LUDIC LOG

Master Ringyo and I walked along the western shore. The day was still and a cool breeze blew from the ocean; the oppressive heat of days past was fled, and I was invigorated and heartened by the fairness of the weather. Master Ringyo, however, still had great difficulty walking due to his robust girth, and his heavy, labored breathing was the only sound to be heard besides the chattering of the gulls and the soothing hiss of the waves breaking against the shores.

We stopped at a small shrine placed on a promontory of rock as the Western Road broke away from the shore. Master Ringyo fumbled in his pockets for a few scraps of bread, most of which had been conquered by mold. He placed them clumsily in the bowl of the shrine and, while reaching across the stone barrier that surrounded it, his thick and heavy spectacled slid off of his sweat-soaked face and fell into the sand. Fortunately for him, they did not shatter.

"Where did you get those?" I asked.

"Get what, o student?" he replied. "I not understand you." It was often difficult to understand what the master was saying. Although we both spoke the same dialect of Japanese, for reasons beyond my understanding, he conversed in a thickly accented pidgin-speech, and would often leave out verbs or pronouns. His overbit was also quite pronounced, which rendered his speech even more difficult to comprehend. This, of course, made me concentrate even harder on the great wisdom he had to offer.

"Those spectacles you wear, o Master. I have never seen the like on anyone in all the land. Their lenses are as thick as the base of a bottle of spring wine."

"Never you mind where is bottle glasses," he responded. "Is material object, distract you from studies. Cause of suffering is desire, like your desire to know about glasses, or my desire for hot poontang."

I was unsure of the meaning of 'poontang', and in truth had been unsure about 'glasses', since the Master had the perplexing habit of pronouncing his L's as R's. I felt it best at this point to turn the conversation to more spiritual matters.

"Master," I humbly inquired, "how may I achieve the oneness of the Buddha?"

He contemplated my question with a sour look upon his weathered, doughy face; for a moment I feared I had offended him with such directness. He was, after all, the wisest of monks; he had done my family a great service by taking me, a humble Okinawan fisherman's son, under his wing. I waited with trepidation and awe for his response.

"Buddha nature," he said, "like diseased monkey. Sit 'round, lick balls, fleas land on head. Sometimes it shit. Then it lie next to shit, sleep with poo smell."

I considered the lesson. He arose, grunting and huffing to his feet, expelling a small amount of bodily gasses from our seafood meal of earlier in the day. It was time to move along our journey. We continued on in silence for some time, I weighing his reply and he no doubt comtemplating greater and richer things, as was his nature.

Some hours later the master became winded, and we stopped on the ridge of a small cliff of white stone rising from the sea, ancient and lifeless. I let my thoughts drift distractedly to the majesty and perfection of the natural world as Master Ringyo spat phlegmatically into the ocean. The sun began to boil away into the sea. Finally I broke the silence.

"Master," I quietly asked, "I have heard it said that one can not know anything, even what one does not know. How, then, can one learn to walk the right path, if all knowledge is transient?"

This time his answer was longer, but faster in coming: such was the enigmatic and paradoxical brilliance of the man. "Quest for knowledge," he informed me, "like cheap hooker. She do many men, is very sloppy and smell like old sweat and bird feathers. She blow all money on crack, then burn herself in arm with crack pipe. She have bad breath, like monkey."

We sat by the peaceful sea in silence, broken only by Master Ringyo's occasional loud chewing on a piece of dried whale blubber and a furious bout of hiccoughs that followed soon after his completion of the whalemeat snack. It was late evening by now, and the day had been a picture of perfection; yet, I could not enjoy the placid silence, for too many questions nagged at me. Was the Buddha nature really like the testes of a chimp? What was a crack pipe? Where did a hermit get spectacles? Finally, I could bear the solitude of my thoughts no longer.

"Master," I said, cursing my insolence even as I spake the words, "I often suspect that your koans and parables are naught but an excuse to tell disgusting, off-color stories that are not the least bit enlightening, let alone tasteful or grammatical. Also, you over-indulge your delight at the mention of monkeys at any opportunity -- a delight no other shares. How am I to reach Nirvana with such a teacher?"

Master Ringyo smiled beatifically. "O monk," he told me, "your suspicions like retard boy of village. No one like him. He short and do not bathe, and like monkey he run away from slightest move or loud noise. One eye look in different direction from other eye, and pants stink of fifteen year of crap. All hate retard boy of village but no one kill, for to kill must get close. No one want to get close because he leak pee and throw up all over. He in no danger, but is big coward, so he squawk and holler, sometimes eighteen hour a day."

I stared off into the distance, watching the eternal ebb and flow of the tides. I realized I still had much to learn.