R. H. Blyth

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

December 1, 2022

This coolness!

It is the entrance

To Paradise!

—Issa  (1763-1828)

Happy Day! There’s a new book of “Letters and Uncollected Writings of R. H. Blyth,” edited by Norman Waddell, titled Poetry and Zen.

Reginald Horace Blyth (1898-1964) was instrumental in introducing haiku poetry and Zen Buddhism to the West. He was a student and friend of D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966), who wrote many books and essays about Zen. Blyth’s four volumes titled Haiku are probably what he is most well-known for. These books were a big influence on Gary Snyder and Richard Wright, among many other writers. My favorite book by Blyth is Zen in English Literature and Oriental Culture, his first book, which he wrote while he was a prisoner of war in Japan, and which was published in Japan right after World War II. (Strangely, after being a prisoner of war, he was tutor to the Crown Prince for 16 years!) Every time I finish reading the book, I start reading it again from the beginning. The boldness of his thought reminds me of Emerson and Thoreau. And he’s terrifically funny!

Excited by getting Poetry and Zen, I thought Blyth would be a good subject for the next peace, love, happiness & understanding. I know a couple of other people for whom Blyth is a blithe companion on their life journey. I asked my friend Howard Thoresen if he would write something. This is what he wrote:

The first thing I remember hearing about R.H. Blyth was that he “had given up Zen for haiku.” Over many decades I have sometimes suspected I got it wrong; perhaps it was Lafcadio Hearn or one of the other early western luminaries of the cult of Zen and Haiku. Or maybe I had just imagined it. But in sniffing around the internet I came across this quote from Alan Watts: “R.H. Blyth, who was a great Zen man, wrote me once and said ‘How are you these days? As for me, I have abandoned satori (enlightenment) altogether and I’m trying to become as deeply attached as I can to as many people and things as possible.”

This quote doesn’t exactly say that he “had given up Zen for haiku” but perhaps my version is like an early translation of an ancient Japanese poem into modern English.

Blyth, as quoted by Watts, expresses my own attitude; I am an administrative director of a Zen temple, and I have a lifelong meditation habit, but I have never taken the precepts; and, when people ask, I say, “My Buddhism is all about attachment.” I am working for the temple because I am attached to people in the community and that attachment is a common thread running through everyone and everything in my life. My attachment to Johnny Stallings is the reason I am writing at this moment. 

In my nosing it appears that many modern pundits think Blyth didn’t understand Zen or Haiku; the same charge is leveled at Watts and other famous English language interpreters of Chinese and Japanese literature, some of whom never even bothered to learn the original languages. 

Harold Bloom, in a series of books beginning with The Anxiety of Influence, developed a theory that all reading is misreading. You can never actually know all the things an author knows, you can never embody the author’s experience, so you are necessarily misreading or mistranslating.

     On a withered branch

A crow is perched

     In the autumn evening

                                  —Bashō

This Blyth translation brought to my mind a famous koan: 

An old lady supports a monk and builds a meditation hut for him on her property. After 20 years or so, she decides to test his enlightenment. She instructs a beautiful young woman to embrace the monk and then ask him, “What now?” The young woman does as she is told and the monk says, “A withered tree grows on a cold rock in winter. Nowhere is there any warmth.” When the old lady hears this, she exclaims, “Twenty years of meditation and no loving kindness? Burn down the hut!”

A more recent translation of Bashō’s haiku by Andrew Fitzsimons would never have called up that koan:

On a leafless bough

         The perching and pausing of a crow

                  The end of Autumn

Someone else would have to tell me which is the more accurate translation or which is the better poem.

In this haiku, one translator sees the crow perching on a withered branch and the other sees it perching and pausing on a leafless bough. As I write, I am seeing my own crow, and as you read, so are you. Even if we study the history of haiku and the history of Zen and the history of crows and branches, we will never see what Bashō saw back in the Japan of the 1600s, although we tell ourselves that we do. 

Did the word “branch” call up that curious koan in your mind? Probably not.

I love this theory of misreading, although, of course, I am probably misreading Bloom. 

Maybe Blyth misread the ancient poets, but those of us who encountered his many volumes on haiku and Zen in eastern and western culture when we were young (he finds haiku “embedded” in the western classics) are happy that he did. In his charming and glorious misreadings, he opened a door to a way of seeing, hearing, writing and interpreting that wouldn’t have existed without him. As is similarly true of Alan Watts, it seems probable to me that many of the pundits who sneer at the earlier popularizers of “eastern thought” owe their very interest, not to mention their careers, to these “influencers.”

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Was R.H. Blyth a major influence in my life? Is he still? I would not have thought so, but…

Earlier I said that my own attitude about satori resonates with Blyth as reported by Watts. Is it possible that my hearing or mishearing of this quotation back in the 1960’s—before I had any involvement with Zen and before I had any acquaintance with Blyth’s writings—had a determining affect on the evolution of my thinking? Of my way of life? Certainly it has stayed with me through all these years.

And many haiku, encountered first in Blyth, have also been lifelong companions: 

          O snail

Climb Mount Fuji

          But slowly, slowly!

           You light the fire;

I’ll show you something nice—

           A great ball of snow!

          For you fleas too

The night must be long,

           It must be lonely.

           A red sky

For you snail;

           Are you glad about it?

…and, oh, so many more.

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I confess I never thought much about the man whose writing had such an influence on my thinking. If anyone had asked I probably would have imagined him as a stereotypical Englishman of the early 20th Century, wearing a bowler hat and a suit and sharing with the Japanese a fondness for proper form and tea. What a superficial and chauvinistic person I am!  

In this new book, Poetry and Zen, Letters and Uncollected Writings of R.H. Blyth, edited with an introduction by Norman Waddell, I encounter a sort of superhuman, who taught himself European and Asian languages (without the aid of the internet); who played a number of musical instruments as well as repairing and building organs; who worshipped Bach; who practiced serious Zen under a master’s guidance, wrote books, taught, and engaged with scholars, artists, and politicians. He was also a vegetarian and a pacifist and as a result was imprisoned during both World Wars. He is one of those intellectuals who seem to know about everything and are able to synthesize their knowledge and share it with wit and grace. He found the insight of Zen and haiku in the western canon, and was as likely to quote Jesus or Wordsworth as Basho. He had a friendly relationship with D. T. Suzuki, the foremost interpreter of Buddhism to the west in the first half of the 20th Century. Suzuki praised Blyth’s haiku translations as better than his own.

Blyth’s Zen teacher was Kayama Taigi Roshi. In a passage I love, he describes his teacher’s teishos (dharma talks):

I found them completely different from any Christian sermon I had ever heard. One thing I remember when I took sanzen with him. He told me not to smoke while I was taking a pee. This next teaching is a bit indelicate. He spoke about how you feel when after relieving your bowels your finger breaks through the toilet paper as you’re wiping yourself—and he said that when that happens you must focus with great intensity on that feeling…. I suppose he meant getting intimately in touch with your own essential filth. Having your fingers touching your own shit puts you in touch with the fundamental self.

I believe that going forward I will always think of that “breakthrough” of finger through toilet paper to shit as the quintessential evocation of Zen insight—insofar as I understand it. 

Regarding his four volumes of Haiku through the seasons, the poet Allen Ginsberg “stressed to his class how fundamental those texts had been for the young poets [Snyder, Whalen, himself]—a bible, an encyclopedia, a primer in direct perception and use of concrete details, as well as in the mind that was still enough to catch these and the hand that was confident enough to set them down on paper.”

Since this is a wandering, formless essay, I’ll repeat the story here of how I once heard Ginsberg read at Cooper Union. At the back of the hall a commotion broke out and Ginsberg, from the stage asked what was going on. Someone said, “There’s a huge cockroach walking around here!” And Ginsberg said, “Let’s write a haiku about it!” and took suggestions from the audience and reworked and edited it—alas, I didn’t write it down.

So what could I say to summarize my experience, my life, with R.H. Blyth? As I think is clear from what I have already said, he was a wonderful companion and teacher of whom I was mostly unaware. In a Zen center where we had a bulletin board, I used to post a haiku every season; and my exercise was to read through the volume of the particular season we were in—occasionally straying. These volumes were just there—treasures of wisdom and delight, I assumed them the way I assumed the support of my parents without considering their human fullness. Now and then I wake up for a moment and gasp, “Did I thank my parents? Did I actually say the words to them, ‘Thank you’ ?” But I have so many supporters, lovers, parents, friends, blades of grass—These haiku, these tiny glimpses of eternity, remind me to be aware, to be grateful for all the treasures that surround me. Thank you, Dr. Blyth!

In Poetry and Zen (pp. 6-7, Shambhala. Kindle Edition), Blyth writes about the aim of life, so I’ll let that be the last word here: 

The aim of life, its only aim, is to be free. Free of what? Free to do what? Only to be free, that is all. Free through ourselves, free through others; free to be sad, to be in pain; free to grow old and die. This is what our soul desires, and this freedom it must have; and shall have.