As part of an exploration of Sōtō Zen ancestors, Nomon Tim introduces a study on Keizan. Keizan Jōkin, also known as Taiso Jōsai Daishi, is considered to be the second great founder of the Sōtō school of Zen.

Stream audio:

Tim's Talk Notes:

Meeting Great Ancestor Keizan (Denkōroku talk 1)

Well we did a year focusing on Dōgen in our talks and our last shuso's teachings. Thank you for patiently listening to many of them and exploring Dōgen in the ways that you did. If you didn't feel that connected to Dōgen this time around it's okay - exploring great way is more of a circular thing than a curriculum where you need to start here and get to there. And thank you to our practice leaders for the talks they gave on Dōgen you can find them all, pretty much, on our website and increasingly (thanks to Michael and now Kata) on our YouTube channel.

So this year we thought we'd look at other Zen ancestor. A year of ancestors.

As you know I'm sure traditional Zen has it's share of misogyny and the traditional lineages are all male.  And I'm going to start tonight on a series of talks on just such a lineage.

And of course there were so many enlightened Zen women and we won't forget them. We are blessed with growing levels of access to their stories as well.

To my mind it's a both-and. The traditional stories are important and powerful even if they are oh-so male dominated. They are how the mainline tradition has understood itself and that's good to know about as we're a part of the Sōtō school.

And those traditional stories are also an incomplete understanding, to be sure, so we'll for sure also be learning the stories of our great women Zen ancestors.

So tonight the first talk on the second founder of Sōtō Zen after Dōgen: a monk named Keizan Jokin who lived from 1268–1325. Just a bit after Dōgen's 1200-1253. Keizan never met Dōgen of course but he did study as a young man with Dōgen's primary disciple, Ejo, and his root teacher ended up being Ejo's student Gikai.

I want to give a series of talks on his great text Transmission of the Light - in Japanese Denkōroku - which is exactly a book of stories of the traditional ancestral line from Shakaymuni Buddha to his teacher's teacher, Ejo who was the primary disciple of Dōgen.

This first talk is a bit scholarly to set the stage and give some context. So please just relax and enjoy and don't worry about trying to retain it all. As always the video of the talk will be posted on the website and the YouTube channel and my notes - which I think will pretty closely match what I say tonight - get posted on the website.

From Bodford's introduction:

Together with the “Eminent Ancestor” (Kōso 高祖) Dōgen, the “Great Ancestor” (Taiso 太祖) Keizan is celebrated as one of the two founders of the school. Together with Dōgen’s monastery Eiheiji 永平寺, Keizan’s monastery Sōjiji 總持寺 is one of the two head temples of the Sōtō School. And, together with Dōgen’s Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shōbōgenzō 正法眼藏), Keizan’s Denkōroku is considered one of the two most important sacred scriptures (seiten 聖典) of the school.

Nevertheless, for half a millennium after its composition, Keizan’s Denkōroku was little known even among his Sōtō School descendants. Until its initial printing in 1857, it was unavailable outside a handful of Sōtō School cloisters. Indeed, so obscure is the premodern history of the work that scholars once raised doubts about its authenticity as a record of Keizan’s teachings. Such doubts have now been silenced by the discovery of early manuscripts of the text, but the fact remains that the Denkōroku played very little role in the premodern historical development of Japanese Sōtō Zen.

When there is study in Zen training centers it's usually either Shobogenzo study (Genzo-e) or Denkoroku study (Denko-e).

Dōgen studies had a big revival starting in the 17th century but Keizan wasn't studied and the Denkoroku wasn't widely known until the middle of the 19th century!

The modern history of the Denkōroku began in 1857, when a Sōtō Zen teacher named Busshū Sen’ei 佛洲仙英 (1794–1864) introduced it to the world in a woodblock printing. By this time, Japanese society had awakened to the existential threat presented by the rapidly industrializing West.

Just eleven years later, in 1868, Japan effectively entered the modern age. That year, in a revolution now known as the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese people abolished rule by the shogun, opened their ports for foreign trade, and embarked on their own programs of industrialization and social reform. Progressives advocated the adoption of scientific methods and the critical evaluation of traditions. The notion of religion became subject to debate as leaders attempted to define its relationships with other broad conceptual categories such as science, superstition, spirituality, philosophy, and nationalism.1

In the Sōtō School, monastic leaders struggled to centralize the Sōtō temple networks into a single religious denomination, so as to respond more effectively to the demands of modernity. Lay people organized their own societies to propagate Sōtō teachings. In 1885, in the midst of these developments, Ōuchi Seiran 大 内青巒 (1845–1918), perhaps the most influential lay Buddhist of his day, published a revised modern typeset edition of the Denkōroku.

The preface says Keizan started the lectures for this book in 1300 - just under 50 years after Dōgen died. He was two generations after Dōgen. Zen was just then starting to take off - partly due to political circumstances:

Nearly twenty years had passed since Japanese armies successfully repulsed the massive 1281 naval invasion by combined Mongol, Chinese, and Korean troops representing the Yuan Empire of Kublai Khan. While the conflict drained the finances of the shogun’s military government in Kamakura, the success enhanced the government’s prestige and perhaps contributed to the esteem of the new Zen temples it sponsored. One year later, in 1301, construction of Japan’s first royal Zen monastery, Nanzenji 南禪寺, would be completed in Kyoto.

Up until this time the number of notable Zen monasteries within Japan could be counted on the fingers of two hands. The most influential ones were located either at the seat of the shogun’s government in Kamakura (e.g., Jufukuji 壽福 寺, Kenchōji 建長寺, Engakuji 圓覺寺), or in Kyoto (e.g., Kenninji 建仁寺 and Tōfukuji 東福寺), the traditional seat of the royal court.

There were also four notable Zen monasteries associated with Dōgen and his followers, all of which were far away from those seats of power. In the countryside to the far northeast of Kyo to, the Sōtō movement had three monasteries.

Two, Eiheiji and Hōkyōji 寶慶寺, were in the province of Echizen, and the third, Daijōji 大乘寺, was further north in the neighboring province of Kaga. To the far west, in the province of Higo on the island of Kyushu, there was a fourth monastery, Daijiji 大慈寺.

Eiheiji had been founded by Dōgen, while the remaining monasteries were founded by students of Dōgen’s disciple Ejō: Hōkyōji by Jakuen 寂圓 (C. Jiyuan; 1207–1299), Daijōji by Gikai, and Daijiji by Giin 義尹 (1217–1300). Those four monasteries shared a historical and spiritual connection to Dōgen, but they operated independently and served their own local patrons.

Keizan's primary teacher Gikai studied with both Dōgen and his main disciple and attendance Ejo (Keizan entered Eiheiji as a boy and Ejo was an old man by then). Keizan never went to China. Of course Dōgen did and we've heard stories about his pivotal time there as a young man. And Keizan's teacher Gikai did also. An interesting scholarly thing is that many of Keizan's quotations in these lectures appear to be from a Chinese book not published until 1253 so we assume Gikai brought that back. It's hard to remember how limited access to the written world would have been for most people in the medieval world. Very precious and special, many copied by hand, and even as more were printed on woodblocks there wouldn't have been very many copies.

I won't geek out too deeply on the text itself as originally written down by Keizan's students in the early 1300's but like Dōgen's writing it turns out to have been a really challenging one to translate and make sense of. As is usual there are not chapters or even paragraphs: just column after column of mixed classical Japanese and Chinese writing. And to make this one even harder often the quotations from Chinese literature not only lack any punctuation like our quotation marks to tell you "I'm quoting now" - Dōgen does that too - but Dōgen at least copies the quotation order in Chinese characters and in the Chinese word order he found them in. But with Keizan's Denkoroku we find those quotations already translated into Japanese so it's even harder. And most of the earlier translations assumed, wrongly, that a lot of quotations were Keizan's own words. A group of scholars sponsored by Sōtōshu recently finished a new translation where they tried back translating anything that might be a quotation back into Chinese and then looked that up in digital databases.

In way none of this matters too much: we can only do our best with the translations available to us and none of us are likely to go off and learn classical Chinese and early Japanese along with the layers of modern Japanese you'd need to know also. We just do our best with the English currently available.

But what's available keeps changing and improving. So now we have this more literal and accurate one but I like knowing this stuff. It deepens my appreciation for the text and the ongoing depth of the transmission of Zen to us. And how just like the emptiness and impermanence teachings tell us nothing is final or solid or definitive. And the early translations while not wrong, were a bit off in this regard - accurate but kind of misportraying what Keizan was saying in a way.

A last note about Keizan's importance. The times were right and he was a great organizer. He and his students expanded the reach of Sōtō Zen tremendously. Far beyond where Dōgen left off at his death with basically only Eiheiji as his temple. In future talks I'll say more about Keizan he was kind of a neat guy. For one thing it's clear he paid alot of attention to the women in his life and also to his dreams. He had a mystical and shamantic bent big time, but always at the core the depth of Zen practice.

So, here in Denkoroku from the series of lectures he gave on Zen ancestors we have a story: Keizan's telling the Zen story of a linear lineage from Buddha's day to his teacher's teacher. In the Japan of 1300, however, few people knew anything about Zen dharma transmission or Zen lineages. Those topics had to be introduced and explained so t hat was part of his purpose. But of course reality is always more complicated than any story and the scholarly introduction to Denkoroku has pages and pages on the twining vines that are what we know so far of how these lineages really worked. Of course each person often had more than one teacher and it wasn't uncommon to have transmission in more than one lineage. Dōgen himself we think had already received transmission from his Japanese teacher Myozen before they went to China together and it's shown that way today on our lineage papers.

But the neat thing here is it wasn't just Keizan explaining things to legitimize Zen or himself. These are also teaching stories. The text repeatedly reminds readers that each story is not about other people but about one’s own self, not about other places but right here, not about long ago but right now.

So let's see if we can find ourselves in this text. Here's the first story which I'll comment only very briefly and we'll return to next time. Don't try to hard to understand. Usually I wouldn't use such a long quotation in a talk as I know it's so easy to get lost as you listen but just let it wash over you and we'll return to it next week.

Chapter 1: Shakaymuni Buddha

Root Case

Śākyamuni Buddha saw the morning star, awakened to the way, and said, “I, together with the great earth and sentient beings, simultaneously attain the way.”

Pivotal Circumstances

Śākyamuni Buddha belonged to the Sūrya-vamśa Clan in Western Lands. At nineteen years of age he leapt over the palace walls at midnight, then cut off his hair on Dandaka Mountain. Thereafter he practiced austerities for six years. Then he sat on the vajra seat as spiderwebs formed between his eyebrows, a magpie’s nest rested atop his head, and reeds sprouted up through his seat. Peacefully abiding, without moving, for six [more] years he sat erect. On the 8th day of the last month of his thirtieth year, when the morning star emerged, he suddenly awakened to the way, and his very first lion’s roar consisted of these words.

After that, for forty-nine years he [Śākyamuni] did not dwell alone for a single day, and there was not even a short time when he did not preach the dharma for the congregation. He was never without one robe and one bowl. At more than three hundred and sixty assemblies, from time to time he preached the dharma. In the end, he entrusted the treasury of the true dharma eye to Mahākāśyapa, and it has been disseminated down to the present. Indeed, it has been transmitted in the three countries of India, China, and Japan, where it has been used to form the basis for cultivating the true dharma.

Śākyamuni’s bearing during that lifetime became the standard for his bereaved disciples. Although he was fully equipped with the thirty-two marks and eighty pleasing features, he always took the appearance of an old bhiksu, no different from other people. Thus, ever since his time in the world, throughout the three periods of the true, semblance, and enfeebled [dharma], those who admire his proper manner have adopted Buddha’s appearance and deportment, received and used what Buddha received and used, and whether walking, standing, sitting, or reclining, never ceased to give priority to their own selves for even the shortest period of time.

What this episode clearly indicates is that the true dharma has come down to us through the individual transmission from buddha to buddha and ancestor to ancestor, without ever being cut off. Although what he indicated differed over forty-nine years and more than three hundred and sixty assemblies, the various episodes and parables he told do not go beyond this principle.

So I hope you're feeling inspired by Shakyamuni's example. We take up his bearing meaning we practice embodying him, being him.

And now Keizan talks about the inner work and understanding. Of this and it gets hard to follow. It's all about releasing from separation. The idea of being separate from each other. The idea that Shakaymuni is a historical figure that although we're inspired by and admire with perhaps a very deep feeling, we think he isn't "not-me" that his other.

Confusingly for listening to this in English he's mixing "I" like "me" with "eye"  the organ that sees. The words & concepts me / I / mine being the markers of our separateness. And "eye" as an organ pointing to how perception misunderstood can also feel this separateness if we think I am over here with my eyes looking at something outside of me. For clarity I'll hold up one finger when it's "I" like me and point to my eye when it's "eye" like vision. And we'll post all of his on the website.

The “I” spoken of here is not Śākyamuni Buddha. Śākyamuni Buddha, too, was born from this “I.” And it was not only Śākyamuni Buddha who was born: the great earth and sentient beings, too, were all born from this. “When one lifts up a great net, all of its pieces are lifted up together.” In like manner, when Śākyamuni Buddha attained the way, the great earth and sentient beings also attained the way. And it was not only the great earth and sentient beings who attained the way: the buddhas of the three times, too, all attained the way. Although this is so, Śākyamuni Buddha himself formed no thought of attaining the way.

Do not regard Śākyamuni Buddha as apart from the great earth and sentient beings. Even though mountains and rivers and the great earth — all the myriad, interconnected phenomena — are like a dense forest, none avoid being within Gautama’s eyes.

All of you people are also standing within Gautama’s eyes. And it is not only that you are standing within Gautama’s eyes: they have been replaced by all of you here. You have also become the lumps of flesh that are Gautama’s eyes, and each and every person’s entire body, one by one, is a cliff rising ten thousand fathoms. But do not think, on that account, that through past and through present those are exalted people with perfectly clear eyes. You people are identical with Gautama’s eyes, and Gautama is identical with the entire body of each of you. If so, then what will you call the principle that underlies attainment of the way?

Well, monks of the great assembly, is it that Gautama attains the way together with you people, or is it that you people attain the way together with Gautama? If you say that you attain the way together with Gautama, or if you say that Gautama attains the way together with you, then that is not at all Gautama’s attainment of the way.

Accordingly, it cannot be regarded as the principle that underlies attainment of the way. If you wish to intimately understand the principle of attaining the way, then you must simultaneously brush away “Gautama” and “you people,” and quickly understand what “I” represents. The “together with” of “I” is the great earth and sentient beings, but the “I” of “together with” is not that Old Guy Gautama. You must examine this in detail, consider it in detail, clarify “I,” and understand “together with.” Even if you clarify “I,” if you do not clarify “together with,” then you will still lose the one eye.

While this is so, “I” and “together with” are not one thing, nor are they two different things. Truly, the skin, flesh, bones, and marrow of you all are entirely “together with.” The lord master within the house: that is the “I.” It does not involve skin, flesh, bones, and marrow, nor does it involve the four primary elements or the five aggregates. To sum the matter up in words, “if you wish to recognize the undying person within the hermitage, how could you possibly do so apart from this present bag of skin?” This being so, you should not form an understanding of “the great earth and sentient beings.”

Although spring, summer, autumn, and winter each come in turn, and the mountains and rivers and great earth change together with time, we know from Old Guy Gautama’s raising the eyebrows and blinking the eyes that “amidst the myriad phenomena there is a solitary exposed body.” There is a Zen saying, “would that expunge the myriad phenomena, or not expunge the myriad phenomena?” Fayan said, “What expunging or not expunging could one possibly talk about?”

As Dizang said, “What could you possibly be calling ‘myriad phenomena’?”  Thus, you should investigate horizontally and investigate vertically until, with seven penetrations and eight masteries, you clarify Gautama’s place of awakening and understand attainment of the way by your own self.

Having been able to see such a kōan in detail, on the next day that we hold a request for edification, one by one you must explain the principle with appended words produced from within your own breasts, not words borrowed from previous buddhas or present people.

This mountain monk also thinks he will try to attach some humble words to this single case. People, do you wish to hear them? 

Verse on the Old Case

A single twig sprouts from the old plum tree; 

Thorns and brambles, as time goes by, encroach  on it.

Scholars point out that it's weird that he closed each chapter with a two line couplet. Usually it's be a 4-line verse in Chinese. And we know Keizan and the rest of Japanese Zen at the time practiced writing Chinese poetry in classical Chinese. It was a core practice. So it's possible Keizan asked his students to come up and complete his poem on the spot - probably by quoting lines or phrases from the other Chinese Zen poems they would have memorized. Perhaps putting them together in new ways but always using classical sources.