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.
FASHIONABLE ZEN.
The warden Shinshū had lost the Patriarchate and with it the spiritual headship of Zen. But as a compensation Fate had in store for him worldly triumphs of the most dazzling kind. Leaving the rural monastery of Kōnin, he entered the Temple of the Jade fountain in the great city of Kingchau. His fame soon spread over central China. He was a man of “huge stature, bushy eyebrows and shapely ears.” The Empress Wu Hou, who had usurped the throne of China, notoriously cultivated the society of handsome priests. About 684 A.D. she summoned him to the Capital. Instead of commanding his presence at Court she came in a litter to his lodgings and actually knelt down before him. The friendship of this murderous and fiendishly cruel woman procured for him temporal dignities which in the eyes of the world completely outshone the rustic piety of the Sixth Patriarch. Shinshū at the Capital became as it were the Temporal Father of Zen, while Enō at his country monastery remained its spiritual pope. The successors of Enō became known as the Fathers of the Southern School; while the courtly and social Zen of Shinshū is called Zen of the North.
Was it in sincere goodwill or with the desire to discredit his rival that Shinshū invited Enō to join him at the Capital? In any case Enō had the good sense to refuse. “I am a man of low stature and humble appearance,” he replied; “I fear that the men of the North would despise me and my doctrines”—thus hinting (with just that touch of malice which so often spices the unworldly) that Shinshū’s pre-eminence in the North was due to outward rather than to spiritual graces.
Shinshū died in 706, outliving his august patroness by a year. To perpetuate his name a palace was turned into a memorial monastery; the Emperor’s brother wrote his epitaph; his obsequies were celebrated with stupendous pomp.