Part 12 (2/2)
Christianity continued to be practiced on a surrept.i.tious basis, however, as the Christians found shelter in, of all places, the Zen monasteries.
With the pa.s.sing of Hideyos.h.i.+'s line, the Tokugawa family became the only power in j.a.pan, a land at last unified and with an imposed peace.
Viewing foreign influences as a source of domestic unrest, the Tokugawa moved to bring down a curtain of isolationism around their sh.o.r.es: Christian Europeans were expelled and j.a.panese were forbidden to travel abroad. Ieyasu established a new capital at Edo (now Tokyo) and required the local _daimyo_ to spend a large amount of time and money in attendance. Thus he craftily legitimatised his own position while simultaneously weakening that of the _daimyo_--a technique used with equal effect almost a century later by Louis XIV, when he moved his court from Paris to Versailles to contain the French aristocracy.
Content with the status quo, members of the Tokugawa family felt it could best be preserved by extreme conservatism, so they sent forth a volley of decrees formalizing all social relations.h.i.+ps. Time was brought to a stop, permitting the Tokugawa to rule unhindered until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the country was again opened to foreign trade under the guns of American wars.h.i.+ps.
During the Tokugawa regime another Chinese ”religion” a.s.sumed the place in the hearts of the shoguns that Buddhism had enjoyed in centuries past. This was Confucianism, more a philosophy than a religion, which in its original form had taught a respect for learning, the ready acceptance of a structured hierarchy, and unquestioning obedience to authority (that of both elders and superiors). The Tokugawa perverted Confucianism to establish a caste system among their subjects, separating them into the _samurai_ cla.s.s, the peasant cla.s.s, and the merchant and artisan cla.s.ses--the order given here denoting their supposed status. However, as the j.a.panese social system began to evolve, the idea backfired, causing great difficulties for the government. The reasons for this are interesting, for they bear directly upon the eventual role of Zen culture in j.a.panese life.
For centuries, j.a.pan's major source of income had been agriculture. The _samurai_ were local landholders who employed peasants to grow their rice and who were beholden to a local _daimyo_ for protection. Money played no large part in the economy, since most daily needs could be obtained by barter. But the sudden wealth brought into being by the European traders had nothing to do with the amount of rice a _samurai's _peasants could produce; it accrued instead to the merchants in port cities. Furthermore, the accommodations required to keep the _daimyo _and their families in the capital city of Edo called for artisans and merchants in great number. Thus the Tokugawa government had mistakenly decreed the agricultural _samurai_ and peasants the backbone of the economy at the very moment in history when j.a.pan was finally developing an urban, currency-based culture. Predictably, the urban merchants, who were at the bottom of the Confucianist social system, soon had their supposed social betters, the _samurai_, completely in hock.
The Tokugawa struggled hard to keep the townspeople, now the controllers of the economy, in their place. Merchants were forbidden to build elaborate houses or wear elaborate clothes, and they were expected to defer to the penurious _samurai _in all things. j.a.pan had never before had a bourgeoisie--the traditional divisions were aristocracy, warriors, and peasants-- and consequently popular taste had never really been reflected in the arts. Much to the dismay of the Tokugawa (and to the detriment of cla.s.sical Zen culture), this was changing. While the aristocrats and warrior families in Kyoto preserved the older arts of Zen, in the bourgeois city of Edo there were new popular art forms like the Kabuki theater and the woodblock print, both eons removed from the No and the monochrome landscape. Cla.s.sical Zen culture was largely confined to aristocratic Kyoto, while in boisterous Edo the townspeople turned to explicit, exciting arts full of color and drama.
In spite of this democratic turn of events, the Zen aesthetics of Kyoto continued to be felt, largely through the tea ceremony, which had been officially encouraged in the Momoyama age of Hideyos.h.i.+. Later in the Tokugawa era the poetic form of Haiku developed, and it too was highly influenced by the Zen idea of suggestiveness. Domestic architecture also maintained the ideals of Zen, as did Ikebana, or flower arranging, and the j.a.panese cuisine, which employed Zen ceramics. Thus Zen aesthetics seeped into middle-cla.s.s culture in many forms, tempering taste and providing rigid rules for much of what are today thought of as the traditional arts and crafts of the j.a.panese.
Traditional Buddhism did not fare well during the Momoyama and Tokugawa ages: the militaristic Buddhist strongholds were either put to rout or destroyed entirely during the Momoyama, and Confucianism had considerably more influence under the Tokugawa than did Buddhism. The great upsurge of Buddhism with its fiery teachers and believing shoguns was over, as the faith settled into empty ritual and a decidedly secondary station in a basically secular state. The only Buddhist sect demonstrating any vigor at all was Zen.
The brief flouris.h.i.+ng of Zen during the Tokugawa era was actually a revival, for the faith had become static and uninspired during the years of n.o.bunaga and Hideyos.h.i.+. The formalized practice of Zen at the end of the seventeenth century was described by a visiting Jesuit Father:
_The solitary philosophers of the Zenshu sect, who dwell in their retreats in the wilderness, [do not] philosophize with the help of books and treatises written by ill.u.s.trious masters and philosophers as do the members of the other sects of the Indian gymnosophists. Instead they give themselves up to contemplating the things of nature, despising and abandoning worldly things; they mortify their pa.s.sions by certain enigmatic and figurative meditations and considerations [koan]
which guide them on their way at the beginning. . . . [s]o the vocation of these philosophers is not to contend or dispute with another with arguments, but they leave everything to the contemplation of each one so that by himself he may attain the goal by using these principles, and thus they do not teach disciples.1
_
The good Father was describing a Zen faith that had become a set piece, devoid of controversy but also devoid of life.
The man who brought Zen out of its slumber and restored its vigor was the mystic Hakuin (1685-1768), who revived the _koan _school of Rinzai and produced the most famous _koan_ of all times: ”You know the sound of two hands clapping; what is the sound of one hand clapping?” Hakuin gave a new, mystical dimension to the Rinzai school of Zen, even as Hui-neng created nonintellectual Chinese Ch'an Buddhism out of the founding ideas of Bodhidharma. Hakuin was also a poet, a painter, and the author of many commentaries on the _sutras_. Yet even when he enjoyed national fame, he never lost his modesty or his desire for enlightenment.
Hakuin lived the greater part of his life in the small rural village of his birth. A sensitive, impressionable child, he was early tormented by an irrational fear of the fires of the Buddhist h.e.l.l as dwelt upon by the priests of his mother's sect, the Nichiren. For relief he turned to the Lotus Sutra, but nothing he read seemed to ease his mind. Finally he became a wandering Zen monk, searching from temple to temple for a master who could give him enlightenment. He studied under various famous teachers and gradually achieved higher and higher levels of awareness. At the age of thirty-two he returned to his home village and a.s.sumed control of the ramshackle local Zen temple, which he eventually made the center of Rinzai Zen in j.a.pan. Word of his spiritual intensity spread and soon novices were flocking to him. His humility and humanity were a s.h.i.+ning light in the spiritual dark age of the Tokugawa, and he breathed life and understanding back into Zen.
Despite Hakuin, official Zen never regained its influence in j.a.pan.
Someday perhaps the modern-day Western interest in Zen will give it new life somewhere outside j.a.pan, but this life will almost certainly be largely secular. Indeed, the influence of Zen in the Momoyama and Tokugawa ages was already more p.r.o.nounced in the secular world than in the spiritual. The bourgeois arts of these later years were notably less profound than those of the As.h.i.+kaga, but the spirit of Zen spread to become infused into the very essence of j.a.panese life, making the everyday business of living an expression of popular Zen culture.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Tea Ceremony_
Chazen ichimi _(Zen and tea are one.) Traditional j.a.panese expression
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