found a school of hokku writing which has persisted down to the present day. He reformed the hokku, by introducing into everything he wrote a deep spiritual significance underlying the words. He even went so far as to disregard upon occasion the syllabic rule, and to add extraneous syllables, if thereby he might perfect his statement. He set his face sternly against impromptus, poemes d'occasion, and the like. The number of his works were not large, and even these he perpetually sharpened and polished. His influence persisted for long after his death. A disciple and priest of Zen Buddhism himself, his work is permeated with the feeling of that doctrine.

Zen Buddhism, as Bashō practised it, may be called religion under the forms of nature. Everything on earth, from the clouds in the sky to the[14] pebble by the roadside, has some spiritual or ethical significance for us. Blake's words describe the aim of the Zen Buddhist as well as any one's:

[14]

"To see a World in a grain of sand,

And a Heaven in a wild flower;

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour."

Bashō would have subscribed to this as the sole rule of poetry and imagination. The only difference between the Western and the Eastern mystic is that where one sees the world in the grain of sand and tells you all about it, the other sees and lets his silence imply that he knows its meaning. Or to quote Lao-tzu: "Those who speak do not know, those who know do not speak." It must always be understood that there is an implied continuation to every Japanese hokku. The concluding hemistich, whereby the hokku becomes the tanka, is existent in the writer's mind, but never uttered.

Let us take an example. The most famous hokku that Bashō wrote, might be literally translated thus:

"An old pond

And the sound of a frog leaping

Into the water."

This means nothing to the Western mind. But to the Japanese it means all the beauty of such a life of retirement and contemplation as Bashō practised. If we permit our minds to supply the detail Bashō deliberately [15]omitted, we see the mouldering temple enclosure, the sage himself in meditation, the ancient piece of water, and the sound of a 

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