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    A Zen Harvest: Japanese Folk Zen Sayings (Haiku, Dodoitsu, and Waka)
    A Zen Harvest: Japanese Folk Zen Sayings (Haiku, Dodoitsu, and Waka)
    A Zen Harvest: Japanese Folk Zen Sayings (Haiku, Dodoitsu, and Waka)
    Ebook200 pages2 hours

    A Zen Harvest: Japanese Folk Zen Sayings (Haiku, Dodoitsu, and Waka)

    By Macmillan Publishers

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    About this ebook

    One of the vital aspects of traditional Rinzai Zen koan study in Japan is jakugo, or capping-phrase exercises. When Zen students have attained sufficient mastery of meditation or concentration, they are given a koan (such as the familiar “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”) to study. When the student provides a satisfactory response to the koan, he advances to the jakugo exercise–he must select a “capping phrase,” usually a passage from a poem among the thousands in a special anthology, the only book allowed in the monastery.

    One such anthology, written entirely in Chinese, was translated by noted Zen priest and scholar Soiku Shigematsu as A Zen Forest: Sayings of the Masters. Equally important is a Japanese collection, the Zenrin Segoshu, which Mr. Shigematsu now translates from the Japanese, including nearly eight hundred poems in sparkling English versions that retain the Zen implications of the verse.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateDec 29, 2015
    ISBN9781466895416
    A Zen Harvest: Japanese Folk Zen Sayings (Haiku, Dodoitsu, and Waka)

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      Book preview

      A Zen Harvest - Macmillan Publishers

      Introduction

      To me Zen is a bit like the mikan trees that grow in our temple orchard. The mikan is a kind of mandarin orange that we harvest in late autumn. Every year, I make it a rule to take my son, Sōjun, into the orchard to let him learn something of Zen from mikan-picking. At this time of the year, all the mikan branches are heavy with ripe fruit. Just looking at them makes me restless. I feel as though it were my urgent business to release each tree from its heavy burden. The drooping branch is my drooping heart. It’s not good for a burdened heart to bear any more than it has to. And like the bending mikan trees, the burden should not be carried indefinitely. Unload and just enjoy the freedom of it.

          How refreshing

      The whinny of a packhorse

          Unloaded of everything!  (327)

      As we set to work, each of us hangs from his shoulder a bamboo basket, into which we place the picked fruit. I say to Sōjun, "Don’t toss the fruit in so roughly. Be careful with it or you’ll bruise it. It’s as alive as we are, so treat it as carefully as you would your own eyeball, as Dōgen Zenji says. Treat it roughly and watch its sweetness go. It’ll lose its freshness and rot to spite you.

      "And don’t seal up that vinyl bag we put fruit in. See how damp the inside of the bag has become. That shows the fruit is breathing even after it’s picked from the twig. Leave it open a little so the fruit can breathe. It’s really like us that

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