run its course and the time was ripe for a new form. The new form was Haiku, which was nothing more than the first three lines of a renga. The _waka_ had been aristocratic, and the best _renga _provincial, but the Haiku was the creation of the new merchant class. (To be rigorously correct, the form was at first called _haikai_, after the first verse of the _renga_, which was called the _hokku_. The term "Haiku" actually came into use in the nineteenth century.) Although the Haiku was a response to the demands of the merchant class, its composers almost immediately split into two opposing groups, superficially similar in outlook to the older classical and provincial schools. One group established a fixed set of rules specifying a more or less artificial language, while the other turned to epigrams in the speech of the people. The form was on the way to becoming yet another party game when a disenchanted follower of the second school broke away and created a personal revolution in Japanese verse. This was the man now considered Japan's finest poet, who finally brought Zen to Japanese poetry: the famous Haiku master Basho (1644-1694). Basho was born a _samurai_ in an age when it was little more than an empty title, retained by decree of the Edo (Tokyo) government. He was fortunate to be in the service of a prosperous _daimyo_ who transmitted his interest in Haiku to Basho at an early age. This idyllic life ended abruptly when Basho was twenty-two: the lord died, and he was left to shift for himself. His first response was to enter a monastery, but after a time went to Kyoto to study Haiku. By the time he was thirty he had moved on to Edo to teach and write. At this point he was merely an adequate versifier, but his technical competence attracted many to what became the Basho "school," as well as making him a welcome guest at _renga _gatherings. His poems in the Haiku style seem to have relied heavily on striking similes or metaphors: Red pepper pods! Add wings to them, and they are dragonflies!5 This verse is certainly "open-ended" insofar as it creates a reverberation of images in the mind, and, what is more, the effect is achieved by the comparison of two concrete images. There is no comment; the images are simply thrown out to give the mind a starting point. But the overall impact remains merely decorative art. It reflects the concept of _aware_, or a pleasing recognition of beauty, rather than _yugen_, the extension of awareness into a region beyond words. When he was about thirty-five, Basho created a Haiku that began to touch the deeper regions of the mind. This is the famous_ Kare-eda ni _ On a withered branch _karasu-no tomari-keri _a crow has settled-- _aki-no-kure _autumn nightfall.6