Night Boat. Alan Spence

      Mu.

      Whether it was the koans, or the place itself, the mind-numbing rigour, the repetitive routine, I began to feel constrained. I felt a great agitation, a need to get out on the road and walk. I needed movement, a break from the endless sitting. I asked permission from the head priest, and reluctantly he gave me leave to go.

      You can keep up koan practice while walking, he said. In fact it may help you break through. He also insisted I visit other temples, make the journey a pilgrimage rather than rambling and meandering to no great purpose. As I took my leave he called out to me, Have you eaten?

      Yes, I said. And I’ve washed my bowl.

      So it’s empty, he said. You can feast on nothing.

      Walking was good, in all weathers, in wind and rain, scorching sun. I was drenched and frozen, burned and weather-beaten. It was freedom, and I could happily have walked the whole length of Japan. But I was mindful of the head priest’s injunction to visit other temples, so I stopped wherever I could along the way, to lay down my staff and hang up my bag. I ate my rice and washed my bowl, but nowhere was koan study part of the practice. I made the best of it, threw myself into sessions of zazen, and reading texts. I recited the sutras, made endless prostrations. And after a few days I would move on. But everywhere I found the same listlessness, the same lack of intensity, the same quietism, the stagnation of sitting-quietly-doing-nothing.

      I spoke of it to a monk I met on the road, a wild-eyed old reprobate from a village in Kyushu.

      They’re everywhere, he said, with their do-nothing Zen. They sit in rows, hugging themselves. They pick up some leavings from Soto, lick the leftovers from an unwashed bowl, then they dribble it from their mouths and call it wisdom.

      Heaven is heaven, I said, and earth is earth.

      That’s the kind of stuff, he said.

      Men are men, and mountains are mountains.

      Ha! Next time I meet one I’ll tell him, My arse is my arse!

      We laughed as we walked on, along a steep, stony path.

      Bring them somewhere like this, said the monk, and they can’t stand or walk. They can’t take a single step but cling to trees, or crouch down and grab at plants and grasses, anything to keep them rooted to the spot. They’re bloodless and their eyes are dull. They are unable to move for fear of falling.

      They don’t value koan study, I said.

      They don’t even value the words of the great masters, said the monk. The written word terrifies them. And the koan terrifies them most of all. They call koan a quagmire that will suck you under, a tangle of vines that will choke you. But how can your self-nature be sucked under? How can it be choked?

      The wind whipped up and blew in our faces. Heads down, we pushed on, and the monk continued his rant, shouting above the elements.

      I pray for just one mad monk burning with inner fire. Let him perish in the Great Death then rise up again, flex his muscles, spit on his palms and roar out a challenge.

      At this the old monk stopped and let out a great roar that turned into a throaty laugh.

      Break through to kensho, he shouted, to true enlightenment. Only then can you make sense of it all. Only then can you live it.

      I could have continued walking with the old monk, listening to him rave, but he said we had to go our separate ways.

      Sip this poisonous wisdom if you will, he said. But your way is your way. You have poison of your own to dish out.

      At a crossroads near Mishima we went in opposite directions.

      Kensho is all, he called back to me. Break through! Then he waved and was gone.

      TSUNAMI

      I was back on the Tokaido, walking alone. It grew even colder and the wind stung. At one point I felt the ground shake, heard a deep distant rumbling, and the sky darkened and I was caught in a storm. By the time I found shelter, in a patched-up outhouse at a wayside inn, I was drenched and frozen, but grateful to have even the semblance of a roof over my head.

      By the morning the worst of the storm had passed and the rain had eased to a thin soaking drizzle. There were more travellers than usual on the road, coming from the east, from beyond Izu, many of them exhausted and bedraggled. I stopped a few and asked, and the story emerged.

      A huge earthquake had shaken Edo and the surrounding area. The city had burned. The quake had caused a massive tsunami, a great tidal wave that swept inland, drowning everything in its path. The upheaval, the fire and flood, had destroyed half the city and killed thousands. I bowed my head and prayed where I stood, at the side of the road, asking the Bodhisattva of Compassion to have mercy on all those souls.

      I kept walking, broke my journey at a small temple set back from the road. I found myself huddled under a thatched roof with twenty or thirty refugees from the disaster. The temple had little enough in the way of food and bedding, but what they had they gave, and I helped hand out meagre rations and threadbare blankets. I shivered through another night, my old robe wrapped tight about me, staying awake and continuing to invoke the Bodhisattva, the compassionate Kannon.

      One young man sat watching me, eyes wide and staring, face gaunt and drawn, a twitch at the corner of his mouth. I offered him my bowl with what was left of my own portion of broth, but he looked through me, and past me, into the abyss. His face was smeared with grime and ash, lined where tears and snot had run down. For a moment his eyes seemed to bring me into focus and he wiped his face with his hands. Then he spoke, and his voice was cold and toneless, beyond all hope, the voice of someone speaking from hell.

      If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, he said, I would not have believed it.

      He rocked back and forth where he sat, pulled his thin blanket around him.

      When I was a boy and learned to read, he said, I took great delight in spelling out signs and notices, the name on a shop-front, the inscription on a gravestone, directions at a crossroads. Well, there was one sign that made me smile.

      His lips drew back from his teeth, a response to some far memory, but the face was a mask, the eyes dead.

      It was down at the edge of the beach, he said, and it read WARNING. In Event of Earthquake Beware of Tsunami.

      A harsh dry croak racked out of his throat, the pained semblance of a laugh.

      Beware of tsunami! Might as well say if you’re falling from a high tower, beware of the ground coming up to meet you.

      A great sob shook him and he shivered. Again I handed him my bowl with the last mouthful of soup, and this time he took it, swallowed it down, nodded his thanks and handed back the bowl.

      It was chance, he said. I just happened to be inland, on higher ground. I saw the whole thing, from far away, from up above.

      First there was the noise, the great boom way out at sea. The earth shook and I stumbled and fell. I stood up and saw there was mud on my knees. I wiped it and smeared my hands. I stood there, and I looked out, and could make no sense of what I was seeing. In an instant everything had changed. Buildings had disappeared, toppled over. Clouds of dust and smoke rose up. Everywhere fires broke out and flared, fanned by the wind that rushed in from the sea. And that was where my eye was drawn, to the sea.

      I stood in the midst of a great silence, a hush. I could see the shoreline, and the tide receding, further and further out. The beach and the mudflats were wider than they should have been, wet with a dull glisten. A few small boats were left stranded, keeled over. Here and there were people venturing out onto the sand, children running out, out, stopping to pick up something they’d found left behind by the tide. Out.