Butterfly (33 page)

You mustn't imagine that I had been immersed in a crassly materialistic life during the preceding years. I had lost my youthful taste for debauchery, and since the war I had assiduously practiced
zazen.
The war had made me quite disciplined, really. So it didn't happen out of the blue.

It may seem strange to you that I've talked so much about myself and so little about Taizan. But there is not much I can tell you directly about him that you do not already know.

P.L.: What is your personal view of Taizan and his rather unusual life? And has that view changed since you first became friends—in the 1930s, I suppose?

Ikkyū Roshi:
That's right, I met him in 1934 and saw him regularly until 1937, when I entered the army. I understood his life to have been determined by deep bonds of karma between him and the two women. Which is not to say that it had to be what it was. Our lives are shaped as much by how we respond to our karma as by the karma itself.

Back then, I used to think that Taizan was too good. That is, he wanted too much to do good, he was too eager. From the Zen point of view, such zeal showed attachment, and all attachment is an obstacle; so I sometimes chided him for it. I told him he should let go of his guilt feelings. We talked about it a lot, and in fact he himself saw things quite clearly, only that didn't change the way he was. I was young then, and impatient. Now I see that striving to be good, though it made knots in his life, was part of the process of untying a greater knot. I had disapproved of it as a method he had adopted of appeasing his guilt, but it was not a method but rather the other side of that guilt, something that he could no more jettison than the guilt itself.

P.L.:
It is very interesting to me to learn that you talked about his guilt feelings. Could you tell me more about his attitude at the time, what he thought and felt?

Ikkyū Roshi:
Like most Westerners, Taizan had a penchant for theorizing, and I was interested in Western thought, so our discussions tended to be speculative. At this distance it is hard to recall their contents, or who said what. I do remember, however, some of our talk about guilt; since you ask, I'll repeat some of it, for what it's worth.

Now, what is guilt? It is identifying with something different and separate from yourself and then judging yourself from its point of view. That other can be society, or God, or an abstraction like the law or humanity, or a person like the father or the mother. The greater the distance you put between the other and yourself, the greater the sense of guilt. In the most clear-cut instance, there is an act, a crime, that alienates the doer; but there doesn't have to be a crime, or a consciously identified other.

In the West you have the idea of original sin. It comes from the sense of being alienated from a transcendent God. An entire theology and way of life are built upon it. God is good, so man is
bad; God is omniscient, so man is blind; God is everything, so man is nothing. This is fine so long as you believe in God. But where does it leave you when this God before whom you prostrate yourself begins to seem a dubious proposition? You turn to substitutes—"idols,” they used to be called. The best is a woman, at least if you are a man. It is easy to channel sexual passion into free-floating guilt. Taizan was ready to worship his European wife even before he became guilty of betraying her; the betrayal was almost an excuse. A deep, unspecified guilt was already there waiting—the guilt of being a nothing, a born sinner, before a God whose reality was uncertain. There are other possible substitutes, but none with a woman's presence and immediacy. The undeniable reality of her body ensures an ironclad illusion; an infinite, unbridgeable gap is compressed into the distance between skin and skin; transcendence is brought within reach of a kiss or a kick.

For us, to whom all reality is immanent, the very notion of transcendence is an aberration, a source of perversion even. Divinity is not elsewhere in some greater, transcendent reality but in the very nature of things right here, all things at all times. Someone asked: What is Buddha? A shit-scraper, answered Ummon. A thing is itself, that's all, and its it-ness is the ultimate reality—or Buddha, divinity, God, call it what you like. When you experience it in one thing, you experience it in all. But if you seek it elsewhere, in some “higher” reality, you will end up perverting it.

P.L.:
But the Japanese are certainly not immune to perversions.

Ikkyū Roshi
(laughs):
It's our talent for imitation! And we're a competitive people on top of it. Anyway, God is not the only transcendent reality: there is the state, and the company, just to name two to which my countrymen are easily addicted. But since the distance between these and the individual is so much smaller
than that between God and man, there is less alienation—both quantitative and qualitative—and guilt comes mostly in packets small enough to be confined to the fantasy chamber of a “love hotel.”

P.L.:
You said earlier that Taizan was more advanced in Zen than you at the time. You also spoke of the obstacles of guilt and “goodness.” Do you think he was close to overcoming these? And do you think that he might have attained what one might call “enlightenment” before his death?

Ikkyū Roshi:
He was more advanced in the sense that his experience of life was more genuine. He was not looking to be enlightened, he was even a little suspicious of it. He met my teacher, Benku, by accident, and many years went by before he approached Benku for instruction. Even then, it was with a certain reserve. But he had been working on his own in a spirit that was quite compatible with Zen. In coming to Japan, he had left behind a good deal of the excess baggage we are all burdened with. If he made errors—and who is to say what is error and what is not?—the errors were authentic.

It is hard to talk about enlightenment. When the war ended, I spoke with several people who had known Taizan. According to one, he had been active and fearless in helping people evacuate after the atomic blast—the area he was living in was quite far from where the bomb hit. But the accounts do not agree. The woman who took care of him told me he had been blinded and severely burned. Perhaps that was later, the result of exposure to fallout; I don't know. In any case she had been impressed by the fact that he seemed happy in spite of his obvious pain. He told her that he saw light. She thought he was touched in the head, but it was certainly something else.

112

(Reconstituted from the editor's notes on his interview with Midori, Taizan's housekeeper, on October 19, 1952. Midori died in 1957, at least partly because of exposure to radiation.)

I went to see Taizan two or three days after the blast. I had hoped that he might have stayed home that day, because he was living far enough away not to be affected. But unfortunately that was not the case. His condition was frightening. Large portions of his skin had peeled off and his body resembled one big wound. Furthermore he was blinded. How he managed to get home was a mystery; he himself did not seem to know. I did what I could for him, which wasn't much. It was clear to me that he was going to die, but despite his weakness and terrible suffering, he seemed somehow almost cheerful. I attributed it to damage to his head. He was very concerned about me and my family, however, and asked me to forgive the Americans. I told him I held nothing against him. The one request he had was to burn some papers; there were several stacks. I consented, but afterward something held me back and I kept them, I don't know what for.

I went there every afternoon after that. One day when I arrived, he was dead. The day before, he had seemed particularly excited and spoke to me about the light he was seeing. I saw that he was raving and knew the end was near. He also mentioned seeing people he had known. It was heart-wrenching to see him in such a state, but at the same time I was glad he could be so distracted from his frightful condition.

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my gratitude to all those who in one way or another have helped me over the years in preparing this edition. In particular, I want to thank Paul Liepa of St. Martin's Press for his advice and encouragement; my interpreter and guide Noriko Kanda, whose unflagging good spirits kept me going on long searches that too often seemed hopeless; Mrs. Susan Harrington Choate for her gracious contribution of three letters written to her grand-uncle William Harrington; Ikkyū Roshi for his cordial reception and permission to publish our conversation; Jennifer Haley for invaluable help in the transcription of my interview with Mrs. Davenport and other arduous tasks; Columbia University Press for permission to quote from Burton Watson's translation
of The Complete
Works
of Chuang Tzu;
my friend Norman Kurz, without whose suggestions and aid this edition could never have seen the light of day; my wife Marie Keller Loewen, who read the manuscript and generously put up with the long hours it stole from our life; and finally my stepdaughter Julia Keller, who enlightened and entertained me on every related subject from orthography to Krafft-Ebing to Zen.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form
or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the
publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1988 by Paul Leu

ISBN: 978-1-4976-6337-4

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com