In the domain of Yamagata there is a mountain temple called Risshakuji. It was founded by the great master Jikaku and is an especially pure and quiet place. People urged us to see it, so we turned back from Obanazawa, a distance of about seven ri.
The sun had not yet set. We took lodging at the temple inn at the foot of the mountain and climbed to the halls above. Rock piled on rock forms the mountain; the pines and cypresses are old, the earth and stones are ancient and smoothly covered in moss, and the halls built on the rocks all had their doors shut, without a sound. Going around the cliffs and crawling over the rocks to worship at the temples, I felt the splendid scene lie hushed and still, and my heart grow clear.
"Shizukasa ya / iwa ni shimiiru / semi no koe" (Such stillness: the cicadas' cry soaks into the rocks. In this silence, only the cicadas' voices seem to seep into the stone.)
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Risshakuji, a Tendai temple northeast of Yamagata City, is known affectionately as Yamadera, "the mountain temple." It is said to have been founded in 860 by the great master Ennin (Jikaku), and the "inextinguishable lamp of the Dharma," divided from Enryakuji on Mount Hiei, still burns in its main hall. From the entrance at the foot to the inner sanctuary, more than a thousand stone steps climb the mountain, and partway up is the "cicada mound," where a slip with Basho's verse is said to be buried.
The verse is said to have begun as "Yamadera ya / ishi ni shimitsuku / semi no koe," then become "Sabishisa ya / iwa ni shimikomu / semi no koe," before reaching its present form through revision.
In the early Showa period a debate broke out between the poet Saito Mokichi and Komiya Toyotaka, a disciple of Soseki, over what kind of cicada the verse describes. Mokichi argued for the large brown cicada, Komiya for the small kaempfer cicada. Mokichi even carried out a field study, and in the end, finding that the cicada singing around July 13 in the solar calendar, when Basho visited, was the kaempfer cicada, he withdrew his view.