Holy Fools: The Sages & Us

(This first appeared in The East, July-August 2001)

Ryokan the poet wasn't much of a thinker – or so he thought, for he called himself Taigu, Great Fool, apparently in all sincerity. He didn't think; he lived. He summed up his life in a poem, which begins, "Rags and tatters, rags and tatters, rags and tatters." Was he complaining – of his poverty, perhaps, or his loneliness? On the contrary. He was celebrating them.

Poverty was his wealth, solitude his company. He was a strange man, and though he lived on the threshold of modern times (1758-1831), the modern spirit is alien to him, and he to it. Modern times seem so full it is hard to believe that anything at all is excluded from them. Only Emptiness is. Rags and tatters have no place among us – no happy place, at least.

And laughter. We moderns laugh only at humor. This is not how the sages of old laughed. Ryokan's poetic precursor and teacher was a Chinese hermit of the T'ang Dynasty (618-907) named Han-shan. Little is known about him. He is generally associated with his fellow recluse, Shih-te. Artists loved drawing them, usually together. Among the numerous surviving portraits is a diptych by the 12th-century painter Yen Hui. The monks' robes hang loose about them. Their hair is matted and unkempt. Han-shan leans on a broom. And they are laughing – laughing uproariously, laughing hideously.

"There is something in their transcendental air of freedom," observes Zen master Suzuki Daisetsu, "which attracts us even in these modern days." Yes, but also something repellent, anarchic, almost frightening. Transcendental freedom, their laughter seems to say, is no joke.

***

Do the Oriental hermit-sage-poets of old, lonely and rootless, innocent and childish, wise with a wisdom they themselves call foolish, neither listening to reason nor, with any consistency, speaking it, have anything to say to us of the wired world?

The divergence between our ways and theirs goes back very far, at least two and a half millennia, to the time of the archetypal world-renouncing hermit-sage Lao-tzu. he lived in China in the 6th century BC, roughly a century before the Athenian statesman Pericles, with whom a comparison is instructive. How does Lao-tzu describe himself? "Possibly mine is the mind of a fool, which is so ignorant!... I alone seem to be dull... I alone seem to be blunt... I alone seem impractical and awkward..."

Pericles would have given all this very short shrift. He had no time for ignorance and awkwardness, and a famous line from his Funeral Oration can almost be read as a sharp retort to the sage's babble: "Here [in Athens] each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well... We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all."

Wherein, me might ask, lies Lao-tzu's sagacity? In his being "like a baby who is yet unable to smile"? Yes, and in this: "I value seeking sustenance from the Mother" – that is, the Tao, the Way. And what is the Way, and where does it take us? "Those who know do not speak," goes the celebrated reply. "Those who speak do not know."

Imagine the ancient Athenians not speaking their wisdom! They would have choked on it, for what was wisdom if not fuel for speech, and what was speech if not the very best thing in life, the activity a wise man was born for, the medium that linked him with his fellows in the united search for a universal truth, as true for me as for you, as true today as two thousand years ago?

Knowledge that cannot be spoken, however nourishing to the inner life, poses special challenges to social intercourse. It encourages reclusion at the expense of assembly. The Oriental distrust of speech is as widespread as it is ancient, and as deeply rooted as is the Occidental fondness for it. The Buddha, a contemporary of Lao-tzu's, included Right Speech in his Eightfold Path to Enlightenment, and his meaning, explains Christmas Humphreys, was that "All idle gossip and unprofitable talk must be stamped out. Silence should be so respected that the words which break it must leave the world the better for their birth." Thus admonished, a man might well hesitate to open his mouth. "I may not have made any special vow of silence," remarked the 12th-century Japanese recluse Kamo no Chomei, "but as I am all alone I am little likely to offend with the tongue."

Even teachers preferred silence to words, for the highest wisdom was not, as in the West, shared knowledge of the outer world but an intensely private, individual, incommunicable intuition. The student came seeking not information but liberation – from the conceptualization, first of all, which language by its very nature forces on us.

"How silent! How solitary!" said Lao-tzu of the Tao and its seekers. The Buddha concurred. "Buddhas do but point the way," he said. "Work out your own salvation with diligence."

What islands of solitary contemplation the mountain mists of Japan once veiled!

The classic example is Kamo no Chomei's "ten-foot-square hut." Discouraged by career setbacks and dizzied by the senseless flux and motion of the world, he spent the final decades of his life in secluded mountain retirement. Seclusion is a frequent theme in the contemporary literature.

In the 11th-century Tale of Genji ,the highest aim of life is "leaving the world" – becoming a monk or a nun and losing oneself in prayer, turning one's back on the empty distractions of the here and now. Neither the rewards of office nor the delights of love, however eagerly sought and passionately enjoyed, could quite stifle the feeling of futility that haunted all the sensitive courtiers in Genji's entourage. Was not the world an illusion, as fleeting as a dewdrop in the morning sun? Why, then, seek fulfillment here? Because seen illusion is more attractive than unseen truth. Some resisted that attraction. Genji envied them, but could not join them. Preternaturally handsome and superhumanly accomplished in all the arts and graces, he considered himself a failure in spite of his dazzling worldly success – because of it, perhaps, for that is what held him prisoner in the world, a slave to its sundry beauties, till the end.

***

Kamo no Chomei was fortunate, if leaving the world is indeed the goal, in being neither handsome nor talented – nor, in the worldly sense, lucky. He seems to have vanished like the dew to which the poets are forever comparing us. A ravaging fire and a devastating earthquake taught him early in life what sort of bounty to expect from this most evanescent and capricious of worlds.

But even in quiet times, is this world, with its greed, its envy, its lack of sympathy, really a place a man can live in?

Surely not, he decided, and withdrew, first to a lonely shack by a riverbed, and then, thirty years later, to the mountains, to a series of rustic cottages, each smaller than the last. With old age approaching, he began to jot down his thoughts. They are serene, contented, resigned.

"In this impermanent hut of mine all is calm and there is nothing to fear."

"Like a drifting cloud I rely on no one and have no attachments."

"I commit my life to fate without special wish to live or desire to die."

His final reflection is that he has not after all fully renounced his worldly ties. No, for he cannot altogether overcome his affection for his little thatched hut, and "my attachment to this solitary life," however bare and unadorned, "may be a hindrance to enlightenment." In a similar vein the priest Kenko (1283?-1350?)refers in his Grasses of Idleness to "a certain hermit" who said, "There is one thing that even I, who have no worldly entanglements, would be sorry to give up, the beauty of the sky." Chomei's contemporary, the hermit-poet Saigyo (1118-1190), found himself no less ensnared by the beauty of the moon.

***

What does a person learn, cut off from the society of his fellows and numb to the attractions of the only world our senses can know? What do solitude and detachment teach us? Foolishness? Maybe so. Ryokan and Lao-tzu both claimed foolishness as an attribute, Lao-tzu explicitly seeing in it a higher wisdom. Perhaps we were wrong to banish it from our scheme of things. Suzuki's name for foolishness is "purposelessness," which to him is a prerequisite, if not an actual synonym, for freedom. Dedicated as we today tend to be to the pursuit of this or that goal in life, we fool ourselves in calling ourselves free, though undeniably we are busy. Ryokan, the beggar, the idler, the self-described "lazy old horse," sings this paean to perfect freedom: "If anyone asks/ say I'm in the grove/ of Otogo Shrine/ picking up fallen leaves under the trees."

And if no one asks, an unspoken corollary seems to whisper, that's fine too.

The haiku master Basho (1644-1694) abandoned the samurai life to which he'd been born and at age 40 became a wanderer, subjecting his frail body to the rigors of 17th-century travel, "determined to fall a weather-exposed skeleton" if necessary. Why? For the sake of "the state of sheer ecstasy under the pure beams of the moon."

He explained further, if so cryptic an utterance can be called an explanation, that so long as one's mind is "one with nature," "whatever such a mind sees is a flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is the moon" – even the lice and horse piss he whimsically ennobled in one of his most famous poems. "It is only a barbarous mind that sees other than the flower, merely an animal mind that dreams of other than the moon."

Basho's travels – there were three major journeys over the final twenty years of his life – took him from the Kyoto region to "the deep north," the modern Tohoku. on foot and on horseback, often exhausted, not infrequently ill, he plodded on, and though "it was indeed a terrible thing to be so ill on the road, when there still remained thousands of miles before me," all the same, "my heart leapt with joy when I saw the celebrated pine tree of Takekuma, its twin trunks shaped exactly as described by the ancient poets."

Was Saigyo wrong, then, to fear his love of the moon as an attachment inimical to enlightenment? There is no corresponding uneasiness in Basho. Having acquired "true understanding," he argued, it is only right for the poet to "[return] to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of poetry."

It is interesting to compare Basho's wandering, and his ecstatic admiration of the flora, to the contemporaneous travels of another man, the British naturalist John Ray (1627?-1705). While Basho roamed Japan imbued with the spirit of "our everlasting self which is poetry," Ray roamed Europe, and though no poet, he was as keen on flowers as Basho. "The number and variety of plants inevitably produce a sense of confusion in the mind of students," he wrote. "But nothing is more helpful to clear understanding, prompt recognition and sound memory than a well-ordered arrangement into classes, primary and subordinate."

The end result of his researches was the revolutionary concept of species: "a set of individuals who give rise through reproduction to new individuals similar to themselves."

Basho's naturalism was of a different order: "On a mountain path/ how oddly moving/ these violets." In a similar vein an unruffled Lao-tzu might have replied to Pericles.

***

"Rags and tatters, rags and tatters,/ rags and tatters – that's my life./ Food – somehow I pick it up along the road;/ my house – I let the weeds grow all around. Watching the moon, I spend the whole night mumbling poems;/ lost in blossoms, I never come home."

Ryokan "left the world" at 17. Eldest son of a village headman in Echigo province, today's Niigata Prefecture, he abruptly entered a Zen temple, turning his back on his presumed future as his father's successor.

Status, respect, prosperity – all were his; all he had to do was grow into them. No, he said. Why? No one knows. "It's not that/ I never mix/ with men of the world - / but really/ I'd rather amuse myself alone." Is that an explanation? Did he have an intimation that a higher destiny awaited him? If so, what was it? "I've forgotten/ my begging bowl/ but no one would steal it/ no one would steal it - / how sad for my begging bowl." And how happy for him. "Children!/ shall we be going now/ to the hill of Iyahiko/ to see how the violets are blooming?"

His long life, in its externals, is easily summarized: he wandered, lived alone in temples and one-room huts, begged for food, was often hungry, adored children (being scarcely more than a child himself), loved all living things, even down to the lice in his rags and tatters, and wrote poetry. What did he have to show for it all at the end? Dysentery – and the means to celebrate even that in verse: "With these runny bowels/ my body is hard to bear!"

***

"If one knows himself and knows what the world is," mused Kamo no Chomei in the solitude of his ten-foot-square hut nearly a thousand years ago, "he will merely wish for quiet and be pleased when he has nothing to grieve about, wanting nothing and caring for nobody." That makes us smile. We consider we know a lot more about the world and how it works than he did, and one thing we know is that wanting nothing is no way to cure a sick economy, ailing precisely because of its failure to make us want enough. Moreover, happiness defined as the absence of grief no longer attracts us. For us happiness is a pursuit, the more active the better. We have remade the world in our modern image: it pulses and throbs with our energy.

Have we outgrown the recluses of old? Are we too rational for their inspired nonsense, too sober for their lunatic laughter, too full for their hungry joy, too firmly wired and webbed for their anarchic solitude?

One day in 1924, a time in many ways analogous to ours because Japan's first compulsive modernization drive was at roughly the stage its second one is at today, a middle-aged drunk staggering across a Kumamoto street came within inches of being run over by a trolley. An annoyed passenger leapt off the trolley, collared the fool, and dragged him to a nearby Zen temple for discipline and reflection. The passenger had no way of knowing who he was dealing with, or that his initiative would have deep consequences. The fool in question was the haiku poet Taneda Santoka – chronic wanderer, chronic drunk, chronic scribbler of such lines as "Parting from my brother,/ never to meet him again,/ I tramp the muddy road." His brother had recently committed suicide, as had his mother years earlier. At the temple he absorbed Buddhist teachings and took the tonsure. Begging bowl in hand, he resumed his way, bound for that best of all places, if we can only find it – nowhere. "The road/ on which I've lost my way/ is where I'll spend the night." He died in a hermitage in 1940, and was soon forgotten. What does his rediscovery in the 1970s and his enduring popularity today tell us? That Emptiness leaves a void when cast out by excessive plenitude?

"Let neither of us think too much," Santoka once wrote to a friend. "Let's become more foolish. Better: let's revert to our original foolishness."

Why choose foolishness? What can foolishness give us that intelligence leaves us lacking? Ryokan, the Great Fool, has an answer: "Wonderful, the mood of this moment – distant, vast, known to me only!"