Moon and Finger 3 – When the Pond Jumps into the Frog

Welcome to Moon and Finger, a feature for addressing and discussing any haiku topic under the sun, in depth, but particularly haiku poetics. The feature is hosted by Orense Nicod and Keith Evetts, and eventually, we hope, by a variety of occasional invited guests. We aim to make it varied and challenging, serious and amusing. Host today is Orense Nicod

Old Pond, Still New

Part II Crossing

Last week in Part I we identified how the frog and the pond enact fūeki and ryūkō, and traced the poem’s geometry—horizontality and verticality—meeting at the moment of the splash. What we did not yet have was a name for what happens between them at the instant of contact.

The frog jumps in. Something else jumps back.

This week we turn to how different readings have entered that moment, and whether any of them can fully name it.

This essay stems from my experience of reading “old pond”. Each time I read the poem, I arrive at an interpretation that feels discovered rather than constructed, yet each return makes that interpretation feel insufficient. What first appears stable gradually gives way to further instability, as if the poem resists being finally settled.

Not every reader will experience the poem this way. But the range and persistence of its interpretive history suggest that this instability is not merely personal. Across centuries, readers have repeatedly returned to the poem, offering accounts that illuminate something real in its effect while leaving something else unresolved.

The movement of this essay follows those unresolved elements. Instead of stacking interpretations, it moves from one framework to another because each leaves something behind that the next must take up again. What emerges is not a sequence of competing readings, but a slow shift in the level at which the poem has to be understood. Each approach changes the question: from what the poem means, to how it works, to how it is experienced, and finally toward the conditions that make such experiences possible in the first place.

4. What Jumps Back

The most influential lens through which old pond has been read is Zen Buddhism. Zen-inflected readings tend to treat the moment of the splash as a glimpse of nonduality — the sense that frog and pond were never really two separate things to begin with. The poem is not read as one thing acting on another, but as a single event in which subject and object stop being distinct. The frog does not simply act upon the pond as an outside force, nor does the pond simply receive that action; both appear together, inside the same occurrence. This moment is sometimes associated with satori — a sudden awakening or insight in which ordinary distinctions fall away. The sound of water, in this reading, is not something that happens after the frog jumps in. It is what that collapse of distinction sounds like — the instant when categories stop shaping what is felt, and the whole scene is experienced as one.

These readings are compelling because they capture something real about the poem: the half-cut between frog and sound does not behave like an ordinary sequence of events, and perception itself seems to shift at the moment of the splash. The pond is not just a backdrop, and the frog is not just an outsider breaking into the scene; both are felt as parts of one single occurrence. But while this sense of inseparability is powerful, it also tends to settle into a picture of resolution that doesn’t quite account for other features of the poem.

Zen readings emphasise immediacy — the collapse of distinction into direct apprehension — but they tend to underplay the symbolic and formal mediation through which that immediacy is produced. The poem’s effect depends not only on perception but on structure: on the historical weight of furuike, the hon’i of kawazu, and the deliberate openness of mizu no oto. If experience were simply given without mediation, the specificity of these choices would become unnecessary.

Old pond is therefore not a neutral opening. Unlike “green pond” or “spring pond,” it does not merely describe a seasonal scene. It immediately introduces accumulated time and symbolic weight. The “oldness” of the pond is not decorative; it is structurally active, shaping the vertical axis of depth and duration against which the suddenness of the splash can register at all.

At the same time, mizu no oto introduces abstraction precisely at the point where Zen-inflected readings would expect immediacy. Where an onomatopoeic rendering might have produced direct sonic imitation — a more continuous fusion of sound and event — Bashō instead chooses a minimal, nominal formulation: “the sound of water.” This move withholds acoustic immediacy and replaces it with a mediated designation, as if sound were being named at the very moment it might otherwise dissolve into pure presence.

Another pressure point is that the poem’s terms are not fixed. Depending on the reading, the frog and pond may stand as any number of paired concepts: self and world, mind and reality, the ever-changing and the unchanging, innovation and tradition, or simply frog and pond. Yet whatever names are given to them, the poem does not merely bring them together. At the moment of contact, something happens to them. The poem does not simply present a moment of inseparability. It also presents a movement.

The poem doesn’t just create a gap — it engineers a collision. At the moment the frog enters the pond the axes exchange, the poem’s two halves swap places.

The frog — which arrived as ryūkō, as horizontal event, as the individual intervention moving through space and time — enters the pond and becomes vertical. It disappears downward into depth. It is absorbed into the paradigmatic. It ceases to be a horizontal event and becomes part of what the pond contains.

Simultaneously the pond — which sat as fūeki, as vertical accumulation, as the unchanging ground — is forced horizontal. It speaks. It sounds. It moves outward in time through ripple and splash.

The same transformation can be seen from either side: the frog becomes depth; the pond becomes sound. The unchanging is made to move, and the moving is made to still. Tradition becomes event, and event becomes tradition.

If the splash were only a moment of unity, these shifts would be incidental. But the poem gives them a precise directional logic: what appears on one side of the cut reappears on the other in inverted form.

The contact does not merely erase the distinction between frog and pond.

It redistributes it by changing the position of each.

Some readings of the poem have interpreted this exchange through the yin–yang structure of Chinese philosophy, in which each principle contains and transforms the other. Yin is not simply the opposite of yang but includes it within itself, just as yang includes yin; what defines each term is not separation but reversible interpenetration. Read through this lens, the poem’s own categories can be aligned with that structure: pond/fūeki corresponds to yin, frog/ryūkō to yang. The passive accumulation of the pond is activated and made expressive by the intervention of the frog — the unchanging contains the changing. Conversely, the frog’s action is immediately absorbed into the field it enters, its movement becoming part of what was already there — the changing contains the unchanging.

The poem presents a problem that none of its readings can quite avoid. Frog and pond meet, and something happens to the distance between them. Nonduality and the yin–yang model are often placed in proximity, but they do not describe the same kind of relation and provide different answers to this question.

Nonduality answers by denying the premise. The “two” was never as solid as it seemed; what looks like a separation falling away is the recognition that it was never fully established. Frog and pond do not become one. They were never, in the deepest sense, two.

Yin–yang answers differently. The two terms are not dissolved, but defined through reversible relation: each contains the possibility of the other, and each becomes intelligible only through that transformation. The pond’s stillness can turn to sound. The frog’s motion can settle into depth. Their relation is not static but continuously generative, producing each term through the other.

Read together, the two traditions mark different thresholds of the same encounter. And the poem does not choose between these thresholds: it passes through both. At the instant of contact, the distinction itself falls away: this is the moment nonduality names. But the instant cannot be held, and what follows is not silence but exchange: the frog absorbed into depth, the pond forced into sound, each term passing into the position of the other without settling. This is the moment yin–yang names.

Yet what neither account fully captures is the relation between these two moments — the fact that collapse and exchange are not separate stages, but appear to generate one another within the same movement. Nonduality isolates the disappearance of distinction; yin–yang describes its reversible return. What remains unaccounted for is the structure that allows both to occur without contradiction.

The visual form of yin–yang, the taijitu, already contains the logic of the structure that can hold both.

That structure is a chiasm in which dissolution opens directly into reversible exchange. The name comes from the Greek letter chi (Χ), whose intersecting lines give it its visual form. In rhetoric, chiasmus is the simple inversion ABBA, but in its deeper sense a chiasm names a crossing in which terms exchange positions and remain dynamically reversible.

The chiasm is not itself a resolution. When the terms exchange they do not arrive at a new stable configuration — they open a new gap. The frog absorbed into vertical depth and the pond forced into horizontal sound are not a completed picture. They are two terms in a renewed tension, a relational field generated by the crossing of the last one. The structure does not close. It recurses.

Once this chiastic logic is identified, taking in the larger picture, a new pattern emerges: the poem’s structure does not stop at a single gap. It generates further relations within itself, each operating on the same principle.

At the largest scale, the kireji establishes the primary field: old pond on one side, and frog / sound of water on the other. Meaning lives in the tension between them rather than in either term.

Within the second part, a smaller field appears: frog, then sound of water. Here again the relation is not given but must be constructed by the reader — sequential, causal, or fused — reproducing the structure of the whole in miniature.

At the moment of contact, the relation does not settle but reverses: frog and water exchange positions in the act of interpretation, producing not resolution but a new instability. What seemed like a single crossing becomes the condition for another.

A further field opens beneath the first three, at the level of composition itself. The frog, too, carries fūeki. Kawazu is the classical, archaic word — not kaeru, the ordinary term — and it arrives already saturated with centuries of poetic convention, its hon’i accumulated and waiting: the reservoir/pond of tradition compressed into a single ancient kigo. Read this way, the frog does not act on tradition from outside. The frog is tradition, carried into the scene as a word already heavy with inherited association. And the pond, in turn, becomes the ryūkō. Furuike ya was not the expected opening for this kigo — old pond was never the season word’s accustomed setting — and choosing it was itself the individual intervention, the poetically unprecedented move that disturbs kawazu‘s hon’i rather than honoring it. What looks like the unchanging ground is, at the level of poetic choice, the disruption. Fūeki and ryūkō, then, are not fixed properties of frog and pond. What presented itself as yin was already yang. The mapping reverses again here, beneath the level already mapped.

And there is a final structural observation that gathers the whole poem into a single movement. The kireji establishes the largest division: old pond on one side, and on the other frog / sound of water. But within the second part, the direction reverses. First comes the frog, then the sound. The internal sequence mirrors and inverts the outer one. What begins as pond → gap → frog becomes frog → gap → pond. The poem is therefore not only structured by a cut, but by a reversal across that cut.

The result is that the poem’s largest structure and its smallest movement reflect one another. The outer architecture and the inner sequence are not separate levels but inversions of the same relation.

And this is mirrored even in sound. The phonetic echoes identified in Part I produce a chiastic effect. The to that opens tobikomu returns at the end of oto. Between them, mu and mi fall on either side of the gap — TObikoMU MIzu no oTO — creating a soft inversion across the poem’s hinge. The effect is not strict symmetry, but a felt crossing: the sense that sound turns back on itself at the moment of contact.

What begins to emerge is not a series of separate readings layered on top of one another, but a single structural principle repeating at different scales. The same movement that separates old pond from frog and sound is repeated within the frog and the sound themselves, and again within the moment of contact, where positions reverse rather than resolve. Even the categories used to interpret the poem — nature and mind, change and permanence, event and ground — are not stable frameworks but further instances of the same reversible cut. Each level reproduces the same logic: a division that immediately turns back on itself, generating a new relation inside what looked like a fixed opposition. The poem does not therefore move from unity to multiplicity or from opposition to synthesis. It generates nested fields of relation, each one opening inside the last, each one governed by the same exchange.

I want to be clear about what is being claimed here. I am not claiming the nested fields I have described are phenomenologically available as explicit structures. Nobody reads old pond and consciously thinks: “Ah, now I am encountering the third level of a recursively nested chiastic relation”. What is available, instead, is the effect of those reversals. What the reader might experience is the sense that the poem won’t quite stop moving, a resistance to settling, an unusual density or depth, or a continued oscillation between possible readings. What is encountered, then, is not structure as such, but structural instability — a sense that the relation between frog, pond, and sound remains active, continually reconfiguring itself without arriving at rest. The depth of the poem is not given as an object of analysis, but as a felt resistance to closure.

The structure does not stop at exchange. As the crossings accumulate, the terms become increasingly difficult to separate from one another. What appeared as frog is already pond; what appeared as pond is already frog. At this edge of reversibility, another framework already present within Bashō’s cultural horizon names a formulation that begins to sound less like commentary than recognition.

5. Emptiness is Form

The Heart Sutra of Mahāyāna Buddhism contains one of the most famous chiasms in history: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. As a foundational text of the Zen tradition it would have been entirely familiar to Bashō, who studied Zen seriously in his later years.

The arrival of this framework is not a claim that Bashō set out to illustrate the Heart Sutra, consciously building the poem around its formula. He may have. It is impossible to know, and the argument does not require it. What is more likely, given a lifetime of Zen practice and daily exposure to a text chanted as routinely as the Heart Sutra is in Zen monasteries, is something less deliberate: that its logic had become a habit of thought, a way of perceiving relation that shaped his sense of form without his needing to invoke it by name. The chiasm in the poem may not be an illustration of the sutra. It may simply be what a mind trained by it produces, even unprompted.

The parallels are, regardless of intent, striking. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form — eight syllables turning on a reversible structure already traced in the previous section: two terms exchange position, each requiring the other to be what it is. The frog is the pond; the pond is the frog. The sutra and the poem are not making the same argument. They are performing the same shape.

Emptiness is form: the pond, weighted with prior stillness, is brought into appearance by the frog’s entry. Form is emptiness: the frog’s action, its sound, is immediately absorbed back into the field that receives it.

The Heart Sutra’s formulation is not only a philosophical parallel but a description of meaning at the level of structure. It is usually read as a metaphysical claim — that nothing has independent existence, that all things are relational. But it can also be read more precisely as a claim about meaning itself: nothing signifies in isolation. Form arises only against what it is not. Emptiness is not absence but the relational field in which form appears.

This is one of the structural tendencies of haiku. The old pond means what it means only in relation to the frog’s arrival. The frog means what it means only against the weighted silence of the pond. Neither term carries meaning independently; meaning resides in their relation. The gap is preserved because the gap is where meaning lives. Close it with a conjunction and the relation becomes description rather than event. The Heart Sutra formulation is therefore not merely an external gloss on the poem. Relational meaning — meaning that emerges between terms rather than residing in either of them — bears a structural resemblance to śūnyatā, the emptiness through which things do not exist independently of their relations and haikai poetry can be understood as a poetic practice especially committed to preserving that relational space.

The Heart Sutra names something real in the poem. But another Buddhist concept related to śūnyatā names something different — and, for the poem’s specific movement, more precise: pratītyasamutpāda, dependent co-arising. Here things do not first exist and then enter relation; they arise together, each constituted through the other from the start. The frog is not an independent entity acting upon an independent pond. Each is what it is only through the encounter. Neither precedes it.

Again, the poem sits between the two frameworks where they diverge. Śūnyatā tends toward simultaneity: form and emptiness are two names for a single reality, present from the start, apprehended from different perspectives. The formula does not describe a movement from one term to the other; it names an identity that was never absent. Co-arising is processual: relations unfold, and through that unfolding things become what they are. Old pond enacts both. Frog and pond are mutually constitutive — neither fully exists without the other — yet the poem insists on transition: the frog enters, silence becomes sound, depth becomes event. The terms do not simply reveal identity; they pass into one another. What neither framework fully captures is not relation itself, but the inversion of roles within relation — the way frog and pond exchange experiential position once contact occurs.

The fascination of Zen practitioners with the poem over the centuries may lie less in doctrinal compatibility and cultural affinity than in a structural resonance. Each interpretation seems to open another, as if the conditions of meaning were being reactivated with every pass. The poem behaves the way Zen thinks — and resembles, in compressed form, the logic of a kōan: not a puzzle to resolve, but a configuration that sustains irresolution, where the student does not solve so much as remain with the tension until the question itself changes shape. But even this remains a description of effect. The deeper question remains open: why should a poem of seventeen on generate this kind of experience at all? What is it in its structure that makes such reversals available? And if these reversals persist across readings, are they merely interpretive — or do they reflect something more fundamental in perception itself?

6. The Sensing Body

In contemporary English usage, chiasm is often flattened into a merely rhetorical figure: ABBA symmetry, inverted phrasing, decorative parallelism. But historically and philosophically, chiasm is much deeper than ornament.

Chiasms feel powerful and profound because they mimic lived cognition. Human experience itself is reversible: self/world, speaker/listener, past/present. We constantly cross categories that seem stable. A chiasm captures the moment categories exchange without disappearing. The rhetorical chiasmus works precisely because it echoes this deeper structure. When Kennedy says “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country” the inversion lands because it mimics something true about civic identity — that self and polity are already folded into each other. The phrase doesn’t just sound balanced; it performs a reversal the listener already half-knows from living it. Weak chiasms — purely decorative ones — feel hollow because they invoke the form without the genuine crossing. The terms swap but nothing is actually at stake between them. Strong chiasms carry weight because the reversal isn’t arbitrary; it reveals that the boundary was already porous.

Old pond is, among other things, a poem that foregrounds perception itself. The poem’s persistent reversals are not confined to interpretation. They arise at the level of experience itself, where distinctions between subject and object, sound and image, movement and stillness repeatedly blur and reorganize. Phenomenology, the philosophical study of lived experience, provides a natural framework for examining this dimension of the poem. Two phenomenological approaches, in particular, illuminate what is happening here.

A discussion of chiasm leads naturally to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose philosophy gives the term one of its deepest modern formulations. For Merleau-Ponty, le Chiasme describes the intertwining of perceiver and perceived. When you touch your left hand with your right, the touching hand is subject and the touched hand is object. Yet the distinction never fully settles. The hand that touches can immediately become the hand that is touched. Merleau-Ponty extends this insight beyond the body itself. When you touch a table, the table is not simply an inert object receiving your attention. Its resistance, texture, and weight help shape the experience. Perception is not something a subject imposes upon the world. It emerges through an encounter between them. When you are touching the world, you are also being touched by it.

This relation between world and self returns us to the synesthetic reading. The fusion of the senses is available because perception itself is not a one-way process. When the frog jumps into the sound of water, image, action, and touch are reorganized into audition. Yet the process can also run in the opposite direction. What is perceived reshapes perception itself. The reading does not only move from vision to sound; it can move from sound back into vision. We find that the old pond we thought we saw was, perhaps, the echo of the splash all along. Sound becomes image as much as image becomes sound. What was heard is seen; what was seen is inferred from hearing. Cause and effect become difficult to disentangle within the act of perception itself.

The Japanese phenomenologist Ogawa Tadashi approaches the same problem from a different direction and fills in what Merleau-Ponty leaves open. Where Merleau-Ponty focuses on the relation between body and world, Ogawa turns to the relations among the senses themselves. For him, sight, sound, and touch are not isolated channels that occasionally overlap. They are already intertwined. What appears in one sense immediately colours the others. Meaning is not assembled from separate sensory inputs after the fact; it arises within a perceptual field in which the senses are already influencing one another.

And the relation between Merleau-Ponty and Ogawa is itself chiastic. Merleau-Ponty moves outward, from the body touching itself to the body encountering the world. Ogawa moves inward, showing that the same dynamic is already present among the senses themselves. What appears between self and world is already happening within perception before the world is even fully constituted as an object of experience. The two accounts therefore meet from opposite directions.

This helps explain why the synesthetic reading of old pond feels less like a figure of speech than a description of experience. The frog entering the sound of water is not merely a linguistic novelty. In a sudden acoustic event, sound, movement, touch, and visual expectation arrive almost together, shaping one another before reflection has time to separate them. The reader who reconstructs the splash from the sound is not performing an interpretive trick. He is doing what perception routinely does: forming a coherent scene from sensory elements that arrive already entangled. The haijin who reconstructs the visual scene from the acoustic event is undergoing a process so fundamental that Bashō’s poem needs only seventeen on to bring it into view.

What this reveals is not a claim about what the poem is, but about what it can do in perception. The senses do not fuse; they can fuse. The frog does not enter the sound; it can be read as entering the sound. “Old Pond” shows perception as something reversible and unstable, where sight, sound, and meaning fold into one another as experience unfolds. Perception is not a passive reception of data but an active, reversible, and fundamentally synesthetic process. The poem does not describe a moment of perception. It performs the structure of perception itself.

6. Convergence

Precisely because it is grounded in perception itself, this structure—and the convergence it produces—is easy to misread as universal. It can seem so capacious that it might be applied to any poem. But the alignment it depends on is rare in haiku. The effect hinges on a configuration of properties so specific that altering any single element collapses it.

The pond must be old — not still, not deep, not green, but old, a word that gives the vertical axis its full paradigmatic depth. The animal must be small and fast enough that the senses cannot track the sequence of its entry, which is what makes synesthetic fusion available rather than forced. It must be kawazu, so that the hon’i is already present, ready to be reactivated or displaced. The sound must be mizu no oto rather than a named, determinate sound — open enough to precede as well as follow, to be entered as well as produced. Japanese, in this respect, is especially receptive to onomatopoeia and sound-mimesis; many haiku lean toward sonic immediacy, where the splash could have been rendered as a direct imitation of water striking water. Bashō does not take that path. Instead, he chooses a minimal and abstract formulation — mizu no oto, “the sound of water” — which withholds specificity in favour of openness.

Change any one of these, and the crossing no longer generates in the same way. The poem is a precise configuration in which every element is load-bearing. Its achievement is neither purely structural nor purely imagistic; rather, structure and image are mutually constitutive — Bashō finds the exact images in which structure becomes perceptible.

So far, phenomenology has helped describe this at the level of lived experience: how perception itself can be reversible, how sight and sound, subject and object, continually fold into one another as experience unfolds. But part of the poem’s interpretive gravity may lie beneath experience itself — not in a deeper layer of interpretation, but in the more basic patterns that make experience take shape at all.

In other words part of the poem’s effect may arise before reflection has taken hold of experience.

We have already suggested in Part I that the poem’s horizontal and vertical axes are not arbitrary inventions imposed upon it from outside. The main theoretical source for this claim is embodied cognition, especially the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Their central point is simple but consequential: abstract thought is not detached from bodily experience but built out of it. We do not first form abstract concepts and then apply them to experience; rather, we use recurring patterns of bodily engagement with the world to structure thought itself.

A standard example makes this clearer. In ordinary language we say things like “I’m feeling up today” or “things are looking down.” “Up” here is not describing literal spatial orientation. It draws on a bodily pattern: when we are physically upright, energized, or attentive, we tend to experience ourselves as “up,” while fatigue, illness, or sadness often correlate with lowered posture, downward gaze, reduced energy. Over time, this correlation becomes a stable conceptual mapping: GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWN. The point is not metaphor as decoration, but metaphor as structure — a way bodily orientation quietly organizes abstract meaning.

The same logic applies to the horizontal and vertical axes operating in “old pond.” Horizontality is not merely “movement in space,” but a lived sense of progression, sequence, and temporal unfolding — the way experience moves forward from event to event on a path. Verticality, by contrast, is the sense of depth beneath or behind that sequence: what is retained, accumulated, or held in place as a background against which events appear. One is the felt direction of happening; the other is the felt depth of what persists beneath happening.

In the poem, these are not conceptual labels applied after the fact. They are activated as perceptual intuitions at the moment of reading: the frog moves along a horizontal trajectory of action; the pond holds vertical depth as stillness, history, and receptivity. What matters is that these are not independent interpretations but pre-reflective structures that make interpretation possible in the first place. The claim, then, is not that the poem forces these orientations upon the reader, but that it activates structures already available within thought and experience themselves.

This is why the crossing in the poem feels so immediate. When the frog enters the pond, it is not only an interaction between two objects. It is a collision between two embodied modes of structuring experience — movement and depth, sequence and ground. And because these structures are already active at the level of perception, their exchange is felt before it is understood.

Furthermore Johnson identifies image schemas as recurring, minimally structured patterns that arise directly from bodily engagement with the world — not fully formed concepts, but dynamic structures such as containment, motion, balance, force, and boundary. They are what experience “feels like” before it is organized into language or abstraction. A typical haiku activates a small cluster of image schemas — usually only a handful of basic embodied structures such as container, motion, boundary, or force. What is striking about old pond is not the presence of these schemas, but their concentration and interaction: the poem compresses an unusually large number of them into a single event, where they begin to overlap, invert, and generate secondary relations.

The concentration of image schemas in a poem of 17 on is remarkable. The pond functions as a CONTAINER into which the frog enters. The leap traces a SOURCE–PATH–GOAL. The plunge activates UP–DOWN, moving from surface toward depth. The splash marks CONTACT and FORCE. Ripples spread from CENTER to PERIPHERY. Their encounter establishes a LINK between previously separate terms. The passage from silence to sound, and back to silence, suggests CYCLE. The water’s SURFACE functions as a threshold between IN and OUT. The opposition between REST and MOTION structures the whole event, as does the logic of BLOCKAGE and RELEASE in the sudden rupture of stillness. Few poems this short activate so many schemas at once.

Four further schemas reward closer attention.

Frog, pond, and sound do not remain three separate entities held together in one scene. Each undergoes its own passage through PART–WHOLE, in opposite directions. The frog, on entry, stops being a whole in its own right and becomes a part — absorbed into what the pond now contains. The pond undergoes the reverse: before the splash its surface is a single, undivided plane, no center, no edge, nothing internal to distinguish one part from another. The splash breaks that surface and divides the whole beneath it — produces a center, produces rings, produces the periphery that radiates from it. One whole disappears by joining something larger. The other disappears by splitting into something newly internal to itself.

The same moment activates FULL–EMPTY. The pond, empty of the frog an instant before, becomes full of it. But the fullness does not stay simple: it reveals that neither frog nor pond was ever a fixed, self-standing thing. Each is full only because each was already empty of independent existence — neither complete without the other. Fullness and emptiness, here, are not sequential states but one disclosure, seen from two sides.

NEAR–FAR operates on two planes at once. The pond is distant by virtue of being old — furuike carries the weight of accumulated tradition, an inherited poetic object rather than something immediately present. The splash collapses that distance: the venerable, far thing becomes, in an instant, the immediate, sounding thing in front of the haijin. The schema operates a second time at the level of perception. If the haijin does not see the splash and only hears it, the pond remains visually far. Yet sound has its own immediacy, arriving at the ear without the distance vision implies — nearer, by another measure, than sight could make it. The schema does not resolve in one direction. It holds both.

The poem also sets up a sharp imbalance of SCALE: furuike suggests accumulated depth and stillness, while kawazu is small, fleeting, almost insignificant. But the result of their contact — mizu no oto, the sound of water — does not stay proportional to either term. It expands beyond them, producing an experience in which a minimal event is felt as something much larger than itself.

The density of schemas is remarkable, but what matters is not their presence as a list; it is what happens to them. They do not remain stable structures of experience. Each is carried into transformation. The container becomes a source of outward movement. The path turns inward and disappears into what it opened. The whole that was the frog becomes part of the pond; the whole that was the pond’s surface is broken into parts by the frog. Far becomes near as the pond’s age recedes into the immediacy of the splash, then near becomes far again as sound, not sight, brings the scene to the ear. Rest becomes motion; motion becomes absorption into stillness.

What the poem activates, then, is not simply a set of embodied image schemas, but a system in which each schema is reversible. They do not accumulate as descriptive categories. They exchange positions. And in doing so, they begin to behave according to the same logic traced throughout this essay: a chiastic structure in which relation does not stabilize, but continually turns back on itself, generating new configurations from within the collapse of the previous one.

In this sense, what the poem activates is not a fixed inventory of embodied structures, but a field in which multiple structures remain available and can shift in relation to one another.

This is why the effect of the poem is so difficult to stabilise. It does not resolve into a single dominant schema or orientation. Instead, it sustains several at once, allowing them to overlap, exchange roles, and reorganise perception as the scene unfolds. Counterintuitively, more structure does not necessarily lead to greater stability or determination; it can produce the opposite effect.

The result is a moment in which experience itself appears unusually dense — not because more is happening, but because more ways of structuring what happens are simultaneously available.

This is part of what makes old pond open to many different interpretations. Across this essay I have traced several: Bashō’s poetics, structural linguistics, classical Chinese thought, Buddhist ideas of relation, Zen practice, phenomenology, and image-based cognition.

These do not converge because they share a common language or history. They converge because each, in its own way, encounters the same movement in the poem: not fixed opposition or resolution, but relations that turn back on themselves, where meaning arises through crossing rather than containment.

Other readings could be added—psychological, ecological, mythic—but the point is not to list them. The point is that old pond repeatedly invites the same kinds of interpretation across very different ways of thinking, as though it were less an object to be explained than a configuration that keeps producing the conditions for its own explanation.

This convergence of interpretations on a structure that behaves chiastically at all levels is therefore not a metaphysical claim about an underlying unity of all things, but a testament to the poem’s precision. Each framework that encounters old pond finds its own central concept there because the poem enacts a structure sufficiently fundamental that multiple traditions have independently had to name it.

We began with a simple observation: readings of old pond often feel discovered, and yet no reading remains sufficient for long. The frameworks examined in this part do not resolve that tension. If anything, they intensify it. Each illuminates something real in the poem, yet each leaves something behind.

Even phenomenology and embodied cognition cannot account for all of the poem. Merleau-Ponty and Ogawa describe what happens to any sensing body at the moment of a percussive acoustic event — the reorganization of the senses, the reversibility of vision and sound. But this is not any pond. It is furuike — old, accumulated, weighted with a history of usage in which kawazu had long carried its inherited associations without ever being made to collide with this particular setting. The phenomenological account explains the perceptual structure of the event. It does not explain why this event, in this word, against this background of displaced expectation, carries the weight it does.

For that, the poem’s symbolic and poetic dimension must be considered alongside the phenomenological one. It is precisely the crossing between perceptual structure and poetic specificity that makes old pond not merely a poem about perception, but a poem in which perception and poetic form become, for seventeen on, the same event.

What emerges is not a single interpretation but a picture of a poem unusually rich in relations, reversals, and latent possibilities. Again and again, different traditions recognize something in it that feels essential, as though the poem were able to inhabit multiple conceptual worlds without belonging fully to any of them.

This may be why old pond feels inexhaustible. Its meanings do not simply accumulate; they generate one another. Each attempt to stabilize the poem reveals further structures, further crossings, further possibilities for interpretation. The result is not ambiguity in the ordinary sense but a particular kind of fullness: a poem that continually exceeds the interpretive frameworks brought to bear upon it.

Yet if this excess is real, a question remains. Why should a poem be built this way at all?

If Part I and Part II describe a structure, Part III asks what that structure is for — and considers its extraordinary generative capacity alongside the sheer smallness of the frog.

This accumulation of frameworks is the densest stretch in the essay, especially since Tim Dwyer’s excellent question prompted me to add a part on embodied cognition. Before we move on to part III next week I want to address a familiar objection the analysis invites in English-language haiku criticism: the poem is also, of course, a frog jumping into a pond. One reading does not negate the other.

The gap in old pond is felt before it is understood — the reader doesn’t reason their way to irresolution, they encounter it, in the body, before reflection arrives.
What the analysis identifies as structure is first encountered as sensation — a depth that exceeds the surface, a strangeness that resists settling, a quality of aliveness that the reader may feel without being able to say why.

The frameworks — Jakobson, yin-yang, śūnyatā — are maps drawn after the territory has already been crossed. The analysis doesn’t produce the experience. It names what the experience was. And naming it precisely is not overintellectualization. It is the attempt to be honest about why something that feels simple is inexhaustible.

Orense Nicod

Reactions and questions to Part II are always welcome. Does the chiasm — the crossing between the frog and pond — feel like a structural observation or something you felt in the reading? Do you arrive at a settled interpretation or feel the poem turning?

Take the poll and let us know in the comments!

References:

Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Ogawa, Tadashi. Qi and Phenomenology of Wind. Continental Philosophy Review 31(3), 1998.

At the end of each post you will find a short anonymous poll related to the topic of the week (3 or 6 questions).

It asks not what you know about haiku but what you experience reading and writing it — whether an argument lands, whether a poem does what the essay claims it does, whether your practice matches the orthodoxies you’ve been taught. There are no correct answers. A no or a not yet is as valuable as a yes, and more valuable than a performance of agreement.

Periodic issues titled Chorus will return to what the polls have gathered — not to tally verdicts but to examine what the pattern of responses reveals. Where readers converge is interesting. Where they diverge is often more so. The more poets who participate the richer the picture.

Take this week’s poll

and if you haven’t already take last week’s poll.

Discussion is welcomed in the Comments thread at the very end of this post. Meanwhile, if you would like to propose a topic you wish to see addressed, or better still, if you have an outline proposal for an article that you would be prepared to write—if accepted—please submit it to us via the submission form immediately below this text:

Why Moon and Finger? Zen, Chan, and Indian Buddhist texts cite the metaphor of a Finger pointing at the Moon with a caution: do not mistake the finger for the moon itself. Clinging to words or doctrines (the finger) obscures the awakened mind or truth (the moon). Thus, the analyses, views, and critiques of haiku in this feature are but the Finger. Haiku is the Moon itself, to be viewed by all. Views expressed here are those of the individual authors alone, except where otherwise attributed. They are very much open to discussion in the comments thread below. We all learn.

Introducing the hosts:

Orense Nicod is a French poet working across forms, with a particular focus on haiku. Born in Paris, she spent ten years of her childhood in South Africa before returning to France and writes in both French and English.

Her work has appeared in journals including Frogpond, Cattails, and The Asahi Haikuist Network. She has twice won first prize in the Haiku Society of America Rengay Awards, in collaboration with Joan Fingon (2021) and Anton R-kelian (2025).

A former teacher, she is raising her two children and her poetic expectations while co-hosting Moon and Finger with Keith Evetts on The Haiku Foundation.

Keith Evetts lives in Thames Ditton, Surrey. Life Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.  Aside from scientific papers, diplomatic telegrams, and local history articles, he’s written poetry of various kinds for sixty years, much of it sub rosa. Latterly host and managing editor of the Foundation’s re:Virals commentary feature since December 2021, one of the ten editors of the annual Red Moon Anthology, and an administrator of Facebook’s largest haiku group.   Married with five children, cottage garden, grey parrot, and a sense of humour. His short bio is here.

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