Drifting East, Mooring West: A Kirigami Verse in the Takuan Zenshū

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While reading through the front matter of the Meiji collected works of Takuan — Takuan Oshō Zenshū (沢菴和尚全集), ed. Ashin’an Setsujin, 1898 (NDL 1088656) — I came across a kirigami (切紙; a brushed slip) bound in at page 3, before the prose works begin. It is a small occasional poem, a jiin (次韻; matching-rhyme) quatrain, and it turns on a phrase that recurs around the Takuan material, so I set it down here as a diversion, in the same spirit as the Fu Dashi verse I noted earlier.¹

Kirigami slip, Takuan Zenshū (NDL 1088656) p. 3

The slip

叩依　俊矩公之芳韻　　京軒
東漂西泊只随縁
撲面風塵猶未觸
江上眺望詩思温
一篇應評許渾

Header and signature: kōi (叩依) — “humbly relying on / following” — then Shunku-kō no hōin (俊矩公之芳韻), “the elegant rhymes of Lord Toshinori (俊矩),” and the composer’s studio-name Kyōken (京軒). So the quatrain is a matching-rhyme response, written to the same rhyme-words as a (now-unlocated) poem by a Lord Toshinori.

A reading

Drifting east, mooring west — simply following conditions; the world’s wind and dust strike my face, yet never touch me; gazing out over the river, poetic thought turns warm; a single piece, fit for Xu Hun’s judgment.

Line by line:

• 東漂西泊只随縁 (tōhyō seihaku, tada en ni shitagau) — “drifting east, mooring west, only following conditions (en 縁; pratyaya).” Tōhyō seihaku is a self-characterization associated with Takuan — the wandering monk with no fixed abode — and tada en ni shitagau is the plainest statement of the zuien (随縁) attitude: accepting whatever conditions bring.
• 撲面風塵猶未觸 (men wo utsu fūjin, nao imada furezu) — “the wind-and-dust that strikes the face has yet to touch [me].” Fūjin (風塵; wind and dust) is the stock figure for the grimy world of affairs; the line is a fudō / non-attachment image — buffeted, but inwardly untouched.
• 江上眺望詩思温 (kōjō no chōbō, shishi atatakanari) — “gazing out over the river, poetic thought turns warm.” A turn from the abrasive world of the second line to the ease of the riverbank; shishi (詩思; poetic thought/feeling) warming is a quiet, contented note.
• 一篇應評許渾 (ippen, Kyokon no hyō ni ōzu) — “a single piece, fit to be judged by Xu Hun.” Xu Hun (許渾; Xǔ Hún, c. 791–858) is the late-Tang poet famous for his polished regulated verse and river- and-rain imagery; invoking him as arbiter is a conventional modest flourish — “such as it is, submit it to a master’s eye.”

The sensibility — drifting with conditions, dust that does not touch, closing on a poet’s ease — is thoroughly Chan, and consonant with the Takuan frame of the volume it prefaces.

Notes and open questions

This slip is a minor object and I read it as such, but a few points are worth recording:

• Reading corrections. The opening graph is kōi 叩依, not 以依 (the top character is 叩, “to knock / humbly,” not 以); the third line’s third graph is 塵 (dust), not 座; and the third line ends 詩思温 (warm), not 詩忠湿 — 思 for 忠, 温 for 湿, both confirmed on a higher-resolution scan.
• A trailing mark. Below 許渾 there is a small stroke (〔十／干?〕). Since 許渾 is complete as a name, I take this to be a colophon tick or the start of a signature rather than part of the poem, and leave it out of the text.
• Authorship is open — but the addressee now has a strong candidate. The quatrain is signed 京軒 (Kyōken) and matches the rhymes of 俊矩公, who is very plausibly Yagyū Tomonori/Toshinori (柳生友矩／俊矩, 1613–1639), Munenori’s son and Jūbei’s half-brother — buried at 芳徳寺, the Yagyū temple Takuan founded, and praised in the Yagyū house record as literarily gifted.² That would make this a genuine Takuan–Yagyū-circle exchange preserved in the front matter, and raises (without settling) the possibility that 京軒 is a Yagyū-circle figure or a Takuan gō. The poem still does not appear in the anthologized Takuan verse I can find, so I stop short of asserting Takuan’s authorship; but the 御物語-adjacent 東漂西泊 topos plus a Yagyū addressee place it firmly in that world rather than in a later, unrelated one.

That a slip like this survives in the front matter, distinct from the prose works, is a small reminder of how these Meiji collected editions were assembled: not just the treatises, but the loose verse and occasional pieces that had gathered around a teacher’s name, bound in at the threshold.

End Notes