gestures so insignificant could be The Absolute. If he felt my presence, he would turn and look at me as if I were nuts. Yet his actions said what the headless torso of the statue of Apollo demanded of Rilke: “You must change your life.”
That he could negate another’s existence while brushing his teeth would not have entered his mind. I watched his mop ballet along the monastery corridor, one mop per hand. I watched him veer round and with total nonchalance ax one log after another immaculately down the center, though I later learned he had bad eyes. I watched him in one seamless thrust slip out of his sandals, hoist himself onto the sitting platform, form his legs into the full lotus position without using his hands, and with one flick of his fingers crease his robe and kimono under his knees and descend into meditation. The other monks in the monastery, as they headed toward the daily interviews with the master, leaked subservience, doubt. When he struck the mallet against the epicenter of the gong and strode toward the master’s chamber, his movements alone said: “I’m coming! Be warned!” I have never gotten over his moving, or his stillness. He made visible, casual as a tossed peel, what I have sought the entirety of my adult life: an act that disclosed, as his did, the beginningless, endless life-death force that is infinity.
The Thief is wild about meditation. This is a problem each evening when I enter the meditation hall. All the other meditation hall chiefs I have known arrive last, a minute before they are obliged to ring the bell that begins the evening sittings. The Thief arrives first, sitting alone in the empty hall long before any of the monks enter.
There are rules in the meditation hall—lots of rules—and there are customs. That the hall chief is entitled to arrive last, after all the other monks are settled on their cushions, is one of the customs. That everyone who enters the hall, before proceeding to his own cushions, must walk to a specified spot on the floor two meters away from the chief monk’s sitting platform and bow before his cushions is one of the rules. This bow is mostly an empty gesture executed before empty cushions, since all the monks who later succeed him as chief do everything possible to reduce the time they have to spend meditating and invariably avail themselves of the prerogative of arriving last. Not the Thief. When I enter the darkening hall, hard rubber sandals slapping against the stone floor as I advance to make my bow, he is already seated, a mighty presence lost to the world.
Well . . . not quite lost, and this is the difficulty. The Thief has the unnerving talent of wearing two faces concurrently while he sits atop his cushions. Face one shows him utterly gone, so remote from the hall he couldn’t care less about me and my puny meditation. Face two glowers at me the moment I am in his field of vision and cuts me to shreds. Even when my upper torso is parallel to the floor I feel his glance crushing me with my unfreedom. Any doubts about this are dispelled the instant I raise my trunk and confront his eyes boring without mercy, cool and mocking, into mine. Yet never can I shake the suspicion that this is all a mask, that the Thief is too absorbed with what made him quit teaching school and become a monk to be bothered with the likes of me. The first face says: “You’ve got that right!” The second face, the one I would like to dismiss as a mask, winks (without moving an eye) and says: “You didn’t come thousands of miles to a Zen monastery to bullshit yourself, did you?”
The Thief does not care about my love life, or what books I have read, or if my Japanese is coming along. He terminates me at a single point, always the same point, the point where I attempt to live. If our eyes never met again he would not give me another thought. Since they do, he forms himself into a koan that I can avert only by awakening to the Zen Self or by keeping the hell away.
I can, of course, circumvent him by entering the meditation hall before he does, forty-five minutes before the official start. That would lengthen immensely the longest, most excruciating sitting period of the day. The evening sitting begins with close to an hour of meditation to ready the monks for their one-on-one interviews with the master. I do not yet attend this interview because of my rotten Japanese. While the monks bring answers to their koan to their teacher, I remain in the hall, legs and back pleading in pain as they file back one by one. To add fifty minutes to this agony to evade the Thief’s face for a few seconds—honestly, it’s a toss-up.
The Thief would not like it if I divulged his name. He is steep and you do not scale him. You may love and fear him as I do, or dislike him as I have heard some of the other monks do—those who have come to the monastery merely to qualify for the license that will enable them to take over their fathers’ temples—but he is a precipice that you do not scale. It is hard to conceive that I am thirty years older now than he was then. The uncontrived manliness, the eternal maturity are one in a billion. Beside him the other monks seemed like green kids. These days he is a master. With no disciples, so far as anyone I know is aware. The last time I saw him, in one of our very rare conversations, he told me: “Being a monastery master wasn’t for me.”
He is one of those singular persons you can still find in Japan (in America and Europe I have met only one): a man who without use of the slightest physical force can stop your life in its tracks. This is the crux of the whole thing. It has nothing to do with rules and customs or even glances. Line up every other monk in the monastery and force me to bow to them before heading to my cushions in the meditation hall; let them all glare into my bones—it would mean nothing beyond the trouble any boss can cause. By contrast, imagine that the Thief altered his custom and began coming to the meditation hall last. I would already be hoisted onto the sitting platform with legs crossed. He would stride into the hall. I would see only his back. He would hop onto his cushions and ring the opening bell without giving me a look. There’d be no ray of negation from his eyes. There’d be no intimidation. His answer would still be NO!
“No, what?” you will naturally ask. But it is simply no. Absolute no in the foundations of my being, absolute insufficiency for living or dying.
He knows it. And I know it.
In The Gateless Barrier, when his master tests Keizan’s awakening with the koan “What is the Tao?” the latter answers: “A jet-black ball speeding through the dark night.” That’s the Thief. He explodes out of each step like a thunderclap as he strides toward his cushions across the meditation hall, kimono sleeves cracking the Void. I’m sure he has no idea how.
Palpable threat emanates from his acts. It is cosmic, not moral, energy that pours through him; Zen’s Original Face prior to the duality of good and evil. The Thief is an excellent man. But it is clear, as with the great Tang master Lin-chi, that the good is but one ray of his force and cannot exhaust him. The monk Bunko tells me that Zen master Eikido killed two monks accidentally with blows of his staff. It may be a blessing that the Thief has no disciples.
When I say this to my friend Mrs. Maeda years later, she says: “My experience is completely different.” She assures me that if I were the Thief’s disciple (I am always searching for a way) he would not break me. She never denies my assertions of his ferocity, but her experience is different.
The Thief, you see, is a playful man. I have known this myself from the outset, when I observed him (I observe him whenever possible) with the monk Jun, his best friend in the monastery. They are never serious together. After the two of them have “graduated” the monastery and Jun joins him for one of the seven-day intensive meditation retreats, they disappear on the sixth night, rumor has it to get drunk. He clowns with Dr. Ebuchi, the sixty-year-old lay Buddhist who lives in the monastery and is the master’s only pal. I have heard that he once squirted the master with a hose. My monk friend Saburi-san tells me that when someone told the Thief he had spotted him at some clerical function, he replied: “If it was a bald, middle-aged monk, the ass was me.”
