The Gate

  He had prepared a kind of response to the koan he had been assigned the other day, the best he could come up with. Still, it was exceedingly tentative and flimsy: nothing more, really, than an empty phrase concocted for the occasion, composed of words meant to convey a semblance of assurance where there was in fact none, in order to demonstrate some capacity for discernment when he found himself in the Master’s presence. Not that it occurred to Sōsuke in his wildest dreams that he would be so lucky as to escape his predicament with this pathetic, rehearsed response. Nor, of course, did he have any intention of putting something over on the Master. By this point he had become a good deal more earnest than when he first arrived. He felt quite mortified to find himself in the false position of appearing before the Master simply out of a sense of obligation, with nothing to offer but vague words that had popped into his head, as if serving someone a sketch of a rice cake instead of the real thing.

  As Sōsuke struck the gong-bell in the same fashion as those before him, he was fully aware that he was not qualified to wield the same hammer as the others. He was filled with self-loathing at how he had simply gone ahead and mimicked them like a tame monkey.

  Dreading in his heart his own weak self, he went through the doorway and started down the corridor. It was a long way. The rooms to his right were dark; after turning two corners, he saw lamplight coming through a shoji at the very end of the corridor. He advanced to the threshold of that room and came to a halt.

  The protocol for such audiences was a triple kowtow to the Master before entering. The supplicant bowed as he would in the course of an ordinary greeting, with his forehead nearly touching the tatami, while at the same time placing his hands, palms up, at either side of the head—and then raising them a bit, up to ear level, as if reverently presenting an offering. Kneeling at the threshold, Sōsuke performed the first kowtow according to the prescribed form. From within the room came the command: “Once will suffice.” Dispensing with further protocol, he entered the room.

  The only light came from a single dim lamp, so dim that one could not have read even relatively large characters by it. Sōsuke could not recall having ever seen anyone function at night with the sole aid of such paltry lamplight. Although naturally stronger than moonlight and not of such a bluish hue, it did have the lunar quality of looking as though it might vanish behind murky clouds at any moment.

  In this indistinct light, four or five feet straight ahead of him, Sōsuke could make out the figure of the one whom Gidō called “Rōshi.”[83] His face had the same cast-in-metal impassiveness and color as before. His entire body was wrapped in vestments the color of tannin or persimmon or tea. His hands and feet were out of view. He appeared in the flesh only from the neck up. His countenance, which possessed an utmost solemnity and tension that conveyed imperviousness to time, was riveting. And his head was perfectly smooth-shaven.

  Seated in front of this face, the spiritless Sōsuke exhausted what he had to say in a single phrase.

  The response was immediate: “You’ll have to come up with something sharper than that!” the voice boomed. “Anybody with even a bit of learning could blurt out what you just did.”

  Sōsuke withdrew from the room like a dog from a house in mourning.[84] From behind him reverberated a vehement ringing of the handbell.

  20

  FROM THE other side of the shoji a voice called out: “Nonaka-san, Nonaka-san.” Still half asleep, Sōsuke was sure he had answered this call; yet before uttering a response, he had in fact lost consciousness and fallen back into a deep sleep.

  Later, when he awakened for a second time, he leapt to his feet in consternation. Going out on the veranda, he found Gidō clad in a gray robe, with the sleeves tied up to free his hands, energetically wiping down the floor. As he squeezed out a wet rag in his benumbed red hands, the monk said good morning to Sōsuke with his customary gentle smile. Again this morning, the first meditation long since over, he had been busy attending to his chores around the retreat. Reflecting on his indolence, staying in bed even after attempts had been made to wake him, Sōsuke felt utterly ashamed.

  “I’m sorry I overslept again today,” he said, as he sidled away from the kitchen door toward the well. He drew some cold water and washed his face as quickly as possible. His beard had grown out enough for his cheeks to feel prickly to the touch, but he had no room in his head to bother about such things. He brooded ceaselessly over the contrast between Gidō and himself.

  The day Sōsuke had received his letter of introduction he had been told not only what a decent man this monk was but also how advanced he was in the practice of the discipline. And yet Gidō had turned out to be as self-deprecating as some unlettered lackey. To see him like this, sleeves rolled up, scrubbing away, surely no one could imagine that he was the master of his own retreat. He looked more like some sort of temple bookkeeper or at most a postulant.

  Prior to this dwarfish young man’s ordination, while still a lay practitioner, he had evidently sat in the lotus position for seven days straight without moving a muscle. The pain in his legs was such that he could hardly stand up; eventually he could only make his way to the privy by leaning against the wall. At the time he was working as a sculptor. On the day he was enlightened into the True Nature,[85] he had dashed up the hill behind the temple in an excess of joy and shouted out in a loud voice, “Everything on earth, plants and trees, mountains and streams, without exception they enter into Buddha-hood.”[86] It was only then that he shaved his head.

  Gidō told Sōsuke that it had been two years since he had been entrusted with this retreat but that he had yet to sleep in a proper bed with his legs stretched out comfortably. Even in winter, he said, he slept sitting up, fully clothed, leaning back against the wall. When he was still an acolyte, he added, he had even had to wash the Master’s loincloth. In those days, whenever he managed to steal some time from his chores to sit and meditate, someone would sneak up behind him and play some nasty trick, and people were always saying vicious things about him, such that during his novitiate he often found himself reproaching the ill fate that had landed him in a monastery.

  “It’s only lately that things have gotten a little easier,” he said. “But I still have a long road ahead. Sticking to the practice is a tough business. If there were an easier way to go about it, I wouldn’t be so foolish as to keep slaving away like this for ten or twenty years.”

  Gidō’s account left Sōsuke in a demoralized fog. Besides the frustration over his own lack of commitment and spiritual resources, there was the obvious but unanswerable question of why, if success in this arena required so much time, he had come to the temple in the first place.

  “You mustn’t think that what you’re doing is a waste of time,” said Gidō. “Ten minutes of meditation yields ten minutes worth of achievement, of course, and twenty minutes of meditation doubles the merit you accrue. And once you’ve made the initial breakthrough, you can continue your practice without having to keep coming back here all the time.”

  Sōsuke felt duty-bound to return to his room and meditate again.

  He was greatly relieved when, while he was thus engaged, Gidō came to announce that it was time for the Exposition of Principles. There was nothing but misery in sitting here rooted to the spot, agonizing over a conundrum that was as hard to grasp as a bald man was by the hair. Rather than this, any sort of active, physical exertion was preferable, no matter how much energy it might require. He simply wanted to move about.

  The location for this event was about as far from the retreat as was the Master’s temple, some one hundred yards away. They reached it by once again passing the lotus pond, then, instead of turning left, following the path straight ahead to where the building stood, its majestic roof tiles soaring among the pines high above. Gidō carried a black-bound book in his breast pocket. Sōsuke naturally had nothing to bring. He had not even known until he came here that “exposition of principles” meant something like what in school would be called a le
cture.

  The high-ceilinged hall was surprisingly spacious and very cold. The faded tatami blended with the ancient columns in a manner redolent of the distant past. The people seated here all appeared appropriately subdued. Although everyone had sat down wherever he pleased, in no particular order, there was no noisy conversation and not so much as a chuckle to be heard. The monks, wearing vestments of navy-blue hemp, sat in two rows facing one another, arrayed on either side of the barrel-backed officiant’s chair that was placed front and center. The chair was painted vermilion.

  Presently the Master appeared. Sōsuke, who had been staring down at the tatami, had no idea when he had come in or what path he had taken to cross the room. He only noticed the Master when his impressive figure was already perched, utterly serene, in the officiant’s chair. He then watched as a young monk standing close to the chair undid a purple silk wrapping and produced a book, which he proceeded to set down reverently on a table. Sōsuke followed the monk with his eyes as he made a deep bow and retreated.

  At this point all of the monks in the congregation pressed their palms together and began to recite from The Testamentary Admonitions of Musō Kokushi.[87] The lay congregants who were scattered about near Sōsuke all joined in at the same droning pitch. The recitation had a melody-like rhythm to it and sounded somewhere in between sutra-chanting and normal speech: “Among my students there are three grades: those who can be said to have gone the limit, who have cast off all bonds with others and have single-mindedly examined themselves—they are known as the highest grade; those whose practice of the discipline is not pure, who indulge in eclectic studies—they are termed the middle grade . . .” The passage was not very long. Sōsuke had at first not known who Musō Kokushi was, but he learned from Gidō that Musō and Daitō Kokushi[88] were the patriarchs responsible for the resurgence of the Zen school. Gidō went on to tell him about how Daitō had been lame in one leg and unable through the years to sit in the lotus position. He was so exasperated by this failing that, shortly before he died, determined to force his body to do his bidding, he wrenched his leg until it broke and finally assumed the full lotus position, spilling enough blood in the process to soak his robe.

  Presently the recitation proper began. Gidō removed the black-bound volume from his pocket, opened it, and slid it over the tatami to where Sōsuke could see the first page. The work was entitled On the Inextinguishable Light of Our School.[89] Gidō had explained to Sōsuke when he first inquired about the book that it was an especially suitable work for him. According to the monk, it had been compiled by a disciple of the Abbot Hakuin,[90] an eminent priest named Torei or the like, with the purpose of presenting in proper order the various stages of Zen training, from the most basic to the most advanced, along with the psychological states that accompanied each stage.

  Sōsuke’s visit to the temple had come in the middle of this recitation series, and he found it difficult to absorb everything that was said. The speaker was articulate, however, and Sōsuke, as he listened in passive silence, found many things of interest. Clearly with the aim of spurring on earnest novices, the recitations regularly included anecdotes about Zen adepts who had struggled mightily along the way, thus lending some spice to these expositions.

  Today’s session had proceeded in this fashion up to a certain point when, changing his tone abruptly, the Master launched into a denunciation of those who manifested a lack of sincere commitment in the course of his individual interviews.

  “Just recently,” he said, “there was someone who actually complained in my presence that even now, in this place, he was under the sway of illusion.”

  Sōsuke shuddered in spite of himself. For he in fact was the one who had made such a complaint during his interview.

  An hour later, as they returned together side by side, Gidō said to him, “The Master often interrupts the recitations with cutting remarks about the novices’ indiscretions during their interviews.”

  Sōsuke said nothing in reply.

  21

  THERE amid the temple grounds the days came and went, one after another. During that time two longish letters arrived from Oyone. Naturally neither of them contained anything untoward or unsettling. Deeply as he cared for his wife, Sōsuke procrastinated over answering her letters. Were he to decide to leave the temple without having resolved the riddle that had been posed to him, his journey would have been for naught, and he would be unable to look Gidō in the face. Every waking moment the indescribable burden of these worries weighed on him relentlessly. The more times he saw the sun rise and set over the temple compound, the more anxious he became, like a quarry closely pursued from behind. Yet he could think of no solution to the riddle other than the one he had first proposed. And no matter how thoroughly he considered other possibilities, he remained convinced that this was the only one. Still, he had arrived at this conclusion through simple ratiocination, and it hardly seemed fitting. When he tried to erase this one sure solution from the picture in order to see what compelling alternative might present itself, however, nothing whatsoever came to mind.

  He pondered alone in his room. When he grew tired, he went out through the kitchen to the vegetable garden. Then he entered the grotto that had been carved out of the base of the cliff and stood there absolutely motionless. Gidō had told him that he mustn’t allow himself to be distracted. Rather, what he must do was to focus his attention ever more closely until his concentration was rigidly fixed and he himself became like a rod of iron. The more Sōsuke listened to exhortations like this, the more impossible it seemed to him that he would ever reach such a state.

  “Your problem,” Gidō said another time, “is that your head is already full of the notion of getting it over and done with, and that won’t work.” His words paralyzed Sōsuke even further. Suddenly he began to think again about the return of Yasui. If he were to become a constant visitor at the Sakais’ and not go back to Manchuria for some time, the most prudent course for the couple would be to vacate their rented house immediately and move somewhere else. He could not help asking himself if, instead of idling his time away here, it wouldn’t make more sense for him to return to Tokyo right away and prepare to relocate if necessary. If it were to happen that, while he was steeling himself here at the temple, news of Yasui’s return reached Oyone, this would, he realized, greatly aggravate matters.

  With the air of a man at the end of his tether, he sought out Gidō and said, “It doesn’t seem remotely possible that enlightenment will come to someone like me.” This declaration was made two or three days before Sōsuke in fact went home.

  “No, that’s not true,” the monk replied without a moment’s hesitation. “Anyone with true conviction can be enlightened. You should try approaching it with the same rigid fixation as those drum-beating Nichirenites.[91] When you have been totally permeated by the koan, from the crown of your skull to the tips of your toes, a new cosmos will manifest itself in a flash before your eyes.”

  With a deep sadness Sōsuke acknowledged to himself that neither his circumstances in life nor his temperament would permit him to act with such blind ferocity—never in his entire life, let alone in the few days that remained to him at the temple. It had been his firm intention to excise from his life the net of complications that had enmeshed him of late, but this wandering off to a mountain temple had turned out to be nothing but a fool’s errand.

  This was the conclusion he came to privately, but it was not in him to reveal this to Gidō. His heart was too full of admiration for this young Zen monk: for his courage and passion, his dedication and kindness.

  “There’s a saying: “The Way is near yet we must seek it from afar,’ and it’s true,” said Gidō ruefully. “It’s right in front of our nose and yet we just can’t see it.”

  Sōsuke withdrew to his room and set up more sticks of incense.

  Regrettably this state of things prevailed until it was time for him to leave the temple. No new life opened up for him. On the day of his depa
rture, Sōsuke, freely and without reserve, gave up any lingering hope of realizing his goal.

  “You have been a great help to me through all of this,” he said to Gidō as he bade him farewell. “It’s really too bad, but things could not have turned out any other way. I doubt I’ll have a chance to see you anytime soon. I wish you all the best, then.”

  “I’ve been hardly any help at all!” Gidō said, his tone most consoling. “Everything just rough and ready, you know. You must have been very uncomfortable. I assure you, though, even the amount of meditating you’ve managed to do this time makes a difference. And your having resolved to come here was a worthy accomplishment in itself.”

  Nevertheless, Sōsuke keenly felt that he had merely wasted a lot of time. The monk’s efforts to put the best construction possible on it only served as a further reminder of his own weakness and, though saying nothing, he felt deeply ashamed.

  “The time it takes to reach enlightenment depends on the individual’s temperament,” said Gidō. “Whether you get there quickly or get there slowly has no bearing on the quality of the experience. There are those who break through with no trouble at all only to be blocked after that from developing further; and there are others who take a long time getting through the initial steps but, once they do, experience lasting joy. You absolutely must not give up hope. The main thing is to stay passionately committed. Look at someone like the late Abbot Kōsen.[92] He was a Confucian scholar and already middle-aged when he began to practice Zen. After he’d spent three whole years as a monk without getting past the first precept, he said, ‘It is because my sins are heavy that I have not been enlightened,’ and went so far as to bow down humbly to the outhouse every day. But see what a wise man he turned out to be. This is one of various encouraging examples I could mention.”