“… From my father I learned that there are such things as right and wrong, and that sometimes anger is justified in the service of what is right. From my mother I learned that forgiveness must be accorded to everyone and that all human beings must be treated kindly.
In the midst of that turbulent household I grew up as an introverted child who spent most of his time in his room reading books. For some inexplicable reason I also enjoyed staying at home practicing calligraphy and painting, like some old retired gentleman. I would take up my brush and produce sumi-e to which I’d assign poetic titles like “White Water” or something. I have no idea why the young son of a rural transport agent came to be so fascinated by ink paintings and haiku.
It often makes me think that life doesn’t begin with our present existence but has its roots far in the past, so that this world is simply a continuation of former lives. I often meet people and sense that this isn’t the first time I’ve encountered them, that I’ve met them once before somewhere in a previous existence. Could such feelings arise from some mysterious intuition deep in our physical being?
During the years following the First World War, Tokyo was the scene not only of many social and political movements but also of much religious activity. Anyone walking in Kanda at night was sure to come across soldiers of the Salvation Army beating their drums or followers of the Buddhist Revival Army blowing their trumpets. At the temple Rinshō-in in Yushima one could hear Zen lectures at the gatherings held by Sugawara Jiho, while at the Gudōkan in Morikawa a lively schedule of Dharma meetings was offered by the Jōdo Shin minister Chikazumi Jōkan. In Fujimi-chō the sermons of the Christian minister Uemura Masahisa won a wide audience among the student population. Uchimura Kanzō, too, had an enthusiastic following of younger believers.
Meanwhile Miyazaki Toranosuke, the prophet of the new religion Shinsei Kyōdan, could be seen in Ueno Park haranguing the crowds, his long hair blowing in the wind and his frock-coated chest thrust out. Like a starving stray I wandered about Tokyo, sniffing out the slightest scent of truth.
One day I heard that Uchimura Kanzō was holding a prayer gathering at a church in Tsunohazu, so I went all the way there to attend. After Uchimura’s rousing sermon we were told that the Second Coming of Christ would occur that very evening, so the entire congregation offered fervent prayers far into the night. The Lord never did descend from Heaven…
One day at the invitation of a friend I listened to a lecture on Shantideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva given by Kawaguchi Ekai Roshi, a Zen priest who had established the Snow Mountain Monastery. The text, transcribed on pages of straw paper, contained a passage that went roughly as follows: ‘If I could cover the entire surface of the Earth with leather I could freely walk anywhere in bare feet. But that would not be possible. However, with just nine inches of leather on the soles of my feet it’s just the same as if I had covered the entire surface of the earth. Likewise, it is probably impossible to make this Earth an ideal paradise. But if I arouse the mind of bodhi—that is, if I vow to offer all that I have for the sake of humankind—then it is just as though the Earth had become a paradise.’
How deeply moved I was when I read this passage! These lines precipitated the second turning point of my spiritual life… “This is the way!” I thought. With a sense of utter conviction I felt that this path—the path of immediately manifesting the Pure Land, of immediately perfecting the self, of right here, right now saving the world and saving myself—was the only path for me. It is enough to vow in one’s heart to offer everything one has for the sake of humanity. If that’s the case then even I can do it, I thought, and I can do it this very moment. With all my heart I vowed: “My happiness, my body and my mind, my life, my everything, all of these from this very day I offer for the sake of humanity.” The moment I said this I was overcome with a sense of happiness like none I had ever experienced before. For the first time I knew the bright clarity of the mind that is attached to nothing and the richness of the heart that has given everything.
I composed a long appeal and handed it to Ekai Roshi, entreating him to accept me as a disciple. The master’s younger brother Hanzui was there by his side, sternly lecturing me on the severity of monastic training and warning me that a lukewarm sense of purpose wouldn’t suffice to see it through. I remained determined, though. Seeing this, Ekai Roshi decided to check my father’s position on the matter, and without a word to me sent him a letter. I remember my father came and took me to a fortune-teller named Watanabe Ichigyū. He said to my father, “This child will never be a family man. He has the features of someone who prefers solitude. Even if you make him take a wife he’s the sort of person who will go upstairs when she’s downstairs and go downstairs when she comes upstairs. Best to have him become a fortune-teller, Shinto priest, or Buddhist monk.”
I entered the Snow Mountain Monastery as a postulant at the end of my nineteenth year… I wasn’t allowed to wear a monk’s robe yet, so I wore a black kimono with a black hakama. During the day I attended Tōy University, with my head shaved slick as an egg. In the mornings we would arise at four o’clock and start the day by wiping the floors and making preparations for breakfast. At five we would hit the wooden han while reciting the “Verses on Impermanency” with the plaintive cadences of the Ōbaku Zen school. After school we would sweep the garden and heat the bath. Once a week Iwata Takuhō (my senior at Snow Mountain) and I would go to the vegetable market in Dōsaka to buy supplies. I was a combination housemaid and live-in working student. And since I was there at my own request, I was a housemaid and working student who also paid for his own room and board.
The master was eighty years old at the time but his mother was still alive, living at the monastery though largely bedridden. It was my job to prepare her meals and take care of her bedpan, and I was genuinely happy to be allowed to do so… Sometimes she would hold up her thumb and say, “Is he here?”, referring to the master. If he was out she would pull some money out from under her mattress and say, “Go buy some sea bream and cook it up for me.” The master was a strict vegetarian, to the point where on trips he would take his own pots since he found those of other people to reek of cooked flesh, so I prepared his mother’s fish in a special pot she kept. When I brought it her face would break out in a huge smile of delight. It made me think that a pure-living monk makes an unfilial son.
I labored devotedly from morning till night in the service of the Roshi and his mother. Looking back, I can’t help being impressed by the single-minded devotion to the Way that I was capable of at that time in my life. I still had a kind of childlike purity and innocence; the various bad habits I’ve acquired since then had yet to manifest themselves. Even so, fatigue, lack of sleep, and malnutrition gradually undermined my congenitally weak constitution. I finally suffered a physical breakdown during the final exams for my sophomore year at Tōyō University. A week-long fever left my lymph nodes swollen to the point where my neck was wider than my face...
My physical condition being what it was, I had no choice but to quit Snow Mountain Monastery, which I had entered with such great expectations, and take my leave of Tokyo. Once again I was home in the village I thought I had left for good, my emaciated body prostrate in bed with its swollen neck…
One day toward the end of the rainy season the nanten bushes were covered with white buds. For the first time in quite a while I left my bed and went out on the veranda to look at the garden. A cool, pleasant breeze blew softly against my cheek, as though to soothe my exhausted body. I wondered how many years it had been since I’d felt a breeze like that. Then I thought to myself, “What is the wind?” All of a sudden it struck me that wind is simply moving air. The moment I realized this I felt a shock, as though I’d been struck on the back with an iron rod. “Yes, of course!” I thought. “There’s air!”
In the entire twenty years since I’d been born I’d been sustained and nurtured by the air, but had never been truly aware of its existence. Yet even though I had paid no attention to the air, the air had constantly and unfailingly embraced me. When I realized this I broke out in tears and wept uncontrollably.
The thought came to me, “I’m not alone, I’m not isolated. Behind me is a great power that sustains me, continually urging me to live! I’ll get better!” I felt to the marrow of my bones that our life is not our own, but something given to us. My heart became clear and bright, and I recited a simple poem to myself: ‘From the coolness of this morning’s breeze I know that I’m embraced by something great.’
By this time I had recovered sufficiently to go to Nagoya and receive radiation therapy… After about two or three months the proprietress of Toyotoshi asked me how the radiation therapy was going. When I answered that I hadn’t seen the slightest improvement, she commented somewhat cryptically, “I know a good place, I’m sure you’d get better, but if I took you there the priest would get angry.” When I asked her what she meant, she explained that just north of Lake Hamana to the east of Nagoya there was a temple named Konchi-in, the priest of which could cure even the most intractable illnesses. She said that she herself had been cured of uterine cancer.
I’d heard about this temple before, but had dismissed such talk since I was convinced that Buddhism which dabbled in healing was deviant and that any priest who engaged in such activities was a fraud. But I paid more attention when I heard that Konchi-in’s priest scolded the proprietress when she introduced new patients. If the priest was a fraud, I thought, surely he would welcome new patients, not get angry. With this in mind I decided to call upon Konchi-in and meet its priest, Rev. Kōno Daikei. This priest was to become my second master. I still remember the date on which I met him: November 26th of my twenty-second year.
I can truly say that it is thanks to Rev. Kōno that I am alive today. My meeting him was a fortuitous encounter oddly similar to that of Zen master Hakuin with the Taoist hermit Hakuyū. When I first visited Konchi-in Rev. Kōno held up three fingers and said, “Your illness is nothing more than this!” When I gave him a blank look he shouted, “Blockhead! I’m saying you’ll be well in three months! Don’t you see—your internal organs are not weak, they’re strong, so strong that they’ve forced the disease toxins up to your neck. Can’t you get my point!” It was quite a Zen-style wake-up call, but it left me feeling more dazed than ever. Rev. Kōno said, “I haven’t deceived you. Your life is no longer in danger, so feel free to go wherever you like. Do you plan to go back to Tokyo and resume that ascetic training?” “If I return to the monastery in Tokyo I’ll just ruin my health again,” I replied. “I’d like to go to Kyoto and practice zazen.”
“You’re not ready yet to train at a Zen monastery,” Rev. Kōno said. “You should enter the Zen college and focus on study for a while.”… My recovery was nothing short of miraculous. Though still not one hundred percent cured, I was nevertheless in good enough health after a mere three months of treatment to fully resume my university studies…
I never felt the desire to abandon Christianity and the Bible. Each and every Sunday I would attend services at a church somewhere. At the time Rinzaishū College only accepted the disciples of Rinzai school temples, so for convenience’ sake I had registered as the disciple of Konchi-in and wore a monk’s robe. It was in this robe that I always went to church... I had asked Rev. Hatanaka to look my speech over. One thing he did was to go through the text and change all of the “I”s to “we”s. This left a profound impression on me. Indeed, I took it more to heart than anything I had read in the Bible. It brought home to me the principle that we must never emphasize the “I”, but must always live with the “we” in mind...
Even though I always had a quite profound devotion to Christianity, I always had great difficulty with the concept of prayer. Words of prayer are something I have never been able to utter. If I force myself to speak them the words immediately turn false, transforming into the shallowest type of sentimentality. If I called out “God the Father!”, God seemed to recede ever farther away, ceasing to be the Absolute beyond all concepts and becoming no more than a idol formed of ideas. Little wonder is it that Christ warned his followers against praying in front of the crowds, as the hypocrites do. Rather, he enjoined them to “enter into your private room” and pray in secret, alone with God. Moreover, it always seemed to me that in praying one needs no words, for does not God already know all things?
After I began practicing Zen meditation (zazen) I came to regard this practice as the truest form of prayer. In zazen one settles oneself openly in front of the Absolute, totally forgets the ego, and enters a state of no-mind where not a single thought stirs. One utterly surrenders oneself body and mind in the Absolute, so that self and Absolute are fully one. Could there possibly be any higher expression of prayer than this? In this clear, bright mind, pure as that of an infant, there is not a speck of sentimentality, but only a full immersion in the joyful union of the human and the divine. This, I believe, is the meaning of the famous beatitude, “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” In purity of the heart, God is present.
One semester when the time for sesshin arrived my schoolmates and I took our sitting cushions and daily necessities and sequestered ourselves in the great Zen monastery of Enpuku-ji. That particular sesshin the classmate sitting directly across the aisle from me was a profoundly accomplished meditator…
I aroused a great fighting spirit, and sat with the determination to do every bit as well as him. By the fourth or fifth day I reached the point where I forgot body and mind, with no sense of sitting as I sat and no sense of standing as I stood. It was truly a stillness in which human and divine were one. On the sixth day I was returning from sanzen with the roshi when I happened to see the bright yellow leaves of the ginkgo tree in front of the main hall.
At that moment my mind suddenly opened, and I was so astonished that I almost leapt into the air. The koan “Mu” exploded, and the world of absolute reality manifested before me. I rushed back to the sanzen room and immediately passed my koan, as well as several other problems presented to me by the master.
The Gate of the Celestial Rock Cave suddenly opened and the divine act of creation unfolded in all its infinity. Everything is new. Everything is beautiful. Everything is true. Everything is shining. And everything is Self. I was in a state of utter ecstasy. This, I thought, is what is meant when they speak of “without realizing it my hands were waving and my feet were dancing with joy.” The cosmos and I are one. The world and I are one. Humanity and I are one. With the full intuition of this, how could one not be overcome with joy?
I fully savored, as the reality of my own experience, Shakyamuni’s words that “the totality of the Three Realms is my very being, and every creature therein is my child,” and saw that in them there was no exaggeration and no deceit. I realized that this nondual love toward humanity and the world is the ultimate truth of human nature. The bodhicitta expressed all those years ago when I vowed to offer “my happiness, my body and my mind, my life, my everything for the sake of humanity” was itself the essence of human nature. I knew then in my heart that my aspiration to seek the Way had not been mistaken…
Many people think that students are not in a situation that allows them to awaken to their true nature, or that people in lay life are unable to experience enlightenment, but this way of thinking is simply not true. There is a Japanese expression, “A mouse attacks a cat,” that refers to the fact that anything is possible if one is desperate enough. With sufficient motivation, anyone can attain enlightenment…
As I look back on the fifty years that have passed since I left my village in the mountains at the age of fourteen I remember with a deep sense of gratitude Seisetsu Roshi and all of the wonderful guides and teachers whom I have encountered. Yet as Confucius said, “You can’t carve rotten wood,” and I can only reflect with shame on how much I still have left to accomplish.”
~ "Yamada Mumon Roshi (1900–1988) was a Rinzai roshi, calligrapher, and former abbot of Shōfuku-ji in Kobe, Japan and also the former head of the Myōshin-ji branch of the Rinzai school of Japan. Mumon, together with Rinzai priest Hisamatsu Shin'ichi, was on the original planning committee for the first Zen-Christian Colloquium started by the Quakers in 1967. The meeting was designed to open dialogue between Christians and Buddhists and establish peace in the wake of damage caused by World War II.
During the Second World War, while with Seisetsu Roshi, he visited many places of war, and what he saw left him with deep feelings of repentance. In 1967 he went on pilgrimages to various Southeast Asian countries to apologize to and say sutras for the war dead of all religions, and he taught this posture of repentance to his students as well. Although he knew only a few words of English, he taught many students from abroad and established many strong karmic connections.
He traveled to the opening of Dai Bosatsu Zendo in New York State, to the San Francisco Zen Center, to the Mount Baldy Zen Center in California, and to Mexico. He made a pilgrimage to India and at Bodhgaya built a Japanese temple. He went to Europe and opened the East West Spiritual Exchange between Catholicism and Buddhism, himself entering and living in nine contemplative monasteries in Europe, experiencing the life of the monks there. His disciples settled all over Europe, strengthening his extensive karmic ties with the West.
According to G. Victor Sōgen Hori in the book The Faces of Buddhism in America, "Students of Yamada Mumon Rōshi say that outside the sanzen room, he looked and acted like a tiny, wispy, immaterial Taoist hermit, but that inside the sanzen room, he suddenly turned into a lion." ~ Wikipedia
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