21

THERE amid the temple grounds the days came and went, one after another. During that time two longish letters arrived from Oyone. Naturally neither of them contained anything untoward or unsettling. Deeply as he cared for his wife, Sōsuke procrastinated over answering her letters. Were he to decide to leave the temple without having resolved the riddle that had been posed to him, his journey would have been for naught, and he would be unable to look Gidō in the face. Every waking moment the indescribable burden of these worries weighed on him relentlessly. The more times he saw the sun rise and set over the temple compound, the more anxious he became, like a quarry closely pursued from behind. Yet he could think of no solution to the riddle other than the one he had first proposed. And no matter how thoroughly he considered other possibilities, he remained convinced that this was the only one. Still, he had arrived at this conclusion through simple ratiocination, and it hardly seemed fitting. When he tried to erase this one sure solution from the picture in order to see what compelling alternative might present itself, however, nothing whatsoever came to mind.

He pondered alone in his room. When he grew tired, he went out through the kitchen to the vegetable garden. Then he entered the grotto that had been carved out of the base of the cliff and stood there absolutely motionless. Gidō had told him that he mustn’t allow himself to be distracted. Rather, what he must do was to focus his attention ever more closely until his concentration was rigidly fixed and he himself became like a rod of iron. The more Sōsuke listened to exhortations like this, the more impossible it seemed to him that he would ever reach such a state.

“Your problem,” Gidō said another time, “is that your head is already full of the notion of getting it over and done with, and that won’t work.” His words paralyzed Sōsuke even further. Suddenly he began to think again about the return of Yasui. If he were to become a constant visitor at the Sakais’ and not go back to Manchuria for some time, the most prudent course for the couple would be to vacate their rented house immediately and move somewhere else. He could not help asking himself if, instead of idling his time away here, it wouldn’t make more sense for him to return to Tokyo right away and prepare to relocate if necessary. If it were to happen that, while he was steeling himself here at the temple, news of Yasui’s return reached Oyone, this would, he realized, greatly aggravate matters.

With the air of a man at the end of his tether, he sought out Gidō and said, “It doesn’t seem remotely possible that enlightenment will come to someone like me.” This declaration was made two or three days before Sōsuke in fact went home.

“No, that’s not true,” the monk replied without a moment’s hesitation. “Anyone with true conviction can be enlightened. You should try approaching it with the same rigid fixation as those drum-beating Nichirenites.[91] When you have been totally permeated by the koan, from the crown of your skull to the tips of your toes, a new cosmos will manifest itself in a flash before your eyes.”

With a deep sadness Sōsuke acknowledged to himself that neither his circumstances in life nor his temperament would permit him to act with such blind ferocity—never in his entire life, let alone in the few days that remained to him at the temple. It had been his firm intention to excise from his life the net of complications that had enmeshed him of late, but this wandering off to a mountain temple had turned out to be nothing but a fool’s errand.

This was the conclusion he came to privately, but it was not in him to reveal this to Gidō. His heart was too full of admiration for this young Zen monk: for his courage and passion, his dedication and kindness.

“There’s a saying: “The Way is near yet we must seek it from afar,’ and it’s true,” said Gidō ruefully. “It’s right in front of our nose and yet we just can’t see it.”

Sōsuke withdrew to his room and set up more sticks of incense.

Regrettably this state of things prevailed until it was time for him to leave the temple. No new life opened up for him. On the day of his departure, Sōsuke, freely and without reserve, gave up any lingering hope of realizing his goal.

“You have been a great help to me through all of this,” he said to Gidō as he bade him farewell. “It’s really too bad, but things could not have turned out any other way. I doubt I’ll have a chance to see you anytime soon. I wish you all the best, then.”

“I’ve been hardly any help at all!” Gidō said, his tone most consoling. “Everything just rough and ready, you know. You must have been very uncomfortable. I assure you, though, even the amount of meditating you’ve managed to do this time makes a difference. And your having resolved to come here was a worthy accomplishment in itself.”

Nevertheless, Sōsuke keenly felt that he had merely wasted a lot of time. The monk’s efforts to put the best construction possible on it only served as a further reminder of his own weakness and, though saying nothing, he felt deeply ashamed.

“The time it takes to reach enlightenment depends on the individual’s temperament,” said Gidō. “Whether you get there quickly or get there slowly has no bearing on the quality of the experience. There are those who break through with no trouble at all only to be blocked after that from developing further; and there are others who take a long time getting through the initial steps but, once they do, experience lasting joy. You absolutely must not give up hope. The main thing is to stay passionately committed. Look at someone like the late Abbot Kōsen.[92] He was a Confucian scholar and already middle-aged when he began to practice Zen. After he’d spent three whole years as a monk without getting past the first precept, he said, ‘It is because my sins are heavy that I have not been enlightened,’ and went so far as to bow down humbly to the outhouse every day. But see what a wise man he turned out to be. This is one of various encouraging examples I could mention.”

It was apparent that the telling of such anecdotes was Gidō’s way of trying to fortify Sōsuke against renouncing all further pursuit of this path as soon as he was back in Tokyo. He heard the monk out respectfully, but inwardly felt that this great opportunity had already more or less slipped away from him. He had come here expecting the gate to be opened for him. But when he knocked, the gatekeeper, wherever he stood behind the high portals, had not so much as showed his face. Only a disembodied voice could be heard: “It does no good to knock. Open the gate for yourself and enter.”

But how, he wondered, could he unbar the gate from the outside? Mentally he devised a scheme involving various measures and steps. But when it came to it he found himself unable to summon the strength to put his scheme into effect. He was standing in the very same place he had stood before even beginning to ponder the problem. As before, he found himself stranded, without resources or recourse, in front of the closed portals. He had been living from day to day in accordance with his own capacity for reason. Now to his chagrin he could see that this capacity had become a curse. At one extreme, he had come to envy the obstinate single-mindedness of simpletons for whom the possibility of discriminating among several options did not arise. At the other end of the spectrum, he viewed with awe the advanced spiritual self-discipline of those lay believers, both men and women, who abandoned conventional wisdom and did away with the distractions of analytical thought. It appeared to Sōsuke that from the moment of his birth it was his fate to remain standing indefinitely outside the gate. This was an indisputable fact. Yet if it were true that, no matter what, he was never meant to pass through this gate, there was something quite absurd about his having approached it in the first place. He looked back. He saw that he lacked the courage to retrace his steps. He looked ahead. The way was forever blocked by firmly closed portals. He was someone destined neither to pass through the gate nor to be satisfied with never having passed through it. He was one of those unfortunate souls fated to stand in the gate’s shadow, frozen in his tracks, until the day was done.

Just before his departure, Sōsuke, accompanied by Gidō, paid a brief visit to the Master to take his leave. The Master took them out onto the railed veranda of a room overlooking the lotus pond. Gidō went to the connecting room and returned with tea.

“It will still be cold in Tokyo,” the Master said. “When people leave after they’ve started to get the hang of it, they find that things go easier for them back home. But . . . well, it’s too bad.”

After politely thanking the Master for these parting words, Sōsuke exited the temple’s main gate, the one by which he had entered ten days earlier. The dense growth of cryptomeria, still locked in winter’s embrace, bore down on its tiles and towered darkly behind him.