Extract :
POST-SATORI PRACTICE (1709—1716, AGES 24—31)
During the travels that followed his return to Shoin-ji, it became clear to Hakuin that his attainment was still incomplete. He had no doubts about the depth of his enlightenment, he was sure that his grasp of koans and Zen writings was sharp and clear, yet he found it impossible to sustain the tranquillity he experienced in the quietness of the Zen hall when he returned to the tumult of everyday life.
“I feel like a physician who possesses a wonderful knowledge of medicine but has no effective means of curing an actual sickness,” he lamented. “How can I possibly hope to help rid other sentient beings of their afflictions as long as I still suffer from illness myself?” With renewed determination, he now “grasped the whip in hand and spurred the dead ox forward once again.” The focus of his post-satori training was directed henceforth to achieving the total integration of the two aspects of his life, the quiet and the active.
He was in the provinces north of Edo in the winter of 1rn, his twenty-sixth year, when word reached him that his teacher Sokudô was terminally ill and had no one to care for him. He immediately returned to the Daishô-ji to nurse his old teacher.3 He stayed into the following year, preparing Sokudô’s food and medicine but devoting all his free time to zazen—”never sitting for less than eight sticks of incense each night” —and to reading widely in Zen and Buddhist literature Illuminating his mind with the teachings of the ancients.” Hakuin stayed until summer, when an unexpected offer of help from a fellow monk allowed him to return to the ShOin-ji. It was there in late summer he received the news that Sokudô had passed away.
Hakuin now set out once again on his travels. This time, they took him back to western Japan—Ise and Wakasa Provinces and the areas around Kyoto and Osaka. Among the temples he visited was the Hôun-ji, an Obaku temple in Kawachi Province, where he went to seek the advice of the eighty-one-year-old master Egoku Domyo. Although the account of his interview with Egoku in Wild Ivy has Hakuin asking Egoku how to deal with his “Zen sickness,” according to the Biography, he sought help in overcoming the lack of freedom he still felt when he pursued his practice amid the busy come and go of daily life. Although it is difficult to say with certainty which of these accounts is correct, Egoku’s suggested course of action—”Go and live in the mountains and be prepared to remain there, withering away with the trees and plants, until you find your way through”—would seem more appropriate as a remedy for Zen sickness.
For the next year or so, acting on Egoku’s advice, Hakuin wandered from place to place, searching without success for a hermitage where he could isolate himself for a solitary retreat. One of the first places he visited was the Inryo-ji, a Soto temple in Izumi Province. There the abbot and senior priests were reportedly so impressed by Hakuin that they asked him to stay on and become the resident priest. Hakuin seems to have given the offer serious consideration. But he had difficulty arriving at a decision, and finally, with the matter still unresolved, he set out for other parts.
Although the practice methods of contemporary Soto teachers come in for a good deal of extremely hostile comment later in Hakuin’s writings, during his travels, he seems to have visited many Soto temples. Dogen, the founder of the school, is frequently quoted and always mentioned in terms of the greatest respect. Had Hakuin accepted the offer from the Inryo-ji, it is intriguing to reflect how a person with his extraordinary energy and talents might have influenced the course of later Soto Zen.
In spring of 1715, —at the age of thirty—, well over a year after the start of his search, Hakuin finally succeeded in locating a remote spot deep in the mountains of Mino Province suitable for a solitary retreat. There, living by himself in a tiny hut completely isolated from the world, subsisting on a ration of half a handful of rice each day, he began to carry out the instructions Egoku had given him to “wither away with the trees and plants.” |
