The stone referred to here is called Mojizuri no ishii and is a stone with a pattern carved on it. Traditionally people would dye patterns in cloth by spreading the cloth over the stone and rubbing it with certain grasses to create a color and a pattern. "Moji" here is sometimes written with the Chinese characters meaning 'graph,' but this is wrong; the word in question derives from the verb 'mojiru' indicating the random pattern created by this rubbing process.

Use of the term 'Shinobu' has several interpretations:

1. The name of the region is Shinobu-gun, and the name may come from that.
2. In this dyeing process they may have rubbed the cloth with shinobu grass.
3. The random pattern created by this process may be reminiscent of the way shinobu grass grows.

Shinobu mojizuri is a pillow word found in a love poem by Minamoto no Toru in Book 14 of the Kokinshu:
Michinoku no shinobu mojizuri dare yue ni midaremu to omou ware naranaku ni.
"Like Shinobu patterns of the north/ my mind is a maze, and that for you." (H.H. Honda, trans.)

Also in Ise Monogatari there is a famous poem:
"Midare some ni shi" where the first two lines provide a joshi for the word midare. The sense of the poem is, 'who besides you could cause my heart such turmoil?' According to legend, if you rubbed barley stalks on this stone, the image of your beloved would emerge, so travelers destroyed the farmers' nearby barley fields trying it out. Consequently the farmers cast the stone down into the valley and buried it.

The stone, however, is quite large so it seems unlikely that people were able to push it down into the valley; most likely it was always there. Perhaps an earthquake or something caused the stone to roll down. At any rate, this is the story Basho heard from his child guide. We should note that Basho often employs questionable guides and here he slyly questions the story he has heard.

When Basho saw the stone it was evidently buried deeper than it is today. One account says that in Genroku 7, a few years after Basho passed this way, the local lord had the stone excavated, and again in 1885 a local official mobilized more than a thousand men to dig out the stone and they spent 20 days doing the job. The stone still remains today beside the Kannondo Shrine dedicated to the Goddess of Mercy.

Basho found the stone neglected and half buried in the ground; a situation which caused him to yearn for the past when people used the stone to make their elegantly patterned cloth. The literal meaning of the poem is that the hands that transplant the rice formerly dyed the cloth, and in this way the poem expresses the poet's nostalgia for the past. The season word is 'sanae' which refers to new rice shoots and indicates summer. The 'ya' is a cutting word which draws attention to and emphasizes the busy hands of the rice planting girls. 'Shinobu' is a pivot word. In one sense it means 'to recall' so that the phrase 'mukashi shinobu' means to recall the past while 'shinobu zuri' means to rub shinobu grass. The poem could mean: 1) the hands that plant the seedlings are the same hands that once dyed the cloth, or 2) the hands that plant the seedlings remind us of days gone by. Thus, when I came to the village to see the shinobu mojizuri stone, it was just rice planting time and the young women of the village were planting the fields. When I saw their busy hands, I was reminded of the hands that dyed the cloth in the olden days. In his typical fashion, Basho describes the scene he sees at present and evokes a scene from the past at the same time.