Soko Morinaga
Editor’s Note: Soko Morinaga (1925-1995) was a Zen master who went through traditional training in a Rinzai monastery in post-war Japan. In his humorous and deeply penetrating book Novice to Master he shares stories of his often humbling experiences with his teacher Zuigan Roshi. Training in the monastery meant that all activities of daily life were to be done with great care and attention, including and especially cooking and cleaning. Here Morinaga shares a story of his how his zeal to do a perfect job of cleaning and win his teacher’s approval only got him into more trouble.
Many people look down on activity that pertains to the basic necessities, but I myself do not regard such work as menial. If you desire to gaze out over wide vistas, you do well to climb up to a high spot. But if you wish to gaze into the human heart, you must climb down and look from a low place.
As soon as I entered a Zen temple, I was made to do just that through a routine of all-out cleaning. From morning to night, my mind came to be consumed with cleaning.This led to quite a preposterous experience, and one that illustrates a thorny aspect of practice.
If a person knows that they can come to some understanding of truth through the practice of cleaning, they just may get caught up in the practice and find that they are actually moving farther away from seeing truth. Their own heart has become fettered by that practice.
One morning, after I had prepared the meal and given the call to breakfast, Zuigan Roshi slowly entered the dining room and said, “Hey, go into my room and, from my desk, look toward the alcove.”
Generally, to the ears of a novice monk, the Zen master’s manner of speaking comes across much like anger. So when I heard Roshi’s words, I thought with a start, “Uh-oh, I bungled the cleaning again!” and immediately rushed to his room.
Roshi’s room was small, four and a half tatami mats. The distance between his desk and the alcove could not have measured two meters, but though I carefully inspected the area, I could not find even so much as a bit of dust or a drop of water left from the swab. I crawled about the room on all fours, but I could not find a problem anywhere.
I planted myself there for a while and tried to think it out, but I hadn’t a clue as to why Roshi was irritated with me. It couldn’t be helped; I resigned myself to being yelled at again and returned to the dining room. “I don’t understand what I did wrong in the cleaning,” I nervously admitted to Roshi. “Please show me.”
“You fool!” he came back at me. “Who said you did anything wrong in the cleaning? This morning I put that single rose of Sharon in the bud vase. It goes well with the scroll and looks so beautiful, so I told you to go take a look at it. You did see the flower, didn’t you?”
It dawned on me that I had not, in fact, noticed a flower. I went back into Roshi’s room to look. The wall of the alcove, which had been standing for over 250 years, was darkened. Against the smoky wall there was a scroll with the single large calligraphy of the ideograph for dew.
When a Zen monk writes the word dew, it is not to the natural phenomenon that he refers, but to direct revelation. Nothing concealed anywhere. Truth, revealed in all things. Buddha revealed in all things. Dharma revealed in all things. If you all just let the scales drop from your eyes, you realize then that everything everywhere is filled with truth; everything everywhere is filled with Buddha; everything everywhere is to be appreciated! This is what the scroll of dew was hanging there to say.
Beneath the scroll, a large pure white blossom seemed to float out from the old plastered wall and bathe the eye with its beauty.
Just moments before, I had failed to see that flower. My eyes had been tightly shut to it. And herein lies the difficulty of practice. My oversight was to become grist for my teacher’s lectures. After I made this blunder, Zuigan Roshi was wont to say during talks, “If the heart is caught up, fettered, you cannot see even what you are looking right at. Why, just the other day, that idiot who is sitting right over there….”
