The improbable story of the twin monk scrolls – by Rico Provasoli
I had everything a man could even dream of, but it wasn’t enough. Six years of post-graduate training to get a doctor’s degree, a clinic on the storied coast of Maine, a 200-year-old ship captain’s house, a loving wife, two beautiful children.
And I wanted to kill myself.
And I might well have, until I met a swami in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a sidewalk in front of his bookstore / meditation center. In a whirlwind of snap decisions, I sold the clinic and estate, got a divorce and a plane ticket to Bombay.
After six months of groups smashing the cherished beliefs, projections and assumptions I had unwittingly held to be true, so help me God… something of a deepening relaxation arose.
In Poona, I found the answer to the voice whispering, screaming to this wretched man with a success story to impress all who would listen. And so I had to admit that I’d been looking for love in all the wrong places:
“Go Within! Everything else is the wrong direction.”
Well, I hadn’t yet truly learned the life secret that had been revealed. Maybe a glitter, a flash in the pan lingered in the twilight dusk, but any insight was almost immediately clouded over by egocentric shenanigans. It didn’t take long for the mind to play tricks and bury the truth. Like most we’d expect to find on the trail, it seemed I was also a slow learner.
Before the ego / I could shake off the delusion of the nugget, I went off to Japan to live in a Zen temple for some four months, with my room-mate from Poona. He was a Japanese national who’d been stuck in the Indian visa conundrum for seven years, and whom I eventually smuggled out of India. (That’s another chapter in my forthcoming book: Brave Man, Slowly Wise ~ A Zen Memoir Adventure.)
He had invited me to travel with him to the 1200-year-old historic monastery in Beppu. After a long, frigid winter spent in the icy Zendo, and just as many hours soaking in a local hot bath house, my tourist visa was about to expire.
The final morning in the frosty Zendo, a vision that arose from I-knew-not-where left me weeping: an image of a monk on a scroll.
My translator and globe-trotter buddy took me to a string of local shops in Beppu just a few hours before I had to be on my way to the ferry to the mainland. All shopkeepers said the same thing: “Such a scroll does not exist!”
My friend tried to steer me to give up this fantasy. I looked at him, his sincerity like a parent kindly coaxing a child to give up a fairy tale, but the image I’d seen had seemed so down-to-earth. I insisted that this scroll was as real as his face that I could see so clearly. Not anything like a dream!
As we prepared to leave, an old woman sweeping the ancient step on her shop called to us that there was a retired wealthy banker who had a hobby of restoring antiques. He might know something…
Off we went on an impossibly twisting road up a mountain, arriving at a Shogun’s castle with a double-plated door of steel that dated to the days of noble warriors. After explaining our quest via the door intercom, we were invited for a tea ceremony – always with an eye on the clock for the last ferry departure.
The owner — carefully groomed white hair, gold rimmed spectacles, an impressive robe fit for the Emperor — conducted the interview with a grace reflecting a man of deep meditative practice. After hearing my wildcat story of the improbable monk scroll, he said, warmly, with a hint of relief:
“I have been expecting you for a decade. Thank you for coming.”
My translator almost messed himself.
The elderly gentleman opened a custom-made box for the scroll seen in the photo below on the right (dated by the Kyoto National Museum @ 1750 AD).
“How much would that cost me? I have only a few hundred dollars left in my passport pouch,” I offered with a weak smile.
“Such a masterpiece has no price. It is meant for you to take to the West. May All Beings Know The Dharma…”
I was sure that I had misunderstood my translator / friend, but no, the dignified gentleman wrapped the scroll, placed it carefully in the travel box, wrapped the box securely in a fine silk cloth and bowed most respectfully.
“Please, accept my humble gift.”
Five minutes later we were careening madly down the mountain to the ferry terminal.
The next morning I was at the train station in Kyoto, dialing the home of a Dutch antique dealer I had met sailing in Maine the previous summer. His entire home in Kyoto was a display case for dozens of historic museum-quality pieces on sale to discriminating and very wealthy Westerners shopping for valuable additions to their collections.
At dinner that night I carefully unpacked the scroll gifted to me. He whistled in admiration, astonished that such a priceless article of history was given, not sold for tens and tens of thousands of dollars to a museum. I shrugged, not knowing how to explain this.
He went out of the room, unlocked a safe the size of a closet and brought out a similar custom-made box.
“This is for you. A gift. These two ink paintings of Bodhi Dharma belong together. My gift for you to take to the West.”
(This scroll, seen facing the first scroll I received, also dated by the museum in Kyoto, was painted nearly 300 years ago.)
Both scrolls have been listed in my last will and testament to be bequeathed to the San Francisco Zen Center which my twin brother and I visited in 1967 to try to deconstruct the mystery of Zen. We got sidetracked by the Flower Power and music exploding on every street corner. It would take decades and decades to wear out the endless stories the mind continued to spin until finally, the mystery was no longer in second place. I had begun to sit Zazen with all my heart on the line.
So, after forty-something years of their gracing my meditation Zendo, I can only say that the twins have become family, old friends who spur me on when I’m ready to throw in the towel, give up the impossible task of calming the restless mind. And yet I never do that, understanding that this is just another bamboozle thrown in my path, the trickster never giving up cunning ploys to derail the dedicated intention to continue the (mostly) joyous vista of a spacious mind.
The fruit of practice has no timetable or schedule, but usually an expanded intuitive sense of no mind arises after twenty minutes or so on the cushion. I owe any blessings of tranquillity to the old Dharma Brothers who cheer me on.
And for that, a price tag could never repay the gift or offer any explanation for the improbable story of how the jewels hanging on my wall had guided this lost soul back to himself.
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