A White Tea Bowl: 100 Haiku from 100 Years of Life

by Mitsu Suzuki, Kate McCandless (Translator), Kazuaki Tanahashi (Editor)

Mitsu Suzuki is the widow of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the Zen monk who founded the San Francisco Zen Center and helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States. A White Tea Bowl is a selection of her poems, written after her return to Japan in 1993. These 100 haiku were chosen by editor Kazuaki Tanahashi and translated by Zen teacher Kate McCandless to celebrate Mitsu's 100th birthday on April 27, 2014. The introduction by Zen poet and priest Norman Fischer describes with loving detail a meeting with Mitsu at Rinso-in temple in 2010, considers the formative impact of war in Japan and social upheaval in America on her life, and places her poetry in the evolution of haiku as an international form.

Genres: Poetry, Japan, Buddhism

176 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 2014

Reviews

[Q · Rating 3 out of 5]

This lovely book brings Mistu Suzuki, the wife of Shunryo Suzuki Roshi,the founder of the San Francisco Zen Crnter, to life. Both thru her Haiku and the stories about her from her students. She taught Japanese tea ceremony. My tea teacher had been one of her students. The book had a tenderness to it. And felt like one was in the presence of a zen master. There was a quiet center there.

[Áine · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The essential Japanese aesthetic, inspired by Zen—emphasizing impermanence, the fleeting sadness and beauty of life, embeddedness in nature, a stoic sense of the the humbleness of the human amid the vastness of the cosmos, simplicity, under-or unstated emotion—became the special province of haiku. By the seventeenth century, with Basho, haiku was fully developed as a form, with many variations."
—Norman Fischer

Favorite poems:

Deep in the temple
a thousand-armed Kannon
coolness of green leaves

A falling star
over the grassland—
night deepens

Gentleness
life-giving raindrops—
village green leaves

Winter night—
longing for company
anyone at all

Autumn chill—
tea bowl's roundness
wrapped in my hands

Ink-black clouds
stream past
waxing half-moon

No limit
to kindness—
winter violets

Dusk falls with haiku
sun rises with haiku—
mountains smile

Like a breath
held—
fallen camellia

Birth and death
not holding on to even one thing—
autumn brightness

Learning to be "nothing special"
day by day—
autumn deepens

I bow to my ballpoint pen
and throw it out—
year's end

Learning from haiku
sustained by haiku
this path of dew

[Andō · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most beautiful collection of Zen haiku I have ever read. Mitsu's words have a delicacy, a quietness, and a sensitivity, bringing a sense of time and place.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't read many Haiku, so I was excited to read this collection by such a famous Japanese poet. I won't say I liked a lot of the poems, but I have a feeling that is more because they don't translate as beautifully. The book does provide them in the original Japanese (including transliteration), which sounded so much more beautiful to pronounce out. Certain things like poetry just does not translate easily. Saying that, some of these poems have incredibly beautiful messages.

[Cheryl Crotty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. It's not for everybody but if you like to read and make haiku you might like it. 100 haiku poems for each of the 100 years Mitsu Suzuki has lived. Some of her students of tea making remember her in essay's.

[Brenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and sad

I pour shincha
into the white porcelain
tea bowl he loved

[Alan Wilkerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haiku poetry, indescribable yet everyday zen...

[Jose-Luiz Moura · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of haikus that celebrate Suzuki-san's life.

[Paul Cannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful collection, and a must read for fans of haiku.

[Jason Kirk]

Amazon.com Review: Haiku is nothing if not fungible. This small, originally Japanese poetic form has traveled and evolved across cultures, languages, and centuries to contain as many meanings as dozens of generations' poets could concoct. Haiku can even accommodate an agenda, and A White Tea Bowl is very much an instrument of its publisher. Front and back matter weigh heavily with contributors' "remembrances," all more or less in the service of citing each contributor's relationship to the poet's husband and furthering Rodmell Press's stated aim: "It is our hope that our books will help individuals develop a more skillful [yoga, Buddhism, Taoism] practice." None of which overly dilutes this book's strengths, foremost the poems themselves. A dedicated practitioner of the form, Mitsu Suzuki wrote haiku for decades (not all "100 Years of Life," as the subtitle might have us believe), and of the thousands she composed, one hundred are here translated into Kate McCandless's feather-deft English and rendered beautifully beneath the original Japanese and a transliteration, one per page. To read them is to participate in a worthwhile celebration of a centenarian bard and, as the poet Jane Hirshfield writes, to find oneself "companioned in ways I cannot name but feel completely." --Jason Kirk

[zaynab]

I picked up this book after hearing Mitsu passed away last month. I will probably revisit it a couple more times before the year is out, and become more acquainted with the depth therein. But from the hour it took me to read it in the bath tub, I can say her poetry is captivating, moving, and even sometimes haunting with respect to her poems about being a widow. I think the thing I most enjoyed about this collection is there is no sense of finite temporality. You are not told when each haiku was written, you're left to infer when based on the information within and the sequence as it unfolds within the anthology. At the same time, when precisely they are written become less important the more you sit with her style of writing and the words themselves. When you're truly immersed in her words and the story they tell, you become less concerned with when they were written and if they flow in chronological order or not.

[dre · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the pleasure of reading this book with the folks at the San Francisco Zen Centre (over several weeks on zoom). Such a joy.