Iron Eyes: The Life and Teachings of Ōbaku Zen Master Tetsugen Dōkō (review)

A strong character able to put himself through the kind of rigorous training necessary to overcome desire, to negate the self, and to sacrifice himself for the good of others: the life story of an important monk is usually designed as an exemplum. Its relation to the actual life led may be tenuous and, perhaps, immaterial. It is the image that matters, although it plays, of course, on the hankering that most of us have for some kind of verifiable link between representation and actuality. In the case of the subject of this new book by Helen Baroni, who has previously done us the inestimable favor of providing the first English-language treatment of the Ōbaku Zen sect, the representation looms large. The monk in question is Tetsugen, his dates are 1630-1682, and he is known for two things in particular. The first is his inspirational role as the driving force behind the project to print the first "complete" Buddhist canon on Japanese soil, the so-called Ōbaku edition of 1678. The second is his legendary struggle to achieve that dream. Twice he collected funds enough for the project only to find himself spending the money on saving the poor and starving. It was only on the third attempt that he succeeded in raising and then spending the money on the original enterprise. Baroni ends the biographical section of her book with the news that Tetsugen lives today more in the second context than the first. Among many other places, he is alive and well on the Internet, where almost all non-Japanese language references can apparently be traced back to a single vignette about him that appeared in Paul Reps's 1939 collection 101 Zen Stories. One can imagine Tetsugen himself being a little surprised to find that a legend about him has eclipsed what he saw as his life's work and that the Ōbaku edition of the canon is now all but invisible.

Baroni has done a good job of winkling out the main features of his life. Sectarian sources tend to gloss over the fact that he started as a follower of Jōdo Shinshū and only shifted to Zen in his late twenties. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that it was his insistence on keeping the precepts and in particular on the importance of celibacy that precipitated this move. Another factor may well have been the arrival in Nagasaki of the Zen master Yinyuan, whom he went to meet in 1655. After some difficulties, mainly caused by official suspicion that Yinyuan was a spy, Tetsugen joined what would become known as the Ōbaku Zen sect. Some ten years later he conceived of a plan to print the whole Buddhist canon in Japan. Up to that juncture, copies of commonly used individual sutras had, of course, been readily available, but there were very few copies of the entire canon, and they were scattered throughout Japan. All of them were copies brought in from China. A Japanese edition, produced on Japanese soil, would be of incalculable benefit.

The first public announcement of the project was in 1668 but it took well over ten years to bring to fruition. Based mainly on the Ming period Wanli edition that was in Yinyuan's possession, it consumed sixty thousand individual blocks of cherry wood, each carved with four pages, two to a side. The Ōbaku edition is no longer in use today, having been superseded by the now standard Taishō edition, but the blocks remain in a good state of preservation at the Hōzōin in the grounds of Manpukuji in Uji. An estimated two thousand complete or partial copies were made during the Tokugawa period.

Iron Eyes consists of two sections: the life and the writings. The biographical section has four chapters: "The Life of Tetsugen," "Carving the Scriptures," "The Teachings...