Night Boat

by Alan Spence

  Walking was good, in all weathers, in wind and rain, scorching sun. I was drenched and frozen, burned and weather-beaten. It was freedom, and I could happily have walked the whole length of Japan. But I was mindful of the head priest’s injunction to visit other temples, so I stopped wherever I could along the way, to lay down my staff and hang up my bag. I ate my rice and washed my bowl, but nowhere was koan study part of the practice. I made the best of it, threw myself into sessions of zazen, and reading texts. I recited the sutras, made endless prostrations. And after a few days I would move on. But everywhere I found the same listlessness, the same lack of intensity, the same quietism, the stagnation of sitting-quietly-doing-nothing.

  I spoke of it to a monk I met on the road, a wild-eyed old reprobate from a village in Kyushu.

  They’re everywhere, he said, with their do-nothing Zen. They sit in rows, hugging themselves. They pick up some leavings from Soto, lick the leftovers from an unwashed bowl, then they dribble it from their mouths and call it wisdom.

  Heaven is heaven, I said, and earth is earth.

  That’s the kind of stuff, he said.

  Men are men, and mountains are mountains.

  Ha! Next time I meet one I’ll tell him, My arse is my arse!

  We laughed as we walked on, along a steep, stony path.

  Bring them somewhere like this, said the monk, and they can’t stand or walk. They can’t take a single step but cling to trees, or crouch down and grab at plants and grasses, anything to keep them rooted to the spot. They’re bloodless and their eyes are dull. They are unable to move for fear of falling.

  They don’t value koan study, I said.

  They don’t even value the words of the great masters, said the monk. The written word terrifies them. And the koan terrifies them most of all. They call koan a quagmire that will suck you under, a tangle of vines that will choke you. But how can your self-nature be sucked under? How can it be choked?

  The wind whipped up and blew in our faces. Heads down, we pushed on, and the monk continued his rant, shouting above the elements.

  I pray for just one mad monk burning with inner fire. Let him perish in the Great Death then rise up again, flex his muscles, spit on his palms and roar out a challenge.

  At this the old monk stopped and let out a great roar that turned into a throaty laugh.

  Break through to kensho, he shouted, to true enlightenment. Only then can you make sense of it all. Only then can you live it.

  I could have continued walking with the old monk, listening to him rave, but he said we had to go our separate ways.

  Sip this poisonous wisdom if you will, he said. But your way is your way. You have poison of your own to dish out.

  At a crossroads near Mishima we went in opposite directions.

  Kensho is all, he called back to me. Break through! Then he waved and was gone.

  TSUNAMI

  I

  was back on the Tokaido, walking alone. It grew even colder and the wind stung. At one point I felt the ground shake, heard a deep distant rumbling, and the sky darkened and I was caught in a storm. By the time I found shelter, in a patched-up outhouse at a wayside inn, I was drenched and frozen, but grateful to have even the semblance of a roof over my head.

  By the morning the worst of the storm had passed and the rain had eased to a thin soaking drizzle. There were more travellers than usual on the road, coming from the east, from beyond Izu, many of them exhausted and bedraggled. I stopped a few and asked, and the story emerged.

  A huge earthquake had shaken Edo and the surrounding area. The city had burned. The quake had caused a massive tsunami, a great tidal wave that swept inland, drowning everything in its path. The upheaval, the fire and flood, had destroyed half the city and killed thousands. I bowed my head and prayed where I stood, at the side of the road, asking the Bodhisattva of Compassion to have mercy on all those souls.

  I kept walking, broke my journey at a small temple set back from the road. I found myself huddled under a thatched roof with twenty or thirty refugees from the disaster. The temple had little enough in the way of food and bedding, but what they had they gave, and I helped hand out meagre rations and threadbare blankets. I shivered through another night, my old robe wrapped tight about me, staying awake and continuing to invoke the Bodhisattva, the compassionate Kannon.

  One young man sat watching me, eyes wide and staring, face gaunt and drawn, a twitch at the corner of his mouth. I offered him my bowl with what was left of my own portion of broth, but he looked through me, and past me, into the abyss. His face was smeared with grime and ash, lined where tears and snot had run down. For a moment his eyes seemed to bring me into focus and he wiped his face with his hands. Then he spoke, and his voice was cold and toneless, beyond all hope, the voice of someone speaking from hell.

  If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, he said, I would not have believed it.

  He rocked back and forth where he sat, pulled his thin blanket around him.

  When I was a boy and learned to read, he said, I took great delight in spelling out signs and notices, the name on a shop-front, the inscription on a gravestone, directions at a crossroads. Well, there was one sign that made me smile.

  His lips drew back from his teeth, a response to some far memory, but the face was a mask, the eyes dead.

  It was down at the edge of the beach, he said, and it read WARNING. In Event of Earthquake Beware of Tsunami.

  A harsh dry croak racked out of his throat, the pained semblance of a laugh.

  Beware of tsunami! Might as well say if you’re falling from a high tower, beware of the ground coming up to meet you.

  A great sob shook him and he shivered. Again I handed him my bowl with the last mouthful of soup, and this time he took it, swallowed it down, nodded his thanks and handed back the bowl.

  It was chance, he said. I just happened to be inland, on higher ground. I saw the whole thing, from far away, from up above.

  First there was the noise, the great boom way out at sea. The earth shook and I stumbled and fell. I stood up and saw there was mud on my knees. I wiped it and smeared my hands. I stood there, and I looked out, and could make no sense of what I was seeing. In an instant everything had changed. Buildings had disappeared, toppled over. Clouds of dust and smoke rose up. Everywhere fires broke out and flared, fanned by the wind that rushed in from the sea. And that was where my eye was drawn, to the sea.

  I stood in the midst of a great silence, a hush. I could see the shoreline, and the tide receding, further and further out. The beach and the mudflats were wider than they should have been, wet with a dull glisten. A few small boats were left stranded, keeled over. Here and there were people venturing out onto the sand, children running out, out, stopping to pick up something they’d found left behind by the tide. Out.

  It was wrong, he said. The scene was wrong. The way the world in a dream is like the real thing but not.

  The noise was different now, a distant roaring, a rush. I saw the wave, far out, as wide as the whole horizon and gathering speed as it moved towards the shore. I heard myself shout out No! and I started to run. I pitched forward, fell again. And the wave kept coming, a wall of water ten, fifteen, twenty feet high. It swept in over the beach, engulfed the small figures there trying to run away, it picked up the boats and carried them, it drove on like some great being, an implacable force pushing forward.

  It smashed houses and temples, a hospital, a school. It washed away bridges and uprooted trees. It turned roads into rivers and rivers into lakes. The low hill I stood on became an island. The waters reached almost to my feet. I looked out across this new world and I knew everything I owned was gone, my home destroyed, my wife and daughter drowned.

  He had told me all he had to tell. He had no more words. He looked at me across a great distance.

  The young man and the other refugees lay down where they could in the cold hall and grappled with restless uneasy sleep. I found a corner and returned to my meditation, int
errogating the silence, questioning the emptiness, the nothingness. Mu.

  In a moment I was there, entering into the experience, looking through his eyes, seeing what he had seen. I felt the fear and the panic, faced that vast wall of water thundering inland. I was shaken by sheer terror, then numbed, unable to move, then running, stumbling, crying, scrambling to higher ground.

  The great wave, the colossal destruction and loss of life. This too was a koan, beyond comprehension. This too.

  Existence is suffering, said the Buddha. The First Noble Truth.

  We come from nothing and to nothing we return.

  The great ocean, the wide world, the vast universe itself, are no more than drops of dew on the Buddha’s feet.

  And yet.

  And yet.

  Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them all.

  Before dawn I was on the road, walking, meditating.

  At the next temple I once more laid down my staff and hung up my bag. I once more joined in the reading of texts, the chanting of sutras, the endless prostrations. I ate my rice and washed my bowl.

  After a week I set out walking again, back to Daisho-ji.

  Well? said the head priest, Sokudo, on my return. What now?

  I had nothing to say.

  CLEAR SEVERITY

  A

  fter the tsunami my restlessness grew worse. I had glimpsed another kind of hell, not fire but water. This was how it ended, in cataclysm, all-engulfing. I left Daisho-ji, walked again, not settling, for weeks and months as the seasons changed, and on the way back I spent time in Shimizu village, cloistered away at the monks’ training hall in Zenso-ji.

  Again the regime was based on long hours of study, chanting, meditation. The head priest, Sen’ei Soen, was austere and scholarly, thin-lipped, sunken-cheeked. One day he delivered a sermon on koans from the Mumonkan, the Gateless Gate. He pointed out that the master Ganto referred to in one of the stories was Ganto Zenkatsu, or Yantou Quanhuo, the great Chinese teacher of Zen who was known as Clear Severity.

  I was thrilled by the very sound of his name and by the story the priest told about Ganto challenging his own master’s realisation, then laughing out loud and applauding the master’s next lecture, saying the master had realised the last truth.

  The priest quoted a verse.

  If you understand the first truth,

  You should understand the last truth.

  The first and the last – are they not the same?

  If I’d had the courage I would have stood up and laughed, and applauded the priest’s sermon. But it would have been empty, just a performance, and the thought of it made me burn with embarrassment. This was how far I was from any kind of realisation, first or last. But I came away from the lecture fired up, determined to find out more about Ganto. I went straight to the library and found a book on his life and teachings. I blew the dust from the book. The pages smelled pleasantly musty and damp, and faintly of ancient incense. I settled in a corner of the shrine room to read it straight through.

  Ganto came to life as I read. He had indeed been a powerful character and a great teacher. He had lived the Zen life to the full, in absolute totality.

  Clear Severity.

  There was story with the title Ganto’s Axe. Ganto’s own master, Tokusan, had asked him to test the realisation of two monks. They’ve been meditating here for years, said Tokusan. Go and challenge them.

  Ganto picked up an axe and went to the hut where the two monks were meditating.

  If you say a word, he told them, I will cut off your heads. If you don’t say a word I will cut off your heads.

  He raised the axe, ready to strike. The two monks continued meditating as if he hadn’t spoken, as if he didn’t exist.

  You are true Zen students, said Ganto, and he threw down the axe. Then he reported back to Tokusan.

  I see your side of it, said Tokusan, but what about their side?

  Old Tozan might let them in, said Ganto, but not you.

  I had encountered Tozan’s words, his koans, before. How can we avoid heat and cold? Go where it is neither hot nor cold.

  Ganto’s axe. The blade flashing.

  The light in the room was beginning to fade. I had sat the whole afternoon, lost in the book. I had missed a session of zazen. I had missed the dishing out of rice and pickle. I suddenly shivered, felt the autumn chill in my bones. Go where it is neither hot nor cold. I lit a lamp and pulled my robe tighter about me, huddled over the book and read on through the evening and into the night.

  It was clear that Ganto was the greatest of masters. The commentary called him a dragon of a man and said a teacher of his calibre only appeared every five hundred years. I could see him, like Nisshin Shonin walking through fire, braving hell itself.

  I read the book to the very end, taking strength and sustenance from every word. But on the last page was a passage that drained the life out of me. It described Ganto’s death. It said a gang of bandits had attacked the monastery where he was meditating. They had ransacked the place and found nothing worth stealing, then they had turned on Ganto and brutally murdered him, stabbed him again and again. It was said his death-cry was so loud it could be heard ten miles away.

  I slumped and let the book fall to the floor. I stared at it lying there on the frayed tatami. I heard footsteps and the head priest was standing in the doorway, glaring at me. His voice boomed out.

  What are you doing here?

  He meant here, in the library, but I heard his question as much more. What was I doing here? Why was I wasting my time?

  I didn’t answer.

  You missed two sessions of zazen, he said. You neglected your practice. Instead you sit here dreaming, using up lamp-oil.

  This was the way my father had spoken to me when I was a child, meditating on Tenjin. Wasting lamp-oil. Wasting my time.

  The priest snuffed out the lamp and the darkness closed in.

  For three days and three nights I was in torment. I ate nothing. I couldn’t sleep. The story of Ganto had pitched me into despair. If a master of that calibre could be brutally slain by common bandits, and howl in his death-agony, if even he was powerless against the forces of darkness, then what hope was there for the rest of us?

  One way or another. In event of earthquake, beware of tsunami.

  What was the point of this life of austerity, the endless sitting in zazen, the grappling with insoluble koans? It had all become empty, meaningless.

  Did a dog have the Buddha-nature?

  Who cared?

  Now the teachings were abhorrent to me. The sutras and the images turned my stomach. I was sick to death of Zen and all its trappings.

  By day I walked around numbed, as in a dream, the world a grey place inhabited by ghosts. At night, not sleeping, I turned this way and that, imagined the demons coming closer, ready to drag me down into hell. I imagined I saw Ganto’s face, contorted, heard his final cry echoing, the sound of utter desolation and defeat.

  If you say a word I will cut off your heads. If you don’t say a word I will cut off your heads.

  I couldn’t go on. I would have to leave.

  But what then?

  Go home and face my mother’s disappointment, my father’s disdain? Better to throw myself in the river. But that would take me straight to the deepest hell, reborn among the gaki, the hungry ghosts.

  I couldn’t go on. I had to go on. Life itself was a vicious koan I couldn’t solve.

  If you say a word. If you don’t say a word.

  I found myself sitting on the hard ground, in the farthest corner of the temple, leaning against an old mud wall, legs stretched out in front of me. I had no memory of walking there. I sat, looking at nothing, staring into the void. Mindless, I picked up a stick, scratched a mark in the dirt. I made a rough version of the ideogram Mu. I rubbed it out with my hand in the dust. I leaned forward again with the stick. Three lines made a shape like Fuji.

  I remembered my brush and inkstone. I had brought them
with me to the temple, but I had barely touched them in all the time I had been here.

  Again I rubbed out what I had drawn, wiped out Fuji with a stroke. I stood up, shaky, unsteady on my feet. I went to the kitchen and begged a bowl of rice, ate it too quickly and staggered outside, threw it up. Then I sipped some water and brought that up too. Retching and aching I looked down at my vomit, spattered in the dust. Eyes watering, I saw worlds, sparkling landscapes in the random patterns. Then I blinked and they disappeared.

  I felt weak but purged. I cleaned up the mess. I made my way back to my sleeping quarters, found the inkstone and brush among my few belongings, wrapped in an old cloth. I would start painting again. If I couldn’t be a monk, I would be an artist, a poet. If hell awaited me, so be it. Let me not waste this short life in fear of it, unable to live.

  THE WILD HORSE

  OF MINO

  I

  walked endlessly, along the Tokaido, on mountain paths. I followed rivers and streams, the edge of the ocean. I slept wherever I found myself, wherever I could lay my head, in the cheapest inns, in barns and outhouses, in wayside temples, anywhere I could beg lodging for the night. In six-tatami rooms, in no-tatami rooms, on loose straw and bare hard floors, in the company of thieves and vagabonds, prostitutes who called me monk-boy and asked me to keep them warm.

  The young girl caressed him, then asked, What now?

  The monk answered, Nowhere is there any warmth.

  Once, on a cold cold night, I lay huddled in the corner of a tiny bare room, unable to sleep. In the dark I heard others come in to the room and I realised it was two young women, like me unable to afford more than this meanest of shelters on worn tatami behind thin walls. I heard them whispering and giggling as they settled down, and they called out Goodnight to me, their singsong voices chiming together, then more whispering, another tinkle of laughter.

  I chanted the Daimoku to myself, fell asleep and dreamed of Hana, the feel and smell of her in my arms. Then waking, and not Hana. The scent was wrong, a faint sweetness drowned out by mildew and camphor and sweat. Not Hana but the warmth. One of the two young women, here beside me. Falling into nothing, into a little death, then waking again, the two women gone. Had I dreamed this too? The cold room.