A Life of Bankei by John M Evans. Part of the Zen Masters Series.

Bankei’s main objective now was to have his enlightenment confirmed by other advanced Zen masters. His own master, Umpo, commented that the experience was the marrow of Bodhidharma’s bones, but Bankei wanted more than that.

His travels took him to Nagasaki, where the Chinese priest, Dosha Chogen had been installed in a temple. Dosha, who always retained the respect of Bankei, was impressed by the young man. He had certainly penetrated to the Self, he agreed. “But you still have to clarify the matter beyond, which is the essence of our school.”

Bankei was nonplussed at this news. He had thought that his satori was the final opening of truth. In time, he came to accept what Dosha said and stayed on at the temple for further post-enlightenment training, much to the discomfiture of the other monks who felt he was receiving preferential treatment. However, within a year Bankei “clarified the matter beyond” while meditating in the zendo early one morning.

When he approached Dosha with the tidings, one of those curious Zen set-pieces took place, which are mystifying to the unenlightened mind. Bankei picked up a brush and wrote, in Chinese — for Dosha could speak no Japanese — “What is the ultimate matter of Zen?”

Dosha then brushed, “What matter?” To which Bankei just extended his arms. When Dosha again picked up the brush, Bankei grabbed it and flung it away. Following this apparent display of bad manners, he stood up, swung his deep Chinese sleeves and left. We can be sure that Dosha was well pleased.

Confirmation
What are we to make of all that? Was not Bankei arrogant, over-bearing, and behaving more like a spoilt child than a fully-realised master, which by then he undoubtedly was? The answer is, no. Remembering that the two men could only converse by writing and sign language, there was bound to be a certain staccato quality in their actions. However, the petulance that seems to be present arises from Bankei’s need to show contempt as part of his reply. Contempt for the written word as a means of illuminating the “great matter”, is expressed by hurling away the brush as Dosha is about to write. When the master asks him “What matter?” Bankei extends his arms to indicate the whole of reality — no words are necessary. As he marches out of Dosha’s chamber with a swing of his sleeves, he is saying, “nothing more need be added, now everything must be left to the unborn Buddha-mind in its incomparable illuminative wisdom.” Bankei had reached the point where, in Umpo’s words, “no-one could now touch him.” The next morning, Dosha told the head monk, “Bankei has completed the great matter.”

In his later teaching career, Zen master Bankei had a number of temples in various parts of Japan and a hermitage near Kyoto. His “headquarters”, however, was Ryumon-ji in his native province. By all accounts the regime was extremely easy-going at each of his establishments. He would tell visitors that all he ever did was to urge his followers to live in the Unborn, nothing more. There were no special rules. However, some of the monks, finding this too good to be true, got together and said that they wanted to spend six hours or so every day in meditation. Bankei agreed to this, insisting that the Buddha-mind has no problem with zazen. When the monks were meditating, the Buddha-mind was sitting at rest, when the monks were practising walking meditation, so was the Buddha-mind. He had no objection what the monks did so long as they lived in the Unborn.

Alan Watts has pointed out in The Way of Zen that Bankei’s teachings are not really suitable for a school or institution since the monks might just as well go away and become farmers or fishermen. As if reflecting this impression, Bankei’s appointed Dharma heir, Dairyo, died five years before he did, and no-one carried on his work into the future to form a separate school or order. His spirit lived on, though, in the many Japanese skills and art-forms which operate directly out of the Unborn.

Bankei would often dismiss koan as “old tools” for eyeless bonzes who would be lost without them. They try to raise “great balls of doubt”, he said, but that is only turning the unborn Buddha-mind into a great ball of doubt. What is the point, he queried? Monks should sit in the Buddha-mind, stand, sleep and awake in the Buddha-mind. Then, he reiterated, they will be functioning as a living Buddha in all that they do in their moment by moment existence. There is nothing more!

This “lax” regimen for monks under Bankei’s tuition, sometimes elicited questions about the purpose of it all. One monk asked him outright if this living in the Unborn was not telling people to live purposelessly, without any object in view.

Bankei replied that the interrogator himself did not live in the Unborn; instead he was usually beavering away at some project or other, enthusiastically attending to this or that, and all the time turning his Buddha-mind into something else. What, suggested the master, could be more purposeless than that? When the monk made no reply, Bankei urged him again to live in the Unborn. It is not, he said, purposeless. Try it and see.

However, such incomprehension on the part of younger students intent on doing something in the world probably led more worldly spirits to introduce the rigid koan system into Rinzai Zen.

In terms of time scales, Bankei would exhort his students to try an experiment: live in the Unborn for thirty days. When you get used to it, you will not be able to live without it. It will come naturally. The training will replace a bad habit with a good habit, and, what is more, you will now live like a Buddha.

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