5 lessons for living from a haiku master

Haiku as we know it today―a rich means of expression and one of Japan’s highest art forms―can be traced to Bashō, a 17th-century haiku master. An example of his work―one of his most well-known haikus―evokes the Zen koan about the sound of one hand clapping: Old pond― A frog jumps in The sound of water As Stephen Addiss tells it in his 2011 book The Art of Haiku: Its History Through Poems and Paintings by Japanese Masters, early haiku was more akin to limericks, jokes, and puns: “Bolstered by goodly quantities of sake, composing humorous linked verse became a very […]