From this time on I determined to myself that I would leave home to become a monk. To this my parents would not consent, yet I went constantly to the temple to recite the sutras. . . .1
But after several years of study and chanting, he was dismayed to find he still felt pain (when he tested himself one day with a hot poker). He resolved to intensify his devotion and at age fifteen he entered a local Zen temple (against his parents' wishes) and was ordained as a monk. Hakuin pursued his study of the Lotus Sutra, the primary scripture venerated at this temple (an illustration of how far Japanese Zen had traveled from its tradition of meditation and koans), but after a year he concluded it was just another book, no different from the Confucian classics. He therefore began to drift from temple to temple until, at nineteen, he experienced another spiritual crisis. In a book of religious biographies he came across the story of the Chinese monk Yen-t'ou (828-87), who had been attacked and murdered by bandits, causing him to emit screams heard a full three miles away. Hakuin was plunged into depression.
I wondered why such an enlightened monk was unable to escape the swords of thieves. If such a thing could happen to a man who was like a unicorn or phoenix among monks, a dragon in the sea of Buddhism, how was I to escape the staves of the demons of hell after I died? What use was there in studying Zen?2
He thereupon took up his staff and set out as an itinerant seeker, only to meet disappointment after disappointment—until finally he decided to put his future in the hands of chance. One day as the abbot of a temple was airing its library outside, Hakuin decided to select a book at random and let it decide his fate. He picked a volume of biographies of Chinese Ch'an worthies and opening it read of an eleventh-century Lin-chi master who kept awake in meditation by boring into his own thigh with a wood drill. The story galvanized Hakuin, and he vowed to pursue Zen training until enlightenment was his.
Hakuin claims that at age twenty-four he had his first really moving satori experience. He was in a temple in Niigata prefecture, meditating on the "Mu" koan (Q: "Does a dog have Buddha-nature? A: "Mu!"), and so intense was his concentration that he even forgot sleeping and eating. Then one day . . .
Suddenly a great doubt manifested itself before me. It was as though I were frozen solid in the midst of an ice sheet extending tens of thousands of miles. A purity filled my breast and I could neither go forward nor retreat. To all intents and purposes I was out of my mind and the Mu alone remained. Although I sat in the Lecture Hall and listened to the Master's lecture, it was as though I were hearing a discussion from a distance outside the hall. At times it felt as though I were floating through the air.
This state lasted for several days. Then I chanced to hear the sound of the temple bell and I was suddenly transformed. It was as if a sheet of ice had been smashed or a jade tower had fallen with a crash.3
Elated with his transformation, he immediately trekked back to an earlier master and presented a verse for approval. The master, however, was not impressed.
The Master, holding my verse up in his left hand, said to me: "This verse is what you have learned from study. Now show me what your intuition has to say," and he held out his right hand.