The Lone Bhikku

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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A lone man with a rucksack stands small at the edge of town at dawn, right thumb out toward an empty highway running west into low desert hills. — He left the city at dawn

At dusk a man kneels to spread a thin bedroll beneath a sparse mesquite in gray desert brush, the first stars pricking a deep blue sky above the empty land. — Bedroll under the desert dusk

Under a full moon rising over low hills, a man sits cross-legged on bare earth in an open clearing, moonlight pouring full on his upturned face in the vast still night. — Moonlight, and enough

The morning Ray slipped out of the city, no one said goodbye. He had a small rucksack, a few alms bowls wrapped in a cotton cloth, a worn sleeping bag, and the thumb of his right hand pointing west. What he was chasing, or leaving, he could not have told you if you'd asked. The dharma had come to him in zendos and on mountaintops and in long evening talks under pines, but now it wanted to be tested on hot asphalt and in the cabs of stranger's trucks. He walked until the houses thinned, then stuck out his thumb and let the highway do the deciding. The road itself was his teacher now, and he was ready to be a humble student of gravel and tar and the slow turning of the miles.

By the time the sun got mean he was deep in the desert scrub, riding with truckers who asked no questions and ranchers who offered a cold drink from a jug. At dusk he would step out of the last ride of the day, find a soft spot under a mesquite or in a roadside thicket of gray brush, lay down his little bedroll, and give himself to the night. There was no temple, no bell, no robed teacher waiting in the morning light. Just the wind moving through the dry grass, the far-off bark of a lonely dog, the long silence that gathers in the empty places of the world. He ate little, drank when water came, and learned the particular peace of having nothing left to protect. The stars came out like a million little Buddhas arranged in a careful pattern, all of them smiling the same wise smile. The poverty he had feared began to feel less like a falling and more like a gentle unclenching of the fist.

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One night, somewhere deep in the middle of nowhere, he found a clearing with a fine open view of the moon coming up over the low hills. He sat cross-legged on the bare earth, felt the cool dust under his hands, and began to follow his breath. The thoughts came and went like cattle drifting past a rail fence. He did not chase them, did not argue with them. After a while even the watching stopped, and he was simply there, a small warm body sitting on a vast cool turning planet, the moonlight pouring over him like spilled milk. And then the plain truth arrived, unannounced, without poetry or preaching or any need for explanation: the ground is the ground. What was beneath him was enough. What he carried on his back was enough. What he was, exactly as he was in that moment, was enough. He bowed to the dirt, or the dirt seemed to bow to him, and it did not matter which. He lay back and let the moon shine full on his face and felt, for the first time in a long while, that he had arrived exactly where he was always supposed to be.

In the morning he stuck out his thumb and a man in a pickup hauling oranges slowed to a stop. The ordinary world returned with its small kindnesses and its small demands. Solitude had not been lonely; it had been a mirror polished clean and held up to the sky. Poverty had not been a punishment; it had been a freeing, the dropping of every extra weight he had been carrying for years without knowing it. He understood, in his very bones, that the dharma was not a thing to be carried in a book or worn on a robe or spoken in a hall. It was the road itself, the ride, the dust, the bowl in his lap, the patient thumb, the slow and unhurried heart. He was a lone bhikku under the wide sky, and the whole empty world was his monastery.