When the driver protested, the Thief countered: “It was extremely urgent that I arrive not too early, not too late. You have gotten to the exact spot at the exact time,” and he forced the money into his hand.
So it is not surprising that Mrs. Maeda sees an aspect of him that I never will. The first time they met, he came to the Institute for Zen Studies, where she works as an editor and librarian, to track down a book that the founder of his temple had written. When the book could not be found, he said: “Sit down and let’s talk.” They spoke for the next two hours and have been talking ever since.
The Thief and I will never talk two hours. Until the very last time I spoke with him, our direct conversations were three: two lasting a few seconds, one of five minutes when I was about to begin the daily interviews with the master and he decided that it was time to give me some advice. On all other occasions, he spoke to me through other monks.
Unless the nature of their relationship has changed—this could only occur at Mrs. Maeda’s request—the Thief hides the negating force and lifts her high. I had told her of the gorgeousness of his movements for years. After their second meeting I received a letter from her: “Last week he came to the Institute. I said: ‘It’s cold in the library. Do your work in my office by the heater.’ We talked over coffee. I have never seen anyone drink coffee so beautifully in my life.” The Thief comes to her institute once a month. She says it is the day she most looks forward to, and she marks it on her calendar. “I’ve seen hundreds of monks enter and leave this place,” she tells me. “No one even comes close [to him as a Zen presence].” Our judgment is identical, though we know him at opposite ends of his personality.
When I hear Mrs. Maeda describe her relationship with the Thief, I think I too would like to be his friend. This is impossible. Once I entered the monastery, however inept, I forfeited the right to be treated as an ordinary civilian. I know this because down to 107 pounds and following a bout of blood poisoning, when it became clear that my living inside the monastery was coming to an end, he began to relate to me in a different way, smiling, referring to me, for the first time, by name—”Mister Steven”—though always speaking to me through a third person even when standing a few feet away.
When I arrived at the monastery, the master decided I should live not in the meditation hall but in a tiny room by the kitchen. When I had no duties, I was to stay there. One night there was no meditation. I was in my room when the monk Bunko slid open my door. The Thief had sent him to fetch me. I trailed Bunko to the part of the temple where we had our heads shaved to find a small, elegantly laid-out buffet. The food was set out on newspaper that had been spread over the tatami flooring. The Thief was chatting with Dr. Ebuchi. Neither acknowledged my arrival.
I was happy to be awarded this rare reprieve from what had become my cell. Silently, I sat among the three others: the gentle Bunko (the only monk to consistently seek me out to make sure I was okay); Dr. Ebuchi, who once, near-dead with tuberculosis, saved his own life—he is convinced—by escaping from the clinic where the patients in the surrounding beds had died; the Thief: relaxed, off-duty, even so the majestic mountain barely concealing an infinite crevasse. After several minutes I reached with my chopsticks for my first bite—a neatly cut square of tofu—lifted it, and dropped it. The Thief turned to Bunko, said nonchalantly: “Tell him to return to his room,” turned back to Dr. Ebuchi, and resumed their conversation where he’d left off.
This was our first personal exchange. He had said to me, in effect: “Reality isn’t just what is. It contains an ought, a demand. The Zen world requires you to meet that demand. It’s called true Self. Better luck next time.”
Both my failure and his reproof mean little, forgotten by him, no doubt, by the time I exited the room and by me soon after. I’ll never learn to use chopsticks well, but even if I’d lifted the tofu neatly into my mouth and been permitted to remain at the “party,” the answer would still be “No!” The Thief’s power to press me to the wall has at bottom nothing to do with his judgment of me. The real danger he poses he has no control over: an inadvertent murderousness that resides in his core, inextricable from his beauty. Lethality and beauty as a co-presence in more than a few great monks goes to the heart of Zen, and some scholar of religion should study it. Rilke had a sense of it when he wrote in the first Duino Elegy: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us.” Or just look at the painting of the Tang master Lin-chi by Soga Jasoku meditating with a scowl, hand clenched in a fist. Zen people call its severity “grandmotherly compassion.” It’s that. But it’s more than that: the “Great Death” or “total negation” Lin-chi celebrated in his famous proclamation shortly after his enlightenment: “Everywhere else the dead are cremated, but here I bury them alive at once.”3
The monk Bunko, after fifty years one of the deepest meditators in Japan, tells me: “Zen is to become one with nature.” I reply: “Nature kills ten thousand people in thirty seconds in an earthquake.” He says: “One must become one with good nature.” It doesn’t work that way. The Thief is the tornado, not just the stilled breeze. This is part of his enigma: He is a figure of extreme power, yet the power is not in the end his but that which forms him and which he makes visible with beautiful acts. He isn’t simply compassion. The Thief, as was Lin-chi, is a scythe. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes despite himself. Thor creates with a hammer.
My first night in the monastery an incomprehensible jabbering in Japanese pulled me to my tiny window. The monk indicated with his finger that I was to wait; a minute later he slid open the door to my room and hopped up onto the tatami, closing the door behind him. Muttering repeatedly “Eigo dame”—”My English stinks,” he dropped onto his butt and produced from the hanging sleeves of his work clothes two donuts, one of which he shoved in my direction with the utmost warmth. When I shook my head in refusal, he placed it on the floor, biting joyfully into the other donut and dripping jelly all over the tatami. He was so friendly that I couldn’t be angry, but I’d been told to keep my room spotless and had no idea where to find a rag or a broom. He chatted away between dripping bites, rubbing his shaved head in perplexity at each of my attempts to communicate. Midway through the first donut, he picked up the second, biting them alternately with delight. As soon as he finished, he sat up on his shins and bowed a full prostration in the formal Zen style, head touching palms that he’d pressed to the floor, leaving fingerprints of jelly on the tatami and departing through the sliding door.
This was Chu-san, a babbling Harpo Marx. Rules were not for him, but he was divested of all ill will. One morning as I emerged from sweeping behind the bell tower, the Thief tore into him in front of the other monks. It was a mighty lashing, and Chu-san began to cry.
Later that day, Bunko, as was his custom during the break between lunch and the afternoon work detail, hid himself in the storage space behind my room. Here he would sneak in extra meditation out of view of the several monks who mocked him for meditating more than he had to, or read from the pile of old Zen journals about the great masters from the past. As always he asked about my sitting. I said: “Seeing the chief monk bawl out Chu-san this morning was hard to endure. If the scolding were out of love, I could accept it.” I said this less from empathy than from fear that the Thief would rip me to shreds in the same way.
“The chief loves Chu-san, all right. Before he became a monk, he taught in a school for students who are mentally disabled. Chu-san was one of his students. The chief monk brought him here.”
The
