Five

A large glass of soya sauce and a dangerous snake

A man who has got himself through a whole day without having learned anything and who goes to bed as stupid as he got up, is a dead man. I think I found this bit of wisdom in an American book, a book on success in business. The moral of the story is that you must be aware, because you can make a lot of money that way.

I didn’t like the book. Why is it so important to be successful, to make a profit? Isn’t it true that success and profit are illusions without substance? Whatever has a beginning will end.

A negative, destructive way of thinking, a part of my personality at that time, had entered the monastery gate. The result was that I was not very conscious, not particularly attentive to the situations in which I took part; and I didn’t know I was not attentive. I dreamt a lot.

The head monk described my state of mind even more exactly. “You are asleep,” he said, “you are snoring.”

We were in the kitchen. I was cleaning vegetables, rather carelessly. The head monk asked me to stop mucking about and to follow him. He took me to the room reserved for visitors. There was a low table with a teapot, a tin of bitter powdered green tea and a piece of bamboo, cut into the shape of a shaving brush. He had asked me to bring a kettle of boiling water and I poured this onto the green powder. He whipped the tea with the brush till it foamed. Kneeling we each drank a cup and then he looked at me.

“Buddha,” said the head monk “had to go a long way before he found the final enlightenment. Later he told others about the road he followed so that they would be able to follow him. Buddha talked a lot about right awareness. Do you know what it is?”

I tried to shift my weight, for my legs were already beginning to hurt again. “Looking where you are going,” I said.

“Yes,” the head monk said, “but you can’t do that when you are asleep. When you are asleep anything can happen and you won’t even know about it. The temple may burn down and when you eventually wake up because your sleeping bag is getting burnt, it will be too late. Don’t take me literally. The monastic training tries to wake us up, but when it is time to sleep you may sleep. But when you are not asleep, be awake. When you are cleaning vegetables, you really have to clean them. The idea is to throw the good pieces into the pot and the rotten pieces into the tin, not the other way around. Whatever you do, do it well, as well as you can, and be aware of what you are doing. Don’t try to do two things at the same time, like pissing and cleaning your teeth. I have seen you do that. Perhaps you think you are saving time that way, but the result is no more than a mess in the lavatory and a mess in your mouth.”

“And where do I get by being aware?”

The head monk shrugged, and dropped his eyelids.

“I don’t care where it gets you. I am merely advising you to stay awake. We, the teacher and the monks and the other disciples of the master, can’t help you much. To stay awake is self discipline. We can force you, in a way, to meditate, but we can’t make you concentrate on your koan. You are free to work on your problem, while you are perched on your cushions, or to dream away.”

“Right,” I said, “I’ll try it. I’ll try to stay awake.”

“Try,” the head monk said, “what a word! You mustn’t try, you must just do it.”

Zen monks don’t indulge in long conversations so I began to get up.

“Wait a minute,” the head monk said. “I want to warn you. If ever you succeed in waking up a bit, be careful that it doesn’t go to your head. We used to have a monk here who really did his best to be aware of every situation. When, after three years, he became a priest, the master sent him to a small temple up North. After a while a young man came to keep him company. This young man intended to join a monastery but he wanted to try the life in a temple first, because the routine is different from ours. Temple priests and monks don’t get up as early as we do, they meditate less or not at all, and they are not in contact with a master. The priest tried to teach the young man as much as possible and used all sorts of daily events as examples.”

One day there was an earthquake, quite a strong earthquake and part of the temple caved in. When the earthquake stopped the teacher said: “Look, now you have been able to see how a Zen man behaves under stress. You will have noticed that I didn’t panic. I was quite aware of what was happening. I took you by the arm and we went to the kitchen, because that is the strongest part of the temple. I was proved right because the kitchen is still in one piece and we have survived the earthquake—we aren’t even wounded. That I, in spite of my self-control and awareness, did suffer a slight shock, you may have deduced from the fact that I drank a large glass of water, something I would never do under normal circumstances.”

The young man didn’t say anything but smiled.

“What’s so funny?” the priest asked.

“That wasn’t water, reverend Sir,” the young man said, “that was a very large glass of soy sauce.”

The day the head monk lectured me I became ill. I got diarrhea, probably because of the seaweed we had for dinner that evening, a Japanese delicacy of which we had each eaten a bowlful.

I missed part of the evening meditation because I couldn’t stay in the same place for twenty-five minutes. I had to get up in the middle of a period, bow to the head monk, explain my predicament in a whisper, and rush out of the hall without bowing to the statue of Manjusri, the fierce Bodhisatva who specializes in sword rattling. In emergencies even Zen training will make exceptions.

That night, around 2 a.m., I got up for the umpteenth time, to go to the lavatory. The court was lit by the moon and just in front of the small building which housed the toilets I saw a snake, a fat snake, coiled up, about twelve feet long. Its head pointed in my direction and its split tongue flicked in and out coldly, evilly. I shouted and rushed off towards the main temple. On the way I tripped over something and fell. The fall woke me up a little and I considered that panic might be unnecessary, since the snake wasn’t following me. I stopped but then rushed off again. The head monk looked at me, and covered his mouth with his hand. He was a Japanese of the aristocratic type, lanky and well formed, with a beautiful thin curved nose and calm, wide, and slanting eyes. His even, sparkling white teeth had amazed me, as most monks had irregular teeth, haphazardly placed, yellow and filled in with metal. The sparkling white teeth were now in a glass on the table and I looked the other way while he completed his face.

“A snake,” I said, panting. “A big fat dangerous snake. Near the toilets. If we are quick we may catch it and kill it.”

The head monk gave me a shy grin while he snapped his teeth into place. “Never mind,” he said. “Let the snake be. We have had him for years. He catches rats and he lives in the courtyard. I should have warned you. Just walk around him, he is harmless.”

The snake even had a name which I have forgotten now. Something with “chan” at the end. “San” means “mister” and goes after the names of grown-up human beings. Children and pets have “chan” after their names. I was very annoyed with myself when I got back to my room. Nothing is important enough to become upset about. I should have known that. I shouldn’t need monastic training to be aware of such a home truth. Nothing, nothing at all. I didn’t get upset in the old days when I had a flat tire on my motorcycle, did I? Or if I lost one of my favorite books? So why get upset now because I found a snake in my way? And why should I be upset about having got upset? Instead of getting more detached this training was making me nervous, hysterical. “Idiot!” “Unbelievably stupid fool!” For days I called myself names, often aloud, even in the meditation hall. The head monk had to shout at me. “Stay awake,” he shouted.

In those days I found several possibilities of making life more enjoyable. We had entered a period of “soft training,” which meant we were getting up at 4 a.m. instead of 3 a.m., meditation in the afternoon was cancelled, some monks were on leave, visiting their parents in the country and the teacher had gone to Tokyo to lecture. Of the three older monks who, together, ran the monastery, two were away, so that the head monk was kept busy and we hardly saw him. In the morning he gave us instructions for the entire day and after that he disappeared. I helped to cut wood and dig the gardens, in the afternoon I studied Japanese and only in the evening did I meditate with the others, supervised by a young monk who shortened the periods and ignored wobbling, moving about and falling asleep. At first I had washed my own clothes, a job I didn’t like, and now I bought two pairs of jeans and a pile of underwear and shirts. The shop didn’t stock my size but they took the order, and within a few days a neat parcel was delivered to my room, at 10 percent discount. Now that I had more clothes, I could afford to save up my laundry and take it, once a week, to a washerwoman around the corner. I also found another restaurant; the first, where I had gone on doctor’s prescription, didn’t have enough variety in the menu. But my most important discovery was the public bathhouse. In the monastery the monks were only allowed to have a bath every ninth day; they could have a shower whenever they wanted, but the shower was cold. The monastery’s bathhouse was small and contained an iron bath which was heated by a small fire, to be fed with leaves and twigs only. Forests are scarce in Japan and firewood is a luxury. A monk had to spend the best part of a day heating the bath and when he finally managed to get it to the right temperature the master would go first and then the monks in order of importance. I would always be the last one, as I was the last arrival in the monastery. That didn’t mean I had to sit in dirty water, because the Japanese clean themselves before they get into the tub, splashing about with basins and lots of soap before finally immersing themselves in the hot water, relaxing their weary bones and muscles till the next person begins to show open signs of impatience.

The bathhouse I found was a larger, more luxurious version of what I had got used to in the monastery. I had to walk for a few minutes through the narrow streets of the area, past the small shops and street stands, and I was greeted by everyone. Everybody knew me: there were only twenty-nine westerners in Kyoto then, and more than a million Japanese. I would give ten cents to the lady at the entrance and undress on a sort of balcony in the hall, where not only the lady at the door but everybody who went in or out as well, could see me. The women were very interested. A white man, apparently, was a welcome change, and although they must have seen a lot of details in the cinema, this live show was more fascinating. Three dimensions are better than two.

I used to go in the early afternoon and soak as long as possible in the large, swimming pool sized bath, lined with beautifully glazed tiles. Bathing used to be mixed, but since the American occupation new ideas influenced local behavior and now men and women were separated. I got to know the other regulars after a while and began to greet the old men, who came every afternoon, by name. “Hello Jan-san.” they would say. “Hello Tanaka-san, hello Kobori-san, hello Sasaki-san. Nice water today.” And then we would groan together contentedly. I had more contact with the old men than with the monks. They asked me how long I had to meditate every evening. “Three hours,” I said proudly. “And in a little while, when the master is back, another two hours in the afternoon. And another hour again in the morning.” They shook their heads compassionately and nodded at each other, admiringly. They really had a strange friend now.

“And don’t your legs hurt?”

“Sure,” and I indicated all the painful spots.

The monastery didn’t object, although the head monk must have known exactly what I was doing.