The following week in the master's absence, Alison gave the dharma talk. She talked about discriminating consciousness and about separating ourselves from the whole. She read passages from "Verses on the Faith Mind" to illustrate her points. She mentioned that she suffered from depression and for a long time had felt guilty about needing medication to treat it. She had felt that both her depression and the medication for it were signs of weakness, which had further undermined her self-esteem and increased her suffering.
Her admission spoke to me. I knew I shared some of prejudice toward the depressed that Alison described and toward a reliance on antidepressants. I knew I needed to drop that. Edward had been especially assertive in discussion. He would not let Alison apologize for the supposed inadequacies of her talk.
"None of us has any greater claim to the truth!" he said. Edward had also adamantly objected when Alison had called herself lazy. "You do more for the sangha than any other member of it!" Edward insisted.
Alison said that the hardest part of practice for her was dokusan, the private meetings of student and teacher.
"It always feels like criticism of me," Alison said, "and it hurts."
But Alison added that she understood that this was her problem and that by his criticism the master intended only to help her to improve her understanding and her practice. I understood this, too, and I never doubted it, not even when my own conflicts with the master emerged and escalated, first to the point that I quit and then later to the point that the master did.
Eight of us stayed to rake and to bag leaves. We worked for ninety minutes—until we ran out of bags. We filled forty, and Dean carried I don't know how many more barrels of leaves to the back fence and dumped them. Yet there were a dozen huge piles of raked leaves unbagged in the adjacent lot and we never did get to the back yard. I hadn't joined the group of workers for pizza, thinking I'd better get home and back to my thick stack of student essays, but once there I could not bear the thought of reading them, and Ruth and I threw our bikes into the pickup and drove to DeSoto Wildlife Refuge, where we biked for ninety minutes. We did not see many deer or birds, but the sky was a pale milky blue rippled with pale milky blue and bluish white clouds, so beautiful it took my breath away. That evening I sat my usual twenty minutes but, when my timer beeped, my mind and I were still riding off on my imaginary story lines of the day's minor turmoil.
"So I sat an extra ten minutes," I noted in my journal.
"Why?" the master asked in his comment. "Didn't you get what you wanted? Is wanting and getting what zazen practice is about?"
How about practicing without any gaining idea, the master suggested, and as for the way my mind had kept kidnapping and carrying me off—
"Sometimes it is like this," the master commented. "Zazen is zazen. Just sit, and don't judge it."
Yes.
"Peace," I wrote to conclude my entry.
I had been concluding each of my entries this way.
"No peace," this time the master replied.
Indeed.
Then that evening I had gone upstairs and sat twenty minutes. This sitting was nothing like I had said it was. Instead I was my breath, then suddenly I realized I was my thought.
I had no idea how long I'd been my thought:
I'm my breath—
I'm my thought—
The transition from breath to thought was instantaneous.
"Nothing but pretty words," the master remarked. "There is no 'I' apart from the one you just created in the mind."
I'm breath—
I'm thought!
"There is no thinker behind the thought. Why do you continue to look for him?" asked the master.
Did I?
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