…Philip?

Early on in my residency at MAPLE, I was made the drummer, and integral part of the team that leads chanting in the mornings and evenings. I would sit next to the chant leader as he rang the bells, and chanted loudly, following him with the drum, and the group then followed the drumming. It was a difficult role to do well, with lots of coordination needed with the chant leader to be synchronized.

One morning during chanting, we went through one chant involving the drum, and the chant leader gave me some feedback about a specific point he wanted me to change. Immediately after, we did another chant involving the drum, and he gave me the same feedback, but there was a harshness to the way he said it. He had expected me to make the adjustment right away, and that hadn’t happened. All I could say in the moment was, “I’m sorry”, and I felt an awkward tension between me and the chant leader.

After chanting, our teacher Soryu spoke to the group before leaving the venue. He spoke about how sometimes when we are given corrections, we may not receive that directly as feedback, but that however that situation goes is fodder for our practice.

Later that morning, I was scheduled to cook breakfast with our new apprentice Philip. He had been late or missing to a few things in that first week of his time there, so when he didn’t show up to cook breakfast, I had a sense he might not be found in time to start cooking, and I asked the chant leader to cook with me. We both love cooking, and soon enough we were having fun and jumping up and down in the kitchen in a moment of giddy excitement. It was amusing to me how quickly the vibe had shifted between me and the chant leader as we let the past hour go.

At that exact moment of jumping around together, I noticed a figure standing right next to the big picture window looking into the kitchen from the front yard. Soryu stood in stillness, his figure darkened in the shadow, his face stern and unmoving with an air of despondency. Fairly often during breakfast cooking time, he would walk by that window and turn and wave to the cooks, or even come over and share a few words. This time, his manner reminded me of a scene from a horror movie.

I moved towards the window to see what he wanted. As I got closer, he said one word which could be heard faintly through the glass: “Philip?” He was worried about where this new member of our community was, and how he was doing. It was a severe kind of care, as if he was saying that if we could help Philip get to the kitchen and cook breakfast, it would make him more able to fulfill his vow in this life.

I shrugged. He walked away.

In fact, Philip’s inability to stay with the schedule turned out to be the reason we asked him to leave the training a few weeks later.