Teaching in Plain Speech: Bankei and the Unborn

Most Zen instruction of Bankei's era reached listeners through vocabulary borrowed from classical Chinese and Sanskrit-derived terms, a register that itself put a floor under who could follow a teaching closely. Bankei broke from that convention deliberately, delivering his talks in the everyday spoken Japanese of his lay audience, and audiences answered by turning out in numbers unusual for a Zen teacher of any period, reportedly in the tens of thousands over his teaching life. What he had to say in that plain speech was itself a kind of simplification, though not a dilution: he taught that everyone already possesses what he called the Unborn, an innate Buddha-mind that requires recognition rather than attainment, and that the elaborate structures of formal practice many contemporaries treated as necessary steps toward realization could themselves become obstacles if a student came to believe realization had to be built up over time rather than simply seen. This put him in occasional tension with more scholastic strands of Rinzai practice, since a teaching that plain speech alone could unlock direct insight has an uneasy relationship with any tradition invested in specialized training as the path to it. His own talks, later gathered and translated into English as Unborn: The Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei, remain one of the more accessible entry points into Zen teaching precisely because accessibility was the whole point of how he taught.