Hakuin Ekaku: “Song of Meditation”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Hakuin wrote “Zazen Wasan” (“Song of Meditation”) in eighteenth-century Japan to make zazen understandable in everyday terms to the common people of his era. The song consists of twenty-two couplets in Japanese calligraphy without standard stanza groupings. Some English translators have grouped the lines of this poem into stanzas of different arrangements, and some simply present it without divisions. The version reproduced here has three stanzas. How can one channel one’s sitting meditation into the right way? How can one enhance the meditation practice? Such are among the questions dealt with in this song. “Zazen Wasan” has been chanted for generations in countless Buddhist monasteries around the world. Hakuin attaches great importance to meditation in acquiring enlightenment, proposing that concentrating the spirit in stilled meditation can have a wondrous effect on the reinvigoration of the body. In this famous ode to meditation, the master Hakuin celebrates the power and significance of sitting in meditation for the attainment of enlightenment—the goal of the way of Zen. This practice is regarded as the core of Zen not only by the Japanese Soto and Rinzai schools but also by Zen schools across the world.

Stanza 1

The very first line is not only the essence of the whole poem but also the core of all Buddhist teaching. It means that all sentient beings—all animals, insects, plants, and other living creatures—have the nature or the inherent quality of the Buddha. A person need not go extra miles in seeking the Buddhist truth in the external world and ask for enlightenment from others; all that is needed is to reflect upon oneself, question one’s own mind and heart, and locate the true Buddha nature within oneself. If ice may be compared to the Buddha nature, or truth, then water represents the multitudinous human beings living in this world; without water, there can never be ice, since the latter holds or contains the former and the two can never be separated. This water-ice metaphor is traditionally employed in expounding the Buddhist truth. People are burdened by their desires toward the external world (“far away”) and the mental constructs forged by those desires, but they cannot be free unless they detect their own Buddha nature.

People do not know that they themselves possess the true Buddha nature, and they start to look for it in books, fervent prayers, or the teaching of Buddhist masters. Too concerned with their own limitations, they do not trust in their perception and insight, which is blurred by their experience of the outside world. What a pity for a man suffering from extreme thirst to cry, “How thirsty I am!” when he is standing up to his waist in water. The metaphor illustrates how, when we find ourselves troubled, we usually seek solutions and help from others when we already possess the cure within ourselves. In this case, Hakuin employs the famous parable of the lost son. The reference is to the Lotus Sutra, an ancient discourse of the Buddha in which a rich man teaches his errant son to recognize his own inheritance instead of blindly living in poverty; it aptly illustrates the Mahayana precept that awakening to one’s true nature is more important than seeking it from elders or authorities.

The “six worlds” of line 11 are the realms, or kinds of existence, that sentient beings are subject to: (1) beings in hell, the lowest realm, characterized by aggression; (2) hungry ghosts, the realm of spirits, characterized by craving and hunger; (3) animals, characterized by stupidity; (4) Asura, the realm of demigods, semiblessed beings marked by jealousy and militancy; (5) humans, beings who have enlightenment potentials within, yet are unable to attain it for their own blindness and desires; and (6) the realm of heavenly beings, who also have to inhabit the world of suffering for their overweening pride. All are trapped in this “wheel of life” (as it is called in Tibetan Buddhism). Human beings continuously transmigrate through these worlds and have to go through countless births and deaths before they find enlightenment. They fail simply because they are constantly trapped in worldly desires and mistaken perceptions, “the darkness of ignorance” of line 12, and hence have no hope of redemption and deliverance. Ignorance drives us farther and farther away from Buddhahood on a dead-end road. The rhetorical question “When are we able to get away from birth-and-death?” (line 14) reveals the essence of the Buddhist quest for spiritual enlightenment and freedom.

Stanza 2

Hakuin points out the primary solution to the human dilemma, which is stressed by the Mahayana Buddhist tradition: meditation. Buddhist meditation is a mental process involving concentration, mindfulness, insight, and other faculties for the purpose of gaining enlightenment. The human being cannot use words to define, express, or eulogize it adequately. To some Zen masters, like the Chinese Huineng (d. 713), words cannot be trusted to clarify the truth of the Buddha. The “virtues of perfection,” or paramita, refer to the commonly recognized six aspects of “completeness”: (1) charity, which includes abandoning worldly possessions; (2) following the moral precepts of the Buddha; (3) meekness; (4) strenuousness; (5) contemplation; and (6) spiritual enlightenment. These virtues help believers unshackle themselves from burdens and overcome obstacles on their way to attaining enlightenment or Buddhahood. The invocation of the Buddha’s name, commended in line 18, not infrequently refers to the chanting of the prayer “Homage Amida Buddha” of Pure Land Buddhism. Pure Land Buddhism is a devotional branch of Buddhism focused on Amitabha Buddha. People who chant the name “Amitabha Buddha” many times daily will be guided by this Buddha to the Pure Land, or the West, a place of eternity and happiness where the Buddha and all other enlightened beings reside. The six virtues, together with confession and ascetic discipline and other good works, all contribute to the Buddhist concept of merit making, or the accumulation of merits, and will without exception emanate from the practice of meditation.

This stanza clearly delineates the miraculous power of meditation, which can eradicate all one’s bad deeds and lead the practitioner away from the wicked paths in the world and into the Pure Land that lies within. Karma (line 22), a concept from Indian Buddhism, here refers to the deeds that bind a person in the endless experience of the six realms mentioned earlier. (Indian Buddhism was the fountainhead of Chinese Chan Buddhism, which in turn gave life to Japanese Zen.) Although good or positive karma will lead to a higher or nobler level of existence, evil or negative karma will lead to living as a beast or ghost. Good or bad, karma is unavoidable in a person’s life, and only through the practice of meditation can one escape from the terrible consequences of bad karma and advance in the illuminated directions conferred by the Buddha. By reverencing the Buddha’s correct ways toward meditation and enlightenment, praising and implementing this truth, blessings beyond calculation can be attained.

Stanza 3

The final stanza starts by telling us the importance of contemplating one’s own nature, what it is that one really wants or lacks, and the significance of the intuitive mind in accessing the Buddha nature through the discarding of external obstacles. As Chinese Zen has stipulated, if one clearly understands one’s ultimate nature, and realizes it, one will become the Buddha at that moment. Therefore, one’s ultimate nature is the highest wisdom of the Buddha, and only through meditation can a person testify to “the truth of Self-nature,” which is none other than the true face of the Buddha and the original inner self. “Self-nature is no-nature” (line 31) illustrates the Buddhist concept of emptiness or nothingness that neither advanced human knowledge nor logical reasoning can ever expect to grasp. The world is nothing and without any significance—a fundamental doctrine in Buddhism. For those who have identified with their true nature, the Buddha’s Great Vehicle (Mahayana), the ultimate enlightenment of a person, will be actualized, thus dispersing the differences between cause and effect; that is, once enlightened, a person will see the world as nothing, and the differences between cause and effect will dissolve. Thus, all lesser means of salvation will ultimately culminate in this grand vehicle designed only by the Buddha. When a person realizes that his mind and the universe are one, he has attained nonduality and likewise nontrinity, in other words, oneness or enlightenment.

If one believes in the Buddhist teaching of “not-particular which is in particulars” (line 35), or as a Chinese saying has it, “the form is formlessness, and the formlessness is the form,” one will not make distinctions between going or returning, right or wrong, up or down, a girl or a pencil. This is the Buddhist teaching of discarding all subjective distinctions between objects or concepts in the external world. Doing so leads a person to abandon worldly desires and live in peace and harmony, thus relinquishing all causes of suffering and pain. One who can see the world as it is and think about the world without being attached to it or being influenced by it has attained the state of complete freedom. Such a person has refrained from changing or being changed by the world. In Daoist terms, this is a state of wuwei, or nonaction, of following the rules of nature and never seeking to analyze or conquer it. In this state anything one does is in accordance with the dharma, the truth of the Buddha, and the way of enlightenment.

Samadhi (line 39) is the highest level of concentrated, complete meditation, in which the conscious subject becomes one with the experienced object. In this state one enters the infinite space, achieving complete freedom. This leads to the “fourfold Wisdom” of line 40. The reference is to the four prajnas (or cognitions or cardinal principles) of Buddhahood. Samadhi includes four aspects: (1) the universal mirror prajna, the high state of mind that perfectly reflects the world as it is, as through a mirror; (2) the prajna of equality (or “equality wisdom,” “universal wisdom,” “knowledge of equality”), whereby a person can experience the emptiness of the myriad things in the universe, thus perceiving the equality of all; (3) the observing prajna or “all-discerning wisdom,” which is the carrying out of the achieved enlightenment in dealing with the realities of the world (in other words, the Buddha in action); and (4) the practical prajna, or “perfect wisdom” (or “all-performing wisdom”), which is the wholehearted actualizationof Buddhahood with complete enlightenment. Hakuin here celebrates the supremacy of the four wisdoms and their unsurpassed significance to all who practice Zen.

With the achievement of the fourfold Wisdom, a person has obtained genuine insight into the world and is thus beyond any fear of being affected by life or death, pleasure or suffering. What else shall a person want (line 41)? The next line, “As the Truth eternally calm reveals itself to them,” envisions the enlightened person coming to the highest state of peace and happiness—nirvana, the purest state of existence, a perfectly peaceful mental state free from all human cravings. To one in this state, the very earth is the Lotus Country; there is no need to seek it elsewhere. One’s own body, rather than any external thing or place, is the body of the Buddha. As Bodhidharma, the sixth-century founding father of Chinese Buddhism said: “Once mortals see their nature, all attachments end. Awareness isn’t hidden. But you can only find it right now. It’s only now. If you really want to find the Way, don’t hold on to anything.” For those who let go of the self and the attachments, the body is the Buddha’s body and the mind the Buddha’s mind.