The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Creator of El Topo

6. The Donkey Was Not Ill-Tempered after So Many Blows from the Stick

“Steel-tipped bullets will explode the head from eleven yards away, Chief.”

“Good. That way the corpse will be less heavy.”

SILVER KANE, TEMPORARY SHERIFF

When I got home, I struggled in vain to remove the ring. I felt that if I caressed my wife while wearing it, the golden skull would give off toxic vibrations. My hand was as cold as ice and my arm hurt.

At five o’clock in the morning, I jumped out of bed and drove very fast to the zendo. When I arrived, I found Ejo Takata meditating on the terrace under a dawn sky streaked with red clouds. I stood facing him, waiting for the incense stick to burn down. Finally, he seemed to notice my presence. His look went not to my face but directly to the gold ring. I made a helpless gesture. Smiling, he arose and removed the ring from my finger without the slightest effort. The pain in my arm vanished.

“If you see it as a skull, your arm will hurt, but if you are unattached either to its form or its name, it is simply pure gold. Clear your mind and this ring will be a ring — and you will be yourself.”

Hearing these words, which I only half understood, I began to complain. “I can’t help it, Ejo. I’m unable to adapt to this vulgar world. I thought I would find roots in Mexico, but I feel like a chicken in the wrong pen — and my consciousness only increases the pain.”

Ejo began to laugh so hilariously that it infected me, and I found myself laughing as well. Seeing that my distress had gone, he fetched the secret book and read a new koan: “A monk asked Master Sozan:^*12 ‘Snow covers a thousand hills, but why is the highest peak not white?’ Sozan answered: ‘You must know the most absurd of absurdities.’ The monk asked: ‘What is the most absurd of absurdities?’ Sozan replied: ‘To be of a different color than the other hills!’”

“The first commentary is: ‘In the pine branches, the monkey looks green.’ The second commentary: ‘The disciple, shaking imaginary snowflakes from his head, says: My hair has begun to turn white.’”

No matter how I wracked my brain, it seemed impossible to decode the koan and its very different commentaries. Anxious, I kneeled before the master. “I can’t do it!”

With a roar of “Kwatsu!” that came from his belly, Ejo seized his stick and dealt me six blows on my shoulder blades.

“Change yourself into a hill!”

His voice was like a strong gust of wind blowing away my mental images. I saw myself as a hill covered with snow amid a thousand other hills covered with snow. The high, bare peak was only an illusion. Who is exempt from being covered with snow in a storm? Who can escape aging and death? How could I imagine that developing my talent would exempt me from the sufferings of life? In winter, we are cold. The pine tree is a plant, the monkey is an animal. They are different, surely, but the monkey takes on the tree’s green color in leaping from branch to branch. A different skin color, a different culture, a different level of consciousness — it was absurd to feel that any of this sheltered me from the assaults of our common reality. If the thousand hills are covered with snow, then the highest summit is also white.

The slashes of the Tigress’s claws had taught me an important lesson. When she first agreed to collaborate with me, I would have done better to put aside my director’s vanity and simply incorporate her into the performance without any attempt to change her style. Working together like two hills covered with snow, we could have achieved a fantastic Lucretia. She was an actress who never tried to be different from her audience, but I, feeling that I had a superior art to offer, separated myself from her spectators, whom I considered vulgar. In this way, I lost them. The infantry must fight its battles on known ground, not in the air.

“Ejo, I now see that when the Tigress gave me this valuable gold ring, she was saying that popular art is also noble.”

When he heard these words, he exclaimed: “Give it to the first beggar you meet!” And shouting “Kwatsu!” again, he gave me six blows.

Then we had a frugal lunch together and meditated for two hours. Afterward, he had me read a new koan: “Joshu visited a hermit. He asked the master: ‘Is there? Is there?’ The master raised a fist. Joshu said: ‘In these shallow waters, I do not wish to anchor my boat,’ and left. Then he visited another hermit and repeated the same question. This master also lifted his fist. Joshu said: ‘He can give, he can take, he can kill and yet give life!’ And he bowed. Commentary: The same tree shaken by the spring wind shows two aspects: warm branches on its southern side, cold branches on its northern side.”

Ejo crossed his legs and resumed his meditation. I did likewise. An hour passed. Then two hours, three hours. . no matter how I turned around the koan in my mind, I could not understand it. The silence lay on my shoulders like an elephant. An agonizing pain stiffened my legs. A fly settled into the hollow of my ear. I bore its flutterings without moving. A voice resounded in my skull: “Understand, or die!” As if he had also heard it, Ejo cried out three times: “Is there? Is there? Is there?”

I heard myself answer: “If there is not here, then where? If there is not now, then when? If there is not I, then who?”

Suddenly, I am Joshu. I walk up a steep path toward the distant hermitage. There are monks there, far from the noise of the world, involved in discovering the luminous jewel buried in the depths of the soul. They sit around an old master. He is a realized being — meaning he is himself and not a simulacrum of another. When he hears my triple question, the master (who has already crossed the border where words dissolve into emptiness) lifts a fist to show his present unity. If he is not fully here, he is nowhere. Yet his gesture does not convince me. I find it superficial. In spite of my advanced age (probably more than one hundred years) I climb another hill painfully. Why this extreme effort? I need to be convinced that I am not the only one, that my awakening is not an abnormal phenomenon, that the end of all paths is the same. In the second hermitage, the master also lifts his fist in response to my three cries. And at that moment, in spite of their responses being the same, I recognize myself in the old man before me. The jewel buried in the darkness of our soul can give, can take, can kill, and nevertheless can bestow upon us its own life, which is impersonal and eternal.

“Ejo, if Joshu preferred one place over the other, it was not because there was a difference between the two fists. The difference was in his own seeing. We always have a personal interpretation of other beings, things, and events. Perhaps Joshu perceived no authentic expression of unity in the gesture of the first master. Perhaps he felt that the latter was saying that he would never let go of his realization and that it was only for him. He may even have perceived that he was being rebuked as an intruder, presumptuously questioning a master right in front of his disciples, whom he protected as a hen defends her chicks. If they were to lose faith in him, they would crumble. The fist was actually a physical threat telling him to be gone. With his closed fist, this egoist can hold only a few grains of sand, but if he had opened it, all the sands of the desert would have passed through it. . In contrast, Joshu interpreted the same gesture of the second master in a completely opposite way — as a warning of what not to do: If my awakening is mine alone, then it is not mine. What belongs to me can be mine only when it is also for others.”

Ejo tilted his head to the right, tilted his head to the left, took a deep breath of the evening air, and let out a long sigh. He clucked his tongue softly several times as if comforting a hurt child. “Some branches are warmed by the sun, others cooled by the spring wind, but they are all part of the same tree. The two masters gave the same answer. They had realized the same emptiness, but with the first, Joshu felt cold from the spring wind; with the second, he felt the warmth of the sun. If all the branches are fed by the same roots, why go from one master to another, from one magical woman to another? When will you realize that others cannot give you what you already have in yourself? As long as you do not find this treasure in yourself, you will continue to project your doubts onto others. One day, the ring will be a curse, another day it will be a noble work of art. You will say that the skull symbolizes death or you will say that it symbolizes eternity — but the beggar you give it to will see only its monetary value.”

I felt wounded. I groaned with irony: “Thank you so much, don Ejo. At last I understand: in order to awaken, I must become a beggar, stripping myself of my personal anxieties in order to attain poverty of spirit, transforming myself into an empty bowl and waiting patiently for my essential being, the great Buddha, to grant me the alms of awakening!”

Shouting “Kwatsu!” in a more piercing voice than ever, the Japanese first made me prostrate with my forehead on the ground. Then he administered a flurry of thirty blows of the stick.

When he had finished, he said: “The wisdom of the master depends on your own capacity to use it to find yourself.” After this, he recited a Mexican proverb as if it were a holy sutra: “He who has the most saliva eats the most pinole.^*13

Still feeling hurt, I countered with another Mexican proverb: “You can’t eat pinole and whistle at the same time.”

He laughed heartily, rubbing his belly. “Exactly! Each thing in its own time.”

Then he went to the kitchen and soon returned with plates of rice, fried sardines, and a thermos full of bitter, steaming tea. Between bites, he confided to me: “Mumon Yamada gave me a koan. I was never able to resolve it, but you — you can probably do it.”

Seeing a mischievous glint in his slanted eyes, I sensed a trap. Probably the koan he was going to give me was meaningless. What is the meaning of life? Life has neither meaning nor meaninglessness. It must be lived!

“Tokusan was the head teacher of a Zen monastery. Seppo was the chief administrator.^†14 One day, breakfast was late. Tokusan, bowl in hand, went into the dining hall. Seppo said to him: ‘I have not heard the bell ring for breakfast, and the gong has not been sounded either. What are you doing here with that bowl?’ Without a word, Tokusan bowed and returned to his cell. Seppo then remarked to another monk: ‘Tokusan may be great, but he has not understood the last verse.’”

As a sort of commentary, Ejo began to hum very softly: “The wind has blown the clouds away. Now the moon shines on the green hills like a coin of white jade.”

I began to reflect. If Tokusan is really a master, he cannot behave as a senile old man, and if Seppo is an awakened sage, he cannot speak of Tokusan with condescension. Tokusan did not simply wander into the dining hall out of blind habit. He was fully aware that the breakfast bell had not rung. When Seppo seemingly rebuked the master’s unconsciousness, Tokusan’s bow was not an acknowledgment of his forgetfulness. Between these two masters there could have been only profound respect, not some trivial competition between administrator and teacher. When Tokusan went to the dining hall, he knew that Seppo would be there, hurrying his monks to prepare breakfast, because it was late. Without a word, he held out his empty bowl to the administrator, saying: “The vicissitudes of life do not affect the peace of my spirit. Are you trying to accomplish a perfect work? If so, you are mistaken. For human beings, perfection is not possible, though excellence is. Simply do your work the best you can, accepting the inevitable errors.” Seppo understood. His own rebuke was very different from what it seemed to be: “Having realized emptiness, do you wish to show the way to those whom you believe are still in darkness? So many years of meditation, and still you hold an empty bowl in your hands. Your great flaw is the power of knowing your own mind and nature. Beware of your vanity; your bowl contains a thorn.”

Tokusan bowed his head in recognition that self-consciousness is the last trap. Seppo’s words, like the wind blowing away the clouds, enabled Tokusan to realize that seeing his own perfection is an imperfection. To be in unity is to conquer the dualism of actor-observer. Tokusan returned to his cell — that is, to himself. He still had to learn to dissolve himself, to offer his consciousness as the ultimate gift to the eternal void, leaving aside all metaphysical search. The mysterious commentary by Seppo about Tokusan not having understood the last verse refers to a tradition borrowed from ancient China by Zen masters. In their last moments, enlightened sages would write a poem, leaving the essence of their life experience to their disciples or to their children. The Buddhist monk Zhi Ming,^*15 condemned to die, dictated this poem before his head was cut off:

Illusory birth, illusory death.

The great illusion does not survive the body.

But one idea calms the mind:

If you look for a man, no man exists.

I related this interpretation to Ejo: “Empty mind: nothing to wait for, nothing to receive.”

His response was to recite another poem by a dying monk: “In this world burns a rootless tree, its ashes blown away by the wind.”

At this moment, a gust of wind made our kimonos flap. We had spent the entire day discussing koans. It was already dark, but night always came so softly here that we hadn’t bothered to light candles on the terrace. Another gust of wind, much longer, ruffled my hair. Ejo, with his bald head, grinned boyishly. The gust died suddenly and left in its wake a marvelous gift: a firefly! Free of the wind’s tyranny, the insect fluttered around the terrace, emitting its phosphorescent bursts of light.

Ejo murmured: “Little star, your language of light offers a teaching to us.”

We remained silent for a long time. Then, for the first time since I had known him, Ejo began to speak of his childhood. He spoke in a childlike voice, conveying nostalgia, sweetness, and fascination.

“I was an only child. I was five years old on that moonless night, when there appeared many thousands of fireflies, like a river of stars rushing through time. That was the night when my mother, distraught by the first wrinkles that signaled the decline of her beauty, decided to drown herself in Omi Lake. My father never got over her suicide. Lacking the courage to kill himself, he began to drink. This slow suicide plunged us into abject poverty. Most of the year, we depended on public charity. He emerged from his drunkenness only with the onset of summer, when he wore around his waist a bamboo stick wrapped to a big net sack and took me with him to the willow forest along the shores of Omi Lake. We lived in the region of Ishiyama, a province of Goshu, where several merchants specialized in buying and selling fireflies. They sent them to big cities in little wicker boxes. Rich city dwellers avidly bought these little creatures and then released them for their feasts so that everyone could admire their scintillating beauty.

“The more frightened fireflies are, the more brilliantly they shine. If you startle them, they become paralyzed for a time before taking flight. Kyubei, my father, hated these insects, blaming them stubbornly for triggering my mother’s fatal depression. Like a silent cat, he sneaked up until he detected their presence among the willow leaves. Leaping out suddenly, he began striking the leaves violently with the long bamboo stick. The insects froze, and fell to the ground, shining brightly like countless precious jewels. In order to collect as many of them as fast as possible, my father scooped them rapidly into his mouth. When it was so full he couldn’t hold any more, he spit them into the covered net sack that I held open and then closed quickly.

“The night was as dark as this one. My father was dressed in black so that the insects would not see his approach. Suddenly, in the total darkness, his cheeks began to shine. The insects inside his mouth were frantic and shone with such great intensity that the light lit up his cheeks like a red lantern. When he spit out his prisoners, a luminous jet spewed from his mouth. I gathered this stream of light into the net sack, which became my soul. I imagined my father as a kind of demonic god, expelling his power into me, the transmission of a mysterious gift of knowledge.

“My father was glad to punish these insidious phantoms who had stolen my mother — he firmly believed that the light of each insect was the burning soul of a dead person. When we returned to our humble home, with me carrying a sack of at least five hundred insects, he would recite haiku passed down to him from his ancestors and I had tears of joy, wishing that this summer would never end.”

Ejo paused, sighed deeply, and murmured: “Permanent impermanence.” Drying the tears on his cheeks with the ample sleeves of his robe, he lit a candle. Then, after a loud burst of laughter, he recited:

Mizu e kite,

Hikuu naritaru

Hotaru kana!

In a raucous voice, he recited it again, this time separating and counting the syllables of each verse:

Mi-zu e ki-te. . five

Hi-ku-u na-ri-ta-ru. . seven

Ho-ta-ru ka-na. . five

He smiled with satisfaction. “Five, seven, five: a haiku. The first five, like the fingers of a hand, signify ordinary human reality. The seven, like the seven chakras, signify awakened mind, cosmic unity. The third five return to ordinary reality, but this time with something new, the light of consciousness.

Chiding him playfully, I said: “Your poem is beautiful, Ejo, with a mystical rhythm. But remember — I’m not Japanese. Would you be so kind as to translate it for me?”

To my astonishment, this foreigner who did not speak Spanish very well rapidly produced a translation:

Llegando al agua

hace una reverencia

la luciérnaga!^*16

Arriving at the water

the firefly dips in a gesture

of reverence!

This was the first time Ejo had ever spoken of his personal life. I was moved by this revelation of the vulnerable, nostalgic child in him who was still there after so many years of meditation. Did he seldom speak of them because these memories were not an obstacle, but an intimate treasure? For an instant my personal limits faded, my body merged with the cosmos, the roots of my thoughts were the stars, and Ejo’s past was my own. I ventured to comment upon the haiku.

“The water is that of an ancient pond, calm and undisturbed — no birth or death, always there, like eternity. Halting its labyrinthine flight — in other words, freeing ourselves from identification with our thoughts — the firefly, like the awakened human being, arrives at the border where concepts dissolve in the infinite void before it drinks and communes with the world, accepting the unending change of everything that was thought to be fixed and permanent, making a gesture of reverence in gratitude for its ephemeral life.”

As Ejo listened to my interpretation, an invisible bridge joined his mind to mine. His huge grin made me guess that we were about to embark on a new game: he would recite and I would interpret. I was not mistaken. He went down to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of warm sake. After several toasts, he proposed another haiku:

Akenureba

Kusa no ha nomi zo

Hotaru kago!

The dawn returns

Firefly in its cage

Only grass!

I replied: “When dawn comes, the light of the sun makes the fireflies opaque. No enlightenment, no ignorance, no master, no disciple — drunk all together, we will sing like frogs who swallow fireflies and croak at the moon with phosphorescent bellies.”

Ejo gave a loud “Ho!” of satisfaction and executed a graceful little bow. Then, half singing:

Ame no ya wa

Shita bakari yku

Hotaru kana!

Night of sudden downpours

Fireflies fluttering on the ground!

“Ejo, my dear friend, I think that Buddhas must adapt to their circumstances. Even in the mud, fireflies still shine. In adverse circumstances, the awakened mind, true to itself, does not trouble itself or give way to despair.”

“Ho! Easy to say, very difficult to realize. . My mother and my four grandparents were dead. I was a child whose only family was a father who was drunk nine months of the year. In spite of my young age, I could understand his widower’s grief. But he never understood my orphan’s grief. Through long nights of pouring rain, forcing myself to smile, performing my filial duties, my heart was fluttering in the mud.

“When I was nine years old, I returned from school one day to find my father speaking with a Zen monk. Shaking a piece of paper in my face, Kyubei said: ‘This is a contract that gives Keikisoken Kodaishi the right to kill you if you don’t apply yourself to practicing his teachings. Make no mistake: from now on, being a good monk is a matter of life and death for you. Now eat your rice and go to bed. Tomorrow, at dawn, you will leave with your teacher for the Horyuji Monastery. I am unworthy of raising you. If you stay with me, you’ll become a beggar. This is the last time we will see each other.’ Then he took me in his arms and we both wept. At midnight, I heard his soft steps going outside. I looked out the window and saw him walking toward the willow forest. Taking great care in order not to disturb the sleep of my future mentor, I took a half hour to get dressed and left the house to spy on my father. I found him kneeling near the lake, so motionless in the moonlight that he seemed like a silver statue. To my great surprise, in spite of the winter cold, a solitary firefly appeared. Its great size and brightness indicated it was a female. After circling several times around my father’s head, it settled on his forehead. Then, with the slowness of a dream, he began to walk with tiny steps toward the mirror of the motionless lake. Without making any waves, he entered it little by little, until his head finally disappeared under the water. The firefly never left his forehead. In my child’s mind, the lake had consumed my mother and my father.”

Ejo took a long drink of sake. Then he recited:

Moe yasuki

Mata ke yasuki

Hotaru kana

Swiftly, you light up

Even more swiftly, you go out,

Insect of light

At this moment, I saw us — the Zen monk and myself — in the midst of the river of time, in the center of an infinite sphere, burning like two logs, like two joyous fireworks which leave no trail in the sky, savoring the paradise of the instant, a moment that would never repeat itself. Should we weep because we leaped into the void? With no beliefs to console us, without inventing a destiny for ourselves through compulsive actions, what would we do with this inevitable life?

As if reading my thoughts, Ejo recited two more haiku as a kind of response:

Yo no fukuru

Hodo okinaru

Hotaru kana

The more impenetrable the darkness,

the more your own light shines

Yo ga akete

Mushi ni naritaru

Hotaru kana

Dawn appears.

Fireflies are now only insects

The first rays of sunlight imparted a golden tint to our skin. Sleepy and queasy from all the drink, I nevertheless ventured an interpretation, feeling that my drunkenness would excuse me, even if it were wrong. “If I compare the sublime interdependence of all things — fireflies, dark nights — to my own fixed ideas of the world and myself, I realize that I am not a stranger, but a participant. Nothing belongs to me, not even my consciousness. All places are open doors; my own existence is impossible without that of others. When love — the dawn — appears, we dissolve into the world, becoming nobody.”

Ejo, as drunk as I, let out a long “Hooooo!” Then, in a stuttering voice, he related one last memory: “The shop of the firefly merchant was lit by hundreds of these poor insects crowded in small cages. When my father received the money and returned in the night with his empty net sack, he always said to me, with sadness: ‘And now we must go forth into this dark night with bodies that do not shine.’ Then he would enter a deep sleep while remaining in his meditation posture. I would get up unsteadily and leave him there, like a golden Buddha, snoring loudly.”

I drove home, weaving as little as possible. In the early morning hours, the streets were already full of traffic. At every red light, beggars appeared, each with their own method of attracting attention. At the first stop, I placed the golden ring in the hat that a skeleton-thin urchin held out to me after he emitted flames from his mouth by spitting benzene onto a torch. At the second stop, I gave all the money in my pockets to three kids in clown costumes with enormous buttocks. At the third stop, I gave my coat and shirt to an old man with a small monkey that he had trained to stand on its nose. At the fourth stop, I gave my shoes and socks to a woman who juggled four small rubber skulls. At the fifth stop, I offered my pants to a mother who carried a blind child.

I arrived home in my shorts. Collapsing into bed and just before plunging into a deep sleep, I remembered that my parents had never caressed me.

Ten hours later, I was awakened by cries of pain from my cat, Mirra, who was having a difficult time giving birth. Sensing an emergency, I drove her to the veterinarian. On the operating table, my black angora gave birth to one beautiful kitten with long, soft, gray fur, and then she died. Seeing the little orphan sucking desperately at the nipples of its dead mother, I thought of Ejo.

Although I knew many details of the strict life of a Zen monk, it was with great difficulty that I tried to imagine how this little nine-year-old boy, deprived of his family, friends, childhood games, and favorite places could live in a monastery, far from any contact with feminine tenderness — but perhaps he had already ceased to miss such attention? An austere life of meditation, prayer, work, service, obedience, begging alms, a life in which the negation of himself was considered the supreme good: I imagined him after his arrival at the monastery, before receiving his first meal, trembling with hunger and timidity, walking toward the cell of the severe shika, the head monk, to bow to him and thank him for his hospitality. I saw him sitting still, holding back his tears, while an older novice shaved his head. Any illusions that bound him to the world must have dropped away along with the hair. I imagined him scrubbing floors, emptying excrement from the latrines, working in the garden, helping in the kitchen, and taking his place on a zafu in the zendo, having vowed never to cease in his meditation until he attained enlightenment. Amid this group of severe adults, he would never know a moment of privacy. His only personal space was a tatami, a rectangle of woven straw upon which he slept, dreamed, and meditated. A block of wood served as his pillow, and he was given a space in the communal closets to keep his bowl; a razor to shave his head; a thin, folded mattress; and a sutra. Nothing else. No toys.

Every time he entered or left the zendo, he could see a wooden sounding block inscribed with large letters: “It is a matter of life or death. Nothing is permanent. Time passes quickly and waits for no one. You must not waste it.” In the morning, when the head monk looked at his palm and was able to distinguish its lines, he took a mallet and struck the wooden block. This series of loud, dry sounds woke the child, and he began his day of exhausting tasks. In the evening, when the head monk could no longer see the lines in his palm, he struck the block again. This announced a meager supper, after which the boy must express his gratitude with deep bows and the chanting of sutras. Finally, at exactly nine o’clock, repeated blows on the block announced the end of the day. Before unfolding his little mattress and taking up the required ritual posture of sleep among the other monks, he saw written on another large plank the strict rules of monastic life. He was taught how to bow and salute, how to walk after meditation, how to drink tea, how to take off his sandals, how to urinate and defecate. It was all written, and no spontaneity was permitted. No private conversations were allowed — no comments, no grumbling. He could use only three cups of water to wash himself each morning, holding the cup in one hand and washing his face with the other, like a cat. Once the roshi came by as he was doing this and urged him to learn to do with only two cups, for water was a common good, and this way he would be leaving more for future generations.

Life went on like this for thirty years. There were tea ceremonies, interviews with the roshi when he was given a koan, raking the garden, begging in town for rice or money, communal baths in strict silence, sleeping in winter without heat or wool socks, receiving the ritual blows and remonstrance from the master, the twice-yearly change of clothes: wool in autumn and winter, linen in spring and summer — and the never-ending examinations before senior monks for the purpose of deciding whether he would stay in the monastery or be sent away.

At what point did this orphan child, adolescent, then adult monk realize the awakening that fate had compelled him to seek? Perhaps he saw himself as an instrument protected by the generous arms of the Buddha, to be used by destiny to accomplish a great work. But he must also have been aware that he had no real experience of life in the world (unless he perhaps indulged occasionally in illicit escapades with other young monks, climbing over the walls at night to drink and carouse in a village bar). To have abruptly left this severe monastery for the United States and then to settle in Mexico must have come as an enormous spiritual shock to him. It is difficult to change the habits acquired over a lifetime. Even in a vast, foreign metropolis, Ejo was still enclosed in his Japanese monastery. A life of strict control over his speech and gestures and the discipline of meditation and purification had caused him to lose contact with much of the natural animal tenderness of life. He still knew little of caresses and the pleasure of spontaneous gestures of love.

I decided to offer him the little gray kitten as a gift.

As could be expected in the morning hours, I found Ejo sitting in meditation. I approached slowly and put the little animal between his legs. The kitten immediately settled there, purring, and fell asleep. Ejo sat immobile until the incense stick had burned out. Then he yawned, stretched, smiled, and caressed the kitten’s soft fur.

As he was doing this, he proposed a koan: “One morning, the monks of the eastern hall got into an argument with the monks of the western hall over the possession of a cat. Seeing this, Master Nansen took the animal and a large knife and held them up. ‘If one of you can tell me the meaning of this, I will not cut the cat in two.’ The monks could not reply, so Nansen cut the cat in two. (Here Ejo imitated the harsh sound of a cat dying.) That afternoon, Joshu arrived at the monastery. Nansen told him what happened, asking him for his opinion. Joshu took off one of his sandals, placed it upon his head, and left the monastery. Nansen said: ‘If you had been there, you could have saved the cat.’”

Ejo now made a soft mewling sound, imitating a cat being born. He went to the kitchen and returned with a large knife. Holding the kitten up by the nape of its neck, he said, with an implacable glint in his eye: “If you can tell me the meaning of this, I will not cut it in two.”

I began to sweat and breathe hard. I felt as if I would suffocate. What were Nansen and Ejo talking about when they said the meaning of this? Did holding the cat up with the knife mean that life and death are the same thing? Or did this refer to the illusory, dreamlike reality in which we believe we exist? Or did it refer to the illusory I, disputing possession of something equally illusory? Or was it the emptiness beyond words? And why that absurd sandal on the head and Ejo’s two cries imitating the death and birth of the kitten?

Seeing my state of incertitude, Ejo escalated the pressure on me by raising the knife, as if to give a fatal blow. The kitten began to meow in protest.

I lost control. Leaping upon Ejo, I grabbed his hand, forcing him to drop the knife, pushing him to the ground, and wresting the cat away from him. Holding it protectively against my breast, I backed away, horrified. To me, this act had been a sacrilege. In that moment, the Buddha had been knocked off his pedestal and my mystical illusions were shattered into a thousand pieces. My friendship with this monk was obviously at an end. I was certain that when he had recovered, he would formally expel me from the zendo.

Old, painful memories were surging through my mind like an irresistible flood. On my fourth birthday, a neighbor had given me a beautiful, gray cat named Pepe. This animal and I established a deep love. He became as attached to me as a dog, came when I called him by his name, and sat waving his paws in the air when he wanted me to share my food with him. He played with me often, never using his claws on me, and spoke to me in a language of meows that I understood. Every night, he came to sleep with me, snuggling under the sheets.

My father was convinced that cats who breathe near the face of a child transmit tuberculosis. One day he killed him in the garden, putting a bullet through his head. My happiness with Pepe had lasted only six months. Only four and a half years old, I found out how empty the world becomes when a beloved friend dies — or rather, how full of his absence the world becomes. This sadness flowed right through the marrow of my bones, and I harbored an impotent bitterness toward Jaime, my father.

Now, even with my sense of guilt at having physically attacked my master, I could smile with relief. I had accomplished something of which I was incapable as a child: saving my cat’s life.

And then, to my utter astonishment, I watched Ejo get up from the ground, grinning from ear to ear. He stood in front of me and exclaimed: “You resolved it! When Nansen spoke of this, inviting the affirmation that there is no difference between life and death, Joshu put his sandal on his head, ridiculing the ability of the intellect to resolve it. And you also did this, putting ordinary reality in your mind. Because you love the cat, you wrested it from my hands. Joshu was also saying that if you have to kill cats to lead your monks to awakening, your Zen makes no sense. Kwatsu! Kwatsu! Kwatsu! What joy! Life is only a fleeting dream, yet a living cat is not the same as a dead cat!” And then he embraced me heartily, bursting with laughter and compelling me to do a little dance with him.

I was still holding on to the cat, which was purring contentedly. I felt a certain reticence even as I participated in this merriment. Perceiving this, Ejo took the cat from me gently, murmuring “Arigato,” and caressed it with surprising tenderness. Then I followed him into the kitchen, where he give it a bowl of milk. Looking around this impeccably clean and ordered room, I could not help feeling that every object in it exuded the sadness of an orphan. The joy of a little kitten lapping milk only accentuated the coldness of the atmosphere there.

I could not help blurting out: “Ejo — I think you need a wife.”

“It’s true!” he exclaimed, stretching his left hand toward the ceiling, making a fist.

The next day he took a plane to Japan to search for a companion.