MONK IN LOVE

I ran out of the zendo and across the little wooden bridge over the stream.

Claire was nowhere in sight.

“She’s at the cave!” Yun shouted from somewhere behind me.

Of course. The cave.

I knew exactly where to go. I had sat there for nearly two months before leaving for Boston, preparing for what I had to do. I climbed the slope toward the small grassy knoll that faced the mouth of the cave, and there she was, sitting at its top in full lotus, her eyes closed, her back straight, perfectly still.

“Claire!”

Her eyes opened slowly, aquamarine in the late light, and she smiled.

I climbed the last few yards and stopped in front of her.

“You’re not angry with me?” I asked.

“Of course not.” She tilted her head. “You didn’t teach me to meditate so I could stay angry. Remember?”

“Yes.” I sat down beside her. “I remember. I remember everything now.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. Including a certain young lady who once ran out of a house and gave me this.” I held up my wrist.

She looked at the bracelet for a long moment. Then she looked at me.

“Let’s meditate together,” she said. “Just the two of us. We’ve never done that.”

We turned to face each other on the crown of the hill, crossed our legs, and fell silent.

What happened next lies beyond words. Anything I say will fall short of it.

The inner chatter stopped. Then even the faint stirrings that come before a thought dissolved, and nothing remained but an immense and silent witness. Time and space seemed to hang suspended. A vast, dark openness, like an infinite amphitheater, spread out in every direction.

Far away, a point of light appeared.

It pulsed slowly, and with every pulse it grew brighter. In the endless darkness of that inner universe, it swelled into a small, shining orb. And as it did, I felt a strange tingling at the sides of my head, just above my ears.

My temporal lobes.

Something told me to open my eyes.

Claire was gone.

Then I heard her laugh, behind me. I turned. She was standing there, and she was surrounded by a soft luminescence, and I felt for her an adoration and a tenderness so vast that it seemed to contain the whole world.

I stood and took her in my arms.

An electric warmth flowed out of me and into her. I felt it go. Her eyes fluttered and she went limp in my arms, a smile of pure bliss on her face. For a moment, I was afraid. Then she drew a long breath and opened her eyes.

“Heavenly,” she whispered.

Down the slope, Yun was calling our names. The whole monastery had gathered in the zendo for my welcome-home dharma talk, and they were waiting.

We ran back together. Claire went inside first. Yun caught my sleeve at the door.

“You know that loving her this way breaks the vow of celibacy you took when you received the precepts,” he said quietly. “But that is not what worries me. What worries me is that it will make what you are planning far harder. For both of you.”

He was right, of course.

The way I loved Claire was not the impartial compassion of a monk. It was passion. Attachment. The very thing I had spent years teaching others to set down. But worse, far worse, was the question Yun had not asked aloud.

When the moment came, how would I ever let her go?

Because the moment was coming. Soon. I could feel it.

I looked at him: my disciple, my doctor, my counselor, my dearest friend.

“Xu Yun, I can no more stop loving her than I can stop breathing. It’s too late. I love her. And when the moment comes to let go, I pray you’ll help us through it.”

He shook his head slowly.

“My dear friend, no one can help anyone let go. All I will be able to do is stand there and watch two people who love each other suffer. And perhaps offer a few words of comfort that will sound, by then, completely empty.”

I put my hands on his shoulders. Even then, I could feel a little of the current pass from my body into his.

“That’s all I’m asking. When the time comes.”

He looked at me for a long moment, and then he nodded. Perhaps it was the warmth he had felt through my hands. Or perhaps he understood that when the time came, letting go would be nothing more than that. Just letting go.

We walked into the zendo together.

Hundreds of people sat waiting on their cushions. Some had taken the full lotus. Others sat in half lotus, knelt, or took chairs at the back of the hall. They were waiting for my talk, for the teaching that might help them a step further along the path.

I stood on the low platform and looked at them and said nothing.

This would be my last talk to the sangha. I knew it, even if they did not.

I looked down at my robe, hanging loosely over the jeans and T-shirt I wore beneath it. Slowly, in front of all of them, I took it off. I folded it and laid it on the platform. Then I stood before them in ordinary clothes.

“Today is my last day as abbot of this monastery,” I said. “I have given Dharma transmission to Reverend Dr. Xu Yun. From tonight, he is your abbot.”

The hall was perfectly silent. To my right, Yun smiled faintly and bowed his head in acceptance.

“For nearly ten years,” I went on, “I have given hundreds of dharma talks to thousands of you. But tonight I have nothing to say, because I finally understand that there is nothing that can be said. Every teaching, every instruction you will ever need, is already in front of you. This miraculous show of sound and light that surrounds us every moment is what we are. Add nothing to it. Just witness the preciousness of your life, moment by moment. That is all the instruction you will ever need.”

I looked across the rows of faces.

“And whatever you do, don’t betray the unfathomable marvel of here and now, this precious gift we call the moment, with poisonous thoughts about tomorrow or painful longing for yesterday. My friends, here it is. This is it. Live it. This is enlightenment.”

I stepped down from the platform and walked out through the back door of the zendo.

I knew I would never see it again.

I went to my quarters to pack for Boston, to finish what I had set out to do but failed to accomplish.

I knew now why I had failed. I had pushed my meditation too far, for too long, and too far from where I needed to be. By the time I reached Boston, the power I had built in that cave had overwhelmed me, and I had lost myself in the endless country of my own mind.

At the entrance to my quarters, I stopped.

A scent.

Sweet, intimate, unmistakable. It carried me back to a garden behind tall stone walls, to a childhood I had nearly forgotten, and to a bench in a Boston park.

I looked around. I was standing in a small private garden I had planted with my own hands.

Magnolias.

I smiled.

I had barely closed the door when it opened again.

“Am I interrupting?”

Claire stepped inside and shut the door behind her. She was smiling, a little shyly. I looked at her, at the beauty inside her and out, and for a moment neither of us moved.

Then we did.

We came together in a rush of embraces and kisses and lay down on my narrow bed, and we made love slowly, tenderly, as though we both knew it would be our first and last chance to cross the border of our own skin.

Afterward, we lay in each other’s arms.

“I love you, Mister X,” she said.

“I will always love you,” I said, and my voice was not entirely steady, “my whimsical, beautiful Claire.”