“Deep autumn; My neighbour, — How does he live? . . . Christ’s Golden Rule evoked by a Ginkgo biloba tree on Christ’s Pieces, Cambridge
In an essay from 1969 called “Remembering Mr [Konstantin] Ritsanidis” (which you can read HERE), my own, primary free-religious exemplar, Imaoka Shin’ichirō-sensei (1881-1988), noted that Professor R. H. Blyth interpreted Bashō’s verse, “Deep autumn; My neighbour, — How does he live?” (「秋深き隣は何をする人ぞ」) as a haiku translation of Christ’s Golden Rule, and Imaoka-sensei then added that, given this, “it is perhaps fair to say that within the beauty Bashō sought, there was something sacred.”
Well, this morning as I walked across Christ’s Pieces, opposite the Cambridge Unitarian Church, I was particularly struck by the beauty of one of the Ginkgo biloba trees there, and whilst I took some photographs of the tree, Imaoka-sensei’s essay, and Blyth’s verse, gently came back into my heart and mind. As many of you will already know, the Ginkgo bliboa has many strong resonances within Japanese culture, its leaf is the symbol of the Urasenke school of Japanese tea ceremony, Tokyo City and Tokyo University, and the tree itself is the official tree of Tokyo.
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