object:1.01 - To Watanabe Sukefusa
book class:Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin
class:chapter
To Watanabe Sukefusa
LETTER 1, 1714
This is Hakuin's earliest surviving letter, written in 1714 when he was twenty-nine years old and the only one from the years of his pilgrimage. In it, he scolds a childhood friend named Watanabe
Sukehiko, eldest son of the wealthy Watanabe family of Hara, for unspecified unfilial acts. Citing cautionary stories, Hakuin warns his friend of the dire karmic consequences lying in store if he doesn't mend his ways. The letter owes its survival to its inclusion in Hakuin's publication The Cloth
Drum Refitted, subtitled A Letter to an Unfilial Son, which first appeared in his fifties.
I HAD INTENDED to deliver the inscription I wrote with the Dharma name you requested on it in person on my way home, but since I wanted your father to see it as soon as possible I decided to send it on ahead.
As I said in my previous letter, I was disturbed to learn you have recently been indulging in your reprehensible habit of using strong and unfilial language to your elderly parents. This has caused them much pain. It is altogether abominable. Never forget that there is indeed such a thing as heavenly retri bution. The wrath of the gods is very real.
Until this spring I was staying at a place called Shinoda in Izumi Province. In a village nearby named Tsukumi, there lived the son of a very wealthy man named Shinkichir. He was talented, handsome, had a clever mind, and was dearly loved by all the members of his family, who coddled and protected him as he grew up. Shinkichir turned eighteen last year, his father having passed away three or four years earlier. Arrangements for his marriage were begun this past winter. An agreement was reached with the bride's family, and the bride was being fitted out with a trousseau and so forth.
A minor disagreement of some kind between Shinkichir and his mother flared suddenly into a serious altercation. Shinkichir lost control of himself and grabbed his mother by the hair, yanking some strands of it out by the roots. He picked up a sewing needle and jabbed it into her shoulder. His mother fainted away. Members of the household ran in and lifted her up. By sprinkling cold water on her face, they were finally able to revive her.
After the incident, mother and son both acted as though nothing had happened. But later that night, at about eleven o'clock, Shinkichir suddenly broke into loud screams that shook and convulsed his entire body. "How terrible! Please forgive me! It's all my fault!" he moaned over and over. Violent sweat began pouring down his body, increasing as the night wore on. He fell in and out of consciousness. His screams resounded through the streets, causing a flurry of excitement to pass through the village.
By morning the fever had subsided, and people began coming by to see how he was. "It sounded like you were in terrible agony last night," they said. "Actually," he replied, "I was in some kind of a trance. An old man appeared to me wearing the headdress, white court garments, and black footwear of ancient times. Crowds of monstrous-looking creatures were milling around him, so ghastly I was forced to turn my eyes away. 'This is an emissary from hell. Do exactly as he says,' the creatures
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commanded. They held what looked like green-colored fans in their hands, and when they moved them, the fans sent out a breeze of unbearable heat. One of the creatures produced an iron nail-it must have been ten inches long-that was heated red-hot and had sparks flying from it. He began pounding the nail into my shoulder with a strange green hammer. The pain was indescribable. I became dizzy and so terrified I thought my breathing had stopped.
"Look," he said baring his shoulder. "It is still hot and extremely painful." There was an ugly, purple scar burn several inches square, blackened at the center. "Oh, how miserable I am! What have
I done to deserve this!" he wept sadly. Then he began shouting out delirious cries, begging for medicine and hollering loud prayers. His suffering continued throughout the next night and the following nights as well. The purple scar on his shoulder grew steadily larger and more inflamed, festering and filling with pus, and producing an excruciating heat that became gradually more intense.
His tongue became scorched in his mouth. His breath was foul. His hair all fell out. He became so filthy and unsightly no one could bear to look at him.
It was a truly dreadful state of affairs. Being wealthy, the family freely dispensed money for physicians. Practitioners were called in to employ their magic spells and incantations. But none of them was able to diminish the young man's suffering. At this point, with the situation becoming extremely dire, they came to the temple where I was staying to offer prayers and other devotions. The assembly of monks performed secret rites on the afflicted man's behalf throughout the night. When morning came, they brought me some purified rice, saying, "He should sleep easier tonight."
I immediately scotched that assumption. "No, he will probably suffer even more tonight. Despite your prayers, I am afraid he will undergo even worse sweating spells. Prayers and religious rites cannot help people who are suffering retri bution for unfilial acts."
After I left the temple, word reached me that the gods and Buddhas had protected him and that his life was no longer in danger. But his eyes had been destroyed, his hearing was gone, and he seemed to have lost his desire to live.
In ancient China, there was a gentleman named Shu-liang who lived at a place called Han-yin with his mother, wife, and son. He was extremely quick-tempered, and would often fly off the handle, venting his spleen on his wife and mother, causing them great distress. No matter how ferocious a tiger is, it does not devour its cubs; it cares for them lovingly, as though they were precious jewels.
One day when Shu-liang was away on a trip, his wife accidentally hurt the son, leaving him with a scar. "Woe is me!" she lamented with tears in her eyes. "When my husb and returns, there's no telling what he will do. I would be better off flinging myself from a high cliff."a
Shu-liang's mother tried to allay her fear. "He won't harm either of us if we tell him that it was his own mother who accidentally caused the injury," she said. "Just to be on the safe side, however, I should probably go stay with my second son for the time being." She set out immediately.
When Shu-liang returned home and saw his son's face, he cried out, "How in the world did you get that scar?" Taking his son in his arms, he said, "Tell me who did this to you!" The son pointed at his mother. Enraged, Shu-liang threw his wife to the floor and pressed her body down with his knee.
"Horrible woman, vengefully scarring my son's face!"
"Wait," she replied, regaining her composure. "Don't be so hasty. It wasn't me. It was your mother.
But it was completely unintentional."
"You mean she did this terrible thing and she didn't kill herself?" he replied bitterly. "Harming your own flesh and blood is an unpardonable offense." Half out of his mind, he kept repeating, "I'll avenge my son's injury. I'll avenge my son's injury."
The very next day, Shu-liang visited his brother's home. "I understand our mother is staying here,"
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he said casually. "Please tell her my wife wanted me to come and take her to worship at the shrine."
The mother, though suspicious and disinclined to see her son, appeared from her room and fearfully agreed to visit the shrine with him. As they walked along, Shu-liang said, "Our worries are over, mother. I'm going to show you a secret place where many precious gems have been dug up. I promise you, by tomorrow our family will be rich and prosperous." Coming to a grim-looking place at the base of a mountain, he pointed to a hole in the ground seven or eight feet deep. "Come here and look into it, mother," he said, leading her to the hole. Suddenly, he reached out to grab her and push her over the edge into the hole, but in doing that he lost his footing, slipped, and fell in himself.
"Help me, mother," he pleaded. "Please, take hold of my hand. Pull me out of here. The earth in this hole is sandy and burning hot. I can't bear it any more." His mother, confused and upset, moved this way and that attempting to reach out her hand to him. But by then the intense heat inside the hole was sending up thick billows of black smoke.
Hearing his cries, villagers came running to help. They tried in various ways to rescue him, but flames shooting up from the hole grew to such strength they seemed bent on scorching the very skies.
It was impossible for anyone to get near. Shu-liang's terrible screams were heard over half a mile away. After three days and three nights of continual agony, death finally came. When the fires died out and the villagers came and peered into the hole, they found that although the earth and grass inside were untouched by the flames, Shu-liang had been burned so badly that his body resembled a lump of charcoal.
There is also the story of a priest who was passing an old shrine late one night and saw crowds of tall, strange-looking people within the precincts. Their heads were wrapped in yellow silk and they were sweeping and cleaning the approaches to the shrine with sacred branches of the sakaki tree.
They kept working through the night, muttering words like, "Ahh! How disgusting," and "Oh! How unclean." Approaching them, the priest said, "Why are you cleaning and purifying this place with such great care?"
"Since you ask," one of them replied, "an unfilial son has defiled this shrine. See over there where he entered through the sacred hedge and walked through the sacred precincts. Now we must dig up every particle of earth that his feet contaminated, down to a depth of seven feet, and dispose of it. But that fellow will soon receive his just reward from the lord of heaven." By the time he had finished speaking, light was appearing in the morning sky, and he and all the other strange beings had vanished. Not long afterward in that same area, a man was struck and killed by a single bolt of lightning.
There is another story about a priest who went to an ancient shrine for an overnight retreat. In the deepening silence he heard the sound of a fleet horse galloping by. Presently, a rider pulled up before the shrine and proclaimed in a harsh voice, "Greetings to the fellow inside the shrine. We have vowed to take you from here. Come out this instant!"
The priest heard a voice from within the shrine proclaim, "A messenger of death has come for an old man about to die. I would ask that his sentence be commuted for this one night."
"Just as you wish," the voice outside replied.
Then the voice inside the shrine laughed and said, "It is true we have a man here tonight who has been unfilial to his parents, but one of the lords of hell has already decreed that he will be killed at dawn by a bolt of lightning. I've been waiting to see him receive this punishment for a long time now.
It will do my heart good to see him burned to a crisp. He's well deserved it for more than three years."
As the rider departed, he said, "There are many others just like him that I have to deal with in other
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areas of the country." That very dawn, a man was struck and killed by a single lightning bolt, just as the deity had foretold.
Stories like these are not uncommon. There is an account, for example, of a man whose hand burned fast to the handle of an ax he raised to strike his father, and who went to his death without ever getting it free. Others tell of a son who raised an ax against his mother but ended up burying it in his own head instead, or a son who tried to feed his mother a soup of worms and was struck by lightning on the spot, his hair going white as a wild boar's, or a wife who suddenly turned into a sow when she offered her blind mother-in-law a rice cake she had smeared with her child's feces. Another woman who promised her mother-in-law some mutton but ate it all herself and gave her a stewed placenta instead, found her head transformed into that of a white mongrel dog. Still others tell of a sword that a man concealed on a mountain road intending to use it on his mother-in-law, which turned into a venomous snake, wrapping itself around his head and crushing his skull, and of a son who piled up large bags of sand planning to crush his parents under them, but ending up flattening himself instead.
I have taken these stories from various different books.b But there are many more. They are truly endless in number.
In contrast to these terrible tales of retri bution, there are also accounts of children who thanks to heaven's miraculous intervention were enabled to carry out acts of great filial devotion: the story of a rare medicinal stone suddenly appearing in the garden of a son who needed it to cure an ailing father; of midwinter ice breaking up and fresh carp leaping into the arms of a son whose stepmo ther had a craving for minced fish; of a poor man whose shovel struck a cauldron filled with gold as he was about to bury his child alive to ensure his mother would be adequately fed; of bamboo shoots emerging in midwinter for a son anxious to feed them to his mother; of a carp-filled fountain gushing up in the garden of a son who wanted to satisfy his mother's yearning for fine water and minced fish.
But even if you don't perform acts of filial devotion like these, of a caliber that elicits heavenly intervention, I devoutly hope you do not commit acts of an unfilial nature that will bring punishment down upon you. A person who ignores or refuses to acknowledge what takes place right under his nose and insists on merely doing as he pleases must be either a stupid man or an evil one.
The people in the half-dozen stories I related, having turned away from reasonable courses of action, convinced themselves that their transgressions were minor and that any retri bution would be minor as well, and because of that they ended up receiving the severe judgment of heaven, dying very unfortunate deaths, leaving behind them names blackened forever as unfilial sons or daughters, and falling into the interminable suffering and torment of the Burning Hells. That this happened because they did not fear the wrath of the gods and were ignorant of heavenly retri bution is a matter each and every person should give the greatest care and consideration.
Last winter when I heard that story of Shinkichir of Tsukumi village, I immediately thought of you.
It bothered me, and I decided to write you, but one thing came up after another and I never got around to sitting down and doing it.
The Book of Changes states, "Unless you are habitually good, you do not make a name for yourself; unless you are habitually bad, you do not ruin yourself." In other words, our fortune and misfortune result from the gradual accumulation of small increments of good or evil deeds.
The events I have related may seem dubious to you, incredible and remote. But what about Kyza of Nakasato village, or Sajibei of Sawada village? Those incidents both took place in your own neighborhood. When young Sajibei clubbed his mother with an ax handle, he immediately took leave of his senses. Now over seventy years old, he lives miserably in the Grove of the Deva Guardians in
Sawada, weeping his final years away.
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Good deeds, no matter how many you perform, need no repentance. But evil deeds, even minor ones, are a cause of endless regret and heartache. According to what is written in the sutras, even if a person erects a pagoda twenty yojanas in height, adorns it with the seven precious gems, and enshrines Buddha relics in it, so that every arhat in the world comes to revere it, the arising in his mind of even a single angry thought becomes a fire that will at once turn into a great, all-consuming conflagration. The fires of wrath and anger consume entire forests of merit and virtue.
Until now, your mother could not devote herself to good works because from the time you were born she lavished her every moment on you, caring for you and seeing that you were provided with everything necessary for your upbringing. If she did find time to enter the family altar room, the sutras and dharanis she recited were always dedicated to your good health and long life, without a thought for her own karmic future, and heedless of her own physical exhaustion. Now, having retired in recent years from her former busy life, she has time to spend quietly on Buddhist devotions-but you come around, hatching your malicious schemes to frustrate and upset her, spreading silly rumors at the yearend cleaning, thinking up ways to anger her at the busy year-end season. What a bitterly cruel thing to do.
How heartwarming it is to see ordinary sons and daughters attending to their duty to their parents with benevolent smiles on their faces, sparing no expense to provide for their needs and amusement:
"You must use a palanquin when you visit the shrine." "Why don't you take your friend so-and-so with you when you attend that Buddhist service?"
But never forget, that no matter how long-lived your parents are, they cannot remain forever in this illusory world of dreams. Accounts have been transmitted throughout the past of brave samurai whose minds were filled with thoughts of filial devotion, of virtuous priests of deep attainment whose love and compassion for their parents was a constant concern. Still, perhaps you think it strange my saying these things to you. "Ekaku is quick to grab his brush and write letters of this kind to people. But what about him? Hasn't he left his father, who is well into his eighties, to go wandering off to the far-flung corners of the country, never so much as sending him a letter?"
However, a person who leaves his home to take the vows of a Buddhist monk has, in doing so, renounced his former self completely. He sets out in search of a good master who can help him achieve his goal, engaging in arduous practice day and night, precisely because he is concerned with obtaining a favorable rebirth for his parents into the endless future. He is performing the greatest kind of filial piety.
It is said that on receiving a just remonstrance, you should not consider the person who delivers it.
In ages past, the Great Yu was always pleased to hear wise words of advice, valuing them even if they came from shopkeepers, hunters, or fishermen.c His only regret was that he had not heard them sooner.
If you should feel that the words I have written here are reasonable, then take this letter and preserve it in a safe place. If you mend your ways, regretting your misdeeds and fearing their consequences, then this letter, inadequate as it is, will be an auspicious jewel of great worth- although even a jewel of incalculable price cannot dispel the delusion in a person's mind. No one can predict when another person with your bad habits will appear; it may even be your own son. If you preserve this letter and show it to him, it may influence him to cease his evil ways, even to do good deeds as well.
If, on the other hand, you decide that what I have said is unreasonable nonsense, just toss the letter into the fire. From now on, everything will inevitably depend on your mind alone.
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THE FIRST [FOURTH] YEAR OF SHTOKU (1714), AT THE INRY-JI TEMPLE AT SHINODA IN IZUMI
PROVINCE.
HHZ, 12:39-396
Hakuin was still a young monk when he composed this letter, nearing the end of a decade-long pilgrimage and well into the post-satori phase of his practice, having achieved several satori experiences earlier in his twenties. He was staying at Inry-ji, a St temple in Izumi Province south of Osaka, and was writing in response to a letter from Watanabe Sukefusa's father Heizaemon, who was the proprietor of an important honjin inn at the Hara post station (the kind reserved for the use of
Daimyo and others of high rank), informing him of his son's unfilial behavior.
It is interesting to note Hakuin's deep concern with filial devotion at this early stage of his career, a theme that continues to have a significant, though subordinate, role in his mature Zen teaching. It is most conspicuous in some of the calligraphic works he distributed, which are discussed below.
Another example of the consistency of Hakuin's views is his willingness to take up the village priest's function of moral correction, a purpose he fulfills through his attempts to resolve family discords in other letters in this volume. Also to be noted is that Hakuin does not offer Sukefusa a specific Zen solution to his problem, as he no doubt would have later on.
At some point, either when Hakuin wrote the letter itself or soon afterward, he transcribed it in manuscript form, added a short preface, and titled it The Cloth Drum: A Letter to an Unfilial Son.
Years later this brief letter became the basis for The Cloth Drum Refitted [with a New Drumhead], a series of accounts of retri bution for unfilial behavior that appeared as a single volume in 1747. It was greatly enlarged and reissued in 1753 in a five-volume edition. This edition opens with the letter to
Watanabe Sukefusa, which takes up less than a third of volume one, and is followed by twenty-two more stories of karmic cause and effect. Hakuin returned to this genre in later collections such as
Accounts of the Miraculous Effects of the Ten Phrase Kannon Sutra for Prolonging Life. Whereas
Accounts of the Miraculous Effects describes wondrous escapes from disaster and death thanks to recitation of the Ten Phrase Kannon Sutra, all but one of the stories in The Cloth Drum Refitted are of the retri butive type and recount instead the terrible punishments meted out to unfilial sons and daughters.
In the preface Hakuin wrote for The Cloth Drum Refitted, he alludes briefly to his friendship with
Watanabe Sukefusa, then explains the circumstances that led him to send Watanabe the remonstrance.
After stating that unfilial behavior invariably arises from an addiction to wine and women, presumably the vices his friend had succumbed to, Hakuin goes on to say:
Obsession with these seductions is a serious disease, and it is one that neither the wise nor the foolish can escape. A wise person blinded by delusion is like a tiger that falls into a well and yet has sufficient strength to claw its way out without losing its skin. When a foolish man is similarly blinded, he is like a tired, skinny old fox that falls in but perishes miserably at the bottom of the well because he lacks the strength to clamber out. Even a person who is just tolerably clever will, once he has fallen victim to these seductions and begins behaving in an unfilial manner, heed the warnings of his elders and the advice of the good and virtuous, immediately change his ways and become a kind and considerate son to his parents. Receiving heaven's favor and the gods' hidden assistance, he will be blessed with great happiness and long life. When he dies, he will leave a sterling reputation for wisdom and goodness behind him.
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Not so a foolish man, for once he engages in unfilial behavior he neither fears the warnings of his elders nor heeds the advice of good, upright people. He defies the sun, he opposes the moon, and in the end he receives the punishment of heaven and the dire verdict of the gods. In this state, self-redemption is no longer possible.
The difference between the two men does not exist from the start. It arises only because the former heeds to the warnings, and the latter does not.
[As this next paragraph seems addressed to Watanabe Sukefusa, it must have been written when Hakuin composed the original letter. Did Hakuin leave it in unintentionally when he reworked the preface for inclusion in the published edition of The Cloth Drum Refitted forty years later?]
You yourself have recently fallen prey to delusions of a similar kind. Your relations look on with wrinkled brows, your friends with foreheads furrowed. You have come right up against a firmly locked barrier that you will find extremely difficult to pass through.
Forty years ago, my childhood friend Watanabe Sukefusa contracted a serious illness of this nature, throwing his parents into a state of constant distress. I was staying at a temple in Shinoda,
Izumi Province, at the time, so I sent Sukefusa a long letter. It made a strong impression on him.
He immediately changed his ways and became a devoted son.
Now, on happy and auspicious occasions, Sukefusa puts on a clean robe, clears his desk, takes out the letter, and slowly and carefully rereads it, treasuring it as a precious jewel. After I returned home from my pilgrimage in my early thirties and took up residence in Shin-ji, a strong friendship formed between us. We became closer than brothers. He kept the letter inside a fabric slipcase on which I had inscribed the characters nuno-tsutsumi (the "cloth drum") [something that is utterly useless].
One day during a conversation he said, "You know, at first the words 'cloth drum' seemed strange to me. But now, after having read and reread the letter with great care, I have come to understand what a welcome and valuable work it is." Seeing the joy beam from his face as he spoke, I was filled with joy as well.
Today his son cherishes the letter as a family treasure. Recently, on the occasion of an annual festival, some elderly laymen who frequent my temple borrowed the letter and brought it to my temple. They asked me to copy it out and write some prefatory remarks. I complied with their wishes, and have taken the opportunity to add much new material as well.
What joy it is to imagine readers of this work taking out the letter from time to time as
Watanabe did, and then proceeding to perform kind and wonderful deeds for their parents.
Perhaps they may even succeed in hearing the secret rhythms of the cloth drum. However, if any of them finds the ideas set forth here absurd or unreasonable, they should return it forthwith to me!
In the spring of 1746, shortly before writing this preface, Hakuin had acted on the advice he had given thirty-three years earlier about recycling the letter. Learning that one Murabayashi Tokusabur, the son of a friend and a student in Edo, whom the father had praised as an "extremely sincere, mildmannered, and obedient young man, loved by one and all," was in fact given to wild drinking sprees and other generally reprehensible behavior, Hakuin retrieved the letter, made some necessary revisions, and sent it to the young man (also see Letter 9). As this occurred only months before
Hakuin prepared The Cloth Drum Refitted for publication, it seems reasonable to conjecture that revamping the letter for Tokusabur stimulated Hakuin to write and publish this almost entirely new
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work in which he could declare the hazards of unfilial behavior to a much wider audience.
The cardinal Chinese virtue of filiality, applicable to all interactions with one's elders, but especially to a son's dealings with his parents, grandparents, and family, assumed great importance in
Edo-period Japan with its formal government sanction of Confucian ethics. Many Confucians, including some with great political influence, regarded monasticism as abhorrent on the grounds that it contravened the basic operating principles of filial behavior by keeping young men from producing heirs to continue the parental line. Buddhists in China, and later in Japan, responded to such charges with some success, arguing the deep filiality of the monk's career, in which "leaving home" for the priesthood, through the redemptive power of awakening, is reconciled with Confucian filial responsibilities.
Sharing these premises, Hakuin launched vehement attacks on what he considered the mistaken understanding purveyed by such architects of Confucian orthodoxy as Hayashi Razan (see chapter
12). Hakuin's ideas on the subject may be summed up fairly well in the calligraphic works he prepared and distributed in large numbers to people. These works consisted of one large character, filiality or parent, followed by the inscription, "There is no more valuable act of filiality than to save one's father and mother from the sad fate of an unfortunate rebirth in the next life"-exactly the sentiments Hakuin had expressed to Sukefusa as a young monk. a It was considered extremely unfilial to injure or disfigure the body of one's (male) children. This was especially heinous in the case of an eldest son, who, according to the canons of filial piety, is venerated because of his superior birth, age, and gender. b Although not all of these references can be traced, most of them are found in Tales of the TwentyFour Paragons of Filial Virtue (Ehr-shih-ssu hsiao), a popular Confucian text of the Yuan dynasty that was reprinted and widely read in Edo Japan. c A legendary sage ruler of ancient China. According to Mencius, when ministers came to him with good advice, Yu always received it with deep gratitude.
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