The Empty Mirror

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  It isn’t a bad story, but even with stories one must be very careful. Some men are professional story collectors. I met one of them, a writer, greedily gathering more and more stories, anecdotes, juicy bits. That way all you’ll have is a book full of jokes.

  In the monastery, stories were scarce. The training accentuated meditation and the importance of the koan. The master always asked the same question: What is your answer? He had given me the koan, and I had to find an answer to the problem. Every morning when I visited him he expected the answer—he seemed completely convinced that I would give it to him, on that particular morning, at that very moment. It would have to bubble up, somewhere out of myself.

  He wasn’t prepared to give me a hint or to lead the way. The first koan is important, it is the gateless gate, the closed opening through which the pupil has to fight his way in (or out). He has to do it himself. And the fight is his meditation, his daily discipline, the change in the way he looks at things, in his own being. When the master gave instruction it was about the technique of meditation, about how to concentrate. “Become one with your koan, forget yourself, forget everything which is connected with you. When you are sitting there, sit still, in balance, breathe quietly, destroy everything in your mind and repeat your koan as if your life depends on it, quietly, over and over again. Don’t rush yourself, don’t get excited, but stay calm and indifferent, indifferent to anything which worries you, or seems important, or fascinates.”

  “That’s difficult,” I would say.

  “Of course it is difficult,” the master said. “Do you think it wasn’t difficult for me? I used to visit my master every day, as you do now, and I was a very slow fellow. For two years I mucked about with the koan without getting anywhere and then I had to go to China because the army wanted me.”

  “Yes?” I asked, surprised. “But you are a Buddhist. Buddhists aren’t allowed to kill, are they?”

  “Allowed, allowed,” the master said, “I had to. If I had refused I would have been shot. But in the army, in Manchuria, I meditated a lot. I was always doing guard duty; the other soldiers were very fond of me for I took their duty as well. Look, like this.”

  He got up and stood there, on his platform, a little old man in a Buddhist robe, and stretched his body until he was rigid and fierce, to attention. “This was my rifle, I had my arm out like this. And then I concentrated on the koan which my master had given me, for hours and hours on end. You can meditate while you are standing up—it isn’t quite as good as when you are sitting in the lotus position, but it can be done. Of course you have to be careful that you don’t fall over, but I always had a rifle to lean on.”

  “And did you solve your koan?”

  “Not then,” he said. “Later, when I was back in Japan and had become a monk again. I began to understand and it didn’t interest me any more to prove my understanding to the master. I visited him again every morning and during one of those visits he nodded. He immediately gave me the next koan, an easy one.”

  “And you said nothing to your master?”

  “No, why should I have said anything? I knelt and kept quiet, as I had been quiet so often.”

  “So there was no laughing, or shouting, nobody hit anyone?”

  “You have read too much,” the master said. “I told you you shouldn’t read so much. You identify yourself with all sorts of heroes and fools and try to swallow their experiences. It isn’t wrong to read, but it shouldn’t lead to dreaming, or living through another person.”

  The conversations with the teacher were laborious. He tried to use words which he thought I knew. Sometimes I returned mumbling from such a visit and tried to remember the words I hadn’t understood, so that I could look them up in my dictionary. Most times we didn’t say much to each other. I came in, recited my koan and looked at him. He would wait for a few seconds, pick up his small bell and shake it. The bell was my cue to leave. I knew I could grab the bell and that then he wouldn’t be able to send me away unless I returned it to him. The bell is always next to the teacher, within reach of the pupil. Should the disciple think that the master doesn’t pay enough attention to him he can, in this way, force the issue. I never made use of it. I didn’t think I could bully the teacher into sharing his insight with me.

  It is a tradition in Zen that no one ever reveals the koan he is working on, it is a secret between teacher and pupil: not a very strong tradition, for I discovered that discussing koans was a popular pastime to the monks. They made a status game out of it. “Which koan are you on? I have already reached such and such a koan.” One would think that such childish boasting must mean a total lack of real insight. I am not sure whether this is true. Most of the monks were sent to the temple by their parents. They have to stay three years and will then graduate to a priesthood and be sent to head a Zen temple somewhere. The organization is similar to that of the Catholic Church. The monk will then be somebody in his own right, no longer a slave of the master or head monk. He can start to use his training and do social work, he can take charge of temple services, listen to the troubles of his flock. He can supply peace and quiet to those who look for it, for Zen temples and gardens are designed to provide a soothing influence. He can teach meditation and organize groups. He is even allowed to marry. But the comparative status and luxury which waits for him at the end of the three years’ monastic training is not enough to pull him through. There must be another stimulus. The teacher cannot let him sit and muddle with the koan for too long, so when he shows some insight, even if it is very little, the teacher may pass him. The voluntary monk and the layman are a different kettle of fish; they do things the hard way. A priest who returns to the monastery, after some years of playing the part of priest, will find his teacher rather different from what he remembers.

  But forced or voluntary, the monastery’s schedule is the same. Each disciple starts off with one of the “big” koans. He may get the Mu koan, an extraordinary story about a monk who asks his teacher whether a puppy dog, who happens to be around, has the Buddha nature as well: a senseless question to any Buddhist, because Buddha said that everything has Buddha nature, so the puppy cannot be an exception. The teacher answers by saying “Mu.” Mu means no, nothing, emptiness, denial of everything. The monk doesn’t understand and is told to meditate on the word Mu. His training has started. Another “big” koan is: Everybody knows the sound of two clapping hands. Now what is the sound of one clapping hand? A third koan is: Show me the face you had before your parents were born. Show me your original face.

  All koans are illogical and go beyond the reasoning mind. The monk may try to give a sensible answer, but if he doesn’t it will be just the same: the master will ring his bell and the monk has to leave the room.

  The answers which, after many years of hard work, despair and near insanity, may be accepted, will be diverse. Perhaps the monk will make a nonsensical remark; maybe he laughs, or looks at the teacher in a peculiar way or does something, like knocking on the floor or waving. If the master nods, the next koan will follow, to deepen the monk’s insight. There are rows and rows of koans, and the monk who solves them all has to leave the monastery to practise his insight in the world, perhaps as a teacher, perhaps as an inconspicuous civilian. Only very few disciples come to the end of the road, which doesn’t matter, for the monastery is not a school intended to produce nothing but masters. Everybody is required to do what he can, and the teacher helps, quietly, often passively, sometimes by force. If you do anything at all, do it well. Don’t look at the result. The result is important, did you say? Don’t talk nonsense.

  Five

  A large glass of soya sauce and a dangerous snake

  A man who has got himself through a whole day without having learned anything and who goes to bed as stupid as he got up, is a dead man. I think I found this bit of wisdom in an American book, a book on success in business. The moral of the story is that you must be aware, because you can make a lot of money that way.

  I didn
’t like the book. Why is it so important to be successful, to make a profit? Isn’t it true that success and profit are illusions without substance? Whatever has a beginning will end.

  A negative, destructive way of thinking, a part of my personality at that time, had entered the monastery gate. The result was that I was not very conscious, not particularly attentive to the situations in which I took part; and I didn’t know I was not attentive. I dreamt a lot.

  The head monk described my state of mind even more exactly. “You are asleep,” he said, “you are snoring.”

  We were in the kitchen. I was cleaning vegetables, rather carelessly. The head monk asked me to stop mucking about and to follow him. He took me to the room reserved for visitors. There was a low table with a teapot, a tin of bitter powdered green tea and a piece of bamboo, cut into the shape of a shaving brush. He had asked me to bring a kettle of boiling water and I poured this onto the green powder. He whipped the tea with the brush till it foamed. Kneeling we each drank a cup and then he looked at me.

  “Buddha,” said the head monk “had to go a long way before he found the final enlightenment. Later he told others about the road he followed so that they would be able to follow him. Buddha talked a lot about right awareness. Do you know what it is?”

  I tried to shift my weight, for my legs were already beginning to hurt again. “Looking where you are going,” I said.

  “Yes,” the head monk said, “but you can’t do that when you are asleep. When you are asleep anything can happen and you won’t even know about it. The temple may burn down and when you eventually wake up because your sleeping bag is getting burnt, it will be too late. Don’t take me literally. The monastic training tries to wake us up, but when it is time to sleep you may sleep. But when you are not asleep, be awake. When you are cleaning vegetables, you really have to clean them. The idea is to throw the good pieces into the pot and the rotten pieces into the tin, not the other way around. Whatever you do, do it well, as well as you can, and be aware of what you are doing. Don’t try to do two things at the same time, like pissing and cleaning your teeth. I have seen you do that. Perhaps you think you are saving time that way, but the result is no more than a mess in the lavatory and a mess in your mouth.”

  “And where do I get by being aware?”

  The head monk shrugged, and dropped his eyelids.

  “I don’t care where it gets you. I am merely advising you to stay awake. We, the teacher and the monks and the other disciples of the master, can’t help you much. To stay awake is self discipline. We can force you, in a way, to meditate, but we can’t make you concentrate on your koan. You are free to work on your problem, while you are perched on your cushions, or to dream away.”

  “Right,” I said, “I’ll try it. I’ll try to stay awake.”

  “Try,” the head monk said, “what a word! You mustn’t try, you must just do it.”

  Zen monks don’t indulge in long conversations so I began to get up.

  “Wait a minute,” the head monk said. “I want to warn you. If ever you succeed in waking up a bit, be careful that it doesn’t go to your head. We used to have a monk here who really did his best to be aware of every situation. When, after three years, he became a priest, the master sent him to a small temple up North. After a while a young man came to keep him company. This young man intended to join a monastery but he wanted to try the life in a temple first, because the routine is different from ours. Temple priests and monks don’t get up as early as we do, they meditate less or not at all, and they are not in contact with a master. The priest tried to teach the young man as much as possible and used all sorts of daily events as examples.”

  One day there was an earthquake, quite a strong earthquake and part of the temple caved in. When the earthquake stopped the teacher said: “Look, now you have been able to see how a Zen man behaves under stress. You will have noticed that I didn’t panic. I was quite aware of what was happening. I took you by the arm and we went to the kitchen, because that is the strongest part of the temple. I was proved right because the kitchen is still in one piece and we have survived the earthquake—we aren’t even wounded. That I, in spite of my self-control and awareness, did suffer a slight shock, you may have deduced from the fact that I drank a large glass of water, something I would never do under normal circumstances.”

  The young man didn’t say anything but smiled.

  “What’s so funny?” the priest asked.

  “That wasn’t water, reverend Sir,” the young man said, “that was a very large glass of soy sauce.”

  The day the head monk lectured me I became ill. I got diarrhea, probably because of the seaweed we had for dinner that evening, a Japanese delicacy of which we had each eaten a bowlful.

  I missed part of the evening meditation because I couldn’t stay in the same place for twenty-five minutes. I had to get up in the middle of a period, bow to the head monk, explain my predicament in a whisper, and rush out of the hall without bowing to the statue of Manjusri, the fierce Bodhisatva who specializes in sword rattling. In emergencies even Zen training will make exceptions.

  That night, around 2 a.m., I got up for the umpteenth time, to go to the lavatory. The court was lit by the moon and just in front of the small building which housed the toilets I saw a snake, a fat snake, coiled up, about twelve feet long. Its head pointed in my direction and its split tongue flicked in and out coldly, evilly. I shouted and rushed off towards the main temple. On the way I tripped over something and fell. The fall woke me up a little and I considered that panic might be unnecessary, since the snake wasn’t following me. I stopped but then rushed off again. The head monk looked at me, and covered his mouth with his hand. He was a Japanese of the aristocratic type, lanky and well formed, with a beautiful thin curved nose and calm, wide, and slanting eyes. His even, sparkling white teeth had amazed me, as most monks had irregular teeth, haphazardly placed, yellow and filled in with metal. The sparkling white teeth were now in a glass on the table and I looked the other way while he completed his face.

  “A snake,” I said, panting. “A big fat dangerous snake. Near the toilets. If we are quick we may catch it and kill it.”

  The head monk gave me a shy grin while he snapped his teeth into place. “Never mind,” he said. “Let the snake be. We have had him for years. He catches rats and he lives in the courtyard. I should have warned you. Just walk around him, he is harmless.”

  The snake even had a name which I have forgotten now. Something with “chan” at the end. “San” means “mister” and goes after the names of grown-up human beings. Children and pets have “chan” after their names. I was very annoyed with myself when I got back to my room. Nothing is important enough to become upset about. I should have known that. I shouldn’t need monastic training to be aware of such a home truth. Nothing, nothing at all. I didn’t get upset in the old days when I had a flat tire on my motorcycle, did I? Or if I lost one of my favorite books? So why get upset now because I found a snake in my way? And why should I be upset about having got upset? Instead of getting more detached this training was making me nervous, hysterical. “Idiot!” “Unbelievably stupid fool!” For days I called myself names, often aloud, even in the meditation hall. The head monk had to shout at me. “Stay awake,” he shouted.

  In those days I found several possibilities of making life more enjoyable. We had entered a period of “soft training,” which meant we were getting up at 4 a.m. instead of 3 a.m., meditation in the afternoon was cancelled, some monks were on leave, visiting their parents in the country and the teacher had gone to Tokyo to lecture. Of the three older monks who, together, ran the monastery, two were away, so that the head monk was kept busy and we hardly saw him. In the morning he gave us instructions for the entire day and after that he disappeared. I helped to cut wood and dig the gardens, in the afternoon I studied Japanese and only in the evening did I meditate with the others, supervised by a young monk who shortened the periods and ignored wobbling, moving about and
falling asleep. At first I had washed my own clothes, a job I didn’t like, and now I bought two pairs of jeans and a pile of underwear and shirts. The shop didn’t stock my size but they took the order, and within a few days a neat parcel was delivered to my room, at 10 percent discount. Now that I had more clothes, I could afford to save up my laundry and take it, once a week, to a washerwoman around the corner. I also found another restaurant; the first, where I had gone on doctor’s prescription, didn’t have enough variety in the menu. But my most important discovery was the public bathhouse. In the monastery the monks were only allowed to have a bath every ninth day; they could have a shower whenever they wanted, but the shower was cold. The monastery’s bathhouse was small and contained an iron bath which was heated by a small fire, to be fed with leaves and twigs only. Forests are scarce in Japan and firewood is a luxury. A monk had to spend the best part of a day heating the bath and when he finally managed to get it to the right temperature the master would go first and then the monks in order of importance. I would always be the last one, as I was the last arrival in the monastery. That didn’t mean I had to sit in dirty water, because the Japanese clean themselves before they get into the tub, splashing about with basins and lots of soap before finally immersing themselves in the hot water, relaxing their weary bones and muscles till the next person begins to show open signs of impatience.

  The bathhouse I found was a larger, more luxurious version of what I had got used to in the monastery. I had to walk for a few minutes through the narrow streets of the area, past the small shops and street stands, and I was greeted by everyone. Everybody knew me: there were only twenty-nine westerners in Kyoto then, and more than a million Japanese. I would give ten cents to the lady at the entrance and undress on a sort of balcony in the hall, where not only the lady at the door but everybody who went in or out as well, could see me. The women were very interested. A white man, apparently, was a welcome change, and although they must have seen a lot of details in the cinema, this live show was more fascinating. Three dimensions are better than two.