“I had very angry teenage
years,” Eshu Martin, of Zenwest in British Colombia, told me. His mother had
died when he was very young which had left him with a great sense of sadness.
“Vandalism was my crime of choice. And I think fundamentally it was just a lot
of pain and grief which I dealt with with drinking and drugs at a pretty early
age. By grade eight, I was doing acid and things like that. Breaking things.
And then my father remarried when I was thirteen, which. . . .” He laughed
softly. “I mean, I’m certainly friends and made peace with my step-mother now,
but back then it was sort of I would wake up and the first thing on my mind was
how to make this person’s life a misery.
“In my later teens, started to
get into martial arts because I realized they were more effective, honestly
more effective, and more efficient ways of being destructive than just random
acts of violence. So got into martial arts. Martial arts led to the Tao Te Ching, Eastern philosophy. So I
started reading that and going, ‘Oh, this stuff makes sense to me.’ Then I came
across a book called The Book of Five
Rings by Musashi. Musashi was influenced by a Zen priest named Takuan and
so his whole philosophy and strategy is largely influenced by Zen. So you have
to have some grasp of what Zen was if you’re going to get anything, and in the
beginning of the book, in the introduction, in order to sort of encapsulate
Zen, there was this parable about these two monks—the older monk and the
younger monk—returning to the temple after their begging rounds, and there’s
been heavy rains, and there’s a bridge that’s washed out, and on the other side
there’s this concubine who’s distressed, who wants to get across. So the old
monk picks her up and carries her across, and the young monk is really upset
about it, and, all the way back to the temple, he can’t let it go. And at the
end, he questions the older monk, saying, you know, ‘How did you do that!’ And the old monk says, ‘I put her down at
the side of the river. Why are you still carrying her?’ And for me . . . I get
weepy even now.” His eyes teared as he spoke. “For me, it was like this light
went on. Because my anger had come from this real chip on my shoulder that,
having been the golden boy, the universe had done this to me or that God had
done this thing to me, and my anger at people generally was, ‘Don’t you realize
what a great person I am? Why are you treating me like this?’ And what dawned
on me when I read this was that it was me. It was me that was picking up this
anger and this sense of entitlement and indebtedness every morning. The
suffering I was experiencing was not externally imposed upon me; it was like
something I was whacking myself with. It was just like a couple of paragraphs,
and a bell went and I wept and just
the whole weight of it hit the floor. And it was at this point, I went, ‘Holy
shit!’”
[Eshu Martin
– Cypress Trees in the Garden: 15, 43-44, 46, 47, 50, 52, 84, 98-115, 203, 468]
[See also: Eshu Martin]
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