“Steel-tipped bullets will explode the head from eleven yards away, Chief.”
“Good. That way the corpse will be less heavy.”
SILVER KANE, TEMPORARY SHERIFF
When I got home, I struggled in vain to remove the ring. I felt that if I caressed my wife while wearing it, the golden skull would give off toxic vibrations. My hand was as cold as ice and my arm hurt.
At five o’clock in the morning, I jumped out of bed and drove very fast to the zendo. When I arrived, I found Ejo Takata meditating on the terrace under a dawn sky streaked with red clouds. I stood facing him, waiting for the incense stick to burn down. Finally, he seemed to notice my presence. His look went not to my face but directly to the gold ring. I made a helpless gesture. Smiling, he arose and removed the ring from my finger without the slightest effort. The pain in my arm vanished.
“If you see it as a skull, your arm will hurt, but if you are unattached either to its form or its name, it is simply pure gold. Clear your mind and this ring will be a ring — and you will be yourself.”
Hearing these words, which I only half understood, I began to complain. “I can’t help it, Ejo. I’m unable to adapt to this vulgar world. I thought I would find roots in Mexico, but I feel like a chicken in the wrong pen — and my consciousness only increases the pain.”
Ejo began to laugh so hilariously that it infected me, and I found myself laughing as well. Seeing that my distress had gone, he fetched the secret book and read a new koan: “A monk asked Master Sozan:*12 ‘Snow covers a thousand hills, but why is the highest peak not white?’ Sozan answered: ‘You must know the most absurd of absurdities.’ The monk asked: ‘What is the most absurd of absurdities?’ Sozan replied: ‘To be of a different color than the other hills!’”
“The first commentary is: ‘In the pine branches, the monkey looks green.’ The second commentary: ‘The disciple, shaking imaginary snowflakes from his head, says: My hair has begun to turn white.’”
No matter how I wracked my brain, it seemed impossible to decode the koan and its very different commentaries. Anxious, I kneeled before the master. “I can’t do it!”
With a roar of “Kwatsu!” that came from his belly, Ejo seized his stick and dealt me six blows on my shoulder blades.
“Change yourself into a hill!”
His voice was like a strong gust of wind blowing away my mental images. I saw myself as a hill covered with snow amid a thousand other hills covered with snow. The high, bare peak was only an illusion. Who is exempt from being covered with snow in a storm? Who can escape aging and death? How could I imagine that developing my talent would exempt me from the sufferings of life? In winter, we are cold. The pine tree is a plant, the monkey is an animal. They are different, surely, but the monkey takes on the tree’s green color in leaping from branch to branch. A different skin color, a different culture, a different level of consciousness — it was absurd to feel that any of this sheltered me from the assaults of our common reality. If the thousand hills are covered with snow, then the highest summit is also white.
The slashes of the Tigress’s claws had taught me an important lesson. When she first agreed to collaborate with me, I would have done better to put aside my director’s vanity and simply incorporate her into the performance without any attempt to change her style. Working together like two hills covered with snow, we could have achieved a fantastic Lucretia. She was an actress who never tried to be different from her audience, but I, feeling that I had a superior art to offer, separated myself from her spectators, whom I considered vulgar. In this way, I lost them. The infantry must fight its battles on known ground, not in the air.
“Ejo, I now see that when the Tigress gave me this valuable gold ring, she was saying that popular art is also noble.”
When he heard these words, he exclaimed: “Give it to the first beggar you meet!” And shouting “Kwatsu!” again, he gave me six blows.
Then we had a frugal lunch together and meditated for two hours. Afterward, he had me read a new koan: “Joshu visited a hermit. He asked the master: ‘Is there? Is there?’ The master raised a fist. Joshu said: ‘In these shallow waters, I do not wish to anchor my boat,’ and left. Then he visited another hermit and repeated the same question. This master also lifted his fist. Joshu said: ‘He can give, he can take, he can kill and yet give life!’ And he bowed. Commentary: The same tree shaken by the spring wind shows two aspects: warm branches on its southern side, cold branches on its northern side.”
Ejo crossed his legs and resumed his meditation. I did likewise. An hour passed. Then two hours, three hours. . no matter how I turned around the koan in my mind, I could not understand it. The silence lay on my shoulders like an elephant. An agonizing pain stiffened my legs. A fly settled into the hollow of my ear. I bore its flutterings without moving. A voice resounded in my skulclass="underline" “Understand, or die!” As if he had also heard it, Ejo cried out three times: “Is there? Is there? Is there?”
I heard myself answer: “If there is not here, then where? If there is not now, then when? If there is not I, then who?”
Suddenly, I am Joshu. I walk up a steep path toward the distant hermitage. There are monks there, far from the noise of the world, involved in discovering the luminous jewel buried in the depths of the soul. They sit around an old master. He is a realized being — meaning he is himself and not a simulacrum of another. When he hears my triple question, the master (who has already crossed the border where words dissolve into emptiness) lifts a fist to show his present unity. If he is not fully here, he is nowhere. Yet his gesture does not convince me. I find it superficial. In spite of my advanced age (probably more than one hundred years) I climb another hill painfully. Why this extreme effort? I need to be convinced that I am not the only one, that my awakening is not an abnormal phenomenon, that the end of all paths is the same. In the second hermitage, the master also lifts his fist in response to my three cries. And at that moment, in spite of their responses being the same, I recognize myself in the old man before me. The jewel buried in the darkness of our soul can give, can take, can kill, and nevertheless can bestow upon us its own life, which is impersonal and eternal.
“Ejo, if Joshu preferred one place over the other, it was not because there was a difference between the two fists. The difference was in his own seeing. We always have a personal interpretation of other beings, things, and events. Perhaps Joshu perceived no authentic expression of unity in the gesture of the first master. Perhaps he felt that the latter was saying that he would never let go of his realization and that it was only for him. He may even have perceived that he was being rebuked as an intruder, presumptuously questioning a master right in front of his disciples, whom he protected as a hen defends her chicks. If they were to lose faith in him, they would crumble. The fist was actually a physical threat telling him to be gone. With his closed fist, this egoist can hold only a few grains of sand, but if he had opened it, all the sands of the desert would have passed through it. . In contrast, Joshu interpreted the same gesture of the second master in a completely opposite way — as a warning of what not to do: If my awakening is mine alone, then it is not mine. What belongs to me can be mine only when it is also for others.”
Ejo tilted his head to the right, tilted his head to the left, took a deep breath of the evening air, and let out a long sigh. He clucked his tongue softly several times as if comforting a hurt child. “Some branches are warmed by the sun, others cooled by the spring wind, but they are all part of the same tree. The two masters gave the same answer. They had realized the same emptiness, but with the first, Joshu felt cold from the spring wind; with the second, he felt the warmth of the sun. If all the branches are fed by the same roots, why go from one master to another, from one magical woman to another? When will you realize that others cannot give you what you already have in yourself? As long as you do not find this treasure in yourself, you will continue to project your doubts onto others. One day, the ring will be a curse, another day it will be a noble work of art. You will say that the skull symbolizes death or you will say that it symbolizes eternity — but the beggar you give it to will see only its monetary value.”