Kinpu Kosho is a Sōtō Zen monk and head priest of Eishōji in Seattle. Trained in Japan, he emphasizes traditional Zen over modern adaptations. He founded the Northwest Zen Community in 2006.
光昭 ‘Kinpu’ 金風: Since Descartes, modern Western civilization has been built almost entirely upon a left-brain worldview:
rationality, utility, linear thinking, continuity, efficiency,
and the belief that “to be intelligent is to be mature.”
Within such a culture, people grow strong in knowledge and information, but weak in sensitivity, depth, silence, and intuition.
They become skilled at analysis, yet unable to truly feel.
And because their inner world remains thin, they need places to hide—
titles, institutions, academic societies, qualifications, hierarchies.
Especially in the humanities, many academic gatherings function less as contributions to society and more as psychological shelters:
a place to confirm status and collective identity, to avoid confronting the absence of inner transformation. Why does this happen? Because left-brain culture is built upon a deep attachment to continuity:
a planned life,
an unbroken career,
a stable self-image,
a coherent linear narrative.
The left brain fears the collapse of this continuity.
By contrast, traditional Japanese culture is profoundly right-brain oriented—attuned to intuition, atmosphere, emptiness, silence, “ma,” embodiment, and immediacy.
And the most refined crystallization of this right-brain sensibility is Bashō.
Here the essential truth becomes clear:
A poet is, by nature, a person who lives in the right brain.
A poet does not live by continuity.
A poet does not rely on a linear, accumulating life.
What matters to a poet is not the story but the moment.
In the world of the poet:
resonance matters more than explanation,
perception more than analysis,
atmosphere more than information,
intuition more than thought,
presence more than continuity.
This is why poets often feel suffocated by left-brain civilization:
the structure of that world contradicts the structure of poetic perception.
And it explains why a poet feels a natural, almost instinctive resonance with Bashō.
They breathe the same air.
Bashō’s haiku are pure expressions of total immersion in the present moment—the very landscape where poets themselves live.
A poet is a person who lives outside continuity.
A poet’s life is not a line.
Not a progression.
Not even a story.
A poet lives in the arising of the world in this very moment—
the sudden appearance of reality before thought can name it.
The poet is free from the rigidity of left-brain civilization
and stands instead in the domain of the right brain—
the world of feeling, intuition, immediacy, and encounter.
In this sense, the poet is someone who still carries within them
what modern civilization has largely forgotten.
A poet is a guardian of the human capacity
to live deeply,
to feel fully,
to meet the world directly.
— Kosho Itagaki
via text
14-NOV-2025
Kosho on Substack