From the Chiasmus archive: April 02, 2019. "THE ZEN REBELS: OBSCURE HERMITS AND EXISTENTIAL REFORMERS (PART 17) YOKOYAMA SODŌ (PART 2)"

 

Yokoyama Sodō passed away from Pneumonia in 1980. He lived as the personification of a modern Zen Hermit, he was probably one of the last.  Yet, his legacy is known of living within moment, the now.  Residing at Kaikoen Park, his “Temple”.  The focus, to what Zen refer to as the Zazen.  The meditation and posture is the enlightenment of practice knowing that all there is, will be.  There is nothing else.  Closed off, detached.  But, there is something else, beyond the simplicity of his presence in that park Yokoyama resided in for over twenty years, was his trueness of meditation – it wasn't the Zazen or the ceremonial longings that was his Zen.  It was, the rejection and acceptance of the natural world.  To live solidarity, in a hasty constructed canopy, with his cooking utilizes, inks and paper.  Yokoyama and others similar to him, prompt the question which may not have a direct answer. 

What is Zen for the individual? 

"Satori is being enlightened to the fact that we are deluded. There is then the desire, however small, to stop these deluded acts. That is how ordinary people are saved by zazen. So we realize, beyond a doubt, our ordinariness through our zazen practice, and any departure from zazen (Buddha) will give rise to the inability to deal with these delusions and hence we will lose our way. We can say that the world has gone astray because it can't deal with its delusions...All the troubles in this world, political, economic and so forth, are created from situations in which the awareness of one's ordinariness is absent. "Sawaki Roshi said, 'Those who are unaware of their ordinariness are from a religious point of view shallow and comical."

Yokoyama Sodō (1907-1980)

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(A.Glass 2019)