125 Wonderful

In class I introduced a new activity: In one sentence state the most profound truth of human existence. I showed the class the fifty statements two previous classes had written a year or so earlier. This time I did not ask my students to write their statements immediately, just to think about possibilities, and we talked briefly about the assignment. I wrote several of their suggestions on the board.

They were bleakly revealing.

Don't trust anybody.

We're all hypocrites.

It's all about money.

Everyone is corrupt.

People are all selfish.

We are all assholes.

It's all meaningless.

In English composition my students and I read two more student essays on teen angst and marijuana. Then I had passed out copies of the chapter "Suffering" from Chögyam Trungpa's The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation and slowly and deliberately I read it aloud. We didn't discuss it. About it I asked no questions of my students and I invited none. I just wanted them to hear it. At the end of class I asked them to write short answers to three questions.

1  What should we do for the world?

2  What is the secret of happiness?

3  What is the most profound truth of human existence?

I permitted students to leave when they'd finished and turned in their answers. When all had gone, I glanced at the paper on top. It was by Mary, my gay student who suffered from bipolar disorder.

Mary had written:

1  Be kind.

2  Being okay even when the world is not okay.

3  Love.

"Oh, how sweet!" the master remarked. "This brought tears to my eyes."

Ah!

But after I read the master's comments on my journal entries from the previous week, it occurred to me that for the past few months he had been emphasizing the first noble truth and de-emphasizing the third. It had begun to seem to me that his teaching was that the cessation of suffering lasts only an instant and that then we return to suffering. Yet so much of Buddhist literature, I wrote in my journal, seemed to imply that fully awakened and realized buddhas were not only free of suffering but also that they remained free of suffering and were therefore able to free others.

"No?" I asked the master.

"No," the master replied. "Nothing remains anything."

Everything is impermanent, the master explained in his reply, including awakening and the end of suffering. The first truth does not go away when we end suffering, he said, because like everything else the end of suffering is impermanent. He emphasized the first truth, the master said, whenever his students started thinking that they could become fully awakened buddhas free of suffering. What I needed to learn, explained the master, was what the third truth meant, what the end to suffering meant, what cessation meant.

To conclude one entry in my jounal, I had written simply that I had sat twenty minutes.

"It felt wonderful," I said.

"So attached to wonderful, are we?" the master asked. "Judging zazen again, are we?"