I once had a senpai (senior) who became the editor-in-chief of a large newspaper. This man came to me asking if he could borrow money. I told him, “You have already borrowed a lot of money from me, haven’t you? I don’t know how much it is in all, but you always say, ‘Lend me, Lend me,’ without returning the money once. You ask me to lend you the money, but do you have a means of returning it?”
He said that he could not return the money. I told him, “Then don’t you think that it’s better to say, ‘Give me.’ I ask people to give me the money so I have no debts. You can’t return the money, and yet you ask me if you can borrow the money so you feel inferior to me, don’t you. Even on the phone, your voice sounds depressed. Even when you come, you look pale. From the next time, please ask me to give you the money.”
Even though I told him that, he said that it was difficult for him to ask for the money. If you can’t return the money then there is no other way but to ask the person to give you the money. Once you say it, afterwards you will feel refreshed. If you can’t return it, say “Give me.” That is doing what is right. In his case, his spirit had become wretched. I despise a sempai who goes to a kohai (junior) in an abject manner.
When anyone falls into hard times, they begin to be maudlin in a strange way. When you hang on to a thin thread, your suffering remains; the agony remains as worldly desires arise. If you overcome that, open yourself, accept what comes, and you will suddenly feel light-hearted. That’s how it is. If you have nothing, then you can reach out to anything. That is the strongest way, don’t you think? In order to do this, it is important to be determined.
In other words, it is important not to be impoverished in spirit. If you have the energy and confidence not to become impoverished, even if you live the poorest life, it won’t bother you. Daito Kokushi once said, “As long as you have shoulders, you will have clothes to wear, and as long as you have a mouth, you will have food to eat.” Shoulders were made to have clothes hung on them. A mouth was made to eat food. That is what Daito Kokushi said.
Similarly Christ says in Matthew, “And why take ye thought for rainment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.”
Even if that is so, and we say “Man is the lord of creation,” if all we think of is ourselves, we lose the chance to make other things live. If you are self-centered and if you think that it is all right as long as you have a life of abundance, when you are in need, no one will want to help you—even if he is a friend. Everyday if even in a small way, you try to do something for the world or to help someone, there will be recompense without fail. To expect something in return is wrong. But no matter what we do, compensation follows naturally.
In any case, I overcame adversity in this way. You might say that it is because I am a priest. Even so, there is no doubt that one can live one’s life like this. It may be true that if everyone thinks, “they toil not, neither do they spin,” it will be the end of the world. It is important, however, to try to have this state of mind everyday. If you can do that, though your living standard may reach rock bottom, your vigor and energy will not decline. You will have a carefree and leisurely disposition, feeling that you are living at the center of the Universe. If you do not have this vigor and energy, you will become a failure in society.
Omani Roshi with his family, 1961.
Though it is said, “Even if you must buy it, you must have suffering in your youth,” there are those who benefit from this suffering and those who do not. Some people lose to their suffering, and they end their lives without using that suffering as nourishment for their development as a human being. Some people, however, can use their suffering to nurture their own inner progress as human beings and become people of great character. How we individually shape our suffering into part of ourselves makes a great difference in the kind of person we become.5
Around this time Omori Roshi and his wife had the misfortune of losing their three year old daughter.
Our daughter got sick after the end of the war when conditions were still terrible. The doctor said that if she got one hundred injections of penicillin, she might recover. She had tuberculin meningitis. In effect, it stemmed from malnutrition. The doctor, however, had never administered one hundred penicillin shots. At that time one injection of penicillin cost about ten thousand yen. No matter who they may have been, after ten shots, no one could continue because of the expense. The doctor did not know whether her brain would return to normal after one hundred shots, but the illness would be in remission.
I told my wife, “Let them do it.”
“How will you get the money?” she asked.
“I will raise it somehow. Let her have the injections,” I said. In an emergency parents can be determined. For their child’s life, they will do anything.
But my wife said to me, “That may be all right for you, but please think of the other children.” In the end, the only thing that we could do was to watch our own child suffer and die before our eyes. After that child died, my wife cried by herself every night for three years. For a parent, there is no sadder thing than to have your own child die before you.6
Although he became the priest of Koho-in, Omori Roshi continued to go to the sesshin at Tenryuji every month just as before. Mrs. Omori shares this impression, “After coming home from one week of sesshin, he was different from when he left. His feet were unsteady, and he staggered. He had lost weight and was very thin. During just one sesshin, his face changed totally. That’s how seriously he sat in meditation.”
1960
Omori Roshi and Nagata Hoju Roshi, successor to Seki Bokuo Roshi at Takuan Zenji’s templeSukiyo-ji, 1961.
Zen in Modern Society
After he had become the priest at Koho-in, Omori Roshi continued to participate actively in politics. At the request of Mr. Abe, Secretary of the Interior after the war, he worked on the New Japan Anti-Communist League and continued there for twenty years. He also was a magistrate of the Nakano Court of. Justice for about twenty years. When the court moved for reconstruction, Omori Roshi was busy with other matters and resigned his post as a magistrate. Below he tells of his experience as a magistrate.
After I became the priest at Koho-in, because we never knew from day to day whether we would eat, a lawyer named Fukazawa Sadao probably felt sorry for us. He organized a lecture series for me with the Tokyo Lawyer’s Association. That is how the Hoso Zenwa-kai (Lawyer’s Zen Study Group) began. Once a month I would lecture on Zen to them. Then through the recommendation of the hundred or so lawyers who belonged to this group, I became the Tokyo area judicial magistrate. I guess they wanted to make life easier for me and my family and kindly recommended me for the post. During the 20 years that I was the magistrate for civil cases, I was able to make a thorough study of human beings.
I found that the living creatures known as human beings are unable to see things correctly. As a civil mediator, I dealt mainly with debtorcreditor cases involving money, land, and homes. There were many complications in these cases, and everyone had things that they wanted to say. The simple truth, however, was that something had been borrowed or rented. Moreover, public and private documents proved the truth of what had been exchanged, and I could not understand why people did not understand the facts as they were. There were even cases where one side said that something was round, but the other side said that it was square. In her book The Logic of Listening, Fukunaga Mitsuko of The International Christian University highlights people’s inability to see truth by describing an experiment she carried out.
Fukunaga took 27 university students to the woods in Musashino. She told the students to record any and all sounds that they heard during a ten minute period. Returning to the classroom, she had every student read their list one by one while the other students listened. Some students laughed; some students were surprised. She had each student write their conclusions about the exercise. Here are a few of them:
People expressed the same sound differentl
y.
Others thought they had heard sounds that they had not.
Though they thought that they had concentrated hard and had heard everything without missing anything, they had, in fact, missed some sounds.
Fukunaga took the 27 students to the forest again and gave each a leaf. All the leaves were of the same species. They were told to observe the leaf for ten minutes. Then she had them write down what they had touched and seen. In the classroom each student read out their impressions. The following is a sample of their conclusions:
It was difficult to express what they had seen and felt.
Each person’s impression was different.
Some people saw things that others didn’t notice.
Some felt things that others didn’t feel.
They thought that they had seen everything but obviously they could not have seen everything.
They thought that they had felt everything, but that was impossible.
They did not have the ability to write down everything.
After two weeks when the students were asked to write their thoughts on these experiments, almost all of the students wrote that they had learned modesty. In Dr. Fukunaga’s opinion:
What the students saw was just a part of that thing. The sounds that they heard were not all the sounds. Further, what they felt was just part of that thing…. It is man’s fate that he can have only partial knowledge. The reason is that we experience what is happening around us as sight, sound, and touch. Messages are transmitted to the nervous system through our eyes, ears, and skin. When our nervous system is stimulated, we choose what to process. In short, we take in information not as a whole but in parts. The rest, we throw away. We select what to process and what not to. This selection occurs completely automatically and totally unconsciously.
Since I was still a mediator when I read this, I had a great interest in it. Though the students did their best to concentrate, they were born like all of us with a nervous system that automatically and unconsciously makes selections. That is why seeing and hearing can only be accomplished in parts. That is our fate.
Mediation is a confrontation between A and B; it is a serious matter involving profit and loss. Here one concentrates very hard not for the sake of recognizing the truth but to protect one’s interests. The objective is to win one’s claim. The basis for the selection is not just unconscious. I think that there is something like the consciousness of the unconscious.7
In 1958, Roshi’s book, Ken to Zen, was published by the Chuo Bukkyo Company and was highly praised by Daisetz Suzuki. In a letter to one of Omori Roshi’s students, Suzuki wrote:
I was enthralled by Mr. Omori’s Ken to Zen. I have Harigaya’s book, too, but I had been reading “Harigaya” as “Hariya.” I learned through Mr. Omori’s book that the reading was “Harigaya.” I really believe that ainuke (mutual passing) is the greatest feat in Kendo. I wrote that in my book. Ainuke truly manifests the essence of Kendo.
I completely agree with Mr. Omori on the contrast and the harmony between Miyamoto Musashi’s Iwao (huge boulder) and the Yagyu style’s Marubashi (round bridge). “Ten” (changing, turning, shifting) and “yu” (deep and remote, quiet, dim); “happiness and sadness” and “no happiness, no sadness,” between these terms, there are harmony and interpenetration. With this, for the first time, we can speak of Ken and Zen as one. Because I believe that the foundation of the Eastern thought is in Marubashi’s explanation, the philosophy of the Absolute Now, I mentioned it in my latest work. If one were to systematize this explanation, it would be the Flower Ornament Sutra.
Please convey my gratitude to Mr. Omori.
Omori Roshi appreciated Suzuki Sensei’s review of his book and said in response:
Daisetz Suzuki Sensei was very kind and highly praised my book on the point that this book was at the foundation of Eastern and Western thought. It seems that Suzuki Sensei showed special interest in ainuke (“mutual passing,” a Kendo term that refers to the highest level of the art when two masters confront each other) and felt that it would be a good way to explain the Way to Westerners. He used my explanation as a reference in the second printing of his Zen and Japanese Culture. When I received his excellent book, I found that he had devoted many pages to Kendo and Zen.
Harigaya Sekiun created the term ainuke to describe this condition attained through the sword. It is the world of absolute peace that transcends winning and losing. It is in a different dimension from aiuchi (mutual killing or hitting). We should consider it a cultural treasure left by a man of ancient times. We must try to adapt this concept to contemporary times and build a peaceful co-existence which is based on the philosophy of this great scholar, Daisetz Suzuki.
In Zen training if you think everything is dualistic (self and other), there will be tension, and you will never be able to achieve enlightenment. You must transcend dualism and enter the realm of ainuke. But there is a problem. It is no good just to intellectualise about this realm of ainuke. This is a very important point. If you do not have the background and strength of aiuchi, you cannot enter the realm of ainuke. Your Zen will be empty. If you have not mastered aiuchi, it is impossible to learn ainuke.8
From this time on, Omori Roshi and Daisetz Suzuki became friends. During his later years Suzuki thought very highly of Roshi and felt that his ideas and activities would become influential. When a high government official, concerned about the future of the Imperial family and the Japanese people, hoped that the Crown Prince would go to sanzen, he sought recommendations for a teacher. Suzuki Sensei told him, “Mr. Omori would be the best.”
1964
In 1964 Suzuki wrote the preface to Roshi’s book, Lectures on the Record of Rinzai.9 Here is an excerpt from that preface:
The Record of Rinzai is a book that should be regarded as one of the greatest analects of the Orient—no, of the whole world. I, myself, believe that a book such as Rinzai’s, that has so adequately, so delightfully, and, in such a lively manner, presented MU NO SHINJIN (the True Man without Rank), is rare in this world. Even compared to the Zen writings of the T’ang dynasty, this book is a rare masterpiece on this point. Rinzai says, “Take my point of view, and you’ll cut off the heads of the Sambhogakaya and Nirmanakaya Buddhas; a bodhisattva who has attained the completed mind of the tenth stage will be like a mere hireling; a bodhisattava of Approximate Enlightmenment or of Marvelous Enlightenment will be like a pilloried prisoner; an arhat and a pratyeka-buddha will be like privy filth; Bodhi and Nirvana will be like hitching-posts for asses.” Rinzai is truly a man without rank…. Reading Mr. Omori Sogen’s most recent work, I thought that even at this late time, I found that someone else thinks the same way as I do. That is why I am relating my thoughts and hope that many will read his Lectures on the Record of Rinzai.
In July of 1966 Omori Roshi went to South Vietnam to invite Thich Quang Duc to Japan in order to persuade him to stop his fast. At that time, Nguyen Kao Ky’s administration had imprisoned about two thousand Buddhists. Demanding their release, Thich Quang Duc had begun his fast. Below he relates his experience.
Eighty per cent of the Vietnamese were Buddhists. Thich Quang Duc was their leader. Because his living or dying could alter the fate of Vietnam, the continuation of his fast was a major problem for the government of Nguyen Kao Ky who was oppressing him. For the American government, if anything happened to Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhists would be stirred up. The political situation would become very grave and would affect the war. To lose this very intelligient and highly respected leader would be a fatal blow to the one existing Buddhist Association of Vietnam. Though they had different reasons, it is the absolute truth that the continuation of his fast would have a disastrous effect on all three parties.
Before going to Vietnam to meet Thich Quang Duc, I went to see Ambassador Emerson of the American Embassy in Japan. I told him, “I am going to Vietnam to meet with Thich Quang Duc. There is a possibility that I will bring him back with me.”
He answered in clear and
very fluent Japanese, “I have a great interest in this.”
I said, “You say that you have such a great interest in this. If I go to Vietnam, I could be imprisoned for being anti-American or for obstructing the war. Please call Vietnam so that I will not be thrown into prison.”
He said, “I will call Secretary of State Habib so please meet with him.” When I went to meet Mr. Habib, I learned that we had just missed each other. Since they told me that he had just returned to the United States, I met with a young attache and related my business. I thought that I could then meet Thich Quang Duc, but I couldn’t meet him.
Knowing that I had tried various ways to meet Thich Quang Duc, the Japanese Ambassador to Vietnam summoned me three times. He scolded me saying, “What is a private citizen like you trying to do here?”
The third time that I was summoned, I said to the Japanese Ambassador, “I paid a visit to Ambassador Emerson before I left Tokyo. When I told him that I was going to Vietnam and might bring Thich Quang Duc back to Japan with me, he told me that he had a great interest in this idea. I even obtained the agreement of Foreign Minister Shiina.”
The Ambassador began to shake and asked, “You know Ambassador Emerson?”
“Since I am here by the invitation of Ambassador Emerson, the Americans will give me access to an airplane wherever I go,” I responded.
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