Entangling Vines Page 4

  Andō, comparing the contents of the various missan roku collections, shows that the text he labels Hekizen hekigo var. a, associated with the Tōkai lineage of the Myōshin-ji school, contributes 153 koans to the Kattōshū, well over half of the total cases. Moreover, Cases 2–73 of the Kattōshū are arranged in the same order as they appear in the “Hekizen,” the first fascicle of the Hekizen hekigo, while Cases 128–95 appear in the same order as they do in the “Hekigo,” the second fascicle. The remaining koans are largely taken from a class of koan texts known as the kinshishū (golden turd collections), which are also associated with the Tōkai lineage, being an outgrowth of the Hekizen hekigo var. a material.

  Andō’s research thus points to the development of the Kattōshū as part of a process of koan systematization occurring in the Myōshin-ji school’s Tōkai lineage. To the Tōkai-lineage materials the Kattōshū compilers added a small number of koans from other traditions, such as Tettō’s Daitoku-ji school (e.g., Case 213) and the Sōtō school (e.g., Cases 239 and 244).

  As noted in the Introduction, the earliest known edition of the Kattōshū was that of 1689; Andō lists the dates and publishers of the various editions as follows:

  1689 (Genroku 2): Yamatoya Jūzaemon

  1858 (Ansei 5): Kyōto Ryūshiken

  1859 (Ansei 6): Tanbaya Eisuke

  1886 (Meiji 19): Yano Muneo , ed.

  1890 (Meiji 23): Unkyō Chidō , ed.

  1914 (Taishō 3): Unkyō Chidō, ed., Shimada Shunpo

  1916 (Taishō 5): Zudokko, Shōhen , Fujita Genro , ed.

  1950 (Shōwa 25): Zudokko, Shōhen, Fujita Genro, ed.

  1982 (Shōwa 57): Shūmon kattōshū , Kajitani Sōnin , trans. and annot.

  The Genroku edition of 1689 was somewhat shorter than the Ansei edition of 1858, containing only 254 cases, of which six are duplicates that appear in both fascicles of the book. Altogether the Ansei edition contains thirty-one koans not found in the Genroku version. Six of these koans are replacements for the duplicates; when carving the new woodblocks the Ansei editors carefully replaced the second occurrence of the repeated cases with different koans consisting of exactly the same number of lines, thus preserving as much as possible the original Genroku layout. Other additions included koans that neatly filled the spaces (even of a single line) that had been left blank in the Genroku edition.

  The nearly 170-year gap between the Genroku-era first edition (1689) and Ansei-era second edition (1858), followed by numerous editions and reprintings, is intriguing. Although the sudden popularity of the text from the mid-nineteenth century may owe in part to the emergence of established publishing houses and improvements in printing technology, Andō (2002, p. 9) argues that it primarily reflects the upsurge of interest in Zen from late in the Tokugawa era (1600–1868) through the middle of the Shōwa era (1925–89).

  Another and perhaps more pertinent explanation, however, may lie in the establishment and rapid development of the modern Rinzai monastic system during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Rinzai training monasteries—known as senmon dōjō or sōdō —were established and taught almost entirely by masters in the Myōshin-ji school’s Hakuin lineage, which by the Shōwa period included all Japanese Rinzai teachers. The coincidence of the Kattōshū’s new popularity and the ascendancy of the Hakuin lineage provides further evidence of the text’s roots in the Myōshin-ji tradition.

  Indeed, the Kattōshū as it appeared in its complete form in 1858 can rightly be considered a product of the Hakuin school, particularly since several of the koans newly included in the Ansei edition (e.g., Case 259, “Baiyun’s ‘Still Lacking,’” and Case 272, “Nanquan’s Death”) are considered pivotal in Hakuin Zen koan training (Andō 2011, p. 158). The importance of the text in the Rinzai monastic koan system is indicated by its inclusion in the Poison-Painted Drum , a compendium of essential materials for Rinzai koan study published by Kennin-ji.

  That the Kattōshū, despite its popularity within the Rinzai monastic world, remains relatively unknown outside of that world may be attributed to several factors, most relating to the textual difficulty of the collection itself. As mentioned above, many of the cases are expressed in extremely obscure Chinese; this is particularly true of those involving the Chinese master Xutang Zhiyu. Although the general thrust of these koans is usually apparent (which is generally sufficient for koan work, where a pivotal phrase or two is often all that is at issue), on a sentence-by-sentence level the meaning is often quite unclear. Compounding the problem is the lack in the Inzan lineage—one of the two main branches of Hakuin Zen—of an oral tradition regarding many of the koans. Although monks in the Takujū lineage (the other main branch) usually go over the entire text in the course of their training, Inzan masters inform me that in their tradition only about one-third of the koans are used.

  I suspect that these are among the reasons that Zen masters seldom take up the Kattōshū as a subject for Zen lectures and writings, choosing instead better-known and better-researched texts like the Wumen guan, Blue Cliff Record, and Record of Linji. This paucity of commentary has meant that, although an interested reader can easily obtain books on most of the important Zen texts, almost no literature exists on the Kattōshū. Of the nine editions listed above, all but one are simply presentations of the Chinese koan texts, without amplification. The sole exception, Kajitani’s Shūmon kattōshū, provides the only scholarly research on the work. Privately published in 1982 by Kajitani’s temple, Shōkoku-ji, it offers the original text, the kakikudashi (Sino-Japanese rendering), Kajitani’s Japanese translation and interpretive commentary, and annotation on persons and terminology.

  It was thus to Kajitani’s book that I turned first when I started my English translation in 1999. Before describing my own efforts, however, I should first mention two partial translations that provided me with much valuable help and encouragement during the early stages of the project. First, Burton Watson, retired professor of Columbia University and one of the finest translators of Chinese and Japanese literature, generously shared with me his translations of those Kattōshū cases taken up by Yoshida Shōdō Rōshi, Chief Abbot of Kenchō-ji, in his lectures on this text (among the very few lecture series on the Kattōshū). Second, Victor Sōgen Hori, a fellow Zen monk in Japan during the 1970s and 1980s and now professor of Japanese religions at McGill University in Montreal, provided his translations of those Kattōshū koans he had examined during the course of his own monastic training. His translations were in part based on earlier renditions by Walter Nowick, a Zen student at Daitoku-ji during the 1950s and 1960s and the retired teacher at Moonspring Hermitage in Surry, Maine.

  These preliminary materials provided me with much-needed momentum as I turned to Kajitani’s 650-page Shūmon kattōshū for more in-depth analysis and commentary. I originally considered doing a straight translation of Kajitani’s book, but it did not prove to be entirely suitable for that purpose. The work contains a number of problematic readings and scribal errors, and the commentary, although of course an acceptable expression of Kajitani’s own viewpoint, does not necessarily accord with the way other masters would regard the koans.

  Since over a third of the Kattōshū koans are also found in the Wumen guan, Blue Cliff Record, and Record of Linji, the first place I turned to for “second opinions” was the excellent research and commentary on these works found in the Japanese Zen literature. For the Wumen guan, the extensive and detailed commentaries of Yamada Mumon (1976), Katō Totsudō (1939–40, vols. 13–15), Yamamoto Genpō (1960), Iida Tōin (1913), and others were especially helpful. For the many, often quite difficult, koans taken from the Blue Cliff Record, the studies of Katō (1939–40, vols. 1–12) and Yamada (1985) were indispensable, as they are among the few works that examine not just the Blue Cliff Record’s main cases and verses but also the lengthy commentaries. For the Record of Linji, the studies by Asahina (1968), Yamada (1997), and Yanagida (1972) were very useful, although the excellent English translations of this wor
k by Ruth Fuller Sasaki (1975, 2009) and Burton Watson (1993a) lessened the need for extensive research in the Japanese literature. The translations of those Kattōshū koans taken from the Record of Linji are largely based on the 2009 Sasaki edition.

  Other valuable English translations were found in the works of Zenkei Shibayama (1974), Robert Aitken (1990), and J. C. Cleary (1999) for the Wumen guan, Thomas Cleary and J. C. Cleary (1977), and Thomas Cleary (1998) for the Blue Cliff Record. The Kattōshū also quotes from a broad spectrum of other Chinese sources, ranging from classics like the Confucian Analects, to Buddhist sutras like the Vimalakīrti Sutra, to Zen texts like Huangbo’s Essentials on the Transmission of Mind and Yongjia’s Song of Enlightenment . For these, lucid translations were provided by the works of Arthur Waley (1938), John Blofeld (1958, 1962), Robert Thurman (1976), Sheng-yen (1987, 1997), and others.

  After researching what I was able to in the Japanese and English literature, I was still faced with a large amount of difficult text for which little reference material was available. For help with this I turned to Hirata Seikō, Chief Abbot of Tenryū-ji. Rev. Hirata, whose background in Zen practice, Western philosophy, and foreign languages made him particularly qualified for the task, generously agreed to meet for weekly study sessions, during which we would discuss traditional readings and the general intent of the koans. Later, as described in detail by Prof. Ueda in his Introduction, monthly seminars were arranged at the Tenryū-ji Institute for Philosophy and Religion with Rev. Hirata, myself, and Hirata’s two Dharma heirs, Sasaki Yōdō and Yasunaga Sodō. As a result of this cooperative effort a preliminary translation was finished by the summer of 2003.

  However, a number of questions still remained regarding the most difficult passages; the cryptic comments and verses of Xutang Zhiyu were generally the problem. Valuable help with these was provided by Dōmae Sōkan , priest of the small Kyoto temple Fukujō-ji and an old friend from my monastic years at Kenchō-ji and Kennin-ji. Rev. Dōmae, translator and annotator of a recently published study of the Tales from the Land of Locust-Tree Tranquility , Hakuin’s notoriously difficult commentary on the Record of Daitō (Hakuin 2003), combines a deep knowledge of Zen arcana with expertise in the extensive database of primary and secondary Zen sources compiled by the Institute for Zen Studies in Kyoto. With his help I was finally able to come up with workable translations for the Kattōshū’s more difficult passages. Especially valuable in this respect was Dōmae’s familiarity with the unpublished commentaries of the great Myōshin-ji scholar-monk Mujaku Dōchū (1653–1744), whose Cultivating the Record of Xutang provides detailed analyses of Xutang’s writings.

  Inevitably, over the course of the translation process a fair amount of note material accumulated. Despite a personal preference for lengthy annotation (one of the features I like most about Miura and Sasaki’s classic Zen Dust), I tried to limit the notes to information essential for understanding the koans on a literary level (understanding them in the context of koan training is, of course, an entirely different matter). In several cases, however, the obscurity of the text or the ambiguity of the terms and images made it necessary to include interpretive material, some of it rather detailed. In other cases, I was unable to resist including what is little more than interesting background information; often this is material that, important or not, is presented in virtually all Zen lectures on the koan in question. Again, I would like to emphasize that such comments do not constitute “answers” to the koans in question (they would certainly not be accepted as such by a competent Zen master) but rather interpretations of what the koan is asking.

  It should be kept in mind, too, that such interpretations are in no way absolute. One lesson that was particularly impressed upon me in the course of translating this text was that there are various ways of viewing and working with these koans. A metaphor, for example, may be interpreted one way by a certain teacher and in quite a different way by another. Thus, although I have tried as much as possible to eliminate outright errors of translation, I cannot claim to have eliminated “errors” of interpretation.

  The painstaking task of checking the first English translation was begun by my friend Wayne Yokoyama of Hanazono University, who examined the manuscript for stylistic and grammatical errors, and who offered a number of creative alternatives to my translations. He also had many valuable suggestions on matters of book design and layout. Later, after the manuscript had been revised, he proofread the entire text several times.

  Burton Watson agreed to check the manuscript for Chinese readings, in the course of which he caught a number of inconsistencies and textual errors, and suggested smoother wordings for several of my translations. Liang Xiaohong, a Chinese Buddhist scholar associated with Nanzan University in Nagoya, kindly took time from her busy schedule to examine the Pinyin readings in the Biographical Notes and Name Chart sections.

  When the translation was finally more or less complete, Nelson Foster, a Dharma heir of the American Zen master Robert Aitken and teacher at the Honolulu Diamond Sangha and Ring of Bone Zendo, closely examined and commented upon the entire manuscript. His professional editing skills resulted in a much more tightly and suitably worded manuscript, and his keen Zen eye caught a number of questionable readings and interpretations. He also looked over my often overgenerous annotation, separating that which was genuinely useful from that which was unnecessary and distracting.

  A final check of the translations was made by Victor Hori, who identified further dead weight in the annotation, suggested alternatives for overly abstract terminology, and used his deep knowledge of the Zen literature (gained through his experience in translating the Zen phrase anthologies for his excellent book Zen Sand, 2003) to suggest alternative renditions of a number of particularly difficult expressions.

  Much of the research and editorial work for the Kattōshū was carried out at the International Research Institute (iriz) at Hanazono University, where I am employed as an associate researcher. For this and much other invaluable support I must offer especial thanks to Nishimura Eshin, President of Hanazono University; Okimoto Katsumi, Director of the iriz; and Yoshizawa Katsuhiro, chief researcher at the Institute.

  Toga Masataka, secretary general of Tenryū-ji and executive director of the Institute for Zen Studies, has throughout the years provided unfailing support for this translation. It is thanks to his firm but good-natured pressure in setting clear deadlines that Entangling Vines is being published now and not at some ever-receding time in the future. Important roles in the translation, editing, and publication of this work were also played by many others at the Institute for Zen Studies, especially Maeda Naomi and Nishimura Egaku.

  Finally, I would like to thank my teacher, Harada Shōdō Rōshi; Priscilla Daichi Storandt; and the rest of the community at Sōgen-ji for their steady interest in the project, their trial use of preliminary versions, and their feedback on points of difficulty. This was of inestimable help in maintaining momentum and bringing Entangling Vines to completion.

  To these and many other people who contributed to this translation in ways both direct and indirect, I owe a deep debt of gratitude. Their cooperation was essential in helping me produce as accurate a translation as possible at this time; responsibility for any remaining errors lies entirely with me.

  Thomas Yūhō Kirchner

  Rinsen-ji, Kyoto

  Preface to the Wisdom Edition

  NOT LONG AFTER the Tenryū-ji Institute for Philosophy and Religion published the hardcover edition of Entangling Vines in 2004, Wisdom Publications generously agreed to consider issuing an American paperback edition. Toga Masataka, secretary general of Tenryū-ji, immediately supported this idea, asking only that the Tenryū-ji Institute first be allowed to deplete its stock of hardcover copies. Permission for publishing the paperback edition was granted in the spring of 2010.

  It was a long wait, but in many ways the timing was fortuitous. In the years since the hardcover edition appeared a number of corrections have been sugges
ted by readers (in particular Edmund Skrzypczak, former editor of Monumenta Nipponica), and I myself have reconsidered the wording of a number of the translations. More importantly, though, my chief Japanese collaborator on the 2004 edition, Dōmae Sōkan, published in 2010 his own extensively annotated modern Japanese edition of the Shūmon kattōshū, inspired in part by his work on the English Entangling Vines.

  In the course of investigating the original sources for the koans I consulted him about, Dōmae realized that the Kattōshū in its present form shows many of the same sort of accretions and scribal errors found in virtually all texts transmitted through the centuries via handwritten (or hand-carved) copies. In several cases entire sentences had been lost, obscuring the original meaning of the passages. Errors of this type are now easier to discover and rectify, owing to the nearly complete digital library of Zen literature presently available through the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association and elsewhere. This library also facilitates the task of comparing the various usages of difficult expressions in order to clarify the meaning of passages that in the past have confounded even Zen masters.

  The results of Dōmae’s labors, with restored koans, modern Japanese translations, and copious notes, was published in March 2010, under the title Kōteibon Shūmon kattōshū (Zen school koan collection: Revised edition). This volume is certain to become required reading for all serious Japanese Rinzai monks. The timely appearance of Dōmae’s book meant that revisions for the Wisdom paperback edition of Entangling Vines could go well beyond the mere correction of typos, etc. With Dōmae’s book as my primary resource I was able not only to correct errors but also to retranslate a number of the koans, sometimes with significant changes in the meaning. An example of how different the final results sometimes were is the enlightenment poem appearing in the koan “Xiangyan’s Sound of a Bamboo.” The translation in the 2004 edition of Entangling Vines, based on Kajitani’s interpretation, is: