...a book of profound importance.” — THE EASTERN BUDDHIST BOO*'1 ZENr and e warn TREVOR U LEGGETT Expression of Zen inspiration in everyday activities such as writing or serving tea. and in knightly arts such as fencing, came to be highly regarded in Japanese tradition. In the end. some of them were practiced as spiritual training in themselves; they were then called “Ways.” This book includes translations of some rare texts on Zen and the Ways. One is a sixteenth- century Zen text compiled from Kamakura temple records of the previous three centuries, giving accounts of the very first Zen interviews in Japan. It gives the actual koan “test questions” which disciples had to answer. In the koan called “Sermon,” for instance, among the tests are: How would you give a sermon to a one-month-old child? To someone screaming with pain in hell? To a foreign pirate who cannot speak your language? To Maitreya in the Tushita heaven? Extracts are translated from the “secret scrolls” of fencing, archery, judo, and so on. These scrolls were given in feudal days to pupils when they graduated from the academy, and some of them contain profound psychological and spiritual hints, but in deliberately cryptic form. They cannot be understood without long experience as a student of a Way, and the author drav years’ experience as a student teacher of the Way called jud( The text is accompanied b; drawings and plates. Zen and the Ways * # # # # # # # # #/) /fora 1778 <8> PHILLIPS ACADEMY # » «• OLIVER WENDELL-HOLMES $ I LIBRARY I CgJ rg) ^jper- amphora ; a£ altiora . % v^y agi ■ j^i ogp o§o ^ »> -a> ^ t-y/ Gift Of MORRIS TYLER Trevor Leggett \u Zen and the Ways Vv Charles E. Tuttle Company Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo, Japan 31^3 - First published in 1978 by Routledge & Regan Paul Ltd., London and by Shambala Publications, lnc„ Boulder, Colorado Published by the Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc. of Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo, Japan with editorial offices at Suido 1-chome, 2-6, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo Copyright © 1987 by Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc. All rights reserved ' * .L. 't * \ Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 87-50165 International Standard Book No. 0-8048-1524-0 First printing, 1987 Fourth printing, 1990 Printed in Japan To the late Dr Hari Prasad Shastri, one-time lecturer in Indian Philosophy to the University of Waseda and friend of Marquis Okuma its founder, these translations and transcriptions from the Japanese are reverently dedicated. 911137 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/zenwaysOOOOIegg Contents Preface xi Acknowledgments xiii Part One: Zen 1 Introduction 5 Koan Zen 7 Mushin 22 The wave 26 Dragon-head snake-tail 28 Part Two: Kamakura Zen 53 Introduction 35 Political background 38 Daikaku 40 On meditation (‘Zazenron’) 43 Sayings of Daikaku 58 Bukko 62 Outline of Bukko’s teachings 66 Part Three: Kamakura Koans 71 Introduction 75 The Heart Sutra 75 ShOnankattOroku koans 7 7 vii No. 4 Daikaku’s sutra of one word 77 No. 5 Bukko’s sutra of no word 78 No. 6 Daikaku’s one-robe Zen 78 Bukko’s loin-cloth Zen 80 No. 7 The bucket without a bottom 80 No. 9 Jizo coming out of the hall 82 No. 15 The dragon crest 85 Tokimune 84 No. 18 Tokimune’s thing below the navel 87 No. 19 The gate to the world of all Buddhas 88 No. 20 Tokeiji mirror Zen 90 No. 25 The Nembutsu Robe 95 No. 31 The very first Jizo 96 No. 41 The flower hall on Buddha’s birthday 98 No. 42 Sermon 99 No. 44 Wielding the spear with hands empty 101 No. 52 The night interview of the Nun Myotei 102 No. 64 The picture of beauty 104 No. 68 The Great Katzu! of Master Toden 105 No. 69 The paper sword 106 No. 70 Heaven and earth broken up 106 No. 74 Painting the nature 107 No. 80 The copy 108 No. 87 The sermon of Nun Shido 108 No. 88 The knight patriarch coming from the west 110 No. 92 Meditation of the energy-sea 110 No. 100 Freeing the ghost 112 Part Four: The JVays 115 Introduction 117 Zen and the Ways 119 Ri and ji 122 Shin and ki 127 Isshin and zanshin 136 Not setting the mind 138 Thrust without thrusting 140 Falling 147 Faith 148 Dragon masks 152 viii Contents Part Five: Texts of the Ways 155 Introduction 157 Heihokadensho (about AD 1630) 158 Songs of the Way of the Spear 165 Itto School (late sixteenth century) 169 Shin-no-Shin-To-Ryu (Jujutsu school, late eighteenth century) 174 Tengugeijutsuron 182 Part Six: Stories of the Ways 203 Reading a Zen story 205 Tesshu 207 Disadvantages 210 Endurance 216 Inner archery 218 Teaching methods 220 Janken 222 The rat 227 Music 229 The bell 232 The fortune-teller 233 The pencil stub 235 Historical Appendices 237 1 Imai Fukuzan’s introduction to ShCnankattbroku 239 2 Imai Fukuzan’s introduction to warrior Zen 245 3 Index of names and technical terms 254 Contents ix Preface Zen is practice and realization of the Buddha heart. Its tradition came from India associated with extreme detachment, fearlessness and meditation. Its practice is inquiry into the nature of self. Its realization is the transcendental aloneness of the Buddha’s ‘In heaven and earth I alone am the World-honoured one.’ In expression it has shown freedom from fear of death, a certain carelessness as to what may happen, and inspiration in all the concerns of life, great and small. Zen came from India to China in the sixth century, and from China to Japan in the thirteenth. In China the Zen master was still living in remote temples on mountains; in Japan Zen was adopted by the warrior government ruling from Kamakura, and many of the temples (though still called ‘mountains’) were near cities. The tradition developed that Zen could be practised in and through things like fencing, painting, flower arrangement, writing with a brush, serving tea and so on, and when so practised they were termed Ways. This book has six parts: Zen; Kamakura Zen; The Kamakura Koans; The Ways; Texts of the Ways; Stories of the Ways; and there are three appendices. Part One presents Zen mainly in the words of twentieth-century masters, especially the koan or riddle system which developed in China. In this section and in the others I have used mainly material which has not been translated before. Part Two, Kamakura Zen, describes the warrior Zen of the first three hundred years in Japan. The main text is the classic ‘On Meditation’ by the master Daikaku, one of the founders of Zen in Japan. The Kamakura koans are almost unknown even in Japan, and the text which is here translated in part is of extreme rarity and interest. A full account of it is given in the appendices. xi In Part Four the Ways are presented from traditional sources, mostly the so-called ‘secret scrolls’ preserved in the schools of the Ways. In this section some explanations are given, based on the oral instruction which accompanied the scrolls. Part Five gives extracts from the less cryptic parts of scrolls themselves. Part Six gives some of the stories of the Ways in practice. A number of these I have never seen written anywhere. I heard them when these things were being discussed and, believing them worth preserving, I transcribe them here. Some have a number of variations. The appendices, by F. lmai, a famous scholar of the 1920s, concern the text on the Kamakura koans called Shonankattoroku, and there is also an index of the Chinese characters of the names. The Zen method of instruction is not systematic exposition. Zen teachers believe that realization does not develop from ordinary thinking; in fact it is by its very nature to some extent opposed to it. So the method is by giving riddling stories and analogies, in the expectation that one or more of them will strike a spark. It is similar to instruction in an art, and quite different from instruction in a science. To a particular frame of mind this is merely irritating, in which case Zen will have nothing to give. The method involves a high failure rate among pupils, but it produces remarkable successes also. In this book names, both Japanese and Chinese, are given as the Japanese pronounce them. No diacritical marks are used; the important words and names in Zen will no doubt become anglicized, as judo and kendo have been. The family name comes first, and then the personal name. For the benefit of historians, I have included at the end an index of the characters with which the less well-known names referred to in Imai’s comments are written. Some of the readings are unusual and not to be found in present-day dictionaries; I have however followed lmai on the assumption that these were Kamakura readings verified by him. xii Preface Acknowledgments Some of the translations here have already appeared in The Young East published by Tohokai, Tokyo, and Self-Knowledge published by Shanti Sadan, London, to whom I am grateful for permission to reproduce them. For permission to use the picture of the Nelson Column ,my thanks go to the artist Matsumoto Hozan and to the Japanese Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation, to which it was first presented, and for the two pictures of the mirror, to Morikawa Atsuko who presented these expressions of mirror Zen to this book. Thanks for the photographs from his dojo to Omori Sogen Roshi, present head of Tesshu Society, Tokyo.