Discovering the True Self by Kodo Sawaki

Author:Kodo Sawaki
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640093782
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2020-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

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To practice the Buddha Way is to become a person who will never die, who is not at all different from the Buddha pervading the universe forever.

Kosho Uchiyama often said that after studying with Sawaki for twenty-five years he couldn’t say whether the words he used in his talks were his or his teacher’s. That statement encouraged many of us who trained at Antaiji to want to study the words of Kodo Sawaki. A great many Americans have come into contact with the teaching of Sawaki through the translations of two Antaiji monks, the late Rev. Koshi Ichida and Rev. Shohaku Okumura. They were aided in their translations by Marshall Mittnick and the late George Varvares. Without the pioneering work of these four men, few Americans would know the unique teaching of this iconoclastic Zen teacher.

In Japan, however, Kodo Sawaki is well known throughout the Zen world. There are over twenty volumes of his talks published by Daihorin Publishers. For a while, most of those books went out of print, and only recently has Daihorin republished them.

Since Sawaki traveled the country speaking wherever a request was made (up until the last two years of his life), many who may never have read his printed lectures knew this man through his dynamic and entertaining talks. I am reminded of the seventeenth-century Zen teacher Bankei Yotoku who preached a Zen throughout Japan that reached people of all walks of life and all levels of education.

I fear that Sawaki may have been the last of this type of Zen teacher. Thanks to the work of Kosho Uchiyama and his disciples, we at least have a written record of Kodo Sawaki’s teaching in English.

When Uchiyama retired from Antaiji, his disciples moved to different parts of Japan and some to America. The Rev. Shusoku Kushiya moved into a house near where Uchiyama and his wife Keiko had retired in a village outside Kyoto called Ujidawara, serving his teacher in any way he could. Kushiya loved literature and kept copious notes of his teacher’s talks whenever possible. He edited many of Uchiyama’s sayings about Sawaki, as well as the lectures the abbot gave after his retirement, and he published them through Daihorin Publishers. He also published a regular booklet with contributions of many people connected with Uchiyama and Sawaki, called “Tomo Ni Sodatsu” (Learning to Grow Together).

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