Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook

Bankei Yōtaku

195 Bankei Yōtaku 盤珪永琢 (1622–1693) Bankei was a Zen monk of the Rinzai School who, after studying with both Japanese and immigrant Chinese Zen masters, initially settled into a quiet life away from the major cities, tending to the spiritual needs of his local community . But in his fifties he was invited to preside over major teaching monasteries in Kyoto and Edo (later Tokyo) and quickly became a famed master of many in both metropolitan areas. Bankei is famous for his teaching of what he called the unborn mind. Humans determine or significantly impact the nature of their own reality by their attention. This principle operates on emotional, intellectual, and religious levels, but in the Zen and Pure Landž traditions, “willful” attention is postulated as self-destructive, where a passive, spontaneous focus on things is proffered as having greater spiritual power and religious authority. For Bankei, this is expressed by means of the psychological relationship within the individual to the unborn mind, an absolute principle that echoes the Buddhist doctrines of buddha-naturež within all sentient beings and the “non-arising and non-disappearing nature” of phenomena that recognizes their inherent sacredness. Whereas these Buddhist doctrines typically have a metaphysical nuance in India, in Bankei they are translated or demonstrated in terms of everyday life. So while skeptics regard his claim as internal and personal, Bankei claimed to be able to “prove” the reality of the unborn mind to others. [mlb] The unb orn Bankei Yōtaku 1690, 15–16, 19, 27–8, 82, (58, 69–70, 76–7, 102–3, 80–1) The Power of Attention Bankei’s central point below is that when our attention focuses naturally on one or more tasks, our inherent źbuddha-natureŻ manifests without effort, but when we begin to fuss over what we should be doing or saying, we lose that “infusion” of buddha-nature in our thought processes, and by willing our attention toward this or that issue, our conscious mental activity is uncoupled from our buddha-nature, and this rupture manifests as tension or stress. The unbornž buddha-mindž deals freely and spontaneously with anything that presents itself to it. But if something should happen to make you change the buddha-mind into thought, then you run into trouble and lose that freedom. Let me give you an example. Suppose a woman is engaged in sewing something. A friend enters the room and begins speaking to her. As long as she listens to her friend and sews in the unborn, she has no trouble doing both. But if she 196 | bu d d h i s t t r a d i t i o n s : z e n gives her attention to her friend’s words and a thought arises in her mind as she thinks about what to reply, her hands stop sewing; if she turns her attention to her sewing and thinks about that, she fails to catch everything her friend is saying, and the conversation does not proceed smoothly. In either case, her buddha-mind has slipped from the place of the unborn. She has transformed it into thought. As her thoughts fix upon one thing, they’re blank to all others, depriving her mind of its freedom. Human Nature and Free Will For Bankei, human nature is naturally good because all sentient beings are born with the buddha-nature, which is the potential for źbuddhahoodź. People are not born burdened with any unwitting sin or alienation from truth, but descend into confusion and trouble by means of self-deception. Thus the pain in one’s life is the result of how one chooses to live that life. The following discussion on personal accountability grows out of a dialogue with a monk who is troubled by his own bad temper. Bankei is asserting that there are no inborn or inherent conditions that predetermine a person to bad (or good) behavior, and claims that such things are the result of choice. We can infer from this a doctrine that human nature is never immutable, that free will is always at hand, but it may take some time for individuals to realize this. Bankei: Is your temper here now? Bring it out here. I’ll cure it for you. Monk: I’m not angry now. My temper comes on unexpectedly, when something provokes me. Bankei: You weren’t born with it then. You create it yourself, when some pretext or other happens to appear. Where would your...