$19.95 / F IU m ) i! I SiV can truly be called the quin- tessential philosophy of the Orient. Not just a puzzle to be unraveled by the intellect, Zen offers a challenge to both mind and spirit, calling on all our intuitive, social, and self-disciplinary powers. The distillation of this Oriental philosophy is contained in the Zen sayings—pithy phrases and poems handed down from a distinguished line of Chinese and Japanese masters. Over the centuries, their sayings and writings have been compiled into voluminous handbooks. The most complete of these are the various editions of Zemin Kushu, or the "Zen Forest Saying Anthology." Serious Zen students are still required to memorize hundreds of these sayings. In monasteries all over Japan, would-be priests can be found thoughtfully thumbing through their well-worn anthologies by the dim candle- light, looking for the perfect phrase to "cap" their Zen experience and activity. As their mas- ters assign them increasingly difficult koans for contemplation and eventual solution, they re- spond with sayings culled from the anthologies, or they create their own phrases to add to the dynamic body of Zen literature. In the present book, for the first time, over 1,200 of these short sayings—from the comical, to the profound, to the downright mystifying— appear in vivid, poetic, English translation. From the thousands of sayings in existence, the author has compiled a representative selection, adding his own illuminating introduction on how to read the sayings. Each poem uniquely illustrates some (continued on back flap) (continued from front flap) aspect of Zen, from the nature of satori to the meaning of enlightened activity in the real world. These keys to Zen understanding are nov^ available to English speakers. Readers are encour- aged to read the sayings, to ponder them, and eventually to apply to their own lives the wisdom found there. Included is a selection of the author's favorite sayings rendered in striking calligraphy by his father, abbot of the well-known Shogen-ji Zen temple in Shizuoka. For students with an interest in further study, the book also contains an appen- dix with the original Chinese characters and their Japanese romanizations. A glossary of people and places and a bibliographical source note complete this collection. SOIKU SHIGEMATSU combines his duties as an active Zen priest at Shogen-ji temple with a full-time position as professor of English at Shizuoka University. He has long been interested in applying the Zen viewpoint to the study of American literature, from Emerson to Gary Snyder. In this volume he turns his efforts in the opposite direction, presenting a classic of Zen literature for the English-speaking audience. Jacket design by Yoshihiro Murata Printed in Japan ZEN FOREST Sayings of the Masters compiled and translated, with an introduction, by Soiku Shigematsu foreword by Gary Snyder © New York • WEATH ERHILL • Tokyo The Chinese character appearing on the title page, in the calligraphy of Ssiku Shigematsu, reads tin or hayashi and means "forest/* First edition, 1981 Published by John Weatherhill, Inc., of New York and Tokyo, with editorial offices at 7-6-13 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106, Japan. Copyright © 1981 by SGiku Shigematsu; all rights reserved. Foreword: all rights reserved by Gary Snyder. Printed in Japan. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data: A Zen forest, sayings of the masters. / Translations of over 1,200 Zen phrases and koans. / 1. Zen Buddhism Quotations, maxims, etc. 2. Koan. / 3. Zen poetry. I. Shigematsu, SOiku, 1943- / BQ9267.Z46 294.3'927 81-31 / ISBN 0-8348-0159-0 Contents Foreword, by Gary Snyder • vii Acknowledgments • xiii Introduction • 3 THE SAYINGS • 33 Appendix: Characters and Romanization • 123 Glossary • 171 Bibliographical Note • 177 ILLUSTRATIONS The Ten Oxherding Pictures, by Gyokusen, appear on pages 6-7,10-11,14-15,18-19, and 22-23. Sayings in calligraphy by KijU Shigematsu appear facing pages 50, 51, 66, 67, 82, 83, 98, and 99. A map of China appears on page 169. v Foreword The Mohave Indians of the lower Colorado River put all the energy they gave to aesthetic and religious affairs into the recitation of long poetic narratives. Some of the epics are remarkably precise in describing the details of the vast basin and range deserts of die southwest, but the racon- teurs held that they were all learned in dreams. By another sort of inversion, the world of Ch'an/Zen Buddhism with its "no dependence on words and letters"—and unadorned halls, plain altars, dark robes—created a large and very specialized jiterary culture. It registers the difficulty of the play_be- tween verbaljind non-verbal in the methods of the training halls. The highly literate Zen people were also well acquainted with secular literature, and they borrowed useful turns of phrase from any source at all, to be part of the tool kit, to be employed when necessary, and often in a somewhat different way. A final step was the sifting of Ch'an texts, Chinese poems, Buddhist__sitfras, Taoist and Confucian classics, and proverbial lore one more time. This was done in Japan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the result was the Zenrin Kushu, "Phrases from the Zen Forest." The greater part of the phrases gathered is from Chinese poetry, so that R.H. Blyth could say that the Zenrin Kushil is "the,Zen view of the world on its way through poetry to haiku." Ciive this book a glance. It's not quite like any collection of quotations or sclcctions from "great literature" that has been seen before. Eicho Zenji, who did the basic editing, and his successors obviously knew what they were looking for. Soiku Shigematsu's introduction tells about that. But the Zenrin Kushil selections could not have the terse power and vividness they do, were it not for the richness of the parent material. First, the terseness. It's all from Chinese. (Readings given in the appendix of this hook, to accompany the Chinese characters, are in a form of literary Sino- Japanese and do not represent the pronunciation of the Chinese or the word- vii order. They are read in this way by Japanese Zen students.) The Chinese language is mostly monosyllabic, with word-order grammar, and can be very economical. There is a long-established culture-wide delight in say- ings and quotes, and there is a special lore of ambiguity and obscurity that plays on the many homonyms in the language. Early books such as the I Ching and the Taoist essays abound in "dark sayings." The Zen phrase anthologies do not draw on deliberately obscure sayings, tongue-twisters, traditional riddles, and the like. With the exception of quotes taken from the texts of their own school, they present us with selections from the public body of sayings and quotes. Poems are never quoted whole, so that in this case the obscurity (especially for the Western reader) is from the absence of context. When the Zen phrase is actually an old proverb, such as To sell dog meat, displaying a sheep's head. (305) several levels of meaning are instantly clear. In Chinese this would literally be: "Hang sheep head sell dog meat." Another proverb that comes into the phrase book is One who flees fifty steps Sneers at the other who's done a hundred. (330) English is a relatively parsimonious language, but the Chinese for this is literally "Fifty steps sneer him ahead one hundred." The context is running away from- battle. The most numerous type of Zen phrase is couplets borrowed from poems of five characters to a line. This section is called the "paired fives," and there are 578 such couplets in the Baiyo Shoin edition of the Zenrin Kushii. (Mr. Shigematsu has done away with the traditional arrangement of Zen phrases by number of characters. His original and personal sequencing makes the book perhaps easier to read straight through.) Seven-character lines, both single and paired, make up the next largest body of quotes, also from poetry. Chinese poetry takes the crisp virtue of the language and intensifies it a turn again. It is also the one area of the literature where personal sentiment— vulnerability, love, loneliness—is to be found in an otherwise dry and proper terrain. The very first teaching of Buddhism that Chinese intel- lectuals took to heart, in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., was that of Impermanence. It fit well with the political experience of the times, the troubled Six Dynasties. The lyric poetry of the era is also full of woe and gloom. So almost from the beginning shih poetry has had a line to Bud- dhism. The Chinese (and almost everyone else) consider the I'ang poetry vill of the eighth century to be the crown of their literature. The poems of this period, infinitely superior to the weepy Six Dynasties lyrics, are the ones most often raided for Zen quotes. T'ao Ch'ien is a notable exception. We are speaking especially of the poets Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Han Shan, and Liu Tsung-ylian. Although some were Buddhists, this does not matter to a Zen phrase. The power of image and metaphor, the magic of poetry, not ideology, is what counts. Contemporary with these poets were the great creative Ch'an masters Shen-hui, Nan-ylieh, Ma-tsu, Pai-chang, and Shih- tou. For whatever reason, the Golden Age of Chinese poetry is also the Golden Age of Ch'an. Twelfth-century Ch'an masters who gathered and edited koan books out of the anecdotes and lives of T'ang masters were also reading and quoting the T'ang poets.