Nothing on My Mind

by Erik Storlie

  By the end of this second day, the pain in my knees has built to a crescendo, intense waves of fierce, dark energy rising up through my body. But Roshi’s acknowledgment somehow removes fear, and the waves flow peacefully into the bubble of consciousness that fills my body, a turbulent stream disappearing into deep, calm waters. For a time I mark only purity in the intense dark waves.

  Then I’m listening again, aware of Suzuki Roshi’s voice going on. “Of course, it sometimes seems too hard, but our practice can help your life very much. The Buddha’s zazen is a huge umbrella. In India, you know, it’s very hot. You need an umbrella to help keep off the sun.” Suzuki Roshi opens an imaginary umbrella, holding its handle with his left hand and extending his right hand high above his head. “Please remember, you can come underneath it here and sit with me. There’s plenty of room. It gets bigger and bigger the more people who come inside. You may not believe this, but it is actually so.”

  During the sesshin, Roshi continues work on his rock garden. Someone tells me that as a young monk his work was stonemasonry. I see him selecting stones from the creek. His helpers carry them to shore, then later move them a few hundred feet up to the garden at the front of his cabin. Occasionally I see him standing there during breaks, observing his stones. Sometimes he comes to a decision and swiftly moves one to its place.

  On the fourth day of the sesshin, after lunch, I’m chosen at the work meeting to help Suzuki Roshi and Alan, one of his regular students. This is a privilege. I’ve never worked with Roshi before. Excited and nervous and eager to work, I arrive early at the rock garden. A few minutes later, Alan arrives. He’s tall and muscular, deeply tanned, his head shaved. We stand together, silent, sweating in the hot afternoon sun, waiting for Roshi to come out of his cabin.

  To my surprise, Alan begins whispering intently to me about serving Roshi tea earlier in the sesshin. “Listen, man, he was in there during zazen preparing his lecture. I bring in the plate with tea, a cookie, and an apple. Then after the lecture, I go get the dishes. The apple was eaten down to a core so thin it hardly existed. It was almost a piece of string. You could see every seed.”

  Alan puts his hand on my shoulder and stares closely into my face. He whispers fiercely, “See, man, that’s what a Roshi is. He’s someone who takes time to do absolutely fucking everything absolutely fucking completely. When he eats an apple, he eats it! He really eats it!”

  I nod nervously, eager for Alan to stop talking, hoping that Roshi doesn’t come out of his cabin and catch us whispering. We’re supposed to maintain a strict silence, though I see the regular students, and occasionally Roshi himself, break the rule. And I wonder at this tiny old man who looks like a picture from an oriental travel book. What goes on in his mind as he sits in a little screened summer cabin deep in American wilderness, surrounded by hippies, quietly eating an apple down to the thinnest wisp of a core?

  In a few minutes Roshi steps out of his cabin. He wears loose work clothes, legs bare from the knees down, a kind of karate outfit. On his bare feet are zoris—simple rubber beach clogs. He carries a mason’s hammer and rock chisel. I stand stiffly at attention, not sure how to greet him. He bows matter-of-factly to each of us. We return the bows, and he leads us quickly down to the creek side, where he takes off his zoris and clambers into the rushing water.

  Standing crotch deep, he beckons us. Alan and I pull off our work boots and follow him in. He begins working a huge light-colored stone lying a few inches below the surface of the rushing water in the middle of the creek.

  My diffidence evaporates. How wonderful to be off my cushion, outside in the hot sun and cold creek. The past two days I’ve spent work periods in a dim corner of the primitive kitchen, washing and chopping endless vegetables, scraping stubborn blackened crusts out of the bottoms of huge rice pots, adding new hot spots to a back already a mass of pain. But now, at last, I can straighten up, stretch out, throw my arms straight back to each side and stare up at the blue sky—burning knee joints flexing, back muscles unknotting, my whole body an antenna for sunlight and breezes.

  Roshi hammers steadily on the chisel, its edge placed somewhere on the stone hidden beneath the foaming water. Alan and I stand happily in the creek next to him and look on. Students move up and down the path, busy on various errands. Everyone’s expression is easy, serene in the hot sunshine. It’s bliss simply to be off our tormenting cushions, moving our bodies, free for a time from pain and the intense effort of concentration.

  After a few long, delicious minutes, Roshi pauses in his hammering and turns to Alan. “Please, Alan, you hit the stone. It is too big for us now, but when it splits we can carry each piece up to the garden. Please, strike it right here.” He points to a slight cleft, a margin in the light-colored stone, dimly visible a few inches under the rushing, bubbling water.

  Alan, bare-backed, bends to the task. Then Roshi turns to me. “What is your name? I’m sorry. I forget so often.”

  “Erik,” I say. “I’m Lon’s friend from Minneapolis.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember. Thank you for coming again to Zen Center. Please carry those stones up to my cabin.” He points to a number of smaller stones waiting at the edge of the stream.

  I pull on my boots and carry stones for about twenty minutes, then take a breather by the side of the creek and watch Roshi and Alan still working the stone in the middle of the stream. Alan is tiring and slowing down. Roshi says, “It’s pretty hard. Let Erik hammer the stone for a while.” Then, looking up at me, “Erik, please, you can try too.”

  I pull off my boots again and enter the cool, rushing water. Roshi hands me the hammer and chisel. Alan stands beside him, tired, solemn.

  “Here, you try the stone too. Right here.” He points to the cleft, faintly visible beneath the foaming water. I feel it with my fingers—a slight indentation snaking its way around the top of the rock. Positioning my bare feet on the slippery round stones of the stream bottom, I grip the chisel firmly in my fist and begin striking with the hammer over and over again, each blow splashing water up onto my chest and face.

  My head and back are hot in the afternoon sun, my legs and hips icy in the rushing creek. I strike the chisel over and over, gripping my toes on the round rocks, struggling to balance, to position the chisel for a solid, accurate blow on that faint margin beneath the rushing water.

  Long minutes go by. My blows are slowing down, and I hear Roshi saying above the rush of the creek, “Here, please, I will try again. It is very hard work, don’t you think?”

  As we watch, Roshi works the stone again. Then Alan takes another turn. Then I go again.

  It’s cool in the creek. Intense sunlight heats my back and neck and dances on the waters surging around the stone. As my hand and arm return from each stroke, I see sparks of watery sunlight reflected up from flecks of mica in the submerged rock.

  For half an hour, we alternate at the hammer and chisel, all three standing close, the icy water from the hammering splashing first on the hammerer, then on the two who wait. The sound of steel on steel pulses over the surging creek, ringing out into the little mountain valley.

  Alan and I sense the end of the work period coming. We work furiously, pressing against fatigue, flailing at times and losing our balance on the slippery rocks, pressed downstream by the icy water. We want to succeed, to accomplish this task for the Roshi. He watches quietly.

  Finally, in what I know will be one of my last turns—frustrated, aches reawakened all over my back—I straighten up for a second and glance at Alan, who raises his eyebrows quizzically.

  Roshi, waiting to take his turn at the stone, smiles at us, his face wrinkling with delight. “Of course, I know you cannot believe the stone can split. But I know it can. We must keep hammering that place. It will split. Sometime it will split.” Then with a rising, inquiring, teasing intonation: “Maybe you are not so sure? But I know. Someday you will know it, too. All we have to do is just keep striking the stone.”

  A young woman dressed i
n black zendo clothes, her face freshly washed and her moist brown hair pulled back in a bun, hurries over to the creek side. She says anxiously, “Roshi, work period is already over. You will miss tea.”

  “Oh, I’m very sorry. I always make a mistake.” He bows to the messenger, then to us. We return his bows, and he turns to walk swiftly back to his cabin to change, balancing on bare feet over the smooth rocks in the streambed.

  As Alan and I pick up our work boots on our barefooted way to our cabins, I see, side by side on a large stone next to the rushing water, Roshi’s zoris. He walked right by them. About to pick them up, I glance at Alan hurrying toward his cabin, hesitate, then leave them and rush back to clean up and get to the first period of zazen before the bell.

  Back in place on my round black cushion in the zendo, I think about the stone. Will it really ever split? If one of the young American work leaders had kept me there hammering in the middle of the creek for two hours—for nothing—I’d be furious. But hammering with Roshi, I was happy. He wasn’t hurried or impatient with the stone—or with us. It was Alan and I who got anxious at the end of the work period when the stone wouldn’t split.

  Still, I don’t want to hammer stones that never split. But Roshi’s a stonemason. He knows what he’s doing. His rock garden grows steadily more beautiful up there by the cabin.

  One fine day the stone will split and we’ll triumphantly carry the opened halves, heavy fruit, back up to the garden. Beaming, Roshi will say, “Of course, you would not believe that the stone could split.” The halves will lie there in his garden and he, for one day or many, will observe them, patient, until he knows right where they go. Then, like a hawk, he’ll swoop, and each opened half will find its place.

  That evening after supper, during the short break before zazen, I see him in the rock garden with three of his old familiar students—three big shaven-pated men—wrestling with another huge stone. They strain to start it moving. Roshi throws the whole weight of his small body against the stone. Finally, with grinding sounds from small bits of gravel beneath, it slowly slides toward a shallow pit he’s dug for it. After it settles into the hole, he directs his crew to rock it back and forth so he can observe it in slightly different positions. Finally it’s bedded just right.

  Afterward, as we all survey the placement, one of the students teases him. “Roshi, why do you want to work so hard? You know, this is our break.”

  “Oh, I think this is really a problem for me,” he says, very quietly, in deference to the rule of silence. Suddenly, he’s deadly serious. “Sometimes I think that I enjoy working too much. I am really so attached to work. Thank you.” He bows to the three men, who bow in return, and turns to walk into his cabin.

  I walk down to the creek to retrieve Roshi’s zoris. I carry them back to his cabin and set them down carefully, neatly, side by side, just outside the screen door. If only he’d chance to the door, see me, and speak. There’s nothing I want more than to talk to him. But I don’t dream of knocking.

  Hesitating there, I peek through the screen and see an apple on a plate, a new green and red apple waiting to be eaten down to filigree. When will I eat my apples without haste, completely, with a mind filled with red ripeness and summer? There’s no sound in the cabin.

  Filled with longing, I walk quietly back down the path and turn right toward the zendo.

  The sesshin continues, day after hot summer day, evening after cool mountain evening, zazen after zazen, instant after instant. My back is molten with pain, knees on fire, my mind now faint, overwhelmed with pain and endless thoughts, now fierce and stubbornly determined.

  One night toward the end of that week, the last period of the day, I abandon myself to the pain. I mark it rising up. Each instant I endure without moving is a blow struck on the mind stone, on a faint margin barely visible under the rushing waters of thought and time.

  Two intense rivers of sensation rise up from my knees. I feel a sudden cleavage, a fracturing. Tense muscles relax along my legs and shoulders and arms. “Oh, please,” I beg, a voice sounding in my mind, “let this mind stone split! Let some gorgeous seed spill free!”

  Thoughts stop. Swiftly, as water wets cotton, my mind rises up from the little zendo hidden in the dark creek bottom, wicks up the mountain walls to their steep rims, and overarching, engulfs stars in a spangled sky.

  The last bell rings, signaling that zazen is over. It’s time for bed. We all wearily bow and file out past the yellow glimmer of the kerosene lamps to the stony paths outside.

  Later that week, on the last night of the sesshin, Roshi begins the evening lecture by saying simply, “Tonight I have nothing on my mind. Nothing at all. If you want, you can ask me some questions.”

  There’s a pause. Then someone says, “Roshi, what’s it like for you to speak English? Is it very hard?”

  “Yes, sometimes it is very hard. But if I am calm, then I just see the English words float up from the depths of my mind. They’re like fish. I catch them and say them. That is very easy.”

  After a few more questions, I grow bold and ask, “Roshi, how hard should my effort be in zazen? When I try very hard, I get exhausted, and then I lose my concentration.”

  “Yes, that is true. So please don’t try so hard. But still, you must make effort, too. Without some effort, you will become like that smoky lamp over there.” Roshi smiles broadly and turns to point to a kerosene lamp, its chimney blackened with smoke, standing behind the dais. Or does he point to the cook, who sits next to it, exhausted from kitchen duties, his head bobbling back and forth as he struggles to stay awake?

  A woman says, “Roshi, yesterday I saw one of the cats eating a little bird it had caught. I wanted to save the bird, but it was already almost dead. It really upsets me that nature is so cruel. I don’t know what to think about it.”

  “Yes, that is hard, it makes us feel very bad. But maybe you could imagine that little bird saying to you, ‘Please, please, don’t look at me, don’t look at me, I am a bodhisattva working out my way, don’t look at me!’

  “Of course, you will still actually feel some pain. But remember, birth is birth, death is death, and actually birth is already death and death is already birth. We ourselves will experience like that little bird someday. All we can do is find our compassion.

  “But that does not mean we can change things. We must accept. The bird dies today. The cat lives. Tomorrow the cat may die. Tomorrow I may die. This is the Buddha’s world.”

  Then someone asks, “Roshi, what about reincarnation? Do our souls really go to another body?”

  Slowly, Roshi says, “I know I will probably be scolded for saying so, but I can’t really tell you. I have no experience of reincarnation. I can’t really say anything.”

  A young woman asks, “Roshi, I get really angry when I see rich people driving expensive cars and wasting so much money when there are so many poor people. Shouldn’t we try hard to change those things? Sometimes I think that sitting is just an escape.”

  Roshi picks up his glasses from the mat and waves them at us. “Well, you think these are mine, of course. Everybody would say, ‘Those are his.’ Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Where are my glasses?’ But, you know, that’s really ridiculous. That’s just a way we talk. Nothing is mine at all.” He chuckles delightedly. “Still, I always think, here are my glasses. Well, it is true, you are all very kind to me. You will let me use these glasses for a while. I know you won’t take them away from me. You will let me use them because my old eyes are very weak.

  “So, it is a big problem for people who own many things that they don’t need. But we are here. We don’t need so many things. We can practice the Buddha’s zazen. It is free. When you were born, you received a mind and body. It is wonderful. We don’t have to pay anybody. We can just practice our zazen. And our zazen can help us be calm.

  “It is very hard to really help anybody if your mind is not calm. You may think you are helping, but are you sure? This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t help
people. Of course we should. But it is important to do it with deep calm.” He picks up his roshi’s stick and smoothly traces a horizontal line back and forth in the air. “Someday, if you continue your practice, your mind can become very even, very level.”

  Someone asks, “How can Buddhism really flourish in America if we don’t have more authentic teachers? Do you think we could get more priests to come from Japan?”

  Roshi looks serious. “That sounds like a pretty good idea, but it might not really be so good. There are many things you can’t learn from a Japanese teacher. Someday you will have Caucasian masters. It won’t be too long. That may be better for you, even if you don’t think so right now.”

  The student whose life was “too social” asks, “Roshi, what about the differences between Soto and Rinzai zen? I understand that in Japan the two orders are hostile to each other. I know we’re doing Soto practice, but why is it better?”

  Roshi looks pensive. “Well, that is a problem in Japan. For many years when I saw a Rinzai priest, I didn’t say anything, but I had a kind of bad feeling. But now it’s okay. Now Soto and Rinzai—I think they are two eyes of a dragon.”

  Then I ask, “Roshi, in Minneapolis we don’t have a zen center and it’s hard for me to practice regularly. Do you think I should keep a strict schedule of zazen at home every day?”

  He knits his brows and, to my surprise, says, “That question is very dangerous for you. My answer can catch you in a trap. Just remember, zazen is very important.”

  The late summer darkness falls over the valley as we sit in this last lecture. The room is almost dark. Several kerosene lamps cast their soft, yellow light, and the corners of the zendo fill with deep, black shadow.

  A million crickets have begun to sound outside the zendo, a giant maraca shaking with rattlesnake hiss. Across the creek, a second maraca joins just off the beat. The whole valley trembles in ecstatic Latin rhythm, and a thousand little shivers bubble up my spine and burst beneath my skull.