Kitano Geleko, abbot of Eihei Temple, was 92 years old when he died in 1933. All his life he tried to live without attachments. As a wandering beggar, when he was 20 years old, he met a traveler smoking tobacco. They walked together along a mountain road, and then stopped to rest under a tree. The traveler invited Kitano to smoke, and he agreed because he was hungry.
“It’s so nice to smoke,” he remarked.
The traveler gave him an extra pipe and tobacco, and they smoked together. Kitano felt, “Such pleasure can destroy meditation. Before this goes too far, we need to stop.” And he threw away his pipe and tobacco.
When he was 23, he studied the I Ching, the wisest doctrine of the universe. It was winter and he needed warm clothes. He wrote about this to his teacher, who lived hundreds of miles away, and gave the letter to the traveler. Almost the entire winter passed, but he received neither an answer nor clothes. Kitano then resorted to the predictions of the I Ching, which also taught the art of fortune telling, to determine whether the letter had been delivered. He discovered that his letter had been lost. The letter from the teacher that arrived shortly thereafter made no mention of clothing.
“If I start making predictions from the I Ching, my meditation may suffer,” Kitano felt. He abandoned this amazing teaching and never again resorted to its power.
When he was 28, he began studying Chinese calligraphy and poetry. He improved quickly and became so skilled in these areas that his teacher was proud of him. Kitano thought: “If I don’t stop, I will become a poet, not a Zen teacher.”
And he never wrote another poem again.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru