Bankei Zen

by Peter Haskel

  INTRODUCTION*

  Even in his own day, Bankei’s Zen struck people as an anomaly, dramatically different from any religious teaching they had known before. At first, this alarmed them because they weren’t sure that what he taught was even Buddhism, much less Zen, and there were severe penalties for associating with anyone professing Christianity or other “heretical” beliefs proscribed by the government. By the end of his career, however, Bankei had emerged as something of a celebrity. People trekked from every corner of Japan to hear his talks, and the overflow audiences had to be accommodated in separate shifts. His following embraced nearly every segment of Japanese society: samurai with their families and retainers, merchants, artisans, farmers, servants, even gamblers and gangsters, as well as monks and nuns of all the Buddhist sects, crowded the temples where he spoke. Most came to listen, to learn about Bankei’s unusual teaching, but others arrived with special problems, hoping to solicit his advice. Whether it was a monk with trouble meditating, a layman afraid of thunder, a farmer with a bad temper, or a local family feud, Bankei’s approach was essentially the same. Whatever the problem, for Bankei there was really only one solution: to deal with things on a wholly new basis—to let go, to be natural, to have faith in one’s real, “original” mind. He called this his teaching of the Unborn, or the Unborn Buddha Mind. Everyone has this unborn mind, Bankei said; it isn’t mysterious or remote, but here and now, functioning, alive, “marvelously illuminating and smoothly managing everything.” There’s no need to obtain the Buddha Mind since it’s been there all along. People only have to abide in it, to use it, to open their eyes. It was easy if they just knew how, and he was there to tell them. That was the message Bankei brought.

  In 1622, when Bankei was born, Japan had only recently emerged from a long period of turmoil. Contending warlords had rent the country throughout much of the sixteenth century, and the decisive victory of the Tokugawa forces and their allies in 1600 inaugurated a new and largely peaceful era that was to last over two and one half centuries and leave an indelible mark on much of Japanese life. Though claiming to follow the principles of Confucian ethics, the Tokugawa government was, in effect, a military dictatorship, and its primary concern was to maintain firm control over every area of Japanese society. A rigid class system was instituted, with the samurai, or warrior caste, at the top of the social order, followed by the farmers, craftsmen and merchants who formed the broad mass of the population. Social discipline was strict and enforced at every level through patterns of collective responsibility. Dissent was virtually unknown, and punishment, even for a samurai, could be swift and brutal.

  The Buddhist sects too were organized into authoritarian structures, each directly responsible to the government. Although Buddhism was under attack from Confucian officials who viewed the priesthood as parasitic and corrupt, the Tokugawa shoguns themselves remained important patrons, and throughout the Tokugawa period (1600–1867/1868) the government found the temples invaluable tools in its campaign to root out Christianity, which had been banned as a subversive foreign belief. As proof that they were not “secret Christians,” all Japanese families were required to maintain membership in a parish temple, whose priest regularly issued certificates attesting their support. A guaranteed source of income for the temples, the parish system proved a veritable windfall for Buddhism. The power of the parish priest to grant or withhold the required temple certificate, however, offered clear opportunity for abuse, and cases of extortion by unscrupulous clerics were not unknown.

  Like the other schools of Buddhism, the Zen sect benefited from the economic security provided by the parish system, but for many Zen monks, the early Tokugawa period was a time of crisis and intense self-examination. Though, materially, many of the temples had prospered during the years of civil war, the teaching of Zen itself had seriously declined. In the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Zen study had degenerated into a type of secret oral transmission strongly influenced by Esoteric Buddhism, and the result was a formalized and lifeless affair in which the experience of enlightenment had little or no part. The situation was the same in both the Rinzai and Sōtō sects, the leading schools of Japanese Zen founded during the Middle Ages.

  By the beginning of the Tokugawa period, a reaction had set in, and the secret oral transmission was gradually abandoned. Nevertheless, there was no general agreement on the best means to revive Zen in the new age. Different methods were proposed, and a dialogue of sorts continued in both sects throughout the seventeenth century. For many, the answer lay in a return to the past, a restoration of the teachings of the great Medieval founders. The Sōtō school, for example, sought to establish an identity based on the works of its founder Dōgen Kigen (1200–1253), who had been relatively neglected during the late Middle Ages. In the Rinzai school, the center of revival was the Myōshinji, the great headquarters temple in Kyoto with branches throughout Japan. Here, no figures comparable to Dōgen existed, and the retrospective impulse expressed itself in an enthusiasm for the original “koan” Zen that the early teachers of the line had received from Sung China.* This movement in the Myōshinji culminated in the teachings of the eighteenth-century master Hakuin Ekaku (1686–1769) and his disciples, who created the system of koan study still in use in Japanese Rinzai temples. Reverence for the sects’ founders was accompanied by a new emphasis on the purity of lines of transmission, the “silent transmission” of enlightenment from mind to mind across the generations that was considered a key feature of the Zen school. The transmission was usually witnessed by the teacher’s inka, or “seal of approval,” his written sanction of the student’s enlightenment experience, and these documents were carefully preserved in many Japanese Zen temples. Both schools also witnessed a renewed interest in scholarship, which many felt could offer answers to the dilemmas of the present by providing suitable models from the past.

  There were some, however, who believed the problems confronting Zen too deep-rooted to be solved through such reforms, however well-intentioned. For these monks, what was lacking in contemporary Zen was the enlightenment experience itself. With Japanese Zen in decline for the last two hundred years, they argued, no enlightened masters remained to carry on the teaching; it was now up to the individual to enlighten himself and even to sanction his own experience.

  Such “independents,” men like Suzuki Shōsan (1579–1655), Ungo Kiyō (1582–1659) and Daigu Sōchiku (1584–1669), were primarily self-made masters, colorful individualists who owed little to their own teachers. Shōsan came to Zen later in life, taking the tonsure after a successful career as a samurai, but he continued to insist that the warrior’s role was better suited to Zen study than the priest’s. The only true Buddhism, Shōsan declared, was realized in actual life, in the thick of battle or at work in the fields. He dismissed conventional Zen meditation practices and urged his students to discipline mind and body by imitating the fierce attitude of the Niō, the powerful guardian kings whose images flank the gates of Buddhist temples. Unlike Shōsan, Ungo and Daigu were career priests who had already received their teachers’ sanction as Zen masters when they became disillusioned, renounced their previous achievements and set out once again in middle age on the search for enlightenment. Both succeeded, but entirely on their own and only after much hardship and struggle. Ungo’s teaching was strongly imbued with pietism, while Daigu’s was wildly eccentric; but, like Bankei, both felt that no qualified master existed in Japan to testify to their enlightenment and so were forced to confirm their realization for themselves.

  Other Zen monks, while acknowledging that Japanese Zen had grown stagnant, saw promise in the arrival of a new wave of Chinese teachers from the continent. Despite language difficulties—none of the newcomers spoke Japanese, and communication was mainly in writing*—masters like Tao-che Ch’ao-yüan (J: Dōsha Chōgen, d. 1662) and Yin-yüan Lung-ch’i (J: Ingen Ryūki, 1592–1673) quickly attracted a wide following to their temples in the Chinese commercial colony at Nagasaki. Chi
nese Zen, however, had altered considerably since its introduction to Japan in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) Zen of the Nagasaki temples contained many syncretic elements, and it was vigorously opposed by traditionalists, masters such as Gudō Tōshoku (1579–1661) of the Myōshinji, who saw themselves upholding the “pure” Zen of their temples’ founders. In the end, only Yin-yüan was successful in establishing his lineage in Japan, where it remains a minor branch of Japanese Zen known as the Ōbaku school,* remembered largely for its influence on painting and calligraphy and famous for its shōjin ryōri, or Buddhist vegetarian cuisine.

  As even these limited examples make clear, Zen in seventeenth-century Japan was never monolithic, but a series of diverse and at times divergent streams, varied approaches to the problems of how to restore integrity to the teaching after two hundred years of protracted decline. While Bankei’s style of Zen was unique, he was distinctly a man of his time and shared many important features with his contemporaries. Even Bankei’s originality, his bold self-confidence and iconoclasm were themselves characteristic of certain strains in the Zen world of his day.

  Overall, however, Bankei’s Zen was essentially a personal development, and at the heart of the teaching of the Unborn lies Bankei’s own life story. Bankei himself referred to it frequently in addressing his audiences, urging them not to repeat his mistakes and reminding them how lucky they were to have the benefit of his own hard-won experience.

  Bankei was born in 1622 in Hamada, a district of the town of Aboshi, † then a native port on Japan’s inland sea. His father was a Confucian, a rōnin, or masterless samurai, from the island of Shikoku‡. Through the aid of a village headman, Nakabori Sukeyasu, he was adopted into a local family and settled in Hamada, where he became a doctor, a popular occupation among former samurai. Bankei was the third of three sons, and when his father died in 1632, the eldest, Tadayasu, became head of the household. Bankei was always close to his mother, and remained devoted to her throughout his life, but, by all accounts, he and his older brother were temperamental opposites. Like his father, Tadayasu seems to have been a Confucian, a stern moralist with a conviction of the importance of serious study and obedience. By contrast, the young Bankei tended to be wild, unruly and defiant, a ringleader in any mischief and the village champion at rock fighting.

  The inevitable confrontation occurred when, at about age eleven, Bankei was sent for lessons at the neighborhood school. Almost from the start he rebelled against the lifeless character of the standard curriculum, which centered on rote memorization of the Great Learning (CH: Ta-hsüeh), an important Confucian classic. As Bankei tells us in the Sermons, his curiosity was aroused by the opening words of the text: “The Way of the Great Learning lies in illuminating the Bright Virtue.”

  The Bright Virtue (CH: ming-te) is one of the key concepts of the Great Learning. It was often interpreted as a kind of dynamic intuitive moral sense that constitutes man’s intrinsic nature, and it is likely that Bankei received some such explanation on questioning the local Confucian scholars. But when he pressed them, no one actually seemed to know what the Bright Virtue was, and Bankei was left to puzzle out the problem for himself. Disappointed and consumed by doubts, he eventually began to avoid classes. Tadayasu was outraged at his brother’s refusal to continue his studies, and life at home became increasingly unpleasant. Bankei, however, had no intention of returning to the village school, and seeing no way out of his predicament, he reportedly concealed himself in the graveyard of the family temple and attempted suicide by swallowing a mouthful of poisonous spiders. Possibly he had been misled about the spiders’ deadliness, for the following day he found himself still very much alive and faced with the same unwelcome prospects at home. Tensions between Bankei and his brother continued to build, and Tadayasu finally expelled the young truant from the household.

  The questions aroused by the Great Learning continued to obsess Bankei, and after vainly consulting the Confucian scholars, his search led him finally to Buddhism. By age thirteen, Bankei had begun to study with the priest at the family temple, where his middle brother had become a monk, and the following year, his father’s old friend Nakabori Sukeyasu came to the rescue and constructed a small retreat for Bankei on the mountain behind the Nakabori family home. Bankei practiced alone here for a time, but, still tormented by doubts, soon resumed the quest for a suitable teacher. After briefly studying Esoteric Buddhism under a priest of the Shingon school, his search brought him to the Myōshinji-line Zen master Umpo Zenshō (1572–1653) of the Zuiōji in nearby Akō. Bankei was now sixteen and still driven by his questions about man’s original nature, questions he seems to have lumped collectively under the rubric of the Bright Virtue. Nevertheless, he had apparently decided that only Buddhism effectively confronted the sort of problems that concerned him, and of all the Buddhist sects he had tried, Zen seemed the most promising. Accordingly, in 1638 he received the tonsure from Umpo and became his disciple, with the religious name Bankei Yōtaku.

  Virtually nothing is known of Umpo’s teaching, and, while always grateful for his kindness, Bankei does not appear to have held a high opinion of Umpo’s abilities as a Zen master. In 1641 Bankei left the Zuiōji on a four-year pilgrimage, or angya, the period of travel and study that is a traditional part of the Zen monk’s training. But his old questions remained, and when he returned to Umpo in 1645, he withdrew to a hut in the nearby village of Nonaka and undertook a regimen of strenuous meditation practice.

  For two years Bankei now subjected himself to a series of grueling ordeals in a desperate effort to resolve his doubts once and for all, to uncover the truth about man’s intrinsic nature. Driven to the brink of death by hunger and exhaustion, success still eluded him, and in the spring of 1647, Bankei lay in his hut, ill and apparently dying, unable even to swallow the food his servant offered.

  One day, feeling something peculiar in his throat, he managed to summon the strength to bring up a dark ball of phlegm, spitting it against the wall. Suddenly the whole weight of his illness dissolved, and he realized the answer to his questions—that he’d had the answer with him all along, the innate mind that manages everything, naturally, effortlessly, just as it is. Summoning his astonished servant, he gulped down several bowls of half-cooked rice and was soon on the way to recovery. Bankei tells us that this was when he first realized the Unborn, but it is uncertain when he actually began to use this term. Possibly it was not until much later in his career, when he had already become a successful teacher. In any case, he rarely mentions the Bright Virtue again.

  In 1651, word came of the arrival of the Chinese master Tao-che Ch’ao-yüan at the Sūfukuji, a temple founded by the Chinese merchant community in Nagasaki, and Umpo urged Bankei to pay Tao-che a visit. Tao-che spoke no Japanese, but he sized up Bankei immediately and informed him that his enlightenment, while genuine, was not yet complete. Bankei decided to join Tao-che’s assembly, and one evening experienced his second enlightenment while sitting in a darkened corner of the Sūfukuji’s meditation hall. Presenting his realization to Tao-che, he demanded: “What about the matter of birth and death?” In reply, Tao-che wrote: “Whose birth and death is this?” Bankei extended both hands. Tao-che took up his brush again, but this time Bankei snatched it away and hurled it to the ground. The following day, Tao-che publicly announced that Bankei had completed his study of Zen and made him the tenzo, or temple cook, a position reserved for advanced students in a Zen monastery.

  Bankei stayed with Tao-che for approximately one year, receiving his inka. Nevertheless, in retrospect he recognized Tao-che’s limitations and lamented that, with no enlightened masters available, Tao-che was the best he could do under the circumstances. In 1652, Bankei returned to Harima, but his first attempts to teach were met with suspicion and hostility, and he spent the next year in retreat in the Yoshino Mountains. In this remote rural district, Bankei was warmly received, and it was probably here that he composed the poem known as the Song of O
riginal Mind as a kind of informal instruction for the local people. Umpo was now in failing health, and returning to Akō the following winter, Bankei arrived only in time to attend his teacher’s funeral.

  In Nagasaki, meanwhile, trouble was brewing. Yin-yüan Lung-ch’i, a well-known Chinese master in Tao-che’s teaching line, had arrived in 1654, and his faction was attempting to displace Tao-che at the Sūfukuji. Tao-che preferred to withdraw rather than risk a confrontation that could only prove embarrassing to everyone concerned, and Bankei and several other students set out to find another temple for their beleaguered teacher. Bankei’s mission was unsuccessful, but his activities on behalf of Tao-che introduced him to two daimyo, or feudal lords, who subsequently became his patrons and disciples: Matsuura Shigenobu (1622–1703), Lord of Hirado, and Katō Yasuoki (1618–1677), Lord of Iyo. Bankei returned for a time to the Sūfukuji, but relations with Yin-yüan’s group continued to deteriorate, and in 1658 Tao-che finally returned to China, bidding a tearful farewell to his Japanese pupils.

  Bankei, however, was now to become a Zen master in his own right. At Umpo’s dying request, his heir Bokō Sogyū (d. 1694) conferred inka on Bankei, who had not been present when Umpo died. This was a common procedure in Japanese Zen temples, and though, technically, it established Bankei as Bokuō’s heir, was simply a convenient device to recognize Bankei as Umpo’s descendant and to include him in the Shōtaku-ha, Umpo’s branch of the Myōshinji teaching line. In 1659, in recognition of his new status, Bankei received advanced rank in the Myōshinji. Still something of the enfant terrible, he reportedly elicited objections from traditionalists for refusing to observe the conventions of the ceremony, which included the taking up of koans.