Idle Talk on a Night Boat

As a young monk Hakuin Ekaku drove his meditation so hard that his body gave way. His mind burned, his feet felt as though sunk in ice and snow, and no doctor's needles, moxa or medicine helped. This short book in Japanese tells how he recovered, and the practices it describes are still handed down in Rinzai Zen, the school he reformed. Hakuin relates that people spoke of a hermit called Hakuyū, living in a cave in the hills of Shirakawa outside Kyoto and said to have lived three or four sixty-year cycles. He climbed to him, and the hermit diagnosed zenbyō, Zen sickness: too much straining at insight, too little balance. The cure was naikan, an introspective practice in which the sufferer lies down and gathers breath and the body's vital energy into the lower belly, and a visualisation of a lump of soft butter melting down from the crown of the head. Hakuyū backs it with Chinese medical classics, Laozi and Buddhist meditation texts, and holds that true meditation is no meditation at all. Hakuin had told the story before, and later reused it almost word for word in his autobiography, Itsumadegusa. According to the preface, a Kyoto bookseller heard in the spring of 1757 that the draft lay among the old master's papers and asked for it. The preface, which Hakuin put in the mouth of a disciple, says the method was written down for the monks who lived in ruined houses around his temple and wore themselves out. Katō Shōshun, a historian of Zen, places the illness in Hakuin's late twenties and thinks he probably assembled the remedies himself from medical and meditation texts and folk cures. The translator Norman Waddell notes that the book has stayed in print since 1757, with much of its readership outside Zen.