Suzuki Shosan's Nio Zen: Finding Meaning in the Face of Death
The writings of this retired samurai are your next favorite read
Suzuki Shosan was a man followed by death.
He fought in several brutal battles as a samurai under the command of the famous shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa before retiring to live as a Zen Buddhist monk. To him, Buddhism was a way for him to explore and come to terms with the death and destruction he witnessed during his military career.
One of his notable writings is a story called Two Nuns, in which the wife of a deceased samurai, stricken by grief, attempts to flee from death. As with Shosan, death follows her. In one memorable scene, she falls asleep and dreams she is approached by a crowd of skeletons who dance as they sing a message to her:
"Yes, we're the ones who promptly have given back all we borrowed from earth, water, fire and air. We've cut out the seed of the six robbers and the passions, we've left behind the village where the ten evils lurk, and we've come back to our own first home. From men's eight sufferings we now stand apart, to our great joy!"
"Now, girl, listen! Between you and us there is no difference at all. You are quite wrong to think us other than yourself. The beauty of your physical body, every bit of it, comes only from the flesh and skin laid upon your bones and given an attractive look. This is not your real self, for what makes flesh is earth; what makes life-fluids, water; what makes breath, wind; and what makes the body's warmth, fire.”
Call this dream world a dream, but a dream it still is. What are we to take as real? What does it mean, that we should call a dream something which exists not at all? There is not a single thing even to be called a dream.”
“Nothing means anything,” they sang, “nothing means anything.” And their voices became the wind singing through the pines.
Near the end of the story, the samurai’s wife speaks with an old nun who, at one point, quotes the Lotus Sutra at her.
The sutra says, "The three worlds know no peace, they are like a house on fire.” It is the Buddha who calls this world of ours a house on fire, but the ordinary person knows nothing of what this means. He enjoys his burning house and considers it a dwelling both clean and cool. Deep in fond attachment and clinging, he builds up for all eternity the seeds of suffering in the evil ways and is never, ever able to escape.
To Suzuki Shosan, a man who knew very well the cruel and temporary nature of life, Shakyamuni’s parable of the burning house must have hit home. Shosan’s awareness of death was so great, in fact, that he at times was overtaken by what he called “death energy.” He elaborates on this concept in a passage from “Roankyo,” a book of his saying compiled by one of his students.
Myself, I'd had a feeble energy ever since I was young, but it's only much later that death energy came to me. Say someone had his head cut off right now. I'd get it as though the head cut off were my own. When I hear anyone's died, I get the energy just like that. Alas, I don't suppose much of this is getting through to you right in your chest.
Anyway, when I speak of death pain assaulting me, I mean my chest pounds and I'm really in agony. If this went on long the energy would wane, but now it's unalloyed. I myself at first thought it might be a bad thing, but on later consideration I realized that this energy is the medicine for all ills. Everything is still, and the very truth stands out in its workings. Even now people with death energy get good by and by. So I feel death energy may well be the start of leaving birth and death.
With all of this in consideration, one would expect Shosan to be a gloomy nihilist, yet that is far from the case. Shosan was trusted by his students and commoners alike, and taught Buddhists to face life with a strong stoic demeanor.
He spoke to commoners and other Buddhists alike with a gruff, yet modest demeanor, casting aside lofty notions of enlightenment and communicating to them in ways that were both actionable and easy to understand. When people came to him filled with pretension and heavy theological ambitions, he would attempt to break them down or “lay a stick to them.”
"You have a dangerous nature," he once said to a visiting layman. "The way you are, you soon get stuck up when you're praised, and you run around sprouting horns. People must be praising you everywhere. I'm sure no one abuses you and runs you down the way I do.”
His style is sometimes referred to today as “Nio Zen,” named after the muscular Nio guardian kings who are often depicted in statue form outside of Buddhist temples. Shosan would point to figures like these, as well as the “immovable” Wisdom King Fudo, as examples for the kind of energy Buddhist should bring to facing life.
When you practice Buddhism, make the Buddha-images your models. And talking of Buddha-images, a beginner won't ever reach Nyorai zazen by gazing at an image of the Nyorai [Buddha]. Let him gaze instead at an image of a Guardian King or of Fudo, and let him do Guardian King zazen. Indeed, I've realized that the Guardian Kings are the gateway to Buddhism, and that Fudo is the starting point of the Buddhas. That's why the Guardian Kings stand at the gate, and why Fudo is the first of the Thirteen Buddhas.
If you don't get their energy the passions will defeat you. All you need do is act with whole effort from strength of spirit. But nowadays Buddhism is in full decline, the direction has gone wrong. and nobody's really alive. Everyone's dead…
I know nothing about this business of pretentions or of enlightenment. I just dispose myself so as to conquer all things with a buoyant spirit, twenty-four hours a day. Everyone should get the unshakable energy of the Guardian Kings or of Fudo, then they should practice with it and destroy bad karma and the passions.
The end result of Shosan’s theology was a form of Buddhist stoicism that emphasized warrior-like strength, boundless energy, and a diamond-like composure. In his own words, one could not “enter the Buddha’s way in weakness.” One who attempts to do such would suffer immense pain “in accordance with their passions.”
He is a man of “The Way” who resolutely conquers all things; he is an ordinary man who, with thoughts that cling to form, suffers, overcome by everything. Therefore, one who in passion whips up hot-blooded courage may, for a moment, have the might to smash through an iron wall. In time, however, his hot-bloodedness will change. This mind of the stalwart man is unmoving, and never changes. If a warrior practices this, why should he not reach the mind of the stalwart man?
I expected to find all of this while reading through a translation of Shosan’s works, but one thing I did not expect to discover was an underlying beauty to Shosan’s worldview hidden under the talk of death and suffering.
Much of this comes from Shosan’s interpretation of the Buddhist concept of Sunyata, or “emptiness.” This concept does not refer to “meaninglessness,” but rather the idea of interconnectedness. In short, things do not exist without other things, and thus the idea of a “self” as something separate from the rest of the universe is false.
Rather than by escaping to a mountain cabin to contemplate these things in solitude, Shosan’s view of Sunyata was refined by living amongst common men and observing how they interact with and rely upon each other.
“There is the generosity of all sentient beings,” Shosan wrote in his booklet “Moanjo,” or “A Staff for the Blind.”
The generosity of farmers, the generosity of tradesmen, the generosity of clothing and cloth-making, the generosity of merchants, the generosity of the mutual interdependence of all occupations - if you know these well you will not withdraw from men. You must always be receptive to the mind of others. Thus when you are in the presence of your lord, put yourself in his place and realize the shortcomings of all you do. When in the presence of inferiors, put yourself in their place and never forget how beings suffer.
Never give up pondering, day and night, the woes of great heat, of hunger and cold, of physical exhaustion and mental anguish. Peasants and farmers, they say, injure both body and mind at their unrelenting labors, and they grow the five grains and feed everyone in the whole land. Each grain of rice stands for the work of a hundred hands. Never forget what troubles they have borne.
This extends not just to men, of course, but to the entirety of heaven and Earth as well. “The generosity of heaven and earth is that we should borrow from them the four elements and dwell upon the vast earth in our flesh,” Shosan wrote. “Food and clothing, moreover, fire and water, our very possessions and tools, are all the generous gifts of heaven and earth. Reflect upon this well.”
This realization leads inevitably to a sense of universal gratitude, a view of the universe and other people as a beautiful source of one’s life which, although brief and temporary, is a vibrant and treasure-filled “journey through the floating world,” as Shosan elegantly put it in his treatise “Banmin Tokuyo,” or “Right Action for all.”
It’s because of this view of interconnectedness that Shosan spent much of his writing trying to fit Buddhism into the life of the layman. His final work, the above-mentioned “Right Action for All,” was a treatise that attempted to do exactly this. Shosan sorted laymen into four primary categories (farmers, warriors, artisans, and merchants) and attempted to address each separately.
His conclusion was that each of these four paths was a different form of Buddhist practice in itself, if conducted in the correct way. Not only that, but the hard and honest work of laymen was a manifestation of the one eternal Buddha himself (the dharmakaya, or mystic law. This is the closest Buddhist concept to the God of Abrahamic religions).
The one Buddha, the Tathagata originally awakened, benefits the world by dividing himself into countless millions. Without smiths, carpenters, and all the other trades, the needs of the world would never be met. Without warriors, the world would not be governed. Without farmers it would not be fed, and without merchants nothing in the world would circulate freely. Every other trade, as it comes into being, works for the good of the world.
There are men who have discoursed of heaven and earth, there is the man who invented writing, and the man who distinguished the five organs one from another and so gave us medicine. In endless diversity they emerge and work for the world's good, but all in reality are none other than the one Buddha's virtue in action.
In Shosan’s view, it’s this kind of pure and devoted work towards societal betterment that was an important key to true enlightenment. At the end of “Right Action for All,” Shosan closes with some passages that I feel sum up his philosophy quite well:
In laboring over mountain after mountain, assault both body and mind; in crossing rivers great and small, purify your mind; and when you launch your ship upon the limitless expanse of the ocean, let your body go…
Quite naturally, enlightenment will mature in you until the subtle delight of nirvana is yours, until you are an unobstructed man of great freedom and tread alone both yin and yang. What joy, throughout the eons of the future, could equal this?
If you’re interested in reading Shosan’s works, there is a pdf available from Cornell University at this link here. I highly recommend checking it out if you’re at all interested in Buddhism.
I’m personally very glad to have found these works, since they not only touch upon topics that I have written about for years (extending back to my Hokusaist Thesis in 2021), but expand them into interesting directions using a unique Japanese Buddhist perspective. I sincerely hope you find them equally as inspiring.
As always, thank you very much for reading.