Mental martial arts

“Show me your power, old man”, I said after walking into the room.

“First you must accept me as your teacher.”

“You are already my teacher, but I do not accept you.”

I was sitting in an interview room just outside the Zendo. It was 6:45am on a Sunday. Sitting across from me was Hakuin Yōtaku. An old man in his 50s with bushy grey eyebrows, Hakuin was the head teacher of this small monastery in the mountains near Burlington, Vermont.

“Then why have you come to this interview?”

“Why does a fish swim in water?”

Hakuin’s eyebrows lifted in minor amusement, as though being told a crude knock-knock joke by a badly behaved teenager. This was my first interview after arriving at the monastery in Vermont two nights before. The other monastics and I had filed into the Zendo at 4:40 am this morning. We had chanted in Japanese for an hour, and then settled in for two hours of meditation. At 5 minutes intervals a small bell rang in an adjacent room and one monastics left the Zendo for his or her interview with Hakuin, while the previous interviewee returned to the Zendo.

Hakuin sighed a small sigh and briefly lowered his eyes, then returned his patient gaze to me. “What are you getting at?”

“What gets at the fish in water? Is it more water?”

I had no idea what was happening. I was petrified. I could be thrown out of the monastery on my very first day. But I trusted whatever it was that was generating this gobledigook and I proceeded.

“Water is not the right metaphor here. You can do better.” He said.

“Do better than a fish swimming in water? I don’t even know how to swim.”

The edges of Hakuin’s mouth lifted the tiniest bit and he let out a single chuckle. “Go back to the Zendo and try again tomorrow my friend.”

I sat still. I knew that something would happen next. I was about to witness something I had waited my whole life to see. I knew it would be incredibly subtle, yet that it would move me like a leaf blown by a gust of wind. It would come from some direction I would never expect. I prepared myself to pounce. To catch the mouse that sticks its nose out of the hole for just a moment before returning. I felt the exhilaration of being about to meet an unseen lover for the first time.

Hakuin shook his head the tiniest bit and gestured for me to leave. I got up and left the room. There, it had happened. I had been watching with the closest attention that I could muster. I had given it everything I had, yet I had seen nothing. I had missed it. I had failed. How did he do it?