Ōbaku, as we have seen, taught wisdom with his fists. When the novice
Rinzai came to him and asked him what was the fundamental idea of
Buddhism, Ōbaku hit him three times with his stick. Rinzai fled and
presently met the monk Daigu.
_Daigu_: Where do you come from?
_Rinzai_: From Ōbaku.
_Daigu_: And what stanza did he lecture upon?
_Rinzai_: I asked him thrice what was the fundamental doctrine of
Buddhism and each time he hit me with his stick. Please tell me if
I did something I ought not to have done?
_Daigu_: You go to Ōbaku and torture him by your questions, and
then ask if you have done wrong!
At that moment Rinzai had a Great Enlightenment.
Rinzai substituted howling for Ōbaku’s manual violence. He shouted
meaningless syllables at his disciples; roared like a lion or bellowed
like a bull. This “howling” became a regular part of Zen practice,
and may be compared to the yelling of the American Shakers. Upon his
deathbed Rinzai summoned his disciples round him and asked which of
them felt capable of carrying on his work. Sanshō volunteered to
do so. “How will you tell people what was Rinzai’s teaching?” asked
Rinzai. Sanshō threw out his chest and roared in a manner which he
thought would gratify the master. But Rinzai groaned and cried out, “To
think that such a blind donkey should undertake to hand on my teaching!”
It was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that Zen most completely
permeated Chinese thought. Upon the invasion of the Mongols[9] many Zen
monks from Eastern China took refuge in Japan; the same thing happened
during the Manchu invasion in the seventeenth century. But by that time
Zen had a serious philosophic rival.
[9] On the attitude of the Mongol rulers to Zen, see an article by
Prof. Kunishita, _Tōyōgakuhō_, xi., 4, 87.
In the fifteenth century the philosopher Wang Yang-ming began to
propagate a doctrine which, in all but names, strongly resembled the
philosophic side of Zen. He taught that in each one of us is a “higher
nature,” something which, borrowing a phrase from Mencius, he called
“Good Knowledge.” Of this inner nature he speaks in exactly the same
terms as the Zen teachers spoke of their “Buddha immanent in man’s
heart.” He even uses the same kind of doggerel-verse as a medium of
teaching.
Rigid Confucianists, who would not have listened to any doctrine of
professedly Buddhist origin, were able through Wang Yang-ming’s tact to
accept the philosophy of Zen without feeling that they were betraying
the Confucian tradition. The followers of Yang-ming are to-day very
numerous both in China and Japan. They cultivate introspection, but not
the complete self-hypnosis of Zen.
In China, where Zen is almost forgotten, the followers of this later
doctrine are not even aware of its derivation.