The Empty Mirror

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  It was one of the many answers given to me about which I had the feeling that they were brilliant, deduced from the one and only reality, but which I couldn’t make use of because as soon as I started to have a good look at such an answer its message proved to be well outside my reach.

  My removal took little time or effort. I had arrived with one suitcase and I left with one suitcase. Peter took the suitcase on his scooter and I caught the tram. He lived at half an hour’s walking distance from the monastery, in a four-roomed house with a large garden. I was received in a solemn manner. Peter was waiting for me at the gate. He showed me my room, a large spacious room with the usual niche used by the Japanese to hang a painted or drawn scroll, where they place a vase with a single flower, or perhaps some twigs and dry flowers, beautifully arranged.

  He mentioned a very reasonable amount to be paid monthly and took me to his own room where he gave me a cushion (there were no chairs or other European furniture, he lived in pure Japanese surroundings) and poured coffee. I felt as though I was on a formal visit to the head monk and decided to say as little as possible.

  “You are here,” Peter said, “because the master wants it that way. The idea would never have occurred to me. I have always lived by myself and I like living that way. But all right, I’ll perform my task as well as I can. Perhaps we can be of use to each other.”

  He gave me a questioning look and I nodded. His welcome didn’t sound very cheerful, but perhaps cheerfulness is no part of Zen.

  “First of all we have to construct a program for you. I have a pencil and notepaper here. Write down what I am going to tell you—if you don’t agree we can discuss it later. Now let me see. At half past three in the morning the master expects us. Then we should have meditated first. It’s half an hour’s walk, so you’ll have to get up at between a quarter past and half past two.”

  “Good-day to you,” I thought. In the monastery I got up at 3 a.m. Things weren’t getting any better.

  “Half an hour’s walk takes up too much time,” Peter continued. “You’ll have to have transport, because I am not taking you on my scooter, that’s bad for my concentration and for yours as well. A friend of mine owns an old scooter which I can have for nothing, and the garage round the corner will fix it up for you for £20 or £30. You can have a reliable vehicle that way. Once you have your own scooter you can get up half an hour later—we have to be reasonable of course. And you’ll be back quicker. Once you are back we’ll have breakfast, I’ll cook it, and you wash up. Then we’ll clean the temple together till you get the hang of it so that you can do it by yourself.”

  And so it went on. The whole day was carefully sliced into bits, divided up to the minute. The routine contained at least three hours of meditation, on top of the meditation which I would have to do in the monastery every evening. There was time for work in the garden, time for my Japanese lesson, time to do shopping (that was part of my duties too) and time for naps, twice a day, for half an hour in my room.

  After some minor changes we came to a definite daily program and Peter asked me to write it all down neatly. When I had showed him the result of my labor he gave me four drawing pins to pin it up inside the door of my cupboard.

  “Now pay attention,” Peter said, “because what I am going to tell you now may amaze you because you are a simple spirit. This program will come to nothing. We won’t have a single day in this house which will follow the routine which we have just created. And logically so, because we have left no space for sudden happenings. It may be that we have visitors, or even that we are busy in the garden and decide to go on, and it may happen that you, because I can’t be here all the time to supervise you, will turn the whole program upside down by sneaking to your room for an extra nap or an hour’s secret reading. But when you suddenly wake up again and remember your routine and realize that you are taking part in a training which is supposed to lead somewhere, you can go to your cupboard and all you have to do is look at your watch, and once you know the time, find the right place in your program, and then do what you should be doing. Follow me?” I followed him. Ten years in Japan had left their stamp on Peter. The Japanese society is stiff with written and unwritten laws, but each law has its clause of escape so that life can still be lived and the number of suicides remains limited.

  “All right,” Peter said, “now have a look at what, according to your program, you should be doing.”

  I went to my room and came back grinning. It was time to take a nap.

  “Splendid,” Peter said. “I am going to have a nap too. When we wake up you can make tea, and after tea we’ll work in the garden.”

  I spread my sleeping bag on the floor, arranged my Japanese pillow, filled with very small pebbles, but even so a most comfortable support for the head, pushed an ashtray within reach, set the alarm clock, and lit a cigarette. Peter came in.

  “Hey,” he said, “I won’t have that. I don’t like smoking much, it’s a bad habit and dangerous too. These houses burn easily—they’re built of wood, straw and paper, you know.”

  “But I always smoke before I go to sleep.”

  “And you have never caused a fire?”

  “Never.”

  “Well, all right then. I suppose I have to try and fit in with your habits as well.”

  It was a good beginning. I finished my cigarette, stubbed out the end with care, turned over and fell asleep at once. After half an hour’s sleep, so I had learned in the monastery, my resistance to the daily strain would grow considerably. The head monk had even taught me certain exercises so that I would be able to fall asleep quickly, but I didn’t need them. All I had to do was close my eyes, grunt, take a deep breath, and I was asleep, and if they tried to wake me up immediately afterwards I felt as if I was being dragged from the end of space. I had to give away three alarm clocks before I found one which made enough noise to pull me loose, and then only if I placed it on a tin plate and surrounded it with small change.

  After the nap I washed my face with cold water, made a pot of Chinese tea and woke Peter who had dug himself into his sleeping bag and lay, in the shape of an oversize banana, bent between his music books and a stack of clean laundry.

  The energy with which he woke up frightened me. He jumped up, tore the sleeping bag off his body and swallowed the very hot tea in a few gulps.

  “Work to be done,” he said cheerfully, and within a minute we were in his vegetable garden where I had to dig trenches while he brought bucket after bucket, filled with human shit, from the pit under his lavatory, and ladled it with a huge wooden spoon into the trenches. His face was glowing with pleasure and delight as if the brownish-yellow porridge, with bits of toilet paper sticking from it everywhere, was a delicacy, a special treat for the vegetable garden. I was nauseated and jumped aside every time he passed me, afraid of having the stuff spattered on my clothes.

  “Do you think this is dirty?” he asked, very surprised.

  “Yes,” I said, “filthy.”

  “Ah, but you have to learn about this. Shit isn’t dirty. The entire Japanese economy is based on shit—there are no sewers here, everything is used. One had to do that, with a hundred million people massed on these few islands.”

  He pressed a bucket into my hand and told me to fill it up well. When the contents of my first bucket began to slosh about I had to vomit and lean against a fence afterwards. After that the nausea went.

  During the first few days in Peter’s house it was proved that I could do nothing well. My first attempts at preparing a meal were coupled with black billowing clouds and a nasty burning smell which hung in the kitchen for days. When I cleaned the woodwork with a wet rag the water sloshed down the beams into the straw mats on the floor, which had to be loosened with endless trouble and carried to the garden to dry in the sun. When I wanted to dust the sliding doors (dust collects on the wooden lathe work which keeps the doors together and is knocked off with a feather duster) I broke the paper which had been pasted over the thin
lathes. When I tried to repair the paper it broke in other places. I struggled through a variety of tasks, spurred on by Peter’s sarcasm—he would be so amused at times that he had to turn somersaults and roll about on the floor to give vent to his mirth. He had been brought up on a farm in America and he couldn’t imagine that anyone could be as clumsy as I was. The stories he told about me in the monastery must have been very funny, for when I arrived there in the evening for meditation I noticed from the expression of the faces of master and head monk that they had been following my progress and that they enjoyed the daily reports which Peter delivered, breaking them off at some exciting spot so that their interest wouldn’t wane.

  And old woman who came to clean Peter’s kitchen and bathhouse every day tried to help me with my work, but if Peter happened to be at home she didn’t get a chance. Fortunately he had to work during the day, he taught at a music school, and then, as he had predicted, I would break my routine sometimes to read or sleep, and Tokamura-san, kind old soul, would scrape the pots and repair the other damage. Peter would suddenly rush home, swooping down on us like an eagle from a clear sky, and rage at us both, and I tried to cooperate, realizing that what I was trying to do might serve some purpose.

  My attempts at meditation met with some success. I was sitting much better now, in a position which looked, if one didn’t inspect it too closely, like a half lotus. I had found a spot on Peter’s veranda where I felt at home, with a view of the rockgarden. During meditation I didn’t look at the rocks and brushwood which complemented each other in artistic patterns, but something seemed to come out of the garden and make my meditation easier. I kept the mosquitoes away by burning a special Japanese incense, a thick green coil giving off a sharp smoke which didn’t bother people but frightened off any insect. In the monastery’s meditation hall we used a spray gun, an ideal solution I thought, for I didn’t want to have an itch added to my pain, but some of the monks thought the spray gun a luxury they could do without. Buddha hadn’t used insecticides either when he was sitting in the forest in India. They also claimed that it was possible to keep insects away by concentrating in a certain way, but that was a trick which I never learned. The mosquitoes didn’t bother me too much, I had got used to their sting, but there was a mean, small black sand-fly, whose bite resulted in swellings which always got infected and even made me run a temperature at times.

  What was important to me in those days, and compensated for most of my daily trials, was the scooter which Peter and I had dragged from the back garden of his friend and we pushed to the garage on a wheelbarrow. The rusty, dented structure, carrying the trade name “Rabbit,” turned out to be a special large size, made for export to western countries, and equipped with a powerful engine with a sound which reminded me of my motorcycle in Cape Town. The garage had promised to return the scooter to its original state and to deliver it to my door within two weeks. I counted the days.

  That scooter was a source of joy. Every morning I rode her to the monastery, through a quiet, fast asleep city in which only policemen, baker’s assistants, newspaper boys and late merrymakers were alive. The first time I was stopped by two constables who asked for my papers. I didn’t have them on me, but when I told them I was a disciple of the Zen master they both bowed simultaneously and apologized. I met them, or their colleagues, regularly afterwards, and was always greeted by military-style salutes which I would acknowledge by bowing mildly in their direction.

  The scooter disturbed the head monk.

  “Koan study,” he said, “leads to understanding that all things are connected. All beings are bound to each other by strong invisible threads. Anyone who has realized this truth will be careful, will try to be aware of what he is doing. You aren’t.”

  “No?” I asked politely.

  “No,” the head monk said and looked at me discontentedly. “I saw you turn a corner the other day and you didn’t hold out your hand. Because of your carelessness a truck driver, who happened to be driving behind you, got into trouble and had to drive his truck on the sidewalk where a lady pushing her pram hit a director of a large trading company. The man, who was in a bad mood already, fired an employee that day who might have stayed on. That employee got drunk that night and killed a young man who could have become a Zen master.”

  “Come off it,” I said.

  “Perhaps it will be better if you hold out your hand in future when you turn a corner,” the head monk said.

  Fifteen

  A court lady discourteously treated

  Peter, who had lived in Kyoto some ten years and who spoke Japanese fluently, made contact easily with the Japanese. Almost everyone in Kyoto knew him, and it was well known that he was an advanced disciple of the Zen master; apart from that he was fairly famous as a musician who appeared regularly on radio and TV. But it did sometimes happen that he ran into a Japanese who had never heard of him and who would be very surprised when this miracle appeared—a tall, wide-shouldered, blond, blue-eyed westerner who spoke Japanese with a Kyoto accent and understood even the most subtle allusions. If I was present as well the Japanese could relax again, for my knowledge of the language was faulty and my adjustment to the eastern environment only very partial. Occasionally Peter would take me to meet some friend or acquaintance, and we would break the afternoon’s routine by making a trip on the scooters. His scooter had the trade name “Pigeon,” and was light and dainty compared with my roaring “Rabbit.” I was never allowed to follow him too closely because he claimed to be bothered by the powerful surge of my engine. During a trip through the mountains near Kyoto he held back till I was riding next to him and asked if I would like to visit a hermit. We turned into a narrow mountain path and arrived after a short ride at a temple on a mountain top, a small Buddhist temple consisting of two buildings surrounded by a high wall and locked in by a solid gate. It was very quiet. Only the wind could be heard, moving the branches of the pinetrees, and a songbird trying out a long pure trill. A panel opened in the gate and I saw the face of a young monk.

  “Is he the hermit?”

  “No, that is the hermit’s servant; he doesn’t live by himself.”

  The monk, or acolyte, who would have been about sixteen years old, opened the gate, bowed, and bade us welcome. He seemed to know Peter well and showed his metal teeth when he was introduced to me.

  “Jan-san,” Peter said, “another disciple of the Zen master.” “Welcome, welcome,” the monk said, and brought us to the temple. The sliding doors opened and a man in his early thirties bowed and smiled.

  After we had been served tea and cake the hermit told me that he belonged to the Tendai sect and that he had promised to spend seven years in this temple without ever passing through the gate. He was now in his fourth year. It turned out that he spoke English well and Peter didn’t have to translate.

  “And what are you doing here?” I asked.

  “My master gave me a program!” The Tendai priest said. “I keep to it all the time. I have a daily routine which starts at 4 a.m. and finishes at 11 p.m. I meditate, I work in the garden, I study English, I chant the sutras of our sect, and every day I spend a lot of time on the fire ceremony.”

  Later on I had a chance to see the ceremony. Fire forms only a small part of it, for the ceremony consists of a large number of precise gestures and small activities (such as shifting objects about on the altar) which have to be executed with utmost concentration. If the ceremony is done with complete surrender and devotion, the Tendai priest said, peace will result which, in turn, will give rise to insight.

  “Do you remember the story of the mirrors?” Peter asked. “You told me the story once. That story of the Tendai master and the court lady?”

  The Tendai priest nodded.

  “Would you mind telling it again? My friend has come to Japan to learn something, but so far he hasn’t made much progress. Perhaps your story will help.”

  The priest laughed.

  “I assume that your friend has come to deepen hi
mself. Is that the right word? Deepen?”

  Peter said it was.

  “Hmm,” the priest said. “By listening to stories you don’t deepen yourself much. You know that surely. Unless, of course, the story comes at exactly the right moment, when the mind happens to be open already. Then perhaps a whiff of insight may arise, and if you are in a certain training, or can produce some discipline, the insight may stay alive and even increase. But I don’t mind telling the story again.”

  He called the young monk, who brought bowls heaped full of rice and salted vegetables and another pot of green tea, and placed them on small red lacquered tables.

  All right then. The story is set in China, when Buddhism had become popular over there and the Zen and Tendai sects were large and strong. Even the emperor was a Buddhist, and a certain court lady felt herself attracted to the mysterious teaching. She visited a number of priests and so-called masters, but didn’t find much except splendor and a lot of difficult words. The temples which she saw were beautifully designed and built, she saw magnificent gardens with all sorts of surprise effects and the clergy who controlled this environment pulled holy faces and knew the answer to any question. The lady was intelligent and knew how to observe, and she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that she had been transported into a play, a fascinating show, but a show without substance. She asked and obtained audience with the emperor and described what she had seen.

  “Is this Buddhism?” the lady asked.

  “Well,” the emperor said, “the eye wants something too. And religion isn’t unhealthy for the people. It gives them something to do and there is always the possibility that they pick up some wisdom from the sutras of Buddha. The eightfold path is sublime, and there are priests and monks who try to walk the path, and their example is not without importance.”