Читать книгу Reports from the Zen Wars - Steve Antinoff - Страница 8
ОглавлениеYou couldn’t approach the old masters without fear of being struck by lightning.
—Hakuin (1686–1768)1
ROUND ONE (1972): DOWN FOR THE COUNT
JEWISH MYSTICAL LITERATURE recounts how a Hasid called Lieb chose his spiritual master: “I came . . . not to listen to discourses, nor to learn from his wisdom; I came to watch him tie his shoelaces.”2 The man I have chosen as my teacher has refused my choice. Yet, through his own magnificence, he has forced me up against the meaning of Lieb’s words—though he owns no shoelaces and though a pair of high-laced shoes tinged with this magnificence has tripped me up for decades.
I call this monk the Thief, in the Zen sense, for he has stolen the world. He stole it the first time I saw him, 4 a.m. my opening morning in the monastery. He led the monks into the chanting hall; dropped into a sitting posture; chanted with the group of them for half an hour while I watched from the laymen’s side of the room; bowed a few times; led the monks back to the meditation hall; and while he was about it reduced the other monks to flat, two-dimensional cutouts by his mere presence. I’ve been trying to steal back the space about me and within me ever since.
But it was stumbling upon him brushing his teeth that turned him into a living Zen koan. I had stepped out of the meditation hall to find him standing by the water pump, hand on hip gazing into the distance, brushing his teeth before the evening meditation. I thought: “This is ridiculous. What he’s doing is trivial. What he is doing is the meaning of life!”
I knew nothing of Zen. I did know that whatever Zen is had something to do with this.
His sublime stillness when sitting, the way he handled a broom when sweeping the garden path, his several speeds and styles of “walking meditation” that made all yield to him silent control of the meditation hall—even when he was no longer head monk—are more beautiful to me, more crucial, than any painting or dancer I have ever seen. Later, in Tokyo, Sylvie Guillem dancing Maurice Bejart’s La Luna floored me. Tremendous as she was, great as Bach is, I could step around them. Try stepping past the Thief and you are struck down, and exhilarated. Aldous Huxley writes: “There comes a time when one asks even of Shakespeare, even of Beethoven—is that all?” The Thief snatches this question as he ambles past and stuffs it back into your gaping mouth.
How he steals is a question without answer. For it’s not simply something he does. It’s what life does through him. Daisetz Suzuki writes: “When a finger is lifted, the lifting means, from the viewpoint of satori, far more than the act of lifting. Satori is the knowledge of the individual object and also that of Reality which is, if I may say so, at the back of it.” The Thief moves; his body seems a transparent chassis through which the power of the universe surges. Each action, each glance of the eye, sings—cosmically charged. And as a movement dissolves, the surging power that infuses it with life does not dissolve but infuses his next movement, and his next, shooting him full of vibrancy even as he cleans his teeth.
I used to trail behind him like an amazed five-year-old, trying to comprehend how gestures so insignificant could be The Absolute. If he felt my presence, he would turn and look at me as if I were nuts. Yet his actions said what the headless torso of the statue of Apollo demanded of Rilke: “You must change your life.”
That he could negate another’s existence while brushing his teeth would not have entered his mind. I watched his mop ballet along the monastery corridor, one mop per hand. I watched him veer round and with total nonchalance ax one log after another immaculately down the center, though I later learned he had bad eyes. I watched him in one seamless thrust slip out of his sandals, hoist himself onto the sitting platform, form his legs into the full lotus position without using his hands, and with one flick of his fingers crease his robe and kimono under his knees and descend into meditation. The other monks in the monastery, as they headed toward the daily interviews with the master, leaked subservience, doubt. When he struck the mallet against the epicenter of the gong and strode toward the master’s chamber, his movements alone said: “I’m coming! Be warned!” I have never gotten over his moving, or his stillness. He made visible, casual as a tossed peel, what I have sought the entirety of my adult life: an act that disclosed, as his did, the beginningless, endless life-death force that is infinity.
The Thief is wild about meditation. This is a problem each evening when I enter the meditation hall. All the other meditation hall chiefs I have known arrive last, a minute before they are obliged to ring the bell that begins the evening sittings. The Thief arrives first, sitting alone in the empty hall long before any of the monks enter.
There are rules in the meditation hall—lots of rules—and there are customs. That the hall chief is entitled to arrive last, after all the other monks are settled on their cushions, is one of the customs. That everyone who enters the hall, before proceeding to his own cushions, must walk to a specified spot on the floor two meters away from the chief monk’s sitting platform and bow before his cushions is one of the rules. This bow is mostly an empty gesture executed before empty cushions, since all the monks who later succeed him as chief do everything possible to reduce the time they have to spend meditating and invariably avail themselves of the prerogative of arriving last. Not the Thief. When I enter the darkening hall, hard rubber sandals slapping against the stone floor as I advance to make my bow, he is already seated, a mighty presence lost to the world.
Well . . . not quite lost, and this is the difficulty. The Thief has the unnerving talent of wearing two faces concurrently while he sits atop his cushions. Face one shows him utterly gone, so remote from the hall he couldn’t care less about me and my puny meditation. Face two glowers at me the moment I am in his field of vision and cuts me to shreds. Even when my upper torso is parallel to the floor I feel his glance crushing me with my unfreedom. Any doubts about this are dispelled the instant I raise my trunk and confront his eyes boring without mercy, cool and mocking, into mine. Yet never can I shake the suspicion that this is all a mask, that the Thief is too absorbed with what made him quit teaching school and become a monk to be bothered with the likes of me. The first face says: “You’ve got that right!” The second face, the one I would like to dismiss as a mask, winks (without moving an eye) and says: “You didn’t come thousands of miles to a Zen monastery to bullshit yourself, did you?”
The Thief does not care about my love life, or what books I have read, or if my Japanese is coming along. He terminates me at a single point, always the same point, the point where I attempt to live. If our eyes never met again he would not give me another thought. Since they do, he forms himself into a koan that I can avert only by awakening to the Zen Self or by keeping the hell away.
I can, of course, circumvent him by entering the meditation hall before he does, forty-five minutes before the official start. That would lengthen immensely the longest, most excruciating sitting period of the day. The evening sitting begins with close to an hour of meditation to ready the monks for their one-on-one interviews with the master. I do not yet attend this interview because of my rotten Japanese. While the monks bring answers to their koan to their teacher, I remain in the hall, legs and back pleading in pain as they file back one by one. To add fifty minutes to this agony to evade the Thief’s face for a few seconds—honestly, it’s a toss-up.
The Thief would not like it if I divulged his name. He is steep and you do not scale him. You may love and fear him as I do, or dislike him as I have heard some of the other monks do—those who have come to the monastery merely to qualify for the license that will enable them to take over their fathers’ temples—but he is a precipice that you do not scale. It is hard to conceive that I am thirty years older now than he was then. The uncontrived manliness, the eternal maturity are one in a billion. Beside him the other monks seemed like green kids. These days he is a master. With no disciples, so far as anyone I know is aware. The last time I saw him, in one of our very rare conversations, he told me: “Being a monastery master wasn’t for me.”
He is one of those singular persons you can still find in Japan (in America and Europe I have met only one): a man who without use of the slightest physical force can stop your life in its tracks. This is the crux of the whole thing. It has nothing to do with rules and customs or even glances. Line up every other monk in the monastery and force me to bow to them before heading to my cushions in the meditation hall; let them all glare into my bones—it would mean nothing beyond the trouble any boss can cause. By contrast, imagine that the Thief altered his custom and began coming to the meditation hall last. I would already be hoisted onto the sitting platform with legs crossed. He would stride into the hall. I would see only his back. He would hop onto his cushions and ring the opening bell without giving me a look. There’d be no ray of negation from his eyes. There’d be no intimidation. His answer would still be NO!
“No, what?” you will naturally ask. But it is simply no. Absolute no in the foundations of my being, absolute insufficiency for living or dying.
He knows it. And I know it.
In The Gateless Barrier, when his master tests Keizan’s awakening with the koan “What is the Tao?” the latter answers: “A jet-black ball speeding through the dark night.” That’s the Thief. He explodes out of each step like a thunderclap as he strides toward his cushions across the meditation hall, kimono sleeves cracking the Void. I’m sure he has no idea how.
Palpable threat emanates from his acts. It is cosmic, not moral, energy that pours through him; Zen’s Original Face prior to the duality of good and evil. The Thief is an excellent man. But it is clear, as with the great Tang master Lin-chi, that the good is but one ray of his force and cannot exhaust him. The monk Bunko tells me that Zen master Eikido killed two monks accidentally with blows of his staff. It may be a blessing that the Thief has no disciples.
When I say this to my friend Mrs. Maeda years later, she says: “My experience is completely different.” She assures me that if I were the Thief’s disciple (I am always searching for a way) he would not break me. She never denies my assertions of his ferocity, but her experience is different.
The Thief, you see, is a playful man. I have known this myself from the outset, when I observed him (I observe him whenever possible) with the monk Jun, his best friend in the monastery. They are never serious together. After the two of them have “graduated” the monastery and Jun joins him for one of the seven-day intensive meditation retreats, they disappear on the sixth night, rumor has it to get drunk. He clowns with Dr. Ebuchi, the sixty-year-old lay Buddhist who lives in the monastery and is the master’s only pal. I have heard that he once squirted the master with a hose. My monk friend Saburi-san tells me that when someone told the Thief he had spotted him at some clerical function, he replied: “If it was a bald, middle-aged monk, the ass was me.” Saburi-san also described riding with the Thief in a cab to the Silver Pavilion. The latter insisted on tipping the driver, against custom in Japan. When the driver protested, the Thief countered: “It was extremely urgent that I arrive not too early, not too late. You have gotten to the exact spot at the exact time,” and he forced the money into his hand.
So it is not surprising that Mrs. Maeda sees an aspect of him that I never will. The first time they met, he came to the Institute for Zen Studies, where she works as an editor and librarian, to track down a book that the founder of his temple had written. When the book could not be found, he said: “Sit down and let’s talk.” They spoke for the next two hours and have been talking ever since.
The Thief and I will never talk two hours. Until the very last time I spoke with him, our direct conversations were three: two lasting a few seconds, one of five minutes when I was about to begin the daily interviews with the master and he decided that it was time to give me some advice. On all other occasions, he spoke to me through other monks.
Unless the nature of their relationship has changed—this could only occur at Mrs. Maeda’s request—the Thief hides the negating force and lifts her high. I had told her of the gorgeousness of his movements for years. After their second meeting I received a letter from her: “Last week he came to the Institute. I said: ‘It’s cold in the library. Do your work in my office by the heater.’ We talked over coffee. I have never seen anyone drink coffee so beautifully in my life.” The Thief comes to her institute once a month. She says it is the day she most looks forward to, and she marks it on her calendar. “I’ve seen hundreds of monks enter and leave this place,” she tells me. “No one even comes close [to him as a Zen presence].” Our judgment is identical, though we know him at opposite ends of his personality.
When I hear Mrs. Maeda describe her relationship with the Thief, I think I too would like to be his friend. This is impossible. Once I entered the monastery, however inept, I forfeited the right to be treated as an ordinary civilian. I know this because down to 107 pounds and following a bout of blood poisoning, when it became clear that my living inside the monastery was coming to an end, he began to relate to me in a different way, smiling, referring to me, for the first time, by name—”Mister Steven”—though always speaking to me through a third person even when standing a few feet away.
When I arrived at the monastery, the master decided I should live not in the meditation hall but in a tiny room by the kitchen. When I had no duties, I was to stay there. One night there was no meditation. I was in my room when the monk Bunko slid open my door. The Thief had sent him to fetch me. I trailed Bunko to the part of the temple where we had our heads shaved to find a small, elegantly laid-out buffet. The food was set out on newspaper that had been spread over the tatami flooring. The Thief was chatting with Dr. Ebuchi. Neither acknowledged my arrival.
I was happy to be awarded this rare reprieve from what had become my cell. Silently, I sat among the three others: the gentle Bunko (the only monk to consistently seek me out to make sure I was okay); Dr. Ebuchi, who once, near-dead with tuberculosis, saved his own life—he is convinced—by escaping from the clinic where the patients in the surrounding beds had died; the Thief: relaxed, off-duty, even so the majestic mountain barely concealing an infinite crevasse. After several minutes I reached with my chopsticks for my first bite—a neatly cut square of tofu—lifted it, and dropped it. The Thief turned to Bunko, said nonchalantly: “Tell him to return to his room,” turned back to Dr. Ebuchi, and resumed their conversation where he’d left off.
This was our first personal exchange. He had said to me, in effect: “Reality isn’t just what is. It contains an ought, a demand. The Zen world requires you to meet that demand. It’s called true Self. Better luck next time.”
Both my failure and his reproof mean little, forgotten by him, no doubt, by the time I exited the room and by me soon after. I’ll never learn to use chopsticks well, but even if I’d lifted the tofu neatly into my mouth and been permitted to remain at the “party,” the answer would still be “No!” The Thief’s power to press me to the wall has at bottom nothing to do with his judgment of me. The real danger he poses he has no control over: an inadvertent murderousness that resides in his core, inextricable from his beauty. Lethality and beauty as a co-presence in more than a few great monks goes to the heart of Zen, and some scholar of religion should study it. Rilke had a sense of it when he wrote in the first Duino Elegy: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us.” Or just look at the painting of the Tang master Lin-chi by Soga Jasoku meditating with a scowl, hand clenched in a fist. Zen people call its severity “grandmotherly compassion.” It’s that. But it’s more than that: the “Great Death” or “total negation” Lin-chi celebrated in his famous proclamation shortly after his enlightenment: “Everywhere else the dead are cremated, but here I bury them alive at once.”3
The monk Bunko, after fifty years one of the deepest meditators in Japan, tells me: “Zen is to become one with nature.” I reply: “Nature kills ten thousand people in thirty seconds in an earthquake.” He says: “One must become one with good nature.” It doesn’t work that way. The Thief is the tornado, not just the stilled breeze. This is part of his enigma: He is a figure of extreme power, yet the power is not in the end his but that which forms him and which he makes visible with beautiful acts. He isn’t simply compassion. The Thief, as was Lin-chi, is a scythe. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes despite himself. Thor creates with a hammer.
My first night in the monastery an incomprehensible jabbering in Japanese pulled me to my tiny window. The monk indicated with his finger that I was to wait; a minute later he slid open the door to my room and hopped up onto the tatami, closing the door behind him. Muttering repeatedly “Eigo dame”—”My English stinks,” he dropped onto his butt and produced from the hanging sleeves of his work clothes two donuts, one of which he shoved in my direction with the utmost warmth. When I shook my head in refusal, he placed it on the floor, biting joyfully into the other donut and dripping jelly all over the tatami. He was so friendly that I couldn’t be angry, but I’d been told to keep my room spotless and had no idea where to find a rag or a broom. He chatted away between dripping bites, rubbing his shaved head in perplexity at each of my attempts to communicate. Midway through the first donut, he picked up the second, biting them alternately with delight. As soon as he finished, he sat up on his shins and bowed a full prostration in the formal Zen style, head touching palms that he’d pressed to the floor, leaving fingerprints of jelly on the tatami and departing through the sliding door.
This was Chu-san, a babbling Harpo Marx. Rules were not for him, but he was divested of all ill will. One morning as I emerged from sweeping behind the bell tower, the Thief tore into him in front of the other monks. It was a mighty lashing, and Chu-san began to cry.
Later that day, Bunko, as was his custom during the break between lunch and the afternoon work detail, hid himself in the storage space behind my room. Here he would sneak in extra meditation out of view of the several monks who mocked him for meditating more than he had to, or read from the pile of old Zen journals about the great masters from the past. As always he asked about my sitting. I said: “Seeing the chief monk bawl out Chu-san this morning was hard to endure. If the scolding were out of love, I could accept it.” I said this less from empathy than from fear that the Thief would rip me to shreds in the same way.
“The chief loves Chu-san, all right. Before he became a monk, he taught in a school for students who are mentally disabled. Chu-san was one of his students. The chief monk brought him here.”
The two top monks (excluding the master) rotate the two top posts—head of the meditation hall and chief administrator of the monastery. The Thief manipulates the rotation, staying on as meditation hall chief for an additional six months while postponing his tenure as monastery administrator, since administration duties make the sesshin—arduous stints of weeklong sittings—impossible to attend. The switch enables him to sit six sesshin in succession. The monk with whom he rotates likes this setup just fine.
In the meditation hall, the Thief reigns supreme. In meditation he is colossal—austere, sublime, not to be messed with. When he cracks the wooden blocks to initiate the brief recess midway through the sittings, he releases himself from the full lotus position without use of his hands; his legs fly off the meditation platform, and in an exquisite unified movement he descends into his sandals and without a millisecond’s pause between landing and walking is exiting the hall. It seems not physically possible. The last inch of vertical descent to the floor is simultaneously the horizontal movement toward the doors, like the old Hertz rent-a-car commercial where the customer floats down into the driver’s seat of a suddenly moving car. My descents are less entertaining. My legs are killing me; my feet usually asleep and I cannot get my toes into my thongs. Since, to my relief, the monks have left me behind, filing across the long garden to the chanting hall or to the meal, I cheat, bending over and separating my big and second toe with my hands and then kicking the wall of the meditation platform to drive my toes past the bit of hard rubber that holds the foot onto the sandal. This achieved, I stumble after my brethren.
All of whom see I am a disaster in a Zen monastery. Every one of my talents means nothing here; the skills at which I am inept are constantly required. I cannot execute a single movement or task as the monastery bosses like. Dipping my cleaning rag into the bucket of icy water turns my hand into a paralyzed lobster. Racing to catch up with the monks who are meditating in the garden for the “night sitting,” I smash into the astonished master in the pitch black chanting hall, crashing the old fellow to the floor. The constant pain in my back, shoulders, and legs makes concentration in meditation impossible; I shift position constantly atop my cushions. One night the torture gets the better of me and I leave the hall and return to my room. None of this would be permitted any of the others. The Thief says nothing. Because I am beyond hope and he’s simply following the master’s request: “He’s come from far away. Welcome him”? From a faith that I will rise to the Zen demand in time?
Kafka writes that we are expelled from Paradise not merely because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge but because we have not yet eaten from the Tree of Life. The Thief gorges himself on that tree. He loves physical labor. Carpenters coming to the monastery from the outside world to make repairs receive affection and respect denied even the monks. In late July, when many of the monks return to their home temples, the Thief kicks into high gear to make up the slack, mopping, cutting wood, pruning the garden, raking the sand garden on joyous fire. His one break is after lunch, when he naps in a room across the kitchen from mine, elegant on his back, Paul Bunyan in repose. Shin’ichi Hisamatsu writes in Zen and the Fine Arts of the
Zen “Self-creative” arts . . . among which may be included even the appearance and gestures of a person who has attainted Awakening—the postures that appear when Zen is expressed in man. These may exist momentarily—at a particular time or on a particular occasion—and may vanish immediately after their appearance. Nevertheless, it seems to me that such postures or gestures are of incomparable interest. Rather than something carved in wood or cast in bronze, rather than the formal poses used in arts such as the theater, these naturally occurring expressions in Zen are far more basic.4
An eccentric friend from the sixties who curtailed his law career for bad poetry and psychedelic drugs had one inspired line: “Always honor your father and mother, for they gave you a free ticket to the greatest show on earth.” The Thief is the Show of Shows. The free admission comes at a price.
Zen monks beg in straw sandals that fail to cover my Western-size foot and a straw, cone-shaped lampshade of a hat that obscures enough of the face to ensure anonymity. Three days in ten the monks divide into packs of four and beg through the Kyoto streets. Thus far these groups have been of two types: those who reverse direction after an hour and a half to get back in time for lunch. Those who do not head back at halftime but continue away from the monastery and who tickle me by returning in a taxi out of the money we have just begged.
Today for the first time I have been named to the Thief’s ensemble. I follow at the end of the queue like a duck learning how to imprint on its mama, chanting the mandatory “Hooooo! Hooooo!” The Thief halts, telling the monk behind him to inform me that the chant is “Hooooo!” not “Wooooo!” I correct myself, but he stops several with the same reprimand. At the hour and thirty-minute mark, we rest, according to custom. Here the monks usually chat, smoke, and buy soft drinks. The Thief sits silently on a stone bench with his back rigid in meditative silence. His seriousness inhibits the others, who neither drink nor smoke nor talk. We rise, but he does not head back toward the temple, rather farther away. I assume we will return by cab, or at least by trolley. We return by foot, still far from the temple.
Eventually the Thief marches us into a wooded region that stretches along a shrine, for the first time this morning turning his head from face-front concentration to enjoy the blossoms on the trees. None of the other monks has ever walked among the trees; nor have I ever seen one admire a flower. I am happy to be “in nature,” especially having heard that the Thief likes to beg among alleys where there are barking dogs, to see if they will cower. Two days later there is a shooting pain in the part of my foot that protruded over the sandal. I writhe in my sleep over the next several days with what I think is a bruised heel. The monk in charge of the chanting hall, a true gentleman of six-foot-four and crazy for Beethoven, hears me groaning in the night and applies a plaster. This seems to ignite my foot in flames, and the following afternoon I am admitted for an emergency operation for blood poisoning—very dangerous, the doctor tells the master by phone—and a ten-day stay in the hospital.
Aside from the fact that it wipes out my savings, the hospital is a vacation: My Japanese improves; a pretty nurse comes to my room every night to confess agony over which of two boys she should choose as her husband; I become friends with the patient in the bed next to mine, who annoys me at first because he wears a woman’s stocking on one leg. The nurse tells me that the sickness in his leg has kept him out of work for months and that he cannot support his family. On the day of my discharge, this man supports me with his shoulder into the elevator, through the lobby, then down long flights of stone stairs as I exit the hospital grounds; tears roll down my face at the distance between his troubles and mine, his humanity and mine.
At the monastery I am useless, unable to work or sit. I am losing weight by the week, 107 pounds and counting. I decide to move to a room a hundred meters outside the monastery grounds.
The day before I’m to leave, while raking the sand garden, a monk approaches with a request: For the next three days, the monks will be traveling to the mountains to cut lumber; the Thief would like to know if I’d be willing to postpone my departure so there will be, in their absence, someone to receive visitors to the monastery. Of course I agree. That afternoon when I pass him, the Thief smiles at me for the first time.
Four days later, hearing the monks chanting outside the main gate to mark their return, I hobble to the entrance on my bandaged foot and prostrate myself in thanks for their labors, a ritual I’ve seen the chief cook, who is exempted from the begging tours in order to prepare lunch, do countless times. The Thief grins broadly, and whenever he sees me through the course of the day (never directly, always through another monk), he thanks, in English, “Mister Steven” for manning the monastery. On the morning of my departure, the door to my room slides open. Never before has the Thief sought me out. His face is deadly determined, and though he says nothing, it is clear that I am to follow. I trail behind him past the monastery gate, the sound of our high wooden sandals crunching the gravel underfoot. Not once does he look behind him. At one of the subtemples within the monastery compound, he steps into the garden, slides open the door, and steps into the temple foyer. An old woman, Mrs. K., whose husband was killed in the war and who has cared for the priest of this small temple the thirty years since, welcomes us with a bow to the floor.5 This is the temple that sponsors me, an arrangement made by the master while I was still in the States. I have never spoken to this priest. It is explained that I will be leaving the monastery and that I have come to take my formal leave. The old priest nods; he doesn’t know me from Adam; the whole thing is a formality, but the Thief regards it as a serious affair. I bow, express my thanks, bow again, and when the priest departs, we return the way we came. Back inside the monastery gate, we veer toward the kitchen and my room. Next to the monks’ bathhouse is a toolshed. The Thief slides open the door to the shed and slips from sight; a second later he reappears, his back to me, holding my work shoes by their ankle-high tops in his right hand as he slides shut the door to the shed with his left. These are the shoes I wore the day I arrived. I left them in the foyer when I was first taken to see the master. I had never seen them since and wondered if they’d been discarded. He sets the shoes on the ground, perfectly aligned, and walks off toward the meditation hall. Not one word. Nothing but his back. My hundred pounds are standing alone, in a foreign continent in a Zen monastery where I did not fare well, before these shoes. The Thief’s point is clear: “You have chosen to leave. It is famously difficult to stand in another man’s shoes. You are finding out it is just as difficult, far more difficult in fact, to stand in one’s own.”
One of the monks approached as I was leaving the monastery. “Except for meditation,” he warns, “you are not to come to this temple.” It was clear from whom this stipulation had come, and it made complete sense.
That evening, when I walked the half block from my newly rented room and entered the meditation hall, the Thief was sitting alone. It was mid-August, many monks were still on summer break, and there was no required sitting for those who remained. Each evening for the next few weeks, the Thief sat “unmovable, like a mountain,” as Shin’ichi Hisamatsu’s fabulous calligraphy puts it, while I squirmed through the five sitting periods from my new spot on the laymen’s side of the meditation hall. When the last sitting ended, before I could slip into my street shoes for the walk back home, the Thief would come charging out of the meditation hall, cushions under his arm, speeding toward the stone veranda overlooking the garden and a solitary bout of night sitting.
A half hour prior to that, each evening at 8:30, there’d be a ten-minute break before a final brief meditation, at the end of which Bunko, presently the cook, gonged the bell from the high tower just outside the monastery walls and sang the closing chant of the day. During one of these recesses, as I returned from trying to walk the pains out of my legs, the Thief was waiting for me as I stepped back into the meditation hall. “You can return home at the break.” The entirety of my first stay in Japan, his only direct words to me.
No doubt he thought I was struggling enough and that there was not much to be gained by my sitting out a last fifteen minutes. “I’ll sit through to the end,” I said. He pressed his palms together, bowed slightly, and proceeded to his cushions. I could tell he was pleased.
But as the cold set in, I knew I had had it. My money was gone; I’d lost thirty-three pounds from an initially skinny frame, and though the Zen saying goes: “When pressed to the extremity, there is a breakthrough,” I was inwardly too young to have the courage not to retreat. I made a plan. I would return to America, regain my health and the illusion of equanimity that familiar circumstances and friends bring, replenish my finances, and come back to Japan.
The day before I flew off on a flight of Christian missionaries, where a young American in the adjoining seat proudly informed me that he spoke in tongues and had just spent a week in Taiwan ascertaining that Christianity was superior to Asian religions, I walked through the monastery gate to say goodbye to the master. He gave me two calligraphies and bid me to take care. When I tied my shoes and stepped out of the foyer, I was intercepted by Do-san, a monk my age who would say to me in English: “Japanese language very easy; even two-year-old child can speak it.” I was about to thank him for all his kindness, but he broke in first: “The chief monk says to you: ‘Please live in this monastery again.’”
ROUND TWO (1976–1979, 1987): SPLIT DECISION
Three years of experiences—including a rifle against my head at 4 a.m. in Hillbilly Land that I thought was the last of me—interrupt my first two stays in Japan. But Richard DeMartino, the great professor who drew me to Zen, says you cannot learn from experience. He means that what is time bound, what has beginning and an end, resolves nothing. That’s why I am back in Kyoto. Although when I told DeMartino prior to my first trip that I wanted to study Zen in Japan, he said: “Don’t make the problem geographical,” and he’s right about that too. The problem of being an “I” can be solved neither by moving forward in time nor laterally in space but by casting off time and space.
The Thief sits, hard as marble gone as mist, across the stone floor from my place on the laymen’s side of the meditation hall, in the row reserved for monks who have graduated the monastery but wish to continue their training. In other words, he sits alone. He is now chief priest of a temple in the mountains, returning to the monastery only for the weeklong periods of intense meditation—the sesshin. He is nonetheless unchallenged king of the hall; thief by nature, he steals the job out from under the current chief monk, though he has no wish to and never utters a word.
During walking meditation, if he walks slowly, the monks, including the chief monk, slow. If he picks up the pace, all pick up the pace. He ignites the meditation hall with a power that he cannot conceal, thunderous in his solitude, the living incarnation of the monk Hsiu, who in Hsueh-Yen’s memoir from Whips for Breaking through the Zen Barrier,
kept sitting on his cushion like a solid bar of iron; I wanted to have a talk with him, but he was forbidding. . . . One day I happened to meet Hsiu in the corridor, and for the first time I could have a talk with him. I asked, “Why was it you avoided me so much last year when I wished to talk to you?” He said: “An earnest student of Zen begrudges even the time to trim his nails; how much more the time wasted in conversation with others!”6
I’ve concocted a new strategy this second time around: renting a room a ten-minute walk from the monastery until my monk friend Saburi-san invites me to live in his temple on the monastery grounds for a pittance; three hours meditation with the monks each evening; living in the monastery one week per month for the sesshin. The master agrees.
As usual, I’m stumbling. I can’t function in the cold, and the meditation hall—windows open and following rules established in Tang Dynasty China when the technology didn’t exist—forbids artificial heat. Two goose down sleeping bags, one inside the other, and still I’m too frozen to conk out. Unable to sleep, I eventually have to pee, and four times in the ensuing years—trying to slide open the paper-paneled door that will take me out of the meditation hall to the outdoor, flush-less urinals—my groping hand pierces through the rice paper. Back inside in the pitch dark, I misjudge the location of my futon; climbing up onto the meditation platform, I step on the chest of the layman sleeping in the spot next to mine, who says, in politest Japanese: “It’s me.” The hard rubber that secures my feet into the sandals the monks have lent me for use in the meditation hall cuts my toes to shreds, making the walking meditation agony. When the cuts become visible, I wrap Band-Aids around my toes to buffer them from the rubber. Invariably one of the laymen, on his way back from the latrine, mistakenly swipes my sandals, since every pair looks identical. Forced into the pair he mistakenly leaves behind, my feet are cut in new places. With socks prohibited, and wearing Western-style trousers, my soles are raw with chilblains. The meditating monks cover their feet with their robes; the half dozen laymen wear hakama skirts; Dr. Ebuchi—the master’s best friend and specially privileged because of his age—has me salivating over his thick woolen socks and gloves.
One of the laymen, a young medical student, suggests that I buy a hakama skirt. “You can buy a used one cheap at the monthly flea market at the Kitano shrine.” I’m thrilled at the bargain—a paltry five hundred yen (and five hundred more for a kimono). The first time I put it to use, in the January sesshin, lowering into a bow behind my sitting cushions before the opening sitting period, I stand on the hem and hear it rip the length of my rear. Saburi-san, the master’s attendant and thus exempt from the sesshin, kindly sews it. I hasten back to the meditation hall and at the next bow promptly tear it again, have it sewn again, and tear it again and am forced back into my jeans.
The medical student advises me to buy a hakama like his: used for kendō (the Way of the Sword) and tear-proof—he swears—no matter how much I trample on it. He writes down the address of the kendō supplies shop. The one I purchase differs from the ordinary hakama in that it is divided in two, like culottes, one slot for each leg. Next sesshin, in my flea market kimono and new hakama, I move stiff as the tin man from The Wizard of Oz, but my feet are covered and the heat pocket created by the hakama enables me to cut down from eight layers, including two sweaters and a down vest, to five. Between the first and second sittings I switch position. Unbeknownst to me, I manage to get both left and right legs into the left slot. I sit fiercely as I can. The smashing of wooden blocks announces the walking meditation. The monks jump from the sitting platform into their sandals. I do the same and fall crashing onto the stone floor, both feet caught in the crotch of my hakama in which there is, as the medical student promised, not a tear.
I am the physically delicate one in every monastery I’ve ever set foot in. All the monks suffer, but insofar as I can tell from every visible sign, not as I suffer. They execute the monastic tasks (apart from the solutions to their koan) with ease; they beg through downpours and occasional snow in thin straw sandals and soaked feet with lightheartedness, even cheer. Each sesshin my stomach goes on strike. Each brings me to the brink (though it is never really the brink). Each thrusts me against what in America my big personality, charm filched from my dad, and grace on the dance floor to a considerable degree obscure: that my soul is held together with rubber bands. Yet within this desperation of weaknesses something has congealed, something that compels me to cross my legs night after day, now for more than forty years. Something the Thief cannot steal and, if he is the man I think he is, will be overjoyed that he cannot steal.
By the bell tower I run into Saburi-san, the master’s attendant and the most brilliant of the monks—he speaks English and French fluently and was living in Paris, addicted to French cinema, until his father died of lung cancer and he was forced to return home and enter the monastery to obtain the requisite license to succeed him.
“The Thief’s are the most beautiful human acts I have ever seen,” I say.
He responds by telling me of a water fight the Thief started in the monastery kitchen when Saburi first came.
“Do you think he’s this way because of what he learned from Zen?” I ask.
“Oh, he’s just that kind of guy.” He adds that the Thief once told him: “Hito no koto kamawahen”—“I pay no mind to what others think and do.”
I remember this years later when, taking an American who had somehow gotten hold of my phone number for a tour of the Kyoto sights, I run into Toga-san, director monk of the Institute for Zen Studies, standing contently by the front gate of his temple home on the grounds of Tenryūji Monastery. Warm as ever, he invites us into his beautiful modern kitchen for cakes and tea. “Isn’t [the Thief’s] temple affiliated with Tenryūji?” I ask.
“Yes. His temple has many buildings.” With a mischievous glint he adds: “He likes to burn things.”
The Thief’s handsome looks, it seems, are partly an inheritance from his mother, a wonderful character, from what I’ve heard. To a monk who accompanied the Thief on a visit back home she is said to have confided: “I was so pretty that I decided to travel to Tokyo to see how I compared to the women there. I walked the Tokyo shops and streets, increasingly cocky that none of them could touch me. I wandered into a department store. A gorgeous woman in a kimono appeared. Furious, I headed toward her and a few feet from the mirror realized: ‘Oh, it’s me.’”
Grueling as they are, after a year, sesshin have ceased to press me to the edge of myself. Meditating hours a day brings thrills that are addictive. An American psychologist who had spent a year in the same monastery and was revisiting briefly just as I arrived for my first stay told me: “It’s disappointing to endure a week of sesshin and not reach a deeper state of meditation than you achieved the sesshin before.” I know that feeling—it’s a trap. All states of meditation are ephemeral. DeMartino warned repeatedly that enlightenment is not a state. What Yung-chia said in the seventh century about meritorious acts as a means to enlightenment applies to states of meditation: “Like shooting an arrow against the sky. When the force is exhausted the arrow falls on the ground.”7
So failed sesshin by failed sesshin, I seal off my escape paths: no more naps; sit through the rest periods; all periods to be sat in the full lotus; sit two periods consecutively without moving; do try not to talk so much during the breaks. And to my amazement—though it solves nothing—the monks are off begging and I’m sitting in the meditation hall alone with the Thief almost nonstop until lunch. A half dozen monks who sleep upright through the pitch black meditation periods in the predawn are whacked repeatedly for dozing during the evening sittings, while I—bumbling as ever—grin into the night on my cushions, the full moon stuffed into my brain.
At the November sesshin, I’m lounging on the cement, hoarding a half hour of the scarce warm sun in front of Dr. Ebuchi’s room. Shin-san, a bespectacled young monk who says he can justify being a priest only if he’s useful to society—a rare sentiment among the monks I know—bows before me. I jump to my feet and return the bow.
“[The Thief] wants to know: In your meditation, do you reach the point where there is nothing whatsoever?”
“Not yet,” I say. Shin-san bows and departs.
Several minutes later he’s back: “[The Thief] wants to know: Do you ever feel energy running through your body, in the lower abdomen especially?”
“Most of the time.”
He bows and departs. Seven, eight minutes pass and Shin-san is hurrying toward me. He bows. I bow. “[The Thief] wants you never to forget: When you reach the point where there is nothing whatsoever, do not mistake it for enlightenment. It is only the gate.”
When I return to the monastery for the evening meditation after the three-day break following the sesshin, the Thief, who invariably departs for his home temple at its conclusion, is sitting on his cushions. He has moved back into the monastery to finish up his koan training under the master. Dr. Ebuchi has hung a curtain down the length of his closet-size room; he on one side, the Thief on the other—space for a sleeping body and little else in their shared quarters. I marvel at Dr. Ebuchi, a medical doctor and psychiatrist already past sixty. Stricken with nervous and physical disorders earlier in life, he toughs it out in the monastery year after year, reading and writing about his beloved Morita therapy—a psychotherapy for anxiety-based illness loosely influenced by Zen—on the overturned crate that, apart from a small desk lamp, is his sole item of furniture.
Not surprisingly, the imminent completion of the Thief’s formal training triggers talk of the master’s successor. For me the Thief is a far greater Zen personality than the master, a thought I cannot reveal. I have heard that the master does not like the Thief. Yet the master has given his official sanction to the monk X-san, which bewilders me. For the first months of my second stay, X-san, who has graduated from official monastic positions but has not yet left the monastery, sits alone with me for the five-minute interval that begins when the monks file out of the meditation hall for the daily koan interviews and ends when the current chief monk—the first to bring his answer to the koan before the master—reappears. The instant the monks are gone, X-san quits meditating, cracking his knuckles and neck and stretching his long arms and legs, ever careful to pop back into formal meditation posture as soon as the returning chief monk’s footsteps can be heard. Sixty seconds later, when the chief has resumed sitting, X-san jumps down from his cushions for his turn at an interview. Later, through the master’s influence, X-san is made master of a monastery in western Japan.
Ko-san, the current top monk, is rumored as possible successor; the master is fond of him, it is said. My strongest impression of Ko-san was during my first tenure at the monastery, when I joined the monks for a day of work at the honzan, the building two hundred meters from the monks’ training hall in the same temple complex and where important ceremonies are convened. As I carried some red lacquer trays into the kitchen, Ko-san, then still a rookie, flashed the centerfold of a soft porn magazine my way and in enthusiastic Japlish exclaimed: “Nudo!” He was older now, too fond of his authority, and said to be attracted to koan study, though an extra minute of meditation is never to be observed. It’s hard not to notice that when one of his co-leaders graduates from the monastery, the monk newly promoted to the number-two spot is made meditation hall chief, while Ko-san, whose turn it is to rotate back to that post, continues for another six months exempted from sesshin as chief monastery administrator.
The most striking remark on the topic of the master’s successor is from Tanemura-san, my closest friend among the laymen. Sensitive and brilliant, he reads Martin Heidegger in English “because it’s clearer than when I read him in Japanese” and can render any single Japanese word into English, though he won’t utter an English sentence. He says: “If [the Thief] is passed over, it’ll be time to look for another place to train.”
My friend Saburi-san, having finished the three years of monastic training he needs to qualify to take over from his deceased father as chief priest of the family temple, spends his evenings reading and listening to jazz in his newly reconstructed bedroom-study down the corridor from the three-tatami cell he generously rents me for $15 per month. One night the door to his room slides open just as I return from the monastery meditations. He shows me the book in his hand—by the Japanese philosopher Yanaihara about the author’s relationship with Alberto Giacometti. Saburi gives the most wonderful accounts of Japanese books I will never read. Tonight he explains that as part of the artist’s obsessive attempts to paint Yanaihara, Giacometti had encouraged him to have an affair with his wife. Saburi then surprises me by asking if I think I’ve “got something” as a result of all this meditation. I roll my eyes. He adds: “Maybe it’s time you began sanzen (the daily koan interviews) with the master.” He suggests that he approach the master with the request, then mentions that he had recently spent time with the Thief. “We spoke about you. He says you’re training with all your strength. I told him: ‘Steven-san really respects you.’ He said: ‘We’ve never talked.’”
It is decided that I can begin koan interviews with the master if I show I can handle the modern Japanese renditions that are printed alongside the ancient Japanese texts in the koan collection The Gateless Barrier. The current chief monk tests me; he does such a good job jumping in for me each time I stumble that he concludes that my reading is superb. There follows a two-man ceremony accompanied by a stick of incense. He shows me how to pound the gong to let the master know I’m on my way. I’m left-handed, and the position of the gong obliges me to strike it with my uncoordinated right. My rehearsal attempt, like all my subsequent real attempts, is feeble, in full accord with the answers to the koan I bring before the master. The chief monk has me trail him down an S-shaped corridor, hands folded against my chest, to the empty interview chamber. He instructs me how to bow: once at the door to the chamber, once before the seated master just before I am to raise my prostrated upper torso from the floor and give my response to the koan, once when I am dismissed by the tinkling of the master’s hand bell. I am never to show my butt to the master and must walk backward as I exit and end with a fourth bow. There are no instructions for what happens the night I put all this into practice: Bowing before the master, I step on the hem of my indestructible hakama and stand before him in underpants and skewed kimono, skirt fallen to my knees.
The sesshin commences the next day. When the meditations end the first morning, I’m hobbling off my cushions into my sandals and I double take: The Thief, rather than making his usual exit past the laymen’s row of sitting platforms and out of the meditation hall, is heading toward me.
He bows. I bow. I’m standing next to lightning. “Thanks for the bread. [I sneak a loaf of German bread on top of his cupboard at the start of each sesshin.] A gift to a monk is called kuyō. But stop. It’s wasteful.”
I nod.
“Sanzen needs no big words,” he says. Immediately I recall the previous spring when he’d walked past on his return from the latrine as I was chatting about Nietzsche outside the meditation hall with one of the laymen—a graduate student in philosophy at Kyoto University—during a sesshin break. I had had the odd feeling that he was taking note of me for the few seconds before he moved beyond the sound of my voice. I had wondered what he was thinking. Now I knew.
“Zen says: Harmonize the body, harmonize the breath, harmonize the mind,” he continues. “You will now appear daily before the master.” He slides both hands past the sides of my scalp, then one hand across the top.
“I should shave my head?”
He laughs. “You don’t have to overdo it.” He sculpts an imaginary head, indicating that I just need to be presentable. By the fourth day of a sesshin I look like Beethoven hung over. “I have a kimono I no longer use,” he adds. “My gift to you.”
Two gifts, actually. He’d also given me my one-and-only glimpse of his central thought. “Harmonize the body; harmonize the breath; harmonize the mind” is part of an ancient instruction on how to meditate. The Thief had elevated it far beyond sitting to a total way of moving through the world. He’s so far beyond my reach that I am stunned when he says: “You and I—Steve as Steve, I as I—we’re the same.” My face betrayed the preposterousness of this claim, but he countered me at once: “The same. The same anguish.” And of course, at the fundamental point—the only point that in the end mattered to him—he was right. His continued presence in the monastery proved it.
“I’m concerned the master will start passing me on koan I haven’t really solved,” I say. “I know it’s a common practice. I don’t want that to happen.”
He seems surprised by my remark. He mulls it over, then says: “Probably you’ll be disappointed.” Another pause, before adding warmly: “Let us both hope.” He bows and exits the meditation hall.
Fourth afternoon of the sesshin: The Thief and Dr. Ebuchi head toward one another along the stone walkway bordering the meditation hall and the steps leading to the latrine. Both bow low to the other just before their paths cross. As the Thief straightens, breaking into a twinkle, he toasts Dr. Ebuchi with what looks to be an enema bag in his hand, as if it were a glass of champagne. Some time later, Saburi-san says of the Thief: “He is not so healthy, you know. A congenital illness that, among other things, severely affects his eyes. Before he came here he was living at another monastery. He once wrote his sponsor priest, the one who arranged for him to train there: ‘I work with the monks all day and meditate into the night. I apologize for the large size of my Chinese characters. My eyes are so bad that I can scarcely see what I am writing.’”
“I never would have suspected,” I say. “Vitality gushes through his moves.”
Saburi-san says: “He disciplined himself a long time to be able to move that way.”
“It can’t just be discipline. Have you ever seen him wake from a nap, stretch his arms above his head, and yawn?”
Saburi-san beckons me to follow him into his temple kitchen. He bids me to open the package on the table. It’s a deep blue kimono. I unfold it until it hangs full length. The material is beautifully woven, sturdier than I’d imagined a kimono could be, slightly faded from many washings. The Thief has meditated, struggled, been wondrous in this kimono for a long time. There’s a note, in calligraphic ink on thin paper: “Here is the promised kimono. Obligations make it impossible to descend from the mountain for a while. Do take care.”
But taking care and stepping through the gate into a Zen monastery have always been for me mutually exclusive. Unable to endure having to go before the master with no answer to the koan, I entered the meditation hall each evening as soon after their “medicinal” supper as the monks would allow. The koan would pulverize me as the interview with the master neared. He’d dismiss me from his chamber in seconds. On the rare evenings when instead of the far-off tinkling of the master’s hand bell the chief monk smacked together his wood blocks to begin a new period of meditation—sign that the master was away and that there would be no interview—my heart leapt at the reprieve. But there was no real relief. Zenkei Shibayama says in the Japlish translation that is all that exists of the account of his awakening: “The novice is compelled to have no other alternatives; he had either to flee from the [meditation] hall or throw himself headlong into the world of Zen meditation.”8 I was compelled to do both. It was still me within the Thief’s kimono: a kid from the neighborhood daunted and inept in alien clothes, unable to suppress the urge to run away fast yet stumbling somehow into an effort not wholly remote from heroic.
When I tore my meniscus during a sesshin and was forced for three months to absent myself from the monastery, I was frustrated, alarmed, happy. I made my comeback at a sesshin in Yamanashi prefecture; my knee buckled whenever I bent, an ominous popping noise each time I forced it into the lotus position. Completing the November sesshin, I showed up for the Wednesday afternoon lecture Professor Keiji Nishitani gave gratis in the offices of the Eastern Buddhist journal and in response to his inquiry told him that my knee had held but I’d failed. He said: “Yet one scales the wall of each subsequent sesshin from a higher point of attack.”
For me, this meant breaking custom and moving into the monastery the night before the start of the notorious December sesshin—commemorating Gautama’s “enlightenment or die” week of struggle before his awakening at age thirty-five—rather than delaying, as non-monks usually did, until the first night. I packed my huge stock of sweaters, long underwear, and T-shirts—along with the two arctic sleeping bags—into the cupboard behind my meditation cushions and went to pee before the first sitting. As I exited the urinals, the Thief, who I’d not seen for months—was walking toward them. He bowed deeply. When he straightened, he broke into a huge grin. His bow, his grin, spoke unmistakably: “The December sesshin is as arduous as Everest. You have imposed upon yourself an extra day of striving. I honor your determination.” He walked past.
By the fourth day, under relentless pressure from without and within, I began to fear that I would die the next time I was in the master’s room. Nothing seemed left to me but to throw myself at his feet and hope for mercy. I was rational enough to tell myself that this was completely irrational. But from the fifth day, I could not face the four daily interviews. On the sixth day, when the bell woke me from the allotted three hours of sleep, my entire body was drenched in sweat. Sweating during sleep was a constant of my sesshin life, a consequence of lungs whose X-rays caused doctors on three continents in three languages to utter the identical sentence: “What the hell is that?” Usually the sweating woke me and I had time to change my undergarments—sometimes up to three times a night. On this occasion I was so fatigued that I slept on sopping wet. With no time to change into dry clothes, trembling in the freezing chanting hall, I was so fixated on the destructiveness of the situation—unable to stop the sweating or control the circumstances whereby adhering to rules required doing myself harm—that when the chanting ended I walked in the direction opposite the exit and smashed into the Thief. He absorbed the blow passively and eyed me curiously. Stymied, I about-faced and tailed the line into the even colder meditation hall, shuddering uncontrollably, even during breakfast, for the next three hours. Even my well-tested method of asking to be struck with the patrol stick failed to stops the spasms. DeMartino had told me: “At some point you have to give up the body.” I was terrified of that point.
Cold, ground down, I dragged after the monks across the long, roofed walkway that bisected the garden and connected the meditation hall to the rest of the monastery and the master’s morning talk. At the sixty-meter mark, the red leaves of a solitary maple tree for some reason brought to mind Viktor Frankl’s description of marching on a forced digging detail just outside the grounds of the Turkheim concentration camp: Beaten by a Nazi guard in the freezing morning, he undergoes an ecstatic communion with his wife, ignorant that she’d already been transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she’d died. His unity with her, says Frankl, transcended whether or not his wife was still alive. For the first time in my life, I, a Jew, truly hated the Nazis, for making humans suffer and cold. The redness of the leaves seemed the sole remaining brightness in the world, parting from them as the queue of monks walked on an unbearable error.
Each subsequent sanzen, both that day and the last, I sat glued to my cushions, remembering a story—could it possibly be true?—of a monk who’d resisted being dragged into the interview chamber with such frenzy that he pulled out a young tree from the ground. When the next-to-last interview of the sesshin commenced, I clung to my cushions with eyes closed. A whisper boomed through the meditation hall: “This sanzen is mandatory.” The voice of the Thief. I climbed down from the platform and followed the others.
Pulled into a black magnetizing core of myself, I trudged across the garden, close to tears that in the night blackness I could not find the red leaves of my tree. The monks spread out into their customary five rows in the chanting hall, waiting their turn to strike the gong and present themselves before the master. I dropped onto my place, last spot, last row. The instant my knees hit the floor, the chanting hall opened out and I was laughing joyfully atop a vast tatami sea. The next thing I remember was the head monk shouting at me: not for laughing—but because when the first row of monks had had their turn at the master and the remaining rows had all shifted one row closer to the gong, I had failed to move. I couldn’t stop laughing and didn’t want to. In the master’s room I made my bows but when prostrated before him couldn’t remember my koan and when I raised my upper torso to make my response, laughing was all I had. The master studied me, neither displeased nor pleased.
“What about the koan?” he said finally.
I laughed. He rang me out.
Ten days later I entered another sesshin—for non-monks. On the final night I learned that the most beautiful thing in the world is a breath. The next morning, while the others sat the final sitting period, as part of the meal crew I leaned over to set an empty plastic bowl on a low bench and injured my back so badly that I could neither stand, sit, walk, nor lie down. For three weeks I could barely move. My upper torso, too heavy for my legs, was bent almost parallel to the floor when I walked, and I had to crawl to the outhouse.
My back couldn’t survive the January sesshin. February came, the month a half year earlier I had selected to return home, to be followed by my friend Urs App and the monk Bunko. I informed the master that I’d be attending graduate school in America. He presented me with two of his ink paintings. I couldn’t bend when I tried to thank him with a bow.
“Something wrong?” the master asked.
“My back.” He reached behind him with tremendous speed for an old man and handed me a brown paper bag. I could not imagine what it might be. “Is it medicine?” I asked.
“Candy!”
I knew full well my shortcomings as a Zen student. I knew that my decision to go home was in part a running away. But the sarcastic joy that lit his face as he said this word—the thrill at his own cleverness—surprised me.
A few days after returning to the States, I sat in on one of DeMartino’s classes. He had some shopping to do when it ended. I helped lug the packages back to his apartment. When we’d dropped the shopping bags on the kitchen table, he asked: “What are you going to do?”
“For now, to try to get enlightened.”
“For now isn’t good enough.”
I had no idea why I had said “for now.” The ensuing thirty years have confirmed that while I could never stop fleeing Zen, I could never get away from it either. Probably I said it from nervousness. I’m glad I did. In DeMartino’s words, I saw that despite all I had endured in Japan, I could never have awakened. My quest bore within it a fatal flaw. Sesshin by sesshin I had gradually sought to remove all the gaps in my effort. But I had always permitted the most significant gap to remain: the future. It is not a matter of sitting more or sleeping less but of removing one’s future. This is what Gautama had done at the Bodhi Tree. Once his rump touched the ground, there was no tomorrow. Whether he sat or reclined is irrelevant. The tree could have been a penthouse with a plush bed. My sesshin had always been ruptured by a fundamental ambivalence: From the first sitting period, I struggled to break through but also to get through. Hisamatsu’s own master, Ikegami, warned him: “When you go to the zendō [meditation hall] go as if your life is at stake. If you go through it with a half-hearted intention of living through it and returning home, then you had better not go at all.”9 Hisamatsu writes that on the day of his awakening he had “no means of escape left in the entirety of his existence, not even one the size of a hole in a needle.”10 I, by contrast, at every minute of every sesshin, from day one through seven, had retained the eighth day—the hole in the needle when I would resume civilian life.
“I can’t find the determination to cut off my arm like Hui-k’o,”11 I told DeMartino.
He nodded.
“But I am not unrelated to that act.”
He nodded again. “If you’re going back for your doctorate, get through your classes, but keep the real concern at the forefront.”
“As soon as I finish my course work, I’m going back to Japan.”
“No five-year plans! Take up the koan at the next available moment.”
Seven years later I was accosted by Dr. Ebuchi, the master’s best friend, in front of Rinko-in Temple. He ordered me to resume training at the monastery. I did not.
My doctoral thesis ate up the next several months. I did attend one sesshin at another temple. My legs were so deconditioned that by the second day, every cell in my thighs seemed to have burst. In July I was offered a teaching position in Tokyo.
Before leaving, there was a last sesshin. Run by a group of laymen and -women and held, to my surprise, in the same mountain village as the Thief’s temple. My monk friend Saburi-san had recently achieved notoriety as one of the Gang of Four, a cohort of priests who had organized a multiyear boycott when the mayor of Kyoto had tried to tax admission fees that local temples received from tourists. He initiated the clever idea of having every Zen temple in the city admit visitors gratis and accept only voluntary—which Japanese politeness translated into obligatory—”donations.” Donations, went his argument, were exempt from tax. The city government was furious; Saburi-san was enjoying himself immensely. I asked him to help me get permission to call on the Thief. Within in a few days, he’d received an answer: I could try.
I skipped the noon meal on the sesshin’s second day, cut through the rice paddies, and ascended the steps to the temple. An attractive woman in a kimono, very kind, accepted the loaf of German bread I had brought the Thief, explaining that he was not available and that I should try two o’clock the following day. The next morning my friend Tanemura-san, one of the lay practitioners from the monastery, amazed me by saying that he was attending the sesshin for the chance to say goodbye before I left Kyoto. Years before he’d given his one-word assessment of the Thief: “Wonderful!”
I asked Tanemura-san and my friend Mark Thomas, who had never seen the Thief in action, to accompany me to the temple. I called out the customary “Onegai itashimasu” from the foyer while my pals waited outside. The same woman appeared, apologizing that the priest had been summoned away but was expected back soon. I suggested I come another day. She cocked an ear, asked me to excuse her, reappearing to happily inform me that the priest had returned and would see me. For ten minutes I waited alone in the foyer, where in all Japanese temples one leaves one’s shoes before stepping up onto the roka, the wooden corridor that leads into the interior rooms. The door through which the woman had vanished slid open along its rails. The Thief, splendid in a white kimono, dropped his rear onto the roka, completely relaxed, his legs dangling down into the foyer where I stood.
“Some friends have come to pay their respects,” I said.
He rejected the request with one windshield-wiper swipe of his forearm — of such explosive force that in the years since I have rehearsed it, always unsuccessfully, in ongoing disbelief that a human arm can move with such speed. The gesture said: “You requested a meeting. This is between you and me.”
“I wish to do sanzen with you.”
“Sanzen is no joke. Not something to be done by jumping from master to master.”
“I know that.”
“It’s like this. At a certain point I saw that being a monastery master wasn’t for me.” The guy was live ammunition. “Do you know the word rijin?”
I said no.
“Ri is hanareru [to separate]. Jin is hito [people].
“You mean you have renounced the world?”
He laughed. “That would be an exaggeration. I exist apart from people.” Silence. “Have you looked around the temple grounds?”
“Not yet.”
“Take a look around. It’s a pretty place.” His way of telling me what I had witnessed so often: that his Way, conjoined with meditation, was gardening and hard physical work.
“I’m deadlocked,” I said.
“To be deadlocked is good. ‘When deadlocked there is a change, with the change you break through.’”
“Only if it’s the true deadlock. I’m deadlocked from reaching the true deadlock.”
His eyes widened. “You understand well!” It was the first time I had expressed to him where I stood in life and why I had sought out Zen. He seemed to want to give it some thought. Finally, he added: “There are a lot of young Zen masters coming onto the scene. Study with one of them.”
“I do not believe any of them can help me.”
I believe he recognized that what I said was true and that he knew as well as I there was no one among the new generation of masters like him. He waited a good while before adding, with surprising tenderness: “Then I’ll have you pursue the Zen quest alone. It’s sufficient, you’ll find, and it won’t matter whether you are in America or Japan . . . Well, I am a bit tired.” He shot to his feet like a geyser. He bowed and with a huge smile said: “It was great to see you.” And he was gone behind a closing sliding door.
I was not disappointed. He would never accede to my request as long as his master, nominally my master, was still alive.
Thousands of miles block me from Japan right now. A few years ago I asked Mrs. Maeda to remind him that it was my lifelong dream to have him as my teacher.
The Thief replied: “He’s too serious.”
