113 Inquisition

Days passed.

The practice period group met upstairs with the master. Group meetings were similar to therapy or so I imagined. I had never been in therapy, group or otherwise, but our meetings resembled what I had seen in movies and on television. Though confession was not required it did seem to be expected.

The suffering report.

"Yours?"

Relationships were a frequent source of pain. Persons divorced or never married felt lonely and yearned to find love and life companions. Married practitioners struggled to achieve and to maintain domestic harmony with unhappy partners and with children jealous and critical of the demands of Zen practice.

Family.

Jobs were the other main source of unhappiness. Incompetent, demanding supervisors, petty, uncooperative colleagues and coworkers, and lazy, irresponsible subordinates and associates all seemed cause of dissatisfaction. For some practitioners jobs raised ethical questions. Right livelihood was one problem, stress another, tedium yet another.

It was hard to find balance.

Money.

The meetings reminded me of Stephen Gaskin, Monday Night Class, The Farm, my friend John, and the effort to be totally honest and to tell the truth. The Buddhism—if that's what it was—of Gaskin and the Buddhism of the master seemed on the surface quite different; yet I recognized a common origin and a common identity both in work practice and in the expectation of truth. In practice group meetings at the temple there was no interrogation, no badgering, as there had been in the group truthtelling sessions I experienced in John's apartment in San Francisco and in the intense late night and early morning discussions and debates in Reunion. Practice group meetings as the master conducted them were friendly and polite. They lacked the mad religious zeal that John—and I assumed Gaskin—brought to such activity. Those intense interrogations reminded me of what I had read of inquisition, correction, and purification in communist cells. To John and to Stephen the Way had meant to open up and come clean.

Inquisition.

Confession.

I saw nothing like that in our practice group meetings. But two or three intimate disclosures create a general climate of expectation. I witnessed the process often in my college writing classes. Honesty is contagious. When one person comes clean, another opens up.

Few remain immune to pressure and temptation.

Truth wants out.

In practice group, expressions of gratitude, even those so profound they evoked tears, appeared to come relatively easy; but admissions of unhappiness, suffering, and conflict seemed evidence of personal failure and were clearly painful to confess before dharma friends, fellow practitioners, and the master. Efforts to do so were frequently marked by awkward pauses and silences, halting speech, circumlocution, euphemism, visible trembling, and tears. We had knelt and made solemn promises, we had offered bows, we had pressed our foreheads to the floor, we had recited vows and we had meant them and been sincere, yet we had failed.

Still we suffered.

Other failures seemed relatively minor, skipping a morning sitting, even ten, and sleeping in, missing a precept ceremony, and these were easily confessed, understood, excused, and forgiven. More serious misconduct, crime, addiction, infidelity, violence, I never heard acknowledged in our group meetings except as acts and behaviors in a distant past and no longer practiced. Perhaps the master heard such admissions in dokusan, in private, or perhaps the regular members of our local sangha, a small idealistic bunch after all, had like me already freed themselves of gross misbehavior if indeed they had ever been entangled as I had been in any of it.

I did not know.

But this morning Edward struggled with what I guessed must have been just such a problem.

"There is something I can't speak to anyone about."

We all waited.

"I can't journal about it, I can't confide in Kudo about it, I can't tell you people about it."

We all sat silent.

"But I've taken care of it and it's behind me now."

It seemed obvious it wasn't.

"The content doesn't matter," the master said. "The process does."

More than once I had heard Edward call himself friendless. An evening only two weeks earlier I had put my hand affectionately on his shoulder. I had wanted to hug Edward but the situation had not permitted it.

"I like you!" I told him instead.

He looked surprised.

"Why?" he asked.

Edward had seemed genuinely puzzled.

"Because you're so nice," I said.

"No, I'm not!" he had exclaimed. "You don't know me at all."

Mystery.

In our practice group we waited.

Nothing.

"It's all behind me now," Edward said again.

Finished.

I never learned more.

No greater problem than desire—

No greater curse than discontent.

Lao Tsu.

Now at our practice group meeting I had as usual very little drama of my own to offer. I spoke only briefly of my anxiety in ritual. I said again that I felt I had my life in order. My wife and I got along good, I said, I liked my job, I encountered no serious difficulty in keeping my commitments in my home practice, in my regular temple practice, nor in my special temple practice and, as I always did to conclude my remarks at practice group meetings, I said I felt immensely grateful for having heard the dharma in 1975 and for the opportunity to practice with the master and our sangha at the temple. To some of those present, I later learned, this all seemed much too good to be true.

But it wasn't.