Wild Ivy by Hakuin Ekaku

Author:Hakuin Ekaku
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

Advice from a Student

An elderly gentleman once took the occasion of a personal interview [dokusan] to offer me a piece of advice. After reverently performing his bows, he declared with great solemnity: “It’s said that when speaking out will do no good, it is better to remain silent. I believe what I have to say will do some good, yet like many medicines effective for curing illnesses, you may find it bitter and difficult to take. Honest words of advice may sound harsh when one hears them yet still be of value in changing one’s behavior.

“Master, I have been wanting to give you this advice for a long time now, but I have kept my counsel, fearing it would strike you the wrong way. Deep in my heart, I wondered whether I was being disloyal in not speaking out.”

“If I were ill,” I said, “would you refrain from using medicine that could cure me because it had a bitter taste?”

The old man was delighted at my response and proceeded to tell me the following: “You have always detested the one-sided, sterile, lifeless sitting practices espoused by the teachers of Unborn Zen. You have abused them as if they were mangy curs covered with running sores. You have reviled them as if they were clods of matted filth. But if you continue your attacks on those unpriestly bands of silent illumination bonzes, they will come to regard you as their bitter enemy. Before long, they are sure to trump up perverse and unwarranted criticisms to level against you, to hatch clever plots of various kinds and use them to damage your good name as a virtuous priest. If that happens, what a great loss it will be for the Buddha Dharma.11

“Please give this warning due consideration, master. Leave those shriveled-up gangs of false Unborn Zennists alone. Don’t bother with the quietist dimwits. Don’t give them a thought. Why do I say this?

“The long-abandoned,

long-lost Dharma trail

a rush-choked field

trod open again

by this old man.

“Master Gudō wrote this verse about himself. He inscribed it over one of his portraits.12 But master, I believe you must write the same about yourself:

“The long-abandoned,

long-lost Dharma trail

a rush-choked field

trod open once again

by this old man.

“For truthfully, a mere hundred years after Gudō’s passing, the authentic spirit and traditions of our school had died out so completely that not a sound or smell remained of them. Then, thirty or forty years ago, they were revived again. You and you alone are responsible for that. What you have accomplished compares with the feats heroes such as Chang Liang and Ch’en P’ing achieved for the Chinese people.13 Had either of those two men been sidetracked by some misfortune, the very country would have been imperiled; it might even have ceased to exist.

“So, too, with the Dharma. Were some misfortune to befall you, the wind of the true Zen spirit and tradition would fall to earth again. False Dharmas would rise up and take over as before. The Buddha’s Dharma would sink and vanish into the dust.

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