c. 1470; illustrated edition 1806 2026
This is an AI modernization of The Illustrated Life of Dōgen into contemporary English. The original is available from National Institute of Japanese Literature (1817 impression) and the National Archives of Japan (1806). Also available as an epub.
Dōgen brought the Sōtō school of Zen to Japan. He was born in Kyoto in 1200, sailed to China at twenty-four, came home in 1227, built his monastery in the mountains of Echizen in the 1240s, and died in Kyoto in 1253. Two of his own works are in this collection as The Practice Instructions: a manual for sitting still, and ten sections of advice to students. This book is the record of his life, and it is the oldest one that exists.
It was written around 1470 by Kenzei, the thirteenth abbot of Eiheiji, the monastery Dōgen founded. Kenzei says at the start why he wrote it as he did. The facts were already on record, in the temple chronicle and in Dōgen's collected teachings, but those were in Chinese, the learned language. He wrote his in plain Japanese, in the simple syllabary, so that "the children and the unlettered of this last age" could read it.
What makes it unusual is that it is built out of documents. Kenzei copied his evidence into the text and left it there: letters, the permits Dōgen travelled on, a sworn statement by farmers who saw a coloured cloud over the mountain, the kitchen and storehouse rules in Dōgen's own hand, the note his successor wrote when he stored the broken paper screens above a ceiling to prove what had happened, the custody record of a robe through four generations of monks. The miracles are in the record on the same terms as the receipts, and told in the same flat voice: a god with a walking stick who gives him medicine on a road in China, a mountain deity who sits down and helps him finish copying a book before his ship sails. A reader should know in advance that Kenzei does not sort the two kinds of thing, and that this edition has not sorted them either.
The text read here is the illustrated edition printed from woodblocks in 1806, in which the monk Menzan's corrected version of Kenzei was set out with seventy-one pictures. The men who made it explain themselves in a preface: they added the pictures so that people who could not read might see the founder's life too, and they say plainly that they composed the pictures rather than reporting them — "adding flowers where we render spring, bringing in the moon where we draw autumn." So a plate's season, its weather and its furniture are choices of the artist. The captions here describe what is drawn and do not claim it as fact about the event.
Everything Kenzei set down is here, with all the documents. What has been left out is Menzan's scholarly apparatus — his notes on sources and his arguments with other historians. The chapter divisions are new. Dates are given by their Japanese era name with the Western year beside them.
Chapter One: The Boy in the Capital
Chapter Two: Mount Hiei, and the Question Nobody Could Answer
Chapter Three: Kenninji, and Myozen
Chapter Six: Wandering, and the Plum Blossom
Chapter Nine: Koshoji at Fukakusa
Chapter Twelve: The Five-Coloured Cloud
Chapter Fourteen: The Mountain Years
Chapter Fifteen: The Last Teaching
Chapter Sixteen: The Road to Kyoto
Afterword: How the Illustrated Edition Was Made
The founder of the Soto school of Zen in Japan, and of the great monastery of Eiheiji in the mountains of Echizen, was a monk named Dogen. He lived from 1200 to 1253. This is the oldest full account of his life.
It was written in the fifteenth century by a monk called Kenzei, who was the thirteenth abbot of Eiheiji, at the request of one of the temple's lay patrons. Kenzei explains at the start why he wrote it the way he did. The facts of Dogen's life, he says, were already set down in the temple chronicle and in the collected record of Dogen's teachings. But those were in Chinese, the learned language. Kenzei wrote his in plain Japanese, in the simple syllabary, "so that the children and the unlettered of this last age may read them easily."
Three and a half centuries later, in 1806, another abbot, Menzan of Eifukuji, corrected Kenzei's text against every old document he could find, and a group of monks had it printed from woodblocks with seventy-one pictures. They also wrote a preface, and it says what they were trying to do:
Kenzei's record, written in the plain syllabary, was made in the first place for ordinary believers, and his kindness in it is complete. Beyond that, old Menzan corrected it and filled the gaps in it with the greatest care. And now we have gone further and dressed it out with pictures, setting them beside the text, so that people who cannot read may see it too. The whole intention is that ordinary men and women should have a way into it by this road: that they may be brought close to him, and hear the founder's deeds with their own ears.
And if anyone should accuse us of peddling cheap talk, we hope only that it may make a strong connection with them, whether they take it well or ill.
This English version is made in the same spirit and for the same reason. Everything Kenzei set down is here. The letters, the sworn statements, the verses and the temple rules that he copied into the record are here too, because they are the evidence the book is built on, and because Dogen's own voice is in them. What has been left out is Menzan's scholarly apparatus: his notes on sources, his arguments with other historians, and his appendix. A short account of how the illustrated edition came to be made is given at the end.
A word about names and dates. Japanese years were counted by the reigning era name, so 1244 was "the second year of Kangen." Both are given here. Ages are counted the old Japanese way, in which a child is one at birth. The hours of the day were named after the animals of the zodiac, and are given here as clock times. Dogen is called "the Founder" throughout, as Kenzei calls him.
Dogen was born in the capital, Kyoto, on the second day of the first month of the year 1200, the second year of the Shoji era, in the reign of Emperor Tsuchimikado. He came of the Minamoto, the noble house that descended from Emperor Murakami. On his father's side he was nine generations down from that emperor, and on another line eight generations down from the prince and poet known as the Later Chushoo.
While his mother was carrying him, a voice was heard in the air. It said: this child has had no equal in five hundred years. He will be a great sage, and he is born now to raise up the true teaching in Japan.
A fortune-teller who read faces was brought to look at the baby. He said: this is no ordinary child. He will certainly be a sage. The seven places of his body are full and even, his frame and his features are remarkable, and there are double pupils in his eyes.
The emperor of the day was Tsuchimikado, the first son of the retired emperor Go-Toba. The emperor's own mother was a daughter of Lord Michichika, Minister of the Interior, head of the Koga branch of the Minamoto, and it is said that a daughter of the same Lord Michichika was married to the shogun at Kamakura. The Founder's family had many branches at court and in the east, and from that you may judge how great a house it was.
In 1203, at four years old, he read the hundred poems of the Chinese poet Li Qiao. A famous old scholar saw him do it and praised him. This is not the ordinary run of children, he said. In time he will be a great vessel. He may properly be called a prodigy.
In 1206, at seven, he read the Book of Songs and the Zuo Commentary, two of the oldest and hardest books in the Chinese classics.
In 1207, in the winter of his eighth year, his mother died. At her funeral he sat and watched the smoke go up from the incense, and there, quietly, he understood that nothing in the world lasts. A deep wish to find the truth rose up in him.
In 1208, at nine, he read the Abhidharmakosa, the great encyclopedia of Buddhist philosophy by the Indian master Vasubandhu. People said his mind was as sharp as the bodhisattva of wisdom's. When he studied he copied the scholars of old who kept themselves awake by pricking their thighs with an awl, and he drove himself day and night beyond anything usual.
There was at that time a nobleman called Lord Matsudono, who had held the highest offices in the land, regent and chancellor both. He was a scholar without an equal, a clear mirror of past and present, as people said, and a teacher to kings and ministers. This man decided to adopt the Founder as his son. He meant to teach him the art of government, hand the great affairs of his house over to him, and make him one of the chief ministers of the court. He was already planning the boy's coming-of-age ceremony.
But the Founder said to himself: this is not what I want. Somehow or other I must leave the world and study the way.
So in the spring of 1212, the second year of Kenryaku, when he was thirteen, he slipped away in the middle of the night. He went first to the family's mountain villa at Kohata, and from there to the foot of Mount Hiei, the great monastery-mountain north-east of the capital, where he presented himself at the rooms of a monk named Ryokan Hogen. Ryokan was his mother's brother.
He asked his uncle to let him become a monk. Ryokan was astonished. Your coming-of-age is almost upon you, he said, and your family will be furious. What about that?
The boy answered:
When my mother died she gave me this charge: that I should find a way to leave the world and study the truth, and pray for her in the world to come. And I owe my grandmother and my aunts a very heavy debt for bringing me up. I mean to become a monk and pray for their salvation.
Ryokan wept, and gave his consent on the spot. He took the boy in, and sent him up the mountain to the Senko hermitage in Hannya valley, in the Shuryogon-in at Yokawa.
On the ninth day of the fourth month of 1213, the first year of Kenpo, when he was fourteen, his head was shaved for the first time by Koen, the abbot of the whole mountain. The next day, on the ordination platform of the great temple of Enryakuji, with Koen as his preceptor, he took the bodhisattva precepts and became a monk. From then on he studied everything the Tendai school taught: the secret teachings that had come from southern India, and the doctrines of the greater and the lesser vehicles of Buddhism.
Monks of Hiei all asked to be shaved on the eighth day of the fourth month, the Buddha's birthday. The Founder was shaved on the ninth because the whole mountain had debated his case and held the ceremony back, so that it took place at dawn on the ninth instead.
This abbot Koen lived at the Myohoin, below Yokawa in the village of Okugi. He was the head of the school in his generation, a scholar without equal in both the open and the secret teachings, and a monk of pure conduct who kept the rules.
In 1214, at fifteen, the Founder had been right through the sutras and the commentaries, and a doubt of his own came up in him. He put it like this. The open teachings and the secret teachings both say that every one of us is, from the very beginning, the Buddha-nature itself: that we are already what we are looking for. If that is so, then why did the buddhas of the past, the present and the future ever have to make up their minds to seek awakening, and go looking for it?
He put the question to the people around him, and nobody had an answer. So he was sent to Koin, the abbot of Miidera, the great temple by the lake below the mountain, and laid it before him.
Koin said: this is not a question to be answered lightly. Our school has its doctrine, but I am afraid the doctrine does not get to the bottom of it. You should go to Kenninji, in the eastern part of the capital, and study with Eisai. That was his advice.
So in the same year the Founder went to Kenninji and entered the household of Eisai, the master who had founded it and who had brought the Zen of the Rinzai school back from China. There, for the first time, he heard the Zen way of teaching.
In 1215, when the Founder was sixteen, Eisai died, on the fifth day of the seventh month, at the age of seventy-five. The Founder at once attached himself to Eisai's heir, Myozen, who was also called Butsuju-bo.
Eiheiji still has a portrait of Eisai and a portrait of Myozen. The Founder himself wrote the inscription on Myozen's portrait:
All his life he practised the way, and went straight through to what is close at hand. Since he was consumed, the face of things has been new. Tell me: how is it today? After the diamond flame, the true body shows itself.
His junior, Dogen, bows and inscribes this.
In Dogen's collected teachings there is a discourse he gave on the anniversary of Myozen's death, and from it you can see that Myozen was his own master, and that Myozen was the man he went to China with.
On the twelfth day of the ninth month of 1221, the third year of Jokyu, at Kenninji, he received from Myozen the certificate that a master gives an heir. Gikai, who was later the third abbot of Eiheiji, used to say that he had this from Ejo, the second abbot, who had heard it told.
In 1222, the first year of Joo, the Founder was twenty-three. By then he had already read the whole of the Buddhist canon twice through. In the same year Myozen gave him the great precepts that the buddhas and patriarchs hand down directly, one to the next. The discourse on the anniversary of Myozen's death is really a thanks for that gift of the precepts. You can see it in the words.
In 1223, when the Founder was twenty-four, Myozen made up his mind to go to China. But there was a difficulty. Myozen's own teacher, Myoyu, was dying, and begged him to stay. Years later the Founder told the story himself, and it was written down. Myozen called his disciples together and put the case to them.
That I should think of going to China at all, he said, I owe entirely to this teacher's kindness. But he has fallen gravely ill and is not likely to last long, and he presses me hard to stay. It is not easy to go against a teacher's word. Yet I mean to go to China now, without regard for my own life, to seek the truth; and that too is the bodhisattva's work of compassion for all living beings. Is there any reason, or is there not, for going against my teacher's word? Let each of you say what you think.
The disciples all said: give up this year's crossing. Your teacher's age and his illness have both reached their limit. Go next year instead. Then you will not have disobeyed him, and you will have kept faith with what you owe him. What harm can a year's delay do?
Then I, who was the most junior of them all, said: if it seems to you that your understanding of the truth will be just the same whether you go now or later, then you ought to stay.
Myozen said: just so. If the practice of the buddha-dharma is the same at the end as at the beginning, then I should expect to get free and reach the way by staying here. I said: if that is how it is with the rest of you, then he should stay.
When they had all given their opinions, Myozen said: no. These two things cannot be reconciled. For this crossing to China I have made up my mind, once and for all.
And in the end he went. That this was truly the mind of the way, and the reason of the thing, is plain.
The Founder went with Myozen. They left Higashiyama on the twenty-second day of the second month of 1223 and made for the port of Hakata in Chikuzen, on the western sea. In the last ten days of the third month they boarded a merchant ship and cast off.
Two travel permits for the journey were kept in the treasury at Eiheiji until they were destroyed in a fire in 1714. This was the first:
Myozen, resident monk of Kenninji, with two or three of his disciples, is going to the port of Hakata in order to cross to China. On the roads of the western circuit, at the harbours and the barriers and everywhere else, he is to be let through without hindrance. Issued by order of the retired emperor's office.
The twenty-first day of the second month, the second year of Joo. Sealed by the lieutenant of the Left Guard.
And the second, from the military government at Kamakura:
The monks of Kenninji, Myozen, Dogen, Kakunen, Ryobi and the rest, are going down to the western sea to cross over. Let them pass the barriers on the way and put in at the harbours without hindrance. So ordered.
The twenty-first day of the second month, the second year of Joo. Sealed, the Governor of Musashi. Sealed, the Governor of Sagami.
The monk Dogen went to China at twenty-four. He had in mind a poem that the great master Enchin of Miidera had made four hundred years earlier, when he set out for China himself:
I am one who goes out in the boat of the dharma. Let all the gods and all the buddhas look on me.
And he was of the same mind.
There was a great merchant family at Tsu, in the province of Ise, called Shibahara. Their own family record says that an ancestor of theirs, some twenty generations back, was trading overseas by ship at the time, and that it was his ship that carried the founder of Eiheiji across to China.
They made land at the beginning of the fourth month, at Mingzhou on the Chinese coast. By Chinese reckoning it was the sixteenth year of the Jiading era. For some weeks the Founder stayed on board the ship, and from there he went about looking at the monasteries on the nearby mountains and asking about the customs of the country.
In the middle of the fifth month, while he was still living on the ship, the cook of the great monastery of Ayuwang came aboard to buy mushrooms. They met, and talked, and the cook went away. The Founder told Myozen about it afterwards, and Myozen was delighted. That meeting is the one the Founder describes in his Instructions for the Cook, and it changed how he thought about everything.
In the autumn, in the seventh month of 1223, the Founder went up Mount Tiantong for the first time and was given a place in the monks' hall. The abbot then was Wuji Liaopai, a dharma-grandson of the great master Dahui.
But because the Founder and his companions were foreigners from what the Chinese considered a barbarous country, they were seated in the row of the newly ordained, at the very bottom. Myozen was forty years old. The Founder spoke up. In the house of the Buddha, he said, a monk's place goes by the years since he was ordained, not by his age in the world and not by the country he comes from. How is it that in the great Zen monasteries of China the seating should be turned upside down like this?
The whole mountain heard him, and nothing was done. The Founder pressed the point and would not let it drop. The senior monks answered: it is handed down that when monks came from Japan under the last dynasty, Kukai and Saicho and Eisai and the rest, every one of them was seated with the newly ordained. That is the old precedent, and it is not going to be altered now.
At that the Founder sighed and said to himself: that the standard set by a thousand buddhas should sink to the level of ordinary human feeling is a thing to grieve over. Shall I not put it right?
So he drew up a petition and laid his case before the Emperor of China. When nothing came of it, he sent a second. The heart of it ran:
I say it again. The Buddha's teaching reaches through worlds as many as the grains of sand, and the light of the precepts shines in every direction. The sutra says: "This whole threefold world is mine, and the beings in it are all my children." If it is all his, then this world of ours is the country of Shakyamuni Buddha. The country is a buddha-country already and the people in it are all the children of the Buddha. Brothers are brothers, and the natural order between them is not to be confused. As I see it, the law of the Buddha and the law of the world both follow from this. The gods of heaven and the spirits of the earth do not put up with what is against principle. How should the judgment of heaven take sides? I respectfully ask that the order of seating by the precepts be set right.
The emperor was Ningzong. He read the petition himself and was moved by it more than once, and in the end he sent an order down to Tiantong that the seating was to be fixed by the years of ordination, according to the Buddha's rule. That Japanese monks entering Chinese monasteries were never again put out of their proper place is the Founder's own doing, and it was from this that his name went out through the Five Mountains, the five great Zen monasteries of China.
Some years before, a senior Japanese monk named Ryuzen had nursed the librarian of Tiantong through a long illness, and taken great trouble over him. To thank him, the librarian had brought out his own transmission document, the secret certificate that passes from a Zen master to his heir, and let him bow before it. It was a thing hardly ever seen. Now, when the Founder arrived, Ryuzen quietly asked the librarian on his behalf, and the document was shown to the Founder too. Through another senior monk, Weiyi, he was allowed to see and bow to a transmission document of the Fayan line, and through the elder Zongyue one of the Yunmen line. He thanked each of them with incense. Wuji, the abbot, said to him: this is a thing few men ever get to see. Now, elder brother, you have seen it, and that is the true resort of a man who studies the way. The Founder's gladness was more than he could hold.
In the monks' hall he saw the monk in the next seat lift his kesa, the patched robe that is the sign of a monk, and set it on his head each morning before he put it on. He wept at the sight, and made a vow that he would carry that custom home. And when a monk arrived from Korea who did not even know what a monk's robe and bowl were for, and looked like a layman, he was more ashamed than ever, and took himself in hand.
In 1225, the first year of Baoqing, the Founder was still at Tiantong and coming up to twenty-six. The abbot Wuji had told him several times that he approved of him, but the Founder would not accept it of himself.
He left Tiantong and went to see the master Zheweng Ruyan on Mount Jing.
Ruyan asked him: when did you get here? The Founder said: the fourth month of last year. Ruyan said: you came along with the crowd, just so. The Founder said: since I came along with the crowd, just so, then what is it that does not come along with the crowd? Ruyan said: sit down a while and have some tea.
He went on to Cuiyan in Taizhou, met the master Zhuo there, and asked him straight out: what is the Buddha? Zhuo said: the one inside the hall. The Founder said: if he is the one inside the hall, how is it that he fills the sands of the Ganges? Zhuo said: he fills the sands of the Ganges. The Founder said: you have fallen into your own words.
He went back to Ayuwang. On the wall of the gallery there was a painted circle, the full moon of the philosopher Nagarjuna, and pointing at it he put the guest-prefect, a monk named Chenggui, to the test.
He went on to the Wannian monastery at Pingtian, and there met the abbot Yuanzi, and asked whether he might be shown the transmission document. Yuanzi rose himself, held it up, and said: this is a thing not shown even to a man's own kin, nor to an attendant monk of many years' standing. That is the rule of the buddhas and ancestors. But yesterday, when I had come out of the city and was staying in the prefectural town, I had a dream. There was an eminent monk in it who seemed to be Fachang of Damei, the old master of Plum Mountain, and he held up a branch of plum blossom and said: if there should come a real man who has already crossed the ship's rail, do not begrudge him the flower. And he gave me the plum blossom. Without knowing what I did, I recited in the dream: thirty good blows for the man who has not yet crossed the ship's rail. And this document, besides, has plum blossom woven into its damask. Now, meeting you, elder brother, who have crossed the ship's rail, this must be what Damei was teaching. It agrees with the dream.
So he let the Founder look at it and bow to it. Afterwards he had a second dream about him, and thought a great deal of him as a vessel for the teaching. The Founder was deeply moved by the connection between the two dreams.
He went round from place to place and met the teachers there. But he found nobody of surpassing capacity fit to be his master, and so he decided to go back to Tiantong and see Wuji again. On the road he heard that Wuji had died. He grieved over it greatly, and from then on the thought of going home began to come up in him. He decided to call on Myozen, who was still lodging at Tiantong, and climb the mountain a second time.
On the way he met a monk called Laogui, who said to him: of all the masters under heaven today there is none beyond Rujing. He has just taken up residence at Tiantong at the emperor's request. You should go up the mountain at once and see him.
The Founder took this for good fortune, and hurried up to Tiantong.
The Founder went first to find Myozen, and found him gravely ill, lying in the Liaoran quarters. When Myozen saw him come in he wept, over and over, out of gladness and grief together.
Then he asked: when you were with our late master Eisai, did you settle the question of whether there is any delusion in the dharma-body, the true body of the Buddha?
The Founder said: I would not presume to say.
Myozen said: try me. Tell it.
The Founder said: once, when the master was sitting in his room, I came forward and asked him the question that had driven me from Mount Hiei. If we are all, from the very beginning, the Buddha-nature just as we are, why is it that the buddhas of the three ages had to make up their minds to seek awakening, and go looking for it? And the master said: the buddhas of the three ages do not know that they have it. Cats and white oxen know. At that I understood all at once, and the sweat ran off my whole body.
Myozen quietly approved this, and wrote out a paper to certify it.
His illness grew steadily worse, and at about eight in the morning on the seventh day of the fifth month of 1225 he died in the Liaoran quarters. He was forty-two.
The Founder could not bear his grief. He had the body cremated, gathered up the relics, and made the offerings for the dead.
Then he wrote to Rujing. The letter survives:
That I have been able to take a place at your dharma seat is surely the happy fortune of merit laid up in former lives. You are all kindness and all compassion. What this small man from a far country asks is this: that without regard to the hour, and without full formal dress, I may come up to the abbot's quarters again and again, to bow and to ask about what puzzles me. Impermanence is swift. The matter of birth and death is great. Time waits for no man, and to leave the presence of a sage is certainly to regret it. Great master of this hall, my own teacher, in your great kindness and compassion, take pity on me and give Dogen leave to ask about the dharma. I bow to this and hope for your consent. Your junior, Dogen, making a hundred prostrations and knocking his head on the floor, writes up to you.
Rujing read it, and was moved by the earnestness of it, and wrote back:
Yuan, my son: from this day on, without regard to day or night or the hour, come to my quarters in your everyday robe and ask about the way. There is no objection. This old monk will overlook your want of ceremony exactly as a father overlooks his own child's.
On the second day of the seventh month the Founder went up to the abbot's quarters and asked his first question. Teachers everywhere, he said, speak of Zen as "a transmission outside the teachings," and take that to be the whole point of the first ancestor's coming from India. What of it?
Rujing said: how should the great way of the buddhas and ancestors have anything to do with inside the teachings or outside them? They call it a transmission outside the teachings for a reason. Ever since the first missionaries brought the sutras and the commentaries over from India in the Yongping years of the Han, China had only masters of sutras and masters of commentaries, and no line of true heirs. Only Bodhidharma, sitting alone at Shaolin, brought the thing itself.
It was Rujing, too, who told him how their own line had nearly died, two hundred years before. The Caodong school, which in Japan would be called Soto, had come down to an old master named Dayang Jingxuan, and Dayang had found nobody fit to be his heir. There was one boy, Yiqing, who had the gift, but he was far too young to be given the seal. So Dayang did an extraordinary thing. He entrusted the whole line to a master of a different school, Fushan, with instructions to hold it until the boy was grown. His letter survives, and Rujing knew it by heart:
There is no lack of men to weed and plough, but what is to be done when there is no seed? After the grass has grown thick the confusion begins, and so, as I come to the end, my thoughts run on ahead of me. You are a monk of long standing and a descendant of this line. What I now entrust to you alone is the young hawk I have lately taken in. He is only a fledgling, but has he not merit to spare? He is the fortunate son of my dharma. If I gave him the seal now he might find it hard to bear, and so I entrust it to you instead. Take it. With this verse, and the leather sandals and the one robe and the eighteen articles, I hand my word over to you; and hereafter Yiqing is certainly to receive it. Keep it in charge, and wait for Yiqing.
Grass on the ridge at Yangguang: I leave it to you to wait until its price is known. Where the strange shoot grows thick, the sacred root holds fast in the dark.
He who gets the dharma must be ten years with the Linji house before he may open it out.
Would the rest of them, Rujing said, all have died before Dayang did? It was because Dayang knew how to plan for his grandsons, and his eye was clear, that he set the boy down as his heir although he was so young, and had the proof of it kept in another house, and so the family business was carried on. And he added: the men who wrote the later histories of the monasteries set down pilfered and unreliable things, and get the old worthies wrong oftener than not.
Later, the paper Rujing gave the Founder that day was copied out reverently from his own scroll by the old man Yunxi, six generations down the line. What the Founder of Eiheiji received face to face in the abbot's room at Tiantong was handed on in the direct line and set down at last in writing. It is the pure secret of the Soto abbot's room, and a thing the other schools do not know.
One day, in the monks' hall, old Rujing was rebuking a monk who had fallen asleep at his sitting. In zazen, he said, body and mind must drop away. What is the good of just sitting there sleeping?
The Founder was sitting in the next place. At those words he was suddenly and completely awakened.
He went straight up to the abbot's room and burned incense.
Rujing asked: what is the incense for?
The Founder said: body and mind have dropped away, and I have come.
Rujing said: body and mind dropped away. Dropped away body and mind.
The Founder said: this is only a passing knack. Do not set your seal on me carelessly.
Rujing said: I am not setting my seal on you carelessly.
The Founder said: and what is it that is not careless sealing?
Rujing said: dropped away body and mind.
The Founder bowed.
Guangping, the attendant from Fuzhou, was standing beside them, and said: that a man from another country should get this far is truly no small matter.
The Founder withdrew with respect.
In the winter of 1227, the third year of Baoqing, he took his leave of Tiantong to go home. That same night, at midnight, he was called into the abbot's room, and Rujing gave him the robe that had belonged to the old ancestor Furong Daokai, the text of the Precious Mirror Samadhi, the secret teaching of the Five Ranks, and a portrait of himself with his own inscription on it. And he said:
I give these to you, a man from a barbarous country, as a token of trust. Go back to your own country and spread the teaching there, and do good widely to gods and men. Do not live in cities and towns. Do not go near kings and ministers. Live in the deep mountains and the quiet valleys, and take in one man, or half a man, and do not let my school be cut off.
He came down from Mount Taibai and went west into Jiangxi. At nightfall on the road a tiger came at him. He threw his staff at it and the tiger took fright and ran off. There is a saying to this day that a tiger fears a staff.
Further along the same road he fell ill. His companion on the journey was the monk who later became the master of Doshoan in Kyoto. As the Founder lay in the grass, an old man came along the road, leaning on a stick, and gave him a pill of medicine, and he recovered. That old man was the god Inari of Japan, who had come to look after him.
On the evening before he sailed he got hold of a copy of the Blue Cliff Record, the great collection of Zen cases with the commentary of the master Foguo. He opened it out and began to copy it by hand, and grieved in his heart that he would never get it all down before the ship left. Then a figure in white robes came in, took up a brush, and wrote alongside him until it was finished. This was the god of Hakusan, the White Mountain of Echizen. The manuscript is still kept at Daijoji in Kaga, where it is called the One-Night Blue Cliff.
That winter he sailed from China. On the voyage the ship ran into a black wind, and he was up on deck. He sat down in silence, and all at once the bodhisattva Kannon appeared on the surface of the sea, riding on a lotus leaf, and the wind and the waves grew quiet.
So it was that in 1227, the first year of Antei by Japanese reckoning, he came ashore at Kawajiri in the province of Higo. The picture called Kannon on a Single Leaf, which is still painted, is a picture of that appearance.
He went back to Kenninji in the capital. There, in the Karoku years, he wrote out his Universal Recommendation for Zazen, the short set of instructions for sitting which is still the first thing a Soto monk learns. He says so himself in his Talk on Pursuing the Way: you should practise, he writes, according to the Recommendation I compiled in the Karoku years.
In the Kangi years, from 1230, he was living quietly at Fukakusa, south of the capital. It was there that he wrote the Talk on Pursuing the Way, in the autumn of 1231, and it was there that he made the six poems on living in retirement, one of which everybody remembers:
One thing only stays with me on waking: the sound of night rain over the quiet lodging at Fukakusa.
At Fukakusa, in the district of Uji, there was the old site of a temple called Gokurakuji. On it a vow was made to found a new one. It was finished in the spring of 1233, the first year of Tenpuku, and named Kosho Horinji. The dharma hall was built by a nun named Shogaku, and the dharma seat inside it by the lord of Guseiin.
The monks' hall the Founder raised himself, by an appeal for subscriptions in every direction. The appeal survives, and it is the clearest statement anywhere of what he was trying to build.
An appeal for subscriptions towards the monks' hall of Kannon-dori-in at Uji.
Bowing my head, I respectfully address all the buddhas and bodhisattvas of the ten directions, the sages and the assembly of monks, gods and men, dragons and the eight kinds of beings, and all good men and good women, concerning the wish to found one place of practice out of the pure faith that gives a single coin.
The Sutra of the Bodhisattva Precepts says: a child of the Buddha should always be teaching all living beings, and should found monks' quarters, mountains and woods and gardens and fields, and raise stupas, and set up places for the winter and summer retreats and for sitting zazen, and every place where the way is practised; and if he does not, he commits a minor offence.
So a temple is a place of practice for all the buddhas. The temples of China copied the monasteries of India, and the training halls of Japan should learn from them in the same way. The merit of it is great and deep, and it is handed on from country to country and given out to one person after another.
Since I came back from China I have carried the wish to found a temple, and the days have been long and the months deep with it. It was a thing my robe and bowl should have been laid down for. Now I have got one excellent site, out beyond Fukakusa, on the old ground of Gokurakuji, and it is called Kannon-dori-in. It is rank grass and no monastery yet. Here I mean to raise a temple of the first rank.
The most necessary buildings of a temple are the buddha hall, the dharma hall and the monks' hall. Of these the buddha hall is here already. The dharma hall is not yet. And the monks' hall is the most needful of all, and it is this I now mean to build. Its form is this: a hall of seven bays, with no partitions inside it; long platforms set along the walls; the whole assembly of monks living there together, and the practice of the way not interrupted for a moment, day or night. In the middle the sacred monk is enshrined, and the assembly sits round him. The custom of honouring the three treasures in one hall has been kept up a long while. The merit of it is great, and the work of the Buddha will spread by it.
One might look for a single rich donor to finish the whole thing. Instead I appeal widely in all ten directions, so that many may form a good connection with it. This is the excellent way of India and of China, and the manner of the monks' life in the age of the true teaching and the age of its likeness.
I shall keep the donors' names in the heart of the sacred monk, as seed of the wisdom of the ten thousand characters, and as an adornment for myself and for others. If among them there should be one who goes ahead of the rest and attains the way, I shall make him the guide of this assembly. Would he not be a good friend indeed?
And this does not call on men alone. It should move the heavens and the dragon palace too, and be heard of in the world of the immortals and in the halls of the dead. It is simply the wheel of the dharma that Shakyamuni turned, and it will reach within the dharma realm and beyond it. Respectfully set out.
A day in the twelfth month of the first year of Katei. The chief solicitor, resident of Kannon-dori-in, a monk of the Shakya clan.
From that summer the retreat was formally opened.
From the same year, 1233, there survives a board with fifteen lines cut into it, now at Myokakuji in Echizen. The brush strokes are unmistakably the Founder's own. It is a prayer inviting the gods of Japan to guard a temple:
Respectfully inviting the deities of ten places as protectors of Myokakuji. First, Kumano. Second, Nissho. Third, Kinpusen. Fourth, Kamo. Fifth, Hachiman. Sixth, Gion. Seventh, Sekizan. Eighth, Hiyoshi. Ninth, Kifune. Tenth, Hakusan. The above are invited as set out. A day in the fourth month of the first year of Tenpuku.
There is also a wooden statue at that temple that is called a portrait of the Founder, but it looks more like one of the patriarchs of the Shingon school.
In 1234, the first year of Bunryaku, the monk Ejo came to see the Founder at Fukakusa, and changed his robe. That is all the record says of the arrival of the man who would become the Founder's closest disciple, his heir, and the second abbot of Eiheiji.
In 1236, the second year of Katei, at the beginning of the winter retreat, the Founder formally opened the hall at Koshoji. The assembly was small, and he told them not to mind it.
Do not be troubled that the assembly is small. Do not look back at the fact that you are a beginner. The master Fenyang had barely six or seven men. Yaoshan's assembly did not come to ten. Yet all of them practised the way of the buddhas and ancestors, and that is what was called a flourishing monastery.
Have you not heard? One man came to the way at the sound of a pebble striking bamboo. Another cleared his mind at the sight of peach blossom. Is bamboo sharp or dull? Is a flower deep or shallow, wise or foolish? Flowers open year after year, and not everyone who sees them wakes up. Bamboo rings out again and again, and not everyone who hears it finds the way. It is only by the merit of long practice kept up, and by the conditions that come of hard work at the way, that a man wakes and his mind becomes clear.
It is not that the bamboo's sound is especially sharp. It is not that its ring is especially deep. Call it wonderful if you like; it does not sound of itself. And the flower's colour is not especially beautiful either; it does not open by itself. The one waits for the pebble to strike it before it makes any sound. The other must have the spring wind before it opens. The conditions for studying the way are just like that. The way is complete in every person, but coming to it is still a matter of conditions.
That winter he made Ejo head monk, and gave him the whisk, which meant that Ejo would give the next discourse in the Founder's place. The Founder introduced him from the high seat. Do not sneer that the head monk is not fit for it, he said. Take up Dongshan's three pounds of flax, the famous answer to the question "what is the Buddha," and show it to the assembly. Then he came down from the seat, the drum was struck again, and Ejo took the whisk. That was the first such discourse at Koshoji. Ejo was thirty-nine.
On the first day of the fifth month of the same year the Founder handed on the great matter of transmission to the monk Gi'in. In the course of that year, too, the monk who later founded the temple at Yura stayed a while at Koshoji, changed his robe, and received the bodhisattva precepts; the old history of Japanese Buddhism records it as well. And on the fifth day of the eighth month the collected sayings of his master Rujing reached him from China for the first time. The next day he gave a discourse on them in the hall.
In 1237, the third year of Katei, on the day the summer retreat closed, he compiled the Rite for Leaving Home and Conferring the Precepts, the ceremony by which a person becomes a monk.
In 1242, the third year of Ninji, on the twelfth day of the fourth month, he gave a dharma talk before Lord Konoe, one of the great nobles of the court. Afterwards a question was put to him: had this school ever come to Japan before?
He answered: since Buddhism in its outward forms first came to our country, barely four hundred years and more have passed, and the spreading of the school of the Buddha's own mind falls exactly now. In China, the outward forms of Buddhism came first, in the Yongping years of the Han, and the mind of it came afterwards. So it is with us.
On the seventeenth day of the twelfth month of that year he preached at the private house of his patron Hatano Yoshishige, the governor of Izumo, beside the temple of Rokuharamitsuji in the capital. The evidence for it is the note at the end of one of his own essays, Total Working, which stands twentieth in the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: given, it says, in the year of the tiger, Ninji, on the seventeenth day of the twelfth month, to the assembly at the quarters of the former governor of Izumo beside Rokuharamitsuji.
His time at the temple in Uji lasted eleven years, from 1233 to 1243.
Fukakusa was close to the capital, and the carriages and horses of the court nobles and the great families came and went without a break. He taught more than a hundred households as occasion gave him the chance, and the disciples who took the bodhisattva precepts from him were more than two thousand.
Saving people by whatever means come to hand is the old way of the buddhas and ancestors. But what I want, he said, is quiet, and no business. So he was always on the lookout for somewhere convenient among mountains and woods, springs and rocks. Patrons who had a connection with him offered him twelve sites, mountain and garden land, as quiet places to settle in. But some were in distant provinces and some were in the home provinces, and none of them suited him.
Then Hatano Yoshishige said to him: within the district of Yoshida in Echizen there is an old temple, deep in the mountains and quiet, and it lies inside my own estate. If you would go down there and teach, it would be the good fortune of the whole province and of my house.
The Founder answered: my late master Rujing, the old buddha, was a man of Yuezhou in China. Yuezhou is written Etsu in Japanese, and Echizen means the near side of Etsu. So even to hear the name of the place is dear to me. That is what I want, he said, and he agreed to go.
On the sixteenth day of the seventh month of 1243, the first year of Kangen, he set out from Fukakusa and travelled north over the mountains into Echizen. At first he stayed at Yoshimine, a small temple in the hills, and began teaching there on the first day of the extra seventh month that was added to the calendar that year. He lodged at Yoshimine until the sixteenth day of the eleventh month, and then moved to Zenjigamine, near the great Tendai temple of Heisenji, where he stayed for the rest of the year. In those few months he finished twelve essays for the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: on the nineteenth day of the eleventh month, Seeing the Buddha; on the twenty-seventh, Thorough Practice; on the seventeenth day of the twelfth month, The Eye, and Everyday Life; on the twenty-fifth, The Dragon's Song. Until about the second month of the next year he seems to have gone back and forth between Zenjigamine and Yoshimine.
On the fourth day of the second month of 1244 one of his essays records that he spoke to the assembly "in the damp mountains of Echizen." Whether that means on the mountain where Eiheiji now stands is not clear.
On the twenty-fifth day of the same month he went on retreat at the shrine of Tenjin, the god who had once been the scholar and statesman Sugawara no Michizane. There he found a poem that Michizane had written at eleven years old, on looking at plum blossom by moonlight, and he was moved to answer it, line for line, in the same rhymes. Michizane's poem runs:
The moon shines like snow after clear weather; the plum blossom is like stars shining out. How lovely: the golden mirror turns, and above the garden the jade chambers are fragrant.
The Founder answered:
The green pine: what has it to fear from winter snow? On the old tree the plum blossom flies like stars.
Meanwhile, wanting to found a temple, he searched about the estate for a convenient place among the mountains and woods. East of Ichinoyama and west of Sansho he found ground that suited a temple, and was glad of it. On the seventeenth day of the extra seventh month of 1243 Hatano Yoshishige had levelled the hillside and cleared the ground with his own hands, and the Founder had moved from the thatched hut at Yoshimine to this place. Hatano and a lay monk of the guard named Kakunen, whose land lay in what is now the south-east district, undertook to build the temple between them.
In 1244, the second year of Kangen, the building of the Great Buddha Temple, Daibutsuji, was going on, and the Founder's own lodging was perhaps not yet settled.
On the nineteenth day of the second month of 1244 the ground for the dharma hall of the Great Buddha Temple was levelled. On the twenty-first day of the fourth month the foundation stones were laid and the pillars raised, and the ridgepole went up the day after. The lucky hour for the ceremony was worked out by Abe no Harumune, an official of the court's Bureau of Divination.
On the eighteenth day of the seventh month the hall was opened and the Founder preached in it for the first time. From this day, he said, let this mountain be called Kichijozan, the Mountain of Good Fortune, and the temple be called Daibutsuji, the Temple of the Great Buddha. And he gave a verse:
The great merit of all the buddhas, highest of all good fortunes, above which is nothing. All the buddhas come together and enter this place; therefore this ground is the most fortunate of all.
That day, while the sutras were being chanted, the dragon gods raised clouds and brought down rain.
Until then the hill had been called Sanshoho, Parasol Pine Peak. A copy of the lettering of the name-plaque, in the Founder's own hand, is now in a scroll kept at Doshoan in the capital, and it reads:
In this world, in Great Japan, in the province of Echizen, in the estate of Shibi in the district of Yoshida, Parasol Pine Peak is from this day named the Mountain of Good Fortune. The great merit of all the buddhas, highest of all good fortunes, above which is nothing. All the buddhas come together and enter this place; therefore this ground is the most fortunate of all. The first day of the eleventh month, the second year of Kangen.
So it stands, in eight lines. Since it says "from this day," the place was still Parasol Pine Peak the day before, and the old record that puts the naming in the seventh month was mistaken about the date.
Hatano Yoshishige, the patron, rejoiced with his whole heart. Among those who came to that first assembly were the former governor of Yamato, Kiyohara Sadahito; Minamoto no Kurando; the lay novice Jitsua of Nojiri; and Anjo, a clerk of the guard.
After the discourse the Founder said to Hatano: look at this one piece of ground. The main mountain to the north; Kozai along the flank to the south; the eastern ridge running unbroken to the shrine of the mountain god; and the stream drawing away westward towards the blue sea and the dragon palace. When I was in China my late master at Tiantong gave me more than ten articles on the essentials of sitting, and one of them was this: do not build looking out on the open sea; look instead on the water of a mountain valley. This ground answers to that. The woods and the springs make a fine prospect, and there will always be good food in good vessels here, and fragrant rice enough. Is this not a place for excellent practice? It is above all a training ground for raising up the teaching. I have been choosing among good sites from Kyushu to the Kanto and in every quarter, north and south, and coming to this one I have stopped.
It was named the Mountain of Good Fortune because Kichijo is a name of the palace of the god Indra, and because when the Buddha came to awakening he sat on a mat of kichijo grass. Now, where the ground has been levelled and the buildings are going up, that too is good fortune.
On the first day of the ninth month the dharma hall was finished and there was a ceremony of opening. More than a thousand men and women came to it. From that time on the monastic rules were put into practice.
On the seventh day of the same month an osmanthus tree arrived from Koshoji at Uji, sent up by the senior monk Gijun. It is said to have been planted in front of the Koun pavilion, where it stands today.
From about this time there survives a draft of a letter from the Founder to Hatano Yoshishige. It carries no year, but it shows what Hatano had founded the temple for:
This temple having been founded for the salvation of the Lady of the Second Rank and of the Minister of the Right, and the fortnightly recitation of the precepts having now been begun here, I have respectfully received your wish that the merit be dedicated to them. As you are at present in the province, I shall see that it is done. The letter from the Rokuhara lord I have read with reverence, and it should be put into the temple's keeping at once.
On the fifteenth of this month the recitation of the precepts was duly performed. With respect and awe,
The twentieth day of the tenth month. Dogen.
The letter is at Eiheiji now, in the abbot's quarters. The Lady of the Second Rank was Hojo Masako, the widow of the first shogun and the real ruler of Japan in her day, and the Minister of the Right was her son Sanetomo, the third shogun, who had been murdered on the steps of a shrine. Hatano's house had served the Kamakura government for generations and stood high in its favour, and it was for the salvation of those two spirits that he founded the monastery.
On the third day of the eleventh month of that year the ridgepole of the monks' hall was raised. This time too the dragon gods sent a little rain and a little wind, which is the lucky sign. Hatano, who as a lay monk took the Buddhist name Kakunen, had a deerskin spread under the south eaves of the storehouse and watched from there, and his son Fujiwara no Tokizumi, a lieutenant of the guard, watched from under the west eaves. The Founder stood in front of the storehouse and saw the ridgepole go up. The master carpenter raised the ceremonial wands, in the five colours, and made three bows. He was given a horse. Every one of the under-carpenters and the workmen was given a bolt of silk, and the thousand and more men and women who had come to watch were given a white rice-cake each.
Within one year both the dharma hall and the monks' hall were finished. Even so, the full seven halls of a Zen monastery were never built in the Founder's lifetime. The old record of his life says: the timber was not yet ready, and there were barely two or three halls standing.
In 1245, the third year of Kangen, on the sixth day of the third month, he first set out in order the fifty-six essays of the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye.
On the day the summer retreat opened that year, in the fourth month, flowers came scattering down out of the sky before and after his discourse in the hall, falling on the dharma seat and on the seated monks and into the very tea bowls. Nothing like it, the record says, had ever been known.
From the fifth month of that year there survives a paper in the Founder's own hand, fifty-one characters with his cipher under the name, written for Hatano Hironaga:
Heaven and earth, the whole great mass, smashed into a hundred pieces. At the very bottom of it, no heaven and no earth. Turning back on myself I say: past mind cannot be got hold of; present mind cannot be got hold of; future mind cannot be got hold of.
The fifth month of the year of the snake, Kangen. Dogen. Given to Hatano Hironaga.
In 1246, the fourth year of Kangen, from the discourse in the hall on the fifteenth day of the sixth month, the temple's name was changed from Daibutsuji to Eiheiji, the Temple of Eternal Peace. The name is taken from the Yongping era of the Later Han dynasty, which in Japanese is read Eihei: it was in those years that the Buddha's teaching first came east into China. From the same day the Rules for the Officers of the Monastery were put into practice.
A sheet in the Founder's hand from about this time, forty-six characters in eight uneven lines with his cipher under the name, lays down the roster for one of the temple's daily offerings:
Concerning the monks who attend the offering of gruel before the Buddha at Eiheiji. First, the monk Ejo. Second, the monk Kakubutsu. And so on round again in turn, making the offering reverently.
The tenth day of the seventh month, the fourth year of Kangen. Dogen, monk resident on this mountain.
On the sixth day of the eighth month of the same year he addressed the assembly, with instructions for the kitchen. He began with the old Chinese rule book.
The Rules of the Zen Garden say: in the serving of a meal to monks, reverence is the essence. Far back, that carries on the way of India; nearer to hand, the way of China. In the Buddha's own lifetime and after his death, the gods offered the food of heaven to the Buddha and the monks, kings set their own dishes before them, and offerings came from the houses of the great and of ordinary people, from merchants and from labourers too. In every one of these offerings the reverence went into the smallest detail. They used the deepest bow known among gods or men. They kept to the most respectful forms of speech. And it was in that spirit that they prepared the rice and the dishes and all the vessels. The ways of the kitchen, and the very words used there, are what ought to be handed on correctly, and those who study the Buddha's teaching should do the same.
So: the gruel is to be called the honourable gruel, and the midday meal the honourable meal. You may speak of the hour of the meal, but never simply of the hour. When you send word about the rice, say that the rice is to be washed clean and served, never that it is to be rinsed. Say that the honourable soup is to be made and served, never simply soup. Say that the honourable broth is to be made and served. Say of the gruel that it has been brought to the boil for them.
When you are serving, never blow with your breath on the rice or the greens or anything else. Even if your sleeve is dry, do not let it touch the food. If your hand has touched your face and you have not washed it, do not put it on the bowls or on the food. From the picking over of the rice and greens, through to the making of the rice and broth and the serving of them, if at any point you have scratched an itch anywhere on your body, you must wash that hand.
Where the meals are made ready, recite passages of the sutras and the words of the old teachers, and keep off worldly talk and all coarse and filthy speech. Of the rice, the greens, the salt, the bean paste and everything else, speak with respect: do not say only that there is rice, or greens. When you pass the place where the meal is set out, monks and lay workers alike should bow. Odd greens and odd grains of rice may be used, but only after the meals are done; nothing is to be taken from them while they are being served. The utensils used to make and serve the meals are for that only, and are to be kept carefully and used for nothing else. Anyone coming from a lay household whose hands are not yet purified must not touch the greens or the sweets. Only after water has been sprinkled, incense offered and the fire tended may the food be offered to the Three Treasures and the assembly. In the monasteries of China today, buns and milk-cakes and steamed cakes that come in from lay households are steamed a second time before they are set out. Steaming is a purifying. Until they have been steamed they are not offered.
These instructions are a very few out of many. Take the gist of them and run the storehouse and the kitchen accordingly. Let nothing be done out of due form.
This is the lifeline of the buddhas and ancestors, the very eye of a monk. Those outside the way do not know it. The demons of heaven cannot bear it. Only the children of the Buddha can hand it on. Officers of the storehouse, look to this clearly, and do not let it slip.
The founding monk, Dogen.
On the fifteenth day of the first month of 1247, the fifth year of Kangen, at the fortnightly recitation, while the Founder was preaching the precepts, a five-coloured cloud appeared at the paper screens across the front of the abbot's quarters and stayed there for about half an hour. A good many of the monks and lay people who had come to hear him saw it. Some of them, farmers from the middle village of the Kawaminami estate, put the particulars in writing afterwards as evidence, and swore to it:
Concerning the marvel at the abbot's quarters at Shibi.
The fifteenth day of the first month of the fifth year of Kangen, the year of the sheep: the preaching of the precepts. From about two in the afternoon until about half past four, across the front of the screens there was a five-coloured light. Everyone who had come to hear him, high and low alike, bowed before it. Among them were more than twenty of us who had set out from the middle village of Kawaminami in Yoshida, and we saw it. Days of preaching the precepts are many, but that we should have come on this particular day is cause for rejoicing. And if any part of this account is false, may we fall for ever into the three evil paths. That it may be handed on from this day forward, we have gladly set it down as above.
The Buddha's child Sonkei. Likewise Shoen. Fujii Mitsunari. Onakatomi Masayasu. Sakata Uyake. Kuse Arimitsu. And four more names, worn away in the original. To Eiheiji.
A second sheet lists the people of standing among the assembly who saw the cloud before the gate of the abbot's quarters that day: Minamoto no Mitsuyori, Minamoto no Tokiyuki, the monks Shoen and Sonkei, and Fujiwara no Sadamasa, each with his cipher. Both sheets are on Echizen paper.
Ejo, the second abbot, added a note to them in his own hand, twenty years later:
When the abbot who founded this mountain was preaching the precepts at the fortnightly recitation in his quarters, a five-coloured cloud of good omen appeared at the paper screens across the front of the room. Those screens have grown old with the years and are broken now. The frames and paper of the broken screens are kept as a treasure of this temple. The record of the day and hour when the sign appeared is on a separate sheet. Both have now been put in order and stored above the ceiling of the abbot's quarters, to stand as evidence.
Written on the twentieth day of the ninth month of the fourth year of Bun'ei. The junior monk Ejo.
The originals are in the treasury at Eiheiji to this day.
On the first day of spring that same year he wrote out in his own hand the words Great Good Fortune at the Beginning of Spring. The sheet is kept privately in Doshoji lane in the capital: one hanging scroll, eight uneven lines, eighty-five characters. It is a blessing on the new temple, and it reads:
Great good fortune, and protection from the south for the Buddha, the teaching and the community. Great good fortune at the beginning of spring. Great good fortune upon the founders and the ancestors of this house. May the Buddha's teaching spread widely. Great good fortune, great good fortune. Great good fortune in the shining out of the ancestors' way. Great good fortune in the flourishing of this temple gate. May students gather in numbers, may we find the right people and meet the right times, may all under heaven turn and honour our way: great good fortune. Great good fortune. Great good fortune at the beginning of spring. Great good fortune. Great good fortune on Eihei, the founding mountain.
Dogen. The first day of spring, the fifth year of Kangen. Great good fortune.
There is another such sheet in the abbot's room at Tendenji in Osaka, seventy-eight characters, signed with his other name, Kigen:
Homage and refuge to the Buddha, the teaching and the community; to the seven buddhas and the twenty-eight ancestors of India; to the six ancestors of China; to the founders of this house and the masters and disciples of the Soto line. May temples be founded, the way handed on and the work taught, gods and men brought on, and all be peaceful and at rest. May the cloud-robed monks gather in crowds, may long life and fortune flourish, may everything go as it should and the teaching be spread in plenty: great good fortune, great good fortune, great good fortune. The turn of the year towards the light: great good fortune, great good fortune, great good fortune, great good fortune.
Kigen.
On the twenty-eighth day of the third month of 1247 the era-name was changed, and the fifth year of Kangen became the first year of Hoji.
On the third day of the eighth month the Founder went down to Kamakura, the seat of the military government in the east, at the request of Hojo Tokiyori, the regent, whose Buddhist name was Doso and who is called the lord of Saimyoji after the temple he later built. There he conferred the bodhisattva precepts on Tokiyori. Beyond that, the number of monks and lay people, men and women, who took the precepts from him in Kamakura is not known.
Tokiyori pressed him hard to stay. Again and again he said that he wished to build a temple and have the Founder as its founding teacher. The Founder firmly refused. His small temple in Echizen, he said, had a patron of its own. The temple Tokiyori built was the great Kenchoji, and it was a Chinese master, Lanxi Daolong, who was brought in to found it instead.
Lanxi had only just arrived in Japan, and before this he had written to the Founder from the port of Hakata. His letter survives.
The second day. Daolong bows and writes up to you with an anxious breath. The hot autumn wind is blowing everywhere and the jade sky is high and cold. Respectfully I think of you, sitting at your ease above fame and gain, waking gods and men; and I hope your health, and your going out and coming in, are excellent.
Daolong is a late-born man of Song, mistaken and unlearned, who hides his clumsiness at the bottom of the assembly and does as he is told. For years I lived with my brothers of your country on Mount Taibai, all of us together with nothing settled between us, one household. One day after the meal, your countryman Kakumyo brought out and showed me your dharma-words and verses. I took them up and read them over two or three times, and it was as if I were looking you in the face. Roads and rivers may lie between us, but in the treasury of great bright light there is no separation at all.
At the end of spring I took ship and came to Hakata. I hear that in these last years you have moved away into the deep mountains and the far valleys, and are opening the way to those who come after, and do not care to be friends with red-lacquered gates and great houses. One can see in it the manner of high antiquity, and it makes a man reach after you and not be able to stop. Even if some people look at a leopard through a tube and see one spot, and there is talk of long and short from those who like to talk, what is that worth against you?
The days go by and go by. I hope you will not tire of the mallet and the whisk, the teacher's work, so that the manner of old Damei may not fall to the ground and the line of Caodong may stay cool and clear for ever. Lately I hear the capital is in an uproar, civil and military both, and I imagine you and all the brothers are of one mind about it. I am living in a borrowed robe in a small room. I have not yet had the good fortune to wait on you. I feel it keenly, for the sake of the great teaching. The rest I do not set down.
Respectfully presented, from a man of western Shu under the Song, lodging at Enkakuji in Hakata: the monk Daolong bows and writes up.
The Founder's reply was written from Kamakura that winter.
Dogen, with lowered eyes and an anxious breath, writes back to the abbot of Enkakuji, great master of Zen.
At this turn of the season, in the first cold of early winter, I trust that your health and spirit are in every way well.
Twenty years ago I went to China and hung up my staff at Taibai. In the space of a moment, before I had been through the monasteries, I turned round and came back to this country, blown, no doubt, by the wind of my own karma. Wanting in both practice and understanding, I have kept my foolishness and let the days pass. These last years I have taken a lane into the steep mountains, shut my door, and thought to end what is left of my life there.
Last winter the two monks Senne and Etatsu, in the course of their wandering, respectfully brought me your letter. I burned incense and read it with reverence, glad and abashed together. It was exactly the warmth of the sun reaching into a cold valley. I meant to come to your temple and thank you in person, but my poor wish has not been carried out. Unexpectedly, in the eighth month of this year, I was drawn away by a patron and found myself suddenly in Kamakura in Sagami. Two thousand miles of hills and rivers lie east and west between us, and one day of longing for a familiar wind is three autumns long.
I hear you have already reached the capital. It is the turn of the times, and men's good fortune. Over the long, long distance, to come across the sea: it is just as it was in the far-off years when Bodhidharma came. And I am glad that the wind and cloud of the Buddha's own garden should fan the line of Huineng and carry it well. Written in haste. I hope for your kind understanding.
Early winter, the first year of Hoji. The monk Dogen, with an anxious breath and lowered eyes.
In that same year, the old records say, Ejo went down to the district of Oita in Bungo and founded a temple, Eikeiji, on Mount Dairyu.
The Founder stayed in Kamakura through the winter. A verse of his from the spring of 1248 survives:
Written at Kamakura in Sagami, on hearing the first thunder of spring
Half a year I have taken my meals in a layman's house. The old tree's plum in the frost and the snow. The insects wake: one crack of thunder rolls. In the emperor's city the spring has little peach-red in it.
An old record in the abbot's quarters at Eiheiji says that while he was at Kamakura, at Tokiyori's request, he made a Japanese poem on the meaning of the Zen saying that the truth does not depend on written words:
On the high rock that even the waves of the rough shore cannot reach: if only the truth were a thing one could write down, and make stick there.
Everyone in Kamakura, high and low, monk and layman alike, praised it. The reverend Dogen, they said, has not only got hold of the deepest meaning of the Buddha's teaching; his skill in the art of poetry goes beyond the world as well. In the end they all wrote it on their fans and recited it with admiration. Lord Tameie, the greatest poet of the day, heard it and said: the words are straight and the meaning clear; it puts feeling aside, and yet the feeling in it is all the deeper. That is what a Japanese poem is properly for. Who among the accomplished men of our day comes near it?
On the thirteenth day of the third month of 1248, the second year of Hoji, he came back from Kamakura to Eiheiji, and on the fourteenth he took the high seat and spoke to the monks.
This mountain monk went out from the mountain on the third day of the eighth month last year and travelled to Kamakura in Sagami, to preach the dharma for a lay disciple who is our patron. Yesterday, this month, this year, I came back to the temple, and this morning I take the seat. Some of you may have doubts about this business. Crossing all those mountains and rivers to preach for a layman looks like putting laymen above monks. And you may wonder whether there was some teaching never yet spoken, never yet heard, that I gave to him alone. There was not. Those who do good rise and those who do evil sink; you plant the cause and you meet the effect. I threw out a brick to draw out a piece of jade, and that is all.
Even so, in this one matter the old man of Eihei has made things clear and said them, believed them and carried them out. Do you all want to understand this principle?
After a long silence he said:
Putting up with Eihei's tongue-tip talk: speak of the cause, and the effect has no ground. How many mistakes in the labour of ploughing the way! Today, pitiably, I have turned into a water buffalo.
That is the verse for preaching the dharma. And the verse for coming home to the mountain? He said:
This mountain monk has been away more than half a year, like a solitary wheel set in the vast sky. Today I come home to the mountain, and the clouds are glad; my love for the mountain is deeper than it was at first.
Tokiyori had wanted to give the temple an estate, a piece of land at Rokujo in Echizen worth two thousand koku of rice a year. The Founder in the end would not take it.
The monk who had been sent to fetch the deed of gift was the head monk, Genmyo. He was delighted at the grant, and went about telling the assembly of it. When the Founder heard of it, he said that this gladness of Genmyo's was filthy, and expelled him from the temple then and there. It is handed down that he had the very platform Genmyo had sat on to meditate cut out of the floor and taken away. Nothing like it had ever been known before.
As for Genmyo: about a hundred and thirty years after the Founder's death, a wandering monk met him on Mount Hakone in Izu. I am Genmyo, he said, who was head monk of Eiheiji in Echizen. And leaning on a bamboo staff, standing there, he told the pilgrim stories of the Founder's lifetime. The pilgrim afterwards came to Eiheiji and told them of it.
From the fourth month of 1248 until the twelfth day of the eleventh, an extraordinary fragrance came again and again, and drifted through the monks' hall inside and out. There is a note about it in the Founder's own hand.
Two sheets in his hand from about this time, addressed to the storehouse, show him running the temple's kitchen accounts himself.
One. From this day forward the following is to be stopped. [Two characters worn away.]
One. When a donor gives a meal to the monks and hands over money for the provisions, even if the common rice and the rest are drawn on, reckon up what has been spent and buy rice promptly to make it good. The money is not to be put to any other use.
One. What is spent is the common rice, and it is not to be laid out on sweets and such against the coming years.
One. Rice is not to be taken and used to buy greens or other provisions.
One. The common rice is not to be lent out to this person or that.
One. The common rice is not to be spent on firewood and charcoal and the like.
The five articles above are for the storehouse to know. The twenty-first day of the twelfth month, the second year of Hoji. Kigen, the monk who founded Eihei.
That sheet is in the abbot's quarters at Eiheiji today. The second one concerns the rule that monks do not eat after noon.
Eiheiji hereby informs the officers. From this day forward, if a donor offers a meal in the afternoon, it is to wait until the next day. As for noodles, cakes, sweets and the like, they may still be served late: they are the "medicine stone," the evening snack that an assembly of buddhas and ancestors is allowed, and it is the excellent custom of those who have the way throughout China. The Buddha himself once allowed the monk of the Snow Mountains to fill his belly. This mountain likewise allows the medicine stone in snowy weather.
Kigen, the monk who founded Eihei.
That scroll is now at Myooji at Imasu in Mino. In the autumn of 1711, while on pilgrimage, I asked the retired abbot there to let me see it, and made a note of it.
On the first day of the first month of 1249, the third year of Hoji, there was a service of offering to the arhats, the sixteen great disciples of the Buddha whose images are kept in every Zen temple, and the Founder was asked to conduct it. The arhats, both the wooden statues and the painted ones, and the other sages with them, gave out light and received the offering. In China, he wrote afterwards in his own hand, there were five hundred living arhats on Mount Tiantai; in our country they are here on this mountain. The original of that note is in Hatano Yoshishige's document box.
A note of the signs of good omen shown at that time in the abbot's quarters at Eiheiji.
Before the Buddha there appeared something particularly excellent and beautiful. The sixteen venerable ones of the wooden images all appeared, and the sixteen of the painted images all appeared. Of flowers of good omen appearing like this, the only instance is the stone bridge on Mount Tiantai in China; on no other mountain has it ever been heard of. On this mountain it has now appeared several times. This is a sign of the highest kind. From it we may judge that the venerable ones look with pity on the people and the teaching of this mountain and this temple, and shelter them, and that this is why it is so.
Kigen, the monk who founded this mountain.
At that offering the sixteen arhats and all their attendants appeared above the tall pine on the rock east of the temple, and that old pine is called the Arhat Pine to this day. They say one of the arhats left something behind: a round fan of strange make, still kept secretly in the abbot's quarters. It is shaped like a palm-leaf fan, but larger, and there is nothing like it now.
Considering it afterwards, people remembered that when the Founder was in China he had met an old monk in front of the arhat hall at Jingshan, and that it was on that monk's direction that he went to Rujing. That, they said, must have been an arhat.
From the eleventh day of the first month of that year the Rules for the Monks' Common Room began to be read aloud, and the custom has never lapsed since. On the first, the eleventh and the twenty-first of every month, the monks take it in turn, junior and senior alike, to prepare hot water, tea and sweets. The assembly gathers, they drink tea together in the common room, and then the head monk reads the rules out. The Founder wrote them so that the way monks are to stand and sit and move and keep still, and the courtesies between host and guest, would go into the ear of even a foolish man.
It is handed down to this day that the Founder made a vow never to leave the Mountain of Good Fortune for five hundred years. On the tenth day of the ninth month he spoke to the assembly:
From now to the very end of the future, this old man of Eihei will be constantly among human beings, and day and night will not leave the bounds of this mountain. Even if I receive a command from the emperor, I vow that I will not go out from this mountain. And what does that mean? Only that I wish to spend day and night without a break in strenuous practice, and pile up merit and heap up virtue by walking the way. By that merit I would first carry across all living beings, so that they may see the Buddha and hear the teaching and come to rest inside the cave of the buddhas and ancestors. And at the very last this old man of Eihei will sit under the tree of awakening, break the tempter, throw the great matter open, and complete the highest awakening.
The old buddhas did most of their practice in the mountains; spring, autumn, winter and summer, they lived in the mountains. Eihei would follow in those old footprints: through all twelve hours of the day, always in the mountains.
On the eighteenth day of the third month of 1249 the era-name changed again, and the year became the first of Kencho.
That mid-autumn, while he was watching the full moon, a monk standing by drew him from life as he looked up at it, and asked him to write on the picture. The portrait, with his inscription, survives as a large scroll at Hokyoji at Ono in Echizen:
The air fresh and clear, the mountain grown old in autumn; we look at one another, the bright moon and I, afloat in the well of the sky. Nothing to lean on, and the six senses do not contain it; let it go rolling on as it will. Gruel enough, rice enough, alive and leaping. Straight overhead: above the heavens and below the heavens, the clouds of themselves, the water as it goes.
Written by himself on the day of the full moon, the first year of Kencho: Kigen, the monk who founded Eiheiji, on Kamiyama at Yoshida in the district of Yoshida in Echizen.
In the same year he sent a petition to the government, either to the shogun at Kamakura or to his deputies in the capital. What seems to be his own draft of it is kept privately at Eigonji at Tsunuga in Echizen: sixteen lines, a hundred and ninety-two characters, in a running hand. It asks that the monks of Eiheiji be left alone.
One. Cases like the thousand princes of the Buddha's own clan who left home together are not covered by these restrictions.
One. The monks of this temple are to be excused attendance as chaplains in service anywhere.
One. The monks of this temple are to be excused appearing at court in lawsuits, however good their case.
One. This temple is to be excused appointments to the office of monastic superintendent, and to posts of rank in other temples.
One. The monks of this temple are not to accept the customary invitations of the great houses to preach on set occasions.
One. The monks of this temple are not to be appointed to fund-raising posts, here or anywhere else.
One. The monks of this temple are to be excused kneeling before the local steward, the constable's office or the administrative office to bring suit.
One. The monks of this temple are not to accept invitations from the practitioners of magical austerities.
One. The monks of this temple are not to take part with monks of other places in conferring the tonsure.
One. The monks of this temple are not to be appointed to serve as chantry monks or memorial monks at grave halls anywhere.
The articles above are for the flourishing of the Buddha's teaching, and I ask that an order be issued accordingly. The eighteenth day of the tenth month, the first year of Kencho. From Eiheiji.
It is unmistakably in his hand, but there is no seal under the name, so it must be the draft.
In 1250, the second year of Kencho, a letter came from Hatano Yoshishige saying that he meant to have the whole of the Buddhist canon copied out and installed at Eiheiji. The Founder took the high seat and spoke to the monks.
A monk once asked the master Touzi: is there anything remarkable in the whole canon of the teaching, or not? Touzi said: it is the canon being expounded.
Since the old buddha Touzi spoke so, this mountain gate is fortunate indeed. And so there is a verse, spoken for the wandering monks:
Expounding the whole canon of the teaching: know that in this world there must be arhats, and how should good and evil have no road of cause and effect? Great men, gods, sages and worthies are fortunate to have got this charm to keep them safe. And just at such a moment, what then?
After a long silence, he spoke.
When the copying was finished and Hatano's letter came again with the canon to be installed, he took the high seat once more:
The ocean-store of the cosmic Buddha, handed on from old to now; the wheel of the teaching turned three times over the great thousand worlds. A thousand peaks, ten thousand peaks, the colour of yellow leaves: all living beings come to the way, complete in a single moment.
The Founder made fifteen verses on living in the mountains. Here are the first three.
How glad I am that living in the mountains is so very still. Because of it I read the Lotus Sutra constantly. Wholly given to it under the trees, what is there to hate or love? The colour of the moon to look at, the rain to listen to.
The ancestors' way came from the west, and I have handed it on in the east: fishing the moon, ploughing the clouds, longing for the old manner. The red dust of the world does not blow as far as this: deep in the mountains, a snowy night, inside a grass hut.
Sitting at night, the watches nearly gone, sleep not yet come: I know now in my bones that the way is to be worked out in mountains and woods. The sound of the valley stream in the ears, the moon reaching the eyes, and beyond that, what use is there for the mind at all?
The retired emperor Go-Saga, hearing of the Founder's reputation, sent him the purple robe, the highest honour the court could give a monk. He refused it twice and three times over. He was not allowed to refuse. So he accepted it, and never once wore it. He sent up a verse in thanks:
Eihei's valley may be shallow, but the imperial commands come again and again. I am afraid the monkeys and the cranes will laugh at this one old man.
In 1251, the third year of Kencho, a bell was constantly heard sounding deep in the mountain, where there was no bell. Hatano Yoshishige kept writing to ask about it, and this is the Founder's reply.
Since you ask about it day after day, I write. It has happened again and again over these seven or eight years. This year, at midnight on the fifth day of the first month, while I was discussing the Buddha's teaching with the counsellor of the Kazan'in, who has since become a lay monk, in the hermitage at Ryozan'in, a bell was heard, some two hundred strokes of it. The sound was deeper than the bell of Kiyomizu temple in the capital. We listened to it with joy, and it seemed to me solemn and holy beyond words. The counsellor too said that this is a marvellous and holy ground, and was full of joy at it, and it was for that that he took the tonsure.
Lord Kaneyori, the middle captain, was in the same room and did not hear it. Nor did his foster-brother, the lay monk Keihin. And two or three women besides, and seven or eight retainers who were there, all say they heard nothing.
The fragrance, too, has been extraordinary, and has perfumed the monks' hall inside and out. Perhaps it is the holy sign of this excellent ground, which shows itself in the three things I have set down here. As for the sound, it may be set beside Mount Tiantai in China.
The rest of that sheet is torn away.
In 1252, the fourth year of Kencho, from about the summer, he was ill, though not yet seriously. His last piece of writing was the essay on the Eight Awakenings of Great Beings, which he meant for the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. It is built on the sutra the Buddha is said to have preached the night he died, and it reads as the Founder's own last will. Kenzei gives only the eight headings, with the Founder's plain Japanese gloss on each.
The first is having few wants. This means: do not go after fame and gain. Where there is no wanting there is no grief or care, and all the virtues come of themselves.
The second is knowing when you have enough. This means: you wish to escape the sufferings of the world. The rich and the high-born are so by birth, and the poor man is poor by birth. Have pity on those poorer than yourself, and do not crave what is above you. If a man will only think about his own condition, he will find there is nothing he lacks.
The third is delighting in stillness. This means that if you give up the company of people and live deep in the mountains and woods, you will be honoured and respected by gods and men alike.
The fourth is diligent effort. That is: if a monk keeps up the practice well and does not slacken, then everything he seeks will be fulfilled.
The fifth is not forgetting mindfulness. If you mean to follow a good teacher, do not set the thought aside for a single moment. Then the afflictions will not come of themselves.
The sixth is practising meditation. This is gathering the mind quietly and sitting zazen. At such a time you come of yourself to the truth that nothing in the world lasts.
The seventh is practising wisdom. A man who has wisdom does not covet anything at all. Look well into this, and do not lose it. To do as the teaching says is like getting a lamp in the dark.
The eighth is not indulging in idle argument. This means: do not argue frivolously about anything, anywhere. Idle argument disturbs the mind. Only think of the fact that you must die.
Whoever does not know the meaning of these Eight Awakenings of Great Beings, he said, is not a disciple of the Buddha.
Ejo, who became the second abbot, wrote at the end of his copy of it:
The above is the draft made by my late master, the founding abbot, during his last illness. He said that all the essays of the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye written before this in Japanese were to be rewritten, and new ones drafted with them, and the whole made up to a hundred. After that his illness grew heavier and heavier by degrees, and so this was the teaching he left as his command. It is our misfortune, and the thing I most regret, that we shall never see the draft of the hundred essays. Anyone who loves and longs for our late master must copy this one out and keep it safe. This is the Buddha's last command, and it is our late master's last testament.
Now, on the fourteenth day of the seventh month of the seventh year of Kencho, I have had Gien write it out, and the copying is finished, and I have checked it against the original. Recorded by Ejo.
The original itself is dated: written from the end of the fourth year of Kencho to the sixth day of the first month of the fifth, at Eiheiji.
From old times, it is said, those who have read this essay have been moved to tears, and an abbot expounding it has wept aloud. If in the last age this testament is kept, the manner of the school will be fanned into flame for ever, the line will flow on, and it will not fall away.
On the fourteenth day of the seventh month of 1253, the fifth year of Kencho, while the Founder was still alive, Ejo was installed as second abbot and entered the abbot's quarters at Eiheiji.
At that installation the Founder gave him a kesa, a monk's patched robe, that he had sewn himself. It passed from hand to hand down the line for four generations, and the record of it, in the hand of the last of them, survives at Kofukuji in Higo. It is the story of a piece of cloth.
One robe, handed on in succession, together with its bag.
This robe is the kesa of the first ancestor who founded Eihei. The cloth of it is fine linen. Among the first ancestor's lay disciples there was a man of the province of Yamashiro called Renbo. His wife, whose faith in the first ancestor was undivided, prepared and wove the cloth herself under a vow of abstinence, and carried it the whole long way to Eiheiji in Echizen and offered it there. The first ancestor was moved by the undividedness of her faith, cut and sewed the robe himself, and wore it every day. At last, in the summer of the second year of Hoji, he sewed a bag for it and put it away.
In the seventh month of the fifth year of Kencho, when he handed the abbacy of Eihei to the second abbot, he entrusted this kesa to him along with it. Accordingly, through the eighteen years of his abbacy, the second abbot wore it at the discourses in the hall and at the recitation of the precepts. And for twenty-eight years after the first ancestor's death he never once passed a night apart from the robe, but guarded it and received it on his head.
Afterwards, in his own last illness, on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the third year of Koan, he called Gikai and said to him: you are Ejo's eldest heir. This robe is the kesa our late master entrusted to me together with the abbacy. It is the most precious thing I own. Many have received the teaching from me, but you are the eldest heir, and so I mean to hand it on to you. Gikai made three bows and received it.
For sixteen years after that he received it on his head and guarded it. On the fourteenth day of the first month of the third year of Einin, when he transmitted the teaching to Jokin, he handed on this robe with it, and said: this robe has now been received by three generations. It is a robe to be held in the highest reverence. Apart from entering the abbot's quarters, opening the hall and transmitting the teaching, you are not to wear it once in your life. Receive it on your head with reverence.
Now, in the ninth month of the second year of Enkyo, I write this from my sickbed. Fifty-third in descent from Shakyamuni Buddha; third abbot of Eihei; founder of Daijoji: Gikai.
Received by Jokin, second abbot of Daijoji.
Jokin declares: I now hand on this transmission robe, together with the abbacy of this temple, the sacred texts and the implements, and the deeds of this temple, to my successor. The tenth day of the tenth month of the first year of Ocho. Jokin, second abbot of Daijoji.
Jokin is Keizan, who is honoured in the Soto school as its second founder, and the robe was a hundred years old when he wrote that.
On the fifth day of the eighth month of 1253 the Founder went up to the capital. Because of his illness, Hatano Yoshishige had pressed him again and again to come, so that he could be seen by the physicians there, and Ejo went with him.
The record of his last words says that on the sixth day of the eighth month, at the lodging at Wakimoto on the road, Gikai was given leave to go back to the temple, and took the chance to ask him a question. It is hard, he said, that I should not attend you this time. What I really want is to follow you back to the temple. But if there is any delay, may I come up to the capital to see you? Will you allow it?
The master said: yes, certainly, that is quite right; there is nothing to discuss. But it is because I am thinking of the temple that I am leaving you behind. See to it, and look after the temple well. You are a man of this province, and many people here know you, and there are particular reasons, inside the temple and outside it, why you should stay.
Gikai received this with awe. It was the last time he saw his master's face, and the last instruction he had from him, and he never forgot it.
The Founder made a verse on the journey:
Ten years eating my rice on Eihei's ground; seven months now lying on a sickbed. To look for medicine I go out among men a while, over the ridge, to see the King of Physicians.
And a Japanese poem, on the pass over Mount Kinome, where the road leaves Echizen:
Setting out in a robe of grass over Kinome mountain, it feels to me as though there were a road through the clouds.
He was carried over the mountains in a litter, by the Tanba road. On reaching the capital he lodged at the house of a lay disciple at Takatsuji and Nishinotoin, in the middle of the city. His condition neither improved nor got worse.
One day he walked slowly round the room, and as he walked he recited a passage of the Lotus Sutra under his breath:
Whether in a garden, or in a wood, or under a tree, or in a monk's quarters, or in a layman's house, or in a palace hall, or in a mountain valley or an empty moor: in every one of these places a stupa should be raised and offerings made. Why? Because you should know that this place is a place of the way. Here the buddhas attain the highest awakening. Here the buddhas turn the wheel of the teaching. Here the buddhas enter final nirvana.
When he had finished he wrote that passage on the pillar in front of him, and beside it he wrote: the Hermitage of the Lotus Sutra. What he meant by it was this. He was dying in a layman's house, in the middle of a city, and the Buddha himself had said that even such a place is a place of awakening.
At midnight on the twenty-eighth day of the eighth month of 1253, the fifth year of Kencho, he wrote his own death verse and died. The verse:
Fifty-four years lighting up the first heaven. With this one leap I shatter the thousandfold worlds. Ah! My whole body has nowhere to rest. Living, I plunge into the Yellow Springs.
He threw down the brush and passed away.
Hatano Yoshishige looked up at the sky and threw himself on the ground, and there was nothing like his grief at a man dying so early, at fifty-four. The monks and the lay people and the disciples he left could not stop crying. Ejo was shattered, and for the better part of an hour he was as one dead.
They carried the body first to a small hut in Naka no Koji, in the Tenjin quarter of the city, and made the arrangements there. Then Hatano looked for a suitable place, found a small temple at Akatsuji in the eastern hills, and had the coffin carried there and the body cremated according to the rites. The verse said at the lighting of the pyre is preserved in the travel-record of a later monk, though nobody now knows who composed it:
He searched the dark road everywhere and hid nothing at all; the dream broke after fifty-four frosts and stars. The wood goes into the ashes; the tears fall like rain on blossom; and for one night the whole city smells of running water.
On the sixth day of the ninth month they gathered the relics and left the capital, and on the tenth, in the evening, they reached the Mountain of Good Fortune. On the twelfth, in the afternoon, the rites of a buddha's passing were performed in the abbot's quarters. Tea and sweets and fine food and candles were set out according to the rule, the offerings were made, and the services and the observances of mourning were all carried out as though he were present. His stupa is at the north-west corner of the temple. It is the present Joyo-an.
Hatano afterwards went back to the house in the capital, took the pillar on which the Founder had written the passage from the Lotus Sutra, cut it free, and carried it down to Echizen. At the foot of Mount Tsukio, on his own land, he raised a memorial stupa with that pillar as its central post, and it is said he made offerings there every day. It is still there, as a branch temple.
Of the Founder's Japanese poems, Kenzei lists these: the poems he made on the night of the mid-autumn moon in the year he died; five on themes from the Lotus Sutra; the poem on the first snow, from the ninth month of 1244; the poems made at Kamakura at Tokiyori's request; and thirty-four made in the grass hut at Eiheiji as they came to him. They are collected in a separate book, and Kenzei does not copy them here.
The monks who produced the illustrated edition of 1806 wrote a set of notes explaining themselves, and the notes are worth having, because they say what the book is for and how the pictures were made.
This undertaking fell, as it happened, in 1802, which was the five hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founder's death. Our teacher Chinju, with Daiken and several others, laid the plan beforehand, appealed for subscriptions to the assembly gathered for the memorial feast, collected the money, and put it in the hands of a block-cutter, Shunryo of Oshu, to set him to the work. But Shunryo died, and the work was held up on that account. We then took up our teacher's instructions again, gathered up the drawings that had been let fall, made good what was missing, and put the whole to the blocks a second time, to finish what had been begun.
Kenzei's record is full and exact, to be trusted and to be checked against, and Menzan's corrections did everything they could to make it good. Now, by printing the pictures together with the two texts, we hope for the first time to show the true face of the mountain.
The pictures follow the order of the record as it stands. But some things, like the story of the blood-lineage and the deliverance of the spirit at the pond, belong with the house of Hatano, who revered the founder and founded Eiheiji, so we have worked out the years of these things and set them in their own order. Readers, we ask you to bear this in mind.
Some things, such as Ejo's first sermon as head monk, we have left unillustrated on purpose, because a picture of it would be confused with the founder's own ceremonies. And where a picture would add little we have here and there left it out, for fear of clutter. Do not charge us with carelessness.
Kenzei wrote in the plain syllabary for the sake of ordinary believers, and his intention in it was deep and earnest. That we should now be adding pictures on top of it is no better than the ugly woman in the old story, who tried to improve her looks by copying a beauty's frown. Still, we hope it may guide the young novices of our own school, and be of some use to the children and the plain people among believers far and near. If each goes from what is near him to what is far, it will come in the end to a seed planted everywhere.
The poem in the picture and the picture in the poem: we wanted from the first that they should be closely fused. So we have put a little of our own into the plates, making what was long there short here, or what was small there large, adding flowers where we show spring and bringing in the moon where we draw autumn, and things of that kind. Why should anyone call this the illustrator's fumbling? Because the whole picture, from first to last, is not falsified.
Somebody has found fault with this undertaking, and called it an extreme piece of idle amusement. We cannot think that is right. The deeds of the sages and worthies of former ages, everything that writing cannot reach, have always been supplied by pictures. Are the great painted mandalas, or the paintings of the Buddha's death at Kusinagara, to be called idle amusement too? Writing and painting alike turn a contrary current back. They are provisions made to meet the occasion.
A small view of the founder's mountain is bound in at the end, so that people in far corners of the country who have never been there may picture to themselves the antiquity of the founder's grave, and may form, here and now, the good cause of coming to it. Ah, nearly six hundred years have passed since the founding. And shall the mountain ever be ground down to a whetstone, or the river shrink to a sash?
The full moon of the seventh month, 1806. Written respectfully by the attendant Mokushitsu, burning incense and bowing nine times.