If the master were to be out of town and absent from the temple on a Sunday it was his custom to ask senior students to give the dharma talk. I had heard several of his students, Mark, Jane, Alison, and Edward, give the talk and in the early spring of 2003 the master asked me. I knew what was expected because the master always explained each time he would be gone. Students were to focus on what brought them to Zen practice, on what their joys and difficulties had been, and on what had kept them at practice over time. I wasn't nervous really, I had been a college teacher for thirty-five years, and I was accustomed to speaking in front of groups. There were fifteen people present at the temple. In forty-five minutes I summarized essentially what I have so far written here—my Lutheran upbringing in Small Town, Iowa, the day in fourth grade when I arrived early and learned of the Holocaust, my reading Hiroshima in seventh grade, my naively calling myself a pacifist for the first time in eleventh grade, my college education in literature, history, and philosophy, my repudiation of Christianity, my meeting John Ward, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the War in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the effect of these murders and the War on me—I mentioned specifically the photograph of the burning girl—and then in 1975 my experience with John and with Stephen Gaskin and with telling the truth and nothing but the truth all the time, my year in heaven, my twenty-five years of reflection, practice, and exploration, my friend Billy's insistence that I look for a teacher, and my meeting the master. I mentioned the minor difficulties of my practice—the pain in my legs and lower back, my anxiety in ceremony and ritual, my dread of oryoki—and the major ones—gossip, finding fault, blaming others, arguing, my hypersensitivity to criticism, and my penchant for sarcasm and irony. I continued at the temple and in my practice, I said, because I liked sitting and because of the instruction and the fixed standard that the master provided.
My talk received mixed reviews.
Alison liked it.
"That was wonderful!" she told me.
"Thank you."
Dean and Edward believed that I had been too negative. By design I had punctuated my talk with graphic detail of murder and war that over the years had shaped my opinion of nonviolence.
"It seemed awfully grim," Dean told me.
"I suppose."
"Too dark," Edward said. "It lacked balance."
"Next time," I promised.
Randy, who'd been attending service on Sunday for only a short time, was much impressed. He sought me out near the front door of the temple to praise my talk. He said he'd never heard anything like it.
"It was marvelous," he said. "I think you should write it down and market it."
"Thank you so much!"
"I mean it."
I gave my dharma talk near the beginning of the winter practice period, the first in which I participated. At Heartmind Temple there were three. The fall practice period began with a two-day sesshin in September and ended with the seven-day Rohatsu sesshin commemorating the Enlightenment of Shakyamuni Buddha the first week of December. The winter practice period began with a two-day sesshin in February and ended with a two-day sesshin in April. The short summer practice period in June began and ended with two-day sesshins at Laugh Out Loud, the temple in Philadelphia run by the master's dharma heir Nananda. During a practice period participants are expected to intensify their Buddhist practice. Participants make commitments of three kinds—regular home practice, regular temple practice, and special temple practice—and they write them down and send them to the master. Because this was my first time, the master asked that I make an appointment with him to discuss them. The master invited me into his room where he had arranged two chairs so that they faced one another just three feet apart. The master was in his robe and rakusu. We said hello and bowed and the master gestured to the chair furthest from the door.
The master smiled.
"Have a seat."
"Thank you," I said.
I sat.
The master offered a stick of incense at the small shrine in his room and then sat and when we had once more bowed to each other he asked me about the commitments I planned to make.
"Tell me."
I said that at home I would sit my usual forty minutes of zazen every morning, sit another twenty minutes each afternoon, and continue to do the kitchen dishes and the family laundry, my regular mindful housework. I would make daily entries in the practice journal the master required everyone in the practice group to keep and to submit to him at the end of each week. Only the additional afternoon sitting and the journal were new to me. My regular temple practice already included serving as Tuesday evening doan, Sunday service, attending the precept ceremony once a month, and my temple job. As special temple practice, I said, I planned to attend the two two-day and the one one-day sesshins and also the dharma study on three consecutive Saturday mornings in March.
The master approved.
"Sitting forty minutes five or six days a week is pretty good."
I didn't know.
"Do you do any devotional practices at home before and after you sit?" he asked.
"No."
"Before you sit in the morning and afternoon," the master said, "light a candle and offer a stick of incense if you want and then do three prostrations and, when you finish sitting, chant either the Heart of Great Perfect Wisdom Sutra or, three times each, the Repentance Verse, the Refuge Verse, and the Four Vows, and then do three more full prostrations."
This I did.
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