The story of Isan and Kyōzan while they were out picking tea leaves has already been told in one of the preceding Essays. Zen history indeed abounds with such incidents as here referred to, showing how the masters try to discipline their pupils on every possible occasion. The events of daily life manifestly trivial on the surface, thus handled by the masters, grow full of signification. At any rate all these “mondoes” most eloquently illustrate the whole trend of the monastery life in olden days, where the spirit of work and service was so thoroughly and harmoniously blended with the high thinking on matters deeply spiritual. V The monks thus develop their faculties all round. They receive no literary, that is, formal education which is gained mostly from books and abstract instruction. But their discipline and knowledge are practical and efficient; for the basic principle of the Zendo life is “learning by doing.” They despise the so-called soft education which is like those predigested foods meant for the convalescent. When a lioness gives birth to her children, it is proverbially believed that after three days she will push them down over a deep precipice and see if they can climb up to her. Those that fail to come out of this trial are not taken care of any more. Whether this is true or not, something like that is aimed at by the Zen master who will treat the monks with every manner of seeming unkindness. The monks have not enough clothes to put on, not enough food to indulge in, not enough time to sleep, and, to cap these, they have plenty of work to do, menial as well as spiritual. The outer needs and the inward aspirations, if they work on harmoniously and ideally, will finally end in producing fine characters well-trained in Zen as well as in the real things of life. This unique system of education which is still going on at every Zendo is not so well known among the laity even in this country. And then the merciless tides of modern commercialism leave no corner uninvaded, and before long the solitary island of Zen may be found buried, as everything else, under the waves of sordid materialism. The monks themselves are beginning not to understand the great spirit of the successive masters. Though there are some things in the monastic education which may be improved, its highly religious and reverential feeling must be preserved if Zen is at all to live for many years yet to come.