Saigyō

Based on Wikipedia: Saigyō

The Monk Who Couldn't Stop Loving Cherry Blossoms

Most Buddhist monks, when they sensed death approaching, would ask to be positioned facing west. The western direction held profound spiritual significance—it was where Amida Buddha's Pure Land paradise was believed to exist, and dying while gazing toward it meant being welcomed into enlightenment. But the twelfth-century Japanese poet Saigyō had a different request. He wanted to die under cherry blossoms.

This single preference captures everything essential about Saigyō. He was a monk who had renounced the world, yet remained hopelessly, beautifully attached to it. He had taken vows that should have freed him from desire, yet he could never quite extinguish his passion for nature's fleeting beauty. This tension—between spiritual aspiration and earthly love—runs through his poetry like a golden thread, making him one of Japan's most beloved and human poets.

A Guard Who Walked Away

Saigyō was born in 1118 as Satō Norikiyo, into a noble family in Kyoto. As a young man, he worked as a palace guard for the retired Emperor Toba—a prestigious position that placed him at the very center of Japanese power. He was skilled in both martial arts and poetry, handsome by contemporary accounts, and seemed destined for a successful career in the imperial court.

Then, at age twenty-two, he quit.

The reasons remain mysterious. Some scholars speculate about an unhappy love affair. Others point to the death of a close friend. Still others suggest he witnessed something at court that disillusioned him with worldly ambition. Whatever the cause, in 1140 he shaved his head, took the Buddhist religious name En'i (meaning "perfect rank"), and walked away from everything—his career, his status, perhaps even a family.

He later adopted the pen name by which history remembers him: Saigyō, meaning "Western Journey." The name was a declaration of spiritual intent, referencing that same western paradise of Amida Buddha. But for a man who would spend decades wandering the mountains and roads of Japan, it was also quite literal. Saigyō was always journeying somewhere.

An Age of Endings

To understand why Saigyō's poetry carries such profound melancholy, you need to understand the world he inhabited. He lived through one of the most traumatic transitions in Japanese history.

When Saigyō was born, Japan was still ruled by the old court nobility—refined aristocrats who wrote poetry, engaged in elaborate rituals, and had governed for centuries through the imperial system. By the time he died in 1190, real power had shifted decisively to the samurai warriors, culminating in the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate. The elegant world of Heian court culture was giving way to an age of military government.

There was also a religious dimension to this sense of endings. Japanese Buddhists of this era believed they were living in the age of Mappō—a concept that might be translated as the "latter days of the dharma" or the "end of the law." According to this belief, the teachings of the historical Buddha had a kind of expiration date. After the Buddha's death, his teachings would remain effective for a certain number of centuries, but eventually they would lose their power to lead people to enlightenment. Many Buddhists in Saigyō's time believed that this degenerate age had already begun.

Imagine living with that conviction: that the very methods of spiritual salvation were growing weaker with each passing year, that the world itself was in irreversible decline. This belief colors much of Saigyō's work with what we might call existential sadness—a sense that everything beautiful is passing away, and that perhaps even the paths to transcendence are growing dim.

The Wandering Years

After taking his vows, Saigyō spent decades moving through Japan's most beautiful and remote places. He lived for extended periods in Saga (a district of Kyoto known for its bamboo groves and temples), on Mount Kōya (the sacred mountain headquarters of Shingon Buddhism), among the legendary cherry trees of Mount Yoshino, and at the great shrine of Ise.

But he is perhaps most famous for his long journeys to the remote regions of northern Honshū, the main island of Japan. These weren't comfortable trips. Medieval Japan had no paved highways, no reliable inns, no maps in the modern sense. Traveling meant walking for weeks through mountain passes, fording rivers, sleeping in the open or begging shelter at temples. For a monk past middle age, these journeys were genuine pilgrimages—physical tests as much as spiritual ones.

These northern travels would prove enormously influential. Five centuries later, the haiku master Bashō would deliberately retrace Saigyō's footsteps when writing his masterpiece, "The Narrow Road to the Interior." Bashō looked back to Saigyō the way a painter might look back to an old master—with reverence, humility, and the desire to learn. When Bashō encountered a pine tree at Shiogoshi that Saigyō had written about, he refused to add his own poem, saying that doing so "would be like trying to add a sixth finger to his hand."

A Poetry of Loneliness and Beauty

To appreciate what made Saigyō distinctive, it helps to understand the poetic tradition he inherited and transformed.

Japanese court poetry in the centuries before Saigyō was dominated by the aesthetic of the Kokin Wakashū, an imperial anthology compiled around 905. This earlier poetry valued subjective experience, clever wordplay, smooth flow, and elegant diction—language that was refined but not overly formal, neither colloquial speech nor stiff literary Chinese.

Saigyō and poets like him created something different. Their work would be collected in the Shin Kokin Wakashū (the "New Kokin Collection") and represented a shift in Japanese poetic sensibility. Where earlier poetry was subjective, this new style was more contemplative, almost observational. It used fewer verbs and more nouns, creating a more static, image-focused quality. It cared less about wordplay and allowed for repetition. Perhaps most notably, it was slightly more colloquial and considerably more somber.

Three Japanese aesthetic concepts help explain the emotional register of Saigyō's poetry:

Mono no aware is sometimes translated as "the pathos of things" or "the sorrow of existence." It refers to the bittersweet awareness of impermanence—the gentle sadness that arises when we recognize that everything we love will eventually change or pass away. A falling cherry blossom, the last letter from a friend, the fading light of autumn—these things evoke mono no aware.

Sabi is loneliness, but not quite the anxious, desperate loneliness we might think of in English. It's more like the quiet solitude of a mountain hermitage, the stillness of a single bird calling across an empty valley. There's peace in sabi, even beauty, but it's the beauty of things stripped down to their essence, of being utterly alone with reality.

Kanashi is simpler: it means sadness, grief, the feeling of being moved to tears. In Saigyō's poetry, kanashi often appears in response to nature's beauty—he is sad precisely because things are so beautiful and so temporary.

While earlier poets had explored mono no aware, Saigyō's turbulent times pushed him toward the more austere territories of sabi and kanashi. His was a poetry shaped by civil war, religious anxiety, and personal renunciation.

The Heart That Couldn't Let Go

Here is Saigyō's central contradiction, and the source of his poetry's enduring power: he was a Buddhist monk who could not achieve the Buddhist ideal of non-attachment.

In traditional Buddhist practice, the goal is to become "heartless" in a very specific sense—not cruel or unfeeling, but free from the desires and attachments that cause suffering. A perfected monk would look at cherry blossoms and feel... nothing. No yearning, no sadness at their falling, no desire to see them again next spring. Such a person would be liberated from the cycle of wanting and losing that defines ordinary human experience.

Saigyō knew this was the ideal. He tried to achieve it. He wrote poems about trying to achieve it. But he couldn't do it. Every spring, the cherry blossoms pulled at his heart. Every moonrise over the mountains filled him with longing. He remained, as he himself acknowledged, attached to the beauty of the phenomenal world.

In one of his most famous poems, he writes about wishing he could find the moon less beautiful, the spring less affecting. If only he could become indifferent, he would be free. But he can't. The beauty keeps breaking through his monastic discipline.

This failure, if we can call it that, is precisely what makes Saigyō so moving. He gives us permission to be imperfect, to be human, to love the world even when we know that love will bring us sorrow. His poems don't describe the view from enlightenment—they describe the view from the path, from the struggle, from the heart that keeps hoping and keeps hurting.

Mount Yoshino and the Cherry Trees

If Saigyō had a spiritual home beyond any temple, it was Mount Yoshino in what is now Nara Prefecture. Yoshino has been famous for its cherry blossoms for over a thousand years. The mountain is covered with approximately thirty thousand cherry trees, planted in groves that bloom in succession as spring moves up the slopes—first the lower grove, then the middle, then the upper, and finally the innermost grove near the summit. In a good year, you can watch cherry blossom season unfold for nearly a month just by walking uphill.

Saigyō returned to Yoshino again and again. For him, the mountain's cherry blossoms were not merely beautiful—they were a kind of spiritual text, a kōan written in petals. The trees bloomed with impossible extravagance and then shed their flowers in a matter of days. What could be more perfectly impermanent? What could better illustrate the Buddhist teaching that all conditioned things arise and pass away?

And yet, knowing this, Saigyō still wept to see them fall. Knowing attachment was the source of suffering, he still counted the days until he could return. This is the human condition distilled to its essence: understanding changes nothing about feeling.

Death Under the Blossoms

Saigyō died on March 23, 1190, at Hirokawa Temple in Kawachi Province (modern-day Osaka Prefecture). He was seventy-two years old.

According to tradition, he got his wish. He died during cherry blossom season, under the flowering trees he had loved his entire life. One of his most quoted poems expresses exactly this hope:

Let me die in spring, under the cherry blossoms, in that second month, when the moon is full.

The "second month" refers to the lunar calendar—roughly our March or early April, peak cherry blossom time. That he apparently died exactly as he had wished has become part of his legend, the final poetic gesture of a life devoted to beauty and verse.

Whether it actually happened this way, or whether the story has been polished by centuries of retelling, almost doesn't matter. The image is too perfect, too appropriate. Of course Saigyō died under cherry blossoms. How else could a poet who found Buddha in the flowers meet his end?

A Legacy of Longing

Saigyō's influence extends far beyond his own poetry. He essentially created a template for the poet-wanderer in Japanese literature—the figure who renounces worldly success to travel through nature, living simply, writing verse that captures moments of beauty and insight.

The court lady known as Lady Nijō, writing her memoirs in the late thirteenth century, recorded that she first read Saigyō's work at age eight and immediately dreamed of writing a similar travel narrative. When she later became a Buddhist nun, she deliberately visited many of the places Saigyō had written about, following in his footsteps across Japan.

Bashō's debt to Saigyō is so profound that his "Narrow Road to the Interior" is almost impossible to understand fully without knowledge of the earlier poet. Bashō wasn't just visiting the same places—he was entering into conversation with a poetic ancestor, agreeing and disagreeing, paying homage and pushing forward.

Even in contemporary Japanese popular culture, Saigyō's presence lingers. The character Saigyōji Yuyuko in the Touhou Project video game series (first appearing in 2003) is a ghost associated with a supernatural cherry tree—a direct reference to the poet who wished to die beneath the blossoms. The connection between Saigyō and cherry trees has become so deeply embedded in Japanese cultural memory that it can be evoked with just a name and an image.

The Friendship with Fujiwara no Teika

One biographical detail deserves special mention: Saigyō was a good friend of Fujiwara no Teika, one of the most important literary figures in Japanese history.

Teika was a poet, critic, and compiler who would go on to edit the Shin Kokin Wakashū (which included ninety-four of Saigyō's poems, more than any other poet) and the influential anthology Hyakunin Isshu (One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each). He was also instrumental in preserving and transmitting classical texts, including "The Tale of Genji."

The friendship between the wandering monk-poet and the court aristocrat-editor might seem unlikely, but it speaks to something important about medieval Japanese literary culture. Poetry cut across social boundaries. A man who had renounced the world could still participate in poetic discourse with those who remained in it. The shared language of waka—the thirty-one syllable poetic form that dominated Japanese literature for centuries—created a community that transcended individual circumstances.

Reading Saigyō Today

What can a twelfth-century Japanese monk-poet offer a contemporary reader?

Perhaps the most valuable gift is permission. Permission to be moved by beauty. Permission to feel sadness at impermanence. Permission to fail at non-attachment while still aspiring to something higher.

We live in an age that often treats emotion as a problem to be solved—with medication, with therapy, with lifestyle optimization. Saigyō reminds us that some sadness is not pathological. It is the appropriate response of a sensitive heart to the nature of existence. Things do pass away. Beauty is temporary. Loss is real. To feel these truths deeply is not weakness but wisdom.

At the same time, Saigyō is not wallowing. His melancholy has a quality of acceptance, even celebration. Yes, the cherry blossoms will fall. Yes, this hurts. And yes, he will be there next spring, watching them bloom again, heart breaking all over again. There is a kind of courage in this—the courage to remain open to experience even when you know experience will wound you.

His poetry also offers a model of spiritual practice that embraces contradiction rather than resolving it. Saigyō never stopped being a Buddhist. He never stopped trying to achieve non-attachment. He also never stopped loving the moon and the flowers and the changing seasons. Rather than experiencing this as hypocrisy or failure, he made it the subject of his art. The struggle itself became the practice.

In an era when many people feel caught between competing demands—career and family, ambition and contentment, material success and spiritual meaning—there is something deeply consoling about a poet who lived that tension honestly for seventy-two years and made it sing.

A Mountain Home

Saigyō's personal poetry collection is called Sankashū, which translates to "Collection of a Mountain Home." The title evokes his years of solitary living in remote mountain hermitages—small huts where he would spend months or years in meditation, writing, and contemplation of nature.

But there is another meaning lurking in that title. In Japanese Buddhist thought, mountains are not just geographical features. They are sacred spaces, places where the boundary between the human and divine grows thin. To make one's home in the mountains is to make one's home at that boundary, always aware of the larger reality that surrounds ordinary existence.

Saigyō's mountain home was never one specific place. It was wherever he stopped long enough to write a poem—under a pine tree in the northern provinces, beside a stream in Yoshino, in a temple courtyard watching the moon rise. His true home was the practice of attention itself, the discipline of seeing clearly and recording what he saw.

Eight centuries later, his poems still function as windows into that practice. When we read them, we are invited to stop, to look, to feel the particular quality of light in a particular moment. We are invited, however briefly, to share his mountain home.

And if we find ourselves moved to sadness by what we see there—well, that was always part of the point. Saigyō would understand. He would probably write a poem about it.