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THE RESULTS OF SATORI 171 must include the element of wabi, or of yugen, that "poverty" of soul in which the intuition can have full display. Basho (1644-94) the most famous poet of Japan, was a Samurai by birth, but went into voluntary exile as a penniless wanderer, living for and in his poetry. His was "an acceptance of the greater happiness which comes to those who follow an ideal” 1 He lived in a world of satori, and his poems came out of it. Perhaps his greatest poem books have been written about it—has already been quoted in R. H. Blyth's translation. In Japanese it reads,
"Furu-ike ya Kawazu tobi-komu
Mizu no oto." Literally it means, “The old pond. A frog leapt into—the sound of water.” Blyth's version is genius; transcending all translation he gives us a haiku fit to be added to English verse.
“The old pond. A frog jumps in.
Plop!" Basho was always direct, concrete, clear; no "modern verse" for him. “When Basho looked at an onion he saw an onion; when he felt a deep, unnameable emotion, he said so. But he did not mix them all up in a vague pantheistic stew or symbolic pot-pourri.”? And in a Japanese poem there is room to say so little in so few syllables that only a finger pointing to the moon is possible; the moon can never be described.
1 The Cloud Men of Yamato, GATENBY, P. 99. 2 Zen in English Literature . . . , BLYTH, P. 58.
