Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (30 page)

It was still raining hard, and in the guests’ dining room on the third floor, I had a view of the water plunging through a segmented iron drain pipe hanging from one of the dark wood eaves of the roof. A week earlier, and the large, pale-pink cherry trees in the garden would have been in full bloom, but time and the rain had tattered these once proud blossoms. There was only one tree with blossoms left, a weeping cherry, always the last to flower among the many varietals of
sakura
. I sat and watched the shivering pink tree valiantly clinging to spring in the face of such a gray day. I was pretty sure that this tree was also an example of
awai
, for my mother had told me that certain colors in Japan are known for both pallor and depth. I stared at this tree as I continued to finish the rest of my meal in silence.

When I went home that day, I was exhausted from the effort of trying to see and to taste depth and to understand everything I had been taught. Tomorrow morning at S
jiji, the young monks would rise at three o’clock while I was still asleep. By the time I woke up, they would have already polished the hallway, meditated, and eaten the first of their three enlightened meals.

A
FEW WEEKS
after my initial visit, I went back to S
jiji for a large meditation session. There were about forty of us—all ages and both genders—and I caught tidbits of others’ conversations. Most were saying they hoped to learn to relax through meditation.

We were all herded into one of S
jiji’s many meeting rooms.
Here, the man I had thought of as the “scary priest” from my previous visit did a presentation on how to meditate, holding up pillows and slippers, reminding me very much of flight attendants explaining how to use a seat belt, while Shiba spoke into a microphone. Shiba explained that during our meditation, he and a couple other monks would be going by with their
ky
saku
. If we seemed sleepy or were not able to hold our positions correctly, they would use the bamboo sticks to tap us lightly on the shoulder. He promised this would not hurt. If we felt we needed a smack—a release of energy, he said—we were simply to put our hands together as if in prayer, and one of the monks would happily oblige. I’ll bet, I thought.

I spent the entire meditation session determined not to get whacked. As I sat, supposedly deep in meditation, I could hear the sliding of the bamboo stick in the monks’ hands as they prepared to hit people on the shoulder.
Slither
,
slither
went the sticks. I could see and feel the monks’ shadows as they passed. The whacking was initially intermittent. But as the minutes accumulated, I began to hear it regularly.
Whack
.
Whack
.
Whack
. One man behind me and another off to my left were hit repeatedly. Each time they were smacked, the sound grew louder. I sat up straighter. I estimated that after two hours, very few of us had not been hit. There was the man to my right. And there was me.

Okay, person on my right, I thought. You and me to the end of the line. And this is what I continued to think for the duration of my sitting.

Toward the end of the three-hour session, a senior priest came into the room and spoke to us. “Please,” he said. “If you need to stretch your legs, do so.” Immediately there was a rustle in the room, followed by a lot of yawning and joints creaking. Still, the man to my right did not move, and neither did I. In a low, sonorous voice, the priest droned on and on about enlightenment and meditation. “You will have been here for three hours,” he said. “When
you go home, I promise you will feel as if you had been on a holiday somewhere far away. You will feel refreshed.” My internal skeptic snorted. So far, I thought the priest sounded as though he were reading from a pre-scripted manual. But then, as though he had heard my skepticism, he said, “Do you think that if any of you meditated at home, you would be able to keep going for three hours? I promise you, you have been able to meditate this long only because we were all together.” Three hours? Had it really been three hours? As I write this now, I find it impossible to contemplate sitting for three hours. I can read for hours. I can write for hours. But to just sit, and to sit up straight at that?

At last we were allowed to stand. We bowed to each other. The man behind me, who had been hit so regularly, looked sheepish. The man sitting next to me said in English, “You sit beautifully.”

“Thank you,” I said in Japanese. I was a little surprised. I, of course, had been paying lots of attention to him, but it had not occurred to me that he was paying attention to me. What was more, the entire time we had been sitting, I had not known what he looked like. I hadn’t even been able to guess his age, but now I was curious. He was older—maybe in his sixties. It can be hard to guess Japanese people’s age. He had a full head of silver, a somewhat rare sight in Japan, as most people either naturally keep their dark locks or dye their hair. He was very trim and wore expensive, unobtrusive clothing in muted shades of gray, the Japanese version of landed English gentry, who are rich and well educated but would be mortified to display the bad taste of wearing anything too showy.

As we all tumbled out of S
jiji in a daze, I hurried to keep up with him.

“Goodbye!” Shiba called out to me. The scary priest even cracked a smile. “Come back!”

“Thanks!” I ran to catch up with my sitting partner, as I now thought of him.

“Are you some kind of
star
?” he asked with an arch note in his voice. “Not everyone gets a special good-bye like that.”

“No, no,” I protested. “That was my first real zazen session. Truly.”

He told me that he was a retired computer engineer and that he meditated every chance he got. He was full of recommendations for other places and other forms of meditation I ought to try. He was fond of an obscure form of Chinese boxing. As we talked, it dawned on me that one reason why I had been able to sit still for so long was because he had been sitting next to me, and that he, like me, had not been hit. It was actually as the old priest had said: I had drawn strength from my neighbor. “You should continue to meditate,” he said to me kindly. “You have very nice form. I hope we meet again.” Then he bowed and walked off briskly.

Outside the temple grounds, a young couple fell into step beside me. It was their first time sitting, and the man had been hit often. “At first it’s just like a tap,” he confided. “But by the end, I guess they get irritated.”

“Bam bam bam!” they laughed together.

I asked if they would consider coming back.

“You know,” said the girl, “this is not the way I normally spend my Saturdays. But . . . I do feel really refreshed.”

It is often said that the Japanese, like other East Asians, champion the group over the individual. “I want you to remember that in Japan, we know how to work together. But in your country, you know how to be an individual,” Semp
had once said to me.

There is a lot of talk these days in Japan about how the nation is losing its sense of community and its ability to work together. I wondered if zazen was one of the vestiges of a time when people had intuited how others around them had felt. Every part of me had rebelled against the actual sitting that day, and yet I couldn’t deny
that now I felt greatly refreshed and comforted by the weird intimacy of just sitting next to a stranger engaged in the same activity.

I wondered what might happen to me if I were to meditate like that every day, for a year, as young monks did when they trained. I wondered what else I might be able to do that I had been sure I could not do before.

EIGHT