Copyright © 1992 by Sanford Goldstein
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-994676-37-5
AHA Books
POB 767
Gualala, CA 95445
USA
In July 1982, I traveled to Matsuyama on Shikoku Island to visit the nearby farm of Masanobu Fukuoka, the famous Japanese farmer whose book on natural farming, The One-Straw Revolution, I carried with me. An editor of a small American press had asked me to interview Mr. Fukuoka. I knew a little about Mr. Fukuoka's Zen experience, and since I had been interested in Zen Buddhism for at least twenty years and since a Zen master had lived in my house in Indiana on two separate occasions of a year each, I went to Shikoku with trepidation -- I would be courting difficulties and the inevitable contradictions that surface in any Zen-oriented world.
Since my spoken Japanese succeeds only on the most mundane levels, I planned my list of some twenty-eight or so questions, planned them with the help of two Japanese friends in Niigata, where I had been living and teaching the past two years. That list I no longer have, for Mr. Fukuoka confiscated it without my ever getting beyond the first question, which he claimed had to be answered before any of the others could be. That question concerned itself with satori, or enlightenment, and since my own little breakdown of the written Japanese character for satori included five mouths in order to explain the emotion behind satori, I was aware of the difficulties I would be encountering by posing that question first. A young Japanese who was at the farm to learn Mr. Fukuoka's methods of Japanese farming and perhaps to translate Mr. Fukuoka's latest book into English (I was never quite certain) sat by me to pass on in English the various statements made by Mr. Fukuoka.
Those three nights and four days I spent at Matsuyama remain memorable -- days that were among the most difficult I had spent on my five two-year trips to Japan during the last thirty-two years. It was a period in which I felt I was throwing off much of the clutter (and ease) of the modern world. I was of course frightened and frustrated, and yet I realized I was in the middle of something crucial to my life, my own and that of other persons, something ambiguous and beckoning and building. My bare cabin without electricity or running water with an easy accessibility to all that crawls or flies in the outside world, my keyless door and battered screens, my pile of damp futon -- all that found me groping in darkness after a long first-night session with the farmer and some family members and neighbors and disciples. I was obviously the gaijin-foreigner who had come to ask questions, not someone there to work at natural farming.
Later I helped with meals, with cleaning the kitchen floor and low table we ate at, with sweeping and peeling. It was not the KP of my remote life back in the forties. Throughout I felt something of mu (interpreted audaciously as I write this introduction as Buddhism's complex yet rich nothingness), of sabi (acceptable human loneliness), of wabi (the preciousness of old things in all their bare limitations). I remember feeling that even Matsuyama's hills were wabi, an obvious poetic-license-ism. There were natural peaches, natural rice fields, natural tangerines, and natural summer-mikan (unlike anything tangerine in the world with their shibui rough-textured shapes and skins), and of course the world was shiori, effectively and variously ambiguous on several different levels.
I had come to interview, but only occasionally did I meet Mr. Fukuoka, who appeared and disappeared with strange regularity. I thought he had given me more attention than I deserved in that long three-hour nighttime session in which I had felt like something out of Breughel watched by more than twenty-four eyes. My interviewless-interview found me less a questioner than an examiner of this American self sometimes defecating in a shed under rains that seemed to proclaim some antediluvian connection. But if I saw less of my famous Zen farmer, I saw more of Rebecca, an American from the East Coast studying natural farming, yet more concerned, I felt, with trying to find the Zen way, the Gateless Gate, the magic formula that somehow allows one to walk this tightrope life without falling down. There was also that young Japanese translator (Jiro I shall call him) who every now and then sat pouring over Japanese texts. It was odd the third day out to be invited by a group of four young workers, including Rebecca and Jiro, to spend a long rain-filled afternoon and long-long evening together, the first at a famous Japanese hot spring bath on the island and then, as if to reinforce the irrationalities of my journey, at a disco bar.
I was actually torn between staying longer at the farm or spending a full week in Kyoto as I had originally planned. But another American visitor suddenly arrived to help me decide to leave. Late in the morning of my fourth day I walked the long muddy road down to a spot where taxis maneuvered along the highway to the airport.
I had no advance plan to write At the Hut of the Small Mind, but I had, even since 1964, kept up what I call my tanka diary. Since I have never counted out the traditional thirty-one syllables in writing any of my tanka poems, it has been easy to continue framing tanka over the years, yet it has always been hard to come up with a good one. At any rate, I knew in advance that I'd be adding poems to my tanka diary, but I hadn't expected to be so on my own in the hut I lived in. I had never before so vividly experienced the limits of my own quite limited self.
And so this tanka sequence: At the Hut of the Small Mind. For quite a long long time, more than a decade in fact, I had thought I was writing tanka sequences, but actually I was writing clusters of poems around a single event or experience or person or thought or feeling. It is not my intention to discount those earlier efforts. But for the last five years I had been studying and translating Mokichi Saito's Shakko [Red Lights] with my long-time tanka-translator-collaborator, Professor Seishi Shinoda, and it was through our joint study that I came to realize the dramatic impact of a tanka sequence with its beginning, middle, and end toward some new awareness of the self and/or the world. Mokichi's dramatic night-run entitled "Sad Tidings," the run made just after he learned of the death of his famous teacher Sachio Ito, is perhaps the most famous tanka sequence in Japanese -- unless it is Mokichi's sequence on the death of his mother. Whether or not my own tanka sequence is perhaps the first tanka sequence in English by a foreigner is of little consequence, but that it is at least a true tanka sequence pleases me, consisting as it does of the day before my trip to Shikoku, the trip to Matsuyama, the four-day stay at the farm, and the following twenty-four hours in Kyoto.
Perhaps a note of clarification is in order: Mr. Fukuoka calls his method of farming do-nothing farming. While this is misleading since a great deal of labor does go into his methods, I believe he means by it his protest against the excessive scientific procedures modern farmers are forced into complying with for their yields. A devoted advocate of natural farming, Mr. Fukuoka has gained the admiration of a large following.
Sanford Goldstein
West Lafayette, Indiana
December 1985
devouring
these supermarket cakes
as if
tomorrow's
trip
may be my last!
wanting
tonight's
window gaze
an
almost-satori --
and still only this neon, only this car
glare
I pass rice fields,
tiled roofs,
pine, and all
the rest;
oh, Japan,
my passing is a passing
through
a taxi maze
among
these Matsuyama hills
--
until at last
the farm! the farm!
in his rubber raincoat
stark
against white
hair
and drooping specs,
the solidity of
master?
on the way up
to the mountain hut
the Zen
farmer
crushes
a tangerine pest
they give me
food --
I
eat
napkinless,
chopsticks without Japanese
points
through
this candle-
glow
the eyes
of my
natural farmer
around the table
of this mountain hut
our Zen
farmer
talking his way
through mu
I toss out
a theory
in this Zen hut,
but how
real
the brown rice ball in my hand
I zigzag
my way
through theoretical
Zen,
hurling my smile
at the master's face
first night:
in the dark
I stumble for a
place
to send my urine
natural
how many before me
have found in this mountain
hut
moths clinging to corners,
mosquitoes
over this
July flesh?
how bare
this mountain hut,
my unwashed
body
reduced
to summer smell
voices distant
from my mountain hut
and the
long long
cry
of falling rain
the flesh clings
tighter still
as if to tell
me
this world is smell,
is touch
a universe
of crawling,
flying,
sounding
ambiguities:
insomnia in my
mountain hut
that wing
brushed
by candleflame,
and still
it fluttered,
still it flew
I am a lump
of thought
this fragmented
night
of insect cry
and crawl
I listen
for the soundless --
oh, you
analyst,
can't you hear?
can't you smell?
I too
am Basho,
fleas
and that urine
smell
in this mountain hut
up this mountain
I came
with my
usual
bag
of dishrag servilities
in a corner
tacked
to the mud wall
of my
mountain hut,
Mother Teresa
it was roosters
at morning light-fall --
how
joyous
even that crack
diagonal
is it
with rain water
I wash?
first
morning
in these Matsuyama hills
outside
my hut
where I piss,
am I stepping
on radish,
on burdock?
it's by candlelight
and
perpetual
cock-crow
I write
my morning
poem
in the morning's
candlelight glimmer,
I
sweep
these mountain hut
mats
no god
came down
to tap my shoulder,
to
say
there's a primitive world
the master
gathers the young,
and by
candlelight
dissects
their various worlds
chickens
with legs
on solid ground:
this
morning world
at my Matsuyama hut
is it coffee
withdrawal
giving me
this huge
split
at the back of my skull?
in this Hut
of the Small Mind,
I'm made
to
read
about "knowing"
why I came:
the Zen farmer
asks twice,
three
times,
as if my own koan's in it
where's the talk
at breakfast
poking these
chopsticks
into miso soup,
vegetables, rice?
the others
my Zen farmer led
to
practicalities,
me to abstractions
in the Hut of the
Small Mind
sounds
of labor in those fields,
sounds
of
insect cry,
and, of course, cock-crow
how vivid
that spider
in its lair
I urinate
by
at least
Mother Teresa
smiles at me
from the
mud wall
in my Hut of the Small Mind
for hours
I lay
on my hut futon
till
even
the candleglow waned
as if the world
out there
not nature
enough,
a picture of a bird
nailed to my hut's
wall
I walk
to the natural rice fields
and
back,
I write
my natural poem
green and more green
and
greener
still,
these tangerine leaves
in the July
rain
the cool
of rain,
July relief
in my Hut
of the Small Mind
not a single complaint
do I hear
from these
blades of grass
bombarded
by afternoon rain
all day
in this hut,
mind pouring
over the
abstract prose
of this man of Zen
a mountain child
in this Hut
of the Small
Mind,
I wrap the dampness
round
that bee
stayed and stayed
as if it
too
sought shelter
from the July flood
the hills
are wabi,
and there's a shiori
smell
in this Hut
of the Small Mind
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