Zen for Beginners
A foreign monk’s quest for enlightenment takes a macabre turn
How long is this shit supposed to take?, the monk thought, waiting for his evening interview with Roshi, the head priest and Zen master. A fellow acolyte’s reply was “Ishi no ue ni mo sannen.” Even a rock will warm up if you sit on it for three years. Translation: Fools give up too easily.
But here he was — three years meditating at Nankanji, the notoriously strict Zen temple — and nothing to show for it. Nankanji, 難関寺 in Japanese, meant the temple of difficult obstacles. Just getting there was difficult. The nearest train station was an hour’s walk away and the trail up the mountain was slippery steep.
Monks went barefoot indoors and wore plaited straw sandals in the rain and snow. If you twisted your ankle while working or walking on the mountain, the received wisdom was not to favor the uninjured foot, otherwise your “good” ankle would end up twisted, too. Running could save your life in winter when wild boar and bears foraged the slopes.
He had survived, which was better than some monks.
One American had lost the use of his legs after sitting full-lotus for 12 hours. Another had a psychotic break while contemplating the Ryoanji rock garden — triggered by a loud announcement telling visitors not to sit down because it impeded tourist traffic. And those who disappeared? No one asked.
But mere survival wasn’t cutting it. He woke up each day depressed, bluer than back in Indiana before he left for Japan.
It wasn’t the lure of exotic shores. It was just that he’d be right back in rehab if he didn’t move someplace where a fix wasn’t a text message away.
Zen simplicity — vegetarian meals, a Spartan lifestyle, a low-stress routine — seemed the ideal of staying clean. And satori. That promised to be the ultimate high.
Beginning the monastic life, he had felt pure, a superior being untainted by the material world. But that purity had gone sour. Superiority had curdled into arrogance. Why were Japanese people so inefficient, irrational, and indirect? The culture pissed him off.
After descending into town with their begging bowls, the monks would spread out. Walking the narrow streets in the twilight, they chanted sutras and rang bells. Believers stepped from doorways and silently put money into begging bowls. Down-turned brims on the monk’s hats masked their eyes. But over time, both sides grew to recognize each other.
The village people knew well what the monks ate every day and what they didn’t. So parishioners might invite a monk or two inside and treat them to a feast. This was both a blessing and a curse.
Monks had to eat everything served — after all, they were begging. But there was a limit to how much sukiyaki, sake, and ice cream a person could consume and still make it back up the mountain without jettisoning ballast along the trail.
Vegetarianism was an alien concept. The taboo was on killing animals.
All-you-can-eat feasts became a bright spot on the long road to enlightenment — if there was such a thing. And once the parishioners learned that he loved coffee, they started giving him a few cans to take “home.”
Lately, the monk was always last in line for an audience with Roshi. He waited, fidgeting, for the single peal of the singing bell that signaled his turn for the evening interview. He pressed his palms together in the gassho pose, entered the room, bowed, and kneeled across from the Master. “At ease,” Roshi said. Then, “Well?”
The monk shared his latest insights into the Buddha’s teachings and how his meditation practice was advancing — though it wasn’t. He wished the Master would be impressed, for once, with his observations. How many other monks could expound upon the influence of Zen aesthetics on Sartre’s existentialism?
But Roshi wanted an answer to a Zen koan — a riddle contrived to derail the mind’s one-track dualistic reasoning.
The monk had solved “The sound of one hand clapping” to Roshi’s satisfaction. But this new koan was brain numbing.
How about a few hints?, he thought to himself. A little encouragement!
But the old man always said the same damn thing:
“Kissako.” 喫茶去 Have some tea!
What kind of koan was “Have some tea!” It wasn’t even a riddle!
The Master trickled hot water from the heavy, black cast-iron kettle onto the dark green leaves in the cracked magenta tea pot, undecorated but for the meandering gold seams of kintsugi holding its once-shattered shards together. The mended teapot had a name: Camellia Macabre, 椿事 in Japanese. All treasured tea implements had names given them by their owners, past or present.
The monk sat still, but his resentments would not. Enlightenment? How in hell are you supposed to find this thing called enlightenment if nobody tells you what to look for? But no sound came out of his mouth.
The Master waited for the tea leaves to loosen and dye the puddle of water green as dew-damp moss at dawn. He gazed compassionately upon the novice with effortless awareness nurtured by years of practice. No detail escaped Roshi’s vigilance.
“You have been drinking coffee again,” he said. “I warned you about that … how many times.”
That was it! This f#%king country priest — isolated from reality on a cold mountain his whole life — telling me not to drink coffee, while giving me green tea. Who did he think he was? The Buddha incarnate?
The tea probably wasn’t even organic!
Roshi watched the monk’s face contort into a likeness of Enma, the Ruler of Hell. It was the face of righteous fury — frightening yet familiar — a visage tattooed onto Roshi’s consciousness from meditating for three years on a Buddhist hell mandala that, but for the face of Enma and the difference in media, could have been the work of Hieronymus Bosch.
Roshi had learned to open his heart to the demon, to welcome him as his friend and ally, a catalyst to sever the chains of Samsara. Roshi had found liberation thanks to Enma. His hara (belly) had grown to “swallow the pure with the impure.”
As if animating the suffering of all beings chained by worldly desire, the monk’s ears, nose, eyes, and lips twisted and jerked in the stuttering motion of an early silent film.
The brittle shell of the monk’s world fractured in slow motion. A chill seeped through the fissures.
Uncanny, thought Roshi. A perfect likeness. He could almost hear Enma saying, “Nanto suteki~! Itsumo osewa ni natte orimasu.” How delightful! You always come through for me, Roshi!
The Master tipped the black kettle again; another shot of hot water slapped the leaves, releasing their deep, sweet umami. Mist rose from the teapot, wafting Mu — the void, perfume of nothingness — to Roshi’s nose.
The ripples quieted, the brew’s surface burnished mirror-smooth.
A droplet of dew reflects the full moon; a cup of tea cradles the universe; in every sip you may savor life, or taste death.
When the monk’s red face could twitch and stretch no further, his body began to quiver and shake. All he thought to be true, solid, and real collapsed like a rickety house in a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. The bric-a-brac of categories, labels, and words fell around him. He was trapped in the rubble of the only world he knew.
Satori had caught him at a bad time.
Fight, flight, or freeze? The monk’s lizard brain took control in a tsunami of adrenaline.
He uncrossed his long legs and stood, all six feet of him, the 180 cm length of a standard Kyoto tatami mat. The monk took two quick steps forward. Then, wavering as he realized he was too tall to swing at the only plausible cause of his terror — the sitting priest — the monk squatted into a sumo pose and thrust both hands at Roshi’s throat.
The priest wasn’t going to make the mistake of his Roshi, the one who had broken Camelia Macabre.
In the split second before the monk’s hands could reach him, the Master swiveled counterclockwise on his cushion and swung the black kettle in an arc that ended with a dull thud on the back of the monk’s skull. The monk crumpled.
Roshi set the bloodied kettle back on the hibachi. The red would soon be charcoal, black as the kettle itself.
These Americans!, he thought. “Dead weight” is what his Master had called them. Some had made the grade and become masters themselves, but not this one.
“Ishi no ue ni mo sannen no baka!” Fools who will sit on a rock for more than three years. Translation: If you haven’t gotten anywhere after three years, move on!
Roshi glanced at the maroon goo coagulating on the monk’s scalp and neck.
He struck the singing bell twice to summon Osho, his head pupil.
“Yes, Master?”
“That plot in back we’re saving for the new camellia bush.” Osho nodded. “It needs some fertilizer.”
Osho grabbed both ankles and dragged the flaccid corpse across the tatami, out the sliding side doors and onto the outdoor walkway that led to the garden in back.
The Master stood and considered the red trail left by the dead monk’s bleeding head on the sun-bleached reed mats. Impeccable brushwork. He reminded himself to order new tatami.
He kneeled and unrolled a fresh sheet of mulberry-bark calligraphy paper. Copper and gold flecks speckled the surface, delighting Roshi with their delicate sensuality as he ground the jet-black inkstick on the slate-gray inkstone.
Roshi dipped the fat brush into the black pool of sumi. Holding the brush perpendicular to the paper, he drew long, deliberate strokes in the rhythm of winter mountain storms, wildflowers and wild boar — modulated by the loose piano style of Thelonious Monk, whose latest album, the long-lost Live at Palo Alto High School recording, the dead foreigner had brought back for him from a “vacation” in America.
Such disrespect to the monastic tradition! Did Sakyamuni take vacations?
And his height! Six feet was just too big to stretch out on a single tatami; his toes and arms would encroach on his neighbors’ space. The foreign monk slept diagonally on two mats while everyone else needed only one.
Still, the Monk album was a welcome addition to his vinyl jazz collection that he played on his Linn belt-drive turntable, through his hand-built vacuum-tube pre- and power amps driving the active-crossover washi paper diaphragms in black-lacquer speaker boxes — a connoisseur’s Hi-Fi system he had assembled over the years to “replace” the Sony transistor radio his father had smashed upon hearing the barbarian jazz blaring from it.
It had nothing to do with those ridiculous details. Dead weight was the opposite of Zen. And the monk’s indignation was his flag of failure. Gimme a break!, as he had learned from another of the foreign monks.
Like the proverb said: Borrowing money with the childlike face of Jizo; paying it back with the indignant face of Enma.
Americans weren’t all bad. He loved their music. Jazz. It was like kintsugi. Break the tune apart, then reassemble it with golden riffs of improvised genius. And Thelonious Monk understood like no other how to dissect and recombine any melody into a creation that made the original but a passing thought in comparison, just another zatsunen on the ocean of meditative serenity where jazz was king.
He drew the line where Americans started trying to figure out the truth: “The Buddha says this here but that there.” As if there was a Buddha they could know besides their own limitless nothingness.
The corpse would have its own kintsugi of Camellia roots threading around and through it. Enma would enjoy that. So much more valuable.
Roshi looked at his brushwork, waiting for the ink to dry. When Osho returned, Roshi told him to mount the calligraphy and display the koan in the morning prayer room.
Kissako. Cut the crap. If you meet the Buddha and he offers you tea, enjoy it.
Roshi put his AirPods back in, poured a cup of tea, and carried it out back. He set the teacup down on the freshly turned earth. Roshi put his palms together and asked Enma to give the monk a sip of tea now and then. Hell was a thirsty place.
Tomorrow he would ask Osho to find the monk’s stash. He hoped it was unsweetened. “Round Midnight” would sound awesome with a can of black coffee. Roshi could smell it now.
Nota bene: The author has never lived in a Zen temple. He has known a few Zen Masters, though none like the one described here. 椿事 Camellia Macabre: This is an English play on a Japanese word. The dictionary definition is a bizarre incident or accident. The word is written, in its own bizarre way, with the characters for camellia and (abstract) thing. You might say it’s recursive, the strangeness of its “spelling” reflecting its meaning.
Further reading: “European Aesthetics: A Critical Introduction from Kant to Derrida” by Robert Wicks
