Saigyo’s Inner Moon

Saigyo’s Inner Moon Page 66 Awesome Nightfall This is not to deny, however, that Saigyo’s preoccupation with the moon, as shown in the poems of this book, was deep. Yamada Shozen researched for decades to unearth the multiple and subtle links between Saigyo’s verse and the practices of Buddhism in twelfth-century Japan. He detailed how the use of representations of the full moon or the full moon itself served as the focal point for extended meditations. In these meditations, referred to as gachirinkan and prized especially within the Shingon School the mind/heart (Kokoro ) of the practitioner was visualized as progressively filling with light. Objectives of such exercises included an enhanced ability to recollect the past, greater powers of memorization, and--in the most literal sense- enlightenment. There was even a sense that through such practices something like a personalized luminescent moon would take up residence within the interior of the body-mind of the committed meditator. Yamada suggests that poems otherwise easily mistaken as banal become interesting, even fascinat- ing, when we realize this dimension of Saigyo’s preoccupation with the moon. Such meditations explain the frequent occurrence in these poems of the homonym sumu. One ideograph for it means "to become lucid" but an alternative denotes “to lodge within." The double entendre catches the way these poems, based on the gachirinkan, verbally represent experiences of drawing the moon and its luminosity into the very being of the poet-monk. “Residing”, there, its light becomes embodied. The following is one such verse: kumo oo futakamiyama no tsukikage wa kokoro ni sumu ya miru ni wa aruran 1784 Clouds thickly mantle these mountains, but the blocked moon had already taken up residence in my mind, so nothing now prevents me from seeing its serenity there. Saigyo writes Yamada, inverts the situation with ease. Prevented from viewing the moon in the sky, he finds within himself " what is virtually the same moon” Konishi summed up this trajectory of research by noting that “Saigyo perceived cherry blossoms and the moon as mandalas” and then went on to caution against judging such poems with only a twentieth-century sensibility and standards, writing that " we must give full consideration to how many people in the twelfth century would have been deeply moved by these poems” This was poetry but it was, at the same time, something more than poetry..

Saigyo poetry reading From Awesome Nightfall by William Lafleur