Enlightenment Certificate – Dragon Staff
“On Buddha’s Birthday [April 8] in Hōreki 12 [1762], Nomura Magobei from a county in Suru [Shizuoka] penetrated my two massive barriers and heard the sound of one hand. I therefore brush this as a certificate for this heroic person.”1
Hakuin painted certificates like this one for his followers who reached enlightenment, noted here by the monk’s mention of his student hearing “the sound of one hand,” a reference to Zen Buddhism’s best-known koan, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
At center of the certificate, Hakuin has painted a walking staff in the shape of a dragon. From the dragon’s mouth dangles a fly whisk (hossu), a ritual tool often carried by monks and typically passed down from teacher to student over many generations.
—Bradley Bailey
Notes
1 John Stevens, Zen Mind Zen Brush: Japanese Ink Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2006), 50. See also Stephen Addiss and Audrey Yoshiko Seo, The Sound of One Hand: Paintings and Calligraphy by Zen Master Hakuin (Boulder: Shambhala, 2010), 131. Addiss’s translation is nearly identical, though instead of “two massive barriers,” he uses a “double barrier.”