At Kinryuji, a temple in one corner of Asakusa, the head priest (jūshoku), Rev. Taijun Namiki, speaks of Zen not as "a technique for protecting the self strongly," but as "a practice of quietly letting go of the self that keeps comparing." Born into the temple, trained in law, and having passed through the experience of monastic practice and illness, he arrives at these words—and through them, we look once more at the contours of what Zen is as a practice.
Kinryuji stands on the southern side of Asakusa, in a place where the presence of the town can still be felt nearby. Though it is right beside a tourist district, when you step into the wooden main hall, the light, the texture of the wood, and the faint movement of the air shift the speed of thought, just slightly. Rev. Namiki serves as head priest of this temple while also conducting memorial services (hōyō) and funerals for the temple's affiliated households (danka, the households formally tied to the temple, responsible for its memorial rites and, in turn, supported by its priest), and leading zazen (seated Zen meditation) sessions and corporate programs for visitors to Japan. But the Zen that Rev. Namiki speaks of cannot be fully described as merely an experience offering or the provision of quiet time. Within it lies a question—quiet but pressing—not of how to protect oneself, but of how to let oneself go.
The word Zen has become quite familiar now. Becoming calm, becoming settled, becoming focused—such explanations are probably not wrong. But listening to Rev. Namiki, Zen rises up as something originally far deeper-rooted. Comparing oneself with others. Trying to protect the thing called "oneself" with a hard outline. A practice for moving away, little by little, from those habits that one cannot easily leave even when the head understands they are unnecessary. That was the Zen Rev. Namiki spoke of.
The path of someone born into a temple tends to be told too easily as the story of "a person who will eventually inherit it." But in Rev. Namiki's account there is something this view alone cannot scoop up. Raised in a household where both his grandfather and his father served as head priest, he studied law at university and was also looking at a different path, that of a legal professional. Behind his turn toward the path of a monk lay not only the circumstances of the household, but also, it seems, a discomfort with continually measuring himself within competition, and a sense that there may be things one should learn through the body while still young.
Toguri: First, please tell us about your own path.
Namiki: I was born in this temple. Both my grandfather and my father were head priest here. Since I was born and raised in Asakusa, I took part in the Sanja Matsuri (the local shrine festival) together with the other children, and I think I was in the air of this place in a natural way. At university I studied law, and I was in a seminar on civil procedure law. At that time I was also thinking of becoming a legal professional.
Toguri: You could have continued straight onto the path of law. Why did you turn from there toward the path of a monk?
Namiki: My father, too, had not aimed to be a monk from the beginning. So he told me as well that "any occupation is fine." But when I was thinking about whether to take a job or to sit some qualifying examination, there was a slight hesitation in me.
For one thing, I was not very good at comparing myself with others and competing. So there was a feeling that I wanted, as much as possible, a life of monastic practice—shugyō, the intensive monastery training that joins labor, seated meditation, and communal discipline—in which I would not compare myself with others. For another, there was, somewhere after all, the thought that as the eldest son I might have to inherit the temple.
Toguri: What pushed you forward at that time?
Namiki: Among the nearby parishioners there were people who ran a soba shop and a tofu shop, and they told me, "If you are going to go for shugyō, it is better while you are young." With soba and with tofu too, the kind of sensation that stays in the hands is better acquired while one is young, they said. Monastic practice for a monk is the same, they said, so they urged me to go once and try it, and with that I made up my mind. It was a pity after having studied law, but I left university, shaved my head, and decided to take ordination.
Toguri: Where did you undertake your practice?
Namiki: I trained for three years at the Heirinji specialized training monastery in Saitama, where my teacher—who was also my father—had trained. At times there were as many as forty training monks, and we spent our days sharpening one another. After returning, I served for about six years at Zenshōan in Taitō Ward, where I was taught many things, including how to conduct zazen sessions. After that I also served in Kamakura, and since Reiwa 3 (2021) I have been head priest of this Kinryuji. I have also been active for a long time at the Tokyo Zen Center, where I am involved in zazen sessions, corporate programs, and dharma talks as a preacher.
Tracing Rev. Namiki's path, one comes to see that there is something here beyond the simple story of "inheriting the family temple." Having studied law and looked at the possibility of another path, he still turned toward monastic practice. Deep within that choice, perhaps a sense of "wanting to live without comparing" had already faintly begun to sprout. Considering that Rev. Namiki later speaks of Zen as "a practice for moving away from the mind that keeps comparing," this starting point seems not to have been a coincidence.
When Zen is spoken of, in the present day it is often explained alongside meditation and mindfulness. Settling oneself, calming the mind, cultivating concentration—while such explanations are easy to relate to, they can also flatten, a little, the depth of the question that Zen originally holds. On this point, Rev. Namiki's account was extremely careful. Zen was spoken of not so much as a technique for becoming a better self, but as a practice that, from the outset, asks anew "what is the self" and "what does it mean to live while comparing."
Toguri: There are various schools within Buddhism. How is the Rinzai school positioned among them?
Namiki: Buddhism is a religion that Shakyamuni began 2,500 years ago. The Zen school took shape within that current, and it came to Japan about 800 years ago. The Rinzai school is at present divided into fourteen branches, and our Myōshinji branch is a large one among them.
Toguri: On that basis, what characteristics do you think the Rinzai school has?
Namiki: This is my own view, but in the Rinzai school I think "each person their own" is a very important point of view. Shakyamuni's awakening (satori) is Shakyamuni's own, and there are anecdotes about the successive ancestral teachers as well, but in the end one is asked: what is your awakening? Through Zen dialogue—mondō, the paradoxical exchanges used in Rinzai not to explain awakening but to prompt one's own direct insight—deepening one's own noticing is, I think, our practice.
Toguri: Does that sense of "each person their own" also connect to the root of Zen?
Namiki: I think so. The troubles of life are each person's own; none has the same shape. To get past them and again step forward by one's own strength is, after all, one's own noticing. So through zazen and Zen dialogue, each person opening their own awakening—there, I think, lies the meaning.
Toguri: Then how do you think about what Zen is in the first place?
Namiki: I have heard that the origin of the word Zen is dhyāna, from an ancient Indian language. What matters, I think, is not to seek something outside, but to turn inward, and to stop seeking toward the outside. Normally we see things by dividing them in two. This is good, this is bad; clean, dirty; superior, inferior. Within society this is also a necessary way of seeing, but before one knows it, it connects to the mind that compares itself with others. If one enters a situation where, compared with anyone, one feels inferior, that very way of seeing becomes very painful. That is precisely why it can sometimes be easier to accept what is in front of you as it is, without judging things.
Toguri: But understanding it in the head and actually being able to do it are different matters, aren't they?
Namiki: Exactly. Understanding it in the head is easy, but those habits are stuck fast, so monastic practice—training, in other words—becomes necessary after all. Zen places great weight not just on understanding it as a way of thinking, but on practicing it.
Toguri: In recent years, many people have come to Zen from the context of meditation and mindfulness. How do you see the difference?
Namiki: Among those who come to the zazen sessions, there are also many people familiar with meditation and mindfulness. One difference I feel when talking with them is that, in meditation and mindfulness, it often seems that one places the self as something certain and then practices in order to protect it from stress and from slander. But in Zen and in Buddhism, what matters is muga—"forgetting the self," you might say: releasing the grip of "I," not erasing the self but loosening its hold. Setting aside, for a while, the so-called firm thing of "it is I," and concentrating on what is in front of you. That, I think, is the characteristic of Zen.
The Zen that Rev. Namiki speaks of is not for adjusting oneself into something stronger, more skillful, more stable. Rather, it is placed as a practice for loosening, little by little, the mind that hardens from trying too much to protect itself, and the gaze that keeps judging oneself by comparison with others. In that sense, the words "each person their own" are not merely kindness. Precisely because troubles and noticings are not uniform, there is a limit to borrowing someone else's answer as it is. That, perhaps, is why Rinzai practice asks back, "what is your awakening?"
Words about Zen sometimes sound too well-ordered. Not comparing, letting go of attachment, concentrating on the here and now. Each is certainly an important idea, but left as they are, they can also look like concepts explained neatly from outside of life. But in Rev. Namiki's account there is a felt reality that does not fit fully within such words. It is because, rather than the severity of the training itself, it was through the experience—after finishing the training and returning to daily life—of his own body and mind not going as he wished that the words of Zen took on a different weight.
Toguri: Within your practice, please tell us again what you valued day to day.
Namiki: The basics of life were valuing labor, then zazen, then takuhatsu—the alms round, in which monks walk through the community to receive offerings, at once an act of humility, of prayer, and of connection with lay practitioners. Roughly these three were the pillars of life at the training monastery. What was often said was, "become wholly the action you are doing now." If you are cutting wood, cutting wood; if you are brushing your teeth, brushing your teeth; if you are eating, concentrate only on eating. So if you drop your chopsticks, you are scolded severely. Directing awareness to each fingertip, filling out daily life—that, I think, is the first thing in Zen practice.
Toguri: From your training, is there a scene that still remains with you now?
Namiki: There is. Twice a year there was an event where we went for about a week toward Yamanashi and Nagano for takuhatsu. The scene of walking then with my back to Mount Fuji, in a line with the senior monks, without any of the cares that weigh on daily life, still remains with me now. These days there are many things to think about, like what the temple's tax will be next year, but at that time I was simply walking while doing takuhatsu, enduring the pain in my feet. We training monks are called unsui—"cloud and water"—and it was, just like clouds and flowing water, a time of living without being held by anything: a time free of toraware, the mind's tendency to fix onto discomfort, comparison, or desire and be ruled by it.
Toguri: You also said that, more than the training itself, there was a major turning point after the training.
Namiki: Yes. At twenty-six, in the first year after returning from training, I suddenly developed bronchial asthma. One time, after coughing in my own room, I became unable to draw in air. I tried to breathe in but could not. Yet there was a sound around my lungs. Just then, I felt as if there were no air around me. In a panic I opened the window, put my face outside, and thought it might be over. But within that, little by little I grew calm, and slowly the air came in.
Toguri: How did that experience connect to your understanding of Zen?
Namiki: At that time, because what should have been around me felt as if it were not there, I strongly thought that there is a part where, with my own mind, I am constructing this world on my own. And I felt that the self I think of as myself can, at times, become very much in the way. Until then, although there had been hard things during training, the feeling that I would live by this path no matter what had not welled up so urgently. But through that experience, I finally came to understand Zen by drawing it close to myself.
Toguri: Perhaps it was the moment when the words of Zen first settled into your body.
Namiki: Perhaps so. It was an event that actually made me realize, not just by thinking in the head, how much my own mind and body take a self-willed way of seeing, and how much I cling to myself.
What makes Rev. Namiki's account of Zen striking lies in this point. Neither not comparing nor letting go of attachment is spoken of as a tidy morality. It resonates as the words of someone who, in a situation where even his own body did not go as he wished, came to know how much the way the world appears is swayed by one's own mind. That is precisely why Zen presses upon us not as mere knowledge but as a question of "how to live." The word unsui, spoken within the memory of takuhatsu, also expressed this well. Not controlling the mind completely, but continuing to notice being caught. For Rev. Namiki, Zen is perhaps such a quiet practice.
When tradition is spoken of, people often use large words like "something to be protected" or "something being lost." But listening to Rev. Namiki, tradition comes to be seen as something more concrete, breathing within the accumulation of small repetitions. Feeling a discomfort at the simplification of memorial services and funerals, finding meaning in making osechi together, handling Buddhist implements and ink brushwork with care—all of it connected to a stance of reconsidering "why has this continued."
Toguri: What thoughts do you yourself hold toward history and tradition?
Namiki: Not fine-sounding words, but after all, fact, the actual, is what matters, I think. Traditional culture and religious observances are, lately, increasingly simplified or omitted, and they are sometimes easily cast aside with "it is no longer that kind of era." But I think there is a need to step in one pace and consider why such things have continued.
Toguri: As an example of considering that "why has it continued," the story of osechi was striking.
Namiki: A little each year, but we make a point of preparing osechi—New Year dishes—as a family. In my grandparents' time, simmering black beans, making kinton, such things were done by everyone together. But by my parents' generation, various services appeared, and people came to choose and buy from catalogs. When that happens, osechi itself feels as if it gradually falls into decline.
Once you start making it yourself, in the busy year-end period it really is nothing but bothersome things. Going to buy things you do not usually use, searching for where they are sold. But when you think about it well, that becomes an occasion for relatives to come back, gathering while saying "it has to have this." Not food made by one person, but everyone going through one hardship and building up one thing. Within that, I think, lies the meaning.
Toguri: Culture dwells not in the form itself but in the process, then.
Namiki: I think so. If you look only superficially at the teachings—this brings good fortune, this is for the prosperity of descendants—they might be discarded at once in the present era. But everyone moving their hands, making the same thing, and within that there is the feeling of welcoming the New Year deity, Toshigami-sama—the deity believed to visit the home at the New Year, received through the foods and preparations made together as a community. Thinking of it that way, I feel it is an observance with a warmth of heart. There lies an important side of tradition and culture.
Toguri: That gaze seemed also turned toward the things that remain in the temple.
Namiki: In the Rinzai school, what a senior master—a rōshi—has written is called bokuseki—the brushwork of a Zen master, kept not as an art object but as a living trace of that teacher's presence—and it is treasured. Not a photograph, but from the movement of the brush itself, and from the content of the written words, one remembers that person and feels a longing for them. In that sense, they are very important things.
It is not that older things remain as at temples in the provinces—because this is Asakusa, most are around sixty years old. They burned in the Great Kantō Earthquake and in the air raids, so the things at this temple are not so long-lived. Still, even so, they remain almost untouched since the time of the previous priest. Buddhist implements are expensive, and not something to replace each time, so using them with care is what matters most of all. There are also some that bear the names of the parishioners who donated them, and even now the generation of their grandchildren is involved as officers of the temple.
Kinryuji is also a temple in Asakusa that has lost much, through the Great Kantō Earthquake and the Tokyo air raids. For that reason, even sixty years' time is not light here. What Rev. Namiki sees is perhaps not oldness itself but the weight of what has been continued. As the story of osechi was symbolic, tradition is not enough merely preserved as knowledge; it needs to be repeated with the body and with time. Making it together, continuing to use it, names remaining, being told and passed on. Within the totality of that effort, the depth of culture is born.
When introducing the experience at the temple, perhaps it would be enough as an explanation to line up the order—how many minutes one sits, how one folds one's legs, what is served at the end. But there is something this alone does not convey. Listening to Rev. Namiki, one understands that what one encounters at Kinryuji is not merely a "zazen program," but a time in which the thinking of Zen rises up, little by little, within space and gesture. The texture of the wooden main hall, natural light, the smell of the town, the sequence of settling body, breath, and mind, and the matcha and confection received at the end. These are not separate elements but connected as one experience.
Toguri: What kind of zazen experience do you offer at Kinryuji?
Namiki: First, we give a talk on Buddhism and an explanation of zazen for about thirty minutes. After that, at our temple we do zazen of ten minutes about three times. When it is over, we serve matcha and a confection, take any questions, and close with talk about Zen—that is the flow.
Toguri: What was striking in the explanation of zazen was the three-part order of "settle the body, settle the breath, settle the mind."
Namiki: In the Rinzai school we introduce zazen by those three—body, breath, mind (shin, soku, shin). First settling the body, then settling the breath, then settling the mind. Trying to do something directly with the mind alone does not go well. So one first settles the body and settles the breath. As a result of that, the mind too, I think, gradually grows calm.
Toguri: When I experienced it before, I wondered what meaning there is in not moving itself.
Namiki: When you move, awareness inevitably turns there. Your foot hurts, or itches, and you become more and more caught by such things. But in fact, once it is over, that pain or itch often vanishes at once. In that sense, I think there is an interest in noticing that, rather than the pain or discomfort itself, it is one's own mind that keeps making it larger.
Toguri: It was also striking that you lowered the lighting, creating a state close to natural light.
Namiki: I think it is good to do zazen as much as possible in natural sunlight. At the training monastery too it is done with the windows thrown open, and becoming one while feeling the wind and the air is, I think, one way.
Toguri: What kind of people do you hope will come to this experience?
Namiki: First, I would like people to notice that, despite being in Asakusa, this temple has a wooden main hall. It has a distinctive atmosphere, and it is different from doing it in a concrete room. Around midday the smell of the town's restaurants sometimes drifts in, but I hope people will experience that as well, including such things.
Toguri: The matcha and confection served at the end also stayed with me as part of the experience.
Namiki: Basically we serve fresh wagashi—seasonal Japanese confections—and matcha. Sometimes we choose seasonal things, and sometimes we prepare Asakusa sweets. Since matcha has a strong bitterness, the sweetness against it is, after all, indispensable, I think, and we also follow the tea culture that values wagashi attuned to the season.
The experience at Kinryuji is perhaps a time of being taught Zen as knowledge and, at the same time, a time of understanding it little by little through the senses of the body. Settling in the order of body, breath, and mind; by not moving, making the movements of the mind, rather, easier to see; in natural light, accepting the outer world without cutting it off. Each of these connects to Rev. Namiki's understanding of Zen as placing oneself in the "here and now." The sense of not excluding the smell and presence of the Asakusa streets but accepting them, including those, is also something particular to this temple. Including even the matcha and confection served at the end, that time looks less like something special cut off from daily life than like an experience of regaining a different speed for returning to daily life.
The land of Asakusa is still a place where many people come and go, where gazes from outside continually flow in. In the very midst of that, the Zen Rev. Taijun Namiki spoke of resonated less as a special thought cut off from daily life than as a practice for noticing, within daily life, how much one compares oneself with others, how much one is caught by oneself, how much one shapes the world on one's own.
That account does not brandish difficult doctrine. If you cut wood, cutting wood; if you eat, eating; and loosening, little by little, the mind that hardens from trying to protect itself. Following Rev. Namiki's words, one comes to feel that Zen, before "understanding" what it is, is first a quiet question for reconsidering one's own way of being.
What one encounters at Kinryuji is perhaps not the completed form of that question but its entrance. Including the air of the wooden main hall, the presence of the town, the time of sitting in natural light, and even the matcha and confection offered at the end, there is, there, a margin for coming to know with the body what it means to "place oneself in the here and now." To move, just a little, away from the mind that keeps comparing. That sensation, as something one can suddenly bring back partway through a journey, may, unexpectedly, remain for a long time.