38 Zen

John fed me books.

Doubts and questions I thought I had long ago laid to rest resurfaced. I drove home to Reunion eager to read and to study my borrowed copy of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and thought maybe, just maybe, I could figure all of this out.

I didn't sleep.

The scene I will describe next is etched indelibly in my mind.

Our living room was large and spacious. On the hardwood floor there were only a few pieces of colorful carpet. Our minimalist coffee table and couch were the only furniture in the room. The couch sat several feet from the south wall near the top of which were three square windows. The coffee table sat parallel to the couch. On it lay my wallet, my keys, a folder of student papers I planned to grade, a small tray of pencils and pens, a glass of water. I had taken off my shoes—I never wore shoes in the house—and I had propped my feet up on the coffee table. I leaned back against the cushion of the couch, opened the book by Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, skipped the introduction by Richard Baker, and began to read. It was not at all what I had expected. A college professor of language and literature, I had never before read English prose like this:

People say that practicing Zen is difficult, but there is a misunderstanding as to why. It is not difficult because it is hard to sit in the cross-legged position, or to attain enlightenment. It is difficult because it is hard to keep our mind pure and our practice pure in its fundamental sense.

It was so simple, so lucid, so clean. There seemed to be no motive in it. It was so pure. I could read it only slowly, each sentence more than once, some three times or four or more. I had to stop again and again and think. Its very simplicity made it hard to understand: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few."

It took me an hour, maybe two, to read six pages.

It confused me.

In a good way I got lost.

Intrigued.

It was exhilarating.

My initial contact with whatever it was Gaskin and my friend John were preaching had sunk like a stone in the sea of my normal waking consciousness and unknown to me that stone had been a seed which had planted itself deep in the dark soft muddy ocean floor of my unconscious and had pushed down a root and then pushed up the slender stem that had risen slowly and steadily for four years and was now about to surface and to flower.

Dazed, I began page seven:

When we practice zazen our mind always follows our breathing. When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless. We say "inner world" or "outer world," but actually there is just one whole world. In this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door. The air comes in and goes out like someone passing through a swinging door. If you think, "I breathe," the "I" is extra. There is no you to say "I." What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves; that is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no "I," no world, no mind nor body; just a swinging door.

I felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach, the breath knocked out of me, like I'd just found the words to express something I had known my whole life, words that explained the strange moment of magic and mystery in Shenandoah when I was ten and in my wonder of me—my life, the buildings and businesses around me, the streets, the vehicles, the shoppers, the earth, the air, the sun, the sky, all of it, everything, being itself—I had felt suddenly all alone, lost in infinite space, awed, and in my miracle of mind the question had opened.

What is this?

Now this book had stopped me. I felt dizzy. I had to lie down. I swung my feet up onto the couch and lay on my back. I rested the back of my head on the flat cushion of the seat. A race I had been in for thirty-one years had ended. My breath felt easy and cool as it sailed in and out of my nose.

I looked up.

Above my head was a yellow plastic flowerpot hanging by three golden chains from a hook I had screwed into the ceiling. A single bright white blossom bent gently east in the direction of my face. From the south, beams of bright yellow sunshine poured through the high windows and onto the plant as I watched—already stunned by the most moving intellectual experience I'd ever had in my fifteen years of academic life—and as if moved by the tiny intricate wheels and gears of a living and impossible clock in slow motion the entire pot rotated on its golden chains one quarter turn above my head until its glowing flower directly and perfectly faced the sun.

My brain melted.

Mind.

I don't know how long I lay there.

At rest.

When I finally got up I was a different man.

Empty.

When just a few weeks later John sent me the Evans-Wentz translation of The Diamond Sutra and I read that the Buddha had begged his breakfast in the village before he delivered his lesson to the waiting bodhisattvas and arhats I experienced intellectual shortcircuiting. East and West fused, Eliot and Pound I began to understand, even the Joyce I had been taught in graduate school by O'Malley, and though I had studied American literature in English departments my entire life the category itself now disintegrated and then reconstituted as world philosophy. The Diamond Sutra I felt I understood instantly, intuitively, as if it had been written especially for me, just one more epiphany in a concatenation of countless mystical moments by which my conventional mind would be bombed, battered, and blinded over the next twelve months.

I was stunned.

Exuberant.