A Single Eye Page 7

  In the open end of the circle stood the altar, a highly-polished teak block about three feet high, topped by a statue of a Buddha. The dim glow of oil lamps on either side threw odd shadows across it. Light and darkness are a pair, says the eighth-century Chinese poem, the Sandokai. One does not exist independently of the other. On one side of the altar, a candle flickered seductively, sending swaying shadowy arms from the flowers over the statue of the Buddha onto the walls beyond. The sweet, woody smell of incense drifted and disappeared.

  I found my seat, halfway between the door and the altar along the right wall. I bowed to the cushion, turned and bowed to the room and the community of people here, about to undertake this hard half month, each of us moving in the cocoon of our own fears and fantasies, yet with a calmness of purpose. Normally, the serenity of this communal beginning comforts me, but now, here, it served only to highlight Maureen’s edginess and Rob’s extreme demands. Why were the two people who should have been most settled going into sesshin the most unnerved?

  That moment passed, and on the far side of the altar the roshi’s entrance door creaked. In his formal brown robes, Leo stepped into the oil-lit room. Rob followed, holding a smoking stick of incense. His step was sure; his black robes barely swayed. He paused before the altar and bowed slightly, extending the incense. The flickering light of the oil lamps reflected off his polished skull and sharpened his chiseled nose and cheekbones. Next to tall, elegant Rob, Leo looked like a gnome.

  Leo—Roshi—accepted the proffered incense and placed it in the middle of a bowl of compacted ash that sat in the center of the altar. He bowed before the altar and walked to his seat beside it. A soft, sweet bell rang. Despite his unsteady steps and unprepossessing shape, there was a dignity in his demeanor. I caught myself looking right at Leo and smiling proudly like a parent at a school play. I felt ridiculous. But for an instant when he looked around the room his gaze paused at me.

  With all his robes inside robes, a priest’s settling onto his zafu is always a long process of yanking cloth and tucking cloth and general robe-futzing. But Leo was so brittle it took him a good half minute just to cantilever himself onto the cushion. It was too painful to watch. I was glad anew I’d hauled the cacao beans up the hill for him.

  Now that the bells had rung, the first period of zazen—meditation—had officially begun. The time for watching was over. Hands were to come together in a mudra—palms upward, left resting on right, thumbs lightly touching—eyes were to be open, gaze turned downward, attention on the flow of the breath. Nothing else was to be moving. Stillness in body leads to stillness in mind.

  I breathed in slowly, felt the breath flow out, smelled the incense and the wet wool, heard the clatter of rain beginning on the dome, felt the wisps of exhaled air that connected me to my seatmates. There was something so lush about the first minutes in the zendo when everything and everybody was fresh and eager and glad to be together. Pain, exhaustion, frustration, and anger would follow, but right now the novelty connected us all. I had lived in ten different places in sixteen years and the only place I felt at home was in the zendo.

  The forty-minute period was half over when Leo cleared his throat and began to speak. “I’m going to tell you about Aeneas, and why I didn’t do this sooner.” He cleared his throat. “Someone said to Suzuki-roshi, who brought Zen from Japan to San Francisco, ‘Define Zen.’ Suzuki-roshi answered, ‘Things change.’”

  Leo took a breath and though it was hard to tell in that half-light from the oil lamp, I could have sworn he had a hint of a smile on his wide mouth when he repeated, “Things change.” Then he sat silent so long I wondered if I had hallucinated his words. To my left, Amber recrossed her legs in a flourish more indicative of impatience than pain. I glanced up at Rob, Maureen, and Barry, across from me and took in their still, calm postures. As senior students, monastery residents, they were assigned the seats closest to their roshi. Rain tapped on the curved roof; the oil lamps barely flickered. I was about to let my eyes close when Leo went on.

  “We hear, Things change, and we immediately assume that refers to cosmic things. E equals MC squared. Solids become liquid; matter becomes energy; life becomes death. We can accept that; tuck it in a corner of our minds to be pondered sometime later. Life becomes death: well, that’s not so comfortable, but it’s not a real problem, at least not for years. Ice becomes water isn’t so bad, either—unless it’s summer.”

  He grinned, but none of us reacted. The new people were probably too nervous, and those of us who had heard other teachers give talks understood that this offer of humor was a ruse before he dug into his real point. We didn’t want to be suckered.

  “But we don’t like change,” he continued. “Change around us reminds us that we change, that we are not the solid substance we like to believe we are. We are nothing but stuff that changes. Maybe not even stuff, but just change. We like to come to sesshin and settle into the solid, reliable rules that make us feel safe, secure, unchanging, right?” He looked at Rob, Maureen, and Barry. “Right?”

  He laughed. They smiled. And I was glad to let their aplomb reassure me. “Nothing but change” was not a way I wanted to see myself, not at all.

  “I’ve been here a long time,” he went on. “Six years. When I came, there was only land and trees”—he shot a smile at Rob—“and poison oak. When Rob first got here he thought he’d stumbled into the asylum with a lunatic in charge. Poor Rob. He was about to abandon a flourishing law firm in San Francisco to study with a teacher of great promise. What he got was a guy consumed with his skin. All I could do was try not to scratch . . . and scratch. I had poison oak so often I felt undressed without it.”

  People did smile at that, though I suspect a good proportion of us were hoping he’d say he had gone on a tear to rid the place of every leaf and stem.

  “Of course there was no way to avoid it. You do what you can—take this pill, use that ointment—but when you have to clear the land and the land’s full of it, it gets you in the end. And everywhere else.” He waited a beat. “I had taken the hardships in Japan as a challenge and an honor of sorts. They were foreign, exotic hardships and I knew they weren’t going to last forever. Then I came home and screwed up big. And this place was my exile. So here I was out in the woods with my life turned upside down and, to add insult, with poison oak.” He started to scratch his arm, looked down at it and shrugged. “I have never hated anything or any place so much. If there had been any possibility of anything else—But I’d already burned every bridge and I was stuck. I knew if I left here I would be leaving my Zen practice. I knew—” He paused to look slowly around the room. There was no hint of a smile. Those oversized features on his face made him seem larger than life. “I knew if I left here I would die.”

  A shiver shot through me. I had to control the urge to reach out to him.

  “So I stayed and led sesshins like this and cleared the land and built the cabins you sleep in and this zendo you’re sitting in and the kitchens and the bathhouse and tried not to scratch and did scratch, and tried to sit here on the cushion and see my thoughts and just let them go and sit without thought and I didn’t succeed with that. And it all went on for years. When I had a bottle of scotch or sake I’d escape into it. If there’d been a steady supply I’d have escaped constantly. But there was never enough of anything here, even escape. Right?”

  He glanced in the direction of the senior students, but none of them managed a full nod in return.

  “People came to study. I never asked anyone why. No one’s reasons could be less lofty than my own. Or more desperate. Anyone who chooses this demanding practice has his reasons. So we cleared and built and sat. Last year it rained every day all winter long. The road flooded out in October and stayed flooded and by February we were boiling ferns and rationing oatmeal. Then, finally, the sun came out and everything burst into bloom. Everything, including the poison oak, and, alas, me.” He actually winked at Rob and now Rob did manage a watery smile that seemed
unsuited to his regal face.

  “Now I itched so much that I knew if I scratched I wouldn’t have any skin left. The road was still out. So there was nothing to do but sit and think about scratching. I kept wishing to be that statue of Shiva with the hundred hands, you know?”

  He flung his hands so fast in so many directions he did look Shiva-like.

  “And I knew all about poison oak. Each time I got it I grasped at a new hope—that this time it would be different, a milder case, that I’d developed an immunity, a tolerance, a thick skin, that my practice would give me a serenity enhanced by B vitamins and I wouldn’t itch so much. But I knew the truth: poison oak doesn’t let up for weeks. I had no reason to hope for anything better. And suddenly at this worst of all moments, with every inch of my skin itching, my mind went blank. No thoughts. For the first time in all the years I’d sat. No thoughts. Just itch. But not even itch, just sensation. Itch and not-itch. Just this moment, not the beginning of three miserable weeks. You get what I mean here?” The candle shimmied and tossed out a shadow that landed momentarily on his brow. “I wanted to let go but I couldn’t. Not till the gift of the poison oak. The great gift.”

  He looked around the room, but no one returned his gaze. It was too expensive a gift.

  “Facing change in your skin is easy. Even in your body, hard as that would seem if you lost a leg, still that’s easy. Easy compared to the notion of finding your mind different, your ideas new, and the very way you think altered—of ‘you’ changing. We devote our lives to protecting ourselves from change. But one way we change is by facing facts. Being honest with people and with ourselves.” Pointedly, he looked at me, as if to say, You wanted it. Here it is. “I’m about to be honest.”

  My breath caught. Beside me Amber stirred. I had the sense she had been on the verge of dozing, but she was wide awake now.

  Leo said, “This sesshin is in remembrance of a student, Aeneas, who disappeared. For years I wanted to believe that nothing was any different than before. But the truth is: that incident changed everything. One of the changes was that I chose to believe nothing changed, because I was so intent on protecting this place and protecting myself.”

  He leaned forward almost intimately.

  “Now I’m going to tell you what happened. There were eight of us here then: Rob, Maureen, and Barry,”—he nodded toward them. They returned his nod, but stiffly. “There was a woman; Anna, I think her name was. And three men: Dusty, Max, and Aeneas. It’s Aeneas I have to talk about. He was twenty-four then, a sweet man who could sit every period in an entire sesshin and never move, who would do any job and never complain. It was a rough winter, and people got on each other’s nerves, but Aeneas never argued with anyone. It poured for weeks, people got fed up and went home, but Aeneas stayed and worked on whatever there was to do. If there wasn’t work, he listened to the tapes of the Japanese chants. By spring he was pitch-perfect in every one. He was the Zen poster boy.”

  Leo closed his eyes and sat silent. But there was an uneasy unstillness about him that seemed to vibrate through the room. Rob and Maureen were no longer merely listening but staring at him, as were the people down the row from them. And Amber, next to me, had stopped squirming and was dead still.

  “If Aeneas had an impairment in his ability to judge, well, it wasn’t a problem—that’s what I thought then. It’s what I wanted to think.”

  Leo let his gaze lower. The zendo was electric with tension. Leo inhaled slowly, and when he spoke it was to the middle of the room where no one was sitting.

  “Then Aeneas up and left. I heard he had gone to Japan to study with Ogata-roshi or Fujimoto-roshi, the Japanese teachers who came to the official opening here. I was hurt he hadn’t told me, but I didn’t want to think about that. I wanted to sit zazen.

  “Aeneas never wrote me to explain, nor did the roshis in Japan. I assumed that showed what disgrace I had brought to Zen in America and, reflectively, in Japan. For years I thought Aeneas and Ogata-roshi and Fujimoto-roshi were ignoring me, but I couldn’t write to them because I couldn’t bear to have them snub me—because, you see, that would have forced me to have to change. I didn’t want to change; I wanted to sulk—in a dignified manner, of course. I wanted to sit zazen, not to become aware but to escape. Understand? Pretend-zazen.”

  A gust of wind flickered the oil-lamp light and I couldn’t tell whether the hollow look on Leo’s face was a reflection of the six years of hurt or just the play of shadows. He looked around the room and I should have followed his gaze, but I couldn’t bear to come upon a damning face. Leo took a deep breath and exhaled open-mouthed.

  “I know, you expect better of a teacher. I can’t offer you better; I can only tell you what is. A month ago, after my last bout of poison oak taught me about change, I screwed up my courage and wrote to the Ogata-roshi in Japan. Here’s what I found out: Every one of the ideas I had held as truth for the last six years was fantasy. Every single one. Got that? No truth. Aeneas had never been in Japan at all. All I know is that Aeneas vanished when the visitors left.” He put up a hand as if to stop questions. “All else is speculation. Fantasy, theorizing. But don’t worry or make up your own fantasies. There’s nothing to suggest either that Aeneas left or that he did not leave. All we know is that we don’t know. That is reality.”

  The air crackled with the tension. The senior students couldn’t hide their shock. Rob sat, hands in mudra, eyes lowered, but his shoulders were hunched halfway to his ears. Barry, the bald chocolate cook, was staring at Leo with the intensity that I was staring at him. And Maureen looked like she was about to be sick. Even Amber was learning forward, as if this place had suddenly gotten way more interesting than she could have hoped. Justin, Amber’s boyfriend, was staring intently at Leo. I couldn’t assess that reaction, though; he’d been staring as intently at the vegetables in the kitchen an hour ago.

  But the tension stopped there. On the far side of the room, the three women in shawls were nodding, and the man in his seventies showed no reaction at all, as if the disappearance of some guy a half dozen years ago was ancient history. I glanced around quickly. None of the people I had seen hoisting suitcases off the van looked stunned or panicked. One man was visually examining his skin, his attention still caught in the danger of poison oak. It was like parallel universes here, one unmoved, one of which had had the mats pulled out from under it.

  Was this what Yamana-roshi had warned Leo not to do? Tell him I know what he is planning and he must not do that. I stared at Leo, willing him to return my gaze.

  When he looked up, it was to acknowledge each student, as his gaze moved slowly around the circle. I waited for my turn, but his contact was closer to a pat on the head than a meeting of the minds.

  He took a breath and said to the group, “You had a right to know. And you have a right to leave if that’s your decision. The van that brought you is still here and the driver will take you back to town right now if you choose. Do what is right for yourself. Make your decision now. Once the van leaves it won’t be back for two weeks.

  “But if you stay here don’t waste your time entertaining yourself with fantasies about Aeneas. We’ve got two weeks of intensive sitting to do. We each have our own demons in our past. Don’t search for them.” Now he did glance over at me. “The issue isn’t in the woods; it’s within ourselves. Just sit zazen. Things change every moment; be aware. Whatever is important will come up. Don’t turn away. Do not let yourself escape.”

  A bolt shot through me: anger, hope, fear, trust, outrage? I couldn’t name it, couldn’t even ballpark it. The only thing that was clear was that Yamana or not, Garson-roshi had a plan and he was dead set on seeing it through to the end.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It’s amazing how quickly a zendo empties out after the last bell, as people’s attention shifts from noticing their breaths to wanting to get into the bathhouse before there’s a line, into bed before someone blows out the oil lamp. Small comforts swell into great needs. No one h
ad accepted Leo’s offer of leaving sesshin.

  Traditionally, in Japan, the monks sleep on the zabutons they sit on during the day. But Americans are too big to curl up on their mats. So only some students sleep in the zendo, and those sprawl over three mats. But whoever was assigned to sleep in here tonight wouldn’t be spreading out his sleeping bag for a few more minutes.

  The altar candle had been extinguished, but the sweet smell of incense endured. I felt almost weighted to the floor. There is something wonderful about being in the zendo alone, like standing at the nave of Chartres watching the sunlight pour down through the great rose window. Well, on a smaller scale. But the oil lamps still shone their own subdued suns on the Buddha. I paused in front of the altar where the roshi had bowed. I bowed to the Buddha—life as it is in this moment—and felt the silence of the room, the air brushing my face and hands, the connection between the Buddha, the bow, and me. And I felt just the tiniest bit a fraud. Skepticism was what had lured me to Zen to begin with. I couldn’t imagine ever being without it. I bowed again, but now the movement seemed entirely fake, and I headed silently to the door.

  My hand was on the latch before I noticed the voices outside, whispering. Leo had postponed the normal rule of silence; they didn’t have to whisper. I hesitated. One voice was a man’s but I couldn’t guess whose, the other a woman’s.

  “Aeneas!” she said. “Why couldn’t Roshi just let him go?” Her voice was fuzzy, but panic sharpened her last words.

  “Aeneas!” Disgust flooded the man’s muted voice. “Leo has no idea what he’s opening up. He could destroy this place.”