by Peter Haskel
Back in Hamada, too, things were changing for Bankei. He had long ago made peace with Tadayasu, who died in 1661, and in the same year a childhood friend from the village school, Sasaki Nobutsugu (1625–1686), joined his brothers in establishing a temple for Bankei in Hamada, the Ryōmonji, or Dragon Gate Temple. Originally rōnin, like Bankei’s family, the Sasakis had settled in Hamada and become wealthy merchants, shipowners whose shop name Nadaya was famous throughout Japan. Together with their wives and children, the Sasaki brothers were among Bankei’s most loyal supporters and remained the Ryōmonji’s principal patrons. The Ryōmonji was only the first of many important temples Bankei received. As his fame spread, he acquired numerous followers among the upper ranks of the samurai—daimyo and their families, who vied for his visits and offered temples in their domains and in the capitals of Kyoto and Edo. *
The following years found Bankei frequently in seclusion at one or another of the cloisters provided by his benefactors, practicing alone, instructing a select group of disciples, or nursing his recurrent illness. Bankei’s early struggles had taken a severe toll on his health, and in later life he was often in extreme discomfort, afflicted with chronic stomach spasms and fits of coughing that required intervals of quiet convalescence. Possibly, too, the retreats of the 1660s and 70s were opportunities for Bankei to continue the search for an appropriate method of instruction that led to his mature teaching of the Unborn. But on this our materials from the period are too scanty to permit anything more than speculation.
In any case, the year 1679 marked a significant change in Bankei’s approach, with the emphasis shifting to collective practice and public sermons at large kessei, the traditional three-month periods of intensive meditation held at Zen temples in the winter and summer. From this time until his death, Bankei continued to conduct important training periods nearly every year, traveling to his various temples and sometimes delivering as many as three talks a day.
Unfortunately, we know little of the actual details of practice at these kessei or at Bankei’s temples generally. In certain respects, at least, life in Bankei’s assemblies was apparently different from that in other teachers’ establishments. Bankei, for example, would not tolerate repressive behavior such as the beating or scolding that still characterizes training at many Zen temples; nor would he allow begging by his monks, though the practice was standard in Buddhist monasteries and entirely legal. Nevertheless, in common with most Zen monks, Bankei’s students observed daily periods of meditation and chanting, and Bankei himself, like other Japanese Zen teachers of the day, received students in private interviews, performed funeral and memorial services for his patrons and scrupulously upheld the Buddhist precepts in his personal life. All in all, what distinguished Bankei’s assemblies from those elsewhere seems to have been more a matter of atmosphere than one of procedure.
Bankei’s later years were marked by constant travel between his various temples and patrons. In 1680, he suffered a severe loss with the death of his mother, who had become a Buddhist nun and retired to a convent not far from the Ryōmonji. Bankei had always been fiercely devoted to his mother and insisted that what had originally driven him to realize enlightenment had been, above all, his desire to communicate the truth to her.
In 1690, Bankei was at the height of his career. His teaching of the Unborn had won a vast and devoted following, and in addition to the numerous honors he had received at the Myōshinji, the Emperor now awarded him the personal title Butchi Kōsai zenji, “Zen Master of Beneficent Enlightened Wisdom.” In the fall, Bankei was invited to deliver a series of public lectures at the Hōshinji in Marugame, the castle town of his daimyo patron Kyōgoku Takatoyo (1655–1694), Lord of Sanuki. Later that year, he conducted the most famous of his training periods, a vast kessei at the Ryōmonji, attended by nearly seventeen hundred monks of every sect, some traveling from as far as the Ryukyu Islands. Available space in the Ryōmonji’s zendō, or meditation hall, was quickly exhausted, and temporary zendō had to be improvised to accommodate the flood of new arrivals. The kessei was funded and provisioned by the Sasaki brothers, but the crowd of monks grew so immense that the Sasakis panicked and vainly begged Bankei to turn away any further applicants. Despite these setbacks, the kessei proved a success and was marred only by the tragic death of Bankei’s close disciple Sōen. During the kessei, Bankei delivered a total of sixty lectures, many of which were recorded by members of the audience, and these, together with the lectures recorded at Marugame earlier in the year, constitute the bulk of Bankei’s surviving sermons.
By 1693, Bankei’s health had worsened, and, realizing that little time remained, the Ryōmonji’s parishioners hastened to erect a pagoda for him, contributing their own labor to the project. Ordinary men and women, even grandfathers and nursing mothers, arrived to join in the effort, and at night, when their official duties were over, samurai would come to carry on the work by moonlight. That June, returning to the Ryōmonji from a visit to Edo, Bankei became seriously ill. He managed to deliver a final three days of lectures, but his condition continued to worsen, and before the end of September he was dead. His ashes were divided chiefly between the Ryōmonji and his other principal temple, the Nyohōji, erected in Iyo by Lord Katō. In 1740, Bankei was awarded the posthumous Imperial title of Kokushi, or “National Master,” an honor accorded only six other teachers in the Myōshinji’s history.
What was it that made Bankei’s teaching of the Unborn so popular in his time? Above all, perhaps, was the fact that the basics of Bankei’s Zen were clear and relatively simple. You didn’t have to be learned, live in a monastery or even necessarily consider yourself a Buddhist to practice them effectively. Nor did you have to engage in long and arduous discipline. True, Bankei himself had undergone terrible hardships before he realized the Unborn; but only, as he constantly reminded his listeners, because he never met a teacher able to tell him what he had to know. In fact, one could readily attain the Unborn in the comfort of one’s own home. It wasn’t necessary, or even advisable, Bankei insisted, to follow his own example.
Bankei’s entire teaching can be reduced to the single admonition “Abide in the Unborn!” This was Bankei’s constant refrain. The term “Unborn” itself is a common one in classical Buddhism, where it generally signifies that which is intrinsic, original, uncreated. Bankei, however, was the first to use this term as the crux of his teaching. Rather than obtaining or practicing the Unborn, he says, one should simply abide in it, because the Unborn is not a state that has to be created, but is already there, perfect and complete, the mind just as it is. There isn’t any special method for realizing the Unborn other than to be yourself, to be totally natural and spontaneous in everything you do. This means “letting thoughts arise or cease just as they will,” and doing the same in regard to physical sensations, as Bankei indicates in his advice on illness (pp. 61–63) and in his instructions on the art of the lance (pp. 138–39).
The mind, as Bankei describes it, is a dynamic mechanism, reflecting, recording and recalling our impressions of the world, a kind of living mirror that is always in motion, never the same from one instant to the next. Within this mirror mind, thoughts and feelings come and go, appearing, vanishing and reappearing in response to circumstances, neither good nor bad in themselves. Unlike the man of the Unborn, however, the impulsive person suffers from attachment. He is never natural because he is a slave to his responses, which he fails to realize are only passing reflections. As a result, he is continually “hung up,” entangled in particular thoughts and sensations, obstructing the free flow of the mind. Everything will operate smoothly, Bankei insists, if we only step aside and let it do so. He illustrates this to the members of his audience by pointing out that, even while engrossed in listening to his talk, they automatically register and identify everything else around them—the calls of crows and sparrows, the various colors and aromas, the different sorts of people in the room. No one is deliberately trying to do this; it simply happens. That, Bank
ei says, is how the Unborn functions.
For Bankei, the important thing is letting go, breaking the mold of our self-centeredness (mi no hiiki) and bad habits (kiguse). These are familiar Japanese terms that Bankei used to describe the chief components of delusion. Self-centeredness is the basis of the false self. It is “ego” in the pejorative sense, the reflex that leads us to judge everything from a narrowly selfish viewpoint. What fuels and informs this attitude is bad habits, character flaws that, like self-centeredness, are the result of conditioning. We grow up imitating the people around us, Bankei says, and in the process acquire certain failings which finally become so ingrained that we mistake them for our real selves. Unlike the Unborn Buddha Mind, however, neither bad habits nor self-centeredness is innate; both are assimilated from outside after birth. When we become deluded, we temporarily forfeit the Buddha Mind we started out with, exchanging it for these learned responses. The moment this occurs, duality intervenes and we leave the original oneness of the Unborn to be “born” into particular states of being—as hungry ghosts, fighting demons, beasts or hell-dwellers—passing fitfully from one to the next, trapped in incessant transmigration. The only way out of this dilemma, Bankei maintains, is to go back the way we came, to return to the unconditioned, the uncreated, the unborn.
“What we have from our parents innately is the Unborn Buddha Mind and nothing else”; “The Buddha Mind is unborn and marvelously illuminating, and with the Unborn everything is perfectly managed”; “Abide in the Unborn Buddha Mind!” These are the basics of Bankei’s Zen, his catechism of the Unborn. He explained them over and over in different ways, because he believed the truth of the Unborn was so simple, so straightforward, that anyone could grasp it. In this sense, Bankei’s Zen was truly popular. Other Japanese masters had taught lay audiences. But, in most cases, Zen as such was considered far too difficult for ordinary people, and Zen masters’ popular teachings, especially those directed to women, scarcely touched on Zen at all. Instead, teachers spoke in general terms, urging the merits of pious activity and discussing concepts from the Buddhist scriptures. Study of the “inner teachings” was generally confined to qualified monks and members of the upper classes and intelligentsia who could follow to some extent the difficult Chinese of the imported Zen texts.
Bankei’s position was just the reverse. He maintained that the essence of Zen itself was perfectly plain and direct, and that any person with an open mind could be made to understand. You didn’t need to be widely educated or adept at classical Chinese. That sort of thing only got in the way. In fact, the Unborn could best be explained using simple, everyday language. Any other approach was just deceptive. To teach Zen, Bankei insisted, one had to go right to the core, to divest oneself of everything extraneous—all the gimmicks, the technical jargon, the exotic foreign usages.
This was Bankei’s principal objection to the koan. Though its origins are obscure, koan Zen was largely a development of the Sung dynasty, when it became popular for Chinese masters to assign their students particular kung-an (read as kōan in Japanese) or “public cases,” named for the model cases that served as guidelines in the Chinese courts of law. The Zen koans were brief and often paradoxical episodes drawn principally from the records of the earlier masters, especially those of the “golden age” of Zen in the T’ang (618–906) and Five Dynasties (907–960) periods.
A monk asked Yun-men (862/4–949): “What is the Buddha?”
Yun-men said: “A shit-wiping stick.”
(Wu-men kuan, no. 21)
A monk asked Chao-chou (778–897): “Why did the Patriarch come from the West?” (That is, what is the ultimate truth that Bodhidharma, the First Patriarch and semi-legendary founder of Chinese Zen, brought from India?)
Chao-chou said: “The cypress tree in the garden.”
(Wu-men kuan, no. 37)
Under the teacher’s guidance, the student would strive to penetrate the problem presented by his case, generating a “great ball of doubt” as he puzzled over the koan, attempting to break through to enlightenment. Certain teachers compiled popular collections of koans that included responses to each case in the form of poems, comments and substitute answers. The most famous of these were the twelfth-century Blue Cliff Record (CH: Pi-yen lu, J: Hekigan roku) and the thirteenth-century Gateless Gate (CH: Wu-men kuan, J: Mumonkan).
Introduced from China in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, koan study became a standard form of Zen practice in Japan. However, due in part to the prestige of continental culture, the koan collections with their associated poems and comments were preserved in the original Chinese. The problem was compounded by the language of the koan records themselves, which contained many obscure colloquial expressions, difficult phrases and specialized terms. Japanese students were expected not only to master these but to insert them in the rapid give-and-take of mondō, or Zen dialogues, and in their private interviews with the teacher.
Inevitably, this created certain difficulties. The emphasis on such arcane foreign-language material was a serious impediment to practitioners of merely average intellectual ability and threatened to drain much of the spontaneity from the encounter between master and student. Yet, despite its drawbacks, the koan enjoyed enormous popularity in Japanese Zen, and remained an important feature in both the Rinzai and Sōtō sects. The very difficulty of negotiating the koan collections, the technical expertise required to decipher the original texts, made the Zen priesthood a kind of exclusive fraternity that included many specialists in literary Chinese.
The nature of Bankei’s own experience of koan study is uncertain. It seems likely that he had some contact with koan Zen in his student days, and evidence indicates that he occasionally used koans for his own disciples. Judging by Bankei’s statements in the Sermons, however, he abandoned koans altogether in his later years. As Bankei saw it, the whole approach of koan Zen was hopelessly contrived. He rejected the need for familiarity with classical Chinese as an unnecessary encumbrance, and rejected the koan itself as an artificial technique. The original koans, he argued, were not “models,” but actual living events. The old masters had simply responded to particular situations that confronted them, naturally accommodating themselves to the needs of the students involved. That was the business of any Zen teacher, to meet each situation on its own terms. There was no need to make people study the words of ancient Chinese monks when you could simply have them look at their own “cases,” the way in which the Unborn was at work here and now in the actual circumstances of their lives. This was what Bankei called his “direct” teaching, as opposed to koan practice, which he referred to disparagingly as “studying old waste paper.” The koan, said Bankei, was merely a device, and teachers who relied on it, or on any other technique, were practicing “devices Zen.” Why rely on a device, he argued, when you could have the thing itself?
In this sense, Bankei was a traditionalist. He harked back to the Zen masters of the “golden age” before the triumph of the koan, masters like Lin-chi I-hsüan (J: Rinzai Gigen, d. 860), founder of the Rinzai school. Bankei insisted that his own teachings were the same as Lin-chi’s, and the many similarities between the Sermons and the Lin-chi lu (J: Rinzai roku), the record of Lin-chi’s teachings, suggest that the Chinese master may have been an important influence on Bankei’s Zen.
Taken as a whole, however, Bankei’s teaching remains uniquely his own. Ironically, its failure to survive was probably due to the very qualities that made it so distinctive and so attractive to Bankei’s students: its close identification with Bankei’s own personality and its refusal to associate itself with particular procedures or techniques. Ultimately, “Hakuin Zen,” which revived and systematized koan study in Japan, swept the monasteries of the Rinzai school, even infiltrating the Ryōmonji and the other temples of Bankei’s line. To Hakuin, Bankei’s freewheeling teaching of the Unborn was anathema, and he denounced it emphatically. But the twentieth century has seen renewed interest in Bankei’s Zen. The noted Buddhist scholar D.
T. Suzuki (1886–1975) became the leading modern champion of Bankei’s teaching, hailing it as a refreshing antidote to the strictures of the koan method and ranking Bankei with Dōgen and Hakuin as one of Japan’s three great Zen masters. Suzuki and other Japanese scholars began to compile and edit the records of Bankei’s teaching, many of which had lain forgotten in various provincial temples, and today Bankei is gaining popularity once again.
Bankei’s continued appeal is easy to understand. Though his world was very different from our own, there is something contemporary in much of what he has to say. His sense of freedom, his humanity, his intimate approach to the ultimate problems in terms of people’s daily lives seem wholly attuned to the spirit of the present day. And when we turn to the pages of the sermons, Bankei is still there, still curiously alive and “marvelously illuminating.”
* My principal source for the Medieval period has been Tamamura Takeji’s multi-volume Nihon zenshūshi ronshū (Kyoto: Shibunkaku shuppan, 1976–1981), while for the history of Tokugawa Zen, I consulted a variety of primary and secondary sources. The information on Bankei’s biography is based mainly on Fujimoto Tsuchishige’s Bankei kokushi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1971).
* The Sung Dynasty lasted from 960 till 1279.
* The Japanese use Chinese characters in their written language, and most Buddhist monks and educated men of the Tokugawa period had at least some familiarity with written Chinese.
*Ōbaku is the Japanese reading of Huang-po, the name of the mountain on which Yin-yüan’s Chinese temple stood in what is now Fukien province.
† Today, Aboshi forms part of Himeji City in Hyōgō Prefecture, but in Bankei’s day, it belonged to the old province of Harima.
‡ One of the four major islands that make up the Japanese archipelago. The others are Kyushu, Hokkaido, and the main island, Honshu.