THE ZEN MASTERS.
Let us begin with Enō, a master of the seventh century. He lost his parents when he was young and earned his living by gathering firewood. One day when he was in the market-place he heard some one reading the Diamond Sūtra.[6] He asked where such books were to be had and was told “From Master Kōnin on the Yellow Plum-blossom Hill.” Accordingly he went to Kōnin’s Monastery in Anhui and presented himself before the Master. “Where do you come from?” “From the South.” “Bah! In the South they have not Buddha in their souls.” “North and South,” replied Enō, “are human distinctions that Buddha knows nothing of.”
Kōnin accepted him as a lay-brother and put him to pound rice in the bakery.
Kōnin was growing old and wished to choose his successor. He therefore instituted a poetical competition in which each monk was to epitomise in a quatrain the essence of Zen. The favourite candidate was the warden Shinshū, who sent in the following verses:
The body is the trunk of the Bodhi-tree;
The mind is the bright mirror’s stand;
Scrub your mirror continually,
Lest the dust eclipse its brightness.
Enō, as a lay-brother, was not qualified to compete. Some one told him of Shinshū’s quatrain. “Mine would be very different,” he exclaimed, and persuaded one of the boys employed in the bakery to go stealthily by night and inscribe the following poem on the monastery-wall:
Knowledge is not a tree;
The Mirror has no stand;
Since nothing exists,
How could dust rise and cover it?
The authorship of the poem was discovered and the abbot Kōnin visited Enō in the bakery. “Is your rice white or no?” he asked. “White?” answered Enō; “it has not yet been sifted.” Thereupon the abbot struck three times on the rice-mortar with his staff and departed. Enō understood his meaning. That night at the third watch he came to Kōnin’s cell and was invested with the abbot’s mantle, thereby becoming the Sixth Patriarch of the Zen Church. He died in 712 A.D., without having learned how to read or write.