Read the Revolution of Everyday Life

I have started watching beastars, its good folks

DAIGU SOCHIKU

大愚宗築

Died on the sixteenth day of the seventh month, 1669 past the age of eighty

Daigu was raised in a Zen monastery. While he was still a young monk, a woman asked him to hold a funeral service for her son. After the burial she asked, “Where has my child gone?” Daigu had no answer for her, and the incident shook him profoundly. He abandoned the monastery and went to be alone in the mountains.

Daigu was fond of drinking; it is said that he was usually half-drunk. He did not restrain his speech and used to insult people while conversing with them. In spite of his eccentricity, or perhaps because of it, people from all ranks of society were drawn to him, and they would come to him on the mountain to hear his words.

Daigu later moved to Edo, where he gave sanctuary in his temple to two women, mistresses of a daimyo from whom they had escaped. This act added to already existing rumours about Daigu’s relationships with women, but Daigu gave them no heed. Because of the bad name such behavior gave him, his rise in the religious hierarchy was delayed, but Daigu himself did not care for power and authority. When an honorable post was at last offered him, he refused it on the grounds that he would be dismissed anyway because of his peculiar character.

The name Daigu, which the monk chose for himself, means “great fool.” To his self-portrait he added these words: “This monk is bound in chains of ignorance and lust. He is not able to follow the way of the Buddha. As his name is, so is he - a great fool.”

Lying on his deathbed, Daigu wrote the following:

Needles pierce my ailing body, and my pain grows greater. This life of mine, which has been like a disease - what is its meaning? In all the world I haven’t a single friend to whom I can unburden my soul. Truly all that appears to the eye is only a flower that blooms in a day.

Three days before his death Daigu wrote a short poem praising himself as “unique in his generation.” At the end of the poem he put the words “three days before.”

Did he regret having boasted and wish to write a different poem? The following day he requested that his attendant bring him writing paper, and as the latter was about to hand it to his master, Daigu hit him. A day later Daigu died.

early post