There was a teacher living near a village, well thought of, the sort of man people pointed out to visitors.
A girl in the village became pregnant, and her parents wanted a name, and she would not give one. They asked and asked, and eventually, cornered, she said it was the teacher.
Her parents went up to him in a rage. They said what they had come to say, all of it, and there was a good deal of it.
He said: is that so.
The child was born and they brought it to him and left it there, along with everything else they thought of on the walk up. By then his reputation in the village was finished. People who had sent their children to him stopped. People he had known for years crossed the road.
He took the baby in.
He got milk from the neighbours who would still speak to him, and the ones who would not, he went to anyway and stood there and asked, and took the insults and the milk together. He looked after the child through a winter, badly at first and then better, the way anyone learns it.
A year later the girl could not hold it any longer and told her parents the truth. The father was a young man in the village. She had said the teacher's name because it was the name least likely to be checked.
Her parents came back up the hill. They apologised at length. They asked for the child.
He said: is that so.
And he gave the baby back.
The Lesson of Is That So
Not every accusation requires a defence, and some are made worse by one. He could have argued. It would have been true and it would have changed nothing, because the village had already decided, and a year of arguing would have cost him the year.
Look at what he did, not only at what he said. This gets read as a story about detachment, about a man so serene that nothing touched him. He fed a child for a year and begged milk from people who despised him. That is not detachment. That is the opposite. The calm was in his face and the work was in his hands.
The vindication is not the point and it barely gets a line. He receives the apology with the same three words he received the accusation with, which is the actual teaching. If being cleared had mattered to him, being blamed would have mattered too.
Where this actually comes from
The teacher is Hakuin Ekaku, who was real. He lived in Japan from 1686 to 1768 and he is one of the most important figures in the history of Rinzai Zen, a reformer who rebuilt a tradition that was in decline, and a painter and writer of enormous output.
Whether this happened to him is another matter. It does not appear in his own writing, and he wrote a great deal about himself, including about his failures. It is best understood as a story told about him rather than a record of his life.
Most English readers met it in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, the collection Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki published in 1957, where it is titled with the same three words he keeps repeating. That book put a number of these into English for the first time and is the reason they are now told everywhere.
One thing worth sitting with, which the tidy versions skip. A young woman under real pressure named a man who had not touched her, and the story treats her gently and never asks her to account for it, and it does not tell us what happened to her afterwards. Some readers find that unresolved and uncomfortable, and we think they are right to. The story is not interested in her. It is interested in him, and that is a limit of the story rather than a virtue of it.
