His eyes were seeled, his breath flowed easily, lifting his chest at half-minute intervals and flaring the flanges of his nostrils faintly with each inhalation. His exterior was still as a figure frozen in ice. Yet inside, I knew from his notebooks, he was in motion, traversing 350 passages he’d memorized from numerous spiritual traditions, allowing the words to slip through his mind like pearls on a necklace. The passages — called gatha in Buddhist monasteries — ranged from Avaita Vedanta to Thomas à Kempis, from Seng Ts’an to the devotional poetry of Saint Teresa of Avila, from the Qur’an to Egyptian hymns, from a phrase in John 14:10 to the Dhammapada; they were tools — according to jottings he’d made — selected to free him from contingency and the conditioning of others. When he focused on a gatha, the gatha was his mind for that moment, identical with it, knower and known inseparable as water and wave. He was utterly unaware of me, and his practicing the Presence, reviewing these passages like a Muslim hafiz, was so private and intimate an exercise that I felt like a voyeur and was about to pull myself away, back toward the farmhouse, when I saw tears sliding down his cheekbones to his chin.
Then his eyes were open, and he asked softly, “You like what you see, Bishop?” He wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. “Yeah, I cry sometimes. Can’t help myself. When I sit, it just comes out. I can’t keep it down. At the zendo, I wasn’t the only one who cried when doing zazen.”
I stepped closer and sat down as he stretched out his legs from the kneeling position, massaging them vigorously to get blood moving again. “Where was that?”
“Kyoto,” he said. “Two years after my discharge I was there, tossing down sake, and the fellah I was drinking with told me ’bout a Zen temple way out in the forest that accepted foreigners. ’Bout that time I was a mess, man. Drank like a fish. Hurt inside every damned day. I wanted to kill myself. Kept my service revolver right beside my pillow, just in case I worked up the courage to stick the barrel in my mouth and paint the wall behind me with brains. I went to the temple ’cause I was sick and tired of the world. I wanted a refuge, someplace where I could heal myself. I figured it was either the zendo or I was dead.” Smith kept on massaging his right leg as he talked, working his way methodically from his hip downward.
“When I got there, I kneeled in front of the entrance, on the steps, and kept my head bowed until I heard the straw sandals of one of the priests coming toward me. I begged him to let me train. Naturally, he refused my request, like he was supposed to do, and then he went away. That’s the script. So I sat there all day — like I was supposed to do — on my knees, my head bowed, keeping that posture and waiting. Night came, but I still didn’t move. On the second day it rained. I was soaked to the skin. I damned near caught pneumonia on the second evening. But sometime during the third day the priest came back and gave me permission to enter the temple temporarily. See, he was playing a role thousands of years old — same as I was playing mine. He had me wash my feet, gave me a pair of tatami sandals, put me in a special little room called tankaryo, shut the sliding paper door, and went away again, this time for five days. For five days, I didn’t see nobody. They didn’t bring me food. Or water. I waited, kneeling just like you seen me doing, my eyes shut, hands on my lap, palms up with my thumbs kissing my forefingers, meditating for a hundred twenty hours nonstop to prove to the priest that I could do it. I say five days, but when you’re in zazen that long, there is no time. That’s another illusion, Bishop. In God, or the Void — or whatever you wanna call it — past, present, and future are all rolled up in now. And the hardest thing a man can do, especially a colored man whose ass has been kicked in every corner of the world, is live completely in now. But I did. And the priest came back. He led me down a hallway with wooden floors polished so brightly by hand that they almost gleamed, then he stopped in front of a bulletin board listing the names of the monks and laymen presently training at the temple. Mine was the last, the newest one there. I tell you, buddy, when I seen that I broke down and cried like a goddamn baby. I was home. You get it? After centuries of slavery and segregation and being shat on by everybody on earth, I was home.”
I did get it, and in his voice I saw the beautiful vision of a tile-roofed, forest temple encircled by trees, the grounds spotless, the gardens well tended, and here and there were statues of guardian kings. Smith began slowly massaging his left leg as he’d done his right, working from hip to heel.
“I was a good novice, I want you to know that. Every day I was up at three-thirty A.M. when the priest struck the sounding board. When I washed up I didn’t waste a drop of water. I brushed my teeth using only one finger and a li’l bit of salt, and I was the first in the Hondo — the Buddha hall — for the morning recitation of sutras. After that, when we ate, I didn’t drop nary a grain of rice from my eating bowl. I shaved my head every five days. Kept my robes mended. With the others, I walked single file from the temple into town, reciting sutras and collecting donations in a cloth bag suspended from a strap around my neck. Always I blessed those who gave, singing a brief sutra that all sentient beings may achieve enlightenment and liberation. But for that year I trained, I never touched money. Or thought ’bout women. Or drink. The world that hurt me so bad didn’t exist no more, and I was happy. Hell, I wasn’t even aware of an I. After our rounds we came back and did samu—monastic labor. Chopping firewood. Maintaining the gardens. And all this we did in silence, Bishop. Each daily task was zazen. Was holy. No matter how humble the work, it was all spiritual practice.”
Smith had finished stretching. He scooted back from the spot where he’d been sitting and rested his back against a tree.
“What I’m saying is that my practice was correct. So good the Roshi promoted me to kitchen chef or tenzo. That’s an honor, right? It means I’d been diligent. He put me in charge of preparing food to sustain the Sangha, and I was ’bout the only one the Old Man, the Roshi, didn’t whack with his bamboo stick when time came for him to interview me ’bout my koan.
“It was great,” Smith said. Then, sourly, “For a year.”
“What happened? Why’d you leave?”
“Didn’t want to.” He laughed. “I felt like I was in Shangri-la. I coulda stayed there forever. But one year to the very day I started, one of the priests said the Roshi wanted to see me. I was in the kitchen, making a sauce to go with wheat-paste noodles. Lemme tell you, it was good. Li’l sea tangle, sesame seeds, ginger, chopped green onions, and grated radishes. I washed my hands, then hurried to the Roshi’s room. I struck the umpan, the gong, to let him know I’d arrived, then entered when he called. I knelt before him, never lifting my eyes, but I wondered fiercely why he wanted to see me. Had I done wrong? No, he told me. My practice was perfect. The other monks respected me. But (he said) I was a gaijin. A foreigner. Only a Japanese could experience true enlightenment. That’s what he said. He didn’t want me to waste my time. He was being compassionate — see? — or thought he was. I left that night, Bishop. If anything, my year in the temple taught me what Gautama figured out when he broke away from the holy men: if you want liberation, to be free, you got to get there on your own. All the texts and teachers are just tools. If you want to be free, you’re supposed to outgrow them.”