this up — slipping in just before four a.m. every time he left — for months. But one day, on New Year’s Day, he left when he shouldn’t have, and the head monk, who had never much liked him in the first place, seized the opportunity to get back at him, and told him that he would have to go back to the beginning of the course — become a training monk again! After seven years in the place! So he put all his things in a wheelbarrow and rolled them out of themonastery gates. And he went off to his girlfriend’s house and spent a month with her. And of course, after seven years in the temple, he was totally defenseless — totally unprepared to live in a regular domestic situation — and she just sliced through him, completely ate him up.”
He paused. “It’s funny; many of the so-called Zen masters in America have the same problems — with money or sex or alcohol. Anyway, Ray decided to go off to Berkeley to write. He’d been corresponding with Anaïs Nin from the temple, and she’d given him some really good contacts in the Bay Area. So he had a book of poems published — by a press in Santa Barbara, in fact — and he was going really strong until an old girlfriend from high school came over and dragged him back to Texas. So suddenly he ended up in this clean suburban town where everyone thought he talked funny and nobody could begin to understand what he’d been through. He got a few odd jobs and tried to write a novel. But pretty soon, his relationship fell apart, and he did too. The trouble was, poor guy, he just wasn’t ready for the world. The monastery had prepared him for everything except the world. Last thing I heard, he was a bouncer in a reggae bar.”
5
A S AUTUMN BEGAN to draw on in Kyoto — and the first touches of color to grace the eastern hills — Mark invited me one day to attend a special private initiation ceremony. A longtime friend of his, now a head priest at Tōfukuji, one of the Five Great Temples of Kyoto, was about to ascend to a new rank, the youngest Zen master in Japan to attain such a position. It was a closed ceremony, of course, but Mark had been invited, as a friend, and he thought that I might be interested too. Certainly, it sounded like a rare opportunity to see a little behind the enigmatic transparencies of Zen, if only to the next layer of its public face. So when the day arrived, I dusted off my best jacket and tie, put on a black motorcycle helmet, and, thoroughly incongruous, popped onto the back of Mark’s Honda. Whizzing through the crowded streets, we veered along a maze of narrow lanes and ended up at last outside the temple compound, all abustle in the brilliant morning.
By the time we arrived, sober parishioners in their best suits were already heading under purple banners into the temple, along with monks who looked like giant bats, black robes billowing out around them. “That’s Soto-san,” Mark whispered as one such figure hurried past. “I knew him in California.” In the glorious sunshine, the thickly forested hills that rose above a plunging gorge were glowing almost, and the maples, through which the sunlight streamed, were just beginning to turn. In the shadeless gravel courtyards of the temple, monks were scattering this way and that, some of them in special orange-and-black raiment, some waving tidy scarlet flags. Inside one of the temple’sBuddhas, I once read, the beautiful poetess Ono no Komachi had secretly stashed her love letters.
Slipping off our shoes at the entrance to the monastery, we followed a shaven-headed monk (from California) into an antechamber and there were offered tea. This, I gathered, was the
gaijin
’s corner: it included a middle-aged American student of Zen with his teenage Filipina bride; another eager-eyed American; and a New York woman with granny glasses who handled words as if they were thorny roses. Beside her, and next to me, sat a seamlessly elegant Japanese lady in a flowing dress, who apparently
He paused. “It’s funny; many of the so-called Zen masters in America have the same problems — with money or sex or alcohol. Anyway, Ray decided to go off to Berkeley to write. He’d been corresponding with Anaïs Nin from the temple, and she’d given him some really good contacts in the Bay Area. So he had a book of poems published — by a press in Santa Barbara, in fact — and he was going really strong until an old girlfriend from high school came over and dragged him back to Texas. So suddenly he ended up in this clean suburban town where everyone thought he talked funny and nobody could begin to understand what he’d been through. He got a few odd jobs and tried to write a novel. But pretty soon, his relationship fell apart, and he did too. The trouble was, poor guy, he just wasn’t ready for the world. The monastery had prepared him for everything except the world. Last thing I heard, he was a bouncer in a reggae bar.”
5
A S AUTUMN BEGAN to draw on in Kyoto — and the first touches of color to grace the eastern hills — Mark invited me one day to attend a special private initiation ceremony. A longtime friend of his, now a head priest at Tōfukuji, one of the Five Great Temples of Kyoto, was about to ascend to a new rank, the youngest Zen master in Japan to attain such a position. It was a closed ceremony, of course, but Mark had been invited, as a friend, and he thought that I might be interested too. Certainly, it sounded like a rare opportunity to see a little behind the enigmatic transparencies of Zen, if only to the next layer of its public face. So when the day arrived, I dusted off my best jacket and tie, put on a black motorcycle helmet, and, thoroughly incongruous, popped onto the back of Mark’s Honda. Whizzing through the crowded streets, we veered along a maze of narrow lanes and ended up at last outside the temple compound, all abustle in the brilliant morning.
By the time we arrived, sober parishioners in their best suits were already heading under purple banners into the temple, along with monks who looked like giant bats, black robes billowing out around them. “That’s Soto-san,” Mark whispered as one such figure hurried past. “I knew him in California.” In the glorious sunshine, the thickly forested hills that rose above a plunging gorge were glowing almost, and the maples, through which the sunlight streamed, were just beginning to turn. In the shadeless gravel courtyards of the temple, monks were scattering this way and that, some of them in special orange-and-black raiment, some waving tidy scarlet flags. Inside one of the temple’sBuddhas, I once read, the beautiful poetess Ono no Komachi had secretly stashed her love letters.
Slipping off our shoes at the entrance to the monastery, we followed a shaven-headed monk (from California) into an antechamber and there were offered tea. This, I gathered, was the
gaijin
’s corner: it included a middle-aged American student of Zen with his teenage Filipina bride; another eager-eyed American; and a New York woman with granny glasses who handled words as if they were thorny roses. Beside her, and next to me, sat a seamlessly elegant Japanese lady in a flowing dress, who apparently
Similar Books
