Hakuin lived the greater part of his life in the small rural village of his birth. A sensitive, impressionable child, he was early tormented by an irrational fear of the fires of the Buddhist hell as dwelt upon by the priests of his mother's sect, the Nichiren. For relief he turned to the Lotus Sutra, but nothing he read seemed to ease his mind. Finally he became a wandering Zen monk, searching from temple to temple for a master who could give him enlightenment. He studied under various famous teachers and gradually achieved higher and higher levels of awareness. At the age of thirty-two he returned to his home village and assumed control of the ramshackle local Zen temple, which he eventually made the center of Rinzai Zen in Japan. Word of his spiritual intensity spread and soon novices were flocking to him. His humility and humanity were a shining light in the spiritual dark age of the Tokugawa, and he breathed life and understanding back into Zen. Despite Hakuin, official Zen never regained its influence in Japan. Someday perhaps the modern-day Western interest in Zen will give it new life somewhere outside Japan, but this life will almost certainly be largely secular. Indeed, the influence of Zen in the Momoyama and Tokugawa ages was already more pronounced in the secular world than in the spiritual. The bourgeois arts of these later years were notably less profound than those of the Ashikaga, but the spirit of Zen spread to become infused into the very essence of Japanese life, making the everyday business of living an expression of popular Zen culture. CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Tea Ceremony_ Chazen ichimi _(Zen and tea are one.) Traditional Japanese expression _The "dewy path" to teahouse _ THE TEA CEREMONY combines all the faces of Zen--art, tranquility, aesthetics. It is in a sense the essence of Zen culture. Yet this Zen ritual has been explained to the West in so many volumes of wordy gush that almost any description, including the above, deserves to be met with skepticism. There has to be more to the tea ceremony than meets the eye--and there is. But before unraveling the unseen threads of this Zen fabric, let us pause for a moment to consider the beverage itself. The drinking of tea seems almost to have been the world's second oldest profession. One legend claims that tea was discovered in the year 2737 B.C., when leaves from a tea bush