By this point I was completely flummoxed. “Am I not a ‘living being’ with a ‘personality’?” I wondered. And how could the arhat, a self-described “arbitrary concept,” know that he didn’t exist? I returned again and again to this maddening quandary over the coming months, since I hungered not merely for a meaningful existence, but one full to bursting with permanent happiness—getting “back to the garden,” as a song of the time put it. If I were content to settle for an empty-nothing of a life, I might just as well smoke dope, drop acid, guzzle beer, and be done with all the rigors of Zen practice. As a final source of confoundment in all this, one day while thumbing through a collection of ancient koans I came across the following: “If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him!”
First “no-self.” Then “emptiness” and “nothingness.” Now an exhortation to murder. And here I had embarked upon the Eightfold Path as a portal into unending bliss and contentment.
•••
Katsuki Sekida (1893–1980), author of Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy, as well as several other books on Zen, was a Japanese layman who had trained for many years at a monastery in Japan and who came to live and teach at Koko An and Maui Zendo beginning in the late 1960s. A tiny man with a tiny voice, he nevertheless had an aspect of steel about him, particularly in the military precision of his kinhin (walking meditation) where he would pivot sentry-like on his toes whenever he reached a corner of the zendo. But he also had a softer side that manifested itself in the deep concern and compassion he seemed to have for all of us, as if he might, by some act of the will, propel us into deeper spiritual understanding. He told us repeatedly the story of how, as a young child, he would often fall asleep at night, only to be reawakened by the sound of his own voice crying out, “You will die someday!!” It was primarily this recurrent nightmare that had drawn him to Zen, he told us, and I was reminded of two of my own nightmares. In one of them I am about to be run over by my father’s bowling ball careening down an alley that I am on the opposite side of. In the other, I am standing in front of a mysterious barn-door, sure that I am about to be annihilated by demons.
Mr. Sekida placed the utmost emphasis on the absorbed meditation state of samadhi, the pinnacle of which, he elaborated, was “absolute samadhi,” a state of absorption so profoundly calm and self-contained that one only needs to breathe two or three times per minute. He added that, in addition to the mind’s virtual steel-trap impenetrability while in that state, the very fabric of one’s skin tightens as well, becoming so impregnable that not even a mosquito can penetrate it. He would continue on in these lectures about how a person, after emerging from absolute samadhi, could then perceive the world afresh with what he termed “naked eyes,” that is to say, a world washed completely free of egoistic overlay and projection.
When he delivered these talks, he kept his eyes tightly shut, and he would enter into a kind of samadhi even while speaking. Mr. Sekida’s normally tiny voice would become strikingly powerful for one so diminutive in stature, rising to high alto range at first and suddenly descending into a growling baritone when he was making a particularly important point about absolute samadhi. Samadhi was a state that was fast becoming the yin complement and counterpart to the yang desire for kensho in my Zen practice.
My ears pricked up one evening when he spoke about a Zen phenomenon known as joriki (“samadhi power”), since I had been noticing that when I sat in meditation for extended periods, my head would often throb in what I mentally dubbed “samadhi headaches.” From what Mr. Sekida was saying, it appeared that the psychic force generated in the form of joriki was the probable cause of the sensation. He also said that joriki is a precursor to another phenomenon known as makyo, or hallucinations, which are themselves encouraging signs that the ego is relinquishing its death-grip and that one is edging closer to kensho. Sure enough, I would sometimes feel as though I were elongating on my zafu through the Koko An roof, while flickering, psychedelic lights swirled around in my throbbing, joriki-charged head like the Aurora Borealis. The “Big K” can’t be far off, I thought eagerly, not with auspicious “signs” like these.
At times the pressure in my head when I sat would become almost painful, and I thus began practicing a joriki-control technique that had originated with the eighteenth-century Japanese abbot Hakuin Zenji (zenji is an honorific title given to a handful of revered historical figures in Zen). In Hakuin’s technique, one imagines that a cake of incense is slowly melting from the top of the head down over the ears, neck, shoulders—all the way down to one’s tanden, or center of spiritual energy, a point about two inches below the navel. One is ultimately “immersed” in imaginary liquid incense at the end of the exercise, and through multiple applications of it I was indeed able to distribute the joriki evenly throughout body and mind and to quell my annoying “samadhi headaches.”
With Hakuin’s guided imagery now the first part of each of my sitting periods, the depth and clarity of my samadhi increased by leaps and bounds, and I got better and better able to let go of most thoughts before they could stick to the flypaper of my mind. Even my chronic preoccupation with a spiritual image fell away when I was deep in this state—but it would always reassert itself when I got up off my zafu and reflexively congratulated myself for my egolessness. Even so, I now had, in the form of absolute samadhi, a daily goal for my zazen, one that went hand-in-glove with my quest for daigo-tettei, or Great Enlightenment.
•••
One morning I came downstairs from the men’s dormitory to find a tall, thin, bespectacled man with a scramble of brown hair and a graying goatee, fifty years of age maybe, peering as if transfixed into the glass eyes of the Bodhidharma statue on the altar. Thinking he might be a visitor, I asked if I might be of assistance.
“I’m Bob Aitken,” he replied. “Are you living here now?”
I replied that I was and introduced myself. He went on to say that he had come over from Maui Zendo (another arm of the Diamond Sangha) where he lived and would be spending several days at Koko An. I had finally met the founder of the Diamond Sangha, a man who had studied with the legendary Zen master Yasutani Roshi. He had an air of almost British reserve about him—clearly, a born introvert. With his faded Hawaiian shirt and slacks cinched about his waist with a cloth belt, it was equally clear that he was a member of the counterculture, at least insofar as his manner of dress indicated. I had heard from others at the zendo that he suffered from asthma and numerous allergies, and, indeed, he coughed deeply several times during our short conversation.
I had also heard from sangha members that he had married into money but had renounced all the bourgeois comforts of wealth, since he was a dyed-in-the-wool leftist. I learned first-hand about this facet of his makeup in the talk he gave the day after his arrival. In this talk he evinced a palpable contempt for the value of individualism that runs through American society and culture, especially as it is embodied in capitalism. “A Buddhist must be a radical!” he declared in a tone of categorical pronouncement toward the end, and he concluded by exhorting us at Koko An to move beyond what he termed the “self-indulgent sentimentality” of merely feeling sorry for the less fortunate and into deeply committed social activism. These were themes he would return to again and again whenever he stayed at Koko An. And despite the fact that my own mind-set at the time was thoroughly socialistic and countercultural, his almost exclusively socio-political focus struck me as being insufficiently concerned with such overarching issues as samadhi and kensho, especially coming from a Zen teacher, which I took him to be, although that status for him actually lay several years down the line.
One of the fascinations of several starry-eyed Koko An residents, myself included, was the so-called “Thirty-Two Marks of a Buddha” of early Indian Buddhist lore. These were alleged to be actual physical signs of deep enlightenment that ranged improbably from “wheels on the soles of his feet” to “eyelashes like a cow’s” and to “male organs concealed within a sheath,” as described in Meher McArthur’s Reading Buddhist Art. Buying into this claptrap totally, we had all sorts of preposterous expectations as to what qualities characterized a true Zen teacher, and we were in no position to judge anyone, let alone Bob Aitken. Nevertheless, one of these expectations, or Bob’s alleged deficiency in meeting it, was expressed at breakfast