Sometimes reading a book creates a feeling of slipping into another world. Page turners do what they say on the tin and the way they are written makes it difficult to put them down, but they don’t always create a world to immerse yourself in. This week I read Alan Spence’s Night Boat and, for me, it is one of those books which creates a whole world to live in for a wee while. In fact, I think the particular feel of the Night Boat reminded me of the feeling I had at least 40 years ago when reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Artist of a Floating World (I’ll need to go back and read it again and see if it does the same thing for me)
I’ve always had, and still have, a bit of a complex relationship with Zen – partly I feel incredibly drawn to it, and partly I feel it’s just not for me. Reading the Night Boat pulled me right into that complexity. Over all this isn’t just a novel, it’s an experience.
As a story, this is a fictionalised autobiography of the life of one of the great Zen teachers – Ekaku Hakuin.
I didn’t know the story of Ekaku Hakuin but I’d certainly heard the koan about the sound of one hand clapping and koans, those provocative conundrums of Zen teaching, are a core element of his story. There are also several haikus and poems which I think were written by Alan Spence, but maybe some of them are translations of Hakuin’s poetry?
At one point Hakuin talks about “Zen sickness” which is an illness experienced by many of the monks following the Zen path to Enlightenment. Here’s what he says –
Many years ago, I said, I met an old sage who cured my Zen sickness.
How did he do that?
Like with like, I said.
Hair of the dog. The cause of the sickness is also its cure. Zazen made you sick, zazen will cure you.
Hmmm…..interesting! There’s a concept worth exploring!
One of the classic translations of Hakuin’s work is by Philip Yampolsky (“The Zen Master Hakuin. Selected Writings”) and early in that text he says this about doctors –
The inspired doctors of old effected cures even before a disease made its appearance and enabled people to control the mind and nurture the energy. Quack doctors work in just the opposite way. After the disease has appeared they attempt to cure it with acupuncture, moxa treatment, and pills, with the result that many of their patients are lost.
Hakuin lived in Japan between 1686 and 1768. Yet this idea of what made a good doctor is still something we are a long way from realising. His idea of the “inspired doctor” sounds to me like someone who helped people to be healthy rather than someone who tried to control disease. In fact he calls the doctors who used the various therapies available to “attempt to cure” disease “quack doctors”.
I’m also struck by his emphasis on “[enabling] people to control the mind and nurture the energy”. How much does the practice of Medicine these days “enable people to control the mind and nurture the energy”? Don’t you think we could do with a bit more of that?
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