71 See note 24. Here, a colloquial translation with a chatty commentary; published in 1907 by Hakubunkan, it proved extremely popular.
72 Chinese: Zilu (widely referred to in Western writings as Tzu-lu, the Wade-Giles romanization).
73 Analects, chapter 5, number 14: “Whenever Zilu heard something new, until he had succeeded in carrying it out, he was constantly worried lest in the meantime he should learn of something else to be accomplished .”
74 At times misleadingly rendered as “houseboy” or “student lodger,” shosei denotes a distinctive arrangement that thrived mainly in the Meiji period whereby, typically, a secondary-school or university student would live in a household (mostly upper-middle class or higher) and, in exchange for room and board, perform a range of duties, from tutoring the family’s young children to errand-running and menial chores.
75 The “theater” here is ayose, a small, traditional-style theater with cushions on tatami mats rather than chairs and a small stage with a podium at the front. For much of the Edo period—also, with the exception of the last half of Meiji era, in the modern period, when the number of such theaters eventually shrank to a very few—yose had also been used informally to refer to the main forms of entertainment on view: comic monologues (rakugo) and intricate tales of adventure, often based on historical events (kōdan). The aforementioned exception in modern times, which applies to the performance that the couple attend here, was created by the enormous popularity of jōruri ballads, a form rooted in the late seventeenth century but given a new lease on life from the mid-1880s to the 1910s, through the reappearance of young women balladeers (onna-gidayu), who for much of the Edo era had been banned from the stage.
76 Literally, sitting in meditation, a practice included in some of the earliest forms of Buddhism introduced into Japan (including the orthodox synthesis of doctrines and practice embraced by the long-dominant Tendai sect), after the thirteenth-century importation from China of the Chan (Japanese: Zen) sect. With its central emphasis on this practice, zazen came to be more or less exclusively associated with the several independent branches of this denomination that evolved on Japanese soil.
77 A Zen (Rinzai sect) temple built in the fourteenth century under the auspices of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu; one of Kyoto’s Five Mountains (Gozan), each a major center of learning and art during the Ashikaga period (fourteenth-sixteenth centuries) and beyond.
78 Saikontan (Chinese: Caigentan): a popular collection of pithy exhortations by Hong Yingming (1560–1615) that draws syncretically on Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist principles.
79 The phrase “prior to the birth of one’s father and mother” is used with some frequency in Buddhist discourse, especially of the Chan or Zen schools, to mean something like “time out of mind,” and has been loosely glossed in metaphysical terms—at least by secular commentators—as the realm of absolute truth, beyond all contingencies of time and space.
80 Teishō: the constituent characters for this compound mean literally to raise (or “bring up”) and to enunciate, suggesting a highly formulaic exposition that, in keeping with the historical aversion in Zen Buddhism to the analytical mode, is perhaps closer to a recitation than what is generally meant by a lecture.
81 A compilation of one hundred koan with commentaries, the original version of which is attributed to the Chan master Xuedou Zhongxian (Japanese: Setchō Juken; 980–1052). Sometimes translated as The Blue Cliff Record, here Sōseki actually gives the work a less common title, Hekiganshū.
82 Zenkan sakushin: compiled as a primer for neophytes in 1600 by the Chinese monk Chu-hung, this work achieved wide currency in Japanese Zen due to the high esteem in which it was held by Hakuin, the influential Zen reformist of the mid-Tokugawa era.
83 Although this word, which has been anglicized in recent decades, has been used throughout this section of the original to refer to the person hitherto called “Master” in the translation, the phrasing here suggests that to address him directly as “Rōshi”—i.e., in the vocative case—presupposes a closer degree of discipleship than the likes of Sōsuke could presume.
84 This is a literal rendering of the original, which is an established locution of classical Chinese origin. (There seems to be no agreement as to which ancient text it first occurred in.)
85 Kenshō shita: one of numerous Buddhist terms that tend to be flattened out into “enlightened” in English. It is defined in several non technical dictionaries as daigo, or a “great satori.”
86 The Iwanami edition of The Gate attributes this quotation to the Chūingyō, a sutra translated early in the transmission of the Indian canon to China, in which the historical Buddha, after his own death, is presented as preaching the merits of the Great Vehicle (Mahayana) to the souls of all sentient beings who have recently died and are waiting to be reborn again. The authenticity of this particular passage, however, which proclaims that now that the Buddha has attained to enlightenment, all sentient beings can immediately enter into the same state, has been questioned on the grounds that it cannot be found in the oldest extant texts outside Japan, and hence, some have alleged, must be a later Japanese embroidery (or “forgery,” as at least one scholar has alleged).
87 A posthumously published work by Musō Sōseki (1275–1351), a major figure in the furtherance of the prestige (and secular power) of Rinzai sect Zen in the Muromachi period. Kokushi (roughly, “preceptor-general”) was a government-conferred title given to prominent teacher-monks belonging to the three state-favored denominations in the medieval period (besides Rinzai Zen, the Ritsu and Jōdō sects).
88 Daitō Kokushi (1282–1337): another prominent Rinzai cleric and the founder of the Daitokuji in Kyoto.
89 Shumōn mūjintō ron: by Tōrei Enji (1721–1792), a disciple of Hakuin and the abbot of the Ryūtakuji. (It has been translated into English as Discourse on the Inexhaustible Lamp of the Zen School.)
90 Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1768), the abbot of the Shōinji, who devoted special efforts to encouraging Zen practice among laymen, and through his writings and teachings effected a significant revival of the Rinzai sect in the mid-Edo period.
91 The objects of this back-handed compliment are the faithful of the Nichiren denomination, of which there is one main branch and several offshoots, both in Japan and in various other countries, all of them professing adherence to the distinctive emphases, doctrinal, liturgical, etc., formulated by the medieval Buddhist innovator Nichiren (1222–1282). A central devotional practice is the invocation of the title of the Lotus Sutra, accompanied by the rhythmic beating of a drum or a wooden block. (Nichiren, for his part, had routinely denounced the practices of Zen as the work of temma: “archfiends.”)
92 Abbot Kōsen (1816–1892): in the Meiji period, as the abbot of the Engakuji (the model for the temple depicted in The Gate), he reached out to secondary-school and university students, even as they underwent rigorous education in the now heavily Westernized curricula, and thus contributed to an emergent, specifically intellectual, interest in Zen.
93 Still extant, the park is located about three hundred yards north of Benkei Bridge (which is on the outer palace moat near Akasaka Mitsuke Station), opposite what is now the Hotel New Otani in central Tokyo.
94 Shishi-ruirui: no such established locution is to be found in the standard reference works, though the meaning is clear from the individual components.
Sōseki Natsume, The Gate
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