Reginald Horace Blyth (3 December 1898 – 28 October 1964) was an English author and devotee of Japanese culture. He is most famous for his writings on Zen and on haiku poetry.
Or, to express this in another way, suggested to me by Professor Suzuki, in connection with seeing into our own nature, poetry is the something that we see, but the seeing and the something are one; without the seeing there is no something, no something, no seeing. There is neither discovery nor creation: only the perfect, indivisible experience.
There is a Hindu myth about the Self or God of the universe who sees life as (play). But since the Self is what there is and all there is and thus has no one separate to play with, he plays the cosmic game of hide-and-seek with himself. . . all the time forgetting who he really is. Eventually however the Self awakens from his many dreams and fantasies and remembers his true identity, the one eternal Self of the Cosmos who is never born and never dies.
If all men lead mechanical, unpoetical lives, this is the real nihilism, the real undoing of the world.
There is nothing intrinsically more beautiful or poetical about the moon than about a dunghill; if anything, the contrary, for the latter is full of life and warmth and energy.
We that change, hate change. And we that pass, love what abides. Ashes, darkness, dust.
It is not merely the brevity by which the haiku isolates a particular group of phenomena from all the rest; nor its suggestiveness, through which it reveals a whole world of experience. It is not only in its remarkable use of the season word, by which it gives us a feeling of a quarter of the year; nor its faint all-pervading humour. Its peculiar quality is its self-effacing, self-annihilative nature, by which it enables us, more than any other form of literature, to grasp the thing-in-itself.
The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things. . . . When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living. To do this twenty-four hours a day is the Way of Haiku. It is having life more abundantly.
Zen is the game of insight, the game of discovering who you are beneath the social masks.
A haiku is the expression of a temporary enlightenment, in which we see into the life of things.
A thief running away like mad from a ferocious watch-dog may be a splendid example of Zen.
These are some of the characteristics of the state of mind which the creation and appreciation of haiku demand: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, and Courage.
Thus we see that the all important thing is not killing or giving life, drinking or not drinking, living in the town or the country, being unlucky or lucky, winning or losing. It is how we win, how we lose, how we live or die, finally, how we choose.
What is essential is not the answer but the questions; the answers indeed are the death of the life that is in the questions.
Zen is mind-less activity, that is, Mind-ful activity, and it may often be advisable to emphasize the mind, and say, Take care of the thoughts and the actions will take care of themselves.
I myself think that to have a cat is more important than to have a Bible.
Regarding R. H. Blyth: Blyth's four volume Haiku became especially popular at this time [1950's] because his translations were based on the assumption that the haiku was the poetic expression of Zen. Not surprisingly, his books attracted the attention of the Beat school, most notably writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, all of whom had a prior interest in Zen.
We walk, and our religion is shown even to the dullest and most insensitive person in how we walk. Or to put it more accurately, living in this world means choosing, choosing to walk, and the way we choose to walk is infallibly and perfectly expressed in the walk itself. Nothing can disguise it. The walk of an ordinary man and of an enlightened man are as different as that of a snake and a giraffe.
Nothing divides one so much as thought.
Think of Zen, of the Void, of Good and Evil and you are bound hand and foot. Think only and entirely and completely of what you are doing at the moment and you are free as a bird.
The object of our lives is to look at, listen to, touch, taste things. Without them, - these sticks, stones, feathers, shells, - there is no Deity.