Reports from the Zen Wars. Steve Antinoff
finished the three years of monastic training he needs to qualify to take over from his deceased father as chief priest of the family temple, spends his evenings reading and listening to jazz in his newly reconstructed bedroom-study down the corridor from the three-tatami cell he generously rents me for $15 per month. One night the door to his room slides open just as I return from the monastery meditations. He shows me the book in his hand—by the Japanese philosopher Yanaihara about the author’s relationship with Alberto Giacometti. Saburi gives the most wonderful accounts of Japanese books I will never read. Tonight he explains that as part of the artist’s obsessive attempts to paint Yanaihara, Giacometti had encouraged him to have an affair with his wife. Saburi then surprises me by asking if I think I’ve “got something” as a result of all this meditation. I roll my eyes. He adds: “Maybe it’s time you began sanzen (the daily koan interviews) with the master.” He suggests that he approach the master with the request, then mentions that he had recently spent time with the Thief. “We spoke about you. He says you’re training with all your strength. I told him: ‘Steven-san really respects you.’ He said: ‘We’ve never talked.’”
It is decided that I can begin koan interviews with the master if I show I can handle the modern Japanese renditions that are printed alongside the ancient Japanese texts in the koan collection The Gateless Barrier. The current chief monk tests me; he does such a good job jumping in for me each time I stumble that he concludes that my reading is superb. There follows a two-man ceremony accompanied by a stick of incense. He shows me how to pound the gong to let the master know I’m on my way. I’m left-handed, and the position of the gong obliges me to strike it with my uncoordinated right. My rehearsal attempt, like all my subsequent real attempts, is feeble, in full accord with the answers to the koan I bring before the master. The chief monk has me trail him down an S-shaped corridor, hands folded against my chest, to the empty interview chamber. He instructs me how to bow: once at the door to the chamber, once before the seated master just before I am to raise my prostrated upper torso from the floor and give my response to the koan, once when I am dismissed by the tinkling of the master’s hand bell. I am never to show my butt to the master and must walk backward as I exit and end with a fourth bow. There are no instructions for what happens the night I put all this into practice: Bowing before the master, I step on the hem of my indestructible hakama and stand before him in underpants and skewed kimono, skirt fallen to my knees.
The sesshin commences the next day. When the meditations end the first morning, I’m hobbling off my cushions into my sandals and I double take: The Thief, rather than making his usual exit past the laymen’s row of sitting platforms and out of the meditation hall, is heading toward me.
He bows. I bow. I’m standing next to lightning. “Thanks for the bread. [I sneak a loaf of German bread on top of his cupboard at the start of each sesshin.] A gift to a monk is called kuyō. But stop. It’s wasteful.”
I nod.
“Sanzen needs no big words,” he says. Immediately I recall the previous spring when he’d walked past on his return from the latrine as I was chatting about Nietzsche outside the meditation hall with one of the laymen—a graduate student in philosophy at Kyoto University—during a sesshin break. I had had the odd feeling that he was taking note of me for the few seconds before he moved beyond the sound of my voice. I had wondered what he was thinking. Now I knew.
“Zen says: Harmonize the body, harmonize the breath, harmonize the mind,” he continues. “You will now appear daily before the master.” He slides both hands past the sides of my scalp, then one hand across the top.
“I should shave my head?”
He laughs. “You don’t have to overdo it.” He sculpts an imaginary head, indicating that I just need to be presentable. By the fourth day of a sesshin I look like Beethoven hung over. “I have a kimono I no longer use,” he adds. “My gift to you.”
Two gifts, actually. He’d also given me my one-and-only glimpse of his central thought. “Harmonize the body; harmonize the breath; harmonize the mind” is part of an ancient instruction on how to meditate. The Thief had elevated it far beyond sitting to a total way of moving through the world. He’s so far beyond my reach that I am stunned when he says: “You and I—Steve as Steve, I as I—we’re the same.” My face betrayed the preposterousness of this claim, but he countered me at once: “The same. The same anguish.” And of course, at the fundamental point—the only point that in the end mattered to him—he was right. His continued presence in the monastery proved it.
“I’m concerned the master will start passing me on koan I haven’t really solved,” I say. “I know it’s a common practice. I don’t want that to happen.”
He seems surprised by my remark. He mulls it over, then says: “Probably you’ll be disappointed.” Another pause, before adding warmly: “Let us both hope.” He bows and exits the meditation hall.
Fourth afternoon of the sesshin: The Thief and Dr. Ebuchi head toward one another along the stone walkway bordering the meditation hall and the steps leading to the latrine. Both bow low to the other just before their paths cross. As the Thief straightens, breaking into a twinkle, he toasts Dr. Ebuchi with what looks to be an enema bag in his hand, as if it were a glass of champagne. Some time later, Saburi-san says of the Thief: “He is not so healthy, you know. A congenital illness that, among other things, severely affects his eyes. Before he came here he was living at another monastery. He once wrote his sponsor priest, the one who arranged for him to train there: ‘I work with the monks all day and meditate into the night. I apologize for the large size of my Chinese characters. My eyes are so bad that I can scarcely see what I am writing.’”
“I never would have suspected,” I say. “Vitality gushes through his moves.”
Saburi-san says: “He disciplined himself a long time to be able to move that way.”
“It can’t just be discipline. Have you ever seen him wake from a nap, stretch his arms above his head, and yawn?”
Saburi-san beckons me to follow him into his temple kitchen. He bids me to open the package on the table. It’s a deep blue kimono. I unfold it until it hangs full length. The material is beautifully woven, sturdier than I’d imagined a kimono could be, slightly faded from many washings. The Thief has meditated, struggled, been wondrous in this kimono for a long time. There’s a note, in calligraphic ink on thin paper: “Here is the promised kimono. Obligations make it impossible to descend from the mountain for a while. Do take care.”
But taking care and stepping through the gate into a Zen monastery have always been for me mutually exclusive. Unable to endure having to go before the master with no answer to the koan, I entered the meditation hall each evening as soon after their “medicinal” supper as the monks would allow. The koan would pulverize me as the interview with the master neared. He’d dismiss me from his chamber in seconds. On the rare evenings when instead of the far-off tinkling of the master’s hand bell the chief monk smacked together his wood blocks to begin a new period of meditation—sign that the master was away and that there would be no interview—my heart leapt at the reprieve. But there was no real relief. Zenkei Shibayama says in the Japlish translation that is all that exists of the account of his awakening: “The novice is compelled to have no other alternatives; he had either to flee from the [meditation] hall or throw himself headlong into the world of Zen meditation.”8 I was compelled to do both. It was still me within the Thief’s kimono: a kid from the neighborhood daunted and inept in alien clothes, unable to suppress the urge to run away fast yet stumbling somehow into an effort not wholly remote from heroic.
When I tore my meniscus during a sesshin and was forced for three months to absent myself from the monastery, I was frustrated, alarmed, happy. I made my comeback at a sesshin in Yamanashi prefecture; my knee buckled whenever I bent, an ominous popping noise each time I forced it into the lotus position. Completing the