a half year earlier I had selected to return home, to be followed by my friend Urs App and the monk Bunko. I informed the master that I’d be attending graduate school in America. He presented me with two of his ink paintings. I couldn’t bend when I tried to thank him with a bow.
“Something wrong?” the master asked.
“My back.” He reached behind him with tremendous speed for an old man and handed me a brown paper bag. I could not imagine what it might be. “Is it medicine?” I asked.
“Candy!”
I knew full well my shortcomings as a Zen student. I knew that my decision to go home was in part a running away. But the sarcastic joy that lit his face as he said this word—the thrill at his own cleverness—surprised me.
A few days after returning to the States, I sat in on one of DeMartino’s classes. He had some shopping to do when it ended. I helped lug the packages back to his apartment. When we’d dropped the shopping bags on the kitchen table, he asked: “What are you going to do?”
“For now, to try to get enlightened.”
“For now isn’t good enough.”
I had no idea why I had said “for now.” The ensuing thirty years have confirmed that while I could never stop fleeing Zen, I could never get away from it either. Probably I said it from nervousness. I’m glad I did. In DeMartino’s words, I saw that despite all I had endured in Japan, I could never have awakened. My quest bore within it a fatal flaw. Sesshin by sesshin I had gradually sought to remove all the gaps in my effort. But I had always permitted the most significant gap to remain: the future. It is not a matter of sitting more or sleeping less but of removing one’s future. This is what Gautama had done at the Bodhi Tree. Once his rump touched the ground, there was no tomorrow. Whether he sat or reclined is irrelevant. The tree could have been a penthouse with a plush bed. My sesshin had always been ruptured by a fundamental ambivalence: From the first sitting period, I struggled to break through but also to get through. Hisamatsu’s own master, Ikegami, warned him: “When you go to the zendō [meditation hall] go as if your life is at stake. If you go through it with a half-hearted intention of living through it and returning home, then you had better not go at all.”9 Hisamatsu writes that on the day of his awakening he had “no means of escape left in the entirety of his existence, not even one the size of a hole in a needle.”10 I, by contrast, at every minute of every sesshin, from day one through seven, had retained the eighth day—the hole in the needle when I would resume civilian life.
“I can’t find the determination to cut off my arm like Hui-k’o,”11 I told DeMartino.
He nodded.
“But I am not unrelated to that act.”
He nodded again. “If you’re going back for your doctorate, get through your classes, but keep the real concern at the forefront.”
“As soon as I finish my course work, I’m going back to Japan.”
“No five-year plans! Take up the koan at the next available moment.”
Seven years later I was accosted by Dr. Ebuchi, the master’s best friend, in front of Rinko-in Temple. He ordered me to resume training at the monastery. I did not.
My doctoral thesis ate up the next several months. I did attend one sesshin at another temple. My legs were so deconditioned that by the second day, every cell in my thighs seemed to have burst. In July I was offered a teaching position in Tokyo.
Before leaving, there was a last sesshin. Run by a group of laymen and -women and held, to my surprise, in the same mountain village as the Thief’s temple. My monk friend Saburi-san had recently achieved notoriety as one of the Gang of Four, a cohort of priests who had organized a multiyear boycott when the mayor of Kyoto had tried to tax admission fees that local temples received from tourists. He initiated the clever idea of having every Zen temple in the city admit visitors gratis and accept only voluntary—which Japanese politeness translated into obligatory—”donations.” Donations, went his argument, were exempt from tax. The city government was furious; Saburi-san was enjoying himself immensely. I asked him to help me get permission to call on the Thief. Within in a few days, he’d received an answer: I could try.
I skipped the noon meal on the sesshin’s second day, cut through the rice paddies, and ascended the steps to the temple. An attractive woman in a kimono, very kind, accepted the loaf of German bread I had brought the Thief, explaining that he was not available and that I should try two o’clock the following day. The next morning my friend Tanemura-san, one of the lay practitioners from the monastery, amazed me by saying that he was attending the sesshin for the chance to say goodbye before I left Kyoto. Years before he’d given his one-word assessment of the Thief: “Wonderful!”
I asked Tanemura-san and my friend Mark Thomas, who had never seen the Thief in action, to accompany me to the temple. I called out the customary “Onegai itashimasu” from the foyer while my pals waited outside. The same woman appeared, apologizing that the priest had been summoned away but was expected back soon. I suggested I come another day. She cocked an ear, asked me to excuse her, reappearing to happily inform me that the priest had returned and would see me. For ten minutes I waited alone in the foyer, where in all Japanese temples one leaves one’s shoes before stepping up onto the roka, the wooden corridor that leads into the interior rooms. The door through which the woman had vanished slid open along its rails. The Thief, splendid in a white kimono, dropped his rear onto the roka, completely relaxed, his legs dangling down into the foyer where I stood.
“Some friends have come to pay their respects,” I said.
He rejected the request with one windshield-wiper swipe of his forearm — of such explosive force that in the years since I have rehearsed it, always unsuccessfully, in ongoing disbelief that a human arm can move with such speed. The gesture said: “You requested a meeting. This is between you and me.”
“I wish to do sanzen with you.”
“Sanzen is no joke. Not something to be done by jumping from master to master.”
“I know that.”
“It’s like this. At a certain point I saw that being a monastery master wasn’t for me.” The guy was live ammunition. “Do you know the word rijin?”
I said no.
“Ri is hanareru [to separate]. Jin is hito [people].
“You mean you have renounced the world?”
He laughed. “That would be an exaggeration. I exist apart from people.” Silence. “Have you looked around the temple grounds?”
“Not yet.”
“Take a look around. It’s a pretty place.” His way of telling me what I had witnessed so often: that his Way, conjoined with meditation, was gardening and hard physical work.
“I’m deadlocked,” I said.
“To be deadlocked is good. ‘When deadlocked there is a change, with the change you
