108 Buddhism

On Friday I bought flowers for the temple altars and shrines and while the master made soup for the morrow's sesshin I trimmed stems and arranged bouquets. I carried a tray of vases upstairs and, when I returned, a large bowl the master had left filling under a running faucet was overflowing onto the kitchen island and the floor.

"Uh oh!" I exclaimed.

"What?"

The master followed my eyes to the sink.

"Jesus!" he exclaimed.

I grabbed handfuls of dry rags from the broom closet and we both hustled to wipe up the mess.

It was neither the first nor the last time I saw the master make the kind of mistake for which he so often and so sternly corrected and reprimanded his students for making. This bothered me and I do not know why. Everybody makes mistakes. I knew that. But the frustration, annoyance, and anger that student mistakes seemed so frequently to evoke in the master intrigued me.

Could the master not offer the necessary correction without the vexation?

"Pay attention!" the master often scolded.

"Oops."

"Pay attention!"

My belief was that my teacher should be better than other men.

Better than I.

It would take me a long time to surrender it.

Too long.

This expectation had been in my head when I first came to the temple and later—by some of the things he said—the master himself encouraged it. He stated many times that he could tell the state of our minds by the stitches in our rakusus, by the way we struck the bell and bowl, by the way we chanted, even—he said—by the disorder, clutter, and dust in our homes when he visited. By such clues he could tell who had been sitting a lot of zazen, the master said, and who had practiced the longest. I wondered about these remarks the first time I cleaned his room at the temple. It was filthy—everywhere there lay a thick viscous layer of grease, dust, and animal hair. I doubted the room had been cleaned since the previous summer if even then. Two years later when Eleanor arrived to begin her residency the master moved from his room to a larger one. Assigned the job of moving the master's furniture and personal belongings into his new room and of cleaning the master's old room, Eleanor had the same experience I had. When I arrived at the temple to do office work I inquired about her task.

"It was disgusting!" she exclaimed.

I laughed.

"Whose room was it?" I teased.

Eleanor twisted her mouth into a comic grimace and pointed to the master.

He was listening in the hall.

Embarrassed, he blushed and grinned.

We laughed.

In his supervision of student tasks the master appeared fastidious and demanding.

The contradiction was puzzling.

In the kitchen now the master and I wiped the water from the counter and the floor and the water that had run beneath the north wall of the kitchen and onto the cellar steps.

I remained silent.

"I shouldn't do two things at once!" the master said.

Zen.

When we had cleaned up the mess we resumed work on our tasks, the master at his soup, I at the vases and flowers. For twenty minutes we worked in silence. I had been thinking about teleological visions of life, the idea that the history of humankind is a story with a beginning and an end which is a final fulfillment and completion, a consummation, as in the Christian story of Creation and Judgment Day. Eighty percent of my students at the college were at least nominally Christian. Many were conservative and deeply suspicious if not downright contemptuous of evolution. To them the stories of Creation, Eden, Adam and Eve, and Noah and the Ark were not parable and allegory but history. With few exceptions they believed in the Second Coming of Christ, the Day of Judgment, and in our final assignments to Heaven or Hell for all eternity. I had never read anything remotely like this in Buddhist literature. Every day at the temple and at home we vowed to extinguish all delusions and to free all beings. Was Maitreya Buddha—I vaguely remembered the name—a future buddha whose appearance would herald some final fulfillment?

"Does Buddhism have a story?" I asked the master.

He did not hesitate.

"There's no such thing as Buddhism," the master replied.

I considered this.

"Buddhism is just an idea in your head."

I thought.

"Now do you want to rephrase your question?" the master asked.

"Is life teleological?" I said.

"What's that mean?" he asked.

"Is life a story?" I said. "Does it have a beginning and an end?"

"There are lots of stories," the master responded. "You have a story, I have a story."

Much later I learned that Shakyamuni Buddha had simply remained silent when asked questions of cosmogony and eschatology, the origin and end of everything. The usual interpretation of his silence is that the Buddha had nothing to offer on these matters and that his teaching was concerned solely with human suffering and with the cessation of suffering.

Period.

Other Buddhist teachers, when asked about origin, respond with this phrase:

Beginningless beginning.

Just this.