We can learn from Basho . . . to look at the world with the unfocussed but all-seeing eye, making everything the matter of our pilgrimage. During his time in his little house in Fukagawa (given to him in 1680), Basho had practiced Zen meditation. He often claimed to have one foot in the Otherworld, and one in this: in other words, he had not attained enlightenment. Nevertheless he arrived at a truth which he summed up as: "No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry."
— Jennifer Westwood, On Pilgrimage