Manual of Zen Buddhism

These vows are recited after every service.

For the sake of the second half of this gatha the Buddha is said to have been willing to sacrifice his own life. For this reason this is also known as the “gatha of sacrifice”.

Yemmei means “Prolonging life”; when one daily recites this short document in ten clauses relating to Kwannon, one's health is assured for doing good not only for oneself but for the whole world.

1. It is difficult to tell how this dharani came to be inserted here. As most dharanis are, it is devoid of sense from the human point of view; but it may not be necessarily so to the hungry ghosts, for whom the prayer is offered.

Can this be restored to the original Sanskrit as follows?

“Be adored! O all the Tathagatas who are regarded [as our protectors]; Om! Provision, provision! Hum! Adored be the Tathagata Beautifully Formed! Namely: Om! To the Beautifully-formed One! To the Beautifully formed One! To the Beautifully-formed One! Hail! Adored be all the Buddhas! Vam!”

2. “Jewel-excelled” (ratnaketu).

3. “Abundant-in-jewel” (prabhutaratna).

4. “Fine-form-body” (surupakaya).

5. “Broad-wide-body” (vipulakaya).

6. “Freed-from-fear” (abhayankara).

7. “Nectar-king” (amritaraja).

8. “Amida” (amitabha).]

9. Namo amitabhaya tathagataya! Tadyatha, amritodbhave, amrita-siddhambhave, amrita-vikrante, amrita-vikranta-gamine, gaganakirtikare! Svaha!

“Adored be the Tathagata of Infinite Light! Namely: O Nectar-raising one! O Nectar-perfecting one! [O Nectar-] producing one! O One who makes nectar pervade! O One who makes nectar universally pervade! O One who makes nectar known as widely as space! Hail!”

This is read, as can be inferred from the text, after the recitation of the Surangama dharani.

It is customary in the Zen monastery to recite the Kwannongo while striking the big bell, which is done three times a day. The present gatha is recited when the striking is finished. As will be seen below, from Kwannon issues a sound which is heard by those who sincerely believe in his power of releasing them from every form of disaster. Each sound emitted by the bell is the voice of Kwannon calling on us to purify our sense of hearing, whereby a spiritual experience called “interfusion” will finally take place in us. See under the Ryogonkyo and the Kwannongyo below.

1. There are two texts with the title of The Hridaya: the one is known as the Shorter and the other the Larger. The one printed above is the shorter sutra in general use in Japan and China.

The opening passage in the larger text in Sanskrit and Tibetan, which is missing in the shorter one, is as follows: [The Tibetan has this additional passage: “Adoration to the Prajnaparamita, which is beyond words, thought, and praise, whose self-nature is, like unto space, neither created nor destroyed, which is a state of wisdom and morality evident to our inner consciousness, and which is the mother of all Excellent Ones of the past, present, and future”.] “Thus I heard. At one time World-honoured One dwelt at Rajagriha, on the Mount of the Vulture, together with a large number of Bhikshus and a large number of Bodhisattvas. At that time the World-honoured One was absorbed in a Samadhi (Meditation) known as Deep Enlightenment. And at the same moment the Great Bodhisattva Aryavalokitesvara was practising himself in the deep Prajnaparamita.”

The concluding passage, which is also missing in the shorter text, runs as follows:

“O Sariputra, thus should the Bodhisattva practise himself in the deep Prajnaparamita. At that moment, the World-honoured One rose from the Samadhi and gave approval to the Great Bodhisattva Aryavalokitesvara, saying: Well done, well done, noble son! so it is! so should the practice of the deep Prajnaparamita be carried on. As it has been preached by you, it is applauded by Tathagatas and Arhats. Thus spoke the World-honoured One with joyful heart. The venerable Sariputra and the Great Bodhisattva Aryavalokitesvara together with the whole assemblage, and the world of Gods, Men, Asuras, and Gandharvas, all praised the speech of the World-honoured One.”

2. From the modern scientific point of view, the conception of Skandha seems to be too vague and indefinite. But we must remember that the Buddhist principle of analysis is not derived from mere scientific interest; it aims at saving us from the idea of an ultimate individual reality which is imagined to exist as such for all the time to come. For when this idea is adhered to as final, the error of attachment is committed, and it is this attachment that forever enslaves us to the tyranny of external things. The five Skandhas (“aggregates” or “elements”) are form (rupam), sensation or sense-perception (vedana), thought (samjna), confection or conformation (samskara), and consciousness (vijnana). The first Skandha is the material world or the materiality of things, while the remaining four Skandhas belong to the mind. Vedana is what we get through our senses; samjna corresponds to thought in its broadest sense, or that which mind elaborates; samskara is a very difficult term and there is no exact English equivalent; it means something that gives form, formative principle; vijnana is consciousness or mentation. There are six forms of mentation, distinguishable as seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking.

3. Hsuan-chuang's translation has this added: “He was delivered from all suffering and misery.”

4. “Empty” (sunya) or “emptiness” (sunyata) is one of the most important notions in Mahayana philosophy and at the same time the most puzzling for non-Buddhist readers to comprehend. Emptiness does not mean “relativity”, or “phenomenality”, or “nothingness”, but rather means the Absolute, or something of transcendental nature, although this rendering is also misleading as we shall see later. When Buddhists declare all things to be empty, they are not advocating a nihilistic view; on the contrary an ultimate reality is hinted at, which cannot be subsumed under the categories of logic. With them, to proclaim the conditionality of things is to point to the existence of something altogether unconditioned and transcendent of all determination. Sunyata may thus often be most appropriately rendered by the Absolute. When the sutra says that the five Skandhas have the character of emptiness, or that in emptiness there is neither creation nor destruction, neither defilement nor immaculacy, etc., the sense is: no limiting qualities are to be attributed to the Absolute; while it is immanent in all concrete and particular objects, it is not in itself definable. Universal negation, therefore, in the philosophy of Prajna is an inevitable outcome.

5. No eye, no ear, etc., refer to the six senses. In Buddhist philosophy, mind (manovijnana) is the special sense-organ for the apprehension of dharma, or objects of thought.

6. No form, no sound, etc., are the six qualities of the external world, which become objects of the six senses.

7. “Dhatu of vision etc.” refer to the eighteen Dhatus or elements of existence, which include the six senses (indriya), the six qualities (vishaya), and the six consciousnesses (vijnana).

8. “Till we come to” (yavat in Sanskrit, and nai chih in Chinese) is quite frequently met with in Buddhist literature to avoid repetition of well-known subjects. These classifications may seem somewhat confusing and overlapping.

9. “There is no knowledge, no ignorance, etc.” is the wholesale denial of the Twelvefold Chain of Causation (pratityasamutpada), which are ignorance (avidya), deed (samskara), consciousness (vijnana), name and form (namarupa), six sense-organs (sadayatana), contact (sparsa), sense-perception (vedana), desire (trishna), attachment (upadana), being (bhava), birth (jati), and old age and death (jaramarana). This Chain of Twelve has been a subject of much discussion among Buddhist scholars.

10. The allusion is of course to the Fourfold Noble Truth (satya): 1. Life is suffering (duhkha); 2. Because of the accumulation (samudaya) of evil karma; 3. The cause of suffering can be annihilated (nirodha); 4. And for this there is the path (marga).

11. Nabhisamayah is missing in the Chinese translations as well as in the Horyuji MS.

12. For varana all the Chinese have “obstacle”, and this is in full accord with the teaching of the Prajnaparamita. Max Muller's rendering, “envelop”, is not good.

1. Generally known as Kwannon-gyo in Japanese and Kuan-yin Ching in Chinese. It forms the Twenty-fifth Chapter in Kumarajiva's translation of the Saddharma-pundarika, “the Lotus of the Good Law”. Its Sanskrit title is Samantamukha Parivarta. It is one of the most popular sutras in Japan, especially among followers of the Holy Path, including Zen, Tendai, Shingon, Nichiren, etc.

The Sanskrit for Kwannon seems, according to some Japanese authorities, originally to have been Avalokitasvara, and not Avalokitesvara. If so, Kwannon is a more literal rendering than Kwanzeon (Kuan-shih-yin) or Kwanjizai (Kuan-tzu-tsai). The Bodhisattva Avalokitasvara is “the owner of voice which is viewed or heard”. From him issues a voice which is variously heard and interpreted by all beings, and it is by this hearing that the latter are emancipated from whatever troubles they are in.

The present translation is from Kumarajiva's Chinese. In the reading of the proper names, the Japanese way of pronunciation has been retained.

2. Bodhisattva Akshayamati in Sanskrit, that is, Bodhisattva of Inexhaustible Intelligence.

3. That is, sahaloka, world of patience.

4. “Safety”, or better “faith”.

5. Dharanindhara in Sanskrit, “the supporter of the earth”.

1. Kongokyo in Japanese. The full title in Sanskrit is Vajracchedika-prajna-paramita-sutra. It belongs to the Prajna class of Mahayana literature. Those who are not accustomed to this kind of reasoning may wonder what is the ultimate signification of all these negations. The Prajna dialectic means to lead us to a higher affirmation by contradicting a simple direct statement. It differs from the Hegelian in its directness and intuitiveness.

The present English translation is from Kumarajiva's Chinese version made between 402–412 C.E.

2. Dharma, that is, the object of manovijnana, thought, as form (rupa) is the object of the visual sense, sound that of the auditory sense, odour that of the olfactory sense, and so forth.

3. That is, Samadhi of non-resistance. Arana also means a forest where the Yogin retires to practise his meditation.

4. This finishes the first part of the Diamond Sutra as it is usually divided here and passes on to the second part. The text goes on in a similar strain through its remaining section. Indeed, there are some scholars who think that the second part is really a repetition of the first, or that they are merely different copies of one and the same original text, and that whatever variations there are in these two copies are the result of the glosses mixed into the text itself. While I cannot wholly subscribe to this view, the fact is that passages containing similar thoughts recur throughout the whole Prajnaparamita literature. In view of this I quote in the following only such ideas as have not fully been expressed in the first part.

5. Citta stands for both mind and thought. The idea expressed here is that there is no particularly determined entity in us which is psychologically designated as mind or thought. The moment we think we have taken hold of a thought, it is no more with us. So with the idea of a soul, or an ego, or a being, or a Person, there is no such particular entity objectively to be so distinguished, and which remains as such eternally separated from the subject who so thinks. This ungraspability of a mind or thought, which is tantamount to saying that there is no soul-substance as a solitary unrelated “thing” in the recesses of consciousness, is one of the basic doctrines of Buddhism, Mahayana and Hinayana.

1. “Sutra of Heroic Deed”.

1. From The Transmission of the Lamp, XXX.

2. “Entrance by Reason” may also be rendered “Entrance by Higher Intuition”, and “Entrance by Conduct”, “Entrance by Practical Living”.]

3. “Wall-gazing”.

4. Since this translation from the Transmission of the Lamp, two Tun-huang MSS. containing the text have come to light. The one is in the Masters and Disciples of the Lanka (Leng-chia Shihtzu Chi), already published, and the other still in MS., which however the present author intends to have reproduced in facsimile before long. They differ in minor points with the translation here given.

1. By Seng-t'san (Sosan in Japanese). Died 606 C.E. Mind = hsin . Hsin is one of those Chinese words which defy translation. When the Indian scholars were trying to translate the Buddhist Sanskrit works into Chinese, they discovered that there were five classes of Sanskrit terms which could not be satisfactorily rendered into Chinese. We thus find in the Chinese Tripitaka such words as prajna, bodhi, buddha, nirvana, dhyana, bodhisattva, etc., almost always untranslated; and they now appear in their original Sanskrit form among the technical Buddhist terminology. If we could leave hsin with all its nuance of meaning in this translation, it would save us from the many difficulties that face us in its English rendering. For hsin means “mind”, “heart”, “soul”, “spirit”—each singly as well as all inclusively. In the present composition by the third patriarch of Zen, it has sometimes an intellectual connotation but at other times it can properly be given as “heart”. But as the predominant note of Zen Buddhism is more intellectual than anything else, though not in the sense of being logical or philosophical, I decided here to translate hsin by “mind” rather than by “heart”, and by this mind I do not mean our psychological mind, but what may be called absolute mind, or Mind.

2. This means: When the absolute oneness of things is not properly understood, negation as well as affirmation tends to be a one-sided view of reality. When Buddhists deny the reality of an objective world, they do not mean that they believe in the unconditioned emptiness of things; they know that there is something real which cannot be done away with. When they uphold the doctrine of emptiness this does not mean that all is nothing but an empty hollow, which leads to a self-contradiction. The philosophy of Zen avoids the error of one-sidedness involved in realism as well as in nihilism.

3. The Mind = the Way = the One = Emptiness.

4. The Masters and Disciples of the Lanka also quotes a poetical composition of So-san on “The Mysterious” in which we find the following echoing the idea given expression here:

5. I.e. Tat tvam asi.

1. The Tun-huang copy, edited by D. T. Suzuki, 1934. Hui-neng = Yeno, 637–712.

2. The text has “the Prajnaparamita Sutra” here. But I take it to mean Prajna itself instead of the sutra.

3. The text has the “body”, while the Koshoji edition and the current one have “mind”.

4. The title literally reads: “the true-false moving-quiet”. “True” stands against “false” and “moving” against “quiet” and as long as there is an opposition of any kind, no true spiritual insight is possible. And this insight does not grow from a quietistic exercise of meditation.

5. That is, the Absolute refuses to divide itself into two: that which sees and that which is seen.

6. “Moving” means “dividing” or “limiting”. When the absolute moves, a dualistic interpretation of it takes place, which is consciousness.

7. Chih, jnana in Sanskrit, is used in contradistinction to Prajna which is the highest form of knowledge, directly seeing into the Immovable or the Absolute.

1. Yoka Daishi (died 713, Yung-chia Ta-shih, in Chinese), otherwise known as Gengaku (Hsuan-chiao), was one of the chief disciples of Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism. Before he was converted to Zen he was a student of the T'ien-tai. His interview with Hui-neng is recorded in the Tan-ching. He died in 713 leaving a number of short works on Zen philosophy, and of them the present composition in verse is the most popular one. The Original title reads: Cheng-tao Ke, “realization-way-song”.

2. The fivefold eye-sight (cakshus): (1) Physical, (2) Heavenly, (3) Prajna-, (4) Dharma-, and (5) Buddha-eye.

3. The fivefold power (bala): (1) Faith, (2) Energy, (3) Memory, (4) Meditation, and (5) Prajna.

4. (1) The Dharma-body, (2) the Body of Enjoyment, and (3) the Body of Transformation.

5. (1) Mirror-intuition, (2) intuition of identity, (3) knowledge of doing Works, and (4) clear perception of relations.

6. The Abhidharmakosa, VIII, gives an explanation of the eight Vimoksha. See La Vallee Poussin's French translation, Chap. VIII, pp. 203–221.

7. For the six Riddhi, which are the supernatural products of the meditations, see op. cit., VII, 122 ff.

8. T'sao-ch'i is the name of the locality where Hui-neng had his monastery, means the master himself.

9. According to Buddhist philosophy, existence is divided into two groups, samskrita and asamskrita. The samskrita applies to anything that does any kind of work in any possible manner, while the asamskrita accomplishes nothing. Of this class are space regarded as a mode of reality, Nirvana, and nonexistence owing to lack of necessary conditions.

10. Shang-hsing, lit. “good star”, was a great scholar of his age.

11. The story of this Bhikshu is told in the Sutra on Cleansing the Karma-hindrances (Ching Yeh-chang Ching).

1. The following mondo are all taken from a book known as Sayings of the Ancient Worthies, fas. I (Ku tsun-hsiu yu-lu).

2. The following mondo are all taken from a book known as Sayings of the Ancient Worthies, fas. I (Ku tsun-hsiu yu-lu).

1. Wobaku Ki-un in Japanese, died 850.

2. One of the first lessons in the understanding of Buddhism is to know what is meant by the Buddha and by sentient beings. This distinction goes on throughout all branches of the Buddhist teaching. The Buddha is an enlightened one who has seen into the reason of existence, while sentient beings are ignorant multitudes confused in mind and full of defilements. The object of Buddhism is to have all sentient beings attain enlightenment like the Buddha. The question is whether they are of the same nature as the latter; for if not they can never be enlightened as he is. The spiritual cleavage between the two being seemingly too wide for passage, it is often doubted whether there is anything in sentient beings that will transform them into Buddhahood. The position of Zen Buddhism is that One Mind pervades all and therefore there is no distinction to be made between the Buddha and sentient beings and that as far as Mind is concerned the two are of one nature. What then is this Mind? Huang-po attempts to solve this question for his disciple Pai-hsiu in these sermons.

3. Yuan in Chinese and pratyaya in Sanskrit. One of the most significant technical terms in the philosophy of Buddhism.

4. Wu-hsin, or mu-shin in Japanese. The term literally means “no-mind” or “no-thought”. It is very difficult to find an English word corresponding to it. “Unconsciousness” approaches it, but the connotation is too psychological. Mu-shin is decidedly an Oriental idea. “To be free from mind-attachment” is somewhat circumlocutionary, but the idea is briefly to denote that state of consciousness in which there is no hankering, conscious or unconscious, after an ego-substance, or a soul-entity, or a mind as forming the structural unit of our mental life. Buddhism considers this hankering the source of all evils moral and intellectual. It is the disturbing agency not only of an individual life but of social life at large. A special article in one of my Zen Essays will be devoted to the subject.

5. The five eyes are: (1) the physical eye, (2) the heavenly eye, (3) the eye of wisdom, (4) the eye of the Dharma, and (5) the eye of the Buddha.

6. In the Diamond Sutra (Vajracchedika), the Buddha makes five statements as regards the truth of his teaching.

1. Hsuan-sha, 835–908. The following is a literal translation of Case LXXXVIII of the Pi-yen Chi, which is one of the most important and at the same time the most popular of Zen texts. The words in brackets in the “Illustrative Case” and in Seccho's verse are those of Yengo. As to the nature and composition of the Pi-yen Chi, see my Zen Essays, Series II, p. 237 et seq.

2. The Remark purposes to make the reader abandon his usual relative point of view so that he can reach the absolute ground of all things.

1. It will be interesting to note what a mystic philosopher has to say about this: “A man shall become truly poor and as free from his creature will as he was when he was born. And I say to you, by the eternal truth, that as long as ye desire to fulfil the will of God, and have any desire after eternity and God; so long are ye not truly poor. He alone hath true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing. ”—(From Eckhart as quoted by Inge in Light, Life, and Love.)

2. Symbol of emptiness (sunyata).

3. No extra property he has, for he knows that the desire to possess is the curse of human life.

1. Left to his disciples as his last words when he was about to pass away.

2. This is Dai-o Kokushi's own name, Dai-o being his posthumous honorary title.

1. In those monasteries which are connected in some way with the author of this admonition, it is read or rather chanted before a lecture or Teisho begins.

1. Muso Daishi is the honorific title posthumously given by an Emperor to Kwanzan Kokushi, the founder of Myoshinji, Kyoto, which is one of the most important Zen headquarters in Japan. All the Zen masters of the present day in Japan are his descendants. Some doubt is cherished about the genuineness of this Admonition as penned by Kwanzan himself, on the ground that the Content is too “grandmotherly”.

1. Respectively: April 8, December 8, and February 15.

1. The Training of the Zen Monk, p. 40.

1. See also my Training of the Zen Monk, p. 106.

2. Ibid., p. 44.

1. Fas. XXVII.

2. Introduction to Zen Buddhism, p. 58.

3. Zen Essays, III, Plates XIV and XV, with their accompanying explanations.

4. Ibid. Plates X and XVI, and also Second Series.