One of the laymen, a young medical student, suggests that I buy a hakama skirt. “You can buy a used one cheap at the monthly flea market at the Kitano shrine.” I’m thrilled at the bargain—a paltry five hundred yen (and five hundred more for a kimono). The first time I put it to use, in the January sesshin, lowering into a bow behind my sitting cushions before the opening sitting period, I stand on the hem and hear it rip the length of my rear. Saburi-san, the master’s attendant and thus exempt from the sesshin, kindly sews it. I hasten back to the meditation hall and at the next bow promptly tear it again, have it sewn again, and tear it again and am forced back into my jeans.
The medical student advises me to buy a hakama like his: used for kendō (the Way of the Sword) and tear-proof—he swears—no matter how much I trample on it. He writes down the address of the kendō supplies shop. The one I purchase differs from the ordinary hakama in that it is divided in two, like culottes, one slot for each leg. Next sesshin, in my flea market kimono and new hakama, I move stiff as the tin man from The Wizard of Oz, but my feet are covered and the heat pocket created by the hakama enables me to cut down from eight layers, including two sweaters and a down vest, to five. Between the first and second sittings I switch position. Unbeknownst to me, I manage to get both left and right legs into the left slot. I sit fiercely as I can. The smashing of wooden blocks announces the walking meditation. The monks jump from the sitting platform into their sandals. I do the same and fall crashing onto the stone floor, both feet caught in the crotch of my hakama in which there is, as the medical student promised, not a tear.
I am the physically delicate one in every monastery I’ve ever set foot in. All the monks suffer, but insofar as I can tell from every visible sign, not as I suffer. They execute the monastic tasks (apart from the solutions to their koan) with ease; they beg through downpours and occasional snow in thin straw sandals and soaked feet with lightheartedness, even cheer. Each sesshin my stomach goes on strike. Each brings me to the brink (though it is never really the brink). Each thrusts me against what in America my big personality, charm filched from my dad, and grace on the dance floor to a considerable degree obscure: that my soul is held together with rubber bands. Yet within this desperation of weaknesses something has congealed, something that compels me to cross my legs night after day, now for more than forty years. Something the Thief cannot steal and, if he is the man I think he is, will be overjoyed that he cannot steal.
By the bell tower I run into Saburi-san, the master’s attendant and the most brilliant of the monks—he speaks English and French fluently and was living in Paris, addicted to French cinema, until his father died of lung cancer and he was forced to return home and enter the monastery to obtain the requisite license to succeed him.
“The Thief’s are the most beautiful human acts I have ever seen,” I say.
He responds by telling me of a water fight the Thief started in the monastery kitchen when Saburi first came.
“Do you think he’s this way because of what he learned from Zen?” I ask.
“Oh, he’s just that kind of guy.” He adds that the Thief once told him: “Hito no koto kamawahen”—“I pay no mind to what others think and do.”
I remember this years later when, taking an American who had somehow gotten hold of my phone number for a tour of the Kyoto sights, I run into Toga-san, director monk of the Institute for Zen Studies, standing contently by the front gate of his temple home on the grounds of Tenryūji Monastery. Warm as ever, he invites us into his beautiful modern kitchen for cakes and tea. “Isn’t [the Thief’s] temple affiliated with Tenryūji?” I ask.
“Yes. His temple has many buildings.” With a mischievous glint he adds: “He likes to burn things.”
The Thief’s handsome looks, it seems, are partly an inheritance from his mother, a wonderful character, from what I’ve heard. To a monk who accompanied the Thief on a visit back home she is said to have confided: “I was so pretty that I decided to travel to Tokyo to see how I compared to the women there. I walked the Tokyo shops and streets, increasingly cocky that none of them could touch me. I wandered into a department store. A gorgeous woman in a kimono appeared. Furious, I headed toward her and a few feet from the mirror realized: ‘Oh, it’s me.’”
Grueling as they are, after a year, sesshin have ceased to press me to the edge of myself. Meditating hours a day brings thrills that are addictive. An American psychologist who had spent a year in the same monastery and was revisiting briefly just as I arrived for my first stay told me: “It’s disappointing to endure a week of sesshin and not reach a deeper state of meditation than you achieved the sesshin before.” I know that feeling—it’s a trap. All states of meditation are ephemeral. DeMartino warned repeatedly that enlightenment is not a state. What Yung-chia said in the seventh century about meritorious acts as a means to enlightenment applies to states of meditation: “Like shooting an arrow against the sky. When the force is exhausted the arrow falls on the ground.”7
So failed sesshin by failed sesshin, I seal off my escape paths: no more naps; sit through the rest periods; all periods to be sat in the full lotus; sit two periods consecutively without moving; do try not to talk so much during the breaks. And to my amazement—though it solves nothing—the monks are off begging and I’m sitting in the meditation hall alone with the Thief almost nonstop until lunch. A half dozen monks who sleep upright through the pitch black meditation periods in the predawn are whacked repeatedly for dozing during the evening sittings, while I—bumbling as ever—grin into the night on my cushions, the full moon stuffed into my brain.
At the November sesshin, I’m lounging on the cement, hoarding a half hour of the scarce warm sun in front of Dr. Ebuchi’s room. Shin-san, a bespectacled young monk who says he can justify being a priest only if he’s useful to society—a rare sentiment among the monks I know—bows before me. I jump to my feet and return the bow.
“[The Thief] wants to know: In your meditation, do you reach the point where there is nothing whatsoever?”
“Not yet,” I say. Shin-san bows and departs.
Several minutes later he’s back: “[The Thief] wants to know: Do you ever feel energy running through your body, in the lower abdomen especially?”
“Most of the time.”
He bows and departs. Seven, eight minutes pass and Shin-san is hurrying toward me. He bows. I bow. “[The Thief] wants you never to forget: When you reach the point where there is nothing whatsoever, do not mistake it for enlightenment. It is only the gate.”
When I return to the monastery for the evening meditation after the three-day break following the sesshin, the Thief, who invariably departs for his home temple at its conclusion, is sitting on his cushions. He has moved back into the monastery to finish up his koan training under the master. Dr. Ebuchi has hung a curtain down the length of his closet-size room; he on one side, the Thief on the other—space for a sleeping body and little else in their shared quarters. I marvel at Dr. Ebuchi, a medical doctor and psychiatrist already past sixty. Stricken with nervous and physical disorders earlier in life, he toughs it out in the monastery year after year, reading and writing about his beloved Morita therapy—a psychotherapy for anxiety-based
