Her eyes are lively and intelligent . There is a Japanese quality to her face which is hard to isolate but which, as she recounts, is noticed by others . The photograph was taken early in her Zen practice, but even a few months of hard work have transformed the face of a busy involved Westerner and left behind the flinty joy of Zen .
Her journal stresses ordinary monastic events . At first I recoiled puritanically when she parties, drinks and hangs out backstairs at the monastery listening to music . That is the everyday she chooses to describe. Then there is the work in the garden and particularly the kitchen . As an ordinary person, she does lots of it, but only in the concluding afterword by another ordained Western woman did I realize fully that as the ôTenzoö monk she was in fact second only to the abbot .
I have to admit that the image I had of Zen was of much ceremony and slightly strange ritual .I knew about long stretches of Zazen where a monk would smack you on the back, usually at your own request, when you start to flag . So again I was disoriented by so little description of the unique life or the daily timetable .Just ordinary work .
Then, just by putting MauraÆs account into context, the afterword by Patricia Dai-En Bennage transformed my understanding of what I had read . In training, a person can suffer malnutrition and frostbite . Even food scraps are reconstituted into a vegetable porridge . There are long periods of sitting meditation, of sleeping only in a sitting position and of nights of only three hoursÆ sleep . ItÆs all there in her journal .As an ordinary saint she never boasts or shouts about it .
Yet gradually we can see her life changing . She has her first Kensho and the quality of her mind expressed in her writing is different :
ôI stood in the rain for the longest time without getting wet . Nobody knew . It was my Koan .ö
Still, the hard work remains . I found it hard to remember many of the characters as they flit in and out of her routine, but it would destroy the gradual unfolding if they were unmercifully edited out .As the account approaches the time of her death, the entries become shorter, more practical, and less mystical . Then she dies .
I returned to her photograph . When we see a picture of someone who we know is dead, especially when they died suddnely or relatively young, it takes on a faded and ages-old look . Yet as her face recedes into the past, her account remains in the present :
ôI look at the clock . It is two oÆclock . A long time later I look at the clock and it is only two oÆclock . It is always two oÆclock . I feel a great peace .ö
Her father also died in a road accident and she thinks about him a lot, but when she has learnt to live in the present, she also feels that in a way, with no more to live for, to project into the future for, she has died already, and still she is ôridiculously happyö.
This book is about the transformation of a socially committed Western student into a local saint . As she herself writes, in lines set at the beginning of the text as a kind of prologue,
ôIÆd be embarassed to tell anyone, it sounds so wishy-washy, but now I have maybe 50 or 60 years (who knows ?) of time, of a life, open, blank, ready to offer . I want to live it for other people. What else is there to do with it ?ö
The meaning of enlightenment was much on my mind when I first encountered Buddhism, and I think it will always remain there. In turn, the question I am most often asked as someone interested in Buddhism is how can anyone be helped by a group of monks living in relative isolation . She is someone who was said to be enlightened, but while I honour the intense effort she made, it came as a brilliant surprise, a small kensho even, that enlightenment came through ordinary work . There is death, there is life, and there is the present moment, and thus what is most tedious can in fact be the Bodhisattva way in the thinnest disguise .
Copyright © 1996 The International Communique Ltd