Reginald Horace Blyth

Reginald Horace Blyth (3 December 1898 – 28 October 1964) was an English author and devotee of Japanese culture.

Blyth was born in Essex, England, the son of a railway clerk. He was the only child of Horace and Henrietta Blyth. He attended Cleveland Road Primary School, in Ilford, then the County High School (later Ilford County High School). In 1916, at the height of World War I, he was imprisoned at Wormwood Scrubs, as a conscientious objector, before working on the Home Office Scheme at Princetown Work Centre in the former and future Dartmoor Prison. After the war he attended the University of London, where he read English and from which he graduated in 1923, with honours.

He adopted a vegetarian lifestyle which he maintained throughout his life. Blyth played the flute, made musical instruments, and taught himself several European languages. He was particularly fond of the music of J.S. Bach. In 1924, he received a teaching certificate from London Day Training College. The same year, he married Annie Bercovitch, a university friend. Some accounts say they moved to India, where he taught for a while until he became unhappy with British colonial rule. Other scholars dismiss this episode, claiming it to have been invented by Blyth's mentor Daisetz T. Suzuki.

In 1925, the Blyths moved to Korea (then under Japanese rule), where Blyth became Assistant Professor of English at Keijo University in Seoul. While in Korea, Blyth began to learn Japanese and Chinese, and studied Zen under the master Hanayama Taigi of Myōshin-ji Keijo Betsuin (Seoul). In Korea he started to read D. T. Suzuki's books about Zen. In 1933, he informally adopted a Korean student, paying for his studies in Korea and later at London University. His wife parted from him in 1934 and Blyth took one-year absence from the university in 1935, following her to England. After the divorce, Blyth returned to Korea in early 1936, leaving the adopted son with his ex-wife. The adopted son returned after World War II to Korea. In 1947 he was captured by North Korean soldiers; when he returned to the South, he was shot as a traitor by the South Korean army.

Having returned to Seoul in 1936, Blyth remarried in 1937, to a Japanese woman named Kishima Tomiko, with whom he later had two daughters, Nana Blyth and Harumi Blyth. He moved to Kanazawa, D. T. Suzuki's home town, in Japan, and took a job as English teacher at the Fourth Higher School (later Kanazawa University).

When Britain declared war on Japan in December 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, bringing Japan into World War II, Blyth was interned as a British enemy alien. Although he expressed his sympathy for Japan and sought Japanese citizenship, this was denied. During his internment his extensive library was destroyed in an air raid. In the internment camp in Kobe he finished his first book Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics and wrote parts of his books about haiku and senryu. He also met in the camp Robert Aitken, later Roshi of the Diamond Sangha in Honolulu.

After the war, Blyth worked diligently with the authorities, both Japanese and American, to ease the transition to peace. Blyth functioned as liaison to the Japanese Imperial Household, and his close friend, Harold Gould Henderson, was on General Douglas MacArthur's staff. Together, they helped draft the declaration Ningen Sengen, by which Emperor Hirohito declared himself to be a human being, and not divine.

By 1946, Blyth had become Professor of English at Gakushuin University, and became private tutor to the Crown Prince (later emperor) Akihito until the end of his [Blyth's] life. He did much to popularise Zen philosophy and Japanese poetry (particularly haiku) in the West. In 1954, he was awarded a doctorate in literature from Tokyo University, and, in 1959, he received the Zuihōshō (Order of Merit) Fourth Grade.

Blyth died in 1964, of a brain tumour and complications from pneumonia, in the Seiroka Hospital in Tokyo. He was buried in the cemetery of the Shokozan Tokei Soji Zenji Temple in Kamakura, next to his old friend, D. T. Suzuki. Blyth's posthumous Buddhist name is Bulaisu Kodo Shoshin Koju.

Blyth's tomb in Kamakura.

He left the following death poem:

Sazanka ni kokoro nokoshite tabidachinu

I leave my heart

to the sasanqua flower

on the day of this journey

• Dower 1999, p310
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.3, p70
• Pinnington 1994; Kirkup 1994

Blyth produced a series of work on Zen, Haiku & Senryu, and on other forms of Japanese and Asian literature.

He wrote six books on Haiku (1949–52, 1963–64), four books on Senryu and Humour in Asian literature (1949, 1957, 1959(a), 1961), as well as seven books on Zen (1942, 1952, 1960–64; posthumous 1966, 1970). Further publications include two studies of English Literature (1957, 1959(b)) and a three fifth shortened version of 'A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers' by his favourite author Henry David Thoreau, along with an introduction and explanatory notes.

The most significant publications being his four-volume Haiku Series (1949–52), his 'Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics' and his five-volume Zen Series.

Nearly all of his books were published in Japan, by Hokuseido Press, Tokyo.

Blyth's 'Zen and Zen Classics' series includes a translation of the Mumonkan (Wumenkuan);– the 5-volume series is a modification by the publishers, caused by the unexpected death of Blyth, of the originally planned 8-volume series, including a translation of the Hekiganroku (Piyenchi), a History of Korean Zen and of Japanese Zen (Dogen, Hakuin etc.) and a renewed edition of his 'Buddhist Sermons on Christian Texts' as Vol. 8 (the already published Vol. 7 was reprinted as Vol. 5).

Blyth's Mumonkan was the third complete translation into Englisch, but the first one which was accompanied by extensive interpretive commentaries on each case. According to D. Suzuki the Zen-Series should have been "the most complete work on Zen to be presented so far to the English-reading public".

Blyth's early publication ‘Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics', published 1942 when he was interned in Japan during World War II, and his Zen and Zen Classics Series exerted a significant influence on the Western Writers’- and Zen-community, although nearly all of his books were published in Japan only.

To his "Zen-audience" belonged Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell,Jerome D. Salinger , Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson as well as Alan Watts, Christmas Humphreys, Robert Aitken, Katsuki Sekida, Raymond Smullyan, Janwillem van de Wetering ('a Zen priest told me "Blyth talked too much - the man should have been throttled at birth"') and Osho ("about Zen and Zen poetry - haiku - he was one of the most authoritative persons in the world").

In an autobiographical note Blyth writes: "By a fortunate chance I then came across haiku, or to speak more exactly Haiku no Michi, the Way of Haiku, which is the purely poetical (non-emotional, non-intellectual, non-moral, non-aesthetic) life in relation to nature. Next, the biggest bit of luck of all, Zen, through the books of Suzuki Daisetz ... Last but not least there appeared senryu, which might well be dignified by the term Senryu no Michi, the Way of Senryu, for it is an understanding of all things by laughing and smiling at them, and this means forgiving all things, ourselves and God included". Blyth wrote six books on haiku and four books on humour and senryu, the genre sister of haiku, in which the world is 'not seen as God made it' but 'as man sees it'; 'to haiku, sex hardly exists; to senryu, it is all pervading ... a great many deal with the subject of the Yoshiwara...'

After early imagist interest in haiku the genre drew less attention in English, until after World War II, with the appearance of a number of influential volumes about Japanese haiku.

In 1949, with the publication in Japan of the first volume of Haiku, Blyth's four-volume work, haiku was introduced to the post-war Western world. His Haiku series (1949–52) was dealing mostly with pre-modern haiku, though including Shiki; later followed his two-volume History of Haiku (1963–64). Today he is best known as a major interpreter of haiku & senryu to English speakers.

Present-day attitudes to Blyth's work vary: On the one hand, he is appreciated as a populariser of Japanese culture; on the other, his portrayals of haiku and Zen have sometimes been criticised as one-dimensional. Many contemporary Western writers of haiku were introduced to the genre through his Zen-based haiku explanations. These include the San Francisco and Beat Generation writers, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as well as J. D. Salinger ("...particularly haiku, but senryu, too...can be read with special satisfaction when R. H. Blyth was on them. Blyth is sometimes perilous, naturally, since he's a highhanded old poem himself, but he's also sublime") and E. E. Cummings. Many members of the international "haiku community" also got their first views of haiku from Blyth's books, including American author James W. Hackett (born 1929), Eric Amann, William J. Higginson, Anita Virgil, Jane Reichhold, and Lee Gurga. Some noted Blyth's distaste for haiku on more modern themes and his strong bias regarding a direct connection between haiku and Zen, a connection largely ignored by modern Japanese poets. (Bashō, in fact, felt that his devotion to haiku prevented him from realising enlightenment. In addition, many classic Japanese haiku poets, including Chiyo-ni, Buson, and Issa were Pure Land (Jodo) rather than Zen Buddhists.) Blyth also did not view haiku by Japanese women favourably, downplaying their substantial contributions to the genre, especially during the Bashō era and the twentieth century. In just over 800 pages of text in his two volume History of Haiku, Blyth devotes a total of 16 pages to haiku by women, and even these pages are run through with negative comments about women as writers of haiku. "Women are said to be intuitive, and as they cannot think, we may hope this is so, but intuition, like patriotism, is not enough." With respect to a verse ostensibly by Chi-yo he wrote, "Chiyo's authorship of this verse is doubtful, but so is whether women can write haiku."

Although Blyth did not foresee the appearance of original haiku in languages other than Japanese when he began writing on the topic, and although he founded no school of verse, his works stimulated the writing of haiku in English. At the end of the second volume of his History of Haiku, he remarked 1964 that "The latest development in the history of haiku is one which nobody foresaw... the writing of haiku outside Japan, not in the Japanese language." He followed that comment with a number of original verses in English by Hackett with whom Blyth corresponded.

Blyth: "How about my own [haiku] explanations? Some say they are better than many of the original haiku. Some say they should be omitted. I myself agree with both views".

"Incidentally, I first heard the term "Blyth's Zen" ... when Roshi asked, "Who was your Zen teacher?" I told Soen Roshi that ... for incorporating Zen values in my haiku, I was a disciple of R. H. Blyth. To this, Roshi murmered a long "Hmmmmmmm.....", then said "Blyth's Zen, eh?"

"We must never forget that the one thing in the world that is not a thing is Zen. International, transcendental, pure super-Zen has no existence. Buddha's Zen, and Daruma's Zen, and Eno's Zen and Rinzai's and Suzuki's and even perhaps Blyth's Zen ... - but no Zen without them"

'R. H. Blyth: I have just come from Korea, where I studied Zen with Kayama Taigu Roshi of Myoshinjin Betsuin
D. T. Suzuki: Is that so? Tell me, what is Zen?
R. H. Blyth: As I understand it, there is no such thing
D. T. Suzuki: I can see you know something of Zen'

'"And what did you learn there?" asked Hofuku. "I got nothing", said the monk. "How did you manage to do that?" said Hofuku"'

• "...and when we say, "What is the meaning of life?" the spiritual life, spontaneously generated up to that moment, is extinguished, the world is a darkness that can be felt. However, the question has been asked; the man is sick, it is too late to recapitulate the laws of health, he needs medicine"
• "What is Zen? Zen is the unsymbolisation of the world and all the things in it"

1. 'most of the world's trouble are due to grammar'
2. "...we objectify things which are no objects, subjectify persons who are not subjects, and suffer the consequences of this"
3. "Worry is the great enemy … what is wrong is not the pain and grief suffering, but thinking about ourselves as sufferers"
4. "The intellect beats its wings in vain against the bars of [the] intellectual cage"
5. "Monk: "You are going to swat a fly; it comes and sits on the fly-swat itself; what will you do in such a case?"

• "According to Buddha, the object of life is satori, enlightenment, and this continued and continuous state is Nirvana, but since sin is only the illusion that sin is sin, since enlightenment is illusion and illusion is enlightenment, all this business of salvation and the endeavour to be enlightened is the most blithering nonsense"

1. ".. how about all the poor unenlightened chaps, or those who have died five minutes before they became enlightened? No, No! The universe must suffer, in being what it is, and we must suffer with it. The universe has joy … and we must be happy with it. Above all, the universe is a paradox, and we must laugh with and at it."
2. " [the] history of the development of Mahayana Buddhism, the gradual realisation that without illusion and bondage there can be no enlightenment and release, and the further Zen discovery of the … fact that illusion is, without any change, enlightenment, the ordinary man is, as he is, the Buddha"

• "...the activeness of Zen, compared with the passivity of most forms of Buddhism…"

1. "'Raising waves where there is no wind' is a favourite expression in Zen, signifying that there is no problem of life. Things are as they are, and as they are becoming, and once you realise this in its active, not resigned meaning, there is nothing really to worry about"
2. "This attitude of life, of willing acceptance of all that comes, or rather, all that we come to, for our attitude to life must be active and not passive…"
3. "There are indeed four attitudes to the world, (depending to our attitude to our own being): opposition, resignation, cooperation, and domination. We are continually moving among them. Zen is the last."

• "Really to laugh at oneself, and laugh at oneself laughing at oneself, - this is enlightenment"

1. "... I feel inclined to warn you against a humourless Zen. The secret of life consists in being always and never serious!"
2. "Humour is the origin of life. Humour is the meaning of life. Humour is the object of life. But don't take it too seriously!"
3. "… laughter is the result and the evidence of the perception of the (intellectually contradictory) whole truth. Again, humour or its invariable concomitant laughter … is not a means, it's the end, enlightenment itself"
4. '...when Shuilao was asked what his enlightenment was, he answered, "Since the master kicked me, I have not been able to stop laughing"'

"the Bible of Zen, the Mumonkan plus the Hekiganroku, is the universe laughing at itself"

while reading this sutra,

I began to laugh ...

without knowing why

• Hackett 2002
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.5, p54
• Aitken c.1986, 1996(b), p27
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.2, p62
• Blyth 1942, p92; parallels in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, c.1953, § 255
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.2, p203
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.5, p93[header]
• Blyth 1961, p236
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.1, p98
• Blyth 1942, p251; parallels in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, [c.1929], last paragraph, Philosophical Investigations, c.1953, § 119 and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, c.1922, 6.521
• Blyth 1942, p189; see also Blyth 1960, p178 and Blyth (1949-52) Vol.4, p77
• Blyth, Oriental Humour, p266
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.1, p16
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.4, p275
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.1, p26
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.4, p270
• Blyth 1942, p203
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.1, p189
• Blyth, Oriental Humour, p366/67[plate]
• Letter to Hackett; in: The Genius of Haiku 1994, p133
• Blyth, Humour in English Literature, p28
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.5, p130
• Blyth, Oriental Humour, p93
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.2, p181
• Blyth (1963-64) Vol.2, p360

"Zen is the essence... of all that is good in the daily life of the ordinary people. But that does not mean that we are not to smash it flat if we get the slightest opportunity. And we are not going to attack foxy (false) Zen, or the hypocrites and time-servers who support it, but Zen itself in its highest and sublimest forms … the great thing is to have the courage, and say again and again, "All that can be shaken shall be shaken!" and if nothing remains, let it be so"

• "Zen, it must be admitted, is the selfish side of the doctrine of selflessness that comes down through the Mahayana. Zen has a very weak missionary spirit, and for that reason interferes very little with other people's lives. It does not have, and does not want, the excuse to force people into Heaven"
• "A Zen society is unthinkable in so far as it consists of (celibate) monks. A sexless society is a contradiction in terms, and a Zen society of laymen and laywomen of the traditional type would be a return to (religious) feudalism... The Zen sect has always been, like Athens, a state of "free" men among slaves, living on them more or less, and with no desire to free them socially, politically or financially. It has no view of society, no idea of human progress, material or spiritual. It is always all things to all men, and will support any government, fascistic or communistic or democratic. Its organization is unchangeable feudalistic, though on special occasions it has an All Fools' Day when an absolute equality is de rigueur. The opinion of Zen adepts on world affairs has invariably been a patriotic opportunism dressed in Buddhist platitudes…; the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people has been the least of its concerns"
• "What was, is, and always will be wrong with Buddhism of course is the –ism. A system of doctrine, rules of morality, and above all the Sangha itself means religious mass suicide…the Indian hatred of women persisted; sex was omitted, and the monastery could not be self-subsisting, since new members were constantly needed. Thus the life of the Zen monastery, however earnest and active it may have once been, was always a farce…Zen has not yet taught us how to be fathers and mothers and citizens. It is still a thing for monks, at least for men, and especially for old men"
• "The least admirable part of Buddhisms its attitude to sex. The Buddha accepted women into the Sangha with the utmost unwillingness, and indeed prophesied that they would be the ruin of his system …In actual fact one of the reasons for the decline of Buddhism in India was the resurgence of Tantrism with its female deities and esoteric eroticism ... This attitude has been continued in Zen, which is thus Buddhist in its defects as well as its virtues. Occasionaly women, usually old hags, appear in the Zen anecdotes ---"Some of these old Chinese women were more than a match for the greatest Zen masters [Joshu, Tokusan]…"---, but the enlightenment of women is conspicuous by its absence, and sex problems are conveniently forgotten" ... "Zen is not for women and women (but see Mumonkan Case XLII) are not for Zen. So much the worse for both. Buddhism has always been anti-feminist…" ... "What claim can Zen possibly have to universality when it ignores one half of humanity [women], and assumes sexlessness, that is halflessness, in the other?"

• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.1, p7(Preface)
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.1, p20
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.2, p179f
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.1, p18
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.3, p82; Vol.4, p218; Vol.4, p.201f
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.1, p33
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.4, p218
• Blyth, Zen Classics Vol.5, p53

• Alan W. Watts, Zen and Senryu, Translations by R. H. Blyth, CD locust music 49, 2004 (Vinyl 1959)
• Alan W. Watts, Haiku, Translations by R. H. Blyth, CD locust music 50, 2004 (first broadcast on KPFA Radio 1958; Vinyl 1959)