by Pico Iyer
Then the foreign acts began: satirical stanzas, shouted out in confrontational Beat fashion, that began, “I am a clump of cottage cheese”; poems about Mao, poems with allusions to Godard, and — inevitably — love poems about persimmons wet with summer dew (“Well, she liked it,” huffed the bearded American poet when the audience began to jeer). A Japanese girl got up, holding a white rose, and sang a plaintive ancient melody, “Hamabeno Uta,” by Narita Tamezo.
In the morning on the beach I walk around, remembering.
The sound of wind, the shape of clouds, the surf, the color of the shell;
In the evening, my lover wanders on the beach,
Remembering the waves come up, go down;
Moonlight, starlight.
As I was taking all this in, my eye happened to catch that of the quiet foreigner beside me. He was a shy-looking fellow in plaid shirt and scuffed gray corduroys, sitting by himself and doodling in a sketchbook. Seeing me watching him, he explained that he was an artist, and came from San Francisco, and had lived here on and off for fifteen years, learning to paint in the traditional Zen sumi-e tradition. Before that, Mark went on, he had been a student in Santa Barbara, and when I told him my name, he told me that he had taken a course in Spinoza from a Mrs. Iyer — my mother — and we were off, busily exchanging names in common while, around us, a potbellied character in glasses, so overcome with emotion — or something like it — by the Philip Glass variations being played by a Japanese waiter on a Chinese harp, got up and began swaying to the music, rolling his hands around like a Balinese nymph, and various others started humming “Om” or sat back rocking on their chairs, eyes closed.
Four hours later, sometime after midnight, the show was over, and a mix of strange spirits spilled out into the half-lit lanes: a ponytailed imp from New York, whose claim to fame was painting the patriarchs of Zen with Marty Feldman faces; a girl from Minnesota who was married to a Japanese flamenco dancer; a slightly unsteady Japanese woman, whose American husband had been the translator of some of Japan’s most famous love poems; a vivacious Japanese girl seemingly on the lookout for foreigners (“I live in Gion” — pretty giggle — “you know, the entertainment area?”); and two hearty beer-swilling German students, one bespectacled, besweatered, and apparently keen to hear more about Gion, the other long-haired and leather-jacketed, with a blasé look that suggested that he, with his rock-star looks, had already found a local girlfriend.
Meanwhile, the diligent salaryman kept sidling up to one foreign girl after another, whispering something in each one’s ear and then standing erect and nodding solemnly as he got the bad news, receiving each rejection like a gift.
A few nights later, as I shuffled through the business cards I had collected at the gathering, I noticed, to my surprise, that the street on which Mark was living had the same name as my own. Japanese streets are notoriously as straight as their sentiments and as easy to follow as their sentences. But still, I thought, this was a lead worth following. Going to the nearest phone booth, I gave him a call.
Two minutes later, I was seated in Mark’s creaky old Japanese-style house — the very Santa Cruz vision of what a Zen painter’s house should be, its central paper lantern reflected in the window twice over, twin moons, as we sat cross-legged on cushions at a low, worm-eaten table.
The old room was rigorously spare and clean: just a few cassettes in a wooden cigar box, a collection of brushes in a tin, and, on the wall, some paintings of Zen themes and a nude. From next door came the steady, monotonous chanting of a Buddhist woman; from the rafters, the scuttling of rats. Putting on some tea, Mark told me a little of how he had come here.
He had grown up, he said, in San Francisco, surrounded by artifacts from Japan, brought over by his aunt and uncle, and fascinated by the stories they had told him of the land where they once lived. Yet he had never really had any contact with the island until his senior year in college, in Santa Barbara. “And then this man called Shibayama came over from Kyoto. Only for a week. But somehow — it was one of those things — everywhere I went that week, I kept running into him.” He shook his head at the memory. “He was this really amazing guy, the head abbot of Nanzenji: gentle, but very direct. I’d never met anyone like him before.”
This was ’69, and having survived the student riots, Mark had taken off with a blackjack dealer from Nepal, across the Overland Trail — through Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan — and ended up living with a Tibetan family in Kathmandu. But as he’d settled down there and begun to take the measure of his trip, and to read deeper in the book of Shibayama’s that he’d been carrying around with him, he began to feel “that there must be some reason for my meeting him. So that really confirmed my sense that I ought to come over to Kyoto to study with him.”
By then, however, he was beginning to run out of money, so he went back to the West Coast, started saving up again, and finally, three years after that first meeting, made it to Kyoto. “My first day here, I went over to see the rōshi, and his first question was what I wanted to do over here. Jeez, I had no idea! But I’d done some sculpting in Santa Barbara, and Shibayama’s interpreter and assistant — this really amazing woman called Miss Kudō, whom I’d met in California — had suggested that I mention my interest in painting as well. So I did, and he instantly said, ‘Oh, I have this friend who’s a painter. Let me introduce you.’ And so, the very next day, I was introduced to Jikihara-sensei, who’s one of the top sumi-e painters in the country. He didn’t speak any English and I didn’t have any Japanese, but we got on without any problems. And when I told Shibayama that I was also interested in Zen, he sent me to a temple — Antaiji — and as soon as I arrived there, I ran into an American monk, who found me a place to live with another student of Zen.
“So anyway, my first few days here, everything pretty much fell into place, and I met all these people who were going to have a big influence on my life — Shibayama-roshi, and my teacher, who’s still my teacher now and probably the main force determining the course of my life, and these two Zen students who are still in many ways my closest friends. Fairly soon there were also these two friends I knew from Santa Barbara, who came over to become monks.” A quiet smile. “Just kind of karma, I guess.
“Two years later, after I’d settled into an artists’ village in the mountains — and into the rhythms of my new discipline — the rōshi died. On the day of his funeral, there was a thin drizzle, really thin. A line of pilgrims stretched all the way from the main hall to the next subtemple. And all of them were carrying bells. I still remember the sound of their bells ringing in the drizzle. A little later, Miss Kudō died too.”
Handing me a gift before I left — a friend’s homemade map to the city’s secret places — Mark invited me to come with him next day on a walk through some of the nearby temples. By the time I arrived, early on another blazing morning, the sun was flooding through his wood-framed windows. Pulling the screen door closed behind him — he never locked his door, he said — he led me down a maze of alleyways and towards the eastern hills. As we walked, I asked him a little more about the practice of Zen.
He had never been a monk himself, Mark explained, but he had stayed in a temple sometimes and had attended monthly sessions of sesshin — five days of almost uninterrupted meditation, even in the unheated monasteries in the depths of December. Many of his closest friends were monks, and though his teacher too was not a formal Zen master, he had a temple of his own on an island near Osaka. And though Mark took care not to say it, I could quickly tell that Zen had given him a discipline and a focus: in the cycle of vagrancy and stillness by which he led his life — now spending two years in Kyoto, now taking off for Grenada or Mexico or California for a while, then returning again to Kyoto; in his devotion to his teacher, with whom he had lived for two years as a personal attendant; and, most important, in his training in an art that was, of course, a training in a life.
Though many of Mark’s friends had left their temples by now, that was
mostly, he implied, because they had reached a stage at which the temples would not leave them. Many of them, he said, had wearied of the worldly aspects of the monastic life — the politicking, the emphasis on sheer willpower, the need for subservience, the stress on hierarchy: all the qualities, in short, that could make temples seem just like any other affluent, rule-bound Japanese company. Yet the temples had given them a certain intensity, a sense of discipline, that stayed with them even now.
We walked past a temple graveyard — newly cut flowers at the base of many headstones, and candies still fresh in their eighty-yen wrappers — and Mark pointed out how such rites were the source of many of the temple’s riches: a single headstone here cost twenty thousand dollars. Recently, in fact, the temples had made headlines by refusing to pay taxes to the city and threatening to close their gates to visitors — thus paralyzing the city’s most lucrative tourist attractions — unless they were granted an exemption. This much, I knew, was in keeping with Kyoto’s history: spiritual and temporal powers had always clashed as often as they had conspired here. If the purity of religion had occasionally touched and elevated the daimyō, the chicanery of realpolitik had more often lowered and implicated the monks, who had famously become warriors and libertines and even moneylenders. Poems regularly punned on the closeness between sen (a kind of money) and Zen.
“You’ll also notice,” he went on, as we mounted a steep hill, framed by orange torii gates, “how the Buddhist temples here are always dark and somber; black. People associate them with death. And usually they come to them only for funerals — or as tourist sites. The Shinto shrines, by comparison, are always red and orange — these really bright and happy colors — and that’s where people come for marriages and New Year’s Day and other festivals.”
Nowadays, of course, he continued, Zen had much more appeal for foreigners than for Japanese (who generally entered monasteries only if they had to take over a family temple): this despite — or maybe because of — the fact that outsiders had a great deal to give up before they could even enter the front portals of Zen, and the surrendering of self and cerebration clearly came less easily to us than to many Japanese. “I remember this one Zen teacher told me, soon after I arrived, that the appeal of Zen to many foreigners was like a mountain wrapped in mist. Much of what the Westerners saw was just the beautiful mist; but as soon as they began really doing Zen, they found that its essence was the mountain: hard rock.”
And so we wandered on, past quiet mothers wheeling prams, and age-spotted men pulling yapping dogs; past schoolgirls shuffling their slow way home along canals, and coffee shops where women sat alone, the autumn moon above them in the blue.
Finally, our path meandered into the Tetsugaku-no-michi, or Philosopher’s Path, a narrow, tree-shaded walkway along the base of the eastern hills, beside a slow canal. Above us, a thick camouflage of trees carpeted the slopes, broken, now and then, by the severe spire of some temple; on the other side, pink coffee shops and teddy-bear boutiques rested placid above the bustle of the city. I noticed the Bobby Soxer pizza and spaghetti house, and the Atelier café, run, so I’d heard, by a former mistress of the novelist Tanizaki; I noticed too, amidst the trees, the small temple of Anrakuji, where once — in one of the most famous of all Kyoto’s scandals — two of an Emperor’s favorite concubines had stopped to hear two priests, and been so bewitched by them (or by their message) that they had chosen to forsake the court and join the temple as nuns. Upon hearing of this defection, the enraged Emperor had sentenced both Anraku and the other monk to death.
We stopped in a café, owned by a samurai actor, and as we walked on, were given salted plum tea by two chirpy salesgirls. Farther on, inside a shrine almost Chinese in its solemnity, with stone lions perched on either side of its imposing orange entrance, Mark pointed out a small statue covered with a scarlet bib and surrounded by knickknacks — stuffed animals, frilly shirts, flowers, and piles of stones. Jizō, he explained, was the patron saint of children and of travelers (very apt, I thought, since every child is a born adventurer and every traveler a born-again child). These offerings, in fact, were remembrances of mizugo, or “water children” — children who had died young or been stillborn or, in most cases, aborted. “Is that a sign of real sorrow or just a kind of ritual?” I asked, assuming, as always, that the Japanese were not like other people (the same assumption that so enrages us when the Japanese apply it to us). “Well,” said Mark quietly, “I’ve known a number of women here who’ve had abortions, and they’re always really affected by them.” Having lived here for fifteen years, Mark was clearly well accustomed to dealing with wide-eyed romantics from abroad.
Finally, we arrived at the sprawling compound of Nanzenji — Shibayama’s temple — and stopped in a small room to drink green tea, the dark, red-carpet chamber lit up by a rush of silver down the rocks it faced. In the rooms that followed, we saw stylized paintings of white cranes and prowling tigers on gold-lacquer screens, and then the famous rock garden designed by Kobori Enshu (“Approach a great painting,” he had written, “as you would a great prince”). I noticed how the pines and maples on the hill behind, faintly red and orange and green, blended seamlessly into the pattern of raked gravel, Nature consenting to become a part of art. “This was the first painting I ever did,” Mark explained. “The ‘Leaping Tiger Garden.’ The first time I visited my teacher, he just gave me three sheets of paper and said, ‘Come back in a week with three paintings.’ I did. And when I showed them to him, he just redid them himself — right on top of my drawings!” His quiet voice caught fire. “And I was breathless. The vitality he gave to the scene! The stones had real power, tension. He caught the sound of the water, the softness of the hills behind. He made the whole place come alive!”
Then, as we wandered back into the streets, watching two models set up for a TV ad, Mark asked me with a quiet smile if I thought I might find a Japanese girlfriend.
“Oh no,” I replied easily enough. “I’ve come here mostly to live alone; and besides, I don’t think any Japanese girls are likely to have much time for me.”
“Well,” he said with a penetrating glance, “it would have to be an exceptional girl. But that’s the only kind that you would want.”
That night, Mark introduced me to two of his closest friends, Shelley, a funny, warmhearted lawyer from Brooklyn, and her husband, Kazuo, trim in his jeans, with close-cropped hair and glasses, a teacher of animal sciences at Kyoto University, the most high-powered site of higher learning in the country. Over mounds of curry, a “Positive Thinking” tape reproducing the lap and hiss of the ocean behind us, Mark and Shelley reminisced a little about the folklore of the foreigners (or gaijin) here: of gaijin who had been directed to the vet when sick, of gaijin who, after three years in a firm, were still listed in the company directory as “Mr. Foreigner,” of gaijin who had been made to sign confessions if ever they were late in renewing their Alien Registration forms.
Kazuo, meanwhile, sat silent in his chair.
“How was your summer?” Mark asked him.
“I was in the temple,” he said tersely. For three whole months, he went on, he had been up Mount Hiei, the famous sacred mountain in the northeast of the city, training to be a Tendai Buddhist monk. For the first month, he had had to get up at five every morning, take a cold shower, and then climb the mountain to collect pure water from a well. In their second month, the apprentice monks had had to get up at two and do the same, while praying three or four times every day. The food was sparse, and the days were cold and hard. But that was only the first stage. Those who were serious would have to complete another course, lasting three full years — sweeping leaves for six hours a day — and then another, for five years, and then, if they were ready, they could try the famous thousand-day circuit, the “Great Marathon” around the mandala mountain and in and out of the city, in which they would have to run, in handmade straw sandals, fifty miles a day for one hundred days at a stretch, year after year, until they had done
the equivalent of running around the world. Part of their training involved going nine days without food or water or rest, watched around the clock by two monitor monks. Many of them lost weight, fell ill. Some even died. Any who failed to complete a single part of the course felt obliged to slash their own throats. But those who survived, anointed as “Living Buddhas,” took on the unearthly glow of souls that had almost passed through death; during their nine-day fasts, they grew so sensitive that they could hear ash falling from an incense stick, smell food being prepared many miles away.
For years, I recalled, women had not even been allowed on the three-thousand-temple mountain. Now, though, Kazuo told me, a woman was actually trying the thousand-day course — a woman, in fact, from Santa Barbara.
I asked him why he was putting himself through all this. He looked very gloomy. “My mother’s father and uncle have a temple,” he explained. “I am the only male who can carry on the succession. So I must become a monk.”
4
WHEN I ABANDONED the temple, I moved across town into a tiny four-and-a-half-tatami room in an undistinguished modern guesthouse near the base of the eastern hills. The name of the house was I.S.E. (though not, alas, in honor of the great sacred shrine of Japan), and the district into which it was tucked, as tidy as a paperback in one of the areas crowded bookstore shelves, was called Nishifukunokawa-chō, or Western Happy River Neighborhood. It was a quiet area, of sleepy dogs tethered to their red-roofed villas, and elderly ladies in kimono, with thinning hair and backs so stooped they walked almost parallel to the ground. Outside my room, in a lane too narrow even for cars, I could hear the sounds of a drowsy world: the cries of playing children, the occasional scuffling of a cat, the patient, insistent tinkle of some conscientious student trying and trying to get a piano melody correct.