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  NIGHT

  BOAT

  A ZEN NOVEL

  ALAN

  SPENCE

  CANONGATE

  Edinburgh • London

  Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.tv

  This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Alan Spence, 2013

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 85786 852 7

  ePub ISBN 978 0 85786 853 4

  Typeset in Baskerville MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  To the memory of

  Sri Chinmoy

  (1931 – 2007)

  with eternal gratitude

  Contents

  ONE

  The Gates of Hell

  Tenjin

  Wise Crane

  One Time, One Place

  TWO

  Floating World, Flower-Path

  Mu

  Tsunami

  Clear Severity

  The Wild Horse of Mino

  THREE

  Wind and Rain

  Fire and Brimstone

  Return to Mino

  Shoju Rojin

  FOUR

  The Zen Road

  Zen Sickness

  Mount Iwataki

  Shoin-ji

  FIVE

  Hidden-in-Whiteness

  Beating the Dharma Drum

  Dharma-Thugs

  Chikamatsu

  SIX

  Is that So?

  Satsu

  Teashop Zen

  Two Good Monks

  SEVEN

  Ohashi

  The Sound of One Hand

  Precious Mirror Cave

  Illusion and Play

  Stone Garden

  EIGHT

  Dust under the Pines

  Opening the Gates

  Daimyo

  Tall Tales

  Ryutaku-ji

  Bodhisattva of Hell

  ONE

  THE GATES OF HELL

  M

  y childhood name was Iwajiro, and I was eight years old when I first entered at the gates of hell.

  The old monk looked like one of the gaki, the hungry ghosts. He was gaunt and skeletal, cheeks caved in, skin shrunk tight over the great craggy dome of the skull, fierce eyes bulging in their sockets under thick black eyebrows that met in the middle just below the third eye. (When he glowered I could see it there, blazing.)

  My father had brought me to hear the monk deliver a sermon, on the Eight Burning Hells. When the monk started to speak, voice dry and cracked, rasping, I felt he was talking directly to me, as if he had singled me out. He glared at me, pierced me with his gaze, cut me to the core.

  I whimpered, grabbed my father’s sleeve. My father shook me off, smacked the back of my legs.

  Sit, he said. Listen.

  The hells, the monk explained, descended in order of severity, down and down, ever deeper into the underworld. The first of them was the Hell of Reviving, and even here, he said, the heat was unbearable, far beyond endurance. The ground was a searing expanse of white-hot iron and it was impossible to rest your feet even for a second without being scorched.

  I felt my feet twitch. It was a hot day and the shoji screens were open to the temple courtyard, shimmering in the glare. Inside at least it was shaded, cooler. The old wooden beams smelled of pine incense. I watched a little lizard, bright green, flick and dart across the wall.

  In the Hell of Reviving, said the monk, you will be consumed by perpetual rage.

  He looked at me, he definitely looked at me.

  Think how angry you can get if you are thwarted in some small desire. You are ready to smash and destroy if you don’t get your way. Well, increase this a thousandfold so you would kill anyone who obstructed you. This is what you will feel in the Reviving Hell.

  I wondered, why Reviving? How could coming back to life be hell?

  In this realm of the angry dead, said the monk, there will be countless millions of others like yourself, like your self, so many, so many, all consumed by their own incandescent fury. You will fight and tear and hack at each other with weapons you can only imagine, forged from your own karma. You will slash and cut and gouge, you will stab and rip till you fall down dead, a death within death, a death beyond death.

  The monk paused.

  And then, he said, looking at me again, answering my unspoken question, you will be revived immediately, you will wake up, you will once again be fully conscious, and the whole process will start again. You will fight, you will die in agony, you will be revived. And so it will continue for what seems like endless time. The scriptures are quite clear. You will fight and die in this realm for millions on millions of years. To be precise, for a hundred and sixty-two thousand times ten million years, you will fight and die in anger and pain. And this is the first, the least, of the Burning Hells.

  A young monk bowed and placed a small tea-bowl of water in front of the old man who nodded, took a sip, just enough to wet his thin old lips. I felt my own lips dry and parched. I looked up, saw the little green lizard scuttle across the ceiling, upside down.

  The old monk coughed, loosed the phlegm in his throat. He sipped more water, continued.

  The next level down, he said, the second level, is Black Line Hell. Again the ground is burning iron, hotter than the level above, and the demons of the underworld will lay you out on this white-hot surface and mark your naked body with black lines, dividing you up into ever smaller sections – four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two. And they will use these marks as guidelines for their burning saws and axes, and they will cut you into smaller and smaller pieces – sixty-four, a hundred and twenty-eight. And no sooner will you be reduced to tiny pieces of flesh and bone, than you will be reassembled, only for the whole process to start again, repeating, over and over, for twice as long as the first hell, for three hundred and twenty-four thousand times ten million years. And this is only the second of the Burning Hells.

  Only the second, that meant six more to go, each one hotter and deeper and more terrible than the one above. The lizard had gone now, into the freedom of the world outside, and I wanted to follow, to run out, find my friends and play. My legs ached from kneeling on the hard wood floor, but when I shifted, tried to ease the discomfort, my father prodded me, cuffed the back of my head.

  Be still, he said. Listen.

  The third level, said the monk, is Crushing Hell. It is even deeper, even hotter. Here you will be rounded up with the millions of others suffering for their sins and you will be cast into a long valley between two ranges of fiery mountains. You will be packed in with these millions, piled on top of one another till there is no space to move and no air to breathe, and all that can be heard are the screaming and weeping of the damned in their agony and terror. Then the giant demons of this world will raise their mallets of red-hot metal, each one as big
as Mount Fuji, and pound you to nothing. For a brief moment, an infinitesimal part of a second, there will be oblivion, then in a blink you will be awake, and immediately the whole cycle will begin again, the rounding up, the casting down, and this time the walls of the valley will close in on you, like great beasts butting each other, and once again you will be crushed. And this will continue for twice as long again as the previous level. Six hundred and forty-eight thousand times ten million years.

  The numbers meant nothing. I could count, a little. But I couldn’t imagine a million. Ten million. Grains of sand on a beach. Snowflakes falling through a whole winter day. My mother would laugh when I asked about these things. How could they be numbered? But I knew the way the old monk spoke, he meant they went on for ever and ever. And every time you thought the torture was over, it would start again.

  The sermon hadn’t even lasted a day, maybe not even an hour.

  Howling Hell, said the monk. This is the next level down. Here you will be herded with all the rest into a gigantic red-hot building. And once you are inside, crammed together, suffocating, you will realise there is no exit, no door, no way out. You are trapped there, unable to move, as the intolerable heat increases even more and all you can do is howl and scream and cry and add to the cacophony of all those millions howling and screaming and crying all around you. And this you will endure for twice as long as the previous level. Ten million years, times twelve hundred and ninety-six thousand.

  He looked at me again. I felt sick in my stomach.

  You may think the exact numbers don’t matter. But when you are there, and every single second is agony, it matters very much indeed.

  Thinking of the numbers made my head feel like stone.

  Now, said the monk, we descend ever further, from the Howling Hell to the Great Howling Hell. Here you will be crammed into an even bigger, even hotter building with thick burning walls, and outside those walls are thicker, hotter walls. You will be in a box within a box, a prison within a prison, a tomb within a tomb, where the space between the inner and outer walls is filled with molten metal, sealing it completely. And all the time you are there, you are tortured by the knowledge that even if by some miracle you could break through the first wall, you could never ever broach the second. So you howl and scream and cry, endlessly, or at least for twice as long as before. Some of you can add it up for yourselves, I’m sure.

  Did his features twist a little as he said this, into a kind of grimace that might have been a smile? That was even more unsettling, and already he was racing ahead, ever deeper.

  The sixth level, he said, is known simply as the Heating Hell – as if the other levels were not hot enough. Here you will be impaled on red-hot spikes, you will be flayed and wrapped in strips of white-hot iron. And for how long? Yes, twice as long as the hell before.

  I noticed at the corners of his dry lizard-lips were little flecks of spit. He closed his eyes for a moment, continued.

  And what is below the Heating Hell? What is the next level down? By now you should know it will be even worse, even hotter, for this is the Intense Heating Hell. Here you will be boiled in vats of molten bronze, then dragged out and impaled on larger spikes that tear your insides apart, the pain so intense you lose consciousness for an instant, only to wake to the same torment, again, again, again, for twice as long as before.

  He opened his eyes again, looked out from some deep dark place. His voice was low and gravelly, incantatory, the way he would chant the Nembutsu.

  You have heard of the first seven hells, and the tortures and agonies that await you there. But these are as nothing compared to the last, the worst, the deepest hell. This is the Hell of Ultimate Torment.

  I could read the words, blazing in the air, a sign written in flame.

  In this realm, he said, the intense heat is seven times hotter than all the previous hells combined, and the pain is seven times greater. Here you will be trapped for seven times as long, in an immense edifice of blazing hot metal, at the centre of a mountain of white-hot iron. An army of demons will devise ever greater tortures, pouring molten bronze into your open mouth. Your body and the bodies of all the others suffering this damnation will be indistinguishable from the flames engulfing you. You will be separated only by the sound of your anguished screams which will echo back up through all the other hells. At times they can even be heard here in this world of ours, in the darkest night when you are racked with misery and despair. For surely these hells exist deep in your own being, and you can be pitched into them at any time.

  Was that a bird shrieking out there in the courtyard? And was that an owl I’d heard screeching in the night? And was that really a cat that had woken me in the small hours, yowling like a baby stolen from its parents?

  Don’t whimper, said my father.

  Existence is suffering, said the old monk. Its cause is desire. To conquer desire you must follow the Buddha-path. There is no other way.

  His sermon was finished. He bowed and folded his hands, sipped a few more drops of water from his bowl. I was anxious to get out, to get home, to see my mother. The monk stood up, his old legs stiff as he creaked and unfolded himself. He walked slowly towards the door and I bowed my head as he passed. But he didn’t pass. He stopped right in front of me. I kept my head down, stared at his gnarled old feet in their worn straw sandals, the thin toes bony and splayed, the blackened toenails thick and cracked.

  So, he said. Have these words put the fear in you?

  I looked up at him, that great domed head, that ferocious gaze, and my whole body shook. My mouth was dry, my throat closed. I couldn’t say one word.

  A man of silence, he said. This is a good place to begin.

  He held up his right hand, fingers spread, and for a moment I flinched, expecting him to strike me. But instead he closed his hand again, made a fist, clenched it in front of my face.

  Ha! he said, shaking the fist. Then he let out a terrifying roar of a laugh, sprayed spit, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked at my father who tensed beside me.

  Look after this one, said the monk. Teach him well.

  He glared down at me again, nodded, gave a kind of rough grunt and moved on. I watched his old feet in their straw sandals, shuffling across the polished floor, then he was out the door and gone.

  My father smacked the back of my head. Why didn’t you speak?

  I had nothing to say, I said.

  Useless, said my father.

  All the way home I kept my head down, looked at my own bare feet leaving their mark in the dust with every step. The sun had baked the ground all day and it burned, made me walk quick, not linger. I looked up at Mount Fuji in the haze. I imagined it throwing up fire and smoke. Beneath me were all these worlds, deeper and deeper underground. I was walking on the roof of hell.

  Back home I still had nothing to say.

  My mother laughed, but she was gentle, not mocking.

  That old monk’s a holy terror, isn’t he? He’d put the fear of death into anybody.

  I still said nothing.

  Sometimes it’s good to be just a little afraid, she said, so we’ll do the right thing.

  She had made noodles with my favourite broth, ginger and scallions and the thing I loved most, tororojiru with the rich earthy taste of mashed-up yams. I ate it in silence apart from the slurping. I drank the last of the broth, pushed the empty bowl away from me.

  My older brother came into the kitchen, made a face at me behind my mother’s back, tongue out, eyes popping, a demon.

  She turned and saw him, laughed and waved him away. Then she stroked my head, ran her hands over the short cropped hair.

  Go out and play a while, she said.

  Outside, it was the same old place, the same old world I knew, but it was different. It was still Hara, way-station on the Tokaido, at the foot of Great Fuji. I was Iwajiro of the Nagasawa family, and my father ran the inn, Omodaka-ya. This was my life, here in this place. But it had changed. It was like somewher
e I had dreamed. My friends looked the same, but they were strange to me. They moved around in their own dream, playing, not knowing.

  At night, before I went to bed, my mother told me my favourite story, of the Dragon King’s palace at the bottom of the sea. It calmed me and soothed me a little, imagining the coolness in the depths of the ocean. But when I lay down to sleep, I fell into dreams of fire and torment and I woke in a fever. I burned and howled till my mother came and held me and hushed me, said it was fine, it was fine, it was just a dream and everything would be all right, and she lit a stick of incense, chanted the Nembutsu to protect me from all harm.

  But from that day on, everything had changed. The fear was always there.

  One day my mother took me to the bathhouse. It was something I loved, to soak in the warmth, surrounded by it, to drift away.

  To purify the mind, she said, chant the Nembutsu. To purify the body, sweat out all the poisons, soak in a hot tub.

  The attendant at the bathhouse was a young girl. My mother nodded to her, told her to make the water good and hot.

  Turn it up, she said. The hotter, the better.

  The girl bowed, gave me a smile, set to stoking the fire under the iron tub. She prodded and raked with a poker so the embers glowed, she added more firewood and topped it with chopped logs when it caught and flared. It was hot work. The girl’s face was flushed and a strand of her hair came loose, fell across her face. As she pushed it back, she left a smudge of soot on her cheek. She saw me looking and laughed. The flames flickered. I started to sweat.

  Right, said my mother. Let’s get you scrubbed.

  I stepped out of my sandals, took off my robe and hung it up. I sat on the low three-legged stool and my mother washed me thoroughly, filled a little wooden bucket and poured it over my head, twice, three times, rinsed me down till I stood there dripping, clean and ready for the bath.

  I turned and stepped forward, aware of my own nakedness, this little body of mine so tiny and fragile, so vulnerable, soft flesh. The heat in the room had grown intense. Steam rose, swirled in the air. The water gurgled and churned. Two merchants had come in and their voices boomed. I stood still and could not move. Through the steam I saw the girl’s face as she smiled at me again, nodded encouragement. My mother pushed me forward. The fire was roaring under the tub. A huge flame suddenly leaped and the wood crackled, sent up sparks and cinders. There was a panic in my chest, a trapped bird desperate to escape. The waters would boil and scald me to death, my flesh would melt off the bone. I would plunge into the deepest hell and burn there forever.