Episode Details

Greetings Friends,

We are moving through this wonderful collection of encounters with Buddhist Women found in the book The Hidden Lamp for our Summer Read. This week we met Keizan Zenji and Mokufu Sonin engaged in the dialogue below:

Hidden Lamp Case 20: Sonin’s Shadeless Tree

Master Keizan Jokin asked the nun Mokufu Sonin, “The winter is coming to an end and the springtime is arriving. There is an order to this. What is your understanding?”

Sonin replied, “In the braches of a tree without shade, how could there be any seasons?”

These two people are very important figures in the history of Zen Buddhism. They are direct Ancestors in our Soto Zen lineage tree. So, they are our Ancestors.

What is an Ancestor?

One way we understand Ancestor in Buddhism is someone who aligns their heart and mind with the aspiration to awaken and liberate all beings from suffering. So, someone who wants to help us wake up!

But one Zen teacher says in actuality —all beings are your ancestor.

What would it be like to truly see the world this way?

Are all beings trying to awaken us?

Is everyone we meet helping us on this path of liberation from suffering?

Are they, through their words, thoughts and actions aiding us in opening our own hearts and minds to the love, compassion and wisdom of this universe?

It may not always feel that way. But we can aspire to practice as if it were true, this is taking the view of bodhicitta— the great compassion unfolding this life.

Connecting to the Zen Ancestors can remind us that humans have been walking this path of awakening for a long time. They were shaped by the path and they also shaped or opened new dimensions of the path through their embodied walking.

I find that hearing the ancestor’s stories is a lot like pulling a tarot card, or reading a myth or fairytale. Their life stories usually contain dharma teachings, universal themes about the path, but also personal dimensions that may resonate with our own struggles, questions, doubts, curiosities or lived experience.

Keizan’s Path

Keizan Zenji is a great example of this. Considered the “mother of Soto Zen”, he was born in the early years of Soto Zen in Japan, just eleven years after Dogen Zenji (the founder) died. His mother and his grandmother were both Zen practitioners, but also embodied and practiced a more ancient form of spirituality that was common amongst women at the time—a form of spirituality we might call “folk” or “shamanistic” or “animist”. (In her recent books, Bringing Zen Home and The Little Book of Zen Healing Paula Arai explores how the blend of Zen and shamanism is still alive in how many lay women engage in dharma practice).

Below is an excerpt from Sallie Tisdale’s book Women of the Way, here she shares the story of Keizan’s birth. This short selection introduces us to some of the people and practices that influenced Keizan throughout his life.

Many years later, when Ekan Daishi was thirty-seven years old, she had a dream. She swallowed the morning light, warm and as soft as silk, and it filled her entire body. A few days later she realized she was pregnant. Then she prayed, as she had often prayed, to the beloved statue of Kannon: “May this child be a spiritual leader, a benefit to all, and please, may the delivery be easy.” For the next seven months, she bowed 1,333 times each day and recited the Kannon Sutra. The baby was born on the property of the Kannon Temple in the province of Echizen, without pain. A short while later Daishi took vows as a nun, and the baby’s grandmother, Myōchi, helped raise him.

So Keizan was raised with a deep connection to