What is Meant by Sonomama in Asahara Saichi's Poems
11th European Shin Buddhist Conference

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Asahara Saichi (1850-1932) was a Shin Buddhist devotee of the kind we call myokonin. The Japanese word "myokonin" is not in fact a proper noun but a term used to refer to certain people in the Shin Buddhist tradition who lived their lives with pure faith in Amida Buddha.

Generally speaking myokonin were characterized by their piousness, un-worldliness, liveliness, good-heartedness and profound spirituality. According to the records of myokonin such as The Biographies of Myokonin and The Further Biographies of Myokonin, published in the late Edo Period, most of the myokonin were illiterate. Despite their lack of formal education, however, or perhaps even because of it, their spirit was pure and unaffected. They expressed directly what they had innerly experienced. When they tried to express themselves, whether in words or actions, what they said or did came straight from their innermost hearts and pointed directly to the truth of what they had experienced.

Influenced by the successful publication of The Biographies of Myokonin and The Further Biographies of Myokonin that recorded the words and deeds of some 150 myokonin, there later appeared other biographies, principally in the form of booklets, such as The Record of the Way of Life of Shoma (Shoma arinomama no ki).

These biographies, however, were compiled by Shin Buddhist priests on the basis of interviews and secondary reports. Since the compilers' own commentaries and interpretations are mixed up with the descriptions of the words and deeds of the myokonin, it is not easy for us to achieve any kind of contact with the living personalities of the myokonin themselves.

It is in this respect that the diaries of Asahara Saichi are of such particular value, providing as they do a personal record of his own spiritual insights written by himself day after day over a period of eighteen years, from the autumn of 1913 until his death early in 1932. The poems he entered in his diaries are estimated to number upward of ten thousand. Saichi is believed to have been composing verses at an average of two a day throughout the last seventeen years of his life.