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BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDUM Tòsui’s Story From what we learn of him in the Tribute,Tòsui, during his colorful later years, was very much of a loner, someone who went to great lengths to live in anonymity, to leave no traces, his activities and whereabouts often a mystery even to his closest disciples and colleagues. It is the sort of life that readily attracts anecdote and legend but defies biography , at least in the usual sense of a detailed and coherent chronological record.The Tribute, as its author Menzan freely admits, reflects many of these problems, and while its contents are presented according to a kind of rough chronology, the text itself consists largely of miscellaneous episodes whose sequential relationship often remains vague.When the Tribute does supply figures for the lengths of time Tòsui spent at one place or another, they are frequently imprecise (“seven or eight years,” “more than ten years”) or, when considered together, simply fail to add up. Even at their most conservative, the periods Menzan assigns for Tòsui’s various activities from his transmission in summer 1657 to his death in fall 1683, when combined, leave only two years for his entire life as a beggar and itinerant laborer—including his year at Ikeda and the time in his hut in Kyoto.This is a picture clearly at variance with the overall tenor of Menzan’s account—with the nun Chihò’s remark that Tòsui spent several years simply living in concealment among the beggars ; with the Tribute’s description of Tòsui’s extensive comings and goings centering on the Kyoto area; and above all with Menzan’s own statement in the preface that Tòsui “appeared and disappeared for more than thirty years” after abandoning his temple, Zenrinji, about 1667 or 1668.1 Even when the Tribute indicates specific time spans, then, they are often best viewed in more general terms, as “a number of years” rather than the seven, or eight, or thirty years indicated in the text. For all its shortcomings as a biography, Menzan’s Tribute, completed in 1749,remains our principal source forTòsui’s life,supplemented only 95 by the two brief biographical sketches referred to previously: the short biography included in the 1717 Jûzoku Nichi-iki tòjò shosoden (shortened title, Tòjò shosoden) by the Sòtò priest Zòsan Ryòki and the nearly identical sketch in the 1727 Nihon Tòjò rentò roku by the Sòtò priest Ryònan Shûjo.2 (As a rule, where Ryònan’s biography of Tòsui simply reproduces Zòsan’s, only the latter, earlier work is referred to below.) These three texts are essentially all that remain to testify to Tòsui’s distinctive career, and it is only through them that Tòsui’s story, such as it is, survives to us. For this reason, these works, and above all the Tribute, necessarily form the basis for any discussion of Tòsui’s life. Tòsui was born in Yanagawa,3 a picturesque castle town on the Chikugo River, in what is today Saga Prefecture and in the Edo period formed part of the province of Chikugo, in Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s five main islands. Situated not far from the ocean,Yanagawa lay in an agricultural area of rice paddies and canals,the seat of the powerful Tachibana clan, whose leader, Muneshige (1567–1642), had received Chikugo in 1587 as a fief fromToytomi Hideyoshi. Muneshige had fought against the Tokugawa at Sekigahara and, having backed the losing side, saw his domain confiscated and included temporarily in the holdings of a Tokugawa ally,TanakaYoshimasa (d. 1609). By 1620, however , Muneshige was back in favor and the Tachibana reinstated at Yanagawa. The Tribute tells us that Tòsui was born into aYanagawa merchant family and that his parents were devoted followers of the Pure Land sect (Jòdòshû).There is no mention of any brothers or sisters4 or of Tòsui’s lay name as a child. Like much else about Tòsui’s early life, uncertainty surrounds even the date of his birth. Menzan provides a precise date for Tòsui’s death (the nineteenth day of the ninth month of the third year of Ten’nen [1683]), and in the death verse recorded in the Tribute, Tòsui speaks of his “more than seventy years.” Menzan adds thatTòsui’s younger Dharma brother Shingaku Echû personally...

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