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Gerta Ital (1904-1988)

 

Gerta Maria Luise Karoline Ital (1904-1988) was a German-born actress who entered a Japanese Zen Buddhist monastery late in life. She was born in Hanover. She was the first western woman allowed to stay in a zen monastery (in 1963). She studied with Eugen Herrigel from 1953 to 1955. She was also in contact with Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle. Her master in Japan was Mumon Yamada.
She recorded her experiences in two books, The Master, the Monks and I: A Western Woman's Experience of Zen, and On the Way to Satori: A Woman's Experience of Enlightenment. Both books were published in German in the mid-1960s, but were not translated into English until much later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerta_Ital

Biography
http://testimoniesawakening.free.fr/gertaitalbiography.htm

Gerta Maria Luise Karoline Ital was born on 7 July 1904 in Hanover in a family of musicians. Her father was an orchestra conductor and her mother a lyric singer.

She received a high level of musical training, she studied piano and became an actress. She was rapidly successful and became renowned in her field.

But, she had to stop her carrier because of a tumour in her neck which caused her to loose temporarily her voice. From 1928, she engaged herself on a spiritual path. She studied Egyptology at the Heidelberg University and Indology with the famous Heinrich Zimmer, practising Raja yoga at the same time.

From 1953 to 1955, she became extremely interested by Zen and worked with Eugen Herrigel. She also came into contact with Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle.

In March 1963, she travelled to Japan. She would stay there seven months. She was the first Western woman allowed to stay in a zen monastery. She practiced the Rinzai path (with koans) under the guidance of a very famous master : Mumon Yamada Roshi. She would become enlightened just before coming back to Europe.
She wrote her experience in a zen monastery in a first book published in German and translated much later in English : The Master, the monks and I.

In 1967, she went again to Japan; some biographical elements with her spiritual experiences on the path as well as her second stay would be the subject of her second book "On the way to Satori".

After coming back to Germany, she started to teach Zen. She would become deeply interested in the interfaith dialogue. She left this world on 21 July 1988.

With Hugo Makibi Enomiya-Lassalle and Karlfried graf Dürckheim, she largely contributed to popularised Zen Buddhism in Germany and in Europe.


The Path
http://testimoniesawakening.free.fr/gertaitalzen.htm

The Roshi lives in the One and It in him, and it is this wholeness and totality which gives him his unprejudiced vision in the face of the radical transformation of everything which we have ever known, and which makes it possible for him to accept the logical conclusions imposed by the situation and to put them into practice without prejudice or question.

It is thus hardly surprising that he did not impose any restrictions on the account of my life in his monastery which I planned to write And in any case, I have refrained from saying anything about the final solutions to the two major koans I describe in my narrative, 'Mu' and 'One Hand' (more commonly known in the West as 'The Sound of One Hand Clapping'). I have only described the path which I myself travelled in order to attain the state of union with these koans, and that is something unrepeatable; the questions and answers in sanzen are always personal and individual, involving only the Master and the disciple sitting before him, and they are only relevant at the moment at which they are uttered. A Master will ask each disciple different questions at different times, and people who try to quote words which others have used to express their innermost being instead of speaking of their own individual experience are simply cheating themselves, and they will not be able to pull the wool over their Master's eyes for very long.

The path which I travelled and which 1 have described in my narrative was a very hard and stony one This fact should not discourage anyone else, however for each individual is different. Nowadays it is no longer necessary for anybody who wishes to experience their own being and God within that being to take a roundabout route, nor is it necessary to change one's religion. 1 never abandoned the religion which I was brought up in—in all the time I was in Japan nobody so much as hinted that anything like that was either necessary or desirable A true Roshi, a true Master, lives in a state of union with the Original One, and in that dimension there is simply no such thing as 'one way to redemption' and all dogmas are completely irrelevant. All that exists on that plane is Truth itself as living Being, and a Master's only interest is to awaken that Being within his disciples.

This path is available to everyone without exception, no matter what their religion. The only requirement is that each individual must travel the path themselves, for it is not something ready-made which can be handed out on a platter.

In what I have written about my own beginnings on the path I have tried to give as much help as 1 can, showing how one can deal with the many difficulties which one encounters on the way, and how it is possible to practise on one's own at home, without travelling to Japan. I should like to point out, however that all attempts to 'conquer' this goal are doomed to failure right from the start. It is a path which must be travelled without any objectives in mind. It is important to drop any ideas of success or failure or of the magnitude of one's achievement' I should like to take this opportunity to quote Father Enomiya-Lassalle SJ. once again:

'Enlightenment is something which is available to everyone All one needs to do is follow the right path. Enlightenment itself is neither Buddhist nor Christian. It does not belong to any particular religion. It can be found in both Mohammedanism and Christianity, although it is not striven for so methodically and specifically in these traditions as in the disciplines of Zen and Yoga. Theoretically speaking, the association with a specific religion is secondary, even though it is very unlikely that anyone without a religious motivation or the aspiration to realize the Absolute would ever subject themselves to all the trials, difficulties and radical renunciation which travelling on this path involves'.

Father Lassalle who is a great servant of the Truth, makes it very clear that Truth, of which enlightenment is an integral part, is something which is available to everyone But one should not succumb to the temptation to ignore what Lassalle says about the difficulties encountered on the path and the renunciation demanded of the seeker Even so, the degree of this renunciation always depends upon the stage of development of the individual, and in practice even the most total renunciation is usually made up of a series of many small decisions which are taken individually one after the other until one's state of renunciation is complete. For those readers who still feel that this is too much for them and that it is all very frightening I should like to quote something which Eugen Herrigel once said, both as consolation and as encouragement: 'Even to travel a very short distance on this path is enough, enough to make one's entire life worthwhile'.

And this journey towards the Absolute is a never-ending process, even for the seeker who has already travelled a long distance and experienced much. One must prove oneself again and again, both in the tests and trials of one's everyday life and on the path of enlightenment itself. All the great Masters have spent their lives travelling from one realization of enlightenment to the next, for nothing which one attains is static—it must be deepened, understood, and experienced in its entirety, both as an undivided whole and as endless variety.

(The Master, the monks and I)


Gerta Ital's awakening
http://testimoniesawakening.free.fr/gertaital.htm

I went to sanzen every evening (Sanzen is a private dialogue between Master and disciple in Zen Buddhism, in which the Master gives instruction to the disciple). The Roshi was also too aware of my impending departure, and he drove me deeper and deeper into the One every day, with ever-increasing intensity.
'How do you experience the One Hand?' he asked one evening.
'The One is both the formless and the formed', I replied, 'and the One Hand is everything, I am the One Hand.'
'There is no "I"!' he cried, his voice like a metallic crack of thunder. 'There is only the One!'
The next evening he didn't ask any question. The moment I sat down his voice cracked out again :
'There is no Gerta Ital! There is no Roshi! There is only the One!'
After evening zazen I would return to my room at about ten and light the kerosene stove, a luxury which I would not have had if it had not been for the Roshi's tremendous compassion. Every sanzen during this Great Zazen left me feeling shattered to the very core, and 1 would sit and meditate on the Master's words until late in the night before finally going to bed. Physically 1 was a mere shadow of my former self, but I no longer cared about that; in fact, if 1 had had the choice 1 would have liked to destroy my body completely in order to be free of the hindrances which it created.
The breakthrough finally came on 8 November. The Roshi had asked the same question once again the evening before:
'What is your experience of the sound of the One Hand?'
The One is sufficient unto itself '1 replied, responding to the question about my experience, 'it lives its life in me—in all beings.'
The Roshi breathed deeply for a few moments, as he always did before 'It' spoke through him. When he finally spoke his voice was very soft, and yet the effect could not have been less electrifying if a bolt of lightning had struck me directly, filling me with fire, even though he did not say anything that he had not said before again and again, his statements alternating in response to my answers:
'There is no within. There is no without. There is only the One!'
1 don't know why it was this statement which finally dissolved the koan. Intellectually at least, everything had already been clear for a long time In the stories regarding such experiences one often hears of Zen disciples driving themselves to the very brink of death in their attempts to solve their koans, and yet it is often some tiny, everyday occurrence which finally tips the scales and causes the last barriers to fall away.
In my case it was the Roshi's words, 'There is no within. There is no without' which finished me, destroying a boundary that had already been crumbling away for a long time.
That night 1 sat down to meditate on what he had said, and suddenly it happened. There was no more koan, there was no question of any distinction, there was no 'I'. There was only the One.
Early the next morning 1 sat down in zazen again, after less than three hours sleep, and the experience repeated itself. 1 reached the level of samadhi faster than ever before and then everything expanded into infinity and boundlessness. 1 am not quite sure whether 'boundlessness' is the right word. It is partly right, and partly wrong. The main reason that it is wrong is that when we use the word we cannot help imagining 'something', however vague that something is, and that is a mistake As far as 1 was concerned there was simply nothing. No vision, no ecstasy, nothing When I try to express what I experienced exactly as it was, without any decorative epithets, then all I can say is that there was nothing at all, and that I too was nothing
But this nothing only appeared to be nothing. In fact it was life itself, and I had been devoured by this life, by that which is the All in One. And however hard one tries, there is simply no way of describing the experience of unity with this 'All in One', it is indescribable, far beyond all words. Nothing one could possibly say is anywhere near being right. Even the term I used before to describe samadhi, blissful peacefulness, is wrong although it comes closer than anything else. But it is only part of it. There is no way of describing formless Being Being as an absolute state, Life itself, without beating around the bush and distorting the truth It is simply not possible and I must fail as all others have failed before me.
But 1 wasn't thinking of anything like this that morning. Nothing could hold me back: I knew that I had to see the Master as soon as possible and I took part in the early morning zazen, even though it was officially only for the zendo monks.
The Roshi realized what had happened the moment 1 walked into the sanzen room. I was trembling all over, and when I knelt down before him he asked me about the sound of the One Hand, in a very soft and gentle voice My reply was completely incoherent. I stammered my experience of Unity in bits and pieces, my voice shaking, my body quaking and swaying to and fro as if I were about to collapse completely.
He nodded, his face radiant 'Only One Hand!' he cried joyfully 'Only One Hand!'
I looked up into his face, which was luminous with an inner glow. He nodded once again before he reached over to ring his little bell to indicate that the sanzen was over.
Getting up was difficult, and I had to push myself up from the mat with both hands. I almost fell flat on my face as I bowed to the Master before leaving the room. The sweat flowed out of every pore in my body, and I staggered out of the sanzen room and along the corridor outside like a drunkard. Back in my room I collapsed on my bed, which was still lying unrolled on the floor. My body shook and quaked for a good hour as if I was having a fit of the chills, before it finally begin to calm down again. The few lines I managed to write in my diary are as shaky and scrawled as if I had written them on my knees in a swaying express train.

 

Osho's Last Discourse
http://bur.st/~omp0lyom/iosho.com/oBook/The%20Life%20Of%20Osho/10-67-last.htm

 

 

Werke
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerta_Ital