116 Hell

In 2004 there was another incident the full significance of which I did not understand until later. The master met me downstairs, when I arrived at the temple, to inform me that an old friend of his, Sosan Davis, a Zen priest in Minnesota, married with children, had been impeached and expelled by members of his sangha when his affair with one of his students, herself married, had been exposed. They had fallen in love and contemplated marriage.

"He says they're soul mates," the master informed me.

He grinned.

"I felt that way about Ruth when we fell in love," I told him.

He rolled his eyes.

"Ruth wouldn't buy it," I said.

"Good."

He laughed.

The master said his friend would soon be staying at the temple for a few days, maybe a week, to reflect upon what had happened and to try to put his life in order and figure out what to do.

"He'd like a little privacy upstairs," the master said.

"I understand."

"I feel bad for the children."

"Yes."

Later the master showed me the rakusu his friend had returned and a letter the master had written to the sangha in Minnesota in an effort to repair relationships and to keep it functioning.

I didn't know the temple or the man.

Indifferent.

Four days a week I woke at 4:00 and sat forty minutes and chanted. Then as I sipped my morning coffee I read more about the killing in Iraq and also a retrospective article on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. I wondered—for the millionth time—how all this murder could be arrested. I had wondered since I first woke up to it when I was ten years old—WW1, the Russian Revolution and Stalinism, WW2 and the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Chinese Revolution and Maoism, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cambodian Revolution and Pol Pot, and on and on and on. How horrible and strange that our species plotted and perpetrated mass murder in such numbers.

"It was in 1974 that I concluded I was in hell," I explained to the master, "and it was then, too, that I decided I had better find a way to accept the fact and learn how to live in it."

"Hell is a mental state, Bob," the master said.

Yes.

Yes, of course—and heaven, too.

I couldn't disagree.

Yet his comment made me want to argue. To say I was in hell seemed to me simply another way of expressing the truth of suffering. In the late sixties and early seventies it had helped me to begin from the assumption that our life on earth was life in hell. Doomed, condemned to live always with the awareness of the constant and eternal war—killing, killing, killing, killing, killing, killing—and, with no way out, what could I do? How could I exist? I called my situation existential at the time and it was existential emptiness and the void, nihilism, existential nothingness, the existential nothing, the existential "no" that was for me the linguistic door to the nothing, nothingness, emptiness, void, and shunyata of Buddhism. Mysteriously the one had led me to the other. Hell just a mental state?

Yes and no.