TY - JOUR
T1 - Place as Refuge
T2 - Exploring the Poetical Legacy of Matsuo Bashō
AU - Huntington, Patricia
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - By drawing on phenomenological notions, this paper offers a "middle way" reading of Bashō's travelogues that accentuates their religious, rather than merely aesthetical purpose, which is to transmit the Buddha Dharma. Two distinctive poetic traditions of Bashō interpretation exist: the Zen-inflected, monologic, and individualist tradition and the intertextual or dialogical interpretation. One way to reconcile these two strains in Bashō's poetics is to see his haikai through the lens of mind-to-mind transmission of light. This "middle way" interpretation traces a double movement of phenomenological reduction through two travelogues: first, by showing how home departure entails freeing the mind of fixity and, second, by suggesting that mind-to-mind transmission removes the ambition to find refuge in peak experiences, just as it resists being reduced to parodic subversion of reigning cultural values. In the Buddhist lineage, the heart of transmission rests neither upon conservation nor upon rejection of poetic essences but, rather, lies in transforming haikai into medicine, which is efficacious for the process of awakening.
AB - By drawing on phenomenological notions, this paper offers a "middle way" reading of Bashō's travelogues that accentuates their religious, rather than merely aesthetical purpose, which is to transmit the Buddha Dharma. Two distinctive poetic traditions of Bashō interpretation exist: the Zen-inflected, monologic, and individualist tradition and the intertextual or dialogical interpretation. One way to reconcile these two strains in Bashō's poetics is to see his haikai through the lens of mind-to-mind transmission of light. This "middle way" interpretation traces a double movement of phenomenological reduction through two travelogues: first, by showing how home departure entails freeing the mind of fixity and, second, by suggesting that mind-to-mind transmission removes the ambition to find refuge in peak experiences, just as it resists being reduced to parodic subversion of reigning cultural values. In the Buddhist lineage, the heart of transmission rests neither upon conservation nor upon rejection of poetic essences but, rather, lies in transforming haikai into medicine, which is efficacious for the process of awakening.
KW - Haruo Shirane
KW - Japanese poetics
KW - Makoto Ueda
KW - Matsuo Bashō
KW - haiku
KW - middle way
KW - mind-to-mind transmission
KW - phenomenology
KW - place
KW - religious versus aesthetic transmission
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U2 - 10.3868/s030-006-017-0040-9
DO - 10.3868/s030-006-017-0040-9
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85048607922
SN - 1673-3436
VL - 12
SP - 572
EP - 590
JO - Frontiers of Philosophy in China
JF - Frontiers of Philosophy in China
IS - 4
ER -