From Kosho Uchiyama’s Opening the Hand of Thought:

The persimmon is a strange fruit. If you eat it before it is fully ripe, it tastes just awful. Its astringency makes your mouth pucker up. Actually, you can’t eat it unripe; if you tried, you would just have to spit it out and throw the whole thing away. Buddhist practice is like this too: if you don’t let it really ripen, it cannot nourish your life. That is why I hope that people will begin to practice and then continue until their practice is really ripe.

The persimmon has another characteristic that is very interesting, but to understand it, you have to know something about the Oriental persimmon. There are two types of persimmon trees, the sweet persimmon — amagaki in Japanese-and the bitter, mouth-puckering persimmon, called shibugaki. When you plant seeds from a sweet persimmon tree, all the saplings come up as astringent persimmon trees. Now, if I said that if you planted seeds from a sweet persimmon, all the saplings would become sweet persimmon trees, anyone could understand, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Without exception, all the saplings planted from sweet persimmon seeds are bitter. If you want to grow a sweet persimmon tree, what do you do? Well, first you have to cut a branch from a sweet persimmon tree, and then you graft it onto an astringent persimmon trunk. In time, the branch will bear sweet fruit.

I used to wonder how that first sweet persimmon tree came about. If the saplings from the seeds from a sweet persimmon all come up astringent, where did that first sweet persimmon come from? One day I had the opportunity to ask a botanist who specializes in fruit trees, and he told me this: First of all, the Oriental persimmon is an indigenous Japanese fruit; it goes back thousands of years. It takes many years to grow a sweet persimmon: even the fruit of a tree forty or fifty years old will be astringent. That means we’re talking about a tree that’s at least one hundred years old. Around that time, the first sweet branches on an astringent tree begin to ripen. Those branches are then cut off the tree and are grafted onto a younger astringent one. What took over one hundred years to grow on one tree is then transferred to another one to continue there.

In a way, Buddhism and our own lives are just like that. If you leave humanity as it is, it has an astringent quality no matter what country or what part of the world you look at. It just so happened, however, that several thousand years ago in India, in the culture of that day, a sweet persimmon was born; that was Buddhism. Or, more precisely, it was Shakyamuni Buddha who was born — like a branch on an astringent persimmon tree that after many, many years had finally borne sweet fruit. After a time, a branch was cut off that Indian tree and grafted onto the astringent rootstock that was the Chinese people of those days. From there, a branch bearing sweet fruit was brought to Japan and planted in that barbaric country. More recently, branches of those Asian trees have been grafted onto trees native to American soil.

Now, one thing about big old trees is that they wither easily. For the most part, there is not much Buddhism left in Asia today, except for Southeast Asia and some places in Central Asia, like Tibet. Japan is one of the few places you can find it, as withered and dried up as it may be. Now the sweet persimmon is being nurtured in America, and it needs to be tended and cultivated so it can flower and ripen here. It doesn’t happen without care and attention.

What I am saying also applies to your individual life. I would like for as many of you as possible to become sweet persimmon branches bearing the sweet fruit of a compassionate life, finding a true way to live as you settle on your astringent roots that are, after all, your own life, and your family, coworkers, and society.

I have had only one concern in my life: helping to discover and mark a true way of life for humanity. That is why I became a monk. Over the years I’ve never wished to become famous by the usual standards of fame. The only thing that matters to me is just to be an example of a true way of life that is possible for anyone anywhere in the world.