Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [22]
THAT EXPERIENCE made me wonder what else there was for me in Japan. I hadn’t really done much to expand my understanding of Buddhism since coming here, although I had visited a few temples. I’d visited Eihei-ji, the temple founded in the thirteenth century by Japanese Zen’s greatest teacher, Master Dogen, and seen the spot where he preached. On the whole though, Eihei-ji was nothing more than a fairly average Japanese tourist attraction—but man, it’s got some big trees.
The hill leading up to the temple was lined with tacky souvenir shops selling everything from plastic Buddha statues to the requisite Ultraman toys for the kiddies. Insert 700 yen into the vending machine outside the temple and you get a ticket entitling you to walk around a cordoned-off part of the building. I didn’t actually see anyone doing zazen. I didn’t see anyone doing much of anything except walking around pointing at stuff and taking pictures. That was about it for my Buddhist historical explorations.
Yet I still did zazen every day at home, as I had ever since I’d started sitting with Tim, though usually just the token twenty minutes before bed. And in my first year in Japan I went to three temples to actually practice zazen. All those times had been in the form of the kind of “Get a Taste of Zen!” things typically organized by groups of foreigners with little involvement from the temples themselves. In one case a monk simply showed us where the zendo was then disappeared. We just saw ourselves out when we were finished doing zazen. For all I could tell the monks had all gone home by then.
Another such excursion was an overnight deal organized by some fellow JET participants at a rustic old temple high atop a mountain in a remote part of Gifu Prefecture. Still, aside from cooking and serving our meals, the temple monks were completely uninvolved.
Now that I was in Tokyo and had what could be generously described as an “open social calendar”—although it might be more accurate to call it “a severe case of being a friendless loser”—I figured it was time to get back into the Zen thing. I came across a classified ad in the local free English paper for a Zen group in Tokyo offering lectures in English and decided to take a chance. The group turned out to be called Dogen Sangha and its leader one Gudo Wafu Nishijima.
LET ME TELL YOU a little about Nishijima. Nishijima is a Zen monk who certainly doesn’t fit any usual picture of what monks are supposed to be. These days, at eighty-four years old with a shaved head and the traditional monk’s robes, at least he looks the part. But delve a little deeper, and the neat, easy image falls apart. Besides being a monk, Nishijima also works for a cosmetics company, a job he took after spending several years working for the Japanese Ministry of Finance.
During the early part of the Second World War, Nishijima started attending zazen sittings and lectures held by Kodo Sawaki, one of Japan’s most notorious “rebel” Buddhist monks. Not content with the way Japanese Buddhism had degenerated into little more than maintaining temples as tourist attractions and hosting funerals, Sawaki wanted to return Buddhism to its fundamentals—the practice of zazen. He never had a temple of his own but wandered from place to place teaching and holding zazen sittings and so he came to be known as “Homeless” Kodo. He dispensed with most of the elaborate rituals associated with traditional Zen and stuck to a few favorite chants and bows. Fearing that Buddhism was nearly dead in Japan,