The Importance of Perseverance

By Jiryu Frederic Lecut

I pulled the following anecdote from the short book “Zen and Swordsmanship from the Yamaoka Tesshu archives”.

Yamaoka Tesshū (1836 – 1888), was a famous and highly respected samurai, sword and calligraphy master, and Zen practitioner at the end of the Edo period. He played an important role in the Meiji Restoration that saw the end of Tokugawa dictatorship and feudal era of Japan. He was instrumental in negotiations that led to the peaceful surrender of the City of Edo. Without him, the city would have been destroyed and countless people killed.

A man named Imaoji Dosai once told Tesshu, “Your wife and children must be very good at Zen.”

“No, in fact none of them have any capability to practice Zen, so instead I had them take refuge with Master Unsho of the Shingon Sect.

Questioning Tesshu’s reasoning, Imaoji said, “I have always thought that in learning Zen it makes no difference whether you are a man or a woman, or whether you are intelligent or dull. Is that not so?”

“You’re right. No such distinctions are made in Zen. The most important thing that makes a person able to do Zen practice is perseverance. If a person has perseverance, it doesn’t matter whether they are a man or a woman, wise or stupid. However, if you don’t have perseverance, there is no way to understand Zen, no matter who you are. Having someone who does not have perseverance practice Zen is like having a person with stomach problems (like me) swallow whole pieces of beef: there could well be harm, but there certainly won’t be benefit. That’s why the great sages of the past said that those who want to practice Zen must be of appropriate character. If everyone had the perseverance to study Zen, then we would need only Zen and not the other sects of Buddhism. We have the other sects because not everyone can practice Zen.”