buildings were the work of an Italian mason. A walkway, roofed against the heavy winter snows, connected one building to another. As we strolled around, monks kept circulating, greeting each other with a bow and clasped hands while they went about their chores.
We paused to look at a Kanzeon garden that was used for teaching Sunday school classes to children. In Soto Zen, Kanzeon is the
bodhisattva
who represents compassion and mercy. The garden was an elaborate rock formation that the kids had populated with toys—miniature plastic cowboys, rubber snakes, dinosaurs, even transformers.
Next, we saw the Ceremony Hall, a dark, quiet room with stained-glass windows. The monks meditated in a Meditation Hall adjacent to it four or five times a day, for thirty to forty-five minuteseach time, from their wake-up call at six in the morning until lights-out at ten. They meditated while they worked, too, and in the evening there was a period of walking meditation. The opportunities to meditate were endless, really, because the monks were charged with the duty of recognizing the Buddha nature, or spiritual value, in the most ordinary activities.
The notion—or so it seemed to me—was to make yourself an entirely conscious being, aware of every passing tick of life, and aware, too, of all the lives that were ticking by around you. And the trick, of course, was not to be attached to any of it, but to consecrate its transience instead—a transience that included your own few fleeting seconds of enlightenment.
Little wonder, then, that the Buddha smiled.
At the abbey, the monks grew most of their food. The head gardener was a lanky man in khakis and a blue flannel shirt, who had a goofy-looking, flapped hat on his head to protect him from the sun. I have never met an unhappy gardener, not ever, and this monk did nothing to break that streak.
The monk’s spring crops were just sprouting. His snow peas, lettuce, chard, and fava beans were all coming in, but it was the favas that turned him on. He leaned on the handle of his pitchfork, just as a gardener should do, and spoke of how the beans would be harvested and dried, articulating the procedure so tenderly on their behalf that each fava seemed to be a unique organism of considerable worth.
My visit to Shasta Abbey ended in a little gift shop, where I bought some books and pamphlets and asked my guide what it was like for her to live on Mount Shasta, with its snowy peak constantly in evidence. The mountain flowed in and out of her thoughts, she said. It would disappear in clouds, or in fog, or in gray weather, only to appear again.
F ROM M OUNT S HASTA , I took Highway 89 toward Fall River Valley and cattle country, going through some more lumber towns on the brink of disaster or already fallen. McCloud had a cluster of by-now familiar For Sale signs on the houses around a working mill that was just limping along. The town once had its own railroad, the McCloud River Railroad, that connected the Southern Pacific line to the Great Northern line. McCloud’s mills, even into the 1960s, had cut a million board-feet of wood every year.
Pondosa, down the road, was in much worse shape. It had gone to dust and pine needles, the rot of the earth devouring the abandoned company houses on the fringe of a defunct mill. The windows in the houses were all busted out, leaving shards of glass stuck in the frames. The doorknobs had been jimmied free, and the doors were nailed shut to keep the floorboards from being stolen. The trees, great firs and pines, had all been slashed and toppled, and they lay on the ground bleaching and decomposing, their fibers consumed by termites.
Beyond Pondosa, I turned onto A-19, the McArthur Road, traveling southeast and watching as the forests began to open onto the valley. There was more light, and the dark greens and browns of thickly timbered land were replaced by more alfalfa fields and the blues of lakes and streams.
Fall River, a spring-fed creek as
We paused to look at a Kanzeon garden that was used for teaching Sunday school classes to children. In Soto Zen, Kanzeon is the
bodhisattva
who represents compassion and mercy. The garden was an elaborate rock formation that the kids had populated with toys—miniature plastic cowboys, rubber snakes, dinosaurs, even transformers.
Next, we saw the Ceremony Hall, a dark, quiet room with stained-glass windows. The monks meditated in a Meditation Hall adjacent to it four or five times a day, for thirty to forty-five minuteseach time, from their wake-up call at six in the morning until lights-out at ten. They meditated while they worked, too, and in the evening there was a period of walking meditation. The opportunities to meditate were endless, really, because the monks were charged with the duty of recognizing the Buddha nature, or spiritual value, in the most ordinary activities.
The notion—or so it seemed to me—was to make yourself an entirely conscious being, aware of every passing tick of life, and aware, too, of all the lives that were ticking by around you. And the trick, of course, was not to be attached to any of it, but to consecrate its transience instead—a transience that included your own few fleeting seconds of enlightenment.
Little wonder, then, that the Buddha smiled.
At the abbey, the monks grew most of their food. The head gardener was a lanky man in khakis and a blue flannel shirt, who had a goofy-looking, flapped hat on his head to protect him from the sun. I have never met an unhappy gardener, not ever, and this monk did nothing to break that streak.
The monk’s spring crops were just sprouting. His snow peas, lettuce, chard, and fava beans were all coming in, but it was the favas that turned him on. He leaned on the handle of his pitchfork, just as a gardener should do, and spoke of how the beans would be harvested and dried, articulating the procedure so tenderly on their behalf that each fava seemed to be a unique organism of considerable worth.
My visit to Shasta Abbey ended in a little gift shop, where I bought some books and pamphlets and asked my guide what it was like for her to live on Mount Shasta, with its snowy peak constantly in evidence. The mountain flowed in and out of her thoughts, she said. It would disappear in clouds, or in fog, or in gray weather, only to appear again.
F ROM M OUNT S HASTA , I took Highway 89 toward Fall River Valley and cattle country, going through some more lumber towns on the brink of disaster or already fallen. McCloud had a cluster of by-now familiar For Sale signs on the houses around a working mill that was just limping along. The town once had its own railroad, the McCloud River Railroad, that connected the Southern Pacific line to the Great Northern line. McCloud’s mills, even into the 1960s, had cut a million board-feet of wood every year.
Pondosa, down the road, was in much worse shape. It had gone to dust and pine needles, the rot of the earth devouring the abandoned company houses on the fringe of a defunct mill. The windows in the houses were all busted out, leaving shards of glass stuck in the frames. The doorknobs had been jimmied free, and the doors were nailed shut to keep the floorboards from being stolen. The trees, great firs and pines, had all been slashed and toppled, and they lay on the ground bleaching and decomposing, their fibers consumed by termites.
Beyond Pondosa, I turned onto A-19, the McArthur Road, traveling southeast and watching as the forests began to open onto the valley. There was more light, and the dark greens and browns of thickly timbered land were replaced by more alfalfa fields and the blues of lakes and streams.
Fall River, a spring-fed creek as
Similar Books
