Samurai Zen: The Warrior Koans
When the Chinese master Daikaku first came to Japan in 1246, neither he nor his Japanese samurai pupils could speak the other’s language, and there are many instances in old accounts of the difficulties he had in communicating. For instance, in an old record in Kenchoji there is a passage describing an interview between him and Toyama, Lord of Tango, and in it comes the phrase Maku-maa-sun, maku- maa-sun, nyu-su-ku-ri-i-fu-ya. This was Daikaku’s Sung dynasty Chinese taken down phonetically by a scribe who did not understand it. The priest Ki Zentoku, a man of Szechuan who had come with Shoichi to Kamakura, transliterated this into the proper Chinese characters, which a Japanese scholar could then read as Maku-mo-zo, maku-mo-zo, ji-ze-gan-rai- butsu-ya, and Endo Moritsugu, who could read Chinese, translated it into Japanese: ‘No delusive thoughts, no delusive thoughts! Surely you are yourself from the very beginning Buddha!’ Many such cases are reported where what was said by a Chinese Zen master was transcribed into Chinese characters and then translated into Japanese by a Japanese scholar of Chinese. (We can see that often the phrase is repeated by the Chinese, a characteristic found even today.) In these cases the translation was …