Hakuin Ekaku: The Monk Who Revived Rinzai Zen

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 27 October 2026

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Hakuin Ekaku (1686–1769) was the Japanese Zen master who revived the Rinzai school, teaching for half a century from Shōin-ji in his home village of Hara, below Mount Fuji. The Joint Council for Rinzai and Ōbaku Zen calls him “the most important reviver of the Rinzai tradition”, and by its account and that of the scholar G. Victor Sōgen Hori, every Rinzai master in Japan today belongs to his lineage. He is remembered for the “sound of one hand” koan, the Song of Zazen and his ink paintings.

His life is known mainly from his own late writings and a chronicle by his disciple Tōrei, so this page names the source of each episode. The koan itself is discussed on Zen koans, the school on Zen Buddhism.

Where his life story comes from, and why the dates disagree

Three works tell most of the story. Wild Ivy (Itsumadegusa) is a verse autobiography that Hakuin composed, his translator Norman Waddell writes, “in the final month of 1765, his eighty-first year” (his 2002 introduction to Yasenkanna gives 1766); it was printed in 1768, and Waddell judges its primary motive instructional. Yasenkanna (Idle Talk on a Night Boat, 1757) tells of his illness and its cure. The third is the Hakuin Oshō Nempu, a year-by-year chronicle compiled by his disciple Tōrei Enji (d. 1792) and printed only in 1820, after Tōrei’s own disciple Taikan Bunshū had edited it. Waddell calls it “hardly a biography in the modern sense”. Hakuin tells the bell, the pride that followed, Shōju’s grab at his nose and the old woman’s broom himself, in Wild Ivy, nearly sixty years after the events; the Nempu retells them with its own dates and more dialogue, and the cricket of 1726 we found only in the Nempu. Where the two differ, this page says which one it follows.

Many references, among them the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, give his dates as 1685–1768: Japanese calendar years. The Nempu puts his birth on the 25th day of the 12th month of the second year of Jōkyō, and since the Japanese year then began about a month after ours, Waddell explains, that day falls in January 1686. The old sources count a person as one year old at birth, and they do not always agree with each other: Hakuin says he became a monk at fourteen, the Nempu at fifteen, in 1699. This page gives years, not ages.

Childhood, ordination and the bell at Eigan-ji

As a boy, the Nempu says, he heard a Nichiren priest preach on the punishments of hell, and it made his “flesh crawl”. Hakuin tells the same fear in Wild Ivy, and it set him on the way to the priesthood. In 1699 the priest Tanrei Soden ordained him at Shōin-ji and named him Ekaku, “Wise Crane”.

A few years later a story shook him. He learned that the Chinese master Yantou (Japanese Gantō) had been killed by bandits. “That discovery caused me great distress,” he wrote in Wild Ivy: if such a master could meet that end, what hope had an ordinary monk? The Council’s history says the crisis turned him from meditation to literature for several years, until he read how the master Shishuang Chuyuan kept himself awake at night by jabbing his thigh with an awl. (The Nempu puts that reading in the following year.)

In the spring of 1708 he went to Eigan-ji in Takada, in Echigo province, to hear lectures. The Nempu says he sat on his koan day and night for ten days, and at dawn on the seventeenth day of the second month heard a distant temple bell: “In that instant he achieved great enlightenment.” He shouted that Yantou was “all right after all”. Hakuin’s own account in Wild Ivy differs: he vowed a seven-day fast in the shrine behind the temple, and the bell came “in the middle of the night”, when he cried out, “Old Ganto is alive and well!” Both tell of the pride that came next. “I was possessed by a feeling of enormous pride,” he wrote; the Nempu has him telling himself, “No one in the past three hundred years has penetrated to such a glorious realization.”

Shōju Rōjin: the teacher who humbled him

That same year he travelled with a monk named Sōkaku to a tiny hermitage at Iiyama, in Shinano province, to meet Dōkyō Etan (1642–1721), called Shōju Rōjin, “the Old Man of Shōju-an”, an heir, the Nempu says, of Shidō Munan. In both Wild Ivy and the Nempu, Shōju asked about Zhaozhou’s “Mu” (see koan). Hakuin answered that there was no place to get a hand or leg on it, and Shōju grabbed him by the nose. In the Nempu, Shōju says he has just got a good hand on it and calls him a “cave-dwelling Zen corpse”, a taunt he keeps up for days. The breakthrough came on a begging round, when an old woman lost patience and struck him with a broom. Both accounts say the koans he had been stuck on were suddenly clear; in the Nempu, Shōju confirmed it: “You have broken through the Barrier!”

He stayed a little over eight months. Shōju’s parting charge, in the Nempu, was to devote himself “to turning out one or two real monks” rather than many. Waddell, introducing Wild Ivy, says it was from Shōju that Hakuin learned the importance of “post-satori” practice, the training that goes on after an awakening. Two cautions. Waddell calls Shōju “a rather shadowy figure, known almost solely through the accounts found in Hakuin’s writings”, and notes one writer who held he was a lay teacher, not a priest. And Waddell’s wording is that Hakuin “came to regard” Shōju as his master; we found no source that settles whether there was a formal Dharma transmission.

”Zen sickness” in Hakuin’s own account

In Yasenkanna, which Waddell calls “by far the most popular of his many writings”, Hakuin describes an illness that came on when he threw himself into practice, forsaking food and sleep: zenbyō, “Zen sickness”. He writes of a “heart-fire” rising and of an exhaustion of body and mind that neither teachers nor physicians could relieve. He then sought out, he says, a hermit named Hakuyū, who lived in a cave in the Shirakawa hills of Kyoto and was reputed to be between 180 and 240 years old. Hakuyū taught him an “introspective meditation” (naikan) that gathers the body’s vital energy (ki) low in the abdomen, and a “butter method” (nanso no hō) of visualisation. In less than three years, Hakuin says, his illnesses cleared. This is told here as part of his life; it is not medical advice, and this page does not teach the method.

Scholars read the story in layers. Waddell, summarising a 1960 study by Itō Kazuo, reports that Hakuyū was real: the hermit Ishikawa Jishun (1646–1709), whose fatal fall from a cliff in 1709 is recorded in a temple death registry, probably a year before the visit Hakuin dates to 1710. The title, Waddell notes, alludes to a saying about someone who pretends to have been somewhere he has not. Among those who have closely studied the evidence, Waddell writes, there is “fairly general agreement” that Hakuin did not visit Hakuyū but used him to dramatise the teaching; yet some, among them many of the rank and file of the Rinzai school, are inclined to believe the visit took place, and no one is likely to prove otherwise now. The illness itself “was apparently not fabricated”, in Waddell’s view; he places it in Hakuin’s later twenties, overcome around his thirtieth or thirty-first year. Its date was unsettled early: Tōrei’s manuscript Nempu put the episode in Hakuin’s thirty-first year, and Taikan moved it when he edited the book for print.

Shōin-ji and the cricket

Called home by his ailing father, he was installed as resident priest of Shōin-ji early in 1717, when the temple was, the Nempu says, in “an almost indescribable state of disrepair”. In the autumn of 1726, the Nempu continues, he was reading the parables chapter of the Lotus Sutra when a cricket chirped beneath the temple, and the doubts he had carried since the start of his search dissolved; he saw at last why the Lotus is called the king of sutras. The Council’s history puts his “decisive spiritual breakthrough” at the age of forty-two, the age the Nempu gives for that year. Waddell, introducing Wild Ivy, uses the word differently: there it is the awakening under Shōju that he calls “decisive”.

Students came slowly: “At the beginning, I had only two or three monks with me,” he wrote in Wild Ivy, and in old age “about three hundred”. The preface to Yasenkanna describes monks living in abandoned houses for miles around the temple, hungry and cold.

The “Is that so?” story

A Hakuin story widely retold in English is not one he tells himself. In “Is That So?”, a girl who is with child names him as the father. When her angry parents confront him he says only “Is that so?”, cares for the baby, and a year later, when she admits the father is someone else, hands the child back with the same words. That story, and one in which a soldier named Nobushige asks him whether there really is a paradise and a hell, are among the 101 Zen Stories transcribed by Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps and collected in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled by Reps (Tuttle, 1957). The book says these stories came from the Shasekishū, written late in the thirteenth century by the Zen teacher Mujū, and from anecdotes in books published in Japan around 1900; a story about Hakuin cannot come from the first. We did not find either story in the translations of Yasenkanna, the first two parts of Wild Ivy or the first part of the Nempu that this page draws on. Read them as later Zen lore, not as biography.

The Song of Zazen and his other writings

Hakuin wrote in both vernacular Japanese and classical Chinese. The Joint Council calls the short Song of Zazen (Zazen wasan) “one of the most frequently chanted texts at sermons and meditation sessions for laypeople and clergy alike”. It opens:

That opening puts the teaching of buddha-nature in Hakuin’s own Rinzai terms: beings are buddhas already, as ice is already water. Its theme, the Council explains, is that the meditative mind should carry on beyond the cushion, “whether walking, standing, sitting, or lying”, and the song ends by calling this very place the Land of Lotuses and this very body the Buddha’s. For the sitting itself, see zazen.

His own list in Wild Ivy includes Poison Stamens from the Thicket of Thorns (Keisō dokuzui), his Zen records in Chinese, My Tea Kettle (Orategama, 1749) and a Grain-grinding Song. In Yabukōji he set out the “sound of the single hand”, the koan quoted on Zen koans. Philip Yampolsky’s The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings (Columbia University Press, 1971) translates Orategama, Yabukōji and others into English. Norman Waddell’s translations include Wild Ivy and The Essential Teachings of Zen Master Hakuin, a translation of Sokkō-roku kaien-fusetsu, both in Shambhala editions of 2010; for the art, see The Sound of One Hand by Audrey Yoshiko Seo with Stephen Addiss (Shambhala, 2010).

Teaching lay people

He also took his teaching out of the monastery. Hakuin says he travelled to temples, monasteries and “laymen’s houses”, and in the preface to Yasenkanna he writes that his Zen meetings drew three hundred and sometimes five hundred people. He also promoted a short chant to Avalokiteshvara, the Ten-phrase Kanzeon Sutra for Extending Life (Enmei jikku Kannongyō), as a way to avert misfortune and extend life; the Council notes that he identified it as an excerpt from an older sutra, “but its actual origins are unclear.”

What Hakuin argued against

Hakuin was a polemicist. The Council’s history says he attacked what he regarded as distortions of Zen training, “such as ‘silent illumination’ zazen and the practice of nenbutsu by Zen monks”, the recitation of Amida Buddha’s name central to Pure Land Buddhism. Yet his own Song of Zazen counts invoking the Buddha’s name among the good practices that, it says, all return to the samadhi of zazen. Against what he attacked he insisted on awakening: “Anyone who would call himself a member of the Zen family must, before all else, achieve kensho,” he wrote in Wild Ivy. The Council adds that he stressed bodhicitta in two aspects, one’s own seeing into one’s nature (kenshō) and the saving of all beings.

These were his verdicts, not neutral descriptions. Waddell explains that the “silent illumination” Hakuin attacked meant zazen without koans, associated with the Sōtō school, and that he often lumped in teachers of his own Rinzai school, a considerable number of whom, Waddell writes, seem to have followed Bankei’s teaching of the “Unborn”. Sōtō’s own understanding of sitting is set out on Dōgen.

Painting and calligraphy

Japan Society, introducing what it called the first exhibition in the West devoted to Hakuin (2010, curated by Audrey Yoshiko Seo and Stephen Addiss), called him “the most significant Zen artist of his time”, one who “reached out to the entire population with his painting and calligraphy.” The Shizuoka prefectural record says he liked to paint Shakyamuni, Daruma (Bodhidharma) and Kannon. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a Portrait of Bodhidharma (mid-18th century), Kannon in a Lotus Pond dated 1767, and a calligraphy titled “Virtue”, all ink on paper. Shōin-ji keeps a self-portrait he painted in 1755, with inscriptions by Tōrei. Waseda University’s Aizu Museum calls his style free and uninhibited, carried on by disciples such as Suiō Genro (1717–1789).

Did Hakuin create the Rinzai koan system?

The usual answer is yes, with qualifications. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls him the master “who systematized kōans in the modern Japanese Rinzai tradition”. The Rinzai–Ōbaku Council is more careful: he “started systematization of the Rinzai koan curriculum”, and the two monks most influential in “completing the koan reform begun by Hakuin” were Inzan Ien (1751–1814) and Takuju Kōsen (1760–1833). They were disciples of his heir Gasan Jitō (1727–1797), which makes them Hakuin’s Dharma-grandsons. The scholar G. Victor Sōgen Hori adds: “It is not clear when the Rinzai Zen koan curriculum took its present shape, although everyone credits it to Hakuin.” Ijūshi’s capping-phrase book, the Zenrin kushū, appeared in 1683 (or perhaps 1687), Hori notes, around the time Hakuin was born; he takes it as evidence that the exercise was already part of Rinzai koan practice before Hakuin.

Hakuin himself pressed koan doubt hard. A line sometimes quoted as his own, “At the bottom of great doubt lies great enlightenment”, is one he cites from “a teacher of the past” in his talks introducing the Records of Old Sokkō; Waddell identifies that teacher as the Yuan-dynasty Rinzai priest Gaofeng Yuanmiao (Japanese Kōhō Gemmyō).

The fair summary: Hakuin began systematising a koan practice that was already in use, his line completed the reform two generations later, and exactly when the curriculum took its present shape is not clear. How the graded curriculum works is described on Zen koans.

Heirs, and Hakuin’s place in Rinzai today

His first Dharma heir, Waddell notes, was Ishō Kairyū (d. 1748), his senior and early travelling companion. Waddell calls Tōrei “the best known and perhaps greatest of Hakuin’s disciples”, and Kato Shoshun calls Gasan Jitō “Hakuin’s immediate successor”. Hakuin founded Ryūtaku-ji in his later years, where Tōrei later served as abbot. He died at Shōin-ji on 18 January 1769, and the empress regnant Go-Sakuramachi conferred on him the posthumous title Shinki Dokumyō Zenji the same year.

Hori writes that the Inzan and Takuju lines “teach basically the same body of koans, although in different order”, and that all roshi presently teaching in the Rinzai school in Japan belong to one or the other; Kato says the same. The Council says that the Ōtōkan lineage, the only medieval Rinzai line to flourish to the present day, “through the eighteenth-century master Hakuin Ekaku, includes every Rinzai Zen master in Japan today”. Since Ryōchū Nyoryū (1793–1868), a Dharma successor of Takuju, became abbot of the Ōbaku head temple, it adds, Ōbaku teaching has grown increasingly like Rinzai, and all its masters are now of the Hakuin lineage, though Ōbaku has kept the nenbutsu he attacked. His grave at Shōin-ji is a Shizuoka prefectural historic site, and the prefecture records a local saying: Suruga has two things too good for it, Mount Fuji and Hakuin of Hara.

For the Zen schools in Japan before and after him, see Buddhism in Japan; for other teachers who shaped the tradition, see famous Buddhist teachers.