Daitsu Tom Wright's Articles on Lions Roar

Kosho Uchiyama Roshi on the bittersweet life of a Zen beggar, translated by Daitsu Tom Wright and Jisho Warner. Kosho Uchiyama Roshi was one of the great Zen masters of the twentieth century. He centered his life on zazen, and, at his temple Antaiji, on the outskirts of Kyoto, he taught a life of the highest culture to everyone who wanted to practice with him, monk and lay, Japanese and foreigner. For Uchiyama Roshi, leading a truly rich spiritual life meant leading a life grounded in zazen and following a lifestyle of material minimalism. He did not see material simplicity as some sort of asceticism, but he often spoke to his disciples and followers of the importance of never being afraid or ashamed of material poverty. He saw how the very abundance that people seek confuses them and becomes the cause of so much suffering. Uchiyama Roshi came to Antaiji shortly after the end of the Second World War, in poor health, but not having been a soldier. From the late 1940’s through most of the 1950’s, he lived a bare-bones life of zazen and takuhatsu—takuhatsu being the Japanese Zen term for the begging rounds that a monk undertakes to sustain himself and his monastery. He was a Soto Zen priest, but an iconoclast within the school who cared only for practicing and transmitting true dharma. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, Uchiyama Roshi no longer needed to do takuhatsu. He became the abbot of Antaiji and led a practice of intensive zazen and sesshins, and he lectured and wrote extensively. In his later years, after retiring from Antaiji, he continued to write, more poetry than prose, as he explored what it was like to be at the farthest reaches of a long life. Through his long and distinguished life, Uchiyama Roshi was a true man of Zen, who guided and inspired a great many people. According to him, the religious life was the most refined and distilled practice of life for human beings. He felt it was imperative to bring this understanding to the United States, both because we need it badly here and because he thought we would be receptive to it. The following is an excerpt from an essay Uchiyama Roshi wrote in the late 1960’s on his life of mendicancy in Kyoto. He called it Nakiwarai no Takuhatsu, “The Takuhatsu of Laughter Through the Tears.” Roshi said that one reason he wrote Laughter Through the Tears was to thank all the people in Kyoto who had supported him during those difficult post-war years of his practice. Uchiyama Roshi suffered from the effects of tuberculosis throughout his life. On March 13, 1998, at the age of eighty-six, he passed away quietly at his home at Noke-in Hermitage, in Kohata, a suburb of Kyoto. He is much missed, but his wisdom and great heart live on. —Daitsu Tom Wright & Jisho Warner The famous Japanese Zen monk Ryokan lived by takuhatsu and wrote about it in his poems. Picture a warm spring day, the flowers in full bloom, the warblers singing away, and beautiful butterflies flitting here and there. That surely must have been the setting for Ryokan’s walks through country villages from one farmhouse to the next. Children ran in delight to greet their familiar playmate. Ryokan, always happy to see the children, would put down his bowl and join in the children’s games. Poor Ryokan, the day would pass quickly while he was absorbed in the games with the children, completely unaware that all his rice was being eaten by the sparrows. The deep resonating sound of a nearby temple bell would announce the end of the day. The light of the early evening moon shone brightly after all the children had gone home. Ryokan would feel a tinge of loneliness and head toward his own grass hut. Suddenly, he’d turn and run back to the village where he vaguely remembered having left his bowl hours before. Just picturing Ryokan all flustered returning to the village to fetch the bowl can’t help but bring a smile to my face. Of course, I would have liked my takuhatsu to have been that sort of idyllic, simple kind, too. Unfortunately, the reality of my life of takuhatsu was anything but that. In fact, it was the extreme opposite of the idyllic, simple takuhatsu lifestyle. If you go out on takuhatsu and can do so with the attitude of “Well, if people put something in my bowl, that’s fine, and if they don’t that’s okay, too,” then you can say that your takuhatsu is ideal with no complications. However, I was unable to do that. I was dead serious about it, and I couldn’t hide my feelings. As long as I was going out, I felt I just had to bring home a certain amount of money—I had my quota to fill. Not only that, I felt I had to do it in the most efficient way, because I needed to get back to the temple as quickly as possible. So my story becomes even more pathetic. It wasn’t because I wanted to take a rest that I desired to get right back to the temple. Rather, besides takuhatsu, I had a lot of other work to do that made my going out all the more important. Knowing how much work was waiting for me at the temple, there was no way I could ever feel that what I was doing was in any way “spiritually uplifting.” But everyone in the world has feelings of being pursued, and of living from hand to mouth. I am not talking about my present-day life. The period I’m talking about began in the summer of 1949, when I first arrived in Kyoto, and lasted until the spring of 1962. That is, from the age of thirty-seven until I reached fifty. So, perhaps because there is a certain amount of distance between those days and my life now, I am able to talk about the sweetness and bitterness of takuhatsu. The lifestyle of takuhatsu. Once you start down the path of poverty, there seems to be no limit to how far down you can go. I had been prepared for it by the life I led during the war prior to settling at Antaiji. In 1949, when I first began going out on takuhatsu in Kyoto, the emotion and poverty of the war years had not yet subsided. In that kind of economically difficult environment, the number of fellow practitioners diminished greatly. Finally, there were only two of us left at Antaiji, the leaf-flute artist Yokoyama Sodo and me. On top of that, Antaiji had deteriorated so badly during the war that Sodo had to go out on takuhatsu for funds to refurbish the broken-down temple, while I went around on takuhatsu to supply us with food and also to cover sesshin expenses. I was not only going out on takuhatsu, I also had to take care of the vegetable garden and fertilize it, cut and chop the wood for cooking and heating the bath, plus make our pickle supply, weed and keep up the grounds, clean the temple, and so forth. Also, I prepared three meals a day, and if I didn’t go out on takuhatsu, I had my laundry to do. So, obviously, I couldn’t blithely go out on takuhatsu like Ryokan and enjoy playing with the children along the way. Far from it, I had to keep my mind on how to juggle doing takuhatsu and caring for the temple. I had to figure out how to cut corners everywhere to get a little extra time for zazen and study. Being careless with even one piece of firewood meant that I would have to take that much more time to chop and cut up wood. Or, if I left a light on needlessly, that meant I had to go out on takuhatsu to pay for it. Cutting back on needless expenditures was absolutely critical for the kind of frugal life we were leading. Our life was always on the edge. Whenever Sawaki Roshi came back to Antaiji to lead sesshin, I wanted to have a special treat of lotus root on his tray for him. I would go to the market to get some and not have the few yen the greengrocer asked for. Here was this forty-year-old adult having to say, “Oh, my God, if it is going to cost me that much, I will take something else!” We were really in a pitiable state. If I had had a wife and family to take care of, I would have broken down completely. Fortunately, I was single then. Needless to say, in those days I was never able to purchase any new clothing, such as robes. Actually, from the time the war began in 1941, I was never able to buy any new clothing, and everything I had was tattered. Even the covering on my futon was all torn up. Going to bed was like covering myself with the cotton padding that’s inside futons. If I got sick for a couple days and had to rest, my whole room seemed to be awash in dust balls of cotton. Old newspapers served as toilet paper. Our washcloths looked like some sort of netting, since I used them far beyond the point where they resembled washcloths. Even though they only cost ten or fifteen yen at the time, I couldn’t afford new ones. I did have one bad habit that I just couldn’t give up—smoking. I would collect half-smoked cigarettes left behind by guests and smoke the tobacco in long reedlike pipes—pretty despicable, I admit. In those days, Antaiji looked gruesome. The tatami in my room were completely torn up, with straw popping out of them here and there. And the floor joists supporting the tatami were as soft as cushions. Twice I fell right through the floor. I just took a couple of orange crates that were lying around and used them to prop up the joists. The normally white-papered shoji looked like a patchwork quilt with slips of paper pasted over the holes. But what could I do? I had neither the money nor the time to make any proper repairs. Antaiji was truly a dreary and desolate place in those days. This made it imperative that I put all my energy into takuhatsu. Although it would seem to be nothing more than walking around shouting, “Ho~~~!” when you go out on takuhatsu, you are risking your life. One little mistake in judgment and you’re liable to find yourself sprawled out on the street, having been hit by a car, with one-yen coins scattered all around. Moreover, the emotional burden is incredible. When an able-bodied male is just walking around begging for money, people look at him with contempt. Enduring that look is far more difficult than enduring some half-baked job. And in the end, the amount received is barely a...

Laughter Through the Tears: Kosho Uchiyama Roshi on Life as a Zen Beggar

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