Interest (4 page)

7

Len had always enjoyed the Japanese ethos of zero coddling. Japanese airlines gave their passengers all the booze they wanted, at any time of day, because their customers were damn adults and it wasn’t the airline’s fault if someone couldn’t handle their liquor. They only hired physically attractive stewardesses and no one sued them over it, because in Japan no one bought into the Western make-believe that everyone should have a trophy. Len had done some traveling in his line of work and found that no other country did air travel, or anything, the way the Japanese did. He imagined it was probably the way the United States was before everything got stupid.

Len’s plane chased the sun west, giving him about twenty hours of sunshine. He touched down at Narita in the evening. This time there were no goons waiting for him. It had been a decade and a half since he was last in Japan; his Japanese was rusty, and getting around proved difficult. Len found a train to Tokyo, then another train, then another train, eventually reaching his destination around ten at night.

A young man with a bizarre hairdo at the front desk of the hotel checked Len in. “Letter here for you from Mr. Hamasaki,” he said.

Len opened the rice-paper envelope to find a brief handwritten note in excessively proper penmanship. It instructed him to go to a Buddhist monastery (with the address) a few blocks away the next day at noon. That was it. That was all the note said.

Having some time to kill, Len rode the elevator up to the hotel bar. He loved hotel bars, little oases of fugue dotting the globe. No regulars, no intrusive familiarity, just a revolving door of jet lag and drunken anonymity. Len found them to be freeing, the boozer’s version of a blank canvas. All he had to do was pick a stool and he could be anyone he wanted for a night, or no one at all, because no one knew him there. He’d have a drink, and for a brief moment, he’d relax without the lifelong encumbrances of identity. Then the next day, when he and everyone else picked up their burdens again to part ways in their taxis and airplanes, newcomers would wheel suitcases up to the bar to take their own nameless places.

Len ordered a whiskey and looked out the window at the sprawling, glittering blanket of skyscrapers. Despite the situation, he found himself overcome with nostalgia. Len missed Japan, and he never imagined he’d have found himself back here after fifteen years. A shame it wasn’t under better circumstances.

___
_

At noon, Len stood at the door of the monastery. He must have been a sight to the young monk who opened the door: a tall Caucasian man in a rumpled suit with luggage.

“May I help you?” the monk asked in English.

“I don’t know,” Len answered.

“Why are you here?”

“I don’t know,” Len said again.

The monk stared at him, confused, then said, “Please wait here.” He left and returned two minutes later with an older monk who seemed a little more sure of himself.

The older monk bowed and said, “My name is Mutoku. Please come in.” He led Len through the monastery to a little room with no windows. “You may stay here. Are you hungry?”

“Yes.”

“We are just about to eat lunch. Please join us.”

Mutoku led Len to the main hall, where the monks had set out meal boards on the floor and were about to begin eating. There was a spot for him with an
oryoki
set waiting there. The bell rang, and in a flood the whole ritual that Len had practiced so many times came back to him.

Len bowed to the
oryoki
sets that would feed him.
Oryoki
sets came as a neat little kit, wrapped in an outer cloth that was tied into a bow. He untied the bow and removed the outer cloth, designed to serve as a placemat. Len then spread this square placemat out on the meal board, folding the four corners under but with the corners still showing, forming the cloth into an eight-pointed star. Next he removed the dish-cleaning cloth, which he folded precisely in thirds, placing it on the floor between him and the meal boards. Underneath the dishcloth he found the utensil sheath, a little sleeve of fabric containing chopsticks, a long wooden spoon, and a
setsu
, a wooden stick used for cleaning. Len placed that utensil sheath on top of the cloth he’d just folded with the intention of coming back to it later. Now onto the bowls. The bowls came nested like Russian dolls, and Len was careful to pull them out using only his thumbs, placing them at exact locations on the placemat cloth, making no noise while doing so. Returning to the utensil sheath, he removed the utensils ever so carefully, placing them at predetermined locations in front of him while simultaneously folding the utensil sheath in thirds as one would a pocket square.

And so forth. It wasn’t just the setting of the table that went like this; every single part of the meal was a pedantic choreography, a precise ritual with hundreds of details added over as many years, which could only be memorized through rote practice. The idea behind
oryoki
, which was how Zen monks ate, was to create a meal tradition so formal and demanding that it could never be done in a perfunctory way. One couldn’t breeze through it; one had to be mindful of what one was doing and how one was doing it, because sadly, that was the only way most people would show their food any gratitude.

The chanting of the meal sutras, the smell of tofu braised in sesame oil, the taste of shiitake mushroom soup, the warm grassy fragrance of the green tea, the subtle rustling of black robes—all of it was a sensory flashback. Sitting there at the meal, soaked in the experience, Len found himself sentimentally yearning for his youth.

___
_

Mutoku pulled Len aside after the meal and ushered him into a room where they were alone.

“Please sit,” Mutoku said, motioning to a cushion on the floor.

“OK.”

“What is your name?”

“Jim Rivington.” The name slipped off his tongue more easily than before. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yes, you as well. Tell me, how is it that you know how to use the
oryoki
bowls?” Mutoku’s enunciation was perfect and his English very formal, as though he’d studied the language at a prestigious Japanese university.

“Pardon?”

“
Oryoki
is highly specific. It takes years of practice. It is extremely unusual for a Westerner to know how to do it correctly. Where did you learn it?”

“I studied in a Soto Zen monastery in Kyoto for five years. That’s how we ate.”

“Interesting.” Mutoku’s kind eyes indicated his pleasant surprise. “Are you still studying Zen?”

“No, I left the monastery years ago. I gave up on Zen and Buddhism.”

“Why?”

“Because I realized it was all bullshit.”

Mutoku smirked at the unexpected comment, revealing an irreverent sense of humor. “What do you mean?”

“The Third Noble Truth of Buddhism is that suffering can end, right?”

“Correct.”

“Well, do you know anyone alive whose suffering has ended?”

Mutoku laughed and thought about it for a bit. “I suppose suffering doesn’t end, you just learn to hold it differently.”

“Hold it however you want, you’re still suffering.”

“And who is it that’s suffering?”

“Me. You. Everyone.”

“And who are you?”

“Jim Rivington.”

“And what is that?”

Len recognized the tactic immediately: take a tough question directed to the teacher and turn it back on the student with a nonsense question. Try to get the student to question themselves rather than the teacher, thus keeping subordinates unbalanced and maintaining the power dynamic. Len knew the answer was supposed to be “I don’t know,” but he didn’t say that because he was no longer anyone’s monkey.

“Another reason I left is because I grew tired of the games Zen teachers play,” Len said. “They’re never forthright; they’re con artists in black robes. All they do is take people’s money, do silly funeral rituals, and manipulate. They have no answers and no special insight. Buddhism, like anything good and decent in this world, has been corrupted to the point where it hurts people instead of helping them. What you do here, Mutoku, prevents people from seeing the obvious. You folks claim to teach Nothing, and to my utter bewilderment, that’s all I learned over those five years.”

The smile ran from Mutoku’s face. “Why are you here, Mr. Rivington?”

“I don’t know. I was sent here.”

“Sent here by whom?”

“By the people who are blowing up government buildings in the United States. They forced me to come here and I don’t know why.” Len knew he wasn’t supposed to divulge this information, but he was past the point of caring.

Mutoku studied Len for a while, his face betraying his concern. After a long, loaded silence, Mutoku said, “I must discuss this with my superior. Please join the others for meditation in the great hall. We will speak again soon.”

Len shrugged and joined the monks in the main hall. He regretted being rude to Mutoku after he’d shown such kindness in taking Len in off the street. For all Mutoku knew, Len might have been homeless and hungry. Yet talking to Mutoku had made the anger he’d felt all those years ago come right back to him. He’d wasted half a decade of his life searching for enlightenment only to discover that no such everlasting condition existed. At best, you might get a few fleeting moments of understanding while slogging through your life, an Everglades of miserable impermanence.

8

Len’s father had died rather suddenly, right before Len graduated college. Bernard Savitz was standing on a dock one Saturday morning, fishing for lake trout, when he just fell flat on his face and never got up again. The coroner listed the official reason as “natural causes.” Len always maintained it should have been “homicide.”

Unlike fathers who sought to mold their children into miniature versions of themselves, Bernard was a kind-hearted man who simply let Len be who he was. Len and his father had been quite close, and the sudden loss was more than Len had ever dealt with. Len was twenty-two, a fresh-faced kid a month away from college graduation, with final exams looming. He had to figure out how to plan a funeral by himself because his mother and brother were busy pretending that it hadn’t happened, like everything was OK. Len couldn’t live the fiction; he’d always had trouble with bullshit. The man was gone and it had to be dealt with. Len toughed it out through writing the eulogy and carrying the casket, but the really hard part came in the months and years that followed. His father wasn’t at his graduation. His father wasn’t at his wedding and never met Octavia. Len could no longer pick up the phone to ask Dad for advice. These things were like little lead sinkers weighing down Len’s guts.

The age of twenty-two was when a person felt himself to be most immortal. The body recovered from injuries quickly and could handle any abuse thrown at it. A twenty-two year-old could eat pizza every day, drink to get drunk, smoke cigarettes, and rarely get sick as a result of any of it. The consequences of a young person’s actions, and the horror show of old age, were decades away. There was endless time to lie blithely in the sun or stay up all night having wistful conversations with friends. Len had been robbed of this. He was suddenly and brutally hit in the face with the reality of his existence: mortality. Mortality, that little box with no windows or doors.

Len once had a teacher in middle school who used to remark to the class, “Look at you all, bored out of your minds. You’re sitting there in blue plastic chairs, watching the clock, and wishing your lives away.” Len thought the man was just being a jerk, but years later he finally understood. If anything good had come of his father’s death, it was that Len figured out that the only thing people were guaranteed in this life was the next exhalation.
This is it
, he remembered thinking to himself not too long after the viewing while lying awake in bed.
Right now, second by second. Time is all we have—and most of us are wasting it.

On a whim after his father’s funeral and his graduation, Len decided he wanted to move to Japan to become a Buddhist monk. He packed up what little he had at the time, put it in storage, and hopped on the next transpacific flight. His mother and brother didn’t understand his reasoning and never forgave him for it, but it was something he knew he had to do.

Len hadn’t done a lot of traveling before going to Japan. He had never been to Japan before, let alone lived there, so the culture shock was monumental. He didn’t speak the language, and he didn’t understand the completely different way the Japanese saw the world. In Japan, it was never about I/me/my, it was always the greater good and honoring tradition
.
Coming from a Western culture and trying to adjust to an Eastern one forced a perspective shift on par with graduating preschool and going straight to becoming a grandparent.

Len eventually found a monastery willing to take him, a foreigner. Life in the monastery was surprisingly tedious. He awoke at five in the morning when the bells rang, did meditation with the monks for an hour and a half, chanted for an hour, ate a silent breakfast with everyone, then worked outside, then meditated for another hour, then ate lunch, then cleaned floors and toilets, then meditated some more, then had a bit of free time to himself that he used for exercise, then (sometimes) ate dinner depending who was in charge (dinner being considered unorthodox), then meditated some more, then slept. The next day, they’d all get up and do it all over again. Monasteries ran on a very tight schedule and there was little deviation. Len lived like this for five years. Despite the tedium, he enjoyed the constant meditation.

Other meditation schools started a student off gradually: they had a beginner follow the breath, repeat a mantra, or use any number of devices designed to help a novice learn to quiet and concentrate the mind. Then, once the new student developed a certain amount of concentration, the teacher moved the student up to a slightly more challenging form of meditation. After a number of years, the student learned the advanced meditations.

Shikantaza
, the Soto Zen method of meditation that Len was taught, was nothing like that at all. It was the most difficult form of meditation there was because there were no gradations, no steps, no progress. A beginner started off doing it the way a master did. There was an old Zen proverb that said, “If you want to climb a mountain, start at the top.”
Shikantaza
was taught the way swimming used to be: throw the uninitiated into a pool and hope they’ll figure it out. Basically, a Zen practitioner sat on a little cushion with no instructions other than the physical: “just sit” or “be quiet” or “straighten your back.” Len sat there for a year or two, trying to figure out what it was he was supposed to be doing. Where should he put his attention? What was he supposed to do when he had inappropriate thoughts? “Just watch your thoughts,” his teacher used to say. “Don’t follow them, but don’t reject them either. Just watch them the way you’d watch the clouds floating overhead.”

Eventually Len figured it out: you weren’t supposed to do anything during
shikantaza
, because doing itself was the problem. The brain was always doing stuff. Even when he slept, his mind was still going five hundred miles per hour. The mind was always judging others, or trying to solve problems, or planning tomorrow’s events. By default, the human brain was dissatisfied with reality, and it was always coming up with ways to analyze or fix it. Len began to see his thoughts for what they were: a raging river of anxiety. He was astounded at how little control he had over his own thinking. All his life he’d assumed he created his thoughts, but nope, it was his thoughts that created him. How long had he been stuck in this madness?

As time went on and he watched his thinking day after day, Len realized how stupid it was. All of it. At the beginning, Len wasn’t able to extract himself from it; the thinking forced his actions as though he’d been conscripted into slave labor. Until that point, he hadn’t realized it was happening and couldn’t fight it. With time and practice, though, his belief in the veracity of his thinking began to fade, and his inner monologue went from being a compulsory drama to more of a passive soap opera that he’d watch with amusement.

Then one day, it just stopped. For a few minutes, his thinking, that incessant chatterbox in his head, just stopped. It was like someone had finally shut off the spigot. Stillness. A dead calm that glittered with life. Len could feel his lungs expanding and contracting and his heart beating. For the first time in his life, without the distractions of subjectivity, he paid attention to the breeze moving over his arm hairs and the feeling of the floor pressing back against his feet. He’d never noticed that stuff before. His field of vision widened, his nose became sharp. Breathing. Walking. There was just the doing of these things, without any of the usual commentary or judgment. With the bullshit layer of thinking gone, all that remained was the exquisite immediacy of presence.

Then that profound awareness disappeared. The thoughts came rushing back in to fill the vacuum, ruining the experience. Days later, the vivid calm came back. It would recede and return several more times that year, until he felt it on a regular basis. Eventually it would come to him several times in an hour.

Len remembered one moment that really stuck with him. After three years of constant meditation, and enough of those periods of thoughtless open awareness, his mind was finally tilled and seeded. And a seed sprouted. It was early April and he was twenty-five years old. Len had just finished morning meditation in the Zendo. Afterward he went to help some of the monks make breakfast in the kitchen. While waiting for some water to boil, Len looked out the window and saw the darndest thing: snow. Snow in April!

Just then, for reasons unknown, the usual boundary between himself and the rest of the world dissolved. A fourfold wave of insight and joy washed over him, and he saw with absolute clarity some things he’d chosen to ignore his whole life.

The universe itself is a living, conscious thing.

Everything is here on purpose.

Everything is going according to plan.

Everything is absolutely perfect.

A
kensho
, they called it: an initial glimpse, rather than the full experience, of enlightenment. It wasn’t like fireworks or angels singing or any of that, it was more like the mirthful relief of finally putting down a heavy object that he’d been carrying his whole life.

For a few months after the experience, things were easier than they’d ever been. He saw that the obstacles in his life had been purely mental. When they’d just evaporated that day, nothing remained but beautiful flow. Insults rolled off his back, hard work was no longer hard, and for a while there were no difficulties.

As the lungs breathed air and the heart beat blood, the human mind was also an organ of habit: it created thoughts. These thoughts, when mistaken for reality, tended to be clung to. It was this clinging that caused suffering. But after some time, as happened to most who experienced spiritual awakenings, the grace subsided, and Len’s habit of believing his own bullshit returned to him.

Len eventually had a falling out with his teacher, and he left the monastery two years later to pursue journalism. He sometimes found himself wondering if he’d made a mistake by leaving before his training was complete. He wondered what would have happened had he pursued it. Now, years later, through the ineffable machinations of half-assed revolutionaries, here he was in Japan once again.