All through my training, I idolised my mentor. I shouldn’t have - I know that and I knew that - but I wasn’t yet enlightened. What could I do? Did he know how I felt? Did he discourage me or encourage me or did he just sit and allow me to make my own the path?
When I couldn’t sleep, I thought of the all words I would use to describe him. Brilliant. Beatific. Beautiful. I knew that there were gates I was supposed to be traverse and that I was crashing into them like some lower order of ape.
But eventually, as I was instructed to in my early life, I put away my childish things. I tried to take his example and find the way. And I did. In a way.
For all this, I remain a man, and spend my days looking back. When I think of him, I do not – cannot - picture the brilliant, enigmatic teacher I first knew. I know, in my head, that he was a great man who taught me explicitly through his lessons and implicitly through his actions; his dedication to routine and dharma. But in my heart, I do not believe this.
Instead, I see him on that first day. The day he began picking up piles of sand and letting it fall through his fingers, grain by grain, over and over again. He started that morning as the light’s rays began to filter through the slats and continued until we could no longer see the sand but merely hear the shhh shhh shhh as the it hit the bare floor.
The next day, when we returned with crowing of the cock, he was still pouring the sand, grain by grain, onto the floor, through his fingers. We meditated upon it.
We thought: I dwell not in the past.
We said: I dream not of the future.
We concluded: I concentrate mind on the present moment.
He stopped with his usual practice and teaching, and continued in this way instead - pouring the sand seemingly endlessly. I never saw him start and I never saw him finish; I merely observed him scooping up the sand and letting it fall forever.
We thought of the lesson of master who ate the same dish every day. When questioned on how he could eat the same meal every day, he replied, “How could I possibly eat the same meal every day?” I suppose you can’t step in the same river twice.
We tried to take in his message. Some of us followed his example and began to pour sand through our own hands. Some continued the routines as previously set. Some were not as skilled as others, and let the worry show on their brows. What anyone really thought was hard to say.
And, as with all temporal things, this continued until it didn’t. One day, he began to stop letting the sand sift through his hands and positively began to play with it.
Throwing it into the air.
Swirling it on the floor.
Throwing it at the walls.
Placing it grain by grain into his mouth.
Spitting it out at the neophytes.
Some thought of the Laughing Buddha. Some thought of the master who killed with the keisaku. Others, the wise ones, thought of the Parable of The Poisoned Arrow.
Soon after that, my mentor’s face drooped on one side. Saliva spilled from his mouth as freely as the sand had from his hands.
He was taken to the hospital and the tumour was confirmed. He died shortly after.
In his hospital bed, he was no longer the master I had known. He had begun to curse his carers and grasp at invisible things. His body was no longer him. He had become an old, scared, angry man.
I so strongly desired an end to my own personal Buddha’s suffering. I desired the end of my suffering. I needed the serene man who had achieved bodhi, who was destined to leave our wheel of suffering, not this cruel trick our corporeal world had played on him - on his body.
As I look back, as in a mirror dimly, I ask myself if he left the saṃsāra and ascended as I was sure he would when I was his disciple. My mentor was perfect, enlightened. Could I take it that he, himself, had gone from his body before his mind changed? Did his soul ascend to nirvana the second the first sarcoma cell split in his brain? Was the body that lay in the hospital bed merely the husk of who he had been?
I try and I fail and I am doomed to repeat in my next life. That is a given. But for him, my mentor, I cannot help but wonder if it is the cancer that will continue the cycle of existence – preferably reincarnated as a slug or a nematode - and that he, himself, has achieved liberation.