Seiobo There Below (24 page)

painful
for his mother, she developed a kind of over-sensitivity of the optic nerve, in the evening she could hardly bear to look at anything; but it was all in vain, she could not stop working, so after a while, when in the evening those eyes were really hurting a lot, he said, a nun began visiting them, she took care of his mother, she cooked the rice, and this lasted until he, the master, was in the eleventh grade, during which time, he says, he was continually worried, he was very worried for his mother, he couldn’t even pay attention in school, he only thought of his mother’s eyes, and how they would hurt in the evenings, and he really wanted his mother to stop working, already he was in middle school but everything went on, and he was worried that his mother wouldn’t stop, and that there would be a huge problem, he was so worried that he couldn’t think of anything else, only about her, and he became more and more worried that she would be very ill, and wouldn’t get up anymore; keep on studying, they told him, but he was incapable of that, he says, he wanted to stay home at any cost, to help his mother, and he did stay home, and he helped her too, he too began to produce these baubles for the Christmas trees, and he didn’t go to university, even though his teacher advised him to do so, instead of university the Christmas baubles, really it couldn’t be otherwise, he had to stay at home, because in any event he wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on anything else from all the worry, and he was still in middle school when, at the beginning of the school year, there was the renowned mountain-climbing event, this was the occasion that he, along with every one of his classmates, awaited with great excitement, just that in his case the problem was that the other school children always, the week before the big mountain-climbing event, got a new pair of running shoes, yet so great was the destitution in their home that there was no money for new running shoes, so that his mother came up with the idea of polishing the old running shoes with some half-penny chocolate, first she really cleaned them off and then smeared the chocolate on, and really they looked as if they could have been new, but he was distressed by this, and because he was not ashamed if, due to the family’s poverty, he was the only one not to get new running shoes before the big mountain-climbing event, he took the shoes and scraped off the chocolate, and he never went mountain climbing with the others, this is just one example of how difficult it was, he says, but an example, too, of how difficult it was for him to be with others; it wasn’t as if he didn’t long to be among them, there was nothing he desired more than to play alongside them, it was just that some obstacle or another was always in the way, which meant that he always had to renounce their companionship, so when he was in middle school he became even more solitary than he had been in primary school: just his mother and he, the two of them in the street that ran parallel with the Nanna-jo, while his father sat the entire day in the old business premises, smoking cigarettes and looking out the window, although nothing ever happened out there, he was completely alone, and so the years passed and the compassion within him for those who could not make friends grew ever deeper, or for those who could not be with the people they wanted to be with, because he was always at home, or at school, or at school or at home, and because he was so worried for his mother and the entire family, and what would happen to them if he wasn’t at home, during this time because of the worry he very often would not go out into the street to play, or go and join up with the others during school breaks, because there was only one thought in his mind, how to find an exit from this destitution so that his mother would not have to strain her eyes; he brooded over this incessantly, and of course in the meantime, he says, he did not have too much time to think about playing with the others; he could however have made friends, for example, with the boy who once complained that he felt very bad, and he was really afraid, because he couldn’t go like this to his singing lessons in the mornings; I said to him, he says, that I would go in his place, and I even went, I went, and in the meantime I learned everything that he was supposed to learn, then later at the singing lessons I explained the situation with my classmate; I sang everything that he was supposed to have sung, and I was praised greatly, and the teacher said that they did not reproach my classmate for his absences, that it was alright, and of course the boy in question was very grateful for this, and they could have even been friends, but well he had to go home, at the beginning he just walked normally, then he began to move quickly, but finally he was already running, so afraid was he that while he was gone something had happened with his mother’s eyes, and so it was not possible for him to be anyone’s friend, for even if this boy had invited him on another afternoon to come along and play with him, in this dark period of his life he only thought immediately of what would happen at home if he weren’t there, this was always his profound conviction, that no one would be there to help, as he was utterly certain, under this burden of continual suffering, that a larger catastrophe was looming; in the first place he thought of his mother, filled with concern for her, thinking that the catastrophe would be connected with her eyes, but it didn’t happen like that, something completely different occurred, something completely extraordinary that turned everything upside down and changed their lives; no one thought that it could happen but it did; everyone, and in particular he himself, was convinced that the catastrophe was here, about to occur, and everything seemed so utterly hopeless that one day — such was the sorrow that overwhelmed him from his mother’s and father’s fate — he made a decision and went to them in the upper room, and his advice was that they should commit suicide, together, the entire family, because in my view, I said to them, he says, this is the only solution, this is what I can recommend, because we are so bereft of any future, there is no future whatsoever for us, all of our time is completely taken up solving the problems of everyday life, of what we are going to eat; well, of course I wasn’t thinking of any future, I did not wish for any future, because there was no future at all, I went to the upstairs room, I knelt down before them, I bowed, and I said, let us all commit suicide together, but in the end we didn’t do it, because an extraordinary turn of events came about, something completely unimaginable: one day in school a big white dog suddenly got into the hallway, I was in the seventh grade, when a stray, bedraggled, white dog came in, and it was in such a bad state that everyone just yelled and screamed at it, but no one dared or wanted to try to grab hold of it, it was evident, however, that the dog was getting close to the end already, its entire body was trembling, its fur was scraped off, and it was so skinny that its bones literally stuck out, of course it was chased out of the classroom somehow, and chased out of the entire building onto the street, it’s just that the dog didn’t leave but stayed there near the school and stayed right underneath our classroom window, it didn’t move away from there for a whole week, it just trembled and cried and howled and whined, you could hear it very clearly, and in the end I couldn’t hear anything else, I heard it even at home: so the dog did not budge from next to the tree, they tried to chase it away with a cane, but it was simply impossible to chase it away, so it stayed, no one bothered it anymore, only you could hear it crying, and I — as the week went by — looked at the dog, and I saw how it wanted to die, and then I said to myself, I have to take it home, somehow it will get along with us, and so, the master relates, that’s exactly what he did, he took the dog home, he just said to it come, and at that one single word the dog came; but his mother said we can’t do this, we can’t have a dog here, whatever are we going to give him to eat, and this really did present a huge problem, as they had no meat that they could give to the dog, only rice, and moreover, dogs don’t eat rice; his mother advised him to take it out to the monastery, it can’t stay here, but, he says, he was not able to do that, he pleaded with his family, please let it stay here, he even made a doghouse secretly, he pleaded with his mother, but she said we don’t have enough even for ourselves, to which he replied that he would give the dog his own portion, which of course sounded a bit peculiar, because dogs don’t eat rice, but then he implored his mother so much that that night they gave the dog his nightly portion of rice, and the dog ate the rice, and then already his mother began to see things differently, and she allowed the dog to stay, fine, she said, we’ll keep it, and really it turned out like that, he says, we took in the white dog, and two weeks later, altogether two weeks after the day that we had taken the dog in — people began knocking at the front door saying they wanted to buy an oxygen mask, suddenly they were getting orders, my father’s business started up again, and even his business partner, the one who had caused the business to go bankrupt earlier, turned up again, and suggested that due to the change in demand they should go back into partnership again, and the telephone rang off the hook, and there were hundreds and thousands of orders, everything changed at once, the business flourished; at that time, the massive industrialization campaign was going on and due to the pollution, a huge demand for oxygen masks arose, and in addition, my father’s business partner came up with a new kind of mask, a yellow one that filtered out the pollution more effectively, and it became so successful that even the state television, the NHK, did a program about it and advertised it, everything got better, the master lowers his voice, and everyone knew, my mother knew, I knew, and my father knew as well, that the change in our fate was because of the dog, it brought us luck, my father announced sitting on his chair in front of the window, and from that point on he prayed for it, for the white dog, and ever since he, my father, died, I pray for it, and when I shall die, my first-born child, sensei Kimiko will pray for it too.

It is difficult to express the joy of the practice in words, he then says, if there is a rehearsal — and for him there is always a rehearsal — then he breaks free from all indirectness and he is absolutely active, immersed, totally identified with what he is doing: with the next step to follow in the sequence, with the holding of the arm, the placement of the fan in front of the body, with the placement of the body in space, and then with the poetry and songs that began to resound in his voice, through his voice, which bursts out of the depths; in a word if he is rehearsing, as he has been just now with Seiobo, or if he is continuing the Seiobo rehearsal, as he shall do in a moment, then he feels in the deepest of depths that there is a soul; if he does the necessary dance-steps according to the prescribed order, then he doesn’t think about whether or not the spirit is operating within him, because this spirit is perfectly ingrained in the order of steps he has just completed, he does not gape into the future thinking: after this, what step do I need to take, after this, what step comes next; it is a question of only one step that exactly fills the present moment, it is always this that he must concentrate on, says the sensei, on what I can do exactly in this moment, indeed, to put it more precisely, on what I am doing in this moment, this is altogether what concentration is for, not for anything else, not for the desire that this step here will be better, but that exactly in this moment, exactly this step in the dance is coming into being; that is all you have to know, and the rest is a matter of the soul; in a word, rehearsal is his life, so that for him there is absolutely no difference between rehearsal and performance, there is no particular mode of performance in the Noh, what happens in a performance is exactly the same as what happens in a rehearsal and vice versa, what happens in a rehearsal is exactly the same as what happens in a performance, there is no divergence, but as for him he is happier to view it all as a rehearsal, because this expresses the fact better that it is not about some kind of finality or completion, it better expresses the fact that the Noh has no goal, and this goal, in particular, is not performance, but that for him his entire life is a rehearsal, a successive awakening — or rather, he would just say, a waking up, since there is nothing to awaken to, namely that what remains is awoken to successively; this is a truly inexpressible catharsis for a Noh performer such as himself, for whom Noh is everything and the source of all things, the Noh only gives and he only receives, and he understands everything, because one then understands that things do not turn out for the better because a person has a certain level of apprehension of what will be correct in the future, but that things turn out for the better if a person has a correct apprehension of the present, namely, this is a kind of apprehension that is good not just for you but for everyone, that is to say it doesn’t harm anyone, so thus it is good in general; no, says the sensei, smiling, he does not believe that those who speak so threateningly of an approaching catastrophe, some kind of a total collapse, a complete apocalypse, are in the right, for such people never take into account — and this is very characteristic — they never take into account the fact that there are higher potentialities; you have to know that your own experience in this is crucial for understanding how senseless it is to separate living beings, to divide up living things from each other and from yourself, for everything occurs in one single time and one single place, and the path to the comprehension of this leads through the correct understanding of the present, one’s own experience is necessary, and then you will understand, and every person will understand that something cannot be separated from something else, there is no god in some faraway dominion, there is no earth far from him here below, and there is no transcendental realm somewhere else apart from where you are now, all that you call transcendental or earthly is one and the same, together with you in one single time and one single space, and the most important of all is that there is no room here for either hope or for miracles, since hope has no basis and there are no miracles, namely that everything happens as it must happen, miracles never changed anything in his life, he says, but he realized that it was a question of the endlessly simple operations of an endlessly complicated construction, so that anything can happen, anything can turn into reality, all told it is just the natural result of potentially billions of single outcomes, namely that — the sensei says this now in an entirely subdued voice, indicating that his words are being uttered only for the guest — namely that before we are born, the Heavens have innumerable plans for us, but after we are born there is just a single one; these recognitions, of course, do not always come easily; he, for example suffered greatly before he could encapsulate his experiences in a correct manner; and when the time was right, the personal teachings and written thoughts of Master Takahashi Shinji directed him, it was he, sensei Shinji, who was able to explain to him, when they met personally when he was a youth of nineteen, his story of losing God did not by any means lead him to suicide, that is to say, on one occasion, he related to him, that when he was praying, still at his home in Kyõto, on the upper floor of his old house, as he knelt with his hands folded in prayer, he suddenly caught a glimpse of himself in his own shaving mirror, and from that, all at once, he lost his faith; well as for that, sensei Takahashi explained to him, that is not the loss of God but on the contrary, it means that you have found God, whatever we call it, we might as well call it God, said sensei Takahashi Shinji, it’s sweet all the same, that was the first thing that sensei Shinji said to him, and it had an enormous effect, similarly as when he sat next to his deathbed, there was a particular encounter when sensei Shinji, as a final admonition told him that at times the existence of the higher dimensions are veiled by those selfsame higher dimensions, that is what he heard from him, and it goes without saying that then, altogether in one single flash of illumination, like a blow, he understood all these things: he perceived, he felt, the other person, he saw what lay behind the other, he saw others’ past lives, so that the day quickly came when he had to take notice that it was not just he who believed in something, but that people believed in him as well — of course through the agency of the art of Noh — and that meant that if people were turning to him, and he was able, exclusively, to lift them up through the Noh, that he should live with this word, with that same word through which the genius of Ze’ami lived, for Noh is the lifting up of the soul, which, if it doesn’t occur through Noh, that means that the Noh is not occurring, but if it does occur, then anyone can comprehend that above us and below us, outside of ourselves and deep within ourselves, there is a universe, the one and only, which is not identical with the sky looming above us overhead, because that universe is not made of stars and planets and suns and galaxies, because that universe is not a picture, it cannot be seen, it doesn’t even have a name, for it is so much more precious than anything that could have a name, and that is why it is such a joy to me that I can practice Seiobo; Seiobo is the emissary who arrives and says I am not the desire for peace, I am peace itself; Seiobo arrives and says do not be afraid, for the universe of peace is not the rainbow of yearning; the universe, the real universe — already exists.