Reported by Ben Van Overmeire, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
On September 10, 2025, faculty and students gathered in Room IB1047 to attend a lecture on Zen Master Zekkai Chūshun (1336–1405), a Japanese Rinzai Zen monk and poet. The speaker, Paul S. Atkins, a professor of Japanese in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Washington, focused his lecture on this monk’s visit to China.
Professor Atkins began by sketching the “medieval” time period under discussion. Despite the end of the Tang, Japanese Buddhists still looked to China as the source of inspiration. Zekkai’s unique capabilities in Chinese poetry (he wrote as if he was a Chinese, not a Japanese poet), as well as his friendship with the influential monk Musō Soseki allowed him the unique opportunity to travel to China, where he had an interview with the first Ming emperor. Zen monks were, in this period, a type of cross-cultural ambassadors, and Zekkai fit this role. However, circumstances after the Ming takeover were still in flux, and Atkins demonstrated how we can find, within Zekkai’s poetry, hints that he was being held against his will, and was lucky to eventually be allowed to leave China.
The Q&A afterwards featured a host of topics, from the difference between Japanese and Chinese poetry to the origin of many Japanese foodstuffs (soba and udon noodles) in Zen monasteries.
