Eight

The first sesshin and the whale’s penis

Not knowing what to expect I didn’t worry much about joining the first sesshin. Gerald, who did know what to expect, told me it would be quite easy. “Just a little more meditation than we usually do.” He advised me to stockpile some food, for the gate would be closed and the way to my restaurant cut off.

“Food?” I asked. “What sort of food? Tins? But I can’t very well cook my own food in the kitchen. And I am not allowed to have a hotplate in my room because the head monk says that the wires are too weak—and then there is a fire-risk of course, what with all this timber and paper and the straw mats on the floor.”

“No,” Gerald said, “you’ll have to buy some chocolate slabs and a supply of ship’s biscuits. I’ll get them for you.”

He also brought me a large bag of peanuts mixed with raisins, supposed to be ideal power-food for mountaineers and meditators. Meditation is heavy work, for concentration and self-control consume a lot of energy. According to Gerald the monks’ diet was no good at all. Rice gruel and radishes, sometimes noodles with soy sauce, cucumber now and then, all eaten at speed—very unhealthy. “They all have stomach complaints,” he said. “Go and have a look in their rooms; there is a pot of pills on every shelf. You have to eat well, eggs and milk and bread and cheese and steak and good strong soup and a lot of fruit and fresh vegetables.”

“But Buddhists aren’t allowed to kill? And they shouldn’t eat meat, because that means killing indirectly.”

Gerald didn’t think so. “Nonsense. If you eat vegetables you also kill living beings. Every move you make is deadly for some insect or other. Your body kills microbes. And what is death? An illusion, a change, a birth, a process of passing from one stage to another.”

“But why don’t the monks eat meat then?”

“They do eat meat,” Gerald said, “but not here, not in the monastery. They are often invited by people in the neighborhood and then they eat everything which is offered to them, meat, fish, shrimps, you name it, they eat it. And because they know that the monastic fare is scanty they eat too much at such occasions. You watch them when they come back—they are all puffed up and swollen and can only just reach their rooms. Very bad for their health.”

“But why does the monastery have unhealthy rules? It is directed by enlightened spirits isn’t it?”

Gerald gave me a surprised look. “You talk like an old lady, searching for the higher life. Enlightened spirits! You mean, perhaps, that the master and the head monk know what it is all about. They do know, but they are Japanese. Japan is a country of tradition. Here they want to keep everything. Just walk into a shop and see how beautifully and carefully everything is packed. Look into the houses: everyone has his cupboards filled with ornamental boxes, every box contains another box and then there are strings to be undone and pieces of cloth to be unwrapped and then, finally, you find what they have been keeping.”

“Packing is very important here, and the training which we are following is packed with tradition. A thousand years ago some Zen monk started eating piping hot rice gruel and that’s why they still do it now. And a thousand years ago an Orthodox Buddhist decided that one shouldn’t eat meat and that’s why Zen monks still refuse to eat meat, provided they have the feeling that someone is supervising them.”

“And sex?”

“Well,” Gerald said. “Here in the monastery we have no girls, so it can’t be done. I suppose some of the monks may have homosexual relations—it’s much more accepted here than in the West anyway. But with the training and the continuous discipline, there isn’t much time or opportunity for sex. You’ll have to go out for it and I don’t think they allow you to go out and look for it.”

“And you?”

“When I run into it I won’t shy away,” Gerald said and smiled contentedly. “But I haven’t got much time to look for it either. During the day I work, in the evenings I have to meditate and I have to sleep a few hours too. The master expects me every morning, I have to organize my daily routine and I keep strange hours. There’s no money for the whores. No, I have to wait till it comes my way; it has happened, and it will come again. I am always prepared for it.”

The day after that conversation the sesshin started and Gerald moved into the room next to mine, carrying a seaman’s bag full of clothes and food. After the morning’s meditation he furnished his room by spreading his sleeping bag on the floor. Then we were both put to work. We had to pull up weeds in the rock garden, a finicky job, because the weeds weren’t much bigger than the small moss plants and were about the same color. The monks squatted down while they worked, with their feet flat on the ground. Gerald had no trouble squatting on his haunches, but I couldn’t do it easily. The head monk had often advised me to squat as much as possible, even if it hurt me. It would be good exercise, he said, and would lengthen the muscles of my thighs and loosen up my body. Eventually it would enable me to sit in the full lotus position without any pain whatever. I hadn’t wanted to listen to him and had found a small wooden box which I always carried with me when I had to work in the garden and on which I could sit comfortably. This time too I had my box and was sitting on it quietly while I pulled the little weeds and talked to Gerald when the box was suddenly, and with force, kicked from under me. I toppled over backwards but jumped up, ready to attack whoever had delivered the kick. Rage is an emotion which comes very quickly and I didn’t need more than one or two seconds to change from a peaceful soul into a raging maniac. I saw the head monk standing in front of me, imperturbable as usual but with a fierce light in his widely opened eyes. He had placed his legs a little apart, with his belly slightly pressed forward: the balance-position of a judoka. If I had attacked him, as I intended to, I wouldn’t have been able to throw him, and if I had wanted to kick or hit him he could have avoided me and easily have thrown me with my own power.

His calm helped me to control myself but my breathing was out of order for the next few minutes. Gerald continued working as if nothing had happened, and the head monk stooped down and took my box under his arm. I bowed, and he nodded and walked away.

“That was very nice,” Gerald said. “In normal life a superior usually really loses his temper when he thinks that an inferior is behaving stupidly, or conceitedly if you like. And he becomes angry because he isn’t quite sure of himself, or because he thinks he is important, or because he identifies himself with some ‘cause,’ like ‘the company’ or ‘the job.’ All these causes don’t, in reality, exist. It’s only a matter of awareness, of knowing what you are doing. If you are pulling weeds from the moss you should do it as well as possible, without sitting down comfortably.”

“So that is important?” I said.

“Of course,” Gerald said. “Nothing matters, nothing is important, but it does matter and it is important to do whatever you are doing as well as possible. Just for the hell of it. As an exercise. No more. It’s like the four truths of Buddhism. Life is suffering. Suffering is caused by desire. Desire can be broken. It can be broken by walking the eightfold path. But how do you get to and on the eightfold path? By desiring to be free. By desiring to break desire. That desire is all right. To want to is wrong, but to want to stop wanting, well, that’s excellent. Simple, really.”

“I thought Zen knows no words.”

“Yes,” Gerald said. “And I am using a lot of words. But what I am saying isn’t Zen. I have no idea what Zen is, all I have is the idea that I will know one day and that’s why I am here.”

*   *   *

A little later the meditation started again: four periods, two hours altogether. I wanted to smoke but there was no time, and I took a few quick pulls in the lavatory and kept the rest of my cigarette in my breast pocket. At the end of the week I had a pocket full of half smoked cigarettes, because I kept on lighting cigarettes without noticing it. In the afternoon we meditated for another two hours, and another four and a half in the evening. It seemed as if time was lengthened artificially. Because I was in pain continuously I was forced to feel the torture consciously, minute after minute. The head monk allowed me to walk sometimes, and would wave me off my seat and into the garden for a period. Time would go quickly then. Sometimes, but very rarely, he sent me to my room and I could flop down on the floor and lie on my back for twenty-five minutes. Because I fell asleep now and then, in spite of my efforts to concentrate on the koan, time would suddenly rush away.

It isn’t possible to think about two subjects at the same time and I used this fact so as not to feel the pain. I remembered the most exciting times of my life and tried to live again through pieces of my past. That I couldn’t think of the koan then didn’t matter, I was only concerned with getting rid of the pain because I was certain that the muscles of my legs were being torn apart and the bones were being chiselled out of my feet. Again and again I imagined being back in Cape Town, coming out of the front door of my cottage, and starting my motorcycle. I recaptured every movement, I saw the trees again on the other side of the road and smelled the fragrance of the flowers in the garden. I heard the gurgling of the engine and rode off, through the narrow streets of Wynberg, towards the Waal Drive, then past the mountains and along the seashore. Sometimes I could fill an entire period of twenty-five minutes that way and Gerald congratulated me. He sat next to me and had noticed that I hadn’t moved once during a whole period, apparently deep in concentration. I told him what I had been doing and he laughed.

“I do that too sometimes,” he said. “But then I think of women I have been to bed with. The only trouble is that I become excited and it is tiring to sit with an erection for any length of time. It’s much safer to ride a motorcycle.”

After the third day I began to be disturbed. The pain of sitting and the stress caused by the visits to the master began to have effect. The master had changed himself for this week into a raging lion. In his room I felt the power which came out of him, and his will which forced itself on me. I had to give an answer to the koan, a satisfactory answer to a question which could not be understood, determined or analyzed. I had already given every answer I could think of and none of them were any good. I wasn’t even anywhere near it, he kept on saying. The beginning of any real understanding hadn’t even come, I was miles, light-years, away from any indication of the truth. I was convinced he was quite right. But if I said nothing he wouldn’t accept it either. I came into his room, bowed, stretched myself out on his floor three times, came back into a kneeling position, recited my koan and the master looked at me and said: “Well?”

“Well nothing. Well no idea at all.”

But I didn’t have to say that. I didn’t know. It should be clear that I didn’t know.

Sometimes he sent me back without saying anything, sometimes he said a few words, and once he spoke to me for at least ten minutes. When I left his room there were tears of frustration in my eyes. I hadn’t understood what he had been saying, I had too little Japanese. I had travelled through half the world to find a teacher, I had found a teacher, and I didn’t understand what he was saying.

But the others had their problems, too. The head monk sat like a feared and powerful demon in the hall and shouted when he saw that we were falling asleep or dreaming off. He made us patrol regularly, and each of us in turn had to walk around with a long flat lath on the shoulder, moving slowly, dragging our feet in a threatening manner and looking at the others one by one. Whoever wobbled or was asleep was first touched on the shoulder. Then we bowed: the monk who was about to hit bowed because he was grateful that he was allowed to administer punishment, and the monk about to be hit was also grateful. Then we hit eight times. The monk who was beaten had to lean forward so that he could be hit on the muscles of the back. We hit quickly, allowing the lath to spring back so that it could only make contact for a split second. I had to learn the trick first, on a monk who had tied a cushion on his back. The lath, when it isn’t handled properly, can inflict real damage, especially when it hits the spine. The monks in the hall often wore padded waistcoats; I wore an extra jersey. Even so the pain was sharp, and at the end of the week I had a blue cross on my back. But this pain couldn’t be compared with the pain in my legs. When I was hit the pain would disappear very quickly but the pain in my legs never seemed to pass—even when I walked the torture continued. The monks showed their sympathy and enquired regularly how I was getting on. That helped. A young monk who had hurt his leg while chopping wood was in almost continuous pain, too, as his wound wouldn’t heal properly. I saw him cry when it was my turn to go round with the stick and when I passed him without appearing to notice that he was moving about and obviously not meditating, the head monk shouted and I was forced to go back and give him his eight whacks. He bowed politely and smiled when I met him later that day in the dining room.

I began to mumble to myself and walked into walls and trees. When I said something the words weren’t connected and my sentences had neither beginning nor end. Gerald was also showing signs of abnormality.

When we were cleaning the lavatories together and I had to control myself so as not to vomit, he suddenly started a story about whales.

“A whale has a penis as long as a full grown man, did you know that?”

I said that I had never thought about whales’ penises but Gerald didn’t hear me.

“Yes,” he said. “Very big, unbelievably big. I have seen grey whales copulating, just off the coast of California. They jumped clear out of the water and fell back with a splash. You can hear a splash like that miles away. It’s really something.”

When I looked at him his eyes weren’t focusing and he looked clean through me. The surroundings in which I lived began to irritate me. I was looking for a seat, a chair, a bench, anything I could sit or lie on. But there was nothing of that kind about. Empty rooms everywhere, with straw mats on the floor, and nothing but a few uncomfortable rocks and gravestones in the garden. I couldn’t lie down on the ground either: it had been raining a lot and the ground was wet through. My room was prohibited territory. I was allowed to sleep in it from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m., but for the rest of the day I couldn’t use it unless the head monk sent me there to lie down for half an hour and that didn’t happen every day.

Gerald thought that I was living a luxurious life. He asked me whether I was meditating in the garden.

“In the garden? What do I have to do in the garden? We meditate in the meditation hall don’t we?”

“Yes,” Gerald said. “But you are expected to meditate for an extra half hour in the garden every night. Just go into the garden at eleven o’clock at night tonight. You’ll find us all there; we sit on the rocks and on the gravestones—everybody has his own place. Half an hour free meditation, that’s compulsory.”

I didn’t believe him, and took a few minutes off my cherished sleeping time that night to see for myself. He was right. But I didn’t feel any compulsion to follow the good example. I thought I was doing enough, more than enough. I would start meditating in the garden only if they dragged me out there by my hair, and that night I dug myself into my sleeping bag, grunted with pleasure and dropped far away before I had even managed to touch the bottom of the bag with my toes.