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Another funny zen story!





There once was a monastery that was very strict. Following a vow of silence, no one was allowed to speak at all. But there was one exception to this rule. Every ten years, the monks were permitted to speak just two words. After spending his first ten years at the monastery, one monk went to the head monk. "It has been ten years," said the head monk. "What are the two words you would like to speak?"



"Bed... hard..." said the monk.



"I see," replied the head monk.



Ten years later, the monk returned to the head monk's office. "It has been ten more years," said the head monk. "What are the two words you would like to speak?"



"Food... stinks..." said the monk.



"I see," replied the head monk.



Yet another ten years passed and the monk once again met with the head monk who asked, "What are your two words now, after these ten years?"



"I... quit!" said the monk.



"Well, I can see why," replied the head monk. "All you ever do is complain."

A Zen student came to Bankei and said, "Master, I have an ungovernable temper. How can I cure it?"

"Show me this temper," said Bankei, "it sounds fascinating. "

"I haven't got it right now," said the student, "so I can't show it to you."

"Well then," said Bankei, "bring it to me when you have it."

"But I can't bring it just when I happen to have it," protested the student. "It arises unexpectedly, and I would surely lose it before I got it to you."

"In that case," said Bankei, "it cannot be part of your true nature. If it were, you could show it to me at any time. When you were born you did not have it--so it must have come to you from the outside. I suggest that whenever it gets into you, you beat yourself with a stick until the temper can't stand it and runs away."

Love Is an Imaginary Number

by Roger Zelazny



_____________________________________________________________________



They should have known that they could not keep me bound forever.

Probably they did, which is why there was always Stella.



I lay there staring over at her, arm outstretched above her head,

masses of messed blond hair framing her sleeping face. She was more than

wife to me: she was warden. How blind of me not to have realized it sooner!



But then, what else had they done to me?



They had made me to forget what I was.



Because I was like them but not of them they had bound me to this time

and this place.



They had made me to forget. They had nailed me with love.



I stood up and the last chains fell away.



A single bar of moonlight lay upon the floor of the bedchamber. I

passed through it to where my clothing was hung.



There was a faint music playing in the distance. That was what had done

it. It had been so long since I had heard that music...



How had they trapped me?



That little kingdom, ages ago, some Other, where I had introduced

gunpowder-- Yes! That was the place! They had trapped me there with my

Other-made monk's hood and my classical Latin.



Then brainsmash and binding to this Otherwhen.



I chuckled softly as I finished dressing. How long had I lived in this

place? Forty-five years of memory--but how much of it counterfeit?



The hall mirror showed me a middle-aged man, slightly obese, hair

thinning, wearing a red sport shirt and black slacks.



The music was growing louder, the music only I could hear: guitars, and

the steady _thump_ of a leather drum.



My different drummer, aye! Mate me with an angel and you still do not

make me a saint, my comrades!



I made myself young and strong again.



Then I descended the stair to the living room, moved to the bar, poured

out a glass of wine, sipped it until the music reached its fullest

intensity, then gulped the remainder and dashed the glass to the floor. I

was free!



I turned to go, and there was a sound overhead.



Stella had awakened.



The telephone rang. It hung there on the wall and rang and rang until I

could stand it no longer.



"You have done it again," said that old, familiar voice.



"Do not go hard with the woman," said I. "She could not watch me

always."



"It will be better if you stay right where you are," said the voice.

"It will save us both much trouble."



"Good night," I said, and hung up.



The receiver snapped itself around my wrist and the cord became a chain

fastened to a ring-bolt in the wall. How childish of them!



I heard Stella dressing upstairs. I moved eighteen steps sidewise from

There, to the place where my scaled limb slid easily from out the vines

looped about it.



Then, back again to the living room and out the front door. I needed a

mount.



I backed the convertible out of the garage. It was the faster of the

two cars. Then out onto the nighted highway, and then a sound of thunder

overhead.



It was a Piper Cub, sweeping in low, out of control. I slammed on the

brakes and it came on, shearing treetops and snapping telephone lines, to

crash in the middle of the street half a block ahead of me. I took a sharp

left turn into an alley, and then onto the next street paralleling my own.



If they wanted to play it that way, well--I am not exactly without

resources along those lines myself. I was pleased that they had done it

first, though.



I headed out into the country, to where I could build up a head of

steam.



Lights appeared in my rearview mirror.



Them?



Too soon.



It was either just another car headed this way, or it was Stella.



Prudence, as the Greek Chorus says, is better than imprudence.



I shifted, not gears.



I was whipping along in a lower, more powerful car.



Again, I shifted.



I was driving from the wrong side of the vehicle and headed up the

wrong side of the highway.



Again.



No wheels. My car sped forward on a cushion of air, above a beaten and

dilapidated highway. All the buildings I passed were of metal. No wood or

stone or brick had gone into the construction of anything I saw.



On the long curve behind me, a pair of headlights appeared.



I killed my own lights and shifted, again and again, and again.



I shot through the air, high above a great swampland, stringing sonic

booms like beads along the thread of my trail. Then another shift, and I

shot low over the steaming land where great reptiles raised their heads like

beanstalks from out their wallows. The sun stood high in this world, like an

acetylene torch in the heavens. I held the struggling vehicle together by an

act of will and waited for pursuit. There was none.



I shifted again...



There was a black forest reaching almost to the foot of the high hill

upon which the ancient castle stood. I was mounted on a hippogriff, flying,

and garbed in the manner of a warrior-mage. I steered my mount to a landing

within the forest.



"Become a horse," I ordered, giving the proper guide-word.



Then I was mounted upon a black stallion, trotting along the trail

which twisted through the dark forest.



Should I remain here and fight them with magic, or move on and meet

them in a world where science prevailed?



Or should I beat a circuitous route from here to some distant Other,

hoping to elude them completely?



My questions answered themselves.



There came a clatter of hoofs at my back, and a knight appeared: he was

mounted upon a tall, proud steed; he wore burnished armor; upon his shield

was set a cross of red.



"You have come far enough," he said. "Draw rein!"



The blade he bore upraised was a wicked and gleaming weapon, until I

transformed it into a serpent. He dropped it then, and it slithered off into

the underbrush.



"You were saying...?"



"Why don't you give up?" he asked. "Join us, or quit trying?"



"Why don't _you_ give up? Quit them and join with me? We could change

many times and places together. You have the ability, and the training..."



By then he was close enough to lunge, in an attempt to unhorse me with

the edge of his shield.



I gestured and his horse stumbled, casting him to the ground.



"Everywhere you go, plagues and wars follow at your heels!" he gasped.



"All progress demands payment. These are the growing pains of which you

speak, not the final results."



"Fool! There is no such thing as progress! Not as you see it! What good

are all the machines and ideas you unloose in their cultures, if you do not

change the men themselves?"



"Thought and mechanism advances; men follow slowly," I said, and I

dismounted and moved to his side. "All that your kind seek is a perpetual

Dark Age on all planes of existence. Still, I am sorry for what I must do."



I unsheathed the knife at my belt and slipped it through his visor, but

the helm was empty. He had escaped into another Place, teaching me once

again the futility of arguing with an ethical evolutionary.



I remounted and rode on.



After a time, there came again the sound of hoofs at my back.



I spoke another word, which mounted me upon a sleek unicorn, to move at

blinding speed through the dark wood. The pursuit continued, however.



Finally, I came upon a small clearing, a cairn piled high in its

center. I recognized it as a place of power, so I dismounted and freed the

unicorn, which promptly vanished.



I climbed the cairn and sat at its top. I lit a cigar and waited. I had

not expected to be located so soon, and it irritated me. I would confront

this pursuer here.



A sleek gray mare entered the clearing.



"Stella!"



"Get down from there!" she cried. "They are preparing to unleash an

assault any moment now!"



"Amen," I said. "I am ready for it."



"They outnumber you! They always have! You will lose to them again, and

again and again, so long as you persist in fighting. Come down and come away

with me. It may not be too late!"



"Me, retire?" I asked. "I'm an institution. They would soon be out of

crusades without me. Think of the boredom--"



A bolt of lightning dropped from the sky, but it veered away from my

cairn and fried a nearby tree.



"They've started!"



"Then get out of here, girl. This isn't your fight."



"You're mine!"



"I'm my own! Nobody else's! Don't forget it!"



"I love you!"



"You betrayed me!"



"No. You say that you love humanity."



"I do."



"I don't believe you! You couldn't, after all you've done to it!"



I raised my hand. "I banish thee from this Now and Here," I said, and I

was alone again.



More lightnings descended, charring the ground about me.



I shook my fist.



"Don't you _ever_ give up? Give me a century of peace to work with

them, and I'll show you a world that you don't believe could exist!" I

cried.



In answer, the ground began to tremble.



I fought them. I hurled their lightnings back in their faces. When the

winds arose, I bent them inside-out. But the earth continued to shake, and

cracks appeared at the foot of the cairn.



"Show yourselves!" I cried. "Come at me one at a time, and I'll teach

you of the power I wield!"



But the ground opened up and the cairn came apart.



I fell into darkness.



I was running. I had shifted three times, and I was a furred creature

now with a pack howling at my heels, eyes like fiery headlights, fangs like

swords.



I was slithering among the dark roots of the banyan, and the

long-billed criers were probing after my scaly body...



I was darting on the wings of a hummingbird and I heard the cry of a

hawk...



I was swimming through blackness and there came a tentacle...



I broadcast away, peaking and troughing at a high frequency.



I met with static.



I was falling and they were all around me.



I was taken, as a fish is taken in a net. I was snared, bound...



I heard her weeping somewhere.



"Why do you try, again and ever again?" she asked. "Why can you not be

content with me, with a life of peace and leisure? Do you not remember what

they have done to you in the past? Were not your days with me infinitely

better?"



"No!" I cried.



"I love you," she said.



"Such love is an imaginary number," I told her, and I was raised from

where I lay and borne away.



She followed behind, weeping.



"I pleaded with them to give you a chance at peace, but you threw that

gift in my face."



"The peace of the eunuch; the peace of lobotomy, lotus and Thorazine,"

I said. "No, better they work their wills upon me and let their truth give

forth its lies as they do."



"Can you really say that and mean it?" she asked. "Have you already

forgotten the sun of the Caucasus--the vulture tearing at your side, day

after hot red day?"



"I do not forget," I said, "but I curse them. I will oppose them until

the ends of When and Wherever, and someday I shall win."



"I love you," she said.



"How can you say that and mean it?"



"Fool!" came a chorus of voices, as I was laid upon this rock in this

cavern and chained.



All day long a bound serpent spits venom into my face, and she holds a

pan to catch it. It is only when the woman who betrayed me must empty that

pan that it spits into my eyes and I scream.



But I _will_ come free again, to aid long-suffering mankind with my

many gifts, and there will be a trembling on high that day I end my bondage.

Until then, I can only watch the delicate, unbearable bars of her fingers

across the bottom of that pan, and scream each time she takes them away.

I think this is one of the greatest pieces of literature I have ever read.







Azathoth

by H. P. Lovecraft



Written June 1922



Published 1938 in Leaves, Vol. 2: p. 107.



When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared tosmoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of Spring'sflowering meads; when learning stripped the Earth of her mantle of beauty and poets sang no more oftwisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone forever, there was a man who traveled out of life on a quest into spaces whither the world's dreams had fled.



Of the name and abode of this man little is written, for they were of the waking world only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is enough to say that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not to open fields and groves but on to a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair. From that casement one might see only walls and windows, except sometimes when one leaned so far out and peered at the small stars that passed. And because mere walls and windows must soon drive a man to madness who dreams and reads much, the dweller in that ro0m used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond the waking world and the tall cities.



After years he began to call the slow sailing stars by name, and to follow them in fancy when they glided regretfully out of sight; till at length his vision opened to many secret vistas whose existance no common eye suspected. And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and the dream haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher's window to merge with the close air of his room and to make him a part of their fabulous wonder.



There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of gold, vortices of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy perfumes from beyond the worlds. Opiate oceans poured there, litten by suns that the eye may never behold and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable depths. Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him away without touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely window; and for days not counted in men's calandars the tides of far spheres that bore him gently to join the course of other cycles that tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore, a green shore fragrant with lotus blossums and starred by red camalotes...

Roshi Kapleau agreed to educate a group of psychoanalysts about Zen. After being introduced to the group by the director of the analytic institute, the Roshi quietly sat down upon a cushion placed on the floor. A student entered, prostrated before the master, and then seated himself on another cushion a few feet away, facing his teacher. "What is Zen?" the student asked. The Roshi produced a banana, peeled it, and started eating. "Is that all? Can't you show me anything else?" the student said. "Come closer, please," the master replied. The student moved in and the Roshi waved the remaining portion of the banana before the student's face. The student prostrated, and left.



A second student rose to address the audience. "Do you all understand?" When there was no response, the student added, "You have just witnessed a first-rate demonstration of Zen. Are there any questions?"



After a long silence, someone spoke up. "Roshi, I am not satisfied with your demonstration. You have shown us something that I am not sure I understand. It must be possible to TELL us what Zen is."



"If you must insist on words," the Roshi replied, "then Zen is an elephant copulating with a flea."