Introducing Japanese Religion, Robert Elwood Chapter 7: Swords and Satori, Zen and its culture
A Zen Experience
Zen Buddhism is only one Buddhist strand in Japan, and only one of the three major movements = Pure Land, Nichicren, and Zen - resultant from the Kamakura spiritual upheavals. Actual members of the temples of the two or three Zen denominations represent less than ten percent of the total population. Nonetheless, Zen is allotted a separate chapter in this book for two reasons: first, that school has had a widely-recognized distinctive role in Japanese culture; and second, Zen has attracted particular interest outside of Japan.
Why the twofold interest? Zen is associated with several arts in a way emphasizing nature, ‘minimalism’, and what might be called ‘trained spontaneity’. Challenging concepts. Fascinating also is a school some inquirers have thought to be, in the opening words of one of the most influential modern books on Zen, “a way and a view of life which does not belong to any formal categories of modern Western thought”.
However, it is important to realize that, despite presentations which put Zen in a sort of spiritual stratosphere, the tradition is in fact simply an East Asian form of Buddhism grounded in history, culture, and religious institutionalization as any other. It has its rituals, has had its scandals, its wealthy temples and set attitudes – as well as its glorious art, its tales of marvelous spontaneity, and the inner freedom of those who have found the secret of satori.
Perhaps, to introduce the real life of Zen, a personal story would be of help. Many years ago, I visited an evening zazen, or seated meditation, at an American Zen center. The roshi or master was from a Japanese monastery, but most of the members of this center were Euro-American. As I crossed the flagstoned courtyard of the old mansion which was now the center’s main edifice, I was met by a woman who welcomed me courteously and, rightly taking me for a newcomer, showed me how to take a seat on one of the two rows of mats and cushions on either side of the long room. This I did, sitting cross-legged in the ‘half-lotus’ posture (one foot on the opposite thigh, the best I could attain) with spine erect, and eyes pointed toward the floor three feet in front. (This being a center in the Rinzai rather than the Soto tradition, the two rows faced each other rather than towards the wall)
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Most of the others, regular members or attenders, wore black robes. One such individual was the jikijitsu or proctor, who walked up and down the rows with a flat paddle, the kyosaku or awakening stick, on his shoulder. When he saw someone whose mindfulness seemed to be lagging, or whose posture – like mine – was poor, he would pound the stick sharply on the floor in front of that person to get attention, then make the correction. If she or he was a stable and experienced member, he would slap the drowsy mediator smartly on the shoulders with the stick, then bow as the recipient also bowed to acknowledge the favor, and pass on silently.
At the end of a half hour, everyone silently arose, filed out into the courtyard, circled around in single file for a few minutes of ‘walking zen’ to loosen up, then returned to the zendo for another half hour of sitting. After that, another moment of exercise, and more sitting.
By this time, to my uninitiated mind, Zen was becoming tedious, and my body was feeling the effect of sitting too long in an unaccustomed position. But then the jikijitsu approached and, whispering into my ear, asked if I would like to have a sanzen, an interview with the roshi. Being willing to try, I consented, and was led to a small anteroom.
A low table, with a gong on it at one end, was the only furniture; three or four people were seated in zazen posture on cushions beside the table. Beyond this room the roshi waited in a private audience chamber. When he had finished an interview, he would ring a bell; the next student in line responded by sounding the gong. That person would then enter, kneeling to bow touching the forehead to the floor as he entered the room, and again just before the master.
The small rotund monk from Japan was seated high on a vast cushion. He wore a sashed grey robe with wide winglike sleeves, and held a fan in his hand. Taking a note of introduction from my hand, he eyed me shrewdly.
“So” he said. “You’re a professor of religion. Do you believe in God?”
Stumbling around, having no real idea how to express such things to a Zen master, I tried to say something about God as the ground of my being and the source of my life.
I was cut short. I was surprised by a sting on my thigh as he brought the folded fan down on me. “Not good!” he said strictly. “Now, how do you know God?”
This time I stumbled even more. “Perhaps in the immediacy of the experience…”
“Not good!” he retorted, slapping me again with the fan. “This is your Zen koan: Now how do you know God?”
I knew that the Zen koan is a riddle with no obvious answer. Famous ones are, “Where was your face before you were born?” or “What is the sound of one hand?” The ultimate answer to both lies in the Oneness that is prior to all differentiated, manifested phenomena, but just to say so would hardly satisfy a Zen teacher. The student has to demonstrate that he or she knows. For the Koan is meant to bring the mind up against the limits of its rational, verbal way of thinking, and to shift gears to immediate awareness expressed in direct, spontaneous action without words or ideas. If asked, for example, about the sound of one hand, the student who knows might just silently thrust out one hand in a single, unified gesture, putting all his energy into that one movement, with no flicker of doubt or hesitation.
I thought I knew what “Now how do you know God?” meant: How do I encounter God in the immediate Now? Not how did I know God in some past religious experience, or as a result of theological study or reflection, but Now, before I even have a chance to find words for that experience. How do I know God before I know I am knowing God, in what the Japanese would call naka ima, the ‘middle now’? Perhaps the roshi used the term ‘God’ because I was a Westerner; it might have been the Buddha-nature or the Dharmakaya; but the purport was the same. How does the ultimate interface with the passing moment, and how could that be expressed without thinking? How do I push awareness outside the verbal and conceptual boxes into which we put all experiences as soon as we have them, or only a split second later?
I knew that the idea was not to cogitate on the koan, trying to figure it out rationally, but just to hold it in my mind, perhaps just saying it over and over, sinking into deeper and deeper levels of consciousness, until it had an effect beyond the reach of ordinary mind. Then I began, if only dimly, to have some feeling for the potential of Zen practice. I seemed to be lightly floating, as though a half-inch above the cushion.
All times except the Now shrank away, like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. I might have been in the Zen meditation hall two hours, which was actually the case by then, or two weeks, or two years, or two centuries’ it didn’t matter and wouldn’t have made much difference whatever it was. The present was my life, the center of my being, and that was enough.
But soon enough we were brought back to the normal space-time-continuum. The meditation was over, tea was served, and the roshi came out to give a brief teisho or sermon. (The Japanese-American interpreter was a simple gardener by day, but some in the temple said he was secretly a bodhisattva.) Finally, the evening ended with the chanting of the Heart Sutra. (“Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form… The wisdom that has gone beyond, and beyond the beyond; O what an awakening, all hail.”)
Note two thoroughly integrated sides to this experience: structure and freedom; one might even say form and emptiness. Of structure and tradition there was plenty: bows, robes, chants, bells and drums, altar and incense. The roshi was in his position because he had been certified by his roshi, and so on back in a kind of apostolic succession supposedly leading back to the Buddha himself. In Japan many Zen temples have at times been powerful institutions, with heavy political and cultural influence.
At the same time, the final point of that traditional structure was, ideally, to release within myself and the other students an inner freedom that would go beyond even the fetters of words, to express itself in a shout of awakening, or perhaps through one of the Zen arts; in the natural lines of an ink-wash painting, the clear seeing of a haiku poem, or the thrust of a martial artist’s sword. Extreme constraint and liberty nurturing each other: that is the Zen model.
Philip Kapleau, in his invaluable The Three Pillars of Zen, gives a number of Zen accounts, by both Japanese and Westerners. Here are some of the closing words often attributed to an “American schoolteacher” as she recorded her experiences during sesshin, a time of intense Zen training. On this last day, despite great fatigue, she awoke early:
“With a bright ‘Ha!’ and realize I was enlightened
A strange power propelled me… I arouse and calmly dressed. My mind raced as I solved problem after problem… at dokusan [the interview with the roshi] I rushed into the little cottage my teacher was occupying… and let loose such a torrent of comical verbosity that [we] laughed with delight. The roshi tested and passed me, and I was officially ushered through the gateless gate.A liftetime has been compressed into one week. A thousand new sensations are bombarding my senses, and a thousand new paths are opening before me. I live because I know that I am not just my little self but a great big miraculous Self. My constant thought is to have everybody share this deep satisfaction.
I can think of no better way to end this account than with the vows I chanted at sesshin every morning:
All beings, however limitless, I vow to save. Fantasy and delusion, however endless, I vow to cut off. Dharma teachings, however immeasurable, I vow to master. Buddha’s Way, however lofty, I vow to attain”
Now onto the story of Zen in Japan
Basic Zen
Heian Japan cut off commercial and diplomatic relations with China in the mid-ninth century, as the once-brilliant Tang dynasty (681-907), whose early phase had represented a golden age of Chinese Buddhism, deteriorated into warlordism and persecution of the Dharma. The unique culture of the Heian era, though at first inspired by Chinese Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and secular poetry, thereafter flourished on its own and in its own way. So it was also that Japan knew the Buddhist faith in the forms in which it had crossed over to the island nation before the break – the six Nara schools, the two Heian versions – but had little awareness of its subsequent developments on the mainland. Shingon, Tendai, and the other schools continued in Japan as though nothing had happened since their arrival, save their accommodations with the Kami, and the exfoliation of growths whose seeds were already embedded in Tendai: Pure Land, and Lotus or Nichiren Buddhism.
But beginning in the mid-twelfth century, as the Heian era gave way to the Kamakura, Japanese priests and others began traveling to China once more. They found a quite different religious world from what they had expected. The dominant monastic form of Buddhism was no longer esoteric schools like the originals of Shingon and Tendai, but Zen, known as Chan in China. Chan prevailed partly for political reasons: a great persecution, launched in response to complaints that most monks and nuns were idle parasites in society, had devastated Chinese monastic Buddhism in 845. Most monasteries and convents were emptied, their inhabitants returned to lay life. But Chan temples were much simpler. Often located in backcountry areas, and in principle these monks could not be accused of lassitude because they already worked with their hands.
On a deeper level, the success of Chan can undoubtedly also be attributed to the way that school, really an amalgam of Buddhism with Taoist simplicity and naturalism, and a bit of Confucian respect for hard work thrown in, went well with the Chinese temperament. At one and the same time, Chan was commonsensical and mystical, self-disciplined and life-affirming – all virtues the Chinese admire.
According to tradition, Chan was brought to China by Bodhidharma (ca. 470 – 532; Daruma [‘Dharma’] in Japanese), a south Indian who journeyed to the Middle Kingdom around 520. Allegedly he was the last in a series of Indian patriarchs of a silent style of Buddhism begun when the Buddha handed his favorite disciple, Ananda, a flower and merely smiled. This legend is no doubt apocryphal, but for whatever reason a new Chinese interpretation of Buddhism, Chan, coalesced around Bodhidharma’s name.
Many are the stories about Bodhidharma. It is said he meditated in front of a wall until his legs atrophied; a round-bottomed Japanese toy representing a man who, when you push him over, comes back up again, is called a Daruma. According to legend, he once fell asleep while trying to do zazen, and in his anger cut off his eyelashes, which fell to the ground to become tea leaves – a drink which ever since has kept sleepy monks awake. The first patriarch is said to have answered an emperor impudently, declaring the sovereign’s good works on behalf of the dharma had won him no merit, and that he, Bodhidharma, did not know why he was standing there before him. Somehow he got by with it.
He left four principles which – whether actually by him or a later hand – have since governed Zen: A special transmission outside the scriptures; No reliance on words or letters; Direct pointing to the mind; Seeing into one’s own nature.
This is the heart of it: direct experience of reality here and now. Zen masters were insistent their docents abjure buddhas and sutras outside themselves, and see the Buddha-nature as much in the hedge at the back of the garden, and in themselves, as in a book or temple. They would say such things as that a sutra was toilet paper, or “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” You might become enlightened when, after you had eaten your breakfast, your master told you to wash your dishes.
Zen took the basic Mahayana premise that samsara is Nirvana all the way. The wheel of existence, the world as it is, is also the Buddha-nature or eternal Reality – not a philosophical idea but something to be experienced directly, within oneself and in all that is. Words and concepts only get in the way of this direct experience. That’s why sutras are for toilet use and any Buddha you meet – that is, outside of yourself – is an enemy. So one Chinese master said, “Eat when you are hungry, sleep when you are tired” – that’s enlightenment if you can really do it without bondage or self-deception. Again, “Cutting wood, drawing water – how wonderful, how miraculous!” For this radical Chan everyday life was the Path: “The only difference between a Buddha and an ordinary person is that a Buddha realizes he is a Buddha and the ordinary person does not.”
Some Western interpreters of Zen may have given the impression that Zen was mostly just this kind of talk. But although these and many other good lines, preserved as koans or mondo (teaching stories), may suggest that Chan was a rather freewheeling, even chaotic, way of life, in fact they come out of the context – like my experience, such as it was – of highly structured monastic practice. Discipline is not at odds with spontaneity and “everyday life”. Rather, the stick and the zendo frame the freedom at Zen’s heart. To play or sing great music so well that it sounds free and easy takes a lot of practice, as any performer knows. So does eating, sleeping, and living everyday life with enlightened joy rather than hassles in your heart.
Eisai and Rinzai Zen
The first Japanese teacher to discover and transmit this new Chinese Buddhism in the Kamakura era was Myoan Eisai (1141-1215). To be sure, he did not represent Japan’s first meeting with Zen, but no earlier contacts had taken hold. One or two Chinese Chan masters visited Japan in the Nara period; Saicho of Tendai had also studied Chan meditation. The eminent Tendai monk Ennin, Saicho’s disciple and successor, was in China 838-847 as a member of the last official Japanese embassy. There he witnessed the persecution of 845. But though he must have been aware of Chan, he was apparently not impressed; on his return he introduced esotericism instead to Mount Hiei.
Like so many other creators of the new Kamakura religious era, the aristocratic Eisai began as a restless Tendai monk. In 1168 his restlessness carried him to China as he embarked with a Shingon priest on a tour of the mainland, intending mostly to sightsee and make a pilgrimage to the main Tiantai temple. The pair was disconcerted to find the once-great monastic center seriously deteriorated. On the other hand, Chan was everywhere. Nonetheless, on his return the young Tendai cleric continued Tendai practice for some twenty more years.
In 1187 Eisai went again to China, this time studying with an aged master of the Linji (Rinzai) lineage on Mount Tiantai. He returned to Japan in 1191 with a certificate of enlightenment. Even so, his commitment was less that total, for he brought an array of other Buddhist and Confucian teachings as well, together with tea plants. (Zen, at its best intellectually alert and curious, conveyed Neo-Confucian as well as Buddhist philosophy to Japan – and tea has always had an important role in Zen to revive drowsy monks in zazen; recall Bodhidharma’s eyelashes. There is a Japanese saying, Cha no aji, Zen no aji, “The taste of tea is the taste of Zen.”)
However, Eisai did establish a Rinzai Zen temple in southern Kyushu, and wrote a lively defense of Zen as good for Japan. In “Propagation of Zen for the Protection of the Country”, he tactfully emphasized Saicho’s earlier introduction of the practice and the simple purity of its way, saying, “Outwardly it favors discipline over doctrine, inwardly it brings the Highest Inner Wisdom. This is what the Zen sect stands for.” A skillful religious politician, Eisai also got permission to start a Zen temple in the new capital of Kamakura, and later in the old imperial capital of Kyoto as well. He ended his life as an abbot there.
Eisai was a complex individual with wide-ranging interests. He was not a passionately single-minded missionary for Zen, but he seriously believed its practice could have a reforming effect on his own sect, Tendai, and on Japan as a whole. Ironically, although Rinzai is often thought of as a strict, intense form of Zen, with frequent use of Koans and the stick, its Japanese founder also embodied that other, cultural side of the tradition which is no less celebrated. Eisai is famous not only for “Propagation of Zen”, but also for a treatise called “Drink Tea and Prolong Life.” While allegedly written for the benefit of an alcoholic shogun, this work did much to promote the beverage in Japan, and indirectly the famous “tea ceremony” which has become almost a Zen sacrament.
With his cultured and cosmopolitan background, Eisai laid the foundations of Zen as a favored religion of the emerging samurai class. The match was right: on the one hand the discipline of Zen, including the ability to endure pain and privation, went well with the warrior spirit; on the other, the austere but elegant arts of Zen suited the rising warrior’s aspirations to refinement. We will examine some of the features of this culture in a moment. Fist however, a look at a rather different personality, the other great founder of Zen in Japan, Dogen.
Dogen and Soto Zen
The leading Western historian of Zen, Heinrich Dumoulin, has called Dogen “the strongest and most original thinker that Japan has so far produced.” Probably more than any other traditional Japanese intellectual, Dogen would be entitled to take his place as a world-class philosopher. Yet he did not seek fame, nor did he receive much in his own lifetime. All he wanted was to find enlightenment by living a completely natural and ordinary life as a monk.
Dogen (1200-1253) was, like Eisai, of aristocratic background. He was the illegitimate son of a Fujiwara mother and a princely father, nurtured and educated amid the elegance of the Old Court. However, his parents both died while he was a child. Thus made acquainted with the dark as well as the sunny side of life, he desired to become a monk. After some difficulty he entered a Tendai center at Mount Hiei.
But like Honen, Nichiren, and others of his age he was troubled by apparent unanswered paradoxes in conventional teaching – in his case the question of why, if a person is born with the Buddha-nature within, does he nonetheless have to seek enlightenment? In this quest, Dogen first worked with a disciple of Eisai, Myozen, in Eisai’s old Rinzai temple, Kennin-ji. But though he always spoke of Eisai with great respect, little by little the younger disciple, Dogen, was becoming dissatisfied with Rinzai Zen. To him, the koans in which Rinzai put such stock were too much directed towards inducing particular mental and emotional experiences, rather than ultimate unconditioned liberation.
In 1223 Dogen sailed for China with Myozen, desiring to visit Buddhist centers. He found his way to Caodong (Soto) monasteries, where he appreciated the way they emphasized quiet sitting and living Zen in the context of all one’s life, including ordinary labor, more than koans and intense breakthrough experiences.
Later, Dogen was to write a whole book on working in the kitchen as Zen practice, though he also insisted on much zazen. Dogen also declared that not only cooks, but “Even a little girl of seven can become the teacher of the four classes of Buddhism and the compassionate mother of all beings; for [in Buddhism] men and women are completely equal. This is one of the highest principles of the Way”
This was not, however, a principle widely recognized in practice in traditional Buddhism. In this, as in so many other things, Dogen was far in advance of his times, and often ours.