Chapter 25
Japhy had cooked up some good buckwheat pancakes and we had Log Cabin syrup to go with them and a little butter. I asked him what the "Gocchami" chant meant. "That's the chant they give out for the three meals in Buddhist monasteries in Japan. It means, Buddham Saranam Gocchami, I take refuge in the Buddha, Sangham, I take refuge in the church, Dhammam, I take refuge in the Dharma, the truth. Tomorrow morning I'll make you another nice breakfast, slum-gullion, d'yever eat good oldfashioned slumgullion boy, 'taint nothin but scrambled eggs and potatoes all scrambled up together."
"It's a lumberjack meal?"
"There ain't no such thing as /lumber/jack/,/ that must be a Back East expression. Up here we call ' em loggers. Come on eat up your pancakes and we'll go down and split logs and I'll show you how to handle a doublebitted ax." He took the ax out and sharpened it and showed me how to sharpen it. "And don't ever use this ax on a piece of wood that's on the ground, you'll hit rocks and blunt it, always have a log or sumpthin for a block."
I went out to the privy and, coming back, wishing to surprise Japhy with a Zen trick I threw the roll of toilet paper through the open window and he let out a big Samurai Warrior roar and appeared on the windowsill in his boots and shorts with a dagger in his hand and jumped fifteen feet down into the loggy yard. It was crazy. We started downhill feeling high. All the logs that had been bucked had more or less of a crack in them, where you more or less inserted the heavy iron wedge, and then, raising a five-pound sledgehammer over your head, standing way back so's not to hit your own ankle, you brought it down konko on the wedge and split the log clean in half. Then you'd sit the half-logs up on a block-log and let down with the doublebitted ax, a long beautiful ax, sharp as a razor, and fawap, you had quarter-logs. Then you set up a quarter-log and brought down to an eighth. He showed me how to swing the sledge and the ax, not too hard, but when he got mad himself I noticed he swung the ax as hard as he could, roaring his famous cry, or cursing.
Pretty soon I had the knack and was going along as though I'd been doing it all my life.
Christine came out in the yard to watch us and called "I'll have some nice lunch for ya."
"Okay." Japhy and Christine were like brother and sister.
We split a lot of logs. It was great swinging down the sledgehammer, all the weight clank on top of a wedge and feeling that log give, if not the first time the second time. The smell of sawdust, pine trees, the breeze blowing over the • placid mountains from the sea, the meadowlarks singing, the butterflies in the grass, it was perfect. Then we went in and ate a good lunch of hotdogs and rice and soup and red wine and Christine's fresh biscuits and sat there crosslegged and barefoot thumbing through Sean's vast library.
"Did ya hear about the disciple who asked the Zen master 'What is the Buddha?' "
"No, what?"
" 'The Buddha is a dried piece of turd,' was the answer. The disciple experienced sudden enlightenment."
"Simple shit," I said.
"Do you know what sudden enlightenment is? One disciple came to a Master and answered his koan and the Master hit him with a stick and knocked him off the veranda ten feet into a mud puddle. The disciple got up and laughed. He later became a Master himself. 'Twasn't by words he was enlightened, but by that great healthy push off the porch."
"All wallowing in mud to prove the crystal truth of com- passion," I thought, I wasn't about to start advertising my "words" out loud any more to Japhy.
"Woo!" he yelled throwing a flower at my head. "Do you know how Kasyapa became the First Patriarch? The Buddha was about to start expounding a sutra and twelve hundred and fifty bhikkus were waiting with their garments arranged and their feet crossed, and all the Buddha did was raise a flower. Everybody was perturbed. The Buddha didn't say nothin.
Only Kasyapa smiled. That was how the Buddha selected Kasyapa. That's known as the flower sermon, boy."
I went in the kitchen and got a banana and came out and said, "Well, I'll tell you what nirvana is."
"What?"
I ate the banana and threw the peel away and said nothing. "That's the banana sermon."
"Hoo!" yelled Japhy. "D'l ever tell you about Coyote Old Man and how him and Silver Fox started the world by stomping in empty space till a little ground appeared beneath their feet? Look at this picture, by the way. This is the famous Bulls." It was an ancient Chinese cartoon showing first a young boy going out into the wilderness with a small staff and pack, like an American Nat Wills tramp of 1905, and in later panels he discovers an ox, tries to tame, tries to ride it, finally does tame it and ride it but then abandons the ox and just sits in the moonlight meditating, finally you see him coming down from the mountain of enlightenment and then suddenly the next panel shows absolutely nothing at all, followed by a panel showing blossoms in a tree, then the last picture you see the young boy is a big fat old laughing wizard with a huge bag on his back and he's going into the city to get drunk with the butchers, enlightened, and another new young boy is going up to the mountain with a little pack and staff.
"It goes on and on, the disciples and the Masters go through the same thing, first they have to find and tame the ox of their mind essence, and then abandon that, then finally they attain to nothing, as represented by this empty panel, then having attained nothing they attain everything which is springtime blossoms in the trees so they end up coming down to the city to get drunk with the butchers like Li Po."
That was a very wise cartoon, it reminded me of my own experience, trying to tame my mind in the woods, then realizing it was all empty and awake and I didn't have to do anything, and now I was getting drunk with the butcher Japhy. We played records and lounged around smoking then went out and cut more wood.
Then as it got cool late afternoon we went up to the shack and washed and dressed up for the big Saturday night party. During the day Japhy went up and down the hill at least ten times to make phone calls and see Christine and get bread and bring up sheets for his girl that night (when he had a girl he put out clean sheets on his thin mattress on the straw mats, a ritual). But I just sat around in the grass doing nothing, or writing haikus, or watching the old vulture circling the hill. "Must be something dead around here," I figured.
Japhy said "Why do you sit on your ass all day?"
"I practice do-nothing."
"What's the difference? Burn it, my Buddhism is activity," said Japhy rushing off down the hill again. Then I could hear him sawing wood and whistling in the distance. He couldn't stop jiggling for a minute. His meditations were regular things, by the clock, he'd meditated first thing waking in the morning then he had his mid-afternoon meditation, only about three minutes long, then before going to bed and that was that. But I just ambled and dreamed around. We were two strange dissimilar monks on the same path. I took a shovel, however, and leveled the ground near the rosebush where my bed of grass was: it was a little too slanty for comfort: I fixed it just right and that night I slept well after the big wine party.
The big party was wild. Japhy had a girl called Polly Whit-more come out to see him, a beautiful brunette with a Spanish hairdo and dark eyes, a regular raving beauty actually, a mountainclimber too. She'd just been divorced and lived alone in Millbrae. And Christine's brother Whitey Jones brought his fiancee Patsy. And of course Sean came home from work and cleaned up for the party. Another guy came out for the weekend, big blond Bud Diefendorf who worked as the janitor in the Buddhist Association to earn his rent and attend classes free, a big mild pipesmoking Buddha with all kinds of strange ideas. I liked Bud, he was intelligent, and I liked the fact that he had started out as a physicist at the University of Chicago then gone from that to philosophy and finally now to philosophy's dreadful murderer, Buddha. He said "I had a dream one time that I was sitting under a tree picking on a lute and singing 'I ain't got no name.' I was the no-name bhikku." It was so pleasing to meet so many Buddhists after that harsh road hitchhiking.