Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (51 page)

The Buddha will lead you to the water, Ry
shin said, but you are the one who will have to force yourself to drink. All difficulties that are placed before us are placed there to teach us, and we must
try to learn from them. When we do not like people, we must ask instead what it is in the person we are supposed to see that is good and what the situation is trying to teach us. That is why, he said, he had been able to persist at Sh
j
shinin, despite the fact that the K
yasan bureaucracy did not want to recognize his right to inherit the temple.

K
kai said that if you come to a lake, you can be the kind of person who looks up the word “lake” and tries to figure out what it is based on its properties. K
kai suggested it was better to go straight into the lake and figure it out as you swim.

Ry
shin laughed a lot as he talked, as though he was aware of how absurd he sounded. But he also seemed quite fond of absurdity, gleefully asking me if I wasn’t amused, too, by the prospect of meditation preventing frostbite, or that sleeping on the ground within a six-inch space could reveal one of earth’s secrets. Gone was the jaded, irritated man who had performed the purification ceremony. He was in his element—a teacher who enjoyed making the difficult questions of Buddhism easy and manageable. After he spoke for a while like this, in the dark room with all the fluttering candles and the green leaves on the altar, he said it was time to meditate.

He said that K
kai knew that people needed beauty in order to focus and to learn, and that this was why in Shingon, one looked at a mandala with the Sanskrit character for “A,” pronounced “ah,” which was the first syllable in Sanskrit, English, and Japanese. He said that when a baby is born, it exhales and cries. And when we die, we take in a breath and then die.

I said I thought that people exhaled when they died. No, he said, we just breathe in. The air leaves us only when we are already dead. And this is why, he said, the breath is so important when you meditate. He asked me to visualize a large cup in my torso. And then he asked me to breathe.

First, I exhaled all the air in my lungs. Then, as I inhaled, I
imagined filling my lungs with a pure liquid like milk. I imagined exhaling all the way down to my diaphragm, and then inhaling to my diaphragm. Then I exhaled harder, emptying everything from all over my body. I imagined the new air filling up my lungs and going through my veins and into my capillaries. Then I closed my mouth and breathed through my nose and focused on the mandala, with my eyes half closed.

At first, I would just stare at the letter “A.” One day, I would close my eyes and see the symbol in my imagination. Eventually the letter would float out at me. It would enter into my body, and it would fill me up and I would be in it, as though I were sitting in the moon. Then I would practice sending the letter back out to the painting. Much later, I would be able to bring the letter back into my body, except this time we would both travel out into space.

Ry
shin told me that it was okay for my mind to be skeptical, even clouded. Meditation was supposed to be like looking at the moon. Occasionally, a cloud would come in front of my mind. But this was just fine. No cloud stayed in front of the moon forever. Something, he said, always blows a cloud away.

So we sat together and looked at the Sanskrit “A” suspended on the easel. The whole time, I had this strange feeling of being in the forest and looking at K
kai’s mausoleum from a slight angle, from the left and as though I was a bit up in the air. The letter “A” did not float into my body—it did move, but it seemed to want to go at my head. It dawned on me that at this moment, on K
yasan and maybe even at Eiheiji, or in Tibet, other people were meditating. We were all sitting together. If you did a Google Earth satellite photo of the world, and put in little people-shaped icons where everyone was sitting, it would look an awful lot like a modern version of the mandalas I had seen in the museum that afternoon. And what if I added in everyone praying? Everyone in a mosque or a church? There would be more little people-shaped icons sitting together.