Robert Aitken on Basho's "Old Pond"

[From Robert Aitken. A Zen Wave: Basho's Haiku & Zen. New York: Weatherhill, 1978, pp. 25-29.]

The Old Pond

THE FORM Ya is a cutting word that separates and yet joins the expressions before and after. It is punctuation that marks a transition-a particle of anticipation.

Though there is a pause in meaning at the end of the first segment, the next two parts have no pause between them. In the original, the words of the second and third parts build steadily to the final word oto. This has penetrating impact—“the frog jumps in water's sound." Haiku poets commonly [26] play with their base of three parts, running the meaning past the end of one segment into the next, playing with their form, as all artists do variations on the form they are working with. Actually, the word haiku means "play verse."

The Japanese language uses postpositions rather than prepositions, so phrases like the last segment of this haiku should be reversed when translated into English: "water of sound" becomes "sound of water."

COMMENT This is probably the most famous poem in Japan, and after three hundred years of repetition it has, understandably, become a little stale for Japanese people. Thus as English readers, we may have something of an edge in any effort to see it freshly.

The first line is simply "The old pond." This sets the scene—a large, perhaps overgrown lily pond in a garden somewhere. We may imagine that the edges are quite mossy and probably rather broken down. With the frog as our cue, we guess that it is twilight in late spring.

This setting of time and place needs to be established, but there is more. "Old" is a cue word of another sort. For a poet such as Basho, an evening beside a mossy pond is ancient indeed. Basho presents his own mind as this timeless, endless pond, serene and potent—a condition familiar to mature Zen students.

In one of his first teisha (presentations of the Dharma) in Hawaii, Yamada Koun Roshi said: "When your consciousness has become ripe by true zazen—pure like clear water, like a serene mountain lake, not moved by any wind—then anything may serve as a medium for enlightenment."

D. T. Suzuki once said that the condition of the Buddha's mind while he was sitting under the bodhi tree was that of sagara mudra samadhi (ocean-seal absorption). In this instance, "mudra" is translated as “seal," as in "notary seal." We seal our zazen with our zazen mudra, left hand over the right, [27] thumbs touching. Our minds are sealed with the depth of the great ocean in true zazen.

It was in such a condition that the Buddha happened to look up and notice the morning star. As Yamada Roshi has said, any stimulus would do—a sudden breeze with the dawn, the first twittering of birds, the appearance of the sun itself. It just happened to be a star in this case.

In Basho's haiku, a frog appears. To Japanese of sensitivity, frogs are dear little creatures, and Westerners may at least appreciate this animal's energy and immediacy. Plop!

"Plop" is onomatopoeic, as is oto in this instance. Onomatopoeia is the presentation of an action by its sound, or at least that is its definition in literary criticism. The poet may prefer to say that he himself becomes that sound. Thus the parody by Sengai Gibon is very instructive:

The old pond!
Basho jumps in,
The sound of the water!

Hsiang-yen Chih-hsien became a sound while cleaning the grave of Nan-yang Hui-chung. His broom caught a little stone which sailed through the air and hit a stalk of bamboo. Tock! He had been working on the koan "My original face before my parents were born," and with that sound his body and mind fell away completely. There was only that tock. Of course, Hsiang-yen was ready for this experience. He was deep in the samadhi of sweeping leaves and twigs from the grave of an old master, just as Basho is lost in the samadhi of an old pond, and just as the Buddha was deep in the samadhi of the great ocean.

Samadhi means "absorption," but fundamentally it is unity with the whole universe. When you devote yourself to what you are doing, moment by moment—to your koan when on your cushion in zazen, to your work, study, conversation, or whatever in daily life—that is samadhi. Do not suppose that [28] samadhi is exclusively Zen Buddhist. Everything and everybody are in samadhi, even bugs, even people in mental hospitals.

Absorption is not the final step in the way of the Buddha. Hsiang-yen changed with that tock. When he heard that tiny sound, he began a new life. He found himself at last, and could then greet his master confidently and lay a career of teaching whose effect is still felt today. After this experience, he wrote:

One stroke has made me forget all my previous
knowledge.
No artificial discipline is at all needed;
In every movement I uphold the ancient way
And never fall into the rut of mere quietism;
Wherever I walk no traces are left,
And my senses are not fettered by rules of
conduct;
Everywhere those who have attained to the truth
All declare this to be of the highest order.

The Buddha changed with noticing the morning star—“Now when I view all beings everywhere," he said, "I see that each of them possesses the wisdom and virtue of the Buddha . . . "—and after a week or so he rose from beneath the tree and began his lifetime of pilgrimage and teaching.

Similarly, Basho changed with that plop. The some 650 haiku that he wrote during his remaining eight years point surely and boldly to the fact of essential nature. A before-and-after comparison may be illustrative of this change. For example, let us examine his much-admired "Crow on a Withered Branch."

[29] Unlike English, Japanese allows use of the past participle (or its equivalent) as a kind of noun, so in this haiku we have the "perchedness" of the crow, an effect that cannot really be duplicated in English.

Basho wrote this haiku six years before he composed "The Old Pond," and some scholars assign to it the milestone position that is more commonly given the later poem. I think, however, that on looking into the heart of "Crow on a Withered Branch" we may see a certain immaturity. Though the poem certainly demonstrates his evocative power, that is not enough. Something is missing. What this haiku shows us, in fact, is quietism, the trap Hsiang-yen and all other great teachers of Zen warn us to avoid. Sagara mudra samadhi is not adequate; remaining indefinitely under the bodhi tree will not do; to muse without emerging is to be unfulfilled.

Ch'ang-sha Ching-ts'en made reference to this incompleteness in his criticism of a brother monk who was lost in quietism:

You who sit on the top of a hundred-foot pole,
Although you have entered the way, it is not yet genuine.
Take a step from the top of the pole
And show your whole body in the ten directions.

The student of Zen who is stuck in the vast, serene condition of nondiscrimination must take another step to become mature.

Basho's haiku about the crow would be an expression of the “first principle," essential nature, emptiness all by itself—separated from the world of sights and sounds, coming and going. This is the ageless pond without the frog. It was another six years before Basho took that one step from the top of the pole into the dynamic world of reality, where frogs play f'reely in the pond and thoughts play freely in the mind.

The old pond has no walls;
A frog just jumps in;
Do you say there is an echo?