bashō conveys in poetry the core ofZenphilosophy, emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things and the value of living in the present moment. This approach to aesthetics offers an alternative to more traditional modes of aesthetic appreciation, which tend to prioritize grandeur, spectacle, and formal perfection. Ultimately, the concept of ordinary aesthetics invites us to find the intrinsic importance in the simple things that surround us and to cultivate a deeper appreciation for the richness of our everyday lives. (shrink)

Calm is a little-theorized but important link between Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett. Beginning with Beckett, moving on to Barthes, and then interleaving the two, this paper proposes calm as a ‘scandalous’ category not reducible to kindred states like languor or apatheia. In dialogue with theorists of repose, such as Kant and De Quincey, calmness becomes less a sedated condition than an interactive process, entailing intense sensitivity to the fluctuations of what Barthes calls ‘the affective minimal’. Artistically generative, this ‘emotive (...) lucidity’ encourages inquisitiveness towards the natural world, and enables in both writers specific writing practices — from lists to notation to haiku. (shrink)

El siguiente texto es una introducción a la ecocrítica. Se trata el tema de la pertinencia de la ecocrítica, el problema de la división entre ciencias duras y ciencias blandas, el del antropocentrismo en la cultura occidental, el de la representación de la naturaleza en la literatura, y, finalmente, se habla del haikú para ilustrar las diferentes maneras en que hombre y naturaleza se relacionan y cómo la literatura las puede reflejar.

El autor realiza un paseo por la experiencia artística como creador y amador del arte. Recorre sus impresiones e influencias juveniles, de cómo se aprende arte del paseo por la vida, narra su pasión por formas de arte como el haikú japonés, describe el arte como “todo lo que expresa frescura vital con cierta belleza u horror iluminado por un halo estético”, y roza la Rosa del Ser esencial, entrando al tema de la Esencia, postulando que las obras de (...) arte tocan de algún modo misterioso espacios esenciales del ser humano, constituyendo un ejercicio de libertad. (shrink)

This article establishes itself first in a kind of slough, a lack of inspiration, and transvalues this via Fred Wah’s poem “Ikebana” and Roland Barthes’s celebration of haiku as a form that “lacks inspiration.” Following Barthes on “the minimal act of writing that is Notation,” this article explores and theorizes the status of the notational in and for poetics. The article registers and sustains the ambiguity in notatio, notationis and suggests that the notational points to a conceptual dialectic between condensation (...) and dilation. Poets Tonya Foster and W. S. Graham offer key cases, as do the author’s own poems. The article moves from haikus and other short forms (including the imagist poem) to haibuns (a mixed form of verse and prose) to questions of accent as a mode of differentiation from the surround. Drawing on Claudia Rankine and Jacques Rancière (as well as on classical rhetoric), the article also shows how the notational as censure might register antagonisms and not only accents or gestures (as notational forms are typically glossed). Alert to the enmeshment of notational forms with other media—such as the novel and photography—the article suggests in its final turn that a notational poetics can also vivify the (sometimes latent) diegetic aspect of short, minimal, “uninspired,” supposedly “immediate” notational forms and practices, as we see in the dance of notation and annotation, or in the unfolding of haiku within mixed forms such as the haibun. (shrink)

> この道や行く人なしに秋の暮れ Matsuo Basho 16941 The surface is asymmetrical, the pigment flecked and uneven. Looking close, what seems at a distance to be smooth is actually covered in tiny gentle indentations and irregularities. On one edge, there are a series of fine lines—evidence of past damage, and repair. It is obviously old. But its age is part of its specialness. It is simple, one of a kind, beautiful. The above is a description of a Japanese stoneware tea bowl, like the (...) one in figure 1, embodying an aesthetic dating back to at least the 16th century called wabi-sabi (侘び寂び). Figure 1 Wabi-sabi tea bowl. ottmarliebert.com from Santa Fe, Turtle Island, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Wabi-sabi is famously difficult to translate, but derives from the words wabi 侘– indicating austerity, simplicity, the quiet life and sabi 寂—indicating maturity, solitude, naturalness. Wabi-sabi refers to the aesthetic appreciation of natural imperfection and impermanence.2 It is embodied in a tradition of handmade pottery, sometimes including repair of past breaks with gold inlay (kintsugi). But it is also reflected in stone gardens, in bonsai, in haiku, and some forms of the Japanese tea ceremony. What, you might ask, does this have to do with medicine? Pottery and aesthetics seem a long way from pathology and medical ethics. First, some …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 33-36 [Access article in PDF] How I, a Christian, Have Learned from Buddhist Practice, or "The Frog Sat on the Lily Pad... Not Waiting" Frances S. Adeney Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary As a Christian, I have practiced various forms of silent meditation. I remember sitting under the grand piano as a child of three, watching the sun flit through white curtains during our one-hour home (...) communion service of the Plymouth Brethren. Most of the hour was spent in communal silence, gathered around a small table upon which was placed wine and bread. My memories of these meetings are filled with a sense of awe and presence.I practiced a different kind of silent meditation as a young adult when I spent six weeks living on a beach in Greece. I saw few people apart from my two companions and the shepherdess who brought her flock to the meadow each day. I spent hours watching the waves or studying the grains of sand at my feet. I never missed a sunset.At certain times of my life, there were more intentional, prayer-filled kinds of silent meditation. Wordless yearnings and grievings were brought to those meditations as I sought understanding and peace during times of illness, loss, and confusion. I wouldn't call any of those experiences Buddhist meditation. They were intentionally focused on either worshiping Christ or experiencing nature. There was no attempt to leave behind desires, no longing for emptiness, no intentional focus on being in the present moment, qualities that I associate with Buddhist meditation.The first time I joined a group of people practicing Buddhist sitting was in 1997. Yet I felt like I had been doing this kind of silent meditating for years. Here is how that convergence came about.During the early 1990s, while living in Indonesia, I frequently visited a Trappist monastery in central Java. The nuns there didn't practice Buddhism, but my spiritual director, a German priest who lived down the mountain, said to me, "Come and see." Father Hamma introduced me to sitting in a gentle non-technique-oriented way. He called it "contemplative prayer." I took up this practice daily during a difficult time of loss in my life. Spiritual retreats at the monastery up the mountain helped me learn to let go of what I could not hold onto in life. It was there that I began to experience the delight and calm that comes from a practice of meditative silence. [End Page 33]This silent meditation differed from other practices of silence that I had known in significant ways: (1) It was not focused on an interchange between God and myself. I was not listening for God's voice. I was not bringing my concerns to God. I was simply entering a place of silence. (2) It was not predicated on specific ideas about God or thoughts from writings in the Bible. I did not need to frame this time of silence with religious meanings. (3) It was not focused on an outcome. I neither expected nor did I ask for any changes in myself or the world.Yet there were ways in which this practice of meditative silence was framed by my Christian faith. In taking up this practice, I felt I was intentionally entering God's presence. While not looking for spiritual experiences, I was somehow seeking life, and I did believe that God met me in those silent moments. More than once I had experiences that were "sightings" if not meetings with the Divine. During the seven years that I have practiced entering silence, the space that I enter has grown larger, and the conviction that I am entering and becoming part of God's presence deepens. The frog sat on the lily pad not waiting. This Haiku poem resulted from one such experience. I had taken the bus out from the city. It dropped me at the foot of one of hundreds of small mountains in Java covered by... (shrink)

ABSTRACT“Time-consciousness” constitutes the core of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Extending from a project of reviving the comparative method, we develop Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of time as a method of literary comparison. Three views of time set the stage: the quatrain “Luán’s Fall” by the eighth-century Chinese poet Wang Wei, a stanza from the poem “Etched off‌” by Paul Celan, the quintessential post-war poet in German language, and the haiku “Walking, on and on” by the Japanese itinerant monk and free-verse haiku pioneer (...) Santoka Taneda. What makes these poems relevant is not merely their superficially shared theme of time, but an intrinsic affinity, manifested in different poetic “time-objects”, to the very notion of time-consciousness. Through poetic analysis in the context of Husserl’s philosophy of time-consciousness, these poetic experiences, embodied in a phenomenological concept of “walking,” emphasize time as being. (shrink)

La Préparation du roman, Barthes's course at the Collège de France which was interrupted by his death in 1980, announces a change of life: not giving up analysing literature and culture to write a novel but `preparing the novel', working as if he were going to write a novel. Barthes's approach to the novel is quite singular. With no interest in narrative, nor in extracting the meaning from experience, he treats the novel as a sort of notation, and perversely takes (...) Haiku as a model. This new project constitutes in many respects a regression to literary and cultural ideas Barthes had previously rejected. Most seriously, it involves a turn away from reflection on language, which had been crucial to Barthes's work. But there are other ways in which the change in approach brings new insights to a thinking of the novel and of literature. (shrink)

The discovery of the oriental poetry, specially Japanese and Chinese, had a deep impact in the poetic writing and personal evolution of the mexican poet Octavio Paz. The initial approach to the taoist aesthetic and philosophical universe was made trough the synthetic, sensorial and deeply suggestive strength of oriental poetry, and Paz found immediately an essential resemblance between the universe just discovered and the prehispanic cosmovision. As a result of that experience, in 1955 he published “Piedras sueltas”, a brief poem (...) collection, in which he combines the evocative power of the poetic image typical of the japanese haiku with several indigenous topics. The influence and the attraction to Oriental thought, particularly Taoism, is also present in El arco y la lira(1956), book that represents the pinacle of Octavio Paz’s ultimate poetic thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Original Dwelling Place: Zen EssaysRobert E. GossOriginal Dwelling Place: Zen Essays. By Robert Aitken. Upland, California: Counterpoint, 1996. 241 pp.Robert Aitken narrates his over forty-year journey into Zen, elucidating not only his spiritual journey but also reflecting the Americanization of Zen Buddhism. He was introduced to Zen Buddhism during World War II as an internee in a camp for enemy civilians in Kobe, Japan. Original Dwelling Place is Aitken’s (...) ninth book to explore a series of topics that accent his personal journey into Zen. He has gathered a series of essays about the texts and lineage teachers with whom he studied over the years. In the opening section, entitled “Ancestors,” he pays homage to the masters [End Page 212] who influenced his own Zen practice. He writes, “All of my guides have passed away, but they are alive in my mind and body” (p. 5). The book reflects his continuing bond with those deceased teachers who exercised a vital presence and environmental influence within his life. He shares some stories, personal insights, and legacies of some of his guides, such as Nyogen Senzaki, Soen Roshi, Blyth Sensei, and D. T. Suzuki. I found his essay on the legacy of Dwight Goddard filling in many personal details of a pioneer Western Buddhist who significantly contributed to the Americanization of Buddhism. In many ways, Aitken’s own spiritual development and Original Dwelling Place recapitulate the Americanization of Zen Buddhism, providing some important insights into that process of Buddhist acculturation.Yet Aitken does not limit his guides to twentieth-century ones. He brings alive the classical discourses and relates them to contemporary life. Throughout his essays, I was struck by how alive and dynamic Aitken’s Mahayana contemplative vision and practice are. There is a spirit of “contemplative action” that collapses the duality of meditative practice and living that discovers the truth dynamically within a matrix of open living. As a Christian practitioner of Ignatian spirituality, I found many parallels to the Jesuit ideal of being “contemplative in action.” Aitken’s essays elucidate an ongoing dynamic dialectic that fluctuates between meditative reflection and the world of experience—reminding me at times of the contemplative Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, and at other times of the Jesuit poet-activist, Daniel Berrigan.The reader garners an aesthetic sense that classical Zen texts have been an integral part of his journey and have provided him with a platform to reflect on topics such as marriage, death, the use of money, sexuality, and Zen practice. Some of his essays have a meditative quality, drawing the reader into an web of intertextuality and experience where Zen teachers and Western poets engage in a contemplative path of pleasure expressed in awareness of the everyday dewdrop world. There were moments that I envisioned reading a particular essay on retreat, for they had a meditative quality that reminded me of some the writings of Thomas Merton. Like Merton, Robert Aitken does not merely probe meditative experience but attempts to interrogate the everyday experiences of Western Buddhists from meditative awareness. Most Japanese Buddhists, he notes, are married within Shinto ceremonies, and Western Buddhists have resurrected old Buddhist marriage ceremonies seldom used by Japanese practitioners. Western Buddhist marriage ceremonies, Aitken notes, are a relatively new tradition that often blends ceremonies from The Book of Common Prayer with Buddhist rituals. He ends his short essay on marriage with final reflections on how marriage and family form a little sangha.In “Death: A Zen Buddhist Perspective,” Aitken breaks new ground by noting how Buddhists face the fact of death and find solace in impermanence. He quotes the Japanese haiku poet, Isa Kobayashi (1763–1827), grieving at the loss of his baby daughter:The dewdrop world is the dewdrop world, and yet—and yet(p. 124). [End Page 213]Isa looks desperately for something to give him hope but only finds comfort in his grief. Aitken points out that within grief is emancipation and that bereavement can be a good teacher. He develops some reflections on a highly underdeveloped topic within Buddhism: grieving and the transformation of grief into solace.Aitken writes on political revolution and the matters of ethics. He addresses... (shrink)

The article discusses Steve McCaffery’s The Basho Variations with a focus on various modes of transtranslation/transcreation/transaption of Matsuo Bashō’s famous frog haiku. The emphasis is placed on the complexities of transtranslation which deliberately alters, distorts and reimagines the source text. The intercultural and intertextual quality of McCaffery’s poems is discussed in the context of multilevel references to classical Japanese aesthetics of haiku writing. The comparative reading of McCaffery’s and Bashō’s texts foregrounds the issue of events, or “frogmentary events,” and the (...) importance of the role of the reader in completing poetic messages. (shrink)

The paper concerns a form of experiencing time which is specific for haiku poetry. Haiku is an expression of the momentary glimpse of time. Haiku poetry treats the moment uninstrumentally, neither as a result of the past nor as a transition to future deeds. Seen this way, the moment arises on the stream of time as a unique, existential experience. It is my attempt to explain the phenomenon of this experience of “now” as I explore the metaphors of “background”, “figure” (...) and “composition”. (shrink)

“Waterman's profound respect for the northern lands burns on every page, and his photos and essays prove to us that there is still beauty in this world—beauty worth fighting for.”—Robert Redford North of the sixtieth parallel, the sun shines for less than six hours in the winter, and towering mountains are the only skyscrapers. Pristine waters serve caribou, moose, and bears in an unbroken landscape. At any given moment in this spectacular scenery, there’s a chance that Jonathan Waterman is present, (...) trekking across the land. A masterful adventurer, Waterman has spent decades exploring the farthest reaches of our beautiful spaces. The essays and photographs collected in Northern Exposures are a product of this passion for exploration and offer an unparalleled view into adventuring in the north and beyond. Picking up after In the Shadow of Denali, his first book of essays, Northern Exposures collects twenty-three stories from Waterman’s thirty-year career that show the evolution of the adventurer’s career and work, from ducking avalanches near the Gulf of Alaska, to searching for the most pristine tundra on the continent, and from writing haiku on Denali in the depth of winter to decrying oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Ninety-six spectacular photographs taken by Waterman during his expeditions lend a broader context and allow readers to fully understand his heartfelt argument for protecting these places. Whether active, aspiring, or just armchair adventurers, readers will be inspired by Waterman’s daring spirit. (shrink)