Reiki, in its original form as taught by Dr. Usui uses poetry as an evocative force to try on the feelings of our true nature, our Buddhanature.

The earthly expression of this Buddhanature is our most beloved teacher, our Earth Mother. She offers to us feelings we can use to embody healing, and the wisdom of seeing beyond what we have previously seen through our human eyes.

The poet’s work is to employ the eyes through the lens of feeling, and tell the story of that.

In today’s storytelling, I will relay the short story of Basho to inform our practice.

Basho was and is one of the most famous and celebrated poets of Haiku. At 22, he lost his close friend, and it was then that he decided to start a pilgrimage to contemplate the meaning of life. Following his loss, the work of this aspiring poet begins to reflect the element of sabishisa - a feeling of loneliness that is moved by the understanding of emptiness in Zen practice. Sabishisa most closely relates to the quiet, fading beauty within nature. We have no single word for this in English.

His most celebrated poem:

Furu ike ya!  

Kawazu tobikomu 

Mizu no oto 

The old pond!  

A frog jumps in

The sound of water

Knowing Basho’s view of emptiness, we can now understand this poem in a multi-dimensional way.

Like a short nature mantra, Basho weaves the lines together, with the element of sabishisa, beginning with an exclamation of seeing an old pond…how joyful to recognize the age of the pond. It is a contrast to our predictable feeling of aging - of sorrow for the loss of beauty.  

The second line “a frog jumps in” also adds a surprise in the frog’s forward movement into the aged quality of the environment. This frog is choosing this with deliberate action.  He does not slide, or simply look - he jumps!

Basho’s frog jumps into what can be understood to contain two separate meanings. The first, a literal one, emerges when we take the second and third lines as separate, and we see the sound of water being caused by the jump. That is the first level.  

The second level requires us to open to interpretating the meaning without cause and effect, without a filter of meaning that the frog is jumping into the water and thereby causing the sound. 

The deeper view can be seen by allowing the second and third lines to be connected in a surprising way. The word “sound” is that surprise, a kanji or “cutting word” that points us to a new understanding. In this realization of meaning, we can now see that the frog is jumping into the sound.  

When we allow this way of seeing, at this second level, this changes the way we think. Now, effect precedes cause. The sound is there before it was created. The frog, with his love and enthusiasm for this old pond, already knows the quintessential nature of his life as he ages, as the pond ages, and leaps into its sound, before the sound is born. 

Basho invites us to see the complexity within the simplicity. Just like our Orioki practice. 

Here is the invitation today. 

Find something simple in nature. 

Look.

Look again.

Allow the many meanings to wash over you, as if you are the frog jumping into a sound that is created before the sound’s creation.

Jump again.

Jump.