presence
I immediately knew, walking into the crowded gallery, that I would sit with them. They drew me to the space just in front of them, like a weary forest traveler drawn to the promise of warmth in front of a hearth in a strangely familiar hut appearing as if from nowhere in the graying light of dusk.
Except this forest was a city in a large Western conurbation, and the hut a massive, sprawling three-storey building housing the treasures of an entire continent of the planet.
As it was the first Sunday of the month, it was Free Admission day at the Asian Art Museum at the Civic Center, towards which I walked on my long early afternoon constitutional yesterday. I fondly remembered the arhat I had found (or who found me) there sometime last summer, in July's free Sunday. It was when I was engrossed in Richard Powers' The Overstory, and it was a fitting thing to encounter, that arhat in the corner of the large gallery, and beside which I sat zazen for a while, oblivious to the flow of museum-goers.
Same thing yesterday.
As it happened this time, there was a low wooden bench in front of the two life-size figures behind the glass case and it's where I sat zazen on this visit. Initially, there was a woman on my left, and a dad and his young daughter on the right, the adults peering into their respective mobile devices, the child fidgeting a bit. And into their midst on that convenient piece of museum furniture I sat, backpack set by my feet on the floor, back straight, hands clasped on my lap, closing my eyes as the flow and murmur of the artifact-watchers in that gallery became one with the pieces themselves, and with me.
And as it is with zazen for me, time both focused into a point and dissipated into a cloud all at once and whoever it is standing at the escarpment of my consciousness becomes both pronounced and unannounced, as it should be. Or, more accurately: as it is.
When I stood up to walk on, the people on that bench with me had long gone, unreplaced by others. Without so much as a further glance to my two zazen companions standing in front of me with such perfect immobility, I thought a farewell to them, noting to myself that I'd seek their names and provenances on the next free Sunday some other month. I didn't have to know these facts right at that moment, as I felt I'd already come to know them in the essential way: as companions along the path, hosts to that sudden, humble, and illuminating hut presenting itself to me as if that was the reason for everything that had come before.
And they were bodhisattvim, too.
[ At another gallery I found the mighty Arya Avalokiteshvara... ]
