The extraordinary Shunkai, whose middle name was Suzu, was forced to get married against her will when she was still very young. Later, after the end of this marriage, she entered the university, where she studied philosophy.
Seeing Shunkai meant falling in love with her. Moreover, wherever she was, she fell in love herself. At the university, love reigned around her; later, when philosophy ceased to satisfy her and she began to visit a temple where Zen was taught, students fell in love with her.
Finally, she became a real Zen student in Kyoto. The brother monks from the small monastery of Kennin praised her for her sincerity. One of them turned out to be close to her in spirit and began to help her in comprehending Zen.
The abbot of Kennin, Mokurai - Silent Thunder - was stern. While he himself observed the rules, he expected the same from his monks. In modern Japan, for the dedication these monks devote to Buddhism, they reward themselves by having wives. Usually, when Mokurai found women in any of his monasteries, he drove them away from there with a floor brush. But it was as if the more he swept them out, the more came back.
And in this very monastery, the wife of the senior monk began to envy the seriousness and beauty of Shunkai. When she heard Shunkai's disciples praise her for her dedication to Zen, she felt like itching with scabies. In the end, she spread the rumor that Shunkai and this young monk were lovers. As a result, he was expelled from the monastery. Shunkai also left the monastery.
“Even though I could be mistaken in love,” thought Shunkai, “but if my friend was treated so unfairly, then this woman should not be in the monastery!”
That same night, using a can of kerosene, she set fire to the monastery. The monastery, which had stood for five hundred years, burned to the ground. The next morning she ended up at the police station.
A young lawyer became interested in her, and he began to try to mitigate her sentence.
“Don’t help me,” Shunkai told him. “I can decide to do something else so that I can go to jail again.”
Finally, her seven-year sentence expired, and Shunkai was released from prison, where a sixty-three-year-old guard fell in love with her. But now everyone already saw her as a criminal, no one wanted to communicate with her. Even Zen practitioners, who are supposed to believe in enlightenment in this life and in this body, have avoided it. Shunkai realized that Zen is one thing, but the people who study it are something completely different. Her relatives also wanted nothing to do with her. She squandered what she had, fell ill and became weak.
She met a priest of the Shinei sect, who taught her the name of the Merciful Buddha, and in this name Shunkai found consolation and peace of mind. She died still unusually beautiful, barely thirty years old.
Trying unsuccessfully to somehow earn a living, she partly wrote down and partly told her story to a writer. This is how it reached the people of Japan. And so the people who hated her, persecuted her and slandered her, now read about Shunkai’s life and cry with remorse.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru