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宮前心山 Miyamae Shinzan (1935-2021)

宮前心山 Miyamae Shinzan's signature

Born in 1935 in Niigata, Japan, he graduated from Doshisha University with a degree in Economics. In his twenties he failed in three business ventures, experiencing great hardships. Contemplating suicide, he was by chance transformed upon meeting a Zen nun. He was 31.

He was ordained a Zen monk by Mitsui Daishin (三井大新 1903–1992) Roshi who sent him to train at Shōgen-ji (正眼寺) monastery with his own master, the formidable Kajiura Itsugai (梶浦逸外 1896-1981) Roshi [Dharma name: 宗実 Sōjitsu]. Shōgen-ji, known as the devil’s dōjō (鬼 僧堂 oni sōdō), had the reputation of being the strictest training monastery in Japan. It was founded in the mountains of Gifu-ken on the spot where Zen ancestor Kanzan Egen (関山慧玄 1277-1360) in his post-monastery training worked as a cow herder by day and sat zazen on a precipice by night. Recognising his understanding, Itsugai Roshi wished Shinzan to succeed him at Shōgen-ji.

The Lineage of Kajiura Itsugai

白隱慧鶴 Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769)
峨山慈棹 Gasan Jitō (1727-1797)
隱山惟琰 Inzan Ien (1751-1814)
棠林宗壽 Tōrin Sōju (d. 1837)
雪潭紹璞 Settan Shōboku (1801–1873)
泰龍文匯 Tairyū Bun’i (1826–1880)
大義祖勤 Daigi Sogon (1841–1874)
昭隱會聰 Shō’in I’sō (1865–1924)
無隱惟精 Muin Isei
梶浦逸外 Kaji’ura Itsugai (1896-1981)

Shinzan Roshi instead went on to study at Kokutaiji in the north of Japan. The resident teacher, Inaba Shinden (稲葉心田 1906-1986) Roshi, requested Shinzan to become the next Zen Master of Kokutaiji.

After completing his koan study, Shinzan Roshi took the unusual step of visiting every Zen Master in Japan seeking to test and deepen his insight. Later he restored Gyokuryuji, the hermitage of the great Zen master Bankei Yōtaku (盤珪永琢 1622–1693). He has become known for protesting against institutional abuses and Zen teachers without insight. He parted ways with the Myoshinji branch of Rinzai Zen over excess charging for funerals. Shinzan Roshi went on to found Zendo Kyodan (禅道教団 Zenways Sangha), a primarily lay-based Zen organisation dedicated to fostering true awakening in the modern world. He has taught in the US, Canada and Europe and has written two books in Japanese, one about true Buddhism and one about finding happiness.

The Buddhist establishment in Japan considers him a maverick over his willingness to teach former members of the Doomsday Cult Aum Shinrikyo:

The February 21, 2004, issue of Tokyo’s English-language Daily Yomiuri newspaper featured an article about a Japanese Zen priest named Shinzan Miyamae, who counsels former members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult. The Aum cult, as some of you may recall, was the lovely spiritual organization — a Buddhist sangha dedicated to saving all living beings whose leader was a close personal friend of the Dalai Lama, they claimed — that, in 1995, attempted to give a head start to the apocalypse their leader Shoko Asahara had predicted by gassing the Tokyo subway system with a nerve toxin developed by the Third Reich. Twelve people died in the attack, and many more were injured in the mayhem that broke out in the packed subways that morning. Miyamae Sensei has made it a point to read up on the “spiritual writings” of the Aum leader, Asahara. In his books Asahara recounts the experience of the mystical awakening that led him to form his organization. After this enlightenment experience Asahara had no need for a teacher of any kind because, he said, he had completely freed himself of his physical body during deep meditation. When Miyamae Sensei read about this, he was struck by the similarities between what Asahara had described as his moment of awakening and some of his own experiences of disembodiment during his training as a Zen monk. “I wasn’t afraid of death,” says Miyamae in describing one of those experiences; “I felt as if I could do anything.” Unlike Asahara, however, Miyamae Sensei had a teacher. When he told his Zen master about what had happened to him, the master admonished him, saying, “You may get all sorts of experiences while training, but you must not linger on them.” That brought Miyamae back down to earth.
(Sit Down and Shut Up; Brad Warner, pp. 54-55)

洗心 "Senshin" = Purify the Heart
Calligraphy by 宮前心山 Miyamae Shinzan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinzan_Miyamae_Roshi
https://prabook.com/web/shinzan.miyamae/1887802
https://zenways.org/about-our-teachers/#shinzan
https://web.archive.org/web/20110322211927/http://www.japansociety.org.uk/14746/continuity-and-change-in-zen/
https://www.facebook.com/shinzan.miyamae

Disciples:

In May 2007 he named Julian Daizan Skinner Rōshi as a teacher, presenting him with inka In November 2009 he named Melody Cornell Eshin Rōshi as a teacher and in June 2017 he also named Matt Shinkai Kane as a teacher, presenting them both with inka transmission. In May 2018 he confirmed his Dharma transmission to Tomio Yugaku Ameku and Barbara Jikai Gabrys, naming them both as a teacher and presenting them with inka.

SHINZAN RŌSHI ON THE KOAN
by Julian Daizan Skinner
in: Practical Zen

When you practise with the koan, Hakuin says to start with the
breath: inhale, bring up the koan, exhale, be as big as the whole
universe.
There are many many koans but all come back to you – who are
you?
Koan study is not idle thinking. We cut off idle thinking. Don’t
think about the koan; become the koan. Koan study is very good for
scholar-types – thinking, thinking, thinking is cut off.
I like the koan ‘mu’ – only one mu in the whole universe. What is
this mu? Very important koan for me.
If you want kensho, the best way is koan study. Koan is a kensho
machine.
If you don’t have a teacher, best to stay with one koan – go deep,
deep, deep. Same thing as working with many koans.
Shakyamuni Buddha had one koan, the koan of human suffering
(dukkha). That’s all he needed.
Use the koan to cut off idle thinking. Every problem: kids ignoring
their parents, ecology, population is solved if we can cut off. In
English you don’t have a good translation for nari-kiru. This is the
key word in Zen. Nari means ‘become’ – become the koan, no gap,
nothing separate. Kiru means ‘complete’ – completely cut off idle
thinking.
As you develop, your koan study will change, you will find your
own way. I don’t mind what you do, just bring me a good
understanding, not theories or intellectual stuff. If you can do that, on
the cushion, you do what you like.
Some people say you don’t need the koan, but show me a good
Zen master these days who didn’t practise with the koan – I haven’t
seen one.
Put the koan in your hara – grow, grow, grow like a mama grows
a child. Soon a new baby comes.
Even Bankei Zenji started with a question, a koan – ‘What is
bright virtue?’ Later he didn’t need, but first he worked very, very
hard. The most important koan is, ‘Who am I?’ Everything comes
from that.
Why do we have many koans? We have to come back again and
again – get the truth then throw it away many times. That we, we pile
up, pile up understanding.
When sweeping, who sweeps? When weeding, who weeds?
Practise like this, not just zazen – sitting Zen, but also do-zen –
moving Zen or Zen in action. Make every day a sesshin.

SHINZAN RŌSHI1
by Julian Daizan Skinner
in: Practical Zen

When I asked Shinzan Rōshi about his life, he began by telling me
indirectly why I was there talking to him. As a child in northern Japan
during the closing stages of the Second World War, he and his
friends were given sharpened bamboo poles by an older boy, and
drilled in ‘killing an American’. Day after day they practised, knowing
they were rehearsing their deaths. Then suddenly the war was over.
Japan had capitulated.
In no time at all friendly American soldiers had arrived and were
giving the kids sweets and teaching them baseball. ‘Something in me
unwound,’ Shinzan Rōshi said. ‘I cried.’ After that he was always
open to Westerners, unlike many in the Japanese Zen world.
You’ll find a fuller account of his life in the book The Zen
Character: Life, Art and Teachings of Zen Master Shinzan Miyamae.2
Here we will just cover the highlights.
Adjusting to post-war life, the young man had dreams of
becoming a successful businessman. But two of his business
ventures crashed. He lost not only all of his money, but his parents’
money as well.
In complete despair he considered suicide. He even laid his head
on the railway tracks but felt unable to go through with it. Everything
he touched, even suicide, had turned to failure.
By chance, one day he offered an elderly Zen nun a ride from the
railway station back to her temple. Her kindness and twinkling good
humour awakened a new possibility. She gave him a book on Zen
called Senshin Roku (On Purifying the Heart). He began to read and
his life began to change.
Not long afterwards, he was ordained a Rinzai Zen monk
(wearing robes sewn by the nun) by Mitsui Daishin Rōshi at Zuiryoji,
a Zen training temple in Gifu, central Japan. As this temple was
close to the distractions of a city centre, it tended not to attract the
most dedicated Zen students.
Daishin Rōshi recognised Shinzan’s sincerity, and sent him to
study with his own master, the renowned Kajiura Itsugai Rōshi at
Shogenji, deep in the mountains. Known as oni sodo (the devil’s
dojo), Shogenji had the reputation of being the strictest Zen training
temple in Japan.
The new monk, Shinzan, went to Itsugai Rōshi, desperately
looking for someone who had already awakened and who, in turn,
could help him to awaken to something beyond his own misery. He
wasn’t disappointed.
Many times Itsugai told the story of how as a young Zen monk he
had practised at Daitokuji Temple in Kyoto. Although he practised
sincerely, the liberating insight of kensho was slow to come.
He vowed to meditate all night in the temple graveyard for 100
days. It was in the middle of winter, and of all Japan, Kyoto is notable
for its winter cold. Even when snow fell on him, the earnest young
monk didn’t falter in his practice. When he went to see his teacher
for sanzen, sometimes Itsugai would faint from cold. He battled on
through 100 days, seeming to make no progress at all.
Then came a rest day. His brother monks wandered into the city,
but not Itsugai. He walked to a nearby shrine that his mother used to
visit. He bowed his head and prayed that his spiritual eye would
open. Then he returned to Daitokuji and continued his meditation.
Evening came; it began to get dark, but the monks had not yet
returned. Their laundry was still hanging outside, so he brought it in,
mindfully folded it and placed it in front of their rooms.
The rest day is also the bathing day in a Zen temple, so he
prepared the bath, anticipating the return of the others. He filled the
furnace with firewood. Unconsciously, automatically, he piled on
more wood and lit the fire. All of a sudden a stream of fire and heat
came out and hit his body. At that moment he realised his true
nature. The returning monks found him dancing and singing with joy.
Itsugai was a strict teacher. At the beginning, he wouldn’t even
allow the new monk Shinzan to attend sanzen. Things only started to
change when he spotted Shinzan walking back to Shogenji after a
week spent meditating alone in a cave.
Even then he was considered an outsider. Shinzan was already
30 by this time and the other junior monks were in their late teens or
early twenties. And it wasn’t just his age that marked him out as
unusual.
Shinzan encountered some wonderfully true-hearted
practitioners. But many of his fellow monks came from temple
priestly families. Rather than coming with the intention of seeking
awakening, many of them wanted to do a certain minimum amount
of shugyo or ascetic training in the monastery, so they could qualify
as priests and go home to assist their fathers. Eventually they would
become, in turn, the new priests of their temples. Being almost ten
years older, with no temple connections and a burning quest to find
some meaning in life, the misfit Shinzan was nicknamed oji
(grandad).
Itsugai Rōshi gave him the traditional koan, or spiritual question,
of mu. The Zen master Joshu was asked by a young monk whether
a dog had a Buddha nature, to which he answered mu or ‘No’. ‘What
is this mu?’ challenged Itsugai. ‘Bring me this mu.’ While absorbed in
this question, Shinzan was out on the mountain behind Shogenji one
night. He shouted ‘mu’, with his whole being. ‘I lost myself,’ he
explained simply. ‘After that many koans pass, pass, pass.’ He had
realised kensho – his true nature.
In the Rinzai approach to Zen study, the understanding is
deepened and broadened through facing many koans in sequence.
Different lineages have different programmes and also slightly
different ways of dealing with this material. More kensho experiences
followed, and Shinzan grew in confidence. As time passed it became
clearer to him how, despite the sincerity of the few, many in the
monastery were not there to gain spiritual insight, or even to simply
support their family traditions. The big motivator was money.
Funerals were the source of cash. Big money could be made
from providing them.3 Ordinary people, feeling exploited, were losing
trust in the temples. The scandal grew to the point that in the 1984
satirical film Ososhiki, which portrays a Japanese funeral, the
Buddhist priest arrives to conduct the ceremony in a white Rolls-
Royce limousine.4 Shinzan believed that the Japanese Zen system
was in urgent need of restoration.
His practice continued to mature. Gradually he mastered all the
hundreds of koans of the Mino branch of the Inzan line of Rinzai
Zen, taught at Shogenji. One day Itsugai Rōshi looked intently at
him. Their eyes locked. Fire met fire. Itsugai said, ‘As surely as my
eyes are black you are worthy to be the Zen master of Shogenji.’
Developments intervened, however. Itsugai Rōshi, believing that
he could best serve others by expanding his reach, progressed from
running Shogenji to become the abbot of the head temple, Myoshinji.
Itsugai Rōshi wanted Shinzan to receive his Zen master’s
paperwork from another senior monk. But Shinzan’s feeling was that
since this senior monk had not yet penetrated to genuine
understanding (and Itsugai readily agreed with his assessment), the
process would be meaningless.
So Shinzan moved on, making public his misgivings. Someone
who hasn’t reached understanding himself, Shinzan believed, cannot
help others to do so any more than a blind person can help others to
see. He had created a powerful enemy. ‘Anyway,’ Shinzan said,
‘everybody already called me Rōshi, Rōshi.’
He moved into a tiny temple deep within the mountains, and
began to travel to study at Kokutaiji, a prestigious training temple
near Japan’s north coast. After some time, Shinzan was offered the
position of Zen master of Kokutaiji, following on from Inaba Shinden
Rōshi.
His bête noire from the past intervened behind the scenes and
made the appointment impossible.
Undaunted, Shinzen Rōshi stepped out of the Rinzai Zen
mainstream and restored Gyokuryuji, the abandoned hermitage of
the great 17th-century Zen master Bankei. Realising that he actually
had little interest in running a school for funeral priests, he put up a
sign at the hermitage reading, ‘Training place for young and old
people to realise their true nature.’
Over the 14 years or so of my Zen monastery training I’d
experienced my own share of temple politics, and I’d long come to
the conclusion that while enlightened individuals are rare,
enlightened organisations simply don’t exist. But there was
something in Shinzan Rōshi’s story I didn’t understand: his
simultaneous celebration of the teachings of Hakuin and Bankei.
Looking into the events of Bankei’s life, Shinzan Rōshi felt a great
affinity with the staunch independence and boundless kindness of
the former Zen master. ‘Bankei helped many people,’ he said. ‘I
wanted to do the same.’ At the same time he upheld the fierce goaldirected
focus of Hakuin. He took the unprecedented step of making
Bankei’s gentle teachings and the warrior intensity of Hakuin-style
practice available simultaneously.
His journey to the margins of Zen had allowed Shinzan Rōshi to
focus his teachings on what he believed to be truly important – the
development of transformative spiritual insight. He frequently began
his dharma talks with the following: ‘The first priority is kensho; the
second priority is kensho; the third priority is kensho.’ Different
people, Shinzan realised, would find this insight in different ways.
Moreover, Shinzan Rōshi recognised that people needed
funerals, but as he was so disturbed by the modern distortions of
Zen through excessive funeral fees, he began teaching laymen how
to conduct them free or at low cost. There were howls of outrage
from the temple priests whose income was potentially being
undercut, and he was asked to desist. Shinzan refused, and after an
inconclusive spat in the regional courts,5 he parted ways with the
Myoshinji branch of the Rinzai school and focused on zaike bukkyo
(lay-based Buddhism). He is the honorary founder of Zendo Kyodan
(literally, ‘Zenways community’), and other sanghas both in and
outside Japan. All of these independent Zen organisations honour
the lineage of teaching that Shinzan Rōshi had received, but remain
outside the financial and administrative structure that had become so
problematic.
Shinzan Rōshi’s fearless way of living continues to inspire
controversy. He was always particularly welcoming of people outside
the mainstream of society. He accepted hikikomori (young people
who had been bullied into withdrawing to their bedrooms), retired
men thrown out by their wives, and even gangsters. Sometimes I felt
I was living with Jesus (although Shinzan never exuded an air of
sanctity).
In recent years, probably the most hated people in Japan have
been the leaders and members of the doomsday death cult, Aum
Shinrikyo. One of the senior members, Kazuaki Okazaki, caused
consternation when he was involved in the horrific murder of anti-cult
lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto, his wife, and their infant son.
After his arrest, Okazaki underwent various psychological tests
and a cult-deprogramming process. No one could get to him; he was
rock-solid in his belief that what he’d done was right. Shinzan Rōshi
was requested to visit and they talked together on the level of
spiritual experiences. Shinzan Rōshi recognised and acknowledged
what Okazaki had experienced, but then pointed out that there was
further to go. Gradually Okazaki began to open up. There was a foot
in the door.
Over a series of prison visits Shinzan Rōshi helped him fully
acknowledge what he’d done and begin to do what he could to make
amends to the survivors. Okazaki became a Zen student. He is a
gifted artist, and his ink paintings have appeared in the Gyokuryuji
temple magazine.
Eventually the legal process progressed to the point that
Okazaki’s case was concluded. He was the first former Aum
Shinrikyo cultist to receive the death sentence. At that point in the
conviction process, Japanese law restricts prison visits to family
members only. Undaunted, and believing that Okazaki could go
further in his practice, Shinzan Rōshi adopted him as his son.
Allowing such a hated person to become part of his family cost
Shinzan Rōshi his marriage. Nevertheless, he stuck by his decision.
At the time of writing Okazaki remains on death row awaiting
execution. His Zen training continues.
Shinzan Rōshi has taught internationally for over 20 years. After
naming me as a successor, he named a successor in Canada,
Melody Eshin Cornell, and one in Japan, Tomio Yugaku Ameku. In
May 2011 he came to London to witness the opening of Yugagyo
Dojo, our Zendo Kyodan practice headquarters. In his speech of
congratulations, he said:
‘I believe that the Zen masters of the future could come from
the students here. Nobody here is expecting money or fame;
your motivation is sincere and your results will lead from that
sincerity. May your practice and realisation bring you great
happiness, and benefit all beings in the whole world.’
Shinzan Rōshi is a notable and collected Zen calligrapher. To honour
his 80th birthday, his students in London organised an exhibition of
his artworks. Contributors to the exhibition book6 include Dr Audrey
Seo, writer on Hakuin’s art, and Professor John Stevens, perhaps
the foremost Western commentator on Zen art and artists.
Over 80 years old, Shinzan Rōshi continues to reside as a hermit
at Gyokuryuji. Although sometimes a little forgetful, his energy and
vigour are undiminished. He runs every day, dotes on his dogs, and
teaches all who come to him.

1 Daizan’s teacher and abbot of Gyokuryuji.
2 Julian Daizan Skinner (2015) The Zen Character: Life, Art and Teachings of
Zen Master Shinzan Miyamae. London: Zenways Press.
3 A family might end up paying the equivalent of US$5000–6000.
4 The clip can be viewed on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUX3dXfDJpw
5 Paradoxically, Shinzan Rōshi stood accused of profiting from his teaching of
funerals – given the lie by his simple and austere lifestyle.
6 Julian Daizan Skinner (2015) The Zen Character: Life, Art and Teachings of
Zen Master Shinzan Miyamae. London: Zenways Press.