Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (28 page)

I pulled myself up onto the tatami ledge—doing my best not to make contact with the wooden part—and sat on the hard, round meditation pillow. Then I rotated around to face the wall. The young, scary monk in the hallway struck the gong. It was time to meditate.

I tried to keep my gaze at a forty-five-degree angle as instructed. I found myself counting the number of rows of weave in one tatami mat while listening to the rain overhead. Then I blinked and started counting all over. All too soon I heard the gong ring again. I certainly felt refreshed and calm, but that could have been because the rain had lulled me into a relaxed state. I certainly did not feel I’d reached enlightenment, not even for a moment, but at least no one had hit me with a bamboo stick.

Another monk was waiting for us outside the meditation hall. He smiled at me, and Shiba bowed to him. I was a bit surprised to be handed off to this new young man, whom I will call Hayashi. As Shiba hurried off to his next appointment, Hayashi greeted me in English and asked me where I was from.

“New York,” I said.

He told me that he had spent two weeks backpacking in New York. “It’s really a great place,” he smiled, a little wistfully. “Everyone is happy.”

I laughed.

“Isn’t everyone happy?” I realized he was serious. “Why would anyone in New York be unhappy?”

“Usually they hate their apartment. Or their job. Or they wish they had more money or were better looking.”

“Really?”

Up until that moment, all the young monks I had met had had a slightly hurried and watchful quality to them. Hayashi, in contrast, moved slowly and never pulled out his watch. He also struck me as having the slightly brooding quality that I cannot help but associate with a youthful search for depth. Hayashi had been at S
jiji for three years, and like Shiba, he had come here to complete his training and to take over his father’s temple in Nagano.

I followed him farther into the temple complex, climbing up and down stairs, rounding corners, and every now and then bowing to altars featuring a panoply of Buddhist gods. Other monks passed us by. The monks were nearly always running, as if in a constant state of controlled near panic. They started, briefly, when they saw my foreign face, then quickly recovered with a bow. Hayashi, bemused, bowed back.

It dawned on me fairly quickly that there was a hierarchy to the greetings. There were the deep, shy bows of those who were below Hayashi. These young men scurried away at an even faster pace than they had appeared, as though just seeing us had prompted them to get away as quickly as possible, as though they were afraid of committing an error or felt the need to impress us with their dedication to perpetual motion. Hayashi did not have this kind of near-panicked energy. Even as he seemed to be deeply troubled by something, he also had what I can only describe as a stillness, a term that Westerners often employ when writing about Buddhism. This stillness, a deep and fundamental calm, was a trait that I most often encounter in older priests. For me it is a palpable characteristic,
and when I am around it, it is difficult not to feel its force, in the same way that it’s hard not to feel the exuberance of someone who moves with great abandon.

As Hayashi and I continued on through an underground corridor, I heard a sound, like the cluttered, undisciplined thunder of a flock of pigeons. A group of young men tumbled into view down another staircase. These boys yanked their sleeves, as a new dog owner pulls on the leash of a spastic puppy. They kicked at their hems, unused to so much fabric around their legs. Some of the boys were fat. They bowed, nervously, and filed into line while their teacher yelled at them to move more quickly. Hayashi and I watched for a while. “First-year students?” I asked. Hayashi nodded. Another group of boys then came down the staircase, moving with distinctly more coordination. “Second years?” I asked. Hayashi nodded again.

We navigated the labyrinth of hallways and stairwells that connected S
jiji’s many buildings until we suddenly emerged onto a covered walkway, just outside S
jiji’s
hond
. A lattice-like wall separated us from the courtyard beyond, where I could hear worshippers trudging across the gravel while the rain pelted their umbrellas. The
hond
was enormous, comprising one thousand tatami mats, nearly eighteen thousand square feet. A large gold statue of the Buddha dominated the center of the room, while the back of the room was dark and unlit. Immediately behind us was a large wooden offertory box—every temple has one. I heard the intermittent sound of coins sliding down the angled mouth of the offering container and then hitting the bottom of the box. Over the years, I have thrown lots of money into offering containers. It was an odd sensation to be here—on the inside—with the worshippers behind me, where I normally stood.

Hayashi said, “Tell me. What do you think a priest should do?”

I had been so mesmerized by the coordinated young men, the
statues, and the incense that I’d assumed, naively, that even if S
jiji had become a bureaucracy with an efficient PR machine, its inhabitants would have a very clear idea of what Buddhism was all about.

“Don’t you know what a priest is supposed to do?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said.

Hayashi told me that he greatly admired his father and longed to emulate him, but in his first year on the mountain, Hayashi had seen second-year students bully first-year students. One boy was beaten up quite badly. Hayashi thought that this was wrong and wanted to help the injured boy. He did not like himself for not helping, and he loathed that the educational apparatus and the power structure made it impossible to intervene. He felt painfully trapped. He was certain that such a thing would never have happened in New York.

As we were talking, two monks came into the
hond
, one in front and the other behind. They walked along its perimeter, disappearing into the very back, through a doorway just to the side of the large Buddha. A moment later I heard screaming in Japanese. “
Gomen nasai
!
” I am sorry! I am sorry! I am sorry! I jumped. It was a very loud, very anguished sound. Moments later, the men came back out in single file. Like everyone else, they had been trained not to gawk at visitors. Still, they snuck in little looks at my face before they continued around the corner and disappeared.

“What was that?” I asked.

Hayashi gave me a half smile. “Probably one monk has done something wrong. He has to apologize as loud as possible to show all of us that he is really sorry. In my first year, I made a little mistake.” He produced a little cell phone from inside the folds of his robe. “Just a little thing. It fell, and I picked it up. And then I had to sit
seiza
for nine hours.” To sit
seiza
is to sit resting on your knees. My grandfather continuously scolded me as a child for my inability to correctly sit on the floor; Indian style was the best that I could
do. While the older generation of Japanese mourns the loss of the compact
seiza
sitting position, which allows for small rooms uncluttered by chairs, doctors now advise that
seiza
produces numerous health problems in old age. As a result, fewer and fewer Japanese get into the habit of
seiza
from childhood, and very few are able to hold the position for very long.