“He has come down the mountain every night, terrifying the villagers.”
After hearing this tale, Kaian said, “Yes, strange things happen in this world. Among those who have been born as humans but end their days in foolishness and perversity, because they know not the greatness of the teachings of the buddhas and bodhisattvas, there are countless examples, from the past down to the present, of those who, led astray by the karmic obstacles of lust and wrong thoughts, reveal their original forms and give vent to their resentments, or turn into demons or serpents to take retribution. There have also been people who turned into demons while they were still alive.8 A lady-in-waiting to the king of Chu turned into a snake;9 Wang Han’s mother became an ogre; Wu Sheng’s wife became a moth.10 Also, long ago, when a certain traveling monk was staying over in a poor house, the night brought heavy rain and wind, so that the monk, lonely without even a lamp, could not sleep. As the night deepened, he heard the bleating of a sheep, and soon thereafter something sniffed at him intently, to see if he was asleep. Suspicious, the monk picked up his Zen staff, which lay by his pillow, and struck out forcefully, whereupon the thing fell over with a scream. Hearing the noise, the old woman who was the head of the household lit a lamp and brought it in, and by its light they saw a girl lying there. The old woman pleaded tearfully for the girl’s life. What could he do? Leaving things as they were, the monk departed; but later, when he had occasion to pass through the village again, he found many people gathered together in a rice paddy, looking at something. Approaching them, he asked what it was. A villager told him, ‘We captured a girl who has turned into a demon, and now we are burying her.’ But these stories are all of women; I have never heard one of a man. It is, after all, because of their perverse nature that women turn into shameless demons. Now, as for men, there was a minister of Emperor Yang of Sui named Ma Shumou, who fancied the flesh of small children, whom he would kidnap from the people, steam, and devour;11 but this was shameless barbarity, quite different from the case you have described. Nevertheless, your monk’s turning into a demon must be the result of his actions in a former life. The virtue he accumulated through his earlier ascetic practices is due to his utter sincerity in serving the Buddha, and he would surely have become a splendid priest had he not taken in that boy. It was probably his single-minded nature that caused him to turn into a demon when, once having entered the maze of lust, he was burned by the karmic flames of unenlightenment. He who fails to control his mind becomes a demon; he who governs his mind attains to buddhahood. Your priest is a good example of this. If I, an old monk, can instruct the demon and lead him back to his original mind, I shall also be repaying your hospitality tonight.” Thus he set a noble aim. The master of the house pressed his head to the floor mat. “If you can accomplish this, Your Reverence, it will be as though the people of the province had been reborn in the Pure Land,” he said, weeping tears of joy. Lodging in this mountain village, they heard no sound of conch or bell; but they knew that the night was late, because the last-quarter moon had risen, spilling its light through a crack in the old door.12 “Well, then, have a good rest,” the master said, and retired to his bedroom.
Since the mountain temple was almost deserted, brambles clung to the two-story gate and moss grew on the neglected sutra pavilion. Spiders had spun webs that bound the Buddhist statues together; sparrow droppings covered the goma dais; the abbot’s residence, the covered walkways, and the monks’ quarters were all in terrible disrepair.13 As the sun declined toward the southwest, Zen Master Kaian entered the temple grounds and struck his ringing-staff against the ground. “Please provide lodgings for a traveling monk tonight,” he called, again and again, but there was no response. Finally, from the sleeping quarters, a withered monk emerged, came slowly toward him with uncertain steps, and spoke in a dry, hoarse voice: “Where are you going that would lead you here? For certain reasons, this temple has gone to ruin, as you see, and turned into a wilderness. There is no food, nor am I prepared to offer you lodging. Go quickly to the village.” The Zen Master said, “I have come from the province of Mino and am traveling to Michinoku.14 When I passed through the village below, I was drawn by the beauty of this mountain and the streams and came here on an impulse. As the sun is setting, the road to the village would be long and dangerous. Please let me stay for just one night.” The abbot said, “Bad things happen in a wilderness like this. I cannot encourage you to stay, nor will I order you to leave. Do as you please.” He said nothing more. Without another word, Kaian sat near the abbot. Soon the sun went down, and in the darkness of the night he could not make out his surroundings, for no lamps were lit; he could hear only the ripple of a brook nearby. The abbot returned to the sleeping quarters and made no sound thereafter.
The night deepened and the moon rose, its brilliant light reaching every corner. Shortly after midnight, the abbot reemerged from the sleeping quarters and rushed about, looking for something. Unable to find it, he cried, “Where’s that damn monk hiding? He ought to be right here.” He ran past the Zen master several times, but could not see him at all. He appeared to hurry off toward the main hall, but then danced crazily around the courtyard until finally he collapsed, face down, in exhaustion. Dawn came, and the morning sun began to shine. Looking like a man recovering from too much wine, he seemed dumbfounded when he saw the Zen master sitting right where he had been sitting before. Leaning silently against a column, the abbot heaved a great sigh but said nothing. Drawing near him, the Zen master said, “Abbot, why are you grieving? If you are hungry, fill your belly with my flesh.“15 The abbot said, “Were you there all night?” The Zen master said, “I was here and did not sleep.” The abbot said, “Shamefully, I have a fondness for human flesh, but I have never tasted the flesh of a living buddha. You truly are a buddha. It is no surprise that, with the dark eyes of a fiend, I could not see the coming of a living buddha, try as I might.16 This is more than I deserve.” Bowing his head, he fell silent.
The Zen master said, “Villagers tell me that, once your mind had been distracted by lust, you quickly sank to the level of a fiend. This is an almost unprecedented result of bad karma, and neither ‘shameful’ nor ‘sad’ can describe it. Because you go to the village night after night and hurt people, no one in the villages nearby can rest easy. I could not ignore this when I heard of it. I have come here especially to instruct you and lead you back to your original mind. Will you listen?” The abbot said, “Truly, you are a buddha. Teach me, please, how I can quickly put these shameful actions out of my mind.” The Zen master said, “If you will listen to me, then, come with me.” Having the abbot sit on a flat stone in front of the veranda, he removed the dark-blue hood from his own head, placed it on the head of the abbot, and taught him two lines from the Song of Enlightenment:17
The moon glows on the river, wind rustles the pines.
Long night, clear evening—what are they for?
Kaian instructed him kindly: “Seek quietly the meaning of these lines without leaving this spot. When you have worked out the meaning, you will probably, without trying, encounter your original buddha-nature.” Then he went down the mountain. Although the villagers escaped great harm thereafter, they did not know whether the abbot was alive or dead, and so, in their uncertainty and fear, they forbade anyone to go up the mountain.
One year passed quickly. In the winter of the following year, early in the Tenth Month, Priest of Great Virtue Kaian traveled this way again on his return from the north, stopped at the house of the man who had lodged him for a night, and inquired about the abbot. The master of the house welcomed him joyfully: “Thanks to Your Reverence’s great virtue, the demon has not come down the mountain again, and all the people feel as though they had been reborn in the Pure Land. They are, however, terrified of going to the mountain, and so not a single person has climbed it. Therefore, I do not know what has happened to him. But how could he still be alive? While you rest here tonight, may you pray that his spirit achieve buddhahood. All of us wil
l follow you in doing so.” The Zen master said, “If he has passed on as a consequence of his good actions, then he is my teacher, preceding me on the Way. If he is still alive, then he is one of my disciples. In either case, I must see what has become of him.” Going up the mountain again, he could hardly believe that this was the same path he had taken last year, for indeed it appeared that all traffic had ceased. Entering the temple grounds, he found plumed grasses growing thickly, taller than a man; the dew fell on him like a cold autumn shower; and he could not even make out the three paths. The doors of the main hall and the sutra pavilion had toppled to the right and left, and moss grew on rain-dampened cracks in the rotted wood of a walkway that connected the abbot’s residence with the kitchen.
When he sought out the place near the veranda where he had told the abbot to sit, he found a shadowy man with hair and beard so tangled that one could not tell if he were monk or layman. Weeds coiled about him and plumed grasses swayed above him, and he murmured something almost inaudible in a wispy voice, no louder than the hum of a mosquito:
“The moon glows on the river, wind rustles the pines.
Long night, clear evening—what are they for?”
Seeing this, the Zen master immediately took a firm hold on his Zen staff, cried “Samosan, what are they for?” and struck him on the head. Instantly, the figure began to fade, like ice meeting the morning sun, until only the blue hood and some bones remained on the leaves of grass. No doubt his long obsession vanished at this moment. Herein lies a venerable truth.
In this way, the great virtue of the Zen master came to be known under the clouds and beyond the seas, and people celebrated him, saying “The flesh of the First Patriarch has not dried up.” Gathering together, the villagers cleared the temple grounds, repaired the buildings, and chose the Zen master to live at the temple as abbot, whereupon he changed it from its original, esoteric, sect and established a revered Sōtō site. It is said that the venerable temple still flourishes today.
NOTES
1. On this subject, see, for example, Bernard Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
2. Robert Ford Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China, SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 324–328.
3. Hiroshi Chatani, trans., “The Pot at Kibitsu” and “The Blue Hood” (available at: http://www.kcc.zaq.ne.jp/dfeea307/); Kengi Hamada, trans., “Demon,” in Tales of Moonlight and Rain: Japanese Gothic Tales (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1971; New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 123–135; Alf Hansey, trans., “The Blue Hood,” The Young East 2, no. 9 (1927): 314–319; Donald Richie, “The Ghoul-Priest: A Commentary,” in Zen Inklings: Some Stories, Fables, Parables, Sermons, and Prints (New York: Weatherhill, 1982), pp. 7990; Takamasa Sasaki, trans., Ueda Akinari’s Tales of a Rain’d Moon (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1981); Dale Saunders, trans., “Ugetsu Monogatari, or Tales of Moonlight and Rain,” Monumenta Nipponica 21, nos. 1–2 (1966): 196–202; William F. Sibley, trans., “The Blue Cowl,” in Stephen D. Miller, ed., Partings at Dawn: An Anthology of Japanese Gay Literature (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1996), pp. 125–133; Makoto Ueda, trans., “A Blue Hood,” San Francisco Review 1, no. 4 (1960): 42–47; Leon M. Zolbrod, trans. and ed., Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of Moonlight and Rain: A Complete English Version of the Eighteenth-Century Japanese Collection of Tales of the Supernatural (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1974), pp. 185–194.
4. “summer retreat”: Buddhist monks traditionally stay inside their monasteries for three months during the rainy season. In Japan, the period of confinement was from the sixteenth day of the Fourth Month to the fifteenth day of the Seventh Month of the old calendar, in which the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Months were summer.
5. The situation that follows—a village householder conversing with a traveling monk who ultimately saves the day—was apparently inspired by chapter 5 of Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong, Water Margin.
6. The temple is Daichūji.
7. Koshi refers to the former provinces of Echigo, Sado, Etchū, Kaga, Noto, Echizen, and Wakasa (prefectures of Niigata, Toyama, Ishikawa, and Fukui), on the coast of the Sea of Japan.
8. The examples that follow are drawn, with some garbling, from book 5 of Xie Zhaozhe, Wuzazu (Five Miscellanies, 1618).
9. King Zhuang (r. 613–591 B.C.E.) ruled the ancient Chinese state of Chu.
10. Nothing is known of Wang Han or Wu Sheng.
11. Emperor Yang succeeded to the throne of Sui in 605 by murdering his father and reigned until his own assassination in 618. Ma Shumou is said to have progressed from lamb meat, which he began eating to treat a rare illness, to human flesh.
12. In the lunar calendar, the moon reaches its last quarter on the twenty-first day of the month and rises at about midnight.
13. The description suggests a fairly large monastic complex and seems to have been inspired by the first part of chapter 6 of Shi and Luo, Water Margin.
“sutra pavilion”: a repository for sacred texts.
The Buddhist statues would be in the main hall of the temple.
“goma dais”: characteristic of Shingon temples, is used in the goma ritual, in which a priest chants spells and incantations while burning poppy seeds and slips of wood on a dais, to symbolize the flames of wisdom extinguishing bad karma.
14. Michinoku was a province in northeastern Honshū, corresponding to the modern prefectures of Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima.
15. There is a precedent for Kaian’s offer in story 5:7 in the late-Heian setsuwa collection Konjaku monogatari shū (Tales of Times Now Past, ca. 1120), which tells of the Buddha’s giving his own flesh to save a starving couple.
16. “dark eyes of a fiend” (kichiku, literally, “hungry-ghost beast”): in Japanese Buddhism, hungry ghosts (gaki), whose bad karma condemned them always to be famished, and beasts (chikushō) occupied two of the Six Realms (rokudō) into which humans were reborn. Their eyes are “dark” because they cannot discern the truth of the Buddha’s teachings.
17. The Song of Enlightenment (Zhengdaoge), by Yongjia Xuanjue (665–713), a disciple of the founder of the Sōtō school of Zen, expresses essential Zen teachings in 166 lines of poetry. Quoted here are lines 103 and 104.
* * *
“clouds and waters”: that is, he traveled as an itinerant, mendicant monk, constantly on the move and without any particular destination, like clouds and water. Unsui (cloud-water) is a common word for an itinerant monk.
“Dānapati” (J. dan’otsu): the Sanskrit word for a lay believer who supports the monastic community with donations.
“practices”: ascetic, religious practices designed to facilitate enlightenment.
“storm”: the storm of evanescence, a common Buddhist metaphor.
“karmic obstacles”: actions (including mental activity) that obscure one’s understanding of Buddhist teachings and impede progress toward enlightenment.
“original forms”: one’s form, such as an animal, in a previous life.
Pure Land (Jōdo): a Buddhist paradise in the west, presided over by the Buddha Amitabha (J. Amida).
“no sound of conch or bell”: that is, there was no active Buddhist temple nearby, where a conch or bell might be used to mark the hour, among other functions.
“ringing-staff” (shaku[jō]): wooden staff with brass heads, decorated with metal loops that ring when moved. Originally used by itinerant holy men in India to frighten off snakes, it evolved into a ceremonial staff carried by priests.
“living buddha”: one who has achieved enlightenment in this life.
“buddha-nature”: the potential for perfect enlightenment, inherent in every person.
“the Way”: the way to Buddhist enlightenment.
“three paths”: the proverbial paths in a hermit’s garden: to the gate, to the well, and to the toilet. This section echoes a passage
in the “Yomogiu” (The Wormwood Patch) chapter of The Tale of Genji: “The gates were coming unhinged and leaning precariously. … Even the ‘three paths’ had disappeared in the undergrowth” (Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker [New York: Knopf, 1976], p. 296).
“Samosan”: originally a slang expression in Song-era Chinese, used in the Zen sect to mean something like “Well, how about it?”
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