Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (32 page)

Guests who spend the night at Eiheiji are nominally treated as though they are in religious training. The more nights you stay, the more intense the training. The day I went, there were twelve of us, all with our own rooms on the same floor in the guest center. The hallways and stairwells of the facility were very institutional looking—fluorescent lighting, a whining elevator, and beige linoleum tiles. But on the inside, the guest rooms and practice rooms were suffused with atmosphere. Each room was seven to eight tatami mats in size, and warm and inviting. I had a balcony too, with a view of the courtyard below and the dark-green cedar trees and moss-covered rocks. By contrast, the monks have neither air-conditioning nor heating, though it’s hard to know exactly what the dormitory looks like, as photography is never allowed.

I was asked to wait in my room until someone returned to attend to me. I sat for a few minutes, but the long trip in the toilet-free, one-car train I had taken to get here meant that I was very eager to go to the bathroom. I didn’t see how anyone would mind if I slipped out.

As it happened, people did mind very much. On my way out of the bathroom and back to my room, I was intercepted by two monks who seemed flustered that I was wandering about on my own. One ushered
me back to my room. There was a “way” to go to the bathroom, they explained. It involved bowing to the small statue of the Ususamary
bodhisattva in an altar just outside the bathroom door. Had I even noticed the altar? Before I took a bath, I was to bow before a different altar, home to the Battabara bodhisattva. I was not, under any circumstances, to talk while I was out in the hallway, in the bathroom, or in the bath. As I circulated these public spaces, I was also to keep my arms and hands in a specific position—the relaxed
gassh
position—in which my hands were clasped in front. Just now, I had done everything incorrectly, though I had at least managed to properly exchange my hallway slippers for the ones in the toilet, and then exchange them back again.

Years of training in dance classes led me to immediately try to mimic the
gassh
. “Like this?” I clasped my hands and held my arms out stiffly.

The monk look troubled. He was very young and from the countryside in Aichi Prefecture, not too far from where my mother had been born. His family temple dated back to the Muromachi era (fourteenth century). Unlike Hayashi or Shiba from S
jiji, this young monk had not the slightest whiff of city about him, and he did not seem to know how to behave in any way other than with complete sincerity. “Well, don’t let anyone know I told you this, but you don’t have to be so stiff. You can relax. But please, don’t let anyone know I told you.”

There was more. My bed had been laid out for me, but in the morning I had to fold up the mattress, remove the sheet and the pillowcase, and put them out in the hallway. The mattress had to be folded in thirds. The pillow went on one specific shelf, and the mattress on another.

It was 3:30 in the afternoon, and we would be leaving for zazen meditation in two hours. I was encouraged to take my bath now
and to remember to bow and not talk. There would be no lock on my door, and I should take my valuables with me. With a bow, and arms in perfect
gassh
, the monk retreated from my room.

T
HERE WERE THREE
women in the bath. One sat perfectly still in the water, a paragon of erect and silent fortitude, her back to the door. When she left the bath, she bowed and never once showed any sign of discomfort, but she made a great display of drying herself off in the bathing area so she would not drip in the changing room. My twitchy Western self was immediately irritated by her calm and her perfect consideration for others.

The other two women were mother and daughter. Though we had been instructed not to speak, they began to talk to me as soon as the Perfect One had departed. They were staying in the room next to me, they said. They were nervous. They had never done this before, and now that we were all here and committed to staying overnight, there would be no escape. I told them I was nervous too.

“I forgot to pack snacks. And coffee,” I said.

“Coffee!” the daughter cried. “I forgot coffee too! And we will be getting up at three a.m. to meditate!”

I told her I had some Excedrin, and I would be taking that, at which point she laughed. She had noticed that her room had come with a complimentary cookie. I ought to check my room for a cookie too. We all swore to save our cookies for the 3:00 a.m. wakeup call. Our secret alliance sealed, we settled our imperfect bodies into the water, and it occurred to me for the first time that here I was in the company of women, all of us trying to do our best to follow the rules of a religion that had been established by men.

At 5:00 p.m., a monk rang a bell, and the great wooden gate of Eiheiji was closed. Just like that, most visitors were shut out. Almost immediately, the temple took on a different atmosphere. All I could
see out the window were the shapes of slim, young, black robe–clad monks. The lumbering, photographing tourists were gone. I was reminded of the times I had gone to see dress rehearsals at the ballet in New York. On stage, there were stagehands checking the lights and the props, while dancers jumped up and down to warm up. Then the lights dimmed, and when they came back on, only the dancers remained, and the stage suddenly was fraught with tension.

At 5:30 p.m., we were summoned from our rooms and asked to stand in two lines in the hallway. There was a range of ages—from single guests in their twenties, to a few married couples in their fifties. Everyone stood with arms in the
gassh
-relaxed position, and then we were marched away to dine. No one spoke a word.

We were going to eat
sh
jin ry
ri
for dinner in a formal, Japanese-style room. We were to sit on our knees on a square pillow on the tatami floor and eat with chopsticks while leaning over a lacquered table only a foot off the ground. There were additional rules. There was a way to pick up a bowl and to eat from it. When I put the bowl back down, I was not to make a sound. Not a single clink. I must never eat from a bowl while it was still on the table; I had to hold it. I was to keep my mouth closed. I should not talk, I should not slurp, and I should try to eat any noisy foods, like pickles, as silently as possible. Everyone would hear me if I made any noise. When I needed to put down my chopsticks, I was to place them at a forty-five-degree angle on the bowl on the lower righthand corner, with the eating end pointing out. We were to eat absolutely everything; there should be no leftovers. Living things had given up their lives so we could eat, and we were not to do something as wasteful as to leave even a grain of rice. There would be a way to stack the bowls, and we would be guided in this, but we were to do it silently.