The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  Then the training began in earnest. In silence we went into a simple medieval chamber, and in silence ate a dinner of vegetables served from wooden buckets. If I wanted more, my guide had explained, I would have to tap my bowl; and after I was finished, I would have to rinse out the bowl with my finger and hot tea, ensuring that not a speck of rice was left. Then I would have to wrap the bowl up, left over right over bottom, in the furoshiki that was almost the monk’s only possession. They were allowed no books, no keepsakes, no reminders of their lives outside; nothing but their robes, their bowls, and the body-length mats on which they slept face-up.

  Our dinner finished, we walked across, in the chill of the darkening afternoon, to the wooden shack where the monks were allowed, once every five days, to take baths. The man preparing the bath today, a bespectacled man in his fifties with a look of frightened bewilderment, was rushing around in panic while the younger monks shouted orders at him. Only a week before, I learned, this man had been a regular salaryman, living with his family at home; then, however, he had learned that he would have to take over his family temple and been obliged to join a monastery. Now, as the junior monk in the place, he was the one the others were obliged to toughen up.

  Scrubbed and rinsed clean in the scalding water of the tub, we proceeded to the ancient meditation hall. As the last light of day seeped in through the pulled-back screens, I sat with the monks, erect on the wooden platform, in silence. Occasionally, a monk, standing silent sentry by the door, strode forward and whacked, with his long wooden stick, anyone whose form was slipping — usually the terrified-looking newcomer in spectacles. The other seven sat in motionless zazen. Now and then, in the bird-scattered quiet of dusk, the mournful melody of a garbage collector’s truck floated up from a nearby street. Occasionally, there was a swish of black robes, a flash of motion, as a monk headed away for dokusan, his daily private conference with the rōshi.

  I too, once, at school, had gone off on evenings such as this for private meetings, and alone with my thoughts — too new to be above this — I thought back in the dark to school in England, so similar to this: the cold showers at dawn, the ascetic bare rooms, the beatings, the daily prayers in five-hundred-year-old chambers. The sense of hierarchy, the all-male rites, the chores, the fears, the longings — all seemed eerily the same. But that kind of school had been preparing its students to take over the world, while this one taught them to renounce it; ruling ourselves, at school, we were made to feel we could rule everything; while here, ruling the self, one was trained to need nothing from the world.

  My legs by now were aching, my body was stiff; I waited and waited for the session to end. Finally, with relief, I heard a monk stir, and draw back the screens against the night. In a flash, with movements as quick and precise as in some army drill, the monks whipped out their bedrolls and stood at attention; the poor businessman, wrestling unhappily with his lot and unable to get it all done in five seconds, earned more sharp shouts and rebukes. Then, single file, we walked off to the temple garden, silver in the moonlight.

  Nine figures, eerie in black robes, shaven heads shining in the silent dark, sat perfectly erect in the cool night air. When at last I left to sleep, all eight were sitting there, ready to continue through the night.

  By three o’clock the next morning, my guide was rustling me awake. Bare feet cold on the wooden planks, we shuffled back into the meditation hall. There, still groggy, I followed the monks to another room, where gongs sounded and sutras were chanted, broken by the silver ringing of a bell. Then we returned to the hall for more zazen, screen doors open to the chilling dark as, very slowly, the light began to seep in and the birds to sing.

  Hours, many hours later, we took a brief breakfast of gruel and pickled plums. Then we went out into the golden light of morning and began sweeping leaves, the monks working rapidly, in silence, sweeping and sweeping till every last inch was spotless. Above us, the temple’s cherry tree blazed against the dawning blue.

  Then there was long scrubbing of floors, on all fours, and chopping of wood, a quickly taken snack, and more hard physical labor (a form of moving meditation). In midmorning, the monks donned straw sandals and wicker hats and went into the neighborhood on their daily alms-collecting rounds. Then they returned for more work, more meditation, and, perhaps, at night, a few hours sleep on their mats. To an outsider, the Californian monk had told me, the temple seemed as calm and motionless as a river; inside, however, you got caught up in the rush and intensity of the surging currents. Every day was so full, he said, that there was never a moment of true rest. Did he ever miss the world? I asked. No, he said, touchingly. Nothing but his books.

  Before I left the monastery, I went for an audience with the rōshi, whose presence I had felt all the time I was in Kyoto, as Mark’s longtime friend and Sachiko’s steady counselor. Seated in a thick leather chair, a tiny figure in huge orange robes, his windows thrown open to the green and golden quiet of the garden, he looked at me with warm and piercing eyes. He greatly feared for Zen in America, he told me over tea, because everyone there was after instant wisdom. Some people were so intent on satori, or instant revelation, that they actually bought books with answers to koan. The Americans did have one advantage over the Japanese, insofar as they were willing to take one day a week off. But as long as one reminded oneself constantly of how much fun one should be having on a holiday, it was not, in the true sense, a “holy day.”

  The “pride” of Americans, he went on, and their openness to challenges were exemplary; but he worried about their ambition, their love of cerebration. By coming to Zen with their minds, they were all but ensuring their failure at a discipline whose aim, after all, was to short-circuit the mind. “You should not think about the koan,” he said, as any Zen master must. “You should become the koan.”

  During his own training, he explained, his teacher, Shibayamaroshi, had shouted at him constantly, “Be an idiot! Be a fool!” And in time, it had worked. At first, when he had begun, he had always been thinking of his girlfriend and his college pals. For five years, he had not been free of this. Intense meditation, after all, sharpened the very powers of memory that were the main block to meditation. But then, at last, he had learned to live in the moment.

  The rōshi ended, in the classic Zen manner, with a story. Once upon a time, an old man was trying to explain to his grandson the belief of Jōdo Buddhism that the Pure Land lies in the West. Practical and alert as children are, the little boy had pointed out that if you go west, and farther west, you end up going around the world and back where you first started. Paradise, in short, was all around us, if only we would stop and look.

  I, however, incorrigible foreigner, was still lost in books and hoping to bring Zen home to me by reading in Thoreau. For the rough earth of his prose was crisscrossed with the footsteps of Zen poets. Certainly, his ground seemed theirs — and his heaven too! — as if all of them were acolytes living in hermit huts scattered across the slopes of some sacred mountain. With his discursive essays on “Moonlight” and “Autumnal Hints,” his retreat into the woods to “transact some private business with the fewest obstacles,” and his insistence on living in a society of one, Thoreau seemed to have worked out for himself what was sacred in Japan (where the very character for “Nature” could be read as “self-seeing”); and every Zen wanderer and poet and solitary seemed, in his way, another sojourner in Walden, living off berries in the wood, sustaining himself on natural scriptures, devoting himself to slowness and to idling. Having given up everything, he had nothing to lose — and all the world to gain.

  So when I read in Bashō, “My solitude shall be my company, and my poverty my wealth,” I felt I was reading again the anarchist of Walden, pursuing his nonviolent revolution of words, remaking the world by reversing its meanings. And when I read in Dōgen, “Why leave behind the seat that exists in your own house and go aimlessly off to the dusty reaches of other lands?” I could almost hear his neighbor in New England declaring, “I
t is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.” And when I read Kamo no Chōmei’s “Account of My Hut,” singing the praises of a simple life of solitude, I found Thoreau again in the recluse’s famous claim that none can know the pleasures of loneliness who has not tasted them himself.

  Soon, in fact, the parallels started doubling back on themselves, till the Buddhists almost seemed the Transcendentalists’ disciples. When Emerson wrote that “The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway,” he all but enunciated the guiding principle of the wandering Zen monk. And when he wrote, in a poem, “Sleep is not, death is not, who seems to die, lives,” he sounded almost like a Buddhist haiku master. Even the Buddha could sound at times like a follower of the Sage of Concord: “Self is the lord of self, who else should be the lord?”

  I got the strongest chill, though, when I read in Emerson: “Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion.” What could be closer to the old Mahayana saying: “Of all the forms of illusion, woman is the most important”?

  Just as I was pursuing these connections, Mark, with his unerring gift for reading my thoughts the better to guide them, handed me a volume of Santōka, one of his favorite poets, a monk who was said to have walked 28,000 miles on his path, along the back roads of Japan, in a straw hat, retracing some of Bashō’s steps. Though the natural descendant of Bashō and Ryōkan, this solitary figure was a citizen of our century, who sustained his “walking meditation” through all the tumult of the early decades.

  Santōka’s free-style haiku were a model of the form, so cleansed of ornament and abstraction that they sometimes ended less than ten words after they began; his art seemed to come to him as naturally as breathing. Free of pretension, his poems were free of tension. And in accordance with that spirit, his life was also as clear and simple as running water. His great joy, he said, was “one room, one person, one light, one desk, one bath, and a cup of sake.” The only journal he read was his own, and what little extra he had, he gave away. Even the constant sake drinking he did, he did, as he did everything, with all his being.

  When I read of Santōka’s defection from society and most civil of disobediences — refusing to participate in the preparations for war — I could hear his words echoing round the woods at Walden, and so too, when he wrote, with characteristically bracing simplicity, “To do what I want, and not to do what I don’t — this is why I entered such a life.” Yet the most striking thing about his wanderings was that they were always in pursuit of something more than self. “My pilgrimage,” he wrote beautifully, “is into the depths of the human heart.”

  A little later, in the spring, Mark and his teacher put on an exhibition together of paintings based on Santōka’s poems, Mark translating them into simple images, his sensei scrawling the poems, in vigorous calligraphy, round the edges of the shapes. And when I went to the gallery and spent an hour or two with the pictures, slowly, in the silence of the department store, I began to feel I could understand a little, for the first time ever, the power of blank space. How space can live, and draw one in, as silences can speak; and how the Japanese, more than anyone, could charge the emptiness. When Mark drew the lonely figure of Santōka, one felt the space around him, irradiated with his quiet, and when he drew a flower, he drew nothing but its shape. Autumn was merely the faintest outline of a falling leaf. Attention had been brought to such a point that it turned into a kind of meditation.

  At the exhibition, I realized, for the first time, why the Japanese were fascinated with ma, or space, and how they tried to sustain it inside their crowded homes and lives. They sought to approach life, in a sense, the way one spoke one’s language to a foreigner, in a spirit of simplicity, sympathy, and clarity. In Santōka’s poems, translated by the side of the paintings, nothing extraneous intrudes.

  My begging bowl

  Accepts the falling leaves.

  Mark’s painting of the poem was just a leaf in downward flight.

  No more houses to beg from,

  Clouds on the mountains.

  Mark’s painting showed just clouds.

  All day I say nothing,

  The sound of waves.

  The painting caught sound, and nothing more.

  The poems themselves, in their clarity and ease, began to open up a space within. One had to tread them slowly, as through snow; and step by patient step, one began to savor the crunch, the texture, the depth.

  Brightness of the snow

  Fills the house with calm.

  Reading very slowly, I began to feel the calm of that, the soothing quiet of the falling snow, remaking the world without a sound. I began to see the warmth of the poem, too, and its freshness; how snow brought silence, and a spaciousness within. The gradual movements of its flight began to slow the mind down, as surely as the tolling of a bell.

  No path but this one,

  Spring snow falling.

  As I wandered round the room, with Sachiko by my side, I began to think how much we need space in those we love, space enough to accommodate growth and possibility. Knowledge must leave room for mystery; intimacy, taken too far, was the death of imagination. Keeping some little distance from her was, I thought, a way of keeping an open space, a silence for the imagination to fill.

  “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things,” Thoreau had written, “we require that all things be mysterious and unexplainable.”

  And as we walked around the paintings, Mark’s teacher, eighty-six years old now, but alive with coiled energy, his shaggy gray hair falling bohemian across his face, came into the gallery. Full of energy, he began telling us about his coming trip to China, his various projects, the classes he gave, the books he was working on. Then he spoke warmly of the abbot of Tōfukuji, a friend of his for life.

  “Chotto kibishii,” said Sachiko of the rōshi. “A little strict.”

  “Demo yasashii,” added the painter, smiling. “But gentle too.”

  “Strictness without gentleness is not so good,” he went on, “and gentleness without strictness is not so good. Strictness and gentleness together are the best.”

  8

  SACHIKO’S GOODBYE, when it came, was as perfectly planned, as exquisitely decorated, as everything else in this land of ceremonies.

  One day, towards the end of spring, she invited me and Matthew to join her and Hideko at a tea ceremony. She appeared in the hotel lobby in a radiant blue kimono, hair done up in the style of a Meiji maiden, her steps in pure-white socks and formal sandals slow and reticent. We watched a woman in a white peacock kimono glide along against the paper screens, flooded now with early-morning sun, and we entered our names with thick brushes in a visitors’ book. Then, with a bow, we were ushered into a room full of bowing matrons, all beady-eyed and kimonoed, as used to this as we might be to church. Seated cross-legged, we sipped at our tea, dutifully inspecting the lacquer tea box, inscribed with a scarcely visible tracery of cherry blossoms. “Night cherry,” Sachiko whispered under her breath, and the matrons leaned a little closer. “Little monoganashii feeling.” We inspected a scroll that told of a flower and a butterfly, and, eyes bright, she looked over at me meaningfully as the springtime message was translated.

  Matthew, meanwhile, was his usual engaging self, and as the matrons looked at us in wonder, he started pulling at the legs crossed under him, forming a hideous frown and delivering, in loud stage whispers, a moving account of his torments. “Can’t understand it. Terribly simple, actually. Legs quite dead. Can’t move. Don’t know if I’ll ever recover!”

  “Are you okay?” Sachiko asked anxiously, leaning over me towards him, to extend a hand.

  “Oh yes,” he said, smiling tightly. “Fine, fine. Just a little stiff. Can’t move, you see. Awfully painful, actually. Quite extraordinary.”

  The pantomime continued, I as ill at ease as Matthew, and the matrons staring over at us with quickened excitement, exchanging happy glances and then look
ing back at us, in awe; for them, I imagined, hardened veterans of these rites, the presence of two galumphing foreign males, banging against walls, attacking their tea with chopsticks, and pulling at their limbs like pretzels, was doubtless a welcome gust of comic relief in what was otherwise dull routine. “Terribly sorry, awfully embarrassing,” Matthew apologized, smiling unhappily back at them. “Not sure, actually, whether I can move!”

  “This was something Merchant Taylors’ never prepared you for,” I whispered back.

  “No, quite,” he answered, tight-lipped, then erupted into schoolboy chortles.

  The tea bowl went round and round for our admiration, we munched at our sweets, scattering crumbs, which we proceeded to fold ineptly in the napkins Sachiko gave us. Then at last it was over. Matthew and I disentangled limbs and got up, legs so dead that I, standing up, reeled and staggered against the paper screen before bowing farewell to the delighted matrons and tiptoeing out to the lobby. Outside, in the soothing sun, Sachiko led our incongruous band to a coffee shop, and as the four of us settled round a circular table, Matthew filled us in on how a two-day trip to Tokyo Disneyland had somehow kept him away for a month. In Tokyo, he explained, he had found everything he wanted: high fashion, neon futurism, even an English-speaking girlfriend. After two weeks, however, of a consuming intensity that had almost frightened him, he had rung her up one day, to find that she had dropped him for a new foreigner.