Everything worthwhile in life is a paradox.
I have been reading Ihara Saikaku’s Life of an Amorous Woman. It’s a collection of his koshokubon, or erotic writings, including “The Tale of Seijuro from Himeji, the Town of the Lovely Damsel.” In this story the young man, Seijuro, is living a dissolute life consorting with all eighty-five of the courtesans of his small town. One day he has them all undress together to satisfy his whim to recreate in the flesh the so-called “Isle of Nakedness,” which he has only seen on a Chinese map. When the artfulness of the women’s dress and half-dress is cast off, it becomes clear that they owe their seductive attraction mostly to the artistry of their clothing which conceals in each of them some physical flaw — flaws when revealed in the light of their nakedness dampens the lust in the men.
There is a lesson to be learned here about how art disguises nature, about appearance and reality, about the illusion of desire, and so on. But that’s nothing new, we know all that — that is not the most interesting part of the story.
At this point Seijuro’s father bursts in and, disgusted with the scene, disowns his decadent son. Disgraced, the son contemplates suicide and half expects his favorite courtesan, the young Minakawa, to accompany him. Except that she reminds him that it’s the nature of her job to change her affections from one man to another, so it’s sayonara Seijuro.
There is another, more interesting lesson to be learned here about mujo, impermanence, the transitory nature of desire; that passion is fleeting and fickle, especially in the floating world. And there is a reason the founder of Zen, Daruma, in addition to being a child’s toy in Japan, is associated with prostitutes. But that’s not what I want to talk about, either.
What I want to talk about is why Minakawa says she can’t commit suicide with her favorite lover, Seijuro. She begs off, saying that she has “attachments to the world.” By this she means not only desires and longings for the material and sensual delights (what in a Buddhist context we might normally think of as attachments) but rather something more intangible and compelling — obligations. She may, for example, owe money to the house and madame she belongs to, or there might be other duties that death would make it impossible for her to fulfill once she took that step, much as she might like to accompany Seijuro out of this world.
This set me to thinking in a new way, or at least in a nuanced way, about attachments — in the Buddhist sense and in my own life — as obligations rather than just longings or desires. Longings and desires are not only easy to contemplate leaving behind, but they can drive us, like Seijuro, to think about ending them by self-destruction — and this escape becomes yet another in the long spiral of seductions. But so long as one has obligations, one cannot honorably absent oneself from the world. That would be the height of selfishness in Tokugawa era society. It is only when disability or dishonor makes it impossible to fulfill one’s obligations that one is not only allowed but sometimes bound to end one’s worldly existence.
Instead of committing suicide, the eighteen-year-old Seijuro becomes a monk (although not for long). One might say that he leaves the world symbolically. Minakawa, on the other hand, does manage, inexplicably it seems after all her reasonable objections, to kill herself in actuality. Seijuro’s ordination is the less permanent solution to their temporary problem, since he will live to love another day.
Becoming a monk means giving up not only attachments to personal desires, but also to social obligations. This is the meaning of the home-leaving part of our ordination ceremony. Yet there is a tension here, a contradiction, and it is this that I find most interesting. At the same time that monastics leave their worldly obligations behind on one level, yet they pick up other heavier obligations on another level. For what are we bodhisattvas but beings who embrace our obligation to save all beings? We don’t strive to be arhats or lohans, enlightened beings detached from the world, basking in the glow of a premature nirvana. On the contrary, our job is much more nuanced, difficult, and interesting.
Like the young Seijuro, I was once like a floating weed, free and unattached — and often miserable in the unbearable lightness of being, disrobing the world and reveling in revealing its blemishes. The erotic world was all in all for me, my religion, I suppose. The world of shiki — of color, form, sensuality, texture — was all I cared about, that and elegance and intelligence and beauty. It was only when I became a monk — and before that, a bodhisattva — that I became truly engaged and embraced my obligations. It was only then that I finally gave up the seductive idea of suicide and took on the burdens that paradoxically grounded me in a sort of freedom I had never known.
The attachment of obligation saved me. My duty to the temple, my duty to Robert, my teacher, saved me. My duty to my wife and daughters saved me (that was always available but somehow I had always managed to shirk it). My obligation to you, my Zen students, saves me every day.
This is the meaning and value of sangha. It’s not about friendship or fellowship. It’s not about some personal spiritual enlightenment. It’s about the power of the obligation to save all beings. We save each other without even knowing it, without even trying. It’s not about you. It’s not about me. It’s not even about us. Zazen teaches us this without words, without nuance. It’s all about seeing the world in the nakedness of ku, emptiness. No matter how lightly we wear this obligation, it is about the reason to go on. To endure.
The etymology of obligation derives from the Latin, and it has to do with a formal and binding pledge, a pledge that we take in the form of the ordination vows, those four impossible obligations: to save all beings, to drop all illusions, to penetrate all gateless gates, to be buddhas here and now. But it is important to note that we attach ourselves to these vows in the same way that we attach ourselves to water when entering a stream. You have heard me say before: attachment is not a problem, attachment is natural — it’s attachment to attachment that is neurotic. You can no more cling to your vows than you can cling to the waters of the stream: they cling to you, naturally, like Dogen’s fish swimming in the ocean.
We must take care, then, not to become attached to our attachments, nor obligated to our obligations. Otherwise we become rigid and pious when we should be pliant and lighthearted. Are these contradictions? Yes. Are they paradoxes? Yes. Everything worthwhile in life is a paradox.
— Richard Collins
A Parade of Courtesans (c. 1690) Hishikawa Moronobu