Saigyo Saigyo - Gazing at the Moon: Buddhist Poems of Solitude

He has held a special place in the hearts of Japanese people down the centuries since he lived. The great seventeenth-century haiku poet Bash revered him as his master, and many today can still quote his famous death poem (the final poem in this book)even those in a generation that only knows of him through manga and anime. Part of the appeal lies in the story of his life. Norikiyo, as he was first called, was born into a privileged world as the son of a minor branch of the Fujiwara clan, the greatest and most powerful family in the land. As a young man, he joined the prestigious Hokumen Guards who served at the retired emperors palace, and his future career seemed assured. Yet at the age of twenty-two, Norikiyo astonished everyone by deciding to turn from the world and become a tonseisha, one who takes Buddhist vows to henceforward live a life of simplicity and austerity and dedicate himself to the practice of the Buddhas teachings.

Such a gesture was not uncommon at the time, but those who undertook it typically did so in response to old age or illness, or after a major setback to their career. Why, people wondered, would a young man with his life ahead of him willfully choose to throw away the world, as the common expression had it? Rumors naturally focused on his love lifeperhaps he nursed a despairing passion for some unattainable lady of high rank? But whatever private sufferings may have lain behind his decision, his poetry makes it clear that his urge was deeply sincere, and that it was no spur-of-the-moment act. Fujiwara Yorinaga, a contemporary diarist who visited him soon after he had left the world, gives a description that we can surely trust: He was already devoted to the Buddhist Way while he was in the world. Though he was of a wealthy family and was still young, he chose to leave the world, and people were full of praise for him. Norikiyo took the Buddhist name Saigy. The new life he chose was not that of an institutional monk affiliated with a temple but a freer life of reclusion and wandering.

Recluse monks such as Saigy typically searched out a remote place deep in the natural world and conducive to quiet contemplation, where they built themselves a simple hut (iori) and devoted themselves to a Buddhist practice of sutra chanting, meditation, and austerities. Some, like Saigy, also wandered from place to place, making their way by begging alms and calling at temples. Saigy became famous for his travels, which took him twice into the remote northern land of Michinoku (present-day Thoku) as well as to the island of Shikokudifficult journeys that were themselves a form of austerity. He also spent time living in various recluse communities that spontaneously grew around temples and in particularly attractive natural places. His poems provide the only record of his movements, but they reveal a life rich in travel interspersed with periods of reclusion in various places. Although Saigys poetry would influence the poetics of Japanese Zen, the Zen teachings that we in the West tend to associate with Japanese Buddhism today had yet to arrive in Japan.

The non institutional Buddhism of Saigys time was a fluid mix of beliefs and practices, none of them mutually exclusive, among which the practitioner was free to choose. Elements of the tantric Buddhism of the two most powerful sects, Tendai and Shingon, were often tempered by worship of the bodhisattva Amida (Amitabha), who promised rebirth in the Western Paradise or Pure Land. Amidist faith, already a powerful influence in Japanese Buddhism during Saigys day, was on the verge of becoming the dominant form of faith for future generations with the spread of popular Buddhism in the Middle Ages. Saigys poems attest to the fact that Amidism was an important part of his practice, but the lengthy periods of time he spent on Mount Kya, the spiritual center of the Shingon sect, suggest that Shingon was probably his primary affiliation. Shinto faith in the native gods was also easily integrated into Buddhist faith at this time, and Saigys strong association with the great Shinto shrines at Ise would not have been seen as any obstruction to his Buddhist practice. His eclectic and fluid mix of beliefs and practices was typical of the recluse monks of his day and later.

One thing we can say with certainty is that central to his belief, and to his poetic preoccupations, was the great Buddhist teaching of impermanence and the resultant folly of attachment to the things of this world. The events that unfolded during his lifetime dramatically drove home the truth of this teaching. Court politics, already unstable when young Norikiyo served at the palace, erupted into unprecedented upheaval and bloodshed in 1156. The continuing turmoil saw the world that Saigy had known disintegrate and effective power seized by the warrior Taira clan. Their ascendancy was short-lived. In the final decade of his life, Saigy witnessed the Tairas defeat at the hands of the rival Genji clan, in a bloody civil war that lasted years and engulfed the nation.

With the Genji victory, Kamakura became the new center of power. Four centuries of tumultuous samurai military rule followeda new era that historians identify as Japans Middle Ages. Already by the time Saigy died, the world he had known had fundamentally changed. Many whom Saigy knew were killed, exiled, or otherwise caught up in the ongoing chaos of the time. When his poems speak of this sad self (