A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  The Historical Society swelters in its new building. On the back wall they have a set of E’s shadowy sepia ink-and-wash drawings of the graves and the trees I was just walking among. The records show that Henry Handel Richardson spent thirteen months in Queenscliff in 1877–8, when she was seven; the house in Mercer Street has found a buyer, they said. There is a navigation map of the Rip entrance on show, dated 1870, with the shoals marked, and the various lights (the black lighthouse has a steady light, not flashing, the Lonsdale light a red and a green sector) and the beacons and hazardous rocks: Lonsdale Rock, Lightning Rocks, Corsair Rock, Beacon Rock…A real estate poster, no date, offers lots at Point Lonsdale, The Loveliest of Seaside Resorts, for £5 DEPOSIT, BALANCE £2 MONTHLY AT LOW INTEREST. The steamer fare to Melbourne: 2/6, return 4/-…They had the sea side of Glaneuse Road subdivided, the other side labelled ‘Potato Paddock’; a ‘Mr P. Synot’s Orchard’ was marked in. Also on display is a photocopy of the diary entry of William Todd, one of John Batman’s party at Indented Head for the July day in 1835 when the escaped convict William Buckley first met again with white men, after thirty-two years in the bush with the blacks: how he accepted bread, and spoke its English name; how he had seen two ships in all that time; how he spun them a fine yarn too:

  After he had got his dinner he informed us that he was a Soldier in the Kings Own & a native of Macklesfield in Cheshire, & was wrecked off Port Phillip Heads…

  He said he swam ashore with the Captain (‘who could not swim’) on his shoulders. ‘He was an entire day swimming before he could reach the shore.’ A sketch in the diary shows the tattoos on his arm. What did the black tribe make of this?

  Diving in my dream, I found a pitted and barnacled amphora on the seabed. Lifting it free, I kicked my way to the swimming of light that was the surface. It was heavy out of the water. Eyes were graven on its side and I saw it was the head of a Buddha – not a lid, a topknot; the handles I held it by were the long hoops of earlobes.

  The first day of the Sesshins began simmering and still (the giant fern under the lemon gum at Faraday Street is singed), until as I reached the hills a blue-black cloud hid them and a storm-wind whipped leaves, grey dust, branches over the road and lightning (white forked tongues of the serpent) stabbed the bush. A power pole was down, the line flat on the gravel; a farmer was cutting a fallen tree with a chainsaw to clear the way. The rain fell on other hills. The wind brought us the smell of it only.

  We could talk over the evening soup, after which the silence began. We have to share rooms and tables, and not speak. We bow and enter the zendo, a plain room with a view over the hills: no candles, no Buddha images here but ourselves. Hogen sits in the lotus position against a black tree on a gold sky: a monk in stiff black robes, come straight from winter on Mount Fuji. Was there snow? Here – magpies, kookaburras, frogs and crickets; crows. Thunder. We face the hot wall for the first zazen.

  At six the next morning the sky is gold as if no time has passed in sleep and we have spent all night sitting. Our legs ache as if we have. Cows are bellowing. In the valleys the lights have gone out; drifting mist.

  Every day the bell is rung at 5:30. The first of the ten zazen periods is at 6:00. This is followed by ‘mantra-running’ forwards and backwards (with closed mouths, mentally chanting Bo-dhi Sva-ha) on the gravel track beside the aqueduct, then yoga, then chanting the Heart Sutra in Japanese four times, then another zazen, motionless sitting cross-legged facing the wall. Breakfast is at nine. Meals, an afternoon sleep, a talk given by Hogen-san, and zazen unbroken otherwise except by short periods of kinhin (walking meditation) and dokusan in private one by one, for those who wish to ask a question, when Hogen rings his bell in the room below, cooler, behind the low branches of the wattle that also shades this zendo. The day ends at 9:30 with the chanting in Japanese of the Great Vows:

  Shu jo mu hen sei gan do

  Bon no mu jin sei gan dan

  Ho mon mu ryo sei gan gaku

  Butsu do mu jo sei gan jo.

  The water in the aqueduct is cold, clear (brown because the bottom is brown); leaves and twigs twist, floating deep. Tonight I dipped a hand in, half-expecting an avid eel-mouth to take shape and snap it off. How simple it would be – just two side-steps and off you would go, whipped downstream past them all, carried by the current and mantra-swimming, not pounding along on gravel.

  Outside the kitchen door they keep two unruly little goats chained to stakes, brown and white goats with a dark stripe along their spines, wagging whisks of tails, two dark teats, and large dark gold eyes, fishes’ eyes. They stand on their hind legs to nibble at any tree within reach, breaking off to scratch themselves with a hoof or a horn.

  The deep voice of Hogen-san: ‘Are you living your own real life? We are bubbles…on the surface…of the water. The water is…death.’

  Ma ka han nya ha ra mi ta shin gyo-o-o.

  Both dokusan on the first day were for all ‘new participants’. We sat on our cushions in the lower room. ‘Now you will be my teachers,’ he said. ‘Tell me. Why have you come here?’

  No one spoke. This was the moment (but I saw it only afterwards) for me to have asked about Mount Fuji! A response in the very spirit of Zen, and he would have taken it as such. But I thought he might misunderstand, see the question as rude, aggressive – I misjudged the man and therefore the moment, in fact, and it passed. So: I learned a lesson from that, at least – but not if there was snow on Fuji-san.

  Someone asks about the efficacy of the mantra. ‘What’s the difference if instead of Bodhi Svaha I chant Sandal, Sandal?’

  ‘No difference.’

  ‘But the mantra, that means God, and a sandal –’

  ‘No difference. Sandal is God too.’

  ‘But a sandal’s just a sandal! And God’s –’ He points up, he spreads his arms.

  ‘You think: God is high, sandal low. This is wrong…’

  Not the Zen way, he goes on. It’s like when you climb Mount Fuji. Following your path step by step, you reach the summit. From there you can see countless other ways, all leading there…‘This is the way of Zen.’

  (There is another world, but it is in this one.)

  Seeing us unwilling to come out with questions of our own, at his first talk (teisho) he reads aloud a long letter full of questions, sent to him by an Irishwoman, and his answers. They are questions about human evil and cruelty, the nature of the mind, reality.

  Someone asks him about karma. ‘All the karma of all humankind is within each one of us…When we watch an animal which is living in this world by killing other beings, it is a karmic being. We are the same.

  ‘We can be free of it. We can die every time. We can die. Otherwise zazen is not so meaningful at all.’

  The food is bland: hot unsalted vegetable broths at night, vegetables or beans with rice or pasta and fruit for lunch. The hot little bedrooms face the same view of the hills, across a balcony onto which the only doors are in other people’s rooms. Our three beds are crowded in together. The sheets are starched; every shift of a limb in the night rattles them like paper. Throughout the day as well, one or other of us is always to be found lying down to rest, while the others tiptoe in, out. We smile briefly if our eyes meet. All I know of the others is the names on the label on the door. Silence obliges us to ignore each other and this, I find, makes sharing easier: privacy is undisturbed.

  Everyone sits. I squirm. We do zazen facing the wall. The green cover of the piano is inches from my face. My shadow is on it, and faintly superimposed, Hogen-san’s. Pain flares along one leg. I shift it. He pushes the small of my back straight. Sweat is trickling between my breasts.

  ‘Zazen: sitting. From the outside, look the same. But someone is doing it in the darkness, some other one in the light.’

  He says we must die every moment, cut ourselves off and be born anew. The time of death is every moment…‘The present is all, all at once. This is what I wanted to tell you. This is it.’

  A few drops of r
ain fall, the earth smells like a wet dog: the trees are alert. But no more rain falls.

  ‘If you have more questions, please come to me in dokusan. I will prepare a sharper sword.’ A grin splits his gravity. We gasp and laugh.

  A copy of Hogen’s book was on the table tonight: The Other Shore. (Paramita – Well, this shore will do me, my mind murmurs rebelliously.) The book is a collection of short statements and koans like the talks he gives us. I stayed up late (10:30!) to copy some of them in my notebook, since it seems the book is out of print; he went past me to the kitchen to ask for fruit juice. Next day he asked us please not to read at the sesshin: this Way is found by discarding concepts, thoughts, words, ideas.

  Again, gusts of wind, rattles of rain, no rain.

  From The Other Shore:

  The life of true emptiness takes the form of whatever is here now.

  By doing yoga and zazen, we can begin to appreciate the real state of our body and mind, both of which are stiff and unpeaceful. We should not hate them. Please, let them be as they are. Taste their special, bitter taste. It is one’s intention, one’s mind, that obstructs the limitless light and freedom, though originally there is nothing but light and freedom.

  You ask me how to get rid of expectations and intentions. In response to your question, I can sincerely say that there is no method, and that it is not a question of how to abandon them. It is your sitting itself that should be completely one with ‘it’. Your daily actions must become one with it. You cannot depend on anyone to lead you. From here on, you must just sit until you fall from the cliff of the self. I cannot say any more than that, and you cannot know any more than that.

  The harder we try to clarify muddy water, the muddier it becomes. It is best to leave it alone.

  Each of us is the whole cosmos.

  If you do not investigate the living Zen of life’s actual struggle day and night, and if this living Zen doesn’t always die and come into being anew, then it is a false belief. All you have practised is of no use.

  The formal disciplines (of sitting, posture, daily practice) are not ultimately disciplines at all. They are the fruits of human wisdom; the abyss, the infinite, the void.

  Carried by the current of deep life, we are naturally led to sit. Here is the opening of a new encounter in sitting. This sitting is no longer your own.

  The form of your zazen should be like a mountain.

  Hogen Daido Yamahata: The Other Shore

  I sit in my black clothes: their Indian-ink smell. He wears a brown bib over his black tunic and faded pants. The biographical note in The Other Shore says that he has a wife and children and disciples in his little monastery, and that he teaches in England, Ireland, Norway, Holland, France, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Australia, the United States and Israel…My mind makes collages of him in Athens, in Dublin – a little Buddha-figure of black and parchment paper pasted over whitewashed walls, fishing boats…

  The wattle has dark, spare drifts of feathery leaves, and long red pods hanging from the ends of branches.

  One of the women who share my room wears a brown bib like Hogen-san’s. She is reading Bruno Bettelheim’s Freud and Man’s Soul. Today she asked Hogen a question about the hidden part of the mind, the unknown, unknowable part that goes on being without our being conscious of it, in our sleep, for example. Can we fully know what we are? (And in memories of ill-treatment repressed for years and revived by therapy – as the Irishwoman’s letter mentioned.) I suggested it was like the eye which can see everything outside itself, everything but its own self.

  ‘Hidden? It is not hidden,’ he exclaimed. ‘You were blind maybe. It was not hidden…’

  Ringing the metal bowl with his fingernail, he made it chime. ‘Do you really hear this? Just listen to it. That’s enough.’

  ‘This encounter. Only this.’

  In conclusion he said: ‘Now I give you many koan, I think. Hidden koans. I will take responsibility for that. I do not like to leave things half? Half-way. That is why dokusan is important. Please, come to me in dokusan.’

  (Saint Augustine said, and Wittgenstein quoted: ‘What is time? When I do not ask the question, I know the answer.’)

  Facing the four walls, Hogen in the centre. ‘Exhale.’ His voice blares. ‘Ex-hale. One exhalation. Nothing else. Here now. This is it.’

  We are supposed to be aware only of the breath, but again and again I discover that I am aware of the pulse in my body, in my joined legs and thumbs, and I tug my mind away to the breath – exhale – only to find that again…

  The question I might ask: in writing, am I weaving a veil for my own eyes and those of others? Is writing my path or an obstacle on it?

  ‘An emptiness under the mask,’ as the poem of George Seferis says…‘Under the mask an emptiness.’

  The meaning of the ‘other shore’:

  Mahaprajnaparamita is a Sanscrit term of the western country; in the T’ang language it means: great-wisdom-other-shore-reached.…What is Maha? Maha is great.…What is Prajna? Prajna is wisdom.…What is Paramita? The other shore reached.…To be attached to the objective world is to be attached to the cycle of living and dying, which is like the waves that rise in the sea; this is called: this shore.…When we detach ourselves from the objective world, there is neither death nor life and one is like water flowing incessantly; this is called: the other shore.

  Hui-neng, seventh-century Chinese patriarch, quoted – with ellipses – by Octavio Paz in The Bow and the Lyre from D.T. Suzuki’s Manual of Zen Buddhism: leaving out the elaborations has made the passage piercingly beautiful. Better than the original! Remember this.

  Another day, the fifth in succession, of this sultry heat, though today is overcast at least. Is it raining on the coast, is there a cold sea wind? Here now and then a gust of wind makes the trees move like waves breaking. The giant ferns even up here are yellowing, scorched.

  The Tibetan Geshe is opulent, a large flow of red-and-gold robes, an elm, a maple in autumn, a liquidambar. Hogen is dark, taut and grim; he sits like this wattle becalmed in heat.

  Mantra-running this morning along the fast brown water while a rooster crowed I saw among the tree ferns in the gully below the track a pool of milk. It must be a bend in the river. There is a white bridge. Not safe to climb down and look – there are sure to be snakes.

  ‘I do not think of my home. I have no home. No past. Here Now is all there is.’

  This afternoon five sticks of incense were burning, stuck in to the mesh of the fireguard. The air was sweaty, still, full of blowflies. The clock was a quarter of an hour slow: Hogen-san, who came in after this zazen began, in good faith kept us sitting on. Cows in the valley bellowed. Mu. Mu. The incense was ash-worms on the hearth. When he rang the bell we had been sitting for an hour. He was horrified when he was told – ‘And it is so hot here!’ – and had us lie down for his talk. Everything, he said, is Mu. Emptiness, Shunyata. We are empty bubbles on the water, forming, dissolving. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form: as in the Heart Sutra that we chant each day. The Prajnaparamita Sutra, the Wisdom of the Other Shore: Gate Gate… The mantra is the one that was engraved on the white stupa beside the gompa in Tasmania, but in Japanese the Sanscrit reads: Gya tei gya tei ha ra gya tei hara so gya tei bo ji sowa.

  Aye on the shores of darkness there is light.

  John Keats

  Heat radiates through the half-dark. All along the tracks blackberries grow thickly (none ripe), and ragwort, bracken, thistles. Cows amble on the slopes: Mu echoes back from the hills. Mu echoes all through the Heart Sutra. Gen kai nai shi mu i shiki kai mu mu myo yaku mu mu…

  The foghorn all night was the cows bellowing. Had their calves been taken away? I woke reminded of the night of the last day in the Captain’s house in Nea Rhoda in Halkidiki, when we thought war was about to be declared against Turkey – how in the evening cool, whimpering old women in black were trailing between the oleanders along the suddenly emptied, silent streets – silent but for the roars of cows sw
ollen with milk, whose owners were too sunk in despair to care. My sister-in-law went knocking on doors for milk for her two-year-old son and mine: after an hour she came home with a small jugful. In the half-light the cows bellowed…The other women stirred, crackling sheets. I tried to avert my mind from past and future, other times, other places, as Hogen-san insists. But in three weeks I will be forty-seven years old. ‘Be your age,’ was one of my mother’s sayings; am I being? With my life leading into ever deeper solitude, what if I’m unable to bear it?

  Be your age. Whenever she punished or scolded me I used to cry and threaten to do the same when she was a little girl and I was her mummy. Then you’ll laugh on the other side of your face! (Another of her sayings.) She laughed and said that would never happen, but I knew better. Wherever this idea came from, I persisted in it for a long time, only giving it up reluctantly and even then with a sort of lingering incredulity at the injustice of life. After her stroke in old age (she was sixty-three) she did turn into a child, a withered child – a parody of my real mother, and at the same time of the child that I had been. Truculent, hurt, hangdog: the quivering lower lip, the broken sentences, spurts of words and silences.

  At daybreak when the bell rang they were still bellowing. I saw them through the trees, on yellow paddocks and folds of the valley, as I ran along the water.

  I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream.

  Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being

  No chance to say goodbye to Hogen before I drove away into the noon sun. I never went to dokusan, I left my questions unasked. I thought of writing a few words of thanks, perhaps on a postcard of the black lighthouse. What would he make of a ‘black lighthouse’? – ‘Black light’? – whose light (as marked on old charts) is F(ixed), not Fl(ashing)? This man of light in black clothes. Was there snow on Fuji-san? But no, I won’t write. There was the good encounter. Only that. Over now, it is complete as it is.

  All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others…and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.