Tosui Unkei, the beloved and eccentric 17th-century Zen master, was, like Ikkyu Sojin 200 years before him, a decided maverick. He rejected the monastic world for a life among the common folk, and had no respect for the Buddhist church as it then was. Turning his back on abbothood, he hired himself out as a servant, worked as both a palanquin carrier and a pack-horse driver, and later became a beggar, giving the day's proceeds to those even poorer than himself.
This has led later commentators to compare Tosui to Saint Francis, who also turned a resolute back on the official church, and even to find him "the first hippie." Such generalizations were perhaps thought necessary because very little is actually known about the maverick master. Unlike Ikkyu or Ryokan, with whom he is also sometimes compared, he left behind few poems. Indeed, what little is known about this likable but mysterious figure is due to this biography, written some 50 years after his death.
The "Tosui Osho Densan" (A Tribute to the Life of Master Tosui) was composed by the Zen scholar Menzan Zuiho in 1749 and published in a woodblock edition in 1768. It consisted of the main text, 20 narrative illustrations (retained in this translated edition), each of which was paired with a short poem that Menzan composed in praise of Tosui, an introduction and an account of how the biography happened to have been written.
In it Menzan, who himself held an important position in the Zen church, said that in Buddha's time monks simply begged, but that "in our own corrupt time this is hardly the case." He gives some scandalous examples and then turns to the single exception -- Master Tosui. Observing that recent histories give only the most abbreviated history of this holy man, he states that "such mendacity is intolerable, slandering as it does the worthies of the past." And since he himself studied under a master who had known Tosui, and because young Menzan himself had heard the accounts, he took up his brush and began the biography.
It consists of unconnected scenes from the later life of the sage and is mainly concerned with his unorthodox way of thinking. There was, for example, a religious follower who was continuously reciting the "nenbutsu" (a Buddhist invocation) and bragging about the tens of thousands of recitations he made in a day. Asked to state what he thought about this, Tosui wrote a comic verse: "It is useless forcing yourself to repeat the nenbutsu -- what if you overshoot the Pure Land?"
Another example was when a group of monks were all solemnly listening to an illustrious teacher lecture on the Lotus Sutra and Tosui suddenly ran off and brought back buckets of night-soil, with which he began to anoint the vegetable garden. For this he was strongly rebuked. How, he was asked, as a Buddhist monk, could he touch excrement? To which Tosui calmly replied: "If that's the case, then one can't even wipe one's ass in the toilet -- everyone uses the same hands they wipe their ass with to pray."
Colorful as these examples are, they are mild compared to the eccentricities of Ikkyu, who used to take off his vestments in the middle of the service in order to "offer" them, defended masturbation by quoting the Sixth Patriarch (who had written that "outside of licentiousness there is no true Buddha-nature"), and used to carry on visibly with a nun. But then he was Rinzai sect, and Tosui was Soto school.
Actually, however, such erratic behavior was only seemingly heterodox. Ikkyu correctly understood that licentiousness is a part of human nature. He strongly believed that his own satori was deepened by frequenting brothels and he demonstrated this to unbelievers.
Through sex and its open practice, Ikkyu could break down dualistic misconceptions about the nature of the sacred and profane. Precisely, he could attack the dualistic principle at the base of such a presumed dialectic.
He waged a continuous battle against all forms of dualism, that convenient and dangerous breaking up of all experiences into black or white, good or bad, sacred or secular. For him life was not either/or, but both/and. Behind any superficial notion of duality lies the basic wholeness of things -- this being one of the basic precepts of true Zen.
Master Tosui, two centuries later, knew this and demonstrated it in his own way. He continued the good fight against dualistic thought, drawing, for example, no distinction between rich and poor. As a beggar he lived just as fully he as he had as a well-off adept.
Likewise, no line was drawn between the learned and the illiterate, between high-class and low. As Peter Haskel says in his introduction to his fine translation, Tosui's life was that of a Zen master who has hidden in the world, rather than merely from it.
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