D.T. Suzuki on the Zen of Sengai Gibon.
Take a moment to look online at some of the calligraphy of Sengai Gibon. Done we are told after formerly retiring at the age of 61 as the one hundred twenty-third abbot of Shōfuku-ji, the first Zen temple established in Japan, Sengai’s legendary wit and humor jumps from his brush. Living well into his eighties, the master loved humanity and sympathized with those who were suffering around him. Like any good master of Zen however “he never lost himself in them.”
The last of many works written by Daisetz Teitaro Sukuzi, the man who is said to have brought Zen Buddhism to the West, Sengai, The Zen Master is a collection of 127 scrolls, personally selected by the author with commentary, that spoke directly to and for his own Zen heart. The embodiment of absolute wisdom and absolute love, for Daisetz, and perhaps for us all, the laughter set down in Sengai’s work is a spirit of genuine humanism that can find “something comic in our human affairs” without the aftertaste of ridicule or ill-will.
The great awakening, Satori or Kensho, that is, enlightenment in Zen, is Reality itself, which holds within it heaven and earth and the ten thousand things that fill them both. To step into this reality, not as an empty concept or set of symbols, as D.T. warns, but with an eye on the Infinite is to be “thoroughly free from all possible forms of limitation and definability.”
What I think he is getting at, and why he is using the brilliance of Sengai’s art as a tool to help him do it, is that if we are not merely to survive this life (the world of relativities), but to experience the here and now as something of deep joy, we must learn to let go and embody a certain “sportiveness” in the way we live it.
All things are passing in time. Not too serious. Not too preoccupied. Not too over identified with anything around us or even with our own thoughts. Detached, but not uncaring. Rather knowing very closely, as close as our breadth, that tomorrow is another day. And with that day, another chance to laugh , and to laugh-out-loud not just at the world around us, but more importantly at ourselves.
Sengai Gibon had his head shaved and donned the robes of a Zen monk at eleven years of age. By the time he was thirty he gained his insight into life, and had another thirty years of sitting to deepen it. Picking up his brush in retirement and capturing that insight in ink, we are left transfixed, if you will, by a record of transcendence that is profoundly, and yet delightfully, human.
Where the good abides, in rich playfulness, is “enjoyment of the simple magic of life.”
