The Brothers K by David James Duncan

Author:David James Duncan [Duncan, David James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780553563146
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1991-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

4. Tariki

If a man wishes to be sure of the road he walks on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.

—St. John of the Cross

To trip over a bike and damage a shoulder was no great setback for a faith-filled phenom like Irwin. The shoulder, for anything short of javelin-throwing, was still perfectly serviceable, and Irwin had always been able to give up gifts and glory as blithely as he attained them. The only problem with this injury was the timing: it was sustained at the height of the Vietnam draft. The loss of his athletic scholarship therefore meant that he had to carry a full academic load, to make decent grades in order to maintain his student deferment, and to take out student loans as well as get a full-time work-study job as a campus grounds-keeper in order to continue with school. This sudden change from doing what came naturally (throwing javelins) to what came effortfully (working sixteen-hour days as a scholar/drudge) was the toughest transition he’d ever been called on to make. But it wasn’t the quantity of work that made it so. Irwin loved manual labor, was the extreme opposite of lazy, and was a decent student too. It was his character, his nature, that made his situation so difficult.

Proponents of Zen say that there are two ways of attaining self-knowledge. One is called jiriki, which translates “self power;” the other is tariki, which translates “Other Power.” The medieval Scholastics used the terms “will” and “grace” to describe the same two principles. And Irwin’s great strength, his great source of happiness, was his love of living by tariki alone. Not only did he “consider the lilies of the field,” he behaved like one. He loved nothing better than to take absolutely no thought for the morrow, then to sit back and grin when the Good Lord’s grace took care of him anyhow. His athletic life, his religious life, his love life were all an undifferentiated series of heart-over-head impulses, one blind leap of faith after another. Blind leaping was his joy, it was what he’d always lived for. And his shoulder injury had suddenly made his life a marathon of the head and the will.

He didn’t complain. It must have been terribly hard for him, but he never griped at all. What he did do, though, was start warning us. Every time a family member asked how he was doing, he’d say “Great,” but then add that he didn’t know how much longer he could keep it up. Everett and I always greeted these doubts with a barrage of Vietnam horror stories—which Irwin always listened to with a wonderful non sequitur of a smile. But in time I realized what this smile meant: he didn’t care how long he kept it up. He had no fear of failure, or of the draft. He adored Other Power, and trusted it to care for him even if he did end up in ’Nam. He even gave

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