The history of almost all religious movements includes periods of vitality, periods of consolidation and periods of decline: during these last, the great truths are no longer the objects of earnest belief, no longer felt on the pulse. This pattern is evident in the history of the Rinzai (C: Lin-chi) school of Zen. The Japanese school traces its lineage ultimately back to Nampo Jomyo (1235–1309) and his successors Daito Kokushi (1282–1338) and Kanzan Egen (1277– 1377). This school flourished and became dominant over the rival Soto school (cf. the essay on Dogen) during the Kamakura period (1185– 1333). As time passed, however, this dominance led to complacency and complacency to stagnation. Rinzai Zen came to be associated more with artistic and literary life than with the urgent, dedicated pursuit of religious truth, and this was the state of affairs at the beginning of the Tokugawa period (1603–1867). Hakuin earned his place in history by reversing this decline. He revived Rinzai Zen both by his own example and by means of his many written works. He and his heirs1 codified koan practice, and devised a monastic rule or system which has lasted until the present day. Nor was his concern restricted to the life of the monks in his charge: he wrote at length to advise eminent lay-believers, and had in addition a genuine regard for the simple and unlettered labourers, whose lot was hard to endure. He often went to the fields near his monastery to talk to them, giving such consolation as it was in his power to give.
Hakuin was born on 19 January 1685 in the village of Hara near the foot of Mount Fuji.2 The chief influence in the childhood of the gifted and sensitive boy was his mother, a member of the Nichiren sect. Early evidence of his unusual openness to religious matters was shown in his reaction to a sermon he heard in a local temple at the age of 7 or 8. The priest described the hot hells of the Buddhist system, and this frightened the boy deeply. Shortly afterwards, in the course of a hot bath, the heat of the water reminded him of the description of the hells, and he records that he ‘let out a cry of terror that resounded through the neighbourhood’.3 He resolved to become a monk, a course of which his parents did not approve, and left home at the age of 15 in order to begin his training. He received his primary ordination at the Shoinji (temple) in March 1699. After some years, during which he experienced a crisis of faith later restored by intense meditation, he achieved a number of minor enlightenment experiences, and then what he believed to be a major one.
Hakuin’s travels between teachers took him next to Iiyama (present-day Nagano prefecture), where he met the Zen Master Dokyo Etan (1642–1721)4 and presented the Master with a written statement of his understanding of Zen. To Hakuin’s astonishment and mortification, Etan roared with laughter and shouted at him that he was a ‘poor hole-dwelling devil’.5 Rather than being put off by Etan’s harsh treatment, which was unremitting, Hakuin redoubled his efforts to achieve enlightenment. He finally did so, seemingly to Etan’s satisfaction, some eight months later. As so often in Zen, the trigger for awakening was a trivial incident. Hakuin had gone to a nearby village, and encountered a man who tried to beat him with a broom. At that moment, all the koans were solved, and Hakuin grasped the Great Matter, i.e. became enlightened. Thereafter, Etan no longer abused him.6
The austerities Hakuin practised before achieving enlightenment were by now beginning to take their toll, and he fell ill. The experience of ‘meditation sickness’ and its cure impressed him deeply, and Hakuin left a detailed account of it in one of his best-known works, Yasen kanna (A Chat on a Boat in the Evening, 1757). Besides trying physical symptoms, mentally he was ‘distressed and weary, and whether sleeping or waking . . . always became lost in wild fancies’,7 and so was unable to practise Zen. After fruitless consultations with a number of doctors, Hakuin was recommended to visit a hermit living in the mountains of Shirakawa, Master Hakuyu (1646– 1709). Hakuyu, basing his treatment on the ideas of the I Ching and Taoism, instructed Hakuin in a special type of introspection (J: naikan). This Hakuin faithfully adopted, with the result that within three years his health was fully restored. For the rest of his long life, Hakuin was to caution against too much asceticism in the practice of Zen.8
In 1716, Hakuin received a message that his father was dying, and he returned to the temple near his home, the Shoinji. There he was to remain for the rest of his life. He restored the ruinous building, and made it the centre of the Rinzai school in his time. His fame gradually spread throughout Japan, and he never lacked for disciples. He left the Shoinji only to give lectures by means of which to raise funds for both its maintenance and that of its monks. Not only did he continue to write, but achieved distinction as a painter and calligrapher – almost a thousand surviving paintings are attributed to him. Hakuin died peacefully in his sleep, aged 83, on 18 January 1769.
Underlying all Hakuin’s thought are the metaphysical beliefs which Zen took over from the parent Mahayana school of Buddhism. In this school, the fundamental belief is that the world of ordinary experience, of discrete individual entities causally interacting in space and time, is a delusion, the world of the samsara. Being-as-is or reality is a divisionless unity, a oneness. The ultimate metaphysical truth, the ‘dharma principle’ in Hakuin’s terms, is that ‘all things are a non-dual unity representing the true appearance of all things. This is the fundamental principle of Buddhism.’9 This oneness is such that no conceptual descriptions apply to it: concepts are our way of articulating divisions within experience, and reality exhibits no divisions:
If you say it is in existence it will not be there; if you say it is in non-existence it will not be there either. This place, where words and speech are cut off, this free and untrammelled place, is provisionally called the Wondrous Law.10
Since it has no divisions, reality is changeless, it ‘has not changed one iota since before the last kalpa began, nor will it change after it has ended’.11 Further, it follows that if all divisions are unreal, the division between the self and the not-self, normally regarded as a logically indispensable precondition for human experience as such, is itself unreal. Moreover, as the Buddha taught, it is this erroneous belief in the reality of the self which brings about all our suffering: ‘Because of this view that the self exists, we have birth and death, Nirvana, the passions, enlightenment.’12
The goal of Zen is to free us from these false beliefs in the reality of the samsara and to give us direct experience of being-as-is. This project presupposes that reality is experienceable by us. It is experienceable by us because we are all manifestations of reality: our belief in our own self and so our personal separateness is an illusion, and we have a real nature which is utterly different. In the vocabulary of Zen, this is the view that all entities possess the Buddha-nature (= reality). Hakuin states this often; for example, at the opening of his poem Zazen wasan (The Song of Zazen):
All beings are primarily Buddhas.
Like water and ice,
There is no ice apart from water;
There are no Buddhas apart from beings.13
The Buddha-nature, our real nature or ‘original face’, is ordinarily hidden from us by the web of delusion inherent in conceptual thought, and Zen training is designed to free us from the immensely powerful grip in which we are held by such thought. Hence the goal of Zen is often described as attainment of the state of ‘no mind’ or ‘no thought’: this means, not extinction, but nonconceptual awareness, free of delusion, including the delusion of selfhood.
Since we all have the Buddha-nature, it follows that the path to awareness of it is inwards. Reality is not to be found by exploration of the samsaric universe, but at the base of consciousness. Awareness of reality is wisdom (S: prajna), and so Hakuin says that prajna is not far off:14
Not knowing how close Truth is to them,
Beings seek for it afar – what a pity! . . .But if you turn your eyes within yourselves
And testify to the truth of Self-nature –
The Self-nature that is no nature,
You will have gone beyond the ken of sophistry.15
The method recommended by Hakuin by which we can be freed from the delusions of conceptual thought is that of carefully sequenced work, under a master, on the special problems called koans. ‘Koan’ is the Japanese form of the Chinese ‘kung an’, which means a public record or announcement, e.g. the public records of cases and judgments in law courts.16 The koans are in effect the recorded sayings of the Zen masters: they both facilitate the path of others on the way to enlightenment (the early masters had no such aids) and provide a standard by which enlightenment claims can be tested, thus preventing the importation of private eccentricities into Zen. A number of koan collections, chiefly originating from China in the Sung period, were in use for Zen training in Hakuin’s day, and have continued to be so.17 Hakuin’s contribu tion was to organize their use into a system, and to enrich the koan literature with a number of his own.
The nature of the koan can be illustrated with one of the best-known examples, a koan formulated by Hakuin himself:
What is the Sound of the Single Hand? When you clap together both hands a sharp sound is heard; when you raise one hand there is neither sound nor smell . . . This is something that can by no means be heard with the ear.18
So long as conceptual thought is employed, the koan has no solution, and the aspirant is brought into a mental condition for which the physical equivalent is being faced with a blank wall. The aim of the koan is to baffle the rational mind, to cause it to exhaust itself, and so bring it to breaking point: only in this way, Hakuin contends, can the powerful grip of conceptual thought be broken. Hakuin’s descriptions of the state of mind induced by koan practice are unusually full and detailed. Here he describes his own state of mind when, in his early twenties, he had been set Joshu’s koan ‘mu’:19
Suddenly a great doubt manifested itself before me. It was as though I were frozen solid in the midst of an ice sheet extending tens of thousands of miles. A purity filled my breast and I could neither go forward nor retreat. To all intents and purposes I was out of my mind and ‘Mu’ alone remained.20
By means of intense concentration on the koan, Hakuin had reached the point at which ordinary self-consciousness disintegrates: there ceases to be an ‘I’ and all there is is the koan.
This state of mind may continue for some time – in Hakuin’s case for several days. If the aspirant is fully prepared, the next stage is a timeless moment of awakening or enlightenment: satori or its near synonym kensho in Japanese. Often, this breakthrough follows a trivial incident: in the present instance, Hakuin by chance heard the temple bell,
and I was suddenly transformed. It was as if a sheet of ice had been smashed or a jade tower had fallen with a crash . . . In a loud voice I called ‘Wonderful, wonderful.’ There is no cycle of birth and death through which one must pass. There is no enlightenment one must seek. The seventeen hundred koans handed down from the past have not the slightest value whatsoever.21
It is asserted in Mahayanist metaphysics that all things are one, and this is the insight gained in the nondual awareness which constitutes enlightenment. Since all things are one, samsara and nirvana are found to be identical. Nirvana is not a future state or a different place: to the enlightened, it is here now:
When one reaches this state of the realization of True Reality in one’s own body, the mountains, rivers, the great earth, all phenomena, grass, trees, lands, the sentient and the non-sentient all appear at the same time as the complete body of the unchanging True Reality. This is the appearance of Nirvana, the time of awakening to one’s own nature.22
Reality is revealed to have no defects or limitations and to be subject to none of the conditions which pertain to entities we class as existent. Echoing the thought of Nagarjuna, Hakuin prefers to describe reality as a void: ‘All is vast perfection, all is vast emptiness.’23
Zen masters have often warned against not differentiating between major and minor awakenings, and against becoming complacent after a first satori. Hakuin, after his experience with Etan described above, was well aware of this problem, and in his writings develops the theme of degrees or grades of enlightenment to a pitch of great sophistication. The Chinese master Tung-shan Liang-chieh (Tozan Ryokai, 807–869) had much earlier put forward a view of five degrees of insight, termed the Five Ranks (C: Tung-shan wu-wei; J: Tozan goi), and on this view Hakuin commented at length.24 Thus for example, whilst in common with many other Zen thinkers Hakuin accepts the Yogacarin doctrine of the eight consciousnesses (cf. Vasubandhu), he warns against holding that insight into the eighth or store-consciousness (alaya-vijnana) is ultimate: rather, it is a ‘dark cave’ to be smashed open.25 Again, the nondual insight described above in Hakuin’s own words should not be thought to be the final goal: it is only the first of the Five Ranks, and the aspirant must take care not to cling to it, since clinging is evidence of desire, and desire is an attribute of a self not completely eliminated.26 The initial satori is to be refined by unremitting further practice on graded koans until the Fifth Rank, Unity Attained, is achieved.27 One who attains this Rank is ready once again to lead what is termed an ordinary life, though transfigured by Zen insight. The way of Zen does not end with a single satori: Hakuin himself had many, and he and his successors made provision for their cultivation in a highly advanced scheme of training.
It might be assumed that the extensive programme of koan practice implied in the above would leave hardly any time for any activity other than meditation, and in a sense this is so. However, it is important to stress that for Hakuin, meditation is not synonymous with zazen (seated meditation), though zazen is an important aspect of his programme. Instead, Hakuin insists that every activity, if informed by Zen, is a form of meditation. It is necessary to develop the capacity to meditate during all forms of action:
What is true meditation? It is to make everything: coughing, swallowing, waving the arms, motion, stillness, words, action, the evil and the good, prosperity and shame, gain and loss, right and wrong, into one single koan . . . Make your saddle your sitting cushion; make the mountains, rivers and the great earth the sitting platform; make the whole universe your own personal meditation cave.28
Not surprisingly, Hakuin had little patience with those Zen adherents, chiefly the Soto school of his time, who equated meditation exclusively with zazen, and who did not insist on the use of koans:
They practise silent, dead sitting as though they were incense burners in some old mausoleum . . . If you examine these people you will find they are illiterate, stinking, blind, shaven-headed commoners with no power whatsoever to guard the fortress of the Dharma. [The Dharma is the True Law, i.e. Buddhism.]29
In Hakuin’s view, such people do not even approach the levels of insight available to those who follow his practice of koan meditation in action.
Hakuin nowhere disguises the difficulty of the programme he advocates. He stresses that the Zen aspirant needs not only faith in the master and the attainability of the goal, but also perseverance and courage. Awakening is unlikely to come before the student has gone through an extensive programme of koan practice, probably lasting some years, and unwavering perseverance is needed to prevent failure during this time. Courage is needed because the unseating of the grip of ordinary thinking processes by koan practice, ‘raising the great ball of doubt’, is not always pleasant. As has been indicated, the aim is to bring the reasoning mind to breaking point, the ‘Great Death’: that Hakuin should describe the state in this way indicates the profundity of the mental upheaval involved in Zen. What justifies the effort – it takes every ounce of strength – is the experience of enlightenment:
At this moment what is there that you lack?
Nirvana presents itself before you,
Where you stand is the Land of Purity.Your person, the body of Buddha.30
The insight of enlightenment brings absolute peace, absolute fearlessness and absolute joy. Small wonder that despite the rigour of the training so many should have followed this path.
References to P.B. Yampolsky (ed. and trans.), The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings, New York and London, Columbia University Press, 1971, are given as Yampolsky.
1 His direct heir Gasan Jito (1727–1797), and then Inzan Ien (1751–1814) and Takuju Kosen (1760– 1833).
2 Hakuin Ekaku, the name by which he is always known, is a combination of two religious names he took later in life. He was born Sugiyama Iwajiro.
3 Orategama Supplement, Yampolsky p. 116 (the word ‘Orategama’, the title of one of Hakuin’s bestknown works, has traditionally been said to be the proper name he gave to his favourite tea-kettle).
4 Also known as Shoju Rojin.
5 Orategama Supplement, Yampolsky, p. 119.
6 op.cit., p. 120.
7 Yasen Karma, trans. R.D.M. Shaw and W. Schiffer, in Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 13, nos 1–2, 1956, p. 113.
8 Before leaving the figure of Hakuyu, it is of interest to note that, according to Hakuin, he had carried his yogic practice (Taoist in his case) to such a point that like Milarepa, he needed only a cotton shirt in the bitterest cold. (cf. Yasen Karma, p. 125.) Hakuin was to continue to recommend ‘naikan’ for the rest of his life, cf. e.g. the opening of Orategama I, Yampolsky, pp. 29 sqq, written almost forty years after the meeting with Hakuyu.
9 Orategama III, Yampolsky, p. 87.
10 op.cit., p. 89.
11 op.cit., p. 90. A kalpa is an immense stretch of time: ‘eon’ gives something of the same meaning in English.
12 Orategama zokushu, Yampolsky, p. 134.
13 Zazen wasan, 11, 1–4, trans. Sumiko Kudo in Zekei Shibayama, On Zazen Wasan: Hakuin’s Song of Zazen, Kyoto, 1967, p. 1. There is another translation of the poem in I. Miura and R.F. Sasaki, Zen Dust, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1966, pp. 251–253.
14 Orategama II, Yampolsky, p. 76.
15 Zazen wasan, 11.5–6 and 28–31, trans. Sumiko Kudo in Zekei Shibayama, op. cit., pp. 1–2.
16 This explains why, in the great koan collections, it is customary to refer to each entry as a ‘case’.
17 The best-known koan collections, referred to with some frequency in later Zen literature, are:
18Yabukoji (1753), Yampolsky, p. 164. Hakuin had a taste for naming his works after bushes and shrubs. ‘Yabukoji’ is Aridisia japonica. The same work is sometimes referred to by an alternative title, Sekishu no onjo = Sound of the Single Hand.
19 The Gateless Gate, case 1: ‘A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen master: “Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?” Joshu answered “Mu” [= no-thing].’ (In Paul Reps (comp.), Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971, p. 95.) This is a koan very often set for beginning Zen students. Joshu Jushin is Chao’chou Ts’ung-shen (778–897 CE), a great Zen master of the late Tang.
20 Orategama Supplement, Yampolsky, p. 118. Such a state as Hakuin here describes has close parallels in the experience of western mystics, cf. e.g. St John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, Bk II, ch. xvii or St Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, Fifth Abode, ch. I.
21 ibid.
22 Orategama zokushu, Yampolsky, p. 139.
23 Yabukoji, Yampolsky, p. 166.
24 In his Tojo goi hensho kuketsu (Treatise on the Five Ranks), Pt 3 of his Keiso dokuzui (Poison Blossoms from Thorn Thickets), 1758.
25 Tojo goi hensho kuketsu, trans. R. Sasaki in Zen Dust, p. 66.
26 op.cit., pp. 27–28.
27 The graded koans are described in detail by a modern roshi (Zen Master), Miura Isshu, in Zen Dust, pp. 35–76.
28 Orategama I, Yampolsky, p. 58.
29 Yabukoji, Yampolsky, p. 170.
30 Zazen wasan, 11.41–44, trans. Sumiko Kudo in Zekei Shibayana, op. cit., p. 3.
(N.B. Hakuin often named his works after plants, or chose otherwise eccentric titles for his essays and letters. The literal equivalents are given below.)
Hebiichigo (lit. the snake-strawberry)
Keiso dokuzui (Poison Blossoms from Thorn Thickets)
Orategama; Orategama Supplement (‘Orategama’ is said to have been the proper name of Hakuin’s teakettle. The work is sometimes called The Embossed Tea-Kettle.)
Yabukoji (the shrub Aridisia japonica)
Yasen kanna (A Chat on a Boat in the Evening)
Zazen wasan (The Song of Zazen)
the Buddha, Vasubandhu, Dogen, Bankei, Nishida, Suzuki
(a) Hakuin’s works
Only a fraction of Hakuin’s literary output is available in English. The two most extensive selections are:
Yampolsky, P.B., The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings, New York and London, Columbia University Press, 1971 (which also contains a complete list of Hakuin’s writings)
Shaw, R.D.M., The Embossed Tea-Kettle: Orategama and Other Works of Hakuin Zenji, London, Allen & Unwin, 1963
Hakuin’s Yasen kanna (A Chat on a Boat in the Evening), trans. R.D.M. Shaw and W. Schiffer, SJ, also appeared in Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 13, nos. 1–2, 1956, pp. 101–127
Hakuin’s poem Zazen wasan (The Song of Zazen), with a lengthy commentary, is available in Zenkei Shibayama, On Zazen Wasan: Hakuin’s Song of Zazen, trans. Sumiko Kudo, Kyoto, 1967
Miura, I. and Sasaki R.F., Zen Dust, New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1966, a richly annotated study of the history of the koan in Rinzai Zen. Together with much else it contains a further translation of the Zazen wasan and an almost complete version of Pt 3 of Hakuin’s Keiso dokuzui (Poison Blossoms from Thorn Thickets).
(b) Other works
The major koan collections referred to in note 17 have been translated into English, see:
Schloegl, I., The Zen Teaching of Rinzai: A Translation from the Chinese of the Lin-chi lu, Berkeley, CA, Shambhala, 1976
Reps, Paul (comp.) Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971 (contains a version of the Mumonkan)
Sekida, Katsuki, Two Zen Classics, New York and Tokyo, Weatherhill, 1977 (contains the Mumonkan and the Hekigan roku)