Reports from the Zen Wars. Steve Antinoff
Copyright © 2016 by Steve Antinoff
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Antinoff, Steve, author.
Title: Reports from the Zen wars: a memoir / Steve Antinoff.
Description: Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015046443
Subjects: LCSH: Antinoff, Steve. | Spiritual biography. | Zen Buddhism.
Classification: LCC BL73.A595 A3 2016 | DDC 294.3/927--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046443
Cover and interior design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc.
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Contents
Introduction
King of Whatever Universe
Zen Man Hidden
Cut with No Razor
Meditation Prometheus Falling through the Shaft
The Divine Comedy of a Tragic Buddha
Better Hakuin’s Tremble Than to Want to Be a Zen Master
The Fire in the Lotus
Between Straw Fedora and Wood Clogs
Never with Wisdom . . .
Notes
For Naomi Maeda
empress of bodhisattvas
For Shun Murakami
who translated my work—
though he didn’t know me well—
even while dying
For Urs App
touched by greatness
SHEN-KUANG CUT OFF his left arm in expression of his determination to pursue the Zen quest even to the death. I have not. The unused blade hangs over my life like a guillotine.
The author, in consequence, is unimportant to these pages, beyond one fact that brings him considerable joy: In stumbling over himself in America and Japan, he fell into position to witness.
You couldn’t approach the old masters without fear of being struck by lightning.
—Hakuin (1686–1768)1
ROUND ONE (1972): DOWN FOR THE COUNT
JEWISH MYSTICAL LITERATURE recounts how a Hasid called Lieb chose his spiritual master: “I came . . . not to listen to discourses, nor to learn from his wisdom; I came to watch him tie his shoelaces.”2 The man I have chosen as my teacher has refused my choice. Yet, through his own magnificence, he has forced me up against the meaning of Lieb’s words—though he owns no shoelaces and though a pair of high-laced shoes tinged with this magnificence has tripped me up for decades.
I call this monk the Thief, in the Zen sense, for he has stolen the world. He stole it the first time I saw him, 4 a.m. my opening morning in the monastery. He led the monks into the chanting hall; dropped into a sitting posture; chanted with the group of them for half an hour while I watched from the laymen’s side of the room; bowed a few times; led the monks back to the meditation hall; and while he was about it reduced the other monks to flat, two-dimensional cutouts by his mere presence. I’ve been trying to steal back the space about me and within me ever since.
But it was stumbling upon him brushing his teeth that turned him into a living Zen koan. I had stepped out of the meditation hall to find him standing by the water pump, hand on hip gazing into the distance, brushing his teeth before the evening meditation. I thought: “This is ridiculous. What he’s doing is trivial. What he is doing is the meaning of life!”
I knew nothing of Zen. I did know that whatever Zen is had something to do with this.
His sublime stillness when sitting, the way he handled a broom when sweeping the garden path, his several speeds and styles of “walking meditation” that made all yield to him silent control of the meditation hall—even when he was no longer head monk—are more beautiful to me, more crucial, than any painting or dancer I have ever seen. Later, in Tokyo, Sylvie Guillem dancing Maurice Bejart’s La Luna floored me. Tremendous as she was, great as Bach is, I could step around them. Try stepping past the Thief and you are struck down, and exhilarated. Aldous Huxley writes: “There comes a time when one asks even of Shakespeare, even of Beethoven—is that all?” The Thief snatches this question as he ambles past and stuffs it back into your gaping mouth.
How he steals is a question without answer. For it’s not simply something he does. It’s what life does through him. Daisetz Suzuki writes: “When a finger is lifted, the lifting means, from the viewpoint of satori, far more than the act of lifting. Satori is the knowledge of the individual object and also that of Reality which is, if I may say so, at the back of it.” The Thief moves; his body seems a transparent chassis through which the power of the universe surges. Each action, each glance of the eye, sings—cosmically charged. And as a movement dissolves, the surging power that infuses it with life does not dissolve but infuses his next movement, and his next, shooting him full of vibrancy even as he cleans his teeth.
I used to trail behind him like an amazed five-year-old, trying to comprehend how gestures so insignificant could be The Absolute. If he felt my presence, he would turn and look at me as if I were nuts. Yet his actions said what the headless torso of the statue of Apollo demanded of Rilke: “You must change your life.”
That he could negate another’s existence while brushing his teeth would not have entered his mind. I watched his mop ballet along the monastery corridor, one mop per hand. I watched him veer round and with total nonchalance ax one log after another immaculately down the center, though I later learned he had bad eyes. I watched him in one seamless thrust slip out of his sandals, hoist himself onto the sitting platform, form his legs into the full lotus position without using his hands, and with one flick of his fingers crease his robe and kimono under his knees and descend into meditation. The other monks in the monastery, as they headed toward the daily interviews with the master, leaked subservience, doubt. When he struck the mallet against the epicenter of the gong and strode toward the master’s chamber, his movements