Throughout the middle ages, Shinto, with its animist origins, native to Japan, and Buddhism, which arrived from India via Korea in the sixth century, lived for the most part in peaceful harmony.

What Shinto, native to Japan and intensely local in its origins and continuing affiliations, gave to the incoming system of belief was a very special love of nature which it was only too happy to build on and develop, receiving in return the benefits of contact with a body possessed of centuries of written and doctrinal history behind it, and well established, overarching organisational methods, so that many of the small shrines dotted round the countryside were in practice run by local Buddhist priests.

Still more striking in the history of Buddhism itself is the linkage between poetry and faith.

In essence this reflects the underlying fact that in the centuries of oral transmission, when even the most important things were of necessity passed from person to person and generation to generation by word of mouth, the regular, rhythmic structure of poetry made it a good deal easier to memorise than prose, quite apart from any intrinsic ritual connotations.

In any consideration of the role of poetry in general and haiku in particular in Buddhism's development, it is important to remember that the Hindu Rig Veda, of some two or three millennia earlier at the very least, consisted of more than a thousand hymns in verse, and verse as well as prose played an important part in the Upanishads which followed in succeeding centuries.

When, after some five hundred years of likewise being orally transmitted, the great Buddhist texts such as the Lotus, the Nirvana and the Avatamsaka Sutras were written down, the latter in translation running to almost fifteen hundred pages and ending with a long vow in verse, extensive narrative sections, and the beliefs and philosophical systems which are central to them, are often firstly given in the form of lengthy hymns and poems, which can run to as many as four hundred lines or more.

In this context, it is interesting to note that in Kumarajiva’s translation of The Lotus Sutra into Chinese in 406 AD, which led to its being widely known and was no longer intended for oral transmission, the sections of the text given in verse form follow, instead of preceding, the equivalent passages in prose.

At the other end of the scale, it is only in this context that the origins and content of haiku as a separate poetic form can properly be understood, since all three of its great progenitors, Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson and Kobayashi Issa were devout and knowledgeable Buddhists.

For Buddhists, haiku are indeed especially important, as they are the product, not of organisational or monastic systems, but of individual poets with deeply held and personal convictions and beliefs, as well as great poetic powers.

Bashō, with his Shinto starting point and an intensive period of Zen training, was obviously non-sectarian in his outlook and his poetry, as is shown when, speaking of Zenkoji, he says

tsuki kage ya
shimon shishū mo
tada hitotsu

This reads in English

under the moonlight
the four gates and the four sects
are all of them one

Even Issa’s Shin Buddhism was very much his own, and Buson, with his strenuous advocacy of a back to Bashō movement, was no mere copyist. In contrast to his predecessor, Bashō, the wanderer, or Kobayashi Issa, who was to follow in his footsteps at a later date, he set himself up as a professional painter in Kyoto, where he steadily developed his own personal and more colloquial and free running style of haiku.

For all three of them, it is wholly inappropriate to attach sectarian or other simplistic labels.

In the case of Issa, in the light of the more than twenty thousand haiku that he wrote, and the fact that almost seven hundred of the ten thousand already published in translation on the internet are quite straightforwardly descriptive, it would be a great mistake simply to write him off as less profound than Bashō.

There has perhaps never been, within the compass of just seventeen short syllables, a better symbol for, or encapsulation of, the content of the whole vast panoply of the sutras than the haiku, which runs

hasu no ha ni
kono yo no tsuyu wa
magarikeri

In it he says that

on a lotus leaf
all this world’s dewdrops are seen
to be distorted

A dewdrop is, as we ourselves are, empty, having no inherent, permanent self, and is a symbol of the impermanence of all created things.

Together with the lotus leaf, which stands for the eternal, all-embracing Buddha, Issa’s haiku as a whole reflects the unity of all that is and that is not, while the distortion of the dewdrops of this world, which are so often seen by him as symbols of perfection, shows his simultaneous, sharp awareness of what was for him the total defilement of the world in which he lived, and of his understanding of the Buddhist belief that all the things that we are ever able to perceive are mere illusions.

The indescribable reality simply lies elsewhere.

This world's dewdrops, with their implicit emptiness and their impermanence, are seen at their clearest as serving, nonetheless, as symbols of earthly perfection in Issa’s

asa tsuyu ni
jōdo mairi no
keiko kana

through morning dewdrops
the way to reach the pure land
is now being learnt

In translation, another, slightly different version has a last line reading "is what can be learned".

Issa’s poems are a crystallisation of an idea nascent in Bashō’s earlier

tsuyu toku toku
kokoromi ni ukiyo
susugabaya

the drip, drip of the dew
trying to see this fleeting world
is given a rinse

Dewdrops also feature in a haiku which at first may even come as a surprise to many Buddhists, and which reads

tsuyu no tama
tsumanda toki mo
mō hotoke

a drop of the dew
was already a buddha
as i picked it up

It leads to the realisation that for Issa all things in this world, however impermanent or imperfect they might be, became Buddhas at the instant they departed from it or, to use rather more precise terminology, melted back into the dharmakāya, the truth body of the Buddha, which is the ultimate reality of which they were no more than a dim, illusory reflection.

He could declare, with possibly somewhat sardonic humour,

abare-nomi
waga te ni kakatte
jōbutsu seyo

spirited, lively
flea, it will be by my hand
you’ll become a buddha

Indeed, it seems at times in reading Issa’s poetry that fleas are everywhere, as they were in fact in everyday late 18th and early 19th century life, and there are almost as many references to them as there are to dewdrops.

He was well aware of the paradox involved in caring for their welfare, as when saying

tobu na nomi
sore sore soko ga
sumidagawa

flea, don’t ever jump
over that way for there lies
river sumida

He also tells them that they should practise their jumping even in so cramped a space as his own hut, while remarking elsewhere that the mouth which uttered the nenbutsu also contained the very teeth which cracked them.

The constant talk of fleas, or in one breath of lice and pretty women, is important in epitomising in an extreme form the uniquely realistic approach of the Japanese haiku poets, both to their surroundings and to the life they lived.

No major British poets come remotely close to giving such a vivid insight into the realities of life throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.

So different was society and the role of poetry within it that there is nothing to compare with Bashō’s

nomi shirami
uma no shito suru
makuramoto

the fleas and the lice,
and the horse passing water
next to my pillow!

or say as Issa did

sendō yo
shōben muyō
nami no tsuki

now then you boatman
no peeing into the waves
where the moon shimmers

But haiku cover everything, not just religious faith, the hopes and the discomforts of old age, the brevity of life and frequency of early death, or of mothers and babies, little girls and lovely women, and all the wonders of the natural world; it is indeed a world of the emotions.

By implication love is everywhere, but it is Buson who speaks quite directly of it in its most intense and all-pervasive aspect, that of love between a man and a woman.

Issa could deal with it in a perceptive and quite touching way as an observer, as in

kinuginu ya
kasumu made miru
imo ga ie

at lovers' parting
his eyes go back to her house
till there’s only mist

When Buson writes of it in much the same way, however, as when he speaks of clouds and says

ame to naru
koi wa shiraji na
kumo no mine

they turn into rain
so what do they know of love
those towering clouds

there is already something of a special feel to it.

Just what that is begins to be apparent when we read his far more tender, personal and touching

imo ga kakine
samisen-gusa no
hana sakinu

all alongside the fence
where my love lives, shepherd’s purse
is found blossoming

As in so many of the finest haiku, the first five to twelve syllables, ten in English in this case, open up a wealth of possible meanings or interpretations, and they are often best left to do so, even when a diligent researcher could actually pin them down to one particular happening or series of events; hence the paucity of explanatory notes in the edition of three hundred of Buson's haiku, or indeed in either of the other two, devoted to Bashō and to Issa.

Here in the third line, elaborating a charming scene, something similar occurs.

The shepherds purse, with its multiplicity of small white flowers, is both pretty and, for gardeners, one of the fastest growing, widespread weeds throughout Eurasia.

In medieval Britain and Japan it was much used for its medicinal properties, as well as a food, and hence was notable in Buson’s day as one of the seven herbs that featured in symbolic dishes during spring festivals.

In terms of poetry, one may well just say ‘so what’, since it is likely that the major, underlying reason for its use in this particular haiku were the tiny, heart-shaped seed pods from which it took its name; but that too might be a mistake, since it is the many uses to which it was put that may have led to its being referred to in English as ‘I offer you my all’, a term so perfectly adapted to the theme of love established in the first two lines.

Still more direct are the two haiku which read

temakura no
yume wa kazashi no
sakura kana

asleep with my head
on my arm i dreamt of the
blossom in her hair

and then again

koshinuke no
tsuma utsukushiki
kotatsu kana

reluctant to rise,
how lovely she is, my wife
by the foot warmer

Quite frequently one aspect of the greatest haiku lies in their ability suddenly to open up new worlds and give a cosmic meaning to some small event or detail in the natural world, as in the case in Issa’s own

hiya mizu ni
susuri kondaru
ama no gawa

in the cold water
i seem to be sipping stars
from heaven’s river

The same is true in Bashō's

koe sumite
hokuto ni hibiku
kinuta kana

clear, echoing sound
rises up to the great bear
from the fulling block

Another prime exemplar of the unity of all that is lies in Bashō’s

sō asagao
iku shini kaeru
nori no matsu

monks and morning glories
dying again and again;
the dharma pine tree

Here there is no distinction between monks and flowers, both of which exemplify the Buddhist concept of impermanence, and the final line is a reflection of a famous koan in which, on being asked for the significance of the patriarch’s coming from the west, Zen master Joshu gave just such an answer.

Even Buson, who was far less prone to venture out into the cosmos, asked

mume no ka no
tachinoborite ya
tsuki no kasa

the plum blossom scent
rising to heaven, does that
make the moon’s halo

Implicit in the haiku of the lotus leaf, and in contrast to the Hinduism out of which it grew, is the important principle, some would say the most important principle, in Buddhism in all its many forms, that there is no such thing as an enduring or immortal self.

In haiku this receives its most memorable and succinct, indeed most beautiful expression, in Bashō’s

kozue yori
adani ochi keri
semi no kara

out of a treetop
it was emptiness that fell;
a cicada shell

In contrast, on the other hand, to Bashō and Buson alike, reincarnation, another fundamental aspect of Buddhism in general, was always in the forefront of Issa’s mind as far as haiku were concerned.

In one, he declares

ki no kage ya
chō to yasumu mo
tashō no en

in a tree’s shadow
i rest with a butterfly friend
from an earlier life

In another he asks

saki no yo no
ore ga itoko ka
kankodori

in a former life
was it perhaps my cousin,
that mountain cuckoo

But one good reason, as was earlier said, for reading the great haiku poets, and not just the sutras, is that they were simply individuals whose Buddhism was a personal, living, ever shifting practice and experience not tied down by all the multifarious rules and regulations of the organised monastic systems within which the writers of the sutras necessarily worked.

In Issa’s case, he not only looked back to the past and said

naka naka ni
hito to umarete
aki no kure

unknowingly i
have been born as a human ;
twilight in autumn

He also looked forward and had hopes regarding what might happen in reincarnations yet to come, and said of butterflies

mutsumashi ya
umare-kawaraba
nobe no chō

how happy they are!
i wish i could be reborn
a field butterfly

When it comes to the unity of all that is and that is not, that fundamental Buddhist concept underpinning all they wrote, the haiku poets gave it a new flavour by applying it emphatically, not just to the external world, but also to the internal world of the five senses in a manner closely akin to what is now called synaesthesia in modern clinical terminology.

In it, the input into any one sense is accompanied by vivid and involuntary experiences in another.

Every colour has a smell, each fragrance a sound; each sound can actually be seen, not merely heard or thought of.

Not surprisingly in this case, it is in Bashō’s work that its most complex and intense embodiment is to be found, reaching its climax in the haiku which reads

sazanami ya
kaze no kaori no
ai byōshi

among rippling waves
the fragrance of blowing wind
is in their rhythm

This is seen in simpler form in a haiku such as

kazairo ya
shidoro ni ue shi
niwa no aki

the colour of wind
has been planted at random;
an autumn garden

In Buson’s work such things occur less frequently and in a possibly less immediately obvious way, as in his

sara o fumu
nezumi no oto no
samusa kana

as it is running
over a platter, a mouse
makes a frigid sound

A similar thing is also seen again in his

furuido ya
ka ni tobu uo no
oto kurashi

in an ancient well
a fish leaps up at gnat,
the sound of darkness

Perhaps surprisingly, however, it is Issa who comes closest to Bashō in this respect, and even wrote a haiku which surpasses him in its complexity, since the crossover between the senses does more than merely link two wholly separate entities, and reads like this :-

semi naku ya
tsukuzuku akai
kazaguruma

the cicadas’ songs
sound just as thoroughly red
as paper windmills

Here, in addition, the fundamental concept of ‘the unity of all that is’ lies close to the surface and is obvious enough, but deeper down, and not perhaps immediately apparent, is that of ‘interdependent origination’.

The redness of the single sound that Issa heard does not depend on any one source, but has its origin in the organic and the inorganic, in cicadas and paper windmills, and in Issa’s hearing, in his sight and imagination all combined.

The all-inclusive, fundamental Buddhist concept of interdependent origination underlying all phenomena is here upfront in the seventeen syllables of the haiku itself, but for any Buddhist it is instantly apparent in the untold multiplicity of sources involved in the ideation or conception, and the actual execution, of every haiku that those three great poets ever wrote.

A final thing that should be said about Buddhism and haiku, leading on into the future, is that because of their brevity and their succinctness they can many of them, form a perfect starting point for meditation on the road to the Pure Land.

And so, in this Shin Buddhist temple and in front of a Shin Buddhist Sangha, I will end with Issa and the unity of all that is and that is not, together with that fundamental Buddhist practical ideal of non-attachment, which, as is the case with all ideals, cannot in practice, ever quite be realised :-

chō tobu ya
kono yo ni nozomi
nai yō ni

a butterfly flies
as if wishing for nothing
that’s here in this world