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/ F IU m ) i! I SiV can truly be called the quintessential philosophy of the Orient. Not just a puzzle to be unraveled by the intellect, Zen offers a challenge to both mind and spirit, calling on all our intuitive, social, and self-disciplinary powers.

The distillation of this Oriental philosophy is contained in the Zen sayings--pithy phrases and poems handed down from a distinguished line of Chinese and Japanese masters. Over the centuries, their sayings and writings have been compiled into voluminous handbooks.

The most complete of these are the various editions of Zemin Kushu, or the "Zen Forest Saying Anthology." Serious Zen students are still required to memorize hundreds of these sayings. In monasteries all over Japan, would-be priests can be found thoughtfully thumbing through their well-worn anthologies by the dim candlelight, looking for the perfect phrase to "cap" their Zen experience and activity. As their masters assign them increasingly difficult koans for contemplation and eventual solution, they respond with sayings culled from the anthologies, or they create their own phrases to add to the dynamic body of Zen literature.

In the present book, for the first time, over 1,200 of these short sayings--from the comical, to the profound, to the downright mystifying-- appear in vivid, poetic, English translation. From the thousands of sayings in existence, the author has compiled a representative selection, adding his own illuminating introduction on how to read the sayings. Each poem uniquely illustrates some

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aspect of Zen, from the nature of satori to the meaning of enlightened activity in the real world.

These keys to Zen understanding are nov^ available to English speakers. Readers are encouraged to read the sayings, to ponder them, and eventually to apply to their own lives the wisdom found there.

Included is a selection of the author's favorite sayings rendered in striking calligraphy by his father, abbot of the well-known Shogen-ji Zen temple in Shizuoka. For students with an interest in further study, the book also contains an appendix with the original Chinese characters and their Japanese romanizations. A glossary of people and places and a bibliographical source note complete this collection.

SOIKU SHIGEMATSU combines his duties as an active Zen priest at Shogen-ji temple with a full-time position as professor of English at Shizuoka University. He has long been interested in applying the Zen viewpoint to the study of American literature, from Emerson to Gary Snyder. In this volume he turns his efforts in the opposite direction, presenting a classic of Zen literature for the English-speaking audience.

Jacket design by Yoshihiro Murata Printed in Japan

ZEN FOREST

Sayings of the Masters

compiled and translated, with an introduction, by Soiku Shigematsu

foreword by Gary Snyder

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New York ? W E A T H E R H I L L ? Tokyo

The Chinese character appearing on the title page, in the calligraphy of Ssiku Shigematsu, reads tin or hayashi and means "forest/*

First edition, 1981 Published by John Weatherhill, Inc., of New York and Tokyo, with editorial offices at 7-6-13 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106, Japan. Copyright ? 1981 by SGiku Shigematsu; all rights reserved. Foreword: all rights reserved by Gary Snyder. Printed in Japan. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data: A Zen forest, sayings of the masters. / Translations of over 1,200 Zen phrases and koans. / 1. Zen Buddhism Quotations, maxims, etc. 2. Koan. / 3. Zen poetry. I. Shigematsu, SOiku, 1943- / BQ9267.Z46 294.3'927 81-31 / ISBN 0-8348-0159-0

Contents

Foreword, by Gary Snyder ? vii Acknowledgments ? xiii Introduction ? 3 THE S A Y I N G S ? 33

Appendix: Characters and Romanization ? 123 Glossary ? 171

Bibliographical Note ? 177

ILLUSTRATIONS The T e n Oxherding Pictures, by Gyokusen, appear on pages 6 - 7 , 1 0 - 1 1 , 1 4 - 1 5 , 1 8 - 1 9 , and 22-23. Sayings in calligraphy by KijU Shigematsu appear facing pages 50, 51, 66, 67, 82, 83, 98, and 99. A map o f China appears on page 169.

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Foreword

The Mohave Indians o f the lower Colorado River put all the energy they gave to aesthetic and religious affairs into the recitation o f long poetic narratives. Some of the epics are remarkably precise in describing the details of the vast basin and range deserts of die southwest, but the raconteurs held that they were all learned in dreams. By another sort of inversion, the world of Ch'an/Zen Buddhism with its "no dependence on words and letters"--and unadorned halls, plain altars, dark robes--created a large and very specialized jiterary culture. It registers the difficulty of the play_between verbaljind non-verbal in the methods of the training halls. The highly literate Zen people were also well acquainted with secular literature, and they borrowed useful turns of phrase from any source at all, to be part of the tool kit, to be employed when necessary, and often in a somewhat different way. A final step was the sifting of Ch'an texts, Chinese poems, Buddhist__sitfras, Taoist and Confucian classics, and proverbial lore one more time. This was done in Japan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the result was the Zenrin Kushu, "Phrases from the Zen Forest." The greater part o f the phrases gathered is from Chinese poetry, so that R.H. Blyth could say that the Zenrin Kushil is "the,Zen view o f the world on its way through poetry to haiku."

Ciive this book a glance. It's not quite like any collection o f quotations or sclcctions from "great literature" that has been seen before. Eicho Zenji, who did the basic editing, and his successors obviously knew what they were looking for. Soiku Shigematsu's introduction tells about that.

But the Zenrin Kushil selections could not have the terse power and vividness they do, were it not for the richness of the parent material. First, the terseness. It's all from Chinese. (Readings given in the appendix of this hook, to accompany the Chinese characters, are in a form o f literary SinoJapanese and do not represent the pronunciation of the Chinese or the word-

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