As long as space remains
And living beings endure
May I too remain
To dispel the miseries of this world.
—SHANTIDEVA
The summer before my junior year of high school, I decided to visit Nabatame in Nepal. I knew that he was in charge of building a stupa and temple in Lumbini, the Buddha’s birthplace. My parents wouldn’t hear of me traveling to Nepal. Absolutely not! But by then they were resigned to my absences in Rajgir, so I went to Nepal via a couple days’ detour to Rajgir, where I convinced Okonogi to give me the bus fare to Lumbini.
I walked across the border at Raxaul at around four in the morning after endless bus rides, and then hired a horse cart to get to the bus station on the Nepali side. Not having enough cash to pay bribes made it easy to push back. Main Hindustani hoon! I wasn’t some rich tourist they could hit up for baksheesh. Locals didn’t even need a passport to cross. Customs? How could a small backpack with a change of clothes and a few books be a problem?
I got to Lumbini and located the temple, which was a construction site with a small colony of huts that housed some of the workers. There was no way I could have phoned ahead, and as it happened Nabatame was away when I arrived. The young Sri Lankan monk who was left in charge wanted nothing to do with this oddly insistent young tourist. I spent the night at a nearby guesthouse that served pilgrims and the day loitering at the construction site, feeling entirely unwelcome.
When Nabatame returned, he was shocked to see me. “Did you run away again?”
“Sort of.”
“What does that mean?”
“My parents think I’m in Rajgir.” The fact that Okonogi was complicit, if not exactly responsible for my being there, was in my favor. Nabatame said I could stay if I didn’t mind sleeping on a mat on the ground, which was fine by me. He assigned me to share a hut with the Sri Lankan monk.
The next morning over breakfast we discussed how I might be useful. “The cook has quit,” Nabatame said. “Do you know how to cook?” There were around thirty laborers who had to be fed daily. I confessed that I’d never had a reason to spend time in the kitchen. My mother was an exceptionally good cook, and she had all the help she needed.
“What about carpentry then?”
“I’ve never hammered a nail.”
“Laying bricks?” I shook my head. No experience there either. “It seems you’ve lived a very sheltered life.”
He spoke the words lightly, but they cut. I went back to the hut under a dark cloud. Having come all this way, this was not how things were supposed to play out. That Brahmin kid who wouldn’t get his hands dirty was not who I was. My mind was filled with stories of the hardship Fujii Guruji went through to build the first stupas. This was holy work and I was hungry to have a part in it.
I came back out and told Nabatame that even though I brought with me no relevant skills, I was willing to learn. I was young and strong. He nodded and sent me off with a group of laborers. I made myself useful carrying bricks, cement, and sand from one spot to another, and they taught me to mix mortar for the masonry.
Early one morning before the laborers were normally up, we were doing prayers in Nabatame’s hut when screams broke through the chanting. A cobra had made its nest in the carpenters’ hut and caused a panic when one of the men woke up and saw it. The commotion continued with heated discussion. Everybody had an opinion about the habits of cobras. Everybody had a story to tell about a prior encounter with a snake. Everybody had a theory about the best way to kill it.
At that, Nabatame drew the line. They could move the hut or build another one, lay down all the marigolds and green chilies they pleased, but there would be no killing of cobras or anything else that happened to slither, crawl, or creep inside. This did not go down well. Everyone had seen Nabatame escorting a scorpion, held delicately with a pair of chopsticks, to the edge of the clearing behind the huts where our encampment faced the jungle. This removal and liberation happened on many occasions. Even Nabatame’s hut, which contained the altar, offered little protection from anything other than weather. To the Nepali laborers, the expert gesture with the chopsticks seemed an eccentricity of their Japanese boss, who had specific notions about the right way to do many things. Cohabiting with cobras was a step too far, they grumbled.
“The cobras lived here before we came,” Nabatame told them. “We are the intruders.” My own fear of snakes wrestled with my respect for Nabatame. But it was true: Until archaeologists discovered the pillar that Ashoka had raised here, this holy place was abandoned. Scorpions and cobras were its caretakers. The park where the Buddha’s mother Mayadevi steadied herself against a sala tree as she delivered him into the world had long ago dissolved into the forest that surrounded us. The only reason for our undertaking here was to honor the Buddha’s teaching. The first and most important precept that he taught was to abstain from killing or harming living beings. If we killed to build the stupa—if the means did not respect the end—the whole project would be a failure.
I had come to Nepal to see Nabatame with high hopes of learning something in the way of a monk’s education. The construction work offered certain valuable life lessons; tamping concrete can tamp ego too. But I had plenty of questions saved up and I tried to engage Nabatame whenever we had a break. When my questions veered toward the philosophical, he would return to the same refrain I had heard over and over again from the monks in Fujii Guruji’s order: “Don’t worry about that. Just practice. When you beat the drum, you will begin to understand.”
And yet Nabatame could see that I didn’t have time to practice after the long hours of tiring physical work. He called me into his hut one day and said, “I think you should go to Pokhara. There is an unbuilt stupa there, but you won’t need to do construction. It’s a very quiet place where you can practice. There is nobody there to lead the prayers right now, so that would be your responsibility.”
He put me on the bus alongside a Japanese hippie who was a delightfully colorful companion for the daylong ride. I was intrigued that he carried no luggage beyond an array of lighters and many cartons of cigarettes that he was chain-smoking as we climbed slowly through the forested lower reaches of the Himalayas. When we arrived at Pokhara, the beauty of the stupa’s site took my breath away. It was high on a wooded hill above Lake Phewa, with the town below lapping the eastern shore of the lake. All across the horizon the snow-dusted white peaks of the Annapurna range divided earth from sky.
What Nabatame called an “unbuilt” stupa was exactly that. Construction had begun some twenty years earlier and then halted. Hindu authorities, who were not happy that Nepal’s Buddhist history was being honored, ordered the monks to leave and demolished the stupa. By the time I was there, the recent democratic transition had made it possible for construction to resume. The temple and a couple of guest rooms were complete, and a contractor was slowly rebuilding the stupa with a small team of laborers who came and went during the day. There was a Gurkha armed with a kukri knife who served as watchman and another caretaker who I had to eject the day he showed up horribly drunk. Mostly I was alone. Though the stupa has become a busy tourist attraction now, very few visitors ever came up the hill in those days.
I threw myself wholeheartedly into what was, essentially, my first solo retreat. The practice became effortless. I could beat the drum for nine hours straight without fatigue. Distractions disappeared. The recitation of the sutra was intoxicating. We talk about how focus narrows, but the reality is that when all else is excluded what you are focusing on expands, its every detail larger, richer, more fully present. There was nothing but the frictionless funnel of sound and the shrine filling my visual field, as if sight and sound and self were all continuous, a larger organism than my body, with its interior and exterior parts working in synchronicity. Only the angles of the shadows on the shrine over the length of the day and the shifting color of the light marked the passage of time. There were moments when a ray of sunlight glancing off the golden ornaments sent a shiver through my whole body, or when the cool shift of evening’s arrival surprised me with a stillness so profound, a suspension of breath and time so perfect, that joy welled up to fill the empty space.
Although Fujii Guruji had trained extensively in Zen as well as in other schools, he never taught the kind of meditation that Westerners have come to assume is essential to Buddhism. But the practice of drumming and chanting was as powerful a meditation as anything I learned later. It cleared a space in the mind where silence and stillness did their work naturally, unbidden.
I took the hand drum and walked outside, beating and chanting. There was a small votive stupa, three feet high, that served in place of the “unbuilt” one, and I circled it as I had learned to circle the stupa at Rajgir. Body in motion and voice loud, I spun a thread of loving devotion out of rhythm and repetition. The fact that the stupa was a miniature of what was envisioned on that spot seemed fortuitous, appropriate. The whole world thrummed with potential: a seed inside a fruit inside a flower, and a whole forest contained within that seed.
I walked into the woods, beating and chanting. Some mornings I went out before dawn, beating and chanting my way into the darkness. It didn’t matter if I lost the path, I knew I could find my way back in daylight. All the noise I was making probably scared off any wildlife, but it didn’t entirely account for the fearlessness that buoyed me. This single-minded focus was all I needed to be happy, all I would ever need. It was entirely sufficient. Nothing could ever take this from me. I was invincible.
At other times I would sit on the hilltop above the stupa’s site for hours, taking in the silence. I watched the shadow of a cloud drift across the lake, the morning mist thinning in the valley, the gold blush on the Annapurnas turning a polished white. The peak of Machapuchare that faced me was like another stupa that Shiva had erected, its form echoing through the earth.
By this time I understood well what the mantra meant, the seven syllables namu myoho renge kyo honoring the Lotus Sutra. They were a summation in essence of all that the Buddha had taught. In that one phrase, the whole universe imploded into a single point. I could recite the sixteenth chapter of the sutra by heart, where the Buddha explains to his followers that leaving his father’s palace on a quest for enlightenment and finally achieving it that night under the tree in Gaya was all an illusion created for their benefit: Enlightened beings only appear to come and go, making themselves available for a time in this faltering world, but in reality they are never gone. Enlightened beings are always present here and now if you truly yearn to see them.
Each time I read the sutra again, doors opened that I had passed by before. I pondered the Bodhisattva who makes an offering of his own body, the most precious of all possessions, by saturating himself with fragrant oils and setting himself on fire. That fire continued to blaze out across the universe for centuries, bringing light to as many worlds as there are grains of sand on the shores of eighty million Ganges. I had read in Fujii Guruji’s autobiography about how he was inspired by this passage of the sutra to offer his own body, dedicating his physical existence entirely to the service of the Dharma. To seal that commitment he burned his flesh, a small token of the greater fire he felt, by tying a bundle of incense sticks to his arm and letting them burn all the way down. This made sense of the scars I had seen on both Okonogi and Nabatame. They must have done this exact same thing, I guessed, and I later learned that many monks in ancient China and Japan had done similar practices.
I resolved that I would do it too. I would make an offering of my body, this life’s container that was so dear to me, the one possession that I would give up just about anything else to hold on to when danger threatened it. I would dedicate it totally, without reservation, to serve the Buddhas. With one heart, single-minded, longing to see the Buddha.
I tied the bundle of sticks to my arm, fumbling one-handed with the piece of string. I spoke my vow: From that time on, my body, speech, and mind were no longer my own. They belonged entirely to the Buddhas and my only purpose was service to the Dharma. With my entire being, I longed to see the world through open eyes. Then I began to chant slowly, steadily. I struck a match and set it to the incense. There was a feeling of deep familiarity, as if I had done this many times before. The smoke was heavy and sweet, and the burning sensation began, slowly at first and then very quickly. The smell of scorched flesh mixed with the smell of incense, and I had a flash—viscerally, through the core of this body that was no longer mine—of how thoroughly a cremation pyre would burn this flimsy, short-lived bundle of biochemistry to ashes. The pain faded—it was there, but it seemed distant, not troubling. A calm settled over me, steady as the slow measure of the chant. After a while I let go of the chant too. I sat cocooned in silence, the smoke twisting slowly in the air. Bright sunlight bleached the white walls and bounced off the gold ornaments of the shrine, and then in a sudden moment resolved into a dazzling brilliance that was infinitely more than reflections and sunlight. I was not alone. The space was filled with the presence of enlightened beings, resplendent with a multitude of Buddhas, each one of them witnessing this act. My offering was made, my commitment sealed.
When I got back to Lumbini a couple of weeks later, Nabatame noticed the wound, which was still pretty messy. Swimming in Lake Phewa before it healed had been a bad idea. He realized right away what I had done, and he was upset. “People can die from this kind of thing!” It was the only time I had seen his equilibrium falter. This was not something one did casually, or without guidance. Did I really understand its significance? he asked.
It’s true that my understanding now is deeper than it was then. I’ve learned about the long tradition behind the rite that I instinctively improvised. I have learned too that there is a fine edge between detachment and neglect: If you dedicate your body to service, then part of the responsibility that entails is to preserve it from harm and keep it fit for service. But yes, when I decided to make an offering of my body that day, I wasn’t playing. I understood very well the nature of the total commitment I was making.
Four years later and halfway around the world, I picked up the phone and heard the news that Nabatame had been assassinated. The workers were sleeping outside the huts to escape the summer heat when one woke up with a knife at his neck. Startled, he cried out and the intruder stabbed him with a warning to be silent. Nabatame woke at the cry and was shot in the head at close range when he got up. He died instantly. The workers who were woken counted six men, their faces masked, running off in the night.
Any facts beyond that remained murky. Nothing was stolen. The attackers spoke a local dialect but they were never identified. At first it was thought that the killing was related to a Hindu-Muslim altercation in the neighboring village that Nabatame had tried to mediate. Later, it was rumored that Nabatame was standing up against the corruption that trailed in the wake of a multimillion dollar UNESCO development plan to preserve Lumbini as a World Heritage site. The killers were said to be hired professionals.
The news of his death left me broken. I sat in my room reciting the sutra, pouring words into the vacuum that had been sucked out of me, and staring at the gifts Nabatame had given me when I first left Rajgir: the small Buddha statue and the hand drum with the mantra inscribed in Japanese characters that were at once delicate and bold. Anju-sama had told me that it was the drum that Fujii Guruji gave to Nabatame when he ordained him, and that the calligraphy was Fujii Guruji’s own hand. I was stunned when I realized how precious that gift must have been to him, and I was humbled that he had given it so freely and kept its story to himself.
Nabatame loomed far larger in my mind than the brief and often silent time we had spent together. He was the first monk I ever met, and the gatekeeper of the world that opened to me at Rajgir. My memory of our days there and his quiet encouragement anchored my life in a time of profound uncertainty and upheaval. He was the one who gave me the precepts. Somehow, without thinking much about it, I had always assumed we would share a future: I would go back to Lumbini, we would work together again, there would be time to talk. I would no longer be a child and we would look back on those early days together. The story would continue. Only it wouldn’t. I recognized there was a lesson here about change and grasping and impermanence, but I was blindsided by the feeling of absolute finality, the unassailable permanence of death in the midst of the world’s flux.
I was shaken too when I understood that the monk who refused to kill snakes and scorpions to build the stupa was killed because of the stupa. The whole story may never see daylight, but I don’t doubt that his death was the result of speaking truth to power. Nabatame moved through the world with a single-minded, uncompromising fearlessness—the same fearlessness that so many people who knew him well described of Fujii Guruji. I don’t doubt that Nabatame learned it from his teacher. Nor was he the only one of Fujii Guruji’s followers to die violently for standing on principle; another was killed in Sri Lanka in an almost gratuitous confrontation with the Tamil Tigers. Was the strange fearlessness I had felt walking in the forest before dawn, with the drum and chant lighting my way in the darkness, a small sip from that same spring? I wondered how Nabatame would have responded if he hadn’t been surprised in his sleep. I don’t think he would have fought back. Fujii Guruji believed that violence, even in self-defense, was an immoral response that we should learn to transcend. Should I honor this death? Was this an extreme instance of offering one’s body in service, or was it a tragic waste of a precious life? The mind would sooner wrestle with a tangle of contradictions and seeming paradox than with the flat line of death.
The Nabatame that I so admired met everyone who crossed his path with a graceful acceptance that seemed to suspend judgment. I remembered the calm, evenhanded way he had handled the drama when Chacha-ji found me at Rajgir, sitting us down at the table to talk, guiding us to a resolution without taking sides. How is it possible to be single-minded and yet willing to listen to all sides of a story? To be uncompromising without being rigid?
There is a story told of the Marathi saint Jnaneshwar, who was bathing in the river and saw a scorpion struggling on the water. He picked it up to rescue it and return it to the shore, but the scorpion promptly stung his hand and the sudden pain caused him to shake the scorpion off. He tried again to pick it up, the scorpion stung him again, and the terrible pain once again caused him to drop it. This repeated many times before Jnaneshwar could finally get the scorpion safely to shore, where his disciple was watching in disbelief until he could no longer hold back. “Let the stupid scorpion drown!” he shouted. “It won’t learn!” To which Jnaneshwar replied, “The poor scorpion is just following its nature: Its dharma is to sting. And I am following my dharma, which is to save creatures in distress.”
Nabatame’s uncompromising commitment to avoid harming others was his own kind and gentle dharma. He never expected gratitude and warmth from the scorpions and cobras he saved; he understood their nature. Perhaps if he better understood the nature of the hornet’s nest he had somehow poked, he might still be alive today. We can learn to adjust our actions to avoid provoking a poisonous attack; we can learn to understand the nature of those who see us as enemies so we can navigate that reality more skillfully.
When the Bodhisattva Fukyo bowed to everyone who passed because they would one day become Buddhas, he bowed to his enemies too. If a snake had slithered by or a scorpion scuttled past in the dust, for sure he would have bowed deeply to them too. Each bow was an engagement, an expression of respect and faith in the possibility of change. If our enemies can change, if they aren’t irredeemable, that change can only begin through engagement. How long it may take is beyond our knowing.
I have thought long and hard about the lessons embodied by Fujii Guruji and those like Nabatame who followed him closely. Like them, I dearly want to see a peaceful world, disarmament, and an end to war. I’m not convinced that the most effective way that I personally can move the world closer to that goal is by drumming and chanting. It seems more logical to work on diplomacy and negotiation between hostile parties, or designing policies to circumvent conflict, or educating human beings to see peace as a viable goal. And yet, who is to say that Fujii Guruji didn’t affect many people profoundly, myself included, simply by walking the walk across continents on his path of absolute conviction and by building stupas like signposts to a more peaceful future? How else does one achieve a radical shift in human consciousness if not face-to-face, one by one, with deep affection and respect for each person one encounters on the way?