Former Chief Abbot Gyoson

This year's fourth print is the religious member of the current set of 10, although if I hadn't known that from my reference books, I don't think I would have been able to tell from the design of the print! He looks more ready for hiking than for prayer ... but I guess as any avid mountaineer would tell us, they are perhaps much the same thing ...

Gyoson was the great-grandson of the Emperor Sanjo, whose print you received just a few months ago, and he is remembered for more than just his poetry, apparently also being a musician and noted diarist. But probably the most famous (infamous?) incident in his life to come down to us is the manner in which it ended: '... being buried, by his own wish, in a small stone tomb covered with soil, with only a small pipe leading from his mouth to the open air ... until hunger and exhaustion put an end to his life ...' He was 81 at the time, and the leader of his sect.

I feel a particular empathy with the poem on this print, and not just because it deals with the 'yamazakura', the tree that supplies my woodblocks. In any collection of one hundred poems, isn't it inevitable that there will be a few that seem to be written just for 'you', just for the person reading ...? Well, isn't this one 'mine'?

I don't wish to over-dramatize my living situation, but every day I do sit at my carving bench 'in lonely solitude', and while I work, '... no human face I see'. For hour after hour, month after month, year after year, I touch ... and hold ... and carve ... the mountain cherry wood. And it has sometimes seemed that there was nothing else in my life but the yamazakura ... 'I have no friend but thee'.

But of course, if I left it at that, it would give you the wrong image of my life. Yes, I am mostly alone, but no, I am not working in 'lonely solitude'. I am surrounded by the people who are supporting me; one one side, the craftsmen assisting with the work - and on the other, you collectors who receive the finished prints. No, I cannot honestly say to my woodblocks, 'I have no friend but thee'.

But I don't think that I'll find another poem in the set that comes as close as this to describing my situation. After all, most of the rest are just about people unhappy in love ...

June 1995

Translation - William Porter 1909