•  
  •  
 

Lingbing Meng

Abstract

This article analyzes the five-character quatrains in Wang Wei’s Collected Poetry from Wangchuan, Matsuo Bashō’s haiku, and Martin Heidegger’s poems in his later years. The paper summaries some common features of the Zen-style poetry from the perspectives of the core ideas of Zen Buddhism, Matsuo Bashō’s wabi-sabi, and Heidegger’s later comments on “the truth of existence.”. This style of poetry uses laconic diction and near plain sketch technique to present a natural scene that is instant and self-existing while the ideas of Zen Buddhism informs the poet’s direct sensory perception (pratyakṣa-pramāṇa) that does not discriminate, which aligns with Wang Fuzhi’s summary of the essentials of the direct perception and Yunmen Zen Branch’s concept of three realms as well as Fyodor Ippolitovich Stcherbatsky’s view of point-instant (ksana), and therefore arguably it is the one and only existence of the flowing cosmic vitality that it really expresses. In Matsuo Bashō’s art of haiku, it is expressed as wabi-sabi, “sincerity” and “genuine emotion,” while the poetic philosophical thought of Heidegger, it is expressed as the realm of clarity of existence and poetic dwelling through “poetry”, “language” or “art.” Direct sensory perception, as the core of this kind of Zen-style poetry, underlies all of the above-mentioned three, but it actually displayed in seventh-century Master Huineng’s thought and becomes shared intellectual and cultural heritage of the twentieth-century modern world. The paper maintains that Zen-style poetry should be considered a subgenre so as to highlight its unique value in the history of poetic aesthetics and human philosophy.

Keywords

Wang Wei, Zen-style poetry, Martin Heidegger, Matsuo Bashō; haiku

First Page

194

Last Page

204

Download

Share

COinS