The Empty Mirror

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  The idea of drinking tea had made him thirsty and he said a few words to Peter, who bowed respectfully and went outside. He was back at once carrying a tray, with a pot of tea, cups, a dish full of sugarcakes, cigarettes and an ashtray.

  The master relaxed, and the atmosphere in the room changed. Peter leant against the wall and the master rubbed his back against one of the poles of the niche in the wall. I shifted my position as well; I had been kneeling and my legs hurt.

  “You come from Holland,” the master said. “I have read about your country. You got the land from the water by building dikes and by pumping the water out. Sometimes the water streams back again and you build new dikes and start all over again.”

  “There has been a war between our countries,” I said, “between your country and mine.”

  “Yes,” the master said, “there has been a great war. Many of my disciples died in the war. War is an exercise. Now we have peace and people exercise themselves in a different manner. Much is built, only to be destroyed suddenly and then built again. Do you hold it against us, us Japanese, this war?”

  “No,” I said. “I lived in Holland during the war. I associate evil, the despicable, cruelty, with German uniforms, with German soldiers. Japan, for me, has no associations. I have seen a little piece of your country and I thought it beautiful, and the faces of the people were kind.”

  The master smiled. I was given another sugarcake and another cup of green bitter tea. After that the interview came to an end. The master straightened his back, Peter came back to the kneeling position and I got up and bowed.

  The monk had been waiting for me outside. He had my suitcase. “Your room,” he said, and pointed to a small building at the other side of the garden. The building proved to be neglected: the room I was given was large, but very dirty. The floormats were badly worn and the paper and latticework which formed the front wall was torn and broken.

  The monk brought a broom, some rags and a bucket. He showed me a tap in the courtyard behind the building. Then he produced a roll of paper and some tools and started repairing the front wall. It took a few hours, but by then the room was reasonably clean and when we had finished and he had also fixed the windows and door he smiled, bowed, and returned to the main temple. I lay down on the floor and supported my head on my suitcase. A small dish I had found served as an ashtray. I smoked contentedly. Here I am, I thought, arrived at the source of wisdom. I have a good chance of getting to know something. Still, I didn’t feel quite safe. This was a very strange environment. An eastern temple with a sloping roof, walls of paper, low beams to knock your head against, small living shapes in black cotton gowns. The last thought which flitted through my mind before I fell asleep was that it might have been a better idea to have bought an old converted fishing boat to sail on the Dutch inland sea.

  Two

  Meditating hurts

  Clack. A dry sound. Somebody knocking two pieces of wood together, I thought. I pulled a thin piece of string, switching on a weak light bulb. Three o’clock at night. Why would anyone, at three o’clock at night, knock two pieces of wood together? Ah yes, I thought, I am in a monastery. I have promised to get up at three o’clock at night, for eight months. Confused and angry thoughts jostled each other in my head while I quickly dressed, knocking my head against a beam. It was cold, and my eyelids were stuck together with sleep. I knocked my head again and found myself outside, shivering and listening to new sounds. The monk who had woken me was now waking others a few hundred yards away. I heard him knocking his clappers together and shouting the names of his colleagues whom he wanted to rouse. In the temple a bell was rung, and somewhere else a gong boomed. I washed my face and hands in the courtyard and combed my hair. I couldn’t see what I was doing; there was no light, no mirror, and no time to shave. I knew that I had three minutes, from the moment of waking, to get to the meditation hall. The evening before, Peter had explained the daily routine a little. Everything had to happen quickly—there was no time for hesitation, no time to turn around and have another little snooze. Get up, dress, wash, and go to the meditation hall.

  The large hall was situated at the other side of the garden. It consisted of an empty space with high wide forms on both sides. On the forms were straw mats and cushions, one stack of cushions for each monk. In the centre of the hall stood a large altar with a statue of Manjusri, the Bodhisatva of meditation, holding a sword to cut thoughts. Smouldering incense. When you enter you have to bow to Manjusri and then bow again to the head monk who sits near the entrance, positioned in such a way that he can control the entire hall. Then you walk to your cushions and you bow again. The cushions are holy because on those cushions you are supposed to find, sometime, enlightenment, freedom, the end of all your problems.

  Then you sit down quickly, twisting your legs together and stretching your back. You stare straight ahead of you, wide-eyed, and the meditation begins as the head monk hits his bell. Twenty-five minutes later he hits his bell again. When everything goes as it should go you will by then have been absolutely silent for twenty-five minutes, breathing quietly and deep in concentration.

  You may now slip outside but you have to be back within five minutes. Then the next period of twenty-five minutes starts. After two periods the monks, one by one, leave to visit the master in his little house, and then there is breakfast, boiling hot rice gruel and pickled vegetables, washed down with Chinese tea without sugar. Peter, when he explained it all to me, had made me sit down on the cushions while we were in the meditation hall. “Put your right foot on your left thigh,” he said. I couldn’t do it. “Try and cross your legs then.” I could manage that, and got myself into a position resembling the way a tailor sits. “Try it again.” Peter said, but it proved quite impossible; my thigh muscles were too short and too stiff. He nodded his head sadly. “It’ll hurt,” he predicted, “but you’ll have to learn.”

  “Can’t I meditate on a chair?”

  “Why?” he asked scornfully. “Are you an old man? Or an invalid? Nonsense. You are young, you can bend your body, and those muscles will stretch in time. When you fold your legs your thighs will drop under their own weight and gradually your muscles will lengthen. If you exercise a little every day you’ll be able to sit in the half lotus within a few months, and in the full lotus within a few years. I once had the same trouble as you have now. And I was, if that’s possible, even more stiff than you are.”

  “But what’s so important about this lotus business?”

  “To be able to concentrate well your spirit has to be in balance; when your spirit is in balance your body has to be in balance as well. The double lotus is a position of pure balance, of real balance. When you sit in the full lotus, you just have to become quiet because nothing else can happen. Your heart quietens down, your breathing becomes calm, your thoughts stop flitting about. When you hold your back and head straight all the nerve centers in your body start working in the right way. If you don’t like the double lotus, if you don’t even want to try to master it, you cause yourself needless trouble; and yet you cling to the illusion that you are making things easy and pleasant.”

  “But isn’t it possible to meditate on a chair?”

  “You can meditate in any attitude,” replied Peter, “but one is best, and that’s the one we’ll teach you. You will be here for eight months and we’ll teach you all sorts of things. Now be obedient, and don’t talk all the time. The more you talk, the more you defend yourself, the more time you waste. Perhaps you have a lot of time to waste but we are very busy people.”

  “Zen is free,” I thought. “Free of worry, loose, detached. Free and easy. Bah.”

  Who Peter was I found out later. He had arrived in Japan as an American soldier, part of the army which came to occupy the empire. There he had met the Zen master, by accident, in the street. The meeting had made such an impression on him that he had later returned to Japan. Like me, he had once walked through the monastery gate, but with a difference, for he knew the
master. He had lived in the monastery for a year or so, and now had his own house in the neighborhood. He earned his living as a concert pianist and he taught singing, but every morning or every night (three o’clock in the morning was always the middle of the night to me) he came to see the master, and most evenings he came to the monastery to meditate. When I met him he had been a disciple of the master for more than ten years. An advanced soul.

  I thought, at first, that the monastery would place me under him, that I would be connected to him in some way, but during the first year I hardly saw him. When he arrived he went straight to the hall and when the meditation was over he went straight home. He spent a lot of time with the master, but I wasn’t admitted to the master’s house. The master only received me in the morning after the early meditation, and these visits were formal, the master seated on a small platform, the disciple kneeling respectfully. There was no intimate contact. Japan is a formal country with strict rules of behavior. I sometimes met the teacher accidentally in the garden and if I wanted to ask him something at such an occasion it could be done, but I couldn’t just walk into his room like Peter, or the head monk.

  As I was going to deal only with the Japanese I had to learn the Japanese language. An old lady in the neighborhood was prepared to give me daily lessons, so every afternoon I spent an hour with her, and in my room I spent an hour or two a day on homework. Slowly I began to understand the language a little but it took a long time, half a year at least, before I started to stammer more or less fluently. I never learned to speak Japanese correctly.

  The first meditation is forever etched into my memory. After a few minutes the first pains started. My thighs began to tremble like violin strings. The sides of my feet became burning pieces of wood. My back, kept straight with difficulty, seemed to creak and to shake involuntarily. Time passed inconceivably slowly. There was no concentration at all. I hadn’t been given anything to concentrate on anyway, so I just sat and waited for the bell to ring, the bell which would finish the period of agony.

  Later I was able to study other beginners, westerners and Japanese. I never saw anyone who was as stiff as I was when I started. Mostly they could find some way of sitting in balance but I had to spend three months on top of an anthill before I stopped wobbling, and could get one foot up. The worst was over then, although I didn’t stop suffering at once. There are many kinds of suffering.

  I believe that meditation is difficult for everybody. Our personality forces us to be active, we walk up and down, we gesticulate, we tell stories, we crack jokes, to prove to ourselves and to others that we exist, that our individuality is important.

  We are frightened of silence, of our own thoughts. We want to play some music or see a film. We like to be distracted. We want to put things together, light cigarettes, have a drink, look out of the window. All these occupations fall away during meditation.

  In Zen there is an exercise called kinhin. The monks, after sitting still for some hours, walk in a circle while they continue their concentration. Only the head monk, who is in charge of the exercise, watches the time and looks where he is going; the others follow.

  When I took part in a kinhin exercise for the first time I had to break away from the circle and slip out of the hall. I leant against a tree and laughed till the tears were running down my face. I, a wanderer, a beatnik (there were no hippies then), a free soul, now formed part of a line and kept time.

  Meditation is an exercise aimed at detachment, at loosening one’s ties. I was bound by the idea, which I had created myself, that I was not bound to anything. A Japanese physician who often joined the monks during the evening’s meditation, told me that he always had trouble stopping himself from tittering when he sat there quietly and tried to concentrate. To sit still is a way of creating distance, of isolating oneself, of breaking away not only from what happens around us but also from what happens within, in the mind itself. Later, when I was given a koan to concentrate on, I noticed how the most trivial matters can break concentration. A memory of a good soup, eaten years ago in some restaurant or other, provided enough subject matter to spend ten minutes on the most disconnected facts and associations. To meditate is to sit still, in the right attitude, and to concentrate on never mind what subject. Buddha, Christ, a pebble, nothing, a vacuum, the thin blue sky, God, love, it doesn’t matter. In Zen training concentration is on the koan, a subject which the master presents to the disciple. One tries to become one with the koan, to close the distance between oneself and the koan, to lose oneself in the koan, till everything drops or breaks away and nothing is left but the koan which fills the universe. And if that point is reached enlightenment, the revelation, follows. Very simple, but quite impossible, or apparently impossible; for if it were not possible, all mystical training would be in vain. But mysticism is as old as the world, and “free souls,” “wise men,” “holy men,” “prophets,” “adepts,” “arhats,” “bodhisatva’s,” “buddha’s” have come out of all schools and all exercises. In every training the ego is broken, the “I” is crushed.

  It is almost impossible, especially for the beginner, to meditate alone, In a group, where it is arranged beforehand how long the meditation will last, it is possible. Our pride, or our shame, will force us not to stop the exercise before the arranged time. If others can do it, I can do it. Pride isn’t always negative—as a means to an end it can be used profitably. The others don’t wobble, and that’s why I won’t wobble. I am too proud to groan with pain. I am too proud to scratch my neck. I am sitting still, just like the others. If everyone thinks that way the group sits still. That is not to say that I didn’t do a lot of wobbling and groaning, for pride has its limits. The pain was sometimes so bad that I imagined that I was sitting on a pile of burning, crackling wood, and my teeth would chatter and I would sob, unable to restrain myself at all. If it got that bad the head monk would notice and send me outside for a period of twenty-five minutes. I would then have to walk up and down while continuing my concentration, always in a part of the garden where he could see me from his seat near the door of the meditation hall.

  The first day in the monastery passed quietly. After the early morning meditation I wasn’t admitted to the master’s room, but sent to my own room. Someone came to fetch me for breakfast. We sat on the floor at low tables, in the lotus position of course, although I was allowed to kneel. This was easier but also painful after a while, for the dining room had a hard wooden floor. Before eating the monks sang a sutra, one of the Buddha’s sermons, in classical Chinese, while the cook hit a wooden drum to keep time. It was a hypnotic sound, that singing, short and staccato, the monks cutting the words into syllables and droning them with sharp, abrupt endings. After that we were given small bowls filled with rice and hot water and another bowl containing pickled vegetables; these didn’t taste too bad. We were also served takuan, an orange radish, pickled and sliced. I put a few slices in my mouth but they were very sharp and I grimaced, sucking my cheeks in and looking about desperately, as I felt sweat prickle under my hair. One wasn’t supposed to speak at table but everyone giggled, even the severe head monk, when they saw my reaction to the delicacy. Later, when I got used to the taste, I even began to like takuan and used to help myself secretly when I passed through the kitchen.

  After breakfast we worked. I was given a mop and taken to a very long corridor. There were other corridors to be cleaned when I had finished the first. Eventually someone rang a bell and we had an hour off. I went to my room and fell asleep; it was 6 a.m., still very early.

  At seven, I followed the others to the vegetable garden to harvest cucumbers. The monks wore overalls, and they laughed and talked, pushing and tackling each other. Most of them were young, between seventeen and twenty-one. A few were older, but I only got to know the young ones; the older monks kept to themselves.

  The head monk had his own room. Because he was the practical leader of the monastery and because he was a priest, and therefore higher in rank than the others, he w
as treated with respect. He received guests, took care of the administration of the monastery, paid the bills, collected gifts, wrote letters. My monthly payment was arranged with him—about £2 a month for board and lodging, the lowest rate I ever paid in my life.

  Another older monk worked as cook. The daily menu was simple: vegetables, rice, barley gruel, no meat at all, sometimes fried noodles or a dish which resembles the Chinese tjap tjoy, a vegetable stew which the cook could make very tasty. We also had feasts from time to time and then the cook had three or four assistants and prepared complicated dishes. But mostly the fare was very simple and not very nourishing, a diet which didn’t do much for me. Within a few weeks I began to feel ill and weak. The monks called a doctor and he prescribed better food, so I was given permission to get a meal from outside once a day (if it was possible to go out, for sometimes the monastery cut itself off from the outside world and closed its gates for a week) and I found a small restaurant close by where I could get fried rice and meat salads.

  In the afternoon the meditation started again: four periods, two hours in all. Dinner was early, at 4 p.m., and was the last meal of the day. In the evening we meditated from seven till ten. Meditation times differ in a Zen monastery. In winter there is more sitting than in summer, but I found even this light summer training of six hours a day far more than I could really put up with. Even so, I got through it. I had to of course—my pride wouldn’t let me back out of it.