Soko Morinaga’s Struggle to Change
In the essay entitled “My Struggle to Become a Zen Monk” by Soko Morinaga, the author describes his journey from being a student in school to going to the doorstep of Goto Zuigan Roshi, master of Daishuin temple in Kyoto, to finally becoming a Zen monk at Daitokuji monastery. The journey that Soko experiences is one that demands patience, humility and perseverance—but above all it is one that demands conformity to tradition and submission to something higher than himself. It is this submission that helps Soko to overcome the feelings he has towards death and attain peace of mind. This paper will explain why Soko felt the need for a significant change in his life, the steps he took to effect that change, and how that change impacted him and helped him to achieve his goals.
Soko grew up during WWII and was a liberal arts student at the time. He was called to enter into military service at a time right when his parents died. He was forced out of one world that he knew well (academia and family life) and into a world he did not know or like very much—a world where Western powers were exploiting countries in the East and hanging and butchering enemies in Europe. His experiences in the War and immediately after when hyper-inflation hit Japan and his inheritance (family land) was taken away by the government only served to cause him to lose faith in everything. He no longer hand any sense of peace, no will to go on and study more, no desire to be part of the world really at all. He held no sense of anything other than that people are false and manipulative; his main problem, however, was that this sense would not help him to survive: he needed more. He admits that he could have become a criminal and joined a gang—but there was clearly some goodness in him because he chose instead to seek assistance from the Zen monks (even though he doubted their authenticity and wisdom). At least, he hoped they would give him some refuge. In this...
Works Cited
Morinaga, Soko. “My Struggle to Become a Zen Monk.” In Zen: Tradition and
Transition, ed. by Kenneth Kraft. NY: Grove Press, 1988.
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