so, i felt guilty after rebuffing jaime on the bobo-roshi matter.  the main computer is up again, more or less, and though i’ve been working whaaay too much overtime lately, i owes the nonists a post. so, bearing in mind that it’s been years and years, i will recount, to the best of my recall, the tale of bobo-roshi. first off: if you google the name, most of the hits seem to revolve around a satanist who uses the moniker, and may be the same guy who enjoys encouraging suicide on the internet. this is not the original bobo-roshi…

janwillem van de wetering is dutch; the w’s are spoken as v’s, just so you know. he’s about the same age as ringo starr, and somehow or other decided to go to japan in ‘58 at the age of 18 to join a zen monastery, where he remained for a year and a half. he was a odd fit, a gaijin and rather old for a neophyte; most of the other monks were sent there by their families as boys of ten or so. the ‘abbot’ or head dude of a zen monastery is the roshi (master). van de wetering was surprised when a jesuit priest came to visit the roshi, but the jesuit and the roshi were friends, and zen and the jesuits had a lot in common. like jesuits, the zen monks rose earlier than roosters and meditated, and spent much of the day working around the monastery while thinking deep thoughts about getting beyond deep thought. as everybody now knows, zen uses nonsensical koans as an intellectual catapult to a place if insight and instinct beyond intellect. the roshi gives you a koan and periodically you go in and try to answer it. if you’re wrong he gives you a whack with a slapstick and you go back to the problem. you’re stuck there until you solve the koan, and when you do, the roshi gives you a new one to work on. eventually, he decides you’ve learned enough. maybe you’ll go start your own monastery.

in my book the essence of the zen understanding is the answer, “mu!” basically a nonsense answer, but it’s a way of saying, “i see! it’s the question that’s the problem! we should never have asked that question in the first place! it only leads to confusion! it only makes you crazy!” how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? mu! free will or destiny? mu! pascal’s wager? mu!

van de wetering was shocked to hear the other monks (remember, they were mostly younger than he) whispering among themselves about somebody called bobo-roshi. in english, it translated as “master fuck.” bobo-roshi, they told him, was the roshi of another monastery, and obviously they wouldn’t say that to his face; and that wasn’t his real name. i forget; let’s call him joe.

joe the monk was a very conscientious, hard-working zen monk. he worked and he read and he meditated and he read and he worked and he meditated. years went by, and he just couldn’t get his koan. everybody agreed he was an admirable man, a top-drawer monk, but he stayed stuck on his first koan. he would go see the roshi, and emerge disappointed, and go back to work. other monks progressed, and left, and he was by far the oldest monk in the place, a grown-ass man, but still stuck on his first koan. a failure.

so one day he went to the roshi and said, “i am sorry, i’ve failed. i know i am a disappointment to you. i must leave.” he changed into regular clothes, packed his things, and walked into the city, at loose ends. he had some money, but he didn’t know what to do with himself.

so joe the ex-monk wandered about, had something to eat, looked at the shops, and somewhere along the way concluded that there was one thing he might as well investigate, now that there was nobody to tell him not to.  joe encountered a prostitute, went up to her place, plunked down his money, and lost his virginity. at the moment of ejaculation, a light went on in his head (or maybe a better analogy is an engine roaring to life when the carburetor gets unclogged?) he threw his clothes on and ran back to the monastery. the roshi was waiting at the gate.

after that, things went smoothly for him. he grasped his koans with great speed, progressed rapidly, and was now roshi in his own monastery. hearing this story, janwillem asked his fellow teenage monks, “so if he’s so good, why don’t you study under him?” horrified, they replied, “Oh, no! he’s too strict!”

van de wetering reports that when he left, he was required to see the roshi first, and feared the roshi would be angry at him. but the roshi said: “you are like a sword that has been tempered in a fire. no matter what you do now, you will cut to the core.”