Abstract

BANKEI Yōtaku 盤珪永琢 was a seventeenth-century Japanese Zen master best known for originating the uniquely Japanese tradition known as “Unborn Zen”. Active during the early decades of the feudal Tokugawa period, Bankei was a popular teacher who traveled widely throughout Japan, urging his followers in simple, everyday language to live in the unborn Buddha-mind. His innovative teachings reached a broad audience, lay as well as ordained, helping to popularize Zen among the ordinary people of Japan. Bankei’s major contribution to the Zen discourse was the rhetoric of the “Unborn”. The “Unborn” was Bankei’s term for the mind as it is prior to our birth: the mind prior to all picking and choosing, prior to all conceptual discrimination, and prior to all self-serving calculation. Bankei taught that if one has an unshakable faith in this “Unborn,” also referred to by Bankei as “Buddha-mind”, and remains firmly committed to it, then one realizes that nothing more is needed. Bankei describes the experiences of the “Unborn” and “Bright Virtue” using the metaphor of a mirror.