The Empty Mirror Read online

  After that there was a feast and we had to run about carrying large trays filled with red lacquer bowls heaped full of rice and vegetarian soup. I had to help in the kitchen on such occasions, when all cooking pots would be in use and the cook and his assistants slaved away, sweating and feverish, to feed some 100 guests. At washing up time all the monks worked together and even the master would join in, dressed in his old overalls and with a piece of cloth wrapped around his bald skull to keep the sweat from running into his eyes.

  The head monk told me that the master, fifteen years ago, just after the end of the war, had come to the monastery and had lived there alone for two years. He had lived contentedly and quietly, using only a small part of the large building. In the vegetable garden he only ploughed two small fields, and every morning he swept the path to the temple’s main entrance. He had meditated alone in the large dusty hall, and when the first monks came he hadn’t been excited, just as he hadn’t been sad when he was alone.

  The monastery was now almost filled to capacity and we even had a new arrival, a young American poet with a beard and tufted eyebrows: Gerald, a professional beatnik from the western United States. I was upset when I found out that Gerald spoke Japanese fluently and knew all the customs of the monastery. I should have enjoyed showing him around and explaining it all to him, from my superior status as a recognised and accepted disciple of the master. But it was the other way round and Gerald treated me in a rather offhand manner. This turned out to be his second visit to the monastery. Some time before he had spent a year in the temple and now he had returned, after a tour of the Far East. He bought a beautiful, brand new, heavy Japanese motorcycle, rented rooms in the north of the city, near the large Biwa lake. He came every morning for sanzen, the formal interview with the master, and every evening he joined us for meditation. When we had sesshins he spent them in the monastery. At times the gate of the monastery would be closed for a week, the telephone cut and the mail held up. Every year the monastery has at least six sesshins, each lasting seven days. Everything is made even more difficult than usual, every rule is applied and the master receives his disciples from three to five times a day. For the duration of the next sesshin Gerald got a room next to mine.

  With his arrival an extraordinary problem was created. When the master received his disciples we did not go directly from the meditation hall to the master’s house, but knelt in a row on one of the verandas of the main temple. We did have a roof above our heads on the veranda but it wasn’t a pleasant place because the wind had free play with us, and in winter, in particular, we were very uncomfortable. We knelt on a hard wooden floor, and when the master rang his bell the monk at the head of the line would get up, bow in the direction of the teacher’s house, and go to him, walking along another veranda and up a garden path covered by a narrow roof. Meanwhile the line moved up one place. There were fifteen monks and four lay disciples, a Japanese woman, a Japanese painter who lived on the premises, Gerald and myself. Peter was an irregular guest. I believe that he had come to the end of his formal training and that the normal rules no longer applied to him. What really happened around me was never very clear because, although I could ask as many questions as I liked, the master, the head monk and Peter, the only authorities I was in contact with, only told me what suited them and that wasn’t much.

  As the last arrival I had the last place in the line on the veranda, and sometimes I sat there for an hour or more, kneeling on the wooden boards with burning knees. Every time the line moved I could shift my limbs, but while the next monk spent his time with the master I would be stuck again, my legs cramped and full of pins and needles. The only remedy I could find was to try push-ups so that my knees were off the floor but this exercise was also rather fatiguing and made my arms and shoulders hurt.

  The day Gerald arrived in the monastery he came to see me and said that he would take my place in the line. It was logical, he said. After all, he had been a disciple of the master before anyone had ever heard of me. The monks, of course, were higher in rank than we were, they had to go first, but of the lay disciples he was more important and senior to me.

  “Certainly,” I said. It didn’t matter much whether my legs hurt on the veranda or inside in the hall where we returned after the interview with the master. In any case, “rank” wasn’t of any particular importance to me; it was something for army people to worry about, or officials, not seekers-after-truth.

  Every character has its own pecularities. Gerald, no doubt about it, was a great and strong person. His self-discipline was beyond reproach: even if he was running a temperature he would arrive in the morning, or at night, park his motorcycle near the gate and visit the master, trembling with physical misery. He worked during the day as a translator for some large commercial company where he did long hours. He had a sense of humor and his soul, mind or whatever, seemed to have been dipped in the wisdom of relativity. “Nothing is important enough to get upset about”; “a well organized man is comfortable, even in hell;” “whatever is irritating will pass, in time”—I often heard him recite these truths of the east, and in his daily behavior there were clear signs of detachment. Even so, he couldn’t accept it when, on the very first morning, the head monk told him to sit at the end of the line and, when Gerald didn’t obey, took him by the shoulder and led him to the indicated spot. I heard him grumble and curse, and even a year later his protest could still be noticed. He felt hurt and humiliated.

  So did I, but for a different reason. A new pain began to bother me, a pain which increased in intensity and which attacked me especially when I visited the lavatory; a burning swollen feeling. By careful groping I found a swelling, about the size of a pigeon’s egg. Gerald wasn’t in the monastery that day and I didn’t have sufficient command of Japanese to explain to the head monk what ailed me. I asked permission to use the telephone, an old-fashioned set which was hung on a dark wall in the porch of the temple. Peter was at home, and I told him about my painful discovery.

  “A pigeon’s egg?” Peter asked.

  I gave more details and he began to laugh.

  “A pigeon’s egg, ha ha. What an extraordinary association. That’s a hemorrhoid; they are caused by meditation and going to the toilet in a hurry because you don’t like flies and stench. The veins near your anus are bleeding and probably inflamed.”

  “Yes,” I said irritably. “And what does one do about it?”

  “Nothing,” said Peter. “Wait till I come. I’ll bring you some pills and ointment and if it doesn’t disappear you’ll have to see the doctor. Perhaps you need an operation, which would be painful, but probably it won’t be necessary. Nearly all the monks suffer from hemorrhoids and nobody has ever been to hospital. A pigeon’s egg! Ha ha. The idea!”

  Peter thought my idea so funny that he told everybody about it. The monks grinned when they saw me and held, without ever getting tired of the joke, an imaginary pigeon’s egg between the thumb and index finger. The head monk slapped me on the back and roared with pleasure, and the master smiled at me cheerfully when he saw me busy in the garden. I went to see the wooden statue of the Zen master in the main temple and presented my complaint.

  “Why should I get idiotic, distasteful diseases when I start looking for the truth? Why don’t you help me instead of allowing me being plagued by sagging veins? I am seeking final mystery, the most beautiful and glorious goal a man can aim at, so why should I be rewarded with hemorrhoids?”

  The statue didn’t say anything but it represented a man, a man like me, who had also looked for truth once. Perhaps he had pimples or the itch when he lived under the bridge, among beggars. I felt comforted. At least the statue hadn’t laughed.

  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 som
e 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.”