« Union of Inner and Outer »

A haiku – as I see it – is a pre-industrial camera click, a snap-shot of the outer and inner.   Take this one by Master Buson 1716–1783.

Picking plum blossoms

And fretting at my wrinkled hand –

Fragrance.

Allow me to… analyze, rather than interpret.   At a content level, the gist is simple: a man is picking up plum blossoms, notices his wrinkled hand, frets about it, and then smells the blossoms.   But here’s the yoga of it (yoga=union). 

1. First, the man is focused on the external (plum blossoms).
2. He then notices his hand – a part of himself – and experiences it also as an external object (Subject-Object/Mind-Body dualism).
3. He then reacts to his hand (because it is wrinkled) and experiences a reaction (fretting)(the Subject/Experiencing Self here further subdivides into Self the Subject experiencing one’s own emotion as an Object).
4. Finally, the man notices the smell (fragrance).  The moment of experiencing the fragrance is a moment of the union of the man and the nature.  The nature provides the stimulus (the fragrance of the flower) and the man provides the mind to experience it.  Neither would exist without each other (after all, does a flower smell if there is no mind to experience it;  or can you smell a blossom that is not there?).  And the two (man and the blossom) become one.  The fragmentation of Self-Other (Man/Nature; I/It) ends and so does the haiku.

Restated and diagramed, this haiku can be represented as follows:

Focus on the Outer

Focus on the Inner

Unification of Outer and Inner=Oneness

This haiku, like most, I think, is a story of Duality that leads to Fragmentation and ends in Union.   A snap-shot of a happy ending of self-consciousness.

Reference:

Haiku Master Buson by Yuki Sawa and Edith M. Shiffert, Heian, 1978