Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (35 page)

The chanting was enormous and swollen, an early-dawn Mormon Tabernacle choir in the mountains. As soon as one sutra ended, another began. Sometimes the monks whipped little books out of their robes and held the tomes up straight in front of their eyes, elbows at a ninety-degree angle. Some monks knew the sutras by
heart and didn’t need their books. The style of chanting varied: now fast, now slow. The pitch went up and down. There was one unusual style of chanting: it did not rest on a tone but sounded like the scattered, slightly crazed chanting of bees.

The tightly coordinated, purposeful manner in which the men chanted and moved reminded me very strongly of ballet and the inner discipline dancers require to keep the body under control. But unlike dancers, these monks had not auditioned to get into a touring company; most were born into their roles due to an accident of fate. I was accustomed to thinking that talent was the decisive factor in whether or not someone could dance or move with arresting agility. Was it, in fact, possible to teach anyone to move with such graceful precision?

I recalled an incident I’d witnessed a couple of months earlier. I had just arrived in Japan and was at the Odawara train station on my way to see my relatives. It was rush hour, and the train station was full of young people on their way home from work and school. Suddenly, a young man who couldn’t have been any older than eighteen dropped a handful of change. Instantly, men and women stopped and began to pick up the coins. The reactions were spontaneous, and though completely unplanned, they had the look of an organized effort, like a flash mob. In less than thirty seconds, a dozen people, all of whom were unrelated, had picked up the change, handed it to the young man, and then continued on their way, melting back into the flow of rush-hour pedestrians. Later I wondered if I would have been able to seamlessly join the coin-collecting effort, which seemed to be coordinated by nothing more than instinct.

The rest of the morning at Eiheiji continued with a tour of the lower grounds—D
gen’s grave, a smaller temple, a meditation room—and breakfast, during which the divorced jock again finished eating too quickly and again had difficulty standing up. Then
my stay came to an end. The great gate was opened. A few tour buses were already parked outside.

In my room, there was a little notebook for guests to record their impressions of Eiheiji. I sat and read some of the entries. One after another, previous visitors praised Maruko. More than one person wrote that he or she was going to leave Eiheiji with the resolve to live a better and happier life. One person wrote that he had decided not to kill himself. Although it is difficult for me to write in Japanese, I added my lines of praise. There was a knock on my door.

A young priest came by to let me know that Maruko had asked to see me. He had noticed my avid note-taking. He thought perhaps we could sit and talk.

M
ARUKO HAD A
small office on the same floor as the registration desk. One wall was completely lined with books and a few photographs and mementos. The center of the room was dominated by a long, low table, which Maruko apparently used both as a desk and as a place to drink tea. When I entered his room, he was seated compactly on a square pillow. With sparkling eyes, he greeted me and asked me where in America I was from. I gave him the usual spiel: I was from California but lived in New York and had family with a temple in Iwaki.

Maruko reciprocated with a brief story of his life: His own temple was erected by Prince Sh
toku, which meant that it was very old. But it was destroyed in the nineteenth century, during the Meiji Restoration, when the emperor was reinstated and the feudal lords thrown out of power. That struggle loosened popular resentment against numerous temples in Japan, many of which had grown wealthy and corrupt in feudal years. Maruko’s temple was not much more than a ruin when he took it over, and he spent the next seventeen
years begging in order to raise enough money to restore it. He now divided his time between his own temple and Eiheiji, where he was one of a number of senior priests, rather the way a corporation has many vice presidents. When he was finished talking, he asked me if I had any questions.

I said I had two. I asked him why priests at S
jiji had been so willing to use the bamboo stick, while no one had been hit at Eiheiji. Instantly, Maruko’s face flitted into hardness. The
ky
saku
was something he never used, and he trained the young men who worked with him never to use it either. He liked to oversee guests at Eiheiji because he wanted us to leave with a positive and true impression of Zen. The
ky
saku
was an invention of the Edo period and had nothing to do with D
gen. There were priests—particularly at S
jiji—who abused the
ky
saku
. This bothered him tremendously because zazen meditation was here to help us and should not require any physical beating.

I asked him then about the word
gamman
. Among the articles I had read in Western newspapers about Japan’s ability to deal with the March 11 disaster, I frequently ran across the assertion that people from T
hoku were particularly good at
gamman
, a kind of Japanese stoicism. Somewhere I had read that
gamman
had entered the Japanese language via Zen Buddhism, and that residents of T
hoku were good at
gamman
because Zen was widespread there. I wanted to know if this was true.