by Erik Storlie
As the others wander through the empty house, I step out to a sun porch that overlooks the lake and sit on a low radiator beneath the front windows. Subzero air drifts through cracks in the glazing, chilling my knees. The sun sinks in the west across the lake, shimmering over a mile of crusty, wind-sculpted snow, then filling the white, plastered room with glowing pinks and golds. I know we’ll buy this building.
It’s the spring of 1976. Marion has arranged to have a dance at the old firehouse near Seven Corners. We’re raising funds toward the purchase of the house on Lake Calhoun. Having a dance feels like a return to the sixties, the good times of Country Joe and the Fish and the Avalon Ballroom. I sell tickets to skeptical old friends. I want them to understand. I want them to know I’ve not graduated from drug burnout to a religious cult. I want them to know zen is not about rigidity and puritanism. This, I tell them, will be a very good time.
The band is fine. The firehouse is crowded with zen students, their friends, and folks from the neighborhood who just want to dance on a Saturday night.
Around ten o’clock, an old buddy who teaches with me at the college, another hippie Ph.D. from Seven Corners, appears at my elbow. We’ve drunk and doped together for years. He points up a stairway and motions for me to come. Puzzled, I follow him. At the top, on a dark balcony overlooking the dance floor, he pulls out a joint and lights up. The flare of his lighter illuminates our faces, and I see dancers on the floor looking up curiously.
I hesitate. This isn’t exactly what I’m here for. But it is a Seven Corners dance. Besides, I’m not a zen puritan. I didn’t sign on to achieve some cult purity. I hate sanctimonious stuff about the evils of drugs. I wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for psychedelics.
It’s a moment of truth. Roshi and Tomoe-san have just left the party. With a broad smile and a flourish of his hand, delighted to put me in this bind, my friend graciously reaches me the joint. To appreciative stares from some of the unregenerate zen hippies on the dance floor, I—a member of the board and recording secretary of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center—toke up.
At the lecture on the following Saturday morning, I’m surprised when Roshi begins discussing drugs. He names no names nor mentions time or place, but he expresses special concern about marijuana.
“I know that some people use the drug marijuana. But that is not part of real practice. That is only self-indulgence. It is delusion. So think carefully about this.”
As I learn he will often do, Roshi offers his criticism impersonally, in public, at a lecture.
It’s an evening a few weeks later. Tonight Bob Pirsig gives a benefit lecture to raise money for the purchase of the Calhoun house. The members of the Zen Center have been busy for weeks making arrangements and getting out publicity. I’ve driven all over town offering flyers to local businesses for their bulletin boards and tacking them up on telephone and light poles. The tickets are very expensive, but Bob is a phenomenon now. Advance sales are brisk. And what, we all wonder, will he say to the crowd?
As my wife and I enter the Children’s Theatre, a new hall connected to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, we’re delighted. We see city officials, state legislators, even the Minnesota Speaker of the House, and a host of other well-dressed men and women. At last, I think, we’ll get some broad interest and support for the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center.
Bob’s talk works. He discusses zen and zen meditation in simple, compelling terms, congratulates the Twin Cities for having attracted a genuine meditation master, and begs for community support. Though he talks for over an hour, the audience is intent, absorbed. He concludes by telling the story of Bodhidharma, punctuated with slides of ink drawings—Bodhidharma with various angry scowls, brows beetling over his glaring eyes. “This is what happened to him,” Bob says, “when he sat and stared at the wall for nine years.” The audience chuckles. “We do it for two or five or seven days in a row several times a year. And here is me after five or six days of sitting!” Bob flashes on a picture of Bodhidharma with a huge head that threatens to topple him to the ground. The audience roars.
After the crowd has left, my wife and I congratulate Bob on the talk. Flushed, exhausted, he grips his fists in front of his chest, a few inches apart, as if forcing two things together. “It was a long talk,” he says with a fierce chuckle, “but I crossed the wires and gave them full voltage. I think I shorted out their circuits. I think they got it!”
It’s 1977. I go to the Katagiris’ to work with Roshi on a lecture. They live in an apartment we’ve made on the second and third floors of the remodeled Calhoun mansion. In the last year, I feel his growing impatience with my tutoring. I know visitors to lectures are at times completely confused by his words. Of course, some students think the problem is that they’re not sufficiently advanced. But working closely with him, I know he often can’t put Japanese into accurate English. “At least,” I growl to myself, “let’s get the paradoxes translated clearly—even if they don’t have solutions.”
Today he’s preparing to lecture on Hyakujo and the fox. Tomoe-san shows me into his study, a back bedroom on the second floor.
We bow. I sit down across from him at his big desk on the floor. He shows me working notes in which he’s translated the story. With some help in searching for English words and reworking awkward phrases, he puts together a narrative:
An old man has been attending Hyakujo’s lectures. One day he stays behind.
Hyakujo asks, “Who are you?”
The old man replies, “Once in the time when the Kashyapa Buddha preached, I was the abbot here. Then one of my students asked me, ‘Is the enlightened man bound by the law of causation?’”
“Now,” says Roshi, “I’m not sure how to say the answer of the old man. He says, maybe like this, ‘There is no result from the law of causation.’”
“Well,” I say, “that doesn’t make it very clear. What does he mean that there is no result?”
“He means,” says Roshi impatiently, “that he is not controlled by causation. He thinks that maybe he’s free from any causation. It’s a ridiculous answer, of course. All human beings arise in this world of conditions.”
“So,” I say, “the old man thought that his enlightenment, or what he thought was his enlightenment, meant that he was really no longer a part of the human world, that he was beyond it, or above it?”
“Yes,” says Roshi. “Is it better if I say that the old man says he has no influence from the law of causation?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I think that works better.”
“Okay,” says Roshi, blowing out his breath, “I will write down that the old man answers his monk’s question, ‘There is no influence from the law of causation.’ Now I want to think about the rest of the story.” Roshi and I again bend over his notes and, with some further rewording and rephrasing, complete the narrative:
The old man tells Hyakujo Zen Master that he has been punished for this foolish answer by being reborn for five hundred rebirths as a fox. And he says to Hyakujo, “Please give me an illuminating remark.”
And Hyakujo says, “No obscurity in the law of causation.” At these words, the old man is enlightened.
“Okay,” says Roshi, looking up from his notebook hopefully, “do you think the students will understand this English?” Then smiling, “Maybe it will not be so easy to understand the story.”
Hesitantly, I say, “Well, I am still a little worried about that last answer.” I run my finger along the line, reading aloud, “No obscurity in the law of causation.” “Can you say some more about that? What does it mean that there’s no obscurity in causation? Causation is not necessarily something that is or is not obscure. I’m not clear about that.”
Grimly, I think to myself, “Why go through this whole story if the punch line just claims to dissolve obscurity by saying something isn’t obscure. There’s got to be more to it than that.”
With rising irritation, glancing at his watch, Roshi says, “Don’t you think t
he students will get some feeling from these words, some taste of the story? Maybe it will not be so clear. But I think they will get some feeling.”
“Sure,” I say, “but often they go away confused.” I hesitate uneasily, remembering the enthusiastic audience at Pirsig’s fund-raiser a year ago. Many of those curious strangers have come to the Zen Center, once or twice, and never returned. “I mean, they get confused not by the difficulty of the koan or of zen, but they get confused because they can’t really understand the English. When you just say there’s ‘no obscurity’ in causation, that’s what we call begging the question.”
“What is exactly ‘beg the question’?” Roshi asks, puzzlement on his face.
“Well, I guess that’s kind of off the point,” I say. “What I mean is, Hyakujo seems just to give an answer like, ‘Don’t be confused, be clear,’ to the old man. What else does the original seem to say?”
Roshi looks back over his text. “Well,” he says, “it means something like he is neither caught by causation or free from causation. He is just in causation. To say he is caught or he is free is something extra. Maybe it’s good to say he is ‘one’ with causation.”
“Ah,” I say, brightening. “That sounds fine. That helps me, anyway. You know, I think it’s very important that the translations not only be accurate but also be in powerful English. I’ve seen some of the early translations of the sutras. It’s hard to get through them. They’re dull. They don’t move the reader. The language has to have fire.”
“Yes, maybe so,” says Roshi briskly. “Now it is time for lecture. Thank you very much for your help.” He bows, I bow, and we rise to go.
It’s fall. My wife and I have just returned from the mining claim on Flute Reed Creek. I begin to feel guilty about these trips. I encouraged Roshi to come to the midwest. He never takes a vacation. Yet I go away for two months every summer. Is my time in wilderness only self-indulgence? To me it seems deeply spiritual and grounding. Am I obligated to be here at the Zen Center all the time, too? Roshi seems to think so, although he says nothing directly.
After the Saturday schedule of zazen, breakfast, lecture, and work, I walk upstairs to the Katagiris’ apartment at the Calhoun house. We chat, standing at the door.
He asks, “How was your vacation out west?” I’m distressed by what seems his pointed emphasis of the word vacation.
“Oh, it was good, thank you,” I say. “But you know, it’s not exactly a vacation. It’s a lot of work. The cabin needs lots of repairs, and we spend time carrying backpacks far into the mountains. It seems important to me to know the mountains. I feel something very deep there.”
“Oh, yes,” he says. “Vacation is very good for human beings. I’m glad you had a good time. And how is Jeanne?”
“She’s good,” I say. “But she’s ready to be back in Minneapolis. I wonder when you would like me to come again to work on English?”
“I think,” Roshi says slowly, “I don’t want to have any more tutoring right now with my English. Thank you very much.”
“Oh,” I say, surprised and hurt. “Well, that’s fine. Just tell me and I’ll be happy to help again anytime.”
“Yes, I will tell you.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Thank you very much,” he says, bowing.
I bow and leave.
It’s a Saturday afternoon in the early spring of 1978. After the morning schedule of zazen, lecture, work, and lunch, Roshi invites me upstairs for tea. We sit on the couch in the living room and Tomoe brings in cups and a teapot. We chat for a few minutes. Then Tomoe says excitedly, “Roshi and I think about buying a new car. Erik, maybe it is possible you can help us?”
“Why, of course. That’s great,” I say. “Do you want another Datsun? Or maybe a Toyota? They’re supposed to be very good Japanese cars.”
Roshi says with a twinkle, “Oh, we don’t want the Japanese car. We want a big car. What do you think about Chevrolet cars?”
I’m surprised. Finally, Americans are worrying about dependence on fossil fuels and the extravagance of Detroit’s dinosaurs. And I know how thin is the shoestring on which the Katagiris live. They’re frugal in everything, from both habit and necessity.
“Well,” I think, “Detroit has done some downsizing. And with two boys, I bet the Katagiris are sick to death of that little car of theirs. What an adventure. To come to America and finally get a big American car!”
“A Chevrolet might be fine,” I say. “What can I do to help?”
“Well,” says Roshi, “it was very confusing for us when we went to the place where they sell cars.” Roshi’s eyes get large. “And they are very expensive. But maybe there are some that are not so expensive.”
“Oh, I think so,” I say. “I’ll do some checking. It’s easy for me. You want four doors, of course. It’ll be easier with the boys.”
“Oh, that would be very good,” says Tomoe.
“And how about color?” I ask, smiling.
“Maybe we can get red?” asks Roshi, tentatively.
“Why, I think so. Certainly, if we order one. I’ll call around today and let you know what I’ve found out tonight.”
As I leave, I promise myself that I’m going to get them a big, red, four-door American car, and I’m going to get them the lowest price in town.
After endless head knocking with car salesmen, both over the phone and at several car lots, I’ve worked out a deal with a Chevy dealer on Lake Street.
It’s a Friday afternoon. Tomoe, Roshi, my wife, and I sit in the sales office. The four-door red car with desired accessories at the cheapest price in the state of Minnesota has just been delivered. Foster, the new car sales representative, is a middle-aged man whose red face and fat neck seem painfully squeezed by the collar of his sparkling white shirt. He eyes me balefully. On the phone earlier in the day, he assured me that I’d stolen his and the company’s profits on this one.
I’m delighted. Tomoe and Jeanne have worked on the Katagiri’s budget so the car is affordable. It’s done. Sitting at the desk across from Foster, papers spread out between them, Roshi reaches in his sleeve for his checkbook.
Then Foster, handing Roshi a pen across the desk, casually interposes, “Now, Pastor Katagiri, there is one detail. I hate to bring this up, but we’ve just now had a price increase come through. We weren’t expecting this, of course, total surprise to us, but I am going to have to get an additional two hundred and twenty-five dollars on your car. I know you’ll understand that we’re in the automobile business to serve customers, but we can’t lose money and stay in business. You’ll notice too that this kind of unfortunate situation is covered in our purchase agreement. I’d like to, but there’s really nothing I can do at this point.”
“Goddamn it,” I sputter, coming up to my feet, “why didn’t you say so on the phone? This is absolutely ridiculous. I want your manager in here. You haul us all down here and . . .”
Roshi raises his hand and gently waves the pen. “It’s okay,” he says quietly. Then he adds, with a touch of pride, “We can do that. Don’t worry about it, Erik.” He opens his checkbook on the desk, saying, “Now, show me how much.”
Foster smiles at me.
In less than an hour, the Katagiris drive off in their large, red, four-door American car.
It’s early summer, another late Saturday afternoon. Tomoe serves us tea upstairs in the living room. As we sit on the couch, Roshi pulls out a brochure describing a meeting of Buddhist teachers in San Francisco. All the heavies are to be there, mostly Asian men. Dick Baker, of course, is included. “Roshi should be teaching him!” I think.
“Are you going to go?” I ask innocently.
“No, they didn’t send me an invitation,” he says.
“I see,” I say.
“Oh, it’s not important,” he says. Then after some talk about the various roshis and roshi wannabes, he sighs, “Sometimes I just wish I were swimming in the big ocean.”
“Well,” I ask, “w
here is the big ocean?”
“Yes, that is always the question,” he replies, softly, sadly.
It’s the late seventies. I’m almost forty. My wife is pregnant with our first child. As usual, I do the annual seven-day sesshin scheduled between Christmas and New Year’s. About twenty of us are sitting.
It’s the sixth day. Snow lies deep outside and now Canadian high pressure has brought bright, clear skies and crackling below-zero temperatures. The zendo is cold, especially at five in the morning. I wear a heavy sweater and long johns under my wool pants.
Now, after fifteen years of practice, I can minimize the pain in my knees and back, but there’s always the mind. I was sleepy in the first days of the sesshin. Now, as I wake up, I fight distraction and endless mind wandering. Each day has betrayed my lack of attainment. Fifteen years and no enlightenment. Will this work ever be done?
After a period of zazen in the midafternoon, the doan strikes the little bell. We all rise for ten minutes of kinhin, slow walking meditation. What a relief to straighten the aching knees, change the posture of the back and neck, just to stand up. Winter sunlight slants into the room. Roshi is upstairs holding dokusan.
After seven days of silence, we’re seasoned, calm. We flow around the perimeter of the room, hands folded at the solar plexus, eyes dropped at a forty-five-degree angle onto the oak floor ahead. We’re aware of each silent person, each body and mind. We don’t look at each other, but we know, we can feel, as each passes through the peripheral vision, how she is doing, how he is doing.
Oh, this poor one, this little sad one went down and cried in the basement during afternoon break for the first two days. She seems okay now, though subdued—a bit pale and wan. I don’t even know her name yet. I heard it at work meeting but forgot it. My body becomes firm but yielding, welcoming, as she passes through my vision at the center of the room. “Hang in there. Don’t give up,” I silently telegraph.