73 Sitting

In retrospect it seems utterly absurd—laughable, preposterous—that I had ever imagined that lifelong vows of nonviolence, poverty, and service might in America or anywhere outside of Tibet become the basis of a popular social movement. What had I been smoking? No, I had since become content with the little things in life. I liked going to work, asking my students hard questions, reading their answers, offering them advice, making them think, showing them poems, making them care, helping them stretch; and I liked doing the dishes, washing and folding the laundry, shopping for groceries, shoveling the walk and drive of snow, reading dharma books, monitoring my desire, my anger, and my fear, walking, sleeping, rising, reading the morning paper with my coffee, enjoying my family, my mother—our great grandma—and my little grandson. This life felt neither shallow nor complacent but steady, deep, and good. But now this email conversation with my friends Billy and John had me questioning myself and my life all over again.

I didn't sit.

No, just as Stephen Gaskin had taught, I considered my work—my job teaching and my household chores—my meditation. As I went about my daily activities I returned to my breath, as Thich Nhat Hanh had suggested in his books, and to the present moment hundreds of times a day. I called this my "practice" and thought I was happy. Had I been fooling myself?

John also confessed that he had begun smoking cigarettes again.

No—

By this admission I was stunned.

Trying as hard as I could from morning till night every single day it had taken me six years to quit cigarettes. Just the thought of my ever smoking again, I told John, nearly drove me to prayer. Smoking helped him control his weight, John claimed. He rolled his own, he said, and smoked about eight a day.

Jesus—

"But sitting zazen is my bedrock," John added.

Sitting—

"Meditation is my life," Billy said.

Sitting—

Their declarations of faith first evoked in me a twinge of envy and regret that I had not been more disciplined and worked harder or smarter at meditation. Then I felt discontent. Even John, though he was now for the first time praying to a god, still sat on his cushion almost every day, he said, and Billy was apparently now visiting heavenly realms.

Fool that I was I thought I'd been happy.

For years I had been functioning under the assumption that every being was a teacher to a student who was open to that possibility. It was the truth of this approach that had been confirmed for me in 1975. But now I had better find a teacher as Billy suggested, I thought, and the sooner the better. John had mentioned Reb Anderson at the San Francisco Zen Center, but for him John was lukewarm and Billy, who had heard Anderson speak, felt the same. The books I had read, both modern and ancient, were unanimous in the belief that an unenlightened teacher could be an even greater danger to a student than no teacher at all. From the little I knew of Richard Baker and Ösel Tendzin this certainly rang true. Billy then suggested the names of several teachers he had met in his Tibetan practice—Khenpo Karthar, Dzongsar Rinpoche, Punlop Rinpoche, and Khandro Rinpoche.

With the last, Billy said, I could not go wrong.

"She is the real thing but a little scary," he wrote, "quite capable of drinking the blood of ego."

Hmm.

What this meant I was not sure.