Zen Master Tales: Stories from the Lives of Taigu, Sengai, Hakuin, and Ryokan

A lively collection of folk tales andBuddhistteaching stories from four noted premodern Japanese Zen masters-TaiguS chiku(1584-1669),SengaiGibon (1750-1831),HakuinEkaku(1686-1769), andTaiguRy kan(1758-1831).

Zen Master Tales collectsnever beforetranslatedstoriesof four prominent Zen masters from the Edo period of Japanese history (1603-1868).Drawn froman erathat sawthe democratization ofJapanese Zen, these storiespaint a picture ofrobust, funny, and poignantengagementbetween Zen luminaries andthe emergentch?ninor townsperson cultureof early modern Japan. Here we find Zen monks engaging with samurai, merchants, housewives, entertainers, and farmers. These masters affirmed that the essentials of Zen practice-zazen, koan study, even enlightenment-could be conveyed to all members of Japanese society in ordinary speech, including even comic verse and work songs. Against the backdrop of this rich tableau, Zen Master Tales serves not only as a text for Zen students but also as a wide-ranging window onto the fascinating literary, material, and social history of Edo Japan.

In hisintroduction, translator Peter Haskel explains the history of Zen stories from the tradition’s Golden Age in China through the compilation of the classickoancollections and on totheerafrom which the stories in Zen Master Tales are drawn. What was true of the Chinese tradition, he writes- its focus on the individual’s ordinary activity as the function, the manifestation of the absolute -continued in the Japanese context. Most of these Japanese stories, however unabashedly humorous and at times crude, impart something of the character of the Zen masters involved, whose attainment must be plainly manifest in even the most humble and unlikely of situations.