Basho

Basho and his student Sora start out on their journey.

http://www.uoregon.edu/~kohl/basho/1-prologue/01-6.html

Matsu Basho is thought to be one of the greatest masters of Japanese poetry. He took what had been simple poems and made them art. Basho was born during a time in Japan when warlords--daimyos, tried to outdo each other in shows of power, wealth and art. They hired artists to instruct them. Many warlords, and the samurai warriors who served them, turned to poetry as a way to prove their worth and class.

Basho was born 1644 into a lower samurai family and was "supposed to live and die, sword in hand." At that time, his name was Kinsaku. Although, his family wasn't very important in samurai terms, he was able to get instruction in the arts and attend the court of the lord. But, after the sudden death of the artist master who was teaching him and with whom he was extremely close, he chose to move away from the lord he was supposed to serve and start a new life in Edo which was the old name for Tokyo. He could not afford to become a poet full time at the start and had to support himself with other jobs. He might have worked as a doctor's assistant, a town clerk, or a poet's scribe. There is much more proof, however, that he worked for the city water department for decided amount of time.

However, over the years, he published a lot of poems and was a judge in many poetry contests and became a poet full time. He gained students who wanted to learn from him. In the winter of 1680, his students built him a small house on the outskirts of Edo and gave it to him. It was the first house that he ever owned. A few months later, a banana tree was planted in the front and that is how Basho (banana plant) took on a new name that he kept for the rest of his life.

But, after a while, he grew restless and unhappy with both his life and his poetry. His parents had died and he had achieved what he had set out to do in his poetry. Life seemed empty. He started to practice Zen meditation to help him cope with his emptiness. When he was forty, in the spring of 1689, he set off by foot on the first of several really hard journeys. He wanted to go to the places that poets he had admired, long dead many centuries, had visited and written about in their poems. He also walked to find calm and a sense of peace. Travel was not easy for him. By nature, he was frail and he had health related problems that would slow him down. He walked for five months and covered 2,400 kilometers (1500 miles). This first long walk produced Basho's most famous work, Oku no Hosomichi, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. 2003 marked the 300th anniversary of its publication.

Interestingly, each time Basho went on each of his four long journeys, he gained a better understanding of himself and the kind of poetry he wanted to write. His poems dived deeper into nature while Basho continued to deepen his powers of observing things that happened around him. He also applied his religious feelings he learned through meditation to his poems. In 1694, Basho became ill with a stomach sickness, which he never recovered from. Yet, he was prepared for death. Family and friends hurried to be with him but all he could think about was poetry. Even though he knew that this time was a time for prayer, not poetry writing, all he was able to do was write. What follows is his very last poem.