TEYATA OM GATE GATE PARAGATE
PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA
The sound of the mantra from the Heart Sutra pervades the space of the bamboo grove in the garden of the Teahouse of Necessity. A chanting body floats in the redwood hot tub at the edge of a deck at the edge of a thinning grove of the bamboo they call madake in Japan. The thick yellow grass has ripened in its sixty-year cycle. The early morning sun light, above a bank of valley fog and distant clouds gleams through the limbs of a great valley oak, genus drus. The light moves over the surface of the water, its reflection under-lighting the smooth-skinned, tanned face of the gentle, white-haired old man in the tub. A cloud of steam surrounds him as he emerges onto the bamboo drain-decking by the edge of the deck. The sunlight comes from behind him to the east; distant clouds, valley mist, limbs of a mistletoed, leafless oak, the tall bamboo, sparsely leaved, mostly bare-twigged or releasing the last of their seeds in tiny winged flower space vehicles. Then the tiger-striped light passed through blossom-sprouting twigs of the cherry-plum trees, with every juncture of twigbranching and every nascent bud encased in a water drop from the rain of the recent dawn, dropped by the clouds which receded now to the east and to the north.
Both the raindrops and the cloud of steam generate rainbows--a dispersed spectral aura, and the scattered gleam of light through the star-like prisms of water drops. The old man emerges behind a checkered robe, finely woven of heavy cotton, cut in the style of the Bhutanses Himalayas and dyed in deep rich colors of pink and organic saffron yellow-orange, woven, however, in a tartan pattern, like that of the ancient clan MacMillan, of Argyleshire.
Halfway down the length of the deck he turns, following a runway extension of the deck out into the bamboo grove until it terminates in a small pavillion. The old man glides slowly along the tatami runway bordered with thick, polished yellow bamboo. Before the brocaided strip of silk marking the floor of the pavilion, he stops to remove the grass sandals, setting them on a little shelf off to the side. The old man sits on a zafu the color of the cyclamen flower, in the center of a zabuton of saffron, and tucks his checked robe around his waist as he settles into an easy upright sitting posture. His back is to the northwest; he is facing the center of the pavilion and beyond to the southeast and the sparkling light of the morning sun, in the middle of the bamboo grove, surrounded by oak trees, in the gardens of the Teahouse of Necessity.
Plainly there was a shadow on the old man's forehead. It is the shadow of the two feet of an eighteen-year old boy who is standing on his head in the center of the pavilion; as his feet descend, the shadow does also, down the front of the old man's body. The boy stands facing the sun, with his back to the old man, and does an integration breath. As he continues the sequence of Psychocalesthenic exercises, the old man can be heard calling out names for each.
"Picking grapes," adding a sing-song litany of his own invention as the boy energetically performs, punctuating the old man's song with his rhythmical, gusty breathing: "In the rich, vineyard valley of the fox-skinned spirit, principle, god and incarnation of ecstasy...as the fuzz-bud gleams in the diamond dew light of the sun newly spit out after the eclipse, as the Indians had it, by the gobbling demon moon."
And later, "The plow, of Adam's tilling and toil in the soil for so many generations, paying at least half the respects to the local lords: rock kings of mineral, king trees with roots fixed in royal soil, on the spot lording plants through duration, rocks red with iron compounds smelted into tools like the knife edge, hammer, axe and saw, with all the variations of sierra (in the twelfth century Bestiary, a fish) saw-toothed edge, scimitar, shaving blade and scissors."
He refers to the boy objectively, "He does the bow," as he does that part of the exercise, then elaborates in rhapsody, "as the light of the candle went out and the Spirit of the Lord as the Holy Ghost, a Paraclete, a dove of Aphrodite, a racing messenger pigeon sliced between the oak tree branches making straight for the home dovecote...Norman Akaya here, eighteen-and-a-half years old assumes the posture of a bow, as directly up from his kath, or Tan T'ien, that center of gravity point three or four finger-widths below his navel, there ascends an imaginary line of fire, or could it be lightning, directly up to the peak of the pavilion roof, a row of energy quanta, all in a line as straight as an arrow, and so, there are the real bow and the imaginary arrow, together nonetheless, as are the semenes, the seed meanings in the root from the Proto-Indo-European: a-r-k-w, an ark with a double-u, possibly a proto-catamaran, or a double rainbow... anyway, a double dove." A second pigeon flew through the grove to the dovecote north of the garden.
Norman, the boy, giggled as he let out air of his integration breath. Finishing the exercise, both still bemused, they sat facing each other, silently and warmly performing Trespaso, each looking into the other's left eye, heart wide open, body at rest. They arose to stroll east of the grove, toward the aviary and corral.
Their path brought them within view of a trail of smoke whose tail descended, emerging from the foyer of the Teahouse of Necessity. "Chico Carboneri's forge, kiln and bread oven also does incinerator service...it smells like the sweet smoke of the Dharma's fourth estate, press product smouldering," the Lama said aside to Norman.
Two butterflies chased each other through the bamboo and out into the sunlight and mustard flowers toward the corral, where the pigeons had led the way to their loft. Norman addressed the old man as "Lama," or teacher, asking him to discourse upon the thin high reedy sound, an open oboe A, the frequencies of which in floating elaboration sounded the fine harmonic, resounding the tonic energy of the day. The Lama picked a blade of grass, and folding it as all small boys learn, blew the note in duetto, stereoizing Norman's perception of the world through sound, the path through the Bardo of Tibet, the beginning form of Lord Rama's Creation. The Vibration sang in this single note, twice performed, for Norman inside the resonant chamber of his skull, keying his consciousness to an edge of Cabalistic wrath, the wrath of some god of creativity within.
The scene could have been from one of those those lushly filmed samurai movies. The old man, whose name is Coalman, is addressed as "Lama" by the boy, a title meaning teacher in the language of what was once Tibet. These two characters, the teacher and the maturing student, could have appeared, probably, in any of the centuries of the last millennium. According to two different strains of the legend, they do appear every sixty or every one hundred and twenty years, around the time of the flowering of madake bamboo. This particular species, wherever it grew around the world, flowered with such long term cyclic regularity: 2034-5, 1974-5, 1914-5, 1854-5, 1794-5
Kurt von Meier
Circa 1975