槐安國語

(lit.: Words from the Land of Kaian)

Hakuin, lecturing on another master's sermons, takes aim at monks who mistook quiet sitting for awakening.

Literary Chinese, the original language

First published: 1749(aged 63)
Original language: Literary Chinese

Overview

Nobody in his day read the record of Daitō, the fourteenth-century founder of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto, Hakuin Ekaku complained: it lay about like unsold stock in a warehouse. In the spring of 1749 the monks training under him asked him to lecture on it. He refused three times before he gave way, and this commentary in classical Chinese is the result. The root text is Daitō's own: his sermons, his verses on the old cases called kōan, his sayings, quoted line by line. Around them Hakuin sets short capping phrases and longer comments, and those, not the sermons, are his. His reading turns on one claim: Daitō's words are deliberately hard, meant to block every easy exit until the student breaks through, and Hakuin ranks him as the Chinese master Yunmen born again. He attacks silent illumination, a style of meditation that relied on quiet sitting alone, and the monks who sit all day after their meals, scorn written words and take the calm they reach for awakening. He holds up to them the kōan and the verse on it as a double barrier they can neither pass nor retreat from. He finished in the eighth month of 1749, closing with an apology for his presumption and an instruction that the monks burn the commentary once they had read it. They did not. His disciple Ichidaku edited it, and it was printed the following year in seven volumes. Rinzai training halls came to study Daitō's record through this book rather than on its own.

Key concepts

Whose words are whose in the Kaian kokugo?

The root text is Daitō's: his sermons from the high seat, his sayings and his verses on old cases, quoted line by line. Everything set around them is Hakuin's: a short capping phrase after a line, and longer comments headed with his own name, Kokurin. A reader has to keep the two apart, because Hakuin often answers Daitō rather than paraphrasing him.

What is a capping phrase?

A capping phrase, jakugo, is a short line, often a proverb or a fragment of Chinese verse, attached to a passage of a Zen text as a response to it. It does not explain the passage; it shows that the commentator has seen what the passage points at, and challenges the reader to see it too. Hakuin says he added one below every line, following an earlier commentary on Xuedou's record.

What is a barrier in kōan practice?

A barrier, kan, is a kōan or phrase that blocks the student's thinking completely, so that there is no way through by reasoning and no way back to ease. Passing it means a breakthrough, not a solution. Hakuin uses the word for Daitō's hardest lines, and judges every reader by whether they have passed one.

What does Hakuin mean by withered Zen?

Withered Zen, kozen, is his term for practice that has dried up into quiet sitting without inquiry, its practitioners content with a calm they take for awakening. Hakuin pairs it with silent illumination, the older Chinese style of objectless sitting, and says his line of masters used hard words precisely to crush it. The cure, for him, is the kōan, pressed until it breaks.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Chan by the Perilous Road

Daitō's sermons and verses are deliberately hard, and nobody in Hakuin's day read them. Why a teacher would make his words a thicket of thorns, and why a commentator would refuse to clear it, is the claim Hakuin builds his reading on.

Hakuin opens with a line he calls the hardest to enter: born on the same branch, not dying on the same branch. Such words are the fangs of the teaching, a talisman that takes the student's life. The old master Yuanwu had called verses on kōans a roundabout way of talking Chan; Hakuin replies that they are the perilous way, a golden hammer that smashes anyone claiming a realisation they lack. His own capping phrases, set after each of Daitō's lines, sharpen the thorns instead of explaining them.

koan
koan practice
interpretation
language
teaching
teacher-student relationship
transmission
zen dialogue

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Against Withered Sitting

Some monks of Hakuin's day ate their rice, sat in silence all day and called the calm awakening. What such sitting lacks, and why Hakuin thought it ruinous, runs through the commentary's attacks.

Hakuin pictures these sitters as a sick horse closing its eyes in the stable, unable even to eat its hay, or a blind donkey standing in weeds: they call the old teaching stories words and tangled vines, fear them like a pit of fire, and pity anyone who reads. Against this withered Zen he sets the kōan and the verse on it as a barrier one can neither pass nor retreat from. He is as hard on the other side: monks who neither sit nor study and spend their days writing fashionable poetry.

meditation
zen practice
spiritual practice
discernment
perception
direct experience
conceptual thought
awakening
enlightenment

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Within this work

passages held: 417
distinct concepts: 349
by passages held, corpus-wide: #179

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “nonduality” and “zen buddhism”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 76 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
nonduality	zen buddhism	45
language	zen buddhism	34
koan	zen buddhism	27
koan	language	25
language	zen	25
interpretation	zen buddhism	23
awakening	zen buddhism	22
interpretation	koan	20
koan	zen	20
language	nonduality	20
koan	zen practice	18
awakening	koan	15
awakening	nonduality	14
interpretation	language	14
awakening	zen practice	11
nonduality	zen	10
nonduality	zen practice	10
interpretation	zen	9
awakening	language	7
interpretation	nonduality	7
language	zen practice	7
koan	nonduality	6
awakening	interpretation	5
interpretation	zen practice	5
awakening	zen	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1749 槐安國語 you are here LZH
1757 Idle Talk on a Night Boat (夜船閑話)
Written in plain Japanese rather than the Chinese of his commentaries, for monks who had wrecked their health in training; it found its readers far outside the monasteries.
JA

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