two top posts—head of the meditation hall and chief administrator of the monastery. The Thief manipulates the rotation, staying on as meditation hall chief for an additional six months while postponing his tenure as monastery administrator, since administration duties make the sesshin—arduous stints of weeklong sittings—impossible to attend. The switch enables him to sit six sesshin in succession. The monk with whom he rotates likes this setup just fine.
In the meditation hall, the Thief reigns supreme. In meditation he is colossal—austere, sublime, not to be messed with. When he cracks the wooden blocks to initiate the brief recess midway through the sittings, he releases himself from the full lotus position without use of his hands; his legs fly off the meditation platform, and in an exquisite unified movement he descends into his sandals and without a millisecond’s pause between landing and walking is exiting the hall. It seems not physically possible. The last inch of vertical descent to the floor is simultaneously the horizontal movement toward the doors, like the old Hertz rent-a-car commercial where the customer floats down into the driver’s seat of a suddenly moving car. My descents are less entertaining. My legs are killing me; my feet usually asleep and I cannot get my toes into my thongs. Since, to my relief, the monks have left me behind, filing across the long garden to the chanting hall or to the meal, I cheat, bending over and separating my big and second toe with my hands and then kicking the wall of the meditation platform to drive my toes past the bit of hard rubber that holds the foot onto the sandal. This achieved, I stumble after my brethren.
All of whom see I am a disaster in a Zen monastery. Every one of my talents means nothing here; the skills at which I am inept are constantly required. I cannot execute a single movement or task as the monastery bosses like. Dipping my cleaning rag into the bucket of icy water turns my hand into a paralyzed lobster. Racing to catch up with the monks who are meditating in the garden for the “night sitting,” I smash into the astonished master in the pitch black chanting hall, crashing the old fellow to the floor. The constant pain in my back, shoulders, and legs makes concentration in meditation impossible; I shift position constantly atop my cushions. One night the torture gets the better of me and I leave the hall and return to my room. None of this would be permitted any of the others. The Thief says nothing. Because I am beyond hope and he’s simply following the master’s request: “He’s come from far away. Welcome him”? From a faith that I will rise to the Zen demand in time?
Kafka writes that we are expelled from Paradise not merely because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge but because we have not yet eaten from the Tree of Life. The Thief gorges himself on that tree. He loves physical labor. Carpenters coming to the monastery from the outside world to make repairs receive affection and respect denied even the monks. In late July, when many of the monks return to their home temples, the Thief kicks into high gear to make up the slack, mopping, cutting wood, pruning the garden, raking the sand garden on joyous fire. His one break is after lunch, when he naps in a room across the kitchen from mine, elegant on his back, Paul Bunyan in repose. Shin’ichi Hisamatsu writes in Zen and the Fine Arts of the
Zen “Self-creative” arts . . . among which may be included even the appearance and gestures of a person who has attainted Awakening—the postures that appear when Zen is expressed in man. These may exist momentarily—at a particular time or on a particular occasion—and may vanish immediately after their appearance. Nevertheless, it seems to me that such postures or gestures are of incomparable interest. Rather than something carved in wood or cast in bronze, rather than the formal poses used in arts such as the theater, these naturally occurring expressions in Zen are far more basic.4
An eccentric friend from the sixties who curtailed his law career for bad poetry and psychedelic drugs had one inspired line: “Always honor your father and mother, for they gave you a free ticket to the greatest show on earth.” The Thief is the Show of Shows. The free admission comes at a price.
Zen monks beg in straw sandals that fail to cover my Western-size foot and a straw, cone-shaped lampshade of a hat that obscures enough of the face to ensure anonymity. Three days in ten the monks divide into packs of four and beg through the Kyoto streets. Thus far these groups have been of two types: those who reverse direction after an hour and a half to get back in time for lunch. Those who do not head back at halftime but continue away from the monastery and who tickle me by returning in a taxi out of the money we have just begged.
Today for the first time I have been named to the Thief’s ensemble. I follow at the end of the queue like a duck learning how to imprint on its mama, chanting the mandatory “Hooooo! Hooooo!” The Thief halts, telling the monk behind him to inform me that the chant is “Hooooo!” not “Wooooo!” I correct myself, but he stops several with the same reprimand. At the hour and thirty-minute mark, we rest, according to custom. Here the monks usually chat, smoke, and buy soft drinks. The Thief sits silently on a stone bench with his back rigid in meditative silence. His seriousness inhibits the others, who neither drink nor smoke nor talk. We rise, but he does not head back toward the temple, rather farther away. I assume we will return by cab, or at least by trolley. We return by foot, still far from the temple.
Eventually the Thief marches us into a wooded region that stretches along a shrine, for the first time this morning turning his head from face-front concentration to enjoy the blossoms on the trees. None of the other monks has ever walked among the trees; nor have I ever seen one admire a flower. I am happy to be “in nature,” especially having heard that the Thief likes to beg among alleys where there are barking dogs, to see if they will cower. Two days later there is a shooting pain in the part of my foot that protruded over the sandal. I writhe in my sleep over the next several days with what I think is a bruised heel. The monk in charge of the chanting hall, a true gentleman of six-foot-four and crazy for Beethoven, hears me groaning in the night and applies a plaster. This seems to ignite my foot in flames, and the following afternoon I am admitted for an emergency operation for blood poisoning—very dangerous, the doctor tells the master by phone—and a ten-day stay in the hospital.
Aside from the fact that it wipes out my savings, the hospital is a vacation: My Japanese improves; a pretty nurse comes to my room every night to confess agony over which of two boys she should choose as her husband; I become friends with the patient in the bed next to mine, who annoys me at first because he wears a woman’s stocking on one leg. The nurse tells me that the sickness in his leg has kept him out of work for months and that he cannot support his family. On the day of my discharge, this man supports me with his shoulder into the elevator, through the lobby, then down long flights of stone stairs as I exit the hospital grounds; tears roll down my face at the distance between his troubles and mine, his humanity and mine.
At the monastery I am useless, unable to work or sit. I am losing weight by the week, 107 pounds and counting. I decide to move to a room a hundred meters outside the monastery grounds.
The day before I’m to leave, while raking the sand garden, a monk approaches with a request: For the next three days, the monks will be traveling to the mountains to cut lumber; the Thief would like to know if I’d be willing to postpone my departure so there will be, in their absence, someone to receive visitors to the monastery. Of course I agree. That afternoon when I pass him, the Thief smiles at me for the first time.
Four days later, hearing the monks chanting outside the main gate to mark their return, I hobble to the entrance on my bandaged foot and prostrate myself in thanks for their labors, a ritual I’ve seen the chief cook, who is exempted from the begging tours in order to prepare lunch, do countless times. The Thief grins broadly, and whenever he sees me through the course of the day (never directly, always through another monk), he thanks, in English, “Mister Steven” for manning the monastery. On the morning of my departure, the door to my room slides open. Never before has the Thief sought me out. His face is deadly determined, and though he says nothing,
