broadcast 11.05--Bangkok

back in bangkok, a six week spin through the dream of japan is now disappearing into the dimensionlessness of memory. in the sky today, reading a new murakami novel (200 pages in and i still dont know what its about - typical murakami - but its speaking to me of autism and faith, patience and drunkenness) and suddenly realising that i'm actually leaving the country i was dreaming about so much during the last month at tushita, and yet feeling very comfortable and natural about it. like japan is now just another part of the world for me, a neighbourhood rather than a dream.

osaka felt like my first interactive experience with a complex twenty-first century soft logic cityscape: kyoto temples, homeless communities beneath the kyoto river bridges, art exhibitions... the beautiful patience of jerry and his family as this tibetan hooligan monk crashes through the soft precisions of a japanese home, turning jerry's study into the 'pigeon room' with string hanging from door to window holding drying robes and the floor covered in opened bags, exhibition fliers, books, cds... the aching sweet familiarity of trainstation announcements, and the trains themselves, and conversations with people sitting next to me... heidegger, keith jarret, brian eno, john cage all awaiting collection... making mandala offerings down by the river, accompanied by jerry playing the shakuhachi, pachinko (japanese pinball) parlour searchlights arcing the sky, and trainloads of commuters rattling over the bridge every few minutes... take-out sushi, talking bus stops, takoyaki stands, stand-up noodle shops in train stations... 'electroplankton' (a sweet little computer game where you make music by arranging labyrinths through which musical notes wander) and 'chirirobo' (where a mini-robot's goal in life is to make everyone happy: the family that owns him consists of a dysfunctional mother father daughter trio who cant communicate anymore - the girl especially doesnt talk to anyone, just wears a frog's hat and sits in the corner speaking gobblygook, and the father is frowned upon for spending so much money on electro-gadgets that he later abandons - for example, there are some abandoned frog-robots in the garden that chirirobo helps somehow (he takes them back to a pond maybe) and they reward him with a frog costume to wear which allows him to immediately understand what the little alienated girl wants to say... er, i better stop here or you'll think i've become addicted)... yes, osaka was a place where i could communicate with people at some basic level, and walk around in my robes in a semi-invisible way that didnt stop me from moving through spaces naturally.

it turns out that a month at bukkokuji was all i needed, all i wanted. i just needed that place in my memory, as one more star in the sky to gaze at when the moment of my death arrives. the landscape at that time, its not geological: its made up of all our collected loves and amazements and commitments. we have to start gathering them now. i loved being there (even though i wasnt 'happy' there) and i knew i had to leave and i'm thankful and clean and happy to be moving again, to realise so quickly and cleanly that it isnt me, its not the soft logic landscape that i need.

i realised early that i couldnt settle there long term, despite the power of the place. the cold was a real shock (and the snow hasnt come yet, although i was given advance instructions on how to avoid frostbite) soaking into my bones and stomach during the hours on the cushion in the unheated zendo and starting to make me feel sick, but the deeper, whispered truth lay in the sense of claustophobic limitation. i need to move through something more chaotic and technicolour, to be able to read and walk and dream in ways that you cannot do in such a place. but even one month has left a deep impression on me and blessed me. and i got some simple essential meditation instruction from a living zen master, along with a transmission of the enlightenment vow of dogen zenji to take away with me and make my own.

despite long hours of fighting the cold and the sadness of feeling bottled up (i was sleeping in the dining room and didnt feel like i had a place to just disappear into between the 4 a.m. wake-up bell and the 9 p.m. unfolding of the futon - just a tiny cemetery to walk up and down in outside) there were many times when the inner rhythm of the place would just blow me away with its focus and purity and i would find myself thinking "you're crazy, wanting to leave this place..."

its a very special place and i deeply recommend it (but not in november, to anyone coming from a couple of years in india and thailand). everyone there is so kind, and that kindness is partially the result of the discipline of the life there. seeing discipline and kindness linked so clearly has been a valuable teaching. and both the kindness and the discipline have their roots in the realisations of roshi-sama (the affectionate name for harada roshi, the abbot).

roshi-sama is 81 years old but he looks timeless, like an old taoist sage seen only in movies. occasionally scary but mainly shining with a soft compassionate wonder. lots of laughter in his face. but what a biography...

81 years old, which means he was 20 in 1944. his homeland crumbling into chaos and disaster after taking a lunatic violent swing at the whole of the pacific region. imagine being 20 years old in the midst of japan at that time. "i just wanted to be of service, to protect the people of my homeland..."

so he signs up to train as a kamikazi pilot. you have to remember that he's just 20 years old. he just wants to be of service.

the training is apparently fierce, almost unbearable. training to be a kamikazi pilot isnt like training to jump off a cliff. you can jump off a cliff with a brief, combined focussing and shutting down of consciousness, then let gravity do the rest, but a kamikazi pilot has to stay totally conscious to the very last moment in order to steer the plane into the moving target of the enemy ship and hit it at the most vulnerable spot. you cant pass out five seconds before impact. fierce training.

get this: the war ends one hour before he is due to fly. there's a photo of him drinking a last cup of sake with his group of fellow pilots before heading off. his pilot's clothes look desperately poor. his face totally lost into the acceptance of the chaos of fate. and then just after the photo the end of the war is announced. this is not "big brother" or the academy awards.

but before he can return to japan (the training camp was in china) he's captured by the russians and kept as a prisoner for several months. one of the russian captains torments him every night by making him drink lots of vodka, till he's sick. he ends up being hospitalised, but while he's away the others get sent to siberia and most dont make it back. now he sees alcohol as sacred (in the sense that he never drinks it) - as the thing which saved his life.

he makes it back to japan then. he's totally devasted by the end of the war, by the apparent uselessness of the sacrificed lives of all his fellow soldiers and pilots. he has no reason to live. and then he meets a zen master who tells him that if he is willing to die for zen training in a few years his world will be irreversibly changed. he's already given up his life once so its not difficult for him to accept. he enters zen training and in three years experiences satori. spends the next fifty years polishing the experience and running the monastery that is given over to him.

he talks again and again about eternal life, about deathlessness and birthlessness. his instructions to me repeat the same message over and over, and i slowly begin to realise the enormity of his simple words. again and again: "trust yourself". so simple, and often heard from all the people around us but i have never heard them spoken like this, pushing me to wonder in the face of "what exactly is 'trust'? what exactly is 'myself'?"

"trust yourself, and make space for everything. cling to nothing, oppose nothing. and then just... (cut through)..." (this last part semi-gestural and difficult to translate into the sparse, textureless wordiness of email.)

his mother died giving birth to him. she knew she would die and could have saved her own life by not having the child. but she chose to carry the pregnancy through. i guess she just wanted to be of service.

i'm 44 years old. death (or deathlessness) doesnt seem so far away now - just a few blocks away, in a part of town i dont normally go. i realise that time is running out and there's no portion left among the little time left for hesitation. not hesitating is probably the kindest thing you can do for people (so long as you have developed the discpline of love). most people are being destroyed by patterns of hesitation, not by wars. lost in rationalisations, most people never see.

in an email yesterday a friend tells me that kirti tsenshab rimpoche has been talking about this world-system ending in three hundred years, and that only those who have the kalachakra initiation will be reborn in shambala. hearing such talk, its not about truth or falseness, its about whether your mind can hold such language without breaking, like the biblical parable of the new wine in old bottles. 'not hesitating' is about becoming a new bottle, of not being destroyed (or left behind) by the immensity of the new language. i'm not interested in petty rationalisations of what i consider true and what i consider false anymore, i just want to shine in the little time i have in this amazing immeasurable world, to make something real, beyond language.

as i spiralled out of bukkokuji, waiting for me at jerry's house in osaka was a letter from india - a little piece of white cloth with "HHDL" (His Holiness the Dalai Lama) sewn into it, my parting request to ani desal when she offered me a present to take with me from tushita. ani desal is a nun who has been living at tushita all the time i stayed there and who runs the tailor's office there. she's a really sweet, shining older american lady, down to earth and shining with confidence in her teacher and her path. her teacher has given her enough diamond sutra recitation commitments to last six lifetimes - a fact that so amazed me when i first heard it six months ago that i immediately asked her to sew the cloth that holds my mandala-offering set. i wanted my mandala set to travel in a cloth made by a woman with enough diamond sutra recitation commitments to last six lifetimes. (i guess its her teacher's way of keeping her out of trouble for 300 years...)

why did i ask for a label with the dalai lama's name on? a few years ago i came across this story: In the 1970s the chinese imprisoned the panchen lama for many years, sometimes torturing and trying to humiliate him. at one point a chinese guard held a gun to his head and told him to spit on the name of the dalai lama. but the panchen lama refused. "i will never spit on the name of the dalai lama," he replied. "instead i will write his name on my hat and carry it around the universe..."

when i first heard this story i finally knew that buddhism was totally wild, and that i too could become totally wild and talk in the same way. and the desire to fulfill the panchen lama's beautiful defiant vision, to act out his spontaneous (spoken) performance art piece and carry the dalai lama's name on my hat and through the universe, came to me. two nights ago, while talking with jerry, we sewed the label into my new hat, and during my last day and a half in japan i walked about for the first time realising my wish. it felt wonderful. and on the first day i bumped into an old friend on the street in osaka - a city of 12 million people...

of course, everyone on the planet is an old friend, and the planet itself is just an aeroplane crashing. we're all going to die so why dont we just be nice to each other while the plane is going down? why make such a big fuss about some spilt drink or cold food, or fight over the arm rest? "let's break break all the rules and help each other."

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i havent had chance to catch up on all the emails of recent weeks (only allowed out of temple every five days and a very awkward japanese keyboard, in a community centre in the town, was all i had) - but thanks to all of you that have written, and especially the offers of floors etc back in england. i hope to write direct soon.

love,

shenyen