I held the paper up and the four cops looked at me. They were different people but, for a moment, they all had the same look: like dogs catching a distant scent and hoping it would be something to chase. “It says,” and I paused for effect, “
Shumpu
.”
“Is it a name?” the Lieutenant asked.
I shook my head no. “It means ‘spring wind.’”
Strakowski puffed his cheeks out and let out a long breath. He glanced, up at the gray sky, where thin rain clouds were getting blown in from the ocean, just out of sight.
Ramirez was incredulous. “His last words are a weather report?”
“This mean anything you can think of, Burke?” Strakowski asked me.
“Nothing specific right now. Let me think about it,” I said.
You could tell he was disappointed, but I wasn’t going to rush this. Strakowski’s head swiveled toward Micky.
“Anything you want to add?”
Micky shrugged in my direction. “He’s the expert.”
“Some expert. So far, I gotta say,” the Lieutenant looked off into the street and then back at us, one by one, “I am not impressed by you guys.”
Art narrowed his eyes and said, slowly and ominously, in his best Master Yoda voice, “You will be.”
Different things are important to different people, but we’re all searching for something. I spend a lot of time training with people who seem like they’re interested in the give and take of fighting. But it’s more complex than that. Scratch the surface, and most are also seeking some ill-defined mystic dimension to existence. I’m no different. But it’s hard to admit out loud.
We come to the dojo looking for magic of a sort. The lucky ones who stay long enough find it. But it’s a subtle thing, almost too fragile to bear direct examination. You glimpse it in the elegance of movement, the beauty of the sword’s arc. Sometimes it’s brought home to you by the subtle, warm buzz of integration you can get while doing a move correctly. Other times, it’s just in the feeling you get on entering into the training hall after a hard day in the world. The dojo is stark and bare and quiet. You set your gear bag down, a soft weight of uniforms and pads, and think:
Home, this is home.
And you forget for just a little while about the rest of the things pressing down on your life.
But with Yamashita, there’s more to it than that. It’s not about comfort. If anything the experience is an exercise in constant strain, of having the horizon of your own potential stretched further and further until you can hear the fibers scream. In Sensei’s training hall, the students have all been studying the arts for years, so on some level we all know that this is what’s in store for us. Most karate students, for instance, start out practicing a series of fundamental exercises,
kata
. As time passes, there are new kata, greater challenges to be met on the path to black belt. And when you finally stand there, with a black belt tied around your waist for the first time, you think you’ve really arrived somewhere.
And you have, of course—right back at the beginning. Because the first thing they make you do when you get promoted to the
dan
level of black belt is start on the novice kata all over again. Only now, the sensei say, are you really ready to begin practice. And you sigh and get to work as the horizon seems to grow a little more distant again.
Yamashita no longer spends much time watching my form or correcting technique. In that, at least, I have won his confidence and a measure of approval. He now has me pursue more intangible things.
Sometimes the Japanese discuss
ri
, the quality of mastery that sets the truly great apart from the merely competent. It’s the combination of many things: experience, practice, skill. And insight. You can analyze it all you want. I have. The subtle melding of perception and sensitivity with the lightning spark of muscle synapse. Easily described, but hard to reach. I’ve spent years with Yamashita, laboring at honing the technical details of my art to a razor’s precision. And the process had made me feel changed, altered in a significant way that seemed to me to be at the heart of why I did what I did. But now my teacher appeared to take this as a given, and is focused instead on a completely new set of challenges. He wishes me to develop ri. I understand the quality, but pursuing it is tricky. Every time I sense the approach of ri’s clarity, it slips away again. Skill isn’t enough. And skill is what I’ve worked on for so long. For me, it’s like arriving to play in the major leagues after years of apprenticeship, only to find that they’ve changed the rules of the game.
Why this surprises me is a mystery. You think I’d be experienced enough to know that with Yamashita, like life in general, what you tend to get is less than you hoped but more than you bargained for.
Yamashita’s hands are thick and savage looking, better suited to grasp a weapon than to hold a book. He met me at the dojo entrance as I came in before the evening class. Students were scattered throughout the cavernous room, going through the small personal warm-ups we all do before class. I bowed at the door and to my teacher. He held up a hand.
“Wait,” he ordered.
I stood and looked at him expectantly. Cast a glance around. There didn’t seem to be anything significant going on. The light was fading outside and the fluorescent lights pulsed faintly. The wooden floor shone from a recent cleaning.
“What do you sense?” Yamashita asked.
The usual
, I thought. But I made myself very still in the door’s threshold and tried to focus. The wash of traffic from the street was a faint underlying murmur. Lights buzzed high up in the ceiling of the training hall. Students talked quietly to each other, but watched us surreptitiously. “Anticipation,” I finally told him.
“So?” Yamashita responded. “Hardly surprising. Is that all?” He sounded let down. “We should work more on your capacity for greater sensitivity…” he said.
“Haragei,” I sighed in response. The Japanese use the term to cover a wide variety of non-verbal communications. In the world Yamashita and I inhabit, it’s a bit more of a focused concept. The more advanced sensei believe that there are emotional and psychic vibrations dancing in the air—invisible, but real despite that fact. And you can, with proper training, learn to sense these things. I’ve experienced haragei, usually at moments of great stress. But Yamashita’s sensitivity is vastly more subtle. And he thinks mine should be, too.
I’m working on it, but I’m still a Westerner. My ability to access haragei comes and goes, and the harder I grab at it, the more it slips away. Yamashita must have seen some hint of the feeling of frustration in my expression. “We will talk more about this later,” he told me.
Which was when he handed me the book. I looked at it, puzzled.
“Changpa Rinpoche,” my teacher said.
I saw the name on the cover and perked up. “Oh, sure. There was an article about him in the
Times
, oh, maybe two or three Sundays ago.”
“Indeed. He runs an institution called the Dharma Center in Manhattan. He speaks to many different groups on the internal dimension of existence.”
I grinned ruefully. “They say he’s prescient. That’s why he’s so popular. For every ten people interested in Tibetan Buddhism, there are about a thousand who’ll come to see a mind reader.”
Yamashita waved the irrelevant detail away and continued. “You are unfair. This man has been making quite remarkable presentations across the country.”
“Does he bend spoons with his mind?” I asked.
“Burke, please. Behave yourself. I have known this man for many years and I respect him greatly. He could be an interesting resource for you…”
“For me?”
Yamashita sighed. “You have accomplished much with me, Professor. But now you struggle on another level. And sometimes, the very familiarity of a teacher’s voice makes it hard to hear…”
“I’m paying attention Sensei,” I protested.
“Of course you are. But…” One eyebrow arched up.
“Some of the more esoteric stuff is hard for me to get a handle on,” I admitted.
“Surely you do not doubt the reality of the things I speak of? After all these years?”
I nodded slowly. “I’ve seen some remarkable things…”
“You have done more than see these things, Burke.” He saw me fidget. “Yet?” he prodded.
“Look,” I said, “when I see stuff in dojo that looks amazing, I remind myself that it’s like any magic. Most of it’s sleight of hand. Good technique. The laws of physics. It’s complicated, maybe, but not mystical.”
Yamashita smiled. “So… even after all this time?”
I shrugged. Yamashita looked at me for a moment. His eyes can be hard and unfathomable. In the quiet of the evening, with the dojo not yet active, his eyes were wide and questioning. Then he seemed to make a decision. He took the book and looked at the author’s blurb on the back. Then he handed it to me. “Perhaps another teacher’s voice,
neh
?” He turned then to the practice floor and I followed.
So I sat at lunch the next day reading the book called
Warrior Ways to Power: Entering the Mystic City
. The thoughts of a Tibetan lama thrust on me by a Japanese martial arts sensei.
The weather had slipped back into the clammy grayness of a Long Island spring. The temperature had dropped since that day in Edward Sakura’s backyard. And the sun seemed too weak to burn through the constant cloud cover. The cafeteria at Dorian University was steamy and thin rivulets of rain ran down the plate glass windows that opened onto the quadrangle. I sat alone at lunch, hunkered down in the gloom.
Any university is an odd place. Dorian University was a bit odder than most. Inside the buildings, overeducated professors with wet, shifty eyes and little or no coping skills skitter down the halls. They labor with inept delivery and dated scholarship, sure that their personal magnetism alone keeps Western Civilization afloat. The students sit in the classrooms and eye their teachers with bovine tolerance and dream of the weekend. Each party to the ordeal tolerates the other, secure in the knowledge that classes run for only fifty minutes and the semesters are only fifteen weeks long. It’s the
Classics Illustrated
version of higher education.
A few years ago, I had hoped to get a teaching job here. They could have used me. Dorian’s faculty have all the depth of a silted-up drainage ditch, particularly in Asian Studies. There’s a noodley philosophy professor who spent some time in Thailand, chanting in temples but secretly dreaming of the red light districts. An overweight woman sociologist concerned with gender issues is still trying to get a manuscript called “Coming of Age in Singapore” published, and a hypertensive historian who wants to be the Stephen Ambrose of the Korean War shows
The Bridges of Toko-Ri
a lot. But that’s it.
I worked as a lowly administrator, since the faculty felt I was unworthy to be involved in anything remotely academic. They meant it to be insulting, but by now the sentiment was only faintly unpleasant, like the memory of an old toothache.
Tucked away in upscale suburban Long Island, from the outside Dorian looks like a real school. Its buildings are ivy covered and the brick blushes in the morning sun on clear days. The playing fields stretch away into the distance, and the bustle of fall and spring made it look like a place where something of significance occurs. I’m no longer really sure. Maybe it was Yamashita’s ramped up training demands. Maybe it was the Sakura murder, but I found myself more and more frequently thinking about things other than the university. Increasingly, I just do my job and at the end of the day leave for the dojo, where more important things happen.
I found Tibetan Buddhism interesting. It’s colorful and elaborate. There are all those stories of levitation and mystical powers. The Third Eye. Clairvoyance. But, mostly, the teachers were strict and their followers did what they were told. It was an experience I could relate to. The book wasn’t bad, actually. The mystic city angle has been pretty well used since St. Augustine, but I was interested in the warrior aspect of things. The Tibetans aren’t all sitting around in the lotus position. Life is pretty tough there on the Roof of the World, and they had a warrior heritage of their own. In the old days, they were pretty good archers.
The cadence of the lama’s written words was soothing in a way that I hadn’t expected. The prose was clear. I wondered what he was like in person. The picture on the book jacket didn’t tell you much: a bespectacled man past middle age in the robes of a monk. I wondered how he had met Yamashita.
I tried to focus once more on reading the book my teacher had given me. But my attention wandered from mystic cities to the cryptic clue left by a murdered calligrapher. To the possibility of a type of experience that was unseen and yet nonetheless real. And to the increasingly conflicting demands of the different worlds I seemed to inhabit. It was like a low, distracting murmur. A rumble that, while still faint, would eventually grow in significance. I struggled hard against the idea that I would someday have to make a choice, and made another attempt to concentrate on the here and now. Develop some sensitivity. But the location wasn’t much help. Just within the range of my peripheral vision, a young coed sitting at a nearby table was getting up and wiggling away. Her slim middle was exposed by a short shirt and her navel was pierced. I forced myself not to watch.
Training, as my sensei says, is never ending.
The birds complained during the lulls. Off in the distance the trees were hazy with green buds. The weather had cleared and it was spring again. But the targets came at you fast, and there wasn’t much time to stop and appreciate the weather.
My brother Micky set himself with arms outstretched. The pistol shots snapped out with a quick, machine-like pace. Micky’s eyes were wide and focused on the human silhouette that raced toward him along the cable. The slide on the Glock rammed back and stayed open. The target was shredded in two spots. Micky stepped back away from the firing line and grinned.
“It’s like everything else, buddy boy,” he said to me. “You work the heart and the head.” I nodded in appreciation.