Written for Seminar: Into the Silence w/ Prof Huntington / 5.6.201
“Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself.” — Diogenes of Sinope
Taneda Santōka echoes this sentiment throughout For All My Walking, an unassuming manual for practicing the virtue of poverty. Wandering in ascetic indigence gives Santōka unique insights to expand his understanding of Buddhism. His homelessness allows him to see decadent Japanese society through the eyes of the poverty-stricken. Santōka is therefore part of a tradition of Zen Buddhist thinkers who do not fulfill any orthodox metric of success — stability, academic respect, status, health, long-term relationships, or wealth — but are admired in Japan for their authenticity and wisdom. In this sense, the homeless Santōka is meaningfully employed: he provides essential reflections on the life of a destitute poet.
The origins and nature of Santōka’s poverty
Santōka was not born into poverty. His family epitomizes the Japanese aphorism Oya kurō suru, ko raku suru, mago kojiki suru (“The parent works hard, the child takes it easy and the grandchild begs”), as his father inherited and squandered a fortune.[1] His bourgeois childhood is visible in this early poem from 1911: “In a café we debate decadence a summer butterfly flits” (Hiroaki 23). The irony is glaring here: in a café, a symbol of affluence, a group of wealthy students discuss decadence. The season phrase in the haiku, “summer butterfly flits,” is also a symbol of fluttering and trivial leisure. At only 29, Santōka has piercing insights into the contradictions of the class he was born into.
The voice of this carefree Santōka is rarely audible in his later writings. By the years of For All My Walking, he thinks of himself as “nothing but a beggar-monk” (Taneda, 42). Several processes brought Santōka down from the moneyed pinnacles of Japanese society, but there were two key turning points: (a) his mother’s suicide, and (b) the bankruptcy of his father’s sake brewery. The psychological trauma of these events and the loss of his family’s wealth preceded a crushing sequence of tragedies. Over the next five years, Santōka’s brother committed suicide, his grandmother died, he left his family to find work in Tokyo, and then he divorced his wife. Finally, the last living remnant of Santōka’s old life, his father, perished in 1920.
But the trauma did not die. It haunted Santōka for the rest of his life. He was left with at least two psychological ghosts that impeded him from conventional success: first, his near addiction to sake, and second, a severe mood disorder. The ghost of sake is one of the recurring threads in Santōka’s work. As he summarizes his view of the substance For All My Walking,
I like sake so I’m not going to give it up and that’s that—nothing to be done about it. But drinking sake—how much merit do I acquire doing that? If I let sake get the best of me, then I’m a slave to sake, in other words, a hopeless case! (Santōka, 48)
He seems less self-aware of the second ghost, although it is apparent in his works. As the translator writes, “from a mood of elation he sinks into all-but-suicidal despair” (22). Many of his poems are cheerful observations on the sublime beauty of nature or the kindness of humans. Others condemn the futility of existence: “Flypaper / no outs— / yell in a loud voice / till you’re dead” (70). This “nervous disability” impaired Santōka endlessly, from his brief stint in academia to his marriage (16). The twin demons of sake and manic-depressive disorder cling to both Santōka’s life and his poetry.
Debilitating psychological ghosts and the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” thwarted Santōka forays into normal careers. He was therefore pushed to live in reflective, meandering poverty: “Talentless and incompetent as I am, there are two things I can do, and two things only: walk, and compose poems” (20). His poverty is both a symptom and a cause of his poetry — he is a poet because he cannot make money, and he cannot make money because he is a poet. Or perhaps both have a common root in the trauma and tragedy that marred his life. Regardless: after leaving the monastery, Santōka lived the rest of his days in poverty and poetry.
The value of poverty in For All My Walking
Although Buddhism taught him detachment from material possessions, Santōka struggled to accept being a mendicant poet. Sometimes he waxes grateful about this austere life: “when I think of it / the life I live / is way better than I deserve” (43). But he often subjects himself to intense diatribes. At one point he expresses that he would prefer starvation: “Even if it means nothing to eat, I don’t want to do any more of that hateful begging!” (67). He even questions whether he deserves the sporadic charity he receives:
“Stop to think about it, I’m not qualified to receive alms. Only those of the level of arhat or above are entitled to. So it’s only natural that I meet with refusal. If I do my begging with this much understanding and resignation, then begging will become a kind of religious practice” (68).
This passage illustrates a broader theme in Santōka’s life: his use of Buddhism to understand and improve himself. He tempers each of his brutal self-critiques with some fragment of Buddhist philosophy. In this way, his everyday encounter with poverty encourages Santōka to delve into Buddhism. As he walks through the physical world of Japan, tasting diverse dialects and mountains, he also walks through the conceptual world of Buddhism and the emotional world within himself.
Much of the profundity of For All My Walking comes from Santōka’s experience with poverty. For example, this shining piece touches on individualism, summarizes the common view on poverty, and adds Santōka’s honest self-analysis:
“Nothing for me to do but go my own way. My own way—that’s unconditional. Without noticing, without realizing, I’ve let myself get slovenly. I’ve gotten used to being given things and forgotten about giving. I make things easy for myself, and I despair of myself. It’s all right to be poor, but not to stink of poverty.” (75)
It is unclear whether Santōka is expressing his own opinion or repeating some bromide about the “slovenly poor” he internalized during his stint in the leisure class. But the writing is extremely nuanced. Santōka is lauding the need to live his own life, the artist against the world. However, he also rejects the urge to let himself go and become slovenly – allowing sake, laziness, and self-pity to consume his mind. This complex thinking, simply expressed and inspired by poverty, is one of Santōka’s distinguishing marks.
Furthermore, Santōka’s poverty allows him to juxtapose the Japanese leisure class with the backbreaking paucity of the lower class. For example, he reflects on quotidian economic injustices: “a day laborer sweating from morning to evening, if a man makes 80 sen, if a woman, 50 sen” (43). He also sees the painful mundanity of the “Elevator girl” spending her exuberant youth “going up going down / saying the same words over and over / the long long day” (107). I have felt this deadening routine of menial labor. Santōka could have written a similar haiku about the modern world: “Drive thru girl / opens window, closes window / the same packaged meals and words / to car after car / the long long day.” Ultimately, Santoka realizes there is “no help / for the likes of me,” and therefore decides to “go on walking” (23). This is the tragedy of those who fall through the cracks of society and have no recompense.[2] These lines also show the power of haiku: rich observations channeled into a few lines can have immense impact.
Japan was a profoundly stratified society during Santōka’s life. The graph on the right comes from a paper on income inequality that reinforces Santoka’s observations, finding that “a degree of income concentration was extremely high throughout the pre-WWII period during which the nation underwent rapid industrialization” (Moriguchi, 2). Many of his writings reflect this broad trend with small but effective on-the-ground observations of poverty in Japan. However, Santōka did not use his haiku for social activism. Perhaps that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Furthermore, Santōka’s poverty expands his gratitude. This can be summarized in a single poem: “there were hands / to scratch / the itchy places” (24). Santōka had many itchy places: poverty, problems in Japan, nagging innkeepers, annoying traveling companions, straw hats leaking,[3] trauma from his past, his volatile mood, and many more. But he is grateful for his means of overcoming itches: the method of Buddhism, the outlet of haiku, and the escape of sake. He has hands with which to scratch.
Seeking to create economic value can inhibit candid reflection. His intentional poverty frees Santōka from this pursuit. As such, he can reflect upon nature instead of viewing it as a means of production: “Westerners try to conquer the mountains / people of the East contemplate the mountains / patiently I taste the mountains” (44). Santōka can taste nature fully because he has no need to consume it. And as he is not seeking employment or relying on patronage, he can speak his mind and avoid being another regurgitator of platitudes: “If there is anything good in my life — or I should say, good in my poems — it comes from the fact that they are not contrived, they tell few lies, they’re never forced” (77). Nomadic poverty is vital to Santōka’s wisdom, as it frees him from the economic rat-race.
Finally, Santōka’s poems are primarily descriptive and not prescriptive. Much of the simple beauty of the book comes from judgement-free musings. He does not have wealth, power, or great status, and therefore does not have the high ground to be moralistic. As such, he makes observations instead of judgements, and emphasizes rather than criticizes. Like Herman Melville, he realizes that “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.” His poverty therefore frees Santōka from the pressure to evaluate, manipulate, or make judgements upon other people and existence itself.
We have investigated the causes and characteristics of Santōka’s poverty as well as its unique value. Through his begging Santōka learns the arts of humility, compassion, social criticism, judgement-free reflection, and self-acceptance. These virtues are so difficult to attain it is no wonder that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”[4] Santōka ultimately realizes he has to unapologetically embrace his destitution, writing that “People are happiest when they can be who they really are. A beggar has to learn to be an all-out beggar” (65). This authentic self-embracement becomes Santōka’s simple justification for his life: “by venturing to do something so ludicrous as walking in the modern world, I, who am not very clever, justify my existence” (45). Conclusively, poverty contains a wealth of understanding.
WORKS CITED
Sato, Hiroaki (2002). Grass and Tree Cairn. Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press. Print.
Santōka, Taneda (2003). For All My Walking. Translated by Burton Watson. Columbia University Press. Print.
Santōka, Taneda. Walking By My Self Again. Translated by Scott Watson. Bookgirl Press, 2011. Print.
Chappelow, Jim. “Gini Coefficient.” Investopedia.com. 15 Apr 2019. Web. 7 May 2019.
Moriguchi, Chiaki and Emmanuel Saez. The Evolution of Income Concentration in Japan, 1885
2002: Evidence from Income Tax Statistics. Boston University Press: Boston, MA. Print.
FOOTNOTES
See page 12 of For All My Walking — “His father seems to have been a rather weak-willed man who spent his time dabbling in local politics, chasing after women, and in general dissipating the family fortune, which had been of considerable size at the time he fell heir to it.” ↑
This understanding comes from his poverty: he sees the ways he is marginalized and has empathy for those who are also marginalized. He recognizes that it is almost impossible to understand this perspective from the outside —”People who have never done any begging seem to have difficulty understanding how I feel about this” (67). Siddhartha Gautama himself could not understand poverty until personally witnessing it outside his palace. ↑
“What, even my straw hat has started leaking” — Santōka, Walking By My Self Again, pg 22. ↑
Matthew 19:23-26. ↑
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