Illustration inspired by Hsiao Chin 蕭勤
For many years, since I bought a nicely tradionally bound volume of Basho’s haiku, I was obsessed with this paragraph in the introduction, a quote from Basho:
"What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that is has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry."
I looked for its exact source left and right, in books, on the internet, without any success. One day I’ve got Qiu Peipei book, “Basho and the Dao: The Zhuangzi and the Transformation of Haikai”, I finally understood what was behind the of leaving the high and returning to the mundane - 高尚領悟後，應當回歸世俗 (Having attained a higher understanding, one should return to the ordinary world).
. I wrote her, and she kindly answered me with the original quote in Japanese:
高く心を悟りて俗に歸るべしとの教也。つねに風雅の誠を責悟りて、今なす（ところの）俳諧にかへるべしと云る也。
Why was I so obsessed with it? Maybe because it was pointing me towards my own direction. I am mathematically inclined by nature, and my younger years were populated with grand schemes, ideals, abstractions and concepts. There is something vast and infinite about this way to see the world.
As I started to mature, I tended towards more bodily disciplines. Travel first, then my practice of Taijiquan and other internal martial arts, photography, haiku and even the game of go. These are halfway, I should say, between the high and the mundane. They touch reality and mobilise the body, but they are still populated with stories, ideas and principles.
Recently I walked one step down the ladder. Zen is an absolute search of the mundane, I explored Kintsugi, long walks, became fond of cooking, simple cooking, and loving doing the dishes afterwards.
Where does it stop? I don’t know, but I suspect death is a highly mundane episode, when there are no concepts anymore and we just face the elements.
This trajectory, journey, from the complex to the simple was hinted along the way. Michel de Montaigne went through it, as described in “Montaigne en Mouvement”. Chuang Zi was saying the same thing when he noticed that the sky is infinite and the earth is bounded. The realm of ideas sitting high, the sky, creates this illusion of an unending, infinite world. Alas, we have our bodies to remind us that the world is finite and that is the real ultimate truth. It is when we are confined to our circumstances, when we have the connection to the material world at hand, only then we can develop true presence.
Post a Comment