This is a story from the book The Five Stages of the Soul by Harry Moody and David Carroll, told in the context of sin, guilt, and redemption.
According to a Japanese legend, in the city of Wakamatsu there once lived a young samurai named Zenkai, who spent his days gambling and indulging in pleasure. One day Zenkai fell in love with the wife of the local judge, and the wicked woman asked him to kill her husband and take his money.
Zenkai agreed.
On his way to commit the crime, he passed by an old priest who looked at him disapprovingly. Without paying attention to the feelings stirred in his soul by this encounter, Zenkai continued on his path. When he entered the judge’s house, he cut his throat, took the money, and fled with the woman to another province.
Soon after arriving in the new city, Zenkai began to feel deep disgust toward himself for what he had done, and he also grew weary of the woman; she was vain and greedy. But beyond this, Zenkai could not erase from his memory the gaze of the priest.
One day he slipped away, leaving all his possessions to the woman, and set out to find the priest. After many adventures, he found him in a monastery high in the mountains. Zenkai stood before him, confessed his sin, and asked to become his disciple.
For fifteen years Zenkai remained with his new teacher, meditating, studying books, and experiencing moments of enlightenment. Yet throughout all this time, he could not fully free himself from the shame he felt for having killed an innocent man.
Finally, one day the old priest summoned him to his cell and said that in order to attain complete enlightenment, he must find a way to atone for the crime he had committed in his youth.
Zenkai obediently left the monastery and began wandering the surrounding lands, searching for an opportunity to redeem his deed. While passing through a mountain gorge, an idea came to him. The path there was extremely narrow, and many people had lost their lives at that spot. Zenkai decided to settle there and dig a tunnel through the mountain so that travelers would no longer be exposed to danger.
The samurai worked day and night for twenty-five years. He cut through the mountain, shoveling earth away spade by spade, until three-quarters of the tunnel was complete. Each night he spent long hours in contemplation. The light within him ripened and deepened.
One day a young soldier appeared at Zenkai’s hut and introduced himself as the son of the judge Zenkai had murdered. The young man told him that he had come to take revenge.
“My life is of little value,” Zenkai replied. “But I have worked on this tunnel for many years and will soon break through the mountain. Allow me to finish it. Then you may take my head.”
Sensing Zenkai’s sincerity, the young man agreed and pitched his tent near the hut. Over the following months, he watched the old samurai tirelessly digging and hauling earth. Eventually, the young soldier joined him.
Thus years passed. The two men worked side by side, sharing bread, possessions, labor, and contemplation. At last, the tunnel was completed.
“Now,” Zenkai said to the son of the man he had killed years before, “you may kill me. My work is finished.”
“How could I kill my teacher?” the young man replied with tears in his eyes. “How could I kill the man who gave me light?”
— Harry Moody & David Carroll, The Five Stages of the Soul, pp. 297–299
I deeply love this story. One reason is that it clearly shows the difference between (1) guilt and (2) remorse. Another is that it explains why remorse cannot be healed through psychotherapy alone—whether through insight, emotional catharsis, or a change in thinking.
Zenkai spent fifteen years in spiritual practices of meditation, contemplation, and reflection, yet the shame over his deed did not disappear. Intellectual insight was not enough; something more was required—an act of redemption. We encounter the same truth in another story from the same book.
A physician working with Vietnam War veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress applied everything he knew about therapeutic work with guilt, but instead of improvement, their condition worsened. A devout Catholic, he personally knew the power of confession and forgiveness. He therefore proposed a different approach: together with each veteran, he devised a plan for participation in social programs helping the poor and disadvantaged. Only when they began to carry out this plan did positive change finally become visible.
“After one year, the veterans admitted that the pain from their war experiences still haunted them. For most of them, however, it had changed in nature—from constant tension it had become a deep and strangely sorrowful feeling of unity with the victims, and a stronger commitment to humanity. As a result of their year-long activity, several of the veterans became religious.”
— p. 282
As this example shows, the healing factor here is redemption, and as such it lies outside the field of psychotherapy.
Here another distinction is important. It is easy to see the role of redemption when the transgression is clear—as in the story of Zenkai or the Vietnam veterans. It is much harder to recognize (and heal) irrational feelings of guilt or sinfulness, whose origin we do not understand. Yet the practice of redemption is applicable here as well, though in a different form.
To understand its roots, we must take into account the spiritual history of the individual soul and of humanity as a whole, which lives in the deeper layers of our personality. In the East, this is called karma—individual and collective. Certain individuals are more closely connected to it, and for them the word redemption carries profound meaning.
For these people, the story of Zenkai is especially important. It offers guidance for dealing with irrational guilt and sinfulness. That guidance is called service.
Another useful distinction: the relationship between deed and consequence can be viewed through the paradigm of crime and punishment, or through that of transgression and redemption. In the first, retribution comes from the outside—from institutions enforcing the law. In the second, the source is internal—the human conscience, which can punish far more harshly than any external authority.
This is the rule: when psychic regulation has an inner, rather than external, center, we are dealing with higher levels of psychological health. Osho says the same in different words:
“…one may obey all commandments and still miss the Kingdom of God. Commandments belong to a lower order. Law is for the unconscious; love is for the conscious. Love is the higher law; law is lower love… Religion is not law—it is love.”
— Osho, Follow Me, Vol. 2, p. 261
And here lies perhaps the deepest reason I value this story: it speaks of the most difficult love of all—the forgiveness of the sinner.
Zenkai is driven toward radical inner transformation by his transgression and the corrosive shame it produced. Without the sin, his spiritual awakening would not have occurred. His suffering pushes him onto the path of repentance and redemption, and through walking that path he matures—eventually becoming a teacher even to the son of the man he killed. The tunnel he digs through decades of service to others leads him to a Light not of this world.
But at the beginning of it all stood the transgression.
Thus: first the transgression, then redemption, and finally compassion.
And thus, love is born.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
