Living a life of such physical deprivation, sleepiness is like a chronic illness, and the stomach is hungry year-round. Even the person of considerable desires undergoes a simplification: his craving is limited almost entirely to the desire for food and for sleep.
Elderly ladies, especially, would bow with respect when they saw us out with bare feet in straw sandals, making our begging rounds over icy winter streets. To be frank, though, after the first year or so, most monks become accustomed to monastery life, and the physical rigors cease to be of much consequence. Indeed, the most distressing aspect of training is not the physical suffering but the spiritual agony that invariably accompanies the private dialogues with the teacher. This distress decidedly does not disappear after a year.
The heart of the encounter with the teacher is the student’s presentation of a koan. For illustration, I will use one of the most famous koans, “Show your original face before the birth of your mother and father.” This koan asks, in other words, “What was your true form before your parents gave you birth?”
Some of you will submit that the question is a ridiculous one, but the monk who is given this koan knows that he must, without fail, take a solution in to his teacher the following morning. He is compelled to work on it as if for dear life. Going at it in desperation, the first thing he realizes is that, while the physical body is passed on from parent to child, life itself continues infinitely. No child is born after the parent’s death. Fascinated by the death of the physical body, we make our divisions—the life of the parent, the life of the child, my life, your life—but in reality, even if we endlessly retrace the past, the life that we are living now is infinite continuity, and we cannot pin down any beginnings for it. We can understand this much through simple reasoning alone.
Furthermore, the great functioning of this life is the functioning of the mind. To think of it in purely logical terms, the question arises: Transcending this thing one calls “myself,” what is the substance of the life that continues eternally? Going beyond the self that we distinguish on the basis of small differences—differences in facial features, in personality, in abilities—what is the original and constant true self? Everyone at least eventually realizes that this is the question of the koan.
Even though the practitioner knows this much, he still has quite a hard way to go before he can say to the roshi, “This is my real form.” Almost inevitably, he starts out proffering all manner of empty theories. The teacher, in the beginning, just listens in silence and rings his bell, indicating that the meeting is over and the next person in line must make his entrance.
In due course, however, the teacher will shout, “I’m not asking for explanations! Get rid of your theories and show me your original face!” The monk winds up at his wits’ end.
The monks are not assembled in one hall and then commanded to answer the Zen question one after the other: “All right, you’re next.” Rather, when it is time for the private meetings, the monk on duty brings a small bell out to a location halfway between the zendo and the roshi’s interviewing room and leaves it there. The roshi, holding a thick wand called a shippei, waits ready in his interview room. When the bell is rung, the monks, who are doing zazen, come out of the zendo, line up before the bell, and await their turn. At the roshi’s beckoning, the monks, one by one, ring the bell to announce they will enter the room.
Once inside the roshi’s room, master and student, completely alone, carry on the Zen dialogue. No one else is within earshot. When the roshi decides the meeting in the private room is finished, he rings his handbell and the monk bows and departs, brushing past the person next in line to meet the teacher.
This private meeting with the teacher takes place two times each day, morning and evening, on regular days, and three times a day during the week of intensive zazen. Additionally, an especially intensive training period, called Rohatsu O-sesshin, is held once a year, from December first through the cock’s crow on the morning of December eighth. This week of practice commemorates the great enlightenment that Shakyamuni Buddha experienced upon seeing the morning star on December eighth. During this week, no one may lie down to sleep, and there are four private meetings with the teacher each day.
No amount of theorizing will help the monk to pass his koan. And when all his reasoning is exhausted, and the bell is rung to call the monks to meet the roshi, he finds that he cannot leave his zazen mat. On regular days, the monk may be permitted to forego the meeting and wholeheartedly continue zazen. During the week of intensive practice, however, two or three senior monks with faces like the devil will come to jerk the unwilling monk off his cushion and force him to go to the teacher. The monk cannot avoid the meeting just because he has no answer to his koan.
If one looks at the pillars between the zendo and the interview room, one finds numerous scratches. These are the marks of desperation left by those monks who, lacking an answer to their koan, tried to cling to the posts when they were being dragged by their seniors to the private interview. Many times the monk who tenaciously refused to be torn from the post had his hands slapped with the keisaku. Feeling the sting of pain, he would involuntarily let go and be pulled away to meet the roshi.
The monk who finds himself before the roshi, silent, without an answer, can expect the roshi to bellow, “What are you doing here if you’ve got nothing to say!”—and to strike him with his thick stick. Clobbered from all sides, the monk knows that even if he makes it through this one, there will be another mandatory meeting to face some hours later, in the evening, or first thing in the morning. No matter how lazy or how cunning a monk may be, he is driven into a corner so that he cannot contrive to wiggle his way through with halfhearted or makeshift means. I should mention that this style of training is found particularly in monasteries of the Rinzai sect as opposed to Soto Zen monasteries.
As a result of this experience, I often dreamed of having satori when I was in the training hall. Upon awakening I would find, for the most part, that the dreamt realization was trifling and to no advantage. There were times, however, when the experience I had in a dream held up even when I awoke. Two or three times when this happened I went in high spirits to meet my teacher, and I “passed” my koan.
Every night, when I finally got the opportunity to roll myself up oak-leaf-style in the futon, rather than falling asleep, I would fall into a sort of unconsciousness, and within an instant I would be roused to start another day. Yet each time I fell into this swoon of a sleep, the very last thing to stay awake was the koan. The body sleeps, but the confrontation with the teacher first thing the next morning looms large, the sense of inquiry persisting to the end, and “Original Face…. Original Face….” takes over even in dreams.
Then, every morning the monk comes running through the zendo, clanging a bell and announcing, “Get up! Get up!” When one awakens to that sound, even before one is fully conscious, the sense of inquiry, “Original Face,” is in action. Awareness of a problem awakens first, and consciousness comes around at length. Incredible though it may seem, this was my experience training in Daitokuji.
no end to practice
EVEN FOR THOSE who follow a monastic lifestyle, it is never easy to extricate ourselves from the acquired customs that we have hauled along with us for as long as we can remember. We go along relying on selfchosen value judgments, discriminating on the basis of forms we see with our eyes, distinguishing by the sounds we hear with our ears, differentiating according to the smells we pick up with our noses. We discern tastes with our tongues, form fancies by what we feel on our skin, hold prejudiced notions in our consciousness. We compare and contrast everything we encounter. It was not a simple thing for me to emerge from this habitual kind of functioning of the mind and to purely and directly experience self and other as one.
In order to instantly apprehend situations, a phenomenon for which the philosophical term is “pure experience,” I had to pass through the fear of death. I must confess that until I first experienced this in th
e monastery, life was nothing but continuous physical and spiritual anguish.
Let me relate something very idiotic that occurred on begging rounds one day during the period when, asleep or awake, my koan was never out of my head and my only thought was “I want enlightenment… I want enlightenment….” Unaware of what was ahead of me or behind me, I banged into something; I had run right into a cow’s behind! At just the instant that I realized I had hit the cow’s rump, aside from mighty astonishment, the first thing that crossed my mind was, “Oh! This is enlightenment!”
The most stubborn of spectators is always right within oneself, always assessing and judging one’s own condition. Even when one has reached the extreme of utter exhaustion, the guardian that discriminates and cannot forget this thing called “self” gets busy whispering all sorts of petty information. In my own case, governed by the tiny knowledge and experience that I had accumulated, the guardian voice would whisper this most unwarranted warning: “If you go on like this, you might die. You’d better stop here.”
Doing zazen and still more zazen, I chalked up nothing but distress and fatigue; both my head and my body began to lose their normal functioning. The thought that I would surely meet my death if I continued in this vein arose many times to interrupt my practice. But to give the conclusion before the explanation, I can tell you that matters most definitely did not take the turn that I feared. The extremes of fatigue and anguish did not give way to death, but evolved, quite contrary to expectations, into a curve that led right back to where I had started out. One night I sat, in the middle of the night, a lump of fatigue sitting on a zazen cushion, both body and consciousness were in a haze, and I could not have roused the desire for satori if I had wanted to when, suddenly, the fog cleared and a world of lucidity opened itself. Clearly seeing, clearly hearing, it was yet a world in which there was no “me”!
I cannot fully explain that time. To venture an explanation would be to err somewhere. The one thing I am sure of is that in this instant, the functioning of the heart with which I was born came into play in its purest form. I could not keep still in my uncontainable joy. Without waiting for the morning wake-up bell, I made an unprecedented call on the roshi and received permission to leave the temple for about two hours to deliver the news of my experience to Zuigan Roshi.
It did not take me an hour to walk through the black darkness to Daishuin. When I arrived, Roshi was still in bed. I crawled right up to his pillow and said very simply, “I finally saw.”
Roshi sprang from his bed, examined me for a time, as if with a glare, and said, “It’s from now on. From now on. Sit strongly.”
This is all he said to me. From then on for the next sixteen years, until my fortieth year and Zuigan Roshi’s death at age eighty-seven, whether in the monastery or back in the temple, I continued koan practice. No, really I must say that I continue still. It is not just a matter of the sayings of old masters, but the living koan of human life that continues without limit.
Awakening to your own original face—”enlightenment”—does not mean being able to explain yourself or the source of yourself. Enlightenment is liberation from the dross of learning and experience that, without one’s being aware of it, has accumulated and settled like so much sediment—or like cholesterol into one’s arteries! It is the vivid, lively manifestation of the heart with which one is born—the heart that is no-form, no-mind, nonabiding, attached neither to form nor to thought, but in dynamic motion. Consequently, enlightenment is not an end point, but rather a starting point.
I have gone on at great length about life in a Zen monastery, a subject that may seem totally unrelated to your own lives. Yet all people, regardless of how their lives are structured, hold themselves dear. Everyone wants to be happy. And enlightenment is the starting point of happiness. We can use the words “true self-confidence” in place of “enlightenment.” True self-confidence means confidence in the true self, and confidence in the true self is a necessary requisite to happiness.
The power in which you can come to believe in yourself is not gained through training. It is the great power that transcends the self, that gives life to the self. The purpose of Zen practice is to awaken to the original power of which you have lost sight, not to gain some sort of new power. When you have sought and sought and finally exhausted all seeking, you become aware of that with which you have been, from the beginning—before ever beginning to search—abundantly blessed. After you have ceaselessly knocked and knocked, you realize, as I have said, that the door was standing wide open even before you ever started pounding away. That is what practice is all about.
Not only in places especially set up for training, but anytime and anywhere, the person who exerts himself or herself with dignity, without worrying about results and without giving in to disappointment, is a true practitioner, a true person of the Way. I believe that just this is the form of true human well-being.
part three:
MASTER
what’s it all about?
HAVING RECOUNTED to you much of my experience early on in training, let me now share with you some of my more recent experiences, when the roles are reversed and I have become the teacher. In sharing these stories, what is important to me is not that Buddhism flourish or that the Zen sect spread over the globe, but rather that each and every human being live this life completely, in the most real sense, up until the day he or she dies, with satisfaction and with peace of mind. It is with this hope that I teach.
A young relative of mine, still in his twenties, came to see me one day with a question. In his job at a trading company, he frequently has occasion to receive buyers from other countries, and in the course of friendly conversation, the visitors often ask questions about his religion. He says that when he tells them that he himself has no religion, his guests seem to react with skepticism.
“It looks as if foreigners place a lot of importance on religion,” he generalized, “whereas we Japanese are ignorant of it. The truth is that young people like me only encounter religion at funerals and memorial services, and outside those times, I don’t feel I have much use for it. Even feeling as I do, Roshi, is religion still important?”
What he was asking, in essence, was this: Just what is religion all about?
In Japanese, the ideographs for the word religion carry the meanings “main,” (or “original”) and “teaching.” “So,” I told him, “religion is at the origin of what we call life. We might say that there are various teachings and that religion is the main or most fundamental of these teachings.”
When the young man heard this explanation, he said, “That means that religion is the most fundamental way of thinking about human life, doesn’t it? In other words, we can interpret it to mean ‘view of life,’ can’t we?”
I told him that we might say that, but I also asked him to tell me his view of life.
“Well, of course I think that the purpose of human life is to build something through my own efforts,” he answered.
Now, this is one point of view. I myself, at one time, looked at life this way. In my youthful days, I believed that to be a human being is to be able to gain or acquire.
There are people who can run over forty kilometers in a marathon. A person knows that by training the body he or she can gain physical strength; there is an age at which this physical development is possible. By studying, you can learn anything you please. You can accumulate experiences. If you make sufficient effort, you can make friends, acquire lovers. You can get married, buy property, build a house. There is a time in your life when the world seems to be there for the taking, a time in which the view that the purpose of life is “to build something through your own efforts” may be appropriate. You are in the prime of life.
Then later, as you age, you may need glasses for farsightedness, your ears may start to ring, and your teeth may even fall out. When a preschooler loses a tooth, a still more wonderful tooth takes its place, but when a grown-up loses one, it stays lost! Death comes t
o take away the friends you have so deeply cherished. The children, for whom you have sacrificed your own food and clothing, leave the parental nest. Then retirement age rolls around, and the job over which you have taken such pains must be relinquished. You begin to forget what you thought you had learned. You lose the muscles you had laboriously built up, and they never really return. No matter how a person looks at it, one comes to feel acutely that human life is not a matter of gaining, but of losing.
“When that time comes, will your view of life still serve you well?” I asked my young relative.
He looked slightly sheepish as he lowered his head and allowed that he might have been a tad cocky, that perhaps it might be a good thing to at least look into what religion is all about. He even asked for my guidance.
We all conjure up notions for ourselves commensurate with our ages and circumstances in life. Out of those notions come various and sundry lifestyles. Religion, however, is not a view of life that wears well just for a certain period of time. It is a teaching that will always be valid, holding true regardless of our age and circumstances.
Everything that appears in this world constantly changes; it undergoes a period of maturing, a period of maintenance, and a return to emptiness—birth, aging, and death. Through no effort can you skirt the process of growing old. There is no endeavor whatsoever that will get you beyond death. Whatever is accumulated will be lost, whatever is born will die, whatever is built will be destroyed. A view of the essence of life is a view that helps us through our suffering as we must face it.
Novice to Master Page 7