The Empty Mirror

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  “But are there any real masters?” the lady asked.

  “Yes,” the emperor said. “I know a master. He is an uncouth old man and my predecessors would have cut off his head if he had addressed them as he addresses me. I have never been able to get him here, but when I visit him, and I don’t take more than two bodyguards, he may deign to receive me, if he hasn’t got anything better to do.”

  “But you are the Son of Heaven!” the lady stuttered.

  “Yes, yes,” the emperor said. “So they say. I myself never really believed it, and I am quite sure the master doesn’t believe it either. When he speaks to me I am often reminded of the old Taoist scriptures. You know the sort of thing I mean, to rule by doing nothing, to speak by remaining silent, to own the universe by giving up everything.”

  “But,” the emperor said, “if you want to look him up I’ll tell you where he lives. Dress yourself like a common woman and I will give you two disguised sword fighters to defend you on the way. He lives in a deserted part of the country, a few days’ distance from here.”

  The court lady was a sincere woman, and courageous, and she succeeded in finding the temple of the master. When she arrived a hurricane had passed through the district and the roof of the temple had been torn off. The master lived in a ruin.

  The master was a man of few words, and unkind words at that, and he tried to send her away.

  “I don’t teach. I am an ignorant old man and I live here by myself. I pass my days in dreams and usually I sit and stare; what passes through my mind would be of no interest to you.”

  The lady insisted and the master refused again. Finally she made him a proposition.

  “I am rather a rich woman,” she said. “I should like to do something for another person, and it wouldn’t be very kind of you to hinder me in this. I should like to have this temple restored and come back later and spend a week here to find some peace and be able to listen to you.”

  The master listened, thought a little, nodded and shuffled away. The lady sent workmen, the temple was repaired, and the lady returned. Instead of a week she stayed three months. She meditated, she learned the fire ceremony, and sometimes the master spoke a few words. She did her utmost, but when it was time to return she had to admit that she had learned nothing and that the mysteries which she had tried to comprehend were as veiled as ever. She blamed the failure on herself and didn’t complain, but said goodbye politely to the master and thanked him for his trouble.

  The master was a little upset. His temple had been repaired beautifully, the lady was a noble and sympathetic woman, and there she was, rather unhappy and very discontented with herself.

  “Just a moment,” the master said.

  The lady climbed down from her horse and bowed.

  “Have you got a large room in the palace?”

  The lady nodded.

  “Good,” the master said, “see if you can gather together about fifty mirrors. In about a month I will visit you. Tell your servants that if they find an old bald-pated bum at the gate they mustn’t beat him up straight away. Perhaps I shall be able to teach you something after all.”

  The lady smiled, bowed again, and rode back to the palace. When the master came he placed the mirrors in such a way that they reflected into each other. Then he asked the lady to sit down in the middle of the room and to look about her and describe what she saw.

  The lady had sat in the lotus position and remained quiet for a long time.

  “I see that everything which happens is reflected in everything else.”

  “Yes,” the master said. “Anything else?”

  “I see that every action of any man has its result in all other men, and not only in all men, but in all beings, and in all spheres.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Everything is connected with everything.”

  The master waited but the lady kept quiet.

  In the end he grunted.

  “It isn’t much,” he said, “but it is something. You haven’t come for nothing after all. But there’s still much to learn.”

  After that he left. He refused all food and drink, and with a nod by way of goodbye walked, bent and a little lame, through her gate, knocking the iron end of his stick against the pebbles of the path.

  When she wanted to visit him again later he had died. According to the legend she moved into his temple herself and reached, by doing the exercises which the master had once taught her, the sublime enlightenment.

  Peter and I bowed to thank the Tendai priest for his story. He laughed shyly, poured tea and presented cigarettes.

  “Yes,” he said, “it is a good story. My master told it to me. It is a story from our tradition but it could have been a Zen story as well.”

  We got up and the priest took us to his gate. He bowed, staying on his side of the threshold, and closed the doors. I looked at the closed gate and was about to kick the starter of my scooter when I saw that Peter was watching me as if he expected me to say something.

  “Those mirrors are empty,” I said, “there is nothing. Nothing reflects, nothing can be reflected.”

  Peter walked towards me and gave me one of his rare proofs of friendship; he put his arm around me and pressed me against him.

  “The empty mirror,” he said. “If you could really understand that, there would be nothing left here for you to look for.”

  Sixteen

  Attempted manslaughter and doing some shopping

  It was a winter evening, a long time ago. My father had a fire burning in the grate, and was sitting in his armchair watching the flames. I had brought home two guests for the weekend, friends of my own age, nineteen or twenty years old.

  “And what would you like to become?”

  “A merchant,” one of my friends said. “A merchant in the old style. With a business in a seventeenth-century house, and a warehouse with a hoist to be worked by hand so that I could have some exercise. An office with old beams supporting the ceiling. And goods which can be exported so that I could go on a journey every now and then. To smoke cigars and to approach people in a friendly jocular way. To grow a little fat maybe. To be solid. A watch chain. To have mail, every day, from all parts of the world. To trade in some speciality.”

  My father nodded and looked pleased.

  “A writer,” my other friend said. “To travel all over the world, carrying one suitcase and a typewriter. To live on a yacht in the Mediterranean. To publish a book every now and then which produces enough money to finance another trip. And a loft in Amsterdam, and a beautiful woman sometimes.”

  My father nodded again but he hesitated and he didn’t look very pleased.

  “And you?”

  Perhaps I said it to annoy him, perhaps I meant it. I said I would like to be a hermit, that I wanted to meditate in seclusion, in a cave or in a small hut in a forest, for months or even years on end. To detach myself from everything, to be free, especially free of myself, of the restless monkey-like jumping about, free of being excited now by this, now by that. And then to find the real peace which should exist somewhere in every man: the great silence.

  My father grunted.

  “Something ridiculous, of course,” he said. “Very nice and most extraordinary, but a dream and no more. You’ll never be able to do it. You can’t be still and by yourself. What you could try is doing something you find on the way. To sit, alone, in a cave, for years on end. Ha!”

  Perhaps my father was right.

  Not only would I have been a miserable failure as a hermit, and rushed from the cave or the forest to start moving about sadly in the “world”; here, in the monastery, in spite of the pushing of advanced disciples and the pulling of an everlastingly encouraging master, I couldn’t be exactly proud of my progress.

  There was, as a daily beginning, the endless fight against laziness. That I had to get up so early hardly mattered. I would have had the same difficulties if I had had to get up at seven instead of three o’clock. Every morning it was
the same: my alarm went off, I pressed the button and went back to sleep. Then Peter came in, put me on my feet, sleeping bag and all, hit me gently in the face, waited till the sleeping bag had slid down, and then pushed me to the bathroom.

  I kept on submitting to this treatment till I began to feel really humiliated and my pride forced me to be clever. I placed the alarm on my chest of drawers, well out of reach, and made myself get up that way. The trick paid off. After that I did sleep late a few times, but I don’t think I was to blame then. I was probably too exhausted to wake up and couldn’t hear the alarm. But even this success gave little reason for pride. I did get up, and also I meditated regularly, and cleaned the house, but not out of my own free will. I kept to the rules because my environment expected me to keep the rules, because I was being supervised. Voluntarily I did nothing at all, except study Japanese, and I was spending more time on this study than my program allowed for.

  I was, and the discovery pleased me, no exception. Peter had a Zen monk from another part of Japan to stay at the house. What the monk was supposed to do in Kyoto I don’t know, but he came to stay for ten days and he was given a room to himself in the back of the house. He told me that he had joined a monastery because his father and relatives wanted him to, and that he had stayed on after the prescribed three years were over as he wanted to continue his koan study. Because of that he had the same status as I could claim: he was a volunteer, a really interested party.

  Every morning he stayed in his room till about 10 o’clock. Aha, I thought, he must be meditating. He gets up, just like we do, at 3 a.m. but he is so advanced that he doesn’t even bother about a cup of tea and a quick wash; no, he sits down, and meditates for seven hours on end.

  Then I heard him snoring one morning. I went to have a look and found him fast asleep. Near his cushions I saw a couple of books, novels by the look of them, and a full ashtray. So he was reading till the early hours and slept till deep in the morning, exactly what I would do if nobody bothered about me.

  “You are not meditating, are you?” I asked him when we were raking the garden together.

  “I do in the monastery,” the monk said. “There I meditate during the prescribed hours and also by myself, in the garden, or in my room, for at least an hour a day.”

  I looked at him.

  “Yes,” the monk said, “it isn’t as it should be. But that’s the way it always is; when I’m not in the monastery I don’t practise. I would like to meditate and try to be aware all the time, and try to do everything as well as I possibly can, and be detached and all that, but I forget everything. I read, and I smoke, and I eat, and I sleep a lot.”

  “Doesn’t your conscience bother you?”

  “It does,” said the monk, and got busy again with his rake. I had wanted to ask him if he had solved his koan, but I thought better of it. Anything to do with koans is dangerous ground. If he said “no” it might mean that he had solved his koan. And if he said “yes” he might be trying to show off. And whatever he said, it wouldn’t bring me any closer to solving my koan.

  Traditionally Zen monasteries will only admit wandering Zen monks if they can show proof of having solved a koan.

  It seems that a monk once knocked on a monastery gate. The monk who opened the gate didn’t say “Hello” or “Good morning”, but “Show me your original face, the face you had before your father and mother were born.” The monk who wanted a room for the night smiled, pulled a sandal off his foot and hit his questioner in the face with it. The other monk stepped back, bowed respectfully and bade the visitor welcome. After dinner host and guest started a conversation, and the host complimented his guest on his splendid answer.

  “Do you yourself know the answer to the koan you gave me?” the guest asked.

  “No,” answered the host, “but I knew that your answer was right. You didn’t hesitate for a moment. It came out quite spontaneously. It agreed exactly with everything I have ever heard or read about Zen.”

  The guest didn’t say anything, and sipped his tea. Suddenly the host became suspicious. There was something in the face of his guest which he didn’t like.

  “You do know the answer, don’t you?” he asked.

  The guest began to laugh and finally rolled over on the mat with mirth.

  “No, reverend brother,” he said, “but I too have read a lot and heard a lot about Zen.”

  During my last visit to Leo Marks, when I had been wined and dined again, read another book by van Gulik, and been driven about in his limousine, he had given me a foot high antique wooden statue of a Zen master in meditation. I placed the statue on a special table in my room, burned incense sticks for it, and used this altar, which I decorated with flowers and fruit, as a support for my training. The depicted master had a stern expression on his face and sat rigidly in the lotus position, but he did spread a certain measure of comfort and rest. He symbolized so I thought, my own attempts, for everything in the monastery connected with my training had been created by others while this statue had been installed by myself, as proof of the striving of my own soul, even if that soul did not exist.

  The statue also helped when, at the end of a long day, I returned to my room. The little master would welcome me with his glass eyes. A little kindness wouldn’t be wasted, for Peter seemed to grab any occasion to criticise, and often corrected me when others were present. I made, so he said, too much noise when washing up. I allowed tools to lie about in the garden. I left crumbs on the kitchen floor. I made a mess in the bathroom. I didn’t park my “Rabbit” in the right place. I forgot to close the doors.

  I didn’t protest, I didn’t argue, and I didn’t go for his throat. It may have been fear, for he was strong and he had an overpowering personality. But it may also have been because I kept on trying to remember that (a) Peter was only obeying orders, he did what the master had told him to do and I might use this criticism to better my being and thereby empty my being so that I could realize the Buddha nature, and that way achieve satori, and (b) nothing is important enough to get upset about.

  (b) was more help than (a). With (a) I had some trouble because it went dead against my former way of thinking. As a child and as a boy I had consciously, so far as a child or a boy can be conscious, tried to go against authority. As soon as I had to face criticism I told myself that whoever was supplying criticism had to be wrong, whether he was a parent, a teacher or some other official bearer of truth, and wrong a priori. I had come to this conclusion by reasoning that the world in which I found myself was wrong; it was a world filled with injustice and greed, and its inhabitants were murdering, exploiting and torturing each other in many different ways. Anyone who tried to force me to accept this world, whatever method he might be using, could not be right for he was trying to make me accept the unacceptable, and the only way I could save my soul was through anarchy, by trying to destroy the establishment, hoping that something better would grow out of its ruins. Another reason I may have had was that I liked destruction. It seemed more fun than building ugly concrete castles, consisting of money, fame, power and other illusory nonsense which would come to nothing anyway but were grim and forbidding while they lasted. And if I couldn’t destroy, I could at least resist.

  But now I could no longer resist. I even had to cooperate, as consciously as possible, because this would be the way which would lead me to a point where injustice and greed would be unmasked, as divine or mystic apparitions, useful illusions once I recognize them as illusions.

  A moment came when I was busy cutting meat in the kitchen, using a long, very sharp knife. We had a visitor that day, one of Peter’s pupils, a Japanese girl who took singing lessons at the school of music where Peter taught. I thought she was a lovely girl and wanted to make an impression. I knew she was coming that day, and I knew who she was, as we had met before. I had prepared myself by putting on a shirt which I thought would look well on me, brushing my hair and shaving carefully, and I had been aware that I had been doing all this to make an
impression. Everything had been done consciously: I had been proud of my awareness, aware of my pride, and proud of that awareness again. It went on like this: how clever I am that I know I am so stupid, how stupid I am to think that I am clever, and how clever I am that I am aware of my stupidity, etc.

  But while I was busy cutting the meat Peter made a humiliating remark. I can’t remember what it was, perhaps he told me to hurry up or pointed out something which I had forgotten. It wasn’t so much what he said as the way he said it, for his way of talking was often cutting and derisive. He, the master, I, the slave, the little servant, the tenderfoot supposed to help the experienced wizard—but the tenderfoot couldn’t do anything right. Frustrated humiliations surged up in me and erupted in a burst of anger which flashed right through me. I don’t believe I raised the arm which held the knife, but I did twist my arm so that the knife pointed his way and there must have been a murderously nasty expression on my face for the girl stepped back and Peter approached me as if he was going close to a vicious dog. He spoke to me, using soft and pleasant words, and my hand relaxed a little so that the knife fell on the floor. When I served lunch I dropped two plates, but Peter said nothing while I gathered up the pieces. I have the impression that his attitude towards me changed from that day, and his method became more positive. Rather than jumping on me when I did something wrong he would praise me when I tried to do something well. Gerald followed this new adventure with interest. He had never been an intimate friend of Peter’s but now that I was staying in Peter’s house he came to see us regularly. During the weekends he would meditate next to me on the veranda and Peter sometimes joined us. We would sit “formally,” and even use a temple bell which we rang at twenty-five minute intervals.

  “You’re raving mad,” Gerald said, one afternoon when he had dropped in unexpectedly and we were having coffee together in the moss garden. “Why do you submit to this guy? Do you think it will get you anywhere?”