by Alan Spence
You, he said. Wise Crane from Hara. Do you think you are an exception? Do you think you are above all this?
No, I said.
Well, you should, he said. Call yourself a monk? And he shook his fist in my face, let out a harsh bark of a laugh.
Sokaku used his influence to get me an interview with the master next morning. I felt I hadn’t done myself justice, and I wanted to speak to him face to face.
Well? said the master, glaring at me as soon as I came into his room.
I bowed and handed him the poem I had written on my realisation. A bell rings in vast emptiness. He snatched it from me with his left hand and glanced at it, held it away from him at arm’s length.
So this is what you’ve learned, he said. Then he raised his right hand. Now show me what you see.
I entered into the spirit of the exchange.
If I had anything to show you, I said, I’d vomit it up right this minute. I’d throw it up all over you.
And leave me to clean up the mess, he said.
I pretended to gag as if being sick.
What about Joshu’s Mu? said the master, changing tack. What do you make of that?
There’s nowhere to grasp it, I said. Nowhere at all.
He leaned across quickly and grabbed my nose.
I’ve got a pretty good grip of it, he said, and he twisted my nose so hard the pain brought tears to my eyes and I cried out. I sweated and shook and the master let go, roared with laughter.
Cave-dweller! he shouted in my face. Zen corpse!
My pride was shattered, my self-esteem ground in the dust.
Are you satisfied with yourself like this? he asked.
How else should I be? I said.
When Nansen was about to die, he said, a monk asked him where he would be in a hundred years. What reply did Nansen spew up?
I knew the story, had meditated on it.
A water buffalo at the foot of the hill.
And when the monk asked if he could join him, what further poison did he spit out?
He told him to eat grass.
So, said Shoju. Where did Nansen go when he died?
I stood up and covered my ears with my hands, stumbled towards the door.
The master shouted after me. Honourable monk!
I stopped and turned back.
Cave-dweller! he shouted. Zen corpse!
This was how it was, how it continued between us. He challenged me with koans, with lines from the scriptures, demanded I answer now, now, now! And whatever I said he dismissed as nonsense, brushed me aside.
You’re down at the bottom of a deep pit, he said. I’m shouting down at you but you can’t hear, and you can’t drag yourself up out of the depths.
When I opened my mouth to say a word he shouted me down. Zen corpse! Cave-dweller!
I kept silent and he challenged me again, with a verse from the Blue Cliff Record.
North, South, East, West, we head for home. In the middle of the night, the same snowy peaks, row after row.
Now, he said, where’s the Zen in these lines? What’s the truth of it?
I opened my mouth to speak.
Say something, he said. Anything! Show me you understand!
I hesitated and he grabbed me by the throat, then he pushed me back and started punching me in the chest. I raised my hands to defend myself but I couldn’t bring myself to hit back, strike the master. He had clearly become insane. I tried to back away and he caught me with one mighty blow to the head that knocked me to the floor and I rolled off the verandah to the ground below. I must have lain there unconscious for some time. When I opened my eyes I was drenched in sweat and the master was looking down at me, roaring with laughter.
Well? he said. I’m still shouting down at you. Have you started to wake up?
I scrambled back onto the verandah, kneeled down and prostrated myself before him. Something had broken in me. I saw he was right about my realisation.
Again he shouted. Cave-dwelling Zen corpse!
You’re right, I said.
And what use is that?
The next day, late in the afternoon, the master sent me out with the other monks to beg from door to door. I was still dazed from the master’s battering, the fall to the ground, the descent into oblivion. I had resumed my meditation on the koans, grappled once more with Joshu’s Mu as I tramped the streets of the village, my wooden sandals sclaffing, caked in mud.
I was so lost in myself, in relentlessly questioning, that I lost all sense of where I was and what I was doing. I only realised I had stopped in front of a house and stood there, ox-like, unmoving, when I heard an old woman shouting at me from the open doorway.
Moron! she shouted. Imbecile! Are you deaf as well as stupid!
I stared at her, not understanding anything.
Aren’t you listening? she shouted. I told you to go somewhere else!
Then she picked up a bamboo broom, raised it above her head.
I told you, she shouted. Go!
And she brought the broom crashing down on my head, and for the second time in as many days I was knocked to the ground.
But it was as if she had dislodged some final obstacle, made everything clear.
I stood up and bowed to her.
She was right. I hadn’t been listening. I had to go somewhere else. And yet it was right here. It was wonderful!
Idiot! she shouted, and she slammed the door.
Somewhere else. Right here.
This time the realisation was different. There was no strutting arrogance, no puffed-up sense of my own great spiritual attainment. This old woman had awakened me with her broom-handle Zen. Beyond all duality there was only this. Only this.
I threw back my head and laughed.
Nearing the temple gate I composed myself once more, put on a serious face. But the master saw through me. As I entered the compound he hurried straight towards me and stopped right in front of me.
So! he said. You got what you went begging for.
Nothing but hammer-blows, I said, from the goddess Kwan-Yin in human form.
Just what you deserved! he said, and he cuffed me lightly on the shoulder. Then he fixed me with his gaze, intense and piercing, and he nodded.
This time you have crossed the barrier, he said. You have stepped through.
And ridiculously, for someone who had just gone beyond, I felt tears welling up in my eyes.
This too, I said to the master. This too.
That night in a dream I saw again the old woman who had cracked the bamboo broom on my thick skull, and in the dream I bowed to her once more, and I thanked her for her blessings.
It is I who have to thank you, she said. And all at once her face was my mother’s face, smiling at me. I was overcome with joy. And it was my mother’s voice speaking to me.
Because of your efforts, she said, I will move to a higher realm beyond all suffering.
Her face was shining, radiant, and I woke up laughing, a faint scent of jasmine in the air.
For a time after that, Shoju directed me to meditation on the Five Ranks, the Apparent and the Real.
Read Tozan’s verses on the subject, nothing else. Don’t get bogged down in third-rate commentaries or you’ll be dragged back down into that old Zen hole.
I had read the verses in passing, but I hadn’t spent any time with them. They were a key text in Soto Zen, and Shoju was often scathing about monks from that school. Quietists, he’d call them, slumped in the torpor of their do-nothing Zen. But he made me copy out the verses, replacing the koans as the focus of my practice.
I sat with the words through long hours, day and night, tried to penetrate the heart of them. I memorised the verses, chanted them till they lost all linear meaning, became like mantras, or sutras, the words pointing always beyond the form.
The Apparent within the Real.
The Real within the Apparent.
I moved on.
Coming from within the Real.
Arrival at
Mutual Integration.
I had battled with the first four verses, the way I had struggled with Joshu’s Mu, with the same intensity. The master seemed satisfied with my effort, but when he asked me to explain what I had learned, I bumbled about the reciprocal penetration of the Apparent and the Real.
He laughed. Is that it? That’s your understanding? No more than that? It may as well be some useless old piece of temple furniture, to be discarded and thrown out.
I said nothing.
Why are there five verses, he asked, and not just four?
I recited the title of the fifth verse.
Oneness realised.
And that’s it?
Again I said nothing.
He looked at me kindly, with none of the old ferocity.
You can’t expect to understand it all at once.
A few days later I was walking along behind the master, and we followed a path along the edge of a steep cliff. Without warning he stopped and grabbed me by the shoulders as if to push me over.
The Buddha’s Flower-Sermon, he said. What is that about?
By holding up a flower, I said, he sought to transmit the teachings.
The treasure of the Dharma, said the master, the pure mind of Nirvana, the gate of emptiness. How could these be transmitted?
He held up a flower, I said. Mahakashapa saw and understood.
How could that be? said the master, shaking me.
I broke free of his grasp and hit him a sharp slap. He stepped back and laughed and we carried on walking by the cliff-edge.
The master had long since stopped calling me Cave Dweller and Zen Corpse.
One evening he called me to his quarters and offered me tea, bitter green froth in a cracked bowl. He poured it without any ceremony, slurped tea from his own bowl, also cracked and unglazed, and he told me a story.
Near the master’s hermitage at Narasawa there once lived a woodcutter who came on a little wolf cub lost in the mountains. He took the creature home with him and looked after it, feeding it and rearing it like a domestic pet. He grew very attached to the animal and it became devoted to him and would follow him everywhere like a dog.
One day he was cutting down a huge tree when it skewed out of control and fell in the wrong direction. It landed on the cub and crushed it to death. He buried its body and returned home distraught. That same night, from every direction, wolves descended on the woodsman’s village. They gathered in packs, eyes burning, jaws slavering. They howled as they ran through the streets and they took their revenge on humankind, dragging away babies and young children and tearing them to pieces.
The village was under siege, families trapped inside their homes with the doors and windows bolted and barred. Nobody even dared to step outside. They waited and they prayed.
News of the terror reached Shoju, and he recalled the courage of his predecessors, facing fire and sword. He took strength from the tales and resolved to put his own meditation to the test.
At midnight he went to the cemetery where the greatest numbers of wolves were gathered, and he sat down on a grave, vowing to sit in zazen for seven nights. He sat as the wolves circled around him, black shapes, like creatures from hell. Gradually they closed in on him, sniffing the air, growling. Then the largest of them broke from the pack and ran straight towards him, picked up its stride and leapt over his head, landed behind him with a snarl. One of the others did the same, then another, and another, all charging towards him and only at the last moment breaking stride, leaping over him.
For all his mastery of Zen, he was terrified. He grew icy cold, in his guts, in his liver, in the marrow of his bones. His body shook and the breath choked in his throat. But through the fear he sat, unwavering in his purpose. The wolves nudged and butted and probed him. They sniffed at his head, at his throat. They nuzzled their snouts into his face, his groin.
He could smell them, their matted fur and rank breath, the stink of blood from the carcasses they’d torn apart with their fangs and claws.
But still he sat, back straight, hour after hour, night after night. Every breath might be his last. At any moment those great jaws might rip out his throat, tear the flesh from his bones and devour him. Knowing this, his concentration on every breath, every moment, was total.
By the seventh night he felt an immense inner strength, and with it a kind of joy. The biggest wolf approached him again, the leader of the pack. It glared right into his eyes then cuffed his chest with its massive paw. Shoju bowed to the creature then opened his throat in a howl of his own which became a great roar of laughter. When he opened his eyes he saw all the wolves slinking out of the cemetery. They left the village and never returned.
It was a good story. I would carry it with me when I left the place, a charm against darkness.
I had been at Shoju’s hermitage for nine months that felt like a lifetime, or more. But the old restlessness was on me again and I felt it was time to leave. Shoju said nothing, but on the day of my departure he walked with me along the rough track through the woods as far as the village. We stopped, still saying nothing. The same mangy dog, or one very much like it, still slouched along the street, repeating its feeble bark.
A lifetime.
I had hoped you might stay, said Shoju at last. You could be my Dharma-heir and succeed me at the hermitage.
But you have Sokaku, I said. Surely he will be your heir.
He doesn’t have the strength, he said. He hasn’t learned how to conserve his vital energy.
That’s something I too am still learning, I said.
But you will, he said. I can see it. And by the time you are my age you will be a very great teacher indeed.
I waited, half expecting a rebuke, a parting remark to wither me. But his expression was serious, a sadness in his eyes.
I bowed and I too felt deeply moved.
I would direct you to continue meditation on the Five Ranks, he said. The Apparent and the Real. You will find the verses invaluable for post-enlightenment practice.
I bowed again and he continued.
Concentrate on producing one or two good monks. More than that will be difficult. If you can produce two real successors, the old winds of Zen will blow once more throughout the land.
He held my hand in both of his and looked in my eyes for a long time, then he nodded and stepped back, motioned me to go.
I forced myself to walk away and he called after me.
Honourable Monk!
I turned and he raised his hand in benediction, farewell. He turned away, and the dog barked, and I walked on.
FOUR
THE ZEN ROAD
T
he months I’d spent with Shoju had deepened my sense of purpose. I headed out, spent more than a year walking from one temple to another, covering hundreds of miles in all weathers. On the open road I was scorched by the sun and drenched by the rain. The wind battered me and the cold cut me to the bone. I listened to sermons and lectures, on the Diamond Sutra, on the True School, on the koans in the Blue Cliff Record. And for every glimmer of insight hidden in all these words, I endured endless disappointment. Shoju had railed against Do-nothing Zen and its practitioners. He said they would do anything for their enlightenment except work for it. Sacks of rice draped in black robes. Stinking stubble-headed halfwits. Now I met them by the hundred, hypocrites and reprobates, every one of them a waste of time, a waste of space.
Shoju had directed me to Tozan’s verses on the Five Ranks, a Soto text to which these nothing-ists would pay lip service but stay slumped in their own inaction. I had kept my copy of the verses and carried them with me on my journey, and at each stage as I meditated on them I could hear old Shoju’s voice cajoling, challenging.
Read Tozan’s verses. Don’t get dragged down into that old Zen hole.
In the middle of the night, in a ramshackle hut, I ignored the cold and meditated on The Apparent within the Real, the subject of the first verse.
Middle of the night, no moon.
When we meet, no recognition.
My heart still clings
To days long gone.
I sat, back straight, through the same watch of the night, immersed myself in the words. I saw scenes from my life as if enacted on a stage, like a moving kamishibai screen. My mother’s face. The moon emerging from clouds. Hana smiling at me. Shoju laughing.
Is that it?
The world of things, evanescent, and beyond it, what?
The middle of the night. The cold. This dilapidated hut.
This.
At a remote temple, the priest asked me what I was reading and he dismissed it as an old broken vessel, told me not to waste my time. I gratefully accepted a bowl of rancid rice gruel from the kitchen then found a quiet spot in the temple grounds and resumed my meditation, concentrating on The Real within the Apparent, the second verse.
A sleepy-eyed old woman
Sees a face in an ancient mirror.
So muddled, she can’t recognise
Her own reflection.
Unsettled, not knowing myself. Whose was that old face staring back at me, cackling? A withered old crone. Could this too be me?
This too.
The rice gruel churned in my stomach, and I racked and heaved and threw up the little I’d eaten, kept retching up nothing but acrid bile. I gathered myself and stumbled on, shivering as the sweat dried on my skin.
This too.
Walking, endlessly, one foot after the other. Drenched by the rain and chilled by the wind. The dirt path beneath my feet turning to mud. My old straw sandals falling apart, leaking. But concentrating with every step, the third verse, Coming from within the Real.
One step. Another.
Within this nothingness,
A path leads away
From the dust of the world.
Naming is taboo, but walk on.