Part 2

“The master told me that when he was studying with Enkwan, the Emperor Tai Chung came dressed as a monk. The master happened to be in the chapel prostrating himself before an image of Buddha. The Emperor, who thought he had learnt the lesson of Zen idealism, said to him: ‘There is nothing to be got from Buddha, nothing from the Church, nothing from Man; for nothing exists. What do you mean by praying at your age?’

“Ōbaku answered him: ‘I seek nothing of Buddha, the Church, or of Man. I am in the habit of praying.’ The Emperor said: ‘What do you do it for?’ Ōbaku lost patience and struck him with his fist. ‘You rude fellow,’ cried the Emperor. ‘Since nothing exists, what difference does it make to you whether I am rude or polite?’ and Ōbaku struck him again. The Emperor retreated hastily.”

In his old age Ōbaku visited his native village and stayed a year in his mother’s house, without revealing his identity. After he had set out again for his monastery, his mother suddenly realised that he was her son and went in pursuit of him. She reached the shore of a certain river, only to see him disembarking on the other side. Thereupon she lost her reason and flung herself into the water.

Ōbaku threw a lighted torch after her and recited the following verses:

_May the wide river dry at its source, to its very bed If here the crime of matricide has been done; When one son becomes a priest, the whole family is born again in Heaven; If that is a lie, all that Buddha promised is a lie._

Henceforward the throwing of a lighted torch into the bier became part of the Zen funeral ceremony; it was accompanied by the reciting of the above verses. Probably formula, ritual, and story alike belong to a period much more ancient than Buddhism.

In the seventeenth century a Chinese priest named Ingen[8] carried the teaching of Ōbaku to Japan, where it now possesses nearly 700 temples.

[8] 1592-1673 A.D.

BASO.

Baso was a master of the ninth century. One day he was sitting with his feet across the garden-path. A monk came along with a wheel-barrow. “Tuck in your feet,” said the monk. “What has been extended cannot be retracted,” answered Baso. “What has been started cannot be stopped,” cried the monk and pushed the barrow over Baso’s feet. The master hobbled to the monastery and seizing an axe called out “Have any of you seen the rascal who hurt my feet?” The monk who had pushed the barrow then came out and stood “with craned head.” The master laid down his axe.

To understand this story we must realise that the wheel-barrow is here a symbol of the Wheel of Life and Death, which, though every spoke of it is illusion, cannot be disregarded till we have destroyed the last seed of phenomenal perception in us.

RINZAI.

Ōbaku, as we have seen, taught wisdom with his fists. When the novice Rinzai came to him and asked him what was the fundamental idea of Buddhism, Ōbaku hit him three times with his stick. Rinzai fled and presently met the monk Daigu.

_Daigu_: Where do you come from?

_Rinzai_: From Ōbaku.

_Daigu_: And what stanza did he lecture upon?

_Rinzai_: I asked him thrice what was the fundamental doctrine of Buddhism and each time he hit me with his stick. Please tell me if I did something I ought not to have done?

_Daigu_: You go to Ōbaku and torture him by your questions, and then ask if you have done wrong!

At that moment Rinzai had a Great Enlightenment.

Rinzai substituted howling for Ōbaku’s manual violence. He shouted meaningless syllables at his disciples; roared like a lion or bellowed like a bull. This “howling” became a regular part of Zen practice, and may be compared to the yelling of the American Shakers. Upon his deathbed Rinzai summoned his disciples round him and asked which of them felt capable of carrying on his work. Sanshō volunteered to do so. “How will you tell people what was Rinzai’s teaching?” asked Rinzai. Sanshō threw out his chest and roared in a manner which he thought would gratify the master. But Rinzai groaned and cried out, “To think that such a blind donkey should undertake to hand on my teaching!”

It was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that Zen most completely permeated Chinese thought. Upon the invasion of the Mongols[9] many Zen monks from Eastern China took refuge in Japan; the same thing happened during the Manchu invasion in the seventeenth century. But by that time Zen had a serious philosophic rival.

[9] On the attitude of the Mongol rulers to Zen, see an article by Prof. Kunishita, _Tōyōgakuhō_, xi., 4, 87.

In the fifteenth century the philosopher Wang Yang-ming began to propagate a doctrine which, in all but names, strongly resembled the philosophic side of Zen. He taught that in each one of us is a “higher nature,” something which, borrowing a phrase from Mencius, he called “Good Knowledge.” Of this inner nature he speaks in exactly the same terms as the Zen teachers spoke of their “Buddha immanent in man’s heart.” He even uses the same kind of doggerel-verse as a medium of teaching.

Rigid Confucianists, who would not have listened to any doctrine of professedly Buddhist origin, were able through Wang Yang-ming’s tact to accept the philosophy of Zen without feeling that they were betraying the Confucian tradition. The followers of Yang-ming are to-day very numerous both in China and Japan. They cultivate introspection, but not the complete self-hypnosis of Zen.

In China, where Zen is almost forgotten, the followers of this later doctrine are not even aware of its derivation.

ZEN AND ART.

I said at the beginning of this paper that Zen is often mentioned by writers on Far Eastern Art. The connection between Zen and art is important, not only because of the inspiration which Zen gave to the artist, but also because through Zen was obtained a better understanding of the psychological conditions under which art is produced than has prevailed in any other civilisation.

Art was regarded as a kind of Zen, as a delving down into the Buddha that each of us unknowingly carries within him, as Benjamin carried Joseph’s cup in his sack. Through Zen we annihilate Time and see the Universe not split up into myriad fragments, but in its primal unity. Unless, says the Zen æsthetician, the artist’s work is imbued with this vision of the subjective, non-phenomenal aspect of life, his productions will be mere toys.

I do not mean to suggest that Chinese artists found in Zen a short cut to the production of beauty. Zen aims at the annihilation of consciousness, whereas art is produced by an interaction of conscious and unconscious faculties. How far such an interaction can be promoted by the psychic discipline of Zen no layman can judge; moreover the whole question of the artist’s psychology is controversial and obscure.

Perhaps it is not even very important that the artist himself should have a sound æsthetic; but it is of the utmost importance to the artist that the public should have some notion of the conditions under which art can be produced--should have some key to the vagaries of a section of humanity which will in any case always be found troublesome and irritating.

Such a key Zen supplied, and it is in the language of Zen that, after the twelfth century, art is usually discussed in China and Japan.

THE ROKUTSŪJI SCHOOL.

One institution, about which till recently very little was known, seems to have been an important factor in the propagation of Zen art and ideas. About 1215 A.D. a Zen priest came from the far south-west of China to Hangchow, the Capital, and there refounded a ruined monastery, the Rokutsūji, which stood on the shores of the famous Western Lake. His name was Mokkei. He seems to have been the first to practise the swift, ecstatic type of monochrome which is associated with Zen. In hurried swirls of ink he sought to record before they faded visions and exaltations produced whether by the frenzy of wine, the stupor of tea, or the vacancy of absorption.

Sometimes his design is tangled and chaotic; sometimes as in his famous “Persimmons,”[10] passion has congealed into a stupendous calm.

[10] See Kümmel, _Die Kunst Ostasiens_ Pl. 118.

Of his fellow-workers the best known is Rasō, a painter of birds and flowers. Ryōkai, once a fashionable painter, left the Court and with his pupil Rikaku worked in the manner of Mokkei.

Examples of Ryōkai’s work before and after his conversion are still preserved in Japan.

Finally, about the middle of the fourteenth century, a Japanese priest came to China and, under circumstances which I shall describe in an appendix, confusingly became Mokkei II. It may be that it was he who sent back to his own country some of the numerous pictures signed Mokkei which are now in Japan. Which of them are by Mokkei and which by Mokuan is a problem which remains to be solved.

This Zen art did not flourish long in China, nor in all probability do many specimens of it survive there. But in Japan it was a principal source of inspiration to the great painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Sesshū himself is the direct descendant of Mokkei; as in a decadent way are Kanō masters such as Tsunenobu.

Zen paintings are of two kinds. (1) Representations of animals, birds and flowers, in which the artist attempted to identify himself with the object depicted, to externise its inner Buddha. These were achieved not by study from the life, as the early Sung nature-pieces have been, but by intense and concentrated visualisation of the subject to be painted. This mental picture was rapidly transferred to paper before the spell of concentration (samādhi) was broken. (2) Illustrations of episodes in the lives of the great Zen teachers. This branch of Zen art was essentially dramatic. It sought to express the characters of the persons involved, subtly to reveal the grandeur of soul that lay hidden behind apparent uncouthness or stupidity. Typical of this kind of painting are the pictures of “Tanka burning the Image.”

One night Tanka, a Zen priest, stayed as a guest at an ordinary Buddhist monastery. There was no firewood in his cell. As the night was cold he went into the chapel, seized a wooden statue of Shākyamuni and, chopping it up, made himself a comfortable fire. To him the idol of Buddha was a mere block of wood; his indignant hosts took a different view. The controversy is the same as that which occupies the central place in the Nō play _Sotoba Komachi_.

There is another aspect of Zen which had an equally important effect on art. The Buddha-nature is immanent not in Man only, but in everything that exists, animate or inanimate. Stone, river and tree are alike parts of the great hidden Unity. Thus Man, through his Buddha-nature or universalised consciousness, possesses an intimate means of contact with Nature. The songs of birds, the noise of waterfalls, the rolling of thunder, the whispering of wind in the pine-trees--all these are utterances of the Absolute.

Hence the connection of Zen with the passionate love of Nature which is so evident in Far Eastern poetry and art.

Personally I believe that this passion for Nature worked more favourably on literature than on painting. The typical Zen picture, dashed off in a moment of exaltation--perhaps a moonlit river expressed in three blurs and a flourish--belongs rather to the art of calligraphy than to that of painting.

In his more elaborate depictions of nature the Zen artist is led by his love of nature into that common pitfall of lovers--sentimentality. The forms of Nature tend with him to function not as forms but as symbols.

Something resembling the mystic belief which Zen embraces is found in many countries and under many names. But Zen differs from other religions of the same kind in that it admits only one means by which the perception of Truth can be attained. Prayer, fasting, asceticism--all are dismissed as useless, giving place to one single resource, the method of self-hypnosis which I have here described.

I have, indeed, omitted any mention of an important adjunct of Zen, namely tea-drinking, which was as constant a feature in the life of Zen monasteries as it is here in the régime of charwomen and girl-clerks. I have not space to describe the various tea-ceremonies. The tendency of monasteries was to create in them as in every part of daily life a more and more elaborate ritual, calculated to give some pattern to days otherwise devoid of any incident. We possess minute descriptions of every ceremony--the initiation of novices, the celebration of birth and death anniversaries of the Patriarchs, the procedure in cases of sickness, madness, disobedience, disappearance or death of monks; the selection and investiture of abbots; the lectures, liturgies and sessions which constituted the curriculum of Zen instruction.

In China decay set in after the fifteenth century. The Zen monasteries became almost indistinguishable from those of popular, idolatrous Buddhism. In Japan, on the other hand, Zen has remained absolutely distinct and is now the favourite creed of the educated classes. It has not hitherto conducted any propaganda in Europe, whereas the Amida Sect has sent out both missionaries and pamphlets. But I believe that Zen would find many converts in England. Something rather near it we already possess. Quakerism, like Zen, is a non-dogmatic religion, laying stress on the doctrine of Immanence. But whereas the Quakers seek communion with the Divine Spark in corporate meditation and deliberately exploit the mysterious potencies of crowd-psychology--the Zen adept probes in solitude (or at least without reference to his neighbour) for the Buddha within him.

In cases where a Quaker meeting passes in silence, the members having meditated quietly for a whole hour, a very near approach to a Zen gathering has been made. But more often than not the Holy Spirit, choosing his mouthpiece with an apparent lack of discrimination, quickly descends upon some member of the meeting. The ineffable, which Zen wisely refused to express, is then drowned in a torrent of pedestrian oration.

Some, then, may turn to Zen as a purer Quakerism. Others will be attracted to it by the resemblance of its doctrines to the hypotheses of recent psychology. The Buddha consciousness of Zen exactly corresponds to the Universal Consciousness which, according to certain modern investigators, lies hid beneath the personal Consciousness. Such converts will probably use a kind of applied Zen, much as the Japanese have done; that is to say, they will not seek to spend their days in complete Samādhi, but will dive occasionally, for rest or encouragement, into the deeper recesses of the soul.

It is not likely that they will rest content with the traditional Eastern methods of self-hypnosis. If certain states of consciousness are indeed more valuable than those with which we are familiar in ordinary life--then we must seek them unflinchingly by whatever means we can devise. I can imagine a kind of dentist’s chair fitted with revolving mirrors, flashing lights, sulphurous haloes expanding and contracting--in short a mechanism that by the pressure of a single knob should whirl a dustman into Nirvāna.

Whether such states of mind are actually more valuable than our ordinary consciousness is difficult to determine. Certainly no one has much right to an opinion who has not experienced them. But something akin to Samādhi--a sudden feeling of contact with a unity more real than the apparent complexity of things--is probably not an uncommon experience. The athlete, the creative artist, the lover, the philosopher--all, I fancy, get a share of it, not when seeking to escape from the visible world; but rather just when that world was seeming to them most sublimely real.

To seek by contemplation of the navel or of the tip of the nose a repetition of spiritual experiences such as these seems to us inane; and indeed the negative trance of Zen is very different from the positive ecstasies to which I have just referred. I say that it is different; but how do I know? “Zen,” said Bodhidharma, “cannot be described in words nor chronicled in books”; and I have no other experience of Zen. If I _knew_, I might transmit to you my knowledge, but it would have to be by a direct spiritual communication, symbolised only by a smile, a gesture, or the plucking of a flower.

I need not therefore apologise for having given a purely external and historical account of Zen, a creed whose inner mysteries are admittedly beyond the scope of words.

APPENDIX I.

Reproductions of Zen Paintings in Japanese art publications. (The _Kokka_ and the other publications here referred to may be seen at the Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum; and at the Print Room of the British Museum.)

MOKKEI--_Kokka._ 37, 112, 122, 177, 185, 238, 242, 265, 268, 291, 293, 314.

RASŌ.--_Shimbi Taikwan_ XX.

MOKUAN.--(Mokkei II).--_Kokka_ 295, _Shimbi Taikwan_ Vol. IX. (Nos. 21 and 22 in the collection of Chinese Paintings at the British Museum are probably by Mokuan.)

RYŌKAI.--_Kokka_ 40, 114, 145, 152, 220, 227, 229.

RIKAKU.--_Kokka_ 269.

MUJUN.--(An important thirteenth century Zen writer.) _Kokka_ 243.

INDRA.--(A Hangchow priest, presumably an Indian; flourished c. 1280.) _Kokka_ 35, 110, 223, 310. _Shimbi Taikwan_ IX.

APPENDIX II.

MOKUAN.

The Nikkōshū[11], a diary by the priest Gidō, has the following entry under the year 1378 (month and day uncertain):

To-day Donfu[12] came, and we fell to talking of Mokuan. It seems that he was once known as Ze-itsu. But on becoming a pupil of the priest Kenzan[13], he changed his name to Mokuan. Afterwards he went to China and entered the Honkakuji[14], where he became the disciple of Ryō-an[15] and was made librarian. Here he published at his own expense (lit. “selling his shoes”) the _Second Collection of Sayings by Korin_.

Subsequently he lived at the Shōtenji at Soochow, and was warden there under Nanso[16], dying soon afterwards.

When he first came to China he spent some time at the Jōji Monastery at Hangchow and from there visited the Rokutsūji on the shores of the Western Lake. This monastery was inhabited by the followers of Mokkei. The abbot greeted Mokuan with a smile, saying to him: “Last night I dreamt that our founder Mokkei came back again. You must be his reincarnation”; and he gave to Mokuan Mokkei’s two seals, white and red. Henceforward he was known as Mokkei the Second.

[11] See my _Nō Plays of Japan_ (Allen & Unwin, 1921), p. 19. The passage here translated is taken not from the current, two-chapter abridgement of Gidō’s Diary, but from the _Kokuchoshū_, a miscellany by the 15th century priest Zuikei, who quoted many passages from the lost portion of the Diary. See Mr. Saga Tōshū, _Shina Gaku_, I., 1.

[12] 1314-1384.

[13] Died 1323. Both he and Donfu were Japanese priests who visited China.

[14] At Chia-hsing in Chehkiang.

[15] Entered this temple in 1334.

[16] Visited Japan; was at the Shōtenji from 1342-1345.

APPENDIX III.

Reproductions of paintings illustrating Zen legend.

BODHIDHARMA.

(1) With tightly closed lips, as he appeared before the Emperor of China in 520. _Masterpieces of Sesshū_, Pl. 47.

(2) Crossing the Yangtze on a reed. Perhaps the best example may be seen not in a reproduction, but in No. 22 of the original Chinese Paintings at the British Museum.

(3) Sitting with his face to the wall. He sat thus in silence for nine years in the Shōrin Monastery on Mount Sung. _Kokka_ 333.

EKA.

Second Patriarch of the sect. Severed his own arm and presented it to Bodhidharma. In spite of his fanaticism (or because of it) the Founder did not at first regard him with complete confidence and recommended to him the study of the Langkāvatāra Sūtra, not considering him ripe for complete, non-dogmatic Zen. Eka waiting waist-deep in the snow for the Founder to instruct him. Masterpieces of Sesshū, Pl. 45.

ENŌ.

Sixth Patriarch. See above, p 15. _Kokka_, 289, 297.

TOKUSAN, died 865 A.D.

_Shimbi Taikwan_, I, 13, shows him with his famous Zen stick. He is also sometimes depicted failing to answer an old market-woman’s riddle; and tearing up his commentary on the Diamond Sūtra.

TANKA.

A painting by Indra (_Kokka_ 173) shows him burning the wooden statue of Buddha at the Erin Temple.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

(1) EUROPEAN.

The only writer who has made extracts from the works of Bodhidharma is Père Wieger, whose remarks (in his _Histoire des Croyances religieuses en Chine_, pp. 517-528) show a robust and likeable bigotry.

Of Zen literature he says: “Nombre d’in-folio remplis de réponses incohérentes, insensées.... Ce ne sont pas, comme on l’a supposé, des allusions à des affaires intérieures, qu’il faudrait connaître pour pouvoir comprendre. Ce sont des exclamations échappées à des abrutis, momentanément tirés de leur coma.”

For the tea-ceremony in Japan see Okakura’s _Book of Tea_ (Foulis, 1919). The “military” Zen of Japan is well described by Nukariya Kaiten in his _The Religion of the Samurai, 1913_.

(2) NATIVE.

Most of this paper is derived from the section on Zen (Series II, Vol. 15, seq.) in the “Supplement to the Collection of Buddhist Scriptures,” _Dai Nihon Zoku Zō Kyō_.

Much of the information with regard to the Rokutsūji School is taken from the article by Mr. Saga to which I have already referred. For the Rokutsūji (“Temple of the Six Penetrations”) see _Hsien Shun Lin-an Chih_ (“Topography of Hangchow, 1265-1275 A.D.”), ch. 78, f. 9 recto.

I have also used Yamada’s _Zenshū Jiten_ (Dictionary of Zen) and the _Hekiganroku_, edited by Sōyen, 1920.

SHORT INDEX.

(Chinese pronunciations given in brackets.)

Amida, 8.

Baso (Ma Tsu), 20.

Bodhidharma (Ta-mo), 8 _seq._, 29.

Bodhisattvas, 8.

Buddhapriya (Chio-ai), 11.

_Dai Bonten Monbutsu-ketsugi Kyō_, 14.

Daigu (Ta-yü), 20.

Diamond Sūtra, 15.

Dhyāna, see Zen. Also, 10.

Eka (Hui-k’o), 29.

Enkwan (Yen-kuan), 14.

Enō (Hui-nēng), 15, 29.

Fujaku (P’u-chi), 17.

Haikyū (P’ei Hsiu), 18.

_Hokkekyō_, see _Saddharma_, etc.

Honkakuji (Pēn-chio-ssŭ), 28.

Joji (Ching-tz’u), 28.

Kern, 8.

Kōnin (Hung-jēn), 15.

Korin (Ku-lin), 28.

Mahāyāna, 7.

Mokkei (Mu-ch’i), 22, 27.

Mujun (Wu-chun), 27.

Nanso (Nan-ch’u), 28.

Ōbaku (Huang Po), 18.

Okakura, 30.

Rasō (Lo-ch’uang), 23, 27.

Rikaku (Li Ch’üeh), 27.

Rinzai (Lin-chi), 20.

Rokutsūji (Liu-t’ung-ssŭ), 22.

Ryō-an (Liao-an), 28.

Ryōkai (Liang K’ai), 23, 27.

_Saddharma Pundarīka Sūtra_, 8.

Saga T. 28, 30.

Samādhi (San-mei), 12.

Sanshō (San-shēng), 21.

Shākyamuni, 7.

_Shina Gaku_, 28, 30.

Shinshū (Shēn-hsiu), 16.

Shōtenji (Ch’ēng-t’ien-ssŭ), 28.

Tanka (Tan-hsia), 23, 29.

Tendai (T’ien-t’ai), 8.

Tokusan (Tē-shan), 29.

Wieger, 30.

Wu Hou, 17.

Zen (Ch’an), 7, etc.

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Transcriber's Note

A duplicate title page has been removed from the text.

"Externise" on p. 23 is a variant form of "externalise", and has been left as printed.

The diacritics in "Saddharma Pundarīka Sūtra" on p. 8 were marked in pen on the printed copy, and may not have been printed.