Tone of Spring

Spring has the tone of spring, and autumn has the scene of autumn; there is no escaping it. So when you want spring or autumn to be different from what is, notice that it can only be as it is.

Eihei Dogen

My entry into the classroom does not affect the hum of conversation among my students, though it elicits a couple of nods and hellos from those who happen to be looking toward the door. This pleases me, both the conversation and the greetings. I teach in the disadvantaged English Department of a small business school, and I have been in classrooms where the students did not talk to each other and nobody moved when I entered the room (stupefied by the previous period of accounting, no doubt). In all my teaching career I have never entered a classroom without at least a frisson of stage fright—am I on time? in the right room? on the right day? sufficiently well prepared?—but I am a lot looser than I used to be, having passed my planned stopping point and postponed retirement indefinitely, now that Rachel is no longer here for me to spend it with.

I have served my time in the required expository writing sections, and this class, Literature of Zen, is my reward. Instead of arriving precisely at the appointed hour so that I can launch straight into my sthick without the need for any social preamble, I frequently show up 5 minutes early and wander among my students, exchanging pleasantries. I tell myself that I do this at random, speaking to whomever my eye lights upon, but the truth is that I have my favorites, and they are the more likely to catch my eye and to say something about the assigned reading, thus obviating the need for me to make small talk.

Perhaps the mourning for my beloved has something to do with this unwonted sociability. Since I no longer leave the house in the evening to attend serendipitous events that Rachel culled from the internet or entertain friends in the lavish style that she loved, my students are virtually my only society, and apart from my Zen sangha (where we mostly sit in silence), my classes are the sole proof of a connection with the larger world. Her presence is everywhere in the house, and perhaps that ought to suffice me. She assured me that we two were one, that we could never be parted, neither by distance nor by death, but I am the one who has to carry on as one.

I am a thoroughly Americanized Irish citizen born in Ireland, and it occurs to me that I would be no more bereft in the old country than I am here and now and that I might renew some old friendships and rest my bones in my native earth. The thought terrifies me!

There are logistical matters to attend to before I can get down to business in the classroom. By now my students know that the formal arrangement of chairs in rigid rows favored by physical plant is abhorrent to me and that they are required to seat themselves in a circle, the center of which is empty of chairs, backpacks, and other extraneous objects, a more or less circular circle in which everyone can see and be seen by everyone else. The circle rarely requires tweaking, but it is frequently necessary to open the window shades after the previous class. he controls for shades and lights are at the teacher’s podium which students are reluctant to approach of their own initiative--unless they have come to prefer the atmosphere of a cinema before the film starts with its reassurance of a passive experience in store. I wish to restore them to God’s good daylight and to emphasize that there is nowhere to hide in my class from active or induced participation.

One of my favorites is Josephine, a young woman who has followed me from the required expository writing courses to creative writing and now to Literature of Zen, probably the best writer of fiction I have ever had in my classes—which presents me with a dilemma: do I encourage her to spend her senior year refining stories that are certainly worthy of publication but lack an outlet? Or do I bow to the inevitable and accept the fact that she will never write (or read!) another word of fiction after she becomes a Certified Public Accountant? Can I be satisfied to know that there is an intangible benefit to the contact she has had with literature (and with meditation in the small practice group I facilitate at the Spiritual Life Center)? In my younger days I might have fretted about the waste of an exceptional talent, but lately I console myself with the thought of bread cast upon the waters…

Josephine is tall and thin, high-strung, restless. Usually her blonde head is bent together with the straight blue-black hair of her bosom friend Amelia, a Vietnamese-American student with a beautiful Vietnamese name she has asked me not to use for fear her classmates will mangle it. The pair are inseparable, and since Amelia is probably my most engaged student, who seems to be discovering a forgotten part of herself in Zen writing and the practice of attention, her absence momentarily disconcerts me.

--Where’s Amelia? I say involuntarily.

Josephine gives me a look which might mean, You really don’t know? or Mind your own business.

--She went to San Francisco for the weekend.

--For the weekend? I cannot help saying. Isn’t it kind of a long way to go for the weekend?

Josephine gives an expressive shrug of her elegant, bony shoulders.

--That’s love, she says, trying to look as though such an explanation is incomprehensible to her.

Josephine’s fiction reveals that she knows more about love than she will let on, to me, at least, though the gritty details that she favors are more than tempered by a streak of youthful romanticism. However, I do not usually concern myself with what I learn in passing about the personal lives of my students, being unwilling or unable to figure out whether they are more worldly than I think or more naïve.

I take my place in the circle, call the troops to attention, and announce our 2 or 3 minutes of silent sitting together. When I instituted this practice in the first class of the semester, there were gasps of amazement, and though no one raised an objection, I could almost hear them thinking, We are going to bring our attention to the breath—why would we do that? How would we do that? We are going to sit without moving—that’s impossible! And so it proves to be for many of them. But they are game to give it a try, and their reward is to discover that the practice is impossible and that this does not constitute an impediment, believe it or not, but rather an opportunity. I do not say very much about this opportunity, being loath to sell the practice, but pretty soon it becomes apparent that the students perceive a benefit—or at least that they are willing to insist upon our interval of silent sitting before class begins if I should happen to omit it.

I’ve assigned the opening pages of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. If On the Road is a paean to sex, drugs, and jazz, its counterpart has to do with buddha, dharma, and sangha, or in more secular terms, with the drug-free high, wisdom (worldly and otherwise), and an improbable community of hikers, meditators, and beat poets. But first we have to explore the life and poetry of Han-shan, the 8th- or 9th-century Buddhist or Taoist hermit to whom Kerouac has dedicated his novel.

Han-shan (aka Cold Mountain, his place of residence) inscribed many of his poems on the walls and rocks of his cave in the mountains of eastern China. He was a hermit, but he occasionally visited the nearby Kuoching Temple on Mt Tientai where he wrote on paper and made friends with two of the prototypes of Kerouac’s Zen lunatics, Feng-kan (Big Stick) and Shih-te (Pickup). Feng-kan was an iconoclastic monk who also came and went at Kuoching and ‘picked up’ the 10 year-old Shih-te abandoned by his parents and brought him to the monastery. Shih-te grew up working in the kitchen where Feng-kan and Han-shan hung out with him. None of the three seems to have relished the monastic regimen, but they were happy to sit together in the kitchen and trade poems, jokes, and a belly laugh or two—and scandalize the monks with their irreverent antics.

What I like about Han-shan: he has feet of clay, like the rest of us, and he makes no bones about it in his poetry. There is some evidence that he came from a wealthy family, but was disappointed in his career aspirations, perhaps because he failed a government exam or was forced to abandon an influential position due to association with a rebellious faction. There is a hint in the poems that he suffered from a physical disability which would also have disqualified him from office, but at any rate he seems to have come to the life of a hermit as a result of disillusionment and frustration with worldly affairs

While some of his poems display remarkable insight, not to say the profound speech of one who has ‘attained the Way,’ others express the suffering of sickness, old age, death, loss of loved ones—and occasional bitterness and regret. Han-shan is living the paradox of Zen, entering deeply into the joys of communion with nature, but also experiencing the loneliness of the hermit’s isolation, confronting the full stop of mortality—and seeking refuge in poetry and laughter.

I tell a lie. When I first encountered Han-shan’s poetry, I was disconcerted by the poems that express his human, all-too-human being. How could someone who has attained the way allow himself the indulgence of bitterness and criticism of the unenlightened? How could he feel sad and lonely on his chosen mountain top? But that is the paradox of Zen, for one who is capable of living it to the hilt. As Han-shan himself puts it, Who can leap the world’s snares and sit with me amongst white clouds? And there’s the rub. The world reasserts itself: there is no once-for-all attainment: there is just this, just that.

I deliver what is known about Han-shan to an outwardly attentive circle of students, feeling that I am coming perilously close to lecturing, which is sure to stifle their responses to the verses. Before I read selected verses, I get up and project them onto the unfurled media screen, not wishing to ask my students to absorb poetry read aloud since I cannot do so myself. I have to draw the blinds halfway down and turn off the overhead lights, which produces a dust-filled gloom penetrated by shafts of sunlight and initiates a ripple of movement among the chairs.

Like Kerouac, I owe a special debt to Han-shan.  My introduction to Zen practice came when I opened an anthology of Zen writing at random and read the following verse:

People ask for the road to Cold Mountain,

But no road reaches Cold Mountain.

Summer sky—still ice won’t melt.

The sun comes out but gets obscured by mist.

Imitating me, where does that get you?

My mind isn’t the same as yours.

If your mind were like mine,

You’d be here now.

No road reaches Cold Mountain: what’s with that? The complete frustration of expectation, the futility of asking for directions: nothing to be done. Yet the second verse seems to hold out a possibility, if not of a road, then at least of an entry: You’d be here now. I was confounded—and intrigued. It’s that paradox again: no road, no impediment. But how far do I have to travel in order to realize this?

I read these verses to the darkened room and then raise the blinds a little so that I can see my students’ faces without entirely effacing the words on the screen.

--Pick a line, or a word, or an image that struck you, I say. For any reason.

There is a studious silence as they eye the projected verses. I allow it to continue, knowing they know I am willing to call on one of them (and not necessarily one of my favorites) if a timely response is not forthcoming. As it happens, Josephine raises her hand.

--Wherever you go, there you are, Josephine says. That’s the first verse.

--Wow, I say. What about the second?

--Be yourself. Everybody else is taken. That’s Oscar Wilde.

I’m a little taken aback to be instructed in my own tradition, as Josephine is undoubtedly aware. (Though I suspect that it wasn’t really Wilde who said this, but rather someone very like him.)

--I think you have enough wisdom there to write your own poem, Josephine, I say lightly, not wishing to embarrass her with overt praise. And you’ve come by it without having to be a hermit.

Josephine sniffs suspiciously and bends her blonde head over the highlighted pages of her copy of The Dharma Bums. I will have to tell her privately how impressed I am. In the meantime, her response seems to have taken the air out of the room. Nobody else wants to risk a comparison with her elegant brevity of interpretation, a poem in itself, as I have been rash enough to point out. For a change, I do not press them.

Josephine stops by my desk as I am gathering my books and papers.

--By the way, Professor, she murmurs, with a shy grin, I have no idea what the poem means. Amelia emailed me last night that she missed her flight. She wanted me to tell you what she thought about the poem, so I did. And she said she met the reincarnation of Han-shan on the street in San Francisco.

I am at a loss for an immediate response. Josephine gives a little toss of her blonde head.

--She’ll be back on Wednesday. We’ll see you at meditation.

The Spiritual Life Center is a light-filled room in a relatively little-trafficked area of the Student Center, separated from a meeting room next door by means of a not-entirely soundproof partition. This meeting room contains a piano that is available to passing students, and although the piano has a neatly printed sign affixed to the lid asking for silence during our meditation periods, it is sometimes necessary for me to go next door in order to put a stop to an impromptu recital. I do this with some misgivings: after all, things are as they are and not otherwise, and we practice in order to let them be. But since we are occasionally unable to hear ourselves talk, not to mind think (or not-think), the Director of Spiritual Life and Catholic chaplain, my friend and colleague Father Foley, has suggested a skillful means, and I now lock the piano for the duration of our meetings.

The room that constitutes the Center is a pleasant one, with a wall of windows and a high ceiling. Its ambience is entirely secular, at least at first blush, the religious artifacts of the various ‘faith-based’ groups being concealed from casual visitors in a large, walk-in closet, along with our meditation cushions and mats (courtesy of the Spiritual Life budget) and a tiny bell with which to keep the time. There is a flat-topped podium that serves as an inter-faith altar, as well as another tiny storeroom with a long low sink which doubles as a wudu area for Muslim students (the only overt concession to a particular denomination). The chairs are usually arranged in regimented formation by the incorrigible physical plant folks, but they are easy to move back against the walls and the partition in order to create space for the cushions.

In my association with the Center, my title (printed upon a business card embossed with the college logo) is Buddhist Practice Coordinator, and I joke that I direct Buddhist traffic, of which there is very little. Our group is open to all students (or faculty, for that matter, who rarely come, being reluctant to sit on the floor with students), no experience of meditation required, and I take a catholic attitude to styles of practice other than Zen, which is to say that I am content to sit in silence and do not inquire too closely into how newcomers occupy themselves. My Literature of Zen students, however, tend to wish that our practice conform to what they are learning in class, and they are more than willing to present their understanding to the newcomers.

A new Spiritual Life Center, in a dedicated, free-standing building of its own, on a little eminence overlooking the lush green playing fields, with spacious rooms for each of the faith-based groups, was a pet project of one of the college’s trustees who promised our hugely enthusiastic Father Foley that her donation of a million dollars would be contingent upon its being put to this singular use. Over a period of about 6 months, the members of the team—Catholic priest, Protestant minister, Rabbi, Muslim chaplain, Hindu advisor, and Buddhist Practice Coordinator—met with the architects to express our respective needs and to approve preliminary drawings. The BPC was grateful merely to be included in the discussion and astonished to be presented with his own space inside the building (after he had concealed the scarcity of Buddhists on the ground and somewhat sheepishly pointed out that a miniature Japanese rock garden would not suffice for year-round sitting in New England). The artist’s drawings of a design nearing completion were presented to the team by the architects at a celebratory meeting. But as I was about to pinch myself to make sure that I had not dreamed up the handsome and supremely functional building that was about to be put at our disposal, Father Foley rendered this unnecessary by leaning over to inform me in an irate whisper that it was all pie in the sky.

--What do you mean? I spluttered, while the architects beamed and bobbed and bowed toward the image of a shining, glass-walled temple on a hill and the rest of the team ooh-ed and aah-ed.

--They got to her, Father Foley hissed. She just emailed me.

--Who? What?

--The other trustees. They told her she had no business throwing away a million bucks on spiritual life in a college like this one. And so she’s giving it to the Center for Business Ethics instead.

--Christ! I said, before I could help myself. So what are the architects doing here?

--The college already paid them for this part of the project, Father Foley observed primly. You don’t think they’re going to refund their fee, do you? They’re here to deliver the artist’s drawings. God knows they’ve cost us a pretty penny.

So that’s what we got: the artist’s drawings—and no actual building. But when I asked poor Father Foley a couple of months later if I could look at them, for a purely Pisgah view of the Promised Land, he could not lay his hand upon them. And very much later, when he was about to retire from the college in order to devote his remaining days to his position as Director of his branch of the Order of Augustinians of the Assumption, he confided disconsolately that he had torn the drawings to pieces in a fit of sinful (as it seemed to him), but surely understandable rage.

I wanted to tell him that whatever happens, it’s all right: when you are angry, just be angry; when sad, be sad. Here I was, a lapsed Catholic and practicing Buddhist in my mature years, about to counsel the Catholic priesthood that had urged guilt and remorse of conscience upon me in childhood to practice Buddhist equanimity—and this to a member of the clergy who was also a colleague and a dear friend. In the event we ended up tackling the Bushmills that I keep for such eventualities in the back of my office filing cabinet and commiserating with each other about the way of all committees and educational institutions.

The truth is that I have not attained anything resembling equanimity in some 30 years of Zen practice. The most I can say when I drag myself out of bed at 3 am to take my longing for Rachel to the cushion, as it were, to meet my apprehensions about a solitary old age, to sit without turning away from grief (or to sit with turning away), the most I can say is that the Dharma is arising as despair. And a complaint from one of Dogen’s monks (rather than Dogen’s measured response) echoes in my mind: Although I have practiced diligently for many years, I have never had a moment of complete, unsurpassable enlightenment…

When I walk into the room that must serve as the Spiritual Life Center for the foreseeable future, the chairs have already been moved to make way for the cushions which are disposed in the manner favored by the BPC, that is, in two narrowly separated rows that face each other rather than in the more informal circle. Do not ask why I favor this arrangement: it may have something to do with my awareness of the person sitting opposite me, which I find supports my practice—or with the fact that Zen practitioners tend to be a little compulsive.

Josephine and Amelia are there, already seated, along with Angela and Maria, all talking excitedly, and James, looking a little left out. James is the only one who has not taken a literature or writing course with me, and he takes no part in our discussions about Zen texts, which made me think that he would drop out of the group, but in fact he is our most regular attendee, and his rare questions show that he is paying close attention to the experience of practice.

Amelia gives me a rueful glance and makes a comic grimace. I pretend not to notice that there are tears on her plump cheeks.

--How was San Fran, Amelia? I ask, with some trepidation.

--She didn’t tell me that her boyfriend was going to be there, Amelia says in an indignant rush.

--Uh-oh, I say.

I fetch our bell and clapper out of the closet, settle myself in the middle of a row opposite Amelia, and pass them to her. The xeroxed pages with the Refuges and the Remembrances have already been placed on the cushions, but I know that she will not need to look at them.

--James?

--Yes?

--How is it?

--Good.

James is a man of few words, at least in the company of women. I glance at Angela and Maria, who are both grinning at me.

--The weekend?

--It was cold, Angela says, on the top of Mount Katahdin. The hiking club’s most ambitious ascent to date.

--You can’t say Mount Katahdin, Maria giggles. Katahdin means greatest mountain, to the Penobscot.

They are both of them the picture of fitness and good health. I wonder if I will ever climb Katahdin again; it’s been at least 5 years since I last attempted it, only to be stopped in my tracks by high winds on the summit of Pamola and forced to beat an ignominious retreat down the Dudley trail. But it would be a noble hill to die on.

--She did her homework, Angela says. But I virtually had to short-rope her across the Knife Edge.

--It was worth it. The mountain spoke to me.

--What did it say?

--Wherever you go…Josephine chips in.

I set the timer and pass it to Amelia. Instead of an alarm, a light will flash when our twenty minutes are up. She reaches across the space between us to take it delicately between thumb and forefinger, gives me a quick glance in which I fancy I can see distress, and composes herself to sit. Everyone except James (and the BPC) is capable of holding a passable half-Lotus; he kneels upright with the cushion supporting his butt, and I manage to get my knees on the mat (which is as far as they will extend in this lifetime). Amelia draws three pure and careful tones from the bell, and our practice begins. I recall that I have forgotten to lock the piano on the other side of the partition, but I decide to entrust myself to whatever arises.

Sunlight brilliant on the floor between us, the dignity of silent upright sitting, against the background noise of the Student Center, laughter in the corridor, the hum of the cafeteria downstairs, a gust of sound as someone opens the door and closes it again with a truncated giggle. The sincerity of our little sangha, their unmoving practice in the midst of everything, touches me.

Amelia sounds the bell twice in rapid succession, and the tableau dissolves of itself.

--Please sit comfortably, I say, quite unnecessarily.

We are all sprawled in different attitudes upon our cushions. I look around, inviting comments.

--Why do you take a deep breath about five minutes into every meditation? James wants to know.

--I do?

Of course I’m aware of this, but I’m stalling for time, trying to think of a joke. Josephine beats me to the punch.

--He’s putting it all down, she says, showing me that she remembers one of the ways in which we have talked about realization, as an absence rather than an attainment.

--He’s listening to the cries of the world, Amelia says plaintively. Like Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion.

--Is that right? James says.

Angela and Maria exchange gleeful looks.

--It’s just what my body does, James, I say quickly. Everyone’s different.

--So you’ve never had a moment of enlightenment? Josephine persists.

--Our practice does not prefer enlightenment over non-enlightenment, I say, rather pompously. What about you?

The first tentative notes of a Bach prelude emanate from behind the partition.

--The sound of music! Josephine proclaims triumphantly.

I pick up my watch from where I’ve placed it in front of my mat and check the time.

--We have a few minutes. What do you guys want to do?

--I’d like to throw the little book, Amelia says. I could use some enlightenment.

Throwing the little book is our modified koan practice. I toss the Little Book of Zen, a collection of quotations from within and without the Zen tradition, to whomever requests it. The book is opened at random, and the practitioner reads the quotations on facing pages and gives an immediate, spontaneous response, which may consist of a gesture, a word or phrase, or a mini-dharma talk.

I take the book out of my pocket and pass it to Amelia.

--You have to throw it to me, she insists.

--Sorry.

She plucks it out of the air, tosses it up into the dust-filled shafts of sunlight, and grabs it again like a centerfielder snagging a fly. Everybody claps.

--What happens if you drop it? James wonders.

It is game he’s fought shy of, as though it were a species of magic or uncanny divination.

--A hundred years of bad karma, James, Angela tells him. And you’ll come back as a golden retriever.

--Give over with that sort of talk, I tell her. We have no truck with reincarnation around here. If you drop it, you pick it up.

--There are worse things than being a golden retriever, Maria says. If our family’s dog is anything to go by, you get to do a lot of sitting.

--Don’t you guys want to hear what I got? Amelia pleads, holding the little book open in her lap with her chubby finger keeping the pages spread.

--Go ahead, Amelia.

She reads in a formal, fragile voice that is not like her usual self-mocking drawl.

--To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. That’s from someone called Dogen.

--Whoa, Angela says. I think the professor will have to enlighten us about that one.

--I wish I could forget the self, Amelia says plaintively.

--So do we all, my dear, I tell her, trying to offer some indirect comfort. What’s your other quotation?

--Anything more than the truth would be too much, she reads. Robert Frost. I think I’ll take this one.

--How do you express it?

Our practice is to enter into the words of the quotation, to apply it to our own predicament, right here, right now. I have a moment of sympathy for Amelia, who seems to be at a loss. She’s sitting cross-legged again, hunched over the little book which she cradles in her hands, a couple of strands of sable hair falling over her face. I am afraid she is going to cry.

--That’s me alright, she says brightly. The truth doesn’t satisfy me: I always want more. And when I get it, it’s too much. It’s a story, not the real thing, and because it’s not real, it takes so much effort to maintain it, to believe it, that it’s exhausting. And in the end, it turns out not to be what I want after all. And not the truth either.

This sobers us all a little. I am glad that Amelia did not tell us the story of her weekend. Josephine is her good friend and confidant, but Angela and Maria might be inclined to take it too lightly—and James would just be embarrassed.

There is a general movement to rise, but Amelia silences us with the bell and leads us in chanting the Bodhisattva Vows.

--Beings are numberless. I vow to free them…

As usual, it is the mountains of old Ireland I imagine as the abode of the numberless beings, seen and unseen, and it gives me a superstitious pleasure to be concerned with their welfare. This is all of old Ireland that remains to me.

Everybody helps to put the mats and cushions in the closet. James is first to leave, assuring me seriously that he will see me next week. Angela and Maria bob in unison at the door, hands together in gassho. Josephine is on her way, with quick, nervous strides.

--I’ll see you downstairs in a minute, Amelia says.

She’s bending over in her chair, tying the laces of an expensive-looking pair of hiking boots. Amelia’s attire marks her out from her more business-like fellow students. She favors long loose dresses in natural tones with pastel tie-dye undershirts and lots of Navajo jewelry, silver and turquoise, and mala beads in wood and stone. When she adds the incongruous boots, I sometimes tease her that she’s on her way to Woodstock, and she claims not to know what I mean.

--Sorry I missed class on Monday, Professor, she says. I know how you are about absences.

She gives me a quick, mischievous glance. I’m relieved that she has recovered her good humor. She gives an inflection to the word ‘Professor’ that seems to point up the absurdity of the term. What is it exactly that I am professing?

--You get to be absent twice without penalty, Amelia, I remind her. No excuses necessary, no questions asked. You have one to give. And of course (I cannot resist adding with a little complementary mockery in my tone), your class participation is exemplary.

--Thanks, she says lightly.

She straightens up and sits with her hands resting quietly. Her eyes are clear of distress, and her features with their youthful bloom, fresh pink skin, and raven-black hair are composed.

--It was good to sit, she tells me. I feel better.

--I’m glad.

--But my parents don’t want me to practice meditation.

--Good lord. Why not?

--They think it’s weird. They think it’s affected my grades. I tried to explain to them. About meditation, I mean, not about my grades. But they don’t get it.

--Is meditation affecting your grades?

--Come on, Professor, she giggles. I didn’t spend much time sitting while I was in California.

If this is an invitation to ask her about the weekend, I ignore it.

--Vietnam is a Buddhist country. Aren’t your parents Buddhist?

--For my parents, Buddhism means going to the temple and getting the priests to chant and offer incense and earn merit for you that you don’t have time to earn for yourself. Or officiate at a wedding or a funeral. My parents don’t know anything about meditation, and they don’t want to know about it—or about Vietnam, for that matter.

--Don’t they have relatives there?

--Sure. But they don’t visit very often. I’ve only been there once: I was too young to remember it. I want to go back when I graduate and see my aunt and my cousins, maybe spend a few years there, learning about my own country—because it is my country!—before I start in on a career. They don’t want me to go. It’s not your country, they say. You’re an American. You’re going to be a businesswoman in America. That’s what we’ve worked so hard for—not for you to take courses in literature and meditation.

Amelia is certainly a young woman who is thoroughly American. But that must make it all the harder for her if she is nourishing a suspicion that America is not her home. And the conflict with parents is undoubtedly a painful one—

--It’s your fault, you know, she tells me brightly.

--What?

--I only started to think about Vietnam when we read Thich Nhat Hanh. How he was kicked out by the communists during the war and wrote to the monks that were left behind. I’ve been kicked out too, in a way. What do you think I should do?

I’m both flattered and alarmed to think that my course in the Literature of Zen should have such potentially life-changing consequences for a favorite student.

--How strongly do your parents oppose your going back? I say, stalling for time, or attempting to balance my prejudice toward Amelia’s position.

--I understand the way they feel, she says, with a sigh and a helpless gesture of her cupped palms. My father is always telling me about the pirates that came on board their boat when they were trying to escape from the communists. They thought they were going to be killed. My father swallowed his wedding ring and my mother’s ring so that the pirates wouldn’t have them, no matter what. The pirates took everything, including the boat’s motor, and left them to drift with no oars in the middle of the ocean. If they hadn’t been picked up by a freighter, they would have drowned or starved to death.

She tells the story in a monotonic recitation, as though she is unmoved, but fears to omit a detail.

--Of course my father cannot resist telling me that he got the rings back the next day, she says with a little grimace. I could have done without that part of it.

--I’m glad they made it, I say, rings or no.

--I don’t see why the rings mattered so much, Amelia says. The pirates would have killed my father and carved him up if they’d known what he did with them. But that’s one of the differences between me and my parents. I don’t think I’ll ever be exchanging rings with anyone, at least not in the traditional wedding bells and bridal gown sort of way.

She stands up, brushes down her dress, and shoulders her backpack.

--I might need to use my second no-questions-asked absence, she says casually. I’m going back to San Francisco on Friday.

--Our last class is the week after next, isn’t it?

--I can’t wait that long.

--What about the boyfriend? I can’t resist saying.

--What about him? she bursts out laughing.

I join in. I’m happy that she seems to have recovered her resilience too. What need to caution her against missing classes? My policy is spelled out in the syllabus in order to avoid such conversations. And how much less do I wish to give fatherly advice about life choices or, God forbid, romantic relationships? I am not her father, who has a hold on her by virtue of what he has suffered and sacrificed for her.

Standing, we bow formally to each other, maybe a little tongue-in-cheek, and I walk with her to the door.

--I’ll get you the Kerouac assignment before I go, she says. I finished Dharma Bums on the red-eye. And started Desolation Angels.

--What did you think?

She opens the door, and the inrush of noise momentarily obscures the sense of her reply. She’s tripping down the stairs to the cafeteria, black head bobbing, before I decipher it.

--You’ll have to wait and read my paper!

I begin the Friday class with my usual invitation to my students: find a quotation you can talk about. But I have a hidden agenda. I want to discourage a reading that focuses on the autobiographical element of Kerouac’s book and to emphasize the artistry of the conclusion—in which Ray Smith emulates Han-shan and Japhy Ryder (a character based on the poet and pioneering Zen student Gary Snyder) by finding a mountain and having a ‘peak’ experience that serves to wed his ingrained Catholicism with his Buddhist practice…

How to sneak this in without seeming to dictate? Well, how about a few innocent words by way of summary for the benefit of those who are lagging behind with the assigned reading? The novel closes with an account of Ray’s sojourn as a fire ranger on Mt Desolation in the Cascades. His first impressions are bleak, but before too long, he’s happier than he’s been in years. He meditates on Buddhist emptiness—and longs to find a personal God in the midst of it. He doesn’t forget the existence of suffering, but he sings the praises of the mountains and the pure sensory joy of being alive. The book ends with a vision of the freedom of eternity—and of Japhy as Han-shan, emerging from swirling fog and rain. Before Ray takes his leave of the mountain, he assures God that he’s fallen in love with Him and kneels on the trail to thank his shack for its shelter. He returns to the world with renewed faith, hope, and charity. The marriage of Buddhism and Catholicism, made in the heavens and consummated on Desolation.

The professor’s take. Is it sufficiently surreptitious not to stifle discussion? Pick a quotation.

Josephine comes up with the following: “Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?”

--What does that say? she asks.

--After you.

--I don’t know—and neither does Jack. If we’re fallen angels, then we don’t have to believe that there’s nothing up there. 

--You have his dilemma right there in a nutshell, I say. As a Catholic, he’d like to believe in Heaven and redemption. But from the Buddhist perspective, belief is beside the point. Reality is what matters, how it is, the way things are.

--But what does the loss of loved ones and dear friends prove? Josephine says, a trifle indignantly. It doesn’t prove anything.

--Quite right. The suffering of loss doesn’t prove anything. But the point is not to reach a conclusion, but to keep looking. There may be a vision—of a little old Chinese hermit—there may be wisdom and understanding too, or love and gratitude. That’s the way the book ends. Is it a satisfactory ending?

--Blah! Amelia sings out suddenly. Blah!

--I beg your pardon?

--Blah! That’s the way the book ends. With a big Blah! That’s his last word, his final judgment on the experience.

--And what does that mean to you, Amelia? I ask, cringing inwardly at the predictability of the question.

--I don’t know—and neither does Jack! she says, nudging Josephine who covers her smile with her hand. The shack knows, and the mountain knows, but they don’t say. And I won’t say either—unless I have a vision before I finish my paper.

With that, I have to be content. But I have a feeling that my favorite students are less willing than I am to acknowledge Kerouac’s literary achievement—and perhaps more willing to read biography as an aide to understanding fiction, in spite of my covert efforts to steer them in the opposite direction. A lesson for the professor?

Instead of the paper, there’s an email from Amelia on Friday evening. The subject line reads ‘sent from the runway before I turn off my laptop’:

Dear professor, I wish I could believe what you said in class about the end of Dharma Bums, I wish I’d never read Desolation Angels, but it’s no use wishing, is it? He’s writing about the same experience in DA, but he tells it like it really is this time—and it’s a bummer! He thought he was going to see God or Buddha on top of the mountain, but all he sees is himself, and he doesn’t want to see himself, he wants a drink, he wants a drug, he’s bored, and he’s sick of trying to figure it out. All he knows is that the void doesn’t care about what he feels, and the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth doesn’t do him any good: if all suffering results from attachment to a personal self, what good does it do to know that? You’re still attached. Blah!

‘Hope is a word like a snow drift.’ I love this line, and it makes me sad.

All he can say to himself is shut up and eat your prunes. He still claims that he’s been enlightened, but he’s in an awful hurry to get down out of there, even though he doesn’t think that life in the world is sweet or bitter or anything but just what it is.

Yeah I see what you mean about trying to combine Catholic and Buddhist: Believe—and you’ll live forever! Believe—that you have already lived forever! But he doesn’t believe in either of those things. He says he’s content to know that nothing matters, but he ends up not even wanting to practice zazen. That can’t be Buddhism—or Christianity either—can it? And if he’s content, how come whatever place he thinks about, he sees only bottomless horror? He depresses me. Wherever you go, there you are, as Josephine (and Oscar Wilde) says.

Anyway Ray says there’s no Buddha. I know you told us that if you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him: there’s no Buddha outside yourself. But is that really what he means? He says there’s no meaning, no dharma either. He doesn’t say there’s no God. I think he’s a Catholic having a nervous breakdown, or that he’s nervous about having a Catholic breakdown, or that he’s a nervous Catholic having a breakdown…😊

‘The sound of silence is all the instruction you’ll get.’ Ain’t it the truth?!

What does he learn up there? I know you think Dharma Bums ends with wisdom and love and gratitude and maybe it does. But Desolation begins and ends with Desolation. He learns that he hates himself because he is himself and not even himself because there is no personal self. What kind of a lesson is that? He learns that all he wants is an ice cream. I think all he wants is a drink!

You can reply to this email if you like but I don’t think I’ll have time to read it before I get back and so I’ll just have to write the paper before you tell me that I’ve got it all wrong and

Oops, gotta go. The stewardess is glaring at me

Amelia is not in class on Monday, and so I write and ask her to come to my office as soon as she gets back. I am careful to say that she has a great idea for an essay—which she does!—but I feel that to respond in writing would be to ignore the fact that my assignment of Dharma Bums seems to have compounded her personal distress…

She arrives at my office before Wednesday’s class. I’m looking at my laptop, and when I look up, she’s standing by the half-open door, with a silly grin on her face.

--How long have you been standing there?

She shrugs, keeping the grin in place.

--Why didn’t you knock, or sing out?

She shrugs again, and shuffles in. She’s wearing a tight-fitting black sheath that doesn’t reach her knees, black stockings, and lots of make-up, lip-stick and green eye-shadow. Her hair is piled elegantly, if hurriedly, on top of her head. I’m taken by surprise and do not succeed in concealing it.

--Job fair, she says, clipping her words.

She flops down on my beat-up couch, and I roll my office chair around the desk to sit facing her.

--Don’t ask, she tells me.

--OK.

--She thought I wouldn’t mind if he was there. In fact—

For an awful moment, I am afraid she is going to recount some of the intimate details of an unhappy love triangle, and I am casting about for a way to stop her, without seeming indifferent to her distress. But she remembers the object of our meeting.

--I know the paper is late and I’ll probably lose points—

--Amelia, I say, you already have the paper right there in your email. All you have to do is flesh it out—

--I thought you didn’t want us to say anything about Kerouac’s life.

--It’s not a hard and fast rule. If it sheds light on the text—

--It’s the other way round: the text sheds light on his life, and it’s—heart-breaking!

She rummages in an embroidered handbag that sorts ill with the dress.

--Can’t cry, she tells me gamely. Josephine warned me. If you’re going to get tarted up for them and put on make-up, you don’t want to mess it up.

--Amelia, I say.

--No, listen! They tore him to pieces.

--Tore who?

--Jaaaack! she intones. After On the Road, he was famous, and he just couldn’t deal with it. He didn’t want to be King of the Beats. His business was with the Dharma, just like Snyder. But he didn’t have the sense to keep his mouth shut about it, or to drink in private, if he had to drink. He went on CBS drunk and the interviewer asked him about the Dharma and he started to say stuff like, you know, we’re not really sitting here, two separate beings, that’s just the way it appears, that’s just what you think, we’re really merged in great empty space, in the golden eternity, an empty vision in God’s mind. And the interviewer was laughing up his sleeve and kept egging him on, to make a fool of himself before an audience of millions.

She pauses to dab at her eyes.

--Did you know that? she demands tearfully.

--Sure. It’s a sad story.

--Ray Smith is like a child, she says vehemently, the way he looks up to Japhy, he thinks he can find his way by doing just what Japhy did. Imitating me, where does that get you? He’s naïve and innocent, and that’s Jack’s problem, he just pours out his thoughts about Buddhism without realizing that people will think he’s crazy, he can’t disguise himself when he’s with people who aren’t sympathetic—or else it’s that he doesn’t accept that you have to wear a mask out there or people will eat you up alive—

She fixes me with an indignant look.

--Can I write this stuff in my paper?

--Sure, I say gently. It’s what you saw. And you’re probably right.

--It’s my problem too! she says vehemently. I don’t want to disguise myself either, to put on this stupid dress and this shitty make-up and go to their dumb job fair and pretend I want to work for them—

Suddenly she covers her face with her hands. The movement sweeps the bag out of her lap. Since she sits there without moving or making a sound, I lean over, pick up the bag, and place it gently in her lap.

--Thank you, she murmurs, without uncovering her face.

A number of responses occur to me, but they seem like platitudes, and so I continue to sit with her. She appears to be contemplating rather than weeping.

--Alright, she says, taking her hands down and facing me dry-eyed. That’s what I’ll write. Of course it has nothing to do with the meaning of the book.

--What is the meaning of the book, Amelia?

--It’s what Alvah says when Japhy sails away to Japan to practice Zen in a real monastery. Alvah thinks Ray’s Buddhism has made him mean, he thinks the Dharma is a crock of shit.

--What does he say, Amelia? I ask, although I know only too well.

--It all ends in tears.

We sit in silence, Amelia toying with a loose thread in her bag, me eyeing the clock above the door which is approaching the hour of class.

--Well, say something! she says, with a rueful grin. Am I right or am I wrong?

It all ends in tears. Who can deny it? Me and Rachel saying our farewells in a hospital room. After many a heavenly day.

--It’s time for class, Amelia, I tell her. Maybe we can talk later.

--And she wondered why I was so upset, Amelia says quietly, as if to herself.

I am not a regular at commencement, disliking the robes and the stock speeches, but I make an exception for favorite students like Amelia. Besides, I am curious to meet her parents. Her mother turns out to be a thin, diffident shadow of Amelia’s plump prettiness, attired in a faded pastel dress; she cannot meet my eyes, much less contribute to a conversation, and in my presence she contents herself with surreptitious glances of love and awe at her daughter, who is gaudily dressed in her brightest colors beneath her gown and at a high pitch of excitement and good humor.

Amelia’s father, though overawed by the fabled professor, has a little twinkle in his eye, and if his manner is deferential, he seems to wish to make an impression.

            Josephine, who is a junior, arrives to congratulate Amelia, and as the two embrace, blue-black and blond heads leaning together, and Josephine is introduced to Amelia’s mother, the father edges me away from the three women. I am suddenly afraid he will try to elicit my support for his daughter’s business career—or accuse me of putting the idea of moving back to Vietnam into her head.

            --You have children, professor? he murmurs.

            I shake my head rapidly, to dismiss the question and the feeling of irritation to which it has given rise. How in the name of goodness does he manage to place his finger on this sore spot? I do not have children, but if I did, they would be adults and therefore capable of a modicum of responsibility for an aging parent, should the need arise, which God forbid. I plan to age in place, without anybody’s assistance, to be carried out of the house I shared with Rachel in a body bag. But if I’d had children, I might not feel so apprehensive.

            --Sorry, Professor, he says, smiling somewhat inappropriately. Not easy to raise a child in America. Not all sweetness and light.

            He peers at me to make sure he’s used the phrase correctly.

            --You and your wife did a wonderful job in raising Amelia, I tell him. She’s a remarkable young woman.

            --Ah, he says, as though I have confirmed his own opinion.

            I have the feeling he would like to know what I mean by remarkable, but he is afraid to ask, in case I have found qualities in his daughter that do not align with his plans for her.

            --You teach young people like Amelia, he suggests, tentatively, feeling his way toward something.

            --That’s what I like about my job. But there are not many like Amelia.

            This brings him up short again, and he pauses, as if unsure how to proceed.

            --These young people, he murmurs, they want to marry, settle down, have children?

            --Most of them, I say.

            --But Amelia want not to?

            I give a little forced laugh.

            --She’s just graduated, Mr Lao. Give her a chance.

            --If she marry here in America, she never talk going back to Vietnam.

            --Do you and your wife go back? I ask, to change the subject.

            --I love America, he assures me, more than people who born here. You love America?

            --I’m an immigrant too, I tell him. Ireland.

            --Yeah? Better here. Don’t go back.

            He moves away toward the three women who are giggling with their heads together and their arms around each other. Looking back at me, there is a pleading expression on his mild, bemused features.

            --My wife is afraid Amelia go back to Vietnam—then we are alone here.

            Amelia comes bouncing up to me, the sun glinting in highlights in her dancing, blue-black mop, all vivid colors, swirling gown, wide brilliant smile.

            --Thank you so much, Professor! For everything!

            --I’m not your professor anymore, Amelia. You’ll have to learn to call me Patrick.

            She throws back her head and laughs at the sheer absurdity of this, and I cannot help joining her.

            --I have something for you, Professor.

She holds up a small canvas bag from which she produces a glowing sandalwood statue. It takes me a moment to realize that it is a statue of Avalokiteshvara (the gesture of reassurance, the jar of ambrosia),  Amelia’s Guanyin, seated upon a schematic carving of a lotus blossom. I turn to her open-mouthed.

            --There’s a card, she grins.

            --Read it to me.

            --No mud, no lotus. I’m returning your wisdom, with interest.

            --I don’t remember saying that. But I love it. And this is the new centerpiece of my home altar.

            --Thanks for coming, she says. I know you don’t like commencement. I wanted you to meet my parents, though you couldn’t possibly have lived up to my description of you.

            --I did my best, I say ruefully, aware of a sort of sundering, our relationship dissolving in the bright air. What now, Amelia?

            --I have a job with Converse, she tells me gleefully.

            --The sneaker company?

            --They make more than sneakers, she laughs. And they have subsidiaries in Asia. There’s a chance they’ll send me to Vietnam!

            --The perfect solution, I hear myself say, though I am seeing her father’s look of entreaty.

            --Gotta run! It’s been real, Professor.

            I am waiting for the hug my teaching principles (or my reserve) will not permit me to initiate. Instead she stands on tip-toe, places her hand on my shoulder, and plants a swift wet kiss on my cheek. Then she is running away, holding her mortar board against the wind, in the wake of her family and friend. Impossible not to be moved by her energy and her spirits, her headlong rush toward the future, buoyed on the tides of spring.

            And yet, watching her recede, I feel myself drawn back by the undertow, an autumnal ebb, and suddenly I am looking at my former student from the wrong end of a telescope, seeing a tiny bright splash, standing in encroaching dark.

Sometimes you are the teacher; sometimes you are the student.  For a moment, the beginning of the splendid trajectory of a marriage; for a moment, the end of the rainbow. And loss is the price of love.

I suspect that an insight is imminent, something about time and eternity, spring and autumn, no separation, or some such Zen-speak. But I am moved to reject it, because I know it will arrive still-born, a lifeless concept divorced from the vital experience that gave rise to it. Instead I turn my gaze toward the cherry blossoms lining the quad, the fluttering pennants of the commencement tent, the high sky studded with racing clouds…