Night Boat. Alan Spence

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СКАЧАТЬ the road, asking the Bodhisattva of Compassion to have mercy on all those souls.

      I kept walking, broke my journey at a small temple set back from the road. I found myself huddled under a thatched roof with twenty or thirty refugees from the disaster. The temple had little enough in the way of food and bedding, but what they had they gave, and I helped hand out meagre rations and threadbare blankets. I shivered through another night, my old robe wrapped tight about me, staying awake and continuing to invoke the Bodhisattva, the compassionate Kannon.

      One young man sat watching me, eyes wide and staring, face gaunt and drawn, a twitch at the corner of his mouth. I offered him my bowl with what was left of my own portion of broth, but he looked through me, and past me, into the abyss. His face was smeared with grime and ash, lined where tears and snot had run down. For a moment his eyes seemed to bring me into focus and he wiped his face with his hands. Then he spoke, and his voice was cold and toneless, beyond all hope, the voice of someone speaking from hell.

      If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, he said, I would not have believed it.

      He rocked back and forth where he sat, pulled his thin blanket around him.

      When I was a boy and learned to read, he said, I took great delight in spelling out signs and notices, the name on a shop-front, the inscription on a gravestone, directions at a crossroads. Well, there was one sign that made me smile.

      His lips drew back from his teeth, a response to some far memory, but the face was a mask, the eyes dead.

      It was down at the edge of the beach, he said, and it read WARNING. In Event of Earthquake Beware of Tsunami.

      A harsh dry croak racked out of his throat, the pained semblance of a laugh.

      Beware of tsunami! Might as well say if you’re falling from a high tower, beware of the ground coming up to meet you.

      A great sob shook him and he shivered. Again I handed him my bowl with the last mouthful of soup, and this time he took it, swallowed it down, nodded his thanks and handed back the bowl.

      It was chance, he said. I just happened to be inland, on higher ground. I saw the whole thing, from far away, from up above.

      First there was the noise, the great boom way out at sea. The earth shook and I stumbled and fell. I stood up and saw there was mud on my knees. I wiped it and smeared my hands. I stood there, and I looked out, and could make no sense of what I was seeing. In an instant everything had changed. Buildings had disappeared, toppled over. Clouds of dust and smoke rose up. Everywhere fires broke out and flared, fanned by the wind that rushed in from the sea. And that was where my eye was drawn, to the sea.

      I stood in the midst of a great silence, a hush. I could see the shoreline, and the tide receding, further and further out. The beach and the mudflats were wider than they should have been, wet with a dull glisten. A few small boats were left stranded, keeled over. Here and there were people venturing out onto the sand, children running out, out, stopping to pick up something they’d found left behind by the tide. Out.

      It was wrong, he said. The scene was wrong. The way the world in a dream is like the real thing but not.

      The noise was different now, a distant roaring, a rush. I saw the wave, far out, as wide as the whole horizon and gathering speed as it moved towards the shore. I heard myself shout out No! and I started to run. I pitched forward, fell again. And the wave kept coming, a wall of water ten, fifteen, twenty feet high. It swept in over the beach, engulfed the small figures there trying to run away, it picked up the boats and carried them, it drove on like some great being, an implacable force pushing forward.

      It smashed houses and temples, a hospital, a school. It washed away bridges and uprooted trees. It turned roads into rivers and rivers into lakes. The low hill I stood on became an island. The waters reached almost to my feet. I looked out across this new world and I knew everything I owned was gone, my home destroyed, my wife and daughter drowned.

      He had told me all he had to tell. He had no more words. He looked at me across a great distance.

      The young man and the other refugees lay down where they could in the cold hall and grappled with restless uneasy sleep. I found a corner and returned to my meditation, interrogating the silence, questioning the emptiness, the nothingness. Mu.

      In a moment I was there, entering into the experience, looking through his eyes, seeing what he had seen. I felt the fear and the panic, faced that vast wall of water thundering inland. I was shaken by sheer terror, then numbed, unable to move, then running, stumbling, crying, scrambling to higher ground.

      The great wave, the colossal destruction and loss of life. This too was a koan, beyond comprehension. This too.

      Existence is suffering, said the Buddha. The First Noble Truth.

      We come from nothing and to nothing we return.

      The great ocean, the wide world, the vast universe itself, are no more than drops of dew on the Buddha’s feet.

      And yet.

      And yet.

      Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them all.

      Before dawn I was on the road, walking, meditating.

      At the next temple I once more laid down my staff and hung up my bag. I once more joined in the reading of texts, the chanting of sutras, the endless prostrations. I ate my rice and washed my bowl.

      After a week I set out walking again, back to Daisho-ji.

      Well? said the head priest, Sokudo, on my return. What now?

      I had nothing to say.

      CLEAR SEVERITY

      After the tsunami my restlessness grew worse. I had glimpsed another kind of hell, not fire but water. This was how it ended, in cataclysm, all-engulfing. I left Daisho-ji, walked again, not settling, for weeks and months as the seasons changed, and on the way back I spent time in Shimizu village, cloistered away at the monks’ training hall in Zenso-ji.

      Again the regime was based on long hours of study, chanting, meditation. The head priest, Sen’ei Soen, was austere and scholarly, thin-lipped, sunken-cheeked. One day he delivered a sermon on koans from the Mumonkan, the Gateless Gate. He pointed out that the master Ganto referred to in one of the stories was Ganto Zenkatsu, or Yantou Quanhuo, the great Chinese teacher of Zen who was known as Clear Severity.

      I was thrilled by the very sound of his name and by the story the priest told about Ganto challenging his own master’s realisation, then laughing out loud and applauding the master’s next lecture, saying the master had realised the last truth.

      The priest quoted a verse.

      If you understand the first truth,

      You should understand the last truth.

       The first and the last – are they not the same?

      If I’d had the courage I would have stood up and laughed, and applauded the priest’s sermon. But it would have been empty, just a performance, СКАЧАТЬ