Two

Meditating hurts

Clack. A dry sound. Somebody knocking two pieces of wood together, I thought. I pulled a thin piece of string, switching on a weak light bulb. Three o’clock at night. Why would anyone, at three o’clock at night, knock two pieces of wood together? Ah yes, I thought, I am in a monastery. I have promised to get up at three o’clock at night, for eight months. Confused and angry thoughts jostled each other in my head while I quickly dressed, knocking my head against a beam. It was cold, and my eyelids were stuck together with sleep. I knocked my head again and found myself outside, shivering and listening to new sounds. The monk who had woken me was now waking others a few hundred yards away. I heard him knocking his clappers together and shouting the names of his colleagues whom he wanted to rouse. In the temple a bell was rung, and somewhere else a gong boomed. I washed my face and hands in the courtyard and combed my hair. I couldn’t see what I was doing; there was no light, no mirror, and no time to shave. I knew that I had three minutes, from the moment of waking, to get to the meditation hall. The evening before, Peter had explained the daily routine a little. Everything had to happen quickly—there was no time for hesitation, no time to turn around and have another little snooze. Get up, dress, wash, and go to the meditation hall.

The large hall was situated at the other side of the garden. It consisted of an empty space with high wide forms on both sides. On the forms were straw mats and cushions, one stack of cushions for each monk. In the centre of the hall stood a large altar with a statue of Manjusri, the Bodhisatva of meditation, holding a sword to cut thoughts. Smouldering incense. When you enter you have to bow to Manjusri and then bow again to the head monk who sits near the entrance, positioned in such a way that he can control the entire hall. Then you walk to your cushions and you bow again. The cushions are holy because on those cushions you are supposed to find, sometime, enlightenment, freedom, the end of all your problems.

Then you sit down quickly, twisting your legs together and stretching your back. You stare straight ahead of you, wide-eyed, and the meditation begins as the head monk hits his bell. Twenty-five minutes later he hits his bell again. When everything goes as it should go you will by then have been absolutely silent for twenty-five minutes, breathing quietly and deep in concentration.

You may now slip outside but you have to be back within five minutes. Then the next period of twenty-five minutes starts. After two periods the monks, one by one, leave to visit the master in his little house, and then there is breakfast, boiling hot rice gruel and pickled vegetables, washed down with Chinese tea without sugar. Peter, when he explained it all to me, had made me sit down on the cushions while we were in the meditation hall. “Put your right foot on your left thigh,” he said. I couldn’t do it. “Try and cross your legs then.” I could manage that, and got myself into a position resembling the way a tailor sits. “Try it again.” Peter said, but it proved quite impossible; my thigh muscles were too short and too stiff. He nodded his head sadly. “It’ll hurt,” he predicted, “but you’ll have to learn.”

“Can’t I meditate on a chair?”

“Why?” he asked scornfully. “Are you an old man? Or an invalid? Nonsense. You are young, you can bend your body, and those muscles will stretch in time. When you fold your legs your thighs will drop under their own weight and gradually your muscles will lengthen. If you exercise a little every day you’ll be able to sit in the half lotus within a few months, and in the full lotus within a few years. I once had the same trouble as you have now. And I was, if that’s possible, even more stiff than you are.”

“But what’s so important about this lotus business?”

“To be able to concentrate well your spirit has to be in balance; when your spirit is in balance your body has to be in balance as well. The double lotus is a position of pure balance, of real balance. When you sit in the full lotus, you just have to become quiet because nothing else can happen. Your heart quietens down, your breathing becomes calm, your thoughts stop flitting about. When you hold your back and head straight all the nerve centers in your body start working in the right way. If you don’t like the double lotus, if you don’t even want to try to master it, you cause yourself needless trouble; and yet you cling to the illusion that you are making things easy and pleasant.”

“But isn’t it possible to meditate on a chair?”

“You can meditate in any attitude,” replied Peter, “but one is best, and that’s the one we’ll teach you. You will be here for eight months and we’ll teach you all sorts of things. Now be obedient, and don’t talk all the time. The more you talk, the more you defend yourself, the more time you waste. Perhaps you have a lot of time to waste but we are very busy people.”

“Zen is free,” I thought. “Free of worry, loose, detached. Free and easy. Bah.”

Who Peter was I found out later. He had arrived in Japan as an American soldier, part of the army which came to occupy the empire. There he had met the Zen master, by accident, in the street. The meeting had made such an impression on him that he had later returned to Japan. Like me, he had once walked through the monastery gate, but with a difference, for he knew the master. He had lived in the monastery for a year or so, and now had his own house in the neighborhood. He earned his living as a concert pianist and he taught singing, but every morning or every night (three o’clock in the morning was always the middle of the night to me) he came to see the master, and most evenings he came to the monastery to meditate. When I met him he had been a disciple of the master for more than ten years. An advanced soul.

I thought, at first, that the monastery would place me under him, that I would be connected to him in some way, but during the first year I hardly saw him. When he arrived he went straight to the hall and when the meditation was over he went straight home. He spent a lot of time with the master, but I wasn’t admitted to the master’s house. The master only received me in the morning after the early meditation, and these visits were formal, the master seated on a small platform, the disciple kneeling respectfully. There was no intimate contact. Japan is a formal country with strict rules of behavior. I sometimes met the teacher accidentally in the garden and if I wanted to ask him something at such an occasion it could be done, but I couldn’t just walk into his room like Peter, or the head monk.

As I was going to deal only with the Japanese I had to learn the Japanese language. An old lady in the neighborhood was prepared to give me daily lessons, so every afternoon I spent an hour with her, and in my room I spent an hour or two a day on homework. Slowly I began to understand the language a little but it took a long time, half a year at least, before I started to stammer more or less fluently. I never learned to speak Japanese correctly.

The first meditation is forever etched into my memory. After a few minutes the first pains started. My thighs began to tremble like violin strings. The sides of my feet became burning pieces of wood. My back, kept straight with difficulty, seemed to creak and to shake involuntarily. Time passed inconceivably slowly. There was no concentration at all. I hadn’t been given anything to concentrate on anyway, so I just sat and waited for the bell to ring, the bell which would finish the period of agony.

Later I was able to study other beginners, westerners and Japanese. I never saw anyone who was as stiff as I was when I started. Mostly they could find some way of sitting in balance but I had to spend three months on top of an anthill before I stopped wobbling, and could get one foot up. The worst was over then, although I didn’t stop suffering at once. There are many kinds of suffering.

I believe that meditation is difficult for everybody. Our personality forces us to be active, we walk up and down, we gesticulate, we tell stories, we crack jokes, to prove to ourselves and to others that we exist, that our individuality is important.

We are frightened of silence, of our own thoughts. We want to play some music or see a film. We like to be distracted. We want to put things together, light cigarettes, have a drink, look out of the window. All these occupations fall away during meditation.

In Zen there is an exercise called kinhin. The monks, after sitting still for some hours, walk in a circle while they continue their concentration. Only the head monk, who is in charge of the exercise, watches the time and looks where he is going; the others follow.

When I took part in a kinhin exercise for the first time I had to break away from the circle and slip out of the hall. I leant against a tree and laughed till the tears were running down my face. I, a wanderer, a beatnik (there were no hippies then), a free soul, now formed part of a line and kept time.

Meditation is an exercise aimed at detachment, at loosening one’s ties. I was bound by the idea, which I had created myself, that I was not bound to anything. A Japanese physician who often joined the monks during the evening’s meditation, told me that he always had trouble stopping himself from tittering when he sat there quietly and tried to concentrate. To sit still is a way of creating distance, of isolating oneself, of breaking away not only from what happens around us but also from what happens within, in the mind itself. Later, when I was given a koan to concentrate on, I noticed how the most trivial matters can break concentration. A memory of a good soup, eaten years ago in some restaurant or other, provided enough subject matter to spend ten minutes on the most disconnected facts and associations. To meditate is to sit still, in the right attitude, and to concentrate on never mind what subject. Buddha, Christ, a pebble, nothing, a vacuum, the thin blue sky, God, love, it doesn’t matter. In Zen training concentration is on the koan, a subject which the master presents to the disciple. One tries to become one with the koan, to close the distance between oneself and the koan, to lose oneself in the koan, till everything drops or breaks away and nothing is left but the koan which fills the universe. And if that point is reached enlightenment, the revelation, follows. Very simple, but quite impossible, or apparently impossible; for if it were not possible, all mystical training would be in vain. But mysticism is as old as the world, and “free souls,” “wise men,” “holy men,” “prophets,” “adepts,” “arhats,” “bodhisatva’s,” “buddha’s” have come out of all schools and all exercises. In every training the ego is broken, the “I” is crushed.

It is almost impossible, especially for the beginner, to meditate alone, In a group, where it is arranged beforehand how long the meditation will last, it is possible. Our pride, or our shame, will force us not to stop the exercise before the arranged time. If others can do it, I can do it. Pride isn’t always negative—as a means to an end it can be used profitably. The others don’t wobble, and that’s why I won’t wobble. I am too proud to groan with pain. I am too proud to scratch my neck. I am sitting still, just like the others. If everyone thinks that way the group sits still. That is not to say that I didn’t do a lot of wobbling and groaning, for pride has its limits. The pain was sometimes so bad that I imagined that I was sitting on a pile of burning, crackling wood, and my teeth would chatter and I would sob, unable to restrain myself at all. If it got that bad the head monk would notice and send me outside for a period of twenty-five minutes. I would then have to walk up and down while continuing my concentration, always in a part of the garden where he could see me from his seat near the door of the meditation hall.

The first day in the monastery passed quietly. After the early morning meditation I wasn’t admitted to the master’s room, but sent to my own room. Someone came to fetch me for breakfast. We sat on the floor at low tables, in the lotus position of course, although I was allowed to kneel. This was easier but also painful after a while, for the dining room had a hard wooden floor. Before eating the monks sang a sutra, one of the Buddha’s sermons, in classical Chinese, while the cook hit a wooden drum to keep time. It was a hypnotic sound, that singing, short and staccato, the monks cutting the words into syllables and droning them with sharp, abrupt endings. After that we were given small bowls filled with rice and hot water and another bowl containing pickled vegetables; these didn’t taste too bad. We were also served takuan, an orange radish, pickled and sliced. I put a few slices in my mouth but they were very sharp and I grimaced, sucking my cheeks in and looking about desperately, as I felt sweat prickle under my hair. One wasn’t supposed to speak at table but everyone giggled, even the severe head monk, when they saw my reaction to the delicacy. Later, when I got used to the taste, I even began to like takuan and used to help myself secretly when I passed through the kitchen.

After breakfast we worked. I was given a mop and taken to a very long corridor. There were other corridors to be cleaned when I had finished the first. Eventually someone rang a bell and we had an hour off. I went to my room and fell asleep; it was 6 a.m., still very early.

At seven, I followed the others to the vegetable garden to harvest cucumbers. The monks wore overalls, and they laughed and talked, pushing and tackling each other. Most of them were young, between seventeen and twenty-one. A few were older, but I only got to know the young ones; the older monks kept to themselves.

The head monk had his own room. Because he was the practical leader of the monastery and because he was a priest, and therefore higher in rank than the others, he was treated with respect. He received guests, took care of the administration of the monastery, paid the bills, collected gifts, wrote letters. My monthly payment was arranged with him—about £2 a month for board and lodging, the lowest rate I ever paid in my life.

Another older monk worked as cook. The daily menu was simple: vegetables, rice, barley gruel, no meat at all, sometimes fried noodles or a dish which resembles the Chinese tjap tjoy, a vegetable stew which the cook could make very tasty. We also had feasts from time to time and then the cook had three or four assistants and prepared complicated dishes. But mostly the fare was very simple and not very nourishing, a diet which didn’t do much for me. Within a few weeks I began to feel ill and weak. The monks called a doctor and he prescribed better food, so I was given permission to get a meal from outside once a day (if it was possible to go out, for sometimes the monastery cut itself off from the outside world and closed its gates for a week) and I found a small restaurant close by where I could get fried rice and meat salads.

In the afternoon the meditation started again: four periods, two hours in all. Dinner was early, at 4 p.m., and was the last meal of the day. In the evening we meditated from seven till ten. Meditation times differ in a Zen monastery. In winter there is more sitting than in summer, but I found even this light summer training of six hours a day far more than I could really put up with. Even so, I got through it. I had to of course—my pride wouldn’t let me back out of it.

I have read warnings that meditation can be dangerous and should only be done under the personal supervision of a master. I don’t believe this is true. If a group of reasonably sane people want to sit together for an hour or so, it will work perfectly well. However, if certain members of the group want to see mystical light and astral helpers and visions and lofty spirits bathing in a sea of high powered radiance, a nervous atmosphere may be caused which can have unpleasant temporary results. Buddhism is for the average, normal man. It is a method of transforming daily life, the comings and goings and activities of a common man, into a mystical training. Buddhism is no school for magicians. You can’t predict the future with it, and you can’t use it to find out if you were Louis XIV in a previous life. Nor is it advisable to use Buddhism as a means of developing the third eye, to see the colors of the auras of our fellow men.

In China a Zen master travelled with a few disciples to the capital and camped near the river. A monk of another sect asked one of the disciples of the Zen master if his teacher could do magic tricks. His own master, said the monk of the other sect, was a very talented and developed man. If he stood on this side of the river, and somebody else stood on the other side, and if you gave the master a brush and the other a sheet of paper then the master would be able to write characters in the air which would appear on the sheet of paper. The Zen monk replied that his master was also a very talented and developed man, because he too could perform the most astounding feats. If he slept, for instance, he slept, and if he ate, he ate.

In Tibet in particular, schools were developed which originated from mixture of Buddhism and other methods. The followers of these schools claimed that they had all sorts of supernatural powers: they could fly, they could manifest themselves in different places at the same time, they could make objects disappear and appear again at another spot. It is quite possible that these claims are true, but I wonder if this type of supernatural happening has any real value. Zen masters have often given their opinion of this sort of thing. Supernatural gifts are obstacles on the way to enlightenment, insight, true understanding. The Buddha himself never boasted about his supernatural power. He taught the method of the eightfold path and set an example to show the way.

While I was in the monastery I was continually referred back to the daily routine, the simple everyday life. If I wanted to expound some clever theory I was either ignored or ridiculed or curtly told not to talk nonsense. What mattered was “here and now,” whatever I happened to be doing, whether I was peeling potatoes in the kitchen, washing rice, pulling out weeds, learning Japanese, drinking tea, or meditating. I had to solve my koan, the subject of my meditation, and I shouldn’t fuss.

It is irritating, annoying, to be shut up all the time, to be unable to talk, not to be able to say: “Here I am, I have experienced something, I have thought of something, I believe I know something, I understand something, please listen to me.” What irritated me most, I think, was that nobody wanted to listen to me when I discovered that meditation, even the blundering sort of meditation I was engaged in, led to new experiences with color and shape. I noticed that when I walked through the temple garden, the observation of bits of moss on rocks, or a slowly moving goldfish, or reeds swaying with the wind, led to ecstasy.

By losing myself in the colors and shapes around me I seemed to become very detached, an experience which I had known before, in Africa, after using hashish. The feeling wasn’t only caused by observing, being aware of, “beautiful” things, such as goldfish or pieces of moss; a full dustbin or dogshit with flies around it led to exactly the same result. And this “getting high” was much more satisfactory than the hashish experiences, because now I felt happy and quiet and sometimes pleasantly tense, whereas I had never known quite where I was with hashish—sometimes the experience was pleasant, but often it was nasty and full of fear. Hashish had also given me negative and confusing visions, such as the sudden appearance of endless highways in a strange, unreal light, while now I wasn’t bothered by visions at all. I merely seemed to really see what I was looking at. I tried to find an explanation and concluded that we are, under normal everyday stress and circumstances, much too tense and rushed to be able to be fully aware. None of the senses will then function properly; and we do and think too much at the same time, with the result that nothing succeeds. Alcohol, or hashish, or engaging in some intense and dangerous activity like riding a motorcycle, gives us the only chance to channel our attention in a single direction. A tree is a fantastic example of beauty, but who has time to look at a tree?

And now that suddenly, unexpectedly, without even wanting to, I could suddenly observe and really see objects in my surroundings, I thought this event of such importance that I wanted my discovery to be acknowledged, accepted by qualified authorities. But the master didn’t show the slightest interest; he wouldn’t even give me one of his rare nods. He thought it quite normal that moss on rocks and full dustbins are visually interesting—a truth so obvious that any comment is wasted. Zen monasteries are severe and tough.

Even so, I was occasionally praised, even specially invited by the head monk to his private room and treated to bitter tea and sweet cakes, without having any idea of what it was that I had done right. At one time I was tea “monk” in the meditation hall for a few weeks (I never wore monk’s clothes in the monastery always jeans and a black jersey, and in winter a black duffel coat). After the third meditation period I had to slip out quietly, rush to the kitchen, make tea in a large kettle, and then get back as quickly as possible. In the hall my return was greeted by the head monk striking his bell and I had to bow to the altar. Then I gave everyone tea, I didn’t have to bother about the cups as another monk provided them beforehand. But on one occasion I found this hadn’t happened. I stood there with the kettle and nobody had a cup. I looked surprised, understood that I couldn’t just stand about, put the kettle down, bowed to the altar and went back to the kitchen to fetch cups. Everything which is done in a Zen temple is part of a scheme, even the most trivial activities are part of a ceremonial tradition, but there is no tradition for cups which aren’t there. So I created a new ceremony on the spot, came back with a tray full of cups which I had found in a cupboard (they weren’t the right cups but I hadn’t had the time to look for them properly), bowed with tray and all to the altar and the Bodhisatva, gave everyone a cup, put the tray against the back of the altar, and poured tea. It seemed an acceptable way of dealing with an unexpected situation. My teachers, the master himself, the head monk, and later Peter, thought this a matter of importance. I had proved, so I was told three times, that I was a good pupil. Zen training fosters awareness: it produces somebody who concentrates on everything he does, who tries to do everything as well as possible and who becomes aware of his circumstances and of the part which he plays within his environment. If an unexpected situation suddenly develops he will know how to handle it, and will, by saving himself, save others. The monk who had forgotten the cups wasn’t scolded—everyone had had his tea.

Zen masters are actors. The feather which had been stuck in my cap three times, by the head monk who called me to his room, by the master who spoke to me in the garden, and by Peter who patted me on the shoulder when he met me in the kitchen, was in itself of no significance. Teacups or no teacups, the case in itself wasn’t worth mentioning. I had felt flattered at first, but when they really overdid it I understood that they were really trying to tell me something about awareness.

Meanwhile the meditation continued, day after day. Sometimes six hours a day, sometimes eight, sometimes twelve. The first week of the month the monastery closed its gates, the monks received no mail and the telephone was cut. The master saw us not once, but three times a day. After a month I was admitted to the master’s room for the first time. First I had to practise the ceremony of “seeing the master” while he wasn’t there. The head monk took the part of master. He sat on the platform and stared at me with a nasty glint in his eye. I had to come in slowly, with my hands folded, bow, prostrate myself three times on the floor, and then kneel. After the interview was over I would have to do the same in reverse, and leave the room walking backwards. I had to try a few times before the head monk was satisfied and he told me to learn to walk more softly, because my greater length and weight caused the floormats to start bouncing a little and the movement might bother the master.

Although I was beginning to feel fanatical about Zen, I thought this approach was overdone, just as saluting and coming to attention in the army had seemed ridiculous and senseless to me. I shooed the rebellious thought away by producing the idea that the Zen master himself had to be a free, completely detached man and these were no more than good manners, of no real importance and merely created for appearances of order and respect.

The head monk had advised me not to read while I was in the monastery. I didn’t pay much attention to this and read a biography of Milarepa, the most famous Tibetan Buddhist holy man.1 Milarepa hadn’t had an easy start either. When he found his teacher Marpa, Milarepa was a black magician who had repented and seen the errors of his ways. Marpa made Milarepa do exercises to counteract the results of his own evil deeds. He had to build houses, and every time he finished a house Marpa said that he had made a mistake about the site. The house shouldn’t be here, but there, on that hilltop. And then Milarepa had to take his house to pieces again and carry the stones, one by one, to the hilltop where he would build the house again only to be told to pull it down once more. It didn’t seem such a terrible punishment to me. I should have preferred to build houses, even while knowing that I would have to take them down again, rather than meditate in a hall where I was being slowing torn to pieces. Further on in the book I found descriptions of Milarepa’s meditation, but nowhere did it mention that he had any trouble. There was nothing about pain in the legs or back, the fight with sleep, the confused and endlessly interrupting thoughts.

Sleep had never been a source of trouble for me, but now it had become a fierce opponent. I slept for four hours a night and another hour during the day, provided nobody interfered by ringing a bell or beating a gong indicating that something had to be done somewhere. I had learned the meaning of the various signals. Every day sutras were sung in the temple room and I would have to be there with the others. I couldn’t join in, the chanting was too foreign to me and I couldn’t read the characters of the text, so I had to content myself with kneeling down and listening to the monks; sometimes I literally fell over with sleep. Because I couldn’t master the lotus position I couldn’t achieve balance, while the monks, who were very comfortable in the lotus, could afford to fall asleep while meditating as they didn’t risk falling over and making a spectacle of themselves. There were days which seemed so hopeless that I had to use all my strength to get up in the morning. When I tried to visualise the immediate future I saw nothing but pictures of bondage and assorted difficulties. Sometimes I didn’t get up and pretended to have a sore throat or a headache but I couldn’t do that too often. I hadn’t come to the monastery to try and escape from the monastic training.

I missed the company of my friends. The monks made jokes but they were different from the jokes my friends would invent. I wished for the company of just one of my former mates, so that we could laugh together about the many seemingly illogical or contrasting situations. I missed my motorcycle and it annoyed me that I couldn’t listen to jazz, although the music of the temple, the chanting voices of the monks, the clappers, cymbals, wooden drums and gongs fascinated me. I would have liked to have some coffee now and then and not just Chinese tea. And most of all I wanted to sit on a western-style lavatory, with a cup of coffee, a cigar, and a book, and not, as now, have to squat down uncomfortably above a hole in a board with flies coming out of it.