Night Boat

by Alan Spence

  Hakuin.

  I bowed to the reality behind it all.

  Hakuin.

  I sat late one night, revisiting the Lotus Sutra, recalling my mother’s love for it, her pure simple faith in its power. I remembered my own arrogant dismissal of it as teaching through parables, basic tales of cause and effect.

  I had read it at Daisho-ji, and the head priest had said perhaps one day I might view it differently, read it with fresh eyes. Perhaps in another life, he said, it might speak to me more directly. Perhaps, I had said, not really believing it. Perhaps.

  Turn the Dharma wheel.

  Beat the Dharma drum.

  Blow the Dharma conch.

  Let fall the Dharma rain.

  I saw my younger self, sitting as I sat now, the book open before me. My younger self, forehead wrinkled in concentration as the Chinese characters danced on the page and resolutely refused to give up their deeper meaning. Now here I was, reading the same words and finding them familiar, like old friends.

  The Dharma falls on all alike, nourishing the smallest herbs and the largest trees. Each one receives what it needs.

  My mother’s voice, chanting, Namu Myoho Renge Kyo. The audience at the puppet show. Nisshin walking through fire.

  Entering the fire at the end of the Kalpa and not being burned, that would not be difficult. But after my extinction, upholding the Sutra and preaching it to one single person, that would be difficult.

  I sat, straight-backed, chanting the words, being energised by them.

  Be vigorous and single-minded.

  Hold no doubts or regrets.

  Abide in patience and goodness.

  I saw myself sitting there, the same self, the same no-self I had always been. This self had been terrified awake as a child by the fear of hellfire and damnation. This self had heard his mother chant the Daimoku. This self had battled demons and sat unflinching as great Fuji erupted. He had learned from great masters who had hit him and cajoled him and cured him of his sickness and laughed in his face. He had sat in caves and walked on mountain trails, known hundreds of satoris, great and small. Kannon in the form of an old woman had cracked his skull with a broom. A temple-bell had rung in his head and reverberated through all time and space.

  I saw myself sitting there, this place, this time, back where I had started. One time, one place.

  I turned the page, read once more a verse I had once learned by heart.

  In a quiet place

  he collects his thoughts

  dwelling peacefully

  unmoved and unmoving

  like Mount Sumeru

  contemplating all dharmas

  as having no existence

  like empty space . . .

  I breathed it all in, breathed it all out. In this moment, in this moment, I was limitless. That little self had died to itself and gone beyond, and still beyond, boundless in all directions.

  A great light pierced deep into my heart, reflected out on all things as if from a bright and dazzling mirror. I looked at that brightness inside, saw through it into a clear pool, bottomless, without end. Brighter than the sun, this pure light shone on everything, mountains, rivers, the great earth, the vast sky, and I saw in all of it my own face, my own being.

  At that moment a single cricket began creaking and chirruping outside in the temple grounds, and that simple sound shattered all barriers. Everything I had ever known fell away, a husk to be sloughed off in a great final realisation subsuming all others.

  I understood the freedom Shoju had known, and I stepped into it.

  I let out a great shout of joy and tears poured down my face, unrestrained.

  I closed the book and placed it reverently back on the shelf. I sat a while longer, absorbing what had happened. I took my brush and with one stroke drew a cricket in the corner of the page, and beneath it I wrote a haiku.

  Beyond it all

  I just sit here as if

  I just sit here.

  Beyond it all. As if. Here.

  BEATING THE

  DHARMA DRUM

  O

  ne cold autumn day, grey rain falling steadily, a messenger brought the news that Shoju Rojin had died, or as he would have put it, left the body.

  At first I felt a kind of detachment. Is that so? He had decided to leave, to move on. Like the Chinese master with his precious tea-bowl, used every day although it might break at any time. The bowl was already broken. We were all of us already dead.

  The message had been sent by Sokaku, still residing at Shoju’s hermitage. The calligraphy was a little weak, uneven. He must have been shaken by Shoju’s death, would have found it difficult to write about it.

  Shoju had known it was his time to go, had sat cross-legged in zazen. Sokaku said he had sat a long time, as if unwilling or unable to compose his jisei, his death-verse. Finally he had dictated it, and Sokaku had written it down.

  Facing death at last

  It is hard to utter

  The final word.

  So I’ll say it

  Without saying it.

  Nothing more.

  Nothing more.

  Then he had hummed an old song to himself, looked round the room and laughed, and in an instant he was gone.

  I read the message again, lingering on the poem. I set down the scroll, stood up and walked to the gate. The rain still fell, soaking me, and Fuji was completely obliterated in the mist, as if it were not there, as if it had never been. I walked a little further, composed a verse of my own, a haiku.

  I can’t see you

  But I know you’re there –

  Fuji in the mist.

  I gathered the monks and held a simple memorial ceremony for Shoju, chanted a sutra, told a few stories about him knocking me senseless, breaking my head to let the light in. Then as I sat alone, remembering him and what he had taught me, I realised the enormity of it, the true vastness of his consciousness. And for a moment I was overwhelmed, wondering why I had never returned to visit him after those few months of intense training. I felt a sudden tightness in my chest as if my heart were being ripped out of me, and my tears flowed.

  That night I saw him in a dream, his face so familiar, staring at me with unmitigated ferocity. Then he laughed and shouted, What now?

  What now?

  When I had stepped into that great realisation, the great enlightenment, beyond all thought, I had seen what the Lotus Sutra had been telling me all along, from the first time my mother chanted a single verse to me when I was a child, from the great doubt arising in me at the age of fifteen. It had always been there. In the beginning was the end.

  The attainment of Buddha-mind was in turning the Wheel of the Four Great Vows, striving to put them into practice. Intensify and deepen your own experience, and at the same time, at the same time, work to help others still mired in illusion and ignorance.

  Propagate the Dharma. Cause it to spread and grow.

  I had been on earth more than forty years. But somehow I knew I was only halfway through this life. The road ahead of me was long. The work had barely begun.

  Word had continued to spread about my poisonous teaching, and I received invitations to go and lecture about this or that aspect of the Dharma. I had to spend time replying in the most fulsome and effusive manner, expressing gratitude but turning them down.

  What did they expect? I asked. They wanted a thorough-bred stallion, not a clumsy stumbling jackass. They wanted the song of a heavenly phoenix, and what they’d get would be the croaking of an old crow. They wanted a man of great learning and superior virtue, and I was a bumpkin struggling to maintain this little temple, impoverished and barely able to survive. More to the point, I added, what did I have to say about the subject matter, the particular sutra, the text in question? If I took the book and squeezed it, would it pour out its meaning? Would it ooze out drop by drop? The Vimalakirti Sutra and its wonderful teaching on nonduality? The Bodhidharma’s Breaking Through Form? I searched my heart and mind and felt unabl
e to utter one word that would contribute to the deeper understanding of these great works.

  I sweated over the replies, I wept as I tortured myself in saying no. I begged forgiveness and expressed the hope, no, the certainty, that there were many scholar-priests who would be far better suited to the task of giving lectures. I remained, their most humble servant, the monk Hakuin, known as Hunger-and-Cold, the Master of Poverty-Temple.

  Then something changed. I had given informal talks to the monks at Shoin-ji, like that mob of twenty who had turned up insisting on instruction. My outpourings on Ta Hui’s Swampland Flowers had satisfied them and bamboozled them – a bone for them to gnaw. I saw the possibilities and gave a few more talks as the mood took me. Then two other monks asked if I would talk on a particular theme – In Praise of the True School. I agreed, and so it continued. I awakened to the power of the word, pure and simple.

  I was not a professor of Zen, I lived and breathed it. I was Hakuin, Hidden-in-Whiteness, and from that place I could speak, and those who had ears would hear.

  What now?

  Turn the Dharma wheel. Beat the Dharma drum.

  The monks planned another series of talks for me. As soon as I agreed, they began spreading the word far and wide. They were sure an audience of a hundred or two would come to Shoin-ji to hear what I had to say, and they started right away on making the place ready. For months they worked, long days of hard labour, often in shifts, and through the nights. They shored up walls, replaced sagging beams, patched shoji-screen windows and doors, made roofs watertight. The place rang to the rhythmic thud and drumtap of hammering, wood on wood, repetitive, mantric. They chanted over it, through it.

  They reopened an old blocked-up well, sunk the shaft deeper and tapped into the water level. They laughed and cheered as they brought up the first bucket of well-water.

  Their spirit was remarkable, indomitable, and in between shifts they still took it in turns to beg for food round the village, stocking up what they could in readiness for the visitors who would, they were sure, be coming to hear the talks.

  The talks were scheduled for spring, and nearer the time I went to spend a few days at the home of Ishii Gentoku, the physician, to rest and prepare myself. The first time I had met the doctor, I recognised something in him, and he in me. Our paths had been destined to cross.

  He said my resting was so powerful that my snores shook his house to their very foundations. He said I slept coiled like some great overfed snake and my snoring stirred up clouds of dust.

  I laughed. I felt invigorated, and a few days before the first talk Shoju Rojin appeared to me once more in a dream, shaking his fist at me then laughing in my face. I stepped out into the spring sunshine and composed another poem.

  The spring wind blows east

  over India, China, Japan.

  Branches burst into flower.

  In all that riot of colour and form

  I see my old master’s ugly face.

  Two of the younger monks, Jun and Ko, had come from Shoin-ji to check that my preparation was going well. They had been instrumental in setting up the talks and were anxious that they should be a success.

  I was resting when they arrived, and Gentoku said they were alarmed to hear me, as he put it, snoring up a storm. When I woke they approached me, tentatively, humbly, respectfully, and suggested, tentatively, humbly, respectfully, that I should dictate some Dharma talks which they would write down and take back to Shoin-ji. The talks would be a great encouragement to the body of monks labouring day and night at the temple, making it ready. I thought for a moment, put on a grave face, then smiled and nodded, said I would do it. Then I lay down again to take more rest.

  Jun and Ko came back later, approached me with great purpose, like children pestering their parents to keep some promise they had made.

  Very well, I said, yawning and stretching. Let me see what rumbles up from my bowels.

  Gentoku caught my eye and smiled, then he left the room and returned with brush and ink, scrolls of paper.

  So now I have no excuse, I said. Let us begin.

  I took a deep breath and launched into my discourse, and Ko wrote down every word. It poured out of me, five lines, ten, twenty; one sheet of paper, five, ten. We continued for hours, through the evening and on into the night. I spewed out the words, Ko transcribed and Jun corrected, made sense of it. Gentoku listened and plied us with tea and rice cakes, brought more paper and ink. By the early morning there were no less than fifty sheets covered in writing. I stopped and clapped my hands.

  So, I said. I think that should be enough.

  Gentoku announced grandly that up until now the three finest examples of Zen writing, for teaching the Dharma, were the works of Wan-an, Ta-hui and Fo-yen.

  But I can truthfully declare, he said (declaring it), with the utmost sincerity, before heaven and earth, that none of these great teachers, without exception, ever created such an endless tangle of vines and branches as you have produced today.

  I bowed, and we looked at each other and laughed.

  Back at Shoin-ji I gathered all the monks together in the evening, and we sat in a circle drinking tea, and I thanked them all most humbly for the work they had done in restoring the fabric of the old place. As the light faded we lit the lamps. Ko and Jun brought out the sheets of paper, the pages of my Dharma talks, edited and neatly written out. Their pride in it was touching, and I nodded, gave them permission to read a few extracts out loud. The other monks fell silent, and two hours later they were still listening, rapt. When the session was over, a number of the monks thanked me, and Jun said he and Ko had discussed the matter and thought it essential that the talks be published. I told them it would be better to bring the manuscripts outside and light a fire with them in the courtyard.

  They looked at each other, and Jun clutched the papers and ran from the room. Ko bowed and apologised and ran after him.

  Next morning they asked if they could speak to me and I said they could have a few minutes. They sat in silence, awkward.

  Well? I said.

  Forgive us, said Jun.

  What nonsense is this? I said.

  The manuscript, said Ko. Your Dharma talks.

  Ah, I said. You have taken ownership of them.

  We have put them somewhere safe, said Jun.

  You have found somewhere safe on this earth? That is a miracle.

  I was not making it easy for them, nor did I intend to.

  Jun took a deep breath, summoned up his courage.

  The Dharma talks should be published, he said, in a rush. They would be of great benefit to all who study Zen.

  You speak about them as if they are the Lotus Sutra, I said. Or the Blue Cliff Record. But they are just my foolish ramblings. Your pestering was an emetic and this was what I spewed up. I was half awake, incoherent. What did Layman Gentoku call them? An endless tangle of vines and branches?

  With respect, said Ko, the monks who listened to these words last night were moved and inspired.

  They were exhausted, I said. Months of hard labour had reduced them to a state of simpering idiocy and robbed them of all discrimination.

  Forgive me, said Jun, again steeling himself to speak. It felt . . . true.

  There was something happening in the room, I said, with this particular group of monks. This time, this place. There was a willingness and a receptivity. The seeds had been planted and watered. Beyond that I am not yet willing to go.

  I stood up, ending the meeting, and they bowed deep, foreheads to the floor. They looked disappointed, but not completely crushed.

  The monks had been right about the numbers attending my public lectures. There were close to two hundred at each one, all of them listening attentively, and many queuing up afterwards to offer me their thanks.

  When it was all over, Jun and Ko approached me again, this time accompanied by an older monk, Chu, and my physician-friend Layman Gentoku.

  A delegation, I said. Why am I apprehensive?

/>   We all wanted to pay our respects, said Chu, bowing. The lectures were magnificent.

  I spit out my poison, I said. They lap it up.

  You are spreading the Dharma, he said.

  That is the work, I said simply.

  Chu seemed to hesitate a moment, then ploughed ahead with what he had to say.

  It would seem to be a good time to spread it even further. These young men were discussing with me the possibility of publishing your Dharma talks. They have the manuscript.

  In a safe place, I said. Unless it has been eaten by moths. And if the moths have eaten my words, would it enlighten them? Does a moth have the Buddha-nature?

  Nobody answered.

  You know my master was Shoju Rojin, I said. And he was the dharma-heir of the great Shido Munan.

  They all nodded, bowed.

  There is a story I have often heard repeated. It has become a kind of parable. If it concerned anyone but Shoju, I would have taken it as no more than that, a tale to be told, a point to be made. But Shoju himself told me the story, and I know it to be true.

  When Shoju was a young monk, Munan was impressed with his understanding of Zen. I am old, he said to Shoju, and I want you to succeed me and carry on my work. Shoju said he was grateful and honoured. Then Munan said he had something precious to give him, something that would help him immensely, and he held out an old book of Zen writings. It was no ordinary book. It had been handed down from generation to generation, from one great master to another.

  It embodies their accumulated wisdom, he said. Each of them added something to it, and I too have added my notes and comments.

  But Shoju was reluctant. If this book is so precious to you, he said, you should keep it. I have received your Zen without any writings, and I am more than satisfied with that.