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Lisa Sanders
reads
The Last Temptation of Yudo
in Real Audio format.
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Throughout the morning, as he had for two years, Yudo endured the barking in silence. But by noon, he’d had enough. He stood up from his worn, misshapen cushion, bowed to the makeshift shrine in his bedroom, and called the county office of animal control. He’d only really meant to find out what rights he had, if any, about the yapping dogs next door. Maybe he could get them to stop just for one day. Just this one day. But as he spoke to the officer, he found himself agreeing to lodge a complaint, which would result in a written warning hung on his neighbor’s doorknob. The officer explained that this warning would let Ms. O’Malley know that Yudo had “a little bureaucratic bite” behind him, and laughed at his own joke. But Yudo knew something the officer didn’t: Maura O’Malley had a bite of her own.
The old monk continued to meditate through the sultry afternoon and into the evening. The sounds of the city rose up the hillside to his house as commute traffic became the dinner crowds, and then receded as the last laughing stragglers left the bars, and the restaurants closed up. He listened for the busboy at Luigi’s, who made a game of shattering empty bottles into the steel bins in the alley. The boy would make the game last until his friends drove up in the white Pinto, Mexican music spilling out of the windows and doors and then fading away as they drove off, allowing silence into Yudo’s world. In the middle of the night, with nothing but a sheet about him, he dragged himself to the back deck and continued to sit. After days of intensive meditation, his body was starting to give out. His knees ached, his neck was stiff, he felt as though his spine might break. His feet throbbed. But an occasional movement of air gave him renewed determination to perfect his posture on the zafu —his neck in alignment with his spine, head straight, thighs relaxed, and the soles of his feet facing the black sky. He cupped his hands over his lap like the Buddha himself.
Tomorrow he would finish his long observance. He would cross over to the lineage of a hundred Zen masters, embodying the dharma of his life’s devotion. He needed the full presence of body and mind to receive the transmission into priesthood. But his vigil was troubled by the little Lhasa apso dogs who harassed him whether he came or went, worked in the garden, or belched in the house. They snapped at his hands as he filled the holes they dug beneath the fence, snarled as he patched passthroughs with bits of chicken wire, and growled suspiciously as he hung images of fierce gods, hoping to scare them off. He resented their existence, and he mistrusted the sanity of their owner. Some days, as now, his only goal was to keep such feelings from the surface and distracting him from his practice. But peace eluded him.
A door banged above him. “Yuuudo!” Maura burst onto her adjoining deck and bellowed over the railing.
“Yudo-yudo-yudo!”
Yudo jumped up, covering himself with his sheet. She pointed at him, screaming, “You jerk, you coward!” Her arm came down like the hand of Moses dividing the sea of bugs in the porch light, “You hypocrite!”
Yudo slung his sheet over one shoulder and tied it. He bowed slightly. “Hello, Maura. Yes,” he confessed, “I called the city today about your dogs.”
“Well call me!” she snapped, jabbing a manicured fingernail into the cavity between her breasts. “Me! Not some narco squad.” She gestured out to the universe as though this squad might descend from the heavens and take her away.
“I think I’ve tried, Maura. I’ve tried to talk to you.” He smiled weakly. “It’s just a written warning.”
“Julius and Winston have lived here for ten years, Yudo. They’re old dogs. They are conditioned into thinking this is their territory. That’s the way dogs are, Yudo. Conditioned. I know,” she snorted, “I studied behavioralism.” She had a way of throwing her degrees at him like darts. “Dogs aren’t people, Yudo. They don’t change overnight just because you move in.”
“Thank you. Thank you for telling me that, Maura. Good night.” Yudo hobbled back into the swelter of the house. What was he thinking? The day before he would face the knowing eyes of his teacher, he had set a karmic wheel in motion. The best he could do was to still his mind and hope that Maura’s diatribe would be the end of it. But it was impossible to be still. His mind turned on the spit of the firey night while the dogs barked on and on.
With only a few hours until dawn, Yudo desperately focused his attention on the Buddha figure sitting before him. Fighting against mental and physical breakdown, he clung to the serenity of the face, the calm but attentive posture. These things that had been his second self a day ago now seemed detached, hovering just out of reach. He struggled to fix his gaze and calm his mind. But the vision of the Buddha liquefied in the heat, the features melting into some grotesque caricature of a malevolent god. He began the low, throaty chants of the sutras to stave off exhaustion, but now he saw the fierce red face of Mahakala, Lord of Eternal Time, and he chanted in earnest. Goulish demigods, barking and laughing, danced around the frightening beast aflame with anger. Overcome by fear and delirium, Yudo let out a long wail and fell to the floor.
Mahakala loomed above him.
Yudo struggled to his knees and scrambled from the house on all fours, crashing through the screen door.
Mahakala stayed with him.
Cornered in the back yard, Yudo threw himself against the patchwork fence, snarling and clawing at the wooden planks. He ran up and down the length of the yard barking and howling. The two Lhasa apsos stared in silence as he bared his teeth through a well-worn knothole and dug in the dirt below the fence to get to the dogs. But all the obstacles he had built to keep them from entering his yard now prevented him from tearing them to shreds. He kept up his canine invective until he collapsed, frothing and bleeding in the dirt.
Yudo awoke with no concept of the night having passed into day. But as the morning sun warmed his face, he slowly became aware that he was lying filthy and naked on his front porch. He propped himself up on his arms and watched with some detachment the sickened look of passersby on the street. The world was silent but for the sound of tiny paws ticking on the walkway to his house. Julius and Winston came trotting up to Yudo and quietly lay down next to him.
“I must be dreaming,” Yudo thought as the dogs affectionately nuzzled his feet.
Winston looked up at him. “This is no dream,” he said.
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