115 Rupture

Then on Sunday our group discussion at the temple was about the fear of losing one's mind and one's life and the Buddhist concept of no soul and no self. We talked about the fear of loss—through senile dementia, Alzheimer's, mental illness, and of course death.

Irene wept.

Two others wiped away tears.

Dean and David and I sat together later and continued our discussion of death and grief. I mentioned that I had asked my students to write of what they considered the peak experience of human life on earth.

"What would be the Buddhist answer to that?" Dean asked.

I didn't know.

It was hard for me to think that way. I thought we might tackle the subject from the other end. I mentioned that at age seventy-two my father, feeble, blind, and sick from diabetes, had taken his own life.

"What would be the Buddhist view of suicide?" Dean asked.

I didn't know.

"Is there even a self to kill?"

I didn't know.

I told Dean and David the story my friend Billy had related to me about his Tibetan guru Chögyam Trungpa at the funeral of his friend the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. At the ceremony Suzuki's students affected a stoic demeanor in keeping, they thought, with the teaching of their master: no birth, no death. But Trungpa Rinpoche, the students found to their astonishment, was sitting on the floor in a dark corner alone and sobbing.

"Why are you crying?" they asked him.

"Because it hurts!" the lama answered.

"Yes, that's right," David commented. "I thought when I first started that if I practiced and got enlightened I would never be sad again."

Had the Buddha ever been sad after his enlightenment?

I wondered.

I was reminded of another remark by my friend Billy. I had described for him how I had been unable to utter a single comforting word at a funeral I had recently attended. There, all of the many words in my head, I told Billy, sounded to me hollow and false.

"Sometimes the only thing we can do is be present and allow our hearts to break," my friend replied.

This, later, I told the master.

"Yes, this is so," he said.

The master explained that there exists no entity we can call "Buddhism" and consult for the "right" answers to our questions, there exists no Central Buddhist Authority, no Buddhist Central. The master said that students sometimes expect of Buddhism what they have learned to expect from previous religious practices, an organized system of belief, an ideology, and an authority to whom they can appeal in order to resolve their doubt and confusion and to answer their questions.

"We have to do the hard work of seeing our own true nature and the true nature of reality," the master told me.

He paused.

"We have to stand on our own two feet," the master said, "and come to our own conclusions."

That night in the zendo the master and I sat ninety minutes. It was quiet and peaceful and I felt calm and good. It was warm and beautiful on the drive home, a nice breeze blowing in my window. I included this, too, in my journal, and the master responded with a remark I have many times recalled.

"At the bottom of our lives everything is flowing calmly and peacefully no matter what is boiling on the surface."

Time passed.

Two regular members of the sangha seemed almost to disappear. The first was Daly. Her presence at the temple became irregular, then it rapidly dwindled to nothing, until eventually I realized I had not seen Daly in months. I did not inquire. It was over a year before I heard she had been expelled.

The master said nothing of it.

Expelled!

Why?

Then one evening I was sitting downstairs waiting for zazen when I heard the thunder of booming male voices upstairs. Though the words were indistinct the rumbling continued for twenty minutes or more. It was obvious that two men were quarreling, one of them the master. When the thunder stopped, Mark descended the stairs. He saw me on the couch and paused there before he left.

"Hello, Bob," he said.

Mark bowed—and sitting I bowed back.

"Hi, Mark!"

"How are you doing?" he asked.

"Good," I said, "and you?"

"I'm okay."

Out the door he went.

"Take care," he said.

"Bye."

The next day Mark emailed to apologize for his being so abrupt. He had been preoccupied with his conversation with the master, Mark explained, and he hoped he had not seemed rude.

I assured him that was not the case.

"Your conduct towards me has always been impeccable," I told him.

I meant it.

It was many months before I saw Mark again.

I missed him.

His wife said that he had quarreled with the master over comments on his practice journal. I considered his defection a great loss. Mark had intensity, fire, and he seemed a true believer in the path, the dharma, the temple, and the teacher. I appreciated his passion, his sense of humor, his teasing, his irony. Just as in Daly's gradual disappearance from the temple, the rupture between Mark and the master was difficult to understand. How strange that Daly and Mark and the master, three people so committed to the Way, so dedicated and so good, could not get along.

I did not probe.