by David Guy
The basic teaching of the founder of their school—the thirteenth-century monk named Dogen Zenji—was that the whole of the Buddha’s teaching is expressed through zazen. Dogen had traveled to China to find a true teacher, and when he came back to Japan—in his late twenties—wrote a famous small text recommending zazen to all people, not just monks. His most stunning piece of writing—a three-page piece called the “Genjokoan”—was a letter to a layman. Eventually he became more of a monastic, but Sawaki and Uchiyama took his teaching seriously. The heart of what they did was zazen, and everyone was welcome.
They had brutal sesshins once a month, much more sitting than we do, and the first one Jake did was a turning point. He thought by that time that he had changed his attitude toward everything, but really he’d just transferred his ambitions from art to spiritual practice. He went to that sesshin with the goal of mastering zazen.
By the third day he was in agony. His body ached and was tied up in knots. He sat with tears rolling down his cheeks. He had failed at painting—he was thirty-some years old and was a glorified janitor for some eccentric Japanese—and now he was failing at this. He couldn’t even sit and stare at the wall. He actually stood up from his place and walked out. Uchiyama didn’t do anything.
“You can do that?” Jess asked. “Just leave?”
“Who’s going to stop you?” I said.
“I thought they hit you with a stick.”
“No sticks for Uchiyama. No talks. No nothing. You just sat.”
Jake walked around the city, still breaking into sobs from time to time, he was so frustrated. The practice seemed simple, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do the simplest thing. Somehow, at the same time—this made no logical sense—he could see that there was nothing in the world to do but zazen. He had no recourse. He walked around for an hour, went back to the temple, and took his place again. Uchiyama still didn’t say anything. He never spoke of the incident at all.
Jake wound up staying for twelve years. Uchiyama had a saying, “Sit for ten years. Then sit another ten. Then sit another ten,” so there was no satisfying the man. Jake returned to this country an ordained Zen priest from an extremely austere tradition; that and ninety-five cents bought him a cup of coffee. He traveled around trying to find a place to practice, but nothing seemed right. “Probably I was proud,” he said. “I had a bug up my ass when I got back here.” The last place he tried, having traveled across the country, was in Maine. When that didn’t work out he went to Mount Desert Island and worked as a limo driver, short-order cook, bicycle repairman. He was the kind of person who was good at most things.
“He gave up art?” Jess asked.
“He still did some sketching and painting, as a way of appreciating the world. He had no ambition.”
After a while, in Bar Harbor, he began to give meditation classes in the tourist season. He felt he was good at basic instruction and that people could profit from the classes. He didn’t have great plans, but over the years he developed a following, and things grew from there.
“The same thing happened with you, when you met him,” Jess said.
“Not as dramatically, but yes, over time. I started doing it for myself, had other work altogether. After a while nothing else seemed as important.”
Jess leaned back and stretched, gave a big yawn. We had demolished our breakfast, were sitting over coffee.
“That’s not going to happen to me,” she said.
“No reason it should. It can be important and not be your whole life. I could go back to something else.”
Until recently, I’d thought I’d probably teach high school again after Jake died.
“Look at your mother,” I said. “It was important to her.”
“I used to get mad when I was a teenager. It was part of what I resented. The way she was so perfect about everything. But she still did it when she was quite sick. Not the yoga, but the meditation. I wish I could ask her about it.”
She smiled, shaking her head, but there were tears in her eyes.
“One time right toward the end, she said, ‘This shows me where I’m going.’”
The woman must have gone deep.
“Anyway,” Jess said. “I’m scared now. Scared shitless.”
“You’re just going to sit,” I said. “You can always leave.”
“What if I can’t do it?”
“There’s actually nothing to do. You want to remember that.”
“But what if I can’t take it? You don’t know how nuts I am.”
“Believe me, Jess. I’ve been as nuts as anyone. I know how it is.”
“What do you think he meant, there’s nothing to do but zazen? There’s lots of things. Drinking. Listening to music. Fucking.”
“What he meant was that you’ve got to look at yourself. Sooner or later you’ve got to look. Pay attention. You can spend your life running from it, but that’s a form of suffering. You think you want to run, it makes everything easier, but it’s easier to face it. That’s the weird part. When you finally sit down to face it, and that might take years, it’s easy. Much easier than what you’ve been doing.”
Jess shook her head. “Sometimes I wish I’d never heard of this. You guys had never walked into the bar. Of all the gin joints in all the world.”
“We had to walk into yours. It was your karma.”
I had paid the check and we stood from our seats.
“It might be easy,” I said. “It might be absolutely nothing. You don’t know.”
Sometimes, when someone got their nervousness out before they began, the whole thing was easier than they thought.
On our way back to her apartment, I told her we were going to have dinner at Green Street that night, with Josh.
“No shit,” she said. “The famous Josh Wilder at my bar.”
“If he can get a seat.”
“Friday nights are the worst.”
“We’re coming early. Five-thirty. We have to get back to start sesshin.”
“That shouldn’t be bad. The drunks will be there, but the dinner crowd comes later.”
We had reached her corner, turned and headed to her place.
“I can’t believe that tomorrow at this time I’m going to be sitting there staring at a wall. For four fucking hours or something.”
“There’s going to be a talk after your first sitting,” I said. “Lunch, and a work break. You won’t be sitting that much.”
“Quite a bit for a person who can’t do it at all.”
“You can reduce the time you stay. Adjust as you go along. You don’t want to push too hard.”
We didn’t usually give someone so many outs, but it was unusual to have someone who hadn’t sat at all. I didn’t know why Jake encouraged her.
We walked through the doorway, were just inside the living room, taking off our jackets. She tossed mine on a chair, put hers in the closet. The place still looked neat.
“Oh Christ,” she said. “I’m getting all jittery again. I’m going to have to smoke dope or something. Does anybody do that?”
“No, Jess. Despite the prevailing rumors. Dope smoking and Zen do not go hand in hand.”
“Give me a hug, Hank. I swear to God I’m going to keel over. My knees are shaking.”
She put her arms around my shoulders and practically collapsed. I got my arms around her and gave a big squeeze, held her tight. Her body really was trembling. We stood a few moments, waiting for her to calm down.
She leaned back and looked at me. “Let’s fuck,” she said. She leaned forward and gave me a long wet kiss.
I kissed her, I admit it. It had been a while since I’d kissed anyone and I suppose I saw it coming. In any case, I did do it, stood there kissing her for quite a while. My cock jumped—I was pleased to see it could be so quick—and she pressed against me. I let the kiss go on. She finally pulled away.
“Fuck me,” she said. “I can tell you want to.” She reached down and grabbed it.
“I do, but
I’m not going to.”
“You’ve got to. You’re so hard. Look at you. You’re a hypocrite.”
“I’m not a hypocrite. I admit I want to. I’m just not doing it.” “I need it. I’m about to go nuts here. I need a man inside me. Please, Hank.”
“Jess. You might need a man. I’m sure you’ve got lots of men. And your roommate’s got that vibrator in her bedroom. There’s a lot you can do.”
“That won’t cut it. I know. I need a man to go through me.”
“Tomorrow I’m going to be talking to you. Or the next day. Or the next. I’m going to be your meditation teacher, and I’m going to be helping you with things that come up. If we fuck, the whole thing will be fucked. You won’t listen to me.
“What we’re going to do is much more important than sex. Sex is just a way to get away from it, one of the millions of ways people have. But you can’t get away. We’ve got to stay with it. This is the beginning of that. The retreat begins now.”
“Maybe I won’t do it.”
“The retreat began days ago. We’re way into it. It began when you decided to sign up.”
I removed her hand from my cock, which she’d been clutching the whole time. A few more minutes of that and the whole thing would be a moot point.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “But if you can stand there with your dick hard in my hand and still don’t want me, the hell with you. Go.”
I picked up my jacket.
“It was a good kiss,” she said.
“It was a great kiss,” I said.
“This is your last chance to fuck a twenty-year-old chick in your whole life, and you’re turning it down. You pathetic old fart.”
Life did have its little ironies.
“You’re a beautiful woman, Jess,” I said, “an amazing woman, and you’re going to be at that retreat tomorrow. I’m going to see you.”
“Don’t count on it.”
“It’ll be the first of many times. We’re going to know each other for years.”
I didn’t know where that came from.
I opened the door, stepped out, and closed it behind me. That was a close fucking call. One more kiss and I was a goner.
I looked around as if I’d just reentered the world, stretched and heaved a huge sigh. A woman across the way was sweeping her steps. Traffic roared by on Prospect. Starting that evening, for the next five days, I’d be cut off from all that, as if it didn’t exist. That always made me—right before a retreat—value it all the more.
A long walk was in order, a day of just hanging out. I needed to cool off anyway.
On the one hand, at that point in my life, I felt entirely at peace with sex. Years of sitting and staring at it had given me understanding, which would only deepen as I got older. On the other hand, I hadn’t been with anyone for years, not on a long-term basis. I had the occasional summertime romance in Bar Harbor. But it was definitely not easy to find someone long-term up there. Jake had lucked out.
In the near future, of course, I might be living in Cambridge.
At one time—it was hard even to remember—sex had been an overwhelming compulsion and constant preoccupation in my life. I felt a need for it and was powerless to resist. Sometimes I would lie on my bed—as if to keep from walking out—and get the shakes, trying to resist. Mostly in those days I paid for it, but I also started a few affairs, thinking that if I could just set up the right situation, my ardor would cool off. That never happened. I’m sure it never would have.
What happens in meditation is that you watch and watch and watch, you watch some more, and finally, over months and years, things begin to break down. You begin with the situation Jess was in—overwhelmed by how chock-full of thinking your mind is—and what happens is not (as you hope) that the thought disappears, but that the mind gradually grows until thought isn’t such a large part of it. It’s still there, but off in the distance, quiet and subdued. Sometimes under difficult circumstances it gets noisy, but you know it’s going to quiet down.
In the case of sex, at least my case, which may have been the only one of its kind ever (though I don’t think so), it was overwhelmingly composed of thought. Thinking about sex was the way I’d escaped pain since I was a child. It had become so habitual, my mind did it automatically. In the difficulty of retreats my mind would seek out its old friend, and there I was, seeing those images for the millionth time.
I had thought of it as a physical compulsion—especially those days when I got the shakes—but often, as I sat through long days of meditation, I would be thinking I need sex and would look in my body for where the need was. (That was always Jake’s suggestion. “See if you can locate it in the body.”) Over my years of sitting the body had become a vast place of fascinating sensations. But I couldn’t find the need for sex anywhere.
The male body does periodically need to ejaculate. There’s a characteristic feeling of tension and pressure when it needs to, and apparently, if you don’t take care of it, it will do so on its own. I’ve never understood the reason not to take care of it by yourself at least. It’s so much fun!
But I found that my need for sex rarely had anything to do with the need to ejaculate. It wasn’t a physical feeling at all.
I did find, through sitting, a whole universe of physical sensations at least as interesting as sexual ones. The energy that rushes through our body as we approach orgasm is present all the time, pleasurable quite apart from sex. By the time you discover the depth of various physical sensations, which are happening all the time, the images and thoughts of sex pale in comparison. They are present out of habit, but something much more interesting is going on.
I always had the feeling that various emotional events, including my father’s death when I was sixteen, had numbed my body and cut me off from feeling. The only thing that could penetrate the numbness was sex, and it became my access to feeling. Now that I had discovered the world of feeling in my body, I still thought sex was wonderful, but hardly the only thing going on.
I covered a huge stretch of ground that day, not doing much of anything. I walked to Harvard Square and up to Davis. I walked on little streets up there, sat on benches and watched people go by, looked at squirrels and birds. The day was cold and cloudy, but I had a warm jacket and found the weather bracing. I stopped on my way back through Harvard Square for a light vegetarian wrap. I watched the chess master for a long time, watched other chess games. I was in front of the Y in plenty of time to meet Jake when he and Madeleine showed up.
He took a nap; I took a swim. We were meeting Josh at five thirty.
By the time we got to Green Street Josh was the life of the party, sitting at one of the stools we usually occupied and listening to everyone’s opinions on scores of movies he had reviewed. (He spent his life doing this, he once told me.) Jess had identified him instantly; his picture ran with his column.
“Padre,” Jess said when we walked in, and the whole crowd turned and bowed. It was their best performance yet. Josh, in the middle of the group, sat in khaki slacks and a green tweed sport jacket, laughing.
Jess hugged and kissed Jake. She hugged and kissed me, slapped my cheek a little when she did it. Our spat from earlier seemed forgotten. I don’t know whether she’d found a man to take care of her, but she’d found the man she wanted now. She was flushed and beaming.
“How come you don’t kiss us when we come in?” somebody asked.
“You’re not this cute,” Jess said, patting Jake’s head. “And you don’t have this cute a son.”
“I got a cute son,” the guy said.
“He looks like he got whacked with a tire iron,” somebody said.
“By the same guy whacked you, only harder.”
“Where’d you get that kid, anyway?” somebody said to me. “Where’d he get that red hair?”
“Red-haired milkman,” another guy said.
“Father Jake, you got any sons?”
“He’s a priest, for Christ’s
sake.”
“That should stop him?” “No sons that I know of,” Jake said. Jess had brought his Guinness, and he sipped it.
“Maybe a daughter or two,” somebody said.
“The modern era of movies,” Josh said. “Is it a great one? That was the topic before you guys came in and knocked us into the gutter.”
The discussion went around about that for a while. There was the usual argument—which I actually agreed with—that the golden age of American cinema was the late sixties and early seventies, when a number of us had been young. Movies had more depth then. Now they were derived from TV and comic books.
Josh argued—rather persuasively—that we were forgetting a lot of mindless crap. He admitted the new filmmakers based their work on popular culture—filmmakers always had—but they knew the form and used the technology better than older filmmakers had. He thought that when all was said and done, there would be as many great films from his generation as from ours. They wouldn’t all be American, but they’d be plentiful.
It was startling how knowledgeable and astute that crowd of barflies was. It was not surprising how argumentative they were. It took us forty-five minutes to get out of there and into the restaurant proper. I noticed as we were leaving that Josh gave his card to Jess. He turned away, and she winked at me.
Another reason I was glad I hadn’t fucked her that morning.
Jake had also noticed. “She’s the girl for you,” he said when we got to the table.
“You don’t think she’s a little young?” Josh asked.
“Not from what I’ve heard. Compared to your usual.”
“She does lack focus at the moment,” I said. “Her life’s in disarray.”
“That’s temporary,” Jake said.
“We’re working on it.”
Jake had asked her in the midst of our movie discussion if she was looking forward to the next day.