This is another in a series of articles discussing the book, Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo.
In 1940, John Provoo took up residence at Minobu to begin his studies. While he took instruction from the Lord Abbot Mochizuki Nichiken, Provoo was employed teaching English to the novice students attending Minobu College. His English teaching duties would eventually be expanded to include students in middle school, where he saw evidence of widespread malnutrition.
Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo, p41-42The world at Minobusan was everything I had hoped it would be. It was the ancient and classical Buddhist training in every sense. It was completely separated from the outside world. It was harmonious, it was beautiful, it was immaculately clean, it was calm; it was so well run that I always knew exactly where I should be at any given moment and what my duties were. There was time for study, there was time for meditation, there was time for work, there was time for ceremony, time for eating, time for bathing and even time, if I stayed up late enough, to write letters home.
The diet provided to novice monks was by design minimal as a part of their often-harsh training. It was barely adequate for the typical Japanese novice, but for my somewhat larger occidental frame it represented malnutrition. As a rare Caucasian, my training was made extra harsh; I was not expected to complete the rigors of the novices’ monastic experience. I was given the daily job of cleaning the toilets for nearly a year. I became thin and frail, and when finally it became apparent that I would persevere even though I was literally wasting away, I was allowed to go to the Tamaya Inn in Minobu Village once a week to eat meat.
Minobu may have been separated from the outside world, but that world still pulled at Provoo.
Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo, p45-48My dream of monastic utopia and the unification of my own psyche had become a new fitful conflict. I saw it as two distinct choices: To remain in Japan, continue my studies for the priesthood and dedicate my life to peace and enlightenment; or, to return to America, abandon Buddhist training and probably be drafted into the Army.
I did feel a call to action; to somehow use the tools I had gained, however naïve my feeble efforts might be. If I were to remain in Japan, I would have to find a way to publicly counter the officially orchestrated war hysteria with words of compassion and understanding. On a trip to the detached temple of Minobu in Tokyo with several junior monks, I entered Hibaya Park, just outside the walls of the Imperial Palace, and found a spot in the plaza where the traffic of pedestrians converged. With the junior monks holding a banner, which read “Namu Myoho-renge-kyo,” I began to preach peace. Peace depends on one’s state of awareness: Within the turmoil and warmongering that appears on the surface, there is a land of harmony wherein good people worked to ease tensions and resolve conflicts. I exhorted the passersby to uproot the hatred that was being cultivated by propagandists and instead to sow understanding among their families and friends. I emphasized that President Roosevelt was not mad and didn’t want war.
It didn’t take long to draw a crowd, and a few moments later, plainclothes police appeared and led me away to headquarters of the Tokyo police. I was held for several hours and questioned with new intensity. When I was released that afternoon, I went directly to the American embassy and reported the incident.
It was a very disturbing series of events and left me very nearly resolved to abandon my goals to stay and become a priest. The focus of my monastic training at that point was the teaching of Kannon, the all compassionate one, “regarder of the cries of the world”; but outside the monastery, the Japanese Imperial military and propaganda machines were exhibiting the opposite of compassion.
It was in this mood that I spent a restless night in a friend’s house near the river in the village of Minobu. In the morning, I was awakened by the screams of a rat. It sounded to me as if the rat was calling to me for help. I rushed outside to find two villagers with a rat in a wire cage trap, carrying it down to the river to drown it. I ran to them and pleaded with them to show compassion and release it, quoting from the teaching of Kannon. They agreed to let it go and as they did and it scampered away, I realized that some door within my internal conflict had been opened as well. I could return to America and still be a Buddhist priest; they were not mutually exclusive ideas. I would continue in my vows and studies, and return to Japan and Minobu when it was possible. I credited the rat for recalling me to my vows, and saving me from drowning in my own cage.
Still, it was not easy to leave, and in May 1941, I made two trips to Yokohama with my trunks packed for departure, only to return to Minobu. On the third trip, I did in fact depart, with the blessing of the Lord Abbot and the promise that I could return when possible to complete my training.
With each illumination I gained, the world offered a greater darkness. The Buddha had renounced the world to understand the truth of sickness, old age, suffering and death: I had renounced materialism in favor of a deeper knowledge, and through my choices, I was going to learn of racism, suspicion, war, hate, brutality, starvation, treachery, injustice and persecution. From the mud, the lotus grows.
Provoo returned to San Francisco to find a notice that he was to be drafted into the Army. Eventually Provoo enlisted in the Army and, without a day’s military training, he was sent by ship to the Philippines, arriving in Manilla in 1941. There’s a great deal of detail in the book about the period before Japan invaded, but I want to focus on Provoo’s efforts as a novice priest and how these raised the suspicion of his fellow prisoners. This began during the Japanese battle to capture Corregidor.
Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo, p80-81Outside the tunnels, the once beautiful island looked like a cratered desert. No building remained standing and all the vegetation and wildlife had been completely blasted away.
A change was taking place in me as the fate of Corregidor became more obvious. To assimilate it all, and coming to grips with the impending doom, I had become Increasingly conscious of the description of a perfect world In the Lotus Sutra. Here that thesis could be examined under the most extreme circumstances. Putting my trust in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I found moments during the night bombardments when I felt so calmed by this, I began to leave the tunnel and walk down to a rocky promontory on the south shore and intone my chant as the bombs fell, its meaning never more vivid:
“Beneath the dark surface of this crumbling illusion,
My perfect world shimmers with light.
Though this illusion seems burning,
And these suffering beings lie broken and bleeding,
Believing the end of the kalpa is near.
My perfect peaceful world is here,
And these beings are whole and filled with light.”I did this dozens of times. And returning calmly to the safety of the tunnels after these sojourns, the MP’s gave me strange and ominous glares. I must have seemed too serene and contented; and why would I leave the tunnel during air raids?
After the fall of Corregidor, the Japanese soon learned that Provoo spoke fluent Japanese, and he was made an interpreter for the prisoners.
Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo, p95Scapegoating is a major pastime of a population preoccupied with its own misery. In a prison or a POW camp situation any individual who is removed from the general population for any length of time has gained the suspicion of all who have been left behind to speculate. In such a situation as this, where so many privations and assaults had no apparent motive or logic, how easy it would be to focus on a scapegoat to make order of it all.
Thousands were in this situation, and outside of a few headquarters personnel and scattered individuals, numbering perhaps 50, if that many, no one knew me personally, knew my character. I was a nobody: a desk clerk. Here I was then, within 72 hours of capture, speaking fluent Japanese, appearing at each event of rising hostility, bowing politely to the guards, wearing an armband with Japanese characters, seeming to have such exceptional rapport with them that I could actually hold small talk and compliment them on their families, while an unfortunate captive’s fate hung in the balance. And when I was successful in ending the danger, the suspicious could make note of the influence I seemed to have with their otherwise intransigent and cruel captors.
Worse, and perhaps most damning of all of the accusations that would be one day hurled at me, was that I would chant a Buddhist chant in Japanese over the bodies of the dead, which I did, of course. “Heathen chants” they would be called, and evidence of something despicable. In the ten years that followed those horrible and chaotic days, rumor and suspicion would be nurtured and embellished, so that by the time these tales were told, vague rumor would become vivid testimony, and dark suspicion would become glaring accusation.
The prisoners on Corregidor were eventually transferred to a prison in Manila and then to the Karenko POW camp on Taiwan. Provoo’s status at Karenko was just one of the lower-ranking prisoners. It was here that Provoo got his one and only chance to escape.
Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo, p121-122There arrived at the camp one day two Japanese civilians and they called a few prisoners to be interviewed. I was one of those to be called. Apparently when my story about being a Buddhist priest was checked out through Tokyo, the Buddhist authorities of the Nichirenshu at Minobu had discovered I was a prisoner of war. Since that time they had been doing what they could to intercede. The Japanese civilians offered me the opportunity to return to Minobu and continue my training for the priesthood. I could return to Minobu, the misty and serene culmination of my childhood dreams. It was a chance to escape this life of cruel oppression and to return to the life that was of my own choosing. I would be fed, clothed and nurtured again in an atmosphere of wisdom and compassion.
There was no real choice in my mind. I didn’t hesitate to say no. My place was with my fellow prisoners. I couldn’t leave them and abandon my oath of allegiance to the Army. In spite of what my military service had been, I loved the Army. The many fine officers I had met at Karenko inspired me. I admired their devotion to duty in the face of the most humiliating and debasing circumstances. It was my opportunity to demonstrate to myself that I was worthy of being in their company and receiving their tutelage. I had to say no. I was now a sergeant in the U.S. Army, and my loyalties were to my fellow enlisted men, my commanding officers and my country.
Minobu would still be there if I survived the war. Minobu would shimmer in my dreams and the face of my Lord Abbot, my master, would beckon, but awake I felt more strongly about Colonel Menzies and General Wainwright and the many friends I had found amidst starvation and brutality. It was a decision I never regretted during the final years of the war. It wasn’t until my own government turned against me after liberation, that I would ever even doubt that I had done the right thing. Even so, it was the right thing.