On a New Year's many many years ago...
toshi toranu tsumori narishi ga kane no naru
never to grow old…
the temple bell tolls
—Jokun
I shared this haiku last year, but this is one of my favorite haiku and I think it is just the perfect one for today, so I'm sharing again. Let me explain why it's perfect and what it has to do with New Year's.
Today is the 31st and tonight is a very special bell ringing in Japan. But I'll get to that. First, let's talk about the haiku, then we'll get to the custom of the bell ringing.
Blyth put it best when he wrote about this haiku:
What a universal emotion is expressed in the first two lines! Making our peace with age is part of our acceptance of death.
I completely agree. There is so much emotion expressed here. It is hard not to be moved by the pathos of it.
The bell Jokun refers to is the special New Years bell to which I referred to above. On New Years in Japan, temple bell will be struck 108 times, one time for each of our desires. Called joya no kane (除夜の鐘), this is a purifying ritual of sorts, a way to start the year fresh. We'll come back to this in a second and I'll explain why 108 rings.
In pre-modern Japan, your age didn’t go up on the anniversary of your birth, it went up at the beginning of the year. Most people didn't know or care about when they were actually born. All they knew was when you hear the New Year's bell, you get one year older. So basically everyone’s birthday was the same day. They didn’t celebrate it as we do today, it was just more of a fact of life: ah, I’m older today. We are all older today.
In this haiku, Jokun hears the temple bells toll for the New Year and he is reminded that he has now gotten old, something he—like all of us—never really thought would actually happen. Old age happens to other people, but us? Naw. But then it sneaks up on us before we know it.
Now, about those 108 rings...
They start ringing the bell around 11pm so that it can strike the last one at or shortly after midnight. Why 108? Good question, grasshopper!
Various reasons are given depending on where you look. The number pops up a few times in other places.
Zen Buddhist priests often use prayer beads that consist of 108 beads. Some say the Buddha himself highlighted this as a special number. Not everyone agrees with that; the Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki thought that the Buddha using 108 beads was in fact a mistranslation from Sanskrit.
There is another a theory that says it is a kind of numerology, based on the phrase shiku hakku (“8 unavoidable difficulties”). In Japanese this phrase looks like this: 四苦八苦 and there is a little word play involved here. Let's break down the double meanings.
- 四 is pronounced shi and means 4
- 苦 is pronounced ku which sounds like 九 which means 9
- 八 is pronounced hachi and means 8
All together this gives us (4×9)+(8×9)=108. So, according to this idea, the 108 bell rings is to get rid of these 8 unavoidable difficulties.
A bit silly maybe, but numerology often is. Regardless, whatever the reason, the ringing of the temple bell is a nice tradition with a long history.
The temple bell in Japanese temples is a little different than the church bells you may think of if you are from a Western country. Temple bells are usually quite large, like in that ukiyo-e print above. They are usually made from bronze and they are struck from the outside. The exact sound they make will depend on the size of course; some of the larger ones at richer temples make a deep gong sound that can carry quite a distance when they are sounded.
Again, Blyth:
The bell speeding the old year comes sounding across the fields. We are a year older whether we will it or not.
Misc
- The ukiyo-e print I choose actually fits this haiku better than you might realize. Before Japan switched to the Western calendar, they used one that was very similar (almost the same, I think) to the Chinese calendar. On this calendar the New Year was on the first day of spring. Now it still would have been quite cold, for example the traditional New Year this year will be Jan 22nd, so they probably wouldn't have seen cherry blossoms yet, but we might imagine some plum blossoms might have already started blooming in warmer years.
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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. |
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That is, me! If you like this translation, feel free to use it. Just credit me. Also link here if you can. ↩