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Drop all 'isms'
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Mind of a Sage
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Judging a saint
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The Fake Monk
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Rinzai's Answer
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Mystic Rengetsu
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Zen
Master Sekito
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Zen Sage & Thief
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Zen Master in Jail
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Buddha’s message
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The Game of Chess
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Innocence is Divine
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Master's Compassion
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Knowledge is Trouble
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Respond with awareness
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Tetsugen
3 set of
sutras
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You are already a Buddha
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Sound of one Hand Clapping
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Master waits 4 right Moment
- Stories 1 - 2
- Stories 3 - 4
- Stories 5 - 7
- Stories 8-9
- Stories 10
- Stories 11
- Stories 12-14
- Stories 15-16
- Stories 17-18
- Stories 19 - 21
- Stories 22 - 24
- Stories 25 - 27
- Stories 28 - 32
- Stories 33 - 36
- Stories 37 - 38
- Stories 39 - 41
- Stories 42 - 44
- Stories 45 - 46
- Stories 47 - 48
- Stories 49 - 50
- Stories 51 - 53
- Stories 54 - 56
- Stories 57 - 59
- Stories 60 - 61
- Stories 62 - 64
- Stories 65 - 66
- Stories 67 - 68
- Stories 69 - 72
- Stories 73 - 75
- Stories 76 - 78
- Stories 79 - 82
- Stories 83 - 86
- Stories 87 - 89
- Stories 90 - 91
- Stories 92 - 94
- Stories 95 - 97
- Stories 98 -101
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11. The Story of Shunkai
The exquisite Shunkai whose other name was Suzu was compelled to
marry against her wishes when she was quite young. Later, after this
marriage had ended, she attended the university, where she studied
philosophy.
To see Shunkai was to fall in love with her. Moreover, wherever she
went, she herself fell in love with others. Love was with her at the
university, and afterwards, when philosophy did not satisfy her and
she visited a temple to learn about Zen, the Zen students fell in
love with her. Shunkai’s whole life was saturated with love.
At last in Kyoto she became a real student of Zen. Her brothers in
the sub-temple of Kennin praised her sincerity. One of them proved
to be a congenial spirit and assisted her in the mastery of Zen.
The abbot of Kennin, Mokurai, Silent Thunder, was severe. He kept
the precepts himself and expected his priests to do so. In modern
Japan whatever zeal these priests have lost for Buddhism they seem
to have gained for having wives.
Mokurai used to take a broom and chase the women away when he found
them in any of his temples, but the more wives he swept out, the
more seemed to come back. In this particular temple the wife of the
head priest became jealous of Shunkai's earnestness and beauty.
Hearing the students praise her serious Zen made this wife squirm
and itch. Finally she spread a rumor about Shunkai and the young man
who was now her friend.
As a consequence he was expelled and Shunkai was removed from the
temple. ‘I may have made the mistake of love,' thought Shunkai, 'but
the priest’s wife shall not remain in the temple either if my friend
is to be treated so unjustly.
Shunkai the same night with a can of kerosene set fire to the five
hundred year old temple and burned it to the ground. In the morning
she found herself in the hands of the police.
A young lawyer became interested in her and endeavored to make her
sentence lighter. ‘Do not help me,' she told him. I might decide to
do something else which would only imprison me again.'
At last a sentence of seven years was completed, and Shunkai was
released from the prison, where the sixty-three-year old warden also
had become enamored of her. But now everyone looked upon her as a
‘jailbird'. No one would associate with her. Even the Zen people,
who are supposed to believe in enlightenment in this life and with
this body, shunned her.
Zen, Shunkai found, was one thing and the followers of Zen quite
another. Her relatives would have nothing to do with her. She grew
sick, poor, and weak.
She met a Shinshu priest who taught her the name of the Buddha of
Love, and in this Shunkai found some solace and peace of mind. She
passed away when she was still exquisitely beautiful and hardly
thirty years old.
She wrote her own story in a futile endeavor to support herself and
some of it she told to a woman writer. So it reached the Japanese
people. Those who rejected Shunkai, those who slandered and hated
her, now read of her life with tears of
remorse.
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