117 Aha

During this practice period the master was offering dharma study in the evening. The master talked about the "abhidharma," Buddhist psychology, and the emotions and mental formations of the heartmind. Nikki was thrilled with the presentation. Her degree was in psychology and like me she had a special appreciation of the scholasticism, the system and terminology, of the abhidharma, the intricate map of the heartmind. Zen masters had studied themselves, discriminated between one mental experience and another, and then named these distinct states and conditions. From my reading of Buddhist literature and from talking with my friend Billy I gathered that such analysis played a much bigger role in Tibetan instruction and practice than in Zen. Yet like Nikki I took pleasure in categories and labels and in the charts and arcane diagrams the master produced.

"I never tire of listening to him talk about this!" Nikki exclaimed.

Analysis.

In the kitchen during break there was a discussion of the value of scholastic knowledge as compared to the value of the actual experience of realization and awakening—what several people present called the moment of "Aha!" One student said he'd had in his life two transcendent moments of "Aha!" when all distinctions had dissolved in one unifying experience of white light. Two other students volunteered personal anecdotes of experiences they considered  moments of "Aha!" Several said they had little interest in the academic analysis that Nikki and I so enjoyed.

"I like to just sit and let all the language dissolve," Irene said.

"Exactly."

"Yes."

"The idea," said Irene, "is simply to experience moment after moment of 'Aha!'"

"Nonthinking."

"Right."

I just listened.

"Yes."

To my account the master responded.

"I'm glad to hear that people are discussing these things!"

The master rarely spoke of his own moments of realization but in my five years at the temple two stories he told over and over again. The first concerned a night he returned late to the temple. The door was locked. He fumbled in his pocket for the key. As he inserted it into the lock, the master said, the lock, the key, the unlocking, and he had all become one. Telling the story the master invariably supplied the sound of the tumblers at the moment of union.

"Thunk thunk thunk."

Kensho.

In his second story the master had gone to the bathroom.

"To take a piss," he said.

As he stood at the toilet steadying his aim a flood of bright sunshine poured through the window and illumined the yellow stream of his urine as it splashed into the water of the toilet bowl to create golden bubbles of piss so beautiful that the master had lost and forgotten himself in his awe.

Epiphany.

It was in a practice group meeting five years ago that I mentioned I was planning to write a book about the temple, the sangha, the master, my practice, and my experience of Buddhism.

David asked if I had a title.

"Contemplating the Golden Bubbles of the Master's Piss," I joked.

It got a big laugh.

Aha!

The master blushed.

Two years later in dokusan the master told me that he'd had dozens of enlightenment experiences. I was not certain what he meant. I had practiced at the temple only a short time before I heard the master say in his dharma talk that he had never experienced personally the kind of grand enlightenment alluded to in so many Buddhist texts. The first book on Buddhism he had ever read, the master said, was Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau. In that book Rinzai Zen students meditate on koans, riddles designed to compel students to surrender their reliance on discursive thinking, logic, and language. Kapleau presents various accounts of persons who awaken and experience realization. The master was disappointed, he told us more than once, when even after years of practice he himself had experienced nothing even remotely similar to the spectacular psychospiritual event of which he had read and heard so much; and, discouraged, the master inquired of his own teacher Dainin Katagiri.

"Why haven't I?"

"One day you may have such an experience but then again you may never have one," his teacher told him, "and even if you do become enlightened you may not know it."

This answer only deepened his disappointment, the master told us, and he had even considered quitting.

"Then why am I twisting my legs into a pretzel?" the master said he asked himself.

Ultimately he had accepted the fact.

"There are no enlightened beings," the master told students when they asked him about enlightenment. "There are only enlightened acts."

I liked this understanding

It helped me.