Zen master Hakuin Ekaku, 1685–1768, the author of these talks, is the major figure of Japanese Rinzai Zen. During a long life spent as a country priest in a tiny rural temple, Hakuin almost singlehandedly reformed and revitalized a Zen school that, except for a brief interval in the previous century, had been in a state of spiritual lethargy for nearly three hundred years. In so doing, he laid the foundations for a method of Zen training that has enabled his school to continue as a spiritual force to the present day. When Hakuin died, he had redefined Zen for Japanese people in the modern era. In recent years, recognition of his achievements as a painter and calligrapher have gained him a reputation, beyond the sphere of religion, as one of the most versatile and original artists of the Edo period (1600–1868).
The Japanese title of the present work, Sokkō-roku Kaien-fusetsu, goes rather awkwardly into English as “Talks Given Introductory to Zen Lectures on the Records of Sokkō” (Sokkō, Hsi-keng in Chinese, was a sobriquet used by the Sung-dynasty Chinese priest Hsü-t’ang Chih-yü, 1185–1269, whose name in Japanese is Kidō Chigu). It is considered one of Hakuin’s most important works and, in spite of its difficulty, one of the best introductions to his Zen teaching. Written in Chinese Kambun, that is, Chinese as read and written by the Japanese, it consists of a series of “general talks” or discourses (fusetsu) on Zen that Hakuin gave to students at the start of a large meeting he conducted at his home temple, Shōin-ji, in the spring of 1740. The formal Zen lectures or teishō at that meeting were devoted to The Records of Sokkō, a master Hakuin held in special veneration as an exemplar of the authentic Zen traditions to which he aspired. Normally, the purpose of giving informal talks of this kind at the beginning of a lecture meeting would be to encourage students in their practice in preparation for the training session and the more formal teishō to follow.
In fact, Hakuin took the occasion to deliver a full-length treatise on Zen. It incorporated virtually all his basic views on Zen teaching and training, and proclaimed his firm determination to rectify the erroneous views and practices into which he believed the school had strayed and which were directly responsible for its sharp decline. It called on the Zen community to return to the mainstream koan or kanna (“introspecting the koan”) practice, which, through the efforts of masters like Hsü-t’ang, had flourished in China during the Sung dynasty and had formed the basis for the golden age of Japanese Zen in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Hakuin’s effort was to convince students that the Zen being taught in contemporary temples was false, hence ineffective, and that freedom lay in the authentic realization attained through the way of kenshō, or enlightenment. He proceeded to demonstrate—using the examples of eminent Zen figures of the past as well as the experience he had gained during his own long religious struggle—that this freedom could not be attained by anything less than total dedication to a vigorous program of koan study directed toward, and later beyond, enlightenment.
The main themes of Hakuin’s Zen teaching that appear over and over again in his later writings are here enunciated for the first time: the need to take the “poison” words or koans of the ancients and work into them with a single-minded determination and spirit of intense inquiry until the “Great Death,” or breakthrough into enlightenment, is experienced; the necessity to deepen and mature the initial realization through continued practice beyond kenshō—so-called postenlightenment training; the need to produce some enlightened utterance of one’s own to “trouble future generations of students”; and, finally, sharp denunciations of modern-day Zen teachers, whom he blamed for Zen’s decline, especially those who included Pure Land practices in their training, or favored the doctrines of “silent meditation.” It should be mentioned that while the term silent meditation, or silent illumination, is normally descriptive of the methods of the Sōtō sect, Hakuin uses it more generally as a condemnation of virtually all contemporary teachings.
Hakuin was fifty-two when he composed these talks, in the full flush of his powers. That his reputation had now spread far beyond the borders of his native Suruga province can be seen from the fact that four hundred students gathered from all parts of the country at the Shōin-ji Temple to take part in the great lecture meeting of 1740. It marked a turning point in his career; from that time on, for the remainder of his life, Hakuin dedicated himself with a fierce energy and determination to accomplishing his program of reforming the Zen school. It is a measure of his success that when he died Rinzai Zen was alive and well, flourishing with a strengthened vitality it hadn’t seen for centuries.
The method of Zen training that Hakuin developed over the second half of his career was carried on and systematized by an unusually large contingent of talented followers. The names of fifty of those who received his sanction are known, but it is said that there were probably at least twice that many. Today, virtually all Rinzai masters trace their descent from him. The Rinzai school is now, practically speaking, the school of Hakuin.
THE SOURCES OF HAKUIN’S ZEN
The first Zen temple was established in Japan in the early decades of the thirteenth century. In the next one hundred and seventy-five years, over a score of Zen teaching lines were brought to Japan and established there, either by Chinese priests who came from the continent, or by Japanese monks who had studied in China and received sanction from Chinese teachers. From Hakuin’s standpoint, the most important of those transmissions was the one introduced by a Japanese disciple of Hsü-t’ang Chih-yü named Nampo Jōmyō, 1235–1309, better known by his posthumous title Daiō Kokushi.
Nampo traveled to China in 1259 at the age of twenty-four. After studying with Hsü-t’ang for a number of years, some of them spent as his attendant, Nampo attained enlightenment and received Hsü-t’ang’s certification. When Nampo was about to return to Japan, Hsü-t’ang wrote a farewell verse in his honor. It concluded with the line, “My descendants will increase daily beyond the Eastern Seas.” This became known in later Japanese Zen as “Kidō’s prophecy.”
Daiō returned to Japan in 1267 and taught for more than forty years at temples in Kyūshū, Kyoto, and Kamakura. He had many able disciples, including one student of great distinction, Shūhō Myōchō (1282–1338)—known by his honorary title Daitō Kokushi. Daitō is credited with having achieved a depth of attainment exceeding that of Daiō himself. Daitō went on to become founder of the Daitoku-ji Temple in Kyoto and produced two main heirs, Tettō Gikō (1295–1369), who succeeded him at Daitoku-ji, and Kanzan Egen (1277–1360), who later founded the Myōshin-ji Temple, also in Kyoto. A handful of celebrated priests, among them Ikkyū Sōjun (1394–1481) and Takuan Sōhō (1573–1645), appeared in the first centuries of Daitoku-ji’s history, but by the 1600s the influence of the Daitoku-ji teaching line was in decline, overshadowed by those of the other large Kyoto monasteries. It was at this time that the Myōshin-ji branch, the one to which Hakuin traced his descent, began its rise to prominence. Myōshin-ji priests, teaching for the most part, like Hakuin, in smaller temples located in the provinces, dominated Rinzai Zen throughout the Edo period.
To Hakuin, the authentic Zen tradition was powerfully represented in the lineage of four priests: Hsü-t’ang, Daiō, Daitō, and Kanzan. These men were figures of pivotal importance. They had brought to Japan and firmly established there the only surviving teaching line that transmitted the orthodox Zen of the great Chinese masters. Soon after Hsü-t’ang’s death, the original teaching of this line had begun a rapid (catastrophic, Hakuin would say) decline in China, corrupted by the increasing introduction of Pure Land Buddhist practices into Zen training.
By receiving the transmission from Hsü-t’ang and taking it to Japan, Daiō had, in effect, saved it from extinction. Hakuin wrote of Daiō’s unique achievement in a marginal note he inscribed in a copy of Daiō’s Zen records:
Daiō was the only priest who attained the true, untransmittable essence that had been handed down from the great masters of the T’ang. He was the Japanese Bodhidharma. The reason Bodhidharma, among many other Zen patriarchs, is revered by all branches of Chinese Zen is because he was the one who brought the buddha-mind school [Zen] to China from India. Because Daiō went to China and returned having received the direct transmission of the Zen Dharma from Master Hsü-t’ang . . . he is the most eminent by far of the twenty-four teachers who introduced Zen into Japan. For that reason, from the time I was a young priest, whenever I made an offering of incense, I never failed to offer some of it in honor of Daiō.
According to Hakuin’s reading of Zen history, Daiō’s Zen sustained its original vigor roughly until the fifteenth century. It then fell sharply as literature and scholarship began to take the place of actual religious practice. It managed somehow to remain alive—“a thin, fragile thread”—until the seventeenth century, when a great abbot of Myōshin-ji named Gudō Tōshoku (1579–1661) appeared and gave it new life. It was through a “Dharma grandson” of Gudō named Shōju Rōjin (1642–1721) that Hakuin received the transmission. The teachings of this somewhat shadowy master, which exist only in the extensive passages that Hakuin presents in his own writings, are filled with Shōju’s deep concern over the sorry state of contemporary Zen. “True teachers,” he said, “were harder to find than stars in a midday sky.” He told Hakuin that unless he produced an heir who could carry on the orthodox transmission, it would “fall into the dust” and die out forever.
Standing in his way was the Zen establishment of the time, “heterodox” priests who had “infested the land, planted themselves in positions of power, and shamelessly and willfully turned their backs on Zen tradition.” Hakuin had seen more than enough of these men in his travels as a young monk. He speaks of three general types among his contemporary teachers: “do-nothing” Zennists, “silent meditation” Zennists, and nembutsu Zennists. These three labels are normally applied to adherents of the Rinzai, Sōtō, and Ōbaku sects, respectively, but often Hakuin makes no attempt to differentiate between them; in his eyes, they are all equally guilty of debilitating Zen by espousing passive and quietistic approaches to practice.
By instructing their pupils to do nothing but sit in silent meditation, to combine practices such as the recitation of the Buddha’s name (nembutsu) with Zen, or by curtailing or eliminating the use of the koan in Zen training, such teachers had deprived students of the very thing Hakuin believed was vital to the success of their efforts: a “great, driving spirit of inquiry that cannot rest until satori is achieved.” While he might admit the suitability of nembutsu recitation for students of inferior or even mediocre ability, for students of Zen, who belong to the “highest class of the highest rank” of Buddhist disciple, the adoption of such methods was nothing less than an admission of spiritual defeat. “If that happens,” he said,
we will see all the redoubtable members of the younger generation—people gifted with outstanding talent, who have it in them to become great Dharma pillars worthy to stand shoulder to shoulder with the celebrated Zen figures of the past—traipsing along after half-dead old duffers, sitting in the shade with listless old grannies, dropping their heads and closing their eyes and intoning endless choruses of nembutsu. . . . Whose children will be found to carry on the vital pulse of buddha-wisdom? Who will become the cool, refreshing shade trees to provide refuge for people in the latter day? All the authentic customs and traditions of the Zen school will disappear. The seeds of buddhahood will wither, turn hard and dry.
HAKUIN’S LIFE
Hakuin was born and spent his entire life, except for the years he was wandering the country on his Zen pilgrimage, in the tiny farming village of Hara, situated on the Tōkaidō Road near the foot of Mount Fuji. He was by all accounts inclined strongly toward religion at a very early age. At fifteen (by Japanese count) he entered religious life at the neighborhood Zen temple, Shōin-ji. The head priest, Tanrei, who performed the tonsure, was a family friend. He gave the young novice the religious name Ekaku, which he would use until his thirties when, upon being established as abbot of Shōin-ji himself, he adopted the additional name Hakuin. Four years later his teacher permitted him to set out on a pilgrimage to study with other Zen teachers around the country. His wanderings lasted fourteen years, taking him throughout most areas of the main island of Honshū and across to the island of Shikoku, to masters of all three Zen sects.
After the years of travel, seeking advice and instruction from many Zen teachers but mostly practicing on his own, at the age of thirty-one he sequestered himself in a remote hermitage in the mountains of Mino province, determined to make an all-out effort to attain a final breakthrough. While he was there, news reached him that his father had fallen critically ill and wanted him to return and reside in Shōin-ji, which was now vacant and in need of a priest. Hakuin, somewhat reluctant, agreed. His years of pilgrimage were now at an end.
The temple Hakuin had inherited was not only small and insignificant—“a branch temple of a branch temple”—it was also penniless, its buildings neglected and in an advanced stage of decay. The Hakuin Nempu, a religious biography of Hakuin compiled by his disciple Tōrei, gives some idea of what it was like at the time:
Shōin-ji had fallen into an almost indescribable state of ruin. Stars shone through the roofs at night. The floors were constantly saturated by rain and dew. It was necessary for the master to wear a straw raincoat as he moved about the temple attending to his duties. He needed sandals inside the main hall when he went there to conduct ceremonies. Temple assets had passed into the hands of creditors, the temple equipment had all been pawned. . . . About the only thing worth noting around here,” he said, “is the moonlight and the sound of the wind.”
Shōin-ji remained Hakuin’s home and the center of his teaching activity until his death fifty years later. A passage in Tōrei’s biography describes Hakuin’s life during the first ten years of his residency:
He applied himself single-mindedly to his practice. He endured great privation without ever deviating from his spare, simple way of life. He didn’t adhere to any fixed schedule for sutra-chanting or other temple rituals. When darkness fell he would climb inside a derelict old palanquin and seat himself on a cushion he placed on the floorboard. One of the young boys studying at the temple would come, wrap the master’s body in a futon, and cinch him up tightly into this position with ropes. There he would remain motionless, like a painting of Bodhidharma, until the following day when the boy would come to untie him so that he could relieve his bowels and take some food. The same routine was repeated nightly.
Hakuin had achieved his initial entrance into enlightenment at twenty-four, during his pilgrimage. In the years that followed, he had other satori experiences, “large ones and small ones, in numbers beyond count.” They had deepened and broadened his original enlightenment, but he still did not feel free. He was unable to integrate his realization into his ordinary life, and felt restricted when he attempted to express his understanding to others. The final decisive enlightenment that brought his long religious quest to an end occurred on a spring night in 1726, his forty-first year.
He was reading The Lotus Sutra at the time. It was the chapter on parables, where the Buddha cautions his disciple Shariputra against savoring the joys of personal enlightenment, and reveals to him the truth of the Bodhisattva’s mission, which is to continue practice beyond enlightenment, teaching and helping others until all beings have attained salvation. Hakuin narrates the crucial moment in his autobiography, Wild Ivy:
A cricket made a series of churrs at the foundation stones of the temple. The instant they reached the master’s ears, he was one with enlightenment. Doubts and uncertainties that had burdened him from the beginning of his religious quest suddenly dissolved and ceased to exist. From that moment on he lived in a state of great emancipation. The enlightening activities of the buddhas and patriarchs, the Dharma eye to grasp the sutras—they were now his, without any doubt, without any lack whatever.
In Tōrei’s biography, this experience is emphasized as the pivotal event in Hakuin’s religious life. To this point, Hakuin’s practice had been directed toward seeking his own enlightenment; from then on it was directed toward helping others achieve liberation. In doing this he would use to the full the extraordinary ability he had now acquired to “preach with the effortless freedom of the buddhas.”
During his late thirties and forties, Hakuin accepted a small but growing number of students. His reputation slowly grew and spread until by his early fifties, when he composed these “Introductory Talks,” his name was known and respected even in the halls of the great Myōshin-ji in Kyoto. The lecture meeting of 1740, according to Tōrei, established Hakuin as the foremost Zen teacher in the land.
Monks and nuns and lay people from all over the country began to converge on Shōin-ji. They came from all classes of society and all walks of life. Shōin-ji barely supplied its own needs; it was unable to accommodate even a small number of students, let alone the hundreds who were coming to receive instruction. Most of those who came were obliged to find lodging elsewhere.
They slept and practiced in private houses and abandoned dwellings, unused temples and halls, ruined shrines, under the eaves of farmhouses; some even camped out under the stars. The whole countryside for miles around the temple was transformed into a great center for Zen practice. It was a new kind of Buddhist assembly, formed and maintained by the monks themselves.
The records speak of the great awe in which Hakuin was held by his students. Tōrei remembered him as “a sheer cliff towering abruptly before him. A menacing presence stalking the temple like a great ox, glaring around with the eyes of an angry tiger.” Something of the terror Hakuin must have struck into the hearts of students can be felt by standing before the effigy sculpture of Hakuin enshrined in the Founder’s Hall at Shōin-ji. Even today it glares formidably out at the spectator.
The only students who remained were those who had come to study with the same deep motivation that had driven Hakuin. In a preface to Hakuin’s Idle Talks on a Night Boat—signed by an anonymous student called “Hunger-and-Cold, the Master of Poverty Hermitage,” who is obviously Hakuin himself—is a famous passage that draws a vivid picture of life at Shōin-ji:
From the moment monks set foot inside Shōin-ji’s gates they gladly endured the poisonous slobber the master spewed at them. They welcomed the stinging blows from his stick. Students stayed for ten, even twenty years, the thought of leaving never entering their minds. Some had resolved to lay down their lives there, and become dust under the temple pine trees. They were the finest flowers of the Zen groves, dauntless heroes to all the world. . . . They faced hunger in the morning, freezing cold by night. Sustaining themselves on wheat chaff and raw vegetables, they heard nothing but the master’s blistering shouts and abuse, felt nothing but bone-piercing blows from his furious fist and stick. They saw sights that made their foreheads furrow; they heard things that made their bodies pour with sweat. There were scenes that would have brought tears to a demon’s eyes, and would have caused a devil to press his palms together in supplication. When these monks first arrived, they were in radiant health, with glowing skins, but before long their bodies were thin and emaciated, their faces drawn. . . . None of them could have been held a moment longer, were they not totally dedicated to their quest, begrudging neither health nor life itself.
But Hakuin was not always the flint-eyed teacher striking terror into the hearts of Zen students. He was also a man of great warmth and kindness and humor who shared the life of his fellow villagers and was deeply sympathetic to their needs. When he was not engaged in training his regular students, he was trying to reach out through writing and painting to educate the farmers, fishermen, and others of his native region and bring them closer to the truth of the Buddhist teaching.
Hakuin’s biographical records show that the pace of his teaching activity actually picked up over the final twenty-five years of his life. He lectured regularly at Shōin-ji and other temples in the area on a wide range of Buddhist sutras and Zen texts. Invitations came from other temples and lay groups around the country asking him to conduct meetings. He willingly made journeys of days, even weeks, in order to respond to them. In addition, from his sixties on he turned more and more to writing, painting, and calligraphy to communicate his message, producing works in an unusually broad range of genres and themes.
It was not uncommon for Zen priests to engage in artistic pastimes. They were expected to be proficient calligraphers. But in Hakuin’s case, these skills assumed a much greater importance. They became a central part of his teaching and one of the chief hallmarks of Hakuin Zen.
He left over fifty written works, ranging from difficult Zen discourses and specialized commentaries in Chinese designed for Zen students all the way to simple songs, recitations, and chants, in which he couched his Zen message in a highly colloquial language to make it accessible to the common people. Another characteristic seen throughout his work is his frequent and detailed reference to the circumstances of his own religious enlightenment. He uses accounts of his life in the same way that he does the stories of the Zen teachers of the past: to encourage students in their practice by telling them of the difficulties that others had experienced, and overcome, in the course of their Zen training.
He excelled in both painting and calligraphy, producing works in numbers that must have reached into the thousands. They too were his talks and his sermons, with an even more direct and universal appeal. His paintings include many traditional Zen subjects such as Bodhidharma, Shakyamuni, and other figures from Zen history. But he also invented new themes inspired by folk belief, village tales, and his own fertile imagination. His great versatility and inventiveness are evident in his calligraphy as well. Though he worked in a wide variety of styles, his bold compositions, filled with the thick, massive strength of his large-size characters, possess an ability unique even among Zen artists to translate visceral Zen experience to paper. Standing before them, the viewer is struck by a primordial power uncanny in its depths.
The late Yamada Mumon Roshi, who served as abbot of Myōshin-ji Temple, once wrote, “There was a saying in Hakuin’s home province of Suruga, ‘Suruga province has two things of surpassing greatness, Mount Fuji and Priest Hakuin.’ I believe that in the not too distant future that saying will be changed to, ‘Japan has two things of surpassing greatness, Mount Fuji and Priest Hakuin.’”
A number of annotated editions of Hakuin’s Japanese writings have appeared over the past twenty years, yet until very recently little has been done to make his important Chinese writings such as Sokkō-roku Kaien-fusetsu and Kaian-kokugo more accessible. I must therefore express my gratitude to Gishin Tokiwa, whose modern Japanese translation of Sokkō-roku Kaien-fusetsu (Hakuin, Daijō butten 27, Chūokōron-sha, Tokyo, 1988) appeared as I was struggling to finish my English translation of the text. Professor Tokiwa’s work has made my task far easier and simpler than it would otherwise have been. It was also through his help that I was able to procure a photocopy of a first edition of Kaien-fusetsu from the rare book collection of the Hanazono College library. It is inscribed throughout with glosses and notations in Hakuin’s own hand and has been valuable in helping determine Hakuin’s meaning.
I would like to thank Mr. Daisaburō Tanaka of Tokyo for generously allowing me to reproduce works from his fine collection of Hakuin’s paintings and calligraphy; to Ryūtaku-ji Temple of Mishima, Ryūkoku-ji Temple of Akashi, and the Hisamatsu family of Gifu for reproducing works in their possession.