Foxes Pretending to Be Lions: Hakuin, Bloom’s Taxonomy, and the Challenge of Genuine Learning

Master Hakuin’s searing words — “You scholars who pride yourselves on your knowledge of sutras and commentaries, you are like people who count another’s treasure without having a single coin of your own” — are often read as an outright dismissal of scholars and intellectuals. But such a reading would be unfair and reductive. Hakuin was not attacking scholarship per se; rather, he was calling out a particular kind of scholarship — one marked by pride, superficiality, detachment from life, pretentiousness, and the inability to confront death with equanimity. His concern was not with learning, but with learning that fails to mature into wisdom.

Hakuin’s critique identifies five specific shortcomings. First, he condemns intellectual pride — the tendency to mistake the accumulation of information for genuine understanding. Second, he decries superficial comprehension, the memorization of sacred texts without insight. Third, he targets those who fail to apply their knowledge to lived experience, whose words are profound but whose actions are shallow. Fourth, he calls out pretentiousness, the tendency to put on airs of enlightenment while quaking before life’s existential challenges. Finally, he exposes the fear of mortality, which reveals how little of their so-called knowledge has penetrated…