Sengai; a Zen priest with a joyful mind

What a fun picture it is! Looking at the moon they were asking each other how old the moon was. The big man answered thirteen years old and the other answered seven.


It is childish, but it is the last mental state where the Zen priest who painted it had arrived after many Zen practices and enlightenments. I showed it to my daughter who is a kindergarten teacher and asked her how she felt. She immediately answered cute, “kawaii”.




Sengai

The painter is Sengai who was a great Zen priest at the time of 70 years after Hakuin in the Edo period, but Sengai never met Hakuin. Hakuin who painted many amusing pictures for people, but he was a consistent Zen priest. Contrarily, Sengai was the most eager Zen priest likewise amid the then Zen priests, but his last mind state was away from Zen by Zen practices.


Look at the picture above. It was painted by young Sengai. He was a good painter and a good Zen practitioner with hope. So it concludes the taste of Zen.


Sengai hoped that he would eventually become a master of a famous Zen temple. As Sengai was from the lowest of the poverty class, yet even uncertainly, he had stayed in his practicing temple that his colleagues left in answer to requests to become master priests from famous temples. He despaired of his life and abandoned his hope to become a master, he lived in a cave on a cliff by himself. His then feeling was imprinted into his name. His name Sengai consists of “sen” and “gai” as two kanji characters, sen means to become far from normal life and to live as a mountain man and gai means a cliff or an end.




The Zen for Sengai  

In his poor circumstances he eagerly devoted himself to Zen practices. And his imagination of Zen was in the picture above, a rectangle, a triangle and a circle. In Zen thoughts there is an instruction that “If you meet Shaka, the founder of Buddhism, you have to kill him.” What does that mean? Of course the true meaning isn’t the direct words on surface. The true meaning is not to stay in the thoughts of Shaka but to go beyond the thoughts of Shaka. For Sengai it was a rectangle, a triangle and a circle.




To the new horizon beyond Zen

At last, he became a master of the historically first Zen temple in Japan, which was in Fukuoka, Kyusyu but it was already on the decline. Nonetheless, he devoted himself to rebuild it for the meaning of housing and for the meaning of Zen practices. In addition, the landscape of his mind land was more enlightened, on top of that, his mind achieved a plateau that nobody else could achieve. It was the joyful and amusing landscape of mind as in the first picture.


And the picture above of the dog is interesting as a picture and as with the added writing. The added words are “kyan kyan” in Japanese sound, the sound of a dog’s bark. Kyan kyan is a Japanese onomatopoeia, and such words are normally used in normal conversations, animations, mangas and novels in the Japanese. I was surprised at finding it in this old picture, besides one painted by a Zen priest.


It is fun and kawaii!

Next, this picture is of a frog and the added phrase is curious. “If a person practicing Zazen, sitting quietly, must achieve his enlightened mind”. The hidden meaning is “a frog sitting quietly would be enlightened.”





Compared to Hakuin 

Hakuin’s pictures for people are amusing but those are consistently in Zen taste. On the contrary, Sengai’s pictures are free. They aren’t better or worse, but yet those should depend on each of their minds. Hakuin’s mind consistently depended on Zen, but Sengai’s mind left Zen. There isn’t a self-portrait of Sengai. Though it isn’t proof of his thinking but it may be a tendency of his mind. Well then, what was his new horizon beyond Zen? I think that Sengai wanted to give healing, comfort, soothing and therapy to people. Those were needed for people. Those are simple expressions of tenderness in daily life, in short.


Sengai’s illustrations lead to current manga pictures. So are manga painters Zen priests? Of course not, but they probably heal people’s minds and they seem the successors of Sengai.

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