May 16

Bashō Walks Into the Deep North

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He’d given away nearly everything in the weeks before his departure; Matsuo Bashō had been slowly unburdening himself—distributing possessions to students and friends, settling his affairs in Edo, and preparing to step off the edge of the life he’d built. He was forty-five years old, not considered young for the time.

The journey Basho was planning—north through the rugged interior of Honshū, along mountains and cliffs above the shores, and at least one sacred pilgrimage into legendary forest known as Oku, the “Deep North”—would cover some 2,400 kilometers, taking him take five months.

At dawn on May 16, 1689, Bashō and his student, Kawai Sora, left the hermitage in Fukagawa by boat, crossed to the shore at Senju, and continued the rest of their journey on foot.

Before he went, Bashō composed a poem—the first of dozens that would punctuate the journey:

“The spring is passing

the birds all mourn

and fishes’ eyes are wet with tears.”

“Travelers of Eternity”

From Bashō’s opening meditation in Oku no Hosomichi—published posthumously in 1702:

“The months and days are the travelers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers. Those who float away their lives on boats, or who grow old leading horses, make their dwelling place the road itself. And there are many of the men of old who died on the road."

He wrote that he’d been tempted to take a journey for years, what he referred to, in his journals, as a “the cloud-moving wind”—a phrase that carries in Japanese an entire philosophy of restless, purposeful wandering. And Basho was through with waiting. “Every day is a journey,” he added, “and the journey itself is home.”

Here, Basho framed his journey almost as if it were a Zen proposition. For him, the road wasn’t a means of getting somewhere—it was the practice itself; a walking meditation. Something as simple as composing a haiku in response to a frog or a butterfly or a chorus of cicadas could be an act of spiritual attention. The philosophical ground under Bashō’s feet was Zen Buddhism, and at the center of Zen is a teaching that is simultaneously the most obvious fact in the world and the hardest for us to accept: mujō (無常)—the crucial acknowledgement of impermanence. The acceptance that nothing persists and everything arises and passes away. The mountain you see today is not quite the mountain that existed yesterday, and the Self that is observing it is not quite the Self that observed it before. Bashō not only understood this principle, but accepted it as a lived reality to be inhabited. When he visited the ruins of Hiraizumi—once the glorious seat of the Fujiwara clan, but by then just an unkempt field—he wrote what may one of the most succinct meditation on mujō in Japanese literature:

“Summer grasses

all that remains

of warriors’ dreams.”

Three lines to explain the whole of human ambition, dissolving into the ether. The narrator of Basho’s words doesn’t lament it, nor celebrate it. Rather, He names it, with the exact precision that Zen requires. This is the practice he brought to every moment of the journey.

Sometime during his travels near the mountain temple of Yamadera (and having already climbed a thousand stone steps to have reached that point), the sound of a cicada reached Basho from the rocks below. He stopped, listened, and wrote:

“In the stillness

sinking into the rocks

the cicadas’ cry.”

This was mujō understood from the inside.

Within Japanese aesthetics, there is also a principle that Bashō embodied as fully as anyone who’s ever lived: mono no aware (物の哀れ), commonly translated as “the pathos of things” or “the gentle sadness of things.” In layman’s terms, the grounded accepted of one’s impermanence, corresponding to mujō. Mono no aware doesn’t weep or rage against the dying of any light. Rather, it sighs, as if watching cherry blossoms fall; not grief exactly, but gratitude for the beauty of winter as it makes the summer more precious.

The Japanese philosopher Motoori Norinaga described the concept as a capacity to be moved by the world as it actually is, without the armor of detachment and without the distortion of sentimentality. Bashō’s departure poem captures this description rather perfectly:

“The spring is passing

the birds all mourn

and fishes’ eyes are wet with tears.”

For the journey, Bashō dressed the part of a monk, complete with wide-brimmed sedge hat, bamboo staff, and simple plain robes. This practice is known as wabi-sabi (侘寂) and is, perhaps, the most misunderstood of all Japanese aesthetic concepts. Wabi originally described the loneliness of the hermit, and the spare beauty of living without excess—not necessarily the poverty of deprivation, but the freedom of simplicity; Sabi carried the sense of age, of the marks that time leaves on things, of the beauty that comes not despite imperfection but through it.

Taken together, wabi-sabi is the aesthetic of the thing that has been weathered, used, repaired, and allowed to show its worse-for-wear. However, Bashō transformed wabi-sabi from a quality of objects into a quality of consciousness: the road was wabi—sparse and stripped of comfort; the ruins at Hiraizumi were sabi—aged by time, yet beautiful precisely because they bore the traces of that history. And Bashō himself, aging and unwell, yet enduring the journey on foot, nonetheless—perfectly embodied the concept in his writings, as well as daily living.

The Journey as Esoteric Practice

Western esotericism has another term for what Bashō was doing: “The Vision Quest.”

This concept is one of an initiatory ordeal—a dark night of the soul. Across traditions—from the wandering of the Sufi dervish to the pilgrimage roads of medieval Christianity, to the “walkabout” of Aboriginal tradition—the deliberate journey into unknown territory has been understood as a technology of transformation. There, it is mandatory that leave the known world, so as to encounter what cannot be encountered in ordinary life. Yet, you always return changed—or you don’t return at all.

Of course, Bashō’s version is admittedly quieter than most of these similar spiritual rituals. Here, there are no dramatic initiations or visions, and no expected encounters with spirits or other supernatural forces. Instead, there’s a frog jumping into an old pond, or the sound of rain ta[ing against the leaves. There’s the rough sea stretching toward Sado Island with the Milky Way above it … or an old battlefield where nothing grows but grass. The great Zen scholar, D.T. Suzuki, claimed that within Bashō’s method, the “subject and object were entirely annihilated”—that the poet dissolves so completely into the moment of perception, that the poem that emerges isn’t about the frog or the pond or the poet, but is somehow the event itself, preserved in language as a moment in time set to words.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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