Kōdō Sawaki

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Kodo Sawaki died on the 21st of December 1965 at Antaiji, a Zen temple in northern Kyoto, with his eyes on the mountain outside. His last recorded words named that mountain directly: "Kodo, Kodo," he said, hearing it call to him from the heights. The man who had spent decades traveling Japan to teach sitting meditation had refused, against all convention, to become a settled abbot anywhere. His followers called him "Homeless Kodo." What does it mean for a Zen priest to be homeless? And how did a street kid from Tsu, Mie, raised in a lantern maker's gambling parlor, become one of the most significant Zen teachers of twentieth-century Japan? The answers reach from the battlefields of the Russo-Japanese War all the way to a mountain's quiet stare.

• 2. A Difficult Beginning

  ›

  Sawaki was born on the 16th of June 1880 in Tsu, Mie, the sixth child of a family described as happy and wealthy. By the time he was seven, both his parents were dead: his mother when he was four, his father three years after that. He passed through the care of an aunt whose husband died, and landed in the household of a lantern maker named Bunkichi Sawaki, who had eleven wives, put the boy to work, ran a gambling parlor at night, and beat him.

  At nine years old, Sawaki witnessed the death of a neighbor at a brothel. Viewing the scene afterward, he said the experience produced a feeling of emptiness more acute than the loss of his parents had. He concluded that things cannot be hidden. Described by those who knew him as a tough street kid, he still found himself drawn to Buddhist Pure Land temples nearby. He once watched a group of monks returning from begging, chanting as they walked, and felt a peace he had not known before. He recognized, as he would later put it, that there was a world of beauty in addition to the world he knew.

  That recognition became the axis his life would turn on, though the path toward it was still long and painful.

• 3. The Road to Ordination

  ›

  At sixteen, Sawaki ran away from Bunkichi's household and traveled to Eihei-ji, one of the two head temples of the Soto Zen sect. A monk at the entrance tried to send him away. Sawaki told the monk he would rather die than go back home. He was let in. At Eihei-ji, Sawaki encountered zazen for the first time and also learned that not all monks lived up to the ideals they professed. A confrontation with a monk who mistreated him made that plain. Because Eihei-ji did not ordain monks, he was eventually instructed to leave and find a temple that could.

  The journey to Soshin-ji was miserable. Sawaki had no money, so he recited the Heart Sutra to a ferry captain in exchange for passage across the water. He became covered in lice in the cold. He stopped at temples and reunited with a sister to recover some strength. On a boat, a woman accused him of stealing her lost purse and, because he looked too dirty to be a monk, no one believed him. He was arrested and imprisoned for a month. A prison chaplain eventually believed his account and advocated for his release. Sawaki later reflected that he saw little difference between the prisoners and the guards; in Buddhism, he said, we are all originally deluded beings.

  He arrived at Soshin-ji at eighteen and was ordained in 1899 by Koho Sawada. His reputation grew there, which provoked jealousy and bullying from another monk. During a segaki ceremony, an offering ritual for hungry ghosts, Sawaki fought back and was praised for it by his peers. He also gave away his own kimono to a naked, grieving man whose father had died in poverty, then stole rice and pooled his savings to fund the funeral himself. He would later speak harshly of monks who performed funerals primarily to collect donations. After two years at Soshin-ji, he left to seek further training, eventually settling at Hosenji at twenty, just before being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army.

• 4. War and Its Aftermath

  ›

  Sawaki served in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 and was an active supporter of the Japanese war effort. He stated that discarding one's body beneath the military flag was true selflessness and that doing so made a man a faithful retainer of the emperor and a perfect soldier. He was shot through the neck; the bullet split his tongue. When he regained consciousness, he was in a medical tent marked for patients unlikely to survive. Someone noticed he was still breathing, and he was treated, then moved to a hospital in Hiroshima and afterward to one in Nagoya.

  He was sent to recover at the home of the people who had raised him, meaning Bunkichi's household. There he found the woman of the house chained to a chair, and Bunkichi gone. Bunkichi had gambled that Kodo would die in the war and had borrowed against the army compensation a father figure might collect. He had lost that money. Sawaki felt obligated to help. He went to his brother, asked for money, and gave it to Bunkichi.

  That wartime record would follow Sawaki into his legacy. Buddhist contemporaries and later scholars have criticized him for the support he lent the violent war effort, though how far that support extended, and whether his views shifted in later decades, remains a subject of debate.

• 5. A Life Between Temples

  ›

  Discharged in 1906, Sawaki returned to Soshin-ji as head student. Later that same year he received dharma transmission from Zenko Sawada. He then studied for two years at the priests' training school of Senju-ji, a Jodo Shinshu temple in the Takada district of Tsu. From there he traveled to Horyuji to study Yogacara with Join Saeki, and then spent a three-month practice period studying Dogen with Oka Sotan. Sawaki ended up in charge of Daijiji for seven years, until Oka Roshi died, teaching monks and helping restore the monastery there.

  At Daijiji, he shaped what became a distinctively direct and occasionally blunt teaching style. He named the students at the Fifth High School of Kumamoto as the greatest influences on his life as a Zen practitioner. He also took on students who had been sent to the monastery by parents unwilling to care for them. He struggled with their homesickness and admitted he lacked what he called robashin, grandmotherly love. The experience forced him to understand that discipline alone was not enough; genuine sympathy mattered too. One student at Daijiji, named Akiko, was afflicted with spinal caries and eventually died at Sawaki's side having accepted the three refuges.

  Later Sawaki began a period of wandering from Mannichi Mountain in Kumamoto, staying at the second home of a prefecture member named Mr. Shibata who hoped Sawaki would serve ordinary people. Sawaki distributed printed texts for free and drew broad audiences. In the 1930s he became a professor at Komazawa University. In 1949 he took responsibility for Antai-ji in northern Kyoto, though he never settled there in any conventional sense, traveling the country to speak wherever a request came in until two years before his death. His succession passed to a senior disciple, Kosho Uchiyama, one of five monks and three nuns who received dharma transmission from Sawaki directly.

• 6. The Practice of Sitting

  ›

  Sawaki's most emphatic teaching centered on zazen. He often described Zen itself as "wonderfully useless," which was a deliberate rebuke of any approach that treated meditation as a technique for achieving special experiences or states of consciousness. The point was not to gain anything.

  He taught that zazen is not the way of the ordinary world but the way of the Buddhas and patriarchs, and that practicing it is therefore a form of renouncing the world. Even a person who is still fully deluded takes on, in zazen, the posture of the Buddha. The delusions do not disappear through ordination; they remain. But zazen holds them as they are without being turned around by them. He framed this with the idea of impermanence: if one truly sees impermanence, one is a Buddha with each exhale and a Buddha with each inhale. Nothing needs to be preserved for the future.

  He also grounded zazen in the natural world. He taught that practicing zazen means eliminating the individual self and becoming mother nature. The universe, he said, becomes the content of the self during zazen; when one person sits, the whole universe is sitting. Heaven and earth give air, water, plants, animals, and humans to each other, and all creatures live within what he called a circle of mutual giving, whether or not they feel grateful for it.

• 7. Desire, Teaching, and the "To You" Sayings

  ›

  Sawaki taught that every cell in the human body carries raw ingredients for worldly desire. The question was not whether those desires exist but how a person handles them. The flesh body is a burden, he said, yet squandering it is pointless because then you lose the very instrument through which the burden can be mastered.

  His disciple Kosho Uchiyama compiled a collection of Sawaki's sayings called "To You," the full version containing 34 individual statements, each addressed to a different kind of person. His parable of a dog in Manchuria running after a piece of meat suspended in front of its nose became one of the collection's most cited images. The dog runs its whole race and swallows the meat in a single gulp at the end, then begins running again at the next piece. He compared this directly to people chasing a monthly salary. Nobody, he observed, can see farther than the end of their nose.

  On money, he was unambiguous: a large savings account is not a measure of happiness, and neither is a claim to enlightenment. Puffing up one's personal self through either money or satori makes a person into what he called a devil, not a Buddha. He also criticized the educational system that had emerged after the Meiji period, arguing that its original aim had been to help people find meaning in life but had become merely a pipeline to employment. On teaching itself, Sawaki opposed charging for dharma: the Buddha, he noted, returned from begging barefoot, washed his feet, ate his meal, and gave a sermon without asking for money, and because it was free, it was respected.