The brief flourishing of Zen during the Tokugawa era was actually a revival, for the faith had become static and uninspired during the years of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi. The formalized practice of Zen at the end of the seventeenth century was described by a visiting Jesuit Father:
The solitary philosophers of the Zenshu sect, who dwell in their retreats in the wilderness, [do not] philosophize with the help of books and treatises written by illustrious masters and philosophers as do the members of the other sects of the Indian gymnosophists. Instead they give themselves up to contemplating the things of nature, despising and abandoning worldly things; they mortify their passions by certain enigmatic and figurative meditations and considerations [koan] which guide them on their way at the beginning. . . . o the vocation of these philosophers is not to contend or dispute with another with arguments, but they leave everything to the contemplation of each one so that by himself he may attain the goal by using these principles, and thus they do not teach disciples.1
The good Father was describing a Zen faith that had become a set piece, devoid of controversy but also devoid of life.
The man who brought Zen out of its slumber and restored its vigor was the mystic Hakuin (1685-1768), who revived the koan school of Rinzai and produced the most famous koan of all times: "You know the sound of two hands clapping; what is the sound of one hand clapping?" Hakuin gave a new, mystical dimension to the Rinzai school of Zen, even as Hui-neng created nonintellectual Chinese Ch'an Buddhism out of the founding ideas of Bodhidharma. Hakuin was also a poet, a painter, and the author of many commentaries on the sutras. Yet even when he enjoyed national fame, he never lost his modesty or his desire for enlightenment.
Hakuin lived the greater part of his life in the small rural village of his birth. A sensitive, impressionable child, he was early tormented by an irrational fear of the fires of the Buddhist hell as dwelt upon by the priests of his mother's sect, the Nichiren. For relief he turned to the Lotus Sutra, but nothing he read seemed to ease his mind. Finally he became a wandering Zen monk, searching from temple to temple for a master who could give him enlightenment. He studied under various famous teachers and gradually achieved higher and higher levels of awareness. At the age of thirty-two he returned to his home village and assumed control of the ramshackle local Zen temple, which he eventually made the center of Rinzai Zen in Japan. Word of his spiritual intensity spread and soon novices were flocking to him. His humility and humanity were a shining light in the spiritual dark age of the Tokugawa, and he breathed life and understanding back into Zen.
Despite Hakuin, official Zen never regained its influence in Japan. Someday perhaps the modern-day Western interest in Zen will give it new life somewhere outside Japan, but this life will almost certainly be largely secular. Indeed, the influence of Zen in the Momoyama and Tokugawa ages was already more pronounced in the secular world than in the spiritual. The bourgeois arts of these later years were notably less profound than those of the Ashikaga, but the spirit of Zen spread to become infused into the very essence of Japanese life, making the everyday business of living an expression of popular Zen culture.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN