Great Doubt Great Enlightenment

"Many years ago, the great deity of the Kasuga Shrine appeared to Gedatsu Shōnin of Kasagi. "Since the time of the Buddha Kuruson," he told him, "every wise and eminent priest who has lacked the Mind of Enlightenment has without exception fallen into the paths of evil."


For years, these words weighed on my mind, greatly troubling me. I couldn't understand it. Wasn't a shaven head and monk's robe the Mind of Enlightenment? Wasn't reciting sutras, mantras, and dharanis the Mind of Enlightenment? Not to mention all those wise and eminent priests throughout the past: the idea that such men could have lacked the Mind of Enlightenment seemed incomprehensible to me. Yet here was a sacred utterance from the august lips of the great deity of Kasuga. It certainly could not be dismissed lightly.


I first began to have these doubts when I was twenty-five. They remained with me until my forty-first year, when I at long last penetrated into the heart of this great matter. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I saw it — it was as clear as if it were right there in the hollow of my hand. What is the Mind of Enlightenment? It is, I realized, a matter of doing good — benefiting others by giving them the gift of the Dharma teaching.


I pledged that I would from that moment forth drive forward the wheel of the Four Great Universal Vows. Now I am more than eighty years of age, but I have never been remiss in my effort to fulfill that pledge. I go wherever I am asked. Fifty, a hundred leagues — it doesn't faze me in the least. I do everything I possibly can to impart the Dharma to people. How strange it is that nowhere in the Buddhist teachings or in the records of the Zen patriarchs have I seen any clarification of the Mind of Enlightenment. How fortunate it was for me that the great deity of Kasuga, in an oracle of a few short sentences, succeeded so wonderfully in transcending all the sutras and commentaries. My joy could not have been greater."
~ Wild Ivy: The Spiritual Autobiography of Zen Master Hakuin
A fiery and intensely dynamic Zen teacher and artist, Hakuin (1685–1768) is credited with almost single-handedly revitalizing Japanese Zen after three hundred years of decline.


"WITH GREATEST respect and reverence, I encourage all you superior seekers in the secret depths to devote yourselves to penetrating and clarifying the self as earnestly as you would put out a fire on the top of your head. I urge you to keep boring your way through as assiduously as you would seek a lost article of incalculable worth. I enjoin you to regard the teachings left by the Buddha-patriarchs with the same spirit of hostility you would show toward a person who had murdered both your parents. Anyone who belongs to the school of Zen and does not engage in the doubting and introspection of koan must be considered a deadbeat rascal of the lowest kind, someone who would throw aside his greatest asset. As a teacher of the past said, "At the bottom of great doubt lies great enlightenment ... From a full measure of doubt comes a full measure of enlightenment."