Zen Masters of Japan. Richard Bryan McDaniel

      MYOAN EISAI

      Myoan Eisai was born in 1141. His father was a Shinto priest who had such respect for the new Buddhist religion that when his son was eight years old, he sent him to study at a Tendai temple on Mount Hiei overlooking Kyoto. Eisai took to his lessons well, and, at the age of fourteen, he was ordained in a ceremony during which his head was shaved and he “accepted the precepts”—the list of rules Buddhist monks agreed to abide by. Shaving the head was an act symbolic of renouncing all attachments as well as a public proclamation that the individual had committed himself to pursuing the Dharma.

      After completing his training on Mount Hiei, Eisai undertook his first voyage to China in 1168, three years before Kakua, in order to further his studies. The visit was less than a year long, and, although during the course of it he met a number of Zen monks, he made no effort to question them about their teachings. He returned to Kyoto the following autumn, bringing with him a collection of Tendai texts written in Chinese. He dedicated the next twenty years of his life to the study of those texts, and found his interest piqued by the stories he read in them of various Zen teachers. He remained firmly committed to the Tendai tradition, however, and eventually earned the title of “Patriarch” within it.

      In 1186, he made a second trip to China with the intention of undertaking a pilgrimage to important Buddhist sites in India. He had come to suspect that the Dharma taught in Japan may have been corrupted through mistranslations and contamination from non-Buddhist sources. He hoped that by traveling to the land of the Buddha’s birth, he would find a purer expression of the Buddha’s original teachings. However, once in China he was unable to procure the necessary travel documents to proceed to the sub-continent. Disappointed in his original intention, he decided to investigate the Zen school to see if it were a less adulterated expression of the Dhar ma than what was currently being promulgated in Japan. On Mount Tientai, he sought out Zen Master Kian Esho [Xuan Huai-chang] who belonged to the Rinzai [Ch: Linji] “House” of Zen.

      Zen was not a homogeneous tradition in China. There were Five Houses each of which traced its lineage back to a particular group of teachers. The Rinzai House also produced two offshoots, which resulted in a total of Seven Schools. When Eisai visited China, the two strongest schools were the Rinzai and the Soto [Ch: Caodong].

      While the goal of both of these is to guide practitioners to awakening, their approaches differ both in custom and focus. These differences reflect the personalities of the Tang dynasty teachers from whom they have descended. A basic difference in custom is that while meditators in the Soto tradition sit facing a wall (following the example of Bodhidharma), those in the Rinzai tradition sit facing into the room. A difference in focus can be found in the preferred mode of meditation. The Soto student is usually taught a subjectless meditation, known in Japanese as shikan taza or “just sitting.”

      For the Rinzai, students working with a teacher are generally given a series of koans upon which to meditate. The term koan [Ch: gongan] refers to a “public record,” or “case,” in the sense of the records kept by a court of law that establishes precedent in jurisprudence. Koans are generally based on stories of the teaching methods of the Zen Masters of the Tang Dynasty. In many instances the koan consists of a question posed by a student and the master’s often apparently illogical reply. For example, when Joshu was once asked what the significance of Zen was, he replied, “The cypress tree in the garden.” When Ummon was asked who the Buddha was, he said, “A dried shit-stick.” (Sticks were used for personal hygiene.) The Rinzai student assigned such a koan meditated on it to discover for himself why the teacher’s answer was appropriate.

      The koan most students begin with is called Joshu’s Dog. A student asked the 9^th century Chinese master, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” Joshu replied, “Mu!” Mu literally means “no” or “nothing,” and Joshu appears to contradict the generally accepted Buddhist belief that all things—not only dogs but even trees and stones—have “Buddha-nature.” The meditator, however, is warned not to think of mu as meaning anything, but to absorb him or herself in the koan until he/she achieves the insight (kensho) that will allow them to successfully answer the teacher’s question when he asks, “What is mu ?”

      The teaching techniques were not exclusive, so the Soto School made occasional use of koans, and Rinzai students could be advised to practice shikan taza. The Rinzai tradition had the reputation of being more demanding than the Soto and put a greater emphasis on attaining awakening. Soto practice was considered gentler and stressed the practice of sitting meditation (zazen) over attainment. What the schools shared was the belief that Buddha-hood—awakening—is achieved not through study, acquiring knowledge of the teachings, but through direct spiritual experience.

      What Eisai found in Rinzai Zen was something very different from the Buddhism with which he was familiar. It did not offer philosophical analysis or carry out ritual observances; rather, it focused on a discipline which, he was told, could bring him to have the same experience of awakening that Siddhartha Gautama had had 1600 years earlier. The goal of Zen was not to study Buddhism but to become a Buddha.

      Eisai did koan study with Kian Esho for four years, following him from one monastery to another. In 1191, Eisai received official “transmission,” acknowledgment that he had seen into his own Buddha-nature and was authorized to teach others. In recognition of this authorization, Kian Esho gave Eisai an official document that attested that Eisai was a successor in a tradition which was traced, without break, from the Buddha to the present day. He also presented his disciple with a robe, bowl, and a hossu—a short staff tufted with horse hair which represented the possessor’s right to teach the Dharma, and, specifically in Eisai’s instance, the authority to take and promote the Zen tradition to the people of Japan.

      Although there had been Japanese who had studied Zen before him, Eisai is identified as the individual to establish Zen, in its Rinzai form, on the islands, just as Bodhidharma was acknowledged to have brought the meditation school to China. As with Bodhidharma, Eisai is also credited with introducing tea to a new land. Legend has it that Bodhidharma had been so angered after falling asleep during meditation one day that he cut off his eyelids, which fell to the earth and there, supposedly, grew to become the first tea plants. Eisai’s story is less dramatic; he simply brought tea seeds back from China. Tea had been imported from China in small quantities before, but Eisai was the first to systematically cultivate tea plants in Japan. He even wrote a book in which he promoted tea as a helpful stimulant to meditation and good health. The beverage, at first, was better accepted than the new spiritual tradition he also brought from China.