I went to Kanzeon looking for silence. Literally, and then the other kind.

The tinnitus had gotten loud that year. Depression came with it, the way water comes with monsoon — not really separate things. Fr. AMA prescribed zazen and ACT. I took the prescription the way I take most things once I decide to take them at all — completely. There should be a word for that. Hundred and ten percent sincere commitment. There isn't one, so I'll leave it there.

Then I found the waterfall.

The Zendo sits hemmed between hills forest and market place at Perumalmalai, and the falls run behind it, loud enough to argue with your own thoughts. Taoism has a lot to say about flowing water. I knew that going in. What I didn't know is that dogs are healers too. Bhim taught me that — Zendog, master of sitting still and looking unimpressed, more compassionate than most humans I've sat across from. Jackie Mu taught it differently, quieter. Dogs never once try to fix you, the way counsellors and coaches and spiritual gurus do. Bhim wasn't lying there thinking, how can I help this human find equanimity. He was just lying there. Being.

There's an old Zen story. A student asks the master, what is the Way. The master points to a pine tree. Do you see that tree? The student says yes. The master says, there. That's it.

Bhim was the pine tree. So was the waterfall. Neither needed me to be anything other than what I was.

Silence showed up in patches. Sometimes during zazen. Sometimes off it. And the moment I noticed it — the moment I thought, ah, here it is — it left. That's the joke silence plays on you. You can't catch it looking.

Somewhere in there I stopped trying to cure the tinnitus.

I don't know exactly when. There wasn't a moment I could point to and say, this is where I let go. It just stopped being an enemy and started being a companion instead. An anamcara. A soul-friend that never once asked to be fixed, only to be sat with. The waterfall did the same thing without my noticing — the sound of it stopped being background and became company too. Monsoon turned the volume up. I remember wondering, packing up to leave, whether I'd miss it.

Thursday I went to Balamavathi near Nelaji, Kodagu with Fr. KC Thomas and George Kunnathu, to see a place they and their friends bought for a proposed retreat centre. Beautiful place. Something magical in the air, the sky, the water, the earth, the trees. Where Kanzeon is hemmed in — hills on one side, a market place on the other, chicken and mutton stalls, the Surya tea stall, a church, a temple, a mosque, all elbowing each other — this one is virgin forest. Not many feet have walked that ground. It sits in zazen between Brahmagiri and Talakaveri, two wildlife reserves standing guard on either side, and a stream runs along the border. They call it a thodu here, in Kodagu. It comes down from Brahmagiri and eventually finds the Kaveri, before the Kaveri leaves the forest and becomes everyone's river.

I asked George what the thodu was called.

He didn't know.

I told George and KC something Marx once wrote — that private ownership of the earth by individuals will one day look as absurd as one man owning another.

Good, I thought. Let it stay unnamed. Let that water be free of the minds of humans — free of the naming, the surveying, the deciding-what-a-thing-is that we can't help doing to everything we touch. The Tao Te Ching says the nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth, the named is the mother of ten thousand things. A stream doesn't need a name to know where it's going.

I closed my eyes and listened. And under the thodu, I heard the other water — the Kanzeon falls, still running somewhere behind my ears, months later and several hills away. Sidney Rosen wrote a book about Milton Erickson called My Voice Will Go With You. He meant it about hypnosis, about a suggestion that outlives the session. Water does the same thing to a person. Sit with a sound long enough, and it stops needing you to be present to keep playing.

Here's the koan of it, the one nobody handed me in dokusan but I worked out anyway. I didn't go to Kanzeon seeking a companion. I went seeking a cure. The cure never came. The companion did — and it wasn't the waterfall, and it wasn't Bhim. It was the tinnitus itself. The ringing in my own ears became the anamcara. The thing I went there to get rid of is the thing that stayed.

I opened my eyes and looked around for Bhim. Half expecting him, the way you look for someone out of habit long after they've stopped being where you left them.

I think I saw him too. I still carry his name tag in my wallet. May be the only thing that has some worth in that wallet .

That's the dharma journey of the ordinary: we go looking for one thing, and we receive something else entirely. And the something else is always more than we knew to ask for.

 "A stream doesn't need a name to know where it's going."

Guess ..Neither do I to just keep going. And the water comes with me. And the ringing . And Bhim's name tag in my  wallet too.

That's enough. That's everything.