The Travels and Poems of Matsuo Bashô

This chapter looks at the iconic 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashô, who is known as the originator of haiku and is most famous for his travel-account Oku no hosomichi, ‘The Narrow Road to the Interior’. This account contains many references to Buddhist temples and legends, since the purpose of the trip was not only to “be one with nature” and write poetry, but also to visit religious sites. Bashô was a Buddhist, as well as a Shintôist, a Confucian, and a Daoist. He had studied Zen Buddhism, but had enough worldly attachment to not want to enter a monastery permanently. Through his travel journals, Bashô created an ideal world of itinerant monks and he is often hailed as a role-model for wandering religious poets.

Introduction

In Chapter 1, the editors present the background and scope of the book and discuss main themes of the subsequent chapters on wandering religious poets in India, Tibet, and Japan.

Buddhist Surrealists in Bengal

Towards the end of the first millennium CE, Buddhism in Bengal was dominated by the Tantric movement, characterized by an external/physical as well as internal/meditational yoga, believed to lead to spiritual enlightenment and liberation from the round of birth and death. This technique and its underlying philosophy were expressed in the Caryāgīti, a collection of short songs in Old Bengali composed by a category of poets and practitioners of yoga, some of whom apparently had a peripatetic lifestyle. One of the peculiarities of Old Bengali is the presence of a large number of homonyms, permitting play on ambiguous images. This, it is argued in the first part of the chapter, is the key to understanding many songs that are seemingly meaningless or nonsensical, or that could be superficially taken to be simply descriptions of everyday life in the countryside of Bengal. By means of their very form, the songs convey the idea of the identity of the secular and the spiritual, of time and eternity. The second part of the chapter makes a leap in time, space, and culture, by suggesting a resonance for the Caryāgīti in the Surrealist Movement of Western art.

Milarepa Sings Again: Tsangnyön Heruka’s ‘Songs with Parting Instructions’

Although Tibetan Buddhism is often associated with monks and canonical texts, other types of Buddhist practitioners and other kinds of texts are also of importance. Before the 5th Dalai Lama came to power in 1642 and Tibetan Buddhism became increasingly systematized and monastically oriented, Tibetan charismatic yogins composed and printed religious poetry (mgur) and hagiographies (rnam thar) to promote a non-monastic ideal with remarkable success. They modelled their lifestyle upon Indian Tantric siddhas and on the Tibetan poet-saint Milarepa (c. 1040–1123). Like them, they adopted a wandering lifestyle and used religious poetry as a means for spreading their message. By expressing themselves through poetry, which they also composed, these yogins could present Buddhism in an innovative way, adapted to the needs of their audience. Taking the ‘songs with parting instructions’ (’gro chos kyi mgur) of the ‘crazy yogin’ (rnal ’byor smyon pa) Tsangnyön Heruka (1452–1507) as the point of departure, this chapter explores how these colourful figures attempted to vitalize Buddhism in Tibet by creating an alternative religious infrastructure outside of the monastery.

‘Wander Alone Like the Rhinoceros!’: The Solitary, Itinerant Renouncer in Ancient Indian Gāthā-Poetry

The ancient Indian gāthā – a proverbial, succinct type of single-stanza poetry, often collected in thematic sets – became a favoured form of expression among groups of ascetics from the middle to the end of the 1st millennium BCE. This poetry – contrasting with the magico-ritual chant or mantra of the priest and the artistic poem of the aesthete – functions as (self-)instruction for the ascetic/renouncer. Examples include gāthās that exhort him to be as untiring as the Sun in its daily course, or to “wander alone like the rhinoceros!” This chapter delineates the figure of the solitary, wandering renouncer in a selection of Brahmanic, Jaina, and Buddhist ascetic gāthā-verses from that period. Particular attention is given to the use of solar and heroic imagery for describing the ideal renouncer, and how this relates to the real-life conditions of wandering renouncers.

Spiritual Localization and De-localization: Traditional and Modern Patterns in Hindu Pilgrimage

Going on pilgrimage is a vivid tradition in India and its masterpiece, the Kumbh Mela, is probably the biggest mega-event of its kind in the world. The identification of holy places at established places of pilgrimage is an ongoing process even in our times, contributing to the diffusion-mechanisms of certain pilgrimages. In contradiction to this, the criticism of the institution of pilgrimage has formed an important stream for centuries. The monistic tradition in Hinduism has produced many popular poems that question the reward of religious journeying and ritual bathing at holy places, or that transform pilgrimage into a metaphor for inner journeys towards liberation.

Itinerancy and the Afterlife

The chapter proceeds from the sense of mutual dependence that existed between rudimentary warrior-elites and specialized suppliers of prestige in archaic Greek and Indo-Iranian societies. While this tension was fraught with the danger of bankruptcy and disloyalty, it also fostered new modes of antinomian religiosity. The Greek and Vedic comparanda revolve around the notion of sacrifice as a path to fame and immortality. We catch a glimpse into such elaborate notions in a Vedic myth about three idealized craftsmen, the R̥bhus, who are rewarded with immortality by the gods for their ritual services. Similar notions are linked to the mythical figure of Orpheus and the sectarian ideals of purity and abstinence among Orphics and Pythagoreans in ancient Greek society. The chapter considers how this deep-rooted ritualistic concept informs the frame of mind characteristic of the wandering sage, including the notion of self-care.