I felt wounded. I groaned with irony: “Thank you so much, don Ejo. At last I understand: in order to awaken, I must become a beggar, stripping myself of my personal anxieties in order to attain poverty of spirit, transforming myself into an empty bowl and waiting patiently for my essential being, the great Buddha, to grant me the alms of awakening!”
Shouting “Kwatsu!” in a more piercing voice than ever, the Japanese first made me prostrate with my forehead on the ground. Then he administered a flurry of thirty blows of the stick.
When he had finished, he said: “The wisdom of the master depends on your own capacity to use it to find yourself.” After this, he recited a Mexican proverb as if it were a holy sutra: “He who has the most saliva eats the most pinole.*13
Still feeling hurt, I countered with another Mexican proverb: “You can’t eat pinole and whistle at the same time.”
He laughed heartily, rubbing his belly. “Exactly! Each thing in its own time.”
Then he went to the kitchen and soon returned with plates of rice, fried sardines, and a thermos full of bitter, steaming tea. Between bites, he confided to me: “Mumon Yamada gave me a koan. I was never able to resolve it, but you — you can probably do it.”
Seeing a mischievous glint in his slanted eyes, I sensed a trap. Probably the koan he was going to give me was meaningless. What is the meaning of life? Life has neither meaning nor meaninglessness. It must be lived!
“Tokusan was the head teacher of a Zen monastery. Seppo was the chief administrator.†14 One day, breakfast was late. Tokusan, bowl in hand, went into the dining hall. Seppo said to him: ‘I have not heard the bell ring for breakfast, and the gong has not been sounded either. What are you doing here with that bowl?’ Without a word, Tokusan bowed and returned to his cell. Seppo then remarked to another monk: ‘Tokusan may be great, but he has not understood the last verse.’”
As a sort of commentary, Ejo began to hum very softly: “The wind has blown the clouds away. Now the moon shines on the green hills like a coin of white jade.”
I began to reflect. If Tokusan is really a master, he cannot behave as a senile old man, and if Seppo is an awakened sage, he cannot speak of Tokusan with condescension. Tokusan did not simply wander into the dining hall out of blind habit. He was fully aware that the breakfast bell had not rung. When Seppo seemingly rebuked the master’s unconsciousness, Tokusan’s bow was not an acknowledgment of his forgetfulness. Between these two masters there could have been only profound respect, not some trivial competition between administrator and teacher. When Tokusan went to the dining hall, he knew that Seppo would be there, hurrying his monks to prepare breakfast, because it was late. Without a word, he held out his empty bowl to the administrator, saying: “The vicissitudes of life do not affect the peace of my spirit. Are you trying to accomplish a perfect work? If so, you are mistaken. For human beings, perfection is not possible, though excellence is. Simply do your work the best you can, accepting the inevitable errors.” Seppo understood. His own rebuke was very different from what it seemed to be: “Having realized emptiness, do you wish to show the way to those whom you believe are still in darkness? So many years of meditation, and still you hold an empty bowl in your hands. Your great flaw is the power of knowing your own mind and nature. Beware of your vanity; your bowl contains a thorn.”
Tokusan bowed his head in recognition that self-consciousness is the last trap. Seppo’s words, like the wind blowing away the clouds, enabled Tokusan to realize that seeing his own perfection is an imperfection. To be in unity is to conquer the dualism of actor-observer. Tokusan returned to his cell — that is, to himself. He still had to learn to dissolve himself, to offer his consciousness as the ultimate gift to the eternal void, leaving aside all metaphysical search. The mysterious commentary by Seppo about Tokusan not having understood the last verse refers to a tradition borrowed from ancient China by Zen masters. In their last moments, enlightened sages would write a poem, leaving the essence of their life experience to their disciples or to their children. The Buddhist monk Zhi Ming,*15 condemned to die, dictated this poem before his head was cut off:
Illusory birth, illusory death.
The great illusion does not survive the body.
But one idea calms the mind:
If you look for a man, no man exists.
I related this interpretation to Ejo: “Empty mind: nothing to wait for, nothing to receive.”
His response was to recite another poem by a dying monk: “In this world burns a rootless tree, its ashes blown away by the wind.”
At this moment, a gust of wind made our kimonos flap. We had spent the entire day discussing koans. It was already dark, but night always came so softly here that we hadn’t bothered to light candles on the terrace. Another gust of wind, much longer, ruffled my hair. Ejo, with his bald head, grinned boyishly. The gust died suddenly and left in its wake a marvelous gift: a firefly! Free of the wind’s tyranny, the insect fluttered around the terrace, emitting its phosphorescent bursts of light.
Ejo murmured: “Little star, your language of light offers a teaching to us.”
We remained silent for a long time. Then, for the first time since I had known him, Ejo began to speak of his childhood. He spoke in a childlike voice, conveying nostalgia, sweetness, and fascination.
“I was an only child. I was five years old on that moonless night, when there appeared many thousands of fireflies, like a river of stars rushing through time. That was the night when my mother, distraught by the first wrinkles that signaled the decline of her beauty, decided to drown herself in Omi Lake. My father never got over her suicide. Lacking the courage to kill himself, he began to drink. This slow suicide plunged us into abject poverty. Most of the year, we depended on public charity. He emerged from his drunkenness only with the onset of summer, when he wore around his waist a bamboo stick wrapped to a big net sack and took me with him to the willow forest along the shores of Omi Lake. We lived in the region of Ishiyama, a province of Goshu, where several merchants specialized in buying and selling fireflies. They sent them to big cities in little wicker boxes. Rich city dwellers avidly bought these little creatures and then released them for their feasts so that everyone could admire their scintillating beauty.
“The more frightened fireflies are, the more brilliantly they shine. If you startle them, they become paralyzed for a time before taking flight. Kyubei, my father, hated these insects, blaming them stubbornly for triggering my mother’s fatal depression. Like a silent cat, he sneaked up until he detected their presence among the willow leaves. Leaping out suddenly, he began striking the leaves violently with the long bamboo stick. The insects froze, and fell to the ground, shining brightly like countless precious jewels. In order to collect as many of them as fast as possible, my father scooped them rapidly into his mouth. When it was so full he couldn’t hold any more, he spit them into the covered net sack that I held open and then closed quickly.