Summer 2024 Newsletter: Letter from the Abbot
Hakuin Ekaku Zenji
In this Summer Sesshin, I gave teisho on Zen Master Hakuin who is the 19th Japanese Patriarch in Chozen-ji’s lineage.
Hakuin (1685-1768) is known as the Patriarch who Revived Zen in a degenerate age when Zen was in danger of becoming a cultural pastime and losing its spiritual vitality. Zen took root in the Warring Period of Japanese history when warlords vied for supremacy, and samurai trained in Zen to overcome the fear of death in battle. With the peace and stability of the Tokugawa Era, the influence of Zen in the cultural arts flourished but the inner life of Zen based on shugyo (the deepest training) and the experience of enlightenment was dying out. Without restraint, Hakuin denounced this trend and the practice of silent, dust-wiping meditation that accompanied it, calling such practitioners “dead silkworms in a cocoon.” He was a religious genius who left 90 Dharma successors, and all schools of Japanese Rinzai Zen trace their lineage back to him.
Terrified of falling into the Buddhist hells as a child, he left home against his parent’s wishes and became a monk at Shoin-ji at fifteen. After several years of hard training and doubting, he was at Eigan-ji meditating day and night on the koan Mu. He entered a deep samadhi which he described as like being in a vast field of ice. The sound of the temple bell shattered this samadhi, and he had an enlightenment he believed was unsurpassed in hundreds of years, despite not receiving the acknowledgement of the Abbot.
Eventually he found his way to Master Shoju and presented his understanding of Mu, “Pervading the Universe, nowhere to take hold of it.” Shoju grabbed his nose and twisted it painfully, laughing, “I am quite at ease to take hold of it,” and called him a “dead monk in a cave.” Shoju smashed Hakuin’s confidence to pieces, sometimes literally raining blows on him. After eight months of enduring such treatment, one day while begging before an old woman Hakuin fell into a deep samadhi. Exasperated by his persistence, the old woman hit him over the head with a broom, and he had a great enlightenment that Shoju approved.
Hakuin left Shoju to care for a former teacher who had fallen ill and redoubled his efforts at training only to suffer a psychophysical breakdown. He felt his lungs burning, his legs freezing, his ears filled with a rushing sound, and his spirit exhausted and filled with fear. Finally, his search for a cure led him to Hakuyu, a Taoist sage living in a remote, ethereal mountain setting. Hakuyu diagnosed his illness as the result of the heart-fire rising to his head and taught him naikan (nai-inner, kan-a seeing that involves both feeling and intuition). Hakuin was instructed to visualize the vital energy flowing through him and dissolving all the blockages in his body and releasing the energy to flow into the tanden (the area below the navel).
Practicing naikan, Hakuin recovered and spent several years training in isolation before returning to Shoin-ji, his first temple, with one disciple. He trained and taught there with great vigor eventually having hundreds of students till his death at the age of 83. Hakuin attributed his vigor to naikan, and said naikan and zazen were the two wheels of his teaching. The koan, the Sound of One Hand Clapping, was his spiritual sword.
While we cannot compare the intensity and depth of our training to Master Hakuin, at Chozen-ji we aspire to follow his teaching that zazen is not silent sitting but should be uninterrupted meditation in the midst of activity, that seeing the True Self should be a passionate, dynamic inquiry, and that one’s personal training should contribute to society. We, too, focus on cultivating the vital energy through breath and Hara Exercises and strive to make both the martial and fine arts into koans which make Zen accessible to modern, Western students. The grueling treatment students endure at sesshin aims to make them transcend self-imposed limitations while respecting their real limitations.
On the third day of sesshin, in a light rain I walked the path in front of the Budo Dojo and saw Kangen Roshi instructing a young, beginning student in the Hojo Walk while two pairs of students were practicing the Hojo Kata. I walked past the Kyudo Dojo where Katy Luo was playing a Haydn sonata and Chad Kamei was shooting arrows with two students. I ended up in our little Boxing Dojo and practiced Neigong facing the bamboo overlooking the stream. The elegant music of Haydn, punctuated by the surprisingly frequent hits of the arrows into the target with the kiai of the Hojo in the far background; and the gentle rhythm of the wind, the stream, and the rain made me feel like I heard an echo of Hakuin’s One Hand Clapping.