Same Road Different Tracks

By Brian Burke-Gaffney

Into a colourful description of a modern-day trip by car from Vancouver to Toronto—exploring themes such as Canadian history and Aboriginal culture, visiting former childhood haunts, and letting Beatles songs evoke personal memories—the author inserts a series of flashbacks telling a parallel story about his journey from Canada to India and arrival in Japan in 1972 and his nine-year stint as an ordained Zen monk. The only foreigner in history to train at Myoshinji Monastery, he describes his struggle to solve the Zen ko‐an “the sound of one hand” and the revelation that compelled him to depart again, alone and unaligned.

The title is derived from a Chinese axiom suggesting that people travel the same road to the truth but each in his or her own unique way; the chapters follow the progress of the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, an ancient analogy for the human endeavour to overcome adversities and achieve enlightenment.

A reflection on the spirit of our times, Same Road Different Tracks amalgamates an engaging account of a search for the heart of Canada with the dramatic tale of a youthful quest for truth and fulfillment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Burke-Gaffney
• Release date: Feb 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781987985801

Brian Burke-Gaffney

Brian Burke-Gaffney was born in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1950 and came to Japan in 1972, going on to train for nine years as an ordained monk of the Rinzai Zen Sect. He moved to Nagasaki in 1982. He is currently professor of cultural history at the Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science and honorary director of Glover Garden. He received the Nagasaki Prefecture Citizens Award in 1992 and the Nagasaki Shinbun Culture Award in 2016. He has published several books in Japanese and English, including Starcrossed: A Biography of Madame Butterfly (EastBridge, 2004) and Nagasaki: The British Experience 1854–1945 (Global Oriental UK, 2009).

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Same Road

Different Tracks

Brian Burke-Gaffney

Contents

Foreword

Searching for the Ox:

Vancouver Airport to Deadman Vidette Road

Discovering Tracks:

Kamloops to Golden City

Perceiving the Ox:

Yoho to Faith Hope and Charity

Catching the Ox:

Acme to Buffalo Trail

Taming the Ox:

Stornham to Red Jacket

Riding the Ox Home:

Oak River to Portage Avenue

The Ox Forgotten:

Saint Ignatius to Saint Boniface

Both Ox and Self Forgotten:

Lac du Bonnet to Sudbury

Returning to the Source:

Parry Sound to the Ceeps

In the World:

Woodstock to Holy Cross Cemetery

Foreword

Although theories abound, the meaning of the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures is as open to interpretation as that of the sand and stone garden at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto. The use of the pictures as a religious analogy goes back a thousand years to China, a time when Zen Buddhism was sprouting from the fertile blend of Indian philosophy and indigenous naturalism.

I thank Tokuriki Midori for her permission to punctuate the chapters of this book with the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures by the late Kyoto woodblock artist Tokuriki Tomikichiro. The stanzas associated with each picture are my revised translations of the original Chinese poems. My woodcut on the cover was inspired by the ensō (circle) executed in a single brush stroke by Torei, a successor of Hakuin and facilitator of his kōan the sound of one hand.

I am indebted to Yamagishi Zenrai, Matsuyama Kankei and my former colleagues at Myoshinji Monastery for their instruction and guidance in the culture of Rinzai Zen. I thank the late Tiziano Terzani for urging me to write the story, and Maggie Morris, Erin Ball and the other staff at Tellwell for their advice and assistance. I also thank my brothers and sisters-in-law for their comments on the manuscript. The present project would never have come to fruition without the support of my wife Michiko, son Taka and daughter Saya.

For many years, I subscribed to the view that the ox is a symbol of the mind—unruly at first but gradually subdued through training—and that the human figure is a symbol of the practitioner striving relentlessly for spiritual enlightenment. But now, I think the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures depict the journey of an ordinary human life, starting from ambition and hesitation, passing the waysides of success and failure, joy and pain, and finally arriving at gratitude, humility and fulfillment.

Brian Burke-Gaffney

Nagasaki, early 2016

Chapter One

Searching for the Ox:

Vancouver Airport to Deadman Vidette Road

I wander through the weeds and bushes searching for the ox.

The rivers are wide, forests deep, and paths bewildering.

My strength is failing; the goal seems unattainable.

All I hear is the song of crickets hiding in windswept trees.

I switched off the monitor in the headrest in front of me a few hours out of Tokyo because my reading glasses—crisply referred to in Japanese as rōgankyō or glasses for old eyes—were pulling every pulsating pixel into focus and giving me a headache. My overhead lamp would disrupt the reverie of the movie lovers near me, so I just relaxed in the darkness, stopping from time to time to work on a theory that people find long airplane rides torturous for two reasons: one the discomfort of physical restriction, boredom and fear of disaster; the other the pressure of having to suppress, hour upon hour, the longing to party with fellow travellers.

My plan was to drive from Vancouver to Toronto and spend the last week of August in solitude, searching for the heart of Canada, basking in the colours, flavours and stories of the road, and fitting together the jigsaw puzzle of dream and memory. I saw myself following Highway 1 through the Rocky Mountains and out onto the prairie, past childhood haunts in Winnipeg, and through the maze of forest and lake to Toronto. I had no commitments other than a contract with Japan Air Lines to use the return portion of my ticket. Barring an emergency, I would go cold turkey on telephones, television and computers and abandon watches and calendars. The only modern amenity I would allow myself, aside from the car, was the six-disk The Beatles Anthology, which I had brought along to savour during long intervals of navigation.

The wish to complete the gestalt and bring the trip around full circle had been on the back burner for years. I had already circumnavigated the globe, in the geographical sense, by flying to Toronto to be with my mother when she was dying of cancer, but that did not count because it had been such an impromptu and temporary excursion, more like a telephone call than a homecoming. There had also been a few work trips and family excursions that spun around Vancouver and ricocheted off Toronto and Montreal, but otherwise I had not been back since leaving for Europe and proceeding eastward to India and stopping in Japan for four decades.

I closed my eyes and let my mind wander. The blue glow of the video monitors flickered in the periphery of vision, and the drone of the Rolls Royce engines stretched like a tightrope over the dark unknown of the Pacific Ocean.

The airplane banked to the left as though generously allowing us a last look at the checkered gleam of skyscrapers in downtown Toronto and the net of lights pushing up to the blackness of Lake Ontario. Karen was sitting beside me, still holding my hand after clutching it during the bumpy takeoff. Her long hair was pulled back in a ponytail. The collar and sleeves of a white blouse sprouted from the red sweater that she had bought at Eaton’s before our departure.

We had been a couple since meeting at Catholic Central High School in London five years earlier. We had both found jobs in Toronto that summer of 1971, Karen as a guide at Ontario Place and me as an orderly at Toronto General Hospital, and we had moved together into the third-floor apartment of an old house on Laxton Avenue, off Queen Street where streetcars clanged through the old residential neighbourhoods west of downtown. Our plan to live together for the summer had not elicited any strong opposition from Karen’s parents, probably because they considered it a prelude to marriage, or from my parents, who knew that their objections were no longer exerting much of an effect on my life. We had both turned twenty-one in August, near the end of our pseudo-honeymoon. Now it was October and we were on our way to England.

I had decided to take a year off university and travel overland from Europe to India. Karen was going to take a year off too, touring Britain and Spain and then staying with relatives in Germany. Our only promise about the future was that I would write to her at her aunt’s house in Stuttgart the following spring. It went without saying that I would then retrace my steps to Europe and that we would return to Canada together in time for the new semester in September.

For the past two years, I had been struggling to reconcile an obligation to answer social and parental demands with an escalating desire to shake off all shackles and search for spiritual enlightenment in the East. The idea that the latter might be possible issued from various sources. One was the Pied Piper influence of the Beatles, who had pointed to the mystic depths of India in music and art and imbued their songs with lyrics gleaned from Eastern philosophy. Another was the accounts of Westerners who had made spiritual pilgrimages to India and who had obviously been profoundly changed as a result, like Richard Alpert, who abandoned a career as a Harvard psychology professor and returned from a sojourn in the Himalayan foothills as a lean kurta-clad sage called Baba Ram Dass.

Still another was the startling mental panorama thrown open to view by LSD, advocated by both the Beatles and Baba Ram Dass, celebrated in the psychedelic culture of the Sixties, and easily available on the grapevine. Although imbibed in a rather light-hearted spirit of adventure, the drug had pulled me face to face with the fact of my own existence, like a man arriving at a party only to shed tears of astonishment at finding his long-lost parents and siblings waiting to embrace him. I saw that coolness, sex appeal and the rock of a rock ‘n’ roll band are actually glints of holiness, that my heart beats and blood flows in unison with the movement of stars and surge of ocean tides, and that the heroes of myth and religion are nothing but depictions of the true self, better known as me. The person transported to that sublime realm has to surrender the looking glass of insight when descending from it, but the residue of understanding remains, a certainty that the beauty of eternal truth lies in the here and now right under the thin veneer of so-called reality.

All those experiences had led like clues to the door of Hinduism and Buddhism. I started reading books on related subjects, everything from primers on hatha yoga to the works of Daisetz T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Hermann Hesse and Aldous Huxley. It was a surreptitious extracurricular inquiry that jeopardized my science major, but I pursued it spontaneously and passionately, nodding in agreement with the concepts that jumped from the lines and pages.

All things are impermanent, and people suffer because they cannot stem the tide of change or keep the things they love from falling apart. The way to overcome suffering, therefore, is to stop grasping. All thoughts and actions cause ripples that cause further ripples, so sins bring negative consequences as a matter of course, not because they anger a god watching in some distant heaven. The ideal lifestyle is the middle way that avoids the extremities of self-mortification and over-indulgence, just as a shoe that is neither too large nor too small feels comfortable or a piano string pulled to just the right tension makes a beautiful sound. The door of truth opens to the person who knocks on it actively by meditation and self-examination, not blind faith or unthinking allegiance to some organized religion.

In one book about the Japanese art of kyūdō (archery) and its relation to Zen Buddhism, the German author recounted how, while teaching philosophy at a university in Japan before the Second World War, he had begun lessons in the ancient martial art under a Japanese master. At first, he had been unable even to pull the bowstring back, but with practice and the advice of his teacher he had eventually developed the ability to pull it firmly and hold it steadily, albeit not by muscle training but by breath control. The master had then insisted that he release the arrow without purpose or intention, comparing it to a raindrop that swells at the tip of a leaf and falls off when the time comes. The analogy of the raindrop on the leaf puzzled and fascinated me, just as it had perplexed and inspired the author decades earlier.

At the end of the semester, I informed my university supervisor, not the truth that I planned to travel overland from Europe to India and strive for nirvana, but that I wanted to take a year off for my own research. I used the word research because I did not have the resolve to pull both feet out of the door of academia, and I was yet to see that a year off could be nothing more than a stopgap measure.

Orange juice? The voice aroused me from a shallow sleep. I took one of the paper cups offered on the outstretched tray. A few minutes later, the cabin lights came on and the flight attendants began reaching over seats to open windows and revive people by unveiling the glare of the morning sun.

Vancouver International Airport greeted us with elevated passageways, high ceilings, bright open spaces, accessories of varnished wood and metal painted forest green, and walls and corners decorated with the Aboriginal art of the Pacific Northwest. Tokyo’s Narita Airport, I recalled as I shuffled forward, has no accessories other that those that are functional or commercial, an interesting difference when you consider that the international airport is usually a visitor’s introduction to the culture of the receiving country.

The first person I met was a young immigration officer who asked me questions like What is your purpose in coming to Canada? and How long are you going to stay? before finally conceding the point and pounding a stamp into my Canadian passport. The next was a heavyset man of East Indian descent standing behind the Avis Rent-a-Car counter who, unfazed by the irate would-be drivers sighing and jostling in the queue behind me, would not give me the keys until I explained why a Canadian was using an international driver’s license issued in Japan and, after that, what the food was like in Nagasaki.

Business finished, I gripped the steering wheel of my white Chevrolet Impala and quit the shadows of the airport parking lot for the cascading Canadian sunshine, then followed the signs to Granville Street and pressed north toward the city centre, craning my neck at intersections to ogle interesting buildings and to study the people coming and going. Again the differences with Japan were remarkable. The buildings of South Granville showed a harmonious blend of old and new, the former distinguishable by their brickwork, sombre colours and solid appearance, unlike the discordant jumble of the typical Japanese cityscape where historic structures are nonexistent or dispatched to the mummified background. Similarly, although the trees lining streets in Japan are often cut back to an almost naked state like rams shorn of their wool in an Australian sheep station, Granville Street and its intersecting avenues had groves of oaks, maples and arbutuses extending branches up into the network of telephone poles and electric cables and shedding mottled leaves and other early harbingers of autumn.

After all these years, I knew Japan like my own backyard, but Vancouver exuded a different and deeper kind of familiarity, hints of forgotten childhood scenes, distant echoes of home. It was also clear that while living in Canada I had never noticed, let alone stopped to appreciate, the beauty and romance seeping from historic architecture or the lovely greenery gracing the urban landscape.

My initial sense of disorientation, a dangerous cocktail of jet lag and culture shock mixed with a predilection to drive on the left side of the road as in Japan, soon passed, like the apprehension of a child on the first day of school, gone by lunchtime. I turned west onto Davie Street and continued through the leafy neighbourhoods scattered with restaurants, shops and old apartment buildings with façades of red brick and white stone. After a few blocks, I reached the crest of a gradient and descended toward the sparkling water of English Bay. The vision brought a familiar rush of delight, memories of family trips to Lake Winnipeg when we drove through monotonous forest and farmland for hours on end until breaking into a cacophony of cheers and laughter at the first glimpse of blueness.

The chief object of the present detour was the Sylvia Hotel, which I hoped to find intact at its old corner facing the beach near the lawns and flower gardens welcoming visitors to Stanley Park. And there it was. Except for the condominiums soaring nearby and the helmeted people rollerblading on the sidewalks, little had changed since the summer of 1961. Vines still crept up the outside walls and encircled the windows; modern innovations were yet to alter the gothic exterior and doorways; the grass still sloped down to the log-strewn beach and frigid water. All of those things slipped over the images in my memory like the writing on two identical documents held up together to the light.

My parents and brothers and I had stayed there for a few magical days during a trip to the West Coast. I remembered running for the beach, reacting to the words yes, you may like a dog released from a chain. The first thing I had done at the edge of the water was to test the premise, heard in rumour, that seawater is salty. It was indeed wonderfully, mysteriously salty. Why salt instead of sugar? I had wondered, still under the juvenile impression that the King of Heaven or someone of similar standing deliberately created the world for the enjoyment of human beings.

Lake Winnipeg and the other lakes that I had visited in my childhood had been so vast that the opposite shore was often out of sight in the distance, but just as I had sipped the lake water without pause, I had never doubted while swimming there or playing on the beach that the lake and the shores and all the surrounding lands were a part of Canada. The flavour of the seawater at English Bay, however, indicated something supranational, something unfettered by artificial borders and free from confinement to specific cultures and governments. It had instantly populated my imagination with icebergs as high as mountains and whales and fish that no human eyes have ever seen and exotic boats bobbing in faraway harbours—all sharing this same salty water and accessible to anyone with a boat and sufficient energy.

I left the car on the street behind the hotel and took a walk down the beach and around the neighbourhood, stopping for a cup of coffee in a café on Denman Street where the staff apparently mistook me for an authentic Vancouverite.

Soon I was back in the car following Denman Street to the top of another paved ascent and down toward the harbour where the peaks of the Coast Mountains formed a dark backdrop. I came out on Cordova Street, ducked under a bridge with a sign saying Gateway to Historic Gastown and passed the former Canadian Pacific Railway Station, a heritage building of brick and stone construction with a row of heavy Corinthian pillars, crouching in the valley of skyscrapers.

The city of Vancouver had blossomed from the station and the harbour facilities behind it, serving as a relay point for the tea, silk, porcelain and other prized merchandise carried across the Pacific Ocean from China and Japan and transported by train to Toronto and Montreal. I noted the words Canadian Pacific Railway inscribed on the pediment and spent the next block or two thinking about how the railway had physically and psychologically united the scattered settlements of Canada and provided a fast connection between Hong Kong and London.

The corner of Hastings Street and Abbott Street may have a reputation for heroin addicts and neglected retro architecture, but the fact escaped me until I was beyond it, catching only a rearview glimpse of the Balmoral Hotel with its seedy ground floor pub and grubby half-opened windows with stained curtains flapping in the breeze.

Vancouver was tugging at my heartstrings, but I continued into the city periphery, past Kaslo Street where a sign announcing the arrival of Highway 1 competed with a strip mall, Holiday Inn and Money Mart for the attention of drivers. The sign offered an easy choice between west to the left and east to the right.

I had correctly divined the position of Highway 1 but greatly underestimated the difficulty of emerging scot-free from the hustling city traffic and the urban construction projects clogging the way like plaque on the walls of an overworked artery. Finally, though, the highway left the quagmire of Vancouver and embarked on a straight course through the sprawling alluvial farmland, delivering eastbound cars like balls on a well-polished bowling lane toward the point where the Fraser River incorporates the Coquihalla River and swirls out, swollen with mud, from the shadows of the Cascade Mountains and Lillooet Range.

My initial aim had been to find a quiet stopover somewhere along the Fraser River, but by the time I made the town of Hope it was clear that I had come as far as my eyelids and stomach could take me. The town was lying at the confluence of the two rivers, in the lap of brooding green and rock-grey mountains. Gasoline stations, fast-food restaurants, and video outlets faced the highway, while orderly rows of small houses, motels, and stores with old-fashioned Coca Cola signs dotted the back streets.

The next morning, I arose early and took a walk around the town centre feeling as refreshed as the new sky. I also paid a visit to the tourist information centre and its little museum introducing the history of Hope. After a terse foreword on the Stó:lô people who populated the area for untold centuries and lived off salmon from the Fraser River, the displays presented information on the foundation of Fort Hope in 1848 by the Hudson’s Bay Company—one of the oldest commercial corporations in the world and the impetus behind the development of Canada—and the assimilation of the town into the colony of British Columbia ten years later. The name of the company alone was sufficient to conjure up a kaleidoscopic collage in my Canadian heart, everything from excursions to buy back-to-school clothing in the department store to voyageurs in birch-bark canoes, white point blankets with their green, red, yellow and indigo stripes, beaver dams, and log cabins with smoke curling up from stone chimneys in snowbound valleys.

Hope had expanded from an outpost in the wilderness to a thriving town when prospectors came scrambling up the Fraser River in search of the gold nuggets rumoured to be so plentiful that they twinkled in the river’s sand bars. One of the displays commented on Christ Church, built in 1861 at the peak of the gold rush and remaining to this day as one of the oldest church buildings in British Columbia. Another introduced the now-defunct Kettle Valley Railway, built in the early twentieth century to connect southeastern British Columbia with the Canadian Pacific Railway mainline at Hope and to keep Canadian treasure out of American hands.

The most enthusiastically designed and denoted section of the museum discussed the Hollywood movies shot in Hope, particularly the blockbuster First Blood in which Sylvester Stallone portrayed the moody Vietnam veteran John Rambo for the first time and a good portion of the townspeople neglected their daily duties to work as extras. I wondered if the moviemakers had chosen the name Rambo because it means violence in Japanese, or if that was just a coincidence.

As I sauntered past the displays, I also wondered if the pioneers had named the town Hope in the religious sense that the pastors at Christ Church undoubtedly expounded from the pulpit, or if they were referring to the efforts of the Canadian government to ward off American encroachment in southern British Columbia, or if they were simply confessing an ever greater desire for wealth from the rich resources in the area. In the unlikely event that the Stó:lô people came up with the name, it probably expressed a wish for an end to the greed and prejudice of the European intruders and a return to the cherished ways of old. Oddly enough, the museum did not provide a definite answer, and the person on duty at the cash register—a young woman with the Chinese character for fidelity tattooed backwards on her neck—shrugged and said, Umm, I really don’t know when I brought the question to her.

Eastbound drivers reaching Hope can do one of two things: either continue straight on the four-lane expressway hardly noticing that it has changed to Highway 3 or, like me, turn north through the valve of the town and take the old two-lane Highway 1, following the bends and rises of the fabled Fraser