Part 2: Translations

[Betty]

Norman Waddell's translation of Daiten Kenjō's (1719–1801) "The Life of Baisaō" and of Baisaō's poems.

[Elsa]

Just finished reading the book (except for the end notes which I probably will read because they add a lot to the historical context). Baisao wrote some brilliant poetry. I enjoyed the strong zen influence, humor and his keen observant eye. There is one in there where he wrote a poem for a friend's parents death anniversary to help them on their way to heaven that says to them, and please, no missteps on your way home. I nearly shed a tear.... I always know a biographical book worked for me when I think I would have really liked to sit down and have a conversation with the person.

[Betty]

Reading through to the very end, I didn't experience so much emotion, but did see the timeless experience of frugal living in the poem reprinted on the back cover:

Out of tea
out of food
coin-tube empty
a minnow gasping
in a drying puddle;
thank you
for what you did
the special trip
the food
bowl and dipper
filled again
will stop the end
from closing in.

He lived into his eighty-eighth year.

Much pleasure is found in Baisao's autobiographical poetry and in the biographical stories about the former Buddhist priest who became a layman. The noted phrase "a black-bat of a man", i.e. a "bat-monk" and a "shavepate layman" in the book also pertains to Baisao because of his spiritual life outside of the priesthood--Buddhist prelates and students revered his understanding and transmission of Zen, perhaps not wholly his humble practice of a tea-seller. He thinks that one's being in a traditional Buddhist temple and on itinerant pilgrimages misses the way of true enlightenment. Instead, he earns his own living, barely subsisting on a measure of rice from his tea-selling beside the scenic, traveled byways of eighteenth-century, cultural Kyoto, brewing fragrant clouds of high-quality sencha tea in his teapot over the brazier for passersby and later inscribing paintings, letters, and artifacts with his calligraphic brushwork and his verses.

Buddhist terms and concepts are generally defined in the Notes and/or the Index-Glossary. In the story is shown great sensitivity toward nature's pure waters of former times and its plenitude of maples, pines, dwarf cherry trees, and other flora of the abundant hills and forests, and is descriptive about processed forms of tea. The enchanting biography and verse informs about the exchanges between Chinese and Japanese Buddhists and about the Japanese development of sencha from a few seeds carried from China.