Author Sam Hamill wrote, “His [Bashō] fundamental teaching remained his conviction that in composing a poem, there are two ways:” ‘one is entirely natural, in which the poem is born from within itself; the other way is to make it through the mastery of technique.'
Mr. Hamill wrote, “ His notion of the poem being ‘born within itself’ should under no circumstances be confused with its being self-originating. A fundamental tenet of Buddhism runs exactly to the contrary: nothing is self-originating. Bashō poems were in fact a natural product of his close observation of the natural relationships of people and things, our presence in ‘nature’.”
THE ESSENTIAL BASHŌ Translated by Sam Hamill, SHAMBHALA, Boston, © 1999, pages 176-177.