The World is Dew

 

 

 

The dew was wet and cold on the sides of his feet and the early morning still dark as he made his way towards the monastery. The sun, now just rising over the mountains, was warm to his face, and Kobayashi welcomed it, as he tried to welcome all things, with happiness.

Entering the outer courtyard, Kobayashi saw that the candles had already been lit for some time, and Master Mizoguchi was seated on his mat, in the lotus position, meditating. Kobayashi was always impressed by the calm demeanor on the Master’s face, and this morning was no different. Master Mizoguchi had initiated Kobayashi into the teachings and disciplines of the Zen Way, and Kobayashi loved him for it. Kobayashi had come to desire truth and peace in mid-life, and Master Mizoguchi, now an elderly man, a life-long celibate, had given much to him.

Kobayashi was attracted to Zen not only by its philosophy, but by its sense of peace, and the paradoxical way it invited its followers to see life. Kobayashi especially liked the koans, the questions put to inquirers designed to awaken within the inquirer the truth of the world. Such awakening, the longed-for moment of insight, of satori, lay elusively beyond the grasp of most.

Master Mizoguchi frequently made use of koans as part of Kobayashi’s initiation. When Kobayashi raised the issue of personal identity, Master Mizoguchi simply responded, “What was the appearance of your face before your ancestors were born?”

At another time, when Kobayashi expressed tangentially in the presence of the Master how much his family, especially his four year old daughter, meant to him, Master Mizoguchi said, “The dew lasts only a few hours, and then it is no more.”

Finding his mat and taking his place Kobayashi assumed the lotus position, closed his eyes, and began to breathe in an undulating, peaceful manner.

And yet Kobayashi could not entirely release his mind from his concern for his daughter.

 

*

 

 

Kobayashi arrived back at his home before breakfast. Kiku had prepared tea and some rice, and saw him come in the door as she went into the next room. Kobayashi slid open the thin, bamboo door that led into the main room of the house. To his left was the kitchen, straight ahead his bedroom, and to the right was his daughter’s room, where Kiku had just gone. Kobayashi approached the low-laying table, and poured himself some tea. Kobayashi held the small cup with both hands, his eyes closed, and his nostrils dilated with the aromatic odor of the tea before him. Soon, Kiku joined him, pouring herself tea, and sitting down.

“Good morning,” Kobayashi said to her.

“Yes,” she responded.

“Did you sleep well?”

Kiku responded “Up twice with her.”

Kobayashi looked into his cup, and sipped.

Sato had come into his life as a surprise. Kobayashi had married late, and expected to leave this life childless. Seven years into his marriage with Kiku, Kobayashi luxuriated with the freedom to write haiku, to travel, and to study with Master Mizoguchi. But Sato’s coming, though unexpected, was welcomed, as welcomed as the sun in the morning.

 

*

 

Noon at the monastery mixed the smell of tea with that of the candles. Monks gathered together, sharing a few words, always a few words.

Kobayashi sat with Master Mizoguchi. Kobayashi recited to him a newly composed haiku.

 

“Yes,” replied the Master. “Your gift in haiku reflects the wisdom you have gained. To focus the attention on one moment, in that one thing to see all things, all transitory, all changing, is the way toward enlightenment.”

Kobayashi listened appreciatively.

 “Do you have another?” asked the Master.

“I do,” replied Kobayashi, and so he recited, invoking the image of sleeping monks:

 

 

Master Mizoguchi smiled, and then his demeanor suddenly changed.

“Ha, the hour is over,” and clapping his hands once, the monks returned to their assigned duties. The scene reminded Kobayashi of one if his favorite koans, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

As silence regained dominion over the monastery, Kobayashi stood up, bowed before his revered master, and exited the monastery.

 

*

 

Sato had had a fitful sleep the previous night. Kiku and Kobayashi were up with her, and that morning Dr. Nakamura was sent for. Kobayashi feared the diagnosis. So many had been stricken that year with small pox. So many had died. Kobayashi knew many who had perished in this invisible net, and could only ease his sorrow with the thought that, as the dew arrives at night and evaporates in the morning light, joining with all the moisture of the universe, so all people merge into a similar reality.

Kobayashi arrived at his door step, and found the door opened.

Entering the room, Kobayashi saw Kiku standing just outside of Sato’s door, and presently Dr. Nakamura came out of the room and approached Kobayashi. They met in the center of the house.

“Konnichiwa, Dr. Nakamura,” greeted Kobayashi, bowing perfunctorily.

“Yes, good day Kobayashi,” he replied.

An awkward silence.

 

 

“I have examined Sato, and I regret to have to report that she has small pox.”

Kiku placed her right hand over her mouth, her anxiety finding its confirmation.

Kobayashi looked down upon the floor. 

“I have left some medication, but these are only to reduce the fever and discomfort.”

Kobayashi listened impassively.

“Do you understand what I’m saying, Kobayashi?”

He nodded.

After Dr. Nakamura left, Kobayashi sat down with Kiku. Kiku thought how her mother might come and join them for a while. Kobayashi, in his mind, found it impossible to resist a recurrent haiku he had written some time previously:

 

 

*

 

Over the next days, many died in the town of Kashiwabara.

 

 

*

 

Sato’s breath left her one early morning, not long afterwards, and silence filled the house.

 

*

 

Had he been asked, Kobayashi would have said that grief felt like a sharp ache that not be assuaged. But no one asked. It would have been impolite.

So many months passed since Sato’s departure, and Kobayashi’s ache remained. For a man so striving toward the ideal of detachment, he had never before felt so attached. On one hand, his daughter’s death confirmed his growing detachment from the things of this life, and yet to her memory he never felt so attached to anything before. Detached, yet attached more. Transitory existence, enduring presence.

Many months passed after Sato’s death before Kobayashi could bring himself to return to the monastery. Master Mizoguchi had performed the funeral ritual for Sato, but Kobayashi could not go back to see him, until this day. But finally, Kobayashi summoned the will to return, and so he climbed up the mountain toward the monastery.

 

 

Master Mizoguchi approached Kobayashi and bowed low. Kobayashi, ashamed of such deference from his esteemed mentor, bowed in return. With a gentle, sweeping arm gesture, Master Mizoguchi invited Kobayashi into the monastery, towards one of the side rooms, where tea awaited them.

Master Mizoguchi served Kobayashi his tea, and he received it gratefully. Silence passed between them for many minutes. Master Mizoguchi broke the silence.

“It is a beautiful day, Kobayashi.”

“Yes.”

“How are you, my friend?”

Kobayashi looked down, unable to formulate a response.

Silence.

“Master, you maintain such a tranquil, peaceful demeanor. How? I have been with you for some time, but still, right now, I do not comprehend it. How do you remain at peace?”

“I remember the teachings of the Buddha, Kobayashi. Life is suffering. Suffering is attachment. Relinquish attachment, and suffering will diminish.”

Kobayashi listened to the words, but saw his daughter’s face, heard her laughter, smelled her hair.

Master Mizoguchi closed his eyes. He hurt for his friend.

“Transience,” the Master continued, “this world is transient. It deceives us into thinking it is permanent. It is transient. Passing.”

Kobayashi listened, and yearned for his daughter.

“The world is dew, Kobayashi. It is here in the morning, and gone before the sun fully rises. All its inhabitants, all whom we know, appear and pass into the Night.”

Kobayashi closed his eyes.

“I speak as one who believes these things,” Master Mizoguchi continued, “but has little experience of them. I still seek enlightenment, to pass from knowledge beyond knowledge. But this I believe, that this world is dew. It is dew, Kobayashi, samsara, illusion, non-being, nothingness. When we achieve satori, we will know ourselves to be nothing, and then we shall know peace. We shall know nirvana.”

Kobayashi inhaled deeply, and exhaled slowly. How he wished he could accept this proposition that up to now he avidly explored and studied. Yes, Kobayashi knew the teachings. The wheel of samsara turns, souls are born into the world, souls leave the world. Release from the wheel, the wheel of rebirths, the meshing of sensation and illusion, the attachments, was the goal of wisdom, of insight, of enlightenment. Yet for all the world nothing seemed so real as this, his absent daughter. Nothing seemed so permanent as his love for her, and for his suffering wife. Would that he could only bend his mind toward the doctrines, he might know peace, release, quiet.

“It seems so difficult, Master,” Kobayashi said, “to coordinate the doctrine of No Being with the human beings before me.”

“Turn your gaze from particular human beings, Kobayashi, and concentrate your attention on just one thing. Remember your haiku, which encourages the focused attention on one moment, one thing, and by practice to learn to focus on the one thing, and eventually on no-thing.”

Haiku had always been Kobayashi’s primary access to Buddhist doctrine. His own writing of haiku represented his purest meditation.

Silence ensued once again. Enough had been said.

Both arose. Master Mizoguchi walked Kobayashi down toward the monastery entrance. Master Mizoguchi bid Kobayashi farewell at the gate, and Kobayashi began his slow, winding descent back toward town. Dusk was falling.

 

*

 

Kobayashi awoke, as he had for months since Sato’s death, around 3 AM. The same twinge of anxiety, the brief sense of panic, and then the recollection of thought. Kobayashi lay on his mat next to Kiku. He dared not stir, for she had hardly slept for months. Kobayashi lay still listening to the sounds of the night.

In the quietness of the night, Kobayashi listened to his heart. The elusive dialectic between the doctrine he sought to embrace – that life is transience – with his deep desire to hold his child again, to hold and to never let go, played itself out in his mind. How he wanted to reconcile these two impulses. How much he wanted, as Master Mizoguchi might have said, to pass beyond all duality to the unity that is truth. Transience. Relationships. Surely the doctrine of transience wasn’t for celibate monks alone. Yet how to reconcile the human desire, the seeming inevitability, of relationships, with the doctrine of Non-Being?

Kobayashi was not a philosopher, let alone an ascetic. But he felt he might achieve a measure of satisfaction if he could at least express poetically this battle within his heart.

Kobayashi lay still on his mat for over an hour. His daughter’s face, her muffled morning hair, her last bath, the Master’s words of that past day, his striving for philosophical reconciliation, passed randomly through his mind.

“The world is dew…the world is dew…”

Sometime between 4:00 and 4:30, the words came to him, almost like an afterthought. A perfect reflection of his inner state of mind. Quietly he arose from his mat, went to his table, took out a pen, and wrote. Kobayashi wrote the characters upon the paper in less than a minute, and then placed the pen back in its holder. It was done.

Kobayashi, as quietly as he could, slipped on his sandals, slid open the door, and walked down the steps. He stepped onto the walkway, but then soon turned off, toward the back of the house, toward the mountains that surrounded Kashiwabara. The sunlight was beginning to lighten the eastern sky, the birds were beginning to sing, and the dew felt damp and cold around the rims of his sandals. Kobayashi stopped, looked toward the rising sun, closed his eyes, and inhaled the morning air. As he exhaled, he opened his eyes, and for the first time in many, many months, felt that something had been accomplished. Kobayashi, who possessed the instincts and temperament of an artist, had captured truth, his truth, in words, and this provided a degree of satisfaction for his soul.

Kobayashi stood still in the morning air, in the dew-laden grass, and felt the light of the sun upon his face.

 

*

 

In the year 1819, in the sixth month, Kobayashi Nobuyuki, who published under the name Issa, composed the following haiku:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

James McCullough

28 January 2006

Revised 7 April 2006