Description: In the autumn of 1820, in the mountains of northern Japan, a young monk at a small Sōtō Zen temple is chosen to accompany an elder on a journey to the coast. Jikai is rigid, judgmental, and quietly certain of his own correctness, so when the aging monk Sōgen requests him over more agreeable companions, Jikai is confused, but accepts it as an honor. The road north takes ten days on foot, through barrier checkpoints, flooded crossings, and washed-out mountain passes, with nights in cheap inns and farmhouses. Sōgen teaches as they travel, in an unhurried, sideways manner of Buddhist instruction. By the end, Jikai learns that blind devotion to rules is not the same as wisdom. The Weight is a quiet story about grief, patience, and the burdens we choose to carry. For readers new to Zen Buddhism, it offers an accessible introduction, with its koans, teachings, and practices. Woven into the narrative are two threads of old Japan: the Zen Buddhism of a training monk’s daily life, and the older ancestor traditions that shaped how people mourned their dead. Print version: Below is the full text of the story. If you'd like to purchase a print or eBook version, it's available on Amazon. A note before you begin: This is a work of historical fiction set in Japan in 1820. If at any point you'd like a deeper explanation of a term, place, or custom, I've included a comprehensive collection of endnotes arranged in the order things appear in the story. Chapter 1: Wet Straw The Sixteenth Year In my sixteenth year, I was sent on a journey with my teacher, and I’ve been on it ever since. This was in the eighth month of the third year of Bunsei, at Seirin-ji, a small Zen temple of the Sōtō school in the hills of northern Shinano. I was an unsui then, a training monk. The word means cloud and water. A young monk is meant to be like both, drifting where the teaching sends him, clinging to nothing. I clung to everything. I gripped the precepts of the temple the way a drowning man grips a plank, and if you had asked me, I would have told you that this was the way of any good student, to rigidly conform to every rule. I can still see the boy I was, bent over my writing desk, brush and inkstone before me. My characters stood in their columns like planted rice, no one taller than its neighbor. Near the foot of a finished page, a single stroke sat thicker than the others, where my hand had pressed too long. No one would ever have noticed the flaw in the sutra. But I would have known, and so I set the page aside and began again from the first column. During meals, I noticed when a single bowl sat a finger’s width out of line with the others. I noticed which of the older monks rushed through the dawn sutras. I kept a mental ledger, always open, noting every transgression I observed. Where these habits came from was no mystery, not even to a boy of sixteen who understood little else about himself. My father was a brewer in a shukuba two valleys south, who supplied the inns and the travelers along the highway with sake. Most nights he drank from his own inventory, and I would lie in fear in my room above the shop, walking my fingers along the floorboards while his voice grew increasingly irate through the walls. I can still recall the count of every board along the floor and wall. I had longed for peace and calm, but most of all structure. I had found it in the temple, where daily life was regimented and predictable. I knew what was expected of me and how others would act in any given circumstance. But most importantly, no one yelled or struck one another. Over the years, as my confidence and sense of safety grew, I began to speak up when I saw that order was being disrupted. This caused the other monks to think of me as difficult, and they said so, sometimes gently and sometimes not. I corrected their sutras. I noticed the rips in their robes. I kept every rule and expected the same of others. The Chosen My hand was the best in the temple at copying sutras. I’d compared, so I knew. That’s how it fell to me to carry a finished copy to the master’s quarters for his seal. Oshō-sama, we called him, as one calls the master of any temple. There was a rule for approaching his rooms. You announced yourself in the outer corridor and waited to be told to come in. I had my mouth open to announce myself when I heard my own name through the paper of the door, and my mouth closed, and I stood there holding the sutra in both hands. “Jikai’s tiresome as wet straw,” the oshō-sama said. “Ten days on the road with him and it’ll feel like a full winter. Take Ryōnen. At least he can talk to an innkeeper without lecturing the man.” I stood in the corridor and listened as tea was poured. “He’s the one I want,” Sōgen said. “Why him?” The man who was not yet my teacher did not respond. I kept waiting for him to say I wasn’t tiresome, that my discipline reflected well on the temple, that the oshō-sama had gotten it wrong. But the silence dragged on long enough for the tea to be lifted and set down again. I knew the oshō-sama’s habits well enough to picture him shaking his head. “Well, if you insist,” the oshō-sama said finally, dropping into that patient voice he used when he disagreed, but was willing to let you make your own errors. “As to the other matter, then.” I waited for the conversation to circle back to me, to hear what I’d done to earn being called “tiresome” by my oshō-sama, but their conversation did not return to me. I couldn’t stand in the corridor holding a finished sutra like a fool forever, so I cleared my throat and spoke to the paper door. “Jikai, with the copied sutra for your seal, Oshō-sama.” “You may enter.” I slid the door open and knelt at the threshold, the sutra held out before me on both palms the way I’d been taught, spine straight, knees together. The oshō-sama took the scroll without looking at it and set it aside on the low table. “You’ll be traveling with Sōgen-san,” the oshō-sama said. “Ten days on the road to Takada, and as many home.” He set two fingers on the sutra I had just carried in. “A wife and two children died during a famine, after the mountain burned the sky. This autumn marks the thirty-third year. It is the final rite that will be said for them by name, after which their spirits become one with the ancestors. The husband has asked for a new copy of the sutra to be prepared.” He turned the scroll, so that its bindings faced him rather than me. “You have already done him a great service by preparing this. Sōgen-san will read the sutra at the graveside. You will carry it and keep it dry.” He paused. “Start your arrangements today. Traveling papers, provisions, whatever needs mending before you go.” I bowed until my forehead nearly touched the tatami. “It is a great honor to accompany a monk as esteemed as Sōgen-sama.” I straightened enough to catch Sōgen’s face, which was warm with satisfaction. The oshō-sama appeared doubtful. “I’ll begin at once,” I said, and bowed myself out before either of them could take the honor back. The Departure The oshō-sama met us at the gate himself, which he did not do for every departure. He carried the sutra box in both hands, lacquer black, the cord knotted and sealed with a paper band bearing his vermilion stamp. He held it out to me the way I imagine a father hands a son his first real blade, and for a moment neither of us moved. “Keep it dry,” he said, which he had already told me once, in his quarters, and which he seemed to feel needed saying again now that the thing was in my hands and the sky above the gate looked threatening. I knelt on the stone and wrapped the box in oiled paper, tying the cord twice the way I’d been taught. If I was to be trusted with something this important, I intended to do it correctly. We made a poor match. My own robe was black and neatly kept, the hem even, brushed clean for the road before we had set foot on it. I had shaved my head that morning, as I did every third day. Sōgen’s robe was the same black, gone light gray at the shoulders where the sun had been on it for years, patched once at the elbow in thread that did not quite match. His head he kept shaved as we all did, though a day or two of white stubble showed on it. He did not seem to know or mind. I did not yet understand that a robe kept too well says as much about a man as one let go. My pack was full. Sōgen’s pack, by contrast, looked to be almost empty. I would later find that it contained nothing more than a change of underclothes, a bowl, and a second robe. Before he shouldered the pack, he reached into it and withdrew a small bundle wrapped in cloth, worn soft at the folds, and tucked it into his sleeve. I noted this action in my mental ledger. The oshō-sama’s eyes found Sōgen’s over my head. I thought the look was for me, or else for the road, which would be long for a man of his years. We went out through the gate, and the road took us down through the cedars, trunks black from the morning mist. I counted ri-mounds because they offered themselves to be counted, the way most things did if I let them. The mounds came every hour or so, paired earthworks on either side of the road, each crowned with a hackberry or a wind-bent pine. The shogunate had placed them at set distances along the great roads two hundred years before, so that a traveler could know how far he had come without asking anyone. Porters priced their fees by them. At the first teahouse, a woman brought Sōgen a sweet he hadn’t asked for and had no money for, charmed by nothing I could see except maybe his weathered face. He ate it with the pleasure of a boy, licking a fleck of bean paste from his thumb. She offered me one as well, but I declined with a small shake of my head. She told us a joke about her neighbor’s ox that I did not find funny. Sōgen laughed loud
