Cultural Keywords

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- Cultural Keywords used by Basho -

During his many travels around Japan, Basho came to know different places, different regional food, different legends, customs and festivals.

He also wrote about animals and plants, implying his friends or famous people from the past.

In his hokku and travel diaries he introduced many items casually, since they were usually known to his fellow poets of the Edo period.
Some of the themes he introduced are kigo.

But for readers coming from other cultures, most of these words need a special explanation before the hokku can be understood in its proper cultural environment.

Here I will try to list the most important ones,
Basho being my guide to Japanese Culture and the early Edo period.

This is the most important collection
of my Basho Archives of the WKD.

. Basho travelling / traveling in Japan .
utamakura 歌枕 place names used in Japanese poetry

Mit Basho durch die Kultur Japans reisen!

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quote
In one of his most famous theoretical statements, Basho says,
“Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo.”
Each pine exhibits pineness but is not pineness itself: each pine alludes to, or is symbolic of, the essence of pine.

Contemporary writers may find Basho’s statement confusing. To use the Western terminology of essence we see in Reichhold and many modern Western haiku commentators, even the essence of pine is not the same as the essence of being. The essence of things is not located within the thing itself. The is-ness of a thing is not to be gained through attention to the thing alone. Indeed, is-ness is not the same as the “thingness” of a thing.

Barnhill says that in his travels Basho pursued
“the wayfaring life in order to embody physically and metaphorically the fundamental character of the universe.”
He visits places “loaded” with cultural and spiritual significance and his sense of “nature” is bound up with these traditions of place. This intertwining of place and significance, the local and the transcendental, is basic to Basho’s experience. The centrality of “place names” or utamakura is basic to Basho’s outlook.
Barnhill says,
“Basho tended to write of places in nature handed down through literature,
giving cultural depth to his experience of nature.”
source : JAMIE EDGECOMBE, 2011

. learn from the pine - - - said my American haiku friends. . 　

This is a still growing list. Please come back again.
under construction
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Join with your own cultural keywords!

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WKD - Matsuo Basho Archives

01/11/2014

Cultural Keywords