Hakuin

Hakuin found Rinzai Zen in Japan in a poor state, with koan work reduced in places to the memorising of accepted answers, and he rebuilt it. His most famous single contribution is a koan of his own devising: two hands make a sound when they are clapped, so what is the sound of one hand. He introduced it as a first barrier because he judged the traditional opening koan, Zhaozhou's mu, had become too well worn to stop anybody.

Behind it is his doctrine of great doubt. Hakuin held that the practitioner must be brought to a condition he described as being frozen inside a sheet of ice or swallowing a red hot iron ball, in which the ordinary machinery of understanding is completely blocked and the question cannot be put down. Beneath great doubt lies great awakening, he wrote, and where there is no doubt there is no awakening at all. The koan is not a riddle with a clever answer; it is a device for producing that blockage reliably.

He was equally insistent on what comes after. He had contempt for practitioners who took one opening experience as the end of the matter, and he arranged the koans into a graded curriculum to be worked through for years afterwards, so that the insight was tested against every part of the teaching. Every Rinzai lineage in Japan today descends from him, and the curriculum they use is substantially his.

In his twenties Hakuin drove himself into a physical and mental collapse that he described in detail: burning feet, freezing head, ringing ears, terror, exhaustion, an inability to practise at all. He called it Zen sickness and attributed it to forcing the energy of practice upward through sheer effort. The cure he credits to a hermit named Hakuyu, who taught him a contemplative method of settling attention below the navel and imagining a soft healing butter melting down through the body. He published the account decades later in a book called Idle Talk on a Night Boat, and it is one of the very few frank descriptions in the literature of meditation practice going badly wrong.

The second half of his life was spent almost entirely at Shoinji, a dilapidated temple in his home village. He declined the prestigious metropolitan appointments that came to him, taught farmers and townspeople alongside monks, and wrote in colloquial Japanese and in popular song form so that people who could not read Chinese could follow him. He also wrote letters attacking a local lord over the taxation of peasants.

He drew and wrote constantly, producing thousands of paintings and calligraphies, given away rather than sold: blind men crossing a log bridge, an enormous rough character, a monkey reaching for the moon in the water. They are deliberately unrefined, and they were teaching instruments rather than art, which is a large part of why they are now treated as art.