Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (33 page)

And then there was the most important thing: we all had to finish eating at the same time.

The food was delicious, but I chafed against the rules. I was
certain that because of my foreign face, everyone would be looking to see if I could eat correctly. It was spring, and so the menu included some seasonal foods, like bamboo shoots, which crunch in the mouth. I chewed these very slowly. A bowl clattered. Our eyes darted to the source of the noise; the mother I had met in the bath had dropped her bowl. I looked around the room to see who was eating what, as though to get permission to start another dish; there were nine bowls in all. And then an odd thing happened. I could, in fact, sense exactly where everyone was in the process of eating his or her meal. I could feel that the woman next to me had eaten only a third of her food, and I slowed down accordingly so she would not be left behind. I could feel that the man all the way to the left had finished—too early. I could feel that everyone noticed he had finished too early. I could feel that everyone was alarmed.

The monk who was watching us eat told us that we had two extra pieces of food by our tables: a banana and a sweet. We were allowed to take these to our rooms to eat later. I looked at the girl from the bath, and she winked at me. I winked back. The monk then talked us through the exact order in which we were to silently stack our bowls and push them to one end of the table. Now, said the monk, it was time to rise and to go to meditation.

Despite having sat on my knees for the last twenty-five minutes, I was able to stand up in one motion. Around me, everyone else shot up. But in the corner of the room, there was a problem. A young man—the one who had finished eating at least five minutes before everyone else—could not stand up. His legs were stuck in the
seiza
position. He pushed his arms off the floor to free his body, but his feet would not cooperate. We all began to gather around him, waiting for him to stand.

He was a good-looking guy whom I guessed to be in his thirties. He was tan and extremely fit and either worked out regularly or
played some kind of sport. He was also quite tall, at least six feet. I wondered, absent-mindedly, what a jock was doing at Eiheiji.

The monk attending to us suggested that the man relax and stretch out his feet. Everyone was waiting, he said, and by just waiting here for the man to stand, we were wasting time. It was fine that the young man could not sit
seiza
. Even I, in Japanese, suggested that he stretch out his legs and wake them up. He ignored us. “
Daij
bu
.” I am fine, he said. “I want to stand up properly.”

The seconds ticked. We continued to wait. I felt the agonizing pain of knowing that someone was doing something
wrong
. Can’t you see this is
wrong
, I wanted to say to him. Again the monk asked the young man to please stretch out his legs and to stand up. The point of dinner, he said, was to move together. To learn to move as a group. But the man persisted. I grew increasingly tense and frantic. Finally the man was able to hoist himself up. There was an audible sigh of relief from the group. Off we went to our rooms, before we were led to meditation.

T
HE
J
APANESE HAVE
a phrase:
k
ki wo yomu
. It means roughly, “to read the air” or “to read the atmosphere.” If you use this phrase in Japan, everyone knows what you mean. To be truly Japanese—one of the characteristics that supposedly make the Japanese so special—is to have an ability to immediately sense a change in the atmosphere and to adjust accordingly. But this man, with his not eating on time and his holding us back because he could not stand up, had not been able to read the air. Occasionally I heard from older people that the Japanese were unlearning this ability and that this was a problem. Reading the air had been so necessary when most Japanese had been farmers and had relied on cooperation to make their rice crops grow. “Now we are becoming too much like
you,” relatives said, by which they meant “too Western” and unable to read the air.

I was alarmed by my reaction to this man. I had wanted him to get up and in fact had been deeply frustrated that he couldn’t. I had even decided that this man—this jock—was
difficult
.

I recalled my conversation with Hayashi when I first visited S
jiji, and how he had been troubled by the bullying he had witnessed during his three years of study. In my impatience with the very tall jock, I saw the seeds of a bully.

One of the things that D
gen stressed repeatedly in his teaching and writing was that the body needed to be trained and that the mind would follow. My dance teachers had always said something similar: “how you dance is how you are.” This was always a great irritation to me because while I am a competent dancer, I am not a great dancer. And I have met plenty of wonderful dancers who left much to be desired as people. A bookish sort of person at heart, I had always believed that it was what I thought that mattered most, not how my body moved. And yet, weirdly, in the eating-together exercise, a great deal about myself had been revealed to me, including excessive pride.

N
OT LONG AFTER
dinner, we were recalled to the hallway, and from there we walked silently as a group to the meditation room. Once again we were instructed in how to walk and how to remove our shoes and climb up on the elevated meditation platform. As I sat, I listened intently for the sound of the
ky
saku
, but I didn’t hear it. In fact, the entire time we were sitting, no one was hit at all. I started to relax into the zazen position and focused simply on the sound of my breath.

A few minutes before our meditation ended, I heard someone enter the room. He was breathing loudly, and I wondered if he were
ill or had some kind of a lung problem. Then the visitor began to talk. His voice was warm and kind, and he asked us to stretch out our legs if we were uncomfortable. Around me, bodies began to melt. The man said that even if we were able to meditate for only a few minutes a day like this, we would learn to be more comfortable within our own skin. The world today did not teach people how to be comfortable with their own bodies. Modern people treated their bodies like objects. A moment later, he asked us all to stand up and to come join him in an adjoining room for a talk.

His name was Maruko K
h
, and he was a priest from Nara. He congratulated us on having completed our session, and said that we might think that meditation would be something we’d get better at doing as we got older, but in fact this was not true. Maruko had learned recently of a study conducted at T
h
University by the scientist Arita Hideo, which revealed that the brain waves of a novice meditator were identical to those of a veteran. Meditation could help us immediately by raising our levels of dopamine. Science had proved that D
gen was right; all we needed to start down the path of enlightenment was our bodies. Even a body as sickly as Maruko’s had been helped by this discipline.