Ryokan and us: 'How wide! How boundless!'

An imagined dialogue between Ryokan the monk (1758-1831) and one “Ryo-kun” (2013-). The monk speaks first.

Ryokan: What’s that?

Ryo-kun: This? You don’t know what this is? It’s a smartphone.

Ryokan: What’s that?

Ryo-kun: Hey mister, you’re funny ... and wearing funny clothes. Why’re you dressed up like that?

Ryokan: I’m a monk!

Ryo-kun: What’s a monk?

Ryokan: You don’t know what a monk is? Everyone knows what a monk is!

Ryo-kun: Everyone knows what a smartphone is!

Ryokan: Well you know, it’s funny. I’ll tell you how it was. I was playing hide and seek with the children of the village...

Ryo-kun: Is that what a monk is? An old man who plays games with kids?

Ryokan: Yes! That’s exactly what a monk is. Oh, you’re a clever one, that’s plain. Well ... there I was hiding deep in a haystack and I fell asleep. And when I woke up... nothing was as it had been. All around me were things I’d never seen before, people I’d never met though I know everyone in my village, wearing clothes — “funny clothes,” you say; is everyone dressed up for a festival, or what?— and everyone so old. You’re the first child I’ve seen.

Ryo-kun: Yeah, there’re hardly any kids anymore. They had to close the school. I take a bus to school now.

Ryokan: What’s a bus?

Ryo-kun: Come home with me, you can meet my mom and dad, I’ll tell them you’re my friend.

Ryokan: Of course I’m your friend! I’m everybody’s friend. But no, I have

to go begging, you see.

Ryo-kun: What’s begging?

Ryokan: It’s ... I go through the village chanting holy sutras and people put rice and greens and stuff into my begging bowl; that’s how I live, and how people wash themselves clean of sin.

Ryo-kun: No one’ll give you anything.

Ryokan: What do you mean? Everybody gives me something.

Ryo-kun: No one goes begging here. Everyone works, or ... well old people don’t work. They get pensions.

Ryokan: What’s pensions?

Ryo-kun: I don’t know. Come home with me. We’ll ask my dad. He’s a scientist. He knows everything. I’m going to be a scientist too when I grow up.

Ryokan: What’s a scientist?

Ryo-kun: Someone who knows everything. Measures everything, weighs everything, observes, calculates, cuts everything up into smaller and smaller bits and puts them all back together again and ... you know ... knows!

Ryokan: So a scientist is the opposite of a poet?

Ryo-kun: I don’t know. What’s a poet?

Ryokan: What’s a poet, what’s a monk, what’s begging? It’s like asking, what’s life?

Ryo-kun: Scientists know what life is.

Ryokan: Poets know they don’t know what life is; know there’s nothing to know, no one to know it, no knowledge to acquire and ... listen: I’ll recite you a poem. About begging.

Taking my time, I go begging for food/ how wide, how bound-less this Dharma world!

Ryo-kun: I don’t understand.

Ryokan: Only ... I seem to have lost my begging bowl.

Ryokan — monk, poet, beggar, eternal child, inveterate innocent. Has there ever been anyone quite like him? Monks, poets and beggars of course Japan has spawned in abundance, each one unique in their own way, but Ryokan seems a special case even among special cases. The story told of him playing hide and seek with village children — he lived most of his life in rural Echigo, roughly today’s Niigata Prefecture, in various hermitages he affectionately called his “grass huts,” children his constant companions and playmates — is him to the life. He hid under a haystack and there he spent the night, never dreaming the kids would go home leaving him unfound.

He fell asleep and dreamed, let us imagine, something else instead: A journey through time to our era for a glimpse of our ways and a breath of our air, whose strangeness and pungency awoke him rather sharply — to what feeling? Relief at being alive in his own time? Regret at missing out on ours? And what of the smartphone-brandishing child he met? What seeds would have been sown in that child by the encounter? There’s no telling. Would they wither for want of nourishment? That would be a pity.

Here’s another story told of Ryokan. A local daimyo wanted to build a great temple and appoint Ryokan head priest. Ryokan, when the daimyo with his entourage visited the monk’s “grass hut,” was out, picking flowers. The lord was kept waiting. To his credit, he seems not to have minded. Ryokan didn’t demand indulgence; he inspired it. Returning at last, he heard the lord out. There was a silence. Ryokan’s answer, when it came, was a haiku: “The wind has brought/ enough fallen leaves/ to make a fire.” In short: “No thank you, I have everything I need.”

Things were not well with the world. They never are. Childish though Ryokan may have been (child-like seems a better word), human suffering wrung his heart. “Thinking about the people in this floating world/ far into the night,” he wrote — “my sleeve wet with tears.” And this: “O that my priest’s robe were wide enough/ to gather up all the suffering people in this floating world.”

Old age, it is pleasant to report, brought him love. But no, that is misleading: his whole life was filled with love. He was 68 and the nun, Teishin, 29. Together they deepened their innocence: “Singing waka, reciting poems, playing handball (with the children)/ together in the fields/ two people, one heart,” wrote Ryokan; and this, addressed to her: “...the one I waited for has come at last/ seeing her now,/ what more could I ask?”

The convulsions of his time left his inner serenity untroubled. Was he even aware of them? Did he feel them? Did Japan? Its rulers a century and a half before Ryokan’s birth had closed the country to the outside world, and closed it would remain for a generation after his death. What was known of the West, and by whom? Very little by very few; nothing, it is all but certain, by Ryokan. During his lifetime there occurred the three world-shattering, world-creating revolutions we remember under the names American, French and Industrial. It’s strange to think of a whole nation of people — highly literate people at that — living contemporaneously with such cataclysms yet wholly unaware of them. But so it must have been for the vast majority of Japanese, even those much more worldly and, so to say, “grown-up” than Ryokan.

All the same, beneath Japan’s changeless surface, change was stirring, restlessness growing, modernity brewing, danger approaching. A handful of Dutch traders confined to a trading post on a tiny island off Nagasaki were the only Europeans in the country. They were not for the most part learned men but somehow they transmitted such wisps as they had of Western science and medicine to a handful of learned Japanese who risked their lives — manifest curiosity being a capital offense — to approach and probe them. In 1771, when Ryokan was 13, there occurred an epochal event: the translation of a Dutch medical textbook — we can only imagine the agonizingly dogged word-by-word nature of the work — into Japanese. Thus did Western science infiltrate Japan.

It was a seed. It grew — slowly, scarcely perceptible at first. In 1825, six years before Ryokan’s death, the government issued an order called uchiharai — all approaching foreign ships were to be fired upon. It was a dead letter; such guns as Japan had were impotent against armed British, Russian and American ships, approaching ever more threateningly in ever increasing numbers. Ryokan lived in a different world. So did Japan.

Those worlds had no future. Of the world that did, Ryokan could scarcely have dreamed. From the dream we whimsically give him he would have awakened, we imagine, puzzled at first and laughing at last. “Impossible!” he would have laughed as he arose from the haystack and went playfully and joyously about his monkish, beggarly, poetic business: “How pleasant/ in my grass hut/ stretching out my legs/ listening to the sound/ of frogs in mountain paddies.”