Lay ordination required that the initiate stay four days at the temple. My four days at the temple were for me a powerful and intense emotional experience. Four or five times I thought I might cry. My anxiety over the ceremonial forms of the services made me feel like I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Then when I managed clumsily to perform them I felt such an overwhelming joy in the dharma that I thought I might weep.
Koshin.
That was the ordination name I was given by the master.
He said it meant wide and spacious mind or the mind that abides nowhere. In his private talk with me and with Dean, the other initiate, following the ceremony the master explained that I was to understand my ordination name both as a description of my potential and as an aspiration. He explained to the two of us that our ordination also meant that we were now expected to keep four lifelong commitments—a regular daily practice at home, support of and participation in temple events and sangha activities, study of the dharma, both academic and experiential, and practice under the supervision of a teacher. If not him, the master said, then another teacher. Though it had been in a manner much different from what I was doing now, I felt that I had for twenty-five years practiced faithfully in my own way and according to my own understanding the first three of these commitments. Only the last had been lacking and it was to find a teacher that I had followed my friend Billy's advice and come finally to the temple. The master knew already that neither Dean nor I had any reservations about the first three commitments. It was Dean whom the master first addressed.
"Do you want me to be your teacher?" the master asked.
Dean remained silent.
"I don't know yet," Dean said finally. "I need more time."
His answer surprised me.
The master explained again that the commitment to practice under the supervision of a teacher did not mean necessarily that the teacher had to be him. The teacher could be someone else.
But Dean must promise to find one.
"Understand?"
"Yes."
Dean nodded.
"Do you want me to be your teacher, Bob?" the master asked.
"Yes," I said. "I do."
I expected this question and I had prepared my answer. I had put to rest all of my doubts, I thought, and I was eager to move forward in my practice. Within a year it would become obvious that Dean, too, had asked the master to be his teacher. The master thanked the two of us for our agreeing to take part in lay ordination. We thanked the master for his instruction and help. He bowed, we bowed, and we all three walked downstairs to join the sangha and our guests at lunch and conversation. My daughter and her boyfriend had accompanied my wife to the ceremony. As I descended the stair in my rakusu they all looked up at me and grinned.
Religion!
Me?
I had told several friends at the college that I would participate in lay ordination at the temple and when I returned to work on Monday they asked me about it. It was difficult for me to find the right words.
"How was it?"
"Intense," I said.
"How did it go?"
"Good."
There had been times in my life, I confessed in my journal, when I thought that it would be nice to be able gracefully to shed silent tears of sorrow, empathy, and joy as actors do.
"But on the few occasions that I did cry," I wrote, "I made ugly noises and felt only embarrassment and not relief."
"Crying is crying," the master replied. "Embarrassment is extra and unnecessary."
I understood.
"Let yourself go," he advised.
Days passed.
The younger of my two sons called. He said he was surprised by my first week's journal which I had sent him along with the master's responses. He referred to my entries about my nervousness and my crying.
"You don't seem anything like that at home," he informed me. "I can remember seeing you cry only once in eighteen years," he said, "and that was when your friend Don died."
I included my son's remark in my journal the following week.
"So there are sides to you that your son hasn't seen," the master commented. "Has he just not seen you in situations that provoke these responses or have you kept them from him? Nervousness in new situations is normal, isn't it? If sons see their fathers cry, it'll make it easier for them to cry."
No.
In the past I had not hidden.
"If they don't," the master said, "they'll think that men crying is not okay."
I had brooded.
Koshin.
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