Iron Eyes: The Life and Teachings of Ōbaku Zen Master Tetsugen Dōkō

Good

Nope, I didn't live in Japan during the 1600's, and I've never met the Obaku Zen monk Tetsugen, but strange as it sounds, this book inevitably sends me on a trip down memory lane. To my college days when my best friend and I were first starting to explore Asian religions and taking a class on the subject from our favorite professor. To the time he threw us for a loop by mentioning a third school of Zen Buddhism in addition to the two we were familiar with (Rinzai and Soto), one that combined meditation with the chanting of the nenbutsu--which to our minds at the time represented the exact polar opposites of Japanese Buddhism. How does that work?! So we went straight to the campus library, assuming naively that if a subject exists, there's a book in English about it. There wasn't, of course. Not a one. Obaku Zen remained a bizarre, unresolved mystery in our blossoming minds.This rather unabashedly anecdotal nostalgia trip highlights, I hope, the pioneering significance of Helen Baroni's continuing scholarship on this otherwise ignored subject, as seen first in her more general study ( Obaku Zen: The Emergence of the Third Sect of Zen in Tokugawa Japan ) and now again with this excellent new publication, "Iron Eyes," which takes a more focused approach. Indeed, the book is primarily a highly detailed and interesting study of the life and teachings of one specific Obaku monk, Tetsugen Doko. This is handled in a slightly unusual way that I found highly effective: "Iron Eyes" divides more or less neatly in two, with the first half devoted to Baroni's overall analysis of this monk from a good variety of angles (a secondary source, essentially), and the second half consisting of a representative selection of Tetsugen's own writings (an anthology of primary sources, basically). The first half starts by taking a close look at Tetsugen's life within the context of Obaku Zen and Tokugawa religion more generally (shedding some much needed light on Tokugawa Buddhism, still underappreciated as it tends to be), and then addresses the project for which he is most famous (the printing and publication of the complete Buddhist canon for pretty much the first time in Japan), explores his approach to Buddhism and the nature of his religiosity in-depth, and finally outlines how Tetsugen was understood and interpreted by later generations in Japan and, later, abroad.The second half includes a wide variety of Tetsugen's writings in various genres, including teaching texts in both Japanese and Classical Chinese (lectures aimed at a general crowd of laypeople, letters addressed to specific lay followers, and more specialized instructions to his monastic disciples), poetry in classical Chinese (kanshi, clunky but edifying for the most part), correspondence from Tetsugen regarding his activities and other events in his life (especially the ongoing sutra publication project, relief work for those suffering from natural disasters, and an incident in which he was threatened with violence by a mob of Jodo Shin Buddhists), and finally posthumous biographies of Tetsugen (including a suitably serious and reverent one by his chief disciple Hoshu, a highly entertaining and irreverent one by Ban Kokei in his tales of eccentric individuals, and a preachy, mildly patriotic one appearing in elementary school textbooks in the early twentieth century).The book as a whole is written in wonderfully clear and careful prose, and Baroni has apparently taken great pains to craft the book so that it is accessible and understandable to the non-specialist and educated generalist, edifying and inspiring to the Zen practitioner and American Buddhist, and highly thought-provoking, informative, and useful for the specialist and scholar. Not to mention extremely interesting all around. Too few academic titles are able to strike such a fine balance, and I definitely suggest folks look here to see how it can be done and why it should be. Highly recommended to any and all in any way curious about this subject, then, and a big thanks to the author for finally providing that book my friend and I were looking for in vain almost two decades ago.