The Zen Experience - Part 50
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Part 50

13.Ibid., pp. 150-51.

14.Dogen's att.i.tude toward women was revolutionary for his time. A sampling is provided in Kim, Dogen Kigen--Mystical Realist, pp. 54-55: "Some people, foolish in the extreme, also think of woman as nothing but the object of sensual pleasures, and see her this way without ever correcting their view. A Buddhist should not do so. If man detests woman as the s.e.xual object, she must detest him for the same reason.

Both man and woman become objects, thus being equally involved in defilement. . . . What charge is there against woman? What virtue is there in man? There are wicked men in the world; there are virtuous women in the world. The desire to hear Dharma and the search for enlightenment do not necessarily rely on the difference in s.e.x."

15.Yokoi, Zen Master Dogen, pp. 35-36.

16.See Collcutt, "Zen Monastic Training in Medieval j.a.pan," p. 59.

17.Translated in de Bary, Sources of j.a.panese Tradition, Vol. 1., p.

247.

18.See Collcutt, "Zen Monastic Inst.i.tution in Medieval j.a.pan," p. 62.

19.See Ibid., pp. 62 ff.

20.See Philip Yampolsky, trans., The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 5.

19.IKKYU: ZEN ECCENTRIC 20.

1.This view is advanced convincingly by Collcutt in "Zen Monastic Inst.i.tution in Medieval j.a.pan," p. 113 ff.

2.Ibid., p. 80.

3.This would seem to be one of the reasons for what became of a host of emigrating Ch'an teachers as sub-sects of the Yogi branch struggled for ascendency over each other.

4.Wu-an's strength of mind is ill.u.s.trated by a story related in Collcutt, "Zen Monastic Inst.i.tution in Medieval j.a.pan," p. 84: "Wu-an is said to have shocked the religious sensibilities of many warriors and monks when, in what has been interpreted as a deliberate attempt to sever the connection between Zen and prayer in j.a.panese minds, he publicly refused to worship before the statue of Jizo in the Buddha Hill of Kencho-ji on the grounds that whereas Jizo was merely a Bodhisattva, he, Wu-an, was a Buddha."

5.Related in Ibid., p. 88.

6.Collcutt ("Zen Monastic Inst.i.tution in Medieval j.a.pan," p. 114) points out that the warrior interest in Zen and its Chinese cultural trappings should also be credited partly to their desire to stand up to the sn.o.bbery of the Kyoto aristocracy. By making themselves emissaries of a prestigious foreign civilization, the warrior cla.s.s achieved a bit of cultural one-upmanship on the Kyoto sn.o.b set.

7.Collcutt ("Zen Monastic Inst.i.tution in Medieval j.a.pan," p. 106) reports that this conversion of temples to Zen was not always spontaneous. There is the story of one local governor who was called to Kamakura and in the course of a public a.s.sembly asked pointedly whether his family had yet built a Zen monastery in their home province. The terrified official declared he had built a monastery for a hundred Zen monks, and then raced home to start construction.

8.A discussion of the contribution of Zen to j.a.panese civilization may be found in Hoover, Zen Culture. An older survey is D. T. Suzuki, Zen and j.a.panese Culture (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1959).

9.Yampolsky, Zen Master Hakuin, p. 8.

10.Philip Yampolsky, "Muromachi Zen and the Gozan System," in John W.

Hall and Toyoda Takeshi, eds., j.a.pan in the Muromachi Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 319.

11.One of the best political histories of this era is Sansom, History of j.a.pan. For the history of Zen, the best work appears to be Martin Collcutt, The Zen Monastic Inst.i.tution in Medieval j.a.pan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, in press), a revised version of the dissertation cited above.

12.English sources on Ikkyu are less common than might at first be supposed. The most exhaustive study and translation of original Ikkyu writings to date is certainly that of James Sanford, "Zen-Man Ikkyu"

(Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1972). There is also a lively and characteristically insightful essay by Donald Keene, "The Portrait of Ikkyu," in Archives of Asian Art, Vol. 20 (1966-67), pp. 54-65. This essay has been collected in Donald Keene, Landscapes and Portraits (Palo Alto: Kodansha International, 1971). Another work of Ikkyu scholarship is Sonja Arntzen, "A Presentation of the Poet Ikkyu with Translations from the Kyounshu 'Mad Cloud Anthology'" (Unpublished thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1966).

13.See Thomas Cleary, The Original Face: An Anthology of Rinzai Zen (New York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 13. An example of a Nasrudin-esque parable told about Ikkyu is the story of his approaching the house of a rich man one day to beg for food wearing his torn robes and straw sandals. The man drove him away, but when he returned the following day in the luxurious robe of a Buddhist prelate, he was invited in for a banquet. But when the food arrived Ikkyu removed his robe and offered the food to it.

14.Sanford, "Zen-Man Ikkyu," p. 48.

15.Ibid., p. 68.

16.Ibid. pp. 80-81.

17. Translated by Keene, Landscapes and Portraits, p. 235. Professor Keene (personal communication) has provided a revised and, he believes, more fully accurate translation of this verse as follows:

After ten days of living in this temple my mind's in turmoil;

Red strings, very long, tug at my feet.

If one day you get around to looking for me,

Try the restaurants, the drinking places or the brothels.

He notes that the "red strings" of the second line refer to the ties of physical attachment to women that drew Ikkyu from the temple to the pleasure quarters.

18.Jon Covell and Yamada Sobin, Zen at Daitoku-ji (New York: Kodansha International, 1974), p. 36.

19.Sanford, "Zen-Man Ikkyu," p. 221.

20.Ibid., p. 226.

21.Ibid., p. 235.

22.Ibid., p. 225.

23.Ibid., pp. 253-54. A translation may also be found in Cleary, Original Face; and in R. H. Blyth and N. A. Waddell, "Ikkyu's Skeletons," The Eastern Buddhist, N.S. 7, 3 (May 1973), pp. 111-25.

Also see Blyth, Zen and Zen Cla.s.sics, Vol. 7.

24.Sanford claims ("Zen-Man Ikkyu," p. 341) that Ikkyu's prose is "almost totally unknown" in j.a.pan.

25.Ibid., pp. 326-27.

26.Ibid., p. 172.

27.Jan Covell (Zen at Daitoku-ji, p. 38) says, "Ikkyu's own ink paintings are unpretentious and seemingly artless, always with the flung-ink technique. His calligraphy is ranked among history's greatest . . ."

32.Sanford, "Zen-Man Ikkyu," p. 342.

33.

21.HAKUIN: j.a.pANESE MASTER OF THE KOAN 22.

1.Yampolsky, Zen Master Hakuin, p. 116. This is undoubtedly the definitive work by and about Hakuin in English and has been used for all the quotations that follow. Another translation of some of Hakuin's works is R. D. M. Shaw, The Embossed Teakettle (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963). A short translation of Hakuin's writings may be found in Cleary, Original Face. Perhaps the most incisive biographical and interpretive material may be found, respectively, in Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism; and Isshu and Sasaki, Zen Dust.