Master Bonsai

Master Bonsai always pissed on the potted trees. No one could understand why his piss didn’t kill the bonsai trees. The miniature trees always thrived under Master Bonsai’s care if you could call it that. He never even noticed the trees, he was skeptical of any tree that was well tended but not allowed its commanding growth. His students so loved the bonsai trees and credited him with the spiritual flow or chi or power to keep them flourishing. They fussed over the bonsai collection in which there were over 200 trees—the same number of students that could stand to stay under his tutelage at any given time. All his students grew to love his bonsai trees more and more and in due time could stand him less and less. Yet, they were all reconciled to the fact that his pee kept the trees alive, strong and healthy. Master Bonsai himself was not a particularly healthy specimen. He ate whatever he liked and didn’t like and accepted whatever he didn’t like, declaring, “This food tastes like garbage even a skunk would refuse. Give me another helping!” He was a very difficult man and his teachings were even more difficult to understand. He never wrote any books on his spiritual wisdom and no one, not even one of his students (even smart ones) could fathom what he was actually talking about. Sooner or later they would all just shrug their shoulders and say, “We are in it for the trees.” They may have originally been students of Master Bonsai, but they all ended up becoming truly and completely devoted to the potted trees. They put up with him because they loved the trees and for some strange reason the trees flourished under his yellow stream.

No one knew Master Bonsai’s actual name. They called him the Bonsai Master to his face and behind his back they called him weird, insane, and a joke. There was one woman, a young woman in her early twenties who had her suspicions about Master Bonsai. She believed that she was his daughter and there was a strange resemblance between them. Underneath his unkempt appearance there was a family profile that matched. One could see it when they were standing side by side. He always smiled at her, just briefly—he didn’t make a show of it. He called her Yea-she, Yeashe, and so that was the name she went by. She had grown up in Master Bonsai’s ashram. She had everything she needed, a lot of personal freedom, came and went as she pleased. She liked drawing and watercolor painting, but didn't care for the bonsai trees like the devotees of Master Bonsai. She did spend a lot of time in the garden. She had no adults to whom she had to answer and yet she was friendly, private, and at times reserved. When she was fourteen, she heard a couple of devotees of Master Bonsai complaining about their teacher’s lack of instruction on meditation. How are we going to get enlightenment if our teacher doesn’t teach us how to meditate? They wondered. Oh, what is this enlightenment they are talking about? She wondered. She asked Master Bonsai about it one day when they happened to be alone together in his back yard. He had greeted her with his smile that always read to her, “Happy to see you.” She had smiled back and called him her name for him, “Koofy”.

“I heard your students talking, they were complaining that you don’t instruct them on meditation for the sake of their enlightenment, Koofy. What is this enlightenment they are talking about?”

“Yeashe, I don’t know nothing about this meditation thing or this enlightenment thing they are talking about.”

“But, Koofy, why do these people stay around you.”

“For the trees, for the trees! A tree needs to be in the earth, not a pot! People have strange ideas, trees in pots—and Yeashe, enlightenment is another one of their strange ideas.”

“But, Koofy, why are they looking to you to instruct them about enlightenment?”

“I don’t know, it must be my animal magnetism or my piss that keeps those damn trees alive. They’re in it for the piss!” He laughed, “And the trees.”

Yeashe sighed and gave him her look that they both knew meant, “This is not a real, plausible answer,” They both laughed and Koofy said, “Try some of the eggplant, it’s just terrible!”

There was an understanding between them—don’t ask and I won’t tell. Yeashe never asked her Koofy if he was her father. When Master Bonsai felt that the question was coming his way, he always dodged the arrow and the point and the target was never reached. He himself was not sure, though he could see some resemblance. She looks more like her mother, he reasoned. He had slept with a lot of his female devotees in the early years when he had taken up teaching and gathering devotees more seriously. Now-a-days he never acknowledged any of the spiritual titles that were given to him in the past. In his early days of teaching he was a human dynamo given to shows of his siddhis. There was a dispute among devotees whether one of his siddhis was the seduction of all the women who came to him. He must have bedded every woman who came to him. Women came and went from his bed. Women fought over him for his attention. Only one woman refused his advances. She just wanted to meditate. This made Master Bonsai desire her more. He actually tried to court her and give her presents, which made all the other women jealous and mad. Saman always refused the gifts.

One night on her own volition, she went to his bed and had sex with him and left the next day for parts unknown. About ten months later a baby girl was left in his bed. He did his best (which wasn’t all that good) to care for the girl and called her Yeashe. His women devotees, seeing his predicament, felt sorry for both their master and the baby, and cuddled with Yeashe, fed her and saw that she had the love, nurturing and protection a child needed. At times Master Bonsai was a little jealous of their attention to Yeashe, and that’s when he started to piss on the bonsai trees that his students gave him. He felt disillusioned with his life as a spiritual teacher and began to act out with strange behavior. Being once a gentle man, he became rough with his men students. A crisis was reached and his students met with him and asked him to stop acting crazy and to be more considerate of their flaws. He only laughed at their request and tried to chase everyone away. Many people, including some of his strongest advocates from the beginning, left. People who had paired with another under his tutelage left to begin families and pursue other interests and destinies. Master Bonsai kept to himself more and more, looked after Yeashe from time to time. When the dust settled and all the tempers were cooled, devotees noticed that their gifts of bonsai trees to their master were all thriving and they felt that was a sign of their master’s authenticity. They noticed that the bonsai trees attracted people to come see them and that’s when they took up their own way of trimming and pruning the miniature trees as their form of practice.

When they noticed that their master often peed on them and that instead of killing the trees, it helped them thrive and grow more interesting and beautiful, they felt this was a sign of true divinity appearing. Their master was nicknamed Bonsai Master and they put up with his lack of etiquette toward them and his lack of teaching and instruction. The twisted, beautiful miniature trees were a source of pride for them and evidence that they were truly on the spiritual path, whether anyone could understand their teacher or not. There were only a few devotees who ever even talked to the Bonsai Master. They talked mostly about the trees and he only grunted in reply. There was one woman devotee who still looked out for Yeashe and him at times. He never said much to Karole, they had an understanding—one that he never spoke of. He was never harsh with her, yet he never extended any familiarity or affection. Karole’s heart was in the right place, she was not spiritually ambitious and she had the innate ability to accept life graciously as it played out.

Karole was a fiercely loyal person. Once she accepted you in her heart, she would never throw you out. Yeashe respected Karole and loved her and gifted her with her watercolor paintings. No one conformed, confined, or disciplined her, not even Karole. Yeashe could feel when Karole’s heart was heavy, and would cook her dinner—and they would sing and make up chants. Karole had a beautiful, sweet voice. When she sang, people would be attracted to sing back what she sang and she lead them in a chanting session from time to time. The musician devotees began to bring their instruments to accompany her. Yeashe like these sessions and sometimes brought her sketch pad and sketched the form of the devotees as the chanting became more and more ecstatic. Master Bonsai collected her discarded sketches and saved them in a drawer in his bedroom. Yeashe didn’t know about that drawer of her discarded sketches. She did see his form come to the window when the sessions were in full heat, when the clapping and stamping were the heaviest and loudest. She saw him gaze down at the group and she thought she could see a smile on his face. What she couldn’t see from her vantage point was his feet tapping to the beat and his hands moving quickly into different mudra forms. He enjoyed the sessions from his room and when there finished, he laid down on his bed and drifted past the realms of struggle and found himself in another room, in another bed. In that realm, he was younger, he was with Saman and they were living a life of gaiety together. There was a forest that surrounded their room and he and Saman would wander there after their lovemaking.

The path through the forest shone the light of the day. The trees resembled the bonsai trees with strange and beautiful twisted shapes, but unlike the bonsai trees in his ashram, they were free of any potted constraints. They grew to great heights, maples dogwoods, cypress, junipers, manzanitas and oaks, many kinds grew in this forest. He and Saman loved the forest and had many excursions. She called him “Koofy,” like Yeashe called him in the other realm, where he is old and unfulfilled. In this place with Saman, he was fulfilled—a loving partner, full of creative gestures that were a source of great heart fun for Saman. In his “other” play, the realm of the constrained trees, he was rigid, like a petrified stick, and was reluctant to show any warmth to anyone, except Yeashe, but even that was handed out sparingly. When Master Bonsai woke from his excursions into the other realm where he lived with Saman, he did not remember a thing. His heart ached and he felt constrained. Everyone annoyed him and the bonsai trees felt his anger release on them when he peed on them. But the trees did not wither from the waste products of his body or his anger, they accepted it and made use of it because they knew his heart could never really punish them. They knew it wasn’t in him. Master Bonsai did not see at that time who his true devotees were. He would come to know when he needed to know the most.

Would anyone call Master Bonsai a happy man? Did anyone understand his freedom? Did anyone see why he let his devotees restrain him? Did he blame anyone for his confinement? He endured his whereabouts and almost never left the garden. Sometimes he was seen in his torn robes and worn-out flip flops, shuffling to the end of the driveway to the property limits of the garden. He would throw out whatever had accumulated in his pockets—old wrappers from the ginger candies he liked to chew on—into the road. He unlocked the mailbox and reached in for the mail. Most days the mail was advertisements for bonsai fertilizers, some art magazines that Yeashe liked to look at, and sometimes a personal letter from what he believed to be an aggrieved family member. Sometimes there was an inquiring letter to meet him, but he hadn’t seen any of those in years. Today there was a curious letter addressed to Master Bonsai written in what he perceived to be a woman’s handwriting. He thought of throwing it into the street, rejected that impulse and then held the letter to his forehead. An image of a young woman with long, very curly locks, beating a drum, appeared in his mind’s eye. Master Bonsai was always (he felt) being disturbed by his psychic openness, but the image attracted him. He held the letter to his heart and, god forbid, his heart actually ached and unfurled into a smile. He put the letter into his deep sleeve pocket and walked back up the hill to his cottage. Time for some matcha tea.

He was to meet with Yeashe today. She wanted to talk to him about something. He thought he had successfully gotten her off the track of asking him questions about enlightenment. At this point in his life, in his advancing years, he didn’t feel that enlightenment could be taught or talked into. He had felt that his devotees had not benefitted by him, his teaching, his transmission, or even any ordinary presence, in their lives. If he had any effect, he felt that he had given them false hope that they could and would wake up. He disliked them, was always annoyed by them, but lacked the courage to leave them and live without them. When he was around them he felt he wasn’t good enough, he had failed them, and he hated that they had made him feel that way. He had always been a gentle person, but he had never known that he was a coward too. That bothered him the most. So, every day when he walked to the edge of the property to get the mail, he wanted keep walking past the neighborhood, down the long urban blocks—he wanted to walk all the way to the desert and live out his days under a rock ledge looking at the desert sky. He always returned back to his cottage and his 3 o’clock tea.

Yeashe watched him plod up the driveway. She thought his steps were heavier than usual. He hadn’t noticed her watching him and so his usual kind smile was absent from his face. Yeashe studied his form and face like a true artist would and saw the sadness that she usually didn’t discern because he shielded it from her. Koofy, what is wrong? She wondered. Her heart went out to him and she wanted to soothe him, to cheer him. She remembered when she was younger, he would get up from his chair and spontaneously make up very bizarre dance steps that he would ask her to imitate. This would end in many big guffaws. Whenever Karole came into the room, they would fall dead silent and erase any signs of the previous hilarity. Yeashe was struck by how frail he looked and heavy hearted. When he noticed her standing there he smiled his usual comforting smile. “Koofy, tea is ready along with your favorite shortbread cookies.”

Uncharacteristically, Yeashe linked her arms into his and he did not show her any sign of approval or enjoyment, but he did not pull his arm away. Before she poured the tea, Koofy handed her her two watercolor magazines—one on how to paint portraits and the other on how to paint still objects. She noticed a letter in his robe pocket. He pulled it out and put it on the small table by his chair. Her attention was drawn to the letter and Koofy noticed that.

“You wanted to talk to me about something?” he asked. He intuited that Yeashe was yearning to make her way past the garden, out of the forest of his students and the bonsai trees and into the bigger world, into the jungle of humankind.

She surprised him with her request, “Can I paint you? Can I do a series of watercolors of you?”

Koofy grunted, “Why would you want to do that? There are all the bonsai trees here that people come from around the world to see. You probably could make a decent living selling your paintings of the bonsai,” he added.

“Oh, Koofy, the bonsai are great and I have sketched and painted many of them. I want to paint you. I want to see you, I want to understand you more.” Yeashe felt vulnerable, she didn’t know how Koofy would reply—probably his usual dismissal.

Koofy looked down. His flip flops were coming apart. He had forgotten to take them off upon entering his cottage. He had never forgotten before. He wiggled his feet from the tattered flip flops. He looked up at Yeashe and noticed her nervous anticipation. He didn’t turn away and gazed deeply into the eyes of the young woman whom he had never acknowledged to be his own daughter. Yeashe felt a deep stillness and a depth of that stillness ignite in her. The man and the woman met, the father and the daughter recognized each other in a way that Yeashe had never met anyone before. In that meeting she felt herself as she is. Whatever relationship she had with this old man was a connection that transcended form.

“Yes,” Master Bonsai simply said. He turned away from his gaze with Yeashe and sipped his matcha.

She had prepared herself for his big, blunt, flat no, not his agreement that came so easily.

“Can we start tomorrow? The morning light in the garden is beautiful.”

“Yes, yes,” replied Koofy. “What should I wear?”

Yeashe laughed, “Oh, wear what you have on now, what you always wear.”

Koofy smiled. “I suppose my wardrobe is limited, I might have to do something about that.”

Yeashe laughed. “I could take you shopping.”

Koofy waved his hand in dismissal of her suggestion. Yeashe was already thinking about the spot in the garden that had the best morning light. She might need a few more sketch pads and watercolor paints. She was thrilled that the Bonsai Master would let her paint him. She almost danced out of the room without giving him her usual parting greeting of palms together.

Master Bonsai grunted goodbye and as she closed the door behind her, he reached for the letter he had left on his table. As he didn’t see a return name or address on the left hand corner of the envelope, he was trying to decide if the letter deserved to be tossed into the wastebasket. He usually never read any of the mail, passing it to Karole instead. After giving in to Yeashe’s request, he realized that a mood of giving in, of being open to new possibilities, was upon him. Must be a strange configuration of the stars and planets. He struggled to open the envelope as it was well sealed. Finally he just ripped it open and a small picture fell out with a short letter accompanying it. He looked at the picture of a young woman. She reminded him of someone, a look-alike of someone who had once been his devotee, a look-alike of an actress, maybe? He liked the face, her eyes shined with a confidence that you don’t often see in young women. And she was smiling, a big smile. She appeared to be delighted at the time someone snapped this shot of her. He put the picture down and unfolded the brief letter.

Dear Master Bonsai,

I want to meet you and learn about enlightenment from you. I am ready and

willing to do anything you ask of me. I heard that you are not teaching anymore, I

hope this is not so. Please accept me as your student.

Love,

Brima-ful

Master Bonsai picked up the picture again. He studied the picture of the girl. He saw that her heart was strong and her sense of self was not wrapped in entrenched egoic patterns. He drifted into a psychic reverie where he saw her in many roles, in many times, and the one dominant theme was her deep attraction to what is True Reality. He knew that he would accept her as his student. He felt a hope and a relief, an expectation that he could transmit and reveal to her what he truly Is and in that revelation she would be revealed to herself. Master Bonsai, at the age of 78, would return to the arena of teaching to serve once again. He was nervous about being called into service again. He finished his shortbread cookies by dipping the last crumb into the last gulp of the matcha tea. He called out to Karole who was in the kitchen chopping vegetables. “I will be giving meditation tonight.”

Karole dropped her knife and it bounced on the cutting board, and if she hadn’t jumped it would have stabbed her big toe. Master Bonsai had called for meditation after 17 years of no invite.

The devotees were puzzled at the call to meditation. They weren’t enthusiastic about it, some doubted the intentions of the guru. Some devotees had never even meditated with the guru. They thought the old man was someone’s grandfather, an eccentric that they called the Bonsai master for having lived in the garden longer than anyone else. Most of the devotees hadn’t meditated or practiced meditation for years. Their life was centered around the bonsai trees. Sometimes they talked about their practice, but it was always about the trees. “I pruned Bodhi today,” (they came to name each tree) “and he was beaming. I could feel the energy of his delight.” Some devotees had their favorite trees and revered them like they were their living deity. They fussed over them, dreamt about them and didn’t like being away from them for even a day. So a call to meditation by their teacher was met with a lot of mixed emotions. Why is he doing this? Will this change anything? Will this change my relationship with the bonsai trees?—were some of the questions that were on their minds.

Karole was happy that she would get to sit with her guru again. Yeashe wondered what had changed in Koofy that he was willing to sit with his students in meditation. She couldn’t remember what kind of teacher he was. She knew she had grown up around him being revered (more than he is now) but for many years he hadn’t given much attention or regard to any of the people who had come (initially) to be around him. She wondered what it would be like to sit in silence with Koofy and all the other students.

The gong sounded at 7:00. Master Bonsai entered the room and sat on the chair Karole had provided for him in the front of the room. She noticed that he was wearing a robe that was not worn at the elbows, a newer robe, and she realized that she had given it to him five years ago. She never saw him wear it until this night. Master Bonsai bowed from the waist to his students and closed his eyes. His breathing became slowed and deep and this led everyone to match his example. Yeashe felt her mind quiet and thoughts only flittered by and did not come to her attention to be explored or further thought. She felt simple, uncomplicated with nowhere to go but here and nothing to get but to be here as is. A smile came to her lips and she felt happy for no reason whatsoever, and she knew that unreasonable happiness didn’t have to make sense and that it had to come from somewhere. She opened her eyes and looked at Koofy. She saw him without his usual discontentment. She felt him without the sense of being confined that she felt he suffered. He was an old man who had lived his life without an ego of fulfillment, and Yeashe felt she understood his dissatisfaction better. He was not discontented nor dissatisfied because he wasn’t able to succeed at what he wanted. His dissatisfaction had more of a noble impulse behind it. He had wanted to give everything away, but no one noticed what he had to give, so no one could accept the true depth of what he had to give. Yeashe felt compassion for Koofy, that a heart as big as his had been confined like the bonsai trees that his students were fascinated by and attended to with so much regard. Yeashe felt that their regard had been transferred from whatever they couldn’t understand or accept about their teacher to the trees that they could control and take charge of. His bristle exterior was his way of protecting himself from their tending to him in ways that they could possess him and “grow” him toward their personal satisfaction and success. Yeashe’s heart could feel Koofy’s suffering and she felt she could understand him better. This made her want to paint him more, she wanted to see and feel the man more. Painting him would help her see Koofy and she so wanted to see him as he really is. Her impulse was of a true artist, to reveal what is hidden, to reveal the sacred in us all.

She wanted to paint Koofy more than anyone else because he was the one person who had the most to see, the most to reveal. This made Yeashe giddy for the work he would allow her to do.

Master Bonsai opened his eyes. He almost smiled, almost. He pushed his feet into his flip flops and walked across the room. No one moved right away. People were finding their way back to the familiar, familiar agendas, familiar attitudes. Karole wiped the tears that had been freely flowing from her eyes. She had remembered something that she hadn’t thought about in years. She knew she still had it even though she hadn’t looked at it in years. It was tucked into a small plastic box that contained what she called sacred mementos. It was a letter that Master Bonsai had written to her after she had professed her very personal love to him many years ago. She had felt hurt by his reply to her love and had filed the letter away with other small items that he had given her—a Prasad of dried rose, a scribble that he did of the Bodhidharma, and Yeashe’s birth certificate that named him as the father, though she was not sure if that was actually the case. She thought of the letter again, and when she thought of the letter she always felt the burn of his rejection of her. She decided to take out the letter again, after all these years, her heart didn’t know what to expect, it fluttered but she needed to read the letter again, to set aside her personal hurt feelings to see what Master Bonsai had written to her. So after many years she opened the letter (again), the letter that had broken her heart and confined her to her existence and way of life that she knew all so well, a life ordered by duty, ritual, and pattern. The page had yellowed a little and the writing was a bit faded. It was still readable. She read it out loud, “Your love for me is a reflection of your own desire for fulfillment, I cannot accept it. Your personal love is only your call for disappointment, so be disappointed.”

The words still cut her, but after all these years of serving him and existing alongside him, she was able to face them. She felt the depth of the sting of his words, but underneath those words she felt him not just as a rejecting lover, she felt what he was offering her. She laughed right out loud and realized that she had enough of being disappointed! Enough! She said over and over like a mantra. She realized that she had conformed her life to live in a room of disappointment. She was not alone in this, she realized that all the devotees that had left and those that had stayed had designed the rooms that they lived in by their disappointment that their Master’s enlightenment would not give them a single damn thing, nor would it save them from the fact that life would always disappoint in giving them the fulfillment they all so craved. She saw that Master Bonsai had no course but be confined by everyone’s disappointment, how this must break his heart, she thought. And yet he stayed and lived with us, even as we disregarded him more and more. He lived an ordinary life with us. He didn’t reject us, me, he let us construct and create the lives we wanted, but we couldn’t let go of him completely. We confined him into a potted life, all the while mistaking our ability to do this as a creative drive, a success in owning beauty for our own sakes, for our own sense of spiritual attainment. What an awful sacrifice, she felt. And all these years I blamed him for his rejection of me. She was done with being disappointed, with living in a room designed by disappointment.

“Master,” she called out, “Your love is your sacrifice and your disappointment cuts my heart. My love will no longer confine you. I will try my best to make sure it gladdens your heart in enjoyment.” She put the letter back into the plastic box and laughed, and declared, “Now, I finally got that lesson!” She knew love could never reject, no matter how much it hurt. She realized that her need for confirmation of her personal love for Master Bonsai had confined her heart into the small container of her body-mind of ego and personal pride. She knew he was free and wild and his heart was bigger than all the restraints that desire could put on it. And she knew that her heart was not her own, it too was wild and unlimited and now she was ready—ready to love.