I had a wealth of words and images from my four days at the temple with the master and with Dean. To "wake up" was for the master the only thing in Zen even close to a goal and like other Buddhist teachers the master used that expression almost constantly.
One day during ordination week Dean asked me a question.
"How do you know if you're awake?"
Hmm.
I didn't know how to answer. The only time in my life I had known for sure that I was awake I had no doubt. But that time had long since passed so I included Dean's question in my journal.
"Sometimes you know," replied the master. "Most times you don't."
On a long walk late one afternoon Dean asked about my experience twenty-five years before and I answered as best I could. Dean was especially interested in a passage I remembered from one of the many dharma books I read.
I forget which.
"I can guarantee you one thing," this teacher and writer had said. "If you sincerely and wholeheartedly commit to the Way, buddhas and bodhisattvas will appear everywhere to help you."
I told Dean that it had been that way for me and I later included the guarantee in my journal.
"I read this somewhere early on," remarked the master, "and I've found it to be true."
Another remark I thought important enough to write down had come from the master during the dharma class on Saturday morning. The master had told me, and more than once I had heard him tell others, too, that he and his students could not be friends. This was different from the Tibetan literature I had read. In books and articles by teachers and students associated with Trungpa and Shambhala, the organization to which my friend Billy belonged, it was common for a student to refer to his teacher as a spiritual friend.
But the master could not be our friend.
"No."
It just did not work, the master explained, because then, when he had to assert himself as the teacher, a student who considered his teacher his friend might feel betrayed. This raised questions. Did the master have friends? Was he not honest with them? If he were honest, did they feel betrayed? How many relational categories were there? Family? Colleague? Student? Friend? Acquaintance? Stranger? Enemy? Though his student, I considered myself also a friend to the master even if the feeling were not mutual; and in the first five years of our association the master on many occasions related to me much more like my friend than my teacher. The distinction seemed a fiction that required more effort of both student and teacher to maintain than it was worth. I myself did not think much about it. In the dharma class the master found reason to try to explain it again.
"This is a lonely job," he concluded.
Me—
I had really never been lonely.
Days passed.
Puffy gray and white thoughts seemed to drift into and then over and out of the clear empty sky of my mind. As I sat, the yellow white light of spring sunshine would come flooding through the two windows of my meditation room and brighten it. Then a slow motion shadow would fall, then bright yellow white light again, then shadow, light, shadow, light, and yet off and on in this beauty, silence, and peace I found myself wondering how much time remained before my timer beeped. Each time I'd wake and return to breath. I sat for forty minutes and chanted and then came downstairs to make the final entry in my practice period journal before I read it over one last time and sent it in. I wrote this:
"I feel happy, at peace, fulfilled, content, fortunate, and grateful."
I did.
"Geez!" the master responded. "What more do we need?"
The next morning I got up, I brushed my teeth and hair, I sat forty minutes, and I chanted. In sitting zazen it occurred to me that lately I had been thinking I was kind of special—my awakening, my love of teaching, my lay initiation, the steady happiness I had felt for several years, my good fortune. Except for my brief allusion to it at the end of my final meditation class with the master three years before, I had not directly mentioned to him my—what to call it—my religious experience; nor had I ever asked him any questions about it. Now the subject surfaced naturally as I made a perfunctory entry in my practice journal. That experience had been overwhelming, I said, impossible to describe.
"I lived a year in heaven," I wrote. "What was it?"
"A moment of insight," the master replied. "Nothing more, nothing less."
"Why me?" I asked.
"Mind was open," the master answered. "You were ready."
"What am I supposed to do with the experience?" I asked.
"Learn from it, let it go, and don't try to repeat it," he replied.
That was it.
Three questions that for twenty-eight years I carried around in my heart—at times feeling that they were a shameful secret, a burden, like a memory of mental illness, and at other times feeling that they were precious gifts from god—had when I least expected it simply bubbled up, popped open, and sighed out. For years I had made a point of reminding myself each day of my ordinariness. It was part of my practice, my sanity, my way of freeing myself from my experience of god.
It still is.
"The ways of the mind are the ways of the self and the ways of the self are separative."
Krishnamurti.
Before I had clicked on send and emailed my journal and my three questions, my confession, to the master I had stared at them for ten minutes. There seemed to be no end to it.
"The more I write and the more I explain," I told the master, "the more there is to write and the more there is to explain."
"You'll never puzzle it out," he replied.
So true.
A question opens mind. An answer closes it. God is not an answer but a question.
Days passed.
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