Bankei’s Zen Made Easy

  

Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in Peter Haskel’s Bankei Zen: Translations from the Record of Bankei; those in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     The prize of enlightenment is so precious, one might naturally think it must be very difficult to attain.  The history of Zen certainly includes some heroic strivers, among them the Second Patriarch Huìkě who cut off his own hand to offer Bodhidharma as evidence of his earnestness.  The very last advice the Buddha gave his followers was to strive hard [1], and monks of the sangha have virtually always been given a rigorous and demanding regimen of meditation and sutra chanting. 

     Yet Zen, particularly the Rinzai (Linji) tradition that arose from the Southern School has always recognized the possibility of sudden enlightenment.  Their founder Huìnéng, after all, experienced what the Japanese came to call satori when he overheard a passage of the Diamond Sutra.  Though monasteries of all sects continued the demanding spiritual practices they had inherited, none considered diligent effort sufficient to guarantee enlightenment, and many thought spiritual liberation might suddenly arrive at any moment. 

     The seventeenth century Japanese monk Bankei served as abbot of several important monasteries (including that at Ryoanji in Kyoto where the celebrated “dry garden” of raked sand and rocks is found).  He was as well a genuinely popular teacher whose public sessions attracted tens of thousands of listeners.  His approach to Zen, though singular in its simplicity and surprising to many, was approved by such masters as he could locate and his work became sufficiently influential that he is today regarded as one of the greatest exponents of Japanese Buddhism [2].

     Bankei’s central teaching is his exhortation to dwell in the Unborn Buddha Mind, a concept derived from the concept called in Sanskrit anutpāda, which is to say unconceived, or unborn [3].  His sermons hammer away at this one simple counsel to the point of becoming tiresome.  “Straightway abiding in the Unborn Buddha Mind just as it is , and you’re a living  tathagata from  today forever after” (4).  “Everything is perfectly managed with the Unborn” (13).  ”You’re always a living buddha, and there’s no time when you don’t remain a buddha” (22).  One need do nothing to achieve this status; it is in fact always already present {4].

     Bankei repeatedly recounts his own history of pursuing enlightenment by practicing zazen, reciting sutras, and studying Chinese to read the accounts of earlier masters, only to assure his followers that they need do none of these, though, if they wish, they may (49).  Bankei does not shout or strike meditators, seeking to shock them into enlightenment.  He tells them that, rather than anticipating years of rigorous and perhaps fruitless effort and self-denial, they are fortunate to hear his advice which has the potential to bring them enlightenment the very same day they hear his message.  The question is problematized by Bankei’s claim that “there’s no such thing as enlightenment” (83) and that “talking about wanting to achieve ‘enlightenment’ is certainly useless.” (84). But the aspirant need not worry about his meaning.  Everything, Bankei says, is already perfect.  There are no rules: “Do whatever you like” (58, 155), he says.  A student need do nothing but recognize the fact of a liberation fully present in every moment [5].

     Thus he insists that moral laws and miracles are irrelevant (7), there is no need even to speak of Buddhism or Zen (8), koans are nothing but “old wastepaper” (23) and icons useless (25).  All methods are merely expedients (103) and, if study has any role at all, it would be only to confirm one’s satori (114). 

     One must, however, contend with an adversary perhaps more subtle than memorizing characters on a sparse diet with a harsh teacher: the old bugbear of self-consciousness.  Bankei notes that his listeners are paying attention to his sermon with their conscious minds, yet they are simultaneously aware of other extraneous sounds such as sparrow, crows, or human voices which they hear without intention or effort, thus with the Buddha Mind [5].  While one may intentionally concentrate on a lecture or on achieving a goal, one must sneak up on oneself unawares to avoid paying attention or striving.  Surely this is the reason that most of Bankei’s listeners did not find their lives transformed after once hearing him speak.  Will is powerless, one must fall without thought into the Unborn Mind . 

     By his account Bankei’s own enlightenment came after prolonged arduous effort, when he was ill and had not eaten for a week, “on the verge of death.”  He spit against the wall and, when he “noticed that the sputum had congealed into a jet-black lump like a soapberry,” he suddenly realized “Everything is perfectly managed with the Unborn . . .I’ve just been uselessly knocking myself out!” Presumably his overstressed physical state had taken him out of himself and brought him momentary thoughtlessness which was sufficient to alter his consciousness, leaving his spirit “clear and buoyant” (13).  Yet he insists that his listeners need not follow his path.

     Bankei does not shrink from self-contradiction; indeed, he embraces paradox.  In spite of criticizing the traditional means for pursuing enlightenment, since one need do nothing whatever to find the Unborn Buddha Mind, he also declares that “to practice is hard” (67) and advises students “don ‘t fritter away your time” (89).  In spite of considering koan study “of no particular usefulness,” (23) he uses koans to bring his followers to understand his position. 

     The very koan that elicits Bankei’s dismissal of the device in fact enriches the subtlety of his vision.  An old man asks Hyakujō Oshō whether an enlightened person remains subject to causation.  He says he had told a follower of his own that such a one would no longer be subject to birth and death whereupon the student was condemned to five hundred lives as a fox.  When he was told that an enlightened state “does not ignore causation,” the student was freed from his fate and died in the form of a fully enlightened fox [6].  His error had presumably been to provide too definite an answer.  Bankei thus reminds his listeners of the value of such old stories for some and warns against accepting duality.  Bankei's use of the story, reminds his followers of the teaching while holding it at arm’s length, using it while explicitly rejecting its value. 

     Another central koan for Bankei’s Unborn Buddha Mind is that in which a monk who pursues the Sixth Patriarch, expecting to challenge his succession is startled into a higher consciousness by being told  “Think neither good nor evil. At this very moment, what is the original self of the monk Myo?” [7]  This “original self,” identical with the Unborn, though always and inevitably present, is obscured by delusion and accumulated habitual ignorance.   Hui-neng assures his questioner who inquires whether this is the most profound mystery that “what I have told you is no secret at all.  When you look into your own true self, whatever is deeper is found right there.”  He sounds here very much like Bankei.

     We twenty-first century Americans may feel that our era, even more than seventeenth century Japan is a “degenerate age of Buddhism” (6), sorely in need of a kickstart of insight.  Bankei reminds us that the Unborn Buddha Mind is always present, always perfect, for those who can recover a spontaneous unselfconscious grasp of it.

 

 

 

1.  "Behold now, bhikkhus, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness!" Maha-parinibbana Sutta: Last Days of the Buddha translated from the Pali by Sister Vajira & Francis Story.

2.  In the century following Bankei, Hakuin rose to prominence.  He was an advocate of very rigorous and unremitting practice and very critical of what to him was “do-nothing” Zen, including that practiced by Bankei’s followers.  Most modern Japanese Zen has roots in Hakuin.

3.  The term is often encountered in the Prajñāpāramitā Sutras and in the Lankavatara Sutra as well as in  Nagarjuna.

4.  Readers may be reminded of the use of the expression “always already” (immer schon) in Heidegger, Althusser, Derrida, and others.

5.  This point appears on pages 5, 27, 28, and 33.  The reader may be reminded on Cage’s celebrated piece 4’33” (1952).  In another image, Bankei notes that one withdraws the hand from hot fire without thought, prior to conscious perception.

6.  Case 2 Mumonkan.  The phrases here quoted are from Two Zen Classics: The Gateless Gate and the Blue Cliff Records, translated with commentaries by Katsuki Sekida and edited and introduced by A. V. Grimstone, p. 31. 

7.  This is quoted from the above edition of the Mumonkan, Case 23, p. 81. This story appears as well in the Sung version (the Hui-sin edition) of the Platform Sutra.  The questioner’s Chinese name is Hui-ming.