Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (50 page)

On the floor, a two-foot-high easel displayed a square painting of the Sanskrit character for “A.” The “A” had been painted in black ink inside a white circle, with a lotus flower drawn very lightly on the bottom. The rest of the paper surrounding the circle was black. Candlelight illuminated the painting from behind, so it glowed like a small moon. Now I didn’t feel like I was in a room at all, or at least not an ordinary room. I was in some kind of planetarium, and the world had been stripped away, and around me stars and planets trembled. “Have a seat.” Ry
shin patted the pillow next to him and started to talk.

“T
HE POINT OF
Zen, as I understand it, is to be nothing. To be in the void.” He scoffed. “What is . . .
nothing
?”

He picked a dish up off the altar—the gesture was meant to seem casual, but it was full of dramatic flourish. Look at this dish right here, he said. Will this be here in a million years? No. So it is here. But it is not here. You know about atoms? K
kai thought about atoms long before we were able to see them. If we had a thread that was thin enough, we could thread it through the cup and it would go out the other side. And so the cup is here, but it is not here. If enough time were to go by, the cup would not be here, but if we were to look for its atoms, we would find them scattered around the universe, which means the cup would be everywhere. And in the same way, the Buddha is everywhere. The point of Shingon is not to be nothing, but to understand that everything is and is not actually concrete. That’s it.

Twelve hundred years of history, thousands of pages of ink
spilled on the subject of what the Buddha meant by entering the “void” and “nothingness.” For me, this was the simplest, clearest explanation I had ever heard.

“Do you have a pen?” he asked.

I did. He wrote down two phrases in Chinese from the Heart Sutra:

I have only a rudimentary ability to read Chinese, but I knew these characters. The character
means “heart,” with the two little marks in the upper right corner acting as little heart beats. The second two characters can be translated to “are very.” The third means “color.” For me, the phrase seemed to read, “Your heart has many colors. There are many colors in your heart.” Ry
shin smiled indulgently. He said that a closer translation would be, “Matter is in your heart. Your heart is in matter. Everything is the same thing. The point of meditation is to feel this deeply. Within your heart.” He touched his left breast.

He told me about his friend who had started out as a freelance cameraman, and who had gone to India to photograph homeless people, and then he decided to live like a homeless person in order to get their point of view. He started sleeping on the streets, and he learned that for homeless people, the air six inches above the ground is different from air that is higher. People who sleep on the streets sleep within that six inches and know about a quality of air and size of space that most people do not. The world was full of such seemingly hidden spaces.

Then the friend decided to go to Tibet. He hiked through the mountains and became extremely hungry and asked to join a monastery. The monks there told him to bring some water up from a
nearby stream. They gave him a bucket, and he did as they asked. For days he brought the monks water, until he was finally invited to join the monastery.

They taught him to meditate. His focal point was a small window with no glass. Ry
shin held up his hands to show me how small—just a foot across. “This small!” Out the window was a view of the Himalayas. The monks told Ry
shin’s friend to “go to the mountains,” but they didn’t mean that he should physically go there. They meant that he should fly there. And so he did. Ry
shin’s friend noticed that some monks had lost fingers due to frostbite. Done correctly, however, meditation aided circulation and kept most of the monks’ fingers warm and dry. Even though they were up high in the Himalayas and there was no heating and the meals were sparse and they wore thin robes, the monks were comfortable.

The man came back to Japan and became a Rinzai Zen priest and continued to pray and prostrate himself every day, not for enlightenment, but for everyone else. He taught meditation too, and Ry
shin considered him to be a master. He asked me to visit his friend someday.

Then Ry
shin talked a little bit more about Shingon. K
kai once said that if you are a doctor and you walk along a mountain path, you will look at the plants and will know how they can be used to cure different ailments. A different person will walk along the same path and not know any of this, but that doesn’t mean the plants don’t have this power—they still do—it’s just that the person doesn’t know about them. A mineralogist will look at rocks and know that a precious stone is buried deep inside, but another person will look at them and just see rocks. In the same way, the Buddha is always inside a person, but that person has to recognize it.