Sugar Satori

On emptiness and confectionery

What is the secret that connects each of the world religions? What is it, silent, sticky, and shared, that links all sects of monastic practice, that adheres to mysticism, that binds the minds of anchorites, hermits, and mendicants in their singular cells?

My travels as aspiring ascetic have taken me to clifftop monasteries and inner-city convents, to forest temples and desert ashrams. What I craved was not so much fulfillment as emptiness. To access those last unconsumed corners of the world, where silence and stillness and shadow still held.

Since moving to Los Angeles, my monastic fantasy has subsided in favor of diamanté-framed license plates and perfecting my rollerblading technique. However, those years of pilgrimage were not in vain. They have since distilled and crystallized to one lasting revelation: the sudden knowledge that the vocation to asceticism can be traced to a predisposition to sugar addiction.

My own vocation was primarily that of vacation. As a graduate student, testing whether my stipend could transcend the stubbled horizons of the Midwest, I quickly mastered the time-honored travel hack of being subsidized by monks. At competitive rates – approximately the nightly price of a grimy motel – among the Carmelites and the Benedictines I could be sure of a spotlessly clean room, a neat and narrow single bed, a desk with reading lamp, starched sheets and towels, a vow of silence, and two cooked meals per day plus vegan option. The presence of an iron crucifix nailed above the bed, absence of Wi-Fi, and the intermittent clanging of bells cajoling (but not obligating) me to join the monks at mass was an acceptable exchange rate for budget-friendly cleanliness. A three-night stay at a monastery ultimately seemed less risky than a 20-minute dry-cut at my local Great Clips in Cedar Rapids where, scissors to my neck, the flared and mustachioed hairdresser would lean close and whisper, “Have you discovered the love of Christ?”

Each religious order I visited had developed their own cottage industry, a practice of “ora et labora” that neatly aligned prayer and profit. As strategy for financial autonomy, this isn’t so different from the business model of other enterprising intentional communities in the U.S. – the silverware business of the Oneida Community in New York, for instance, or the smoked sausage empire headquartered at the Amana Colony in Iowa. The differentiating factor, as far as I could discern, was primarily calorie count.

Again and again, I fell prey to the honeytrap of monastic labor. At New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, I have purchased holy granola and brandy-dipped fruit cake. At the Monastery of the Angels in Los Angeles, I have sampled pumpkin bread and nibbled on peanut brittle. At Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, I have enjoyed eight different flavours of fudge, including butter walnut, chocolate bourbon, and mint julep.

The association of sugar and spirituality is not solely an U.S. phenomenon – a way of courting capitalism by catering to the consumer habits of a dopamine nation. Across continents and religious traditions, the sugar-spike is integral to the mechanics of ecstatic experience.

At the Ram Raja Temple in Orchha, Madhya Pradesh, I have stood in a crowd of worshippers at hot dusk. I have felt a collective rattling intake of breath and the raising of hundreds of hands – have seen the effigies of Rama and Sita revealed in the sanctum, have been carried forward in the rush to deliver the evening’s offering at the lovers’ feet. Sweets – cubes of condensed milk and sugar, saffron and cashew; deep-fried swirling syrup; spheres of jaggery and coconut. Sweets sold outside the temple, intended to be eaten only by the gods and the flies that settle, at ease with their divinity.

During Ramandan in Paris, I have cycled through the steam of roasting meat as street vendors prepare for sunset. I have watched small bowls of dates placed on trestle tables, as a gesture to the piety of self-mastery – and seen instead, the unraveling of shawarma, the tearing of pita, the destruction of pyramids of baklava and spun-gold kunafa.

But nowhere have I witnessed the relationship between sugar and spirituality stronger and stickier among the Zen monks of Japan.

As a student of Zen – that is to say, a student of sweets – I do not pretend to be anything other than a dilettante. Nonetheless, a militant two weeks of 3am wake-up calls, pre-dawn meditation, synchronously slurped rice gruel (no time for mindfulness), samu labor – sweeping leaves, raking sand, mopping spotless corridors – has afforded me a certain expertise.

The trip, a package-pilgrimage organized by a Los Angeles Zen center, involved staying at a monastery at the center of Sapporo, the wintry city known for its snow sports and dairy-based confectionery – most notably, Shiroi Kobito, a white chocolate-filled langue-de-chat cookie. I credit the cookie with curing me of my addiction to asceticism; I have not crossed the threshold of a monastery since that trip.

Perhaps at this point I should backtrack, reverse engineer the links of religio, the conditions of the cure.

While most world religions are structured as a ladder to heaven, Zen is a stumbling block positioned to trip up hypocrites. The koans – a set of insoluble non-questions and obdurate anti-parables – are designed to tie the receiver into binds of brain until she finally capitulates to insight beyond thinking. This is satori. Awakening, understanding, sudden enlightenment. Absolute acceptance, acceptance of the absolute, an experience beyond words, the end of this essay.

But for those who like to chew on language a little longer, do continue.

The koans have a Strewwelpeterish quality in their delivery of empty lessons; the characters of these tiny dramas are often subjected to all sorts of gratuitous violence. There is the boy whose finger is chopped off with a knife when he imitates the gesture of a Zen master. Monks are repeatedly slapped, struck, shouted at. A cat is torn in two. And if you meet the Buddha, kill him.

It's a mood very different from the burbling fountains and groves of bamboo I had come to associate with Californian Zen. My fellow soft-edged pilgrims – nervous types with frown lines etched and shadowed by the sun – were joined by a squad of young Japanese businessmen and baseball players, sent by parents or coaches for transferable training. Together, we learned a new logic of carrot and stick; chiasmically flipped to keisaku and mochi, beating stick and sticky rice ball.

In the monastery, unpredictability is training for immediacy. Like the theme-and-variation of the eeriest koto music, the elements of the day are generally consistent – what differs is the order in which they are arranged and the time allotted to each task.

The rhythm of activity follows the fluctuating moods of the head monk – he who is granted command of the bell and thereby the right to sculpt time. The result is a schizoid mishmash of rote action and unpredictable flips and switches in schedule. Zazen, seated meditation, may last as little as 10 minutes or extend across wastelands of brain-bludgeoned hours. Samu might involve trudging into the rain with the goal of tweezing pine needles from a manicured landscape of moss – then called back inside just as you’re finding your flow, tasked instead with peeling hundreds of unsoaked and intractable chestnuts.

Thus stripped of expectation or reason, each action may become as direct and uninflected as an arrow from a bow.  To the monkey-mind, gnawing on the rinds of speculation and conditioned by a craving for inner peace, such straightforwardness might sound like the definition of freedom. However, Zen has a way of negating any action driven by desire. Goals – however pearly and polychrome they might appear to the imagination – collapse in upon themselves like nebulae. The projection of a path is a heavy-handed scrawl across the emptiness of the present, and peace is no more preferable than distress. What is, is. If equanimity is attained, this is less an achievement than a falling-away, a slow subsiding of story.

There is something inherently eerie about the breakdown of conventional values. Encircled by the happy hum of urban activity, the Sapporo monastery  opened a space like a vortex at the center of the city; on passing through the arch of the temple gate, the cheerful consumerism of the surrounding streets faded to grey. I retained vague memories of oysters bobbing in restaurant aquariums and the fuzzy mouthfeel of cappuccinos in cat cafés, but the scents and flavours of the outside world now felt garish and unconvincing; a vitrine of varnished and inaccessible sampuru.

Unlike the mountaintop monasteries I had come to associate with Zen – delicate sketches of sweeping rooftops, slatted verandas, and translucent shoji screens – the urban version had the cinderblock aesthetics of a juvenile delinquent center. Dharma talks took place in a beige carpeted classroom hung with mildewed scrolls, fiberboard drop ceilings and sulphurous overhead lighting conditioned the quality of attention. It was to this room that we were led on first arriving, one rainy twilight in the warp of jetlag. We sat on stackable chairs in an A-A style circle and were welcomed by the roshi, who – smiling and unreadable – handed us each a blue cotton fukusa and a cookie contained in air-tight plastic. We were told that the evening’s meditation would be deferred to the morning; that the contents of the cookie were rum-soaked raisins and buttercream; that the kanji printed on the fukusa could be translated – “if you don’t work, you don’t eat.” We were sent, with the symbols of sugar and milk and stick, to an early bed.

I found myself locked within the contortions of a koan. Overnight, the wind-up of the day’s broken clockwork would turn around and around in my dreams – to be released in the hypnogogic pause before the first bell of the morning.

In Zen, there is a concept of warming the bell before the full sound, a type of muffled half-note to prepare the soul. Sleeping alongside my fellow pilgrims in a tatami-lined dormitory, that warming – that warning – would be half-heard as the beat of bare feet running along dark corridors – or forests, or supermarket aisles – before the monk of the morning seized the bell, flipped the fluorescent lights, and set our nerves jangling.

As we rolled up our futons and tied our bat-like black robes, those disembodied feet still paced in the background; whether heard, or my heartbeat, or an extension of dreamspace, impossible to know. In Japan, it is an accepted fact that ghosts have no feet, and yet those footsteps pursued me with their own peculiar hauntology; a tripping rhythm that became the metronome of the monastery.

The footsteps of the evening feet unfurled from the lotus position; heavy with sleep, ankles hobbled and dactylic. The pre-dawn feet of kinhin walking meditation; a human ōmukade coiling a moonlight path between moss and raked sand. The feet that reportedly salted the pickles served with rice gruel at breakfast. And the predatory pad-pad of the feet of the head monk, as he prowled the meditation hall brandishing the keisaku.

In my former life as a West Coast Zen-weekender, I had assumed the keisaku was symbolic. A wooden stick about the length of a boarding school cane, unhooked from behind the altar during meditation and applied to redirect attention to the here and now. In Los Angeles, receiving the keisaku felt like a special blessing . If selected by the jikijitsu – the monastic officer responsible for maintaining order during zazen – you would bow your head and receive two light taps on each shoulder. Awoken, invigorated, full of reverence for life, the chosen would adjust their posture and realign the wandering mind, grateful for the stick’s gentle gift of encouragement and admonition.

In Japan, the keisaku took on new meaning. The symbol of the stick, formerly a means of pointing to the present moment, became a weapon of wakefulness; mindfulness redefined as disciplinary action, made into matter, crashing down with the force of monastic anger management and written-in as red welts across the back of the meditator.

We would be seated in the zendo, minds suspended in the half-light of dawn or the slow falling rain of early evening. And then the jikijitsu, still as a corpse or coat hung from a hook, would twitch and reach for the keisaku. I traced his movements with my peripheral vision, keeping my head straight to mask my errant mind. The jikijitsu held the stick with both hands and sliced the air with the finesse of a samurai, pausing for a moment to survey the rows of inmate monks and monkey-minded visiting pilgrims. Walking heel-to-toe, as though along a tightrope, he made his way slowly through the zendo.

 There was no knowing which one of us would be chosen – no way of anticipating what small offense or excessive diligence would cause the jikijitsu to pause, and turn, and administer discipline. My logical mind assured me there was nothing to worry about, but my body expressed my animal instincts; shoulders tensed and hackles raised. When the stick eventually selected its scapegoat, the decision would be accepted with the equanimity of gassho – hands together in gratitude and supplication – and then – a symbolic half-step to satori – consciousness is awoken, broken, robes binding with bleeding skin and ego very-slightly unstuck.

In time, I learned that we thin-skinned Westerners would not be submitted to the full thwak of the keisaku. The novice monks – those who had earned entry to the monastery after weeks waiting outside the gates and being repeatedly turned away – had proved their sticking power. Their desire to straightjacket the self within monastic regulation was strong enough to warrant slow-healing wounds. We pilgrims, however, had simply paid the price of entry – a few thousand yen of the crispest new banknotes and several boxes of the finest quality Japanese sweets.

These gifts would be our undoing. Though spared the rod, the monks had devised for us a more twisted form of torture; we were not to escape being spoiled.

After morning meditation, we would file into the windowless, carpeted, exposed-brick dining room where we received our daily ration of rice and pickles. Served in three rounds (the third was serving was a formality, designed to be declined), breakfast was ingested with symbolic speed. Meals were not for the sake of sustenance but for practicing unreflective action; dawdlers and leftovers were not to be tolerated. Bowls were not for washing, but would be wiped with a cloth once the remaining grains were swilled down with green tea. The cloth was then used to wrap the bowls in precise and bacteria-lined folds. After breakfast we would change into prison-style samue and engage in a pointedly pointless activity: shifting imaginary dust from one side of the zendo to the other, sweeping leaves with picturesque brooms made with inefficiently bunched twigs.

Without the consolations of meaning or intention, temptation or fulfillment, daily rituals became tests of endurance. Each task and clasp of time – extending with no predetermined ending – would condemn us to the exile of the present moment. Yet neither breakfast nor samu, rice gruel nor leaf heaps, were dreaded so much as a surprise sprung upon us within each 24-hour cycle: sarei, the call for tea and sweets.

Relentlessly recurring with unscheduled regularity, sarei developed its own flavour of affliction. On our first morning in the monastery, the sudden announcement of a tea break had felt like salvation. We were not yet acclimatized to the duties of the dharma; meditation in the damp and drafty zendo would last for hours without stretches; samu involved scrubbing the wooden slats of the outside walkways, knuckles swollen from immersion in tin buckets of soapy water. Hunger rose and fell like the crest of a dragon, forefront of mind then forgotten as the hours encircled – around and around with no promise of an ending.

Then, the chime of the sweetest silver bell – a sound that was later to induce rabid and fearful salivation. We walked through the drizzle to the dining room, where we were met by monks bearing industry-standard kettles; we sat at the grey, scratch resistant tables and were served green tea.

At that stage in the day – samu-battered and jet-lagged – caffeine would have been sufficient to cast us into ecstasy. To our delight, the monks did the rounds again and again, the kettle as attentive to free refills as a coffee carafe in an American diner. Then, just as the jitters set in, the arrival of the sweets.

It was as though the lights had suddenly dimmed; the shoji screens sliding open like the mechanisms of a stage-set, the monks as stealthy and shadowed as bunraku puppeteers. Illuminated as pageant, performing for our choosing – there were dorayaki and daifuku (the friends we knew from home ) then – tripping on the tongue – wagashi! in shades of pearly pink, powder green, periwinkle, and custard-plum. Gleaming blocks of jellied yōkan in neoclassical constructions, hard hexagonal higashi like witches’ buttons, plump nerkiri posing as lychees and maple leaves, and hidden within each matcha-dusted mochi – a fresh muscat grape.

On that fateful morning, our collective gut-brain connection skewed by gruel and sleeplessness, the sweets arrived to save us like a deus ex machina, a sudden spiriting away, a gift beyond our means. Each confection had its own special way of attracting attention – shimmying and saluting, consuming our choosing, competing for the prize of being eaten.

The monks, who had receded to the far darkness of backstage, would slide in and out of focus as they presented the offerings. During formal meals, we had learned to decline the third serving with a slight bow of the head; in the context of sarei, the same signal switched – without warning – to an insult. The monks typically maintained a front of impenetrable detachment, keeping us suspended in a state of potential transgression, but now made every effort to cross the language barrier. Gestures and expressions became unusually communicative; any attempt to resist the onslaught of hospitality was met with a sharp intake of breath and dramatic sculpting of the brows, as though each face had converted to a Noh mask.

We were anxious to uphold correct etiquette – after all, we had travelled several thousand miles across the ocean to distance our selves from those bungling and culturally insensitive Americans. And so we accepted the sweets with resignation and grace; nausea offset by the relief of watching each mask melt into smiles of approval.  

In the hours that followed – wood chopping, dormitory dusting, evening zazen, rice gruel nightcap  – we lived in hope that sarei had been a one-off extravagance; a generous – if overzealous – initiation to the superabundance of the spiritual life. When those sessions of anti-abstinence returned day after day, it became clear that something was terribly wrong – not least, with our interpretation of what monastic withdrawal was for.  

Back in Los Angeles, I had pictured the monastery as a sanctuary apart from the consumption habits of the worldly world; a contained space, safe from temptation, where patina added value to ceramics, workwear, and kitchen implements. That picture (borrowed largely from Venice Beach boutiques) gave me hope as I trawled the desolate technicolor of the freeway at sunset. There, glinting on the horizon of my mind, was the promise of a telos, a wabi-sabi Emerald City; a place where monastic values of reverence, restraint, and measure yielded their own aspirational aesthetics.

What I found on the other side – the present moment tearing through the delicate projections of the mind’s eye – was not so much disappointment as disorientation. I had opened the door to the inner sanctum and found myself submerged beneath an avalanche of sugar. If I had set out seeking emptiness, my goal had been achieved – all sense of sanctity and discipline had dissolved like sherbert into seltzer; monastic life was just another setup for the desolation of excess.

We had brought this upon ourselves. Like other visitors to the monastery, we pilgrims had arrived bearing gifts; a neat stack of the crispest new banknotes and several boxes of the highest quality sweets. The tradition is a practical symbol of sustaining the monastery – funds to fix a leaky roof, glucose to fuel the long hours of meditation. Levels of largesse are inversely proportionate to estimations of monastic appetite; the quality and quantity of the sweets rises in accordance with a perception of the monks as paragons of piety. This ritual of gift-giving is a form of sympathetic magic; by giving away what we crave, we might gain a morsel of the monks’ self-control. By exiting the outside world, we hoped to become more like those whose home we had entered – to slip, somehow, into their skin – to metabolize, monasticize, to convert an ideal-other into our ideal selves.

What we hadn’t considered was that the monks might be – just like us. That they, too, had retreated to the monastery in search of stillness, reverence, emptiness. That they, like us, desired. And hidden within that desire was a tiny twist of fear.

As we sat in sarei, knees bent in seiza, hands trembling and outstretched, we refused to let the idea enter our minds. To eliminate the gap between them and us would be to miss the point of the pilgrimage – no longer a journey, just recursion, nowhere to travel and nowhere to hide. We had paid our way – with our weight in sweets – and now we were receiving our wages.

Avalanches of sugar do not settle well in a stomach lined only by rice gruel and radish pickles. But the monks did pay us this courtesy: our gifts were never regurgitated back to us. There was no need. The backlog of sweets supplied by day-tripping tourists extended beyond the kitchen and into the kura, the fireproof storehouse typically dedicated to protecting sacred texts, temple records, and ceremonial robes.

The sound of tourists disgorged from their minivans would trigger a rising tide of dread; happy chatter heralded the imminent refilling of the kura and the promise of protracted torture. These visitors only stayed for an hour or so – enough time to deposit their offerings, collect their temple stamps, and pose for a photo pretending to bash the gong. Then it was back into the minivans for the next stop on their packaged path free from decision fatigue.  

They had chosen the straight shot; the way of immediacy, convenience, outsourced booking, inner peace. We had chosen the mazy way; the Zen zigzag, a striving against struggle, a pursuit of loopholes against delusion. As a result, we rarely crossed paths with these visitors. Sometimes, we would catch the flash of a camera as we axed logs or scrubbed the outdoor sinks in the muddy yard behind the bath house. Occasionally one of us would be required to lead a wayward child or over-adventurous adult back to the group. But otherwise our worlds were kept cleanly apart, as though held within a force-field forbidding cross-contamination. 

As insider-outsiders, we existed in an ambiguous category that that required bracketing. Unlike the monks, we had not earned entry to the monastery by way of niwa-zume – the ritual of waiting outside the gates, turned away day after day, until finally admitted for training. Nor were we the day-trippers with their folding parasols, liberal wallets, and swift departure, too light-hearted to linger.

Those who left quickly were blessed with the blithe desirelessness of tourists on a quest to fill their temple books with stamps. We, however, had come to be branded; to be impressed with the mark of the monastery. Our hearts were heavy with attachment to an ideal.

Our betwixt position and anxious respect for the rules made us natural scapegoats. But we were also the aggressors, and our offerings were declarations of war. The monks had gone to great lengths to separate themselves from the world of consumer choice; yet now they were surrounded by a greater array of delicacies than any earthly confectioner could conjure – sweets selected to satisfy the spirit by way of the stomach, each visitor’s private pact with the infinite. The monks received the gifts with gritted teeth, crumbly with cavities. But the tourists were not the objects of their wrath. We who stayed – we who delayed – presented ourselves for punishment.

And so, creations once associated with special occasions became part of our burden, the cross we must bear. We found ourselves complicit within a system of indulgences whereby purgatory was prolonged and perfect peace postponed. Each day, we watched ourselves reenacting the story of the Shakyamuni Buddha who attains enlightenment after six years practicing extreme asceticism. On the verge of starvation, he is offered a bowl of sweet rice milk by a village girl who believes him to be a tree spirit. He takes the milk, and breaks his commitment to self-mortification. Sitting beneath a bodhi tree, over the course of a single night his soul undergoes multiple stages of sublimation. At dawn, he sees the morning star as though for the first time.

Whether the Buddha’s enlightenment was in fact the sensation of sugar hitting his system after years of fasting is a question for scholars to quibble over. We who submitted to sarei knew only that our awakening was eternally deferred, for as long as Shakyamuni’s salvation eternally recurred. In an attempt to escape the cycle, the more ingenious among us developed a technique of slipping the sweets into the drooping sleeves of our samu jackets, which gathered an inner fleece of stickiness as the day unraveled.

Towards evening, when we peeled off our work clothes and changed into meditation robes, we no longer clung to any hope of becoming unstuck. In Zen, there is no distinction between samsara and nirvana - the cycle and the end are one and the same; an impossible shape, inescapable. We would pick at the problem like a wound as the hours of meditation extended into darkness, and it followed us across the threshold into sleep. Turning and turning, across our floor of unrolled futons, the restlessness of those who dream of sweets.

*

In the hours between each onslaught of sarei, samu became our sole source of pleasure; a palate-cleanser of honest labor, restoring hope in the possibility of self-control. For as long as we swept, mopped, dusted, chopped, we could be consummate performers of the pursuit of emptiness – no false food of the future, no repasts of the past – we were denizens of the present moment, grim-set on making a home in the here and now.

In the elsewhere, California, I had associated Zen with sensate immersion; the subtle delectations of Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, the sighing of a tea kettle like wind in the pines, the annual circus of seasonal tropes – the cherry blossoms of spring, the blaze of maple leaves in autumn. A trip to Little Tokyo in Downtown Los Angeles promised heightened consciousness made shoppable in the form of sakura picnic sets, hinoki diffusers, and kintsugi teacups. I would bring my purchases home for unboxing, ready to re-refine my life – only to find that the passage from retail to reality had sapped each item of sensation.

Attending the Los Angeles Zen center was a way to offset the built-in shrinkage of the experience economy; meditation, my hack to gain ever-greater access to a materialist paradise. In zazen, I learned that true appreciation is conditioned by negation. We were instructed to lower the gaze to the ground to avoid distraction; the flickering light on the floorboards and the grain of the wood soon became as fascinating as the birds of paradise on the altar, the gold-gleam of the Buddha, and the reels of incense rising to the high octagonal windows, where tapered fingers of date palms stroked and painted the bright blue sky.

This, I assumed, was the point of the instruction. By narrowing our perspective, we would – in the manner of anchoress witnessing the eucharist through a squint, or a fairground punter spying a nude through a pinhole camera – gain apophatic access to an expanse of vision. To be was to become a great hall within a cell, a Tardis of time travel inside of an hour. This fitted with the economic logic of appreciation, a way of having my negation and eating it. I invested my sensory resources to increase my chances of gain, I downsized my outlook to maximize my assets.

For the first 25 minutes or so of samu – approximately the duration of one pomodoro – this reasoning allowed us to sustain a sense of purpose. As our bodies became supple with exhaustion, we grew fluent in the art of unthinking action; it became taxing to think of taking in the world, of exerting ourselves to feed upon its gifts and motivations – easier to become neither interested not interesting, just bodily blocks of reality, heaving ourselves through space for no reason but being.

There we were, minds free and scraped clean, uninflected extensions of our brooms, or axes, or mops – for a moment, pure expressions of Zen. But as soon as we viewed ourselves as such – an eye-outside, a filmy skin of thought – we were thrown back into the oscillations of self-reflection, the acknowledgment of achievement occluding any possibility of attainment. The blinkered bliss of nonduality – I work, I am the work – was scattered into glittering fragments until resolved once again into action without hope.

Logic and agenda were left behind in Los Angeles; the bond between instruction and intention no longer held. Each action was only itself – as pointless as the finger of the boy who imitates his teacher in the koan of Master Gutei. Chopped, forgotten, enlightened, lost.

*

And yet, something of my Western individualism persisted. A sense of self which, when pressed towards the white light of nirvana, would flare up against negation and assert existence in time and space, pulsing and shaping and seeking stimuli from my surroundings.

On the final morning of the pilgrimage, I was tasked with polishing the ancestor tablets in a dark chamber behind the central shrine in the hōndo. To keep myself entertained and the ecstasy of emptiness at bay, I attempted to invest the tablets with personality traits, basing my deductions on the variations of vertical kanji, the relative sheen of the lacquer, and each tablet’s signature coiffing of gold scrollwork. This technique might have worked if de-mossing tombstones in an English country churchyard, but the ancestors remained stubbornly resistant, rejecting my narratives as cartoonish and edged with orientalism.

With no story for speculation or characters to keep me company, I was confined once again to the friendless playpen of the present moment – no comfort in an elsewhere, no promise of the nonexistent – and so samu extended into roiling waves of denuded consciousness, forming tiers and tiers of the deceased.

To shine, one must have light. The irreflective gloom of the chamber made the assignment of polishing near-impossible; as I climbed the small stepladder to reach the upper tiers, the ancestors became increasingly angry and crumbly – shedding clumps of gold scroll at the slightest touch and poking splinters under my fingernails.

For as long as I remained shackled to the task at hand, I could exist as though life was safe from sarei. My body was tensed in readiness for the bell, but my mouth was dry in anticipation of sweets. A powdery membrane of mochi still coated my palate from yesterday’s serving; a sarei in honor of the harvest moon, once a symbol of mystery and grace, now associated with the gravity of glutinous rice.

The minutes gelled into hours. The beating of blood behind my sleep-deprived eyes became my inner metronome, the stuck record of the self. What I had known as “mindfulness” back in California now seemed like a glitchy mistranslation of mushin – no-mind, mindlessness. The mush of being me. No past, no future. No bell to deliver me from the ancestors, and no hope of salvation from sugar.

To be born-again Zen is to profess acquiescence to – no hope. In the green and loamy Sunday school of my Anglian upbringing, I was tutored in the theological virtues of hope, faith, and love; a doctrine legitimized by the design sensibility of a God who took delight in ancient yews and branching rood screens – who condoned the carving of mermaids beneath the seats of choristers, and the vigilance of small dogs to next to long-dead knights.

My sense of the sacred never wavered, for as long as I was cradled within a creed that had its roots in nature worship. How could I doubt the presence of a God whose aesthetics aligned so precisely with English ecology – who had created the moth to nibble at Sunday cashmere, the raindrop to collect in the bapistry bucket, the catkins to be torn untimely from leafless branches and arranged on stone windowsills as an invocation to spring. The Buddhist premise of life as suffering never occurred to me; not because life was free from pain, but because we – humans, apples, pilgrims, catkins – were part and product of a marbled planet, red in tooth and claw.

There is magic in knowing that all things are mixed under the moon. Yes, the crumbs collecting beneath the trestle tables in the vestibule were of Walker’s Shortbread; yes, the reassuring hum of a food service kettle at the back of the church would promise a swift end to the dirge of hymns and hip-replacement sermons. Yet those rituals still sustained me in the possibility that there might be more to life than what could be consumed; a fleeting suggestion that we were more than just the bored hunter gatherers who had drifted to the top of the food chain, denied the thrill of the chase or the hush of the numinous, doomed to invent new processed snacks to prevent the brain from atrophying.

Before the prefrontal cortex, there was the jaw; before reason there was rumination. As I let my thoughts fill the chamber, the ancestors were displaced by more ancient predecessors – loping shadows of memory and theory, migrations mapped by rejected husks of the here and now.

My mind foraged across continents in search of the comfort of jammy dodgers and fondant fancies, the familiar fare of village fêtes and church fundraising. But there was no escape from the emptiness of Zen. In the old days, the English days, when I had attended occasional evensong at Binsey Church in Oxford, it had been possible to live for sweetness and story, knowing nothing of negation and satori. The church is the site of healing spring, a treacle well – of which, Alice says, there is no such thing. The loss of logos, the undoing of anthropocentric common sense, was already encoded in Lewis Carroll’s sentences, rewritten as mathematical puzzles. But at the time, cheerfully waving from the well among the graves, I was asymptomatic of the uncanniness of narrative.

Why, waving. For a photo, presumably. Or just to be part and particle of life entangled. In England we are experts at accepting apparent contradiction, as modelled by the architecture of medieval and neo-gothic churches. Vaulting those underfunded aisles, Christianity and paganism coexist in tension and compression; organic growth and static symbols are engineered to hold a world, a theater, a tensegrity sphere. Upon these hallowed grounds, in this holy net, disbelief is neither suspended nor relevant. What is, is. The crucifix is continuous with the branching and grafting of trefoil arches, the cross is our sheltering tree.

There is a term for this continuity: the paschal mystery, the ongoing raga-rhythm of life, death, and resurrection. Young and ambitious vicars – fresh from the seminary – would attempt to explain the concept in their Easter sermons, employing anecdotes and conceits that would exhaust even the most dexterous of metaphysical poets. The elderly and disillusioned lay preachers were better suited to the priorities of our commuter-belt village. Canny communicators, aware of the most efficient way to metabolize meaning, they would stand at the lychgate – our inevitable route of exit – and distribute the mystery in the form of creme eggs.

In England, the mystery was inherently cosy. The Earth’s promise to ultimately consume us had the stern yet benevolent quality of a mother calling her children home for dinner. Paradox was our bread and butter, nonduality our amniotic fluid; Christ was our acrobat, a trickster performing above the altar, offering himself up for being-eaten.

It wasn’t until I moved to the US that my knowledge of what was “natural” was called into question. Shortly after arriving, down on the ground of a flyover state, flipping through the channels in an airport hotel, I studied the pointy goatees and shiny three-piece suits of televangelists. Pastors had the appearance of prosperous traders and Christian virtue was equated with commercial success. This was the deal, my soul was in the balance; God wanted me to be wealthy and my earnings were seeds to be planted strategically in megachurch ministries.

Back home, it was never so clear that God was on my side. This was a problem of geometry rather than justice. The Anglican God was multiple and many-sided; a close-cousin of Brahma, Vishu, Shiva, omnipresent, earthy, and absorbed in a multi-channel game of make-believe. There they were – the neighbor in the pew behind us, the fingers that clasped ours in a sweaty sign of peace. The microbes that svengalied our inner circuitry, the blinking eyes in the forest, observing our divergent paths.

In the US, I encountered a God who was singular, omnipotent, and definitely did not live on Earth. Yes, he was bigger than us, but he could also be bought; by calling the toll-free number and inputting my credit card details, it was possible to invest in his blessings. Watching the televangelist strut across the stage, I became aware of a seam of muscular strain across my shoulders and lower back, as though I had been pushing a boulder uphill. For years, I had labored under the misapprehension that life was inherently complex. But now that I had exchanged my island of Shakespeare-trained graduates for a continent of self-made capitalists, I recognized that reality was alternating and more straightforward. Here – in this world controlled by keycard and TV remote – critical thinking was a symptom of the anxious and low-paid, whereas those with faith in the free market, self-reliance, and consumer choice would be rewarded with infinite tessellations of shiny surfaces.

For the brief interlude of an ad break, I flowed with the knowledge that all would be well – that my fraying DNA would re-weave into stretchy molecular chains, that sediments of dental plaque would drain away like black sand, that insomnia would be eclipsed by the shadow of a vast oneiric pharma-moth. Soon enough, however, relief turned to nausea. Unlike those whose citizenship affirmed their right to the pursuit of happiness, I was unable to enjoy promises of the life to come. My body was not made to withstand the surface tension – instead of presenting a mirror to my ideal self, the screen became liquid and viscous, sinking me under.

When the televangelist reappeared and invited me to touch the screen for healing, I instinctively reached for the remote in self-protection. On the Food Network, a hot sauce tolerance competition was being staged in a canyon in Death Valley; on QVC, a skeletal hostess was slowly cranking a zucchini spiralizer. The channels were connected by more than just a multiplexed data stream on a single frequency. I was travelling through a real-time paradigm of what was worth serving – God, nation, condiments, Mammon. Each vision revealed a new world of wanting: a gap, a lack, that could only be resolved by owning. And with ownership, belonging. To touch, to take, to know, and not to doubt.

And so, the old world loses its mystery. Under the influence of the fruits of materialism, the body is reshaped for alternative enchantment. Magic becomes magick; no longer the “making happen” of an animate planet, but the fantastical conjuring of wish-fulfillment. A knowledge not cellular but kitsch and self-conscious; home as a behind-the-scenes tour of Middle Earth, an island tiny enough to be traversed with a golf buggy.

When I returned to Binsey Church the following summer, I found a foliate green Los Angeles Dodgers hat in the porch, waiting next to a ridged sheaf of parish newsletters dated February 2017. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of major league baseball will know that Dodgers Blue (HEX: #005A9C) is not green. I was possessed by a deep desire to place the hat on my head and felt a heavy aching in my feet as though putting down roots, saw the raised veins in my outstretched hand. The bleating of goats from the neighboring farm suddenly became frantic, and in my mind’s eye my mouth became the grin of the May King. I retracted my hand, remembering that knockoff branded baseball caps also came in shades of Burberry, LV, and Swarovski.

As baseball hats passed along the conveyor belt of my mind, the ancestors forced their way up from beneath, determined to break through my factory settings of displacement. I tried to push them down again, to no avail. The present moment is a place of pain because it denies access to past and future, those zones of fantasy where reality is safely limited to human imagination. But here, behind the shrine – caught between dread of a future and no memory of a better, I was compressed into the pureland of Zen – and then, observing myself in awareness, forced out again.

I applied a mantra of negation as had been taught, repeating words in my head until they became meaningless. Lemon, lemon, lemon, life, life, life, lime, lime, lime. Clean the mirror of the mind. No space, no time. Lemon, lemon, lemon. Lime, lime, lime.

The ancestors were polished with a soft cloth; dust motes gathered at my epiglottis; my mind was scoured with a paste of citrus and existence.

Just as I was poised on the knife-edge of enlightenment, the bell rang with a degree of swing and insistence that implied the monks had something special in store. We pilgrims had been conditioned to respond to the sound with the immediacy of cadets mobilizing for a drill; incomplete tasks were abandoned in-situ and rarely re-commissioned, denying us the satisfaction of a job well done. I returned the ancestors to the shelves at random – they would have to accept their new hierarchy for several more centuries – and ran to join the monks assembling from across the temple, the clanging of the bell syncing with the clacking of sandals and the occasional glitching of a bone-cold ankle.

The bell would typically call us to the dining room, where we would sit at the grey tables, bow our heads, and wait to discover whether today’s manju would contain custard or red bean paste. But today we were led to the veranda at the front of the monastery. We stood facing the garden of gravel and cement; the monk clamped the bell to his chest and the reverberations ceased. No word was uttered, no bird sang, no leaves fell. There was no sign of tea or sweets.

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