Читать книгу Zen Masters of Japan - Richard Bryan McDaniel - Страница 14
ОглавлениеKAKUA
The earliest event to become the subject of a Zen story in Japan concerns a monk named Kakua, who made the difficult journey to China around 1172 in order to study Zen. Since Dosho had brought back the Hosso teachings, several forms of Buddhism had been established in Japan; however, the teachings of Zen (Chan) were still only to be found in the remote mountain regions of China.
After completing his training, Kakua returned to Japan. He was a recluse by nature and made no attempt to gather students. Following the example of the Zen masters of China, he lived in seclusion in the mountains of his homeland. Although he sought anonymity, stories began to circulate about him, and occasionally students would discover where he lived. They came to ask questions about what he had learned in China. Kakua would reply to their inquiries, then move further into the wilderness.
Eventually the Emperor of Japan heard about this elusive monk who had undergone numerous hardships in order to study Zen in China. Curious about how this school differed from the other branches of Buddhism with which he was familiar, the Emperor ordered Kakua to the capital to explain what wisdom he had acquired from the study of Zen. Standing before the emperor and his retinue, Kakua brought out a flute from the sleeve of his robe, blew a single note on it, then bowed and left the court.
Japan’s first encounter with Buddhism had occurred in 552, when a diplomatic delegation from King Song Myong of Korea paid a visit to the court of Emperor Kimmei. The Japanese court would have been a shabby affair judged by the standards of the royal residences of China and Korea. Conditions in Japan at that time were primitive compared with those of the great Asian powers to their west. Isolated from the mainland of Asia, Japan had been protected from invasion and conquest, but for a long while it was also cut off from contact with the technological and social advances that were occurring elsewhere. The Japanese had no written language. The first steps were just then being taken to establish a central government that would be able to exert control over the various clans and tribes who, lacking other enemies, continuously warred with one another. One clan, the Yamato, argued its right to rule the entire archipelago by virtue of its claim to be descended from the first Emperor of Japan, Jimmu, and the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu. Other clans challenged this assertion and sought ways to align themselves with the divinely descended emperor through both martial and marital alliances.
There was no organized religion on the islands. There was a folk tradition that honored the spirits (kami) associated with certain sacred places or times of year, and there was a tradition of venerating ancestors, whose ghosts needed to be propitiated. But there was no official priesthood commissioned to conduct services; it was the responsibility of individuals or families to provide the appropriate offerings. Householders maintained a family shrine, the clan or tribe a collective shrine, and there was a national shrine in honor of the imperial household. There was no organized philosophical or moral code associated with these traditions. And it was not until these native practices were challenged by the arrival of foreign traditions that this collection of practices evolved into Kannaga-no-michi, or Shinto, “The Way of the Gods.”
The Korean delegation of 552 brought with them a number of gifts including a statue of the Buddha and copies of several Buddhist sutras. After this meeting, certain factions in Japan, impressed by the sophistication of the Korean visitors, came to believe it was important to cultivate relationships with other nations; other factions sought to preserve national purity and unity through isolationism.
The progressives were in the ascendency during the reign of Empress Suiko (592-628), whose regent, Prince Shotoku, both modernized Japan and established the Buddhist faith on the islands. Shotoku was a great admirer of Chinese Tang dynasty culture, and he arranged for a number of expeditions to that country. Courtiers, scholars, craftsmen, and monks (like Dosho) made the hazardous crossing to the mainland and brought back with them Chinese ideas which the Japanese were able to assimilate and modify in their unique fashion. The forms of Buddhism these visitors encountered were those popular in the larger port cities on the Chinese coast; there was no contact at this point with the remote Zen communities still hidden in the mountains of China.
Using Chinese models, Shotoku worked aggressively to reform Japanese institutions, governance, the legal system, the calendar, and other branches of learning. The Chinese mode of writing, kanji, was adopted, with the result that while a particular character would have the same meaning in both languages, the word it represented, the sound, could be entirely different. For example, it has already been mentioned that the Japanese pronounced the characters for “Huike” as “Eka.” Over time a second and more practical writing system arose, hiragana, based on symbols that designated syllables rather than individual sounds (letters).
Shotoku established a government bureaucracy based on Chinese models and promoted a central government in which local barons owed allegiance to the divinely descended emperor. In addition to Buddhism, Shotoku also promoted Confucianism, which he considered an appropriate vehicle for instilling in youth the virtues of loyalty, self-restraint, and commitment to duty.
Today, Shotoku is recognized as the “father of Japanese Buddhism.” He composed a commentary on the Lotus Sutra, and, like the Chinese Emperor Wu, he sponsored Buddhist monasteries and temples. In popular devotional Buddhism, Shotoku is believed to be an incarnation of the Buddha; legend has it that he had been born holding a holy relic in his hand.
The new religion was not universally popular, and when the 8th century Emperor Shomu, inspired by reports of massive statues of the Buddha in China, sought to erect an even more impressive Dai Butsu (Great Buddha) in Nara, the scale of the project disturbed many who viewed Buddhism as a foreign belief system. The adherents of Shinto warned that such a statue would be an insult to the native gods of Japan. In response, Monk Gyoki of the Hosso sect, made a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Goddess Amaterasu and asked the oracles there to consult the goddess about her feelings regarding the proposed monument. The oracle recognized the Buddha as Amaterasu’s emissary and declared the goddess’s approval of the project.
The great bronze Buddha, not completed until after Shomu died, was 53 feet (16 meters) tall, well shy of the 85 foot (25 meter) Chinese statue; however, the hall housing the Japanese copy was enormous—284 x 166 x 152 feet (86 x 50 x 46 meters)—making it then the largest wooden structure in the world.
The controversy over the statue was representative of the tension that was developing between traditionalists, who followed the way of Shinto, and the advocates of progress and change who tended to be, at least nominally, Buddhist. Shinto strove to establish itself as the official Japanese way of devotion; the emperor was, after all, the descendant of the Shinto sun goddess. The lower classes, however, made little distinction between the two belief systems, and Shinto and Buddhist figures were often found placed side by side in popular shrines.
By the start of the second millennium, Japanese culture, wealth, and technology had become the equal of her Asian neighbors. Politically, however, the country remained in disarray. The power of the Divine Emperor waned as the power of the military leaders known as Shoguns waxed. Feudal clans—powerful families like the Fujiwara, the Minamoto, and the Sugawara—raised armies to battle one another for control of the imperial court. Even Buddhist monasteries raised armies and fought with one another. Local war-lords (Daimyo) arose whose power rested in the fealty of the new warrior class of knights known as samurai. The warlords financed their armies by taxing the lower classes, which chose to pay taxes to them rather than to the imperial court because it was the local lords who were able to provide them some degree of protection.
Conditions reached their nadir in 1050, which began
—the Age of Degenerate Law, a dark epoch of epidemic, earthquake, fire, famine, banditry, and murder. The Fujiwara, to whom the imperial government had long since ceded its prestige, had been infected by their own decadence even as they attained the summit of their power. Their armed monks were now a threat to their own masters, and the soldiery of feudal lords in the outlying provinces was finally called upon to bring the anarchy under control. These lords—descendants of outcast emperors—detested the decadent despotism at Kyoto. Over the course of the next century, the Fujiwara were challenged and defeated by the strong provincial clans, notably the Taira or Heike, descendants of that Emperor Kwammu who had done so much to bring the Fujiwara into power. Other claimants challenged the Heike, in their turn, notably an alliance of strong clans that was grouped around the family Minamoto. In five bloody years between 1156 and 1160, when the Fujiwara were already in retreat, the Heike gained a brief ascendancy over the Minamoto and established their own emperors in court, but within a few years, they were overthrown by Yoritomo Minamoto in a series of epic battles that culminated in 1185 in the great sea coast battle at Dannoura. Within four years Yoritomo had eliminated the last resistance of the Fujiwara in the eastern provinces.
As shogun, or administrator general, Yoritomo established his own headquarters at Kamakura, three hundred miles east of Kyoto. A feeble court persisted in that city, but the Heian period was at an end. For the next seven hundred years Japan would be governed by military shoguns, mostly of Minamoto origin, who paid mere ceremonial homage to the emperors. (3)
At the beginning of the Kamakura era, three schools of Buddhism imported from China flourished in Japan—the Tendai, the Shingon, and the Pure Land. Dosho’s Hosso sect had lost influence on the islands.
The Tendai School is considered the first wholly Chinese School of Buddhism. It had evolved as the result of confusion that had arisen in China long before Bodhidharma’s voyage from the west. Often, Chinese travelers had brought back Buddhist documents from India, even though they could not read them, because it was believed the scrolls were inherently sacred. Often these documents were stored for many years before scholars arose who were able to translate them. The translators then discovered that some of the documents were only fragments and others had missing passages. More problematic was the fact that the documents reflected a wide range of perspectives within the long history of Indian Buddhism. The teachings proclaimed in one document might be difficult to reconcile with those in others, although they all purported to reflect the instructions of the Buddha. The founders of the Tendai School set themselves the task of trying to determine which of these apparently contradictory teachings were those of the historic Buddha. They finally based their exposition of Buddhist doctrine on the Lotus Sutra, which they believed to be the least corrupt of the documents they had.
Although meditation was practiced in the Tendai tradition, the majority of Tendai adherents were satisfied with understanding it as a doctrinal system which was intellectually coherent and which was able to meet the devotional needs of the literate population.
Whereas the focus of the Tendai School was on scripture, the focus of the Shingon School was on ritual. It was one of the so-called “esoteric” schools of Buddhism, in which secret teachings, or “empowerments,” were transmitted from teacher to student. These were not recorded in writing but were only available to initiates through oral instruction. The tradition was brought back to Japan by a monk named Kukai (better known by his posthumous name, Kobo Daishi) who accompanied one of the delegations from Japan to China in 804. Shingon practices included elaborate rituals and mantra recitation. A mantra is a special verbal formulation that the devotee keeps in mind. As a result of his practice with mantra, Kobo Daishi, it was claimed, acquired extraordinary powers of recall that allowed him to memorize all of the secret oral teachings that had been passed onto him in China.
The teachings that Kobo Daishi brought back to Japan survived there even after being eradicated in China during a persecution of Buddhism in that country in the mid-19th Century. Kobo Daishi did not intend to start a separate school of Buddhism but rather sought to enrich Buddhist practice. It would be his successors who would establish the school as an independent line of teaching. As the sect developed, the role of ritual became more central to it. Emperor Junna decreed that official rites for the state should be carried out in the Shingon Temple in Kyoto, and many influential families were drawn to the sect, hopeful that its rites would benefit them in their quest for political prominence.
The Pure Land Sect became popular among ordinary people who found philosophical Buddhism abstruse. Nor did traditional Shinto, which lacked a conception of personal immortality, have much to offer them; the blessings sought in Shinto ceremonies were not so much for personal attainment as for the benefit of the family and the clan. Buddhism, with its doctrine of reincarnation, offered hope to ordinary persons who found their lives burdensome. Daily difficulties, fear of brigandage, conflicts between warring clans, disease, and endless labor, gave the lower classes little to hope for in this life, prompting an understandable desire for a better life to come. The array of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas (roughly the equivalent of Buddhist saints) that had developed in devotional Buddhism provided a pantheon to whom individuals could offer prayers for personal health, achievement, or consolation in times of trial. The simplicity of the Pure Land School had great appeal; it taught that the repetition of a mantra dedicated to the Buddha Amida was adequate to ensure the devotee rebirth in the Pure Land, an albeit temporary heaven-like afterlife. The teaching had been brought to Japan in the 12th century CE by a monk named Honen, whose early training had been in the Tendai School.
In the Buddhism that had evolved in the centuries following the death of Siddhartha Gautama, it was recognized that there were many other “Buddhas” both in the past and yet to be born. Amida Buddha was the Buddha who reigned in the “Western Paradise.” He had taken a vow that anyone who called upon him with faith would be reborn in that Paradise. Devotees were taught to repeat the nembutsu—“Namu amida butsu”—a short prayer meaning, “I take refuge in Amida Buddha.” Later Zen teachers would occasionally advocate the practice of nembutsu, especially for the laity.
It was Honen’s disciple, Shinran, who was primarily responsible for the spread of the Pure Land Buddhism. He began his religious career at Shorenji, the Tendai temple on Mount Hiei in Kyoto. His conversion to the Pure Land School came about as a result of a dream he had in which the Bodhisattva of Compassion appeared to him in the form of Prince Shotoku; the Bodhisattva told Shin-ran to seek out Honen and to dedicate himself to the practice of the nembutsu.
The rivalry between various schools of Buddhism was intense, and, in 1207, Shingon and Tendai leaders were able to have the Pure Land School officially proscribed. Honen and Shinran were both expelled from Kyoto. Now no longer a monk, although he did not consider himself a layman either, Shinran married and started a family.
The ban on the Pure Land School was lifted in 1211. Honen died a year later, so it was left to Shinran to revive the teaching. He decided not to return to Kyoto but instead worked from a small community just north of Edo. He proved to be an effective proselytizer, and through his efforts the teaching became popular among peasants and commoners. Today the Pure Land School is the most popular form of Buddhism in Japan.
MYOAN EISAI
Myoan Eisai was born in 1141. His father was a Shinto priest who had such respect for the new Buddhist religion that when his son was eight years old, he sent him to study at a Tendai temple on Mount Hiei overlooking Kyoto. Eisai took to his lessons well, and, at the age of fourteen, he was ordained in a ceremony during which his head was shaved and he “accepted the precepts”—the list of rules Buddhist monks agreed to abide by. Shaving the head was an act symbolic of renouncing all attachments as well as a public proclamation that the individual had committed himself to pursuing the Dharma.
After completing his training on Mount Hiei, Eisai undertook his first voyage to China in 1168, three years before Kakua, in order to further his studies. The visit was less than a year long, and, although during the course of it he met a number of Zen monks, he made no effort to question them about their teachings. He returned to Kyoto the following autumn, bringing with him a collection of Tendai texts written in Chinese. He dedicated the next twenty years of his life to the study of those texts, and found his interest piqued by the stories he read in them of various Zen teachers. He remained firmly committed to the Tendai tradition, however, and eventually earned the title of “Patriarch” within it.
In 1186, he made a second trip to China with the intention of undertaking a pilgrimage to important Buddhist sites in India. He had come to suspect that the Dharma taught in Japan may have been corrupted through mistranslations and contamination from non-Buddhist sources. He hoped that by traveling to the land of the Buddha’s birth, he would find a purer expression of the Buddha’s original teachings. However, once in China he was unable to procure the necessary travel documents to proceed to the sub-continent. Disappointed in his original intention, he decided to investigate the Zen school to see if it were a less adulterated expression of the Dhar ma than what was currently being promulgated in Japan. On Mount Tientai, he sought out Zen Master Kian Esho [Xuan Huai-chang] who belonged to the Rinzai [Ch: Linji] “House” of Zen.
Zen was not a homogeneous tradition in China. There were Five Houses each of which traced its lineage back to a particular group of teachers. The Rinzai House also produced two offshoots, which resulted in a total of Seven Schools. When Eisai visited China, the two strongest schools were the Rinzai and the Soto [Ch: Caodong].
While the goal of both of these is to guide practitioners to awakening, their approaches differ both in custom and focus. These differences reflect the personalities of the Tang dynasty teachers from whom they have descended. A basic difference in custom is that while meditators in the Soto tradition sit facing a wall (following the example of Bodhidharma), those in the Rinzai tradition sit facing into the room. A difference in focus can be found in the preferred mode of meditation. The Soto student is usually taught a subjectless meditation, known in Japanese as shikan taza or “just sitting.”
For the Rinzai, students working with a teacher are generally given a series of koans upon which to meditate. The term koan [Ch: gongan] refers to a “public record,” or “case,” in the sense of the records kept by a court of law that establishes precedent in jurisprudence. Koans are generally based on stories of the teaching methods of the Zen Masters of the Tang Dynasty. In many instances the koan consists of a question posed by a student and the master’s often apparently illogical reply. For example, when Joshu was once asked what the significance of Zen was, he replied, “The cypress tree in the garden.” When Ummon was asked who the Buddha was, he said, “A dried shit-stick.” (Sticks were used for personal hygiene.) The Rinzai student assigned such a koan meditated on it to discover for himself why the teacher’s answer was appropriate.
The koan most students begin with is called Joshu’s Dog. A student asked the 9th century Chinese master, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” Joshu replied, “Mu!” Mu literally means “no” or “nothing,” and Joshu appears to contradict the generally accepted Buddhist belief that all things—not only dogs but even trees and stones—have “Buddha-nature.” The meditator, however, is warned not to think of mu as meaning anything, but to absorb him or herself in the koan until he/she achieves the insight (kensho) that will allow them to successfully answer the teacher’s question when he asks, “What is mu ?”
The teaching techniques were not exclusive, so the Soto School made occasional use of koans, and Rinzai students could be advised to practice shikan taza. The Rinzai tradition had the reputation of being more demanding than the Soto and put a greater emphasis on attaining awakening. Soto practice was considered gentler and stressed the practice of sitting meditation (zazen) over attainment. What the schools shared was the belief that Buddha-hood—awakening—is achieved not through study, acquiring knowledge of the teachings, but through direct spiritual experience.
What Eisai found in Rinzai Zen was something very different from the Buddhism with which he was familiar. It did not offer philosophical analysis or carry out ritual observances; rather, it focused on a discipline which, he was told, could bring him to have the same experience of awakening that Siddhartha Gautama had had 1600 years earlier. The goal of Zen was not to study Buddhism but to become a Buddha.
Eisai did koan study with Kian Esho for four years, following him from one monastery to another. In 1191, Eisai received official “transmission,” acknowledgment that he had seen into his own Buddha-nature and was authorized to teach others. In recognition of this authorization, Kian Esho gave Eisai an official document that attested that Eisai was a successor in a tradition which was traced, without break, from the Buddha to the present day. He also presented his disciple with a robe, bowl, and a hossu—a short staff tufted with horse hair which represented the possessor’s right to teach the Dharma, and, specifically in Eisai’s instance, the authority to take and promote the Zen tradition to the people of Japan.
Although there had been Japanese who had studied Zen before him, Eisai is identified as the individual to establish Zen, in its Rinzai form, on the islands, just as Bodhidharma was acknowledged to have brought the meditation school to China. As with Bodhidharma, Eisai is also credited with introducing tea to a new land. Legend has it that Bodhidharma had been so angered after falling asleep during meditation one day that he cut off his eyelids, which fell to the earth and there, supposedly, grew to become the first tea plants. Eisai’s story is less dramatic; he simply brought tea seeds back from China. Tea had been imported from China in small quantities before, but Eisai was the first to systematically cultivate tea plants in Japan. He even wrote a book in which he promoted tea as a helpful stimulant to meditation and good health. The beverage, at first, was better accepted than the new spiritual tradition he also brought from China.
His first attempt to establish a Zen temple was in Kyoto, where he ran into resistance from the clergy connected with other Buddhist sects active in the city. The Tendai hierarchy, perhaps considering Eisai an apostate, went to the court to prevent the introduction of what they called a “new sect” to the city. Eisai argued then, as he would throughout his life, that Zen was nothing “new,” that, in fact, Saicho, the founder of the Tendai tradition, had practiced and taught meditation (zen). His adversaries were unswayed and remained opposed to his efforts.
Eisai found a sponsor, however, in Shogun Yoritomo and with his protection was able to found the first Zen temple in Japan, Sho fukuji, at Hakata. Even in this remote region he had to defend the practice of Zen from the attacks of other schools. The basis of their objection was found in the traditional description of Zen attributed to Bodhidharma: Zen presented itself as a teaching “outside” the traditional scriptures, and Eisai described Zen as the “school of the Buddha mind.” His opponents interpreted this as a specious claim to be a superior teaching without scriptural basis.
From Shofukuji, Eisai moved to the new capital at Kamakura. Yoritomo’s son, the ShogunYoriie, shared his father’s admiration for Zen. They both found the spare and practical discipline of Eisai’s teaching more appealing than the abstraction of other schools, and Yoriie continued his father’s patronage of the new sect. At the request of both the Emperor and the Shogun, Eisai established a Zen temple, Kenninji, in Kyoto. The Shingon and Tendai schools of Buddhism resented the intrusion of the new meditation school in what was still the spiritual, if not currently the political, capital of Japan, and they retained enough influence to ensure that the new temple was obliged to serve their schools as well as the Zen tradition.
In spite of what others may have believed about him, Eisai had not rejected the Tendai tradition, and he continued to function within it as a priest. He maintained that Zen was a vehicle for renewing and strengthening Tendai Buddhism, which, to his mind, had become overly ritualistic. But he was also aware that he was a Dharma heir in the Rinzai lineage—the 53rd in a lineage he traced back beyond Bodhidharma to the Buddha himself. As a Rinzai master, he put an emphasis on awakening (kensho) which was not part of the Tendai tradition. For a time, at least, he would assert that Rinzai Zen was the fullest flowering of the Dharma.
In contrast to the luxury of other Buddhists temples in Japan, Eisai’s temples were relatively poor. At one point, his monks had had nothing to eat for several days. Then a Buddhist devotee came to the temple and asked Eisai to have the monks chant sutras on his behalf (a common devotional practice). In payment for this service, he presented Eisai with two rolls of silk. The monks were elated, confident that the silk would be sold and the money used to resupply their larder. However, when a beggar came to Eisai seeking alms, Eisai gave him the rolls of silk. The monks were disappointed but, seeing that the master was eating no better than they were, kept their anger in check.
Then a second beggar came to the monastery. Because there was nothing else to offer, Eisai had the gold leaf stripped from the Buddha image and presented to the man. This time the monks, already irritable from hunger, protested what they considered amounted to a sacrilege. Eisai countered by telling them, “You’re familiar with the stories told of the Buddha’s prior lives before being born as Gautama Siddhartha. And you remember how time and again he gave up his life in order to help others. If he was so willing to do that, how can you imagine that he would object to giving up his halo for this man?”
After 1200, Eisai divided his time between the temples he had established in Kamakura and Kyoto. But he appears gradually to have returned to the Tendai tradition, remarking that it was not yet time for Zen to flourish in Japan. In his later years, he dedicated himself to Tendai ritualism. He died in 1215 at the age of 75.
Eisai was a synchronist. Whether it was by conviction or as a result of the times in which he lived, he presented Zen as supplemental to the more ceremonial and ritualistic forms of Buddhism popular among the upper classes of Japanese society. It was left to his disciples to begin the process of establishing Zen as a separate and autonomous school.
RYONEN MYOZEN
The most important of Eisai’s Dharma heirs was Ryonen Myozen. When orphaned at the age of eight, he was placed in a Tendai temple on Mount Hiei where he studied under a monk named Myoyu. When Myozen was sixteen, he took the precepts in the Tendai tradition. He then sought to deepen his understanding of Buddhism by training with Eisai. Eventually he was recognized as Eisai’s successor, and, after that teacher’s death, Myozen continued to promote the Rinzai tradition and began to acquire his own disciples.
In 1223, Myozen planned to travel to China with several of his students. Before they left however, Myozen received word that his Tendai teacher, Myoyu, was dying and had requested his former student come to see him one last time. Uncertain of where his obligation lay, Myozen called his monks together and put the situation to them. Should he proceed to China to deepen his Zen practice, or should he honor the debt he owed his teacher and go to his bedside? The majority of Myozen’s students felt that the master’s obligation to his teacher took priority and urged him to delay his trip to China and go to Myoyu. Only one student dissented, but his argument convinced Myozen to proceed with the trip. Myozen explained that the most effective way to discharge his debt to Myoyu would be to achieve awakening for the benefit of others. He stated that if he acquired:
—even a trace of enlightenment, it will serve to awaken many people, even though it means opposing the deluded wishes of one person. If the virtue gained were exceptional, it would serve to repay the kindness of my teacher. (4)
Accompanied by the young monk who had encouraged him, Myozen set off for China. Once there the two parted company. Myozen proceeded to Mount Tientung, where Eisai had trained, and there he studied with two Chinese masters for three years. His health was not strong, however, and in May 1225, he died while seated in meditation.
The disciple who had encouraged Myozen to make the journey to China had pursued his own path while in the country, but before he returned to Japan he collected Myozen’s ashes and brought them back with him. That’s disciple’s name was Dogen Kigen, and the other thing he brought to Japan from his visit to China was the Soto Zen tradition.
