He goes regularly to early morning meditation with Bhanti, and attends his classes in the evenings. He mounts the cement steps flanked by lion-like statues, opens the white double door, and enters another world—a place removed from time and expectations, a sanctuary. In this oasis of calm, he drinks in Bhanti’s words and feels replenished:
In truth, there is no self.
Everything is a temporary mental state.
Thinking is the root of all our neuroses.
Impermanence is the nature of existence.
We must die because we are born with a human body.
Everyone dies but no one is dead.
He lingers after the class to ask questions, and Bhanti invites him into a small room off the main hall—a round wooden table, four cushioned chairs, a counter with a sink, the smell of tea and cinnamon. As Bhanti fills the kettle, Jeff asks, “So how does a Chinese-Jamaican boy, who grows up in Toronto, become a Buddhist monk?”
“In university, I had this crazy restless mind,” Bhanti laughs. “I was always worried about not achieving, about not having enough time. I had terrible anxiety about having to get a master’s degree by the time I was twenty-five, then having to get a Ph.D. in biochemistry. I was caught in this trap of fear and thinking. I did not know how to get out. So I decided to try to quiet my mind by taking meditation classes at the Buddhist temple. And here I am … ten years later.”
“Wow. That’s a radical shift. It must have taken a lot of discipline.”
“It was a matter of survival,” Bhanti says, lighting the beeswax candle in the centre of the table. “In retrospect, I was clearly on the wrong path. My head was full, but my soul was crying for nourishment.”
Jeff breathes in slowly, inhaling the scent of honey. “University doesn’t seem to satisfy me in the same way anymore. I don’t know if the emptiness is because I just lost my grandmother … but I don’t know where to go from here.”
“You seem to be at a crossroad.” Bhanti gazes into his friend’s sad eyes. “It is as if you have outgrown your familiar clothes. Your old ideals no longer fit. Perhaps it is time for shedding your skin.”
Jeff nods. “I’m thirty years old. I have no money. I’m living with my parents. But I just sit around, not doing much about it.”
“Sitting is good,” Bhanti chuckles. “I spend a lot of time just sitting. Think about the Buddha. He sat under the Bo Tree for seven weeks before the light came on. And Mohammed, he was forty when he sat alone in that cave in Mecca. Just sat, preparing for the quest of his life. Our society pushes us to be so busy—grasping, achieving, earning. But sometimes you have to withdraw into yourself, and just be still.”
They talk late into the night, and many nights thereafter, sipping cups of spicy chai. The candle burns between them, illuminating their shaven heads. As Jeff strolls home through the quiet city streets, the darkness recedes—the first twittering of birds; a saffron sheen in the eastern sky.
IN 2001, THE SOLSTICE SUN shines down on a bus winding up the narrow road that leads to the top of Mount Tohamsan. A thousand years ago, Korean pilgrim monks in flowing robes hiked up this rugged mountain to Sokkuram Grotto, an eighth-century Buddhist cave temple in southeast Korea. They climbed in search of spiritual renewal, believed their arduous physical journey to the temple embodied the spiritual journey to Nirvana. Seated in comfortable plush seats, Jeff and Mica feel an inward ascension of travelling to a holy place as they curl up and around the serpentine road, spiralling thousands of feet into the striated mackerel sky.
Jeff has come to South Korea for a ten-day visit with his sister, his flight another perk from Sylvie’s Air Canada buddy pass. Teaching English in the country since last fall, Mica visited the temple a few months ago, drawn by its renown as one of Asia’s finest Buddhist shrines, a UNESCO world heritage site. When her brother told her he was coming to visit, she knew she had to bring him here; that he, too, would feel the power of this sacred spot.
The bus stops at a parking lot, a mesa on the mountain’s eastern side. They step into the mid-morning sun, into alpine air steeped in pine and fir. A string of rice paper lanterns—red, blue, yellow and green—leads them up a path to a pagoda temple emerging from the side of the lushly forested mountain. They pass under an arched stone gateway into a rectangular chamber, its brown granite walls carved with images of ancient deities. They step slowly through a narrow stone passageway, run their hands over the smooth bas-relief sculptures, threshold guardians of the hallowed world they’re about to enter.
In the centre of a rotunda, the Buddha sits cross-legged on a lotus pedestal. They stand transfixed, gazing at the five-metre-high granite statue. Under a dome ceiling, the Buddha’s robust circular body, draped in carved folds of fabric, exudes an inner force. A circular relief of lotus flowers on the back wall creates a halo around his head, tightly curled hair, elongated ears, eyebrows shaped like crescent moons. One hand hangs over his knee, palm inward, fingers touching “the earth”; the other rests in his lap, palm up. A golden light illuminates the half-closed eyes, the faint smile on his face.
… the clouds of bewilderment clear away …
Have no fear: life and death are one in the void of nothingness.
Back outside, they rest on a stone bench in the sun, surveying the blue mountain ridges and the East Sea glistening on the horizon. “I’ve finally made a decision,” Jeff says. “I’m going to join the army.”
“What?” Mica turns sharply to look into his face. “You mean the reserve?”
“No,” he says, meeting her eyes, “the regular force.”
“Are you serious? What about your Ph.D.?”
“I’ll finish it at some point. I can’t focus on it right now,” he says with long sighing breaths. “I need discipline.”
“You’ll certainly get that at boot camp,” she says dryly. “Have you thought this through?”
“It’s all I’ve been thinking about for the past six months. Ever since Dad and I took that road trip to Virginia last fall. Did Mom tell you about that trip?”
“Not much. Just that Dad had to visit some naval bases down there, and you went along for the ride.”
“I’d been thinking about the reserve as a part-time job,” he says. “Then I read this novel that Dad brought with him about British special forces. That’s all I’ve wanted to read since we got back … war novels, military history, military strategy. I have no interest in the books I’m supposed to be reading. Then Dad and I went on a few wilderness camping trips around Nova Scotia with a winter survival group. I loved it! And realized it’s the kind of physically challenging stuff I’d like to be doing all the time.”
“Working out has always been your therapy, but … boot camp?” she says, grimacing. “Have you talked with Sylvie about this?”
“Yeah, she’s encouraging me to go for it. She said, ‘Whatever makes you happy, I’ll be right there behind you.’ ”
“What about Mom and Dad?”
“I’ll tell them when I get back,” he says, rising and grabbing her hand to pull her up. “I wanted to be sure first. Now I am.”
IV. THE VOID
To attain the Way of strategy as a warrior you must study fully other martial arts and not deviate even a little from the Way of the warrior. With your spirit settled, accumulate practice day by day, and hour by hour. Polish the twofold spirit heart and mind, and sharpen the twofold gaze perception and sight. When your spirit is not in the least clouded, when the clouds of bewilderment clear away, there is the true void.
Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings
AT THE TIME, JEFF’S DECISION to join the military’s regular forces seemed to come out of nowhere. We were blindsided by its suddenness, its radical deviation from his scholarly path. But with hindsight, the markers leading to his ultimate destination are clear. Growing up, Jeff thrived on physical challenges—on the hockey rink, the soccer pitch, the baseball diamond, the lacrosse field. I remember the sweltering summer of 1986 in CFB Winnipeg. We were
in the backyard of Marion and Russ’s PMQ where a three-metre-high wooden ramp was set up. Fifteen-year-old Jeff was practising jumps on his BMX bike. He sped up to the ramp, his sandy brown hair blowing back off his lean freckled face. The tires hit the front of the ramp; he crouched towards the handlebars, eyes steely with determination. He jerked the front wheel up and soared to the top of the ramp, flew up into space, spiralled at the peak of his jump; then landed, beaming with exhilaration. To our relieved applause, he smiled at us and pedalled back to go higher and farther next time. My three-year-old son, hands clasped behind his back, watched in wide-eyed wonder, mesmerized by his daring older cousin.
The summer of his eighteenth year, Jeff had to endure a month at “Base Boring.” His father set up weight-training equipment for him in the garage beside the cottage. That July, Jeff developed his pecs, glutes and abs, as well as a lifelong commitment to health and fitness. His weight training progressed into a regime that went far beyond the physical. It was as much about having a disciplined mind as a strong body. During his decade at Carleton, he furthered this ideal—unifying body, mind and spirit—by practising martial arts: kick boxing, Brazilian jujitsu, grappling, and t’ai chi. In 1998, he enrolled at the Thai Boxing Academy and returned home for Christmas with two shiners. Since both he and his adviser, Alan Hunt, were committed weight trainers, they sometimes worked out together at the Carleton gym and talked about boxing. Forced to box as a schoolboy, Alan detested the sport. But Jeff told him that boxing gave him a venue for confronting fear, as did his job as a bouncer in Ottawa clubs and pubs.
Jeff’s intellectual development corresponded with his physical and spiritual dedication to samurai philosophy. In 1997, he got a tattoo on the trapezoid muscle of his left arm that embodied this commitment: the Japanese character for “the void,” the Buddhist ideal of emptiness of the mind. “Voidness is the eye of Buddhism,” Miyamoto Musashi proclaims in A Book of Five Rings, a 1643 text on Japanese samurai culture. This mind—the way of the warrior—is essential in the path of the martial arts. “Warrior” is used in the Tibetan sense of pawo, “one who is brave.” As Jeff underlined in his copy of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, “Warriorship does not refer to making war on others. Aggression is the source of our problems, not the solution.”
A year after he was tattooed with the Void, Jeff shaved his head, another external sign of his internal transformation. In most spiritual traditions, head-shaving rituals mark rites of passage. For Buddhist and Christian monks, the “shedding” of hair is synonymous with the shedding of a previous stage of one’s life, a bodily show of psychologically preparing for an ascetic struggle. Although the two endeavours seem antithetical—combat and spirituality—perhaps soldiering was “the way” for Jeff to further his search for the Void, a state of mind that can’t be found by passively reading books. At age thirty, he was considered “old” by military recruitment standards, but he eschewed a desk job. He wanted the gruelling corporal tests of the infantry.
Shortly after he returned from South Korea, Jeff told his parents about his decision to enlist. Russ breathed a sigh of relief. He could see his son’s waning enthusiasm for his doctoral studies, and that they were, in fact, depleting him. Russ felt that soldiering, which would challenge him both physically and mentally, would be a much better fit for Jeff than the sedentary life of a professor. Moreover, the military had been a fulfilling career for Russ; and in two years, at fifty-five, he would retire with a decent pension. Marion was bewildered by her son’s turnabout, but she could also see that he was suffering. “He was too much in his head, kept too much within himself,” she once told me. “The solitary reading and writing were too isolating for him. He was slipping into a black hole.”
“The soul has a code,” writes psychologist James Hollis. “The larger life is the soul’s agenda, not that of our parents or our culture, or even of our conscious will. The agenda of the soul will not be denied though it may be repressed. It will show up in depression, listlessness, ennui, and fantasies.” This Jungian view would interpret Jeff’s depression as his psyche’s displeasure with his life choices. Was he not living his own story, the myth that he himself had chosen? In “The Myth of Er,” Plato writes,
When all the souls had chosen their lives, they went before Lachesis. And she sent with each, as the guardian of his life and the fulfiller of his choice, the daimon that he had chosen, and this divinity led the soul first to Clotho, under her hand and her turning of the spindle to ratify the destiny of his lot and choice, and after contact with her, the daimon again led the soul to the spinning of Atropos to make the web of its destiny irreversible, and then without a backward look it passed beneath the throne of Necessity.
Was “Necessity” intervening, disrupting the pattern of Jeff’s life?
When Marion told me about Jeff’s enlistment, I felt dismay and confusion. Abandoning his Ph.D.? He was so intellectually gifted, and had climbed so far up that mountain—the summit was in sight. I also harboured many conflicted feelings about the military since my father’s death in 1968—even though it wouldn’t be until 2005 that we would suspect military complicity in his illness. That year, 1968, also heralded the peace movement. Ideologically, I lay with John and Yoko in their 1969 bed-in for peace in Montreal, wanting to “Give Peace a Chance” and to “Imagine” a world where there was nothing to kill or die for. I wondered if “The Universal Soldier” really was to blame. As a pacifist, however, I had never been able to resolve the problem of how to combat the evil that exists in the world. What do you do when the barbarians are at the gate? What would I do if the lives of my own children were threatened? Speak softly and carry a big stick?
On Friday, September 7, 2001—the day of Jeff’s swearing-in ceremony—the Canadian military still felt like a safe place to be, as it had been for Jeff’s father and his grandfathers for the past fifty years. When my dad was a soldier in the 1950s and ′60s, I never thought of him having a dangerous job. His basement workshop, where he shone his boots and Royal Canadian Dragoons pins, had a comforting smell of shoe polish and Brasso. Every morning when I came down to the small kitchen in our PMQ, my father would be standing at the stove in his uniform, stirring the porridge for breakfast. As the hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy” sounded on CFNB radio at 7:45, he’d put on his burnished black army boots, wrap the puttees and chains around their tops, don his khaki beret at just the right angle, and head out the back door to drive to the base. While he was in Egypt for a year with the UN peacekeeping force, I imagined him in his blue beret “standing on guard,” as we sang in “O Canada” during our school assemblies. The pictures he sent back showed him bare-chested, riding a camel and wearing shorts—which he never wore at home.
When Russ served in the forces during the 1970s, ′80s and ′90s, the odds of a Canadian soldier being killed continued to be negligible. After getting his BA in history in 1972, Russ had a family to support, and the military offered a stable well-paying career as well as the possibility of adventure. So when Jeff swore his Oath of Allegiance in front of the Canadian flag on September 7, 2001, we weren’t worried that he was committing to a high-risk occupation: Canadians were peacekeepers in the world. As an officer, Jeff would earn a significantly higher income than the average university-educated civilian worker ($73,000 versus $40,000 in 2002). But salary was not his prime motivator, nor is it for the average young Canadian interested in a military career, according to a 2005 DND report—Military Ethos and Canadian Values in the 21st Century: “Soldiers answer to a higher calling. They do not believe that money is the key to a good life.… They look for social value in their work, to be of help to others.”
But four days after Jeff’s swearing-in ceremony, everything changed, changed utterly.
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was a golden autumn morning in Halifax. Marion had just arrived home, hot and sweating from her run around the Halifax Commons and up Citadel Hill. “Mom, come here!” Jeff called from the living room. “You have to see what they’
ve done!” Mother and son sat together on the brown tweed sofa, the blue-green Murray tartan afghan stretched across its back, and watched two arrows fly into the heart of America: twin towers of concrete, glass and steel implode in an apocalyptic inferno. From the towers’ tops, orange-yellow flames billow, jet-black smoke streams; begrimed bodies leap into space. Deathly screams, wailing sirens, blaring horns; ghostly ash-covered figures flee through the streets, the Manhattan skyline shrouded in a grey haze of dust and smoke.
It was the collapse of an old world order. Out of the ashes, a new Canadian military was born—a phoenix more in the guise of a hawk than a dove.
SAINT-JEAN-SUR-RICHELIEU, on the west bank of Quebec’s Richelieu River, abounds with apple orchards and cider houses, vineyards and wineries, maple trees and sugar shacks. But Jeff and the six thousand new recruits arriving here to begin their military careers will experience none of its pastoral charms. For the next three and a half months, they’ll be confined in a grey monolithic structure—half a kilometre long and twelve storeys high—home to the Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School and the Canadian Forces Language School: “Apprendre à Servir” emblazoned on the coat of arms in the foyer. Not all of the eager recruits that are crossing the threshold will “learn to serve” and outlast the trials of the fourteen weeks. Only half of them will march in full dress uniform at the graduation parade in December.
With his disciplined fitness regime, Jeff is primed for the notorious ordeals of physical endurance—marching thirteen kilometres at 5 a.m., running six kilometres in combat gear, scaling four-metre walls and crawling through mud-soaked ditches. He glories in the field exercises that test his mettle: cold, wet, tired and hungry, he hones his samurai sword. And he’s learned from his dad about riding out “the BS”—inspections for precisely folded socks and handkerchiefs, flawlessly pressed uniforms, cots so tightly tucked you can literally bounce a quarter off them. He resorts to the same survival strategies as his father did thirty years before. He hunkers down on the floor with a sleeping bag and air mattress to keep his sheets crisp, the corners taut, ready for inspection.
For Your Tomorrow Page 9