1. My Personal Connection with the Kannon-gyo

There’s a saying in Japan that doctors neglect their own health and Buddhist priests lapse from their faith, and I am certainly one of those priests if you’re talking about practicing the old established religion. I’ve had an iconoclastic tendency since my student days, but before I became a priest, I felt that Buddhist statues were special and mysterious. But, after taking Buddhist vows, I lost that feeling, and now I regard those statues as something like Japanese dolls. Honestly speaking, despite the phrase “truth proceeds from magnificence”—that somehow these icons must have majesty—well, I think that they are nothing more than ornaments. I have come to think of their effect as nothing more than decorative.

One time I attended a sesshin at a nunnery. The abbess tasked me with offering water or tea or flowers morning and evening to the Buddhist statues. I was shocked by how many statues there were—large and small ones, old and new, about twenty or thirty altogether. I was flabbergasted that I had to make an offering to every single one!

Later, in a roundabout way, I mentioned this to my teacher Sawaki Roshi and asked his impression. I said, “Don’t you think that these nuns offer flowers and water and take care of these Buddha statues with the same loving care that a girl gives to her dolls?” With a bitter smile, he said, “You’re always taking such a cynical point of view!” Well, it appears that I am a habitual cynic.

I’m sure that some people frown when I bandy about these wild points of view. But here what I want to talk about—and what I would like to 10ask you to listen to—are the words of Kannon Bodhisattva. Knowing this story about me is a prerequisite for understanding my tendency toward iconoclasm and cynicism. So, when it comes to the Buddha statues enshrined in temple halls and in altars in homes, and the ideas of the established conservative religious order, I would like to destroy them and, having eliminated these notions, I want to start thinking about the meaning of Kannon Bosatsu.

Once a monk asked the Chinese Zen master Nanyang Huizhong, “What is the mind of the ancient Buddha?” The master replied, “Fences, walls, tiles and pebbles.” According to the master’s answer, it is a mistake to think that the Buddha has a special form and emits radiant light and so forth. The Buddha is simply fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles. So, if what Huizhong said is true, my feeling about Buddhist statues does not show a lack of faith in Buddhism.

Yet the Kannon images we see in Buddhist temples and home altars are not Avalokiteshvara. Also, the valuable images of Kannon found in the ancient temples in Nara and Kyoto that we appreciate as fine art are certainly not the bodhisattva incarnate. Since there is no historical person named Kannon, this is nothing more than religion that we should understand as the expression of the life force of our original self.

Please permit me to tell you the story of my personal connection with the Kannon-gyo. In 1944 and 1945, shortly before Japan lost World War II, all Japanese people were suffering through hard times, and I was no exception. Since my teacher, Sawaki Roshi, made it his principle not to have his own temple, my fellow disciples and I had been practicing zazen at Daichuji Temple in Tochigi Prefecture. But then in the summer of 1944 we had to leave to make way for some schoolchildren who had evacuated from Tokyo in order to stay at the temple. Though originally there had been seven or eight of us practitioners, by this point some had left and only three of us remained, now with no place to go. Moreover, in those days, if you weren’t already engaged in work directly related to the war effort, you would be conscripted to work in a factory. 11It was Sawaki Roshi’s and our wish for the three of us to stay together, find some work to do, and continue our zazen practice.

At that time, someone suggested as a joke that we should go deep in the mountains of Shimane Prefecture and work as charcoal makers. It certainly was a wild idea, and I don’t hate wild ideas. Since I was born and raised in the big city of Tokyo, I thought that it would be a piece of cake to tend a warm charcoal kiln during the winter in the mountains. I thought that I could probably sit reading a book in front of the kiln. When I look back on it now, it was a hilarious pipe dream.

We received Roshi’s permission, and the three of us headed off to the mountains of Shimane Prefecture. To get to this place where our fate had led us, we took a train for about ten hours from Kyoto, finally arriving at a small, out-of-the-way village. Then we took a bus that ran only twice a day, all the way to the end of the line. After that, we walked another five miles to get to a small farmhouse in a glen belonging to a family to whom we had an introduction.

When we arrived, the family showed us where we were going to live and sleep, on the second floor of the farmer’s small storage shed. Only half the floor had tatami mats, and there was no electric light. Since there was no kerosene allocated for lamps in those days, we economized by using candles that we appropriated from the local temple, using them as if they were treasures to light our room. The mountainside where we worked was about an hour’s walk along a narrow mountain road, alongside a cliff on the sunless north face of the steep mountainside. We could look down into a steep valley in the deep mountains. It was quiet and beautiful scenery.

I had never used a woodsman’s saw before, and I had to carry a large heavy axe. When we were guided into the woods, we could scarcely carry the heavy tools as we climbed up and over rocks and balanced on tree roots. We didn’t have enough strength either in body or mind to do that work, and for a while the three of us were in a daze. Given that we had finally been able to get permission to evacuate despite severe 12wartime travel restrictions and had come a great distance from Tokyo to the deep mountains, we had to stay whether we liked it or not. So, I made a desperate effort to somehow get used to the work.

During the Shimane winter you can count the number of days of clear weather on your fingers. We arrived in December, and almost every day a cold north wind dumped snow on the mountains. Shimane Prefecture faces the Sea of Japan, which gets frigid weather fronts coming from Siberia. Since we knew only the climate of warm places in Japan that faced the Pacific Ocean, we were excited by the snow. At first, we thought we could take the day off—hooray! But the locals soon labeled us as lazy. They always worked on days when it snowed—if they took snow days off, there wouldn’t be any workdays left.

So, we resolved to live and work with great diligence. We got up while it was still dark, made a breakfast that we ate by candlelight, and then left for work as soon as it was light. All day we used saws and axes to cut down large trees, stripping off branches to make logs that would go into the charcoal kiln. We threw the logs down the valley from midway up the mountain. The mountain slope was very steep, so we were able to heave the logs from the mountain all the way down to the valley floor.

Then we would remove the charcoal we had fired from the kiln, cut it into smaller pieces, and pack it in bags made from rice straw. Also, in those days, we couldn’t get proper shoes, so we made our own straw sandals out of thick coarse straw and wore those over our bare feet. As a result, our feet were always raw, cut, and scarred. We didn’t have gloves and had to handle the charcoal with our bare hands. When we reached into the kiln between the pieces of charcoal and ash, in a flash we would get burned with blisters all over our hands. Then we’d jump around writhing in pain when the burning charcoal embers stuck on our skin in the spaces between the burns and blisters.

On top of that, food was rationed. We got no food from the government, so we had to consume what little rice we managed to save with great economy. We decided to eat two cups of rice a day per person, 13dividing that into three meals, making watery rice gruel and drinking it. Our only food besides rice was daikon radishes that we gnawed on raw with a little salt. Eating just made us feel hungrier. If we could have somehow stolen food, that would have been good, but there wasn’t any food to steal in the winter in the deep mountains.

We worked all day long, and in the evening, we carried heavy straw bags of charcoal on our backs to the farmhouse. On the way, we had to cross some log bridges that were only two or three narrow logs wide. The bridges were icy, so sometimes we got injured when we slipped and fell into the stream along with our wood-frame backpacks loaded with the heavy straw bags of charcoal. At last, we would manage to cross over the bridges and arrive home. By that time, it was completely dark. Then we prepared our dinner by candlelight, ate it, and immediately went to bed. That was our life that winter.

In the beginning, I often woke in the middle of the night, and the blisters and open sores on my hands hurt. When I moved my body even just a little, my joints cracked so loudly that I wondered if my bones were breaking. It was not easy to get used to that. While I hated my situation, it was out of the question to jump on a train and go back to Tokyo, given that this was toward the end of the war. We spent a dejected, gloomy, and dark winter in those mountains.

One morning we awoke as usual in the dark, and it was snowing. The mountain and valley before us were a total whiteout covered with snow. A bitterly cold wind was blowing hard. Even though I didn’t think I was suffering, I certainly was in dark despair. Then when I remembered the work that I would be doing all day long, I started to tense up. If I somehow lost my concentration out there, there was a real danger of falling off the mountain or slipping off one of those bridges, or having my fingers chopped off by an axe—especially in those snowy and icy conditions. As I was preparing breakfast in this tense and despairing state of mind, at some point I became aware that I was unconsciously repeating in my mind Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu, Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu—“I take refuge 14in Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva,” a mantra used to invoke the name of and take refuge in the bodhisattva of compassion.

Even now I don’t understand why on earth I suddenly began chanting Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu. Looking back, it seems there’s no other explanation except that I had had a deep connection with the bodhisattva through exposure in my childhood. On the grounds of my childhood home, from the time of my great-grandfather, there had been a small chapel that enshrined one hundred miniature statues of Kanzeon, representing the temples on the Kannon pilgrimage routes of Saigoku, Chichibu, and Bando. A nun lived there as a caretaker. I heard that my great-grandfather did not like the Pure Land temple that my family belonged to, so in protest he probably built his own chapel and enshrined the Kanzeon images.

The chapel had been dismantled by the time I was born. Instead, there were two chapels on the grounds—until my house burned down during the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. One of the chapels was large enough to accommodate three tatami mats, and the other six. On the eighteenth of every month—Kanzeon’s day—a group came and sang goeika (Buddhist hymns of praise) to Kanzeon. When I was a young boy, I looked forward to these monthly events. My mother had taken three of those statues from the house during the earthquake, and afterward, for as long as my family lived in the house, the group continued to come and sing the songs of praise to Kanzeon. Both my grandmother and mother were pious devotees of Kanzeon Bosatsu as a folk religion. I am told that my mother chanted the Kannon-gyo every day while she was pregnant with me. And later, she continued to chant it every day until she died. She often told me that it was why I eventually became a monk.

Probably due to my childhood experiences, I spontaneously began chanting Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu. If I had been a child, I certainly would have called out “Mama!” but instead I said Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu. At that time, I felt that there was nowhere else that I could turn to for help.

In any case, in the mountains, preparing breakfast and chanting silently, at some point I began to relax. Although the tension did not dissipate 15completely, the dark gloominess and stress disappeared. I remember feeling fresh energy within myself and thinking that something mysterious and wonderful had happened.²¹

Even though I had had this connection from my past, up until that day in Shimane I had never thought about the bodhisattva Kannon, and I hadn’t had the slightest interest in reading the Kannon-gyo. However, after this experience, I suddenly wanted to read it, and quickly sent a letter to my mother and asked her to send me a copy with Japanese annotations for the Chinese characters. I knew that my mother kept some of the printed copies that my great-grandfather had commissioned for special occasions. I knew that she truly treasured them. After receiving the sutra from my mother, every morning I stuffed it into my pocket as I went to work in the mountains, and I read it whenever we had a short break.

During that period when I lived in that remote area, deep in the mountains of Shimane Prefecture, eking out a living making charcoal, there was no time for zazen. Reading the Kannon-gyo was my sole comfort.

21. According to Okumura Roshi, this is what Uchiyama Roshi means by his expression “opening the hand of thought”: spontaneously letting go of our thoughts and feelings while practicing zazen or chanting. Or, as Dogen would say, “Dropping off body and mind.”