Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (90 page)

A
FTER THE MEMORIAL
service ended, I went to the visitors’ center to wait for Minami. About five minutes later, he came out to greet me, his head slightly stooped and his face a taut mask of caution and wariness.

“Hello,” he said. He had a low, very masculine voice, but he also spoke briskly, as though constantly plagued by impatience. “Please follow me.”

We made our way to the hotel where I had spent the night that spring. Here again a white, granite Jiz
greeted me cheerfully, framed against a somber wall of polished black marble. I was feeling intimidated by our impending conversation, but the sight of the happy Jiz
cheered me up a little. I exchanged my slippers and followed Minami to the lounge area, where we sat down opposite each other in two enormous armchairs. He arranged his robes around him with fastidious little hand twitches and then settled down, like a cat finally come to rest on a favored pillow. In his left hand, Minami clutched a Buddhist wooden scepter called a
kotsu
or a
nyoi
. The scepter was about a foot long and had been carved in an S-shape, meant to replicate the curve of the human spine. The head of the scepter blossomed in the shape of a bulbous, cerebral
fungus, a symbol of wisdom and intelligence in the Far East. Only high-ranking Buddhist priests can carry these scepters, which are usually used as a tool for emphasizing some teaching point. Minami’s long fingers curled over the top of the
kotsu
, absent-mindedly toying with the coiled, curling head or sliding along the spine. It was a strange and unsettling object, but in its human-form-meets-mushroom appearance, it also conveyed a sense of otherworldly knowing.

By now I had learned that the best way to introduce myself to priests in Japan was to explain that I had family in T
hoku who ran a S
t
Zen temple, and that I had done a pilgrimage to Eiheiji. Indeed Minami’s face brightened, and some of the caution slipped from his eyes.

“Ah, yes. You stayed overnight and did the basic training.”

“When I told my family members, they said to me, Now, imagine doing that every day for years.”

“I was there for twenty years.” As he said this—very dramatically and with deliberate articulation—Minami did not bask in the rosy, beatific glow emanating from so many of the older graduates of Eiheiji I had met. Nor did he project the beleaguered-but-relieved-to-have-come-out-on-the-other-side pride exhibited by some of the younger priests with whom I’d spoken during my travels. There was instead a hint of bitterness mixed with self-confidence in his voice, and I was alerted immediately that I was talking to someone who fell outside the usual parameters of opinion and experience. I was at once intensely curious, but nervous. I did not want to do or say anything stupid.

I said, “I’ve been thinking that D
gen was right. There is really something to training the body, and then letting the brain catch up.”

Here Minami laughed—a short, knowing chortle. He had a habit when he talked of turning his head slightly to the side and keeping his eyes cast down, only every now and then looking up.
The impression this conveyed was of shyness. But such passive mannerisms were at odds with his way of speaking, which was laden with impatient intelligence. “Yes,” he purred, still keeping his head to the side and his eyes cast down. “You Westerners like to know why you are doing things before you do them. Only then will you do what you are asked to do. We train our Japanese differently. We make them do things, and then they learn why later.” He glanced up and looked at me, holding my gaze sharply for an instant, before he looked back down again and stroked the head of his scepter, nodding slightly.

It was an opening that caught me off guard. I was, by now, very familiar with the caution that Japanese people have when coming face-to-face with Westerners. But it is uncommon for someone in Japan to make it so directly clear that he has had his own experiences with Westerners, and that he has observed us and thought about us perhaps even more than we have thought about them.

Minami had known two Italian monks at Eiheiji. Over time, they had come to understand Zen as deeply as anyone else. He also told me that he had been at Eiheiji for three years before he had gone off to Minneapolis to see how Zen training was done in America. “My first thought was that American training is superior because you only bring in people who truly want to understand Zen. But then, over time, I’ve come to see what it is about Eiheiji that has made it so successful for twenty years. We can train
anyone
.”

There was a weird, hidden combativeness to the way Minami was speaking to me. I felt it partly from his voice, a deep, masculine voice that lingered over certain words and at times spit out others. I tried not to take this method of conversation too personally. Hadn’t I just a few days earlier witnessed a dharma combat ceremony in which young priests virtually shouted at each other in question-and-answer format? Perhaps, I thought, this was what it was actually like to speak with another Buddhist priest. If I thought back, there
was something slightly martial about many of my encounters with Japanese priests: the monks on K
yasan, Kaneta’s method of disarming those lost in grief, and even Semp
’s warning that I could not understand Japan.

Before I could say anything else, Minami offered up the following jewel: “My master told me when I entered Eiheiji that I would understand
everything
in three months.” He turned his head coquettishly to the side, eyes downcast. “That was all it would take for
me
to understand the
essence
of the training. But he told me to be quiet and just to observe. And so I
was
. And then, after three years, I began to voice my
opinions
.” The corners of his mouth were still turned down as he smiled slightly. He was the sort of person who frowned even when he smiled. His eyes grew distant, as though looking at a photo of a cherished memory. The purr in his voice became silky. “I was an
outsider
. They called me
Darth Vader
.” He glanced up to see how I had taken this admission.

In my application to speak with Minami, I had stressed that I was curious to learn the venerable priest’s thoughts on how Japan had been coping since the disaster. Minami was in the unusual position as the head of Mount Doom to know many who had suffered as a result of the tsunami. But here he was presenting himself as an outsider, with knowledge of the West and with his own distinct understanding of Buddhism, which didn’t necessarily have anything to do with Eiheiji’s official party line.