The cypress in the courtyard

Sanchéz, Jorge A. - The Cypress in the Courtyard. Sayings and facts of the Zen monk Joshu. Editions Abraxas. Barcelona. 1998

This XXth century that saw the "God's death" prophesied by Nietzsche, experienced an increasing interest towards the East religions, especially towards the Buddhism. It escapes from nobody that precisely this fundamental quality of the Buddhism, that of being a religion without god, has made her attractive to the skeptical western minds. His ways after the individual liberation have been also especially well received in a few more and more individualistic societies.

The Zen Buddhism, with this radical proposal for the sudden lighting that the state allows, we might say of hyper-conscience, in the development of the daily activities, it has become especially popular from the 70s, when hallucinogenic, the rock and roll, and the videos seem to bombard our consciences with the hope of a sudden lighting that wakes up us of this continuous lethargy into which our lives are turning.

This sociological phenomenon is allowing the gradual rescue of the big thinkers who developed the doctrines of the Zen Buddhism (chan in China), before it was happening to Japan where he lived through his second climax. Rescue that, curiously it comes to us in an inverse chronological order, what has done that the translation of the Chinese teachers comes after the diffusion of his Japanese disciples.

The translation of these pioneering works is transforming the literary panorama of the dynasty Tang, to whose already well-known wealth of magnificent poets, it is necessary to add now the least magnificent Zen set of teachers, who like Joshu (Ciao chou in Chinese) contribute a work of an enviable depth and an incomparable beauty.

Joshu is the quito patriarch of the School of the South of the Zen Buddhism. School founded by Hui Neng after fleeing from Shaolin to Canton, and that is, according to the experts, which develops entirely the doctrines outlined by Bodhidharma.

The work of Joshu is perhaps the most hermetic and simultaneously the simplest, of the first teachers. Along hundred events and hundreds of anecdotes only it seems to repeat the importance of assuming the proper life and of managing to exceed the "distinction - discrimination level, that is to say, to achieve the awakening."

More than 500 koans that compose the book, they are as his translator says: "exercises for the mind, beyond the thought, which the disciple must solve without using the reason."

The best homage to Joshu, is not to speak any more of the book. Leave that it is read.

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