The previous installment of this story is here.
During my adult life…especially before I found Jungian analysis…I used any number of things in an addictive way. For a while I used food to numb my pain and went from a size 7 to 16. For a while I used shopping. While I was living with Xavier in Japan, my vehicle of escape from uncomfortable feelings was alcohol.
Xavier was not a drinker. I recall one night when he and I were out on the town. As usual, I was dying to get smashed. He wanted no part of my ordering any sake in the club where we were enjoying karaoke, but I managed to find a vending machine that sold some really nasty and cheap rotgut. I put my coins in the machine and glugged down the rice-based liquid that tasted not too unlike the PGA that my high school chums and I used to bring to parties to spike the punch. This is the sort of stuff that makes for the most brutal hangovers known to man.
I remember making a complete fool of myself in the club. Thankfully, Japanese tend to excuse anything a person does under the influence of alcohol. When we got home, I remember going straight for the romanized sutra booklet and prayer beads. I didn’t have an object of worship and it was way too late (and I was too drunk) to go knocking on my neighbour’s door asking to kneel in front of theirs. So I just slid down onto my knees in one corner of the dark kitchen and began chanting. While Xavier took off his belt, slacks and white dress shirt, I chanted. While he brushed his teeth and pulled out the futons, I continued through the sutra booklet. When I was done, I quickly got ready for bed.
The next morning I ran into Mrs. K, our downstairs neighbour who saw my conversion to her brand of Buddhism as her personal mission. ”It’s time for you to have your own gohonzon,” she told me.
“What? Really?” I didn’t know what to think. Why now, I wondered.
“I heard you last night,” she said.
“Oh.” It took me a few minutes to realize that she probably did not know I had been drunk. She just knew that we had come in late and that I was very committed to not missing a single morning or evening of chanting, not even when we came in at one or two in the morning. I did not fill her in on the details, but nodded cooperatively to the plan to get me my own object of worship.
Though my Japanese was still rudimentary, I managed to understand that I should buy a butsudan to hold the holy scroll, some incense and a pair of small vases. She took me to the butsudan store. I picked out a very simple box, one I could afford with the little bit of money I made tutoring English, which is a whole other chapter in this story. The box had a little drawer at the bottom where I could store my sutra booklet and beads. Mrs. K showed me which incense to buy. I got a pair of little vases, and she picked up some evergreen sprigs for me to put in them. She had a lot of patience with my limited ability to comprehend Japanese and spent as long as necessary going over the rules of having an object of worship. I would need to change the water in the vases and not let the flowers or sprigs of evergreen wilt in front of the gohonzon. They should always be kept fresh. I could make offerings of fruit or rice, but could not let them sit too long. I tried to pay close attention and remember all the rules.
When it comes to my involvement with the sect, it’s hard for me to remember the sequence of events. Two memories stick out for me more than others, however.
One of them is the first time Mrs. K took me with her to the temple on the weekend. I remember the scores of shoes and geta lined up in the foyer. I took mine off, too. As we made our way quietly up a staircase, I looked around me at all the tabi socks on the feet of the older women padding up the stairs alongside us.
Mrs. K settled in to chant quietly until the monk came out. I sat in the proper seiza position, resigned to the fact that my feet would fall asleep under me. There’s nothing to be done about that when you’re a gainjin who doesn’t want to stick out. Although women are allowed to let their bums slip off their heels to the right or to the left, I have found that doing so only makes me more fidgety during the ensuing hour. I prefer to stay in a completely upright seiza position the entire hour, allowing my feet to become totally numb. (The worst part comes later when you try to stand up while the blood is rushing back into your feet.)
After a while a pair of novices came out in monks robes, heads shaved. This was my first time to see a monk, novice or otherwise. I was fascinated. The novices lit some incense and began beating two large drums. We chanted the introductory part of the sutras for a while with the novices.
Then the real monk came into the room but kept his back to us and did not acknowledge us. He faced the object of worship and lead us through a very slow recitation of the sutras that I was accustomed to reciting about five times as quickly with Mrs. K and her husband. I thought is was wonderful to do it very slowly and deliberately with no rush to finish.
The morning sun sent shafts of light down through a set of high windows. It cut through the lazily swirling white clouds of incense smoke. Time seemed to slow down.
When the monk had led us all the way through the book and closing chants, he rose off his cushion, turned to us, bowed and said good morning, then padded across the tatami on his little white-socked feet and out the door through which he had come.
The second memorable event of my early days as a member of this sect actually probably took place before my first visit to the temple. Xavier’s art student, the son of Professor Purple, had been sick with the flu or a virus or some awful bug that kept him miserable for weeks. He had had to cancel two consecutive painting lessons with Xavier, which I know could only have been the result of the boy’s mother’s insistence on bed rest. I know this because the painfully shy, socially awkward and lonely young man lived for his lessons with Xavier. In spite of Professor Purple’s best effort to keep her son quarantined, Xavier caught the bug and became miserably sick for a good two weeks. He just lay in bed day after day worrying about what the dean would think of it. In Japan, people tend to put on a germ mask and soldier on.
Mrs. K had invited me to one of those neighbourhood meetings that took place each Wednesday night. I likened them to the prayer meetings or Bible study nights with which some churches in the south supplement Sunday sermons. I feel a need to remind the reader at this point that the sect I had joined bears about as much resemblance to the Buddhism I now follow as a charismatic Pentecostal service resembles a Quaker meeting.
In any case… about half an hour into the meeting, I began to feel funny. My eyes were beginning to hurt and I felt very cold. “I’ve caught the flu from Xavier,” I thought. I did my best to keep my eyes open and pretend to be interested in what was going on around me for the rest of the meeting, but I was starting to feel really poorly. I could not wait to tuck myself in bed and rest my muscles and bones, which were beginning to ache.
On the way home, I realized that there was nothing in the house to make me feel better… no Tylenol, no juice to keep me hydrated. Knowing Xavier wasn’t the kind of partner to offer to go out and get me those things (not that I can blame him since I made his life hell with my drinking), I started to duck into a convenience store to buy orange juice. Mrs. K and I parted there as she continued on back to our building.
That night I fell into a fitful fever sleep with a wet washcloth on my forehead. I had a vivid dream. In the dream, I was receiving instructions on chanting. I was chanting in my dream. Then the voice that wasn’t really a voice but was more like a telepathic transmission told me to shift into a certain position. I did not wake up but did follow the instructions by moving my body in the bed. Then it told me to resume chanting, and I did. I knew that all these instructions had to be followed to the letter. It was very important. Then it told me to stick one leg out from under the covers (I was hot with fever), and so I did that while still remaining asleep and dreaming.
At around one a.m., I awoke having to pee. I got up off the futon and began walking toward the bathroom. I had taken three steps when it dawned on me: I am not sick anymore!
The fever was gone. The aches were gone. I wasn’t sweating. My eye sockets no longer hurt. A bug that had stayed with young Mr. Purple for two weeks and then with Xavier for two weeks had left me with no residual pain or discomfort whatsoever after only four hours. I felt as good as if nothing had ever happened.
The next morning I told Mrs. K about it using my halting Japanese and limited vocabulary. She got it. She asked me if I could come to the next meeting to tell everyone what happened. I said maybe it would be better if she told it, but I would come along and punctuate the story with my nods. And that is what we did.
