The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  I was just musing on all this when Mark, as he had promised, gave me the book of poems by his friend Ray Coffin, a book whose very title, Poetry for Crazy Cowboys and Zen Monks, announced the same dialectic (one poem was even entitled “Ode to Narcissus and Goldman”). He had gone East, the American monk had written, in search of “some simple, sound horizons” and had found them in Japan — in his memories of Texas. As for Zen’s immersion in the moment, its sense of immediacy and intensity, he had found that mostly with his girlfriend, in their unsanctioned kind of moving meditation. His love nights, he wrote, were “rich, gusty and full of the ever-fleeting NOW.”

  The stay in the temple, in fact, seemed to have made him only more Texan — because more himself — and his poems read like old Dylan songs set to an irregular Zen beat. They hymned faraway girls, Mexican bars, “the sweet easy drone of a steel guitar on a summer night” — all the pleasures, I assumed, that had grown more piquant for him as they grew more distant. And so the dialogue gained force and fire, the cowboy on his bike, in handmade Nocona boots, chafing at the monk, head bowed in meditation. Sometimes the monk disciplined the cowboy, sometimes the cowboy liberated the monk. And finally the unlikely duet concluded with “Cowboy sun Monk moon friendship — A total eclipse.”

  The very next day, I was reading Zen poems in my room when a call came for me on the guesthouse telephone. A call? I thought. Whom did I know in Japan? I answered it and heard a high, breathless female voice. “Hallo. My name is Sachiko Morishita.” I could almost hear the phrasebook flapping in the background. “Thank you very much coming here my house. I’m sorry. Children very happy. Very fun. I’m sorry. Thank you very much.” Amidst a confusion of girlish giggles and long pauses, I slowly dug out her meaning: in return for my playing with her children, Sachiko-san was offering now to show me around Nanzenji. Like every Japanese citizen, she apparently had a schedule as precisely organized as that of any head of state, what with going to her part-time job, taking her children to school, collecting her children from school, taking her children to swimming lessons, ballet lessons, piano lessons, and English classes, doing her aerobics, paying duty visits to her parents and her in-laws, and preparing her husband’s food, bed, and bath each night. Still, she said, she could be free for a couple of hours on Wednesday morning. Sensing both her loneliness and her openness, I did not have the heart to tell her that Nanzenji was one temple I had seen already.

  A couple of days later, when I arrived at the Heian Shrine, I found her waiting for me eagerly, a tiny figure of casual chic in a thick U.S. Army jacket with a Sting sticker on one pocket, hands shyly crossed behind her back, and bouncing on the soles of her feet. Exchanging greetings in languages neither of us could really understand, we began wandering together through the sleepy backstreets of Kyoto. Ambling into a garden, we found an arrangement of rocks and water, and Sachiko-san backed away when she saw the gliding carp below. In the street, a dog strained at its leash, and again she started, moving quickly to the other side. But her sheltered smallness was most apparent in her enthusiasms. “Last night,” she said, “I go Chris Lay concert. Osaka Festival Hall. Very beautiful concert. ‘September Blue’ encore. I very, very excited. All day I cannot eat. Stomach big problem. Heart cannot control. Very beautiful day.” The epiphanies of her world seemed almost sadder than her trials.

  As she fell into a pregnant, thoughtful silence, I tried to lighten the mood by telling her that I’d been so invigorated by her daughter’s party that I’d written a story for her children, about two heroic raccoons.

  Having learned this new word just the previous week, she tried it out with glee. “Raccoon story?”

  “Yes,” I answered with some pride.

  “You write raccoon story?”

  “Yes.”

  She frowned. “You job, raccoon story writer?”

  Some things, it seemed, got hopelessly lost in translation.

  And so we wandered on, down drowsy lanes, past noodle shops and china tanuki, to Nanzenji, and there, on the platform overlooking the Leaping Tiger Garden, we sat side by side, looking out upon the maples, as I had done with Mark two weeks before. There was, as Mark had noted at the temple ceremony, a curious kind of intimacy that Sachiko-san established — she seemed to draw a net around one as if to shut out the rest of the world. And as she explained the symbols of Zen to me in the giddy autumn sunshine, I caught snatches of her perfume, saw silver bracelets jangling on her tiny wrists, realized that her eyes — finely folded and alight — were the first Japanese eyes I had ever really seen. Sometimes, in the sun, I saw the red lights in her hair, hair she fastened on one side with a mother-of-pearl comb and let fall free across her shoulder on the other.

  Sachiko-san’s influence was soft and subtle as a mild spring breeze, yet still I could feel the warmth in that breeze, and as we walked back into town, I could sense her straying closeness. This strange, unlooked-for intimacy was only formalized when, as we walked along the Kamo River, I suddenly saw a familiar figure on his bicycle. The last time I had seen Billy, a former U.S. Army man, he had been hanging out with two other foreigners, eyeing Japanese girls over their beers. I tried as hard as I could not to see him, but Billy was quick to see me — or at least my companion.

  “Hey,” he said, turning round, getting off his bike, and walking back towards us. “I can see you’re settling down quite nicely.” He looked her up and down. “You seem to be doing really well.”

  “In a way.”

  “Great. Looks like you’re doing real good.” He gave me a conspirator’s grin.

  “How are things going with you?” I said, eager to change the subject.

  “Aw, pretty good. All my students tell me I look like Randy Bass — you know, the slugger for the Tigers?” He flashed Sachiko-san an engaging grin. I refrained from telling him that this was more a reflection on his students than on him, since the Japanese apparently thought that every bearded foreigner looked like Randy Bass. I had heard one portly white journalist likened to Michael Jackson.

  “So anyway,” he said, “bring her along to a Halloween party we’re having.” Then, after a final inspection, he got back on his bike. “Costume required!” he called back as he began cycling away.

  “Can I come as an Indian?” I shouted after him.

  “Sure,” he called back. “I’m going as a gaijin!”

  “Very nice man,” Sachiko-san giggled sweetly as we went on our way. “I like you friend. Very kind, very warm.”

  “Oh, sure,” I muttered sullenly.

  At the Montessori kindergarten, Yuki proudly showed me her agility on the swings. Then, through shifting sunlight, all three of us made our slow way to a sushi restaurant. “I wonder if it’ll rain,” I said, looking up at the sky.

  “Old Japanese people say, ‘Onna-no kokoro, aki-no sora,’ ” said Sachiko-san, shooting me a sidelong glance (The autumn sky is like a woman’s heart). “Your country same?”

  Ten minutes later, little Yuki was seated in front of a mountain of eight empty sushi bowls, while I, incriminatingly, had nothing to show but one. Sensing my unease (I had yet to make my peace with sushi), Sachiko-san suggested that it was time for them to leave. Outside, in the street, the clouds were turning to sun again. “Like woman’s heart,” she said, and looked at me again.

  7

  ONE REASON I had always been interested in Zen was my sense that for people like myself, trained in abstraction, Zen could serve as the ideal tonic. For Zen, as I understood it, was about slicing with a clean sword through all the Gordian knots invented by the mind, plunging through all specious dualities — east and west, here and there, coming and going — to get to some core so urgent that its truth could not be doubted. The best lesson that Zen could teach — though it was, of course, something of a paradox to say or even think it — was to go beyond a kind of thinking that was nothing more than agonizing, and simply act. In that sense, Zen reminded me of Johnson’s famous refutation of Berkeley by kicking a stone. It was unans
werable as pain.

  This training had particular appeal for me, perhaps, because I had often thought that the mind was, quite literally, a devil’s advocate, an agent of diabolical sophistry that could argue any point and its opposite with equal conviction; an imp that delighted in self-contradiction and yet, though full of sound and fury, ultimately signified nothing. None of the truest things in life — like love or faith — was arrived at by thinking; indeed, one could almost define the things that mattered as the ones that came as suddenly as thunder. Too often, I thought, the rational faculty tended only to rationalize, and the intellect served only to put one in two minds, torn apart by second thoughts. In that sense, God could be said to be nothing but the act of faith itself. Religion lay in the leap and not the destination. And Zen was as much as anything a refutation of doubt itself; a transcendence of the whole either/or sensibility that makes up all our temporizing. Instead of temporizing, as Thoreau might have said, why do we not eternize?

  In all these ways, Zen seemed the natural product of a culture that has little time for philosophical speculation but stresses instead the merits of ritual, rigor, and repetition. The directness of Zen appeared to reflect the utilitarian concreteness of modern Japan, where people seemed rarely to dwell on suffering or to give themselves to close self-study. Zen, after all, was about whole-heartedness — or, at least, whole-mindedness. Strictly speaking, I knew, both Shintoism and Jōdo Buddhism, the other great faiths of Japan, were equally free of doctrine and scripture, and, moreover, Zen had been invented by an Indian monk in China. The first Zen temples were active in Korea before the teaching had ever come across the Tsushima Strait to Japan. Yet still the finest achievements of the discipline today were associated with Japan, not least because the qualities sought out by Zen — spareness, self-discipline, precision — seemed closest to those of Japan. Did Zen help to create the features of Japan, or did Japan help to form the distinctive qualities of Zen — it was a question as old in its way, and unending, as the famous Zen conundrum “What was your face before you were born?” Whatever the answer, I thought, if Zen had not existed, the Japanese would have had to invent it.

  Talking to Mark, though, and to Kazuo, had already brought me a little closer to earth. Besides, I knew that coming to Japan hoping to find a world guided by the stern and gentle precepts of Buddhism was as misguided as going to America hoping to find a society graced at every turn by Christianity (but America was shaped and strengthened by Christian writers, one could almost hear a visitor saying — Jonathan Edwards, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot: how could modern America be so forgetful of its inheritance?). I realized, too, that the very qualities that made Zen so attractive to me were also the ones that made it so alien. Most of all, I suspected that if the Japanese really did have a religion, it was very likely one that outsiders like myself would not be able to recognize if we saw it, since it would probably have more to do with rituals than with texts. That religion could have a shifting relation to morality; that religious affiliations could be taken off or put on again as easily as costumes; that the Japanese could partake of what Rexroth had called “a secular mysticism, which sees experience as its own transcendence” — that religion, in short, could be capricious and practical as love, that other celebrated act of nondenominational faith, was something we Santa Barbarians found hard to understand.

  I got a glimpse of this one day when Mark and I came across a Zen student from New York, who was all marshmallowy softness. (“And what are you doing in Japan?” she cooed. “A journalist? Oh, how wonderful!”) As we walked away, Mark, usually so gentle, could hardly contain his impatience. “Jeez,” he began, shaking his head, “that’s the kind of stuff the Zen guys can’t stand! Because they know what it’s really like — how tough and rigid and down-to-earth it is: waking up at three a.m. in the winter and sweeping leaves in the rain and going begging in the snow. Yet these Zen students are always coming over from America and putting on this weird, goody-goody kind of sweetness. And the Zen guys know that has nothing to do with it.”

  As he talked, I could see how right he was, yet also, perhaps, how protective of the Zen he knew. The hardest part of this discipline, like any other, must be to free oneself from a notion of what it was to protect.

  Because I was interested in this aspect of Japan, Mark invited me one day to come and meet his best friend, an American who had lived in a temple for a while but now devoted most of his energy to his wife and children, while teaching English, translating Japanese, and spending long hours reading or playing the piano.

  The next thing I knew, we were seated inside Joe’s house and some frenzied Dennis Hopper madness was exploding on every side of us. Ghostbusters was blasting out of the video set, and some throaty jazz was thrumming out of the stereo system. Joe’s four-year-old son was somersaulting across a tiny room jammed with “Hello Koala” bags and a tank of fish, while his three-year-old daughter was scampering around on all fours like a dog. The master of the household was blowing up balloons as fast as Mark could draw feet on them, and his nine-month-old baby was scattering toys and juice on the floor and feeding at the breast of a mother who was muttering something in Japanese. “She wants to know if Ringo Starr is homosexual,” said her husband, setting up a chessboard for the two of us, and then the phone began to trill. He picked it up. “A hundred fifty thousand? Listen — what’s your problem, man? If I say it, you can believe it. Yeah, all right, one forty-five thousand. Jesus fuck, I don’t believe this, man. One forty thousand,” and then he slammed down the phone and picked it up again. “Listen, Umeda-san, we really had a great time last night,” and then, “Oh shit, man. I just dialed the number of the same guy I was talking to. Wrote down his number, man, and then dialed it again. He must have thought I was crazy or somethin’, callin’ about a piano and then me thankin’ him for dinner.…”

  Joe looked over at us, his unshaven face cracking, and began laughing. His laugh got started like an aging Plymouth on a winter’s day, until he was chortling and chuckling infectiously. His unorthodox directness was hitting me like a slap in the face. But I could see that it was the most Zen-like quality about him and, if nothing else, he was very much his own man. Cackling, uncombed, talking with the crazy intensity of someone forever under some foreign influence, he put on another tape, and as The Neverending Story went on neverendingly, he began telling me about Japan. “Like my students, man. One time, I had to teach them the meaning of the words ‘necessary,’ ‘useless,’ and ‘useful.’ So I asked them to rate all their subjects in one of these categories. And you know the one all of them — one hundred percent of them — listed as ‘necessary’? Sports, man! Fuckin’ sports! And the one that every single one of them listed as ‘useless’? Religious education! Except for one guy, who put it as ‘useful’ But everyone else laughed at him and said it was because he was a Christian. Weird, man, fuckin’ weird. But I thought about it, and it makes sense. Not just because sports makes them healthy. But it instills in them this sense of the team. And it makes them competitive. And in most ways, this is a very competitive society. The place is like a pyramid, man; the whole place is a fuckin’ pyramid. And the one subject you never mention to them is politics. Never, man. Makes them go dead. It’s like in the U.S., if you had a class on Byzantine Church doctrine or somethin’ — they don’t care about it. They don’t know anything about it. It’s not their concern. It just makes them dead. Not a single fuckin’ political science department in the entire country. No one here gives a damn about politics.

  “There are two myths that the Japanese have about themselves. One is that they’re a small country. They ain’t small, man. France and Spain are the only countries in Europe that are bigger. And look at the fuckin’ population, man. Sometimes I get out an atlas and say to them, ‘How many people in Denmark, man? Five fuckin’ million.’ And they say, ‘Ah sō?’ This country ain’t small, man. Look at a map. And they think that this is an old country. It ain’t old. Ask any Japanese high school graduate
to read somethin’ before 1868. He can’t do it, man. They have no connection with their literature. In the old days, before Meiji, they didn’t have this Emperor-worship thing. One old Emperor was just this nothin’ guy who had to sell his own calligraphy to keep goin’. But then in Meiji they built a new nation and trained people to think a certain way. Education didn’t mean broadening horizons. It just meant learning to be a part of society. And hey, man, if they decide to bring back Emperor-worship, you better have short hair, man.” Joe’s eyes were wild now. “And you better get new clothes. And you better not talk in the street. No fooling around with those guys, man. You watch what you’re doin’.”