Sun After Dark Read Free Page A

woods, or in rough outhouses known and feared throughout the Zen community. Most of them use the breaks, however, to continue their meditation unbroken, marching, in spellbound, silent Indian file, round and around a central pine tree. My host, I notice, is probably thirty years older than most of the fresh-faced young men and women in attendance; yet as they walk around the tree, at top speed, he seems at least thirty years stronger, too.
    At 2:00 a.m., after I head back to my cabin to get some sleep, there’s a knock on my door, and a flashlight in the dark, and it’s the rabbinical-seeming elderly man again, ready to vault up rough stone paths to join in morning chants. For half an hour or so, to the beat of a steadily pounded drum, the assembled students race through twenty-four pages of Japanese syllabary that mean nothing to them—my host, like many others, reciting the entire
Heart Sutra
from memory. Then he leads me back through the frosty night to his cabin, to show me the ninth-century text on which we’ll be hearing a
teisho,
or Zen discourse. It’s a fearless scripture, as bracing as a sudden blow to the skull. “Anything you may find through seeking,” the Zen master Rinzai warns, “will be only a wild fox spirit.”
    The light has come back to the austere settlement, and the huge boulders outside my room look as if they’re buried in snow when I hear a knock again, and follow my sleepless host up again, through the black-and-white silence, to hear the
roshi,
or teacher of this community, deliver his daily talk. A small round figure in huge orange robes comes in, and two attendants help him onto a kind of throne. “What is this thing called love?” the man says, speaking in the old-fashioned tones of his northern Japanese dialect, translated by a young apprentice. “A child can befriend a dog and lick its rear end. Is that love? Is love just shaking hands? Dogs and cats and insects mate; is that love?
    “You’ve been hypnotized,” he goes on. “You’ve got to take your mind to the laundry. Get it clean.” And, he concludes, “When a man is with a woman, he has to occupy her fully.”
    Afterwards, we head out into what is now a dazzling blue-sky day. “Nine o’clock,” says Leonard Cohen, a penetrating glint in his eye, “and we’ve had several lives already today.”
    Leonard Cohen is for most of us a figure of the dark, sitting alone sometime after midnight and exploring the harsh truths of suffering and loneliness. It’s four in the morning, the end of December, as one of his mournful songs begins, though in his recent work, like Thomas Merton in his way, he has seemed to look so intensely at the dark that something else comes through (there is a crack, a crack in everything, he sings, and that’s how the light gets in). His songs and poems have always been about letting go and giving things up, the voluntary poverty of a refugee from comfort.
    Yet even those who see in him an explorer of chosen limits and the dark—even those who know that he turned down the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in Canada when he was thirty-four, lived in a bare house on the Greek island of Hydra that he bought with a $1,500 inheritance, and wrote, scored, and directed an entire film called
I Am a Hotel
—may be surprised to hear that the definitive ladies’ man and husky poet of the morning after is living now, year-round, in the Mount Baldy Zen Center, 6,250 feet above sea level, in the dark San Gabriel Mountains behind Los Angeles, serving, as he says, as “cook, chauffeur, and sometimes drinking-buddy” to a ninety-one-year-old Japanese man with whom he shares few words.
    Cohen has, in fact, been a friend of Joshu Sasaki ever since 1973, though he has not made a fuss about it, and votaries will get clues to this part of his existence only from a couple of tiny elliptical vignettes in his 1978 book,
Death of a Lady’s Man,
and occasional songs—for example, “If It Be Your Will”—that,