Musashi: Bushido Code (135 page)

He was thinking about his promise to Matahachi to wait for Gudō's return when the lights of Okazaki came into view and a voice called to him from a small roadside shrine.

"Musashi, it's me, Matahachi. We were worried about you, so we came out here to wait."

"Worried?" said Musashi.

"We went to your house. The woman next door said people had been spying on you recently."

"
_We?
"

"The master came back today."

Gudō was seated on the veranda of the shrine. He was a man of unusual mien, his skin as black as a giant cicada's, his deep-set eyes shining brilliantly under high eyebrows. He looked to be somewhere between forty and fifty, but it was impossible to tell with a man like this. Thin and wiry, he had a booming voice.

Musashi went over, knelt and lowered his forehead to the ground. Gudō regarded him silently for a minute or two. "It's been a long time," he said.

Lifting his head, Musashi said quietly, "A very long time." Gudō or Takuan—Musashi had long been convinced that only one or the other of these two men could deliver him from his present impasse. Here, at last, after a wait of a whole year, was Gudō. He gazed at the priest's face as he might at the moon on a dark night.

Suddenly and forcefully, he cried out,
"Sensei!"

"What is it?" Gudō had no need to ask; he knew what Musashi wanted, anticipated it as a mother divines a child's needs.

Musashi, head to the ground again, said, "It's been nearly ten years since I studied under you."

"Is it that long?"

"Yes. But even after all those years, I doubt my progress along the Way is measurable."

"You still talk like a child, don't you? You couldn't have come very far." "I'm full of regrets."

"Are you?"

"My training and self-discipline have accomplished so little."

"You're always talking about such things. So long as you do that, it's futile." "What would happen if I gave up?"

"You'd be tied up in knots again. You'd be human rubbish, worse off than before, when you were merely an ignorant fool."

"If I desert the Way, I fall into the depths. Yet when I try to pursue it to the peak, I find I'm not up to the task. I'm twisting in the wind halfway up, neither the swordsman nor the human being I want to be."

"That seems to sum it up."

"You can't know how desperate I've been. What should I do? Tell me! How can I free myself from inaction and confusion?"

"Why ask me? You can only rely on yourself."

"Let me sit at your feet again and receive your chastisement. Me and Matahachi. Or give me a blow with your staff to awaken me from this dark emptiness. I beg you,
Sensei,
help me." Musashi had not lifted his head. He shed no tears, but his voice choked up.

Completely unmoved, Gudō said, "Come, Matahachi," and together they walked away from the shrine.

Musashi ran after the priest, grabbed his sleeve, pleaded and begged.

The priest shook his head silently. When Musashi persisted, he said, "Not one thing!" Then, angrily: "What have I to tell you? What more have I to give you? There is only a blow on the head." He waved his fist in the air but did not strike.

Musashi, letting go of his sleeve, was about to say something else. The priest walked rapidly away, not pausing to look back.

At Musashi's side, Matahachi said, "When I saw him at the temple and explained our feelings and why we wanted to become his disciples, he barely listened. When I finished, he said, 'Oh?' and told me I could follow along and wait on him. Maybe if you just follow us, whenever he seems to be in a good mood you can ask him what you want to ask."

Gudō turned and called Matahachi.

"Coming," said Matahachi. "Do what I told you," he advised Musashi as he rushed off to catch up with the priest.

Thinking that letting Gudō out of his sight again would be fatal, Musashi decided to follow Matahachi's advice. In the flow of universal time, a man's life of sixty or seventy years was only a lightning flash. If in that brief span he was privileged to meet a man like Gudō, it would be foolish to let the chance slip by.

"It's a sacred opportunity," he thought. Warm tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. He had to follow Gudō, to the end of the earth if need be, pursue him until he heard the word he longed for.

Gudō walked away from Hachijō Hill, apparently no longer interested in the temple there. His heart had already begun to flow with the water and the clouds. When he reached the Tōkaidō, he turned west, toward Kyoto.

The Circle

The Zen master's approach to travel was whimsically eccentric. One day when it rained he stayed inside the inn all day and had Matahachi give him a moxa treatment. In Mino Province, he stopped over at the Daisenji for seven days and then spent a few days at a Zen temple in Hikone, so it was only gradually that they approached Kyoto.

Musashi slept wherever he could find a place. When Gudō stayed at an inn he spent the night either outdoors or at another inn. If the priest and Matahachi were stopping at a temple, Musashi took shelter under the gate. Privations were as nothing compared to his need for a word from Gudō.

One night outside a temple by Lake Biwa, suddenly aware of the coming of autumn, he took a look at himself and saw that he resembled nothing so much as a beggar. His hair, of course, was a rat's nest, since he'd resolved not to comb it until the priest relented. It was weeks since he'd had a bath and a shave. His clothes were quickly being reduced to tatters; they felt like pine bark rubbing against his skin.

The stars seemed ready to fall from the sky. He looked at his reed mat and thought: "What a fool I am!" All at once, his attitude appeared insane. He laughed bitterly. He'd stuck to his goal doggedly, silently, but what was it he was seeking from the Zen master? Was it impossible to go through life without torturing himself so? He even began to feel sorry for the lice inhabiting his body.

Gudō had stated unequivocally that he had "not one thing" to offer. It was unreasonable to press him for something he did not possess, wrong to resent him, even though he showed less consideration than he might have for a stray dog along the wayside.

Musashi gazed upward through the hair hanging over his eyes. No doubt about it—it was an autumn moon. But the mosquitoes. His skin, already peppered with red welts, was no longer sensitive to their bites.

He was quite prepared to admit to himself that there was something he did not understand, but he thought of it as being one thing. If only he could figure out what it was, his sword would be released from its bonds. Everything else would be solved in an instant. Then just as he felt on the verge of grasping it, it always eluded him.

If his pursuit of the Way was to end here, he would prefer to die, for he saw nothing else to live for. He stretched out under the roof of the gate. When sleep would not come, he asked what it could be. A sword technique? No; not only that. A secret for getting on in the world? No; more than that. A solution to the problem of Otsū? No; no man could be this miserable over the love of a woman. It had to be one all-encompassing answer, yet for all its magnitude, it could, at the same time, be no larger than a poppy seed.

Wrapped in his matting, he looked like a caterpillar. He wondered if Matahachi was sleeping well. Comparing himself with his friend, he felt envious. Matahachi's problems did not seem to disable him. Musashi always seemed to be searching out new problems with which to torture himself.

His eyes fell on a plaque hanging on a gatepost. He got up and went up to it for a closer look. By the light of the moon, he read:

I beg you, try to find the fundamental source.

Pai-yün was moved by the merits of Pai-ch'ang;

Hu-ch'iu sighed over the teachings left by Pai-yün.

Like our great predecessors,

Do not merely pinch off the leaves

Or concern yourselves only with the branches.

It appeared to be a quotation from the
Testament
of Daitō Kokushi, the founder of the Daitokuji.

Musashi reread the last two lines. Leaves and branches ... How many people were thrown off course by irrelevant matters? Was he himself not an example? While the thought seemed to lighten his burden, his doubts would not go away. Why would his sword not obey him? Why did his eyes wander from his goal? What prevented him from achieving serenity?

Somehow it all seemed so unnecessary. He knew that it was when one had pursued the Way as far as possible that vacillation set in and one was attacked by fretfulness—leaves and branches. How did one break through the cycle? How did one get at the core and destroy it?

I laugh at my ten-year pilgrimage—

Wilted robe, tattered hat, knocking at Zen gates.

In reality, the Buddha's Law is simple:

Eat your rice, drink your tea, wear your clothes.

Musashi recalled this verse written by Gudō in self-mockery. Gudō had been about the same age Musashi was now when he composed it.

On Musashi's first visit to the Myōshinji, the priest had all but kicked him away from the door. "What strange line of thinking leads you to my house?" he had shouted. But Musashi persisted, and later, after he'd gained admittance, Gudō regaled him with this ironic verse. And he laughed at him, saying the same thing he had said a few weeks ago: "You're always talking.... It's futile."

Thoroughly disheartened, Musashi gave up the idea of sleep and walked around the gate, just in time to see two men emerge from the temple.

Gudō and Matahachi were walking at an unusually rapid pace. Perhaps an urgent summons had come from the Myōshinji, the head temple of Gudō's sect. In any event, he brushed past the monks gathered to see him off and headed straight for the Kara Bridge in Seta.

Musashi followed, through the town of Sakamoto, which was asleep, the woodblock print shops, the greengrocer's, even the bustling inns, all tightly shuttered. The only presence was the ghostly moon.

Leaving the town, they climbed Mount Hiei, past the Miidera and the Sekiji in their veils of mist. They met almost no one. When they reached the pass, Gudō stopped and said something to Matahachi. Below them lay Kyoto, in the other direction the tranquil expanse of Lake Biwa. Aside from the moon itself, everything was like mica, a sea of soft silvery mist.

Reaching the pass a few moments later, Musashi was startled to find himself only a few feet from the master. Their eyes met for the first time in weeks. Gudō said nothing.

Musashi said nothing.

"Now ... it has to be now," thought Musashi. If the priest got as far as the Myōshinji, it might be necessary to wait many weeks for the opportunity to see him again.

"Please, sir," he said. His chest swelled and his neck twisted. His voice sounded like that of a frightened child, attempting to tell his mother something he really did not want to say. He edged forward timidly.

The priest did not condescend to ask what he wanted. His face might have belonged to a dry-lacquer statue. The eyes alone stood out whitely, glaring angrily at Musashi.

"Please, sir." Musashi, oblivious of everything save the flaming impulse propelling him forward, fell to his knees and bowed his head. "One word of wisdom. Just one word . . ."

He waited for what seemed like hours. When he was unable to restrain himself any longer, he started to renew his plea.

"I've heard all that," Gudō interrupted. "Matahachi talks about you every night. I know all there is to know, even about the woman."

The words were like slivers of ice. Musashi could not have lifted his head if he had wanted to.

"Matahachi, a stick!"

Musashi shut his eyes, steeling himself for the blow, but instead of striking, Gudō drew a circle around him. Without another word, he threw the stick away and said, "Let's go, Matahachi y' They walked away quickly.

Musashi was incensed. After the weeks of cruel mortification he'd undergone in a sincere effort to receive a teaching, Gudō's refusal was far more than a lack of compassion. It was heartless, brutal. He was toying with a man's life. "Swine of a priest!"

Musashi glared viciously at the departing pair, his lips set tightly in an angry scowl.

"Not one thing." Reflecting on Gudō's words, he decided they were deceitful, suggesting the man had something to offer when in fact there was "not one thing" in his foolish head.

"Wait and see," thought Musashi. "I don't need you!" He would rely on no one. In the final analysis, there
was
no one to rely on but himself. He was a man, just as Gudō was a man and all the earlier masters had been men.

He stood up, half lifted by his own rage. For several minutes, he stared at the moon, but as his anger cooled, his eyes fell to the circle. Still inside it, he turned all the way around. As he did so, he remembered the stick that had not struck him.

"A circle? What could it mean?" He let his thoughts flow.

A perfectly round line, no beginning, no end, no deviation. If expanded infinitely, it would become the universe. If contracted, it would become coequal with the infinitesimal dot in which his soul resided. His soul was round. The universe was round. Not two. One. One entity—himself and the universe.

With a click, he drew his sword and held it out diagonally. His shadow resembled the symbol for "o" [オ]. The universal circle remained the same. By the same token, he himself was unchanged. Only the shadow had changed.

"Only a shadow," he thought. "The shadow is not my real self." The wall against which he had been beating his head was a mere shadow, the shadow of his confused mind.

He raised his head and a fierce shout broke from his lips.

With his left hand, he held out his short sword. The shadow changed again, but the image of the universe—not by one whit. The two swords were but one. And they were part of the circle.

He sighed deeply; his eyes had been opened. Looking up at the moon again, he saw that its great circle could be regarded as identical with the sword or with the soul of one who treads the earth.

"Sensei!"
he cried, bounding off after Gudō. He sought nothing more from the priest, but he owed him an apology for having hated him with such vehemence.

After a dozen steps, he halted. "It's only leaves and branches," he thought.