The Zen Experience Part 37

When I am ill she cures the jade stalk

And brings joy back to my followers.22

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Ikkyu also left a number of prose fables and sermons that portray a more sober personality than does his often iconoclastic verse. One cla.s.sic work, written in 1457 and called "Skeletons," has become a Zen cla.s.sic. In the section given below he explores the Buddhist idea of the Void and nothingness:

_Let me tell you something. Human birth is a.n.a.logous to striking up a fire--the father is flint, the mother is stone and the child is the spark. Once the spark touches a lamp wick it continues to exist through the "secondary support" of the fuel until that is exhausted. Then it flickers out. The lovemaking of the parents is the equivalent of striking the spark. Since the parents too have "no beginning," in the end they, too, will flicker out. Everything grows out of empty s.p.a.ce from which all forms derive. If one lets go the forms then he reaches what is called the "original ground." But since all sentient beings come from nothingness we can use even the term "original ground" only as a temporary tag.23

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It seems unfortunate that Ikkyu's prose is not better known today.24 In fact the best-known accounts of Ikkyu are the apocryphal tales that attached to him during the Tokugawa era. A typical episode is the following, ent.i.tled "Ikkyu Does Magic," in which the picaresque Zen-man uses his natural resources to thwart the bl.u.s.ter of a haughty priest from one of the scholarly aristocratic sects--just the thing guaranteed to please the common man.

Once Ikkyu was taking the Yodo no Kawase ferry on his way to Sakai.

There was a _yamabushi _[mountain ascetic of Esoteric Buddhism] on board who began to question him.

_"Hey, Your Reverence, what sect are you?"

"I belong to the Zen sect," replied Ikkyu.

"I don't suppose your sect has miracles the way our sect does?"

"No, actually we have lots of miracles. But if it's miracles, why don't you show the sort of miracles that your people have?"

"Well," said the _yamabushi_, "By virtue of my magic powers I can pray up Fudo [a fierce guardian deity of Buddhism] before your very eyes and make him stand right there on the prow of the boat."

And, with the beads of his rosary the man began to invoke first Kongo and then Seitaka [Esoteric Buddhist deities]. At this, all the pa.s.sengers began to look back and forth wondering what was going to happen. Then, just as he had said, there on the prow of the boat, the form of Fudo appeared surrounded by a halo of dancing flames.

Then the _yamabushi _made a ferocious face and told him, "You'd all better offer him a prayer." This made the other pa.s.sengers very uneasy-- all that is but Ikkyu, who was completely unruffled.

"Well," spat out the _yamabushi_, "How about you, Zen monk? How are you going to deal with my miracle?"

"By producing a miracle of my own. From my very body I will cause water to issue forth and extinguish the flames of your Fudo. You'd better start your prayers up again." And Ikkyu began to pee mightily all over the flames until at last the _yamabushi's _magic was counteracted and the entire image melted away. Thereupon the pa.s.sengers on the boat all bowed to Ikkyu for his wonderful display.25_

Ironically, the real-life Ikkyu spent his twilight years restoring Daitoku-ji after its destruction (along with the rest of Kyoto) from the ten-year Onin war (1467-77), by taking over the temple and using his contacts in the merchant community to raise funds. He had over a hundred disciples at this time, a popularity that saddened him since earlier (and, he thought, more deserving) masters had had many fewer followers. Thus in the last decade of his life he finally exchanged his straw sandals and reed hat for the robes of a prestigious abbot over a major monastery. His own ambivalence on this he confessed in a poem:

_Fifty years a rustic wanderer,

Now mortified in purple robes.26

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Ikkyu's contributions to Zen culture are also significant. He helped inspire the secular Zen ritual known today as the tea ceremony, by encouraging the man today remembered as its founder. He also supported one of the best-known dramatists of the No theater and was himself a master calligrapher, an art closely akin to painting in the Far East and regarded by many as even more demanding.27 He even created a soybean dish (_natto_) now a staple of Zen monastic cuisine.

But as his biographer James Sanford has pointed out, the real life of this truly great j.a.panese master has all but eluded us. His poetry is in cla.s.sical Chinese and virtually unknown; his prose lies largely unread; and the Tokugawa legend of Ikkyu is almost entirely apocryphal.

This last travesty has extended even to fictionalizing his role as a child at the monastery; there is now a popular television cartoon series in j.a.pan about the irrepressible acolyte Ikkyu. Sanford speculates that his attraction for contemporary j.a.panese is that, in the legend of Ikkyu, "it is possible for the modern j.a.panese mind to re-discover 'native' examples of, and justification for, individualism-- a term and concept whose full a.s.similation into modern j.a.panese culture has for over fifty years been blocked by a legacy of residual Neo- Confucian norms left over from [j.a.pan's repressive past]."28

It does seem true that the Zen-man Ikkyu represents a safety valve in j.a.panese society, both then and now. He brought the impulsive candor of Zen to the world of affairs, demonstrating by example that after enlightenment it is necessary to return to a world where mountains are again mountains, rivers again rivers. And by rejecting official "Zen,"

Ikkyu may well have been the most Zenlike of all j.a.panese masters.

Chapter Eighteen

HAKUIN:

j.a.pANESE MASTER OF THE KOAN

The closing era of the j.a.panese middle ages, in the decades following Ikkyu's death, is now known as the Century of the Country at War. j.a.pan became a land of quarreling fiefdoms, and Zen, too, drifted for want of leadership and inspiration. The eventual reunification of the country late in the sixteenth century was led by a brutal military strategist named Oda n.o.bunaga (1534-82). As part of his takeover he obliterated the militaristic Buddhist complex on Mt. Hiei by one day simply slaughtering all its monks and burning the establishment to the ground, thereby ending permanently the real influence of Buddhism in j.a.panese politics. n.o.bunaga was succeeded by an even more accomplished militarist, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98), who brought to the shogunate a flair for diplomacy and cunning compromise. Hideyoshi solidified j.a.pan only to have yet another warlord, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), maneuver its rule into the hands of his own family--inaugurating the two and a half centuries of totalitarian isolationism known today as the Tokugawa era (1615-1868). He also moved the capital to the city whose modern name is Tokyo, at last leaving historic Kyoto in repose.

Under the Tokugawa a new middle cla.s.s of urban merchants and craftsmen arose, and with it came a version of Zen for common people, with masters who could touch the concerns of the working cla.s.s. Among these beloved masters must certainly be remembered the monk Takuan (1573- 1645) from Ikkyu's rebuilt Daitoku-ji temple, who introduced Zen teachings to this new audience, and the wandering teacher Bankei (1622- 93), whose kindly, mystical interpretation of oneness through _zazen _earned him wide fame. Overall, however, Rinzai Zen remained spiritually dormant until the middle of the Tokugawa era, when there appeared one of the most truly inspired Zen teachers of all time.

The master Hakuin (1686-1769) was born as Sugiyama Iwajiro in Hara, a small village at the base of Mt. Fuji. He was the youngest of five children in a family of modest means, an origin that may have helped him understand the concerns of the poor. As he tells his story, he was seven or eight when his mother took him to hear a priest from the Salvationist Nichiren sect preach on the tormenting Buddhist h.e.l.ls. He was terrified and secretly began day and night reciting the Lotus Sutra (which claims to protect from the perils of fire or water those who chant the proper incantation). The fear of h.e.l.l, with its boiling caldrons, so permeated his young mind that he even became leary of the traditional j.a.panese bath, then often taken in a round tub fired from the bottom with wood. He claimed this fear of the bath finally convinced him to become a monk.

_One day when I was taking a bath with my mother, she asked that the water be made hotter and had the maid add wood to the fire. Gradually my skin began to p.r.i.c.kle with the heat and the iron bath-cauldron began to rumble. Suddenly I recalled the descriptions of the h.e.l.ls that I had heard and I let out a cry of terror that resounded through the neighborhood.

From this time on I determined to myself that I would leave home to become a monk. To this my parents would not consent, yet I went constantly to the temple to recite the sutras. . . .1_

But after several years of study and chanting, he was dismayed to find he still felt pain (when he tested himself one day with a hot poker).

He resolved to intensify his devotion and at age fifteen he entered a local Zen temple (against his parents' wishes) and was ordained as a monk. Hakuin pursued his study of the Lotus Sutra, the primary scripture venerated at this temple (an ill.u.s.tration of how far j.a.panese Zen had traveled from its tradition of meditation and koans), but after a year he concluded it was just another book, no different from the Confucian cla.s.sics. He therefore began to drift from temple to temple until, at nineteen, he experienced another spiritual crisis. In a book of religious biographies he came across the story of the Chinese monk Yen-t'ou (828-87), who had been attacked and murdered by bandits, causing him to emit screams heard a full three miles away. Hakuin was plunged into depression.

_I wondered why such an enlightened monk was unable to escape the swords of thieves. If such a thing could happen to a man who was like a unicorn or phoenix among monks, a dragon in the sea of Buddhism, how was I to escape the staves of the demons of h.e.l.l after I died? What use was there in studying Zen_?2

He thereupon took up his staff and set out as an itinerant seeker, only to meet disappointment after disappointment--until finally he decided to put his future in the hands of chance. One day as the abbot of a temple was airing its library outside, Hakuin decided to select a book at random and let it decide his fate. He picked a volume of biographies of Chinese Ch'an worthies and opening it read of an eleventh-century Lin- chi master who kept awake in meditation by boring into his own thigh with a wood drill. The story galvanized Hakuin, and he vowed to pursue Zen training until enlightenment was his.

Hakuin claims that at age twenty-four he had his first really moving satori experience. He was in a temple in Niigata prefecture, meditating on the "Mu" koan (Q: "Does a dog have Buddha-nature? A: "Mu!"), and so intense was his concentration that he even forgot sleeping and eating.

Then one day . . .

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