THE HAIBUN GALLERY: 17th April 2025. Sandip Chauhan - Guest Editor

hosts: Shalini Pattabiraman, Vidya Shankar, Firdaus Parvez and Kala Ramesh

mentor: Lorraine Haig

A Thursday Feature

17th April 2025

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT BELOW

THE HAIBUN GALLERY  APRIL 2025   Sandip Chauhan

Prompt 3

The Spring of My Life – Kobayashi Issa

People like myself think in a way a little different from him, for we live in a world filled with earthly dust. In fact, I cannot even go along with what ordinary people do, namely, celebrating the New Year with cranes and tortoises and exchanging hollow-sounding greetings, the kind of greetings given by beggars at our gates during the New Year’s season. In my opinion, people like myself who live in a ramshackle status should celebrate the occasion in a manner appropriate to our ramshackle status. Thus I neither put up pine decorations nor swept the dust of the old year away from our house. This year, too, I left everything to Buddha in welcoming the new spring.

felicity I feel

is of the middle kind—

the spring of my life

Excerpted from Dew on the Grass: The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa by Makoto Ueda.

The Story Behind Issa’s Haibun

The opening haibun of The Spring of My Life was inspired by a Buddhist story from Sand and Pebbles (Shasekishū), a 13th-century text by Mujū Ichien. In the original tale, a Buddhist priest writes a letter to himself on New Year’s Eve, inviting himself to Paradise. He hands it to his disciple, instructing him to return it the next morning. When the letter arrives, the priest weeps with joy, believing it to be a divine calling.

Issa borrows this episode but rejects both the priest’s illusion and the extravagant New Year’s celebrations of ordinary people. Instead, he chooses a “middle kind” of happiness—neither seeking salvation nor indulging in material pleasures. His haibun reflects his acceptance of life as it is, while also revealing his inability to detach completely from human emotions.

Though he avoids traditional New Year’s decorations, Issa still prepares a meal for his daughter, savoring the simple joy of being a father. This happiness is fragile—his daughter would not live long, and Issa’s joy would soon turn into grief. His haibun reveals the tension between faith and attachment, between embracing impermanence and holding on to fleeting joys. He understands that everything must pass, but he still finds himself cherishing what he knows he cannot keep.

Prompt: The Fragile Joys of Life

In The Spring of My Life, Issa grapples with the contradictions of happiness—accepting life’s impermanence while still clinging to the small joys of love and family. His haibun moves between humor, sorrow, and quiet reflection, capturing moments that seem ordinary but later take on a deeper meaning.

What moments in your life have carried this duality of joy and loss? A celebration that later felt bittersweet? A fleeting moment of laughter with someone who is no longer here? A ritual, a conversation, or a gesture that, in hindsight, carried more weight than you realized at the time?

Write a haibun that captures a moment of fleeting happiness—a joy that lingers in memory, whether softened by time or sharpened by loss. What small joys remain? What lingers after they are gone?

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IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT from Kala: NOTICE

              NOTICE

Dear Haibuneers

Starting from March 2025, we at haikuKATHA are moving on to a new submissions format for haibun submissions. (Only for haibun, please note!)

Writers are invited to submit one unpublished haibun per submission window.

Kindly note the submissions calendar.

1-20 March, to be considered for publication in May

1-20 June, to be considered for publication in August

1-20 September, to be considered for publication in November

1-20 December, to be considered for publication in February

All accepted submissions will receive an email to confirm their acceptance by the 5th day of the publication month.

Your unpublished (only one) haibun should be sent to: https://forms.gle/xUEiiDR9wd2dgqtR9 only during the submission period. 

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The Haibun Gallery continues as is.

We will be having editors and prompts, and your sharing…