Reports from the Zen Wars. Steve Antinoff
journal and in response to his inquiry told him that my knee had held but I’d failed. He said: “Yet one scales the wall of each subsequent sesshin from a higher point of attack.”
For me, this meant breaking custom and moving into the monastery the night before the start of the notorious December sesshin—commemorating Gautama’s “enlightenment or die” week of struggle before his awakening at age thirty-five—rather than delaying, as non-monks usually did, until the first night. I packed my huge stock of sweaters, long underwear, and T-shirts—along with the two arctic sleeping bags—into the cupboard behind my meditation cushions and went to pee before the first sitting. As I exited the urinals, the Thief, who I’d not seen for months—was walking toward them. He bowed deeply. When he straightened, he broke into a huge grin. His bow, his grin, spoke unmistakably: “The December sesshin is as arduous as Everest. You have imposed upon yourself an extra day of striving. I honor your determination.” He walked past.
By the fourth day, under relentless pressure from without and within, I began to fear that I would die the next time I was in the master’s room. Nothing seemed left to me but to throw myself at his feet and hope for mercy. I was rational enough to tell myself that this was completely irrational. But from the fifth day, I could not face the four daily interviews. On the sixth day, when the bell woke me from the allotted three hours of sleep, my entire body was drenched in sweat. Sweating during sleep was a constant of my sesshin life, a consequence of lungs whose X-rays caused doctors on three continents in three languages to utter the identical sentence: “What the hell is that?” Usually the sweating woke me and I had time to change my undergarments—sometimes up to three times a night. On this occasion I was so fatigued that I slept on sopping wet. With no time to change into dry clothes, trembling in the freezing chanting hall, I was so fixated on the destructiveness of the situation—unable to stop the sweating or control the circumstances whereby adhering to rules required doing myself harm—that when the chanting ended I walked in the direction opposite the exit and smashed into the Thief. He absorbed the blow passively and eyed me curiously. Stymied, I about-faced and tailed the line into the even colder meditation hall, shuddering uncontrollably, even during breakfast, for the next three hours. Even my well-tested method of asking to be struck with the patrol stick failed to stops the spasms. DeMartino had told me: “At some point you have to give up the body.” I was terrified of that point.
Cold, ground down, I dragged after the monks across the long, roofed walkway that bisected the garden and connected the meditation hall to the rest of the monastery and the master’s morning talk. At the sixty-meter mark, the red leaves of a solitary maple tree for some reason brought to mind Viktor Frankl’s description of marching on a forced digging detail just outside the grounds of the Turkheim concentration camp: Beaten by a Nazi guard in the freezing morning, he undergoes an ecstatic communion with his wife, ignorant that she’d already been transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she’d died. His unity with her, says Frankl, transcended whether or not his wife was still alive. For the first time in my life, I, a Jew, truly hated the Nazis, for making humans suffer and cold. The redness of the leaves seemed the sole remaining brightness in the world, parting from them as the queue of monks walked on an unbearable error.
Each subsequent sanzen, both that day and the last, I sat glued to my cushions, remembering a story—could it possibly be true?—of a monk who’d resisted being dragged into the interview chamber with such frenzy that he pulled out a young tree from the ground. When the next-to-last interview of the sesshin commenced, I clung to my cushions with eyes closed. A whisper boomed through the meditation hall: “This sanzen is mandatory.” The voice of the Thief. I climbed down from the platform and followed the others.
Pulled into a black magnetizing core of myself, I trudged across the garden, close to tears that in the night blackness I could not find the red leaves of my tree. The monks spread out into their customary five rows in the chanting hall, waiting their turn to strike the gong and present themselves before the master. I dropped onto my place, last spot, last row. The instant my knees hit the floor, the chanting hall opened out and I was laughing joyfully atop a vast tatami sea. The next thing I remember was the head monk shouting at me: not for laughing—but because when the first row of monks had had their turn at the master and the remaining rows had all shifted one row closer to the gong, I had failed to move. I couldn’t stop laughing and didn’t want to. In the master’s room I made my bows but when prostrated before him couldn’t remember my koan and when I raised my upper torso to make my response, laughing was all I had. The master studied me, neither displeased nor pleased.
“What about the koan?” he said finally.
I laughed. He rang me out.
Ten days later I entered another sesshin—for non-monks. On the final night I learned that the most beautiful thing in the world is a breath. The next morning, while the others sat the final sitting period, as part of the meal crew I leaned over to set an empty plastic bowl on a low bench and injured my back so badly that I could neither stand, sit, walk, nor lie down. For three weeks I could barely move. My upper torso, too heavy for my legs, was bent almost parallel to the floor when I walked, and I had to crawl to the outhouse.
My back couldn’t survive the January sesshin. February came, the month a half year earlier I had selected to return home, to be followed by my friend Urs App and the monk Bunko. I informed the master that I’d be attending graduate school in America. He presented me with two of his ink paintings. I couldn’t bend when I tried to thank him with a bow.
“Something wrong?” the master asked.
“My back.” He reached behind him with tremendous speed for an old man and handed me a brown paper bag. I could not imagine what it might be. “Is it medicine?” I asked.
“Candy!”
I knew full well my shortcomings as a Zen student. I knew that my decision to go home was in part a running away. But the sarcastic joy that lit his face as he said this word—the thrill at his own cleverness—surprised me.
A few days after returning to the States, I sat in on one of DeMartino’s classes. He had some shopping to do when it ended. I helped lug the packages back to his apartment. When we’d dropped the shopping bags on the kitchen table, he asked: “What are you going to do?”
“For now, to try to get enlightened.”
“For now isn’t good enough.”
I had no idea why I had said “for now.” The ensuing thirty years have confirmed that while I could never stop fleeing Zen, I could never get away from it either. Probably I said it from nervousness. I’m glad I did. In DeMartino’s words, I saw that despite all I had endured in Japan, I could never have awakened. My quest bore within it a fatal flaw. Sesshin by sesshin I had gradually sought to remove all the gaps in my effort. But I had always permitted the most significant gap to remain: the future. It is not a matter of sitting more or sleeping less but of removing one’s future. This is what Gautama had done at the Bodhi Tree. Once his rump touched the ground, there was no tomorrow. Whether he sat or reclined is irrelevant. The tree could have been a penthouse with a plush bed. My sesshin had always been ruptured by a fundamental ambivalence: From the first sitting period, I struggled to break through but also to get through. Hisamatsu’s own master, Ikegami, warned him: “When you go to the zendō [meditation hall] go as if your life is at stake. If you go through it with a half-hearted intention of living through it and returning home, then you had better not go at all.”9 Hisamatsu writes that on the day of his awakening he had “no means of escape left in the entirety of his existence, not even one the size of a hole in a needle.”10 I, by contrast, at every minute of every sesshin, from day one through seven, had retained the eighth day—the hole in the needle when I would resume civilian life.
“I can’t find the determination to cut off my arm like Hui-k’o,”11 I told DeMartino.
He nodded.
“But I am not unrelated to that act.”
He