The Empty Mirror

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  I used to go in the early afternoon and soak as long as possible in the large, swimming pool sized bath, lined with beautifully glazed tiles. Bathing used to be mixed, but since the American occupation new ideas influenced local behavior and now men and women were separated. I got to know the other regulars after a while and began to greet the old men, who came every afternoon, by name. “Hello Jan-san.” they would say. “Hello Tanaka-san, hello Kobori-san, hello Sasaki-san. Nice water today.” And then we would groan together contentedly. I had more contact with the old men than with the monks. They asked me how long I had to meditate every evening. “Three hours,” I said proudly. “And in a little while, when the master is back, another two hours in the afternoon. And another hour again in the morning.” They shook their heads compassionately and nodded at each other, admiringly. They really had a strange friend now.

  “And don’t your legs hurt?”

  “Sure,” and I indicated all the painful spots.

  The monastery didn’t object, although the head monk must have known exactly what I was doing.

  Six

  A thirsty fish

  While studying the head monk’s daily behavior I gradually began to distinguish various characteristics. Of these his equanimity impressed me most. He, rather than the master, was the example which I used in my routine. I think he knew that he was serving as an example, not only for me, but for anybody who was connected with the monastery. In these esoteric disciplines it is very dangerous to identify with another person, because if the other does anything which, in the eyes of the imitator, cannot be accepted or justified, the example comes tumbling down and breaks into a thousand pieces; and with the example, the image, the god, the whole discipline, breaks and appears senseless. Perhaps awareness of this process forced the head monk to avoid any spectacular behavior. He obeyed the monastic rules strictly and got up earlier than the others. He went to bed later. During meditation he never moved at all, he struck the bell exactly on time, and during the communal meals he seemed to watch all his own moves. Still, there was nothing stiff about him. He slipped through life easily; he was free, kind, quiet, perhaps even careless or indifferent. Nothing touched him. When I tried to start a conversation with him, he would listen for a few moments and then bring me back to whatever I happened to be doing. If he wanted to talk he would choose the moment and the environment. He created situations, quite a tricky art to master.

  That under his strict correctness another quality was hidden, I could deduce from the expression in his eyes. Indifference is an unpleasant word, so perhaps one should say “detachment.” One could see that he was really quite free, but that, even so, he did show interest in others and in any activity he might be engaged in for the moment. He had an attractive gait, as if he walked on soft but very strong springs, springs which he could control completely. If he had accentuated his way of walking just a little it would have been silly, affected, but it wasn’t. So right that it is almost wrong: an essential part of Zen.

  When I met him his formal Zen training, the koan study, had finished. He didn’t visit the master any more to demonstrate his progress (or lack of progress) as we did, but he was in constant touch with the teacher. We, the disciples, had to visit the master every day, in the uncomfortable early hours, to struggle with the koan and find the hidden opening which is no opening. He was in.

  When we left the meditation hall to visit the master, the head monk would stay in his place, quietly, his eyes fixed on the floor. If the rule had been applied strictly he would have been out of the monastery, because once a disciple has solved the last koan he should not be permitted to live at the community’s expense. Every penny which is received by the monastery comes as a gift, either directly because somebody has presented a few notes or a check in a closed envelope, or through begging, because the monks never miss a day. Each morning they walk through the streets of the city, holding the begging bowl, and waiting patiently till somebody will give—they never approach people in the street. They shout HOOOOO! to catch people’s attention, and often it is difficult for the passerby to catch up with the monk and present his gift for the monks concentrate on their “Ho” and appear to be in a daze.

  I think that the master hadn’t sent the head monk away because he needed him. The master had to watch his own health, which was weak because of a slight stroke a few years back, and the energy of the head monk must have been welcome.

  I was told, later, how the head monk had come to Zen. He was the only son of a couple of which both man and wife were medical practitioners. The parents had spoiled him; they were well off and not often at home. He had a scooter of the more expensive type, was a member of sports clubs, had a number of rooms in the house reserved for him and two servants to look after his needs. A car accident killed both parents at the same moment. He was sixteen years old at the time and the shock must have been severe. A mental breakdown and attempts at suicide followed, but as a point of light or a rock to lean on he had the Zen master, whom he knew because his father had taken him to the temple, of which he was an active member. The father even used to come for meditation and join the monks in the hall from time to time. When he came to see the master to discuss his parents’ death he was rebellious. He didn’t want to ask the teacher anything, he merely wanted to tell him that life on earth makes no sense and knows no justice. Why should he, a sixteen-year-old boy, suddenly have to lose his parents? Why was he born? If everything will stop and be destroyed why consent to partake in any activity, why live?

  “Yes,” the master said, and allowed the boy to go home. But he kept coming back till the master lost his patience. “If you only come here to complain you may as well stay at home. What do you want of me?”

  “I want,” the boy said “to know why I must suffer. I want you to tell me.”

  “I won’t tell you anything,” the teacher said. “You know the answer yourself. And if you like, you can tell me the answer.”

  “I understand what you are telling me,” the boy said. “I will have to become a monk and you will give me a koan, and then I will have to meditate and repair my own clothes and have a bath once every nine days. Now why should I do that? My karma, the result of whatever I did during previous lives, is good. I am rich, I own a large house. I am intelligent, I can go to the university and become a doctor as my parents did. I can have girl friends and have children and my children will be well off too. Why should I give it all up to find out something which, you say, I already know?”

  “Well, don’t then,” the master said. “I never told you to become a monk. You can do what you like. But I don’t want you to come here any more; I am a busy man and I can’t help you.”

  “But if I do become a monk you will have time for me? Then you will help me to reach the point which, according to you, I have already reached?”

  “I suppose I’ll have to,” the master said, “but you are like a fish saying it is thirsty.”

  So he did eventually become a monk, but he ran away three times and returned three times. The koan must have given him a lot of trouble because after some years he had to adopt extreme methods. He didn’t go to bed any more but kept on meditating, on a rock in the garden, with a bucket of water next to him so that he could splash water into his face to keep himself awake.

  When I knew him there were no signs left of erratic behavior. I couldn’t even imagine that this quiet, energy generating man had ever been a spoiled neurotic boy. I told the master that this complete change was really like a reincarnation in one life. The master shook his head. “You should forget about reincarnation,” he said. “In Hinduism there is a lot of talk about the Atman, the divine self which never changes. It lives many lives and comes closer to its Godlike core with every new existence on earth so that, after many purifications, it will live its final life on earth before it finds Nirvana, the only real heaven, the sphere of God himself. But Buddhism doesn’t attach itself to any theory, not even to the doctrine of the Godlike self. Everything, y
ou will find, is illusion, temporary, beyond our reach, and that includes the divine self. Nothing exists, nothing has ever existed, and nothing will ever exist. But when one starts thinking logically, and every time you try to think you are using logic, we think of ‘this’ or ‘that’, and when we think of ‘nothing’ we immediately oppose it, contrast it with ‘something.’ Then we imagine an emptiness, and we get stuck in this emptiness. A neurotic boy becoming a balanced man is an interesting process to watch, but without significance. That a man lives many lives, and that all lives are connected and flow into each other, is nice to know. But we, in this monastery, are not engaged in psychiatric treatment, and neither are we a school of philosophy. If you are interested in eastern philosophy and religion, if you want to study reincarnation and karma, you can go through the gate, turn left twice and right three times and you will find yourself in the university of Kyoto. There are professors over there who will be able to answer all your questions, but when you analyse the answers, they will be questions again. The intellect is a beautiful instrument and has a purpose, but here you will discover a different instrument. When you solve koans you will have answers which are no longer questions.”

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s what I want. Insight.”

  The master looked at me kindly.

  “Insight, by itself, is of no significance either. I want you to show me your insight.”

  On the way to the bathhouse I met a Catholic priest, a Jesuit from Germany who taught at a Catholic school for Japanese. The monks had pointed him out to me before, when he walked by but I had never met him. That day he stopped and asked me how I liked the monastery. I was, in those days, well on the way to becoming a fanatical Buddhist because the more I understood about Buddhism, or thought I understood, the more I was convinced that this was the only right way, the most enlightened and effective religion which I had ever encountered. And if the Buddhists are right, I thought, then the others are all wrong and especially the Christians with their ideas about heaven and hell, with their God and Son of God and their definitions of crime and punishment. This celibate Catholic priest who suddenly faced me in the street seemed a clown to me, a very lost soul. Why should he do without sex all his life if he was living in a body meant and equipped for sex? Why should he believe in dogmas because someone in Italy claimed they were true? No, I thought, I am better than that. I am allowed, I am even compelled, to find out everything for myself, and I only believe and accept what I can believe and accept, and if tomorrow some new insight grows in me I will believe something different tomorrow. I am celibate because I promised to stay away from sex for a certain period, like a man training for a boat race will not smoke for a few weeks. Christ, a hazy man from a far past, is, to this priest, the great Messiah, the savior, the prophet of a message in which he has to believe unconditionally. Buddha may be another hazy man from a far past but he had no pretensions. He merely said that there is a solution to all human problems and that this solution can be found by living in a certain way, by meditation, by awareness, by being awake.

  Christ always talked about his Father, about God. Buddha never denied the existence of God but he never confirmed it either. That is much more reasonable; why should we try to understand something we’ll never be able to understand? It is more practical to try and reach a certain point, consciously, where insight is possible and to restrict all attempts to reach enlightenment to the daily discipline.

  I pitied the priest, a man working for a competing business, a company without a future, a church destined to disappear. I would have liked to convert him.

  The Jesuit didn’t show that he felt anything of my hostile compassion. He seemed very impressed when I told him how difficult and trying the Zen training is.

  “That isn’t much!” he said, “four hours’ sleep a night!”

  I was told, later, that the training in Jesuit monasteries is about the same, as far as the daily routine is concerned, as Zen training. Jesuits hit themselves with a piece of rope. Zen monks hit each other with a stick. Both methods hurt. I often met the priest after that but I never risked another conversation. People who knew him well said that he was a very modest man. He was reputed to be a graduate twice over, and his lectures were supposed to be brilliant. He meditated at least two hours every day and often much more because when the school was closed for holidays or weekends he would retire to his room and could only be reached when he was needed. The monks considered him a holy man and when he visited the monastery he wasn’t received by the head monk but by the master himself in his private room.

  It seems that in Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan, there is a small Zen monastery where the master is illiterate. The teacher was a farmer’s son and he had been taken to the temple when he was very young. He had never learned to read or write but he completed the koan study and came to complete enlightenment.

  That there were other religions except Buddhism he scarcely realized, until he heard the monks discussing Christianity.

  One of his monks had been to the university of Tokyo and the teacher asked him to explain Christianity.

  “I don’t know much about it,” the monk said, “but I will bring you the holy book of the Christian religion.”

  The master sent the monk to the nearest city and the monk returned with the Bible.

  “That’s a thick book,” the master said, “and I can’t read. But you can read something to me.”

  The monk knew the Bible and read the Sermon on the Mount. The more he read, the more the master was impressed. “That is beautiful,” he kept saying. “That is very beautiful.” When the monk finished the sermon the master said nothing for a while. The silence lasted so long that the monk put the Bible down, got himself into the lotus position, and started meditating. “Yes,” the teacher said finally. “I don’t know who wrote that, but whoever he was, he was either a Buddha or a Bodhisatva. What you read there is the essence of everything I have been trying to teach you here.”

  Seven

  A difference of rank and a pigeon’s egg

  Zen is free; Zen training is not. The training is bound to time and place, and tied up with customs and tradition.

  Sunday was a special day in the monastery. Then the local people would arrive, neatly dressed, father first, then mother, then the children. At the gate they were welcomed by a bowing monk. When I saw that for the first time, I remembered my early youth: the Free Dutch Reformed Church in Rotterdam and all those devout faces. All week everybody had messed about, but now they marched in, arranged in neat rows, faces folded in just the right expression, bodies tucked away in Sunday suits. History repeats itself; the repetition is unavoidable.

  Still, there was a difference. Here festivities started with a drum solo. On the veranda of the main temple there was a drum as big as a beer barrel, on its side, supported by wooden trestles. Every Sunday morning at nine o’clock, if the monastery wasn’t closed because of special exercises for the monks, Gi-san, the monastery’s drummer, would give a short rattle on the drum. When the rattle exploded through the gardens I stopped, because this was far too good to miss. At that time it was very quiet in the monastery and also in the surrounding neighborhood. The rattle, therefore, would be sudden, clear and penetrating, and I could feel it go right through my spine. After a pause of ten to fifteen seconds the drum would start again, slowly working up an easy but impressive rhythm handled by a relaxed Gi-san for he had lots of time—the solo took at least ten minutes. He wouldn’t just hit the skin of the drum but would also use the sides of the barrel and cause a hissing rustling sound by stirring his sticks on the drum. I thought that Gi-san must be a master on the instrument but when he happened to be away one Sunday, another monk, haphazardly selected, proved to be just as good.

  During the solo the monks entered the temple, where the master was already seated on a large chair, a chair with a back he didn’t use since he always sat in the lotus position keeping his back straight without any need for support. The master dress
ed, for such occasions, in a glorious robe of embroidered silk and brocade. The head monk would sit at his left side, small and inconspicuous on the floor, with a small bell in his hand, and Ke-san, a tall, very thin monk, a temple priest who, years ago, had given up his easy life to become a disciple of the master again, sat in a small fortress consisting of three gongs: a small gong, a middle-sized gong, and an enormous gleaming monster gong.

  When Gi-san gave his final stroke on the drum outside Ke-san hit his gong in the temple, and at that signal the monks’ choir started the first sutra of Buddha, a rhythmical musical droning of syllables, regularly interrupted by the gongs and bell of their leaders.

  I sat uncomfortably among the monks. It would have been better if I could have joined in the chanting but I can’t sing, and even if I had had the right voice I wouldn’t have been able to remember the words and sounds. That I couldn’t read the Chinese characters of the text didn’t help much either. The flock sat at the other side of the large temple room and I could feel their curious eyes prick into my body. My larger size and curly brown hair must have contrasted strangely with the small, uniformly bald monks around me.

  The chanting lasted a long time, about half an hour, and after that the master would speak: an official sermon within the tradition of Japanese Zen. He would tell stories about the lives of former masters, or would read us something about the life of the Buddha. His voice was monotonous, droning away, and the monks would fall asleep. When one falls asleep in the lotus position the upper part of the body begins to sway, slowly to the front, slowly to the back. Because I couldn’t manage to sit properly in balance I couldn’t fall asleep either. If I did, I fell over, and I did fall over once, much to the amusement of the flock which immediately emitted a high titter. After that I did everything possible to stay awake. When the sermon was over the head monk hit his bell, the monks woke up with a sudden shock, the gongs began to vibrate all around us, and outside Gi-san started on his drum again.