A scroll in the hand of Nanpo Shōmyō, a Japanese Zen master who had trained for eight years in China, still carries his instruction to a pupil: having come to awakening, he was to ripen it for twenty years before teaching in public. The pupil was Shūhō Myōchō, known by his later title Daitō Kokushi, and he never made the journey to China himself. For more than a century Zen had reached Japan through Japanese pilgrims who went there and Chinese masters who came over. The question his generation faced was whether the real thing could now be found, and taught, at home.
He had begun in Tendai, the old scholarly school of Japanese Buddhism, at the temple on Mount Shosha in his home province of Harima, and left it for Zen. Under Nanpo, at Kenchō-ji in Kamakura, he worked on the "barrier", a case about the Chinese master Yunmen Wenyan, and early in 1308 Nanpo confirmed his awakening. Then came the years the scroll asked for. Kenneth Kraft, an American scholar of Japanese Buddhism, finds in his 1992 study that Shūhō spent at least ten of them in relative seclusion at a small Kyoto temple near the Gojō bridge. The one dated manuscript from that time is a copy in his own hand of the Transmission of the Lamp, the Chinese lives of nearly a thousand Chan monks, which he finished in forty days.
The tradition tells those years differently: twenty winters among the beggars under the Gojō bridge, until Emperor Hanazono came to the river and recognised him by his answer to a riddle. Ikkyū, the fifteenth-century Zen poet, wrote of the twenty years at the bridge, and Hakuin, the reformer of Rinzai Zen, painted him as a barefoot beggar. Kraft concludes that the record cannot settle how much of that time he spent among the beggars.
Two emperors, Hanazono and Go-Daigo, became his patrons. In 1325, after the leaders of the established schools had petitioned the court to halt the spread of Zen, Go-Daigo held a debate at the palace, and Shūhō was one of the two monks who spoke for Zen. In the fragmentary accounts that survive, when Gen'e, the leading Tendai scholar, asked what Zen was, Shūhō answered with a single line from the Blue Cliff Record, the Chinese kōan collection, about a millstone flying through the air. The line was a capping phrase, agyo: a few words, usually borrowed from a sutra, a poem or a proverb, set against a kōan or a question to answer it from inside rather than explain it. He used them constantly and turned them on the Chinese classics themselves, setting his own remarks among the sayings of the Song master Xuedou Chongxian. The capping-phrase exercise he helped to establish is now a central part of kōan training in Rinzai Zen.
What he put before everything else was awakening. The "Final Admonitions" that carry his name were assembled from two passages of the life that Takuan Sōhō, a later abbot of his monastery, wrote of him in 1617. They say that followers who preside over gilded temples, chant the sutras and sit through the night are not his descendants if the Way is not in their hearts, while a monk in a thatched hut, boiling roots in a broken-legged pot and investigating himself, meets him face to face every day. Many Rinzai monasteries chant the text each night before the monks go to sleep.
The monastery was Daitoku-ji, north of Kyoto. In the last year of his life Shūhō recommended his disciple Kanzan Egen to Hanazono as a teacher, and Kanzan became the founding abbot of Myōshin-ji, the retired emperor's new monastery. Heinrich Dumoulin, the Jesuit historian of Zen, judged that with Shūhō the transplanting of Zen from China was complete. The line that runs from Nanpo through Shūhō to Kanzan is the one from which most of today's Rinzai masters trace their descent.