101 Zen Stories: Compilation of Zen Koans
101 Zen Stories Compilation of Zen Koans
“Turning the impossible into possible”
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101 Zen Stories Compilation of Zen Koans
Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era, received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. It is over full, no more will go in. Like this cup, Nan-in said, you are full of your own opinions and speculations.
How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup? Gudo was the emperor’s teacher of his time. Nevertheless, he used to travel alone as a wandering mendicant. Once when he was on his way to Edo, the cultural and political center of the shogunate, he approached a little village named Takenaka.
It was evening and a heavy rain was falling. Gudo was thoroughly wet, his straw sandals were in pieces. At a farmhouse near the village, he noticed four or five pairs of sandals in the window and decided to buy some dry ones.
The woman who offered him the sandals, seeing how wet he was, invited him to remain for the night in her home. Gudo accepted, thanking her. He entered and recited a sutra before the family shrine.
Return now, said Gudo, when the ten miles had been passed. I am going to follow you all the rest of my life, declared the man. Modern Zen teachers in Japan spring from the lineage of a famous master who was the successor of Gudo.
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His name was Munan
His name was Munan, the man who never turned back. The Zen master Hakuin was praised by his neighbors as one living a pure life. A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store lived near him.
Suddenly without any warning, her parents discovered she was with child. This made her parents angry. She would not confess who the man was, but after much harassment, at last named Hakuin.
In great anger, the parents went to the master. Is that so? was all he would say. After the child was born, it was brought to Hakuin.
By this time, he had lost his reputation, which did not trouble him. But he took very good care of the child. He obtained milk from his neighbors and everything else the little one needed.
A year later, the girl mother could stand it no longer. She told her parents the truth, that the real father of the child was a young man who worked in the fish market. The mother and father of the girl at once went to Hakuin to ask his forgiveness, to apologize at length, and to get the child back again.
Hakuin was willing. In yielding the child, all he said was, is that so? The master Bangke’s talks were attended not only by Zen students, but by persons of all ranks and sects. He never quoted sutras, nor indulged in scholastic dissertations.
Instead, his words were spoken directly from his heart to the hearts of his listeners. His large audiences angered a priest of the Nichiren sect, because the adherents had left to hear about Zen. The self-centered Nichiren priest came to the temple, determined to debate with Bangke.
A Zen teacher, he called out, wait a minute. Whoever respects you will obey what you say. But a man like myself does not respect you.
Can you make me obey you? Come up beside me and I will show you, said Bangke. Proudly the priest pushed his way through the crowd to the teacher. Bangke smiled.
Come over to my left side. The priest obeyed. No, said Bangke, we may talk better if you are on the right side.
Step over here. The priest proudly stepped over to the right. You see, observed Bangke, you are obeying me, and I think you are a very gentle person.
Now sit down and listen. Twenty monks and one nun who was named Ishun were practicing meditation with a certain Zen master. Ishun was very pretty, even though her head was shaved and her dress plain.
Several monks secretly fell in love with her. One of them wrote her a love letter, insisting upon a private meeting. Ishun did not reply.
The following day the master gave a lecture to the group, and when it was over, Ishun arose. Addressing the one who had written her, she said, If you really love me so much, come and embrace me now. There was an old woman in China who had supported a monk for over twenty years.
She had built a little hut for him and fed him while he was meditating. Finally, she wondered just what progress he had made in all this time. To find out, she obtained the help of a girl rich in desire.
Go and embrace him, she told her, and then ask him suddenly, What now? The girl called upon the monk and, without much ado, caressed him, asking him what he was going to do about it. An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter, replied the monk somewhat poetically. Nowhere is there any warmth.
The girl returned and related what he had said. To think I fed that fellow for twenty years, exclaimed the old woman in anger. He showed no consideration for your need, no disposition to explain your condition.
He need not have responded to passion, but at least he should have evidenced some compassion. She at once went to the hut of the monk and burned it down. In the early days of the Meiji era, there lived a well-known wrestler called Onami, Great Waves.
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Onami was immensely strong and knew the art of wrestling.
Onami was immensely strong and knew the art of wrestling. In his private bouts he defeated even his teacher, but in public he was so bashful that his own pupils threw him. Onami felt he should go to a Zen master for help.
Hakuju, a wandering teacher, was stopping in a little temple nearby, so Onami went to see him and told him of his great trouble. Great Waves is your name, the teacher advised. So stay in this temple tonight.
Imagine that you are those billows. You are no longer a wrestler who is afraid. You are those huge waves sweeping everything before them, swallowing all in their path.
Do this and you will be the greatest wrestler in the land. The teacher retired. Onami sat in meditation, trying to imagine himself as waves.
He thought of many different things. Then gradually he turned more and more to the feeling of the waves. As the night advanced, the waves became larger and larger.
They swept away the flowers in their vases. Even the Buddha in the shrine was inundated. Before dawn the temple was nothing but the ebb and flow of an immense sea.
In the morning the teacher found Onami meditating, a faint smile on his face. He patted the wrestler’s shoulder. Now nothing can disturb you, he said.
You are those waves. You will sweep everything before you. The same day Onami entered the wrestling contest and won.
After that, no one in Japan was able to defeat him. Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut, only to discover there was nothing in it to steal.
Ryokan returned and caught him. You may have come a long way to visit me, he told the prowler, and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.
The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away. Ryokan sat naked watching the moon.
Poor fellow, he mused. I wish I could give him this beautiful moon. The Zen master Hoshin lived in China many years.
Then he returned to the northeastern part of Japan where he taught his disciples. When he was getting very old, he told them a story he had heard in China. This is the story.
One year, on the 25th of December, Tokufu, who was very old, said to his disciples, I am not going to be alive next year, so you fellows should treat me well this year. The pupils thought he was joking, but since he was a great-hearted teacher, each of them in turn treated him to a feast on succeeding days of the departing year. On the eve of the new year, Tokufu concluded, You have been good to me.
I shall leave you tomorrow afternoon when the snow has stopped. The disciples laughed, thinking he was aging and talking nonsense since the night was clear and without snow. But at midnight, snow began to fall, and the next day they did not find their teacher about.
They went to the meditation hall. There he had passed on. Hoshin, who related this story, told his disciples, It is not necessary for a Zen master to predict his passing, but if he really wishes to do so, he can.
Can you, someone asked. Yes, answered Hoshin. I will show you what I can do seven days from now.
None of the disciples believed him, and most of them had even forgotten the conversation when Hoshin called them together. Seven days ago, he remarked, I said I was going to leave you. It is customary to write a farewell poem, but I am neither a poet nor calligrapher.
Let one of you inscribe my last words. His followers thought he was joking, but one of them started to write. Are you ready, Hoshin asked.
Yes, sir, replied the writer. Then Hoshin dictated, I came from brilliancy and return to brilliancy. What is this? The poem was one line short of the customary four, so the disciples said, Master, we are one line short.
Hoshin, with the roar of a conquering lion
Hoshin, with the roar of a conquering lion, shouted, Ka! and was gone. The exquisite Shunke, whose other name was Susu, was compelled to marry against her wishes when she was quite young. Later, after this marriage had ended, she attended a university where she studied philosophy.
To see Shunke was to fall in love with her. Moreover, wherever she went, she herself fell in love with others. Love was with her at the university, and afterwards, when philosophy did not satisfy her and she visited a temple to learn about Zen, the Zen students fell in love with her.
Shunke’s whole life was saturated with love. At last, in Kyoto, she became a real student of Zen. Her brothers in the sub-temple of Kenin praised her sincerity.
One of them proved to be a congenial spirit and assisted her in the mastery of Zen. The abbot of Kenin, Mokurai, Silent Thunder, was severe. He kept the precepts himself and expected his priests to do so.
In modern Japan, whatever zeal these priests have lost for Buddhism, they seem to have gained for taking wives. Mokurai used to take a broom and chase the women away when he found them in any of his temples, but the more wives he swept out, the more seemed to come back. In this particular temple, the wife of the head priest became jealous of Shunke’s earnestness and beauty.
Hearing the students praise her serious Zen made this wife squirm and itch. Finally, she spread a rumor about Shunke and the young man who was her friend. As a consequence, he was expelled and Shunke was removed from the temple.
I may have made the mistake of love, thought Shunke, but the priest’s wife shall not remain in the temple either if my friend is to be treated so unjustly. Shunke the same night with a can of kerosene set fire to the 500-year-old temple and burned it to the ground. In the morning, she found herself in the hands of the police.
A young lawyer became interested in her and endeavored to make her sentence lighter. Do not help me, she told him. I might decide to do something else which would only imprison me again.
At last, a sentence of seven years was completed and Shunke was released from the prison where the 60-year-old warden also had become enamored of her. But now everyone looked upon her as a jailbird. No one would associate with her.
Even the Zen people, who were supposed to believe in enlightenment in this life and with this body, shunned her. Zen, Shunke found, was one thing and the followers of Zen quite another. Her relatives would have nothing to do with her.
She grew sick, poor, and weak. She met a Shinsu priest who taught her the name of the Buddha of Love and in this Shunke found some solace and peace of mind. She passed away when she was still exquisitely beautiful and hardly 30 years old.
She wrote her own story in a futile endeavor to support herself and some of it she told to a woman writer so it reached the Japanese people. Those who rejected Shunke, those who slandered and hated her, now read of her life with tears of remorse. In Tokyo, in the Meiji era, there lived two prominent teachers of opposite characteristics.
One, Unsho, an instructor in Shingon kept Buddha's
One, Unsho, an instructor in Shingon kept Buddha’s precepts scrupulously. He never drank intoxicants nor did he eat after 11 o’clock in the morning. The other teacher, Tanzan, a professor of philosophy at the Imperial University, never observed the precepts.
When he felt like eating, he ate. When he felt like sleeping in the daytime, he slept. One day Unsho visited Tanzan who was drinking wine at the time, not even a drop of which is supposed to touch the tongue of a Buddhist.
Hello, brother, Tanzan greeted him. Won’t you have a drink? I never drink, exclaimed Unsho solemnly. For one who does not drink is not even human, said Tanzan.
Do you mean to call me inhuman just because I do not indulge in intoxicating liquids, exclaimed Unsho in anger? Then if I am not human, what am I? A Buddha, answered Tanzan. Shon became a teacher of Soto Zen. When he was still a student, his father passed away, leaving him to care for his old mother.
Whenever Shon went to a meditation hall, he always took his mother with him. Since she accompanied him when he visited monasteries, he could not live with the monks. So he would build a little house and care for her there.
He would copy sutras, Buddhist verses, and in this manner receive a few coins for food. When Shon brought fish for his mother, people would scoff at him for a monk is not supposed to eat fish. But Shon did not mind.
His mother, however, was hurt to see others laugh at her son. Finally she told Shon, I think I will become a nun, I can be a vegetarian too. She did, and they studied together.
Shon was fond of music and was a master of the harp, which his mother also played. On full moon nights they used to play together. One night a young lady passed by their house and heard music.
Deeply touched, she invited Shon to visit her the next evening and play. He accepted the invitation. A few days later he met the young lady on the street and thanked her for her hospitality.
Others laughed at him. He had visited the house of a woman of the streets. One day Shon left for a distant temple to deliver a lecture.
A few months afterwards he returned home to find his mother dead. Friends had not known where to reach him, so the funeral was then in progress. Shon walked up and hit the coffin with his staff.
Mother, your son has returned, he said. I am glad to see you have returned, son, he answered for his mother. Yes, I am glad too, Shon responded.
Then he announced to the people about him. The funeral ceremony is over, you may bury the body. When Shon was old, he knew his end was approaching.
He asked his disciples to gather around him in the morning, telling them he was going to pass on at noon. Burning incense before the picture of his mother and his old teacher, he wrote a poem. For fifty-six years I lived as best I could, making my way in this world.
Now the rain has ended, the clouds are clearing. The blue sky has a full moon. His disciples gathered about him, reciting a sutra, and Shon passed on during the invocation.
A university student, while visiting Gassan, asked him, Have you ever read the Christian Bible? No, read it to me, said Gassan. The student opened the Bible and read from St. Matthew. And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.
They toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.
Gassan said, Whoever uttered those words, I consider an enlightened man. The student continued reading. Ask, and it shall be given you.
Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone that asketh, receiveth.
And he that seeketh, findeth. And to him that knocketh, it shall be opened. Gassan remarked, That is excellent.
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Whoever said that is not far from Buddhahood.
Whoever said that is not far from Buddhahood. Buddha Told a Parable in a Sutra A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled the tiger after him.
Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him.
Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him.
Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted! When one goes to Obaku Temple in Kyoto, he sees carved over the gate the words, The First Principle. The letters are unusually large, and those who appreciate calligraphy always admire them as being a masterpiece.
They were drawn by Kosen two hundred years ago. When the master drew them, he did so on paper from which workmen made the larger carving in wood. As Kosen sketched the letters, a bold pupil was with him who had made several gallons of ink for the calligraphy and who never failed to criticize his master’s work.
That is not good, he told Kosen after the first effort. How was that one? Poor, worse than before, pronounced the pupil. Kosen patiently wrote one sheet after another until eighty-four first principles had accumulated, still without the approval of the pupil.
Then when the young man stepped outside for a few moments, Kosen thought, now is my chance to escape his keen eye, and he wrote hurriedly with a mind free from distraction, The First Principle. A masterpiece, pronounced the pupil. Jiyun, a Shingon master, was a well-known Sanskrit scholar of the Tokugawa era.
When he was young, he used to deliver lectures to his brother’s students. His mother heard about this and wrote him a letter. Son, I do not think you became a devotee of the Buddha because you desired to turn into a walking dictionary for others.
There is no end to information and commentation, glory and honor. I wish you would stop this lecture business. Shut yourself up in a little temple in a remote part of the mountain.
Devote your time to meditation, and in this way attain true realization. The master of Kenin Temple was Mokurai, Silent Thunder. He had a little protege named Toyo, who was only twelve years old.
Toyo saw the older disciples visit the master’s room each morning and evening to receive instructions in sanzen, or personal guidance, in which they were given koans to stop mind-wandering. Toyo wished to do a sanzen also. Wait a while, said Mokurai.
You’re too young. But the child insisted, so the teacher finally consented. In the evening, little Toyo went at the proper time to the threshold of Mokurai’s sanzen room.
