Loon Lake

23

At Kamakura he climbed the spiral stairs inside the largest Buddha in the world. In the head of the largest Buddha, on the ledge of its chin, sat a tiny Buddha facing in the opposite direction. Simple idolatry held no interest for him, but a religion that joked held genuine interest. He felt all at once the immense power of a communication that used no words. I acknowledge Warren’s lifelong commitment — cancel lifelong commitment — fatal attraction for any kind of communication whether from words, flags, pigeons or the touch of fingertips in hope of a common language, but we must remember how we are vulnerable to the repetition of our insights so that they tend to come to us not as confirmation of something we already know but as genuine discoveries each and every time. And so he descended, and by degrees over a period of several days, drifted south along the route of the old Tokaido. He saw thousands of Buddhas lined up in trays in the tourist shops or ranked in legions at the shrines, some in lead, some in wood, some carved in stone and dressed in little knitted caps and capes. He came to see in this ubiquitous phenomenon the Buddha’s godlike propensity for self-division, the endless fractioning of himself into every perceivable aspect, an allegory made by the people of Japan from the cellular process of life. Thus enlightened, he turned his eyes on the people in the streets and the narrow shopping arcades, old women in black slapping along on their sandals, black-haired children of incredible beauty staring at him with their thumbs stuck in their plump cheeks, giggling pairs of young women in brightly colored kimonos, old shopkeepers with wispy goatees bowing as he passed, thoughtful peddlers, and young men who stopped in their tracks to glare at him and bear themselves with brazen umbrage — they were all the Buddha too in his infinite aspect. Traveling down this avenue of thought lit only by stone lanterns filled with small stones in lieu of flames, he saw the true dereliction of the planet and realized anew that convictions of friendship, love, the assumption of culture, the certainty of calendars were fragile constructs of the imagination, and there was no place to live that was truly home, neither for him nor for the multitudinous islanders of Japan.

In this he-took-for-appropriate state of mind, Warren arrived one day at road’s end, Kyoto, the strange city whose chief industry was meditation. He wandered from one monastery to the next, there were whole neighborhoods of them, but where, where was the sign that one was for him? He was afflicted with a fluttering humility, not daring even to make inquiries, hovering at this gate or in that garden or touching down for just a moment of indecision before the small window with the visitor admission in yen painted in black calligraphy on white cardboard stuck into the grate as if he were looking for a movie to see. Late in the afternoon, weary and full of self-condemnation, he happened to stumble up the step of a wooden verandah overlooking one of these beautiful monastery gardens of raked gravel and moss and stone. Thus launched, his large Caucasian person hurtled through a rice-paper door, splintering its laths, and like an infant being born, he found himself with the back half of him still on the porch side of the door and the front half in a room, looking with wide, even horrified eyes at the benign polished wood Buddha sitting facing him with a little altar of flowers on either side and the sinuous smoke of incense appearing to squinch up its eyes. He had made a terrible thunderous racket but nobody came running, nobody came shouting, and after he crawled the rest of the way into the room he set about calmly picking up the pieces and preparing in his mind the self-demeaning speech by which he would beg the chance to make the most extended and profound restitution. As it happened, the monastery was empty; he was to learn it was the rare annual holiday of this particular establishment in which everyone was set free for twenty-four hours. Only after searching the grounds did Warren find an old caretaker willing to come look and see the awful thing he had done. This old caretaker was smoking a cigarette, which he held in his teeth. He took in smoke with each inhalation and with each exhalation smoke streamed out of his nostrils. He gazed at the carnage, the plumes of smoke from his nostrils indicating the depth and strength of each drawn breath, and it seemed to fascinate him that such a perfect and modest structure as a sliding paper door should have been turned into this. He was a very short, extremely bald old man, and he wore a torn ribbed undershirt and a pair of dirty white muslin knickers with flapping ties at the waist but the peculiar thing was that he was not unpleasant to look upon, it did not create feelings of pity or fear or other degrees of patronization to look upon him. He picked up a broken length of lath and looked at it and asked a question in unintelligible Japanese. I’ll pay for it, Warren said and removed from his pocket a wad of yen. He unfolded the bills and looked at the old man squinting at the money through the cigarette smoke. Warren peeled off one bill and put it in the man’s hand. Then another. Then another. He kept waiting for a sign that he’d met the cost. He hesitated. The old man looked at him and peremptorily slapped his arm with the lath. Warren was so astonished he dropped the whole wad of bills in the old man’s hand. The caretaker put the bills into the pockets of his voluminous knickers, looked up at the Caucasian and swatted him again with the flat of the stick, this time across the side of his face. Then he laughed, and in so doing released his cigarette, which fell from his teeth and lay on the wooden floor glowing. Immediately Warren, thinking the whole place would go up, stepped on the tobacco ember with his large shoe, only realizing in that moment the defacement he had committed by stepping with street shoes on the monastery floors.

But the caretaker had turned and headed back to his garden shed with its straw brooms and clay pots and small pyramids of gravel. Warren experienced the uncanny sense of a sharply learned lesson. He slept that night at a Western hotel in the downtown section of Kyoto and found in the nightstand drawer a volume in English that seemed to be the Buddhist equivalent of the Bible. Gautama was an Indian prince kept at home by his father so as not to see life in any aspect but its most luxurious. But one day he went out and saw a beggar, an old crippled man, a monk and a corpse. He was thus able to conclude despite his own royal existence that life was suffering. Why couldn’t he have figured that out without leaving the palace? Warren wondered. If death exists, life has to be suffering. Did his father hide death from Gautama? How was that done? The book said the cause of all suffering was desire, the desire to have the desire to be. Perhaps a prince would never experience the desire to have, but how could he avoid the desire to be? If desire by its nature is not gratified before it realizes itself, does it not exist in palaces too? Does it not exist especially in palaces? Nevertheless, he liked the story. He trusted Gautama Siddhartha and the simplicity of his reasoning. Not many people could get away with that sort of reasoning. He trusted the eightfold path for defeating desire and transcending suffering.

Early the next morning Warren went back to the monastery. The place was a shambles. Doors and shoji walls were splintered and torn everywhere. There were recumbent bodies on the verandah, and in the garden a monk lay in a pool of vomit. All the walls were torn and hanging, bodies lay about as if dead. There was even a body lying across the crest of the tile roof. The monastery looked as if it had been bombed. But even as he gazed at this dismal scene he heard the sound of small tinkling bells coming from somewhere in the main monastery building, and though the bells were soft and delicate they had the astonishing effect of rousing the Zen Buddhists from their drunken stupor. One by one they groaned, rose to their feet and staggered off.

And then around the corner came a man in white holding a staff of temple bells. His head was shaved, he was stout, the folds of his neck were like ruffles of a collar. He walked right up to Warren and inquired in heavily accented English if he could be of help. I want to discuss with someone the possibility of enrolling here for Zen training, Warren said. Of course, the monk said. If you don’t mind waiting more than two moments but less than six, I will approach the Master for you.

More than two but less than six, Warren thought as he waited in an anteroom beside the front gate. That’s a few. Shortly thereafter he was escorted by the monk to a small room with a beautiful Bodhisattva pratima and a vase of flowers and straw mats and cushions, and without having to be told, even by himself, he dropped to his knees and bowed to the resident Master, who was seated and facing him with a face of genial amusement. It was the old caretaker. On the one day off of the year for all his followers and monks, he, in perfect realization, had stayed where he was. The Master was smoking a cigarette. Another monk came by and listened. He was laughing and telling the monk, in Japanese, about his first meeting with Warren. Gusts of smoke came out of him. As the story was elaborated, the Master rose and began to act it out, and there to Warren’s astonishment was a perfect imitation of himself, the way he carried himself, his walk, the tone of his voice, the shock on his face as the lath slapped his cheek. The Japanese laughed till there were tears in their eyes. Soon Warren began to smile and then he too exploded into laughter. He would come to understand in the months to follow that the Master so perfectly realized whatever he chose to do, that a kind of magnetic field was formed in which whoever was in his presence drew on its power. That is why interviews with the Master were so highly prized. His perfection was an impersonal force that you could feel and hope someday to manifest from yourself on a continuous basis. If he laughed, it was perfect laughter, and you had to laugh too. If he chose to cry, everyone around him would have to weep. But where did it come from, how did it happen? All Warren could work out was that the Master lived totally to the fullness of his being each and every moment of his existence. He was completely of the moment, then and there, in which you found him. Nothing of him was deadened by the suffering of his past life and there was no striving or fear in him for his future.

Would the Master feel a need to write poems?

No, because poems are the expression of longing and despair. Yes, because if the Master is one in every instant with what he sees and hears and feels, the poem is not the Master’s written need but the world singing in the Master.

No, because the poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.

Your register apologizes for rendering nonlinear thinking in linear language, the apperceptions of oneness in dualistic terminology. However, there is no difficulty representing the absolute physical torture of Warren Penfield’s commitment to Zen meditation. He could not physically accomplish even the half lotus, his spine threatened to snap, his legs seemed to be in a vise; even the mudra — the bowl-shaped position of the hands, the thumbs lightly touching, a simple relaxed representation in the hand of the flow from right to left, from left to right, the rocking crescent continuity of the universe intimations of stars and ancient Eastern recognitions — became under the torment of his distracted physically weeping thought a spastic hand clench, a hardened manifestation of frozen fear and anguish, the exact opposite of the right practice, the body imprisoned, the mind entirely personal and self-involved and then God help you if you nod off every now and then as who could not, sitting like a damn beer pretzel twelve, sixteen hours a day he comes along and hits you with the damn slapstick the goddamn yellow-skinned bastard the next time he hits me with that stick I’m going to get up and wrap it around his goddamn yellow neck and break a goddamn Buddha doll over his goddamn shaven head this is not right thinking but tell me Gautama enlighten me if what you say is true why is it so difficult to attain wouldn’t it all make a lot more sense if everyone could do it if everyone could be it without even thinking without being anything less before, without the death of my darling, and men drowning in the cold black coalwater of collapsed mines miles of coalstone sinking slowly upon their chests, or bullets perforating them like cutout coupons supposing I do attain it, supposing I find the right understanding what then what happens outside me how do I help Local 10110 of the Western Federation of Miners, Smelters, Sheepdippers and Zenpissers, and then there’s the food, look what we wait for when at last the cute little tinkly bell rings and we may unpretzel ourself and try to regain the circulation in our swollen limbs, little bits of pickled leather, or some absolute excresence of the lowest sea life lightly salted or a congealed ball of rice dipped in some rank fermented fluid that smells to me like the stuff we dipped the pigeons in to kill the lice.

No, there is no problem expressing the inner record of Warren Penfield’s quest for enlightenment: the whining despair, the uncharacteristic epithet, the rage, the backsliding giving up and consequent self-nauseation, the stubborn goings on, all of this silent, in a temple hall of inscrutable meditators, all of whom reminded him of the immigrant kids in the Ludlow Grade School around him totally serene and insulated in their lack of language the feeling what do they all know that I don’t know why don’t the storms of self taste fire and thunder across their brainbrow, why aren’t they as sick and unsure of their dangerous selves as I am of mine, leading then to the false Zen-like casuistry as, for example, if we are to press ourselves on the world sticking to it like a decal, if I am one with the rocks the trees the stars why is my memory invalid and why then are the images of Clara on our beds of slag in the cool mountain dusk of Colorado forbidden me, I am my memory and the images of my past are me, and if I am the rocks and stones and trees, Wordsworth, rocked round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees, why are my phantoms less real why are the ghostvoices of my mama and papa less real why is the mud of the Marne less real why must I exclude exclude, if everything is now and mind is matter is not everything valid is not meditation the substance of the mind as well as its practice?

Nor is it difficult to render the casually developed outer circumstances of this monastic life, the old Master becoming at some times demonic in his teaching, a destroyer of ego, of humble ordinary lines of thought, an army of right practice, right understanding overwhelming the frail redoubts and trenches of Warren’s Western mind. One day they were in the temple and he came in screaming, naked, climbed the Buddha like a bee alighting on a flower and bending it with its own honeygravid weight and they watched shocked and stunned as a beautiful polished wood Buddha toppled to the floor under the Master, an act of profound desecration with sexual impact, and the Buddha lay split like a log, a piece of wood the aperture of an earthquake and nothing was ever said of it again. He was a violent old man, one day Warren was admitted for his counseling and the Master threw a cup of cold green tea in his face and that was the lesson of the day. One day he lectured them all, a particular holy day and he shouted at them saying you were all Masters when you first came through the gate and now look at you, I have more respect for the horse that pulls the shitwagon than I have for you — screaming and growling and trilling in the Japanese way of singsong, Warren prostrate with all the rest. But everyone took it as material to be pondered and worked out, it was only a style of pedagogy and only someone stupid enough to take emotions seriously would be shocked threatened or angered by the serene antics of the realized Buddha spirit of such a great Master. Warren finally reached the preliminary kindergarten stage of getting his own koan, a paradoxical question to form the empty mind of meditation. Each devotee received his own koan like a rabbit’s foot to stroke and treasure, an unanswerable question to torment him month after month, perhaps year after year, until enlightenment burst over and he was able to answer it when the Master gently asked it of him the hundred millionth time. Warren walked in bowed, kneeled on the straw mat. The Master was smoking and making each breath visible as a plume of cigarette smoke and Warren knew the standard koans, the famous ones, there were actually collections of them like college course outlines but the one given to him he had never heard before or read anywhere and it was delivered by the Master with a shake of his head, a sigh and a glance of helpless supplication at the ceiling: Penfield-san, said the Master, if this is a religion for warriors, what are you doing here? Warren thanked him, bowed and backed out of the room even though the Master looked as if he was going to say something more. Later in his first pondering of this infinitely resounding question he squatted by his favorite place, near the garden gate beyond the gravel garden, and saw through the slats as for the first time the beautiful little girl who swept the street.