By the bell tower I run into Saburi-san, the master’s attendant and the most brilliant of the monks—he speaks English and French fluently and was living in Paris, addicted to French cinema, until his father died of lung cancer and he was forced to return home and enter the monastery to obtain the requisite license to succeed him.
“The Thief’s are the most beautiful human acts I have ever seen,” I say.
He responds by telling me of a water fight the Thief started in the monastery kitchen when Saburi first came.
“Do you think he’s this way because of what he learned from Zen?” I ask.
“Oh, he’s just that kind of guy.” He adds that the Thief once told him: “Hito no koto kamawahen”—“I pay no mind to what others think and do.”
I remember this years later when, taking an American who had somehow gotten hold of my phone number for a tour of the Kyoto sights, I run into Toga-san, director monk of the Institute for Zen Studies, standing contently by the front gate of his temple home on the grounds of Tenryūji Monastery. Warm as ever, he invites us into his beautiful modern kitchen for cakes and tea. “Isn’t [the Thief’s] temple affiliated with Tenryūji?” I ask.
“Yes. His temple has many buildings.” With a mischievous glint he adds: “He likes to burn things.”
The Thief’s handsome looks, it seems, are partly an inheritance from his mother, a wonderful character, from what I’ve heard. To a monk who accompanied the Thief on a visit back home she is said to have confided: “I was so pretty that I decided to travel to Tokyo to see how I compared to the women there. I walked the Tokyo shops and streets, increasingly cocky that none of them could touch me. I wandered into a department store. A gorgeous woman in a kimono appeared. Furious, I headed toward her and a few feet from the mirror realized: ‘Oh, it’s me.’”
Grueling as they are, after a year, sesshin have ceased to press me to the edge of myself. Meditating hours a day brings thrills that are addictive. An American psychologist who had spent a year in the same monastery and was revisiting briefly just as I arrived for my first stay told me: “It’s disappointing to endure a week of sesshin and not reach a deeper state of meditation than you achieved the sesshin before.” I know that feeling—it’s a trap. All states of meditation are ephemeral. DeMartino warned repeatedly that enlightenment is not a state. What Yung-chia said in the seventh century about meritorious acts as a means to enlightenment applies to states of meditation: “Like shooting an arrow against the sky. When the force is exhausted the arrow falls on the ground.”7
So failed sesshin by failed sesshin, I seal off my escape paths: no more naps; sit through the rest periods; all periods to be sat in the full lotus; sit two periods consecutively without moving; do try not to talk so much during the breaks. And to my amazement—though it solves nothing—the monks are off begging and I’m sitting in the meditation hall alone with the Thief almost nonstop until lunch. A half dozen monks who sleep upright through the pitch black meditation periods in the predawn are whacked repeatedly for dozing during the evening sittings, while I—bumbling as ever—grin into the night on my cushions, the full moon stuffed into my brain.
At the November sesshin, I’m lounging on the cement, hoarding a half hour of the scarce warm sun in front of Dr. Ebuchi’s room. Shin-san, a bespectacled young monk who says he can justify being a priest only if he’s useful to society—a rare sentiment among the monks I know—bows before me. I jump to my feet and return the bow.
“[The Thief] wants to know: In your meditation, do you reach the point where there is nothing whatsoever?”
“Not yet,” I say. Shin-san bows and departs.
Several minutes later he’s back: “[The Thief] wants to know: Do you ever feel energy running through your body, in the lower abdomen especially?”
“Most of the time.”
He bows and departs. Seven, eight minutes pass and Shin-san is hurrying toward me. He bows. I bow. “[The Thief] wants you never to forget: When you reach the point where there is nothing whatsoever, do not mistake it for enlightenment. It is only the gate.”
When I return to the monastery for the evening meditation after the three-day break following the sesshin, the Thief, who invariably departs for his home temple at its conclusion, is sitting on his cushions. He has moved back into the monastery to finish up his koan training under the master. Dr. Ebuchi has hung a curtain down the length of his closet-size room; he on one side, the Thief on the other—space for a sleeping body and little else in their shared quarters. I marvel at Dr. Ebuchi, a medical doctor and psychiatrist already past sixty. Stricken with nervous and physical disorders earlier in life, he toughs it out in the monastery year after year, reading and writing about his beloved Morita therapy—a psychotherapy for anxiety-based illness loosely influenced by Zen—on the overturned crate that, apart from a small desk lamp, is his sole item of furniture.
Not surprisingly, the imminent completion of the Thief’s formal training triggers talk of the master’s successor. For me the Thief is a far greater Zen personality than the master, a thought I cannot reveal. I have heard that the master does not like the Thief. Yet the master has given his official sanction to the monk X-san, which bewilders me. For the first months of my second stay, X-san, who has graduated from official monastic positions but has not yet left the monastery, sits alone with me for the five-minute interval that begins when the monks file out of the meditation hall for the daily koan interviews and ends when the current chief monk—the first to bring his answer to the koan before the master—reappears. The instant the monks are gone, X-san quits meditating, cracking his knuckles and neck and stretching his long arms and legs, ever careful to pop back into formal meditation posture as soon as the returning chief monk’s footsteps can be heard. Sixty seconds later, when the chief has resumed sitting, X-san jumps down from his cushions for his turn at an interview. Later, through the master’s influence, X-san is made master of a monastery in western Japan.
Ko-san, the current top monk, is rumored as possible successor; the master is fond of him, it is said. My strongest impression of Ko-san was during my first tenure at the monastery, when I joined the monks for a day of work at the honzan, the building two hundred meters from the monks’ training hall in the same temple complex and where important ceremonies are convened. As I carried some red lacquer trays into the kitchen, Ko-san, then still a rookie, flashed the centerfold of a soft porn magazine my way and in enthusiastic Japlish exclaimed: “Nudo!” He was older now, too fond of his authority, and said to be attracted to koan study, though an extra minute of meditation is never to be observed. It’s hard not to notice that when one of his co-leaders graduates from the monastery, the monk newly promoted to the number-two spot is made meditation hall chief, while Ko-san, whose turn it is to rotate back to that post, continues for another six months exempted from sesshin as chief monastery administrator.
The most striking remark on the topic of the master’s successor is from Tanemura-san, my closest friend among the laymen. Sensitive and brilliant, he reads Martin Heidegger in English “because it’s clearer than when I read him in Japanese” and can render any single Japanese word into English, though he won’t utter an English sentence. He says: “If [the Thief] is passed over, it’ll be time to look for another place to train.”