The Japanese samurai, dressed in traditional white robes and bathed in cold water, draws the tantō, a dagger less than a foot in length, forged for stabbing, sometimes slashing, and wielded in duality with the tachi, the sword. Seppuku: in one movement, from left to right, the tantō plunges into the belly, bringing cold metal with the final breath of death. In the stirring between Death’s arrival and Life’s departure, left behind is only a poem, a reflection of life in perhaps the most intimate moment with death. Captured in those scant lines, distilled from those jumbled dashes and dots is the summation of all of one’s life—the ink on parchment tells the stories of the lost, the triumphant, and the grieving without fail. In this piece, I will explore some of the history behind the Japanese death poems that start each of our classes, I will argue for their connections to existential ideas that we explore in-class, and offer my own poems, not as a precursor to my own death, but as an existential reflection on all that I have lived.
Popularized during the Edo period (1600-1867) of Japan, the practice of writing death poems spread from Japan to grasp wider East Asian cultures, including parts of Chinese and Korean history. The poems, customarily written by poets, warriors, noblemen, or Buddhist monks, derived primarily from the Buddhist teachings of the “three marks of existence,” (1) anicca: impermanence and transience in the material world, (2) dukkha: suffering from limitations on achieving complete satisfaction, and (3) anatta: there is no fixed sense of self, no self-nature, but rather emptiness. Taken in a general sense, I argue that these three marks of existence themselves, though not perfect reflections of all existentialist philosophies, hold within themselves strains of thought often posited by existentialist philosophers. Reflected in anicca, Nietzsche, who simultaneously criticizes Buddhism yet names himself the “Buddha of Europe,” articulates the impermanence of the world. Just as dukkha suggests an inherent suffering as part of the human condition, so too does Schopenhauer in his belief that life is fundamentally characterized solely by suffering. And as anatta rejects the idea of a permanent, unchanging soul in favor of the idea that the self is a collection of bodily and mental experiences, so does Sartre’ in his suggestion that “existence precedes essence,” that individuals are not born with predefined essences or fixed identities, but rather that they develop themselves through their choices and actions. Though Buddhism and existentialism come from different cultures and places of origin and find separations in many places, their shared similarities too are rather startling. Perhaps being tasked with the penning of a handful of lines to summarize everything and all from a lived life requires a pondering that is existential in nature.
The death poems themselves are as varied as their authors. Occasionally written in haiku form, with three lines and a 17 (5-7-5) syllable composition, the most common form of the death poem, the jisei, takes on a 31 (5-7-5-7-7) syllable composition. Of the poems, some are sorrowful, some prideful, some humorous. From the pens of failed military conquerors and warriors, sickened and ill poets, or monks at the end of their lives, the death poem is the piece that uses winter storms, sunsets, and cherry blossoms. It is the final farewell.
Offered below are 3 of my own death poems which I have written, let them serve as my own goodbye to my past self. Interpret them as you will.
1)
Cherry blossoms curdle
underneath my fire seven times.
eight times I pour tea
and scatter ashy petals
into spring air. I am cold.
2)
Once lived, twice killed, the
blade tastes sweeter than
the honey from a bear’s paw.
3)
Perched on my shoulder,
the foe that faced me at dawn
and the sleeping friend
that struck like black lightning,
who I loved too fondly to fear.
Tianyi Evans Gu 