55 Bowing

I remember a freshman in a class of mine in 1976, only a year after my awakening. Eighteen, Al was Cambodian and Buddhist. I was intensely interested in what had happened to me, about Buddhism I was insatiably curious, and my head was full of nonsense.

"Did you meditate in school?" I asked Al.

"Every day!"

"Did your Buddhist teachers ever hit their students with sticks?" I asked.

"Oh no!" my student exclaimed.

"Really?"

"That's considered old-fashioned!" he said. "Parents wouldn't stand for it!"

I laughed.

"A teacher would be fired for it," Al added.

"Ha."

He smiled.

Under the influence of Shunryu Suzuki's book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, I began both meditating and bowing in earnest. Bowing was especially wonderful. Suzuki wrote that his own master bowed so often he had a thick callous on his forehead. The simple physicality of this gesture appealed to me both as a student and as a teacher and I determined to adopt it. Soon in the privacy of my home any time I felt the need to express my gratitude—for consciousness, for life, for my family, for my good friends, for my good fortune, for hearing the dharma—slowly and deliberately I would kneel, bend at the waist, and press my forehead to the floor. In that position I remained until I felt satisfied. Then I would lie all the way down, stretch out flat, prostrate myself, my arms and hands extended before me, and in that position once more press my forehead to the floor until I felt spent and empty of my wordless prayer. A part of what I learned to love about bowing was my surrender to impulse. Whenever I felt the immensity and power of the universe, death, and god, and my own tiny insignificance, I bowed. It felt so good to be small!  It felt so good to be dirt!  It felt so good to be nothing! My wife and two children gradually grew accustomed to my odd behavior. Eventually they were no longer startled to discover me prone on the floor of our home, my forehead pressed to the rug or to the linoleum.

Without a word they just stepped over or around me.

"Excuse me."

One evening our friends Roger and Mary Lou were visiting Ruth and me and our twins. While they visited in the living room, I was washing, drying, and putting away the dinner dishes. I bent down to stow away the last pot in the bottom drawer of the stove and then stood up—fast, eager to join my family and friends—right under the cupboard door I had left open directly above my head.

The blow stunned me.

Oof!

It hurt like hell.

With both hands I grabbed the top of my head where it hurt and sank to my knees on the kitchen linoleum, grimacing noiselessly and holding my breath until the pain subsided. As I knelt there I was aware that someone had come to the kitchen, looked down at me, and returned wordlessly to the living room. When I finally felt able to stand, I walked in and told everyone what had happened.

"Oh! I saw you kneeling on the floor," Ruth said, "but I thought you were thanking the kitchen gods."

In my classes I assigned Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Suzuki, Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung, and Diary of a Schizophrenic Girl by Marguerite Sechehaye. I asked students to compose first-person narratives of life-altering events of their own instead of insisting that they try to imitate the argumentative and expository prose of professional academics. We discussed religion, philosophy, myth, archetype, ethics, morality, principles, values, history, war, and peace.

One night in my evening class, a senior seminar for English majors, I found myself awkwardly trying to describe and explain to my nine students my experience of bowing. We were all sitting at school desks arranged in a circle in a small room on the top floor of the library.

I decided to demonstrate.

I did feel a little self-conscious about doing this in public, in class, but even this embarrassment I interpreted as a test of my humility and commitment. I announced my intention and I told Dotty, the young woman sitting directly opposite me, not to be alarmed. Then, just as I have earlier described, I bowed. The following day a young man in the class confided to me that as I was bowing another student, a young woman in the desk beside mine, had held up behind my back a handprinted sign for Dotty and all the other students to see.

It read:

"He's going to look up your skirt!"