A fanatically religious friend invited him one December to a Zen Buddhists' retreat at a monastery in Japan.
"My man," the friend said, "you must join me this time! This retreat is yearly and special. It commemorates the Buddha's final enlightenment, and the training is double as tough!"
He had turned down his friend twice before. He doubted the system of superstition and dogma which people had brewed since the Buddha passed away could produce another Buddha. But, this time, he accepted because his life was in a downward spiral. He wanted to get away for a while to check his bearing.
"Who knows?" he thought. "It might even be fun..."
The Zen Master gave everyone a private interview the first morning.
"What are you doing here?" The master, who looked ordinary in each way, asked him bluntly. He noted, however, that the monk, in indescribable calm, never hesitated with anything the way he usually would.
"To let go," he said to impress, but it was true.
The master leaned forward, looked intently into his eyes for a moment, and grinned. "Sit outside at the porch through the night, and listen to the song of the wind," he ordered. "Sing me the song tomorrow."
He was still scratching his head when he walked outside from the meditation hall that night.
It was a clear night. Nobody was around; everyone else had been asked to just sit in the lotus posture and count their breaths. He lit a cigarette and settled down on the steps.
"What the heck?" he asked himself again. There was only a little wind combing the trees. "Hell!" He snapped the cigarette into the dark, and wrapped the robe more tightly around himself. It was going to be a long night of vegetating in the cold.
All he could hear in the stillness was the usual rapid chatter in his head, which was putting him to sleep. He wanted to stay awake, or the prefect might sneak up from behind and whack him on the shoulder with the bat. He decided that, if he was too stupid to understand what the wind had to sing, he would at least hear what his own mind wanted to say.
He soon noticed that the chatter made no sense. The murmur was incoherent, fragmented, self-contradictory, and chased its own tail in loops. "If I wrote it down word for word, and showed it to people," he mused, "they'd think I'm mad."
"So all this shit forms my thinking mind?" He became annoyed.
As he had nothing better to do, he alternated his listening between the mind's gibberish and the wind. At three o'clock, the wind rose. Amidst the empty howling, other voices joined in.
His dying mother, full of cancer, moaning softly in pain; the cry of his ex-wife, who followed through by throwing an ashtray into the back of his head; his kitten purring, asleep, in his lap like a tiny nuclear reactor; voices of everyone he'd ever seen; phone-calls, judgements, accusations...
When he was aware of himself again, he was sobbing; but his mind had become still. The voices had become less distinct to each other. They were mingling to form a single stream.
Then, like lightning, it struck him that the wind itself had never made a sound; the sound happened only when it brushed against something. People and events had no inherent meaning in themselves; the meaning came from his heart which he, alone, had spent years jerking around with abandon.
He was listening not to the song of the wind, but that of his life.
"Now; tell me," the master walked briskly towards him the next morning and asked aloud, "what is the sound of one hand clapping?"
He straightened an arm and stretched the fingers. The master laughed heartily, and slapped the high five.
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