Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

[Taigu]

Just something i bumped into, all in Japanese, giving you a good idea of the place, how cold and hard and harsh is the training. In the middle, rare and exquisite footage of our ancestor, Niwa zenji. At the end, the famous sussho ceremony with its shouting cap phrases and ritualized dialogues.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0f7ejX_qrk&feature=related

and a picture of the back of a rakusu written by Niwa Zenji which I happened to find landing on my lap, the meaning is most profound: a single drop of water

Deep bows to my teacher Chodo, my brother Jundo and all of you.


gassho


Taigu

Attached files

[Shohei]

Re: Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

Thank you for sharing this! Stunning.

Gassho
Shohei

[Dokan]

Re: Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

Very interesting and somehow makes me very happy to be here...guess I should look into that.

Thank you for sharing Taigu.

Gassho,

Dokan

[Shokai]

Re: Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

Taigu;
What a marvelous relic of the Lineage! Thank you for sharing this.

[Hans]

Re: Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

Hello Taigu,

his calligraphy is extremely powerful it seems,

looking at it for the first time just now felt like someone punching my stomach (in a good way - if that makes any sense).

Thank you for sharing and gassho,


Hans Chudo Mongen

[ghop]

Re: Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

Really cool.

Thanks for sharing.

gassho
Greg

[Myozan Kodo]

Re: Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

Taigu,
What wonderful work by Niwa Zenji on the back of that rakusu. It is alive, all these years later.

And the film: Niwa's calm face, amid all that harshness, shouting and stress.

Thank you.
Myozan

[Tb]

Re: Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

Hi.

_/_

Mtfbwy
Fugen

[Eika]

Re: Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

Thanks for posting!

Eika

[Seiryu]

Re: Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

What a gem, thank you for sharing!!

[Taigu]

Re: Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

This is what Koru Nonomura writes about Niwa in Eat, Sleep, Sit p.182, 183:

When we were settled, a slide door slid noiselessly open and aan old priest appeared. This was master Renpo Niwa, the 77th abbot of Eiheiji. His eyebrows were as white as crane feathers,and below them his eyes shone with a preternaturally keen light that was discenible even from my far-off vantage point. There was about him an indescribable magnetism; he stirred my innermost being. (...)Then he began his sermon. Whatever message he may have given us I have since forgotten, but I will never forget the mesmerizing beauty of that voice. For one so old it was amazingly strong, yet it had dignity and calm, and it pulled out my heartstrings with what seemed to be superhuman power.

Everytime this ex monk recalls Niwa Zenji in his Eiheiji experience, it is as a man with compassion, grace, love and light. Watch the video and see for yourself. yes Myozan, a moment of peace an love in the midst of a bootcamp.

gassho


Taigu

[Jinyo]

Re: Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

Thank you Taigu - though I have to admit I found this documentary quite hard to watch. What a shame there is no translation as perhaps listening to Niwa's words may have provided a context for the harshness?

Is Koru Nonomura's book an illuminating account?

I feel I know very little regarding lineage/history of Soto Zen/ it's rituals and ancient practices - would this book help to fill in some gaps?

Gassho

Willow

[alan.r]

Re: Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

I find this terribly inspiring. A swift kick, an aching winter, a burning summer, a hard sweat, a shout, a sore back - here, here, here, now, now, now.

Sometimes I have to shake myself out of myself. To shake that slow creeping complacency.

Gassho, Gassho.

[Dokan]

Re: Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

Is Koru Nonomura's book an illuminating account?

There have been a couple of threads on this topic that also reference Nonomura's book that may be worth your while.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1669&p=23609

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3657


Gassho,

Dokan

[Jundo]

Re: Eiheiji in 1985 featuring Niwa

Thank you so much, Taigu, for finding these Treasures.

I will try to translate and post the comments in the video by Niwa Zenji today.

Yes, there is a great "bootcamp" atmosphere to Zen training in Japan at many places ... both Soto and Rinzai. In the links that Dokan posted, I quoted this excerpt from Nonomura's diary of his Eiheiji experience ... Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple. Some folks may be surprised, but this is Japan ... boot camp, much like the army ...

http://www.wisdom-books.com/ProductExtr ... ?PID=19318

Daikan wasn’t the only one to earn the instructors’ wrath. “No! No, no, no! Come on!” As the meal progressed, the yells grew steadily louder and more menacing. The sound of slaps rang out ceaselessly

“What’s this? You don’t want to eat? Fine, then don’t!” Tenshin had mistakenly laid his chopsticks across his still-empty bowl. The servers passed him by without stopping.

Enkai had the opposite problem: miso soup being poured into his bowl spilled over the edge and ran down onto the tatami while he watched aghast, not knowing what to do.

Doryu got punched in the stomach and dropped his bowl.

Daikan finally managed to lay out his bowls properly by copying his neighbor, but from then on his every move earned him another slap or punch. In the end, he was grabbed by the scruff of the neck and dragged down off the platform. As he lay on the floor in fright, the instructors kicked him.

Yuho, Kijun, and Choshu somehow managed to keep up with the servers, but their bodies were rigid with effort, their eyes wide open and unblinking as they hurriedly crammed food into their mouths and gulped it down without chewing.

For all of us, the acts of eating and drinking were carried out in a state of abject terror. The least mistake brought an instant cuff from one of the eagle-eyed senior trainees standing watch. The food had no taste; there was no sense of enjoying a meal. The pace was fast and it took intense concentration to keep up. Now the chopsticks. Next the lap cloth. You had to confirm each step mentally before you could act.

If you paused to savor the food, before you knew it, second helpings were being served and you had to rush to get your share. If you took time eating that, next thing you knew the servers were coming around with tea, then hot water. Even after we’d memorized exactly what to do and the routine grew familiar, there was never any time to linger over our food.

There are aspects to it precisely like boot camp or a college fraternity 'hazing' ... a building up by breaking down. Group consciousness is created, inner strengths are found, the selfishness of ego is left at the door. As I said in those threads, "there is a time for a bit of "tough love" (emphasis on the 'love' part), and some folks benefit from the marine drill instructor. Not my style so much or Taigu's, and for some folks it just backfires. However, there is a time to push push push some folks forward to attain that 'no where to attain' ... However, we have to be very cautious ... because sometimes a well meaning "spank" can turn into teasing and abuse and power trips, as sometimes seen in that book." In fact, all all too often ... which is one reason we prefer to maintain a soft and gentle atmosphere ... yet just as sincere toward Practice.

Also ...

There is [now at the large training monasteries like Eiheiji] primary focus on the precise performance of ritual, which is often very different from the "freedom" of Zen practice, or some "gentle, peaceful search for enlightenment and personal self discovery", which perhaps most Western practitioners envision. It is something of a prison, with punishments and rigorous discipline maintained ... (in fact, when I used to volunteer as a Zen teacher at a maximum security prison in America, there were more than a few obvious similarities).

Of course, a central point of it all is that true freedom can be found in what seems, at first glance, to be a rigorous lack of freedom! The true "prison walls" are not made of stone, nor are found only outside us. In learning to master, in detail, arcane and precisely performed ceremonies to perfection (Oryoki eating is one that many Westerners may be familiar with, although even then, usually undertaken by lay folks in a simplified, less rigorous form) ... one learns something beyond ideas of "perfection" or "imperfection" in the very striving for "perfection".

On the other hand, the training in a place like Eiheiji or Sojiji, these days, is very much focused on training young novice priests in the mastery of form and ceremony necessary to function as local parish priests performing funeral services and such, and this also is not of real interest to most foreigners who go there. My teacher, Nishijima, is known in Japan as a critic of what the system has become, a kind of assembly line to turn out young priests who will inherit their father's temple.

I have heard that the fact that Nishijima Roshi is a strong critic of places like Eiheiji, by the way, is one of the main reasons that Niwa Zenji ordained him and gave him Dharma Transmission. At the same time that Eiheiji Abbott Niwa was at the heart of Eiheiji, he wanted Nishijima and his students ... Sangha like this one perhaps ... to be a "kick in the shins" to the rusty system.

Gassho, J