Flickering Candles
Early
morning, darkness beyond the panes of her window, the candles
flickering, the scent of sandlewood. She rubbed her eyes, then
reached a hand to the top her head, patted, frowned. "My
glasses," she said. Fiddlesticks. Where ... And found them on
the floor beside the leg of her chair. Elizabeth sighed, bent for
them awkwardly, placed them deliberately behind her ears, gently on
the bridge of her nose. She took up her pencil and wrote:
Ikkyu died in 1481. He was 88 years
old. His death, ascribed to acute ague, came, like the death of so
many Zen masters, while sitting in meditation at Daitokuji, his Kyoto
temple. His death poem, written shortly before his life ebbed away,
was in his own hand. The Daitokuji claims to have the original of
this poem. It reads:
South of Mt. Sumeru
Who can match my Zen?
Even if Hsü-t'ang
comes
He's not worth half a penny.
Elizabeth
pulled her glasses to the end of her nose, scratched her forehead. A
challenge, those words. They were not meant to be disrespectful, not
boastful; but rather, I think, to be a goad to his followers. Zen was
rife with slack monks who gave no thought to practicing what they
preached. And Mori? Had she outlived Ikkyu? Or was she, too, already
buried on her beach? Or, if still alive, would she have known of
Ikkyu's death? From her manuscript, this:
He sat on the rickety verandah of the
old shed, hands draped over knees, thumbs and middle fingers just
touching. A small boy ran by, dust kicking up beneath his heels. A
mother's shrill cry. In the distance, the mill's wheel turned and
thumped, and song rose from the flooded fields as the farmers began
to plant their rice.
I brought him his tea, but he simply
shook his head. Plagued with dysentery these past few weeks, Ikkyu
was now resolved. I knelt beside him. His kimono had opened at his
wizened throat exposing a boney white chest. My small bundle sat just
beside a narrow bench.
"Please go now," he said.
His voice was quite strong. "Nothing done, everything complete."
Then he was silent.
I bowed, took up my bundle and turned
away. Drums beat from the field. Women hurried with their baskets of
young shoots. I walked down the village street towards the high road
to the coast. I saw Ikkyu no more.
Elizabeth
removed her glasses, rubbed her eyes. All we are left with is
speculation. Did Ikkyu die in this nameless village? Lake Biwa is
thirty odd miles from Kyoto. Did he recover sufficiently to return to
Daitokuji? Or have his followers created a little Zen tale? Many
questions. No answers.
"We
need a time frame here," Elizabeth said. It would be good to
know when they parted, those two. Say, late spring through early
summer for the rice and towards the end of the war. "And that
helps us how?" she said aloud.
Was
his death at Daitokuji just some revisionist history? And that death
poem? Genuine? Most think so. Perplexing, the whole business. She
absently wiped the lenses of her glasses on the hem of her robe. In
the margin of the page she wrote: Note to self: Is some explication
of the poem necessary? Should the reader know who Hsü-t'ang
was? And 'ague.' A bit literary. Would 'fever' better serve? I'll ask
Grace.
Her
hand moved to the brown manila envelope. In Grace's looping hand, an
address and her phone number. "Eureka," Elizabeth said
softly. She took her glasses from her face slowly with both hands.
The flickering candles blurred. Reluctant morning sky still in
darkness.
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