“Flowers / Birds, Wind, Moon”

These four words — “flowers,” “birds,” “wind,” and “moon” — do not connect grammatically to form a sentence or any other kind of semantic unit, and the order in which they appear is essentially random. However, because they separately evoke the senses of smell (flowers), hearing (birds), touch (wind), and seeing (moon), when juxtaposed in this way they suggest a direct experience of the natural world that is unfiltered by the sort of abstract, conceptual thinking that typically occurs in the form of sentences. When the expression “flowers, birds, wind, moon” occurs in Japanese Buddhist literature, such as the writings of the Pure Land priest Rennyo蓮如
(1415-1499) and the “Five Mountains literature”五山文学
of Zen, it refers in a general way to poetry和歌漢詩
Japanese: waka kanshi
 composed in either in Japanese or classical Chinese, because each of the four words often serves as the central motif of a poem that celebrates the beauty of nature. Poems in East Asia typically have a seasonal theme, and the mention of flowers, birds, wind or the moon also symbolizes spring, summer, winter, or fall, respectively.