Interest by Kevin Gaughen Read Free Book Online Page B

mistake by leaving before his training was complete. He wondered what would have happened had he pursued it. Now, years later, through the ineffable machinations of half-assed revolutionaries, here he was in Japan once again.

9
     
    After meditation, as Len was leaving the hall with the other monks, Mutoku pulled him aside and whispered, “The Great Master wants to meet with you.”
    Len was led into a small room. An elderly, balding monk stood in the corner holding a bell. His face showed no expression, and his eyes were cast downward in respectful Japanese fashion. A tatami mat covered bamboo floors. A sliding door was open onto a rock garden, allowing a gentle breeze to blow through. Droopy Japanese maples rustled softly outside. Old Japan had had a genius for creating architecture that instilled a sense of peace, which Len felt had been lost after the second world war. Walking around Tokyo, now overbuilt with concrete and filled with illuminated, talking advertisements, one got no sense of that old harmony.
    There was no altar in this room, only a large, gaudy, glass jellyfish sculpture against the far wall. It looked like a freshman art student’s glass-blowing project. Len almost snickered at the tackiness of it but managed not to. In the five years he’d spent in the monastery, he’d always thought it odd that the very people who had devoted their lives to letting go of worldly things couldn’t bear to throw a single item in the trash. Most waste disposal was strictly forbidden in the monastery because it was seen as a detriment to the environment; reusing an item until it fell apart was standard operating procedure. Thus, any gifts given, any objects found, were never thrown out but instead repurposed in the temple. There were old hubcaps serving as gongs, Coke bottles as decorations in the garden, old-lady tchotchkes on the altars, and tea tins as flower pots.
    Len looked around again. The old man was still standing in the corner. There were two bowing mats and two little seiza benches toward the center that faced a brightly colored mat of the kind that a very important teacher would sit upon. The position of the mats suggested that he and Mutoku would sit on the benches and the Great Master, upon arrival, would sit facing them on the brightly colored mat.
    Mutoku did not walk into the room. Instead he stood at the doorway upon coming in, hands folded in sashu , in a way that indicated Len should do the same. Len stood and imitated him.
    They stood like that for nearly two minutes before Len spoke up. “Mutoku, when will the Great Master arrive?”
    “Shh! He is here,” Mutoko whispered.
    Len suddenly realized Mutoku was referring to the elderly monk in the corner, and a wave of embarrassment came over him. He’d assumed that the old guy was just a lowly timekeeper or bell ringer, the sort who stood in the corner before every meditation session began. How clever. Len rolled his eyes. They were always making you confront your assumptions, these Zen people.
    Mutoko and the elderly monk nodded to each other without making eye contact. Mutoku walked slowly, deliberately to the mats in the center of the room. Len followed. The elderly monk rang the bell crisply three times. Mutoko did three full bows, touching his nose to the mat each time, in the direction of the ugly sculpture. He remained standing after the last bow. Len clumsily followed his lead in all of this. Then, another minute of standing in pregnant silence before the elderly man rang the bell sharply two more times.
    “Please be seated,” Mutoku whispered, motioning to one of the benches.
    Len sat down, his knees already starting to creak with age. Sitting perfectly still, bolt upright, in meditation created surprising demand on the body. He wondered how much longer he’d need to stay here to accomplish whatever it was he was supposed to be doing.
    The old man put the bell down softly in the corner, bowed to the room, then quietly shuffled out the