In his introduction to Haiku Moment, Bruce Ross wrote the following in 1993:
“The movement from a special attention toward non-human nature to some kind of union with that nature is a central facet of Japanese culture and is derived from Taoism, Buddhism, and Shintoism. This movement from attention to union at the heart of the haiku tradition is for the most part alien to Western culture." (1)
Since then, Dr. Haruo Shirane (2) and others have argued that the role of Zen in traditional Japanese haiku has been overemphasized in the West. However, many haiku poets still try to write poems in which an encounter with nature that somehow blurs the boundary between the observer and the observed. Why is this so?
Perhaps because such poems enable us to sense our place in the world, if only for a moment. In any case, to be unaware of the spiritual tradition in haiku, or to discount it, is to ignore what makes some of the best haiku different than most Western poetry.
For an ardent point of view on this topic, see the recent essays of J.W. Hackett, one of the founders of the haiku tradition in English. Search for the phrase "J.W. Hackett haiku." See also his web site: www.hacketthaiku.com.
— Dave Russo
(1) Bruce Ross, Haiku Moment, An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku (Boston: Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., 1993), xii.
(2) Haruo Shirane, "Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson, and Modern Haiku Myths," Modern Haiku, XXXI:1 (winter-spring 2000), 48-63. Also available online: Beyond the Haiku Moment. Professor Shirane is also the author of Traces of Dreams, Language, Cultural memory, and the Poetry of Basho, Stanford: Stanford University Press (1999).
See also this section on the NCHS Web site: Zen and the "haiku moment".