In March, Mark and David were initiated in lay ordination, a rite similar to the monthly precept ceremony, and presented rakusus by the master. It was like Lutheran confirmation—priest in robe and vestments, candles, incense, chanting, praying, bowing, kneeling, photographs, and potluck. It moved me to see two young men kneel, pray, and promise to be good.
"Yes, I will!"
"Yes, I will!"
At the temple the master had tried to foster the use of the term "lay initiation" in place of "lay ordination." After one of his former students had been so "ordained," the master explained, this student had set up shop and advertised himself as an "ordained" and qualified teacher of Zen, a kind of lay priest, citing his rakusu, lineage papers, and ordination photos as credentials. The master considered this fraud. But later from my reading and from the master himself I learned that much the same criticism had been made of the official and traditional ordination of priests, the dharma transmission, and the lineage.
"Myths," their critics called them.
Fiction.
For the next three years Billy and I continued to correspond, but John and I, both of us for different reasons sickened, saddened, and alarmed by the war, could no longer communicate. In my search for an Islamic tradition of nonviolence, from a lecture by Scott Kugle that I found online I learned of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a contemporary of Gandhi. Here I thought John and I might find common ground. The link to the lecture I emailed to John.
Khan:
I am a servant of God. As God needs no service I shall serve Him by serving His creatures selflessly. I shall never use violence. I shall not retaliate or take revenge. I shall forgive anyone who indulges in oppression and excesses against me.... I shall lead a simple life, do good and refrain from wrongdoing.
But John didn't get that far. He could read only to the point, John said, where Kugle declared the judgments "good" and "evil" to be subjective and relative. John could read no further, he told me. I checked the text. The intolerable declaration appeared in the first paragraph of the lecture. The same idea was expressed by Buddhist masters in chants I recited at the temple.
"If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything," says Sosan in his "Verses on the Faith Mind." "To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind."
"Do not think good or bad," says Dogen.
To me it made sense.
But to John ethical relativity like this was not the solution but the problem.
Impasse.
In his blog John posted his observations and opinions and periodically I checked them to learn how he was thinking. One post in particular—a plea for commitment, for courage, for perseverance, and for both personal and national sacrifice in the war against merciless, irrational, and implacable Islamofascists in Afghanistan and Iraq—in spite of its rhetoric touched me. It communicated a sense of patriotism, urgency, and alarm that reminded me of a painting called "Combat" by the fabulous comic book artist Frank Frazetta. In the painting an American soldier and hero, belts of ammunition slung over his two shoulders, the corners of his mouth twisted down in an agonized and terrible grimace of desperation, determination, sacrifice, and unqualified love, struggles with one arm to keep his wounded, bleeding, unconscious, dying comrade from falling below the surface of the dark water at their knees while with his other arm he fires his automatic weapon at the unseen enemy, the spent cartridges tumbling from his weapon and the splashes and trails of the rounds of enemy fire visible in the water and air. To John without comment I emailed the link to this illustration.
"Yes, that's exactly how I feel," John replied.
I did not.
Months, maybe a year, passed before we corresponded again.
War.
My family, my job, and my practice filled my life.
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