Once there was a General who lead his conquering army across Japan. After some months of war, such was the fear of this General and his army, that entire villages would simply evacuate before the army arrived. And so, the General, who was now accustomed to abandoned villages, was surprised when one of his captains came to report that the village was evacuated with the exception of an old monk who refused to leave the village’s small temple. The General, intrigued, walked into the village where he found the monk sitting outside the modest temple. The monk stood but did not otherwise acknowledge the General. The General walked up to the monk and said, “Do you not realize that you stand before a man who could run you through with a sword without blinking an eye.” The monk looked calmly at the General and said, "Do you not realize that you are standing before a man who can be run through with a sword without blinking an eye?"
Some Thoughts:
As some of you know, i tend not to interpret the stories I tell. Though I am happy to discuss with someone the meanings that they hear. Most such stories that I tell have a pleasing aspect - an initial sweetness that disguises trickier flavours, if you will. Or perhaps these stories are like onions, layer after layer of meaning as Andrei Codrescu, in my favourite essay of his, reminds us. He begins his essay with a virtual ode which I love so much I just have to share it:
There are entire cultures—like the one I come from—that would be inconceivable without the onion. A single onion, sometimes accompanied by a hunk of black bread, was my entire breakfast for the whole of my childhood and adolescence. I would balance my single onion on the top stair of the school and bring my first down with a blam on top of it. I would then extract the sweetest part, the heart, from the elegantly smashed body, and delight in its succulence until the bell rang. Tearfully, we lined back up to go to our classrooms, hundreds of little hearts powered by the pungent queen of veggies.
Codrescu then waxes on, deliciously:
An onion isn’t just an onion, it’s a metaphor. The earth is an onion. The moon is an onion. A person is an onion. The more sophisticated a person is, the more onionlike he or she is. The more layers of mystery wrapped around the simple soul we are all born with, the more interesting we are and the more interesting the world becomes. In other words, no man or woman resembles an onion until he or she has earned the layers. Understanding a person is like unwrapping an onion, layer after layer of transparent experience until, at last, the Zen nothingness beams from everywhere. (in Zombification, 1994, Picador,. p.5-6.)
Since having read this essay many years ago, I have looked at many things as onions. None moreso than stories. While stories serve many functions, one that I I've learned from Ursula K. Le Guin and Donna Haraway, is that they are tools to think with. Just as we use letters to make words, words to make stories, so stories can act together with other stories to enable us to think about the world (or life, the universe, and everything - or 42).
This onion of a story is one that is never far from my thoughts. And walking the picket line in the wintry winds of the first day of Spring, this story strengthens my resolve to fight alongside union sisters and brothers for a just settlement from the employer. I've learned from studying the Zen practice of koans, that the short wisdom tales I have collected from around the world can be seen as a kind of riddle designed to confound the listener. Many Zen koans are barely stories at all, but are paradoxical statements that are as likely to amuse and annoy. But there is an important purpose to this seemingly confounding form of wisdom. And that is to challenge, if not disrupt, the reliance on logical reason. Good for many things, logic is not good for everything. Stories work precisely because they contain contradiction, twists, turns, even paradox.