That evening, when I walked the half block from my newly rented room and entered the meditation hall, the Thief was sitting alone. It was mid-August, many monks were still on summer break, and there was no required sitting for those who remained. Each evening for the next few weeks, the Thief sat “unmovable, like a mountain,” as Shin’ichi Hisamatsu’s fabulous calligraphy puts it, while I squirmed through the five sitting periods from my new spot on the laymen’s side of the meditation hall. When the last sitting ended, before I could slip into my street shoes for the walk back home, the Thief would come charging out of the meditation hall, cushions under his arm, speeding toward the stone veranda overlooking the garden and a solitary bout of night sitting.
A half hour prior to that, each evening at 8:30, there’d be a ten-minute break before a final brief meditation, at the end of which Bunko, presently the cook, gonged the bell from the high tower just outside the monastery walls and sang the closing chant of the day. During one of these recesses, as I returned from trying to walk the pains out of my legs, the Thief was waiting for me as I stepped back into the meditation hall. “You can return home at the break.” The entirety of my first stay in Japan, his only direct words to me.
No doubt he thought I was struggling enough and that there was not much to be gained by my sitting out a last fifteen minutes. “I’ll sit through to the end,” I said. He pressed his palms together, bowed slightly, and proceeded to his cushions. I could tell he was pleased.
But as the cold set in, I knew I had had it. My money was gone; I’d lost thirty-three pounds from an initially skinny frame, and though the Zen saying goes: “When pressed to the extremity, there is a breakthrough,” I was inwardly too young to have the courage not to retreat. I made a plan. I would return to America, regain my health and the illusion of equanimity that familiar circumstances and friends bring, replenish my finances, and come back to Japan.
The day before I flew off on a flight of Christian missionaries, where a young American in the adjoining seat proudly informed me that he spoke in tongues and had just spent a week in Taiwan ascertaining that Christianity was superior to Asian religions, I walked through the monastery gate to say goodbye to the master. He gave me two calligraphies and bid me to take care. When I tied my shoes and stepped out of the foyer, I was intercepted by Do-san, a monk my age who would say to me in English: “Japanese language very easy; even two-year-old child can speak it.” I was about to thank him for all his kindness, but he broke in first: “The chief monk says to you: ‘Please live in this monastery again.’”
ROUND TWO (1976–1979, 1987): SPLIT DECISION
Three years of experiences—including a rifle against my head at 4 a.m. in Hillbilly Land that I thought was the last of me—interrupt my first two stays in Japan. But Richard DeMartino, the great professor who drew me to Zen, says you cannot learn from experience. He means that what is time bound, what has beginning and an end, resolves nothing. That’s why I am back in Kyoto. Although when I told DeMartino prior to my first trip that I wanted to study Zen in Japan, he said: “Don’t make the problem geographical,” and he’s right about that too. The problem of being an “I” can be solved neither by moving forward in time nor laterally in space but by casting off time and space.
The Thief sits, hard as marble gone as mist, across the stone floor from my place on the laymen’s side of the meditation hall, in the row reserved for monks who have graduated the monastery but wish to continue their training. In other words, he sits alone. He is now chief priest of a temple in the mountains, returning to the monastery only for the weeklong periods of intense meditation—the sesshin. He is nonetheless unchallenged king of the hall; thief by nature, he steals the job out from under the current chief monk, though he has no wish to and never utters a word.
During walking meditation, if he walks slowly, the monks, including the chief monk, slow. If he picks up the pace, all pick up the pace. He ignites the meditation hall with a power that he cannot conceal, thunderous in his solitude, the living incarnation of the monk Hsiu, who in Hsueh-Yen’s memoir from Whips for Breaking through the Zen Barrier,
kept sitting on his cushion like a solid bar of iron; I wanted to have a talk with him, but he was forbidding. . . . One day I happened to meet Hsiu in the corridor, and for the first time I could have a talk with him. I asked, “Why was it you avoided me so much last year when I wished to talk to you?” He said: “An earnest student of Zen begrudges even the time to trim his nails; how much more the time wasted in conversation with others!”6
I’ve concocted a new strategy this second time around: renting a room a ten-minute walk from the monastery until my monk friend Saburi-san invites me to live in his temple on the monastery grounds for a pittance; three hours meditation with the monks each evening; living in the monastery one week per month for the sesshin. The master agrees.
As usual, I’m stumbling. I can’t function in the cold, and the meditation hall—windows open and following rules established in Tang Dynasty China when the technology didn’t exist—forbids artificial heat. Two goose down sleeping bags, one inside the other, and still I’m too frozen to conk out. Unable to sleep, I eventually have to pee, and four times in the ensuing years—trying to slide open the paper-paneled door that will take me out of the meditation hall to the outdoor, flush-less urinals—my groping hand pierces through the rice paper. Back inside in the pitch dark, I misjudge the location of my futon; climbing up onto the meditation platform, I step on the chest of the layman sleeping in the spot next to mine, who says, in politest Japanese: “It’s me.” The hard rubber that secures my feet into the sandals the monks have lent me for use in the meditation hall cuts my toes to shreds, making the walking meditation agony. When the cuts become visible, I wrap Band-Aids around my toes to buffer them from the rubber. Invariably one of the laymen, on his way back from the latrine, mistakenly swipes my sandals, since every pair looks identical. Forced into the pair he mistakenly leaves behind, my feet are cut in new places. With socks prohibited, and wearing Western-style trousers, my soles are raw with chilblains. The meditating monks cover their feet with their robes; the half dozen laymen wear hakama skirts; Dr. Ebuchi—the master’s best friend and specially privileged because of his age—has me salivating over his thick woolen socks and gloves.
One of the laymen, a young medical student, suggests that I buy a hakama skirt. “You can buy a used one cheap at the monthly flea market at the Kitano shrine.” I’m thrilled at the bargain—a paltry five hundred yen (and five hundred more for a kimono). The first time I put it to use, in the January sesshin, lowering into a bow behind my sitting cushions before the opening sitting period, I stand on the hem and hear it rip the length of my rear. Saburi-san, the master’s attendant and thus exempt from the sesshin, kindly sews it. I hasten back to the meditation hall and at the next bow promptly tear it again, have it sewn again, and tear it again and am forced back into my jeans.
The medical student advises me to buy a hakama like his: used for kendō (the Way of the Sword) and tear-proof—he swears—no matter how much I trample on it. He writes down the address of the kendō supplies shop. The one I purchase differs from the ordinary hakama in that it is divided in two, like culottes, one slot for each leg. Next sesshin, in my flea market kimono and new hakama, I move stiff as the tin man from The Wizard of Oz, but my feet are covered and the heat pocket created by the hakama enables me to cut down from eight layers, including two sweaters and a down vest, to five. Between the first and second sittings I switch position. Unbeknownst to me, I manage to get both left and right legs into the left slot. I sit fiercely as I can. The smashing of wooden blocks announces the walking meditation. The monks jump from the sitting platform into their sandals. I do the same and fall crashing onto the stone floor, both feet caught in the crotch of my hakama in which there is, as the medical student promised, not a tear.
I am the physically delicate one in every monastery I’ve ever set foot in. All the monks suffer, but insofar as I can tell from every visible sign, not as I suffer. They execute the monastic tasks (apart from the solutions to their koan) with ease; they beg through downpours and occasional snow in thin straw sandals and soaked feet with lightheartedness, even cheer. Each