Shoma

In his book 'A Flower Does Not Talk', while discussing the fourth of Jitoku's 'Six Oxherding Pictures', Zenkei Shibayama, former Abbot of Nanzenji Monastery in Kyoto, Japan, relates a wonderful story from a booklet entitled "The Sayings and Doings of Shoma".

I think this must be the same Shoma that appears in an article by D.T. Suzuki, available on the 'Echoes of the Name' website. Suzuki says Shoma lived between 1799-1871, which matches Shibayama's description of him living "Toward the end of the Tokugawa regime".

While Shibayama writes that the stories come from a booklet entitled "The Sayings and Doings of Shoma", Suzuki gives the title as 'Shoma as He Was', but these are close enough to safely assume that both are talking about the same person and drawing from the same source.

Shoma was a Pure Land lay devotee, called a Myokonin in Japanese, who seemed to have had a variety of manual jobs and was, crucially for the story related by Shibayama, illiterate. Yet the stories of Shoma's faith and the wonderful expressions it took remain striking, and peculiarly familiar.

Zenkei Shibayama's story of Shoma is about how an arrogant monk tried to catch him out and humiliate him for his lack of learning. Holding up a Sutra and pointing at random to a page, the monk said "Tell me what is written on this page." Shoma, with awe-inspiring understanding and compassion, replied "It says, 'I will save you. I will save you.' Does it not?"

Suzuki writes about how Shoma, in response to shock at the fact he was taking a nap before an image of the Buddha, described being in the temple as being "back in my parent's home". In another story Shoma sleeps through a storm at sea. When his panic-stricken friends wake him, he asks "Are we still in the Shaba world?"

It's not recorded what he said next, but I imagine it was "Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?" In another story a friend comes to Shoma as he is sick and says "If you die, we will see to it that you have a fine tombstone over your grave". Suzuki records that Shoma replied "I shall never be under the stone".

The parallels are, to my mind, too obvious to be ignored. Perhaps some stories of that other simple working-class man who lived and acted entirely in the realm of faith filtered through to pre-modern Japan and were incorporated into a composite account of Shoma's life.

Or perhaps, simply, that those who live in deep faith will often behave in similar ways. Suzuki writes, "Shoma's world did not necessarily coincide with ours, he did not see things around him in the same light as we did, his eyes were fixed on a world beyond ours, though not in the sense of a separate world".

I'm often horribly torn over how I name my experience and rarely able to actualise it in daily life. But those that live in faith, woken in the boat by confused and desperate friends, rub their eyes and show the way. "Even in the rising waves", Suzuki writes, "he felt the loving arms of the Great Compassionate One".

Link:
Echoes of the Name: Shoma, by D.T. Suzuki