Eleven

The eightfold path and a jump into the swamp

In India a hermit was meditating on the shore of a river when he was disturbed by a young man. The young man knelt down and said:

“Master, I want to become your disciple.”

“Why?” asked the master.

“Because I want to find God.”

The master jumped up, took the young man by the scruff of the neck, dragged him to the river and pushed his head under water. After a minute the master released the young man and pulled him out of the river. The young man spat out some of the water which he got in his mouth and began to cough. After a while he became quiet.

“What did you want most of all while I kept you under water?” asked the master.

“Air,” said the young man.

“Very well,” the master said. “Go back to wherever you have come from, and come back to me when you want God as much as you wanted air just now.”

I hadn’t come to the monastery to find God. I wanted to have an explanation of existence, an explanation so clear that all my questions would fall away by themselves. I wanted to know why everything had been started, because it couldn’t be, I thought, that it had all been started just to finish again. Why all this trouble, this pain, this looking for something which couldn’t be found? Perhaps the explanation would be identical to the idea of “God,” but that wouldn’t make me a seeker after God; I would prefer to describe myself as an alarmed soul. But whatever I was, devout or alarmed, I had wanted to find something. I had come to a master who, I thought, had what I wanted to find or who at least knew the way to whatever I was looking for. He had shown me the way but I wasn’t following it.

I did, during the months following Rohatsu, all sorts of things. I had found possibilities of making monastic life pleasant. When I “meditated” I didn’t even try to concentrate. I counted the minutes, estimated how long it would take to the next bell, dozed, trained my body not to fall over when I slept, and dreamed. I imagined whatever can be imagined, to get through the time. The pain bothered me much less now and I began to enjoy sitting, nicely balanced, without being troubled by my legs or back. I enjoyed the meals which I ate, on medical prescription as before, in the restaurants of the neighborhood. It was pleasant after a good meal, to sit quietly, smoke and sip coffee. I always carried a book and would spend another half hour reading. The lessons in Japanese, which I was still taking, were very interesting as well; and the hieroglyphics, which had once been so mysterious, now began to have meaning and I exercised diligently and filled notebook after notebook with scribbles. I could make myself understood and when the Japanese, always polite, complimented me on my progress I would glow with pride. And there was the bathhouse and the laundry man who washed and ironed my clothes so neatly. I had even discovered a barber’s shop which employed girls and I went there regularly to be shaved and have the muscles of my neck massaged.

A book on Tibetan Buddhism told me that whoever knows how to organize his life can be comfortable anywhere, even in hell. I quite agreed. I had managed to be comfortable in a Zen monastery.

That I couldn’t solve the koan, I accepted. Koans are difficult, anyone knows that. Nobody really expected me to solve the koan in a hurry. Hadn’t there been Zen monks who had fought their koan for sixteen years before they broke through the wall? Well then. And although the master still gave me the impression every day that he really expected me to solve the koan that very day, well, that was part of his game. He had to pretend that I would bring him the answer here and now. But he knew, of course, that I wasn’t anywhere near the answer.

But the sesshins kept on coming every month, and then my pleasures stopped and I would have to make an effort. During sesshins nobody could escape the pressure of the monastery; the young monks saw their roads of escape cut off and exerted themselves to accomplish the hopeless task. The head monk pushed and the master pulled and they were beaten up and shouted at and sometimes I even meditated when I didn’t have to and sat in my room, or somewhere in the garden, and tried to lose my thoughts and grab the koan which always slipped away again.

I noticed that the young monks had discovered ways to break the rules of the monastery. They couldn’t, as I did, visit restaurants and other public establishments, because they wore the monastic garb and had their heads shaved. But they did have civilian clothes, hidden in their rooms or in a corner of the temple where nobody came. When they put on a suit and a cap nobody would recognize them, and I saw them climb over the wall at night. They even had a special little ladder for that purpose.

“Whatever do you do when you are over the wall?” I asked Han-san, the youngest monk, who had become my friend.

“As long as you don’t tell anyone,” Han-san said. “We go to the cinema, and sometimes to a pub to have a little sake, but it’s difficult because at 3:30 in the morning we have to visit the master and we can’t be smelling of alcohol. And sometimes we go to the whores.”

“Do you have money for it?”

“We get money from home. My mother is always sending parcels, usually there’s some special food in them, and sometimes an envelope. That way I got my suit and cap. My father isn’t supposed to know, but my mother pities me; she didn’t want me to become a monk. And I have an uncle who sends me money every now and then, but he thinks I use it for some Buddhist purpose.”

I couldn’t imagine that the head monk didn’t know what was going on behind his back. He must have seen the ladder, for he knew every corner of the monastery. And he wasn’t only wise, but also very clever.

Sometimes we had a weekend off and I spent them in Kobe, in the house of Leo Marks, but after the visit to the brothel nothing happened there which could offend against the most narrow morality. Leo obviously thought that it wasn’t his task to bring me into temptation; he only made sure that I ate well and that nobody troubled me. Sometimes we walked in his garden, or on the beach. Most of all I enjoyed the use of his library. I didn’t get up too late, and I meditated in my room.

A holiday came along. I don’t remember now why it was a holiday; perhaps it was a national holiday or some day which the Buddhists celebrate. I knew that Leo wasn’t in Kobe, and I wondered how I could spend this sudden gift of time. I wandered into the city without any set goal and found a café where jazz records were played on request. I found some trumpet music which I remembered from my days in Capetown and drank whisky. In the afternoon I watched French gangsters killing each other in technicolor. I had another drink and decided to visit Gerald.

“You’ve been drinking,” Gerald said. “Have you run away from the monastery? Do I have to take you back?”

He still hadn’t forgotten that he had become a disciple of the master before me. When I told him about the official holiday he smiled and asked me to come in.

He lived, as I did, in a Zen temple, with the difference that his temple wasn’t a monastery. The priest who took care of the temple seemed to be a simple old man, a friendly quiet priest who had chosen the road of least resistance after his three years in the monastery, a long time ago. He was in charge of the temple and let rooms, while a few old unmarried women kept the temple clean and worked in the kitchen, in exchange for board and lodging.

The central administration of the Zen complex, to which our monastery belonged as well, gave him a small amount every month, enough for repairs and food. The temple was a national monument so the government paid him a little, too. For the rest he had nothing to do, and he did nothing. Once in a while another Zen priest would visit him. He owned a television set, he read the newspaper, he took part in the temple services of the main temple. According to Gerald he never meditated, because nobody told him to meditate; meditation is only compulsory in the monasteries. Every morning he conducted a short service in the altar room, the old women coming as well and kneeling down respectfully, some twelve feet behind him. He would recite two or three sutras, strike his gong, prostrate himself a few times, bow to the altar, and shuffle back to his room. The best rooms in the temple were let to Gerald and he paid, in those days, a sizeable rent, about £10 a month. The priest, who knew that Zen attracts westerners, had prepared the rooms in western style and provided a bed and chairs which had been immediately removed by Gerald who preferred to live Japanese-style. But, and this was a special attraction for me, there was a western-style lavatory, and I would walk the mile and a half between the monastery and Gerald’s temple to sit at ease instead of having to perform feats of balance. Gerald invited me to dinner and I helped him, in his small modern kitchen complete with gas stove and refrigerator, cleaning vegetables and cutting meat. He studied my way of working.

“You know,” Gerald said, “you still haven’t learned much. Just look at that. You don’t concentrate on what you are doing. You are starting on the next tomato before you have finished the first. You are making a mess of it. You are trying to do two things at the same time.”

I had been getting used to criticism and didn’t answer, but after dinner, and after several cups of sake, I returned to his remark.

“Zen,” I said, “as far as I have understood anything about it, is a meditation training, and no more than that. Buddha has found a way which leads to the answer to all questions, and the way is called the eightfold holy path, the noble path. The eight parts are clearly defined, to wit:

1  right understanding (understanding the four truths, knowing life is suffering, that the eternal desire, the will to have and to be is the cause of suffering, that desire can be broken and the breaking of desire is caused by walking the eightfold path)

2  right intention (always to intend to walk the path)

3  right speech (to be friendly, not to insult or hurt people by words)

4  right action (to try to do everything as well as possible)

5  right means of livelihood (to earn your living in a decent manner)

6  right effort (to continue producing the energy needed to continue)

7  right awareness (to know the situation in which one happens to be, so that one can control one’s reactions to that situation)

8  right meditation.

“That’s right, isn’t it?”

Gerald moved about on the floor, refilled the sake cups and said that I had droned my way nicely through the list.

“I don’t like this ticking off, this numbering. But there is no other way to formulate, to define, the path, of course. If you want to mention them all you have to list them one by one. But in reality the sequence isn’t right, one moment of the day the second step is important, the next moment it is the seventh, perhaps, I am only giving an example. In fact you need them all, all the time, every moment of the day; one step supports the other and they all belong together, like the weave of a fabric keeps the fabric together.”

“Yes.” I said, and slurred my words, for the sake wasn’t blending well with the whisky I had been drinking earlier on, even if they were separated by a substantial meal. “That’s what I wanted to say, too. All these steps fit in with each other, but what do we hear in the monastery? Meditation, and meditation again. And the koan, but the koan is the subject on which one is supposed to meditate. Always the eighth step, never the others, except when you said just now that I wasn’t cleaning the tomatoes properly, that would have been the fourth step.”

Gerald began to clear the table and upset a dish which fell and broke.

“Don’t say anything, I am not doing this well either. I am getting drunk, or I am drunk already, and then there’s something wrong with the second, the fourth, the sixth and the seventh step of my path. And that after many years of training and regular contact with a master. A sad business. But that’s the way it is, and there’s little I can do about it now. All I can do is be aware of the fact that I am getting drunk, or am drunk already, and try to get through the rest of the evening without accidents.”

“Interesting,” I said, “a nice example of self-knowledge. But I asked you a question.”

“Meditation,” Gerald said. “But that’s very simple. With a little reflection you’ll have the answer yourself.”

The answer annoyed me, it was the sort of answer I kept running into. Even if I asked the address of a dentist the head monk would go to any length of trouble not to give me a clear answer; I would have to find out for myself. As the master said, the answer bubbles up in the disciple’s mind, from his own subconscious and the Zen training speeds up a natural process. But how would the address of a dentist bubble up from my own subconscious?

“Tell me something,” I said, “just try to explain something to me. It will be difficult but you should be able to do it. I don’t know why Zen training always harps on meditation, on the koan, on the answer to the koan. If I knew why it does that I wouldn’t ask you.”

“But dear boy, my friend, my fellow disciple,” Gerald said while he refilled my cup again, “what do you think the answer to a koan is?”

“Insight,” I said, “understanding, wisdom, to know how everything is really connected, the capacity to see through the illusion of existence.”

“Excellent,” Gerald said, “intelligence can do something. It can’t form insight by itself but it can help to come to insight. And now imagine that you have insight, that you have solved a koan, an important koan, like one of the first koans on which you are probably working now. You have given an answer which the master has accepted. You have had satori, or a little satori, for one satori doesn’t get you much further than a peep through the crack of the door. Imagine all that—do you think that you can then easily ignore the other seven steps of the path?”

“Ah,” I said, “so morals sneak in through the back entrance once meditation has opened the way? Somebody who has become enlightened because he has solved his koan cannot start a business in drugs, or a war, he can’t torture people? Is that what you mean?”

Gerald shook his head. “Yes, that was what I meant. But now you say so I am not so sure. I know several people who have solved koans, they must have had satori, and they still do things I can’t agree with. They are suspicious, jealous, proud, grabbing, messy, conceited. They are capable of insulting other people just because they feel like doing it. They eat too much and they get drunk. One would think that satori would rule out that sort of behavior.”

“Maybe they would have been worse if they hadn’t had satori, if they hadn’t meditated.”

“Could be,” Gerald said. “I don’t know. Coming to think of it, I don’t know anything about satori either. And you’ll have to go home. It’s twelve o’clock. You should have been back by eleven.”

Once outside I noticed that I was very drunk. The walk back to the monastery took me a long time and I had to support myself against endless walls which moved and swayed when I touched them. When I finally found the gate it was closed and the secret latch of the small side entrance was locked as well. I followed the wall till I thought I was near my room and climbed on top of it after having slid off several times.

I saw a patch of green on the other side of the wall and mistook it for part of the vegetable garden. It turned out to be a swamp and I sank in it up to my waist. My clothes were soaked through with slime and mud when I managed to find my room, and I crashed right through my front wall, breaking the lathe work and tearing the paper covering from one end to the other. By that time I no longer cared. I dropped down on my mat, pulled a blanket over me and fell asleep.

The next morning, around eleven, Han-san woke me up. I had missed the morning’s meditation, the visit to the master, breakfast and a couple of hours of work.

“What happened to you?” Han-san asked. “Are you ill?”

I told him what was wrong with me and he hissed between his teeth and disappeared. I thought that he had gone to tell the head monk. This then would be the end of my mystic career, but my head ached too much to worry about it. I took my clothes off, wrapped a towel around my waist and went to have a cold shower in the bathhouse. When I had washed and shaved I found Han-san busy in my room. Within a few hours he had my front wall back to its original state. I helped him as best I could and we had tea together, brought by another young monk. When I went to the head monk to apologize he cut me short.

“Han-san told me,” he said, “you don’t feel well. Are you all right now?”

“A headache,” I said.

“Don’t do anything this afternoon then. I’ll see you at dinner and if you feel all right you can join the evening meditation.”

I bowed.

That afternoon I stayed in my room and slept till Peter woke me up. He had come in without my noticing, and sat down next to my sleeping bag on the floor, in the lotus position.

“Gerald told me you two had a party last night and that you might be in a bit of trouble. I came to check.”

“Marvelous,” I said, “I don’t think I am cut out for this sort of life. In Kobe I went to the whores and here I get drunk. I wonder if the master and the head monk noticed anything.”

“I suppose they have,” Peter said, “but it doesn’t matter. Nothing is stronger than habit and I don’t think that any of us expect a newcomer to break his former habits quickly. You shouldn’t exaggerate of course. We had a young American here, some years ago, who used to climb the wall three or four times a week. He even managed to make a girl from the neighborhood pregnant and a little while afterwards he disappeared for good.”

“And they accepted his behavior all that time?”

“Yes,” said Peter. “Even after he left nobody in the monastery said anything against him. There was once a Zen master who said that his first satori experience consisted of recognizing all people as himself. Everybody he met had his own face.”

He gave me a friendly nod, got up, folded his hands together and bowed. I didn’t do anything, I just stared at him. When he left I felt that the atmosphere in my room had thickened, as the master’s room would often vibrate with power and tension. Peter had experienced satori, I could be quite sure of that. In the monastic hierarchy he was considered to be of the same rank as the head monk. They, together with the master, were beings of a higher order, who wore their bodies as actors wear masks and costumes. Or was I trying to convince myself.

A question to meditate on, I thought, and fell asleep again to wake up when Han-san came to call me for the evening rice.