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frog too. No description of the pond or the frog... and plop!
The village had an ancient pond, very ancient, and very ancient trees surrounding it; they were perhaps hundreds of years old. And beautiful rocks all around... and certainly the frogs jumped; day in and day out you could hear "plop," again and again. The sound of frogs jumping really helped the prevailing silence. That sound made the silence richer, more meaningful.
This is the beauty of Basho; he could describe something without actually describing it. He could say something without even mentioning a word. "Plop!" Now, is this a word? No word could do justice to the sound of a frog jumping into the ancient pond, but Basho did it justice.
I am not a Basho, and that village needed a Basho. Perhaps he would have made beautiful sketches, paintings, and haikus.... I have not done anything about that village -- you will wonder why. I have not even visited it again. Once is enough. I never go to a place twice. For me number two does not exist. I have left many villages, many towns, never to return again. Once gone, gone forever, that's my way; so I have not returned to that village. The villagers have sent messages to me to come at least once more. I told them, through a messenger, "I have been there once already, twice is not my way."
But the silence of that ancient pond stays with me -- again I am reminded of the Himalayas... the snow -- so beautiful, so pure, so innocent. You can only see it through the eyes of a Bodhidharma, a Jesus, or Basho. There is no other way to describe the snow; only the eyes of Buddhas reflect it. Idiots can trample it, can make snowballs out of it, but only the eyes of the Buddhas can reflect it, although...
The wild geese
Do not intend to cast their reflections.
The water has no mind
To reflect their images...
and still the image happens.
The Buddhas do not want to reflect the beauty of the world, nor does the world in any way intend to be reflected by the Buddhas, but it is reflected. Nobody wills, but it happens, and when it happens it is beautiful. When it is done, it is ordinary; when it is done,
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