Study Hall

Study Hall will suffer in July, with the competing after-breakfast attraction of the Tour de France, especially with the British interest this year. Here is one I prepared earlier, though, from Beating the Cloth Drum, showing Hakuin in full flow to a student of his:
"I could never understand why you had to run off by yourself to a remote province thousands of leagues from here. Never tying up with a single good companion or teacher. Never acquiring the slightest spiritual benefit from it [a first enlightenment experience] whatsoever. Just wasting your time - your most precious asset - and for what? People tell me, 'He just shifts from one beautiful spot to another', 'He's well settled, has plenty of food and good lodgings', 'He's looking for a place where he can live out the rest of his days', 'He goes and performs devotions at temples and shrines'. If that is indeed is the full extent of your religious aspiration, you are a truly doubtful sort of monk. They also say that what you really want is to spend three, five, maybe seven years ensconced quietly in some solitary retreat where you can devote yourself freely to nurturing and maturing your attainment. If that is your intention, it is equally misguided. For someone in your present situation, now is the time to make sure the seedling is nurtured and brought fully into flower. Why would you want to cling mulishly to this 'withered sitting' style of Zen, hunkered dubiously down in some hinterland, turning your mind to ash, extinguishing thoughts and feelings, blinding your wisdom, blundering your life away? Time, you will find, passes by at great speed. And you go on ludicrously wasting your time, like a young girl sewing up piles of diapers and buying mortars and pestles and other kitchen equipment before she's even found a husband. What a terrible, shameful waste."
It makes me wonder what he said to his poor students, and it is also worth noticing that he is largely contradicting earlier writings of his, which I referred to last week.