Читать книгу Enzan - John Donohue - Страница 7

Prologue

Life is a path: a thing of direction and purpose. Yamashita taught me that we forge ourselves in the Do, the Way, that we pursue. My relationship with my teacher is deep and complicated and reverent. Yet there are doubts ghosting around in my bones. On good days I hope we were formed for a purpose, but there is also a deep throbbing, a grim Celtic warning that life can be either full or futile. And there is no sense to how that will be revealed; we graft meaning on our lives as best we can.

My teacher has led me on a disciplined quest to find that meaning, although I didn’t know that for a long time. I was focused instead on the surface aspects of his art. We worked together on technique, perception, and reaction time. It was a craft that insisted on minute attention to the vivid present. There was little room for doubts or distractions. And if you’re fully immersed in the here and now, how could you be wondering about anything else? It was a mystery. In fact, Yamashita, my teacher, was a contradiction himself: a master of the moment who lived with memory swirling around him like some bitter fog. Maybe he hoped his blade would ultimately cut through it. Despite all his activity, his mastery, the rock-solid self-confidence he projected in the martial arts training hall called a dojo, I’ve come to learn that in the quiet times even he had doubts.

But I never doubted him. Not really. The secret manuscript his old friend Mori left to us, the tale it told, helped me understand Yamashita better. And appreciate him more fully. He never spoke to me of the life he had lived in his early years. Mori filled in the gaps—an old story that reached me long after the author himself was dead. But the strands it revealed were alive enough; they uncoiled into the present, the skein rolled out, unraveling but still intact. In the end, it ensnared both my teacher and me. Looking back, I’m not sure I would have wanted it any other way. For in some strange sense, our lives had become joined; no longer two strands, but one.

A splicing of two skeins that continue to unwind.