Names, ages, identity

 Baisaō spent almost 40 years as Gekkai Genshō. The Buddhist names were given to him when he became a monk at 11.

He was known by Gekkai, or Moon Ocean, to his fellow monks. Genshō was his true name, given to him by his teacher. It wasn’t used routinely.

When Gekkai Genshō resigned his Buddhist names, he called himself Kō Yūgai or Layman Yūgai. Kō is literally high, with high-minded understood. Yugai suggests some kind of search beyond.

Later he called himself Baisaō, a kind of nickname, pen name, stage name. I learned in a footnote that he was known as Kikusen, or Chrysanthemum Spring, as a child.

In reading Norman Waddell’s biography, I was struck by how differently a person’s identity was viewed in 18^th-century Japan.

In addition to religious, secular and pen names, there were posthumous names. When their mother died, The Old Tea Seller and his sister began referring to her using a different name, reflecting a different relationship or a different way of relating.

The differences in the way people thought about identity go beyond naming. Age is part of identity. In The Old Tea Seller’s culture, a child was a year old at birth. (How else do you account for time in the womb?) The poems celebrating The Old Tea Seller’s 80^th birthday were written when he was 79, in our way of reckoning.

The Western idea of a birthday did not become common in Japan until the 1950s. In The Old Tea Seller’s day, you — and everyone else — became a year older on New Year’s Day.

The year was common — the way the community reckoned time. Everyone gained an extra year at the same time.

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008.

A shaggy crank

 I should have given some samples of Baisaō’s poetry. Here are the first and third parts of “Three Verses on a Tea-Selling Life”:

 

I’m not a Buddhist or Taoist 

not a Confucianist either

I’m a brownfaced whitehaired

hard-up old man.

people think I just prowl

the streets peddling tea,

I’ve got the whole universe

in this tea caddy of mine.

 

Seventy years of Zen

got me nowhere at all

shed my black robe

became a shaggy crank.

now I have no business

with sacred or profane

just simmer tea for folks

and hold starvation back.

 

Gary Snyder loved the line about the shaggy crank.

I love lines scattered through The Old Tea Seller’s poems about the ordinary business of life. He fed his brazier with pinecones. “Pine wind” was the combination of smoke and steam that rose from his fire, the smell competing with the aroma of the tea.

During his years in Kyoto, The Old Tea Seller rented several tiny places. Here’s his note on moving:

 

Having learned the ways of silence

within the noise of urban life

I take life as it comes to me

and everywhere I am is true.

 

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. The inscription is on pp. 53 and 36. 

An odd business model

 I’ve been trying to imagine the Old Tea Seller’s business.

I would love to know what a professor or a theorist would say about it, whether the Old Tea Seller’s practices could be analyzed in any way that could be discussed at a university’s business school.

The Old Tea Seller did not charge a fixed price for a cup of tea. Instead, he had bamboo donation tubes. One had this inscription:

 

The price of this tea is anything from a hundred in gold to a half sen. If you want to drink free, that’s all right too. I’m only sorry I can’t let you have it for less.

 

A physician named Nagatomi Dokushōan, who wrote a book called Little-known Examples of Hidden Radiance, said that the Old Tea Seller would continue selling only until 20 sen had been collected in the bamboo tube.

Twenty sen a day was close-to-starvation income. The Old Tea Seller wrote repeatedly about being hungry and the humiliation of having to beg. But he also wrote about the joy of doing as he pleased and living as he liked.

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. The inscription is on p. 33. 

The Old Tea Seller

 One of the books I took up the mountain was Norman Waddell’s account of Baisaō, the Japanese poet.

Baisaō means Old Tea Seller, so that’s what I’m going to call him. The Old Tea Seller lived from 1675 to 1763, under various names. (That’s another story for another day.)

I’m interested in him for two reasons.

First, he undermined the dominant paradigm of his culture, as scholars would say. Or, as the hippies put it, he undercut the Establishment.

Second, he changed his own life, at least a couple of times, when he was no longer young. Now that I’m old, I’m interested in people who can do that — who can look at changing themselves rather than trying to change the world.

The Old Tea Seller spent most of his life as a Buddhist priest. He lived during a period of military rule, the Shogunate. It was a period when conservative militarists were discouraging individual expression and encouraging order and conformity.

In all societies, respect for religious institutions ebbs and flows. The Old Tea Seller mourned that monks, who were once revered for seeking enlightenment, were despised as parasites.

The problem, he thought, was with the idea that seekers should be free to seek — that doing work takes them away from seeking.

If one monk in a community spends his whole life seeking, perhaps a village will love the idea and will feel charitable when the monk shows up asking for food. If 400 monks in a monastery hit the streets looking for food, the community sees a plague and feels something other than charity.

The Old Tea Seller was a Zen master. He was in line to be abbot of his monastery. When his teacher died, The Old Tea Seller found another candidate for the job and hit the road. He wandered for 10 years, learning from other teachers. He also wanted to think things through.

The Old Tea Seller eventually settled in Kyoto, the capital. Instead of begging for charity, he supported himself by selling tea.

Working for a living was strictly forbidden, and The Old Tea Seller resigned his priesthood and his Buddhist names. Old men who lived on the fringes of society by selling refreshments were called old tea sellers — and the Old Tea Seller appropriated the name.

Many people who have heard of Baisaō are interested in how he changed the way people thought about tea. At the time, people drank matcha, a kind of powdered tea, in elaborate ceremonies.

The Old Tea Seller brewed loose leaves, known as sencha, with little ceremony. The informal conversation at his stall attracted artists and writers. Can you imagine having a Zen master for a barista?

In an era when individual expression was discouraged and conformity was demanded, The Old Tea Seller ignored the social pressure and the rules. He took what he found valuable about Zen and spread it through the streets of the capital, a cup at a time.

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. Waddell’s book is in two parts. The first is a biography, quoting heavily from The Old Tea Seller’s poems and letters. The second includes translations of The Old Tea Seller’s work.

How do you know a poet?

 What does it mean to know a poet? Does it count if you could write a letter off the top of your head introducing a friend to the poet’s work? Do you have to have entire poems or at least some lines committed to memory?

The political advertisements in Georgia are such an assault on my sensibilities that I was trying to imagine whether any of the candidates read poetry. If so, which poets do they know?

It seems as if that would be telling — a good thing to know.

That question led me to Elizabeth Harball’s essay about a dozen U.S. presidents who read poetry.

Jimmy Carter was a fan of Dylan Thomas. He lobbied to have a memorial installed in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Abraham Lincoln was a fan of Robert Burns. People knew that invited the president to make a toast at a dinner honoring the poet. Lincoln declined, saying he could say nothing worthy of the poet’s genius.

Harry Truman carried some lines from Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall” in his wallet. The paper with the copied lines kept wearing out, and Truman kept recopying — 20 or 30 times.

Truman’s devotion to a poem strikes me as admirable. His choice of poem strikes me as creepy, meaning it’s telling. I’m not sure I’d vote for a candidate who had the sensibilities needed to love that poem.

• Source: Elizabeth Harball, “Poetic Presidents: We’ve matched 12 commanders-in-chief with the poets that inspired them”; Poetry Foundation, Oct. 31, 2012. It’s here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69875/poetic-presidents

10 things about Henry

 Sometimes, a week or two after I finish a book, I realize that it’s been simmering on the back burner ever since I put it down. I realize that Henry Seidel Canby gave me a pretty good sense of what Thoreau was like as a person.

Some items that stuck in mind:

• He hated games, parades, shows and company.

• He wore a green coat to chapel at Harvard when black was required. He wasn’t being eccentric. He could afford only one coat, and his was homemade.

• After he failed at teaching, his first idea, before Walden Pond, was to farm. He thought about an orchard.

• He said he was 5-foot-7, but people in Concord thought he was shorter. However, he was accurate in his measurements.

• People said he always walked out of the house with more grace than he walked in, a way of saying that he loved outdoors.

• He had three pairs of boots: cowhide, India rubbers and full rubber. He wore a neckerchief, and his hat had a flap inside the crown that he used as a shelf to hold botanical specimens.

• On his walks, he carried a stick that was notched so he could measure things, an old music book that he used as a plant press, some cord and a knife. Eventually, he bought a spyglass. 

• He probably read less American literature than any other American writer. He read Emerson and Whitman. He didn’t like fiction. His main reading was in the Ancient Greeks, 17^th century English literature, the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita. 

• He could smell a tobacco pipe a-third of a mile away. He discovered that his friend Melvin, a muskrat hunter, kept an azalea bush by sense of smell.

• When he realized he was sick, he compiled a list of the houses he’d lived in. He reasoned that the first step of a biographer or an obituary writer is to establish the basic facts.

Ten details about the man. I think they catch of the sense of him.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.

Black Rock Mountain

 We spent three nights on Black Rock Mountain. We rented a 17-foot trailer and stayed in the state park.

From the mountain, you can see a series of ridges, the Blue Ridge of the Appalachians. I’m pretty sure the last ridge we could see was in North Carolina.

We saw all those ridges after the fog had cleared each day. In the morning, you could see the peaks. They looked like islands in a sea of fog. It’s thick stuff. You get wet walking through it.

It seems to me that the need to see such sights is not just a matter of personality. It’s deeper than that. Some people need to see wild places and get out in them. They sometimes get wet.