Discovering Dharmic & Abrahamic Divinity coetaneously in Nature
Many in the western academic and literary world and in society in general are subtly influenced by conservative Abrahamic views. This influence suppresses and subverts whatever is deemed divergent, in regards to philosophical, literary, and poetic ways of thinking and writing. Rajiv Malhotra speaks to these conflicted and subversive influences in many theological and even some academic circles in the A-W world. “Whoever is not for Jesus will be assumed to be against him and on the side of the Devil. For such believers, a mutually respectful engagement with dharma is tantamount to dealing with the Devil. It would be sinful to engage on any terms other than the clear intent to convert.” (Excerpt From: Malhotra, Rajiv. “Being Different.” iBooks.).
All of this is in opposition to most Hindus, Buddhists, and many First Nations and Native American Peoples who more pluralistically accept Jesus as one of several divine incarnations, but not as God's exclusive divine incarnation. So I wonder, do christian or Abrahamic haiku poets likewise feel conflicted in regards to accepting the possibility that nature might be a place where they can discern divinity that might be independent of their Abrahamic God? Do we need to do so in order to write haiku on a higher level, one that transcends our religious and spiritual beliefs, if only momentarily? Does doing so or even discussing the possibility threaten our/their religious beliefs? Can the christian God coexist as an equal with the plethora of deities that may also exist in nature? These are complex, controversial, and nuanced issues. They're also issues that each of us has to come to terms with individually. Sadly, many of us deal with these issues by dismissing their relevance, much like we do with other intersectionally complex issues of oppression. Do we have to perceive spiritual or religious divinity in nature at all, to write haiku on a higher level?
I don't have definitive answers to these questions, although I'm aware of and open to ideas that may seem divergent from my own.
Still I'm attempting to brooch these issues in broader and more generalized terms by initiating a dialogue. It is the West's continued reappropriation of kigo for mukigo that is watering down the depth and aesthetic integrity of Saigyo’s Wakka, Basho's Hokku and Sokan & Shiki's Haiku, as they continue to be re-translated and thus gentrified into English. This loss of natural aesthetic integrity was accelerated by a catalyst. This catalyst is the Anglo-West's egocentric segregation of man apart from nature. This is exacerbated by the west’s own Abrahamic/Greek division, one that continues its internal struggle to synthesize a uniform Abrahamic /Greek conceptualization and interaction with nature; as opposed to coexisting with, or even embracing a more Dharmic perspective that views nature as divine in and of itself, irrespective of the presence of any deity. The west's discord is aggravated by the many A-W poets who are unaware of their detachment or resistance to concepts they may repressively perceive as divergent, because they independently (of god) personify nature as divine. This concept of nature’s divinity speaks to the essence of haiku. This essence is personified in the poetry of poets like Saigyo, Basho, Issa, Sokan, Shiki, Buson, etc. Even A-W and Persian poets like Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Rumi, and later Wright all acknowledged nature’s divinity in their own way. To write haiku, or of haiku we too must come to some spiritual complacency in regards to natures divine essence or at least its secular wonderment, otherwise haiku's essence will continue to be distorted and corrupted.
Often without realizing it A-W's and Westernized-Easterners are frequently shackled with this contradiction between Abrahamic and Dharmic spiritual and religious perceptions of divinity in regards to its application and meaning in ehi. This intellectual and spiritual contradiction, this discord spills over into how all of us conceptualize and apply Dharmic based terms like shizen, koto, zoka, and even kigo, in relation to our perceptions of the role nature plays in our lives and in haiku.
So, how can A-W poets indoctrinated into this self conflicted culture of secularism (Greek based academic evolutionism), synthesized with non-secular (abrahamic based creationism) thought become open to writing in a more passive voice, a less peremptory manner? How can A-W poets write in a manner that they can be receptive participants in collaboratively creating haiku with nature, as opposed to writing apart from nature? I choose to believe you can continue to honor and not betray your Abrahamic spiritual ideals while simultaneously embracing others as equals, that have different ways of being. This is after all what those “Manifested” by the 'Destiny" of the A-W empire have done while being colonized and gentrified by us. Still many of us that were raised to believe it's our way (senryu) or the highway, or perceive their way of being, thinking, or believing, as being superior to all others will have great difficulty, poetically speaking to nature as if it were independent of God, yet still divine.
To paraphrase Rajiv Malhotra "No amount of human commonality can resolve the conflicts caused by the non-negotiable and proprietary grand narratives of Abrahamic historicism". I hope Malhotra is wrong. If he is not, then how can we expect Abrahamic writers, scholars, readers, etc to find commonality amongst themselves, never mind with a Dharmic art form like haiku?
This issue of haiku/senryu is an intersectionally conflicted one. It is a literary issue intersected by class, cultural, race, ethnicity, linguistics, religion, spirituality, and conceptions of nature/naturalism that are unique to haiku.
"...The epistemology of modern science is not the intuitive perception of ... essence or form of things ... it is a technical, formative epistemology ... that tortures so-called nature to force nature itself to answer". (Ban'ya Natsuichi in his online essay, "Technique Used in Modern Japanese Haiku: Vocabulary and Structure".)
Still I would suggest that one of Japan's Cultural contributions to the literary world is haiku's methodology, it's unique hermeneutic poetic aesthetic, Haiku's teleological perspective unifies natural threads that in turn transcend the Judeo-Christian God or humanities self absorbed mukigo like ways, while speaking to our innate embodied (shizen) connection to unifying our integral (zoka) relationship with nature.
Why is kigo essential to traditional haiku, structurally and thematically? Because! "By including Kigo in haiku, the rhythm of the earth's revolution is incorporated within haiku". (Robert D. Wilson's excerpt from his interview with Kai Hasegawa from his online essay "The Colonization of Japanese Haiku"). So this is why kigo and to a lesser extent kireji are the definitive characteristics of traditional haiku. "Kigo usage in Japan was a given before ... the Gregorian calendar". (Robert D. Wilson from his online essay "The Colonization of Japanese Haiku"). Kigo is an issue I've also addressed in my book, JIKU. I also agree with Wilson when he states "Again a restructuring of the Japanese vocabulary and its poetic perception/interpretation of nature; a side effect of the self-imposed colonization of cultural memory". (Robert D. Wilson from his online essay "The Colonization of Japanese Haiku").
Again this is what Gandhi referred to as “stripping people of their collective notion of self … (via
the) “systematic destruction of their relationship with nature” This “self-imposed” colonization of cultural memory continues today. Haiku's colonization takes the form of a 5-7- 5 shelled format. This colonized shell is then filled with muki as its primary ingredient. This is how colonization systematically re- appropriates how the world perceives the essence of hokku/haiku. This redefining of kigo as an optional accessory rather than essential ingredient in haiku, is the result of A-W perspectives. A-W perspectives usually feel comfortable linguistically rather than spiritually assimilating haiku. They linguistically do so by counting syllables and employing short-long-short lines, akin to counting rhyme schemes, lines, meter, and syllable stressing in a sonnet. Yet many A-W's feel religious or spiritual discomfort accepting nature as the essentially divine subject of their poetry, equal to, or god forbid more divine then their Christian God. After all nature is the "other" subject, one in which they/we have a maladaptive relationship, distorted by our historicists linear way of seeing the world.
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