2 Ways of Viewing Children’s Stories:

Zen and Literary Criticism

Acknowledging where this conference is taking place (in Kyoto) and in gratitude to my Japanese hosts, I thought I would make some rather large statements about two ways of understanding Children’s Literature and do so with reference to a facet of Japanese culture–Zen Buddhism. My remarks here owe a great debt to Robert Aitken’s book A Zen Wave where he examines Bashō’s haiku. Aitken is an American roshi (teacher) in the Zen tradition who studied in Japan and later established a monastic community in Hawaii; he died in 2010. Throughout his career, Aitken Roshi employed literary criticism in interesting ways to elucidate principles of Buddhism.

In the sixteenth chapter of his book, Aitken examines this haiku by Bashō:

Look, children,
Hailstones!
Let’s rush out!

As Aitken suggests, the circumstances are something like this: Bashō is indoors with a group of young friends when it begins to hail, and he enthusiastically proposes they go outside and play. The attitude of the poem is: Bashō is just a big kid among kids.

Aitken compares this haiku with another poem, a senryū, a traditional and anonymous verse that usually makes some wry or sardonic observation about human nature. To understand this poem, you need to know that a child is…