Scolding Oneself
Kōdō Sawaki — Zen Talks
In the expression ekō henshō, which means “turning the light inward,” the word ekō can also be written with different characters,1 and in this case it means the dedication of merit. To dedicate in this way is a very good thing indeed.
You dedicate to another the food you yourself would eat. You dedicate to another the bonus you receive. To dedicate things to one’s children or one’s wife—this people do readily enough. But when it comes to dedicating something to an enemy, though it is certainly a good thing, it is not so easily done.
Among the people who come to hear my talks, there is one person who is always quarreling with his wife. The husband, puffed up with the little knowledge he has picked up from listening to me, immediately looks down on his wife and says things like:
“You’re no good at all! The other day I heard about the Zen temple cook in the Tenzo Kyōkun…”
And so he puts on quite an air of superiority. Tenzo Kyōkun (Instructions for the Temple Cook) is the set of instructions that Dōgen gave to the tenzo, the head cook of a Zen monastery, explaining the proper attitude for managing the kitchen.
Then there was an old woman who said to her husband:
“Look here, you’d better stop going to listen to that monk’s talks. Every time you come back from hearing him, you get more and more difficult to deal with. If you get any worse than this, I won’t be able to live with you at all. At your age, you ought to be getting gentler—not harder to put up with.”
All that happens because people take the knowledge they hear from my talks and use it only to look outward at the world, without the least turning the light back upon themselves. They do not reflect on themselves. It is just like the critics. They leave their own affairs alone and talk only about the other fellow. Intellectuals are especially prone to this habit. They are always saying, “That fellow is doing this,” or “That fellow is doing that.” They see the faults of others perfectly well—but when it comes to themselves, they leave themselves entirely out of it.
There is a story about a sumo wrestler who kept talking only about his victories:
“Over there I slammed him down—bang!—and made him lick the dirt. And over there I beat another one like this.”
So someone asked him, “Well then, have you never been defeated?”
The wrestler replied, “My defeats? The other fellow is telling those stories.”
At any rate, critics and writers are, by and large, often this sort of breed. It would be far more interesting if they mixed in a little of their own affairs as material when they write. But they leave themselves out and write only about other people. Other people’s business—they understand that very well indeed.
People are all like that. I’m the same myself. Even when I was in the army—when the command “Attention!” was given and the soldiers lined up—just by looking at the ranks I could tell everything: number so-and-so in the back is out of place, number so-and-so in the front, the man in the front row has his right foot forward, the left foot back, the heel drawn in, the toes not lined up… I could see every little thing like that.
But when it comes to oneself—even sitting in zazen—you cannot tell in the least where you yourself are crooked.
There is also a certain wife who often comes to hear my talks. She is forever looking for faults in her husband. She will say things like, “My husband is one of those sham-Zen types…”
Then the husband gets angry and snaps back, “You’re just a woman. You run off to the temple, sit zazen, listen to those talks, and then come home acting like you’re better than your husband. What are you doing—trying to size me up?!”
But this wife, too, does not know turning the light back upon herself. As for me, I am always scolding myself. “Scolding” may sound a little strange, but what it means is simply looking at oneself. It is turning the light inward. If you only look at yourself, that is enough.
A drunken old man, drinking his saké, would roll his R’s and say to his children, “You mustn’t drink!” But they didn’t pay any attention. In their mind was defiance: “I bet the hell I will when I’m older.”
I had a similar experience when I was a child. An old monk called me over, saying, “Come here for a moment.” I went, and there he was, drinking sake himself, spouting whatever he pleased, even though I was trying to listen seriously. In my heart I thought,
“What’s this crap? If you weren’t feeding me, I wouldn’t give a damn what you say.”
Kitarō Nishida once wrote about “seeing the subjective as the objective.”
It means placing yourself in the position of the objective. It’s like setting up a mirror and looking at yourself in it. If you peer closely at your reflection, you can see clearly: “My face is all sour; there are deep wrinkles on my forehead, carved like sculpture; the corners of my eyes are drooping; my eyebrows are thick,” and so on. You can understand yourself properly. But if you don’t place yourself in the objective, you won’t see this. In other words, if you place the subjective in the objective, the subjective is the objective, and the objective is the subjective. There is no subjective and objective apart from yourself.
Sometimes you see someone singing and think, “What an annoying face!”
But if you think carefully, you realize that before it even looks annoying, it is your own feeling that has already turned unpleasant. Because you’re thinking, “That rascal, mocking me!” it is your own attitude that makes the other person appear to resent you. Your feelings reflect outward very easily.
I was raised as a stepchild, so whenever I got scolded, I’d often take it out on the cat we had. Even the cat seemed to understand. It knew that if I showed up, it would get a spanking, so the moment I appeared, it would dart away. If even a cat can pick up on this, humans are even sharper. When you hate someone, they hate you too. Those two, full of hatred, sit side by side, each building an impenetrable fortress from their own anger, facing each other. No wonder humans can never really get along.
The word ekō in ekō henshō is usually written as 回光 in the original Chinese. However, when written as 回向, it is pronounced the same but, as Sawaki explains, means “to dedicate the merit.” The whole expression suggests shining awareness back on oneself, like a mirror reflecting your own image.