ABSTRACT
Regarded by many as amongst Japan's finest literature, Basho's work is an important development and summation of medieval Japanese cultural attitudes to the natural world, and emphasizes a heightened sense of unity with nature, much stressed in later artistic expressions of Zen Buddhism. Around one thousand haiku are attributed to Basho. He established the haiku as a serious and deep poetic form that captures a purity and unity in the immediacy of experiences of the natural world. Whilst there seem to have been no major developments in philosophy during the Tokugawa period of Japanese history, the closing of the borders to foreign influences around the time of Basho accentuated the purely Japanese aspects of art and literature produced by the 'home-grown' talent of the time. Basho's verse now appears in almost all inspirational Zen collections.
