A few weeks ago, I posted a painting I recently completed in Florence, Italy, of a woman in traditional Japanese robes gazing at the moon. Today I would like to tell her story, a haunting, even terrible, yet beautiful story of the clarity of a woman’s vow. The story is memorably related in a familiar text, “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings,” compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki (Tuttle: Tokyo/ Rutland, Vermont, 1957/ 1985), from which I adapted my telling, though I would prefer to relate the story in my own voice. 

This is the story of a young woman who came of age in the early nineteenth-century. Her beauty and her skill as a poet were so renowned that by the age of seventeen, she was selected as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress of Japan. When the Empress died suddenly, however, and the young woman lost her mentor and patron, she realized the fragility and impermanence of existence. This realization led her to earnestly desire to study Zen. 

Her parents disagreed. Her family was an important one, descended from the Japanese warrior, Shingen. They demanded that she marry and have children, as prominent young women in her culture were expected to do. But they did agree to strike a deal with her. After she bore three children, if she still wanted to enter a monastery, she would be permitted to study Zen. I’m sure they thought that marriage and motherhood would distract her from her youthful enthusiasm for such spiritual endeavors. But it did not. By the age of twenty-five, she had given birth to her third child, and she sought to enact the terms of the agreement. 

Free to seek out a teacher of Zen, she shaved her head, took the name Ryonen, and went on pilgrimage. She visited the city of Edo, and asked the Zen Master Tetsugyu to accept her as one of his students. He refused. As was common in that time, his students were all male, and she was a very beautiful young woman. 

Disappointed, she went to another Zen Master, Hakuo. Again, she was told that she was simply too beautiful. Her presence among his students could only lead to trouble. 

Stories of Zen often include shocking features. All the way back to Bodhidharma the semi-legendary sixth-century founder of Ch’an Buddhism in China (which, when it eventually was brought to Japan, became Zen), a disciple of whom cut off his arm to demonstrate to his teacher his seriousness of purpose, Zen stories have at times featured rather extreme acts. Perhaps none is more shocking than this story, however. 

Undeterred from her vow to study Zen, Ryonen found an iron, heated it, and applied it to her face, literally defacing her extraordinary beauty. She returned to Hakuo, and asked again for him to accept her as a student. He relented. To commemorate this event, Ryonen wrote a short poem on the back of a mirror. The poem contrasted how, as an attendant to the Empress, she burned incense to scent her exquisite clothing; now, however, she burned her own face to enter upon the Zen way. 

Ryonen lived as a mendicant Zen nun for another forty years, holding her resolve to study and practice until her death. As her life drew to a close, she wrote the poem which is memorialized in my painting: 

“Sixty-six times have these eyes beheld the changing scene of Autumn. 

I have said enough about moonlight. 

Ask no more. 

Only listen to the voice of the pines and cedars when no wind stirs.”