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Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014)

Dharma name: 無量 Muryō

Peter Matthiessen (Muryo* roshi) studied Zen with Nakagawa Soen Roshi, Eido Shimano Roshi, Taizan Maezumi Roshi, and received Dharma Transmission from Bernard Tetsugen Glassman Roshi in 1984. He is author of many books, including The Snow Leopard, Nine-Headed Dragon River, and East of Lo Monthang, and is a lifelong environmentalist and worker for social justice.

* 無量 Mu Ryō, “No Limit” or “Boundless,” from the third of the Four Vows:
hōmon muryō seigan gaku—“The Dharma is boundless, I vow to perceive it”
—which I was chanting with Eido-roshi at the moment of my wife's death.

http://zenpeacemakers.org/2014/04/roshi-peter-muryo-matthiessen/ by Bernie Glassman
http://www.lionsroar.com/no-complaints-writer-zen-master-peter-mathiessen-1927-2014/ By Konchog Norbu

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Matthiessen
http://dept.sfcollege.edu/news/daily/pdf/2008/Matthiessen-evening.pdf

PDF: The Snow Leopard (1978)

Dharma Lineage

[...]

梅庵白純 Baian Hakujun (黒田 Kuroda, Maezumi's father, 1898-1978)
佛心大山 Busshin Taizan (1931-1995) [前角博雄 Maezumi Hakuyū]
梅仙徹玄 Baisen Tetsugen (1939-2018) [Bernard Glassman]
無量 Muryō (1927-2014) [Peter Matthiessen]

PDF: Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982
Shambhala Dragon Editions, Boston, 1986

Contents

Preface
Author’s Note
America: Rinzai Journals 1969–1976
Nepal: Himalayan Journals 1973
Japan: Soto Journals 1976–1982
Appendix Notes Glossary Index

 

Japan: Soto Journals 1976–1982

Now, mountains, rivers, earth, the sun, moon, and stars are mind. At just this moment, what is it that appears directly in front of you? The sun, moon, and stars as seen by humans are not the same, and the views of various beings differ widely. Likewise the views about one mind differ. Yet these views are nothing but mind. Is it inside or outside? Does it come or go? Does it increase one bit at birth or not? Does it decrease one particle at death or not? . . . All this is merely a moment or two of mind. A moment or two of mind is a moment of mountains, rivers, and earth, or two moments of mountains, rivers and earth. . . .

“Everyday mind” means to maintain an everyday mind in the world of life and the world of death. Yesterday goes forth from this moment, and today comes forth from this place. When it goes the boundless sky goes, when it comes the entire earth comes. . . . This boundless sky and entire earth are like unrecognized words, or the one voice that gushes out of the earth.

Body and Mind Study of the Way
—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER NINE

ON the day that ended the great inaugural sesshin at Dai Bosatsu, a group of Zen priests led by Sochu-roshi wished to visit the large bronze statue of the Buddha on the farther shore of Beecher Lake, perhaps two hundred yards across the water from the monastery. Instructed to ferry them across, I watched in alarm as buddha after buddha stepped blithely from the little dock into the leaky flat-bottomed rowboat, then remained standing, not simply because of inexperience with boats but because there was no room to sit down. Speaking not a word of Japanese, I waved and motioned with respectful gestures, trying to convey the impossibility of the whole plan.

Cheerfully the roshis waved and motioned back. Being innocent of nautical experience (or privy to miraculous information), they saw no reason why arm-waving, enthusiastic groups of upright and robust Zen masters should not travel in confidence across dark waters in a small, overloaded boat. Impatient with this indecisive student, one waved me on while another attempted to join me on the oarsman’s seat; a third leaned far overboard in a strenuous effort to push the boat free from the dock, to which I clung with straining arms until all at last were squashed onto the seats. At this point the boat was so low in the water that even if some ill-considered motion did not capsize it, the first zephyr of ill wind would bring the lake pouring in over the gunwales. I groaned as yet another buddha, coming down the slope, was greeted with shouts of welcome from the boating party.

This roshi, a handsome man in his early forties, was the Soto teacher from Los Angeles who had participated in Eido-roshi’s shin-san-shiki, or abbot installation, in 1972. Taizan Mae-zumi-roshi1 made no effort to get in the boat, nor did he caution the other roshis to abandon the doomed craft while there was time. Ignoring my signals of distress, he smiled like a sad angel, as if this group was already beyond saving, and nodded his head in the direction of the Buddha statue across the lake. Still I hesitated, and he murmured quietly, “It is all right.” Either he knew something that I did not, or he refused to intervene in the imminent destruction of his Rinzai brothers. “It is all right,” he repeated with implacable serenity, still smiling that sad, beatific smile, as if giving me the Zen instruction, “Do not cling!”

His conviction was impressive, and fired my spirit. Letting go, I set off with small and mindful strokes across the water. Maezumi-roshi stood unmoving on the dock, a guardian spirit, as I transported those buddha-beings to the other shore, then steadied the boat in the mad thrash for camera angles that took place beneath the bronze eye of the Buddha (for even Zen masters, in camera-crazed Japan, are equipped to record the illusory nature of existence). Returned to the dock, they cried out, “Kino doku!” (“Oh, this poisonous feeling!” [of being in your debt]) and “Arigato!” (“Such a difficult matter!”).2 Maezumi-roshi, with a minute bow, turned away and walked back up the hill.

Maezumi-roshi had been preceded to Dai Bosatsu by his two senior monks, Tetsugen and Gempo, who urged me to come and study with him in Los Angeles. The timing was auspicious since I was frequently in California on research related to American Indians. American Indian spirituality seemed so akin to Zen (as well as to Tibetan Buddhism) that in my Himalayan journals I was speculating about ancient common origins, an archaic religion, perhaps, in some formerly fertile heartland such as Soen-roshi’s old haunt in the Gobi Desert.

In mid-January of 1977, on a two-day visit to the Zen Center of Los Angeles, I received a warm welcome from Maezumi-roshi, Tetsugen, and Gempo. The following week I returned to ZCLA for January sesshin. Maezumi-roshi was extremely hospitable, putting me up in his own house, but sesshin itself was disconcerting. Although I enjoyed my outdoor work on the center’s buildings, the long work-practice periods that are customary in Soto temples weakened the intensity of relentless zazen that I had come to depend on in Rinzai practice. And Soto Zen, which traditionally emphasizes shikan-taza, or “just sitting,”3 over the use of koan study, lacks the rigor and precision, the shouting and strong use of the keisaku or “warning stick” that characterizes the more spartan Rinzai tradition. (In Soto, the same word is pronounced kyosaku and is translated as “encouragement stick.”) Maezumi’s undramatic teisho, delivered in a murmur so soft that one could scarcely make out his words, was a gentle teaching very different from the vivid, often startling performances of the Rinzai masters.

Nevertheless, Maezumi emphasized strong koan study, which has rarely been associated with Soto Zen. Koan study seems to have evolved out of a split between Zen schools which occurred as early as the Golden Age of Zen in China, among the Dharma heirs of the Sixth Patriarch, Daikan Eno (Hui Neng, 638–713).4 One faction put special emphasis on Bodhidharma’s teaching of a “special transmission outside the scriptures . . . pointing directly to man’s own mind.” This was later identified with “sudden” illumination or enlightenment born of koan study—the profound contemplation, in zazen, of the cryptic acts, sayings, and responses of the old masters, such as the First Patriarch’s exchange with the Emperor Wu. A second faction, founded by Hui Neng’s foremost disciple, Seigen Gyoshi, is identified with “gradual” or “silent” illumination based on “just sitting,” citing the tradition that, after his encounter with Emperor Wu, the First Patriarch, Bodhidharma, crossed the Yangtze River, retired to Shorin Temple on Mount Su, and spent nine years “just sitting” in shikan-taza, “facing the wall.”

The sudden flourishing of the Zen schools is credited to Masters Sekito and Baso, “the two gates of elixir,” whose many disciples would travel all over China. Sekito Kisen, the remarkable “Monk on the Rock,” had studied with Daikan Eno in the Sixth Patriarch’s last years before receiving Dharma transmission from Seigen Gyoshi, and he tried in vain to heal the dissension between Daikan Eno’s forty disciples that would harden eventually into rival schools. Meanwhile Sekito composed the Sandokai, or “Identity of Relative and Absolute,” a seminal Zen document which laid the foundation for the Hokyo Zammai (Jeweled-Mirror Samadhi) teaching set down by his Dharma heirs. Sekito’s “gradual” lineages, distinguished by such eminent masters as Tozan, Sozan, and Tokusan, were eventually consolidated in the T’sao-t’ung school, called Soto (from Sozan and Tozan) in Japan.

Once Tozan asked Sozan, “Where are you going?”
Sozan said, “To an unchanging place.”
Tozan said, “If it’s unchanging, how could there be any going?”
Sozan said, “Going, too, is unchanging.”5

Over the centuries the schism deepened as the “sudden” faction gained the ascendancy. A Baso lineage descending through Hyakujo (Po Chang) and Obaku (Huang Po) eventually produced Rinzai (Lin Chi), whose name is attached to what was to become the strongest school in the Land of T’ang. Another Baso lineage that included Nansen and Joshu would die out, as would the line that ended with Gutei. Soto lines were also disappearing for want of qualified Dharma successors. When Unmon’s line came to an end not long after his death in 949, the prestige and power of the Zen schools was already waning, and the Golden Age was at an end, yet the rivalry between T’sao-t’ung and Lin Chi continued fiercely.6

In the koan collections of both schools, there are wonderful “Dharma combats” between monks and masters, but the spare exchanges lack descriptive details, and only a few teachers such as Joshu and Unmon emerge from the records with distinct and idiosyncratic qualities. No teacher, not Daikan Eno (nor even Shakyamuni), comes to life so insistently as that hard-looking 110-year-old called Bodhidharma, who favored dispensing with abstractions, idle words in order to point directly at “the fact itself.”

Rinzai was washing his feet. Joshu came along and asked, “Why did Bodhidharma come from India to China? [What is this “Zen”? What is the essence of the Buddha Dharma?]
Rinzai continued washing his feet.
Joshu came closer, pretending he had not heard Rinzai’s response.
Master Rinzai poured away the dirty water.

If koan are teaching devices designed to break down intellectual concepts of reality and open the way for a profound apprehension of the universal reality beneath, they are also pure expressions of enlightened mind. “The koan,” Maezumi-roshi says, “is quite literally a touch-stone of reality . . . in which a key issue of practice and realization is presented and examined by experience rather than by discursive or linear logic . . . to help us penetrate more deeply into the significance of life and death.” The student’s understanding is repeatedly fired in dokusan—face-to-face confrontation with a living buddha, as a Zen master of authentic lineage must be regarded—and tempered by the master’s teisho,7 which are not lectures but vivid manifestations of the Dharma.

The split between the “sudden” and “gradual” schools carried over to Japan, but from the start, in both China and Japan, the more interesting masters tended to ignore it. Maezumi-roshi’s teachers (both Rinzai and Soto) considered koan study important, and during sesshin he tested my understanding with the Sound of One Hand and its fourteen “checkpoints”—each one a separate koan—which are progressively more difficult. At one point he asked if I had ever had a kensho, and I related my premature experience of November 1971 and the few small “openings” or glimpses since that time. He murmured, “Just keep practicing and you will have another clear experience.” Of my “flat” sesshins he said, “They should not be flat—deep and quiet, yes. And when you get to this deep place, it is very comfortable, but you must not stay there—go beyond!”

Maezumi-roshi’s koan study mainly derives from a system transmitted by Hakuun Yasutani-roshi, who led sesshin in America almost every year between 1962 and 1969. His Los Angeles sesshin in 1967 was attended by a young aeronautics engineer named Bernard Glassman, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1939. Glassman had been attracted to Zen writings in the late fifties, while still in college, but had no idea where he might find a teacher. About 1965, he heard about a weekly sitting, or zazen-kai, mostly for Caucasians, that was being held at the Soto temple in Los Angeles. After zazen there was tea and talk, and Glassman asked about the purpose of the slow walking between sittings. The head priest, Sumi-roshi, told a young Japanese monk to explain, and this monk said, “When you walk, just walk.”

“I guess that was my first Zen instruction,” says Bernie Glassman, better known today by his Dharma name, Tetsugen. “Not long afterwards, this monk left the Soto temple, and I did, too, because Sumi-roshi did not really speak English, and I was making no progress at all. Then, in 1966 or 1967, I heard that a Zen master was to give a talk at the Theosophical Society. The master was Yasutani-roshi and his translator was this same young monk, Maezumi-sensei, who had opened his own ‘Los Angeles Zendo’ on Serrano Avenue. I was very impressed by Maezumi’s translations, and I knew that he was someone I could study with.”

In 1968, young Bernie Glassman practiced zazen at the L. A. Zendo, and that year Yasutani came again and led a one-day sesshin. At dokusan, he gave Glassman the koan Mu. Afterward, Glassman had a lot of questions about Mu, but Maezumi-sensei, who had not completed koan study, would not answer them. Maezumi told his student to do shikan-taza until Yasutani came back the following year. By that time, all Glassman wished to talk about was shikan-taza.

“He had a dirty beard!” Maezumi recalls, remembering his first impression of young Glassman. “But he also had a flashing light in the eyes, and naiveté in the good sense of the word, open and ready to receive anything he could get. He became an exceptional Zen student because of his devotion to his practice, an ability to hurl himself into whatever he had to do. Very early, he knew how to throw the self away, to become selfless; that’s why he could do so well under hard circumstances. He knew what was important and what was unimportant, and he did not waste his time.” From the start, Maezumi-sensei gave this unusual student unusual responsibilities, and for fifteen months, beginning in September 1969, when Maezumi accompanied Yasutani back to Japan, Glassman was in charge at ZCLA.

In 1970, when Bernie Glassman received a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from UCLA, he was already employed as an aeronautical engineer and administrator for McDonnell-Douglas. He was also a fervent practitioner of Zen. In the year of his doctorate, he shaved his head and was ordained by Maezumi as a Zen monk or priest—neither term is accurate—in the tokudo, or “home-leaving,” ceremony, which almost persuaded his wife Helen to pack up their two infant children and leave home. Meanwhile he was contributing his salary to the new Zen Community of Los Angeles, which otherwise depended for support on the savings earned in a poor neighborhood by the gardening efforts of his new friend and teacher.

In December 1970, Maezumi completed his studies with Yasutani and received his Dharma seal. Yasutani-roshi never returned to the United States; he died in March, 1973, just prior to a planned journey to the United States for his ninetieth birthday. His friend Soen, concluding a long poem of commemoration, said:

Eighty-nine years, just-as-it-is!
How can I express, right now,
The grave importance of this very thing?

In May 1970, Maezumi’s Rinzai teacher, Osaka Koryu-roshi, asked if he might come to America to complete Maezumi’s koan training and give sesshin in Los Angeles. “Because I was at the Zen Center all the time,” Tetsugen says, “I got to know both Yasutani-roshi and Koryu-roshi very well. Maezumi was close to finishing his own koan study and I had decided to put off my own, so that I could begin properly with my own teacher when he came back from Japan. But Koryu’s first teisho at that May sesshin was so powerful that I changed my mind. I went to work again on the koan Mu as soon as I sat down in the zendo that first day. I really got into it, and by the second day, both Koryu and Maezumi knew that, essentially, I was already there. I wasn’t asking any questions, I was just totally immersed. By the third evening, I had passed through it, but Koryu wanted something more from me, wanted me to go deeper, and when I went to dokusan on the fourth morning, I must have been right at the edge of something very powerful. I was still concentrating when I returned to the zendo, and right away I entered a different space, really beautiful, exquisite, very deep.

“All of a sudden, Maezumi-sensei shook me out of that space by really blasting me with MU! He had seen me come out of dokusan, and he knew that I was right on the point of explosion. So after I sat down, he stood right behind me, I don’t know how long he stood there, but when he saw that I was really settled in, he yelled MU! very loud, right there in the zendo! It broke the logjam; the world just fell apart! So Maezumi took me immediately to the dokusan room and Koryu-roshi confirmed the passing of Mu-ji, and Koryu and I spent about half an hour just hugging and crying—I was overwhelmed. At the next meal—I was head server—tears were pouring down my face as I served Koryu-roshi, and afterwards, when I went out of the zendo—well, there was a tree there, and looking at the tree, I didn’t feel I was the tree, it went deeper than that. I felt the wind on me, I felt the birds on me, all separation was completely gone.”

Relating this experience, Tetsugen looked slightly uncomfortable, and a bit awed, as if speaking of someone else. His kensho had been a classic one, not only because it came from a classic koan but because it occurred in the middle of sesshin, with two or three days left in which to deepen his insight. Koryu-roshi would later refer to it as one of the most powerful enlightenment experiences he ever witnessed.

“Maezumi-roshi had passed through Mu-ji in his first kensho, after three years of study with Koryu-roshi in Tokyo. He had his second major opening about a year later, while studying at Soji-ji, in Yokohama. I followed a very similar pattern. After that first kensho, I still had doubts about certain things, in particular reincarnation. When I asked Maezumi about it, he would not comment on my questions: he told me to reread the letters on the subject in The Three Pillars of Zen, then work on the question myself. And one day I was reading one of these letters in a car going to work—I was in a car pool, and my office was about an hour from the Zen Center—and a powerful opening occurred right in the car, much more powerful than the first. One phrase triggered it, and all my questions were resolved. I couldn’t stop laughing or crying, both at once, and the people in the car were very upset and concerned, they didn’t have any idea what was happening, and I kept telling them there was nothing to worry about!” Tetsugen laughed. “Luckily I was an executive and had my own office, but I just couldn’t stop laughing and crying, and finally I had to go home.

“That opening brought with it a tremendous feeling about the suffering in the world; it was a much more compassionate opening than the first. I saw the importance of spreading the Dharma, the necessity to develop a Dharma training in America that would help many people. Until then, I had believed in strong zazen, in ‘forcing’ people, using the kyosaku. That method encourages kensho, but the effects are not so deep and lasting, and anyway, it doesn’t work for everybody. I wanted to work with greater numbers because I saw the ‘crying out’ of all of us, even those who do not feel they are crying out. And that second opening had nothing to do with the zendo atmosphere, or working on a koan. The major opening can occur anywhere, we never know when it’s going to happen.”

In the early days of American Zen practice, much was made of kensho. Yasutani, for example, would announce who had had an “opening” at the end of each sesshin. Maezumi does not do this, and neither did Tetsugen when he began to teach. “Personally, I don’t stress openings, or talk about them, because I don’t want people to get caught up in that. Yet I think kensho is essential—it has to happen. And so long as the practice is constant and steady, so long as the student continues to practice without being intent on achieving some ‘special’ state, something that he or she has heard about, it will. When that idea of gain falls away, people open up. That’s why a teacher is so important—to keep the student from getting caught up in some incomplete idea of what it’s all about, and forcing his zazen in that direction.”

While in Japan, Maezumi had also resumed koan study with Koryu-roshi, who gave him Dharma transmission in 1972. “Like Yasutani, Koryu gave him inka right after he finished koan study, which is very unusual,” Tetsugen says. “For example, Harada-roshi waited three years before giving inka to Yasutani, who was already fifty-eight. Until 1972, Koryu had never given inka to anybody. In December of that year, he finally gave it to five people, all of whom except Maezumi had finished koan study at least five years earlier. Anyway, the speed with which Maezumi finished Koryu-roshi’s koan system was amazing. He started all over again from the beginning, and there are about four hundred koans, and he did the whole thing in three years, even though Koryu was only in the United States for three months each year! Before Koryu and Yasutani, his teacher had been his father. In a very unusual accomplishment, he received Dharma transmission from all three.”

In 1973, after Maezumi was formally approved by his own teachers as a roshi, Tetsugen was installed as his first shuso, or head monk, and three years later, with ZCLA well founded, Tetsugen left the aerospace industry for good. That summer he participated in the great opening sesshin at Dai Bosatsu, where our journeys crossed for the first time.

In early autumn of 1977, returning to ZCLA for a second sesshin, I applied for ordination as a monk. The impulse was vague (and no doubt tainted by spiritual ambition), but I had an idea that shaving my head would renew my practice. Maezumi-roshi, nodding politely, making his soft murmuring sounds, remained studiously noncommittal. Meanwhile, I continued intense study of the Sound of One Hand, not only with Maezumi but with Tetsugen-sensei, who had recently received shiho, or Dharma transmission, becoming the first Dharma successor in Maezumi-roshi’s apostolic line.8 I passed thirteen of the fourteen checkpoints but on the last, instead of a vital expression of the inexpressible, I could only come up with a weak intellectual “answer,” which was refused.

Roshi wished to give me the Dharma name Mukaku, which he said should accompany the name given me by Soen-roshi: Mukaku Isshin. This Mu is not the Mu of the koan Mu: it signifies “dream” in the sense of the illusory nature of the relative world, of everyday existence. Kaku is the awakening from that dream through realization. The final written and spoken word of Soen-roshi’s teacher, Yamamoto Gempo-roshi, was “dream,” Maezumi says. He presents me with his calligraphy of “Dream-awakening,” saying that Soen-roshi would approve this name.

At the end of sesshin, Tetsugen and I went over to Roshi’s house, where we celebrated with a good deal of sake. At one point Roshi, wonderfully drunk, put his arm around me with a beatific smile. “Mu-kaku! Do you see how greedy you are?” Disconcerted (since I know that I am greedy), I asked if he meant that I was pushing too hard in my practice, and he laughed, saying, “No, not hard enough!” Not understanding, I was bothered. Later, Tetsugen assured me it was simply a teaching, intended to “push all my buttons,” keep me off balance and alert. Roshi gave me a great hug when he said goodbye.

I had not made my peace with leaving Eido-roshi, and in September 1978 I telephoned Dai Bosatsu and was admitted for October sesshin. Arriving, I was sad to find how very few of the old faces were left, but Maurine F., accompanying me on a walk to Ho Ko’s grave, reported that Eido-roshi had recently said, “It is wonderful that some of you can lead strict moral lives. But for others, including me, this is very difficult.” Everyone interpreted these remarks as a strong sign that he was confronting his frailties at last. By this time, in apparent rejection of Soen-roshi, he had announced a formal separation of Dai Bosatsu from its parent monastery in Japan.

I found myself very glad to see him. I had missed him, and after three years, my righteous indignation had burned away. Having weathered his crisis, Eido-shi seemed very well, and his teisho were as lively as before. The new monastery, now completely furnished, still struck me as rather opulent, but otherwise the Dai Bosatsu atmosphere was exhilarating. Strong sesshin atmosphere was quickly induced by the strict, precise gongs, clappers, bells, the quiet click of the jihatsu bowls at table, the incense smell and smell of new tatamis, the fierce cleanliness, bare humble feet, dark mountain silence, which I remembered so well from other days.

In teisho, Eido-roshi recited a poem by Soen:

I went to the mountain seeking enlightenment
There was no enlightenment on the mountainside.
In desolation
I cried out and there came an echo.
I shouted again.
The echo came again.

“What more Mu could we ask for than that echo?” Eido-shi demanded.

Late in sesshin, after six long days of pain, hurling myself to no avail against iron cliffs, I began to wonder why I had come, why I persisted year after year in this frustrating practice. A spider hanging from the zendo ceiling, spinning its Mu out of its belly, was my echo. I gave up struggling and settled calmly into moment-by-moment quiet Mu-spinning, breath after breath. Soon I was light and taut, at one with my pain in the same way that I was one with breathing, incense, far crows, and the autumn wind. Caw, caw was not different from Peter, Peter. Small silver breaths, farther and farther apart, scoured the last tatters of thought and emotion from the inside of my skull, now a silent bell. And very suddenly, on an inhaled breath, this earthbound body-mind, in a great hush, began to swell and fragment and dissolve in light, expanding outward into a fresh universe in the very process of creation.

At the bell ending the period, I fell back into my body. Yet those clear moments had been an experience that everything-was-right-here-now, contained in “me.” I mourned that bell that had come so swiftly, and tried to cheer myself during kinhin—“Who, me?” I murmured, right out loud, and began to laugh. The laughter quickly turned to weeping, and with the tears came a spontaneous rush of love for friends, family, and children, for all the beings striving in this room, for every one and every thing, without distinction. This feeling was followed instantly by a rush of doubt—had I really perceived something? All this damned soggy weeping—had my mind gone soft? Was I still too greedy for attainment?

At dokusan, describing what had happened, I burst into tears twice, as Eido-roshi beamed. As I did my bows, he struck me six times with the keisaku: “Very good! Good! Very good!”

On my evening walk I visited Ho Ko’s rock, and in her absence related to the rock just what had happened. “Out of my mind,” so to speak, I laughed and spoke aloud, as if the entire universe had come to attention. For want of any better plan, I burst out with a yell of joy, and yelled again, delighted by such freedom from my self.

And again the doubt came sweeping back. Perhaps I wanted such experiences too badly, perhaps I was exaggerating everything. I was filled with gratitude, and also I felt frustrated, aborted. Seven years had passed since that first opening of November 1971, which I now dismissed as premature and shallow, and this one, valid or otherwise, had scarcely started before being cut off by that bell, which—had it come even a few minutes later—might have rung those cliffs of iron down around my head.

I expressed my doubts and bitterness to Eido-shi, who made light of both, assuring me that more complete kensho experiences were still to come. By next morning I had mainly recovered, sitting calmly and strongly most of the day. In the evening, however, “forcing” again, sitting through kinhin with worn-out legs, I brought down on myself excruciating pain, and went reeling to bed with my teeth chattering, none the wiser for my joy, doubts, and ambitions. And it was now that I resolved, once and for all, to drop the practice of these sesshin notes, with their hoarding of miraculous states and “spiritual attainments,” with their contaminating clinging, their insidious fortification of the ego. I never kept a journal of sesshin again.

When I left next morning directly after breakfast, Maurine in her black cape stood smiling by the road. She has moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is president and teacher of the Cambridge Buddhist Association, and I have scarcely seen her since the weekend sesshin, just before Deborah’s death, when she came to see Ho Ko at the hospital. Yet in some way we know each other, we shall always be close. In parting, she said, “I love you,” with complete simplicity.

At the bridge, in rain, I stopped to peer into the black stream, thick as mercury with its tumbling yellow leaves. Here Beecher Lake began its long journey to rejoin the sea. I walked up to the boulder in the field to bid Ho Ko goodbye; I gathered tart apples from the ancient orchard by the gate. Then I drove to New England on a wild wet windy day, pursuing a wild wet windy sun that later opened out and softened a golden autumn afternoon. At his school, I had a good visit with Alex, his boy’s head so small in football shoulder pads too big for him, and later a warm evening with friends in northwestern Connecticut, with much wine and laughter and good conversation.

That evening I could not sit still. Leaving the dinner table rudely, I rushed out after supper, in a blue-black night with a wild moon spinning through the clouds. A little drunk, not knowing what was up, I strode down winding country roads by the light of the moon on the white birches, embracing the compliant trees, pressing my face to soft, thigh-smooth trunks, whispering and laughing with the silent company gathering around me, and otherwise playing the cosmic fool. Then I walked back to that white New England house, at peace, tears of happiness cool on my face in the black autumn wind down out of Canada. The feeling of being “blown out,” clear, would stay with me for another fortnight.

The following month, at sesshin in Los Angeles, I described my Dai Bosatsu sesshin to Maezumi-roshi. In regard to my aborted experience, he observed that it was not dai kensho, that is, great or “true” kensho, which wipes away the last traces of doubt. Later he said, “I did not say this was not kensho. You glimpsed the ox, but you did not see what color it was, whether male or female, fat or thin, poor or healthy. Work very hard on your koan, and then you will see the ox up close.”9

In koan study, I pass through the last checkpoint of One Hand, but Roshi, keeping me off balance, returns me to a previous point, although I protest that my presentation of it had been accepted the year before. I present it a different way and am refused. “What is the true state of one hand? In other words, what is the true state of your self? That will be good for you to work on until we meet again.”

 

All-inclusive study is just single-minded sitting, dropping off body and mind. At the moment of going there, you go there; at the moment of coming here, you come here. There is no gap. Just in this way, the entire body studies all-inclusively the great road’s entire body. . . . Gourd studies gourd all-inclusively. In this way a blade of grass is realized.

Pilgrimage
—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER TEN

THE previous year, Maezumi-roshi had asked me to help Tetsugen-sensei establish a Zen community somewhere in the New York region. In June of 1979, Tetsugen held a sesshin at the Catholic retreat house in Litchfield, Connecticut, that I knew so well from Rinzai sesshins of other years.

Tetsugen-sensei calls his teisho “Dharma talks,” partly in deference to American Zen and partly because teisho are traditionally reserved for roshis. (In Japan, roshi signifies an elderly abbot of a training center, and is never used for a Zen master less than a half century old, but in America, where not a few “roshis” have never completed formal study nor received an authentic Dharma transmission in a recognized lineage, the term is used a lot more freely, often at the insistence of the students, for whom nothing less than a roshi will suffice.) Tetsugen speaks as easily as other people yawn, and his talks are a strong combination of beginners’ instruction and preliminary inspection of such classic koans as Joshu’s Mu (“Joshu’s way of expressing Buddha-nature, our true nature, the Absolute”) and “Where do you go from the top of a hundred-foot pole?” (“This is my favorite koan: Zen as a never-ending practice, Zen as our life”). He urges us to let go of all prior zazen experiences and expectations, including kenshos—they are just “stinks” to be aired out, since they taint the freshness of this present moment. At dokusan, he refuses my presentation of the last checkpoint of One Hand, even though Maezumi-roshi had accepted it. You understand more now, said he, and last year’s answer is no longer good enough.

In Rinzai study, in which one strives to present the “spirit” of the koan, there were many koans I had “passed” rather than passed through, as Soto teachers say, that is, thoroughly experienced and made a part of me. Knowing that my grasp was weak, I was almost as pleased as I was annoyed by Tetsugen’s rejection. Until now I had wondered how we would fare in a teacher–student relationship, since in Los Angeles this amiable fellow had mainly been my friend and fellow student. His rejection was appropriate, clearing the way for his own standards for koan study, and I admired that. To encourage me, he says that Harada-roshi, Yasutani’s teacher, had given seventy answers to this checkpoint before one was accepted, and that he, Tetsugen, had also been passed and then rejected on the same point. “Go deeper,” he said. “Come to dokusan as often as possible.”

I saw at once how much this man could teach me, and how exciting it would be to study with him in a formal, yet freewheeling way, unhampered by subtle language barriers and the strict and brittle protocol of Japanese Zen. Without effort we maintain an easy balance between friendship and strict deference, which I gladly award him on ceremonial occasions and in dokusan.

The insects are helping me again, a small white moth and also a wandering caterpillar on the carpet, lifting its weird head to inspect my presence: Who are you? A fly draws me taut with a buzz-z of warning, and I stop a mosquito with accumulated Mu power, closing my skin; off it goes with a loud whine of frustration. A bumblebee met with out of doors set me an example of precision, tending more than one blossom each second from flowers lilting in the wind.

My sitting is steady, uneventful. In six days of sesshin, I fail to pass through that final checkpoint, yet I am content. I’ve dropped some aggressiveness and haste, I am more patient, and content to do my best. Driving Sensei to his sister’s house on Long Island, I speak again about becoming a monk as soon as Roshi thinks me qualified. “Roshi just wants to be sure that you are serious. You’re qualified right now,” Tetsugen says.

I like and respect this round-eyed man of round-shouldered and compact construction whose easy smile and unlined forehead are held in balance by the intelligence that shines from beneath his fierce black brows. Like most American students, I have been attracted to the flavor of Asian Zen, so removed in its enigmatic self-containment from the wasteful sprawl of Western life, but I adjust more quickly than I had expected to the idea of a non-Japanese Zen teacher—Bernie Roshi! How different this man is, in style, manner, and appearance, from a quixotic “classical” Zen master such as Soen, a samurai-style master such as Eido, an elegant, autocratic scholar such as Maezumi, and no doubt other teachers from the East whom I do not know.

Those Asian teachers are here now, they have been here since the beginning, and in their teachings they will always be here; once American Zen is under way, it might be said, they will have truly arrived. But looked at from the relative point of view, no more will come; that first great wave of Japanese masters in America is also the last. Therefore it is crucial to develop our own teachers with training and standards at least as exacting as those of the best teachers in Japan.

Tetsugen-sensei is the first American Zen master to complete koan study as well as priestly training. He has been recognized as a Dharma-holder in formal ceremonies at the great Soto temples of Eihei-ji and Soji-ji in Japan. More important still, he is truly enlightened, having experienced two classical dai kensho. Despite his youthfulness—he was born in 1939—he is already a major influence on the future course of American Zen. He is also very ordinary, in the best Zen sense, without idiosyncratic airs or quirks that draw attention to him. He is—and also he is not—plain Bernie Glassman, with a passion for pizza, innovative ideas, and mechanical gadgetry of all descriptions.

In 1980, in Riverdale-on-Hudson, Tetsugen founded the Zen Community of New York. He also officiated at my marriage in Sagaponack to Maria Eckhart. The following year, in a tokudo or “home-leaving” ceremony conducted by Maezumi-roshi, my head was shaved and I was ordained a Zen monk. (To Maria’s alarm, Maezumi stated that tokudo was a more important ceremony than marriage.) Maezumi gave me a new Dharma name, Muryo,1 and also his splendid calligraphy of Master Hyakujo’s “Sitting Alone on Daiyu Mountain.”2 The ceremony was attended by a few friends and by my older children, Luke and Sara, and also by old associates from my Rinzai days, two of whom, Lou Nordstrom and Lillian Friedman, had already joined ZCNY and would later receive tokudo from Tetsugen-sensei. Sheila offered this poem by the eleventh-century poet Narihara:

I have always known that at last I would take this road
But yesterday I did not know
It would be today.

Tetsugen’s formal installation as abbot of ZCNY’s Zen temple, Zenshin-ji, had now been scheduled for June 1982. In the fall he would preside over his first three-month ango, or training period, to be led by his first shuso, or head monk. This training period would complete his studies as a Zen priest, after which his certification in this Soto lineage as a roshi or Zen master would become a formality.

Before his abbot installation, Tetsugen wished to make a pilgrimage to Japan in order to pay formal respects to those teachers, alive and dead, who are associated with his lineage and with his training. Since I am to be his first head monk, I shall travel with him as his jisha, or attendant. “After being shuso, you are a senior monk,” he says, “and your training enters a new phase. Your knowledge and understanding should be developing into prajna wisdom. Without prajna, you don’t realty know what you are talking about.” Tetsugen feels that, in America, there are too many self-described “Zen teachers” who really don’t know what they are talking about, and it is very plain that they embarrass him.

“After I became Roshi’s first shuso,” he says, “I considered myself very lucky to go with him to Japan, but I think it is better that you go beforehand, since being shuso will mean much more to you that way.” We would go to the historic Buddhist cities of Kamakura, Nara, and Kyoto; we would visit Maezumi’s last living teacher, Osaka Koryu-roshi, who had been one of Tetsugen’s teachers, too; and whether or not he chose to see us, we would pay our respects to Nakagawa Soen-roshi at the “Dragon-Swamp Temple,” under Mount Fuji.

The underlying purpose of our journey to Japan was a pilgrimage to those ancient places associated with Dogen Zenji, the thirteenth-century Soto Zen master who has emerged in recent years as one of the most exciting minds in the history of thought.

“One thing that first attracted me to Zen,” Tetsugen says, “was an essay by Dogen called ‘Being-Time,’ translated by Yasutani-roshi. I was studying quantum mechanics in those days, and it read like a twentieth-century treatise on relativity, on the interpenetration of space and time.”

The traces of the ebb and flow of time are so evident that we do not doubt them; yet, though we do not doubt them, we ought not to conclude that we understand them. . . . Man disposes himself and construes this disposition as the world. You must recognize that every thing, every being in this entire world is time. . . . One has to accept that in this world there are millions of objects and that each one is, respectively, the entire world—this is where the study of Buddhism commences. . . .

At one time I waded through the river and at one time crossed the mountain. You may think that that mountain and that river are things of the past, that I have left them behind. . . . However, the truth has another side. When I climbed the mountain and crossed the river, I was time. Time must needs be with me. I have always been; time cannot leave me. . . .

Because you imagine that time only passes, you do not learn the truth of being-time. In a word, every being in the entire world is a separate time in one continuum. And since being is time, I am my being-time. Time has the quality of passing, so to speak, from today to tomorrow, from today to yesterday, from yesterday to today, from today to today, from tomorrow to tomorrow.3

This passage is from Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), an extraordinary work of metaphysical exploration that few of Dogen’s contemporaries in the early Zen priesthood of Japan would have been able to appreciate even if they had had access to a copy. Within a century of Dogen’s death in 1253, Shobogenzo became an unread temple relic, and not until recent decades has it been perceived as a unique and shining vision that far transcends its original purpose as a synthesis of thirteenth-century Buddhist thought. Yet Dogen continues to receive more praise than real appraisal, and he remains all but unknown in the West, not because his language is opaque—it is brilliant, lucid, and poetic—but because he has attempted to convey a set of concepts—not concepts or even perceptions, but intuitions, apprehensions—for which no suitable vocabulary exists. To approach his formidable masterwork is to seek an ascent to a shining peak, glimpsed here and there against the blue through the wild tumult of delusion. With each step forward, the more certain one becomes that a sure path toward the summit can be found.

Maezumi-roshi is an inspired interpreter of Dogen’s thought. In his opinion, Dogen’s writings are “among the highest achievements not only of Japanese but even of world literature. His work . . . displays true poetic mastery. . . . Viewed philosophically, it is a near-perfect expression of truth. . . . Dogen Zenji’s expression is like an inexhaustible spring which gushes out of the ground naturally and without impediment. . . .”4 Maezumi-roshi has done a superb translation of Dogen’s Genjo-Koan (Actualization of the Koan), which one Western scholar has referred to as “surely one of the most brilliant, profound, and moving documents in world religious literature.”5

“What most impresses and attracts me about Dogen,” Tetsugen says, “is his ability and willingness to articulate his understanding of the universal nature of existence. He refuses to make any distinction between the absolute and relative realities. Many teachers will say that ‘you cannot express the inexpressible,’ and they do not try. But teachers like Yasutani and Maezumi don’t agree, and I feel as they do: if you perceive deeply enough, a clear and simple way to express it can be found. Dogen tried to set down in words a very profound understanding, and I think he succeeded. His actions, his practice, and his words—he puts it all together.”

Dogen is many centuries in advance of his pre-medieval epoch, and his vibrant efforts to transcend the old limits of language, like his insistence on the identity of space and time, would not be appreciated until seven centuries later. Like all born writers, he wrote for the sheer exhilaration of the writing, in a manner unmistakably fresh and poetic, reckless and profound. Though the risks he takes make the prose difficult, one is struck at once by an intense love of language, a mastery of paradox and repetition, meticulous nuance and startling image, swept along by a strong lyric sensibility in a mighty effort to express the inexpressible, the universal or absolute, that is manifest in the simplest objects and events of everyday life.

When we view the four directions from a boat on the ocean
where no land is in sight, it looks circular and nothing else.
However, this ocean is neither round nor square,
and its qualities are infinite in variety. It is like a palace;
it is like a jewel. . . .
When a fish swims in the ocean, there is no limit to the water,
no matter how far it swims.
When a bird flies in the sky, there is no limit to the air,
no matter how far it flies.
However, no fish or bird has ever left its element
since the beginning. . . .6

 

You should entreat trees and rocks to preach the Dharma, and you should ask rice fields and gardens for the truth. Ask pillars for the Dharma and learn from hedges and walls. Long ago the great god Indra honored a wild fox as his own master and sought the Dharma from him, calling him “Great Bodhisattva.”

Bowing, Prostrating the Marrow
—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE ancient town of Kamakura on the Pacific sea coast of Japan is celebrated for its huge bronze Buddha, which rises forty-one feet from the gardens of Kotoku-in Temple against a background of steep, forested hills and island sky. According to a postcard sold on these flowered premises, this primordial “Buddha of Boundless Light,” was cast in A.D. 1252 “at the request of Miss Idano-no-Tsubone and Priest Joko.” The hall which enclosed it was borne away by a tidal wave of 1495—and doubtless the dust of Miss Idano danced in the great dun flood—but the Daibutsu or Great Buddha sat unperturbed, turning green in long, calm centuries in the open weather. On this April Sunday, in cherry-blossom festival, the travel-mad Japanese have hurried in orderly thousands to the town, and flocks of pretty schoolchildren in navy-blue uniforms and bright yellow caps dart and flutter through the gardens. Cheeping, they peer around the door in the Buddha’s platform, and an emanation of sweet voices pours from the vast emptiness within.

On wayside shrines, stone Jizo Bodhisattvas, protectors of wayfarers and children, are decked out in red caps and smocks and honored by tossed blossoms. Bright fresh flowers, fruit, and flags bring the avenues to life, and even the Pacific fish in the open markets—mackerel, silver mullet, sole, squid, salmon, red-fish, and bonita—are starry-eyed and sparkling if not entirely cheerful in appearance. Pink-white paper lanterns in the pink-white-blossomed trees sway in the breeze, and altars of gold are carried on stout poles by teams of youths in archaic dress who shout and jump as they lurch their burden up the street, for today there is a celebration at Hachiman-gu, the huge shrine of the old Shinto god of war on the north side of the city. From the sidewalks the celebrants are cheered by young friends in American-style jeans and sweatshirts emblazoned with American-style legends: Fascination Ski, Shooting 4 Fomation, Apricot Sports, Rude Boys, Peppermint Gal.

At Hachiman-gu, the red-bridged canal is speckled with fallen blossoms, and flocks of white pigeons snap wings on the blue sky as they wheel over the crowds. An officiant in a high black, shiny Shinto hat strikes the big drum, the pigeons fall. Long horns resound, the red flags flutter, and a florid householder who presides over the family picnic lifts his bottle of rice wine to the big gaijin (“outsiders” or foreigners) and shouts in celebration. As in many country Japanese, his face is open and his eyes round in unfeigned innocence and acceptance of his life. Surely this ruddy and befuddled face was here at the dedication of Hachiman-gu in 1063, when the shogun Yoshiye, at the ocean gate, set free a multitude of Japanese cranes with silver and gold prayer strips attached to their legs, and lent an intoxicated shout to the wind of awe that rose at the spectacle of the great white birds, trailing the streamers down the Pacific sky.

Among Kamakura’s many temples, the most celebrated is Engaku-ji, a “mountain” or head monastery of Rinzai Zen built into the evergreens in a ravine on a high hill north of the town. “Even when he reached Kamakura and the Engaku-ji Temple, Kikuji did not know whether or not he would go to the tea ceremony”—so begins One Thousand Cranes, a novel by the 1958 Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata. The immense peaked entrance gate stands at the mouth of the ravine in a company of guardian pines and cedars, and behind this portal, tiled rooves with their dull pewter shine climb between heavy forest walls, straight to the throat of the ravine. In spring, the weather-darkened walls are half hidden in cherry blossom clouds and pale bamboo; delicate light-filled red-bronze leaves of a Japanese maple flutter and point at the might and weight of the old buildings. Here at Engaku, one moonlit night, the nun Chiyono, hauling water, attained enlightenment when her wood bucket collapsed and the water splashed onto the ground. In gratitude, she wrote a poem:

In this way and that I tried to save the old pail
Since the bamboo strip was weakening, about to break
Until at last the bottom fell out.
No more water in the pail!
No more moon in the water!1

We ascend the steep hill by leafy walks that pass beneath the bursts of sun-filled blossoms. Two monks in black work tunics, pates tight-bound in white cloths, pad past, incurious; they are hauling firewood slung from a pole. When Tetsugen, who speaks some Japanese, asks to be shown the former dwelling of Soyen Shaku, first Zen teacher in America, another monk points doubtfully at a cloistered cottage. He seems not to have heard this name before.

Bronze pigeons cross the trees where the ravine vanishes into the forest. In a pond beneath a moss-green wall, the sun glints on the raised red-and-yellow head of an old turtle on an ancient rock, drawing its slow eyelid closed as it stares and listens, winking out the world, then letting the world in slowly, slowly once again.

In June of 1973, on the way to sesshin at Ryutaku-ji, Soen-roshi’s students descended from the coast train here at Kamakura to visit Engaku-ji, the immense Daibutsu, and the house and library of D. T. Suzuki, now a museum. We also chanted and sat in zazen at the San-un zendo established here by Yasutani-roshi and administered by his disciple, Koun Yamada-roshi.2 Many years ago, at high school and at Imperial University in Tokyo, Yamada’s roommate and close friend had been Soen Nakagawa, a student of Japanese literature whose hero was the Zen hermit-poet Basho. Much influenced by Basho’s style of life, this young poet was ordained a Zen monk3 not long after his graduation in 1930. Inspired by Soen, Koun Yamada took up Zen studies under Yasutani-roshi fifteen years later, and his profound enlightenment experience in 1953, following a stay at Ryutaku-ji, is described in a wonderful letter to his old friend (addressed here formally as “Nakagawa-roshi”):

The day after I called on you . . . riding home on the train with my wife . . . I ran across this line: “I came to realize clearly that Mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars.” I had read this before, but this time it impressed itself upon me so vividly that I was startled. I said to myself, “After seven or eight years of zazen I have finally perceived the essence of this statement,” and couldn’t suppress the tears that began to well up. . . .

Meanwhile the train had arrived at Kamakura station and my wife and I got off. On the way home I said to her, “In my present exhilarated state of mind I could rise to the greatest heights.” Laughingly she replied, “Then where would I be?” All the while I kept repeating the quotation to myself. . . .

At midnight I abruptly awakened. At first my mind was foggy, then suddenly that quotation flashed into my consciousness, and I repeated it. Then all at once I was struck as though by lightning, and the next instant heaven and earth crumbled and disappeared. Instantaneously, like surging waves, a tremendous delight welled up in me, a veritable hurricane of delight, as I laughed loudly and wildly, “There’s no reasoning here, no reasoning at all! Ha! Ha! Ha!” The empty sky split in two, then opened its enormous mouth and began to laugh uproariously: “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

I was now lying on my back. Suddenly I sat up and . . . beat the floor with my feet, as if trying to smash it, all the while laughing riotously. My wife and youngest son, sleeping near me, were now awake and frightened. Covering my mouth with her hand, my wife exclaimed, “What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with you?” But I wasn’t aware of this until told about it afterwards. My son told me later he thought I had gone mad. “I’ve come to enlightenment! Shakyamuni and the Patriarchs haven’t deceived me! They haven’t deceived me!” I remember crying out. When I calmed down I apologized to the rest of the family. . . .

That morning I went to see Yasutani-roshi and tried to describe to him my experience of the sudden disintegration of heaven and earth. “I am overjoyed, I am overjoyed!” I kept repeating. . . . Tears came which I couldn’t stop. I tried to relate to him the experience of that night, but my mouth trembled and words wouln’t form themselves. In the end I just put my face in his lap. Patting me on the back, he said, “Well, well, it is rare indeed to experience to such a wonderful degree. It is termed ‘Attainment of the emptiness of Mind.’ You are to be congratulated!” . . .

Although twenty-four hours have elapsed, I still feel the aftermath of that earthquake. My entire body is still shaking. I spent all of today laughing and weeping by myself. I am writing to report my experience in the hope that it will be of value to your monks and because Yasutani-roshi urged me to. . . . That American [Philip Kapleau] was asking us whether it is possible for him to attain enlightenment in one week of sesshin. Tell him this for me: don’t say days, weeks, years, or even lifetimes. Tell him to vow to attain enlightenment though it take the infinite, the boundless, the incalculable future.4

Yamada-roshi had been absent on the day of our visit in 1973 (he administers a small Tokyo hospital where his wife is head surgeon), but on this April Sunday, nine years later, a zazen kai—a day of sitting meditation—was just coming to an end when Tetsugen and I arrived in the late afternoon.

Although Yamada was ordained a monk and became Yasutani’s first Dharma successor, he had no training as a priest and no longer shaves his head. At seventy-five, he is a big man of strong presence, with silvering dark hair, dark pouches like shadows beneath watchful eyes, and an expression of wry humor tinged with regret. In the past century (as Soyen Shaku had anticipated), a number of Zen monasteries had closed down or sold off their lands for lack of interest among modern Japanese. “It is no exaggeration to say that Zen is on the verge of completely dying out here in Japan,” Yamada has written. “Some people may think I am stretching the point, but sad to say, this is the actual state of affairs.”5 Yasutani had also been of this opinion, and both teachers blamed it on the decline of zazen practice and of hard training directed toward “Attainment of the Emptiness of Mind.”

At tea in his house after the zazen kai, Yamada-roshi was joined by three old friends6 who had also received Dharma transmission from Yasutani. A little earlier, introducing the American visitors to Yamada’s students, one of these teachers had mentioned that Tetsugen-sensei had attained “a complete enlightenment,” and Yamada had nodded in confirmation, saying, “I have met him in dokusan and it is so.”

Tetsugen had been bothered by that word “complete.” “I don’t think it is ever complete,” he told me later. “That’s why my favorite koan is, ‘Where do you step from the top of a hundred-foot pole?’ Zen is your life—it is life itself!—and you must always go further and deeper.”

Since returning from America in 1975, Soen-roshi had become a hermit, Yamada told us; these days he saw nobody at all. Learning that I had once been Soen’s student, he fetched a published volume of his old friend’s haiku. “There is also a much fatter one,” he said. Of Soen Nakagawa the American poet Gary Snyder has remarked that “In Japan he had a tremendous stature as a haiku poet; he is considered the Basho of the Twentieth Century.”7 Yamada-roshi confirms this opinion. “Soen-roshi is one of the great haiku poets, one of the very best in Japan. But he does not write haiku anymore. He is in pain from an old head injury, and from other reasons”—here he paused and cocked his head, peering out from beneath dark, heavy lids. He wished to see if I was aware of Soen’s rupture with Eido-roshi, and perceiving that I was, said, “A great tragedy. Also, he is suspicious of Western medicines, so he deals with the pain by taking too much sake.” Yamada-roshi shrugged. We could visit Ryutaku-ji if we liked, but there was no hope that Soen-roshi would see us.

In June 1973, Soen-roshi’s students had traveled from Kamakura to Mishima, under Mount Fuji, arriving at Ryutaku temple, in the foothills, in time for a late supper with our teacher. Next day, the roshi awoke us at 3:30 A.M. for morning service, after which we visited the graves of Hakuin Zenji, founder of this temple, and Torei Zenji, who had seen to its construction. On the moss-covered hillsides we paused to admire bright green frogs and huge multicolored carp in the temple’s goldfish pond, and the rice paddies and pines on the slopes below. Pointing at swallows, the roshi instructed us on tatha, or “suchness,” the awareness of everything just as it is: “The swallows come back to Ryutaku by just-coming, no thought of migration, navigation—they are just-coming!”

Ryutaku’s new abbot, Sochu-roshi (who would attend the opening of Dai Bosatsu three years later), had made us welcome in a greeting ceremony, after which a ceremony was held for the opening of “International Ryutaku Zendo.” With these priestly formalities at an end, Soen-roshi had immediately brightened, whisking up thick green koicha tea, then serving sake and lemon wine in his snug quarters at the top of the long stair up the steep hillside. Uproarious, we blew bamboo whistles and triton horns. Then a red demon mask appeard from behind a sliding screen; the mask looked us over one by one, and the laughter died. When Soen dropped the mask, his face was serious. “I have taken off my mask,” he said. “Now take off yours.”

Soen-roshi led us down the stairwell to the entrance, where he sent us off with his kind monk Ho-san to Nara and Kyoto; we were to return here for sesshin the following week. Standing beneath a tattered old umbrella, in spring rain, he spoke of the great “weightless Buddha” at Nara. “See everything with hara,” he said, slapping his stomach two inches below the navel, “not just with eyes.”

 

When we look at human life, we see that often the compassionate person suffers and dies, while the wicked person who gets along in the world by means of violence is happy and lives a long life. Also, the decent person is unhappy and wretched, while the wicked person who commits offenses without ever thinking twice about it is happy. This is the way it seems, and we may wonder why it is this way. When we study the situation, we see that the person who trains in a superficial way thinks that cause and effect have nothing to do with this life and that misery and unhappiness have nothing to do with cause and effect. This person does not understand that the law of cause and effect never deviates, any more than a shadow or echo deviates from its source.

Deep Faith in Cause and Effect
—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

NOW a decade has passed, and once again I travel southeast toward Nara and Kyoto. Today I am a Soto monk, not yet white-haired nor sparse of tooth but older and more scarred than my fresh-faced teacher. Isshin-Mugaku-Muryo stares out the window. I have never cared much for Dharma names, which strike me as “extra” in the context of American Zen, and which reproach me for my stubborn flaws of character. Yet they serve as a reminder (I suppose) not to cling to the badge of identity in my given name—the illusion of separation, which is ego—but to aspire as best I can to One Mind, Dream Awakening, Without Boundaries. Sometimes in zazen on my black cushion I approach these states, but in the much more difficult zazen of daily life, there remains a dismaying separation between what I know and what I am.

Near Ise, the train turns inland toward Mount Yoshino, a shrine of poets for more than a thousand years. (“I could no longer suppress the desire to leave for Yoshino,” wrote Basho, “for in my mind the cherry blossoms were already in full bloom.”)1 The mountains rise under the sun to westward. The iron track threads dark, steep valleys gouged by swift gray torrents; bursts of lavender azalea blossoms near the higher forest of tall pines are the only light. Some of the perched villages are modern, flat, of raw chemical colors, while others are somber assemblies of high-peaked old dwellings with pale shoji windows and pewter-colored rooves, the tiles long weathered to dark mountain hues.

Emerging onto a broad valley floor, the train approaches the ancient capital at Nara from the south and east. I point out to Tetsugen-sensei a wild duck, setting its wings in swift descent through the spring twilight toward the cold gleam of a sedentary river. Wild things are sparse on this central island of Japan, and the duck stirs me.

Tetsugen is less interested in wild ducks and ancient landscapes than amused by my reactions to them. Art and literature (and landscape) don’t attract him much, though he delights in opera. His leanings toward engineering and mathematics are still strong, he loves computers, and anyway he is an unabashed fanatic who thinks mostly about how best to transmit the Buddha Dharma to American students, a task for which he is admirably suited even in appearance. With his big head, round-shouldered slouch, and prominent, piercing eyes, Tetsugen reminds Japanese teachers of Zen’s first great spiritual messenger, Bodhidharma, who carried the Dharma from India to China.

In the distance, as Nara draws near, rise the jutting roofs of the great outlying temples that came into existence thirteen centuries ago, with the arrival of the Mahayana teachings in the backward islands known to the Chinese as “the Land of Wa.” Half hidden in an isolated grove west of the city stands a huge compound of white-walled dark brown wooden buildings with high gray-tiled rooves. Horyu-ji is the first seat of Japanese Buddhism, established in 607 as a seminary or “learning temple” of the Hossu sect. Farther east, at Yakushi-ji (where we spent the night in 1973), in a wonderful airy open court of golden and red buildings, stands the famous East Pagoda, last surviving example of the mighty architecture of this period.2 This early Buddhism in Japan was not yet “Zen,” although Zen traces may have been apparent: Japanese visitors to China, staying close to the cities and old monastic centers, had little exposure to the new “Zen” school which was developing in China’s southern mountains.

By the middle of the sixth century, the first sutra books and Buddhist relics had turned up in Japan. Unlike India, where the teachings of Shakyamuni had to compete with Hinduism and Vedanta—and unlike China with its Taoism and Confucian law—Japan had no philosophical religion or literate priesthood, no body of teachings, nor a written language. The early peoples who had arrived over long ages from the mainland coasts lived in shifting settlements along the rivers and practiced an indigenous form of sun and nature worship (later called Shinto, “the Way of the Gods”). Therefore these first holy objects, accompanied by a written language, made a great stir in the rude assemblies that history books refer to as the imperial courts, and were used to political advantage by the enterprising Soga family, which soon came to dominate the more traditional clans. In 593, Umako no Soga took the precaution of murdering the emperor to ensure the accession of a crown prince who would proclaim Buddhism as the state religion.

Despite the bloody circumstances of his ascendancy, Shotoku Taishi, the “father of Buddhism” in Japan (d. 622), was a sincere practitioner who propagated the moral and philosophical precepts of the new religion and issued a list of behavioral edicts in an effort to bring unity and harmony to his backward country. Soon there were more than forty Buddhist temples in this region, complete with relics, priestly vestments, and colorful ceremonies to attract the people. Most of these ceremonies, as in Shinto, were devoted to curing, summoning rain for crops, and other practical considerations.3

Enthusiasm in imperial court circles for the new culture from “the Land of T’ang” was evident in the foolhardy adoption of the complicated Chinese ideographs for the relatively simple Japanese language, and a somewhat less disastrous decision to replicate a Chinese city in Japan. Until now there had been no capital town in the islands; the imperial court had moved with each new reign, not only to invite good fortune and evade epidemics but because it was easier to replace than to rebuild the frail wood buildings. With the advent of a more sophisticated culture, this makeshift situation was no longer tolerable, and in 646 a reform edict authorized the construction of a capital city on the model of the Chinese capital at Ch’ang-an. The new “Central City” of Nara, some forty miles inland from the present Osaka, was eventually laid out in A.D. 710, and remains a Buddhist shrine twelve centuries later.

In this period, the emperor Shomu, inspired by reports of an eighty-five-foot “Universal Buddha” installed by T’ang dynasty rulers at Lo-yang, proposed to erect a local version here at Nara. In traditional circles, his grandiose plan was widely denounced as a threat and insult to Shinto deities, and the Buddhists perceived that the Way of the Gods, still strong in the outlying districts, would have to be placated. In 742 the energetic monk Gyogi, a leader of the Hossu sect, carried a holy relic to the Sun Goddess at the great Shinto shrine at Ise, inquiring respectfully as to her views on the proposed Buddha, who was, he explained, her spiritual descendant as well as her own emissary on earth. In a loud voice, the oracle proclaimed in Chinese verse that news of this enterprise was very welcome to her. Not long thereafter, the Sun Goddess, appearing as a disc in the emperor’s dreams, revealed to him that the Sun was none other than this supreme Buddha. And since Buddhism has ever made room for the indigenous faiths it has displaced, adopting their deities as Dharma guardians and even Buddha manifestations, the Shinto war god Hachiman confided in the oracle that he wished to serve as a protector of the Dharma, and was speedily pressed into service by the Hossu sect at Yakushi-ji, where he appears in the plain garb of a Buddhist priest.4

And so the emperor commissioned the Dai Butsu or Great Buddha at Nara, which rises fifty-three feet from the bronze lotus of its throne. Though less than two-thirds the height of the Lo-yang figure and entirely innocent of artistic distinction, it was the greatest technical accomplishment ever beheld in the Land of Wa. The great hall that replaced the original Daibutsu Hall after a twelfth-century fire is 284 feet long, 166 feet wide, and 152 feet high—by far the largest wooden building in the world—and the statue itself is a conglomerate of 500 tons of copper, tin, and lead, heaped up in sections, supporting a twelve-foot head cast in a single mold—“the weightless Buddha at Nara,” Soen-roshi had called it in 1973, sending his students off to have a look at it.

Todai-ji, which grew up around the black Daibutsu, is located at the base of the eastern mountains that surround this flat, rich valley. The huge red Buddha Hall is fronted by an enclosed court perhaps one hundred yards long by one hundred wide, the whole surrounded by a deer park of old pines. More people, perhaps, than existed in all the Land of Wa when Buddhism arrived in the sixth century were visiting the Dai Butsu on the fine spring day of our own visit. However, we are the only visitors at Monk Gyogi’s small, forgotten temple5 awaiting fire and decay in a little park of flowering trees and untended graves among the hard-edged structures of the modem city. Reputedly it was inside these brown, worn, shuttered buildings that zazen was first practiced in Japan.

Kohuku-ji, a mile away across the deer park, is noted for the five-story golden pagoda paid for originally by the powerful Fujiwara clan; other eighth-century Buddhist temples were also dependent on their wealthy patrons. Awarded large tracts of tax-free land by the imperial court, and generously endowed by gifts from aspirant Buddhists, the rich monasteries became centers of learning and culture, sharing their prosperity to a certain degree through the creation of charitable institutions. But as in China, the priesthood’s dependence on aristocratic influence soon led to corruption and decline. Few of the new Buddhists understood the profound nonmaterial nature of the teaching, and no true teachers seem to have developed, even though the great classical period Ch’an Buddhism in China was well under way.

In the Nara period, Kegon (Hua Yen) Buddhism also became established in Japan, but throughout the T’ang dynasty, when Chinese Zen was at its height, Japanese Buddhism remained primitive. By 779, hordes of parasitic monks and nuns from new temples in the remote districts had gathered to the feast at Nara, where the power of the priests in court had encouraged political ambitions as well as excess and dissolution of every kind. Possibly this rampant corruption encouraged the decision, three years later, to remove the court to Nagaoka, a few miles to the northward, despite the great inconvenience and expense, but it seems more likely that the hasty departure reflected obscure maneuvers of the Fujiwara clan, in particular Tanetsugu, a favorite of the emperor Kwammu, who was allowed “to decide all matters, within and without.” In 785, Tanetsugu was assassinated by the emperor’s brother, Prince Saware, who paid for this deed with his own life, and these dark events discouraged the completion of Tanetsugu’s plans for the new capital, which was moved again in 793 to a plain perhaps twenty miles to the northeast, called Heian-kyo.

The new capital, later called Kyoto, was to become one of the largest cities in the world, with a population that may well have approached a half-million people, but as at Nara, there was little about it that could be called Japanese. Every aspect of its culture, from its architecture to its etiquette, was a pains-taking imitation of T’ang dynasty culture in China. For the next two centuries, the Heian aristocracy preoccupied itself with art and poetry in the Chinese style, infused by mujo, a rarefied, romantic sense of life’s impermanence, often symbolized in the fall of cherry blossoms in spring.6

The founding of Kyoto coincided with ominous invasions of the main island of Honshu by a wild blue-eyed people called Emishi (the “Hairy Ainu”) from the northern island of Hokkaido, who “gathered together like ants but dispersed like birds,” and in 794, the first shogun or “General for Subduing the Barbarians” was appointed. Meanwhile, the Buddhist monasteries were controlled by the imperial court and the Fujiwara clan, which endowed the tax-free lands and built the temples. After 877, when a Fujiwara was named the first minister or regent, the power of the emperor himself was usurped by this aggressive family; its daughters were married regularly to the emperors and princes, and none but Fujiwara consorts reached the throne. Lacking true teachers, the corrupt monasteries, seeking special privilege and tax-free lands, competed for the favors of the aristocracy (which held almost all the important monastery posts). At the same time, the priests resorted to occult ceremonies and tantric practices of the Shingon sect to win the interest and allegiance of a populace which understood almost nothing at all about the true nature of the Buddhist teachings.

In 788, an inspired eighteen-year-old monk named Saicho, after ordination at Todai-ji, withdrew from Nara to the high forests on Mount Hiei west of Kyoto to escape the rigid structures and corruption of the priesthood and to renew Shakyamuni’s emphasis on meditation. In 804 he spent a year in China at the monastery at Mount T’ien-tai, adding Zen precepts and esoteric teachings to the Tendai (T’ien-tai) teachings he brought back to the Land of Wa. Saicho established a twelve-year course in religious studies that would make Mount Hiei the greatest school of religion in the nation, and it was in his Tendai temple, known today as Enryaku-ji, that most of the later schools of Buddhism would have their start.

But Japanese Buddhism remained a pale, priest-ridden imitation of the Chinese schools, since the great teaching lineages that ensured the continuity of the true Dharma had not yet made their way across the China Sea. By the tenth century, in open contravention of the Buddhist precepts, Enryaku-ji (and the large Nara temples) maintained standing armies, since the strength of their temples depended, not on the power of the Buddha Dharma, but on the armed monks who battled in Kyoto’s streets with monks of other monasteries. In one such battle, early in the eleventh century, about 40,000 monks, backed by mercenaries, are thought to have taken part.

The pollution of the Buddha Dharma, already under way by the end of the Nara Period, would culminate about 1050 in what the faithful themselves called the Age of Degenerate Law, a dark epoch of epidemic, earthquake, fire, famine, banditry, and murder. The Fujiwara, to whom the imperial government had long since ceded its prestige, had been infected by their own decadence even as they attained the summit of their power. Their armed monks were now a threat to their own masters, and the soldiery of feudal lords in the outlying provinces was finally called upon to bring the anarchy under control. These lords—descendants of outcast emperors—detested the decadent despotism at Kyoto. Over the course of the next century, the Fujiwara were challenged and defeated by the strong provincial clans, notably the Taira or Heike, descendants of that Emperor Kwammu who had done so much to bring the Fujiwara into power.7 The Heike were challenged in their turn by other claimants, notably an alliance of strong clans that was grouped around the family Minamoto. In five bloody years between 1156 and 1160, when the Fujiwara were already in retreat, the Heike gained a brief ascendancy over the Minamoto and established their own emperors in court, but within a few years, they were overthrown by Yoritomo Minamoto in a series of epic battles that culminated in 1185 in the great sea coast battle at Dannoura. Within four years Yoritomo had eliminated the last resistance of the Fujiwara in the eastern provinces.

As shogun, or administrator general, Yoritomo established his own headquarters at Kamakura, three hundred miles east of Kyoto. A feeble court persisted in that city, but the Heian period was at an end. For the next seven hundred years Japan would be governed by military shoguns, mostly of Minamoto origin, who paid mere ceremonial homage to the emperors.

Toward the end of the twelfth century, on a second pilgrimage to China, a Tendai priest called Eisai received Dharma transmission in the Oryu branch of Rinzai Zen. In The Propagation of Zen for the Protection of the Country, Eisai deplored what had become of the old Buddhism on Mount Hiei. His proposed reforms won the approval of the second Minamoto shogun, who sponsored the construction of Kennin Temple, in Kyoto.

Kennin-ji deferred to the older sects by including Tendai and Shingon subtemples, but Master Eisai, nonetheless, might be called the first Zen teacher in Japan. Not until a century later would Master Daio institute the first Rinzai teaching that did not have to take the older sects into account. Daio’s “poem” “On Zen” is still recited by Rinzai students in America:

There is a reality even prior to heaven and earth;
Indeed, it has no form, much less a name;
Eyes fail to see it; it has no voice for ears to detect.
To call it Mind or Buddha violates its nature. . . .8

His successor, Daito, after living with beggars for twenty years under the bridges of Kyoto, founded the great Rinzai temple called Daitoku-ji. A celebrated poet and calligrapher, Daito was challenged by Emperor Hanazomo: “Is it not unthinkable that the Buddha Dharma should come face to face with the emperor of the state?” Master Daito retorted, “Is it not unthinkable that the emperor of the state should come face to face with the Buddha Dharma?” In fact, the two came face to face quite often, at least in the “five mountains” of Rinzai in Kyoto, which remained close to the imperial family. Like Daio before him, Daito was made a kokushi, or national teacher, by the emperor, and these two, together with Daito’s successor Kanzan Egen, developed Japanese Rinzai Zen as it is known today.

Daito emphasized that there was no real existence outside of this “moment-to-moment freshening of the mind,” and in his last exhortation to his monks, he did his best to emphasize the importance of kensho: “Some of you may preside over large and flourishing temples with Buddha-shrines and rolls of scripture gorgeously decorated with gold and silver. You may recite the sutras, practice meditation, and even lead your daily lives in strict accordance with the precepts. But if you carry on these activities without having the eye of kensho, every one of you belongs to the tribe of evil spirits. On the other hand, if you carry on your activities with the eye of kensho, though you pass your days living in a solitary hut in the wilderness, wear a tattered robe, and eat only boiled roots, you are the man who meets me face to face every day and requites my kindness.”9 A poem by Daito describes existence after the Dharma eye is opened and “eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind” have dropped away:

If your ears see and your eyes hear,
Not a doubt you’ll cherish.
How naturally the rain drips from the eaves!

In Zen tradition, there is a saying, “Only be ready, and the teacher will appear.” Apparently the Land of Wa was ready, for the first true teachers and strong teaching lineages were emerging, even as Zen in China was on the wane.

 

When you prepare food, do not see with ordinary eyes and do not think with ordinary mind. . . . Do not arouse disdainful mind when you prepare a broth of wild grasses; do not arouse joyful mind when you prepare a fine cream soup. Where there is no discrimination, how can there be distaste? Thus, do not be careless even when you work with poor materials, and sustain your effort even when you have excellent materials. Never change your attitude according to the materials; if you do, it is like varying your choice of words for different people.

Then you are not a practitioner of the Way. . . .

A refined cream soup is not necessarily better than a broth of wild grasses. When you gather and prepare wild grasses, make it equal to a fine cream soup with your true mind, sincere mind, and pure mind. This is because when you serve the assembly—the pure ocean of Buddha Dharma—you do not notice the taste of fine cream or the taste of wild grasses. The great ocean has only one taste. How much more so when you bring forth the buds of the Way and nourish the sacred body. Fine cream and wild grasses are equal and not two.

Precautions for the Tenzo
—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE city of Kyoto—which was spared from bombing during World War II—is one of the most precious in the world. When I came here first as a Rinzai student in June 1973, I stayed at a student boarding house near high-peaked, dark Daitoku-ji, perhaps the mightiest in aspect of all Zen temples in Japan. Wandering the city day after day, I paid my respects at Myoshin-ji (the mother temple of Ryutaku-ji, with its Taizo-in temple rock garden and waterfall, its magnificent bird screen portraits of geese and falcons) and at Tofuku-ji (which became the seat of Rinzai Zen a few years after Eisai’s death, and remains the largest Rinzai monastery in Japan).1 One morning I had the marvelous luck to find myself alone for fifteen minutes on the wood platform that overlooks the austere, disturbing stone garden at Ryoan-ji, where the old earth wall is as beautiful as the composition of large stones. (A simple wash basin bears the legend “I learn only to be contented.”)2 From Ryoan-ji, two Japanese students who wished to try their English escorted me to Koryu-ji and its lovely Miroku Bodhisattva,3 a reproduction of which still hangs upon my wall. I admired Nanzen-ji, with its vivid tiger screens, and Kinkaku-ji, the “Gold Pavilion,” with its sculpted woods and ponds. But at none of these Rinzai temples was zazen permitted to the public. The small woodland dojo, or meditation hall, known as Antai-ji, where we went for daybreak zazen every morning, was the one Soto temple I visited in Kyoto, which has always been a stronghold of Rinzai Zen.

Every day for ten years, it is said, one may see a different temple without exhausting the temples of Kyoto. Few of these are half as interesting as the public baths, antique shops, and bazaars, and the chaos of the downtown modern city, not to speak of such harmonious places as the ancient Tawaraya Inn, the romantic country retreat at Shisen-do Hermitage in the hills east of the city, and the Katsura Villa in its ten-acre pond-garden, which required forty years to build and is tended today by fifteen gardeners and a squad of ten swift woman weeders. Katsura was mostly used for imperial moon-viewing excursions that took place on just four evenings every year. Its series of four teahouses (the Moon-Viewing, Pine and Harp, Flower Appreciation, and Sense of Humor teahouses), each one with a quite different view, are designed so that not all of the garden-pond can be seen at once (the same is true of the stones at Ryoan-ji)—the “something hidden” creates a pleasing mystery and encourages the visitor to appreciate each detail. The frames of the teahouses are three centuries old, but everything else is changed every twenty years, including the cedar-shingled roofs with their bamboo nails.

About twenty of Daitoku-ji’s eighty subtemples are still in existence, and one of these, Ryoko-in, is distinguished by wonderful moss and rock gardens and exquisite paintings in the Chinese tradition. At Ryoko-in we were given tea by Sohaku Kobori-roshi in the exquisite Mittan tearoom, one of two tearooms in Japan that are national treasures.4 The “perfect” dimensions of the small chamber are especially admired, as are its sumi paintings of mountain rocks in clouds, and of birds blown like petals from a large flock in a dead tree. The birds are placed upon the paper in a mind-arresting pattern, like the placement of the stones at Ryoan-ji.

Kobori-roshi, gold teeth and glasses flashing in a shrewd, clear face, tested our understanding in mild Dharma combat and chided us good-humoredly for our Zen-type answers. But when one student offered the opinion that Zen and psychotherapy had similar effects in helping suffering, the roshi observed tartly that the psychotherapist was just another patient. (Psychotherapy deals with the twigs, Eido-roshi says, whereas Zen aims straight into the root.) “Can he cure this bowl? This table? Zen can do.” Kobori-roshi pointed sternly at a pair of American shoes dropped carelessly outside the tearoom door. “If you arrange a pair of shoes together neatly, that is curing the shoes.” He pointed at the sumi painting. “Can psychotherapy cure birds? Or only, perhaps”—and the gold teeth gleamed in anticipation of a Japanese joke that might well have elicited nods and smiles in the Sense of Humor Teahouse at Katsura Villa—“some kind of . . . monkey?”

All the while, Kobori’s deft hands served green tea, brought originally to Japan by Master Eisai.

Formal tea ceremony, Cha No Yu, was an expression of Zen culture developed in the sixteenth century by Sen no Rikyu (1521–1591), founder of the Urasenke Tea School here in Kyoto, who lived to see a statue of himself installed over Daitoku-ji’s great roofed entrance gate. Unfortunately this honor gave offense to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a feudal overlord who refused to walk beneath the likeness of a commoner, and his displeasure persuaded Sen no Rikyu to perform ritual suicide rather than bring down Hideyoshi’s wrath upon his family.

Three of us were tea students at Urasenke in New York, and while in Kyoto, we visited the tea school, which has its own celebrated tearoom. Here long ago an early master, having invited a Zen priest for tea, became annoyed when the priest was late, and left a note which read, “Please come tomorow.” Finding this note, the Zen priest wrote, “Lazy monk cannot come tomorrow.” The tea master was so ashamed that he named this chamber “the Today Tea Room.”

One sunny afternoon, with Urasenke friends, we attended a huge outdoor tea ceremony at the Omi Jingu shrine overlooking Lake Biwa. In a pageantry of white-and-black-robed Shinto priests, swept by a bright freshwater breeze, flags flying, a modem Mr. Sen5 and his assistants offered a prolonged ritual tea to the Shinto gods, the graceful movements gracefully exaggerated in order to be seen by an enthralled audience of thousands. Later we dined at a lakeside hotel at the kind invitation of Mr. Sen, who left word that he would not obstruct our enjoyment with his own presence.

On the second day of the thirteenth century (January 2, 1200)6 a child was born in Heian-kyo (later Kyoto, “the Capital”) who would have a precocious experience of life’s impermanence, since he seems to have been illegitimate and would soon be orphaned. “Buddhist Dogen, family name Minamoto, of Kyoto; and an heir to the gentry,” as he was identified in the first known reference7 to his genealogy, was apparently the son of Lord Kuga Michichika, a descendant of the tenth-century emperor Murakami and Keeper of the Privy Seal in the imperial court, who took leave of life when Dogen was just two. His mother, of the Fujiwara clan, died when he was eight. “At his mother’s funeral, observing the smoke of incense, he intimately realized the impermanence of the world of sentient beings, and profoundly developed the great aspiration to seek the Dharma.”8 For the rest of his life, Dogen Kigen was concerned with the awakening of the enlightened state through penetration of the true nature of reality, and the consequent freedom from the bondage of life and death, as—in his own image—a fish escaping from the net. “At each moment,” he would write, “do not rely upon tomorrow. Think of this day and this hour only, and of being faithful to the Way, for the next moment is uncertain and unknown.”

After his mother’s death, this young Minamoto was adopted by an aristocratic uncle, but eventually he ran away to her younger brother Ryokan, a hermit monk at the foot of Mount Hiei. No doubt to ensure his place in life, the boy’s mother had urged that he join the priesthood, and in 1213 he trudged up Mount Hiei to Enryaku-ji, the huge Tendai monastery on the north face of the mountain, overlooking Lake Biwa, some 3,000 feet below. Here the Tendai abbot Koen gave him the precepts as the novice monk Buppo-bo Dogen in the Yokawa-chudo, a small temple on a wooded ledge under the north peak, on a steep hillside of giant cedars.

In Dogen’s time, Enryaku-ji concerned itself with rituals and rich ceremonies that attracted the costumed aristocracy of Kyoto, paying small attention to the practice of the Buddha’s teachings. It made much of Shakyamuni’s realization that “all sentient beings have the Buddha-nature,” since this seemed to eliminate the need for arduous training. Dogen (who would teach that Shakyamuni meant “All beings are the Buddha-nature”) demanded of his mentors why, in that case, the Buddhist patriarchs had struggled so hard to attain this enlightened condition. Already he knew that priestly finery, ritual incense burning, sacrament and ceremony, sutra copying and even chanting—the mere veneration of the Buddha’s words—all missed the point, that the structured hierarchies of Mount Hiei had lost the bold spirit of the quest for profound awakening.

“The masters I had seen all advised me to study until I was as learned as those who preceded me. I was told to make myself known to the state and gain fame in the world.”9 Such teachers were unqualified to answer the relentless probing of the young monk, and after one year he walked back down the mountain to Mii-dera, another extant Tendai temple on Lake Biwa. Here a teacher named Koin sent him on to Eisai, the Rinzai master in Kyoto. “I first developed the mind for enlightenment because of impermanence [mujo] and asked about it in all corners of the world. At last I left Mt. Hiei to study the Way and entrusted myself to Kennin-ji. In the meantime, I encountered no authentic teacher.”10

Dogen’s restlessness was symptomatic of a growing resistance to the decadent “aristocratic” Buddhism of the Heian period. At Nara, the older sects had enjoyed a mild revival by instituting strict monastic practice, and the Hall of the Great Buddha at Todai-ji, burned down in the civil wars of 1180, had been rebuilt ten years later by the shogun Yoritomo Minamoto. In the same period Honen Shonin (1133–1212) founded the Jodo or “Pure Land” school, which, as he said himself, was “nothing but the mere repetition of the name of the Buddha Amida without a doubt of his mercy, whereby one may be born into the Land of Perfect Bliss.” To this simple-hearted teaching (which does not really contradict the Buddhist tenet of emancipation from within)11 thousands of converts from the unlettered multitudes, denied access to the esoteric schools of Mount Hiei, gathered like “clouds in the sky,” causing a fierce attack on Jodo by the threatened priesthood of both Nara and Kyoto. After his death in 1212, Honen’s sect spread rapidly in influence, especially in the military government. The great Buddha of the Boundless Light at Kamakura, described earlier, is an Amida figure constructed by Honen’s supporters in 1252.

Master Eisai apparently answered some of Dogen’s questions. Yet it seems unlikely that he studied much with Eisai, who died in 1215, the year after Dogen’s arrival, having spent most of his last years in Kamakura seeking the protection of the Kamakura regents for his new sect of Rinzai Zen. Still frustrated, Dogen embarked on two years of inconclusive wandering before returning to Kennin-ji to study with Eisai’s first Dharma heir.

In 1221, this monk Myozen transmitted the precepts of the Oryu Rinzai school to Dogen, who accompanied him on a pilgrimage to the T’ien-t’ung Monastery in China two years later. Before departing, Myozen was asked by a former teacher to see him through the death that was soon to come. Myozen’s other disciples felt that nothing would be lost by postponing the journey until after the old man’s death, but Dogen was not of that opinion. “If you think your realization of the Buddha-Dharma is satisfactory as it is now,” said Dogen—who clearly doubted it—“then you should stay.” Apparently Myozen was impressed by his disciple’s relentless attitude. At any rate, he told the others, “To spend time in vain just for one person is against the will of the Buddha. . . . I resolve to go to China now.”12

In 1223, Myozen and his students sailed from the Port of Hakata on the “Western Sea Road” to the Land of Sung. Dogen, who had already begun the copious writing that provides so much insight into his character and life, took note of his own seasickness and diarrhea while “entrusting his ephemeral existence to the roaring waves.”13

In the Land of Sung as in the Land of Wa, the Buddhist priesthood was enmeshed in politics, finance, and the imperial court. The Zen schools were still powerful, but the long spiritual decline from which Chinese Buddhism was never to recover had set in. Young Dogen, already contemptuous of the immature Buddhism in Japan,14 was dismayed by its decrepitude in China. Especially was he critical of his own Rinzai school, which had now absorbed all other Zen schools except Soto; it seemed to him to have distorted the Buddha’s teachings in its emphasis on koan study to the near exclusion not only of the sacred texts but of zazen. Although devoted to Myozen (“leading disciple of my late Master Eisai . . . unparalleled among his fellow disciples in learning and virtue”),15 he soon despaired of finding a true teacher of the uncompromising kind he had read about in the ancient Chinese chronicles.

Indeed, the closest Dogen came to the pure spirit of Zen was an encounter with an old monastery cook in the first days after his arrival. This monk, who had visited his ship to buy Japanese mushrooms, declined Dogen’s invitation to stay and converse, since he had to get back to his monastery to supervise the next day’s meals. When Dogen protested, saying that other cooks would surely take care of things, the old man said mildly that his job as tenzo, or head cook, was “my training during my old age. How can I leave this duty to others?” Incredulous, Dogen exclaimed, “Venerable sir! Why don’t you do zazen, or study the koan of ancient masters? What is the use of working so hard as tenzo monk?” At this the cook laughed, remarking that the young Japanese appeared ignorant of the meaning of true training, much less Buddhism.

In the cook’s reproof lay two important teachings which were later much emphasized by Dogen, that work for its own sake was fundamental in Zen practice, and that the state of enlightenment was manifest in even the most ordinary acts of everyday life. (In a later encounter, when Dogen asked, “What is the Way?” this old man said, “The entire universe has never concealed it.”)16

After three months of living aboard ship, Dogen went to visit Myozen at T’ien-t’ung, south of the Yangtze River and not far inland from the East China Sea. T’ien-t’ung, where Master Eisai had studied, was an ancient shrine of the third century which had become one of the five great “mountains” or Zen monasteries of southern Sung. Here Dogen was given an inferior position in the monk’s hall, despite his status as Myozen’s Dharma successor. The outspoken Dogen fired off three letters to the emperor, protesting that the monks’ positions should depend on seniority, not on nationality, and winning a certain notoriety when the emperor intervened on his behalf.

At T’ien-t’ung, Dogen received another lesson from a tenzo. This ancient monk, painfully supported by a staff, was drying mushrooms in the heat of summer noon. Asked why he did not use the help of others, the old man said, “Others are not I.” Dogen said, “But the sun is scorching! Why must you work now?” And the old man said, “If not now, when?”17

Between 1223 and 1225, Dogen visited a number of the leading monasteries of southern China, after which, having failed to find a teacher, he decided to return home to Japan. But at T’ien-t’ung, where he went to say goodbye to Myozen, the Rinzai abbot had been replaced by a teacher of the Soto sect named Tendo Nyojo (Ju-ching), aged sixty-two, who until this time had led the life of a poor wandering monk, far from the influences of the government and court. More interesting still, so far as Dogen was concerned, was Tendo Nyojo’s repudiation of priestly occupations and his insistence on strict training based on shikan-taza. “No more need,” said Tendo Nyojo, “to burn incense, make prostrations, invoke buddhas, perform repentance ceremonies, or read scriptures—just sit and liberate mind and body.”18

This “silent illumination” practice of the Soto sect was harshly criticized by Rinzai teachers as passive and ineffective, since no effort was made to attain enlightenment. In Tendo Nyojo’s view, shikan-taza itself represented the enlightened state, because practice and realization of one’s own Buddha-nature, when truly perceived, were no more separate from each other than the relative and the absolute, the fleeting and the eternal. That practice and realization were inseparable was to become the marrow of Dogen’s teaching.

“I met Master Ju-ching face to face. This was an encounter between a man and a man!” Dogen wrote later, extremely moved by his first meeting (on May 1, 1225) with a severe master who shunned fame, fine robes, and monetary privilege, and who, in his enlightened old age, did zazen until late each night, beginning again early each morning, vowing “to wear out a diamond seat.” According to Dogen’s journals, Tendo Nyojo said, “What is the point of . . . entering a monastery if you are only going to waste time? Birth and death are vital matters. The impermanent world passes swiftly away. . . . With time so short, how foolish it is . . . to waste your time in sleep! This is what brings the decline of the Buddha Dharma!” Dogen, who had all but abandoned hope of finding an inspired teacher, immediately recognized this one “who regardless of old age or prestige, comprehends the right Dharma clearly and receives the certification of true master. . . . He is one in whom living and understanding correspond to each other.” For the first time in his life, he perceived in a teacher the embodiment of the true Dharma, and was overjoyed. Nyojo, in turn, immediately recognized the Dharma in this very rare student,19 instructing him to come to dokusan whenever he wished.

Dogen spent three years at T’ien-t’ung, entering whole-heartedly into rigorous zazen practice. One day during meditation, Tendo Nyojo shouted at a sleeping monk, “When you study under a master, you must drop body and mind! What’s the use of single-minded intense sleeping?” For Dogen, seated right beside this monk, the shouted words “drop body and mind!” precipitated a profound kensho. He made his way to the abbot’s quarters and burned incense in awe and gratitude, and after a brief exchange, Tendo Nyojo confirmed that his young Japanese disciple had indeed “dropped body and mind.” The unrelenting Dogen said, “It might have been a temporary delusion; please do not give me the seal of approval indiscriminately!” Apparently this was his way of pleading that his teacher drive him deeper, which he did,20 and eventually Dogen left after receiving face-to-face Dharma transmission: “The Great Matter of my life was thus resolved.” He had now perceived that “Buddha-nature is not some kind of changeless entity, but is none other than the eternally rising and perishing reality of the world”—the wonderful precision of this present moment, moment after moment—now!—just as the old cooks had tried to teach him.

In 1227, encouraging Dogen to spread the true Dharma in his own land, his teacher presented him with further documents of succession, in a silk cover with a design of plum blossoms. At the same time he instructed him not to be “preoccupied with concern of limited time, limited life. . . . The succession of the buddhahood should not be studied that way. . . . It should be learned that Shakyamuni Buddha inherited the Dharma from Kasyapa and Kasyapa from Shakyamuni Buddha. When it is thus studied, we understand the succession of the Dharma by all the buddhas and all the patriarchs.”

The ancient lineage of Dharma transmission traditionally began when Shakyamuni in dead silence held up a single flower before the assembly and Kasyapa smiled. The Buddha said, “I have the treasury of the true Dharma eye [Shobogenzo], the inconceivable mind of nirvana. This I entrust to Kasyapa.” What Tendo Nyojo (and later Dogen) said was that Kasyapa was simultaneously transmitting the true Dharma to Shakyamuni—in short, that the lineage was not linear but circular; that buddhas or awakened ones, while not identical, were not to be separated either. (“Those who have passed the barrier [of Mu] are able not only to see Joshu face to face, but also to walk hand in hand with the whole descending line of Zen masters,” says Mumon’s commentary to “Joshu’s Dog”).21

Tendo Nyojo gave Dogen a document certifying his place in the circular lineage of the Soto school, from Shakyamuni to Bodhidharma and the Sixth Chinese Patriarch, and from Daikan Eno and his successors to Tendo Nyojo, Dogen, and Shakyamuni. He also gave Dogen certain Buddhist relics, including a portrait of himself and a copy of Master Tozan’s Five Ranks (Goi Kenketsu) and Jeweled Mirror Samadhi (Hokyo Zammai), which, together with Master Sekito’s Identity of Relative and Absolute (Sandokai), is the fundamental literature of Soto Zen: “With all sincerity, I give these to you, a foreign monk. I hope you will propagate true Buddhism throughout your country, thereby saving deluded people. You should not live in cities or other places of human habitation. Rather, staying clear of kings and ministers, make your home in deep mountains and remote valleys, transmitting the essence of Buddhism forever. . . .” Later Dogen would write a poem derived from Hokyo Zammai:

A snowy heron in the snow.
Winter grass hidden
Hides itself in its own form.

Myozen had long since died at T’ien-t’ung—in good zazen posture, according to his former student—and Dogen attested to miraculous events surrounding Myozen’s memorial service that caused people to venerate his old friend and erect a statue to his memory on T’ien-t’ung Mountain. Not until 1227 did Dogen return his ashes to Kennin-ji. Otherwise, all Dogen brought with him out of China was the realization “that the eyes are horizontal and the nose is vertical; thus I am unable to be deceived by others. . . . I have returned to my native country with empty hands. There is not even a hair of Buddhism in me. Now I pass the time naturally. The sun rises in the east every morning, and every night the moon sets in the west. When the clouds clear, the outline of the mountains appears, and as the rain passes away, the surrounding mountains bend down. What is it, after all?”22

In effect, Dogen had freed himself of all ideas and preconceptions about Buddhism, about enlightenment, about the true nature of reality, all of which had “dropped away with body and mind.” There was simply the fact of his vertical nose and horizontal eyes, of the sun and moon rising and falling, moment by moment, day by day. With the opening of his true Dharma eye, he perceived the extraordinary within the ordinary, and realized with all buddhas and patriarchs that everything, everywhere, in every moment, is “nothing special,” as is said in Zen, being complete and perfect just-as-it-is.

The mountain was the mountain once again.

Having met with his own Buddha-nature, Dogen seems to have become less judgmental, less demanding. Asked what he had learned abroad, he said, “Not much except a tender spirit.”23

 

The Buddhist trainee can be compared to a fine piece of timber, and a true master to a good carpenter. Even good quality will not show its fine grain unless it is worked on by a good carpenter. Even a warped piece of wood will, if handled by a good carpenter, soon show the results of good craftsmanship. The truth or falsity of enlightenment depends upon whether or not one has a true master. . . .

In our country, however, there have not been any true masters since ancient times. We can tell this by looking at their words, just as we can tell [the nature of] the source of a river by scooping up some of its water downstream. . . .

True Buddhism has not yet spread to this peripheral little country, and true masters have yet to be born. If you are unable to find a true master, it is best not to study Buddhism at all.

Points to Watch in Buddhist Training
—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ALTHOUGH Tetsugen had visited Kyoto on previous journeys, he had never seen the three great monasteries associated with Dogen Zenji which are still active to this day. Under the guidance of Yo Ishikawa-sensei (whose son Sho is a young monk studying with Tetsugen in New York), we drove up Mount Hiei to Enryaku-ji, which after twelve centuries remains the head temple of Tendai Buddhism in Japan. In the entrance temple on top of the mountain, large portraits commemorate Eisai, Dogen, Nichiren, and others who studied at Mount Hiei before moving away to establish their own schools. Here aged monks in stiff brocade, red, gold, and purple, were chanting the question-and-answer teaching in the Lotus Sutra. In a forest grove is the huge red building called the Kompon-chudo, built originally in 788 by Tendai’s founder. Although the present Kompon-chudo, with its chancel of gold Buddha figures, was rebuilt in 1642, after a fire, the three dedicatory bronze lanterns that bring dim light to the ancient shadows of the hall are said to have been lit by Saicho and never extinguished to the present day.

The original Yokawa-chudo, down the mountain, lasted well over one thousand years—it burned to the ground in 1942—but because we were eager to experience the place where Monk Dogen received ordination, an obliging young priest led us downhill on the silent forest paths to the remains of the old temple, which is marked by an open-air altar scattered with needles from the tall and silent trees. Probably the oldest hoary conifers on this mountainside were already living when that thirteen-year-old boy, pate fresh and shining as an apple seed, received his monk’s robe and monk’s bowl from the Tendai abbot Koen, with the blue cloud mirror of the lake shining below. If he came in spring, the lavender bloom of these woodland azaleas would have freshened his eye, and doubtless a bold forebear of this blue Eurasian jay came squalling to the treetops to jeer at the priestly retinue in its brilliant robes.

From Enryaku-ji, by way of Mii-dera, on Lake Biwa, Dogen had traveled to Kennin-ji, which in those days was located in a wooded swamp along the Kamo River. Since then the Kamo has been rechanneled and the swampland drained, and the modern city has grown up around it, replacing the miasmal climate of the swamp with that of the Gion red-light district.

On the day of our visit to Kennin-ji, a special ceremony was in progress. Outside the entrance of the main service hall was a hallucinatory array of hundreds of small Japanese shoes, set out in intricate patterns to help the wearer locate the right pair upon emerging. Within, small, bright-robed, decorous figures moved ceremonially across a sun-filled hall. Opened screens and an outside platform overlooked a renowned stone garden of Kyoto—at least the equal of the stone garden at Ryoan-ji, or so we were assured by an American monk, who seemed glad of this rare opportunity to speak with countrymen. A number of comparable stone gardens, the monk said, are hidden away in cloistered courts of the thousands of temples in Kyoto.

The event in progress was an annual commemoration of the importation of green tea by Master Eisai, who had used it as a stimulant for his monks during zazen. Under the stem eye of elder roshis, four leading tea masters, each with eight disciples, were being served tea in high ceremonial fashion by the priests and monks, after which formal tea would be prepared for two hundred or more Japanese ladies in ornate combs and many-colored silks. Tiny feet in their white tabi peeped like mice from beneath the silks as the happy ladies, opening bright fans, sailed across the fresh-smelling greenish straw of new tatami.

In the stone garden, a turtledove’s wings were the bronze color of wild cherry leaves after the spring fall of pink-white blossoms. Uninterested in the human pageant, it walked about beneath a red azalea bush, inspecting the raked earth for fat new grubs.

According to the American monk,1 Kennin-ji under Sado-roshi is the most active Rinzai training center in Kyoto, and one of the few monasteries left in Japan that maintains a strict zazen schedule. Seven days a week, as in the old days, thirty-one monks arise at 4:00 A.M. for zazen, then go out into the city with their “begging bowls.”2 In the afternoon the monks perform their monastery duties, followed by zazen until near midnight. They are also expected to chant sutras every day, at two in the afternoon and at two in the morning.

The monk led us to the grave of Eisai, in a stone garden hidden behind old walls. Not far away was the grave of Myozen, where a very old man dressed in white sat on his heels among the mosses, paying the big gaijin no attention. “He was the head priest here,” murmured our guide. “He’s retired now, and spends his days pulling out the weeds in the stone gardens.”

Returning here with Myozen’s ashes in 1228, Dogen realized that Kennin-ji had deteriorated. “Every room of the temple was furnished with a lacquered case, and every monk had his own furniture, liked fine clothes, and stored away treasures. . . .” Nevertheless, he remained here for three years while he composed Fukan-zazen-gi (A Universal Recommendation for Zazen), which was in effect zazen instruction, a manifesto of Zen practice (as opposed to the “mixed practice” established by Eisai), and a challenge not only to Kennin-ji but to the entrenched Buddhist priesthood all over Japan.

Need I mention the Buddha, who was possessed of inborn knowledge? The influence of his six years of upright sitting is noticeable still. Or Bodhidharma’s transmission of the mind seal? The fame of his nine years of wall-sitting is celebrated to this day. . . . If you want to attain suchness, you should practice suchness without delay.

“In Fukan-zazen-gi, we see Dogen’s desire to reach everyone,” says Tetsugen, who sometimes seems to have the same desire. “Later he has to give this up.” Not long before this document was written, the tomb of Honen, founder of the Jodo school, had been vandalized, and an extant letter of the period to the poet Teika Fujiwara suggests that the priests of Mount Hiei were debating the merits of destroying Dogen’s house and also his expulsion from the capital. Dogen himself became aware that his ambition of spreading the Dharma must be put aside “until a time of rising tide.” In 1230, unhappy (and no doubt unwelcome) at Kennin-ji, he moved south to the Fukakusa District, where he rebuilt Anyo-in, an abandoned hermitage of his mother’s Fujiwara clan, known thereafter as Kannon-dori.

Births and deaths, coming and going—how pathetic!
The path of ignorance, the road of awakening—I walk dreaming!
Yet one thing persists even at waking:
The sound of rainfall in a hut at Fukakusa.3

At Kannon-dori, Dogen accepted Koun Ejo as his first disciple. This monk, born a Fujiwara, had studied in the Nihon Daruma (Japan Dharma) school at Nara, whose temple had been burned down twice by the older sects. Two years older than Dogen, he had already received the seal of realization from a Rinzai teacher, but it is suggested4 that his true realization came about through study of the koan “A single hair penetrates many holes,” with which Dogen had tested him at their first meeting at Kennin-ji. One evening at Fukakusa, he passed through this koan with great enlightenment. He went to Dogen, made his bows, and said, “I do not ask about the single hair. What are the myriad holes?” Dogen smiled, saying, “It is penetrated.” From that time forward, Koun Ejo was his attendant, serving to the end of Dogen’s life, and requesting that his ashes be placed at the foot of his teacher’s grave, so that he might attend him after death.

In the Fukakusa period, Dogen composed Bendowa (The Practice of the Way), which sets out the main principles he would deal with later. Here he states plainly the answer to the question that had plagued him as a boy at Mount Hiei: the Buddha-nature or enlightened state “is amply present in every person, but unless one practices, it is not manifested; unless there is realization, it is not attained.”5

In 1235, with the completion of the monk’s hall and the installation of Koun Ejo as first shuso, or head monk, Kannon-dori was renamed Kosho-Horin-ji. At the opening ceremony of the new monk’s hall, designed specifically for zazen, Dogen discussed what he had “gained” from his studies in China, which was, in effect, the realization of his own true nature, his Buddha-nature, beyond all teachers and ideas, beyond enlightenment itself. Subsequently, he ordained a small number of new monks. In the next ten years, in the peaceful atmosphere of the beautiful Uji River and surrounding mountains, he composed a large part of Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), including the famous Genjo-koan (Actualization of the Koan), which contains the best-known passage in his work:

Seeing forms with the whole body and mind,
hearing sounds with the whole body and mind,
one understands them intimately;
Yet it is not like a mirror with reflections,
nor like water under the moon—
When one side is realized, the other side is dark.
To study the Buddha Way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.
To be enlightened by all things is to be freed from one’s own body and mind and those of others.
No trace of enlightenment remains, and this traceless
enlightenment is continued forever. . . .6

At Kosho-ji, Dogen also composed the Tenzo Kyokun, a discussion of the head cook’s significance in the monastery (and by extension, the true meaning of the Dharma, Tetsugen says. The meal is our life, its ingredients the means we have available. Each of us is tenzo: what sort of meal do we prepare? Do we make the best of what we are given, or do we complain that the right ingredients are missing?). This fascicle recounts—and was doubtless inspired by—those thorny encounters with the two old tenzos in the Land of Sung. Meanwhile, Koun Ejo gathered Dogen’s more informal sayings for the collection know today as Shobogenzo Zuimonki.7

Although he gave koans to Ejo and other disciples, Dogen felt that most Zen lineages using koan study—especially in the Rinzai school—had become “dead lines” that did not perpetuate the essence of the teaching. Yet Shobogenzo is a vast compendium of koans drawn from Dogen’s voracious reading of the old texts. The Mumon-kan or Gateless Gate collection was put together during his lifetime, the Shoyo Roku (Book of Equanimity) commentaries by twelfth-century Soto master Tendo Shogaku had been recently completed, and apparently he was aware of the Hekigan Roku (Blue Cliff Record) put together in the eleventh century by Setcho Joken, of the Unmon-Rinzai school. The Hekigan Roku included eighteen original koans by Master Unmon, and beautiful commentary verses by Master Setcho:

Overwhelming evening clouds
Gathering in one great mass
Endlessly arising distant mountains
Blue upon blue.

Kosho-Horin-ji, a lovely white-walled monastery across the river from Byodo-in (a former Fujiwara villa at the edge of the old town of Uji), sits on a hillside just north of the bend where the Uji River flows down out of the mountains. The majestic location doubtless inspired the Sansuikyo, or Mountains and Rivers Sutra, which celebrates the manifestation of the Buddha-body in the mountains, rivers, and great earth, an ancient synonym for all things, fleeting and eternal, that are included in the emptiness, the void, the One. “I came to realize clearly that Mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars.” This phrase, from an early Chinese collection (Zenrin) used in koan study and often cited in Shobogenzo, precipitated the enlightenment experience of Yamada-roshi quoted earlier.8

In Sansuikyo, Dogen challenges head-on the Chinese teachers who (like so many today) claim that any talk which can be grasped by thought is not true Zen talk of the Buddhas and patriarchs. “At the present time in the Land of Sung there is a certain crude bunch who have by now formed such a crowd that they cannot be overcome. They maintain that talk such as this is incomprehensible. Consequently, they hold that Obaku’s stick and Rinzai’s roar, because they cannot be comprehended or grasped by thought . . . are impossible to comprehend. Those who talk in this way have never met a true teacher, and lack the eye of study. This is truly regrettable, for it represents the decline of the great way of the Buddhas and Patriarchs. . . . What these shavelings call ‘incomprehensible talk’ is incomprehensible only to them, not to the Buddhas and Patriarchs. . . .9

“Dogen tried all of the known theories, from Shakyamuni onward,” Tetsugen says. “He discarded them when his students got too caught up in theories and forgot about life itself. He spoke out against koan study, sutra-chanting—in fact, virtually everything except zazen—but only that aspect of them that was stereotyped and dead. Even as he condemns koans, he is using them in his own teaching.”

Especially Dogen denounced koan practice that excluded sutra study. “In the country of Sung lately there are those who call themselves Zen masters. . . . Reciting a few words of Rinzai and Unmon, they take them for the whole truth of Buddhism. If Buddhism had been exhausted by a few words of Rinzai and Unmon, it could not have survived until today. . . . These people, stupid and foolish, cannot comprehend the spirit of the sutras, slander them arbitrarily, and neglect to study them. . . .”10

On the other hand, he is urgently aware that one must go beyond all words and teachings to the thing itself. “To read the words, unaware of the way of practice, is just like reading a medical prescription and overlooking the mixing of the compounds for it; it will be altogether worthless. Lifting your voice in endless recitation is like frogs in the spring fields, croaking from morning to nightfall.”11

“In the great Way of the Buddha Dharma, all the sutra chapters in the Universe are contained within a dust mote. A blade of grass or a leaf are the Mind and Body.”12 And “Hundreds of grasses and myriad forms—each appearing ‘as it is’—are nothing but Buddha’s true Dharma body.”13

“At Kennin-ji, Dogen studied koans under Myozen,” Tetsugen says, “and received inka from Myozen, so he was familiar with koan study as it was then practiced in the Rinzai sect. In China he studied with Tendo Nyojo, a Soto master not much interested in koan study and giving precedence to shikan-taza. When Dogen came back to Japan, he started to criticize koan study, saying that, as practiced by Zen sects in China, it had become stereotyped, that there was no life in it anymore. In his opinion, koans had been reduced from expressions of enlightenment to tools or techniques to attain a desired end—that is, completion of koan study and formal approval from a teacher, without any real penetration along the way. Most scholars read these criticisms superficially, assuming that Dogen rejected koans as a valid method of Zen practice. But he continued to use koans. In fact, Shobogenzo contains so much commentary on koans that to read it properly, one must really be familiar with koan study; otherwise, it seems much less intelligent than it really is. Shobogenzo itself is one enormous koan: each word is an expression of the Way.”

Directly opposite Kosho-ji’s gate, a white egret alighted on a gravel bar in the bright torrent. (“Brighter than the fireflies on the Uji River are your words in the dark, Beloved,” Amy Lowell wrote, in a haiku imitation that entirely lacks this Zen form’s tension between the fleeting and the eternal.) From the riverside, the entrance road, carved through the wall of river rock, runs straight up the wooded hill, while twin rivulets run down stone ditches under the stone walls to either side. This place is called Koto (a stringed instrument), because of the water’s purl. Sunlight descends through a canopy of delicate maple leaves, alighting here and there on yellow roses. Then the road ends at a white arch inset into the long white forewall of the temple court, which sits on a broad step of the mountainside above the river. On the portal arch, a sign identifies Kosho-ji as the earliest Soto training center in Japan. Inside this gate—so simple by comparison with the huge and dark-peaked entrance gates of the Rinzai temples—is a stone garden with an ancient temple bell.

Completed in 1233, Kosho-ji was the first Zen temple in Japan entirely free of influence from other Buddhist sects, having been specifically designed for the zazen training that Dogen had emphasized in Fukan-zazen-gi. Seven centuries later, it is still offering zazen practice. The simple zendo—maintained in the original style, says the present abbot—seats thirty people under the gaze of a striking Manjusri Bodhisattva, seated on his lion, whose blazing eyes seem to shine in the dim light. The Founder’s Hall is dominated by a hard-faced Dogen, very unlike most Dogen representations. A second image, much more typical, portrays him as gentle and cerebral, with a broad, high forehead, pink face, and small mouth.

Tetsugen-sensei, who had never imagined that Kosho-ji was still so active, was moved by the feel and spirit of the place. Regretting aloud that we had not worn our formal robes this morning—we travel in the black work tunic of monks—he prostrated himself in three full bows to Dogen Kigen, touching his shaved head to the gray tile floor.

Because Tetsugen is so casual and so informal, I am taken by surprise, and touched, by his unselfconscious impulses toward devotion, just as I have been taken aback by his sudden sternness. At Kosho-ji he had undergone a change of mood, remaining silent much longer than usual as we walked a little in the temple grounds. However, his mind was as hard at work as ever, and when he spoke again, he entered directly and without preamble into the subject of Dharma transmission training and our own relationship.

“Maezumi-roshi often told me how Dogen developed shiho studies with his first Dharma successor, Koun Ejo, and how he had set such high standards for this face-to-face training, and the broadness of this training. In fact, my original admiration of Dogen came from these standards for shiho training, which is peculiar to the Soto sect and was mostly established by Dogen himself, at least in Japan. Koan study is very important in opening your Dharma eye and broadening your understanding, whereas shiho study is more concerned with teacher–student relationships, the closeness, the merging, as teacher and student become one. The first shiho document transmitted specifies that the point of training is for master and student to become one. And what should happen—it doesn’t always—is a sort of father—son relationship, so that no matter what you do, it’s all right, you’re not dismissed for mistakes, there’s no turning back.”

Tetsugen looked at me seriously, then chuckled, as if to say, You’re trapped! “It’s not so simple for two people to become that close, even a parent and child. That’s why there is this emphasis on face-to-face study of such matters as Dai-ji—‘the Great Matter’—enlightenment. But just living together, being together, as we are doing on this trip, is also very important. For that reason, I consider the trip itself much more important than how many dokusan we have together, how much koan study we accomplish. Even if nothing is going on, so to speak, there is a lot going on.”

“Teacher and disciple studying simultaneously is twining vines of buddha ancestors,” said Dogen.14

As Tetsugen’s jisha, I nodded dutifully, letting him continue without interruption. While I found what he was saying fascinating, I also feared that I would be found wanting. Traditionally, a Zen teacher’s first shuso should be a disciple younger than himself, not a student a decade older than the teacher. Also, I knew that he had “become one” with Maezumi-roshi in a way and to a degree that was probably not possible in our case, given not only my life apart from his Zen community (which meant that except in intense bursts, such as this journey, we spent too little time together), but also discrepancies in age, outlook, and temperament, including my stubborn resistance to authority and a notable lack of the proper devotional attitude. Not that Tetsugen’s devotion to Maezumi made him blind to his teacher’s human failings—on the contrary—but even when they disagreed, this didn’t matter, their communication seemed like the internal dialogue of a single person. And inevitably Tetsugen was more steeped in Japanese Zen tradition than I would ever be, or felt like being (if I had found an American Indian teacher—not some media medicine man but a true teacher—willing to work with me, I might well have chosen a North American tradition over an Asian one). Ever conscious of Maezumi’s standards, he was conservative and strict about his monks’ observance of Soto customs despite his ongoing discussions with his teacher about forming their own school of American Zen.

Once, in Riverdale, a senior monk made a technical error while officiating at morning service. Embarrassed, this monk made an open joke of it right then and there. The joke was funny, and I, for one, had to struggle not to laugh out loud, but Tetsugen went dark red in the face, saying nothing at all. When the service was concluded, he snapped at this monk very coldly, “To joke that way during this service is very disrespectful to our practice. You will do three full bows to the Buddha by way of apology to us all.” I stood there guilty and unhappy while the humiliated monk performed his bows.

The episode was reassuring, since it put to rest certain lingering doubts about Tetsugen’s mettle, so well hidden by his soft-voiced, teasing manner. Almost always, he controls his anger, but this “nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn” has a huge voice and power at his disposal, and when aroused—or pretending to be aroused—is a fearsome Dharma guardian indeed.

“In Rinzai, there is intimacy and face-to-face contact through dokusan,” he is explaining, “and by the time of inka, student and teacher are one. The cell splits, and after that, both can give dokusan. The master is the center of the circle, the student is the circle, becoming smaller and smaller until they become a single point. In Soto, this process takes place in shiho training. There’s a lot of correspondence with koan study, so that if you understand koans, shiho study will be quite straightforward. There are three basic documents to be transmitted, which Dogen was permitted to see in China. In fact, several teachers showed him their Dharma, which is rare; he must have been an exceptionally powerful student. Dogen was very impressed, and set up his own study system, based on these documents, which he used with Ejo, his successor.

“This system has since been strengthened by other teachers. But the need for priests as Soto spread caused a lowering of standards, since priests had to have finished shiho training to qualify. The system deteriorated, and these days only a few Soto teachers try to maintain Dogen’s standard, and only then with a few students. Most Soto priests receive shiho without serious study. It is scarcely more than a form they have to know to go through the motions of Dharma transmission.”

It is impossible to give the seal of realization without being a buddha, and it is impossible to become a buddha without receiving the seal of realization from a buddha. . . . When chrysanthemums inherit from chrysanthemums and a pine gives the seal of realization to a pine, the preceding chrysanthemum is one with the following chrysanthemum, and the preceding pine is one with the following pine. Those who do not understand this, even when they hear the words “correct transmission from buddha to buddha,” have no idea what it means. . . . My late master, abbot of Mt. Tiantong, strictly prohibited students from unjustifiably claiming to have received dharma heritage.15

Being-Time, which had first attracted Tetsugen to Dogen, was set down here at Kosho-ji in 1240. The seventeen fascicles of Shobogenzo composed in 1242 included Unbroken Activity, which was read at the Kyoto residence of Lord Yoshishige Hatano, of Echizen Province, in the remote “Snow Country” to the north and east. Hatano, a samurai attached to the Kyoto headquarters of the Kamakura shogunate, is the man who is thought to have persuaded Dogen to remove himself entirely from the Kyoto region.

Dogen’s growing reputation as a teacher had attracted more students than Kosho-ji could maintain, and had also increased the resentment of the other sects. Although he had shown some of his writings to the emperor Gozaga, Dogen—unlike Eisai—apparently made no political overtures to win those in power over to his side. Toward the end of his stay here at Kosho-ji, he intensified his attack on Rinzai Zen, attributing the ideas that he expressed to his late teacher, “the old buddha,” Tendo Nyojo, whom he described as the greatest master to appear in China “in two or three centuries”—that is, since Zen’s Golden Age in the T’ang dynasty. But far from criticizing Rinzai, Nyojo had followed the lead of Sekito Kisen in belittling sectarian disputes, ignoring the five separate schools of the Zen sect, and the Zen sect itself, for that matter. What he had endorsed was “the Great Way of All Buddhas” and the transmission of the true teaching from Buddha to Buddha. Denying that Zen was (or was not) what Bodhidharma had called “a separate transmission outside the scriptures,” Nyojo observed that the Great Way was not concerned with “inside” or “outside.”

Very likely, Dogen’s fresh resentment of Rinzai was caused by government sponsorship of Tofuku, the new Rinzai monastery in Kyoto, since it was only a few weeks before Tofuku-ji was opened that he would leave the area for good. (Dogen’s criticism of the Rinzai school did not lessen his great admiration for Rinzai himself, whom he praises repeatedly, even favorably compares to the great Soto master Tokusan. “It has been said that the best of the partiarchs were Rinzai and Tokusan, but how can Tokusan be put in the same category as Rinzai? Truly the Zen man Rinzai was without an equal in the whole crowd.”)16

Perhaps his political difficulties interfered with his work on Shobogenzo, or perhaps he realized it was time to heed the instruction of his teacher: “Do not stay in the center of cities or towns. Do not be friendly with kings and state ministers. Dwell in the deep mountains and valleys to realize the true nature of man.” In any case, he accepted Lord Hatano’s invitation to relocate himself in the far north, where Hatano proposed to build him a new temple. Leaving Kosho-ji in the care of his student Gijun, he departed in 1243 for the remote Snow Country on the Sea of Japan. Not long thereafter, Kosho-Horin-ji was destroyed by fire, whether by accident or by ill-wishers is not known.17

 

Emptiness is bound to bloom, like hundreds of grasses blossoming. Although originally having no flower, it now has flowers. It is, as it were, a plum tree that some days ago did not have flowers but blooms when spring arrives. It is the time of flowers, and flowers have arrived. . . .

The flowering of plums and willows happens to plums and willows; that of peaches and damsons to peaches and damsons. The way the flowers of emptiness small>[Kuge, literally “sky-flowers,” the illusory forms of the relative world] open is also like this.

Sky Flowers
—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

FROM the train northward from Kyoto, the gray tiles of the shore villages and the gray waters of Lake Biwa turn a weary shine to the misty light. We wonder if Monk Dogen, on his way to the Snow Country in Echizen province, came this same way along the western shore, under the steep sides of Mount Hiei, which in those days must have been mirrored in a clear blue lake. And Biwa was surely the inspiration of Dogen’s poem, called “On a Portrait of Myself,” in which the poet presents the “original face” of our Buddha-nature:

Cold lake, for thousands of yards, soaks up sky color.
Evening quiet: a fish of brocade scales drifts to the bottom,
then goes this way—that way.
The arrow notch splits:
endless water surface, moonlight, brilliance.1

Behind the old villages, small gardens rise in terraces to the edge of coniferous forest that climbs into the mists on Mount Hiei. Bursts of spring color in the dark corridors between the evergreens are lavender sprays of wild azalea. Toward the north end of the lake, which is forty miles long, the train enters a region of harsh, sudden peaks and inhospitable ravines. Then the land opens out again, descending to the coastal city of Tsuruga. The blue distance is the great Sea of Japan.

Eventually the train comes to Fukui, not far from Dogen’s first habitation in the Snow Country. At a temple called Yoshimine, near the coast, he completed nearly thirty chapters of Shobogenzo in scarcely more than a year. It was at Yoshimine “in three feet of snow” that the remarkable Baika, or “Plum Blossoms,” was first presented as a teisho. The preliminary verse, attributed to Tendo Nyojo, sounds very much like Dogen himself:

Old plum tree bent and gnarled
all at once opens one blossom, two blossoms,
three, four, five blossoms, uncountable blossoms,
not proud of purity,
not proud of fragrance;
falling, becoming spring,
blowing over grass and trees,
balding the head of a patch-robed monk,
whirling, changing into wind, wild rain,
falling, snow, all over the earth.
The old plum tree is boundless.
A hard cold rubs the nostrils.

Because of what Dogen calls zenki (“unbroken or concerted activity” or “total exertion”—the free, spontaneous being of anything at all, which in that moment is the whole expression of the universe), the absolute and relative, the fleeting and the eternal, appear instantaneously, in the blossoms and ancient trunk of the old tree: “When the old plum tree suddenly opens, the world of blossoming flowers arises. At the moment when the world of blossoming flowers arises, spring arrives. There is a single blossom that opens five blossoms. At this moment of a single blossom, there are three, four, and five blossoms—countless blossoms. . . . Blossoming is the old plum tree’s offering. . . .”2

On June 15, 1246, Dogen moved inland to Daibutsu-ji, the new temple built under Mount Kichijo by Lord Hatano. Upon its completion, this temple was renamed Eihei-ji, or Temple of Eternal Peace, which Dogen envisioned as an earthly Buddha paradise. “The mountain landscape was the sound of streams: all is the form and word of Shakyamuni,” he wrote, in one of the poems composed in a wild land of deer and bears. The new monastery was based on monastic specifications laid down in the first years of the ninth century by the Chinese master Hyakujo, who, like Dogen, put great emphasis on physical labor as inseparable from Zen practice: “A day of no work is a day of no eating,” said the venerable Hyakujo, who refused to eat after his monks hid his tools. His ideal monastery was located like this one “in the bosom of mountains and waters.”

Near the end of Basho’s classic Narrow Road to the Deep North, the poet-monk arrives at Eihei-ji: “I thought it . . . a miracle that the Priest Dogen had chosen such a secluded place for the site of the temple.” Today one travels by small electric train, sixteen kilometers inland from Fukui, ascending the valley of the Nine-Headed Dragon River to the steep village that has accumulated over the centuries at Eihei-ji’s gates. Here a wood plaque inscribed with Chinese characters reads, “Only those concerned with the matter of life and death need enter here.” Rebuilt after a fire in the fifteenth century, Eihei-ji today is composed of some seventy buildings, yet this huge place seems overwhelmed by the looming hoary cedars on the mountainside, the rush of water. Dogen wrote,

I won’t even stop at the valley’s brook
For fear that my shadow may flow into the world.

At the guest hall we are given formal tea by Hirano-sensei, guest master of Eihei-ji, a cool, urbane, and handsome priest who had paid a visit to the Zen Center of Los Angeles a few years before, when he was head of a Zen group in Seattle. Subsequently two apprentice monks, or unsui,3 lead us to the baths, then bring a simple supper to our room. Tetsugen is much bemused by the hospitality we have received in this strict place. “Maezumi-roshi must have called ahead from Tokyo,” he has decided. “Roshi is very well regarded here in Japan; you can see that from the treatment we receive wherever we go.”

However, I feel out of place, a gaijin or barbarian of unseemly height, and the only monk in this great monastery whose hair, though short, is not shaved to the skull. When he had joined us at Los Angeles Airport, Maezumi-roshi (who makes an annual trip to Japan on a fund-raising mission for the Zen Center of Los Angeles and on Soto business) had made a sour comment on my hairiness, but he had the tact to leave the final decision to Tetsugen, and Tetsugen—though keenly sensitive, as ever, to his teacher’s disapproval—was confident enough to pass the decision on to me. Having no wish to embarrass my teachers, I told Tetsugen I would shave my head more or less cheerfully if he felt strongly about it, but otherwise would prefer not to. I do not live in a Zen community but am very much out in the world, where my work these days is among American Indian people and commercial fishermen. A shaved head would draw unwelcome attention, making people uneasy and flaunting my “Zen” in a way that I very much dislike. It is also true that self-consciousness and vanity are too much with me.

For American Zen students who choose to become monks, this “being in the world” presents serious, unmonkish problems, which include in my case not only the demands of a large family and the role of money but also my chronic involvement in social causes—the environment and peace movements, the migrant farm workers, the Indians. Activism is not antithetical to Zen practice in Japan since in Zen it is critical to be “who you are” (Suzuki-roshi, among many past and present masters, was a strong pacifist); on the other hand, Eido-roshi used to say that, until one’s Dharma eye is opened, such activities are “the blind leading the blind.”

In America, despite the counterculture reputation that Zen acquired in the “Beat Zen” days, no Zen group formally espouses any cause which sets one group against another, or involves itself in politics or world affairs. Tetsugen has never been an activist, though he hopes to involve ZCNY in social welfare programs in the poor neighborhood of the Zen bakery which, with the help of Richard Baker-roshi and the San Francisco Zen Center, will become the livelihood of our Zen community. For individual students (and some teachers, too), the situation is more troublesome. Robert Aitken-roshi, for example, has been an antiwar activist since the 1960s; Baker-roshi, in recent years, has been active in the antinuclear campaigns. I feel as (I imagine) they do. Since from a Zen point of view, the absolute and the relative are not different, I cannot dwell in the absolute calm of my black cushion and ignore the chaos of the relative world pounding past the zendo doors.

Finally, there is the consequential matter of my “literary endeavors” of nearly forty years, which place me at once in the most hopeless category of Zen student, according to the Rinzai master Muso Soseki (1275–1351): Muso names three grades of disciples, then concludes, “Those who befuddle their minds in non-Buddhist works and devote their efforts to literary endeavors are nothing but shaven-headed laymen and are not fit to be classed even with those of the lowest grade.”

Presumably Master Muso railed at dilettantes, not true poets—though the work of both is an expression of their Buddha nature. Since the ground of Zen is life itself, neither murderers nor poets are excluded.

Eihei Dogen Zenji is so named because of his identification with this monastery, which even today maintains the strictest discipline in the Soto sect. “Undefiled practice,” Maezumi-roshi says, “is the very spirit of Shobogenzo,” and this practice is manifest at Eihei-ji. At 3:00 A.M. a monk is tapping on our screens, and we are scarcely in our robes when Hirano-sensei’s jisha comes to lead us up the mountain, through old, dank passages to the old halls. No outsiders are permitted into the zendo. Here the novice monks sleep, eat, and do zazen on the single tatami mat, six feet by three, which serves as their home during years of arduous training. We are shown to a raised platform along the corridor outside the zendo hall.

In the darkness, deep in the April mountains, it is very cold. A bell awakens the unsui, and there comes a hushed stir as the monks clamber about, folding their bed rolls into the lockers on the tatami platforms. Within ten minutes they are dressed and seated in zazen, and soon the monitor is making his rounds with the narrow-bladed stick that represents Manjusri’s delusion-cutting sword. The old timbers echo the monotonous whack-whack on each pair of shoulders. The somber priest does not spare the gaijin—whack!—the pain rings in my ears. Then he is gone, and each black-robed figure sits alone in the cold gloom of the old brown hall with what Maezumi-roshi calls “the Real One inside ourselves.”

At the end of zazen, while still seated, we put on the toga-like Buddha’s robe, or kesa, and also white bessu on our bare feet, after which we climb the steps to the main service hall. Waiting for service to begin, we stand outside on a platform overlooking the monastery below. Dawn is coming, and still it is very cold. The gray-tiled roofs are dim in the night’s shadow, but the climbing sky high overhead, behind evergreen turrets on the ravine walls, is turning pale, and already a solitary bird sings in the forest.

“It’s not just a deep respect I have for Dogen,” whispers Tetsugen, who has scarcely stopped talking about Dogen during our stay here. “More than that, I feel an affinity with him. His universality affects me strongly, the feeling and thinking behind his conviction of the single Dharma, the everything-as-it-is-now, not in a superficial sense but as the true expression of the Dharma or Law in every instant, every object, every phenomenon of mind and matter.

“For Dogen, the Zen of our everyday life, moment after moment, is truly the way of enlightenment. His teachings hammer that idea over and over, and at the same time, his practice manifests it so sincerely that it serves others as a model. Dogen’s great contribution—and his own life was an example—was the perception that daily practice and enlightenment are one. That’s why his system here at Eihei-ji became so ritualized—so that his whole life and being could become a model for what our life should be. Part of Dogen’s plan in ritualizing Eihei-ji—and Japanese Soto derives from his ideas—was the emphasis he put on everyday life, on work and personal conduct, as opposed to koan study, teisho, and dokusan. So many teachers say ‘All is the Dharma,’ but I don’t feel that they truly mean it, or live their lives that way.

“The one way to be truly universal is to be very particular, moment by moment, detail by detail. If you are merely ‘universal,’ you lose the feel of life, you become abstract, facile. All is the Dharma, everything is enlightenment! Or everything is okay!—according to Beat Zen, which lacked that vital particularity. But if the emphasis on everyday detail is too rigid, our existence loses the religious power of the universal. To walk with one foot in each world—that was Dogen’s way, and Dogen’s life. In a single sentence, he talked from both points of view, the absolute and the relative, the universal and the particular. He was not only living in both, he was switching so fast between the two that he was in neither! He was entirely free! And this is wonderful, just as it should be! Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Relative is absolute, absolute is relative. But all of reality is in the is—the now of this very moment! Generally we favor one realm over the other, but our real existence is that ‘is.’”

In the great hall we take our place in rows of gold-robed priests and black-robed monks. The chanting and invocations of the morning service last almost two hours, most of it kneeling, sitting on our heels. For one unbroken stretch of nearly an hour we maintain this position, which the Japanese use all their lives but which for most Westerners is painful quickly. (American students never last long at Eihei-ji, which has small tolerance for lack of fortitude. For years, this place refused to accept Americans, who were not worth the bother of having to deal with their complaints.) The long service is choreographed against the golden altar, the cascades of small golden bells, the scarlet carpeting on the tatami mats. The pageantry, the bells, the pound of voices to the ancient drums is stirring, and we, too, chant those parts of the service that, in our training, we have memorized in Japanese: the Heart Sutra (the essence or “heart” of the great Prajna Paramita literature of Mahayana Buddhism); the Sandokai (Identity of Relative and Absolute, attributed to the Chinese ancestor of Soto, Sekito Kisen); the Names of the Patriarchs; the Daihishin Dharani, paying homage to Avalokitesh-vara Bodhisattva. Toward the end, an old priest beckons us, and I follow Tetsugen to the main altar, where we make our bows and offer incense.

After morning service, we go to a rock outcrop above the lower buildings where Dogen Kigen is said to have performed outdoor zazen. Even in bright morning sun, the power of the place is not dispelled. Most monasteries are located at the base of mountains, but here the old buildings sit in a compact mass in the deep V made by the mountainsides, high up in the valley of the Nine-Headed Dragon River. Because its buildings are necessarily close together, the old monastery has great force, for as Dogen teaches us, Eihei-ji itself is doing zazen, hurling its power down the canyon and out into the world on every toll of the old mountain bell. This is the bell that each new monk must sound upon arrival, requesting to be let in (“What do you want here!” they bellow at him, in the first test of his resolve). From that day forward, the unsui run barefoot from duty to duty and from job to job. (“A monk is like the clouds and has no fixed abode; like flowing water he has nothing to depend on.”)4 In black work denims, white cloths wrapped around their naked heads, squads of grim youths attack the ceaseless cleaning of the stairs and corridors, stopping short to bow almost to the waist to the lowliest priest, then resuming their arduous and redundant work, performed barefoot even in the winter.

Tetsugen resists the “military” practice at Eihei-ji, which he feels is ill-suited to American Zen. The stem atmosphere is reinforced by the monastery’s oppressive location in a dark mountain ravine in the northern Snow Country. In winter the snow here is so deep that even from the downhill side, says Hirano’s jisha, one can walk from the ground up to the roofs, and the enclosed corridors between the buildings are dark all day because of the drifts piled high above the windows.

It seems appropriate that in the Buddha Hall, above the altar, a wood frieze illustrates the legend in which Monk Jinko, standing all night in the snow, cuts off his arm to prove his zeal to Bodhidharma, who appears as a cowled figure in zazen, facing the wall. The famous koan based on this episode—the forty-first in the Gateless Gate collection—is the one I happen to be working with this very day. Tradition relates that the only text permitted his students by Bodhidharma was the mighty Lanka-vatara Sutra (“Things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise. . . . Deeds exist, but no doer can be found”), which later became the main document of the Kegon (Hua Yen) sect of Buddhism, and was given to Jinko when he received Dharma transmission. Dogen wrote:

Snowdrifts like those at Shorin, in the old days.
Whole sky, whole earth, whole spring—new.
Inheriting the robe, attaining the marrow—
To join the ancestors
Who would spare himself standing in snow through the night?

Tetsugen feels that because Bodhidharma was so old when he came to China, he had no time to found a monastery or school. He was fierce and severe in order to maintain high standards and attract strong students like this Jinko, who felt obliged to cut off his arm to attract the old man’s notice. Traditionally, Bodhidharma found just four successors, among whom Jinko was the best. (You have my skin, my flesh, my bones, he tells the other three who grasp his teaching, in a famous story; to Jinko he says, You have my marrow—though in saying this, he does not mean that marrow is “superior” to skin.) And all this time, so it is said, two rival teachers were trying to murder the Blue-Eyed Monk with poison so powerful that it burned his teeth out—hence the broken-toothed look in certain portraits. By the time of the sixth attempt upon his life, he had already chosen Jinko as his successor and, being tired, decided to go along with his own assassination, dying in good zazen posture about A.D. 536. Jinko (known later as Taiso Eka, the Second Patriarch) was also persecuted, but he, too, transmitted the Dharma before being killed for his unorthodox Zen teachings.

As the sun peers down over the east wall of the ravine, lighting silver fires in the stream above the monastery, two wagtails teeter on river stones of shining black, stuck with pink blossoms, and a dipper flutters on the water sparkle, rounding a bend. This is the stream referred to in a story5 used for teaching at Eihei-ji in which a young monk who tossed unused water onto the stream bank was chastised by Dogen. The stream water had inochi, or “life integrity,” as stream water and should therefore have been returned into the stream with gratitude and as little waste as possible (in the same way that an American Indian who is still in touch with Indian way will return even a pebble to its own place).

“As more and more of Dogen’s work becomes available in English,” my teacher is saying, “we can really appreciate his thinking, such as his notion of what one critic6 refers to as ‘cosmic resonance.’ In effect, this is the Kegon concept of Indra’s net—the One Body, which is very important to grasp. ‘Cosmic resonance’ is what Dogen called the oneness of the universal; when I am enlightened, at that moment the mountains and rivers are enlightened, and vice versa. Shakyamuni said it first: ‘Alone above and below heaven, I am the honored one.’ Dogen brought this idea into practical use: as I practice, everything is practicing. To realize this invests each moment of our life with great significance. This moment is not just for ‘us,’ just for right now, but for all space and time. When we really perceive that, we can feel the trees and rocks doing their enlightened practice.”

And the wagtails, too, think I, watching the birds. But it is difficult to interest Tetsugen in wagtails, short of pointing them out as expressions of the One.

At the graveyard, in dappled April light, we pay our respects to Dogen Zenji’s memorial stone, a rough, plain rock sheltered by a small hut from the weather. Soon two unsui come with an offering of fresh yellow flowers.7 For more than seven hundred years here at Eihei-ji, Priest Dogen’s recommendations for zazen (Fukan-zazen-gi) have been chanted every evening as an inspiration to the monks, and only those priests who have had shiho, or Dharma transmission, are permitted to rise at 2:00 A.M. each morning to wash the calm features of Dogen’s face on the statue in the Founder’s Hall. In their gold kesas, they offer this buddha green tea and dried plums, as well as kaya nuts from the surrounding forest.

All my life false and real, right and wrong tangled.
Playing with the moon, ridiculing the wind, listening to the birds . . .
Many years wasted seeing the mountain covered with snow.
This winter I suddenly realize snow makes a mountain.

In another poem of this period, Dogen would speak of the “shining forth, true Buddhism all over the world.” But the great labor of establishing Eihei-ji interfered with his progress on Shobogenzo, and scarcely eight chapters were completed after his arrival on the Nine-Headed Dragon River.

In 1247, in what seems to have been a belated attempt to justify his new school to the authorities, Dogen accepted the invitation of Tokiyori Hojo, the new regent at Kamakura, to teach in the military capital. The invitation testifies to his prestige as a teacher, since there was no “Soto school” as yet and since Rinzai was very strong in Kamakura. Before leaving that city seven months later, Dogen conferred the Buddhist precepts on Tokiyori, who was a sincere practitioner.8 Dogen also presented ten small poems to a lady of the court, including “Original Face” (from the classic koan “What was your face before your parents were born?”).

Spring flowers.
Summer cuckoos.
Autumn moon.
Winter snow.
Cool. Serene.

Dogen returned to the Snow Country in March of the year 1248; he was not to leave Eihei-ji again until the last month of his life. In 1249 he composed a poem to accompany his best-known likeness, “Portrait of Dogen Viewing the Moon”:

Fresh, clear spirit covers the old mountain man this autumn.
A donkey stares at the sky ceiling; glowing white moon floats. . . .
Buoyant, I let myself go, filled with gruel, filled with rice.
Lively flapping from head to tail.
Sky above, sky beneath, cloud self, water origin.

In 1250, Dogen Zenji was finally prevailed upon to accept an honorary purple kesa from the emperor Gosaga in Kyoto, but like Tendo Nyojo (who had inherited a brocade robe from his own teacher), he refused to wear a garment which signified pursuit of fame and profit: “If an old monk here wore a purple kesa, he would be laughed at by monkeys and cranes.”

Dogen fell ill in 1252, apparently of some ailment of the heart, and the following January he wrote The Eight Aspects of the Enlightened One, in which he explicates the Buddha’s last words to his disciples. This was the ninety-fifth and final fascicle of Shobogenzo (“Unfortunately,” as Koun Ejo comments, “we cannot see a one-hundred-chapter version [which Dogen had intended]. This is a matter of deep regret.”)

To the end, Dogen Kigen returned to the theme of mujo, the transience of existence, evoked by the eternal wind, the eternal moon:

On a grass leaf, awaiting the morning sun
The dew is melting.
Do not stir the field so soon, wind of autumn!

To what may this world be likened?
Moonlight in a dewdrop
Falling from a duck’s beak.9

By midsummer, seriously ailing, Dogen was persuaded by Lord Hatano to travel to Kyoto to seek medical advice. Before leaving, he appointed Koun Ejo as the next abbot of Eihei-ji and presented him with a robe of his own making. Ejo escorted him to Kyoto. On the 15th of August,10 under the full moon he had used so often as the symbol of the awakened state (“the moon abiding in the midst of serene mind”),11 he wrote his final verse:

Even when I hope to see it again in autumn,
How, this evening,
Can I sleep with such a moon?

Tradition has it that Dogen died on August 28, 1253, at Seido-in or Sonen-in, a temple now vanished from the Takatsuji District, but Hirano-sensei tells us that he died at the house of his student Kakunen, located somewhere near the edge of what is now Maruyama Park.

 

The forming of mountains, rivers, and the earth is all dependent on the Buddha-nature. It being thus, seeing mountains and rivers is seeing the Buddha-nature. Seeing the Buddha-nature is seeing a donkey’s jowls or a horse’s mouth. . . .

The very impermanence of grass and tree, thicket and forest, is the Buddha-nature. The very impermanence of men and things, body and mind, is the Buddha-nature. Nations and lands, mountains and rivers are impermanent because they are the Buddha-nature. Supreme and complete enlightenment, because it is the Buddha-nature, is impermanent. . . .

Our present moment-to-moment activity is the opening of a gate. . . . Completely utilizing life, we cannot be held back by life. Completely utilizing death, we cannot be bothered by death. Do not cherish life. Do not blindly dread death. They are where the Buddha-nature is.

For infinite kalpas in the past, foolish people in great number have regarded man’s spiritual consciousness as Buddha-nature, or as man’s original state of suchness—how laughably absurd! . . . Buddha-nature is a fence, a wall, a tile, a pebble.

Buddha-Nature
—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

EIHEI DOGEN, as he became known, had developed a religion that drew its energies from his own insights and devotion, rather than from thin-blooded imitations of Chinese tradition that had characterized Japanese Buddhism before this time. Nonetheless, it remained too “Chinese” in character to win wide acceptance from the common people. Koun Ejo, Dogen’s loyal successor as abbot of Eihei-ji, did his best to record and maintain his teacher’s words in his Shobogenzo Zuimonki, and the third abbot, Tetsu Gikai, encouraged the dissemination of the teachings, which in the early years after Dogen’s death were little known beyond Eihei-ji.

Like Ejo, Gikai had come with their teacher from Fukakusa and Kosho-ji, where he had awakened upon hearing Dogen say, “This [absolute] truth abides in the world of objective reality. . . . In the spring, the hundred flowers are red; doves are crying in the willows.”1 Gikai founded a Zen monastery at Daijo-ji, a spare, beautiful temple on a wooded rise overlooking Kanazawa on the northern coast, which is the birthplace of D. T. Suzuki. On the afternoon of our visit, a hard sea light on the pines in Daijo-ji’s inner garden was softened by the mist of cherry blossoms, the sad warmth of weathered wood. A solitary monk weeding the mosses, who did not look up or greet the only visitors, reminded me of that old head monk tending Myozen’s grave at Kennin-ji, and also the old monk raking leaves (described at sesshin years ago by Eido-roshi), who embodied profound realization without ever having experienced a kensho.

In feudal times, Kanazawa was already a wealthy city, and remnants of the great castle of the Maeda clan still stand. Kenroko-en, a miniature landscape of streams and ponds, bridges and paths, stone lanterns, and flowering trees, required two centuries to put together, and is now regarded as one of the finest gardens in the nation. On our travels in Japan, songbirds have been few in species as well as numbers, and so I was pleased, in late afternoon, to encounter in Kenroko-en a small party of Eurasian tits or “chickadees,” three different species, gleaning new bugs from the old handcrafted trees.

Soto priests say that if Dogen is the father of Japanese Soto Zen, Keizan Jokin (1268–1325) is its mother. Like Gikai (who once struck him in the mouth as he struggled to answer the koan question “Can you show me ordinary mind?”), Keizan founded a temple (Yoko-ji) which has survived in Kanazawa. Then, in 1321, he became abbot of another temple far out on the remote Noto Peninsula to the north and east. This temple, which he renamed Soji-ji, is the one associated with the spread of Soto Zen. Like Dogen himself, Keizan had studied with an accomplished Rinzai master, and this master’s successor, in his turn, came to study with Keizan in Kanazawa. A decade later, the same monk turned up at Soji-ji with ten Dharma questions from the emperor Godaigo, who was apparently so delighted by Keizan’s answers that he made Soji-ji an imperially approved temple and presented its abbot with a purple robe. At the end of his life, according to one ancient account, Keizan “wandered around with a broken rainhat and a skinny cane, meeting people wherever he went, and crowds of people submitted to him.”2

In his efforts to adapt Dogen’s “Chinese” teachings to the Japanese people, Keizan and his successors felt obliged to give these teachings a name. Like Tendo Nyojo, Dogen had put much more emphasis on the way of everyday enlightenment then on the Zen sect and its various schools, but his successors, attempting to claim him by setting his teachings apart, established a Japanese Soto school, naming Dogen and Keizan its cofounders. Dogen would surely have abominated the proselytizing of his teachings, not to speak of the defiling of the Dharma in the esoteric prayers and tantric incantations adapted from Shingon by his followers to broaden Soto’s appeal. Yet but for Keizan and other missionaries, Japanese Soto and Dogen’s teachings might never have endured to the present day.

“Dogen’s ritualizing of Zen practice at Eihei-ji ran the same risk as systematizing koan study,” Tetsugen says. “The life can go out of the ritual, and merely the structure is left. Yet the structure is very important. In Judaism there were brilliant mystics but no structure to their teachings, and Judaic mysticism died away. A similar thing happened to the Gnostics, who also refused structure. On the other hand, the Christian churches have retained their structure while losing most of their vitality. It is necessary to maintain a balance between structure and creativity; both are needed. In Soto, Dogen was the germinal seed, but without the structure established by Keizan, Soto might not exist today.

“I see it as an endless, intertwining dualism, in which one element seeks to maintain its structure and the other tries to keep it from petrifying; if either fails, the whole will die. This is why it is so crucial to maintain the lineage, perpetuate the teaching, knowing that a Dogen will appear once in a while to bring new life.”

At the time of Dogen’s death, the Buddhist hierarchy at Nara and Kyoto was still trying to suppress Zen teachings, all the more so because of Zen’s refusal to extend any special privilege to its own priesthood, far less the aristocracy. The abbots worked in the gardens and kitchens with the monks, and the head cook, or tenzo, was usually the second-ranking figure in the monastery. In addition, Soto dared to state that the Buddha’s true teachings could be transmitted to illiterate peasants without benefit of incense, ceremonies, or sutras, far less the priestly hocus-pocus by which the older sects had ensured their power.

The popular rejection of the Buddhism of the aristocrats coincided with the rise of the military government in Kamakura. The new warrior class, intent on an alternative to the Heian court, was attracted by Zen’s spare, self-reliant style, its lack of interest in fame and worldly affairs, its avoidance of esoteric doctrine and abstruse study, and its ethical precepts, which were an implicit rejection of the corruption of the older Buddhist schools. It was also drawn to Zen’s philosophic attitude toward life and death, which had a strong influence on the development of the samurai warrior class and the stoic code of bushido, “way of the warrior.”

The struggle between popular and esoteric Buddhism was intensified by the emergence of the Hokke or Lotus sect under a reformer with violent political views. Like Eisai and Dogen before him, Nichiren (1222–1282) had studied with the Tendai priests at Enryaku-ji and later denounced the court-corrupted doctrine; while he was at it, he attacked the Nara schools, the meditational approach of Zen, and the simplistic nembutsu (“Take shelter in Amida Buddha”) chanting of Jodo, for which he substituted the equally simplistic Namu-myoho-renge-kyo, “Take shelter in the Lotus Sutra.” Nichiren’s dire predictions about the future of a nation contaminated by false teachings were borne out in 1257–58, when Japan was racked by floods and earthquakes, famine, plague, and crime. From Kamakura, to which he would retreat in 1260 like Eisai before him (Dogen had retreated to the Snow Country), he denounced Zen as “a doctrine of fiends and devils” and all the other schools as even worse.

In this troubled period, China’s Kublai Khan wished to subjugate the Land of Wa. When the Great Khan’s envoys were executed by the Kamakura government in 1275, Nichiren commented, “It is a great pity that they should have to cut off the heads of the innocent Mongols and left unharmed the priests of Jodo, Shingon, Zen, and Ritsu who are the enemies of Japan.” (This view was not so wrong-headed as it appears. The previous year, while the Kamakura government was trying to organize resistance to a Mongol invasion, armed monks were busy rioting in Kyoto to advance the fortunes of Tofuku-ji; in Nara, just prior to a second Mongol invasion a few years later, similar riots were encouraged by Enryaku-ji.) But when the Mongol fleet was destroyed by storm, credit was given, not to Nichiren, but to the ancient Shinto gods and goddesses, and Nichiren, thwarted in his aim to make his Lotus sect the national religion, retired to a mountain hermitage, where he soon died. An inspired and courageous reformer, he is commemorated in the name of his sect (Nichiren Buddhism) and remains a great figure in the history of Japan.

The Tendai sect, still very strong, had been the main enemy of Nichiren, and in 1537, in a great battle in Kyoto, all of the Lotus sect temples were burned down. Nichiren never recovered its former energy, and Tendai itself began to waver. Today this sect has little influence beyond the confines of its own great temples. Jodo and Zen Buddhism became dominant, together with Shinto, which was faithfully credited with foiling the natural calamities, anarchy, and widespread wars that continued to threaten the old order of the nation. But already the Zen schools had begun a long decline that would continue for three hundred years.

With the death of the regent Tokimune, the Kamakura government began to weaken, having drawn too close to the aesthetic attractions of the Heian court, and in 1333 it was overthrown by Emperor Daijo II, abetted by some disgruntled Minamotos. One Minamoto clan, the Ashikaga, promptly deposed their imperial ally in favor of a Minamoto lineage, which was consolidated after a half century of struggle known as the Age of the North and South Dynasties (1336–1392). The government was returned to Kyoto, “the Capital,” where a new court was established by the Ashikaga shoguns in the city district which gave the name “Muromachi period” to the next two centures of Japanese history. The Ashikaga shoguns and the imperial court were strong sponsors of Rinzai Zen, which had established five “mountains” or main temples in Kyoto. The cultured priests spent less time in zazen then in composing stilted Chinese verse, but they were useful as arbiters of taste and in diplomatic relations with the mainland nations.

Although none became true Zen practitioners, the Ashikagas interested themselves in poetry and painting, upon which Zen—unlike the other Buddhist schools—would have an influence “so subtle and pervading that it has become the essence of Japan’s finest culture.”3 While Dogen’s teachings strengthened the development of the strong identity with nature that lies at the heart of Japanese sensibilities, the superb brush painting and calligraphy, tea ceremony and flower arrangement, stone gardens, Noh theater, haiku poetry—all of them made more exquisite by artistic ideas and artifacts from China—were brought to their present eminence by Rinzai Zen. If Master Eisai introduced green tea, Daio Kokushi introduced tea ceremony, which was later taught by Master Ikkyu, developed by his disciple Shuko, and perfected by Sen no Rikyu, who became the most celebrated tea master in Japan. As D. T. Suzuki has made clear, Zen is “so adaptable to the character of the Japanese people, especially in its moral and aesthetic aspects, that it has penetrated far more widely and deeply into Japanese life than into Chinese.”4

Without question, the infusion of Zen principles into the arts produced an extraordinary flowering of Japanese culture, but the effect of the Zen arts on Zen itself was less beneficial. Many if not most of the monks and priests were primarily painters and calligraphers, tea masters and poets, and very often all of these at once. Daito Kokushi (perhaps inspired by the appearance of the Mumon-kan, or Gateless Gate, in 1228) had assembled his own koan collection, but in the next century koan study became mere literary analysis of heretofore secret confrontations in the dokusan room. As for zazen, it was scarcely mentioned, and the Rinzai teachers who are best remembered from the next three centuries were all “heretics” in their unconventional attempts to return to zazen and the true spirit of the Dharma.

The first of these was the poet-calligrapher Jakushitsu (d. 1367), who wrote wistfully of the “intimate” Buddha-nature all around us, if only our eye would open and we could see:

Didn’t I tell you it was there?
You could have found it without any trouble.
The south wind is warm, the sun shines peacefully. . . .

Another was Ikkyu (d. 1481), bastard son of the emperor, pauper, poet, twice-failed suicide, and Zen master, enlightened at last by the harsh call of a crow. At eighty-one Ikkyu became the iconoclastic abbot of Daitoku-ji. (“For fifty years I was a man wearing straw raincoat and umbrella-hat; I feel grief and shame now at this purple robe.”) His “mad” behavior was perhaps his way of disrupting the corrupt and feeble Zen he saw around him: “An insane man of mad temper raises a mad air,” he wrote.5 He also said, “Having no destination, I am never lost.” One infatuated scholar6 has called him “the most remarkable monk in the history of Japanese Buddhism, the only Japanese comparable to the great Chinese Zen masters, for example, Joshu, Rinzai, and Unmon.” Ikkyu found no one he could approve as his Dharma successor. Before his death, civil disorders caused the near obliteration of Kyoto, forcing Rinzai Zen to follow Soto from the decadent capital city into the countryside.

For three centuries after Dogen’s death, the Rinzai school would continue to construct large temples in Kyoto and Kamakura, but eventually its power was rivaled by Soto, which had achieved a broad expansion in the north and west. Keizan’s successors had carried on Dogen’s tradition of avoiding institutionalized Zen in favor of seeking seclusion in the mountains and offering the Way to the common man. Dogen’s symbolic identification of “mountains, rivers, and the great earth” with Buddha-nature suited the animistic ideas of the local people and the traditional mountain religion called Shugendo. More important, it exposed his countrymen to the idea that awareness of the inochi, or life spirit, in everything-just-as-it-is was crucial to a religious sense of our existence through which the beauty of “mountain, rivers, and great earth” might be revealed. Not that Dogen’s respect for all things in nature was animistic, far less pantheistic reverence or nature mysticism; it was clear-eyed homage to the absolute identity of each phenomenon, from dust mote to mountain, from sky-flower to dream.

In the middle of the sixteenth century, the first traders from Europe had reached Kyoto, already a city of 96,000 houses or a half-million people. As usual, the Christian missionaries were hard behind. Spanish Jesuits, arriving in 1549, exploited the unsophisticated nation’s desire for European manufactures and manipulated the opinion of the shogunate not only against other Europeans but against Buddhism, all sects of which were attacked and suppressed in 1571. By the end of the century, Buddhism had lost almost all its political power and prestige in the capital city. But in 1612, Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa shogun, prohibited the practice of Christianity, which in a few short decades had converted some 300,000 impressionable Japanese. Ieyasu had already removed his government to Edo, a small settlement at the head of Edo Bay that was protected by the swampy terrain behind it, and with the consolidation of his power, based on sworn fealty from local overlords and their samurai, the political status of Buddhism was restored. (This tumultuous period is a popular subject of Japanese theatre and films, especially the story of the ritual suicide of young Lord Asano and the forty-seven ronin in 1702, which was the basis for the great Kurosawa film, Chushingura.)

Nevertheless, Zen had become a decrepit teaching. In 1620, while still vigorous, Zen master Takuan, poet, painter and calligrapher, master of swordsmanship, tea, and ikebana (and the inventor of the sour “takuan pickle”), retired from his position as fifty-fourth abbot of Daitoku-ji rather than “flatter people for the love of wealth, sell Buddhism for a living, and drag the teachings of the patriarchs down into the mud.”7

During the feudal Tokugawa period, the Zen schools were able to reconsolidate and spread their influence. Dogen’s original monastery at Kosho-Horin-ji was rebuilt and the Obaku Zen School founded by Ingen Ryuku (1592–1673) was established a short distance to the north down the Uji River. An anti-Christian persecution culminated in a general massacre in 1638; two years later some Portuguese trade envoys were beheaded. For the next two centuries the Tokugawa shoguns would carry out a national policy which excluded foreign influences almost entirely.

From Kanazawa northeastward to the Noto Peninsula, the local train crosses a plain of rice fields among humble mountains. The paddies in wet browns and greens are set off by lone white egrets, like sentinels. Spring comes late to this northern land, and the rice is in several stages of seasonal cycle: a cracked winter earth of withered stalks is side by side with dark rectangles of froggy water and patches of intense fresh green. In this old landscape of Japan, the rice fields are harrowed by small motor plows, then worked by hand and heavy mattock before flooding. The elder peasants in the fields wear old-fashioned wide conical straw hats—the oldest women wear white bonnets—while the younger men, who operate the small red plows, prefer white overalls and Western tractor caps. What is noticeable in Japanese farm country on this main island of Honshu is the near absence of livestock—cows, horses, sheep, pigs, goats, and even chickens—as well as a seeming scarcity of dogs and cats.

From the town of Nanao, on Noto Bay, the train follows around the shore through a series of small fishing towns stuck to the coast between the hills and sea. Small rice fields abut the sea walls, even the beaches, and one paddy, scarcely twenty feet across, is pinched between the railroad tracks and a row of pines along the cliff, above blue water. To the northeast is the open sea, but a circle of faraway islands protects the calm waters of Noto Bay, where fields of stakes are sign of extensive aquaculture in kelp (nori) and oysters. The kelp and oyster beds are tended by small boats, while solitary old women of another epoch, bent by big baskets, up to their hips in water, forage for shellfish in the tidal rocks. Far out on the bay, a small, still boat on the silver sea, against the islands, evokes that immemorial solitude that has always drawn the painters and poets of the East.

Waves recede.
Not even the wind ties up a small abandoned boat.
The moon is a clear mark of midnight.

Once again, the ephemeral and the universal: Dogen called this poem “On the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye” as if to point out that these simple lines conveyed the whole import of his mighty work.

Small flocks of sandpipers on their way to Kamchatka and the Siberian tundra cross back and forth over the gleaming fields, and a Japanese pheasant flutters across a ditch, cocks its head in the spring sun, then sneaks into a thin margin of weeds. A man planting his new field casts grain from side to side as he wades the shallows in bright yellow boots, and the quick seeds, wrinkling the bland surface like puffs of wind, startle a band of Siberian buntings; the birds flit away along the grassy strips between rectangles of water. But there is no wind, and as soon as man has gone, the rice paddy mirrors a fair-weather white cloud reflected on the earth between sea and mountain.

The local train stops at Anamizu on the bay, from where a small bus huffs uphill over the dry wooded ridge of the Noto Peninsula and wheezes down again on noisy air brakes to the valley of the Haka River. Here at the base of a small mountain stands the monastery that Keizan founded in 1321, the last year of his life. Since then the village of Monzen has grown up around it, while the Haka delta was transformed into broad rice fields. The old monastery, an airy and open place around a long court at the base of the hill, was rebuilt after the most recent fire in the late 1800s. It has been called So-in Soji-ji or “Old Soji-ji”8 since 1907, when Soji-ji was officially moved to its present location in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, as one of the two head temples of the Soto sect.

At So-in Soji-ji the abbot was away, but his assistant and the ten-odd monks who take care of the old monastery were friendly and hospitable, offering green tea and nori crackers in a guest chamber that overlooked an enclosed garden of ilex and small pines. At Eihei-ji there had been no contact with any unsui except those who served us, but here we slurped thin Japanese noodles in exuberant Japanese style at the monks’ table and took the morning meal with them after zazen and sutra-chanting service the next day.

That afternoon we walked down the valley of the Haka to the sea. Gulls, terns, herons, and an osprey had convened around the calm waters of an estuary pool behind the beach, and a pretty fishing village sat perched at the river’s mouth, but the beach was disfigured by the wrack of plastic and industrial flotsam which even on this remote coast, so far from cities, is left stranded on the sand after each tide. The eager materialism of a small and crowded country has deprived the Haka delta of its “life integrity” as an ocean shore, and yet—from a Zen point of view—the ocean coast has always been here, no more altered by such fleeting phenomena as man and plastic than this ocean sky by the atomic clouds from Hiroshima.

Behind the monastery a steep path climbs the hill to numerous bodhisattva shrines, like Stations of the Cross. In quest of solitude, I followed a narrowing path high up the mountain, pursuing the lovely song of an unknown bird. A sea wind thrashed the points of the great cedars, but the forest floor was quiet, and in high fields along the path were not quite familiar spring flowers—buttercups, mints, violets, cinquefoil, and mustard, Eurasian species not the same yet scarcely different from closely related forms in the New World genera. The trees looked vaguely familiar, too, and of course they were, as Palearctic kin of the trees of home. I saw buntings and a thrush and yellow grosbeaks, but was unable to locate the mysterious bird.

 

Being unstained is like meeting a person and not considering what he looks like. Also it is like not wishing for more color or brightness when viewing the flowers or moon. Spring has the tone of spring, and autumn has the scene of autumn; there is no escaping it. So when you want spring or autumn to be different from what it is, notice that it can only be as it is. Or when you want to keep spring or autumn as it is, reflect that it has no unchanging nature. . . .

Only Buddhas to Buddhas
—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

IN a well-loved story of Japan, a beautiful young girl who would not tell her angry parents who had made her pregnant finally pointed at an old and revered Zen master, who until now had been praised for his pure life. Accused by the parents, all the old man said was, “Is that so?” When the child was born, he accepted it into his house and took good care of it, unconcerned about his loss of reputation. Not until a year had passed did the remorseful girl admit to her parents that the good old man was entirely innocent, that the real father was a young man in the fish market. The embarrassed parents rushed to fetch the child, apologizing to the old master and begging his forgiveness for the great wrong that they had done. “Is that so?” was all the old man said.1

This story is one of many about Hakuin Ekaku, born in 1686 at Hara village under Mount Fuji, on the old Tokaido high road between Kyoto and the Tokugawa stronghold known as Edo. Like Dogen, nearly five centures before, Hakuin had hurled his life into the practice of Zen in the fierce tradition of the great masters and restored respect to the Zen schools, which had been weakened by long centuries of decline. Concentrating on Mu, this monk once went into deep samadhi on a boat in hurricane, while others vomited and cried out to high heaven. Afterward he was chastised by the boatman: “In all my long life, I have never come across such a rascal as you!” Hakuin experienced a number of profound awakenings, the first of which was brought about by the chirping of a cricket. (“The cricket is just a cricket and the bird is just a bird—nothing else!” Soen-roshi says. “All the cricket does is chirping. Our great master Hakuin was very grateful to the cricket.”)

Inspired by the Soto example, Hakuin emphasized work in the fields and kitchens, and did much to revitalize Rinzai Zen by making it more accessible to the common people. He also recommended to his students the study of the Jewelled-Mirror Samadhi, “that supreme treasure of the Mahayana,” even though the teachers who had developed it, from Sekito Kisen to Tozan Ryokai, had been patriarchs of the rival school: “For the past eight or nine years or more, I have been trying to incite all of you who boil your daily gruel over the same fire with me to study this great matter thoroughly, but more often than not you have taken it to be the doctrine of another house and remained indifferent to it.” Hakuin went on to explicate Dogen Zenji, which Dogen’s own Soto priests were unable to do: “Eihei [Dogen] has said, ‘The experiencing of the manifold dharmas through using one’s self is delusion; the experiencing of one’s self through the coming of the manifold dharmas is satori.’ This is just what I have been saying. This is the state of ‘mind and body discarded, discarded mind and body.’ It is like two mirrors mutually reflecting one another without even the shadow of an image between. Mind and the objects of mind are the same thing; things and oneself are not two. A white horse enters the reed flowers . . . snow is piled up in a silver bowl. This is what is known as the Jewelled-Mirror Samadhi.”2

In his Song of Zazen, Hakuin wrote:
Not knowing how near the Truth is
We seek it far away—what a pity! . . .
We are like him who, in the midst of water,
Cries out in thirst so imploringly.
We are like the son of a rich man
Who wanders away among the poor. . . .
At this moment what more need we seek?

As the Truth eternally reveals itself,
This very place is the Lotus Land of purity,
This very body is the Body of the Buddha.3

In 1760, Hakuin founded Ryutaku-ji, the Dragon-Swamp Temple, a few miles east of his own temple of Sho-in, at Hara. He was already one of the great painters and calligraphers of his time (his are the best-known portraits of Bodhidharma), but his foremost accomplishment was the renewal of koan study, which in both Rinzai and Soto had declined to dead “formula” teaching that certified indifferent monks for the Zen priesthood. (“The ancestor’s garden has become desolate, and the teaching is trampled down.”)4 In Hakuin’s view, kensho or satori was of primary importance, and his students were given the koan Mu and also One Hand, a now-classic koan of his own invention (“I have asked everyone to listen to the sound of one hand”).5 These mighty koans, leaving no room for intellectual maneuver, brought the sincere student straight up against the iron wall. Hundreds of others that expressed the teachings followed these preliminary koan, and all were accompanied by vigorous teisho and dokusan. Hakuin’s methods were organized into a system by his disciples and remain the basis for Rinzai koan study to this day.

“By Hakuin’s time,” says Tetsugen, “both Zen and koan study were in a bad way. D. T. Suzuki said that Hakuin’s system revitalized koan study, which is true, but inevitably it led to stereotyping, decadence, and collapse. Hakuin made a beautiful system, but in the end, the problems that Dogen had spoken of five centuries before emerged again.”

In Hakuin’s time, Shobogenzo was still neglected by the Soto priesthood, and not until late in the seventeenth century (about 1690) did Kozen, the thirty-fifth abbot of Eihei-ji, arrange the several extant versions according to date of composition and assemble the ninety-five-fascicle form. But this arrangement received no more circulation than the others, to judge from the fact that an earlier, incomplete version was the basis for the first commentary on the text since the fourteenth century. The Zen master who challenged the priestly notion that Dogen’s masterpiece was too esoteric and profound to explicate was Tenkei Denson (1648–1735), a contemporary of Hakuin Zenji, who had already written a piercing analysis of the Heart Sutra. Tenkei Denson was “one of the most brilliant masters of our lineage,” says Maezumi-roshi. “Not having access to all the original texts, he made some mistakes in his interpretations6 of Shobogenzo, which only Dogen’s immediate successors really understood, but at least he attempted to set it free, bring it out into the fresh air. It took him three years to prepare, and when he did it, he was already eighty years old! A very rigorous and profound person!”

In response, the Soto priesthood, mindful of official Tokugawa resistance to a work so seemingly critical of Rinzai Zen, continued to stifle the circulation of Shobogenzo for six decades after Tenkei’s death, and a printed edition commenced in 1796 remained unfinished until 1811, by which time Zen was once again decrepit. The dull and repressive atmosphere of Japan’s feudal administrations, encouraging orthodoxy, reaction, and plain laziness in the Soto priesthood, permitted sectarian study of Dogen’s thought to lapse once more into mere veneration of a temple relic.

In a poem called “Reading the Record of Eihei Dogen,” the poet and Zen priest Ryokan commented in vain on this neglect:

On a somber spring evening around midnight,
Rain mixed with snow sprinkled on the bamboos in the garden.
I wanted to ease my loneliness, but it was quite impossible. . . .
I remember the old days when I lived at Entsu Monastery
And my late teacher lectured on the True Dharma Eye [Shobogenzo]. . . .
Inside this teaching, there’s never any shortcoming. . . .

Nobody was asked whether it is a jewel or a pebble.
For five hundred years it’s been covered in dust. . . .
For whom was all his eloquence expounded?
Longing for ancient times and grieving for the present
My head is exhausted.7

The temple associated with Tenkei Denson is Jogo-ji, built five hundred years ago in the tea country near Shimbara, southwest of Mount Fuji, in a landscape of small and abrupt hills terraced neatly with green hedges of clipped tea. Between the stiff tea groves, tall green waves of yellow-green Asian bamboo8 flow with spring sea winds off the Pacific coast.

At Jogo-ji, Dogen’s painted statue is on the altar in the founder’s hall, and as in all the best-known representations, this one is pink-faced, with prominent brow and small, sensitive mouth. Tenkei Denson, on the other hand, seems dark with anger, as befits a man who at the age of eighty defied the Soto establishment in a courageous but forlorn attempt to resurrect a hidden treasure. Up the hill from the temple, an unusual “sutra treasure house” contains a huge cylinder holding drawer upon drawer of rolled-up sutra scrolls. As in the prayer wheels of Tibet, these Vajrayana teachings may be cast upon the world by turning the cylinder, in one of the many Tantric innovations brought into Japan by the Shingon (“True Word”) sect in the ninth century and later adopted by the Soto school in its efforts to attract a wider following.

In the gardens all around, tiger-striped wasps have set up a low humming, and frogs clack like wood blocks in an abandoned rice paddy behind the temple. High overhead in the blue sky, a pale brown falcon sets its wings and stoops in a steep glide beyond the ridges. Otherwise there are no birds in view, although that one I can never seem to locate sings its beautiful and solitary song. “That is uguisu,” says our guide, Hoichi Suzuki-sensei. “The nightingale!” But since the nightingale does not occur in the Land of Wa, I am no wiser than before. Suzuki-sensei whistles this elusive bird’s melodious song. “Ho-ho-ke-kyo, it says—the Lotus Sutra!”

Suzuki-sensei is the son of Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, former abbot of Rinso-in at Yaizu, on the southern coast, who later founded the Zen Center in San Francisco. In 1971, at Tassajara, the Center’s retreat deep in the Coast Range, I worked briefly as an assistant to the carpenter monk who was putting a new roof on the cottage of Suzuki-roshi. Although he was dying, the roshi evinced the keenest interest in our progress, and this interest provided a wonderful opportunity to observe the comings and goings of this gentle teacher, who still offered teisho in the evening. Suzuki-roshi was already frail, and one day his jisha, cleaning his room, set down his teacup a little too hard in her rush to assist him at the doorway. “Take care of my cup!” he warned her mildly. And when she protested that her only wish was to take care of her teacher, the roshi said, “When you take care of my cup, you are taking care of me.”

The carpenter monk was engaged to marry this young woman, who was rich. Since he himself had always been penniless, the prospect of money worried him; he told me he had expressed this worry to Suzuki-roshi. “Rich or poor, it does not matter,” the roshi told him. “It only matters if you cling to being rich.” He smiled in warning. “Or poor.” The monk nodded uncertainly, saying he understood. “Since you understand,” the roshi said, “then you may as well be rich.”

“My father wished to bring zazen way to other countries,” says Suzuki-sensei, an appealing man with a sad face and a quick laugh who had welcomed us the previous evening to Rinso-in, near the fishing village of Yaizu. The night wind of April off the north Pacific was dank and cold, and we were grateful for Hoichi-san’s green tea, sweet cakes, and Napoleon brandy. Expressing regret that he could not speak English as well as his father, he defeated Tetsugen-sensei in a game of go. “First my father went to China, but under that government, the people are only coming back very slowly to Buddhism, and it does not work there. So the Soto headquarters in Tokyo suggest San Francisco, and my father is willing. He studied some English in middle school, and maybe he wanted to use it. So in San Francisco he put up just a little card outside. It said, ‘Everybody welcome, come and sit zazen.’ That was, I think, in 1962. And it built up slowly, slowly, in a natural way.”

Seven young Japanese students were visiting at Rinso-in, and early next morning Suzuki-sensei gave them zazen instruction in one of the few active zendos left in the Soto and Rinzai temples of Japan. After morning service—attended only by Tetsugen and me—we enjoyed a merry breakfast with his friendly family. Afterward, in the temple yard, I had a game of catch with Shungo, aged perhaps six, who wore a blue T-shirt with the inscription “Boston Sports.” The boy lugged his rubber baseball and a fielder’s mitt into the founder’s hall, where Tetsugen and I inspected a peculiar statue of Bodhidharma—the first benevolent-looking replica of the fierce wall-gazer we had ever seen. While we made our bows, our baseball buddha rolled his ball against the altar, then clambered up to seat himself in front of the statue of the temple founder,9 making a loud sound of one hand and smacking the ball into his mitt.

Together with Maezumi-roshi, who preceded him by a few years in America, Suzuki-roshi is revered as the founder of Soto Zen practice in the United States, and his gentle teisho, assembled in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, are widely read by Zen students in the West. In December 1971, a few months after my visit to Tassajara, this wonderful teacher died of cancer. Eido-roshi, who had gone to California to attend him not long before his death, was extremely impressed. He told his students upon his return to New York City, “Shunryu Suzuki was a true-ue-e ro-shi!”

Shunryu Suzuki’s grave lies under evergreens up the small stream that comes down the forested ravine behind Rinso-in, a pretty temple built in the fifteenth century. In April the shady margins of the stream are lighted by large blue-and-yellow orchids. We offer incense in spring morning light as swallowtailed butterflies come and go in red-striped arabesques, mindlessly offering the bold red dots on the undersides of their black wings.

Since 1907, when it moved from the remote Noto Peninsula to Yokohama, Soji-ji has replaced Eihei-ji as the largest temple of the Soto sect. The new monastery’s location in a pleasant, open, parklike area of a big city denies it the power of that ancient place on the Nine-Headed Dragon River, in the mountains; the atmosphere is less severe, and all but novice monks may greet and smile. But the 200-yard corridor that links the monastery to the entrance building is cleaned and shined three times a day by the squads of unsui, who, as at Eihei-ji, must lock into deep bows each time a superior sweeps past.

With one thousand tatami mats (three by six feet each), Soji-ji’s main hall is the largest in Japan. The services are precisely orchestrated by drums and bells and a huge mokugyo, or wooden fish gong; a monk must stand up on a platform and swing a mallet like a sledge in order to deal this instrument a worthy blow. The main drum, on a raised platform in one corner of the hall, is struck by three men simultaneously. The red carpets and gold canopies of bells, the yellow, white, red, green, and dark blue Buddhist colors on the curtains and banners, are set off by the glowing wheat of the new mats, which mingle the scent of incense with a new-mown hay smell from the countryside.

On an ivory seat in a reliquary behind the altar in the old service hall is the dried corpse of Sekito Kisen, presumed author of the Identity of Relative and Absolute and the great eighth-century Chinese ancestor of the Soto lineage. Seven feet tall during his lifetime, so a priest informed us, Sekito once intervened to save an ox that was being sacrificed in an aboriginal ceremony, and later he would try in vain to heal the schism between Zen schools brought about by the Sixth Patriarch’s fierce disciples. Today he sits, sunken-eyed and hunched, in a kind of terminal zazen, brown-shined wrists protruding from pale bamboo-leaf-colored robes. Sekito said, “A sage has no self, but there is nothing that is not himself.”10 His earthly face, black with dehydration, is twisted tight into a smile or grimace, as if he knew that eleven centuries later the exaggerated differences between Rinzai and Soto were still being perpetuated by an unwise priesthood.

Once when Yakusan was sitting, Sekito saw him and asked, “What are you doing here?”
Yakusan said, “I’m not doing anything.”
Sekito said, “Then you are just sitting idly.”
Yakusan said, “If I were idly sitting, that would be doing something.”
Sekito said, “You said you are not doing; what aren’t you doing?”
Yakusan said, “Even the saints don’t know.”11

On the first evening of our visit, about forty new monks, one nun, and one-hundred-odd laymen and laywomen received the Buddhist precepts in a huge and stirring jukai ceremony in the main hall. Six visiting roshis in red robes sat on each side of the great altar, and on the altar itself loomed the hooded figure of the acting zenji, or temple head (the real zenji, we were told, is too old and frail to conduct this great mass service). In their four groups, the preceptors were led by priests up narrow steps onto the altar, joining Shakyamuni, Bodhidharma, Dogen, Keizan, and the other patriarchs in the circle of buddhas. Then the six roshis, led by the zenji, circumambulated the raised altar. “Buddha becomes Buddha!” the red figures chanted, to the bang of the zenji’s stave. “Buddha bows to Buddha!” Hands clasped on their chests, the new buddhas bowed in return, then returned down the steep steps—the novice monks, then the solitary nun,12 the men, the women, one by one by one.

All but a few of the laypeople were old, with bright-eyed, weathered faces and bent backs, shuffling and bowing shyly as the priests herded them along. In the flickering candlelight, to a beautiful, sad chant, they descended from the great altar of no birth, no death, into the darkness. There was nothing sad here, only a hushed joy, for in this moment everyday life and nirvana were not different. When their turn was finished, the small, thickset figures reformed their lines, kneeling on the tatami as simple and close as swallows gathered for the journey south.

Before daylight, roused by an old and crippled monk, we were led by lantern to the guest zendo across the corridor from the monks’ hall. Dawn zazen was followed by morning service in the hondo, where Tetsugen and I, on our knees in the gold-and-black-robed rows, could study the intricate precision of the ritual. Swift monks ran backward from the altar, snatching up sutra books in stacks for presentation to the priests, who deftly flared the saffron pages in symbolic readings of the sacred texts. At this altar, just five years ago, Tetsugen-sensei had officiated at the morning service, having been installed as temporary abbot of Soji-ji the night before. When repeated at Eihei-ji, this zuise ceremony completed his priestly training in the Soto school.13

With the new nun (a young person of great presence) we were given tea in the abbot’s magnificent stone garden. The garden includes a sculpted rock pool inhabited by multicolored carp, those huge “goldfish,” black, white, and red and gold, that are prized like tea bowls and wild river rocks by Japanese collectors. A single one of these illustrious creatures may cost more than the small family car.

Outside the main hall in midmorning, in a fresh sun that followed April rains, Japanese robins, heads cocked, ran a little, sounding the softened earth for worms, as covies of schoolchildren in tulip-red and daffodil-yellow caps chased and laughed among the buildings. Inside, the monks and preceptors had gathered for Dharma combat. Whoever wished to benefit from the zenji’s Dharma might now rush forward between ranks of priests to face the zenji in his staff and hood, high on the altar. Each cried out his question, and the zenji answered in a calm and measured voice, then banged his stave as the aspirant ran backward from the altar, crying out shrilly once again in gratitude.

Traditionally, the final question in this Dharma combat is asked by the shuso, or head training monk, and I “watched with my ears, listened with my eyes,” hoping to pick up a few pointers. In the autumn I shall be shuso myself, and my three-month training period will conclude with my first Dharma talk, based on a koan. The talk will be followed by Dharma combat, in which other students will have at me with tough questions in an effort to test my understanding.

Here at Soji-ji, the shuso’s koan is invariably Bodhidharma’s exchange with Emperor Wu, and both questions and answers are provided in advance to all participants, to make certain that the Dharma wheel turns smoothly. In this baseball-loving country, the questions are lobbed up like softballs, and the happy shuso knocks each one out of the park. Perhaps this is appropriate, since the great majority of Japanese monks have no ambition to become Zen teachers, being content to take over as Buddhist priests in the family temple back home. The ritual combat, which has nothing to do with Zen, reflects great credit on all concerned, and is no doubt very gratifying to the doting relatives, who may have traveled a long way for the great occasion. I, too, will explicate a koan,14 but the questions and answers of the Dharma combat will be unrehearsed.

At Soji-ji, where all four were trained, and where their father was a high official, Maezumi-roshi and his brothers are very well known.15 One of them, Takeshi-sensei, an energetic, cultured man, very interested in art and music, seems destined for a high place in the Soto hierarchy and will certainly follow his father as a Soji-ji official. At present he is abbot of Zenko-ji, a large new temple under a hill in Yokohama, the seaport adjoining Tokyo to the south. After our visit to Soji-ji, Takeshi-sensei and his kind family offered his brother’s students the generous hospitality of his house, including an astonishing array of sushi and sashimi from a Yokohama restaurant, “the best sashimi restaurant in the whole world.”

By 1907—the year that the Soto sect established this main temple—Dogen’s Shobogenzo had been reduced to an anthology of digestible “principles” put together a few years earlier by the priesthood. Its obscurity was the more profound because Soto teachings were still little known in intellectual circles of Tokyo and Kyoto, which depended on Rinzai for their Zen. Although more widespread than Rinzai, Soto was thought of as a rural Zen of the smaller towns off to the north. Even when Soji-ji was transferred here to the Tokyo region, the complacent priesthood made no effort to exhume their extraordinary Dharma ancestor, and his resurrection eventually occurred because Tet-suro Watsuji, one of Japan’s most eminent philosophers, happened upon, not Shobogenzo, but Koun Ejo’s Shobogenzo Zuimonki, a much less vibrant and exciting work. Even so, Watsuji was astonished. In a series of outspoken articles called “Monk Dogen,” which appeared between 1920 and 1923, he stated flatly that “Dogen has been killed thus far in the Soto sect.” A few years later, Watsuji’s peer, the philosopher Hajime Tanabe, described this “great metaphysical thinker” as the precursor of Japanese philosophy. Since then the scholars of Japan have competed in their praise of Dogen, and four translations of Shobogenzo into modern Japanese have been produced in the last twenty years.

But “once we turn our eyes from Japan to the Western scene, we find that virtually nothing has been introduced about Dogen,” says the Korean scholar Hee-jin Kim, (who describes Dogen’s “exquisite mythopoeic imaginings and profound philosophic visions”). “Obviously ignorance of Soto Zen is tantamount to ignorance of Dogen, its founder. The scholarship of Zen Buddhism in the West has chiefly relied upon D. T. Suzuki’s brilliant introduction of many invaluable texts and his own interpretation of them, based primarily on Rinzai Zen in which Suzuki was nurtured. Overshadowed by Suzuki’s brilliance and reputation, the Soto tradition has been treated like a stepchild of Zen in the West. Perhaps this situation has been aggravated by the extreme difficulty of presenting Dogen’s thought in a form intelligible to the Western mind. His language and thought are forbiddingly difficult and subtle, yet irresistibly intriguing, and more often than not, exasperate the students of Dogen, who alternate between hope and despair.”16

As Tetsugen says, “Almost all of Shobogenzo are teisho that Dogen gave his monks, which is why non-practicing scholars have such problems with them. To listen to a teisho is not to figure out what is being said, but simply to allow the mind and body to remain receptive and open, to listen with our entire being. If the words strike sparks and cause something to happen, that’s fine; if they don’t, that’s all right too. The mistake is to try to analyze what’s coming in. Teisho is like zazen—whatever comes from whatever direction, from the five senses or the mind, just let it come, just let it go—the mirror mind. Listening to teisho should be that way. The words flow through us. We do not cling to them, afraid we’ll miss something, or try to ‘understand.’ We allow the words to come in through all our senses, hearing them with our eyes as well as ears, with our whole body, everything but our brain. That is the way Dogen intended them to be received, not read and analyzed in an intellectual fashion.

“Everything in Shobogenzo is dealing with the unity of the absolute and the relative, the universal holistic sphere and the sphere of moment-to-moment phenomena. His sentences shift back and forth between the two, and if you try to follow him intellectually, you’re lost. The only way you can accompany him is to flow freely with his words, to just become each of these sentences, in the same way that you must ‘become’ your koan in order to penetrate it thoroughly. Dogen lived simultaneously in the relative and absolute, and we have to join him in both worlds if we are to know what life really is—not moving back and forth from one to the other but traveling in both at the same time.”

The first translations of Dogen into English appeared in The Soto Approach to Zen, a rendition of Shobogenzo Zuimonki by Reiho Masunaga, who referred to Dogen’s “incomparable depth of thought.” A few years later, Heinrich Dumoulin, in his History of Zen Buddhism, claimed that Dogen belonged “among the great creative figures of mankind.” In 1968 the novelist Yasunari Kawabata (author of Snow Country, One Thousand Cranes, and other works), in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize, commented on Dogen’s influence on the poetry of Ryokan, whose deathbed poem (“What shall be my legacy? The blossoms of spring / The cuckoo in the hills / The leaves of autumn”) was a near echo of Dogen’s “Original Face,” pointing directly at the common miracles of everyday life.

In the last decade, many fascicles of Shobogenzo have appeared in English in texts related to Zen Buddhism, and in recent years, Maezumi-roshi and the Zen Center of Los Angeles’s Kuroda Institute have sponsored two Dogen conferences in the United States. American scholars have begun to reconnoiter Dogen, attempting comparisons with Heidegger and Whitehead. But as Tetsugen says, the first definitive analysis in the West will probably be done by a Zen practitioner with profound experience of koan study and the silence of zazen, from where Dogen’s own primordial intuitions seem to come.

 

Know that within the innumerable things which are in yourself there is birth, and there is death. . . . Birth is just like riding in a boat. You raise the sails and row with the oar. Although you row, the boat gives you a ride and without the boat no one could ride. But you ride in the boat and your riding makes the boat what it is. At such a moment, there is nothing but the world of the boat. The sky, the water, and the shore are all the boat’s world, which is not the same as a world that is not the boat’s.

When you ride in a boat, your body and mind and the environs together are the concerted activity of the boat. The entire earth and the entire sky together are the concerted activity of the boat. Thus birth is nothing but you, you are nothing but birth. Both the entire earth and the entire sky appear in birth as well as in death.

Entire Activity
—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

EARLY in the twentieth century, a great scandal was caused in Zen circles in Japan by the publication of hundreds of the best-known koans in a collection which differed from all others by supplying the so-called koan “answers.” Its unknown author was accused of seeking to destroy the koan study system and thereby bring ridicule on Zen. His defenders perceived it as an attack, not on true Zen, but on “dead” koan study, in which stereotyped answers were offered by uninspired students and accepted by inferior teachers as a kind of perfunctory examination for candidates for the Zen priesthood. Whatever their view of his intentions, almost everyone agreed that the author of this book was an accomplished master, and the teacher whose name came up most often was Sogaku Harada-roshi (1871–1961), Soto abbot of Hosshin-ji, a remote monastery near the town of Obama on the northwest coast.

At twenty, after thirteen years as a novice in the Soto school, Sogaku Harada had yet to meet an enlightened teacher. Dissatisfied, he entered a Rinzai monastery for seven years, then attended Komazawa Soto University in Tokyo, pursuing his Buddhist studies for some six years after graduation. Still unfulfilled, he continued to visit various Zen masters, asking about the great matter of life and death. (“Clarifying birth, clarifying death, is the matter of greatest importance,” Dogen wrote.) At Engaku-ji, in Kamakura, he was told by Soyen Shaku, “If you experience kensho, your question will be answered all by itself.” Resolved to pursue koan study, Harada went to Toyota Dokutan-roshi at Nanzen-ji, in Kyoto, one of the strongest Rinzai teachers of the day. Under Dokutan, his eye was opened, and eventually he received inka.

Thoroughly trained in Hakuin’s koan system, Harada-roshi taught at Komazawa for twelve years. Eventually he became a full professor, conducting sesshins in the summertime and writing an excellent commentary on the brief 1890 anthology of Dogen’s phrases which did much to help bring Dogen to light.1 In 1921, when he was fifty, he accepted the post of abbot at Hosshin-ji, where he would teach for the next forty years.

Before long, this small monastery on a dark and inhospitable coast won a reputation as the strictest in the country. Here the best of the Soto and Rinzai traditions had been merged in a fresh new manifestation of true Dharma. “Nobody has done real shikantaza since Dogen Zenji,” Harada would declare, exhorting his students to ignore sectarian disputes and intensify rigorous zazen through koan study, which had all but disappeared from Soto Zen.

Because Harada-roshi is revered in Maezumi’s lineage (which has based its teaching methods on those adapted from Harada by Yasutani-roshi),2 Tetsugen and I had visited Hosshin-ji, taking the local train west from Tsuruga under the small, solitary mountains that break away from the inland range and scatter down to the blue coves of Watsuga Bay. At Obama, on the Sea of Japan, we were given tea by Harada-roshi’s last Dharma successor, Harada Tangen-roshi, abbot of Bukko-ji, a small temple under the steep hill behind the town. Here Harada Sogaku had lived as a small boy and received tokudo in the home-leaving ceremony at the age of seven. Tangen, a warm, spontaneous man with whom we wished we could have spent more time, had been a student, friend, and young Dharma brother of Yasutani. He summoned his jisha to escort us on foot to Hosshin-ji, a mile away.

Built in the early sixteenth century, Hosshin-ji surrounds a pretty court of stone lanterns and pines. Inside the walls, a stone bridge crosses a small stone-lined canal. These days the monastery has twenty students, five of them foreigners; the Canadian monk who showed us about seemed at once eager and ill at ease, as if voices from home in this far place might dispel the effect he had come so far to find.

In the old days Hosshin-ji, like other Zen monasteries, gave novice monks no instruction of any kind. The unsui was supposed to keep his eyes lowered, looking at nothing, yet be so totally aware of everything taking place around him that he was prepared at any moment to fulfill any duty or take any service position, even in complicated rituals. Without guidance in zazen or any sort of preparation for koan study, the monk was supposed to make what he could out of the teisho, and often spent years going to dokusan only to be peremptorily dismissed and sent away.

In Harada’s opinion, what was left of the true Buddhist spirit in Japan could not sustain the ruthless severity of the ancient methods. Zen practice, he felt, should be illuminated by introductory talks and explanation: it should be less dogged, less perfunctory, more inspired and alive. At the same time, he was very strict. Using the kyosaku as Manjusri’s delusion-cutting sword, he applied it unsparingly to the shoulders of his students, a habit emulated with enthusiasm by his disciples. (Tetsugen believes that the use of the kyosaku—and probably sesshin itself—began since Dogen’s time, with the decrease of fierce urgency among Zen students.)

“Harada talked a lot about listening,” Tetsugen told me as we walked in the court garden at Hosshin-ji. “How when you go to teisho, you should be the only listener in the room. If there is just you and the teacher, you will listen: otherwise, you tend to give responsibility to others. And as you listen, doing zazen, there will no longer be two people in the room, no subject and object, just the One. And that is the way to read Dogen Zenji, too.”

In an important sense, Harada-roshi was the first modern Zen master, and because he offered preparation for koan study—unheard of before this time—the more ferocious Zen students from all over Japan made winter pilgrimages to Hosshin-ji for the annual Rohatsu sesshin. The meditation hall, which seats perhaps thirty-five people, would overflow into the courtyard, all the way down to the small stream that crosses the lower court; at times there were several hundred monks doing zazen in the snow. Such conditions seemed ideal to the master, who approved of the wind and cold on this northern coast, the relentless rains, extinguishing snows, the dark, wild typhoons that came roaring in off the Sea of Japan. Rude weather, he felt, lent itself nicely to introspection and the deep study of “the universe in the pit of one’s own belly” that would eventually lead to letting the self go. Not surprisingly, a high percentage of his students attained a kensho.

On the mountain slope just opposite Hosshin-ji is the small hermitage where the roshi lived after the age of eighty. His grave above the hermitage, on a moss-green knoll strewn with fallen cherry blossoms, is set about with yellow daffodils. Sogaku Harada died on December 12, 1961, and the moment of death at ninety-one coincided precisely with the moment of mean low tide, as if, as was said, he had ebbed away with the ocean waters. On the altar at his funeral service hung a calligraphy prepared several years before, expressing the realization of not-knowing, of nothing to “understand” or “learn”:

For forty years I’ve been selling water
by the bank of a river. Ho, ho!
My labors have been wholly without merit.

Harada once said that zazen clarified the bones, and his own bones turned out to be pure white, according to Etsudo (“Delight in the Path”) Nishiwaki-roshi, one of Harada’s four living successors, who saw to the cremation. When Nishiwaki arrived at Hosshin-ji for Rohatsu sesshin at the age of twenty, the head of training told him his face was too soft, that he should try to look more severe, but at the end of sesshin, Harada had said, “Your face is too severe! Put that stress into your efforts in zazen!” The master himself was very strict until he was over seventy, but in his last years he was gentle, and tried to transmit to his monks all his not-knowing.

Harada sent Nishiwaki to study at Kennin-ji, and Nishiwaki recalls with approval the rigorous Rinzai schedule, which included five dokusan each day. (Later, when Nishiwaki became head training monk at Soji-ji, he reinstituted dokusan, which had been neglected in the Soto school for many years.) In Nishiwaki’s opinion, the Soto school was revitalized by koan study, for which most of the credit goes to Harada and two of his disciples, Watanabe, who established koan study at Soji-ji, and Ida Toin, who was Harada’s favorite, despite an implacable alcoholic nature. Ida Toin had already received inka from two teachers, one of them an outstanding Rinzai master, yet he came to Harada because he still felt “incomplete.” Harada considered that, among his disciples, this layman alone had really “broken through,” that only Ida Toin saw more clearly than Harada himself. Ida Toin inhabited a horrible little room, subsisting on sake and old salt fish hung from the rafters, his poems and papers all over the floor. Once (says Nishiwaki-roshi) when Harada turned up at his door, Ida Toin was so ashamed that he hid himself beneath a pile of papers. Ida Toin received inka from Harada at the age of sixty-one.

His students agree that Harada-roshi—who was never close to the seats of power at Soji-ji or Eihei-ji—was the greatest Zen master yet to appear in the twentieth century, not only because of the brilliance of his teaching but because he lacked those flaws of character that would keep great teaching from taking healthy root. For Harada, as for Dogen and Hakuin, realization of the Buddha Way was not different from its actualization amid the tumult and temptations of everyday life. “Because of his virtue, so much is able to happen,” Nishiwaki says.

“Such masters are very rare,” says Tetsugen with a sigh, comparing Harada with other teachers whose clarity of insight may be unsurpassed, yet whose private weakness—usually drink or women—will disillusion the more idealistic students, and sometimes turn away from Zen those who confuse the teacher with their own notion of a “true” spiritual leader. “They want to dehumanize the teacher so that he reflects some personal deity of their own.” Tetsugen smiles. “We try to improve a little, but we are who we are.”

If Harada-roshi never quit the priesthood, as he threatened, neither did he give up his battle with the Soto bureaucracy, which continued to obscure the purity of Dogen’s teachings with petty sectarian disputes and rigid structuralism, setting up needless impediments to true Zen practice. Harada offended the Soto priesthood by placing so much emphasis on “Rinzai” koan study. At the same time, his views on formula responses that had made a mockery of koan study were very well known. As one of his students, Soen Nakagawa, liked to say, “If the answers to koans are all that interest you, just bring a pad and pencil to the dokusan room and I will give them to you.” Even after he became abbot of Ryutaku, Soen-roshi did not hesitate to put on his old monk’s robe and travel across the main island of Japan to study with Harada-roshi at Hosshin-ji, causing a great clicking of fans in the Rinzai hierarchy.

Nishiwaki-roshi says that Soen first asked to study with Harada while still a hermit on Dai Bosatsu Mountain, near Mount Fuji, in the early thirties, but because Soto lacks Rinzai Zen’s long, honorable tradition of “eccentrics,”3 Harada had refused this bearded poet. Soen studied instead with Yamamoto Gempo-roshi at Ryutaku-ji, but even when he had completed his studies and received inka, he felt (like Ida Toin) “incomplete.” Eventually he returned to Harada-roshi, who admired the power in the young Rinzai abbot’s voice, and said he would go far. Nishiwaki, who was head monk at Hosshin-ji in this period, also “liked him very much.” After Harada’s death, Soen resumed study of the koan Mu with one of Harada’s Dharma heirs, Hakuun Yasutani. Not until this study was complete did he feel qualified to be a teacher, nor would he give a student any koan that he himself had not passed through.

Although a Soto novice monk at age thirteen, Yasutani had spent years as a family man and schoolteacher, longing all this while for a true Zen master. Not until the age of forty did he find Harada-roshi, and at his first sesshin with Harada in 1925, he attained kensho with the koan Mu. Before meeting Harada, he recalled, “I was altogether a blind fellow, and my mind was not yet at rest. I was at a peak of mental anguish. When I felt I could not endure deceiving myself and others by untrue teaching and irresponsible sermons, my karma opened up and I was able to meet . . . Sogaku Harada-roshi. The light of a lantern was brought to a dark night, to my profound joy.”

At Hosshin-ji, some years later, Yasutani encountered Soen Nakagawa, who was already in touch with a teacher in Los Angeles, Nyogen Senzaki, and was familiar with the pioneering work of D. T. Suzuki. Soen convinced Yasutani that Zen must travel to the West, and meanwhile it was Yasutani who transmitted Harada’s teachings to Soen and Eido, Yamada and Maezumi, Aitken and Tetsugen. In this way Sogaku Harada-roshi, whose nonsectarian teachings were carried to the New World by these Dharma heirs, became a great spiritual ancestor of American Zen.

In the opinion of Nishiwaki-roshi, who became head of training at both Eihei-ji and Soji-ji after his teacher’s death, the Soto sect had been dead for two centuries before the advent of Harada, and even today he has his doubts about Zen masters who are not in Harada’s line. He agrees with Yasutani and Yamada that most Japanese teachers and students are not serious, and refuse to undergo vigorous training. Instead of true seeking, the monks ask such questions as “How do I run my temple?” and “How do I get married?,” which Nishiwaki would answer with thirty swift blows of his stick.

Heading east along the coast from the Noto Peninsula, the train crosses a rice plain between the Sea of Japan and the snow peaks of the island’s central mountains. There is a flower culture here, and west of Uozu, mats of vivid red and yellow tulips are set off by the livid green of the new rice plants in the paddies, in misty light under soft blue snows of Mount Shironina. On the rock shore at Itoigawa, we walk along the beach in the chill twilight, observing the Pacific gulls (“The sea darkens,” wrote Basho of this place, “the cries of the gulls are faintly white”) and collecting wild sea rocks colored by the earthen fires and smoothed by ocean storms. After steambath and fish supper, we watch one of the samurai dramas that are almost always running on TV, for Japan is even more addicted to these national epics than America once was to “cowboys and Indians.”

At Naoetsu railway station early next morning, tulips and pansies bloom in boxes on the station platform, and the railway food vendors form a line to bow to the coddled travelers as the train departs. Because trains are frequent, clean, and so efficient that watches may be set by their departure times, the railways are the chosen mode of travel for most Japanese, who seem dedicated to visiting during their lives as many as possible of their country’s points of scenic interest.

From Naoetsu, our way turns inland, for we are leaving the Sea of Japan and returning across Honshu to the Pacific. The railroad climbs a long broad valley to wooded hills under Mount Myoko. At higher altitudes, the spring trees are still bare and the soil is dark, but the day is hot in the mountain valley of Nagano, where we descend from the train to pay a visit to Zenko-ji, a huge Tendai-Jodo temple, at the summit of the town’s main street, against the mountains. “Four gates, four different sects sleep as one under the bright moon,” said Basho, an early visitor to the unfinished temple, which was completed in 1707, in the Edo period (1603–1886).

Tendai-Jodo emphasis on an afterlife makes Zenko-ji a place of pilgrimage for eight million Japanese each year, despite the decline of both these schools of Buddhism. The high priest of Tendai and the high priestess of Jodo are resident at Zenko-ji, and on this April day, both are officiating at a huge service for the thousands who come in formations up the central street, flowing in endless and orderly lines past the smoke-breathing dragon-dog guardian. A young woman assists her mother or grandmother up the steep steps; although of ordinary size, she is at least twice the height of the child-sized figure beside her. In the decade since I first visited Japan, the average height of the younger generations has increased so markedly that I no longer loom over the passengers in a crowded bus or subway.

At the temple entrance the pilgrims pause to touch the wood statue of Honen, which is smooth after centuries of adoration. One woman touches his heart and pate, and then her son’s breast and her own head. A group of young men laugh too loudly when they rub the statue’s loins and then their own.

Further eastward, late that afternoon, as the train crosses the central range and begins its descent toward the Pacific, Mount Asama is sending forth a high white plume of smoke, and later that day Asama erupts for the first time in years. (Basho wrote, “A sudden storm on Mount Asama blowing stones all over me.”) West of Yokokawa, Mount Myogi juts misshapen towers into the sunny mist as a man stands up on his seat to change his trousers for the city. The train emerges on the broad Kanto Plain that extends southeast to the Tokugawa capital at Edo, called Tokyo since the last shogun resigned and the imperial house was resurrected, in the Meiji Restoration of 1868 that introduced the era of modern Japan.

At that time, the nation’s reverence of Western “progress” undermined its culture and old values, and it was questioned in public debate whether a tradition so archaic as Zen Buddhism should continue to exist in the new Japan. But Eido-roshi says that a Zen monk, chanting the Diamond Sutra in its entirety, awed the officials, even those of “big head and small hara,” who wore their ceremonial swords over Western clothes.

An imposing wood statue of Harada-roshi may be seen at Tosho-ji, in Tokyo. We paid a visit with Maezumi-roshi, who had joined us briefly in Kyoto and met us again here. Founded by Harada before World War II, Tosho-ji is administered by Tetsugyu Ban-roshi, seventy-two, who is one of Harada’s four living disciples. According to Ban, a small, merry man with big false teeth who never had any other teacher, the sculptor4 of this statue practiced zazen under Harada and once sat sleepless through the entire eight days of Rohatsu, falling unconscious at the end. Ban-roshi, who keeps as souvenirs on a long rack the many kyosaku he has broken on the shoulders of his students, offered this story as evidence that the man was qualified for the job. The statue is thin-lipped and severe, although later in life, Maezumi says, Harada-roshi gained a reputation for compassion, kindness, and a playful way with dogs and children.

Harada’s purpose in coming to Tokyo was to start a children’s school where the true nonsectarian spirit of Zen practice might be taught, but because he refused to ask for any financial assistance from his supporters, the first school closed within the year, and the establishment was moved three times before it put down secure roots at this location. Yasutani and two other disciples devoted most of every day to trying to salvage their teacher’s dream, but it was no use. Apparently Harada had assumed that conditions in the middle of Tokyo—at that time the largest city in the world—were similar to circumstances at Obama, where the monks could grow vegetables and go out with their collecting bowls on takuhatsu, and where the monastery was largely self-supporting. “He had a wonderful Dharma spirit!” laughed Ban-roshi, who radiates the same spirit himself, “but a very poor sense of administration!”

When this temple was built in 1940, Harada still refused to solicit money (which inspired certain suspicious people to call him a fake), but during World War II, when even Hosshin-ji was going into debt, he finally asked Ban to take care of the matter. The young disciple, who became Tosho-ji’s second abbot, immediately instituted a fund-raising program. Eventually he made the place self-sustaining, after many hard years in which he rose at 3:00 A.M., conducted morning service, went out all day on takuhatsu, then returned in the late afternoon for evening service and zazen. After 9:00 P.M. he devoted a few hours to editing Harada’s writings and other duties. Throughout most of these hard years, he said, he subsisted on pickles.

Maezumi-roshi, translating Ban’s discourse for our benefit, was elated to realize the extent to which Harada had been innovative in both practice and teaching. Harada’s attitude affirmed Maezumi’s feeling that almost all of the most qualified Zen teachers since the time of Dogen were those trained in both koan study and shikan-taza. Such people paid little or no attention to the petty differences between Rinzai and Soto, being determined to locate a true teacher who revitalized and maintained the true Dharma. Both of Maezumi’s principal teachers, Koryu and Yasutani, had refused to submit to the stultifying influence of sectarian thought, and for some time now, Maezumi himself had considered founding his own White Plum lineage as a pillar of American Soto Zen.

Ban-roshi recalled with broad-toothed glee Yasutani’s opinion that scarcely ten among the hundreds of so-called Zen teachers in Japan, Rinzai or Soto, deserved to be called roshi. He had greatly admired Yasutani, who was teaching in the monk’s hall at Hosshin-ji when Ban turned up as a novice monk in 1931, and who gave Ban a final teaching forty-two years later, in the year he died. In his poem commemorating Yasutani’s death, Ban said, “How momentous it is, leaving such great footsteps! You changed your place to teach in the New World. . . .” To Tetsugen he said, “Make your own honzan—‘original mountain’—in America.”

(“Harada’s mind is now with Maezumi-roshi and Tetsugen-roshi in the United States,” says Ban’s Dharma brother Nishiwaki-roshi, who would be the senior priest at Tetsugen’s abbot installation5 in June 1982, on the first of what were to become annual visits. “We hope this mind will go all over the United States and around the world.” Harada had given Nishiwaki “a last koan,” which he intends to pass on to Maezumi. “We owe ourselves to our roshis, but we must know ourselves, too. We must understand how to make Zen in our own style.”)

In Japan, one waves until one’s friends are out of sight, and Ban-roshi stood in the narrow Tokyo street until we reached the corner, perhaps one hundred yards away. There we turned to make our parting bows, as he bowed, too.

 

You should know that the entire heaven and earth are the roots, stem, and branches, and leaves of the long bamboo. Thus heaven and earth are timeless . . . a wooden walking staff is both old and not old.

A plantain has earth, water, fire, wind, emptiness, also mind, consciousness, and wisdom as its roots, stems, branches, and leaves, or as its flowers, fruits, colors, and forms. Accordingly, the plantain wears the autumn wind, and is torn in the autumn wind. We know that it is pure and clear and that not a single particle is excluded.

Painted Cake
—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE train from the Ueno station, north of Tokyo, crosses the great flat Kanto Plain, a heavily populated region of small houses and well-tended gardens, diminutive haystacks and low plastic greenhouses. In every free space between road and railroad track, amid factories, stacks, towers, and power lines, the barefoot householders, pants rolled to the knee, hack at the dark spring earth with the heavy mattocks of long centuries past. In the factory yards as the train rolls past, the workers play baseball in the noon hour, for this eerily adaptive land quickly adopted the national game of the big gaijin who reduced thousands of its citizens to atomized “shadows” on the fallen walls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From food advertisements to the design of children’s clothes, the baseball motif is everywhere in Japan, in celebration of the deft fielders and spry hitters of such teams as the Hiroshima Carp and Tokyo Giants.

The rivers of this region are much diminished by industry and agriculture, even in this season of spring torrents, but at a river edge stands a white egret, the elegant bird so beloved of Oriental artists. Even from the train, the yellow feet on its black legs are visible in the gravel shallows. Here and there a lone fisherman stands well back from the bank, as transfixed as the solitary bird. The stillness of the human figure, the length of the wispy pole, are signs that the last fish in these shrunken streams are scarce and shy. Small Japanese salmon once ascended Honshu’s streams, but today these lovely silver fish, like the Japanese crane and the last native bears, are confined to the northern island of Hokkaido, together with the remnant aborigines, or “Hairy Ainu,” tall, blue-eyed, bearded hunter-gatherers, at one time considered a relict population of the early Homo sapiens known as Cro-Magnon.

In the seventeenth century, this endless plain north of the Tokugawa capital at Edo must have been desolate, since in the first pages of his last, best work, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the poet Basho observed no place of note on his journey across it. “The faint shadow of Mount Fuji and the cherry blossoms of Ueno . . . were bidding me a last farewell,” says he as he sets off on foot. A few lines later, he is already ninety miles northward at Mount Nikko (Mount Sun Rays), site of “the holiest of shrines”—a temple established early in the ninth century by Kobo Daishi, founder of the Shingon sect, and rededicated in 1636 to Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa shogun. Some of these huge cryptomeria or “cedars,” planted three centuries ago, were on this mountainside when Basho came here. Mount Kurokami, so admired by the poet, was engulfed today in clouds and sweeping rains, but the Toshogu shrine is still in good repair, and so is the poet’s great waterfall, which “came pouring out of a hollow in the ridge and tumbled down into the dark green pool below in a huge leap of several hundred feet.” On the rocks below the fall, a dipper teetered. Even in April, snow patches cling to deep, dark places in the gorge.

From Nikko, the poet proceeded east to Kurobane, on the Naka River, in a soft valley not far south of the flat-topped hills called the Yamizo Mountains. Apparently Basho liked this region, where he lingered for some time. His wanderings are locally commemorated by his haiku, which are carved into flat erected rocks, like wild, rough gravestones. At Daiyo temple, an old thatch-roofed building withdrawing year by year into its shaggy grove of evergreens, the caretaker told us that Basho had lingered here for fourteen days.

Yama mo hiwa mo
Usani hidoya
Natsu zaski

Mountain garden
A rabbit came
(Its) summer living room.

Just as we read this commemorative stone, an accipitrine hawk, pearl-mantled with rufous breast, dove through the mountain orchard in cherry blossom light and vanished in the blackness of the pines. Perhaps this sudden hawk pursued that unseen bird of melodious bent whose song I had heard a few moments before, the elusive thing which, in our hurry, we have never tarried long enough to find.

Basho also visited Ungan-ji, a Rinzai temple of the late thirteenth century, which like Engaku-ji is built into a grove of evergreens against a mountain, and remains today very much as he described it: “The temple was situated on the side of a mountain completely covered with dark cedars and pines. A narrow road trailed up the valley between banks of dripping moss, leading us to the gate of a temple across a bridge. The air was still cold, though it was April.” The gate of Ungan-ji is bright red, gathering up light out of the forest, and the mountain torrent between gate and temple is clear and strong, entirely unlike the weary rivers draining the flatland below.

Ten miles to the south, across the Jabi River from the town of Otawara, is Maezumi-roshi’s family temple, called Koshin-ji. Originally a sixteenth-century edifice, Koshin-ji was entirely reconstructed by Baian Hakujun Kuroda-roshi in 1933. A large complex of temple buildings surrounds three sides of an extensive court, perhaps 300 by 150 feet, entirely bare except for a few stone figures and stone lanterns and big evergreens. After four centuries the steep hillside behind the temple is mostly taken up by graves.

Tetsugen-sensei, who first met Baian Hakujun in 1970, was very impressed by “his emphasis on aigo, loving words. It was very rare for him to be harsh with anyone. He always had guests at this temple, and his staff and family were always serving. Privacy was never an issue, since they had none; theirs was a life of giving and serving. He never accumulated money, but spent it on the members, guests, and temple. Money was an energy source that flowed. This kind of lived patience and lived caring is very rare. I feel a special affinity for Baian Hakujun. His teaching was his life, lived in everyday situations, the kind of undramatic teaching that seeps into the blood and marrow of a student and transforms him. Of course such transformation takes many years, but it is the transmission of the true Dharma.”

Although a high Soto official, Baian Hakujun (who was Maezumi’s honshi, or “root teacher,” and a strong influence on his son’s style) had not hesitated to invite Rinzai teachers to lead sesshins at his own temple here in Otawara. One of these teachers, Joko-roshi, fed up with the bureaucratic attitudes of the Rinzai priesthood, was not only willing to teach in a Soto temple but had forsworn Rinzai temple training in favor of simple dojos, or meditation training centers, one of which we visited while near Mount Nikko. Today these dojos are directed by Joko’s disciple Osaka Koryu-roshi, whom the American monk at Kennin-ji had referred to as “the best lay Rinzai master in Japan.” Maezumi’s older brother Kojun became Koryu’s leading student, and Maezumi himself, at age fifteen, left Otawara for Tokyo in order to live and study with this powerful teacher.

After four years under Koryu-roshi, Maezumi studied at Komazawa Soto University, in Tokyo. Subsequently he enrolled at Soji-ji, where Harada’s contemporary Watanabe was then zenji, after which he was asked by the Soto administration to go to Los Angeles to assist in the Soto temple founded there in the 1920s. Since his brother Kojun would inherit the family temple here at Otawara, their father approved of this idea, and Maezumi did, too. “I just wanted to go!” he says, and off he went in 1956, at the age of twenty-five. Because the Los Angeles temple had no serious Zen practice, he was happy to learn of “the floating zendo” led by Nyogen Senzaki, with whom he studied until Nyogen’s death in 1958.

When Yasutani-roshi came to Los Angeles in 1962, the young monk Maezumi, after asking a few questions, “knew immediately that I should study with him.” Yasutani told Maezumi what Harada-roshi had told him—that Harada had not been the author of that koan “answer book,” and had strongly disapproved of it. While convinced that feeble koan study had done great harm, Harada felt that such a book did more harm still, burdening foolish students with preconceptions instead of urging them to let go of their ideas.

Since Baian Hakujun’s death in 1979, Koshin-ji has been directed by Kojun Kuroda-roshi, a broad, strong-shouldered man with thick neck creases who looks more like a sumo wrestler or farmer than a Zen master. Though he does not speak English, his kindness and good nature come shining through a bluff and shy demeanor. Like his father, he is much beloved in Otawara, and at one time was asked to be its mayor; he fills the role of the feudal overlord, or daimyo, who lived in a castle on the next hill in the days when Koshin-ji was first constructed. His wife, Miyoko, a pretty woman of strong, quiet presence with a sudden, quick, appealing laugh, directs a school for young children of Otawara that adjoins the temple.

As the second son, Maezumi-roshi took his mother’s family name—a traditional custom that keeps an old family from dying out—but he still regards this temple as his home. With Kuroda-roshi’s family, and Baian Hakujun’s sprightly widow, known as Obachan (Grandmother), we relaxed at a fine homecoming supper, toasting the coming together at Koshin-ji with copious amounts of sake. Then we drank more in celebration of the coming of Buddhism to America, Europe, and Israel, which would one day be recognized as a great historical event.

After supper, Maezumi-roshi led me on a tour of Koshin-ji, which is constructed around two main service halls connected by long enclosed corridors. Besides the usual temple appointments, Koshin-ji has an esoteric atmosphere due to his brother’s interest in tantric practice, and Maezumi pointed out each detail with the greatest delight. I had never seen this sad-faced, detached man so relaxed and animated. “My father rebuilt it entirely when he was only thirty—isn’t it amazing? Nobody thought that his sangha would raise the funds, but they did. And it was he who established this tantric hall, which is more . . . bold? . . . than the other one.” He wandered on, gazing about him. “As a kid, I ran up and down these halls, climbed on the roof—I was a rascal!” His diminutive mother, who now joined us, confirmed that her second son had been a rascal, and Maezumi laughed in glee at her expression. To prove that he was a rascal still, he imitated her frown and even her stoop as they walked together down the long corridor: “Look!” Taizan Maezumi cried. “Look! Obachan!”

In a family regimen which the Kuroda brothers have made famous in Soto Zen circles, Maezumi celebrated with sake and whiskey until after midnight, then rose next morning before dawn. Peevish, he expressed annoyance that his American students had not risen in time to do zazen before morning service. When I murmured that our sluggishness might be accounted for by all that drink, Maezumi snapped, “Sake is one thing, and zazen is another! They have nothing to do with each other!”

Kuroda-roshi led an elaborate service in which we moved from altar to altar, hall to hall. A young disciple performed the rapid tantric chants as Kuroda kept time with hard, quick pounding on the drum. Afterward we went outside and climbed the hillside to the grave of Baian Hakujun, on a rise overlooking the old town. Obachan, out early to cut daffodils, hobbled stolidly up the steep hill behind us, and Maezumi-roshi, already recovered, called out happily, “Ho, Obachan!” in affirmation of his mother’s doughty existence.

At the grave, we offered water, incense, flowers. The north wind of recent days had died, and the clear skies were thickening with a change of weather. All the way up to the evergreen forest on the ridge, soft, shifting light filled the cherry blossom clouds that covered the hillside. The earth was sprinkled with the blue of violets, and the mist of pale pink cherry blossoms was quickened here and there by blood-red and bone-white camellias. Noisy flocks of bulbuls, with a few bold jays, crossed the high trees, and the wild pigeons mourned their ancestors back in the wood.

Within the forest, at an ancient Shinto shrine watched by stone foxes, the three teachers in their golden robes rang the bell that banishes malevolent spirits. From this height, the blossoming trees flowed down in waves to the Jabi River and the town, and Maezumi spread his arms, exclaiming, “The trees are at their very best!”

Dogen said:

As usual
Cherry blossoms bloom in my native place
Their color unchanged.1

From the thicket in the early light came the melodious sweet voice of that unknown bird, and Maezumi-roshi, who had been talking to his brother as they walked along, turned around on the path ahead, as if anticipating my question. “That is the nightingale,” he informed me, and I nodded wisely, no wiser than before, in my useless knowledge that nightingales are not encountered in Japan.

On the train south to Tokyo, Tetsugen analyzed the system of koan study in which we were engaged. Before Hakuin Zenji, koan study had been arbitrary, with koans assigned at random. In Hakuin’s system, sets of koans were given that dealt with specific questions, and they were progressive in difficulty. Although this is the system in general use today, Hakuin had two “Dharma grandsons” who had different temperaments and developed different traditions, and Maezumi had studied in both. Osaka Koryu-roshi was in one of these traditions, and Yasutani, as a student of Harada (who did koan study with two Rinzai masters but introduced some Soto ideas), was in the other. Their teaching emphasis was different, and so were the koans themselves. Yasutani insisted on meticulous examination of the koan, with a lot of probing; Koryu emphasized the spirit of the koan, without bothering to break it down, to analyze it. Inevitably, people complained that Yasutani took too long in the dokusan room. Others asserted that Rinzai teachers such as Koryu neglected true penetration of the koan. With a good teacher, in Tetsugen’s opinion, either approach worked well. A lot depended on the nature of the student and the teacher’s judgment.

Although Maezumi and Tetsugen used Koryu’s ideas, their teaching reflects the Harada-Yasutani system, which begins with about fifty preliminary koan, followed by the fifty-odd koan in the Mumon-kan (Gateless Gate). Next came the Hekigan Roku (Blue Cliff Record), the Shoyo Roku (Book of Equanimity), the Denko Roku (The Transmission of Light),2 the Go-i koan,3 and the precept koan, about five hundred koan altogether. Many of these koan are also found in the system used in Koryu-roshi’s lineage.

Yasutani-roshi was forty-eight when he began koan study with Harada, and was in his late fifties when he finished. Even after he became a roshi, in 1943, he remained for some years at Hosshin-ji, transcribing Harada’s introductory talks.4 “Of Maezumi’s three teachers,” Tetsugen says, “Yasutani had the most influence on our teaching style in the dokusan room, and this style derives from Harada-roshi. Harada and Yasutani would not settle for half-understood koans, and neither will Maezumi nor his disciples.”

Like Maezumi, Tetsugen is a firm believer in keeping his students off-balance, unaffixed, and he offered me an enigmatic buddha smile. However, I am glad of his strict attitude. If American teachers failed to maintain the highest standards, American Zen would always be weak-rooted, and would certainly die in a few generations.

Kirigaya-ji, where we stayed during our several stays in Tokyo, is an old temple restored to prominence by Maezumi’s father in the 1950s and now administered by Junpu-sensei, the youngest of four Kuroda brothers who are prominent in the Soto priesthood. Junpu-sensei, a slight, boyish man with a mischievous smile, his wife, Tamiko, and the kind aunts and delightful children of his household were unfailingly hospitable, offering us the unusual honor of permitting us to share in their family life. Our airy chamber of shoji screens, tatami mats, and comfortable futon bedding (tucked away in cabinets each morning) looked out on the temple crematory and graveyard, with its loud mynah birds, bare wintry trees, and old stone buddhas. In the fresh spring wind, wood memorial plaques were nagged by the soft, sad clacking of the hungry ghosts.

In Tokyo we paid calls on Zen teachers, bought temple supplies for ZCNY, attended the kabuki theater, and frequented hot baths and good restaurants as happy recipients of our hosts’ abundant hospitality. One afternoon we visited Sengaku-ji, built in 1612, a redoubt of rock and pine erupting like an old root of Edo through the bright chemical-colored crust of Tokyo. In passing beneath the old dark eaves of its mighty entrance gate, one leaves behind the surrounding city to enter another century. Under high pines on the granite outcrop of the hill behind, the graves of the forty-seven ronin are grouped around the larger memorial to their leader, the young Lord Asano. In this small fern-ringed well set in the rock, says Maezumi-roshi, the head of Asano’s persecutor had been cleansed of blood before being presented to Asano’s gravestone altar as an offering.

At the time of the ritual suicide of the forty-seven ronin, in 1702, Sengaku-ji was part of the Tokugawa Imperial Palace, and its temple treasures, which were on display on the day of our visit, include wonderful scrolls, drawings, and paintings. One painting was done by the celebrated Sesshu, creator of the extraordinary Long Scroll, and two of the drawings are by Hakuin Zenji. On this spring afternoon of sun and showers and falling wet blossoms, the visitors bring incense and daisies to the graves, and children offer little candy packets, the unnatural colors running in the rain.

Maezumi-roshi wished to visit his last living teacher, Osaka Koryu-roshi, who lives at Hannya [Prajna] Dojo, a Zen training center constructed a half century ago in what is now Inogashira Park, in northern Tokyo. The modest building, like a hermitage, lies half hidden in dark woods that overlook a narrow, leafy pond. At the age of eighty Koryu-roshi is still noted for his powerful teisho and dramatic dokusan, and continues to maintain stem discipline with his students. In November 1981, Koryu-roshi suffered a bad fall, and now he must offer teisho and dokusan from a chair. Also, he is nearly blind from a deteriorating eye condition apparently caused by exposure to the first atomic blast at Hiroshima, which burned out his hair before he could jump into a shelter. “My eyes maybe got some kind of effect, since I saw that bright explosion and felt that heat,” he murmurs with a shy, sweet smile that recalled accounts of Hiroshima victims, courteous even in death agony, asking passersby to please lift the wreckage that crushed and suffocated them.

Koryu-roshi attributes his survival at Hiroshima to his daily homage to a Kannon Bodhisattva that had been entrusted to him for protection; the temple that formerly contained the figure was destroyed in the atomic holocaust. From an altar behind him, on which yellow chrysanthemums have been placed, the enigmatic deity looks down in mercy as we join Koryu at a low table. To the Roshi’s left, on the wall of the small room, is a scroll painting of a hunched night heron on a dead limb, awaiting evening. Bird shadows flit across pale shoji screens, and a turtledove sings cuh-coo-coo from the spring trees of the park.

Happily the old teacher relates how his excellent student, Taizan Maezumi, cataloged the dojo library of 60,000 volumes. The soft voice falls and rises like the spring wind that murmurs all around the old wood house as the Roshi’s wife offers a light repast of sashimi—raw sea bass, tuna, mackerel, crayfish, fish roe, and squid, served with soy sauce, green mustard, radish, and raw ginger—set about with pickled cauliflower and carrot, mustard tofu, nori, and early strawberries.

Koryu’s jisha brings in an ancient manuscript of the Rinzai koan collection, Hekigan Roku. The manuscript contains annotations, comments, and capping phrases written in by Hakuin Zenji and other eminent Rinzai teachers. This precious volume was once saved from fire, the roshi whispers, by a Zen master who willingly risked and received severe burns. In recent years a second copy has been made that he has given to Maezumi for safekeeping.

“When koan were made, there was the attempt to put all of Buddhism into a single phrase,” Koryu-roshi has said. “What is the Buddha, What is Bodhidharma’s fundamental spirit, Why did the Patriarch come from the West. . . . Zen seeks to speak the entirety of the Buddha’s teaching in a single phrase. . . . But the odor of ‘Buddhism’ remains: ‘What is the Buddha?’ ‘Why did the Patriarch come from the West?’ and so on. Hakuin simply put out one hand and said, ‘Hear this!’ This is truly put directly to us, completely apart from all the trappings of ‘Buddhism.’ To hear the sound of one hand, our fundamental nature must clearly come forth. Without using the word ‘Buddha,’ without using the word ‘Zen,’ we throw ourselves directly into the recesses of the mind.”5

Obeying the injunction of his teacher, Joko-roshi, Koryu has never joined the Rinzai priesthood. He agrees with other nonsectarian teachers that the Japanese priesthood, regardless of sect, has done its best to kill the true Zen spirit. Yet when nearly seventy, Koryu-roshi considered becoming a Soto monk and sincerely discussed the possibility of having his head shaved by his student Maezumi, in tokudo, the ceremony of “leaving home.”

Hearing of this now, I am very moved. My own tokudo from Maezumi (in 1981), though momentous, seemed frivolous by comparison to such a step. I remember a crazy exhilaration, an airy feeling about my new blue head, but, as it is said, the hairs or delusions on the inside of the skull are the ones most difficult to remove. After years of Zen practice, I am still beset by the “greed, anger, and folly” referred to in the Gatha of Purification, still woefully deficient in that simplicity of spirit, that transparency of heart, that is evident in many people who have never heard of Zen at all.

Tetsugen-sensei makes it clear that one day he expects me to be a teacher. I do not feel ready. (“Generally speaking,” Dogen said, “if you have still not sufficiently clarified the Buddha Dharma, you ought not to preach the Dharma rashly and heedlessly to others.”)6 “Be more simple,” Soen-roshi always said, and how I long to simplify myself. The secret of well-being is simplicity, which is here for the taking in this very breath, and also as elusive as the air.

Over the room falls a soft sepia light, as if suffused from the master’s old brown robes. He sits there quietly, all but motionless, his dim eyes seemingly filled with tears due to thick lenses in his glasses, the big ears set low on the close-cropped but not shaven head, the big hands working his wood beads.

“The seed of Zen was sown in India, its flower blossomed in China, and in Japan it bore fruit,” Koryu-roshi has said. “In Japan we savor Zen through an extraordinarily wide range of things. In this room flowers have been arranged, bringing nature in, and if we open the screens here a garden will lie before us. Nature is constantly being brought in. . . . I think that in putting a vast world into something small there is the ‘wondrous flavor’ of Zen.”7

(Koryu-roshi died on July 27, 1985.)

 

Buddha ancestors’ heart and words are buddha ancestors’ everyday tea and rice. Ordinary coarse tea and plain rice are buddhas’ heart and ancestors’ words. . . . You should leap over the summit of the question, “Besides tea and rice, are there any words or phrases for teaching?” You should try to see whether leaping is possible or not. . . .

Each and every extraordinary activity is simply having rice. Thus sitting alone on Daiyu Peak is just having rice. . . . To fill yourself is to know rice. . . . Now what is the monk’s bowl? I would say, it is not wood and it is not black lacquer. . . . It is bottomless. . . . One gulp swallows the vast sky. It accepts the vast sky with its palms together. . . .

Inheriting the buddhas’ essential wisdom is realizing the activity of having rice. . . . You cannot tell how many layers of misty clouds this sitting penetrates. Even with the sound of roaring thunder, in spring apricot blossoms are just red.

Being Ordinary
—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

ON his last visit to the United States, in 1975, Nakagawa Soen-roshi had scribbled on a scrap of paper his address at Ryutaku-ji. Whether I asked for it or whether he just gave it to me, I cannot recall. On another scrap he had scratched one of his haiku in quick Japanese characters:

In the light of flowers
I travel
Just for the sake of traveling.

In 1981, Soen-roshi had refused to see Eido-roshi and a group of American students when they arrived at Ryutaku-ji. Early in 1982, when I wrote to my old teacher that I would like to visit him in April, I received no answer. One of his disciples, Kyudo-roshi (who as Monk Dokyu had visited my house in 1972, later led a Zen group in Israel, and was now accepting students in New York City), assured me that his teacher would see no one. Sochu-roshi, Soen’s successor as abbot of Ryutaku-ji, had informed Maezumi-roshi (who telephoned from Tokyo) that his old teacher was still in seclusion in his chamber high above the monastery, that he had let his hair grow long and had a beard, as in his hermit days on Dai Bosatsu Mountain, and that sometimes he was not seen for weeks at a time. This cloud-hidden state was confirmed by Soen’s friend, Koun Yamada-roshi, at Kamakura. Yet my instinct was to pay my old teacher a visit “just for the sake of paying my old teacher a visit.” If he would not see us, that was all right, too.

I sense in Tetsugen mixed feelings about the visit, and yet he has no wish to interfere. Soen-roshi’s erratic appearances, his long periods of withdrawal, have denied to his students the continuity of study that Soto masters feel is critical, and therefore Tetsugen has doubts about his ultimate effectiveness as a Zen teacher. “He ignites his students, but he does not keep that fire burning. He has not gone to America since 1975, and people who come to Ryutaku-ji to study with him may not set eyes on him for years.” Nevertheless, he admires Soen as a great eccentric master, “in the traditional sense, probably the greatest Zen master of modern times.”

Throughout our travels in Japan, we have mostly stayed at monasteries and temples, but because I am traveling as jisha to a Soto teacher, it seems inappropriate to ask if we might stay at Ryutaku-ji. Instead we will stay at Fuji Hannya Dojo, one of the lay meditation centers established by Joko-roshi, where Koryu-roshi still comes occasionally to give sesshin.

Chido-sensei, who administers this dojo, was a friend of the late R. H. Blyth, the eminent British translator and interpreter of Japanese literature1 who was interned as a Japanese prisoner during World War II (with Robert Aitken, whom he started on the path of Zen) and who lived at this dojo for a while thereafter. Erudite, brilliant, cranky, and opinionated, Blyth decreed that the four greatest Japanese Zen monks were Ikkyu, Takuan, Hakuin, and Ryokan, all of them poets; Ikkyu was rated highest of all. “I omit Dogen,” Blyth informs us, “because I think him infatuated, incoherent, and unlovable.” Simplistic judgments such as these enliven without illuminating a volume2 dedicated to D. T. Suzuki, “the only man who can write about Zen without making me loathe it.” (This opinion is not so wrongheaded as it might seem, since anything written about Zen—including Blyth’s own numerous volumes, and this one—inevitably separates itself from Zen’s “instantaneous” spirit. In using dead words to say that Zen is this or that, a separation is created, and the freshness of the Zen moment is lost.)

A small, sturdy man with beetling brows in a kind country face toughened by weather, Chido-sensei dresses simply in a black beret and dark blue sweat suit that seem to emphasize his isolation from the priesthood. With his daughter and pretty grandchildren, he lives among overgrown gardens of abounding roses, washed by restless winds in the tall evergreens, soothed by the rushing of the Kise River. The Kise flows down from the eastern slopes of Fuji-san,3 as this shining volcano, symbol of Eternal Mind, is known to the Japanese. “Oh! This beautiful Fuji-san! I am so happy living near!” cried Chido-sensei’s friend, Mr. Sakuma, at one time a student of Soen-roshi at Ryutaku-ji. Chido-sensei, too, has known Soen for many years. Like all of Soen’s friends and students, he and Mr. Sakuma have many memories of that quixotic and beloved teacher, and laugh affectionately over old stories. “He hides himself now,” Mr. Sakuma said, collecting himself with a polite sigh. “I have not seen him for some years.”

That night I steamed with my knees up like a fetus in a round wooden vat heated from beneath the shed by a smoky log fire stoked by Chido-sensei. At dawn our host led us in meditation in the small zendo, and afterward we carried flowers to Joko-roshi’s grave on a wooded rise above the Kise River. His daughter served us a big country breakfast, and after breakfast Chido-sensei offered chanoyu. He served the ceremonial green tea precisely and correctly, yet simply, without mannerisms, the worn napkin small in his rough brown hand. His tea was “ordinary” in the sense so much admired by Zen masters, with nothing showy, “nothing special,” nothing that drew attention to itself. (“Be more ordinary,” Soen-roshi used to say to some of my more literary koan answers.)

A fresh wind down off Fuji-san, high to the west, made a rushing sound in the great cryptomeria and strong bamboo, and the one sound strong enough to carry over wind and river was the light, sweet song of that unseen bird, lost in the leaves of a maple overhead. A moment later I laid eyes on it at last. The bird had none of the magical colors with which I had painted it in my imagination, “nothing special.” It was small and plain and brown, the uguisu or bush warbler (known to English-speaking Japanese as “nightingale”). Ryokan wrote:

Illusion and enlightenment? Two sides of a coin.
Universals and particulars? No difference.
All day I read the wordless sutra;
All night not a thought of Zen practice.
An uguisu sings in the willows along the river bank,
Dogs in the village bay at the moon. . . .4

Chido-sensei’s household accompanied us to the main road to wave goodbye. Sayonara! they cried—a lovely word in the voices of young children. We followed the old man across the river. Below the bridge, big white geese of the village sailed on windy pools between shining gray stones, rubbed smooth by centuries of Fuji-san’s spring torrents.

From the village, a small local bus climbed the terraces of the high farm country to smaller villages inset in the foothills. The villages sat at the edge of the montane forest that climbs to the snow line on Mount Fuji. Throughout our journey up the mountain, through fields and crossroads, orchards and pinewood, the great white cone of Fuji kept reappearing, rising ever higher in the blue sky; snow blew from the peak in pursuit of swift white clouds. “Because mountains are by nature high and broad,” Dogen Zenji said, “the right way of riding the clouds is reached from the mountains, and the inconceivable virtue of following the wind is not hindered by mountains.”5

At these altitudes, the spring was new. Wild cherry and andromeda were just coming into blossom, and the low scrub hardwoods were still bare. The grass was straw-colored, parted here and there by yellow-edged leaves of small native bamboo. On the cold earth there were no flowers, but on tall poles above each mountain hamlet, tubular pennants in the form of heaven-colored carp swayed, tossed, and danced in the mountain wind. The huge fish, cloud-pink and sky-blue, swam like dragons against the snows, against the sky.

The road passed a closed amusement park with soiled pastel walls banged by the breeze. A chemical-colored polar bear was king of a plastic ice floe in the middle of a large plastic lagoon. Higher still, in the “Fuji Safari Park,” a few chilled golfers swatted balls across last winter’s novice ski slope. The road came to an end well below the snows at a “Wildlife Protection Area,” a small forest without the smallest sign of life. In vain did I scan the silent woods for ashy minivets and red-flanked bluetails, green woodpeckers and copper pheasants, while Tetsugen, who discourses as freely as the uguisu sings, kept up an animated conversation. Chido-sensei walked ahead of us, hands tucked up behind his back, muttering a little, and seeing the snow cone through the trees beyond him, I was reminded of a story told by Soen-roshi, to show how words get in the way of the natural expression of the thing itself.

One day a young monk at Ryutaku-ji had a kensho, and his teacher, seeking to deepen this experience, led him on a long walk up Mount Fuji. Although the monk had seen the great snow mountain many times before, he truly perceived it now for the first time (like the monk who truly perceived that the sun was round), and all the way up, he kept exclaiming over the harmony and colors of the wildflowers, the flight of birds, the morning light in the fresh evergreens, the sacred white mountain rising in mighty silence to the sky. “Look, Roshi, this pine cone! See how it is made? This stone, it’s so . . . so stone! Isn’t it wonderful? Do you hear the nightingale? It is a miracle! Oh! Fuji-san!”

Muttering a little, the old master hobbled onward, until finally his student noticed his long silence and cried out, “Isn’t it so? Aren’t these mountains, rivers, and great earth miraculous? Isn’t it beautiful?” The old man turned on him. “Yes-s-s,” he said forcefully. “But what a pity to say so!”6

On the way down the mountain, we descended from the bus at the small Fuji museum. The kind curator endeavored to explain the geological mysteries of the volcano but, failing to penetrate the language barrier, presented me instead with a small transparent arrowhead, minutely fashioned by the aboriginal Jomon people of three to five thousand years before. Out of reverence for Chido-sensei, or so it appeared, the curator then drove us the rest of the way down the mountain into Mishima, on Suruga Bay.

In the early afternoon, as we walked off a fine lunch of baked eels and cold beer, Chido-sensei displayed the botanical gardens, children’s park, and zoo of his fair city. One cage containing Siberian cranes (which wander to Japan in winter) was being hosed down by a hasty keeper, and the huge birds pressed frantically against the bars, lifting their wings and feet in consternation. Here in Mishima, in 1973, my bad knee had been treated by two aged acupuncturists, a man and wife, both blind. Before inserting the long, wispy needles, the old couple had run unabashed hands over every inch of me, without exception, chirping innocently as uguisu over their findings. When I returned to Ryutaku-ji, Soen-roshi said, “Have you been punctuated?”

Ryutaku-ji, the Dragon-Swamp Temple, is set on a steep slope of mosses and evergreens on the south side of the foothills of Mount Fuji. (The dragon symbolizes one’s own true nature, or Buddha-nature, as in Dogen Zenji’s exhortation, “Do not be afraid of the true dragon!”) At the entrance a monk said, “Soen-roshi is not so healthy now; he rises, falls. But he is feeling better today, and he will see you.” Chido-sensei translated these words, but because his English is haphazard, we wondered if the opposite message had been intended.

After making our bows in the main service hall where I sat sesshin in 1973, we went to the Founder’s Hall to pay respects to Hakuin Ekaku, whose intensity animates an old wood statue that leans forward to peer into the eyes of those who look upon it. “His figure is extraordinary, he glares at people like a tiger, he walks like a bull; his power is fierce and difficult to approach,” wrote Hakuin’s disciple Torei Enji, who relocated the temple on this mountainside in 1761, the year that Hakuin came here to lecture. In this same place, two centuries later, at his shin-san-shiki, or abbot installation, Soen-roshi had worn Hakuin’s robes.

Soen’s successor, Sochu-roshi, had offered dokusan during the sesshin that preceded the formal opening of Dai Bosatsu, six years before, but our confrontations had been inconclusive. I remembered him best as one of the ringleaders on that lawless rowboat voyage to the Buddha on the farther side of Beecher Lake, and he had no reason to remember me at all. Though large, rounded, and thickset to the degree that Soen is small, erect, and trim, he resembles his teacher in his no-nonsense manner, his quick, cryptic humor, and his all but disreputable brown robes. Without bothering about greetings or introductions, he led us at once on an inspection of the new zendo, now under construction. The wood was still unstained and aromatic, and new copper tiles shone on the roof. At tea in the old monastery office, Sochu-roshi had little or nothing to say, and after a short time he rose rather abruptly and departed.

Quite suddenly, as if he had waited in the corridor for this moment, an old monk in a plain black robe stood in the doorway. He wore no sign of ordination, yet the robe was clean and his head was freshly shaven, and he stood erect in that authoritative way that had always made him seem larger than he was. Having expected an unkempt old man with long hair and beard, we were taken aback, and bowed in silence. Bowing briefly in return, Soen-roshi snapped, “All stand up, follow me.” He turned on his heel and walked away toward the narrow stairs that led up the hillside to the abbot’s rooms and eventually to his own small private chamber.

By these ancient stairs, as the foot of the mossy hillside behind the monastery, lies the small goldfish pond that—perhaps because of my old teacher’s love of Basho—I associate with that most famous of all haiku:

Old pond
A frog jumps in
The sound of water

Basho was a Zen student, and his old pond is the vast emptiness, the eternal. The frog is the quick glint of fleeting life. The splash is the instantaneous NOW! that makes them one.7

In 1973, returning from Kyoto, we had gone for a walk into the foothills, but Fuji-san was hidden in the clouds that wandered down among the daisies and wild rose on the hill terraces. At tea Soen-roshi had presented us with red demon paintings, and on one of these shikishi I found inscribed “Nowhere is now here: Soen.” (The message startled me, having already appeared in a hallucinatory dream in one of my own novels, published eight years earlier; where Soen-roshi came by it I never asked.) The evening service commemorated his teacher, Gempo-roshi. Next morning we rose at 3:30 A.M. to begin sesshin.8

That first morning, Soen-roshi led his American students out of the service hall during dawn zazen, just as the first wand of light touched the old pond behind the monastery. At the foot of the stairs he pointed in silence at a dragonfly nymph that had crawled out of the lily pads and mud and fastened itself to the stair post. The nymph is a mud-colored water dweller of forbidding aspect and rapacious habit that preys on small fish and other creatures until the day comes when it hauls its heavy body from the water, affixes itself to wood or stone, and struggles to cast off its thick carapace, permitting its translucent, sun-filled dragonfly nature to take wing.

At sunrise, the new dragonfly was almost free, a beautiful golden thing, silvered by dew, resting a little, twitching its transparent wings, yet not quite liberated from the crude armor of its former life. When I gasped like the young monk on the mountain, unable to repress a delighted comment, Soen-roshi pointed sternly at the meditation hall: “Now do your best!”

In the first day, there was great pain and weakness in my injured knee, causing teeth chattering and even nausea, but within one day—it seemed miraculous at the time—the acupuncture treatment had taken hold. Though I still had pain, I no longer feared that I had come this great distance to Ryutaku-ji sesshin for nothing. At dokusan the roshi said, “In any event, in any moment, and in any place, none can be other than the marvelous revelation of . . . Mu! If your knee hurts, where is Mu?” Mu is just MU!, I declared, and he said sharply, “Never mind all this Mu! If your knee hurts there is only OUCH! If your car cracks, there is only BANG! Do you understand?”

If the frog jumps, there is only SPLASH: do you understand?

At next dokusan, I asked for a koan, but the roshi was relentless. “Mu practice is enough koan. You will die someday. What is Mu on the day of your death? You must work on Mu more diligently, more sincerely, more completely.”

I was still a new student, and therefore ashamed of my weak and stupid answers. At work period, avoiding the harsh stare of those bald eyes, I cleaned Hakuin’s altar; another day I peeled onions in the sun. And later in sesshin, as my mind cleared, there rose from the great stillness of zazen the irrefutable not-knowing that Hakuin’s eye, the onion smell, knee pain, tea taste, pine whisper, bells, the flutter of temple doves dusting in sunlight, were in no way different from myself, all one, all Mu. Knee taste, tea pain, bell whisper, bald dust fluttering, nowhere, now here, all one, all eternal Mu.

During teisho for the Japanese, we listened upstairs to recorded teisho in English—scarcely teisho at all, since true teisho depends on a live buddha presence. But there was live teisho from the ratcheting frogs in the temple pool, the sudden silence at the nearing of the heron, hard-eyed, wet glint on its taut bill—the frog, the heron stab, the silver water splash all one, the rolling red color and the taste, the pain, are not separate from this excitable student who carried his frog tales into dokusan. Soen-roshi nodded vigorously. “Ripening, ripening! March on diligently! Expect nothing!”

Moon glint on a heron’s bill.
. . . eep!
Silverness.

During zazen, making his rounds with his delusion-cutting sword, the roshi smacks me smartly twice (though I do not ask for it), then says to us, “There is only one thing to win, and all of you may win it in this sesshin!”

At dokusan he demands again, “What is Mu on the day you die?” I fall back in a descending moan of death, and he nods, saying quietly, “This Mu is the true enlightenment.”

Now it is 1982, and once again, in the same reception room, Soen-roshi led us in the Kannon Sutra. Still very stem, the old teacher rose and we trailed him up the stair to the little chamber in the evergreens, overlooking the mossy hillside, the old fish pond, the old monastery. Once again I made my bows to the magnificent thousand-armed, thousand-eyed Kannon figure, a national treasure, which at the time of that 1973 visit was destined to go to Dai Bosatsu, in America. Once again we chanted the Four Vows and the Gatha of Purification.

Only then did the roshi’s stem expression soften in welcome. Greeting us one by one around the circle, he smiled, then laughed aloud in childlike pleasure. When my turn came, he took both of my hands and squeezed them three times, very hard, tears in his eyes, then rose to his knees and gave me a great hug. He laughed with Tetsugen, gazed at his old friend Chido-sensei with a happy smile. Then he went back around the circle, touching our heads in blessing, after which—just as he used to do—he commanded us to slap his shaved head hard, to knock some sense into it. By now, remembering his tricks, we were all laughing in delight.

Then, as if his eyes had died, he withdrew behind the remote expression I remembered so well from dokusan, in which his mouth sets as in a mask and his eyes disappear behind two slits. Without a word, he got up, bowed, and led us back down the crooked stair. At the entrance he took up his long wood staff and marched along the woodland paths of Ryutaku-ji, leading the way down the mountainside to the public road where the cab would be waiting.

Nine years before, departing this place, his American students were accompanied by Soen-roshi on an excursion to Atami, on the coast, where the hotelkeeper would not suffer any students of this renowned Zen master, poet, and calligrapher to pay for anything. We devoured fresh fish, glowed in fountain baths, danced on the hotel roof at dawn, bowed to the sun. In a rockledge house set among treetops on the mountainside, a beautiful woman, Soen’s old student, offered our feet shiatsu massage, a hot face cloth, and a delicious cold sesame drink, preparing us for koicha tea in a delicate straw room that hung like a sun lantern in the old dark branches. From the leaf canopy, in the long June twilight, came a fluting birdsong. To my inquiry, the roshi said, “That is the nightingale.”

A silver sake bottle, silver cups. In ancient dress, the mandarin lady offered in black lacquer bowls the delicate courses of kaiseki supper—hot and cold soups, egg tofu, kelps, tempura of lotus bulb and lilac root. Afterward we improvised a dance on the tatami, until the roshi raised his hand, summoning silence, and pointed through the trees at the ocean sunset. “Please appreciate,” he murmured. “Dragon clouds.”

One afternoon we visited a temple on the hills above Atami and the sea. On one of the roofs in the temple court sat a motley of street pigeons, one hundred strong. In the midst of this discolored mob shone a lone white bird. While the roshi gave instructions to the cab driver, his guests walked across the square, then turned around on the far side to await him. When the small, brown figure set out alone, all but one bird in the pigeon flock, which had risen in a burst as we left the car to wheel in a tight circle overhead, returned in a sudden swirl onto its roof. The white bird circled round and round over Soen’s head.

Not bothering to follow our gaze upward, Soen-roshi smiled at our awe-struck faces. Murmuring “Won-derful! Won-derful!,” he continued on into the temple.

Nine years later, on the forest path, he was still offering appreciation of his life, cheering a late-blooming cherry, pointing his long stave at the sun. “The sun, the moon are buddhas, all the human beings of this earth are buddhas, all is Buddha! Everything and everybody is a teacher. Sometimes you are my teachers, you are so-called roshi! Everybody is so-called roshi, okay? All is enlightened, as-it-is-now!”

All are nothing but flowers
In a flowering universe.9

A little boy running uphill on the path, head down, was startled when he bumped into us, and more startled still when Soen-roshi, pointing his long stick, cried, “Monju! Here is Monju!” Monju is Manjusri, the Bodhisattva of Great Wisdom. The roshi was entreating us to perceive the Bodhisattva in the clear, undefended gaze of the little boy. Then the instant passed. Seeing the gaijin, the child’s eye clouded in bewilderment, and the old man rubbed his head in blessing, saying sadly, “No, it is not Monju after all.” The child ran off, and the roshi fell silent, walking on.

At the bottom of the hill where the cab was waiting, Soen-roshi was courtly and quiet. He inclined his head in recognition of our goodbyes, no longer with us, impatient to retreat into his solitude. Feeling incomplete, I told him how happy his students in America would be if he came to see them. I did not mention Eido-roshi and neither did he. “Perhaps,” he said, “I shall appear soon in New York, but it is not a promise.” He raised his staff and kept it raised as long as we could see him through the car window, a small, black-robed figure at the end of the path that led uphill into the forest.

Even before arriving in Japan, I had faith that Soen-roshi would see us, and this morning, as we drove up toward Mount Fuji, I felt sure of it. Tetsugen was mildly surprised that the visit had worked out so well in the face of so many obstacles and warnings. Tetsugen, too, perceives that Soen, with his ancient, innocent, and other-worldly ways, has the power of some old shaman from the Gobi Desert, and comes and goes, accountable to no one. Eido-roshi perceived him as “my greatest koan, truly ungraspable”: Soen-roshi would say, “If I am caught, it is the end of me.”

At seventy-five, Soen-roshi still seemed animated, but Tetsugen felt—and I had to agree—that he had been going on memory and nerve; his wild, spontaneous inspiration had dimmed. “He was almost like a ghost,” Tetsugen commented as elation died in the journey down the mountain, “the perfect ghost of Soen-roshi, like a ghost in a Noh drama, which for some reason was allowed to reappear.”10

In the sadness attending our visit there was also freedom. The wonderful teachers who had brought the Dharma from Asia to the West would appear no more, but in another sense, they would be with us forever. In Western as in Eastern lands, the Buddha Way might need centuries to become established, so the sooner we got on about it, the better. It was time to step forward from the hundred-foot pole as the fortunate student of this America-born buddha who sits here beside me in this present, first, last, past, and future moment of my life.

Elhunyt Peter Matthiessen
író, felfedező, természettudós, akinek Titkos Tortuga című regénye Magyarországon is sikert aratott a nyolcvanas években.
https://www.prae.hu/news/22755-elhunyt-peter-matthiessen-amerikai-iro-felfedezo-termeszettudos/

A 86 esztendős szerző leukémiában szenvedett, és egy New York-i kórházban hunyt el szombaton - közölte vasárnap a BBC News Matthiessen kiadója, a Riverhead Books közleményére hivatkozva.

Az író legismertebb művei közé tartozott a dél-amerikai indiánok közé érkező hittérítőkről szóló At Play in the Fields of the Lord című regény, amelyből évtizedekig tartó próbálkozás után Játék az Úristen pályáján címmel készült játékfilm Tom Berenger, John Lithgow és Daryl Hannah főszereplésével 1991-ben.

Legutolsó könyve In Paradise címmel éppen április 8-án, kedden jelenik meg az Egyesült Államokban.

Matthiessen a Yale Egyetemen végzett, majd Párizsba utazott, ahol részt vett a máig népszerű irodalmi magazin, a The Paris Review megalapításában. A folyóirat sikere ellenére azonban az ötvenes évek közepén hazatért az Egyesült Államokba. (Az AP hírügynökség beszámolója szerint Matthiessen később elismerte, hogy akkoriban a CIA alkalmazásában állt, és a folyóiratnál végzett munkáját fedőtevékenységként használta.)

A családja révén vagyonos Matthiessen a hatvanas években a buddhizmus felé fordult, zen pappá vált, de közben írásait, köztük a világ különböző részeire vezető expedícióiról beszámoló munkáit is egyre nagyobb elismerés övezte. A Himalájában játszódó The Snow Leopard és a Shadow Country című műveiért 1980-ban és 2008-ban megkapta az amerikai Nemzeti Könyvdíjat.

A Titkos Tortuga című regénye karib-szigeteki teknősvadászokról szól, akik a teknősökben bővelkedő, legendás helyet, a Titkos Tortugát keresik. A magyarul 1981-ben megjelent könyvet Richly Zsolt grafikái illusztrálják.

Matthiessen a Himaláján kívül az Antarktiszon is járt, Ausztráliába is eljutott és Amerika vadvilágát is tanulmányozta. Elkötelezett környezetvédőként nem a természet leigázása vezette felfedező expedícióin, hanem annak védelme. Már az 1959-ben kiadott Wildlife in America című ismeretterjesztő kötetében arról írt, hogy az ember a természet "legnagyobb ragadozója", aki egyedülálló módon hajlamos az önpusztításra.