a python is conceived, part 2

When I finished my last post about the birth of Truth of the Python, I made it seem that I had a definite sense of direction in my desire to seek spiritual truth, but it wasn’t really that way. I did have an urge toward or a sense of the divine, and a conviction that nothing in life, including my writing, would have any meaning for me apart from my relationship with the divine.

When I read The Way of Zen by Alan Watts while traveling in 1979, I felt sure that the Zen Buddhists did indeed have a path to the full realization of ultimate truth—what the Buddhists call enlightenment. But how could I, in Vancouver, follow that path, even if I got up the decisiveness and the nerve? Could I just pack my bags and head to a Buddhist monastery in Japan? What would happen?

In about 1980 I came across a book that told me: The Empty Mirror by Janwillem van de Wetering, a Dutch writer of, I think, crime novels. For he had done that very thing: inspired by Zen, he had packed a bag, traveled to Kyoto, Japan, and simply shown up on the porch of a Zen monastery there. I remember the response he got after waiting around and eventually being met by someone who could speak English: “The abbot wants to know why you wish to leave your luggage in our hall”—or words to that effect. With difficulty he managed to explain his purpose, and, again with difficulty, to be accepted as a postulant.

Yahoo! A dream come true! Not exactly. Life as a Zen novice was hard. It was doubly, triply hard because van de Wetering spoke no Japanese, and he was unable to sit in the lotus posture required by their tradition. The locals, used to sitting on the floor cross-legged, had little difficulty with this, but for van de Wetering the meditation sessions became ordeals. He took to begging off sick so he could escape the pain.

One boon for van de Wetering was the presence of an American at the monastery, an ex-soldier who had become a senior student. This student helped him a lot in the time that he was there, but van de Wetering still had to face the punishing zazen sessions and the weekly interview with the abbot to try to answer his koan.

He never did solve his koan—at least, not while he was at the monastery. Some months later, maybe a year or more, he left again, feeling perhaps no closer to enlightenment, but no doubt with plenty of respect for Zen as a discipline.

What about me? Did I think I could do any better than Janwillem van de Wetering? Did I have his initiative and perseverance$151;his guts? Could I solve a Japanese koan in any finite time? I didn’t seem likely to me. It didn’t seem likely at all.

But if that really were the only avenue to capital-T Truth, could I simply give up like that? Didn’t I owe it to myself to try? Shouldn’t I at least fail after trying, instead of conceding defeat beforehand?

These thoughts contributed to the shadow of unhappiness that lay over my life at that time. Perhaps only very few people ever found a thread that could lead them to enlightenment; the great majority would never find it. Indeed, the great majority would never want it and never miss it. But I was not one of those. I was conscious of my want. Perhaps I was living in a time of mass spiritual starvation, when food could be found only by the fortunate few, while the rest simply starved. And I was to be one of those.

Or maybe, just possibly, there were other answers. Might there not be nourishing food for the spirit in places other than a monastery in Kyoto? Soon I was to glimpse that maybe, indeed, there was such a thing.

To be continued. . . .