Night Hawks

by Charles Johnson

  For an ascetic, he was shamelessly Dionysian, and without an obol or lepton to his name; but besides being Dionysian and shameless, Diogenes was a clown with hair like leaves and tree bark, gnarled rootlike hands, and eyes like scars gouged into stone. He made a virtue of vulgarity, wore the worst clothing, ate the plainest porridge, slept on the ground or, as often as not, made his bed in a wine cask, saying that by watching mice he had learned to adapt himself to any circumstance. Accordingly, he saw animals as his most trustworthy teachers, since their lives were natural, unself-conscious, and unspoiled by convention and hypocrisy. Like them, he was known for defecating, urinating, masturbating, and rudely breaking wind in public. He even said we should have sex in the middle of the marketplace, for if the act was not indecent in private, we should not be ashamed to do it in public. Whenever he was praised for something, he said, “Oh shame, I must be doing something wrong!” Throughout Athens he was called The Dog, but to do him justice, there was a method in his madness. For example, his only possessions were his staff and a wooden bowl. But one afternoon Diogenes stumbled upon a boy using his hands to drink water from a stream. Happily, he tossed his bowl away, and from that day forward drank only with his bare hands.

  Thus things stood in postwar Athens when one day The Dog decided to walk around the city holding a lighted lantern. He peered into all the stalls of the marketplace, peeked in brothels, as if he had lost something there, and when asked what he was doing replied, “I’m looking for an honest man.” His quest brought him to the Academy, where I was lecturing. As I placed several two-handled drinking cups before my students, I could from the corner of one eye see him listening, and scratching at dirt in his neck seams, and sticking his left hand under his robe into his armpit, then withdrawing it and sniffing his fingers to see if he needed a bath. I sighed, hoping he’d go away. I turned to my students and told them that while there were countless cups in the world, there was only one idea of a cup. This idea, the essence of cupness, was eternal; it came before all the individual cups in the world, and they all participated imperfectly in the immortal Form of cupness.

  From the back of the room, Diogenes cleared his throat loudly.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “I can see the cup, but I don’t see cupness anywhere.”

  “Well”—I smiled at my students—“you have two good eyes with which to see the cup.” I was not about to let him upstage me in my own class. Pausing, I tapped my forehead with my finger. “But it’s obvious you don’t have a good enough mind to comprehend cupness.”

  At that point, he sidled through my students, put down his lantern, and picked up one of the cylices. He looked inside, then lifted his gaze to me. “Is this cup empty, Plato?”

  “Why, yes, that’s obvious.”

  “Then”—he opened his eyes as wide as possible, which startled me because that was a favorite trick of my teacher—“where is the emptiness that comes before this empty cup?”

  Right then my mind went cloudy. My eyes slipped out of focus for a second. I was wondering how to reply, disoriented even more by the scent of his meaty dog breath and rotten teeth. And then, Diogenes tapped my forehead with his finger and said, “I believe you will find the emptiness is here.” My students erupted with laughter, some of them even clapping when he, buffoon that he was, took a bow. (That boy from Stagira, Aristotle, who was always questioning me, and expressed the preposterous belief that the ideas must be in things, laughed until he was gasping for breath.) “I think your teacher’s problem,” he told them, “is that he’d like to run away from the messiness of the world, to disappear—poof!—into a realm of pure forms and beauty, where everything has the order and perfection of mathematics. He’s a mystic. And so—so dualistic! He actually wants certainty where there is none.”

  “What,” I said, “is wrong with that? Things are terrible today! Everyone is suing everyone else. There’s so much anger and hatred. No one trusts anyone anymore!”

  Again, his eyes flew open, and he winked at my students, raising his shoulders in a shrug. “When have things not been terrible? What you don’t see, my friend, is that there are only two ways to look at life. One, as if nothing is holy. The other, as if everything is.”

  Oh, that stung.

  All at once, the room was swimming, rushing toward me, then receding. I felt unsteady on my feet. In a matter of just a few moments, this stray dog had ruined my class. Now my students would always tap their heads and giggle when I tried to teach, especially that cocky young pup Aristotle. (I think he’d like to take my place if he could, but I know that will never happen.) I began to stutter, and I felt so embarrassed and overwhelmed by his wet canine smell that all I could say was “In my opinion, only a fool would carry a lantern in the daytime. Why don’t you use it at night like a sensible man would?”

  “As a night light?” He raised his eyebrows and bugged out his eyes again. “Thank you, Plato. I think I like that.”

  There was nothing for me to do except dismiss my students for the rest of the day, which The Dog had ruined. I pulled on my cape and wandered through the marketplace until darkness came, without direction through the workmen, the temples of the gods, the traders selling their wares; among metics and strangely tattooed nomads from the steppes who policed our polis; past the theater where old men prowled for young boys whose hair hung like hyacinth petals, and soldiers sang drinking songs, all the while cursing Diogenes under my breath, because the mangy cur was right. He was, whatever else, more Socratic than Socrates himself, as if the spirit of my teacher had been snatched from the Acherusian Lake, where souls wait to be reborn, and gone into him to chastise and correct me from the beyond the grave, reminding me that I would always be just an insecure pupil intoxicated by ideas, one so shaken by a world without balance that I clung desperately to the crystalline purity and clear knowledge of numbers, the Apollonian exactitude and precision of abstract thought. Where my theories had denied the reality of our shattered world, he lapped up the illusion, like a dog indifferent to whether he was dining on a delicacy or his own ordure.

  Tired, I finally decided to return home, having no idea how I could summon up the courage to face my students. And it was when I reached the center of town that I saw him again. He was still holding high that foolish lantern, and walking toward me with a wild splash of a smile on his face. I wanted to back away—I was certain he had fleas—or strike him a blow for humiliating me, but instead I held my ground and said crisply, “Have you found what you’re looking for yet?”

  “Perhaps,” he said, and before I could step back, he lifted my chin with his forefinger and thumb toward the night sky. “What do you see? Don’t explain, look.”

  It was the first night of a full moon, but I hadn’t noticed until now. Immediately, my mind started racing like that of a good student asked a question by his teacher. As if facing a test, I recalled that when Democritus tried to solve the mystery of the One and the Many, he said all things were composed of atoms, and Thales believed that everything was made of water, and Anaximenes claimed the world’s diversity could be reduced to one substance, air. Oh, I could plaster a thousand interpretations on the overwhelmingly present and palpable orb above us, but at that moment something peculiar took place, and to this day I do not understand it. I looked and the plentitude of what I saw—the moon emerging from clouds like milk froth—could not be deciphered, and its opacity outstripped my speech. I was ambushed by its sensuous, singular, and savage beauty. Enraptured, I felt a shiver of desire (or love) rippling through my back from the force of its immediacy. For a second I was wholly unconscious of anyone beside me, or what was under my feet. As moonlight spilled abundantly from a bottomless sky, as I felt myself commingled with the seen, words failed me, my cherished opinions slipped away in the radiance of a primordial mystery that was as much me as it was the raw face of this full-orbed moon, a cipher so inexhaustible and ineffable it shimmered in my mind, surging to its margins, giving rise to a state of enchantment even as it seemed
on the verge of vanishing, as all things do—poleis and philosophical systems—into the pregnant emptiness Diogenes had asked me to explain. A sudden breeze extinguished the candle inside his lamp, leaving us enveloped by the enormity of night. There, with my vision unsealed, I felt only wonder, humility, and innocence, and for the first time I realized I did not have to understand, but only to be.

  All I could do was swallow, a gulp that made The Dog grin.

  “Good.” He placed one piebald paw on my shoulder, as a brother might, or perhaps man’s best friend. “For once you didn’t dialogue it to death. I think I’ve found my honest man.”

  Kamadhatu: A Modern Sutra

  (FOR MARTIN HUGHES)

  The body is the Bodhi Tree;

  The mind is like a bright mirror standing.

  Take care to wipe it all the time.

  And allow no dust to cling.

  —Shen-hsiu

  Not far from Osaka, deep in the forest, there is a fourteen-hundred-year-old Buddhist temple called Anraku-ji, which in Japanese means “peaceful, at ease.” But the young priest who took over the care and upkeep of Anraku-ji not long ago, Toshiro Ogama was his name, felt neither truly peaceful nor at ease, and having said something as puzzling as that, it is now necessary, of course, to tell you why.

  When Toshiro Ogama was fifteen, both his parents were killed in an automobile accident in Kyoto. An only child, he was suddenly an orphan. His parents’ funeral, conducted by a priest in the Pure Land tradition, and their cremation were engraved into the emulsion of his memory. At the crematorium, they were incinerated at 800 degrees centigrade. Their bodies burned steadily for two hours. They had a thirty-minute cooling-down period. Finally, their bones were crushed and mixed with the ashes—all total his parents each weighed two pounds at the end—and they were given back to Toshiro in two white urns. Those containers, which he kept and placed beside the altar at Anraku-ji, led him all his adult life to listen attentively whenever he heard the Buddhist Dharma or teachings. And what more? Well, he was painfully shy and, like the English scientist Henry Cavendish, he could barely speak to one person, never to two at once since four eyes looking at him made Toshiro stammer. At eighteen, he entered Shogen-ji Monastery and devoted four years to rigorous training, living on a prison diet of cheap rice and boiled potatoes in bland soup. He later passed his examinations at Komazawa University, where many Soto Zen monks have studied, but after this Toshiro decided he did not want to teach or try to work his way up through the politically treacherous Buddhist hierarchy and rigid, religious pecking order in Japan, which was brutally competitive and had corrupted the Sangha, or community of spiritual seekers, by the greed and hypocrisy of the world—or at least this was what Toshiro told himself since he was unable to speak to anyone about his real Zen fears, and why he sometimes felt like a failure, an outright fraud. Knowing he didn’t have the family connections or the constitution to rise very high in the religious power structure, Toshiro chose instead to take a free-lance job translating best-selling American books for Hayakawa Shobo, a publishing company in Tokyo, and he looked around for an abandoned temple that he might repair, manage, and perhaps turn into his own private sanctuary from suffering and all the unpredictable messiness of the social world. Across Japan, there are thousands of these empty wooden buildings falling into disrepair, full of termites and rats, with tubers growing through the floorboards, as if each was a vivid illustration of how everything on this planet was so provisional, with things arising and being unraveled in a fortnight, a fact that Toshiro meditated on deeply, day and night, since the death of his parents.

  So when he was granted permission to move into Anraku-ji, the young priest felt, at least for his first year there, a contentment much like that described by Thoreau at Walden Pond. He had no wealthy parishioners or temple supporters paying his salary. Whatever he did at the temple was voluntary, with no strings attached, paid for by his translation work, and done for its own rewards. With great care, he spent a year remodeling Anraku-ji’s small main hall and adjoining house, quietly chanting to himself as he worked. He pruned branches, sawed tree limbs, and raked leaves. He trimmed bushes, did weeding and transplanting, and drifted off to sleep to the sound of crickets, bullfrogs, and an owl that each night soothed him like music. Sometimes he talked to himself as he worked, which was a great embarrassment when he caught himself, so he kept a cat to have something to talk to and cover up his habit. He was alone at Anraku-ji, but not lonely, and he decided a man could do far worse than this.

  Thus things stood when one afternoon a pilgrim from America arrived unannounced on the steps of his temple. This did not please Toshiro at all because, traditionally, the Japanese do not like surprises. She was a bubbly, effervescent black American about forty years old, with an uptilted nose, a smile that lit up her eyes behind her gold-framed, oval glasses, and long chestnut hair pinned behind her neck by a plastic comb. At first, Toshiro felt ambushed by her beauty. Then he had the uncanny feeling he should know her, but he wasn’t sure why. In Japanese, he said, “Konnichiwa,” and when she didn’t answer, he said in English, “Are you lost?”

  That question made her lips lift in a smile. “Spiritually, I guess I am. Aren’t we all lost? Are you Toshiro Ogama-san?”

  “Yes.”

  “And are you accepting students? My name is Cynthia Tucker. You’re translating one of my books for Hayakawa Shobo. I would have called first, but you don’t have a phone listed. I’m in Japan for a month and a half, lecturing for the State Department and—well, since I’m here, and have a little unscheduled time, I was hoping to meet you, and discuss any problems you might have with American words in my book, and maybe get your help with my practice of meditation.” Now she laughed, taking off her glasses. “Roshi, I think I need a lot of help.”

  “I . . . I’m not a teacher,” said Toshiro.

  “But you are the abbot of this beautiful temple, aren’t you?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Well, if it’s all right, I’d love to stay a few days and—”

  “Stay?” His voice slipped a scale.

  “Yes, visit with you for a while and ask a few questions.” He was amused Tucker said this while standing under the sign posted at every Zen temple and monastery, which read LOOK UNDER YOUR FEET (for the answers), but this pilgrim did not, of course, read Japanese. “I can make myself useful,” she said. “And I won’t be a bother. Maybe I can help you in some way too.”

  As she spoke, and as he studied her more closely—her flower-patterned blouse, sandals, and white slacks, how early afternoon sunlight was like liquid copper in her hair, Toshiro slowly realized that among the five books he was leisurely translating for Hayakawa Shobo there was one by a Dr. Cynthia Tucker, a Sanskrit scholar in the Asian Languages and Literature Department at the University of Washington. Her author’s bio and American newspaper interviews with her told him she’d survived colon cancer, two divorces, had no children, taught courses in Eastern philosophy, and described herself whimsically as a Baptist-Buddhist. Her book, The Power of a Quiet Mind, was a hefty six-hundred-page volume devoted to interpreting the Dharma in terms that addressed the trials and tribulations of black Americans. Toshiro was only two chapters into his translation, but he’d found her work electrifying—even culturally necessary. Her prose was incandescent, shimmering with the Right Thought of all buddhas in the ten directions, but placed within a twenty-first-century black American context. Toshiro also found this ironic. In Japan, the old ways and old wisdom had become antique after World War II. The traditions of Soto and Rinzai Zen held little interest for this younger, business-minded generation of Japanese, who seemed quite satisfied pursuing the goods of the world and being salarymen. But the Americans? Since the 1960s, they had become passionate about the Dharma, even when they got it wrong, and he often suspected that much of the continuation of Asian spiritual traditions might fall to them, the gaijin of North America who had grown weary of materialism. As much as he valued his privacy
at the temple, he saw how impolite it would be to turn this very distinguished visitor away. He wasn’t happy about the prospect of having to be entertaining, but it couldn’t be helped. If he didn’t, her publisher—his boss—would not be pleased. Even so, he had always been awkward around people and felt afraid of this situation.

  The young priest brought his palms together in the gesture of gratitude and veneration, called gasshó, and made a quick bow.

  “Forgive me for not recognizing you at first. I think your book—and you—are wonderful, and you can help me with some of the words. But I don’t think you should stay for too long. One day only. I don’t see people often, and I’m not such a good teacher of the Buddhadharma. Really, I don’t know anything.”

  “Oh, that’s hard to believe.” The corners of her eyes crinkled as she smiled. “I’ve read that all beings are potential Buddhas. Anyone or anything can bring us to a sudden awakening—the timbre of a bell, an autumn rose, the extinguishing of a candle. Anything!”

  Toshiro’s eyes slipped out of focus when she said that. She really knew her stuff, and that made his heart give a very slight jump. How would she judge him if she knew the depths of his own failure? The priest invited the pilgrim inside, offering her a cup of rice wine and a plate of rice crackers. He showed her around the temple, the two of them sometimes walking out of step in their stocking feet and bumping each other as they conversed for half the afternoon about English grammar, with Tucker sometimes placing her hand gently on his shoulder, and peppering him with questions that made Toshiro’s stomach chew itself—questions like What time do you get up? How often do you shave your head? Is your tongue on the roof of your mouth when you meditate? Do you eat meat, Roshi? Why are Zen priests in Japan allowed to get married, but not those in China? Toshiro noticed his palms were getting wet and wiped them on his shirt, but his arm still tingled with pleasure where she had touched him. He excused himself, saying he needed to work awhile on the stone garden he was creating. He repeated his apology, “I am the poorest of practitioners. You must ask someone else these questions. And not stay more than one night. People in the village will talk if a woman sleeps at the temple. And don’t call me Roshi.”