But for the woodpecker
tapping at a post, no sound
at all in the house. (Basho)
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We all have heard the woodpecker tapping, tapping…and the house must be very quiet to hear that tapping outside. But what is the house here? No thoughts in the house either. Thought are sound. Sound is movement. Thoughts are mind sounds. So now we are really quiet. All that exists is the woodpecker’s tapping. And even that is not a woodpecker, not something with a name because that naming is also a sound in the house. There is no “Oh, that’s a woodpecker.” There is not even the poet in the house, because the idea that I’m in the house is also a sound in the house. But for the tapping, tapping…there is nothing or no one there. This is Zen.

There is a shift from awareness-of the wood pecker as an object to awareness-as the woodpecker. There is a shift from awareness of the woodpecker to awareness-as the sound of the tapping. Awareness has shifted from objective to subjective, and subjective awareness has no boundary, a house without an IT. Only Now exists.

Singing, planting rice,
village songs more lovely
than famous city poems  (Basho)
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Why are village songs more lovely than city poems? Why are country people different than city people? What is the ground of each? Is city life artificial? Is the village in the body while the city is in the mind? Are family networks stronger in the village? Is city life fragmented while village life is whole. Does fame and fortune matter in the simple village. Is the village timeless? Is the city future orientated?

From all these trees—
in salads, soups, everywhere—
cherry blossoms fall  (Basho)
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This haiku just gives me a sense, a feeling that is hard to pin down with words, and I guess that is the point of the haiku, to go where words cannot go. Beauty is falling here, everywhere, in salads and soups, everywhere. Beauty everywhere falling like cherry blossoms. All is One, yet Two. The poet sees the two (or many) yet there is one cherry blossom falling everywhere.

Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreams  (Basho)

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This haiku moves me in two directions, one from a burial field where soldiers lie, the other to my own imperial dreams. Summer grasses…..is just this fact of summer grass the burial ground of my dreams. Summer grasses, just this fact ground one’s imperial dreams, the dreams of conquest of the future.

Summer grasses…are always just now…and now is all that remains of our dreams that pop like bubbles on their sharp blades. All of Basho’s haiku have this contradiction of two frames of references; one to the mind and the other references the present moment of direct experience. Time and dreams lie in rest in the concrete moment of “summer grasses.” Imperial soldiers are our little minds with big ideas, but where are they now, always now. Think of all the dreams of man and all there is left is summer grasses. How still the grass is; how noisy the dreams were.