Zen is experienced when the mind does not stop with anything Suzuki, 1988: 103. Like the dragonfly and the grass blade. Basho wrote about the grass
blade as the metaphor for the world, the concepts, and the thoughts. They are the things for the mind to hold on.
It is told that the dragonfly tried to land on a grass leaf, and it tried to hold on to the grass, but it failed to hold on. Zen is experienced when the mind
does not stop. The dragonfly is the metaphor for the mind. What the mind usually does is trying to stop to things, to hold on to it, but it seems to be failed to hold on
it is written as when the dragonfly failed to hold on to the grass blade.
1.4 Ontological
Metaphors in the Basho’s cherry trees poem In this poem the cherry trees do not only appear as an imagery but also as
a metaphor. The cherry trees considered as a spiritual time signal of Japanese people. Ontologically in this metaphor, the cherry trees is an existence that
naturally changing. Basho saw it as the basis subtance, the subtance of changing experience. From its blossom until its fall cherry trees appear in this poem as a
metaphor. In the villa of persimmons, Basho found cherry trees. For Japanese people
cherry trees and cherry blossom are the metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life Bowring, 1993: 13, and it inspired him, when he meditated the ephemeral of the
time. In Zen, when someone experienced samadhi, he found the understanding
that time that past and future is relative. Time is categorized in years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, nano seconds until unlimited. The distance
between past and future is very close. When someone enter a samadhi, the distance of past and furture becomes very thin. When the past and future cannot
be separated, there is no more time. Time is sublimed. The time as a concept is ephemeral.
Year in the first line is the metaphor of the ephemeral of time, the time of human being, and the time of cherry trees. Since the cherry trees are alive it can
be dead. It is called existence when it is in the cycle of life and death. The cherry trees are the metaphor of the existence.
2. Implied Metaphors in Basho’s haiku
According to X.J Kennedy and Dana Gioia implied metaphor is metaphor
that uses neither a connective nor the verb to be. They uses Shelley’s Adonais to explain implied metaphor, in the first line Shelley wrote Life, like a dome of
many-colored glass, and in the second line Shelley wrote Stains the white radiance of Eternity. In the second line it is assumed that Eternity is light or
radiance 2002: 122. Basho uses implied metaphor in stormy sea poem and cicada
’s cry.
2.1 Implied Metaphors in the Basho’s stormy sea poem
The metaphorical river that is implied in the heaven rivers, refers to Aurora that usually can be seen along the northern to the western shore of Japan at
autumn. Aurora is in the sky. The h eaven’s river in third line of the poem is the
metaphor for the Aurora.
