Thought Rhyme

The classical Japanese syllabary, consisting of forty-seven syllables. It is also a poem, which may be translated:
"Their luster remains, but the blossoms have fallen;
in our world, who goes on forever?
Crossing the deep mountain of being today,
I saw no shallow dreams, nor was I drunk."
"Incorporating i-ro-ha" means beginning each tanka with one of the forty-seven syllables.
— Footnote #7, in From the Country of Eight Islands, Hiroaki Sato/Burton Watson (trs. & eds.), p. 195.

Plum blossoms at their best — if only the wind blew empty-handed!
— Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), 1667, in Ibid., p. 278.

In my hut, square light cast by the window moon.
— Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), 1684, in Ibid., p. 280.

An old pond: a frog jumps in — the sound of water.
— Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), 1686, in Ibid., p. 282.

     Take Saigyo's waka, Sogi's renga, Sesshu's paintings, Rikyu's tea — what runs through them is one and the same thing. Those in art follow nature and make friends with the four seasons. Whatever they see can only be a flower; whatever they think can only be the moon. Those who see no flower in anything are no better than barbarians; those who feel no flower [moon] in their hearts are akin to birds and beasts. Get out from among barbarians, take yourselves away from birds and beasts. Follow nature and return to nature, that's what I say.
     Early in the tenth month the sky looks uncertain and I feel like a leaf in the wind, not knowing where I'm going:

I'd like to be called a traveler in the first showers [FN # 14: Followed by Yoshiyuki's wakiku, "again lodging under sasanqua from place to place."
— In Ibid., p. 283.

A green willow's quiet, wherever you plant it.
— Chiyojo (1703-1775), in Ibid., p. 333.

"Truth is one":
Clear water has no front or back.
— Chiyojo (1703-1775), in Ibid., p. 334.

    It is hazardous to think that a coordination of words (for philosophy is nothing more than that) could resemble the universe. It is also hazardous to think that of those illustrious coordinations, one — albeit in an infinitesimal way — might resemble it a little more than the others. I have examined the combinations which enjoy a certain credibility. I venture to affirm that only in the one formulated by Schopenhauer have I glimpsed some trace of the universe. According to that doctrine, the world is a factory of the will. Art requires certain visible unrealities ... always. Allow me to cite on: the metaphorical, or multiple, or carefully casual diction of the interlocutors of a play ... Let us admit that which all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do that which no idealist has done; let us search for the unrealities which confirm that nature. We will find them, I believe, in Kant's antinomies and in Zeno's dialectics.
     "The greatest sorcerer," wrote Novalis in a memorable phrase, "would be he who bewitched himself to the point of taking his own phantasmagories for autonomous apparitions. Would that be our case?" I surmise that this is so. We (the indivisible divinity who operates in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it to be resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space, and fixed in time; but we have  permitted tenuous and eternal intersticies of illogic a reason in its architecture in order to know that it is false.
— Jorge Louis Borges, from "Joyce and Neologisms," in Borges: A Reader, Emir Monegal/Reid (eds.), pp. 108-109.