Deshi (22 page)
And he did, rising up and starting to bring his weapon to bear. But he was a little slow and a little off balance. I grasped my bo like a spear and drove it deep into his solar plexus as hard as I could. When I jerked up, I felt the tip grind against his sternum.
His eyes bugged out and he backpedaled a bit, but I could see that he would keep coming. I reversed my handhold and brought the bottom of the staff around, cracking him across the head. It made a nice, deep sound when the wood hit the bone.
He had about had it by then, but amazingly enough he was still standing upright. I dropped my weapon, knocked his right arm down and grasped his bo. It came out of his hands easily: there wasn’t much resistance left in him. Then I whipped a roundhouse kick into the back of his knee and down he went like a sack of meat.
I pointed the tip of his bo against his neck as he tried to recover. And pushed. He was pretty stunned, but the gag reflex still worked.
When you move this fast you don’t start breathing heavily until things are all over. I looked around at the watching class. “The lesson…” I said as I took a breath, “is over.”
I glowered at the circle of angry men that surrounded me. I projected as much force as I could, tensing my abdomen with the effort. They say your ki, your internal energy, can be projected this way. I’m not too sure, but I was hoping it would work. It was my big plan for escape. My angriest stare was reserved for Stark. No one said a word. No one moved. I dropped the staff onto the mat and went off to change.
When I got back to my dojo, Yamashita looked silently at me, and I don’t know whether what I saw in his eyes was approval or disappointment.
“And your visit?” he finally prompted me. “Was it… instructive?”
I glared at him. I still hadn’t cooled down. “It was a waste of time.”
“Tell me about it,” my teacher asked.
So I did. I described the trip and Stark’s secret excitement. My dawning realization that I was being set up. And Stark’s role in it. I briefly described the fight itself—a tight sequence of technical Japanese terms that serves as the shorthand of our system.
My teacher looked at me with those dark eyes. “Not too long ago, Burke, you would have talked more and acted less.”
There didn’t seem to be much to say about that. Was this good or bad? My teacher offered no clue. Yamashita considered me for a moment. “So you used the foot attack?”
I nodded tightly. “Yes.”
“Well,” he said, “there was at least some training value in the exchange.” Then, almost to himself, “It is unfortunate that the match was not against Stark himself.”
And it struck me. It wasn’t just Stark who had set me up. My own teacher had been a part of it. I was momentarily stunned.
Looking back, I shouldn’t have been. The martial arts world is filled with stories of the old days, when a style’s master would be forced to choose between two promising students. Invariably, the method of selection would not be a humane one. And, in the final analysis, I was willing to undergo the ordeal. But against
Stark
? The very thought was insulting.
“Is that was this was all about, Sensei?” I demanded. “A trick? Another test?” Yamashita’s face was closed, his eyes narrow slits. “Again?” I could feel myself getting worked up.
Yamashita turned away, but I wouldn’t let it go. I moved to block his way, and he came up short, looking almost surprised. Affronted.
“I don’t have time for these games anymore, Sensei,” I told him. “We’ve been at this too long!” I thought of Sakura and Hoddington and Kim. Of Han stalking the city. Of the thousand and one other things that demanded attention in my life, and the way I neglected them to follow this man.
Yamashita stared at me in silence.
“I’m sick of it!” I told him. “I don’t want to play these games with haragei anymore. I don’t want to have to guess what you’re up to. You want me to fight Stark, tell me. Give me a reason…”
“I am the sensei,” he said stonily, “my reasons are my own.” It seemed that the angrier I grew, the quieter he became.
“That’s…” I suppressed the expletive, even as angry as I was, “… that’s not good enough!” But he was immovable. Unyielding.
We stood staring at each other. You don’t often look directly at your superior’s eyes in Japan—decorum and sincerity demand an averted gaze. But I looked hard at him, hoping for some hint that I was getting through.
In the end, I broke away. “Fine.” I moved to the wall rack and removed my bokken, the wooden sword battered from years of training with him. And then I headed for the door.
“When will you be back?” he asked quietly. But I kept moving. When I reached the door, he spoke again. His words were hard and tight, as if they hurt to say.
“Will you be back?”
I stepped through the door without replying. I had one last glimpse of him, squat and hard and alone. Yamashita stood there in the silence that swallowed his unanswered question, like a rock in a falling tide.
The room was dark, the air somber. Tapestries hung on the walls, dimly seen figures that danced and whirled in the grip of karma. A bank of thick, squat candles guttered in a nave, and in the occasional surge of light you could pick out the crimson and gold thread in the wall hangings. Incense burned: a faint scent hung in the air, almost nonexistent, like an item recently lost to memory. The lama’s students chanted.
I had wanted to talk with someone. I thought immediately of Sarah Klein, but she was traveling on business for a few days and was then heading directly to Kita’s seminar. I could imagine calling her, hoping that she’d come home sooner. Whining, essentially. But I thought of her clear eyes and the way she understood things and realized that she would expect more of me than that.
So I sat in the back of the meditation room, waiting to talk with the lama. In that cool, dark room, everyone else seemed lost in the rhythmic murmur of the mantra. I still burned.
At the close of the session, Changpa’s students came to kneel before him. He gently placed gossamer-thin white scarves around their necks, a symbol of blessing stretched gently between his big hands, laid with delicacy upon his disciples. There was calm here, lapping against my anger, but I fought it.
He finally looked up at me. The light played on his glasses. He seemed composed and yet concerned.
“And,” he breathed, “now you have come.” He made a motion as if looking about the room. “Where is your teacher?”
I started to say something, to explain that I had left the dojo. But I couldn’t get the words out. The Rinpoche looked at me, his eyes wide and sad as I floundered for words. Speech seemed inadequate at that moment. The lama reached out and placed a prayer scarf down across my shoulders. It fluttered there, light as a bird. My eyes burned with emotion.
“Come,” he said, and led me out of the meditation chamber.
The Dharma Center had a library and reading room, a high ceilinged formal space that smelled of wood polish and old paper. Amid the books, I felt more at home. At intervals, small portraits of monks hung on the walls. Changpa walked slowly around the room, drawing me after him, pausing at each picture. “Teachers,” he told me. “Disciples of the Lord Buddha in my homeland.” His voice sounded sorrowful.
“You must miss them,” I said.
“Some of my brother lama have gone into the Great Void before us. And now, since they are one with all things, they are with us here.” He paused for a moment. “But for others, we know only that the authorities have taken them. I memorialize them here. I seek information about those in prison. I advocate with world governments.” Merely reciting the litany of activities sounded as if it tired him. He sagged down within himself for a minute, then straightened. “But mostly, I hope that the resonance of our prayers reaches them in captivity.”
I nodded. Since my run-in with Han, I had read up on this. The Chinese government has been waging a decades-long struggle to control the Tibetan Buddhists. And it’s not just all that puritanical communist opium-of-the-masses stuff. In the Chinese drive to expand their hegemony in Asia, the unique hold of Buddhism in Tibet had to be broken in order to destroy the cultural distinctiveness of the Tibetan people. Protests in the West get some attention, but the Chinese are old hands at this: there’s a relentless, single-minded, and persistent brutality that totalitarian regimes have mastered. The Rinpoche struggles against it, but we’re probably incapable of stopping it. Most protesters are well meaning. But they think that if only we could all hold hands, the world will change. The Chinese don’t want to hold the Tibetans’ hands; they want to shackle them.
And, of course, the prominent lamas embody the persistence of Buddhism there and are the targets of Chinese repression. Monasteries have been dynamited. Monks killed. And slowly, ever so slowly, the Chinese occupiers of Tibet are putting the remaining religious leaders under their control. Those who resist are never seen again.
“I knew many of these men,” Changpa told me, moving his hand in a gesture to encompass the portraits. “They were men of great compassion and wisdom. And some were gifted with powers that you would have a hard time accepting, Dr. Burke.”
He knew, of course, about my struggles with Yamashita. How much of it had been told him and how much he just sensed seemed irrelevant at the moment.
“But perhaps the greatest gift and the heaviest burden to bear is to be a teacher,” he told me in a voice heavy with significance.
He motioned me to a chair and set himself in a seat facing me. He arranged his robes with the unconscious efficiency of habit and reached within them for his prayer beads.
His fingers worked at the beads and they made soft clicking noises that lent rhythm to his words. “We are both in pursuit of the Way, Dr. Burke, albeit along different paths. As you progress, different challenges must be faced. Some of this, of course, you know.
“It is your teacher’s job to prepare you for these challenges. And to make you face them.” His voice had that calming, clear quality I had experienced the first time I saw him. I felt some of the tension leaving me.
“It creates a curious link between teacher and student, does it not, Burke?” He persisted. “So much achievement. So much struggle. And always, more struggle ahead.” He sighed. “The Way stretches out before us with no end in sight. It is only the compassion of the Lord Buddha that sustains us.
“The duality of our nature, physical and spiritual, is, of course, an illusion. Your teacher seeks to destroy this illusion by helping you achieve a type of physical mastery that frees you to transcend its limitations.” He looked right at me with those unsettling eyes. “This has been a hard path for you.” I nodded in agreement.
Changpa closed his eyes briefly in acceptance of my silent response, then continued. “You are a man of books. There is a measure of control in the printed word, is there not?” He paused. Interesting to think that we say that a book is bound. It suggests something, don’t you think?”
“A lot of the martial arts seems to me to be about control,” I answered. “How to cope with the chaos of violence.”
“Certainly,” he smiled. “It is the thing we fear the most, chaos. It threatens our very… selves.”
I listened to the measured, calm cadence of his voice. The clicking of the beads. His words seemed to occupy the entire space of the room we were sitting in.
His tone became gentler. “But in both my Way and yours, we are called to move beyond the discipline of the body. To grow in new ways. And this creates… challenges within you. It is not physical fear; it is something more profound.”
“What is it?” My voice was raspy.
He smiled, but didn’t answer the question. “It is elemental and potent this fear, is it not? We cannot put it into words, but it is there, deep within us.” He stood up and once more moved along the portraits of teachers that dotted the walls. “And think of this: once the fear has been faced, the disciple moves to a different plane. He is changed forever. How does that make the master feel? When for years the bond between master and disciple is one based on… what?” He looked at me.
“Inequality,” I ventured.
“Oh, Burke,” he sighed, “you are unkind. The master knows his student. His flaws. His strengths.” He was talking now of something he knew intimately. “Our disciples are our children. We guide them, protect them. And, when they are strong enough, we force them to grow beyond themselves…” I followed Changpa down the hall toward the meditation room, and his following comment was almost lost to me. He said it quietly, softly, and the words fluttered like a prayer scarf in the wind. “We help them outgrow… us. Students are not the only ones to struggle with the self.”
But the anger was still with me.
A lecture on Tibetan tough love?
I thought.
He turned and his eyes flickered with that cold flash of knowing. “It is not love, Burke, but true compassion that is often difficult. Because it demands so much from us. To awaken this awareness in a student is the teacher’s greatest task and perhaps the most daunting for both.”
He gestured me to the floor. I sat in the Japanese style, while he adopted the lotus position. “You are angry,” he told me. “And you fear…” He smiled wryly as I started to protest. “The point I wish to make is that often our emotions, our fears, our… insecurities sometimes cloud perception. We must learn to see through this fog of illusion if we are to follow the True Path.”
“What is the illusion, Rinpoche?” I asked quietly.
But his answer was elliptical. “We struggle all our lives as individual actors, discrete drops of water. And our destiny is to seek a union with the great sea of unknowing. When we merge with that ocean, what becomes of the drops? To the individual self? We now are one with something greater and move to its tides.
“You doubt others because you doubt yourself, Burke. And you fear what will happen when you break through the barrier of perception. To a place where things are not always in your control. Where the very idea of
you
becomes blurred.”
His words were simple and direct and spoken with utter conviction. They made the very core of my body go cold.