“PLEASE watch your step.” Gidō led the way down the stone steps in the dark, with Sōsuke following a pace behind. Here, away from city lights, the footing by night was uncertain, and the monk carried a lantern to illuminate their one-hundred-yard passage through the compound. They reached level ground at the bottom of the stone steps, where tall trees thrust out their branches from left and right, blocking out the sky and seemingly close to grazing the tops of their heads. Dark as it was, the green of the leaves was still visible. It all but soaked into the weave of their clothing and sent a chill through Sōsuke. The lantern itself seemed to emit the same color of light and, in contrast to the mighty tree trunks that it managed to bring into outline, looked exceedingly small. The faint light it cast on the ground was no more than a few feet in diameter, a small pale gray disk bobbing along with them in the dark.
Past the lotus pond, they turned left and climbed up toward the Master’s residence; there the going became rough for Sōsuke, who was making the trek for the first time at night. At a couple of points the front edge of his clogs struck against the exposed surface of buried rocks. Gidō knew of a shortcut that, before reaching the pond, led straight to the residence, but the ground there was still rougher, and on Sōsuke’s account he had chosen the more roundabout path.
Once inside the entryway Sōsuke detected a good many clogs strewn about the dimly lit earthen floor. Bending low, he proceeded to thread his way through the footwear and stepped up into an eight-mat room. Alongside one wall six or seven men had seated themselves deferentially at right angles to the corridor leading from the entrance to the Master’s quarters. A few of them had the gleaming bald heads and black robes of monks. Most of the others were dressed as laymen, though in formal hakama. Not a word was spoken. Sōsuke stole a glance at the men only to be arrested by the severity of their faces. Their mouths were hard-set, their eyebrows closely knit in concentration. They appeared heedless of whoever was next to them and oblivious to anyone entering from the outside, no matter what manner of man he might be. With the bearing of living statues they sat utterly still in this room to which no fire brought warmth. To Sōsuke’s mind these figures added an even greater austerity to the already frigid atmosphere of the mountain temple.
After awhile the sound of footsteps filtered into the desolate silence. At first a faint echo, the tread of feet on the wooden floor grew steadily heavier as they approached the area where Sōsuke was sitting. Then, all of a sudden, the figure of a solitary monk loomed in the doorway leading to the corridor. The monk moved past Sōsuke and, without a word, exited the temple into the darkness. Just then a small bell tinkled from somewhere deep inside.
At this, one of the laymen wearing a hakama of sturdy Kokura cloth stood up from the row of men seated solemnly with Sōsuke alongside the wall; he crossed over silently to the corner of the room and sat down again, directly in front of the open doorway to the corridor. Next to where he sat, within a wooden frame about two feet tall and one foot wide, there hung a gong-shaped metal object that was, however, too thick and heavy to be an ordinary gong. It glowed a midnight blue in the scant light. The man in the hakama picked up the wooden hammer from a stand and struck the center of the gong-shaped bell twice. Then he stood up, passed through the doorway, and advanced down the corridor. Now, in a reverse of the previous pattern, as the footsteps moved deeper into the temple’s interior they grew fainter and fainter, and ultimately died out. Still seated firmly in his place, Sōsuke was inwardly shaken. He tried to picture to himself what momentous things might be happening to the man in the hakama right now. But throughout the temple confines, complete silence prevailed. Among those who sat in a row with him no one moved even a single facial muscle. Only Sōsuke’s mind stirred, with imaginings of what might be occurring in the temple’s inner recesses. All of a sudden the handbell rang again in his ears, accompanied by the sound of approaching footsteps along the length of the corridor. The man in the hakama appeared in the doorway, crossed over to the entrance without a word, and vanished into the frosty air. The man whose turn was next stood up, struck the gong-like bell as before, and marched off down the corridor. Hands planted formally on his knees, Sōsuke waited his turn.
Shortly after the second-to-last man in line before Sōsuke had gone to take his turn, a loud shout resounded from down the corridor. Because of the distance, the sound was not so loud as to strike Sōsuke’s eardrums with any great force, but it reverberated enough to bespeak a mighty upwelling of righteous indignation. The tone was so distinctive that there was only one person from whose throat it could have issued. As the very last man in front of him stood up, Sōsuke, gripped by the consciousness that his turn was next, lost most of what little composure he had left.
He had prepared a kind of response to the koan he had been assigned the other day, the best he could come up with. Still, it was exceedingly tentative and flimsy: nothing more, really, than an empty phrase concocted for the occasion, composed of words meant to convey a semblance of assurance where there was in fact none, in order to demonstrate some capacity for discernment when he found himself in the Master’s presence. Not that it occurred to Sōsuke in his wildest dreams that he would be so lucky as to escape his predicament with this pathetic, rehearsed response. Nor, of course, did he have any intention of putting something over on the Master. By this point he had become a good deal more earnest than when he first arrived. He felt quite mortified to find himself in the false position of appearing before the Master simply out of a sense of obligation, with nothing to offer but vague words that had popped into his head, as if serving someone a sketch of a rice cake instead of the real thing.
As Sōsuke struck the gong-bell in the same fashion as those before him, he was fully aware that he was not qualified to wield the same hammer as the others. He was filled with self-loathing at how he had simply gone ahead and mimicked them like a tame monkey.
Dreading in his heart his own weak self, he went through the doorway and started down the corridor. It was a long way. The rooms to his right were dark; after turning two corners, he saw lamplight coming through a shoji at the very end of the corridor. He advanced to the threshold of that room and came to a halt.
The protocol for such audiences was a triple kowtow to the Master before entering. The supplicant bowed as he would in the course of an ordinary greeting, with his forehead nearly touching the tatami, while at the same time placing his hands, palms up, at either side of the head—and then raising them a bit, up to ear level, as if reverently presenting an offering. Kneeling at the threshold, Sōsuke performed the first kowtow according to the prescribed form. From within the room came the command: “Once will suffice.” Dispensing with further protocol, he entered the room.
The only light came from a single dim lamp, so dim that one could not have read even relatively large characters by it. Sōsuke could not recall having ever seen anyone function at night with the sole aid of such paltry lamplight. Although naturally stronger than moonlight and not of such a bluish hue, it did have the lunar quality of looking as though it might vanish behind murky clouds at any moment.
In this indistinct light, four or five feet straight ahead of him, Sōsuke could make out the figure of the one whom Gidō called “Rōshi.”[83] His face had the same cast-in-metal impassiveness and color as before. His entire body was wrapped in vestments the color of tannin or persimmon or tea. His hands and feet were out of view. He appeared in the flesh only from the neck up. His countenance, which possessed an utmost solemnity and tension that conveyed imperviousness to time, was riveting. And his head was perfectly smooth-shaven.
Seated in front of this face, the spiritless Sōsuke exhausted what he had to say in a single phrase.
The response was immediate: “You’ll have to come up with something sharper than that!” the voice boomed. “Anybody with even a bit of learning could blurt out what you just did.”
Sōsuke withdrew from the room like a dog from a house in mourning.[84] From behind him reverberated a vehement ringing of the handbell.