by Blair Hurley
But her hand, jammed in her jacket pocket, was still turning the slip of paper, the one for the Zen center.
Awake, I breathe in.
In the little glass storefront of the Peaceful Healing Zen Center, the Master spoke fluently of the Lotus Sutra, which she had read but never understood. It was a puzzle, like all Zen was a puzzle. That was why it was frustrating to outsiders, he said. But the riddles were a way of arriving at intuitive truths. At forcing our minds to think upside down.
“The teaching of Buddhism is that suffering is not only endemic to the world, it is unavoidable,” he said. “At first, we want to reject this. There is joy, there is beauty, we want to say. Buddhism does not deny this. But for anyone who has loved, we know that the people and things we love will pass away. This is a source of suffering. The more beauty we see, the more love we feel, the greater the pain.”
He put his hands behind his back and walked a few powerful steps, like a sea captain surveying his crew. “Many of you here have experienced skillful means in your own lives. You have seen death and illness and suffering. You know, or you are beginning to realize, deep in some part of your most essential self, that you will die. That anything you thought was certain and unchanging is actually fragile. That the delicate web of people you love is made of the most brittle strands, and when one strand breaks, the rest of the web will disintegrate. You’re beginning to know this. But you have to feel it in your bones, or you will never see beyond the abstraction. When you lose someone you love, you will cry, and you will be filled with rage, and then you will scuttle busily away into your half-awake lives.”
How startling it was, to hear those words then. How devastating. In the meditation that followed, she felt warm tears on her cheeks. The Master passed and touched her shoulder—the sign to sit up straighter. She gulped back a sob.
After the session, she asked for a private meeting. They sat in the bare meeting room and she told her story sparingly: her conversion, running away, her father. It was like providing a case history for a doctor, listing the most relevant symptoms. He spotted this immediately and stopped her. “Zen is not psychotherapy,” he said. “If you are looking for a therapist, a doctor, I won’t be that for you. If you are looking for a teacher, I can teach.”
She nodded, embarrassed into silence. “I—I’d like to learn.”
“Good. Then I will be your Master. I’ll start you at the very beginning. You have to trust me and obey me. In Japan, Zen students swear vows of fealty to their masters. Will you take a vow?”
She was quiet. Thinking. “I don’t know,” she said.
He stopped her from rising with a hand on her knee. “I understand what you’ve been through. I’ve lost people, I did enough drugs to drive my family away. I screwed up my life.” This was the only time she would hear him speak so frankly. “I didn’t know who I was, beyond this creature of craving and need. Then I discovered Zen, and something happened to me. I could see my life was one effect of many causes. And I realized I could shed my addictions because they were meaningless. But I had to break away from my old life. I had to risk everything. I need you to take that risk for me.”
That was the thing she’d been waiting to hear. It was like a sign; it sounded almost like love. “I’ve already lost so much,” she said. “I’m afraid to lose any more.” I’m afraid of never being free of sadness. Now Jules is gone, my father is gone, there will never be another day when I hear their voices, I must persist alone.
He nodded. “Naturally. It’s natural to be afraid, especially when we are grieving. Let me give you a Buddhist prayer for the dead. You can say it for your father.”
He is passing from this world to the next.
He is taking a great leap.
The light of this world has faded for him.
He has entered solitude with his karmic forces.
He has gone into a vast silence.
He is borne away by the great ocean of birth and death.
She murmured the words after him, and knew she was saying them for Jules, too. His eyes were clear, red-rimmed, direct. She struggled to avoid his gaze, but it seemed to be everywhere her eyes moved.
“Your father is dead,” he said. “And your mother will die, and your brother. This is only the beginning of the deaths you’ll see in your lifetime. You have to understand this now. I need you to understand.”
The air in the room shimmered. She could smell the faint trace of incense on his robes, and beneath that, a clean vegetable smell like green tea. She could smell herself as well—the sourness from the unwashed hospice days, the lingering bite of antiseptic, the bitter dirt on her boots. The candy-chalk pills in her pocket, waiting for her to use them. For a moment she thought she could smell and see and feel everything in the room. She could smell the inside of her nose and see the backs of her eyes. The Master’s hand on her knee burned. In the days to come, she’d bow worshipfully at his feet and take the vow to all the innumerable beings and all the measureless infinities. She’d be his first, his best, his only. Soon the hard training would begin. And once she proved herself, her excellence, her devotion, he would grant her everything. This was the thing she had to explain to Jocelyn. He was going to re-grace her. He was going to show her how to awake, how to melt away.
Dear Sean,
Siddhartha and his monks are walking alongside the road to their retreat in Dharamsala. The rainy season is coming and they have to spend the time meditating; travel is impossible when the roads become mud and disease spreads from house to house.
A naked man runs up to them, his hair long and wild, his beard holding burrs and dead insects. He kneels for a blessing. “Save me, give me sanctuary, I take refuge with you,” he begs.
We can’t take this man, says one of the monks. I know him. He’s a murderer. Now he’s gone mad. The monks try to come between him and their leader. The murderer clutches at them, bowing and scraping in the dirt.
Give him a robe, says Siddhartha, and the murderer is allowed to join them.
An old man stops them on the road and bows deeply but will not touch anyone in the ragged group. He keeps his eyes on the ground and does not reach for the hands the way others do for blessings. Take me, please. Take me.
We can’t take this man, says one of the monks. He is an untouchable. He can’t share our robes or our bowls or our tents.
Oh, just give him a robe, says Siddhartha, and the untouchable is allowed to join them.
The group of the devoted continues to grow. It passes by villages scarred with poverty, places where mudslides have destroyed homes. Madmen are living in the woods, refusing to wash, refusing to speak, letting small animals live in their beards. By petrifying the body, you conquer it, the teaching goes.
A young woman comes running out of a house and kneels before them. Please, take me, Blessed One. I take refuge with you.
We can’t take her, says one of the monks. She is the only daughter of that old couple that lives there. She takes care of them.
I’m sorry, says Siddhartha.
Why can’t I go, when all of these monks have renounced their families? I heard you left your wife and son.
I’m sorry, says the Thus Come One. You are their daughter. You have to take care of them.
Why can’t I leave everything behind?
Karma. Be a good daughter; in your next life, maybe you’ll be born luckier.
And maybe she will. There are prayers you can say, to be born as a man. I never went that far, never hated being a girl that much. But I knew that my leaving was an unforgivable sin. You know the Irish saying: A son is a son till he gets him a wife; a daughter’s a daughter the rest of her life.
No getting reborn in Catholicism; just one shot at the life you’re given. No way out but to weep.
EASTER
Her Master had been giving her more assignments on the phone, now that he had her well in hand again. Chants and poses and koans. She was back to her prostrations; her hands were blistered and raw. Kukai watch
ed her while she bowed and rose, bowed and rose, sitting by the window late at night while she labored, and then they’d both stretch and moan and watch the sun rise together. The clank and roar of the garbage trucks always arrived like a thunderbolt, one of those things decent people were not supposed to hear.
“You have to atone,” her Master told her. “If you were a student in a monastery and you had committed such a wrong, you would have to announce it before the entire community and beg for their forgiveness. For months to come you would be the lowest of the low. You would have to crawl on your knees for your daily bowl of rice. But I am merciful. Take off your clothes. Send me a picture of yourself on your knees.”
“I’m not going to do that!”
He made a small hiss of impatience. “This is why they put you in the beginners’ class with that other roshi,” he said. “You’re afraid to be truly transgressive.”
The words rang painfully in her ears. “How did you even know that?” she demanded. And when he refused to answer she said, “I’m not afraid. I’ve transgressed. I’ve done hard things in my life. I converted, didn’t I? And ran away?”
“And came crawling back, a failure. ‘No Buddhas ever attained the Path by continuing their family lives: nor have there been patriarchs in any time who did not assume the form of homeless ones.’” He was silent for a while, and then delivered his pronouncement: “You’re terrified of the very idea of doing something that would make you unlovable. Isn’t that right? Tell me.”
She listened, hollowly, but couldn’t speak.
“You have only to whisper, and your Master is there. Isn’t that what you always wanted?”
Was that what she wanted? How did he know, how did he always know?
After a moment, her Master laughed his thick, dark laugh. “That’s all right. You can always shelter under my wing. I’ll always have a place for you, little chick.”
The traffic had a Sunday feel: fewer delivery bicycles tilting madly in the corner of your eye. Nicole was squeezed into the back seat, with Charlie heavy and squirming on her lap, June and her mother wedged in beside her. It was Easter. Her mother had flown in from North Carolina for the weekend; she had already shopped and lunched with her friends, and now there remained only the family trip to church.
Paul and Marion’s heads in the front seemed like those of her own parents. She wondered if Paul felt the warmth of the moment, too. He was resting an elbow on the windowsill, the lines of golden arm hair they shared slanting under an expensive-looking watch. She looked over at her mother, straight-backed and elegant. She was remarkably unchanged, as if age and sickness could no longer touch her.
“Your hair,” her mother said to her. “You need a cut.”
“You’ll love this church, Nicole,” said Marion. “Beautiful, a miniature St. John the Divine. I’ve always found churches to be such inspiring spaces. They have something that secular spaces never will. Don’t you think?”
Nicole groped for the right response. “The place you grew up in teaches you what is holy.”
“I should say so,” her mother said.
The kids—pink-scrubbed, smelling of shampoo, twitched and struggled over a chocolate rabbit they were sharing. “I don’t want that on your good clothes,” said Marion. June was slippery beside Nicole in a pale blue satin dress with a white sash, done up like a Tiffany’s box with a matching white headband for her hair. “We got you some Easter candy,” June said, and handed Nicole a crinkling cellophane bag of marshmallow Peeps and tin-foiled chocolate eggs.
“You’d better keep that away from her,” Nicole’s mother said. “Remember, Nicole, when you left a chocolate bunny in your pocket during church and it melted all over your beautiful dress? Oh, it was ruined.”
That morning Paul had come to pick her up, straddling the arm of her couch while she searched in boxes for stockings, jewelry, anything grown-up. “Why didn’t you tell me you went to Boston?” she asked. “I could have gotten a ride, seen some friends.”
“Oh, they don’t give me much notice. All those hospitals, I’m always running over there.”
“Marion doesn’t mind?”
“She’s flexible with her job; we work it out.” Paul raked a hand through his thin, colorless hair. With that innocent face, he still looked like a young boy, trying on a man’s coat and tie and shoes. “You know, over time, you learn how to coexist with someone, you develop a rhythm. Give it long enough and even the things you hate about another person lose their edge. You make your peace.” He looked out the window as if scanning for storm clouds. Then he reached out his hand, and she took it, and they ran down to the car.
“You should have your furniture moved here soon,” her mother said. “If we got it out of there and fixed the roof, maybe we could finally sell.”
Half of the family’s furniture was still waiting for her in the old house in Waban under white sheets, the plan to sell in an unending limbo. “I leave it all to you and Paul,” her mother had told them after their father’s death. She had recently moved to North Carolina, near her cousins. Widows, she said, need a chance to start anew. She wanted her house, her life, emptied out. She wanted light wicker beach furniture, not dusty old New England dressers and armoires and their itinerant memories. In some ways, Nicole thought with admiration, her mother was very Zen. The space inside her must be cool and dark and derelict, like a house abandoned to the weather.
“I don’t want the furniture,” Nicole said, though she knew her mother would never stop pressing her to take it all.
“I figured out the riddle you gave me,” June said loudly. “I mean, the koan.”
“Oh really?” She’d last left them with a haiku by Basho. “The cry of the cicada / Gives us no sign / That presently it will die.” It was an old favorite.
“It means that everything’s going to die, but they don’t know it. All the things you think will last forever—they won’t.”
Paul’s and Marion’s backs stiffened in the front seat. “Goodness,” said her mother. “Did Nicole teach you that?”
Where did you come from? Nicole thought, staring at her niece. And what should I say? Kids shouldn’t be thinking such things.
“They’re still good, even if they can’t last forever,” she said. Careful, careful. “The cicada sings without the knowledge of its own death. There’s something beautiful about that. It goes on anyway. It’s the ephemerality that makes things precious.”
“There’s no need to think about it that way, Junie,” Marion said briskly. She’d given Nicole her chance, and now she was sweeping in for cleanup. “It’s just describing things in a pretty way.” Then she changed the subject: “Who’s going to want waffles after church?”
Everyone raised their hands. Nicole turned her face to the window, rubbed the raw, tender blisters on her palms. Really, why did she have to make things so difficult? There were, as always, at least two selves rattling around inside her: one wanted to grab Marion by the shoulders and shake her, wanted to ask her Master what it was about and demand a straight answer, was terrified, nauseated by what she had just said, that things were only beautiful because they would die. And one wanted waffles.
The church was a grand old cathedral in the Financial District, with buttresses and a soaring spire. The priest greeted churchgoers at the door in his white-and-purple Easter vestments, snowy fringes of hair flapping. The sight made Nicole sway as she stepped out of the car: she hadn’t been to church since her father’s funeral.
“Come on, June,” her mother said, stepping out of the car. She hugged her close. “Don’t you know you’re my absolute favorite granddaughter? Do you promise not to grow anymore?”
June smiled tolerantly and tripped on ahead. Paul grinned at Nicole through the window. They both watched their mother striding forward. “She really is glad you’re here, you know.”
“All right, Paul,” Nicole said. “Don’t oversell it. I’m here, okay?”
“Right.” He rolled his eyes and smiled. �
�I’m going to park.”
To get to the entrance of the church they passed by an old graveyard, with tiny gravestones erupting from the earth. As the kids ran ahead, her mother followed with warnings not to step on the graves, because it was bad luck.
Marion slid up beside Nicole. “I’d appreciate it if you kept the riddles to a minimum with the children,” she said.
“What?”
“The Buddhist stories. The pictures, the statues. I’d just really appreciate it if you toned down the Buddhism thing. I don’t want to confuse the children.”
“Confuse them?”
“Yes. I think the stories you tell are sometimes confusing for their age. The one about the prince who gives his children away, for example. June was troubled by that. Those kinds of stories are really not appropriate.”
“If that’s what you want,” Nicole said. “You’re their mother.” This was the closest they’d ever stood together, and it was all Nicole could do to keep from rearing back in alarm. Marion seemed to notice her distress; she reached out an arm. “I don’t mind that you are,” she said. “Buddhist, I mean. Really. It’s none of my business, what you do with your life. I’d just rather avoid—confusing the children. It’s a difficult age.” Then she smiled. We’re in this together, right? This tricky business of child-rearing. Then she moved on, picking her way delicately through the tombstones.
At that moment the church bells began to ring, heavy and soft. The sound was solid, insistent. It was a beautiful call, an undeniable one. Four, five, six rings. Christ is risen. Let joy ring in Christendom.
The inside was just as Marion had promised: cool and shadowed, giant with interior space. The family shuffled into a pew halfway down the nave, and she had to crane her head back and stare into the high ceiling the way she did when she was young. She admired the way Christian architects had figured it out, this formula, the proper effects to make you feel both larger and smaller than yourself. Like you were a great house too, small on the outside, vast on the inside. As the swell of the organ filled the air, Nicole remembered the words. The hymn sprang easily from her lips.
