In this case, the teacher he was referring to was Sawaki Kodo Roshi – he was a really great teacher. But Uchiyama Roshi practiced very closely with Sawaki Roshi for twenty-five years, until his death, so he knew Sawaki Roshi was not a special person, but an ordinary human being. Kodo Sawaki: To You. Essays of Kodo Sawaki. The Dharma Teachings of Kodo Sawaki. Today’s monks say zazen isn’t in demand anymore. They say, Sawaki is out of touch with the times. There is a bad deed, called “doing good”. For some, doing good is just a decoration. When something concerns the teaching, and at the same time it’s also a matter of expanding the business, somebody or another must have gotten something.

Kodo sawaki

• Kodo Sawaki Roshi, Uchiyama-roshi’s teacher, was described as being “like an ancient Zen master: fearless and unconventional.” By age 7, both his parents and the uncle who had later adopted him had died, and he was adopted by a professional gambler. At age 16 he went to Eihei-ji with aspirations of becoming a monk.
• Kodo Sawaki (nicknamed “Kodo the Homeless”) – is regarded by many as the greatest Zen Master of the twentieth-century. Kodo Sawaki was born in 1880 in Tsu, in the Mie prefecture. Orphaned at the age of ten, he was adopted by his lazy, gambling-addict uncle and his ex-prostitute wife.

Kodo Sawaki (沢木 興道Sawaki Kōdō^?, June 16, 1880-December 21, 1965) was a JapaneseSōtōZen teacher of the 20th century.

Biography

Sawaki's parents died early,^[1] and he was adopted by an uncle who then died.^[1] After his uncle's death, Sawaki was raised by a gambler.^[1] When he was 16, he ran away from home to become a monk at Eihei-ji, one of the two head temples of the Sōtō Zen sect, and was ordained in 1899.^[1][2] However, he was drafted to serve in the Imperial Japanese Army during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 to minister to the wounded. He later became a Zen teacher, and during the 1930s he served as a professor at Komazawa University.^[1][2] In 1949, he took responsibility for Antai-ji, a zen temple in northern Kyoto.^[1] Because of his regular travels throughout Japan to teach zen, and against tradition his not becoming a conventional abbot of a home temple, he came to be known as 'Homeless Kodo'^[1] ('homeless' in the Japanese referring more to his lack of a temple than a residence). Sawaki died on December 21, 1965, at Antaiji.^[2] He was succeeded by a senior disciple, Kosho Uchiyama.

He is known for his rigorous emphasis on zazen, in particular the practice of shikantaza, or 'just sitting'.^[1] He often called Zen 'wonderfully useless,' discouraging any gaining idea or seeking after special experiences or states of consciousness.

Lineage

Dharma transmission to:

Though Sawaki ordained many monks and nuns, only five monks and three nuns received Dharma Transmission (Shihō) from Sawaki:

• Shūyū Narita (1914-2004) who also had a few students in Europe,
• Kosho Uchiyama (1912-1998), who followed in his footsteps as abbot of Antai-ji,
• Sodō Yokoyama, also known as 'kusabue zenji (Zen master with the grassflute)',
• Satō Myōshin, active in Japan,
• Kōjun Kishigami^[3] (born 1941), lives in Japan, has got students in Japan, France and Germany,
• Jōshin Kasai, died 1984 in Antai-ji,
• Kōbun Okamoto, alive in Ichi-no-miya, Japan, where she teaches kesa sewing,
• Baikō Fukuda.

Influential students:

Other influential students of Sawaki are:

• Gudo Wafu Nishijima (born 1919), teacher of Brad Warner^[4] and Jundo Cohen^[5]
• Genkō Kawase (died. 1989), had her own temple Myōgen-ji in Nagoya,
• Sakai Tokugen, the teacher of Fumon Nakagawa, who teaches in Germany
• Kōun Enmyō (died 1980),
• Taisen Deshimaru^[6] (1914-1982), went to France in 1967, and established the Association Zen Internationale.

Bibliography

• The Zen Teaching of 'Homeless Kodo' (1990) by Uchiyama Kōshō

References

External links

Kodo Sawaki Sayings

• Sayings by Kodo Sawaki
• Seven chapters that were not included in the English translation of 'The Zen Teaching of 'Homeless Kodo' (Sayings by Kodo Sawaki with some texts by Kosho Uchiyama)
• Zen teachings by Kodo Sawaki

Kodo Sawaki Amazon

Kodo Sawaki Quotes

Dokusan