Nothing on My Mind

by Erik Storlie

  Emptiness—an emptiness filled with the fire of being. Moving, rhythmic, transforming endlessly, zazen after zazen, meal after meal, work period after work period, sleep after sleep, day after day, year after year, hammer blow after hammer blow.

  Beneath the crickets shaking the valley, drowning the wind, I hear the creek—not just the little riffle near the zendo, but simultaneously riffles and rapids along its whole length. Rippling, gurgling, sucking, sometimes rumbling as a rock is upset and rolls downstream, it flows from the mountains toward me and then past the monastery and away.

  Finally, Roshi adds his voice to the crickets and the creek. “This is the last night of the sesshin. Now you will go free. Many of you will go back to the city. You will see all sorts of wonderful things. Please try to contact them gently.”

  The Roshi, his lined face illuminated, speaks softly, quietly now. I’m transported back thousands of years. This could be India, China. I feel the deep gratitude of a young man hearing an old man’s words—an old man who wants nothing, who wants only for the young man to blossom.

  “You cannot escape the things in this world. They are just our world. But contact them gently. Do not become so attached. Remember, they are not really real. They are just pictures in your mind. I know that’s not so easy to understand. But it is actually so.

  “Try not to get too excited. Most of you are young. You want to run and jump and stretch your arms and legs wide, as wide as they can go. That is pretty natural. That’s okay. But just contact things gently. Thank you for sitting this sesshin with me. Thank you very much.”

  The bell rings, signaling the end of zazen. We all bow, rise, and face the center of the zendo. We wait for Roshi to fluff his cushion and arrange his robes. He seems absorbed, his gestures slow and deliberate. Finally he bows, turns around, and bows gently as the bell sounds once more. We return his bow and the sesshin is over.

  The next day there is time to relax, wash clothes, swim, and hike. In the afternoon, I go to the old cement plunge fed from the hot spring. Stripping off sweaty clothing, I walk in and am surprised by a naked Roshi about to climb in at the far end of the pool. Standing without robes or stick or attendants, he is suddenly tiny and frail, his yellow-brown skin smooth, childlike.

  He looks at me shyly, one hand lightly shielding his genitals from view. He climbs into the pool, and, embarrassed, I follow, not knowing what I can possibly say to this being whom I admire more than anyone I’ve ever met before.

  We spend long minutes standing in the pool together, looking past each other, relaxing in steaming hot water up to our waists.

  Finally Roshi says with a smile, bringing his hands up a little above the surface, palms up, dripping, cupping a little water in each hand, “It is pure. It is very pure.”

  “Oh, yes, it is,” I say, feeling the magnificent, empty clarity of the hot, steaming water that flows endlessly from the foot of the mountain. My heart is full. I want to talk, but I can’t think of one thing more to say.

  We stand quietly together for what seems a very long time. Then he bows, and I return his bow. He turns to go, and I stand waist deep in hot, pure water, head filled with a million questions.

  It’s August, the next summer, at the end of another long sesshin held at the new Page Street Center in San Francisco. I think I’ve broken through. For the last several days my body has relaxed into the lotus position hour after hour, heart pumping emptiness, mind pulsing upward into consciousness, then flowing back on itself, a sparkling spring-fed pool. I don’t drag myself to the forty-minute periods of zazen. I welcome them—breath flowing, thoughts drifting downstream, bubbles flowing with the current, then quietly bursting.

  On the last day I see Suzuki Roshi for dokusan, a private interview with the teacher. Entering his study, I bow three times to the floor before him. Seated, he slowly returns each bow. I feel his deep relaxation.

  I sit down facing him on a zafu placed only a few feet away, taking what I hope is my most perfect sitting form. He watches calmly, observantly, waits for me to speak—but again, tongue-tied, I have no words.

  Though comfortably settled on his zafu, he suddenly stands with a quick, smooth motion and makes fine adjustments in the height of my left shoulder, the position of my hands. He returns to his zafu and sits, rearranging his robes, which make silky, whispering sounds as he moves them into place.

  After another silence, he says, finally, with a smile, “You are very calm.”

  “Only now, at the end of the sesshin,” I blurt out, heedless of the irony.

  “Lon is from Minneapolis, too, I know. It is very far. How do you travel here?”

  “I drive my Jeep. It takes me five days. Would you come visit us sometime? We’d like you to lead a sesshin. Do you remember that Lon asked you whether we should do one together last year, even though we had no teacher?”

  “Oh, yes,” he says with a nod. “I remember. It is possible I could come sometime. But how do you feel when you are calm?”

  “Well, even at the end of a sesshin, my head is filled with many thoughts. They get quieter, though. But I always worry about whether Japanese zen practice is right for Americans. I know zazen is exactly what I need to do, but the Japanese ceremonies and traditions bother me.”

  “Yes,” he replies, looking at me intently, raising his eyebrows. “Japanese zen has many ceremonies, it’s true. Don’t worry too much about ceremonies. Ceremonies are maybe not so important.”

  “I guess it bothers me too much,” I say. “It seems like the dark robes and ceremonies and everyone speaking softly make zen look like a cult—especially for people back in Minneapolis.” I pause, but Roshi says nothing, observing me with alert eyes. Confused, I stumble ahead, “You know, I think Americans and Japanese are completely different, like fire and water.”

  Suddenly he looks me full in the face and breaks out laughing. He laughs long, leaning so far forward on his cushion that his forehead almost touches the floor. I begin to laugh, too.

  After a minute he recovers and says, “Oh, yes, Japanese people are very quiet, usually. You know, we just go on like a peaceful river. And the Americans get very excited. I see that. But all we can do is practice the Buddha’s zazen together. Zen in America is like a little baby. We have to take care of it. We don’t know exactly how it will grow up. A baby cries, the mother gives it some milk.”

  He smiles. “But you practice hard. I see that. I have practiced so many years, I know when people’s practice is lazy or hard. But don’t try too hard or you will become exhausted. And don’t be too lazy. Just sit. Someday you will know how big the Buddha’s world is that we are sitting in. Your zazen will give you some power to do that. But I don’t like to say ‘power.’ That is not right. I think a better way to say is ‘possibility.’ The important thing about zazen is not that it gives you power. It gives you possibility.”

  It’s a few years later, the fall of 1971. I’m thirty and on my third year of a leave from teaching to finish my Ph.D. Farmer and I have continued our zen practice with the small group in Minneapolis. I want, somehow, to fuse an academic career with mastery of zen. Now I’ve arranged to study zen with Suzuki Roshi for a full year. I’ll live at the Zen Center building on Page Street, follow the daily practice, and use the library at Berkeley for research. I arrive in September to find him dying.

  Yvonne, one of his old students, tells me they tried to ask me not to come, but couldn’t reach me. I’d been in the mountains all summer. I’m glad they couldn’t find me.

  That evening Reb, one of the building officers, takes me aside. We sit on zafus in his room. After a silence, he says sadly, “He’s dying. We’re going to lose him. Of course, there could be a miracle. Why not? But there’s jaundice now. Even that is beautiful. He’s turning to gold, a golden Buddha. He says to us, ‘The cancer is my friend.’”

  I’m given a little dormitory room on the cold north side of the building. It’s fall, and the sun never reaches here. To save money, and to encourage hard prac
tice, the building is kept cold. On clear days, as I sit at my window to study after breakfast, the room fills with a thin, filtered winter light reflected from sunlit buildings on the hills off to the north.

  Suzuki Roshi is now too weak to lecture. He stays in his rooms in the building, attended by his wife and a few close students. But he struggles to be part of the community. He takes short walks in the building. If it’s warm, he’ll come downstairs and sit on a bench in the little open-air courtyard.

  One evening he comes into the meal hall during dinner and stands chatting with some students at the table opposite mine. Turning to walk out, he loses his balance and almost falls. The top of his shaven head traces three small circles in the air as he steadies himself, tightly gripping his short staff to his chest.

  “Why,” I wonder, “why did I spend the last two years in Minneapolis doing doctoral work? Why did I wait so long to come? At least I’m here now. Does he know what he has done for me? How can I tell him?”

  One afternoon, walking down the hall past the Suzukis’ rooms on the second floor, I pass him just as he is about to enter his door. Since I arrived weeks ago, we’ve not spoken. He’s been so ill, I’ve felt it wrong to intrude. He fixes me with his eyes and stands expectant, his hand, tiny and frail, gripping the knob. I stop walking and stand, too, holding his gaze. Does he know I came from Minneapolis this fall to spend the year with him? Has anyone told him?

  Again, despite the imminence of his death, I’m tongue-tied. His face is thin, eyes sad and solemn, yet suddenly they regain the old twinkle and he smiles.

  My heart is breaking. I can’t speak. The smile speaks everything to me. I hear it like words: “O strange American, I know you. You have sat hard for many years, and you have always come back to me to sit. I am dying, it is true, but that is all right. Don’t worry. Just remember what I told you. Zazen is very important.”

  We hold each other’s gaze for a very long time, his eyes suddenly alive with humor, mine moist with tears. Finally I raise my hands, palms together, and make a slow bow, all the time keeping my eyes on his eyes. He also puts palms together and bows slowly, keeping his eyes on mine.

  I turn away and, walking down the hall, hear him open and close his door very gently. We have said our farewell.

  Suddenly I’m back, nestled among my trees, tears tracing gritty lines down through the dust on my cheeks. Where have the years gone? I’m fifty-four, not thirty. The freckled skin on my Scots-Norwegian face has collapsed from the mountain sun, from decades of summers enfolded in these pine-and-fir-forested hills dropping down from the Crag. Now Roshi is dead. Even Alan is dead, who was young like me on that hot summer day in the cool of Tassajara Creek.

  Still, I sit. As Roshi told me, I sit. I sit here on the mountain in wind and sun—now struggling and cursing, plagued with regrets—now suddenly ecstatic, every finger and toe tingling with joy—now gliding to rest, words all gone, the mind stuff an ocean dabbling a bright sand shore. “Yes, yes,” I think, “one bright pearl is its name.”

  Day after day, year after year, I strike the mind stone. I hammer—some days weak, some days strong—hammer blow after hammer blow. Should the stone never split, I hammer still, hammering with the joy of that day in the rushing creek. Hammering with tall, tanned, broad-backed Alan. Hammering with Roshi, who stands at our sides barelegged, diminutive, his sunlit mind teasing. “Oh, Roshi,” I whisper. “I’ll hammer forever.”

  I stretch out my legs to ease the ache in my knees and bend double, dropping my forehead to touch my knees. I sit back, pull up the neck of my T-shirt, and slowly wipe the tears from my eyes and cheeks, a gesture I always smiled at in my young son. I smell a puff of warm air, fragrant with sweat, rising up from my armpits and chest. The cotton comes away streaked with the fine yellow-brown dust of the basin. I stand up, stretch, and slowly walk to the edge of the trees.

  A chill afternoon breeze wafts ten miles from Flute Reed snowfields. I shiver. The mountains are bluish as the sun drops to the west, throwing the east- and north-facing slopes into shadow. “Ah,” I think. “Let’s head back up to the Crag for a final sit.”

  I gather my things back into the day pack, shoulder it, then caress with my fingertips the dark, rough treads of bark on each of my three trees.

  With palms pressed together, I bow to each of the four directions. “Thank you,” I whisper at each bow, then shout “Ho!” as loud and long as I can. There’s no echo. The shouts are carried off by sharp gusts of wind.

  I slowly walk out of the shade of the forest floor, along the open hillsides, through sage and angling sunlight, back up toward the Crag.

  I stand for a moment at its base, gazing out into the crystalline atmosphere, then clamber up the jumbled outcrop to my three leveled black rocks. I open the pack, take out my red vest, and fold it again into a cushion. I sit down, cross my legs, pull my hat down hard against the afternoon breezes, and sway from side to side, forward and back, centering myself.

  Flapping overhead, a solitary raven catches my eye. He coasts down to sit on the top of a dead fir and squawks fitfully. His fussing annoys me and I turn to observe him. His black feathers are ragged. He pointedly ignores me, staring down into the trees.

  Then Suzuki Roshi’s words drift back to me. Shutting my eyes, I see again his small body, buoyant, graceful, as he sat at ease on his cushion at twilight that evening in the zendo at Tassajara, the creek rippling, the crickets sounding. Opening my eyes, I whisper musingly to myself, “Nothing on my mind. I have nothing on my mind.”

  Now the late summer grasshoppers busy themselves, flying with clack-clack-clacking through the sage, their days numbered by imminent frost. Sitting among these rough black rocks still holding the noon heat, I’m almost hot again. Then a cloud floats by to the west, casting its shadow, and I shiver, cooled by gusts blown off the mountain fortresses before me. A thousand feet below, the basin floor shimmers. My hands lie relaxed, palms up, on my knees.

  9

  A Year at the Zen Center

  AFTER SUZUKI ROSHI’S DEATH IN DECEMBER, I stay on living at the Page Street Zen Center till the next summer. I’m older than most of the residents—a refugee from the Berkeley sixties, but now a college teacher and doctoral candidate. I throw myself into zen practice, sitting daily zazen and the monthly sesshins, and driving each day to Berkeley to do dissertation research in the library.

  Ever since arriving in the fall, I’ve been tested. Shortly after being assigned my cold north room, I get a roommate. He’s lived at Zen Center before. Everyone knows about him but me.

  He appears in my room one afternoon—stocky, in his late twenties, hair dark and close-cropped, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt. He drops several old army duffle bags and a cardboard box and introduces himself.

  “Hey, man, good to have you on the scene. I’m Ron. Wow, you sure got this place neat. Uh huh! Another anal-retentive hard-practice type! My own practice is to be messy. But that’s cool. That’ll be part of your practice now, too.”

  “My practice?” I say. “I don’t think so. By the way, I’m Erik.” I stand up off the mattress-on-the-floor bed that serves as furniture and offer my hand. “Just leave me half of the room. We’ll get along fine.”

  By evening the entire small room is filled with Ron’s clothes, books, shoes, papers, religious paraphernalia, and miscellaneous clutter. Every surface, including my bed and desk, is covered. Ron, it turns out, has just begun a career selling futons, traditional Japanese sleeping mats that are now gaining popularity.

  “Hey, man, look what you’re sleeping on,” he comments, as I start to climb into bed. “It was worn out years before the Zen Center got this dump. Just cheap dormitory crap to begin with! Four inches thick on this cold concrete floor? You’ll kill yourself. In a few months you won’t be able to practice your zazen. Now, I’ve got a deal for you. This is a spiritual investment! Get a king size, double-thick futon. Since you’re a zen student, I’ll let it go for wholesale—a little thing I do for members of ou
r zen community. That’s less than what you’d have to pay for a queen at my store. I’ll personally deliver it.”

  “No, no, Ron, I’m doing fine. All I ask is that you get your stuff organized tomorrow morning. You can probably skip the work period since you’ve just moved in.”

  The next day is a Saturday. After morning lecture I skip work period myself to have coffee and cinnamon rolls at a zen hangout near Market Street. It’s not considered good form to skip work period, especially to go drink coffee and eat sugary sweet rolls, but I always find Alan, the poet Philip Whalen, and other less-than-pure zen students. Afterward, walking back up the block to the Zen Center, I cross to a little Chinese grocery and buy a pint of half and half. I glance up and down the street, then stand on the corner and gulp it down, hoping no zen student walks by. The vegetarian diet has left me with an immense craving for fat. I head up to my room to check on Ron. Entering, I see new stuff scattered about on top of the old stuff—and a young female resident under the covers with Ron. “Hi,” I say noncommittally.

  They watch me intently. Ron says, “Well, hello. I hope you’re cool with my having visitors. I’m sure your thing isn’t celibacy. I mean, that’s really not what zen is all about. You dig?” He turns to the young woman, who lies peacefully on her back, arms behind her head, now staring up at the ceiling. “It’s not your practice either, is it, darling?”

  “Nooo, not really,” she says, smiling, gazing coyly at the ceiling.

  This is too much. I sit down on my bed and angrily push aside a pile of Ron’s clothes. “Look,” I say, “I don’t really care what you two do as long as you don’t do it when I’m here. And I’m gone most of the day. So, for Christ’s sake, enjoy yourselves. But I can’t handle your shit everywhere. My bed and desk and this side of the room are mine. I mean mine! Keep your goddamn shit on your own side.” I trace an imaginary line with my finger between our mattresses and move stuff off it until a six-inch no-man’s-land of concrete floor appears. “Dig it?”