Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (27 page)

At S
jiji, visitors are received inside a thirty-foot-tall building that was completed in 1990. It was raining the day I visited for the first time, and I was relieved to enter the cavernous space,
even though it was cold inside. I dropped my umbrella in a rack just inside the door (in Japan, there is always a designated place for wet umbrellas), placed my shoes in a locker, and put on a pair of slippers, picked from a pile of slippers stacked by the landing and intended for all visitors to wear; in Japan, one often changes out of street shoes and into slippers when entering a building. At the far end of the room, I saw statues and candles on an altar. The entire area smelled thoroughly of incense. To the right, young monks dressed in black manned an office. Everyone was trim. Some sat at desks answering phones, while others pored over paper work, or stood in little groups engaged in earnest conversation. It looked like the deck of a battleship, staffed by Buddhist priests.

A few minutes later, a young priest named Shiba presented himself as my guide. His head was shaved, and he wore the hallmark dark silk robes of a monk. He also had on a pair of black-rimmed glasses, which made him seem serious yet fashionably modern. Shiba was in his mid-twenties and at S
jiji for his second year. He had been a math teacher for children aged five to eleven, before he commenced his training so he could take over his father’s temple in Chiba Prefecture. I would see Shiba often when I visited S
jiji.

Like Semp
and Takahagi, Shiba had mastered his monks’ robes. The silk billowed about his form as he walked, but he did not fight the excess fabric in the sleeves or in the hemline. Shiba had long fingers, with which he deftly extracted personal effects from the front slit of his robe and just as quickly tucked them away. There was an economy of motion to his every gesture, as though he had long ago learned to do away with expending any excess energy.

As we walked the length of a long, roofed corridor that connected the visitor building to S
jiji’s inner complex, Shiba began his spiel, talking at a business-like clip as if he were a young corporate employee speaking during a PowerPoint presentation. This corridor
had been made intentionally long—108 meters, or approximately 118 yards—to separate all the buildings from each other, so a fire could not consume everything all at once, as had happened to the original S
jiji structures. But, he said, the hallway was also there as a training device, for every day the youngest monks polished the gleaming, chocolate-brown wood; Zen places a premium on physical activity as the gateway to disciplining the mind.

Shiba and his fellow monks rose each morning at three o’clock. They bathed in silence and then immediately went to Zen meditation, which was followed by sutra chanting in the
hond
(the main hall of worship). After this, they cooked and ate breakfast—before going on to gardening, cleaning, and other chores. They ate very little. Most monks lost anywhere from ten to twenty kilos (about twenty-two to forty-four pounds) in their first two months of training. They were not allowed to leave the campus and were not allowed relaxed moments for chitchat or email. As Shiba talked, he referred to the day he would depart S
jiji as the day that he would
oriru
, or “come down.” One did not graduate, or quit, or leave. One came down off the mountain and returned to the mundane world.

We rounded a corner and stood before the S
do hall, the meditation chamber. A low, elevated platform covered with tatami ran the perimeter of the room. At the front of the platform was an apron of wood. Taut, round black pillows had been placed at regular intervals on the tatami. These were the
zafu
meditation pillows, sometimes referred to as
ozafu
, or “honored meditation pillows.” Shiba told me that the actual monks’ training quarters resembled this public meditation room, and that the wooden portion of the ledge functioned as a table. “Try never to touch this ledge,” he said, “as this is the place where I and the other monks eat.” Very quietly, a second young monk materialized from a doorway. “Would you like to try to meditate?” Shiba asked me.

From Shiba, I learned that there was a way to walk, a way to remove my slippers, and a way to place my slippers on the floor. I was to use the
ozafu
, and there was a way to position this too. As Shiba guided me through the minutiae of steps, the other priest stood by a gong in the doorway. Something about this other priest’s expression unnerved me; he did not smile. I feared that this second priest had been summoned to administer the
ky
saku
, the bamboo stick that priests use to whack meditators who fall asleep or fail to hold their position properly.