Orange County Buddhist Church
Orange County Buddhist Church
Juugatsu ya
It is the 10th month.
Yoso e mo yukazu I go nowhere;
Hito mo kozu No one comes here.
- Shoohaku tr. by R.H. Blyth
I really had to stretch for something to say this month, because there is no
special service that I could base this essay on. The haiku by Shoohaku is in
R.H. Blyth’s Haiku, Vol. 3, summer – autumn.
I seldom go anywhere in any month, let alone the tenth (which might not be
October, since the haiku was probably written when the lunar calendar was still
being used), and people seldom come to our place, which is probably for the
better, what with the condition of the house. I was probably born in the year
of the packrat, not just a simple rat, if you get my point.
The haiku actually does not fit my situation this year,
because we’ll be going to Japan: Hokkaido, then Kyoto and Tokyo. I hope the
severe aftershocks in Hokkaido are over by the time we get there.
Although the haiku doesn’t really fit the
situation, I am using it for the commentary that Blyth brings to it. “Why
should absence have a deeper meaning than presence, no one and nowhere than
someone and somewhere? In truth, the ‘no one’ of the poem is a being as real as
ourselves:
“’I see nobody on the road,’ said Alice [of Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland]. ‘I only wish I had such eyes,’ the King
remarked in a fretful tone. ‘To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance
too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light.’”
Not knowing anything about the author of the haiku, Shoohaku,
it is difficult to say how literally or figuratively we should understand it.
Is he saying simply that he doesn’t go out a whole lot in the tenth month, maybe
because it’s too cold, and that not a whole lot of people come to his place, for
whatever reason? Or is he saying, perhaps, that, from the Buddhist point of
view, he goes “nowhere” and “no one” comes, playing off the teaching of “no
self?” And to reiterate Blyth’s questions, why should absence have a deeper
meaning than presence, no one and nowhere than someone and somewhere?
If you do not think Blyth’s questions are all that
meaningful, you might ask something like, Why does it take a loved one’s death
to make you realize what you should have done or said (such as, I love you,
mom/dad; or, I’m sorry) while that person was still alive? October is a good
month to think about such things, because it is cool but not so cold that you
think more about the weather, so I hope you do. Think, that is.
Gassho,
Dull-rooted Jaan, Rev. John Doami
