Hakuin Ekaku 白隠慧鶴 (1685 –1768)

The Second Patriarch Standing in the Snow

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Hanging scroll, ink on paper

Inscription:
二祖昔寒夜
終夜立雪庭積
雪埋腰初祖見
呵口諸佛無上少道
曠却難行難忍
能忍難行能行汝
等憍心慢心争豈
得分二祖即断左臂
見今時認無事安閑
為向上禅認無念無心
為宗票視瞎癡漢
將喜耶將悲耶嗟

Translation:
A long time ago, the Second Patriarch stood in a garden on a cold night until the snow came up to his waist. The First Patriarch saw this and scolded him: »It's wasteful for you to approach the marvelous ways of the Buddhas with worthless efforts. Can you endure that which cannot be endured, and practice that which cannot be practiced? How can you hope to know true religion with a shallow heart and an arrogant mind?« The Second Patriarch then cut off his left arm. Seeing this, Bodhidharma immediately allowed Huike access to peaceful tranquility, and let him practice an advanced level of Zen. Allowing freedom from ideas and feelings, the Second Patriarch practiced the true nature of religion and came to understand the blind and the stupid. On one hand, rejoice! On the other, how sad!

Seals:
1) Hakuin 白隠
2) Ekaku 慧鶴
3) Kokan’i 顧鑑意

Box inscription, outer:
»True (Ink) Traces of Zen Master Hakuin: The Second Zen Patriarch« 白隠禅師真蹟二祖

Box inscription, inner:
»Certified by the old monk Sōkaku, presently at the Shōin[ji] Temple, dated on an auspicious day in the 2nd month of 1960« 
昭和三十五年如月吉日現松蔭宗鶴翁識

Box inscriptions, end:
»Hakuin: Niso inscription, apprentice monk in snow. Bokubi« 白隠二祖賛　雪中雲水　墨美
»Hakuin Zen Monk: painting and inscription of Dharma Master Niso« 白隠禅師　二祖大師画賛

Oval seal mark: »Shinwa’an Collection« seal

Published in:
Morita, Shiryū 森田子龍, ed. Bokubi Tokushū: Hakuin bokuseki 墨美特集―白隠墨蹟．Kyoto: Bokubisha 墨美社, 1985, plate 263.
Tanaka Daisaburō 田中大三郎, ed. Hakuin zenshi bokusekishu 白隠禅師墨蹟集. Tokyo: Rokugei Shobō 六芸書房, 2006, plate 47

Hakuin here represents the Second Patriarch of Zen Buddhism, Eka 慧可 (Chinese: Huike; 487 – 593), as he is standing out in the snow, patiently hoping for the First Patriarch, the great Bodhdharma (Japanese: Daruma), to accept him as a student. We see the snow piling up on the monk’s hat and on the pines in the background and feel the hardship of the monk hoping for approval from the stern Indian monk, sitting in meditation in the Shaolin Temple 少林寺.

According to the records, Eka was born close to Luoyang 洛陽 and practiced religions under a number of masters before coming to the snowy garden at age forty. The famous story alluded to in Hakuin’s inscription describes how the monk was finally able to receive Bodhidharma’s approval by cutting off his left hand and presenting this as a tribute to the older monk. After several years of hard practice, Eka received the Dharma transmission from Bodhidharma. During the lifetime of 
Eka, Buddhism suffered under persecutions in China. Nonetheless, he is recorded as having preached for over forty years and coming to rest at the high age of 107.

The earliest extant biographies of Zen Patriarchs is the Biographies of Eminent Monks (519) (高僧傳; Japanese: Kōsōden; Chinese: Gaoseng zhuan) and its sequel, Further Biographies of Eminent Monks (続高僧傳; Japanese: Zoku Kōsōden; Chinese: Xu gaoseng zhuan), written in 645 by Daoxuan (道宣; 596 – 667). For the Japanese monks, however, the fourteenth-century compilation Transmission of the Lamp (伝灯録; Dentōroku), by Keizan Jokin (1268 –1325), a collection of 53 enlightenment stories based on the traditional legendary accounts of the Zen transmission between successive masters and disciples, became very influential.1 Although the stories are semi-legendary, they came to take on real importance for the early modern Japanese monks, such as Hakuin.2 Although Hakuin’s inscription quotes sections of the Transmission of the Lamp, there are sections that do not appear there or in other known texts. As all of Hakuin’s Second Patriarch paintings have variations in the text, it seems safe to say that Hakuin worked from memory and added or amended sections as he saw fit.

Many portraits of Zen patriarchs by Hakuin exist, and he is famous for his images of the Bodhidharma and of the Kannon, which comprise the largest group of extant Hakuin paintings. There are, however, very few paintings of the Second Patriarch.3 According to the great Hakuin scholar Takeuchi Naoji 竹内尚次, the portraits of the Second Patriarch are important as a representation of Hakuin’s earliest extant paintings—he suggests that a painting similar to the present work was brushed by Hakuin in his thirty-fifth year.4 Moreover, Takeuchi provides no examples of Second Patriarch paintings brushed after the earliest period of painting.5 This makes the Second Patriarch paintings rare, as Hakuin claimed to have burned all his earlier paintings.

Furthermore, it could well be significant that Hakuin only painted the Second patriarch painting in his younger days, at a time when he was still struggling with the principles of Zen Buddhism. At times he surely must have felt like the Second Patriarch himself. And as he writes in his inscription (»On one hand, rejoice! On the other, how sad!«), Hakuin seems not entirely at ease with the message of extreme self-mutilation that the story valorizes. Perhaps he was able to separate himself from the pressing message of the story of the arm-sacrificing monk as he got older and more settled into Zen practice.

The painting is also of interest in the way it shows Hakuin, the painter, working with shapes. Looking at the composition, one can see a carefully orchestrated semi-circle of triangular shapes, starting with the monk’s hat in front and repeating with pine trees behind. The receding line of similar shapes works to anchor the monk firmly into the composition of this painting and further emphasizes the key point of the story: the permanence, duration, and perseverance of the monk as he stands rooted to the garden ground over night while the snow piles up around him. It is a fine example of how a painting’s composition reinforces its motif. It also reminds us that the often haphazard-looking appearance of Hakuin paintings might well be anything but spontaneous: the compositions are likely the result of much consideration of shapes and painterly ideas.

The painting is housed in a kiri box that was certified and inscribed in February 1960 by the Hakuin authority Tsūzan Sōkaku (1891–1974), the seventeenth abbot of Hakuin’s old temple, the Shōinji Temple in Hara.

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