figures in somewhere along the line. If you can't get your mind into an altered state any other way, sleep deprivation will eventually do it for you, for deprived of dreams, the mind becomes psychotic.
Something like that happened to my mind two days before the monastic term ended. That afternoon I went storming into the roshi in a frenzy. Self-pity had long since become boring; that day I was in a rage. I was furious. What a way to treat human beings, I kept telling myself, and charged in to my roshi prepared, not just to throw in the towel, but to throw it straight at his face.
I entered the audience room with the required ritual, palms clasped together. Turning only straight corners because there are no diagonal shortcuts in Zen, I made my way to where he was sitting in his priestly robes. His short, heavy stick (for clobbering if need be) was lying in his lap. Sinking to my knees on the cushion before him, I touched my head to the floor and flexed my outstretched fingers upward, an Indian gesture that symbolizes lifting the dust from the Buddha's feet. Then I sat back on my heels, and our eyes met in a mutual glare. For some moments he said nothing, then, “How's it going?” He was one of the two roshis in the world then who could speak English. It sounded like a calculated taunt.
“Terrible!” I shouted.
“You think you are going to get sick, don't you?”
More taunting sarcasm, so I let him have it.
“Yes, I think I'm going to get sick!” I yelled. For several days my throat had been contracting to the point where I was having to labor to breathe.
Then something extraordinary happened. His face suddenly relaxed, its taunting, goading expression was gone, and with total matter-of-factness he said, “What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put both aside and go forward.”
What I despair of conveying to you is the impact those fifteen words had on me. Without reflecting for a moment, I found myself saying to myself, “By God, he's right!” How was he able to spin me around, defuse my rage, and return me to lucidity in a twinkling? I will never comprehend. Never have I felt so instantly reborn and energized. It was as if there was a pipe connecting his hara—his abdomen, where the Japanese locate the self's center—to mine. I exited in the prescribed manner, not only determined to stick out the two remaining days, but knowing that I could do so.
It didn't occur to me at the time that in that climactic moment I might have passed my koan, and I returned to the States assuming that I had not. But when I related my story to a dharma brother (someone with whom I'd undergone spiritual training) who had trained for twelve years under my roshi, he said he wasn't at all sure that I had not passed it. He reminded me that the answer to the early koans is not a rational proposition but an experience. That, at the climactic moment in my training, I was able not just to acknowledge the identity of life's opposites theoretically, but to experience their identity. In my case the identity of sickness and health struck him as a strong foretaste of the enlightenment experience.
BENEKE Therapists talk about interventions, which require a certain timing and art where the therapist picks just the right moment to say just the right thing that leads to insight. Your roshi intervened in just the right way.
SMITH Apparently so. It still seems to me like genius. He knew exactly where I was, and administered exactly the light tap—ping—that changed everything.
BENEKE Your early work focused on the historical religions, ones that have written texts and cumulative histories. At a certain point you came to appreciate oral traditions as well.
SMITH I now see that in addition to the three great families of historical religions—East Asian, South Asian, and Abrahamic, or Western—there is a fourth: the primal, tribal, and exclusively oral family which is not inferior to the other three. What enabled me to honor tribal peoples as our equals is that while writing adds, it also subtracts. We tend to think that because unlettered peoples only talk and we both talk and write, we have everything they have, and something in addition. I no longer think that it's true. Writing exacts a price, which is loss of the sense of what is important.
Visualize a tribe gathered around its campfire at the close of the day. Everything its ancestors learned the hard way, through generations of trial and error, from medicinal plants to the myths that empower their lives and give them meaning, is stored in their skulls, and there only. Obviously they are going to keep reviewing what is important for them, and let what is trivial fade into oblivion.
BENEKE Tell us about your encounter with the Masai warriors in Africa.
SMITH I was in Tanzania for a conference in the late 1960s and didn't want to leave without a glimpse of big game in its natural habitat. There were no tours, so I found a fly-by-night rental joint and took off in a rickety jalopy for the Serengeti Plain. There was no road map, but that was logical because as far as I could make out there were no roads. I did encounter one road sign during the day, but I couldn't read it, besides which it had fallen over, so I couldn't tell which way its arms pointed.
A couple of hours into the desert, it suddenly dawned on me that I was completely lost. And out of gas. When we rent a car here we assume the tank to be full. Not there. They give you about enough to get out of the lot, but I didn't know that and hadn't checked. At a total standstill, I could not think of a thing to do. The car was too hot to sit in, and there were no trees to shade me from the blistering sun. Giraffes were friendly; one virtually looked over my shoulder when I had had to change a threadbare tire. There were other animals, but at that hour no lions. Dry bones were everywhere, though—portents of my impending fate. I ate my packed lunch, started rationing my last bottle of water, and tried to think of a plan of action.
None had suggested itself when two figures appeared dimly on the horizon. I started toward them, but with every step I took, they retreated. I quickened my pace, making frantic gestures of distress, and they gradually slowed their pace to allow me to catch up with them. They were disconcertingly large and wore nothing but spears taller than themselves, and flapping cloths over their shoulders to ward off the sun somewhat.
What then could I do? I was in human company but without words to communicate. Something had to be done, so I seized one of them by the wrist and marched him to my dysfunctional car, his companion in tow. This seemed to amuse them, and why not? What had our move to a pile of metal accomplished?
The two of them conversed and then started to leave, but I seized my hostage's wrist again. Human beings were my only lifeline, and I wasn't going to let it be severed. More laughter and conversation between them, and then one of them started off while leaving his companion with me. When he returned he had in tow a small boy who knew a few words of English, such as hello, good-bye, and the like. So, pointing in different directions, I said, “School, school!”
He gave no signs of comprehension, but after more conversation, he and the man who had fetched him went off, leaving my hostage with me. In about an hour, the man returned with ten adult cohorts, and the sun set that evening on as bizarre a scene (I feel sure) as the Serengeti Plain had ever staged: a white man, seated in state at the wheel of his car steering, while twelve Masai warriors pushed him across the sands. My propellers were taking the experience as a great lark. Laughing and all talking simultaneously, they sounded like a flock of happy birds. My first thought was, Who listens? then immediately, Who cares? They were having such a great time.
Six miles across the plain they delivered me to the school I had asked for, which turned out to be Olduvai Gorge, where a decade or so earlier Louis and Mary Leakey [with their son Richard] discovered the tooth that “set the human race back a million years,” as the press reported their discovery. That encounter left me with a profound sense of human connectedness. There we were, as different in every way—ethnically,
