Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (34 page)

Maruko was born just after the war, during the great famine. The youngest of seven children, he was very weak as a child. His mother remembered him as being too quiet and never causing any trouble. In his youth he developed rheumatoid arthritis. This admission took me aback. He was nearly the same age as my mother, who also suffers from the same illness.

Maruko was not from a priestly family, and he might not have become a priest were it not for his parents’ taking him to the mystical mountain Dewa Sanzan. There, a healer tried to rid Maruko’s body of pain. The healing didn’t work, but Maruko met a priest from Nara who happened to be on a pilgrimage to Dewa Sanzan. They hit it off, and the priest invited him to Nara to become a disciple.
The daily meditation greatly relieved Maruko’s pain. Today he was a believer in the healing power of Zen. Were it not for his illness, he might never have learned about Buddhism. He now trusted in the great wisdom that life was full of suffering and happiness and that wisdom lay in this tension.

I loved listening to Maruko K
h
talk. He was small and slight, and one of those people who seemed to be both young and old at the same time. I could see the child in him, even though his hair was gray and he dispensed the kind of worldly advice that only an older person can give with conviction. His emotions were extremely close to the surface, as though there was a candle burning inside him, just under his skin. When there was no wind, the flame grew very strong, and his eyes brightened, and his voice became robust as he emphasized an important point. If he was disturbed, a breeze rushed over his face, and he became dark and troubled, and you felt the absence of his light. Just as quickly, he would brighten again. The effect was captivating, and I avidly took notes during his entire talk.

Maruko wanted to discuss the true meaning of the middle way, the concept at the heart of Siddharta Gautama’s teachings. He sensed that people today didn’t really understand what was meant by the middle way, because we now lived in a world in which people thought they had a right always to be comfortable.

His gaze settled on the man who had had such difficulty standing up in the dining room. “You, for example. Are you married?”

“Divorced.”

“Ah.”

A pause.

“That is too bad. It is too bad for you. And for your wife too, isn’t it. And now you have come here to Eiheiji.”

The man nodded.

Maruko said that in the past, when a young man got married and brought his wife home to live with his family, there were often
tensions between the mother and the daughter-in-law. This was one reason why young people no longer wanted to live with their in-laws. Very often, the older woman was attached to her role as the great beauty in the family and did not like ceding power to the new wife.

“And then,” said Maruko-sensei (
sensei
means “teacher” and is often used as a sign of respect), “one day that old woman is sick and is dying. Is she able to thank her daughter-in-law for caring for her? Is she able to be grateful in that moment?” He wanted us to imagine the moment of death and of the final parting, when we all say good-bye to each other. He used the word
owakare
, the great parting, the term that Kaneta had also used when talking about his job at the crematorium after the tsunami. As a priest, Maruko had seen many people die, and he had seen many families just after a loved one had passed away. The very worst thing was when someone forgot to say “thank you” before dying. If only the dead could see the pain they left behind when they died selfishly. He often counseled the living on this inherited pain and tried to get them to put it into context.

In Japanese:
“In order to become myself, my mistakes and hardships were also necessary.” This was an essential way to view life. It was only by keeping this in mind at all times that one could live in the present. The practice of Zen, he said, was about looking forward and living in this way.

I
SLEPT POORLY
that night. I knew we would be roused at 3:00 a.m., and I had the same kind of anxiety I often get when I need to be up early to catch a flight. I had meant to save my banana and my bean cake to eat at 3:00 a.m., just before the morning prayers, but by 9:30 p.m. I was hungry, and I finished them off. Finally, around eleven, I fell asleep.

I had set my alarm but needn’t have bothered. Just after 3:00 a.m., there was a great clattering. Outside, a young man ran up and down the wooden hallways of Eiheiji, hitting a metal bell with a mallet and exhorting everyone to get up. Not long after, a monk in the hallway outside our rooms asked us to please come out and line up for zazen.

A monk would later say to me that at Eiheiji, one woke even before the birds. He said it was an unnatural time to be awake, and it made him feel as though he was operating outside of the natural order of things, as though just getting up when it is still dark is powerful enough to force you to think more clearly.

A
FTER ANOTHER GENTLE
meditation session, we all climbed up the slick wooden stairs toward the apex of the complex. It was extremely cold outside. All around me, I heard a great commotion of flying robes and slippered feet scaling the staircases to the top. Every few seconds or so, a bell rang out the same note over and over.

One monk was chosen to stand on top of a pole and to hit a gong every time someone new approached the
hond
. I can still picture his face. He was beautiful, almost too beautiful to be a man, or perhaps more accurately, he had a kind of beauty we no longer see or are perhaps unaccustomed to seeing in the modern world. Later, I would tell Kaneta about this young boy, and he would laugh. “The Eiheiji
bijin
,” he chortled. The Eiheiji beauty. “It’s all the rice they eat. Their skin turns white! They become as beautiful as princesses.”

Now we were at the upper reaches of a building called the
hatt
, or the dharma hall. We sat down in the very back and were urged not to stick to the painful
seiza
position, as the morning service would be quite long. Around us, monks exhaling white breath began filing in from the cold. They wore no socks. To the right, senior priests began to assemble, their ranks betrayed by their slightly
more colorful robes and their age. Some of the eldest sat in low chairs. The very back of the
hatt
had a statue of the historical Buddha seated in meditation. Overhead were several large gold chandeliers whose individual pieces were made up of bells and lotus flowers and wheels. It was an abstract representation of Buddha’s paradise.

What I saw that morning is called the
h
y
—the morning sutra reading—which includes prayers for the dead and the living. It involves physical coordination and closely resembles a very carefully rehearsed dance or pageant. The effect was stunning. Young monks—those who had been at Eiheiji over a year—were chosen to go and get portable bookshelves, about two feet long and one foot high, filled with tiny compact books. Holding the shelves sharply to the side, as though the wind were pulling the books behind them, they half crouched and half walked in between the lines of monks, who each deftly nabbed a book. The hands of the seated monks darted in and out, one after the other, in rapid succession like successive typewriter keys hitting a sheet of fresh paper. When the bookshelf-carrying monks came to the end of a row, they turned, pivoting on the balls of their feet like dancers do, then continued back down another row. Again, hands shot in and out. The monks with the bookshelves kept their heads perfectly level, never once bobbing, and the overall effect was of a human loom weaving an invisible tapestry. Sometimes a monk would present an important figure—like Maruko—with a table on which there was an instrument or a document. This too required the same dramatic pose—legs bent, arms outstretched, and head kept level.