A Life With No Temple: Ryokan's Hermit Poetry

Ryokan completed a full monastic training, twelve years under the teacher Kokusen at Entsuji, and then declined the outcome that training was supposed to lead toward. Rather than accept or seek a temple of his own, he settled into a small mountain hut near the province he had grown up in and lived on what he could beg, an arrangement that gave him no institutional standing at all within the Soto hierarchy he had trained inside. What he did instead, by every account that survives him, was write, in a register almost nobody else practicing formal Zen at the time was using: plain, direct, often self-deprecating verse about begging bowls, weather, missed visits and the games he played with the village children, alongside more conventional Chinese-style kanshi engaging classical themes. Read together, the choice of life and the choice of poetic voice look like the same decision made twice, a preference for the unadorned over the credentialed that shows up equally in his refusal of temple rank and in his refusal of poetic convention. His calligraphy drew the same praise for the same reason, valued less for technical polish than for an unaffected directness later calligraphers found difficult to imitate precisely because it was not built from technique in the first place. He is remembered today more as a poet than as a Zen teacher in any institutional sense, which is very nearly the outcome his own choices aimed at.