古池や 蛙飛び込む 水の音
Furuike ya/ Kawazu tobikomu/ Mizu no oto
From the Buddhist point of view (and since Japs are hella smart, it is safest for me- an ignorant and stupid Tambram- to attribute the highest cognizable Buddhist perspective to those charming and convivial sake drinkers) it is perhaps the case that the poetic word 'kawazu'- which means both frog and the Noh mask used to depict a drowned person- has the following, quite haunting, aesthetic echoes or 'reverberations'- which us guys term 'dhvani' and, I believe, the Japanese term 'yojo'
1) RG Veda 7.103. Manduka (frog) is the Deity though the hymn is to Parjanya (Rain God) who however is also pictured as a rain-cow or rain-bull which can bellow. In other words, there is a sort of 'Prayer & Response' relation between the little creature and the great Monsoonal Rain Clouds which determine the 'Cycle of Heaven' and the fate of Imperial Dynasties.
I believe Japan has a rainy season like India but the frog is more associated with rivers. Indeed, in Japanese, the word for frog is likely to be metonymically derived from that of river- or the onomatopoeic word for the sound water makes.
In other words, if the 'kigo' for a renga or haiku is 'kawazu', you already have the sound of water in the poem. But the sound of a frog is croaking not the splash it might want to create when jumping into a pool of water though, obviously, that species can dive noiselessly enough.
For the Indian Buddhists, the croaking of the frogs symbolises a literally self-defeating prayer for Salvation's rain. Samsara is Nirvana. There is a danger in the Frogs' funktionslust, because as the Vaishnavas tells low IQ Hindus like me, the cry of the frogs invites snakes to eat them.
Once a worthless cunt like me see this, Katechon becomes the most apocalyptic and unforgiving of possible Eschatons. Krishna, the plump infant hiding in plain sight and giggling audibly, is always already irretrievably lost. God's Lila is our Kala- his pastimes, our continuing pain for so tied to a Past whose Time never passes.
Low IQ descendants of the one low IQ udgatr who features in the Chandogya, may see things differently. The crescendo of the frogs' croaking is always polyphony not cacophony. That is Soma- if we could but see it- except the whole point of the exercise is to forever be, as I'd have you picture me, blind drunk.
Basho turning from such harmonious sabi as overwrought wabi aesthetics could no longer turn to 'lightness' and 'the common speech' (karumi), gives us, at one and the same time, a stoned-Hippy, Allen Ginsberg-type 'kerplunk' as well as an 'Aryan', Tocharian, 'Tuirgen' or, at the very least, the more modest & miscegenated Bihari or merely Scholastic and Nalandan, Shantideva's 'paratman parivartana' solution whereby the Boddisattva diving into Hell to rescue us is also merely going 'kerplunk' somewhere, that is everywhere, along the rain-chain of our exchange of identities or Indra's net of pearls.
But that's not the point. There's an old pond. It is stagnant. There is no sound of water. But, by a decision of the frog, it is turned back to 'wa' that is water. This is all the more the case because there was no fucking old pond around at the time and place where Basho composed this haiku. Indeed, 'old pond' was, not an after-thought, but the only way the thought could be completed in such a manner as to cease to be a thought- just as the old pond became water to cease to be water. The frog who, perhaps, like Rihaku, was drunkenly trying to rescue the Moon, has meanwhile gone to Hell. That's what should happen to any kigo in any haiku. All things, if only in the irreality of each other, harrow Hell as Boddhisattvas.
2) Them Japs weren't just better at Sanskrit and Buddhism than us lame ass Babus, they were also great scholars of Chinese. The fact is-
In Mandarin Chinese the word for frog, 蛙 (wā), sounds similar to the sound made by a baby (娃 wā),
But, to the question, 'due to why, does baby cry?', the Rg Vedic answer is 'Ka' which is also the question mark at the end of a Japanese sentence. Us udgatrs think Ka and Kha are connected- coz us guys know 'Space' and 'Bliss' and 'God' just mean 'Daddy was good looking and Mummy, due to the excellence that Beauty endows, looked after him and had his baby'. True, there wasn't much money and we've had to move around a lot BUT no bar or board room cacophony aint a more perfect polyphony, no drink aint Soma- nor Love not, on itself, blind drunk.
Obviously, guys who know Japanese and Chinese and esoteric phonology and shit would get a lot more out of this haiku than me. But, so long as they don't inflict their erudition on me, I too will desist from ignorantly expounding a tedious theme.
Fuck that. Just returned from the offie. I'll now tell you my own 'reception' of
古 as what has passed away
&
池 as an object used for storage but more particularly the water well in a calligrapher's ink-stoneNote- the 'Frog' must actually jump out of the typography in some manner.
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