Novice to Master Page 3

  My dilemma was not unique. Perhaps most everyone, from times of old to today, who has set out to practice has suffered the same problem. There was Tzu-lu, for instance, a disciple of Confucius’ in ancient China. Tzu-lu had lived a hooligan’s life until the day he unceremoniously barged into the place where Confucius was quietly teaching the Way of the Saints. Struck with the master’s character, Tzu-lu became his disciple. This Tzu-lu was a man who had complete confidence in his own physical strength, but he quickly realized that Confucius was not only a man who taught the Way of Virtue through his own gentle and virtuous character but that he also possessed a strength that Tzu-lu could not begin to match. Confucius had a profound understanding of the psychology of the lower classes that prompted Tzu-lu to wonder what kind of life this man had led in his earlier days. The range and depth of Confucius’s knowledge were so vast that his disciples were at a loss to know exactly what to make of him. Though a diligent disciple, Tzu-lu feared he would never match his master.

  On another occasion, Confucius was heard praising one of his many disciples, Yen Hui, saying, “That Hui! A single bamboo bowl, a gourdful of drink, living in a back alley. Others would have found such a life unbearably depressing, but Hui’s good humor was not dampened a bit. Worthy indeed was Hui!”

  Confucius was essentially saying, “Ah, that disciple of mine, Yen Hui, what a great human being he was. He ate the poorest food, drank only water”—in China where the water was bad, having tea to drink was simply taken for granted, so to lead a life where one has only water to drink was quite remarkable!—“and he lived in the slums. Most people would find such a life unendurable and fall into despair. But not Yen Hui! Even in the midst of that life, nothing stopped him from happily following the Way. What a wonderful fellow was Yen Hui!”

  Now, Jan Yu, a disciple who was present at the time, raised a concern, “It is not that I do not believe in the wonderful Way, which you, my master, and my excellent seniors such as Yen Hui have practiced. It is only that some of us lack the power to practice that way.”

  Confucius, quite out of character, sprang upon Jan Yu in forceful rebuke for his self-indulgence, “Lack of ability is an excuse for those who have at least tried, at least come partway. But you! Before even setting out to try anything, you set limits on your ability.”

  Confucius gave Jan Yu a sound scolding.

  Everyone will have times when they may want to utter such refrains, trying to escape responsibility. Even I, speaking as I do now about Jan Yu’s scolding, was once a disciple who felt exactly as he did. “There’s just no way. Roshi could do it because he understands Buddhism, and he is a great human being. But me, I am just an ordinary person and, well…” This is not humility; it is nothing more than self-cherishing self-defense!

  And now I recognize what kind of image my own disciples have of me. While they may not look up to me quite as highly as I looked up to Zuigan Roshi, they still seem to imagine that it is beyond their power to equal me.

  That being the case, just what is it that I have accomplished up to now? I was not inspired to work my way into and out of Tokyo University as did Zuigan Roshi. Neither have I become a chief abbot. What I have done is only this: When it has been my turn to work in the kitchen, I have given everything I’ve got to working in the kitchen.

  There is no way you can exert yourself in this world without that exertion being of value. Each and every thing is the form that the heart is presently taking, the revelation of Buddha, a manifestation of Dharma. When I first entered the monastery, Zuigan Roshi, sweeping beside me in the garden, called this fact to my attention when he said, “Well, do you get it? From the first, in people and in things, there is no trash.” I surely took the far and roundabout way of coming to understand this in terms of actual practice, though.

  “Meeting with a broom, become that broom; meeting with a bowl of rice, become that bowl of rice.” Such expressions are standard fare in Zen, but the question is: How do you put it into practice in daily life?

  working it out for myself

  IN ZEN TEMPLES, a breakfast of rice porridge is followed by tea in the roshi’s room. The roshi goes over the day’s schedule while a bowl of powdered green tea is whisked and served, first to him and then to the others. When I first went to train under Zuigan Roshi, a certain woman, Miss Okamoto, was living at Daishuin. This elderly lady had graduated from Ochanomizu Women’s College decades ago and had worked in young women’s education for many years in both Tokyo and Kyushu. When she was over forty years old, she became a serious disciple of Roshi. She quit her job and moved to be near her teacher, and, dressed in baggy work pants every day, she helped take care of him until the day he died. At that time, there were only the three of us living there, and during teatime Roshi would talk with Miss Okamoto, but he never deigned to utter a word to me.

  One day Miss Okamoto, probably out of pity, sought to bring me into the conversation. “And what do you think, Morinaga?”

  “No, no,” came Roshi’s intervention. “This one is not yet fit to speak in front of anybody.”

  It was Roshi’s view that in order to speak before others, one should thoroughly know oneself. This verifying of one’s own essential nature is called kensho in Zen. Those who have not had kensho are not considered qualified to speak in front of other people.

  This incident irked me, and once again I cursed in silence: “This hateful old man! While he proclaims that nobody and no thing are trash, isn’t he treating me like trash?”

  I thought this to myself. But if I had dared let my attitude show, that would have been it! Roshi would have told me without hesitation, “Well, you can go on home now. There’s no practice under a roshi that you can’t respect and trust.”

  From this teatime experience, I understood that true belief is to accept without objections. I must agree to undertake every task, no matter how impossible it may seem. Even if I am told to do three things at once, even if I am told to do something I have never before attempted, I must never, under any circumstances, say, “I can’t do it. That’s impossible.”

  What was I to do then? As if for dear life, I had to pour all of my concentrated effort into the task—that is the only way. The very first thing that Zuigan Roshi hammered into me was belief in the teacher. That meant that I had to work things out for myself, through all-out effort, without complaint.

  “i can’t do it”

  WHEN MY PARENTS were alive and well, I grumbled ceaselessly, and the words “I can’t do it” were quick to roll off my tongue. I came to notice, however, that this “I can’t do it” that I was forever mouthing was not, in reality, an unbiased assessment of an objective impossibility, but only a speculative impossibility based upon my own assessment of my power at that moment.

  When you feel you have a capacity of, say, 10.0, anything up to 9.9 feels possible; the feeling “I can’t do it” arises just at the point at which you are given a 10.1 assignment. The person who is quick to judge a task as impossible will never perform any task beyond a 10.0. That person will never improve. For this reason, you must never think, “I can’t do it.”

  No matter what demands the teacher makes of you, you must somehow fulfill them. You make unyielding efforts to work it out, and as you climb—10.1, 10.2, 10.3—you gradually develop, for the first time, power you never thought yourself capable of having.

  Suppose, now, that my master ordered, “Kill!” or “Die!” Would I really have to kill, or die? What in the world would I do? Given such orders, how can one continue to believe in one’s teacher?

  First of all, one realizes that the teacher in whom one believes would never instruct one to do something unethical. It follows, then, that when the teacher uses the words kill and die, the words have a hidden, deeper meaning, one that the student does not yet understand.

  Then, accepting that the words have another, deeper meaning, yet not knowing what that meaning is, the student finds himself or herself assailed by a great doubt. Driven by this doubt, spurred on by
the constant sense of a problem, they proceed desperately with concentrated practice. This, in Zen, is what it means to believe.

  Phrases such as “Kill the Buddha, kill the ancestors” and even “Kill your father, kill your mother” show up throughout the writings of the Zen sect. “Belief” in Zen is working through, in practice, exactly what on earth this all means. Regardless of what one is told, regardless of the task assigned, one tenaciously carries it through, without complaint. This diligence characterized the first stage of my life as a novice monk.

  This is not to say, though, that I performed all my assignments creditably or even competently. For example, there was the time, on my first day, when I was told to wipe the floors. I sat down on my knees on the wood floor with my legs folded under me and proceeded to wipe from right to left, holding the rag in one hand. However, the wooden floors of a Zen temple are far more vast than those of any ordinary house.

  “You fool! How many days do you plan to spend wiping that floor? This is the way you wipe a floor.” When I saw Roshi down on all fours, his bottom up in the air, pressing the rag to the floor with both hands, and running swiftly up and down the corridor, I felt as if the scales obscuring my vision were dropping from my eyes.

  In the literature department in high school, my classmates and I had read philosophy and ushered in many a new dawn debating with each other. Talk about theorizing! I had put in my time at that particular activity long before I reached the temple. But that was all talk, and in reality, I couldn’t even wipe the floor properly, could I? I felt terribly ashamed of myself when I realized this. I decided then that I would try to do my very best. But I still did not know toward what, exactly, I should direct my energy.

  During the day a group of young people would come to the temple from the outside. If one of them took a bamboo broom and commenced to sweep the garden, I would swoop down on him, announcing, “Here, I’ll do that!”— and grab the broom out of his hands. If another started to wipe the floor, I would soon be down on her, grabbing the rag, “Here, I’ll do that!” If another started to make a fire under the bath, I would fly in to take over the job, declaring, “Here, I’ll do that!”

  Finally, I had them all shouting at me, “Can’t you find a job without grabbing somebody else’s?”

  I could not, for the life of me, understand just what I was doing wrong. That is because I could not work things out for myself, through my own efforts.

  Now, when students come to my temple to do zazen, the first job I give them is to make the bath. Bearing in mind that students occasionally light fires under empty baths, I initially probe them with a few questions.

  “You are going to make the bath. What is the first thing you do?”

  Likely as not, the answer comes, “Light the fire.”

  “You’re going to do that to me, are you?” I ask.

  “Oh, no. First I’ll fill the tub with water,” the student will say.

  “You’re going to put in water, just like that?” This puzzles them because they have no concept of cleaning the bath first. After covering the basics—clean the bath, fill the tub with water, check the water level, put the lid on, make the fire—I come back to find them beside the fuel feed hole, looking perplexed. Peeking inside, I see a couple of fat logs perched atop some newspaper cinders.

  “That’s not going to catch on fire, is it? Hadn’t you better use smaller sticks of wood?” I ask.

  “But there aren’t any smaller sticks of wood.”

  “Well, what about splitting some?”

  “I don’t know where the hatchet is.”

  “Well, if you don’t know where it is, why don’t you ask?”

  After all this, the young student is set to splitting firewood. But that is not to say that a blazing fire is imminent. Smoke pours from the hole, and the fire refuses to take off. When I come to survey the situation, I see that the ash from the previous fire has not been removed. So I say, “Hey, what is this thing called a fire anyway?”

  “Well, it’s the combusting of oxygen and matter.”

  “Where is the oxygen?”

  “It’s in the air.”

  “So why, then, don’t you get rid of this ash so that the air can enter freely? And if the chimney is stopped up, you ought to clean that as well.”

  If I say this, the young student will climb to the roof to clean the chimney, but on their way back down they will, without fail, stomp on and break two or three tiles.

  But I cannot get angry at young people like this because I was exactly like them at one time!

  between teacher and student

  ONE MORNING during the novice period of my training, Miss Okamoto asked Zuigan Roshi the following question during teatime: “Roshi, who was greater, Kosen Roshi or Soen Roshi?”

  Some background information is needed here. I will give it in the form of a chart.

  I am the “Soko” who appears last on the list, and Sesso is my elder brother in the Dharma. We both had Zuigan Roshi for our master, and his master was Sokatsu Roshi. If you trace the line all the way back, you arrive at Shakyamuni Buddha.

  In the Zen school, the lineage of those great monks who have carried through with their training to attain satori is clearly known. This religious experience must be certified by the master, and only those who receive the seal of transmission of the Dharma enter into the lineage. We know exactly who has received the seal from which master, and these successions are carefully preserved. In the Rinzai sect, the honorific title “Roshi” is used to refer to persons within these lines.

  Kosen Roshi, who appears on the lineage chart above, refers to Kosen Imakita, an outstanding master who was the abbot of Engakuji in Kamakura from the latter days of the Tokugawa Period into the Meiji Period in the nineteenth century. During the time of the persecution of Buddhists, he rose above sectarianism and spared no efforts to revive Buddhism. There is a book about him by the layman D. T. Suzuki, who greatly admired him.

  Kosen Roshi’s Dharma successor, Soen Shaku Roshi, who was the first to propagate Zen in America, also served as abbot of Engakuji in Kamakura. Soseki Natsume was one of the many who practiced Zen under this roshi.

  It was these two masters to whom Miss Okamoto referred when she asked who was greater.

  Zuigan Roshi, very austere and not one to joke, answered with a solemn face, “The master Kosen was greater.”

  “Well, then, of Soen Roshi and Sokatsu Roshi, who was greater?” continued Miss Okamoto.

  The Sokatsu Roshi to whom she now referred was one who chose not to live in a famous temple after he received the Dharma sanction to teach, but, instead, connected himself with a tiny hermitage called Ryoboan, in the Yanaka district of Tokyo, where he worked with lay householders in Zen practice. The first women to become famous for their outspoken stance on women’s rights in Japan were among his many followers.This Sokatsu Roshi was one of the subjects in question, but Zuigan Roshi replied, “The master Soen was greater.”

  “Oh, Roshi, that’s terrible! Isn’t the lineage gradually thinning down to nothing? Well, who is greater, Sokatsu Roshi or Zuigan Roshi?” Miss Okamoto persisted.

  Zuigan Roshi, responding to the lady’s concern that the lineage was thinning down to nothing, promptly answered, “I’m greater.”

  Up to this point, it had always been the master who had been greater. But now when he comes to his own place in line he says, “I am greater than my teacher.”

  This thoroughly pleased Miss Okamoto, who then asked, “Well, in that case, Roshi, who is greater, you or your disciple, Mister Sesso?”

  At this, I thought I would burst out laughing. Zuigan Roshi, who had already filled the posts of abbot of Myoshinji and Daitokuji, was a high peak in the Zen world. His disciple, Mister Sesso, who did not even have his own temple yet, was living as a mere caretaker in a small hermitage inside the Myoshinji complex, just keeping the garden clean. Because I did not as yet have any insight into human beings’ intrinsic qualities and could only judge in terms of their s
ocial positions, I thought that comparing Zuigan Roshi and Mister Sesso was like comparing the moon and a turtle. There was simply no contest, and I was right on the verge of laughing out loud.

  Zuigan Roshi, without stopping for even a second to consider, said, “Well, we don’t know that yet.”

  When these words hit me, my face, which had been ready to burst into laughter, immediately straightened, and now, in spite of myself, I thought I was going to cry. I felt so blessed to be with this teacher. He might scold me unmercifully, call me worthless, and say that I am not fit to talk in front of anybody, but he always has his eye out to the future of his disciples. I realized that, even faced with my present immaturity, he believed in what I could become in a year, in two years, ten years, twenty years. Always bearing in mind my potential future form as well as my present one, he worked with me. I could feel this come through strongly when he said, “Well, we don’t know that yet.”

  As it turns out, this Mister Sesso managed, some years later, to live up to these words, becoming the successor of Zuigan Roshi and then the abbot of Daitokuji. Following the instructions of Zuigan Roshi, I was able to stay by Sesso Roshi’s side for many years, and I later became his Dharma successor. At the time of his death, Sesso Roshi had achieved a towering state of mind, not inferior to that of his own teacher.

  So, that single episode that one morning at teatime enabled me, at last, to trust my teacher from the bottom of my heart.

  But even so, I still didn’t seem to get anywhere in my practice.

  that’s between him and me

  ONE MORE ANECDOTE will further illustrate trust between teacher and student. Soen Roshi had a disciple named Josho Ota. This disciple later went on to become the abbot of Engakuji and then to serve as abbot of Daitokuji, but the incident I will relate occurred when he was still in training under Soen Roshi.