Let us begin with Enō, a master of the seventh century. He lost his
parents when he was young and earned his living by gathering firewood.
One day when he was in the market-place he heard some one reading the
Diamond Sūtra.[6] He asked where such books were to be had and was
told “From Master Kōnin on the Yellow Plum-blossom Hill.” Accordingly
he went to Kōnin’s Monastery in Anhui and presented himself before the
Master. “Where do you come from?” “From the South.” “Bah! In the South
they have not Buddha in their souls.” “North and South,” replied Enō,
“are human distinctions that Buddha knows nothing of.”
[6] Translated by W. Gemmell, 1912. Its use by Kōnin shows that Zen did
not long avoid the use of scriptures.
Kōnin accepted him as a lay-brother and put him to pound rice in the
bakery.
Kōnin was growing old and wished to choose his successor. He therefore
instituted a poetical competition in which each monk was to epitomise
in a quatrain the essence of Zen. The favourite candidate was the
warden Shinshū, who sent in the following verses:
_The body is the trunk of the Bodhi-tree;
The mind is the bright mirror’s stand;
Scrub your mirror continually,
Lest the dust eclipse its brightness._
Enō, as a lay-brother, was not qualified to compete. Some one told him
of Shinshū’s quatrain. “Mine would be very different,” he exclaimed,
and persuaded one of the boys employed in the bakery to go stealthily
by night and inscribe the following poem on the monastery-wall:
_Knowledge is not a tree;
The Mirror has no stand;
Since nothing exists,
How could dust rise and cover it?_
The authorship of the poem was discovered and the abbot Kōnin visited
Enō in the bakery. “Is your rice white or no?” he asked. “White?”
answered Enō; “it has not yet been sifted.” Thereupon the abbot
struck three times on the rice-mortar with his staff and departed.
Enō understood his meaning. That night at the third watch he came to
Kōnin’s cell and was invested with the abbot’s mantle, thereby becoming
the Sixth Patriarch of the Zen Church. He died in 712 A.D.,
without having learned how to read or write.