Time Of White Dew (白露)

September 7-23

It's like clockwork. Every year, by mid-September, the dew point is reached and suddenly there are glistening dewdrops --like diamonds-- scattered in the morning grass.

This was true in Tokyo and it's true in Los Angeles.

In Japan, these pearly gems are not only treasured for their gem-like beauty, but they are also appreciated  for their fleetingness; which, like scattering cherry blossoms, are likened to the transience of our human existence. For life, like the disappearing dewdrops in the morning sunlight, is too often cut short. In this way, dewdrops have been considered, since ancient times, along with “scattering flowers and fallen leaves” (飛花落葉) as a poetic metaphor for impermanence, or mujo (無常).

Have you heard of the dewdrop world?

In Japan, human transience became so associated with the autumn dew that our frailty was referred to as our “dewdrop world” (tsuyu no yo 露の世); or as our “dewdrop lives” (tsuyu no inochi 露の命), our “dewdrop bodies” or “dewdrop selves” (tsuyu no mi 露の身). One of the most famous haiku written on this theme is one by Issa who, devastated after the loss of his beloved one-year old daughter, lamented:

露の世は露の世ながらさりながら
一茶

this world of dew-
is yes, a world of dew
and yet...
-Issa

The above translation is by Patricia Donegan. I really like the translation since she emphasizes the sorrow of things. "Yes," says Issa, life is fleeting and precarious. filled with sadness. Like dewdrops fated to fade away in the morning sunshine, our lives are all too fragile. Yet even in knowing this, still the poet whispers "and yet..."

This is something you can't help but feel in early autumn. After all, the world itself seems to be in a process of death and decay:

秋風に
なびく浅茅の
末ごとに
おく白露の
あはれ世の中

White dew
poised at the tips of 
grass, fluttering 
in the autumn wind-
What a fragile, fleeting world
- Semimaro, Shin-kokinshu

The above poem is from the second imperial anthology of court poetry, compiled in the 15th century. What a fragile and fleeting world, says the poet. But so beautiful too. For indeed, precisely what is fragile and fleeting is what is considered beautiful, as Japanese monk Yoshida Kenkō remarked in his Essays in Idleness :

If man were to never fade away like the dews of Adashino.... but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us!

Buddhism, of course, also teaches that nothing in life can escape the law of anitya or “necessary change” and that all life inevitably must perish.

The Heart Sutra teaches that, All that appears before us is as a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow. All is like the dew or lightening. It should thus be contemplated that nothing has reality. That everything is in flux and that all must eventually perish is a sad but inevitable fact that somehow seems all the more apparent in this season of sparse autumn grass, disappearing dewdrops and sudden, passing thunderstorms.

For more, see my essay at 3 Quarks Daily/ Photos by Tracey Parmley Nuki