Issa - This dewdrop world, is a dewdrop world, and yet

露の世は露の世ながらさりながら (tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara): a world of dew is a world of dew, granted; and yet. 露の世 is the world as dew, the Buddhist figure for impermanence; ながら grants it; さりながら is and yet, and the whole verse stands on that one word, the only word in it that is not doctrine. Issa wrote it into his journal of 1819, おらが春, My Spring, after his daughter Sato died of smallpox in her second year, and signed it there; the sentence before it says that hard to cut is the bond of a parent's love. The verse says what the sutra says, twice, and then says the one word a believer is not supposed to say, and stops. Every reader in either language has read it the same way: the first line is the teaching and the last word is the refusal. The English is Timothy L. Jackowski's, made for Takase Studios.