Tengu (35 page)

At home, winter still held the countryside. Although the season’s light was thin and washed out, the sun was beginning to work its magic. I could feel it in the fading heat of sunset as I stood in the fields, letting the red warmth brush my face lightly before the wind scoured it away. And even though my breath steamed in the air and snow clung to crevices beneath the trees, I knew that spring was coming. As the sun went down and the world cooled, winter strengthened its faltering grip on the world. The air grew blue as the light faded, as if to remind me that the season of ice was with us yet.

I meditated on change and continuity. On confronting evil and the toll it takes. I thought about life’s harsh struggle that, on my better days, I believe is the forge of the spirit.

The long walks still hurt me, a bone-deep moaning in the body. It waxed and waned, and I was slowly mending, but it persisted like a bad memory. I would have done the walks no matter what. It wasn’t just that the rehab people said I needed them. There was comfort in the solitude of the upstate forest and fields, and the circular nature of meandering paths that went nowhere and always led me back to my starting point.

All through the long winter, my teacher struggled as well. It was disorienting for me to see him so vulnerable, to see the master humbled. The soft tissue damage from the Tengu’s torture had been devastating, and the physical therapy required would have drained a much younger man. Staying in his apartment above the
dojo
was out of the question. He needed access to therapy and daily support in coping with the littlest things. Yamashita was exhausted by the scope of his injuries and the fight it would take to come back even partially to his old level of fitness. I never underestimated him; he still had more to teach—one thing still brought a fierce glint to his eyes.

“The
dojo
,” he told me. “The students have been without us long enough.”

“They can wait,” I told him. I had spoken with some of the senior students and they were rotating to cover classes.

“
Ie
,” he snarled. No. “They have been without a master too long, Professor. Go to them.”

“I’ll stay with you,” I said, but he shook his head even as I spoke. He was thinner now, and you could see the lines of muscle that stretched up his neck.

“No,” he ordered. “The
dojo
is yours now . . . ”

“It is not!” I protested.

He looked at me sharply. “Do not interrupt me, Burke. This is no time for self-delusion. You will go and teach them. I . . . have other battles to wage.” And he crossed his arms across his chest to signal an end to the discussion.

Yamashita settled into the Zen Mountain Community, a Buddhist center a few hours north of Manhattan. The abbot was an old acquaintance who arranged for Yamashita’s daily trips to a local hospital for therapy. I spent my weeks in Brooklyn, running the
dojo
, and prowling the empty loft above it, worried about the invisible wounds that afflicted my teacher. I was still not really up to anything challenging—in the training hall, I mostly directed the students and used the senior people to demonstrate—so I could only imagine what Yamashita was going through. On the weekends, I spent the days with him, noting slight signs of improvement, waiting for the old Yamashita to reemerge. I realize now that we had both been inalterably changed by our experiences and that things would never go back to what they were. But change meant that we had endured—
gambatte
.

Often, we rose at dawn and stretched. It was painful to watch Yamashita force his muscles to relearn what they had once known so easily. After a session, his forehead was dappled with sweat. I conferred with the physical therapist on a regular basis to get a sense of how things were going.

“He’s got a tremendously high pain threshold,” the PT told me. “He can push himself farther than most of my patients . . . ”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” I told him.

He nodded. “Well . . . look . . . he’s old. It takes time for the tissue to regenerate. And some of the elasticity is not going to come back fully. Ever. And he knows it. He’s going to push and push and push and ultimately, he’s going to improve, but he’ll never be the same.”

I wanted to argue with the therapist. His verdict was the last thing I wanted to hear. But I saved my breath. My teacher has surprised people before.

Over the months, I saw small signs of progress.
Sensei
still tired easily and took naps late in the afternoon. I let him rest, taking the opportunity for long walks by myself in the woods around the monastery.

His legs were continuing to give him problems and the therapist suggested a cane. I recoiled at the image of my
sensei
tottering along with a rubber tipped monstrosity. I brought him a
bokken
, the wooden sword we use to train with, instead.

Yamashita looked at me and smiled briefly. “Ah. An old friend.” He held it gingerly.

“Perhaps it’s time you held him again,” I said. He said nothing, but carried it with him from then on, using it as a support. I hoped it would serve as a reminder as well.

Every weekend after that, we would go slowly through the motions of sword
kata
—the performance routines used to mold technique. Sensei crept through the
kata
, like a man newly blind feeling his way across a once-familiar room. But he made the trip.
Little things
, I thought as we trained in a feeble parody of our old practice.
Tiny steps
.

And now I was the one who pushed, who forced my partner to go further, to accept the pain. One afternoon, near the usual close of our session, I pushed a little too hard.

“Burke,” Yamashita said, breathing heavily, “I cannot.”

“You can,” I insisted, and brought my sword to bear on him in the ready position.

“No,” he sighed. “Enough for today.”

I stood there, the tip of my sword threatening him. “
Mo ichido
,” I demanded. One more time.

“I cannot!”

I inched forward aggressively. “Burke!” he warned. But I didn’t back off.

He saw me set myself for an attack and his nostrils flared in anger. “Do not push me,” he warned.

I began a short, chopping motion that would slam down into his forearm. He saw it coming and could tell from the set of my body that this was not going to be some gentle slow motion parody. I was going for the real thing. “Burke!” he warned again. “Do not!”

But it was too late—I was committed. His body, worn as it was, acted instinctively and he brought his own
bokken
up and around to slam into my attacking blade. It was a little move, but tight, hard and precisely executed—a flash of the old Yamashita. My sword was beaten down and away, the attack defeated.

He glared at me momentarily, but then a rueful smile played across his face. Yamashita gave a small, quiet snort. “As always, Burke, there is more to you than meets the eye.”

“I have a good teacher,” I answered.

“As do I,” he said gruffly. He bowed slightly and turned away. But I noticed that as he left, he held the sword like a weapon and not like a crutch.

I wondered whether I was worthy to be a teacher. I’ve mastered some of the way of the sword—the externals, the technique—but deep down I know I’m not the equal of my master. I don’t know whether I’ll ever think of death as something light as a feather. I wandered the trails around the monastery, feeling a mixture of sadness, hope, and confusion. Maybe I’m a fraud.

I shuffled through the old leaves that the maples had surrendered to earth at the beginning of the winter. And it struck me for all these years, although I had always believed that training in the art was a vehicle for something else, that I had never really grasped what that goal was. It wasn’t my ability to wield a sword or my commitment to training that mattered. It had to be something else. In the final analysis, skill fails or fades. All that is left is our spirit, and the willingness to endure in the service of something larger than ourselves. The old masters knew that some things were too precious to abandon, no matter what the cost. People like Baker understood that as well as Yamashita. Life seemed to me too bittersweet to be surrendered lightly. And our connection to each other is too strong to be severed by fear. It was not that our paths are always easy—it is rather that they seem to me to be worth the effort to walk.

And my path is one that flows along next to my teacher. It’s different from what it was in the past and perhaps not what I expected, but we are still connected, like two wheels of the same cart—distinct, yet linked together.

As I wandered down the wooded slope and into a clearing, I paused to ease the muscles of my left side. The air smelled clean and I caught the scent of earth and water. The sun was working the ground, softening the frost’s grip. I probed aimlessly in the mast at the foot of a dormant maple tree, and the matted leaves humped up to reveal the dark wetness that lay underneath. There, just uncoiling and whitely translucent, was the first tentative shoot of new growth.

I made my way back to the monastery. It was time to work again with my teacher, to coax him along a hard road and back to his life. I thought of the effort it took for him just to move, and the pain and weariness that etched his face. He had changed. So had I. But I could still see the feeble spark of spirit in his eyes, and I would work hard to feed it. In the end, it didn’t matter whether this frail old man returned to his former self. What mattered was the fact that we would totter along this new path together.

Beauty in the most unexpected of places.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Donohue is a nationally known expert on the culture and practice of the martial arts and has been banging around the dojo for more than 30 years. He has trained in the martial disciplines of aikido, iaido, judo, karatedo, kendo, and taiji. He has dan (black belt) ranks in both karatedo and kendo.

John has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His doctoral dissertation on the cultural aspects of the Japanese martial arts formed the basis for his first book,
The Forge of
the Spirit
. Fiction became a way to combine his interests and
Sensei
, the first Connor Burke thriller was published in 2003. John Donohue resides in New Haven, CT.

Also by John Donohue…

Novels
Sensei
Deshi
Kage

Nonfiction
The Overlook Martial Arts Reader
Complete Kendo
Herding the Ox: The Martial Arts as Moral Metaphor
Warrior Dreams: The Martial Arts and the American Imagination
The Human Condition in the Modern Age
The Forge of the Spirit: Structure, Motion, and Meaning in the Japanese Martial Tradition

BOOKS FROM YMAA