The Sound of Rain

Although I have always been following the sun to the West, I have at last come to love the rain as well, especially in the dry California hills, where the burnished grass so easily takes fire. Better yet, though, are the spring and autumn rains of Japan. Despite the fascination I have had for the Far East since reading about Dr. Fu Manchu at the age of 11 and Lafcadio Hearn's Gleanings in Buddha-Fields at the age of 14, I didn't reach Japan until I was 46. From all I had heard about its frantic industrialization, I was prepared to be completely disillusioned. But I went, and have returned three times.

One would suppose that, in view of my lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism, I would have gone there years before to undertake the monastic discipline of living Zen, sit at the feet of a master, attain enlightenment and come back with a certificate to prove it. I have nothing at all against that, but it isn't my way. And when at last I did get to Japan, I didn't rush off to a Zen school to gobble up all the wisdom I could. I went to look and to listen, and to see things in a way that insiders often miss; and I found what I wanted--albeit with the help of two Zenmasters. It was the sound of rain.

Zen Buddhism fascinates Westerners because its way of teaching is quite unlike that of any other religion, if religion it is. It has no dogma, requires no particular belief and neither deals in abstractions nor harps on morality. Then what, of religion or philosophy, is left? All and nothing, for Zen deals with reality--the universe--as it is, and not as it is thought about and described. The heart of Zen is not an idea but an experience, and when that experience happens--and happens is just the right word--you are set free from ideas altogether. Certainly, you can still use them, but you no longer take them seriously.

Picture yourself, then, as a person earnestly concerned about making sense of life, of a world involving intense pleasure and appalling pain, and trying to understand how and why there is this weird sensation called myself in the middle of it all. You have heard that there is a great master, a sage, who can give you the answer--not in terms of some fancy theory but in terms of the thing itself, so that you will never feel the same again, and that sensation called myself will have been turned upside down and inside out. You approach the master and, perhaps with some difficulty, get an interview. You have thought out your questions most carefully, but just as you are about to open your mouth, he yells "Ho!" at the top of his voice. You are nonplused and he asks what's puzzling you. You begin, "Well, I came to ask----"

But he interrupts, "And I have answered you."

"But I don't----"

And again, "Ho!"--shouted from the depths of his belly. End of interview.

The greater part of Zen literature consists of such tales, often adding, however, that the questioner was completely satisfied. He cannot think of any more questions about life--other than such simple matters as, "What time does the plane leave for San Francisco?" For this reason, intelligent and adventurous Westerners have, in considerable numbers, been heading for the ancient capital of Kyoto, which has long been the center for training in Zen.

But it was not only for Zen that I went immediately to Kyoto when I first arrived in Japan. I wanted to feel the everyday life of a city that had been soaked in Buddhism for so many centuries--not analyzing it like a psychologist, categorizing it like an anthropologist nor studying its splendid monuments like an antiquarian. I went to gape like a yokel and simply absorb its atmosphere. I went to the district called Higashi-yama, or Eastern Hills, where buildings on narrow, winding streets overlook the rest of the city, which, unusually for Japan, is laid out in the flat grid pattern of an American city in a geographical setting that slightly resembles Los Angeles. Hills, even mountains, lie to the east, north and west, while the south is open to Osaka, Kobe and the sea. As in Los Angeles, the best land is in the foothills, where spring water flows into garden pools through bamboo pipes, and though there are many quiet and sumptuous private homes, much of the area has been occupied by temples and monasteries. Originally, it belonged to feudal brigands who were afraid of the Zen priests because the priests weren't afraid of them, so they became pious Buddhists and made generous offerings of land.

When one goes to a city like this, it is all very well to make plans to see the famous sights, but there should be plenty of time to follow one's nose, for it is through aimless wandering that the best things are found. I stayed in the ryokan, or Japanese-style inn, on the hill above the Miyako Hotel. To the northeast the sweeping, gray-tiled roofs of the Nanzenji Zen temples float above dense clusters of pines, and to the southwest stands the huge temple of Chion-in, and all about are wayward cobbled lanes enclosed by roofed walls with covered gates, giving entrance to courtyards and gardens, and interspersed with small shops and restaurants. It was April, and under such a gate I took refuge from a sudden shower. The gate opened a few inches and out came a hand proffering an umbrella, and as soon as I took it, the hand was withdrawn and the gate closed. The umbrella was a kasa made of oiled paper--a wide circle spread out like a small roof supported on a cone of thin bamboo struts, almost as cozy as carrying your own house with you in a quiet, heavy rain. I returned it the next day.

Gutters were bubbling and water was spilling from bronze, dragon-mouthed gargoyles at roof corners. Everywhere the soft clattering of wooden sandals like small benches with legs on the soles to keep your feet above water. Courtyards with glistening evergreen bushes and floating branches of bright-green maple. The smell of Japanese cooking--soy sauce and hot sake--mixed with damp earth and the faintest suggestion, pleasant in that small a dosage, of the benjo (toilet), which, because of the diet, smells quite different from ours. Because I need a dictionary to read most Chinese characters, the signs on shops are just complex abstract designs. Going deeper into the city, I found the long, busy lane of Teramachi, or Temple Street, to nose about in the higgledy-piggledy of tiny shops that sell utensils for the tea ceremony, incense, ink, writing brushes, old Chinese books, fans, Buddhist ornaments and huge mushrooms--the whole lane buzzing and rattling with motorcycles and diminutive Toyota taxis.

With sense of time gone awry from travel by jet, I awake at four in the morning to hear what is, for me, the most magical single sound that man has made. It comes from a bronze bell some eight feet high and five feet in diameter, struck by a horizontal swinging tree trunk and hung close to the ground--actually more of a gong than a bell. It doesn't clang out through the sky like a church bell but booms along the ground with a note at once deep and sweet and vaguely sad, as if very, very old. It sounds once and, when the hum has died away, again--and several times more. From the direction I realize that this is the bell of the Nanzenji Zen monastery, signifying that, so long before sunrise, some 20 young men, skin-headed and black-robed, have begun to sit perfectly still in a dark, quiet hall. When the bell finishes, they will begin to intone, on a single note, the Shingyo, or Heart Sutra, which sums up everything that Buddhism has to say: "Shiki soku ze ku, ku soku ze shiki"--"What is form that is emptiness, what is emptiness that is form?" Actually, the language is the Japanese way of pronouncing medieval Chinese, which hardly anyone understands, and the words are chanted for their sound rather than their meaning. We shall see why.

With one part of my brain, I know that these are rather bored and sleepy young men, many of them sons of priests, attending the Japanese equivalent of an ecclesiastical boys' boarding school or a Jesuit seminary. They think they ought to be there, but they would really rather be chasing girls or learning to fly planes. The fine aloeswood incense, the faint candles, the sonorous gongs and the pulsing chant are for them merely kurai--gloomy, musty, dank, decrepit and old. A graveyard long gone to waste, with an old lady muttering over a stone. Only the sternest discipline will keep these boys at it. For the most part, they are not, like Western seekers, interested in Buddhism, and Westerners, in their turn, seldom realize that much of this seemingly esoteric discipline is simply routine drill for reluctant boys. Having been through that once, in school at Canterbury Cathedral, I have not been inclined to try it again.

But with another part of my brain, I want to be in their company, silently and unseen, with no wretched novice-master pushing me around and trying to teach me how to sit in meditation. For the antiquity and mystery of those gongs and the chant are not so much from a backward direction in time as from a vast depth inside the present, from a level of my own here-and-now being as ancient as life itself. I wonder: What is this glamor of the mysterious and venerable East? Is it all a phony projection of my own romantic fantasies and, if so, why such fantasies? Why do Buddhist rituals and symbols evoke in me a sensation of the mysterious and the marvelous far more enthralling than any Christian equivalent, more, even, than astronomical revelations about the scope of distant galaxies? There is, of course, a wise-guy debunkery school of cultural anthropologists who want to insist that, seen from the familiar inside, all exotic culture forms are just humdrum old hat, as if Japanese and Tibetans could not feel for their traditions what we feel for Shakespeare and Beethoven. There are, indeed, orchestra men bored to death with the Ninth Symphony and school children who find Hamlet a drag, so why should I share these Japanese novices' lack of enthusiasm for Zen? I am sure that the paternalistic discipline with which it is forced down their throats connects it with the same emotions of guilt that I felt in the presence of God the Father and Jesus Christ. It would follow, then, that my enchantment with Zen and Buddhism is that their forms are, for me, free from this kind of static, and thus that through them I can approach the mysteries of the universe without having to feel like a small boy being bawled out because it's good for him.

Anyhow, I am not a small boy. I have five grandchildren and thus am no longer liable to be impressed by grandfathers. Nevertheless, as I look back, I could be inclined to feel that I have lived a sloppy, inconsiderate, wasteful, cowardly and undisciplined life, getting away with it only by having a certain charm and a big gift of gab. Yet what am I supposed to do, now, about that? A realistic look at myself, at the age of 57, tells me that if I am that, that's what I am and shall doubtless continue to be. I myself and my friends and my family are going to have to put up with it, just as they put up with the rain. I could, of course, tell myself that in so feeling, I am casting away my humanity, the only thing that makes me different from a machine, which is the effort of will to take control of myself and change.

This might be fine if one knew precisely what would be a change for the better. If I would become more Christlike, I should remember that the Crusades and the Holy Inquisition were conducted in his name. If I would practice asceticism, I should bear in mind that Hitler was quite an ascetic. If I would cultivate bravery, I should consider that Dillinger was brave. If I would observe sobriety, I should recall that Bertrand Russell put down a fifth of whiskey daily. And if I would find it in myself to be chaste, I should meditate upon Sri Hari Krishna and the Gopi maidens, and twit myself that I once had the privilege of sharing a mistress with one of the holiest men in the land. The difficulty is that our waking and attentive consciousness scans the world myopically--one thing, one bit, one fragment after another--so that our impressions of life are strung out in a thin, scrawny thread, lining up small beads of information, whereas nature itself is a stupendously complex pattern where everything is happening altogether everywhere at once. What we know of it is only what we can laboriously line up and review along the thread of this watchfulness. Better not to interfere with myself; it could set off an earthquake. Perhaps there is an entirely different way (continued on page 216)Sound of Rain(continued from page 144)of being responsible and compassionate.

To keep the Zen monks company, I light a stick of incense, sit down on the tatami mat and begin the ink-and-brush meditation. Some people have passions for ancient weapons, crystal eggs or effigies of owls; mine is for Chinese ink and writing brushes. I can't stay away from Kyukyodo on Teramachi, where, the day before, I had bought several small slabs of black ink, each in a box of plain white wood, interestingly perfumed and embossed with gold ideographs, and also a large and somewhat expensive brush, about three quarters of an inch in diameter with hairs coming to a fine point. But the first step is to make tea for wakefulness, and for this there is nothing better than ma-cha, the finely powdered green tea used for ceremonial tea drinking. A small amount is put in the bottom of a roughly glazed bowl, covered with hot water and whirled into a jade-green froth with a bamboo whisk. Although it tastes vaguely like Guinness Stout, it smells of straw matting and freshly planed wood. And then I begin to rub the ink, easily back and forth, on a black stone cut like a small swimming pool with a short deep end and a long shallow end and filled with water. It takes 15 minutes or more, during which there is nothing in my consciousness except the increasingly oily texture of the liquid, the mountain-forest smell of the incense and the continuing sound of soft rain on the roof. Wide-awake but with hardly a thought in my head, I stroke and roll the brush in the black liquid, and then, with a certain unhurried suddenness, write ten Chinese characters on a long scroll of absorbent paper. They say:

In the spring scenery there is nothing superior, nothing inferior;

Flowering branches grow naturally,some short, some long.

That day my wife, Jano, and I go down to Sanjusangendo, a long barn of a building that contains 1001 images of an astonishing hermaphroditic being known as Kannon, the Watchful Lord, revered popularly as the Goddess of Compassion. One thousand of these images are life-size standing figures, each with eight arms, lined up along five or six platforms that run the entire length of an inside wall down the center of the building. But at mid-point there is the one extra figure, sitting on a lotus throne with 11 heads in a tall column and exactly 1000 arms forming an aureole about the figure. Most of the hands are empty, but at least 100 of them hold various objects--bells, wands, flowers, thunderbolts, daggers, conch trumpets, flags, books, rosaries, staves, bottles--instruments that this cosmic millepede is manipulating all at once without having to stop to think about any one of them in particular.

It is in the same way that my nervous system manages the multitudinous functions of my body, and the energy of the universe appears simultaneously in myriad patterns and forms, all working together in an ecological balance of unthinkable complexity. For you cannot truly think of one without thinking of the others, just as the earth implies the sun and the sun implies the galaxy. To think of one alone is to have your mind caught so that you miss the movement of the whole, and this is what Buddhists mean by ignorance (ignoreance) and consequent attachment to worldly things. This means any particular thing, such as myself, considered as separate or separable from the rest, and attachment in this sense is almost exactly what we now call a hang-up. Spiritual myopia. Not seeing the forest for the trees. Killing flies with DDT and forgetting about the fish and the birds. Thus, in passing judgments of praise and blame upon myself, I forget that I am like one of Kannon's hands--a function of the universe. If my conscious mind had 11 heads and 1000 arms, I might know what I was talking about. But my conscious mind is but one small operation of my nervous system.

When the rains stopped, Jano and I took a day off for meditation at Nanzenji, not in the temple itself but on the forested hillside behind it, where we sat on the steps of some ancient nobleman's tomb, supplying ourselves with the kit for ceremonial tea and a Thermos bottle of hot sake. Zen meditation is a trickily simple affair, for it consists only in watching everything that is happening, including your own thoughts and your breathing, without comment. After a while, thinking, or talking to yourself, drops away and you find that there is no self other than everything that is going on, both inside and outside the skin. Your consciousness, your breathing and your feelings are all the same process as the wind, the trees growing, the insects buzzing, the water flowing and the distant prattle of the city. All this is a single, many-featured happening, a perpetual now without either past or future, and you are aware of it with the rapt fascination of a child dropping pebbles into a stream. The trick, which cannot be forced, is to be in this state of consciousness all the time--even when you are filling out tax forms or being angry. Experiences move through this consciousness as tracklessly as the reflections of flying birds on water and, as a Zen poem says:

The bamboo shadowssweep the stairs,but raise no dust.

In this state, it seemed that the whole city of Kyoto--with its thousands of shops and businesses, its streetcars, schools, temples, taxis, crooks, policemen, politicians, monks, geisha girls, salesmen, firemen, waitresses, fish vendors, students and bulging sumo wrestlers--was no other than the 1000-armed body of Kannon. And a curious feature of this state is that all details are as clearly etched as in a perfectly focused photograph. Even mist appears as its millions of individual droplets of moisture, each containing the reflections of all the others--a haze of jewels. I can have the feeling "self" only in relation to, and by contrast with, the feeling "other." In the same way, I am what I am only in relation to what everything else is. The Japanese call this ji-ji-mu-ge, which means that between every thing-event and every other thing-event there is no barrier. Each implies all and all implies each.

The hour's train ride into the mountains of Wakayama, south of Osaka, is like a journey through one of those long horizontal landscape scrolls called makimono, which you roll and unroll as you go along. You move through ranges of densely forested hills, growing higher and higher, and below the forests are hundreds of wiggly terraced fields, following the contours of the slopes and many-colored with the various crops of tea, rice, millet, radishes, onions and beans. Villages, farmhouses and temples peek from the folds of the hills, tiled blue-gray and belonging in the landscape as much as the trees, since the old nonindustrial culture of Japan sees the work of man as but one of the many works of nature. The end of the line is Mount Koya, where, at 3000 feet and more than 1000 years ago, the monk Kobo Daishi established a complex city of temples in the midst of the colossal Japanese cedar trees known as cryptomeria.

Here, the style of Buddhism is called Shingon and is closely related to the highly ritualistic and magical Buddhism of Tibet, so that in this place I am more than ever affected by the supposedly phony mysteriousness of Asian religion. I know perfectly well that most of the priests are going through the motions and have forgotten the meaning, that the young seminarists are just dutifully following their fathers' tracks and that the economic raison d'être of this temple city is to be a tourist trap and a mortuary. But the point of Shingon is "to realize Buddha in this body," and as I look at the temple architecture and the imagery and symbolism, I get the odd feeling that it is at once electronic and neurological. The masts on the pagodas are topped with a flaming golden ball and surrounded with nine metal rings, suggesting an early type of transmission mast for television, and the ever-present vajra, or thunderbolt-scepter of bronze, has five claws at each end with points barely touching, as if about to generate electric sparks. And there are diagrams of kshetra, or fields, containing hundreds of Buddha figures like some organism with massed eyes, or nerve endings, or contact points where, again, each implies all, because the body of Buddha means the whole universe.

Thus, "to realize Buddha in this body" is to realize that you yourself are, in fact, the universe. You are not, as parents and teachers are wont to imply, a mere stranger on probation in the scheme of things; you are rather a sort of nerve ending through which the universe is taking a peek at itself, which is why, deep down inside, almost everyone has a vague sense of eternity. Few dare admit this, because it would amount to believing that you are God, and God in our culture is the cosmic boss, so that anyone imagining himself to be God is deemed either blasphemous or insane. But for Buddhists this is no problem, because they do not have this particular idea of God, and so also are not troubled by the notion of sin and everlasting damnation. Their picture of the universe is not political, not a kingdom ruled by a monarch, but an organism in which every part is a doing of the whole, so that everything that happens to you is understood as your own karma, or doing. Thus, when things go wrong, you have no one but yourself to blame. You are not a sinner but a fool, so try another way.

Now, I have always found this a highly civilized and humane point of view. For Westerners, the only real alternative to the boss-God religion has been the so-called scientific view of the universe as a system of essentially stupid objects. This comes from looking at things in a coldly withdrawn way, as in studying the behavior of machinery, and in physiology and psychology we turn this attitude inward upon ourselves--only to become objectionable objects to our own gaze. If this mechanical view of life gets rid of horrors about sin and guilt, it also gets rid of any real reason for sympathy or kindness. From the standpoint of mechanical efficiency, all feelings and emotions are just obstructive static; and when we are through with poisoning the air, there will be every reason for replacing ourselves with steady-state electronic mechanisms that require no atmosphere and do nothing but solve mathematical problems. The objective attitude to oneself is finally suicidal, and it is not, therefore, surprising that the grandest flower of our technology is the hydrogen bomb.

But when Buddhists look very deeply into themselves, they ask, "But who is looking?" They come up with an answer that has been hard to understand, essentially because of a language problem. For the Japanese word ku has the sense of sky, space or emptiness, but when it is used for the root of one's own consciousness, it means also the finally mysterious and inconceivable. Not so much emptiness or darkness as the way the head looks to its own eyes. This is the meaning of the flaming golden ball atop the pagoda mast, which in Zen is said to be "like an eye that sees but does not see itself." Ku is therefore clarity, as of vision or hearing, and nothing is so mysterious as clarity, even though we speak of clearing up mysteries. For exactly what is clarity itself? Could it be well-defined form? Crystal-clear form? Then, as the Heart Sutra says, ku is shiki--transparency is form.

Unburdened by a Christian upbringing, the poet Gary Snyder has the humorous attitude to religion so characteristic of Zen. We found him in a Japanese-style cottage, close to the Daitoku-ji monastery in Kyoto, where he was making a 12-year study of the Zen way of life. He is like a wiry Chinese sage with high cheekbones, twinkling eyes and a scrawny beard, and the recipe for his character requires a mixture of Oregon woodsman, seaman, Amerindian shaman, Oriental scholar, San Francisco hippie and swinging monk who takes tough discipline with a light heart. He seems to be gently keen about almost everything and needs no affectation to make himself interesting. He has taken to wife Masa, a beautiful and gutsy Japanese girl from the southern islands, who looks you straight in the eye, does not simper and giggle and shows no mock humility--yet has a quiet naturalness. Their living room is adorned with two large and colorful scrolls bearing those Shingon diagrams of multitudinous Buddha figures and so abounds with Buddhist ceremonial tools that Gary calls it "the safest place in the galaxy."

After we have taken a communal bath in a huge caldron over a wood fire, much sake is downed and, apropos of ku, the clear void, Gary suggests that we incorporate the Null and Void Guaranty and Trust Company with the slogan "Register your absence with us; you can take it with you!" Later, I had some business cards printed for him to this effect, naming him the company's non-representative. I wonder why it is that we can't stop laughing at the notion that none of us really exist and that the walloping concreteness of all the hard facts to be faced is an energetic performance of nothingness.

The joke derives from the fact that, although Westerners speak of conquering space, they have a radical prejudice and a positive blind spot with respect to the importance of nothingness. They balk at it as people used to balk at thinking of the earth as round. To them, nothingness is the awful-awful, the end, the demise that, we most fervently hope, is not to be the ultimate destiny of man and the universe. Yet this is due to a freaky lapse in our logic that affects our theology, our science, our philosophy and our most vivid emotions. No one seems to have realized that you can't have something without nothing. How can you know is without understanding isn't? Try to imagine a solid without any space through and around it. Try to imagine space without any solid, including yourself, within it. For if something implies nothing, then nothing--in turn--implies something. To be or not to be is not the question, for reality, like electricity, is a pulsation of positive and negative energy. The big bang with which this universe is supposed to have started was, as they say in Zen, "the void gnashing its teeth." Put in more scientific jargon: Every approach to the limit of absolute inertia condenses by inversion into a departure from the limit of absolute energy. Flip--total void equals big bang.

Stated in bare words, this looks too simple. Yet I regard it as my most important philosophical discovery, and it we could understand it thoroughly, we would no longer have the horrors about death, darkness, night, silence and the unknown--and, as a side effect, women would be free of their qualms about seeing themselves as representatives of the negative principle. This is, I think, what makes the difference in Masa, for she follows the Zen discipline along with Gary. When she stoops to conquer, the male confers victory upon her with pleasure. But the remaining question is how to get one's feelings, those easy victims of habit, to recognize that it takes nothing to start something.

On the far west side of Kyoto is the village of Nagaoka. Here, some years ago, there was established a Zen school, not for regular monks but for college students, so that they might combine Zen practice with their academic courses. Though the buildings are relatively new, the damp climate of Japan fosters rapid growth of moss, and the patina of antiquity forms quickly. These buildings, and their garden, are in the most exquisite Zen taste--uncluttered but not bare, white but not garish, brown but not drab. (The wooden passage floors, though stained, show all the grain and have been polished with long slithering of stockinged feet.) Gary, Jano and I are received by Morimoto-san, the roshi (master), and his student successor, Gisen-san, in a spacious room where that adjective does not mean simply large or adequate. It is a room so designed that its empty spaces are a positive feature of its beauty: The shoji windows and sliding wall screens are not mere background but, by their proportions and playing with light, are what is there to be seen.

Morimoto is so ancient and frail as to seem transparent, whereas Gisen--with his rich black hair and rounded, sensuous features--looks more Latin than Japanese, though he serves us ceremonial tea and then sake and then dinner with such perfection of refined Zen style--of slow and relaxed formality--that I find myself deposited, dreamwise, into some sort of Buddhist heaven designed by Sesshu and Rikyu. Meanwhile, Gary interprets my conversation with Morimoto so expertly that I hardly remember him as an intermediary. There is some preliminary talk about the possibilities of intelligent action without thinking--as when Kannon uses 1000 arms. In Zen this is called munen (no-thought), and I would describe it as using the brain rather than the conscious mind with its linear limitations. Someone suggests that this is like the skill of Japanese carpenters, who can make astonishing constructions measuring by eye alone, without yardsticks or blueprints. So I ask, "But what about the skill of making a blueprint without using a previous blueprint?" My point is, of course, that conscious thinking is one of the 1000 arms. We don't think before we think, and we don't know how we think; we just do it. That is the Zen of thinking. Morimoto makes no immediate comment but goes after my question in a roundabout way.

For what I am really asking is whether there is a conflict between Zen meditation and the intellectual life, since his school was attempting to provide both. But can one be in the state of munen while reading? He replies that, for college students, he goes about teaching Zen in a new way. "Instead of asking them to meditate on the sound of one hand, I ask them what is the first word in the dictionary." And, of course, there isn't one: Since every word requires other words to define it, the dictionary is circular. I remember trying, as a small boy, to write down the pronunciation of the letters of the alphabet. This is obviously impossible for just the same reason that words and ideas can never lead us to reality. Yet although you can't take a bath in the word water, the word itself is an event in the real world--not wet but noisy.

"Any book will do for studying Zen," Morimoto goes on. "You can use the dictionary or Alice in Wonderland--even the Bible. There's no real point in going to all the trouble to translate our old Chinese texts about Zen--not if you're serious about understanding real Zen. The sound of rain needs no translation."

Though the conversation went on for some time, that remark--as we now say--blew my mind. At the end of the evening, Gisen produced a nyoi, a Zenmaster's ritual scepter, this one made of smooth dark wood in the shape of a butterfly's proboscis, and presented it to me with the remark, "This for Western Zenmaster!"

The following morning, Gary and I arise at dawn and go to the Daitoku-ji monastery for the teisho, or formal lecture, to be given by Sesso Oda, then the presiding roshi. It is announced by a tremendous drumming, a monk using a stick on a large upright wooden drum with its skin secured by big upholsterer's nails. He pounds it to the rhythm of a bouncing ball, with variations, crescendos and decrescendos, and sometimes circulates the stick across the heads of the nails to make a sound like a speedboat. We assemble in the great rectangular hall and sit on the mats, monks on one side, guests on the other, and everyone is given a copy of the textbook for the lecture--a Chinese text about the teachings of a Tang-dynasty master. Knowing that I had studied this work, Gary finds the place for me, and then the roshi enters, wearing scarlet and gold brocade robes, dangling a rosary from his wrist and holding a white horsetail fly whisk. He solemnly mounts a throne facing the Buddha image across the hall, for these lectures are actually to be understood as conversations between the master and the Buddha. At the sound of a gong, the head monk intones, "Ma-ka-hannya-ha-ra-mi-ta-shin-gyo," and to the heavy pulse of a wooden drum, everyone chants the Heart Sutra.

This done, the roshi begins to speak in a low voice and the monks to doze off into sleep. There is an art to this, for they must remain sitting upright as if in meditation, and the head monk must perform the trick of waking up exactly two minutes before the lecture ends, so as to ring the bell. This is sleeping Zen. About halfway through the lecture, rain begins to fall in torrents and the pelting on the roof drowns all other sounds for at least five minutes. But the roshi doesn't stop. He doesn't raise his voice. He goes straight on with his inaudible lecture. The story is told of another master who, years before, had been about to begin the lecture when a bird started singing. When it stopped, he announced that the lecture had been given.

Long after this, I was talking to Ali Akbar Khan, the sarod player, who is generally regarded as the greatest living master of Indian music. I have a particular personal admiration for him, for he is at once holy and sensuous, a complete man. Wine and women go with his song, a song of unsurpassed technique that he also uses as a type of yoga meditation in which--if one can use temporal language about things eternal--he is very advanced. Discussing this, he dropped the remark, "All music is in the understanding of one note."

Now, this really ought not to be explained. Simply listen to the rain. Listen to what Buddhists call its suchness--its tathata, or da-da-da. Like all classical music, it means nothing except itself, for great music never mimics other sounds or is about anything other than music. There is no message in a Bach fugue. So, too, when an ancient Zenmaster was asked about the meaning of Buddhism, he replied, "If there is any meaning in it, I myself am not liberated." For when you have really heard the sound of rain, you can hear, and see and feel, everything else in the same way--as needing no translation, as being just that which it is, though it may be impossible to say what. I have tried for years, as a philosopher, but in words it comes out all wrong--in black and white with no color. It comes out that life is a perfectly and absolutely meaningless happening--nothing but a display of endlessly variegated vibrations, neither good nor evil, right nor wrong--a display, though marvelously woven together, like a Rorschach blot upon which we are projecting the fantasies of personality, purpose, history, religion, law, science, evolution and even the basic instinct to survive. And this projection is, in turn, part of the happening. Thus, when you try to pin it down, you get the banality of formal nihilism, wherein the universe is seen as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

But this sense of "turning to ashes in one's mouth" is the result of trying to grasp something that can come to you only of itself. Trying to catch the meaning of the universe in terms of some religious, philosophical or moral system is really like asking Bach or Ali Akbar to explain their music in words. They can explain it only by continuing to play, and you must listen until you understand, get with it and go with it--and the same is true of the music of the vibrations. The vibrations can go so high on the scale of pain that we have to go into zero, and the way can be made richly horrible by thinking to ourselves, "This ought not to happen," "It was all that bastard's fault," "I'm being punished for my sins," "How could God let this happen to me?" When you say the music is abominable, listen to the sound of your own complaint. Above all, simply listen, and I--for the time being--will be silent.