Simple Zen. C.Alexander Simpkins
or sign-oriented, aspects of our everyday world. All external sign-oriented phenomena are invitations to experience a deeper, truer understanding at the absolute level of wisdom. The path of enlightenment is here and now, through symbols and words, as well as through experience.
Chinul’s teachings were specific and detailed, offering techniques so that the needs of students with varied intellectual and spiritual capacity could be met. For example, he thought not-thinking meditation was helpful for those who had attained spiritual awakening, but he also believed the intellect was needed to help disentangle students from negative habits. This was part of the sudden awakening/gradual cultivation process he believed was essential for sustaining enlightenment. As he explained to his students: “Hence sudden awakening and gradual cultivation are like the two wheels of a cart: neither one can be missing” (Seung Sahn 1987, 99).
Chinul’s approach to Zen technique emphasized and developed Ta-hui’s analytic adaptation of koans, or hua-t’ou, calling this tool of meditation hwadu. Hwadu are shorter than koans because the koan story is removed, thus leaving only the topic. Students were instructed to focus attention on the hwadu as a kind of yogic concentration to block out distraction and interpretation and thus achieve a deep focus on the essence of the koan. The discursive intellect was bypassed. Chinul felt that this method was a direct path to enlightenment.
Chinul’s school of Son was called the Chogye, which is the Korean term for the sect of Hui-neng. Chinul offered a unified group to which the separate, often contending, schools could belong, with a harmonizing rationale. He invited monks from the different schools to meet in the forests for group meditation.
Although unity did not come to Korean Buddhism for quite some time, it remained an important goal for later monks. T’aego Pou (1301-1382), along with the influence of King Kongmin’s royal decree (1345), encouraged the Zen monks to unite as one order, as Chinul had done before him. Unity gradually came to be a political reality, but hundreds of years, as well as the decrees of more than one monarch, were needed to bring it to fruition.
LATER DEVELOPMENTS
In Korea, the tides turned against Buddhism, forcing those who continued the traditions to retreat to the remote mountain temples. Although the life cycle of Zen as an independent sect of Buddhism was ebbing in China and Korea, it would find new life in Japan, where it was just beginning to take root.
CHAPTER 3
Middle Period in Japan
In the world of the truly pure, there is no separation. Why wait again for another time? The tradition of Vulture Peak has arrived.
The authority of the Dharma needs no one.
—Muso, national teacher of Japan, in Dumoulin 1990, 163
EARLY BUDDHISM IN JAPAN
Japan was prepared for Zen by the earlier introduction of Buddhism in 552. During the reign of Emperor Kinmei, Korea first introduced Buddhism to Japan with its gift of a golden statue of Buddha. Several forms of Buddhism were brought to Japan by a succession of emperors. Prince Shotoku Taishi (572-621) incorporated Buddhism into the Japanese constitution. Prince Shotoku was fond of the Vimalakirti Sutra, which portrayed a householder who became a bodhisatva. This sutra explained that even a layperson could find enlightenment, setting the stage for Zen. Everyday life can be an opportunity to live morally and stay focused meditatively. Prince Shotoku became the most renowned interpreter of the Vimalakirti Sutra in Japan.
Fukurokuju by Hakuin
Buddhism soon grew to be a well-established institution that was supported by the government of Japan. Buddhist monks were given political influence and played an active role in court policies. Shingon and Tendai Buddhism had attracted royal support and patronage for hundreds of years and became the dominent forms of Buddhism.
As time passed, the doctrines and rituals of Buddhism evolved to become more and more complex. Tendai Buddhism emphasized meditation as part of a triad of practices along with performance of rituals and elaborate analysis. At first, Zen was linked to Tendai. Eventually, Zen evolved to become its own distinct discipline, the Rinzai tradition.
MYOAN EISAI BRINGS RINZAI ZEN
Zen was brought to Japan by several monks between the years A.D. 600 and 800, but it did not take hold until a dedicated Buddhist monk named Myoan Eisai (1141-1215) founded a Zen temple that endured.
Eisai had been guided toward a religious life from his early years. His father entrusted Eisai’s education to the monks, and at age fourteen he entered the monkhood, shaved his head, and was ordained on Mount Hiei, near Kyoto. He eagerly learned Tendai, a form of Buddhism brought from China that taught the “ThreefoldTruth: Absolute truth of Emptiness, Relative truth of phenomenas, and the Middle Way between.”
Eisai could see that Buddhism was in need of reform, and in April 1168 he made a pilgrimage to China to deepen his knowledge. He hoped to renew and revitalize Buddhism, which was failing in Japan. He took with him a Shingon monk named Chogen (1121-1200). Together they visited Mount T’ien-t’ai, the source of Tendai Buddhism, where they learned that the meditation that was part of Tendai practice originated in Zen temples in China. Upon his return to Japan, Eisai founded a new line of Tendai called Yojo. The regent Hojo Mikkyo declared Eisai the patriarch of this line.
Twenty years later, Eisai returned to China to retrace Buddhism to its roots in India. However, his plans were thwarted when he was refused a visa to enter India, so he did the next best thing and studied Zen in China. Zen claimed to have the true dharma, transmitted directly, over the centuries, from Buddha himself. Eisai believed that this flourishing Chinese sect could revitalize Japanese Buddhism. He returned to Mount T’ien-t’ai where he found a master of the Rinzai sect, Hsuan Huai-ch’ang (Koan Esho, in Japanese), the eighth generation of the Huang-lung (Oryo, in Japanese) line of Lin-chi (Rinzai). He followed this master when he left the temple to reside at Mount T’ien-t’ung. Through Zen meditation, Eisai found the deeper inspiration he had been seeking. He received a certificate, insignia of succession, as dharma heir of the Huang-lung line.
Eisai returned to Japan, ready to spread the message of the dharma through Zen. He landed at Hirato, a port on Kyushu, one of the islands of Japan, and began to propagate Zen. Eisai wrote a persuasive treatise about the value of Zen entitled Kozen Gokokuron (Treatise on the Spread of Zen for the Protection of the Nation) (1198). He believed that the large city of Kyoto would be the best place to establish Zen. But Eisai ran into resistance from the Tendai and Shingon establishment. Roben, a Tendai monk from Hakasaki, Kyusu, persuaded the emperor’s court to issue an interdict against Eisai’s new Zen sect. Eisai left the city and in 1195 founded Shofoku-ji, a monastery in Hikata that was under the protection of the Shogun Minamoto Yoritomo. Later, in 1202, he established a temple in Kyoto, the Kennin-ji Monastery, which became an important center for Zen.
Eisai’s temples endured. He is given credit for bringing Zen to Japan, and also for introducing tea—he carried tea seeds back with him from China and planted the first tea garden on monastery grounds. This would eventually lead to the development of tea drinking as a Zen art.
Although Eisai’s Zen was always mixed with Tendai, he had planted the seeds. His students carried on the Rinzai Zen traditions that Eisai had started, firmly rooting Zen in Japan.
DOGEN ESTABLISHES SOTO ZEN
One of Eisai’s students, Myozen, studied Tendai Buddhism before he joined Eisai’s temple. He trained with Eisai, and became his number one disciple. After Eisai died, Myozen determined that he would follow his master’s footsteps and go on a pilgrimage to China to the temple where Eisai found enlightenment.
Dogen (1200-1253) was a young student of Myozen at Kennin-ji Monastery at this time. He encouraged Myozen to make the trip and asked to accompany him. Soon after landing in China, Dogen met a cook who opened his eyes to Zen. The cook was an elderly tenzo monk, which means he was the monk in charge of cooking. The cook had come to the ship to buy Japanese mushrooms for the monastery. Dogen, who was interested in talking to this Chinese