66 Guru

I learned there was a Zen center in Council Bluffs but, I had been told, no Zen master. Then in 1983 I learned of the scandal at the San Francisco Zen Center and of the impeachment and dismissal of Richard Baker, the teacher there and the only dharma heir of the late Shunryu Suzuki. Suzuki, though I knew him only by his book and by his reputation, had been my hero, my idol, and indeed through his famous book also my teacher. This news of Baker put into my understanding of the concept of "the guru" the first dent.

Materialism.

Sex.

How had transmission gone so wrong?

Suzuki had also been a teacher of Stephen Gaskin. In 1984 after eight years in the commune in Tennessee my friend John and his family left The Farm. They stayed one night at my home in Iowa on their way back to California. John now repudiated his Farm experience. John and I had corresponded for eight years and John had sometimes complained of his frustration with his teacher Gaskin, with the executive committee of The Farm, and with its authoritarianism.

In the beginning John had been a zealot.

True believer.

Disciple.

"For the first year I was on The Farm," John told me many years later, "I didn't go out the Gate once—for two years maybe. I picked vegetables and banged nails and chopped wood and hauled propane and dreamed at night of glowing plants. I never thought about money and I was warmed clear through by the knowledge that I was saving the world."

John added: "Totally delusional of course."

This put a second dent in my idea of the guru. I asked question after question. John and I had exchanged vows of nonviolence, honesty, and poverty. Now John renounced his vow of poverty.

Indeed he had sworn the exact opposite.

"To get rich."

He planned to return to San Francisco, John informed me, find work in the computer industry, save his money, start his own business, and then hire all of his friends to share in the wealth.

Huh—

I was both stunned and amused.

Ruth and I had struggled in part because I imagined myself sworn to a vow of poverty and thus refused to buy a house. I had not moved to The Farm because there I would not be able to support my two children from my first marriage and also because I had no practical knowledge of farming or construction; yet I considered myself nevertheless fully committed to the Gaskin teaching. My private personal psychomystical experience had made my faith in the dharma unshakeable, but I was certainly confused about how my family and I were to live and to survive. In addition to his vow of poverty and his commitment to communal living John had also given up on the idea of a teacher. With Gaskin he was totally disillusioned. His earlier devotion to Gaskin he now considered folly.

Obedient no more—

Free!

"I heard someone say once," John told me years later, "that the last job of the teacher is to disillusion the student."

Within five years John had settled in California, he had in fact founded his own computer software company, in just a few years he had hired and employed ten people, and though he had not become rich John had achieved business success. Though little remained of the religious program he had sold me, John still sat forty minutes almost every day, he told me. My own interest in a teacher, never very strong, diminished even further. I read dharma books, meditated on my back before bed, meditated as I walked for exercise, tried to foster nonviolence, honesty, and tolerance along with composition and English, washed the dishes, did the laundry, mowed the grass, shoveled the snow, and wondered.