From Stillness to Presence: A Comparative Study of Spatial Poetics in Vietnamese Zen Poetry and Japanese Haiku

While spatiality has been extensively theorized in literary studies, the comparative spatial poetics of Vietnamese Zen poetry and Japanese Haiku remain largely unexplored. This study situates the two traditions within the broader landscape of East Asian Buddhist aesthetics, examining how they share metaphysical foundations yet diverge in aesthetic realization. Vietnamese Zen poetry generates expansive, porous spaces of emptiness and ontological dissolution, where the lyrical self merges with the Dharma realm. By contrast, Haiku crystallizes fleeting perceptual moments of sensory immediacy anchored in seasonal imagery. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space, Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotics, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, the study conducts close readings of poems by Pháp Thuận, Tuệ Trung Thượng Sĩ, and Trần Nhân Tông, alongside haiku by Bashō, Issa, and Shiki. Through spatial metaphors and symbolic motifs, it identifies two distinct logics: the meditative void and the momentary real. On this basis, the study proposes a dual-axis model juxtaposing ontological silence with sensory presence, thereby advancing intercultural literary theory and contributing to comparative poetics, phenomenological aesthetics, and broader efforts to theorize space as an embodied structure of perception.