106 Torture

The writing of my students on their loneliness, depression, and psychic pain helped to keep me aware of our fundamental human condition, the first truth of suffering, and the terror and the impending war with Iraq still hammered at the media door. In the local morning newspaper I read that the so-called mastermind of al-Qaeda, second only to bin Laden, had been captured. Several times throughout the day I listened to conservative television commentators recommend and defend the torture of this prisoner in order to elicit information that might prevent new terrorist attacks.

Torture.

I felt capable and committed, I later explained to the master in my journal, not spacy nor naive nor sentimental. I was inspired and encouraged by the honesty, gentleness, caring, and kindness of the sangha and I was grateful. Later Ruth and I drove to the DeSoto Wildlife Refuge where we saw a dozen deer and this time a flock of two hundred turkeys gleaning a black muddy cornfield splotchy with white snow. That night I sat zazen for twenty minutes and recited the Heart Sutra before I entered my memories of the day in my journal. Though not many months before I had told my friend John that I did not pray, my custom had been to end each entry in my journal with a line from the Three Refuges and suddenly now I saw clearly that it and many other expressions like it were little different from prayer.

"May all beings embody the great Way, resolving to awaken."

Torture.

The following day I got up at 5:00 and sat my forty minutes. I had coffee and read the newspaper before I shoveled the driveway and the sidewalk. At 7:00 the sky was blue and almost clear. The brilliant yellow morning sun twinkled in the infinite starry white flakes of powdery snow and with my every heave and toss its bright light exploded in a zillion tiny white diamond sparkles. There was much more snow than there had appeared to be the night before in the dark, four inches I'd say, and it took me fifty minutes of hard steady work to clear just the concrete in front. There was the patio in back still to do but I quit to bathe and dress for a funeral.

The mother of a friend.

Death.

The mass had much in common with the rituals at the temple, a priest in robes, an altar boy and an altar girl who lit the candles and assisted the priest with the incense, a chanting, and a call and response; and the mass—with the precise unfolding of the napkin, the careful offering of the Eucharist, the drink from the chalice, and then the precise and reverent final refolding of the napkin—reminded me of oryoki and also of the kneeling celebrants in Ryaku Fusatsu. But there were also in the mass the hundred references to the resurrection of the body, to the immortal soul, to everlasting life, eternal life, and to paradise, and throughout the ceremony of course there hung above the proceedings the tortured and dead murdered body of Jesus to remind me of killing and war.

Never forget.

Life.

"Eternal," says Christ.

Life.

"Impermanent," says Buddha.

Pain.

"Be kind," say they.

Torture.

Outside I found my friend and his brother, the sons of the deceased, and before they left in the procession to the cemetery we hugged and in my head I heard the prajna paramita mantra.

Gone beyond beyond.

Home.

I shoveled snow from the back patio.

White.

Clank.

Growl.

Gray.

Torture.