Chapter Nine Sen #2
“Are you afraid of suffering, Hoshiakari?” Jobo asked. “This world is the middle path between heaven and hell. We are blessed with life. And we are cursed to suffer. I’m no different, though I am a monk.”
Before he left, he handed Sen the knife, now clean. “You are no different either,” he said. “Though you may be born of kings.”
Time passed slowly after that. Sen lost himself in the routine of it, waking before dawn to morning bells and a breakfast of rice or millet gruel and weak twig-tea.
Then Jobo would take him to the woods. “What’re we even doing?
” he asked one morning, as Jobo started their meditations.
He could barely sit still, let alone concentrate his spirit.
“Don’t concentrate,” Jobo said. “Just sit.”
“You’re trying to look like a fool. You do it on purpose.”
“Everything has purpose. Oh, that sounds very wise. I must be a genius!”
Sen rolled his eyes.
“Sit,” said Jobo. “The purpose is not to grasp for truth. The purpose is to awaken. But, like falling asleep, the harder you try, the harder to get there. One day you’ll awaken unconsciously, without thought, and see the illusion of your life, and the truth will already be.
There is no ‘finding’. What is truth? Truth of what?
There is no self. There is no other. It is an illusion. ”
“You know this is why people make fun of you, right?” Sen said. “You’re just trying to sound mysterious.”
“But it is mysterious. Better they make fun of the teachers than follow them blindly. Sit.”
“I don’t like sitting.”
“I don’t like scrubbing my teeth. Sit.”
“We’re not doing anything.”
“The goal is formlessness,” Jobo said.
“I thought you said the goal was awakening.”
“Yes, good!”
Months went by. Each day the same: rise before dawn. Pray, hike the mountains to greet each spirit at the shrines, collect water from the river. The monks trained in physical exercise to keep their bodies sharp, but Sen was getting impatient.
“All you ever speak about is riddles and mystical things,” he complained, weeks later, as they hiked up to the peak.
“What are we, if not mystical things? You’d prefer I wrote an instruction booklet? The little star, still after so long, he wants someone to tell him what to do.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“But it’s what you told me.” Jobo laughed. “I was hung-over the night of my acceptance to the mountain schools, you know that? Oh, a lot to learn. Like you! Now my beard is gray. That’s because I’m approaching the time of my death. Ha!”
“I don’t understand why we have to do all this walking,” Sen grumbled.
“The world of the gods can’t be seen with your eyes.
So how could you presume to think you could understand it with your brain?
At the beginning of my training, my master, Enno, wouldn’t allow me to speak.
I could say nothing but ‘I accept’. It was about surrendering yourself to the universe.
Even if I disagreed, I had to accept it.
Even if I hated it, I had to accept. Even when I thought he was wrong.
I had to accept all that this world brings. ”
They climbed to the heart of the mountain, arriving at the great blue forest falls before sundown. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” Sen said, scowling. “Maybe I should’ve stayed home.”
“Maybe you should.”
“I thought teachers were supposed to help their students!”
Jobo chuckled again. “Oh. That isn’t true.”
Then he turned. “Tell me, have you never encountered a moment – and what is a moment, really? How do you define a single moment of your life – if not for divinity? Have you ever come upon something simple as dew on the grass, or the wisp of steam from your tea in the sunlight, and felt something you couldn’t understand?
It can be anything from the power of the highest waterfall, or the loudest thunderhead the god of storms can make, or small as the simple motion of a child, playing in a puddle.
They are all of them of this earth; that is what we mean when we say ‘gods’. That is why these woods are special.
“If I die, Sen, a part of me will still exist – not my whole spirit, but an essence, no more solid than memory, but just as strong. I give myself to these woods, this land. Each god is all the gods: I pray to the god of this mountain, whose spirit you feel beneath your feet and in the air you breathe; likewise, the spirit folk of the trees and the rivers are gods, and they join the god of the mountain, and are one and the same. When we consecrate a shrine, the gods take residence in a sacred object, divisible but not separate. So, we don’t need to pray only to the giant gods, the great deities of power or war, or the sun or stars or the moon.
The smaller ones, the spirits that live in a stream, or the leaves that fall when the weather changes, they are of this earth, and by finding them again, we may yet be saved.
“It took a long time, but I finally realized the simplest truth: how to stop fighting. With myself, or the gods, or other beings. We say peace is the opposite of war, but do we really understand what that means? So, I sat and learned to ask the questions. Learn to stop fighting, Hoshiakari, and that will be the beginning indeed.”
“I’m not fighting,” Sen said.
“Of course not.” Jobo gave one of his infuriating smiles.
“Anyway, when’d you ever do any fighting?”
“I was not always a crow monk,” Jobo said.
“I had much to learn, like you. The truth is, something dark is coming. I’ve been seeing signs for months.
I don’t know what it is. It may well be the plagues, as those adherents say.
It may be something else. Whatever it is, it’s getting closer. And it feels like…”
He met Sen’s eyes, then wiped his own, kneading with the palms of his hands. “Ah. But never mind. When you’re old like me, you’ll have much to worry over, too. No matter.” He cracked a smile. “You’re young, so you should enjoy it. Been tussling around with anybody I should know?”
“Fuck off!” Sen said, shoving him away.
“It’s only natural… Humans feel what they feel, want what they want, need what they need.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“It’s the most human thing there is. What about that girl Rui, she likes you.”
Sen’s cheeks burned. “Get off it.”
“No?”
“I’m not telling you! I mean, hell!”
Jobo chuckled. “Good. Yes. Probably better.”
“You think everything’s so amusing, don’t you?”
Jobo’s smile fell. “Well,” he said. “It’s better than the opposite.”
He sat quietly, unwrapping a bundle he’d carried up the mountain. “They said you trained with Iyo’s warriors at the castle.”
“I did.”
“And you still want to be like them?”
In his hands was a short training sword made of oak. Sen reached for it, but Jobo pulled away. “Are you afraid of suffering, Hoshiakari?”
“No,” said Sen again. As he had so often.
Jobo sighed. “The truth is, the Ogami’in always wanted me to train you.
” He handed Sen the sword. “She’s worried.
There’s danger in the air. Western monks are snooping in her lands.
Gods are walking through the borders of the earth again.
Peace is soon to crumble… And now, Sen Hoshiakari wants to fight… ”
Sen opened his hands. “Then what do you want of me?”
“If you go in this direction, I will not be able to protect you. You can choose a different path. Our lives are not fixed. The gods don’t carve us out of stone.
Every choice we make changes our fate. The question is not how to choose, Hoshiakari.
The question is, will you be ready? The question is, what will you choose? ”
“I’ll choose what must be done,” Sen said. “That’s the only way to help.”
“Just remember, for people who want to eat their meat, the slaughtering of pigs, that, too, must be done.”
Kitano city lay below them, huge and marvelous at the base of its hill; the river wound behind it, and on the peak, the golden temple being built.
“Kitaiji,” Jobo said. “Temple of hope. The Ogami’in cares for you, Sen. But if you continue on your path, if you want to be a warrior, it means you will be Gensei again. It will be you they call upon when the killing must be done; the knife will be in your hand. And there will be innocents.”
He moved toward the trail, leaving Sen to take in the view, alone.
“That’s what your family is,” he said. “That’s what you must see.”