133 Trust

Most of the time I had not responded to the master's comments on my journal entries. I had just read them and thought about them. But now I decided to reply and even to engage in dialogue.

Before I left home on Saturday morning for dharma study at the temple, I received an email from Ryan to the membership committee. Ryan asked that we meet without him.

"The last couple of weeks at dharma talks," Ryan explained, "I've clearly heard the message that if I do not trust Kudo as my teacher I should go someplace else."

I'd heard it, too.

"I am taking this to heart," Ryan added.

Irene, Edward, and I visited in the buddha hall about this news of Ryan.

David listened from the couch.

He was clearly disturbed.

"That's not the message I heard!" David exclaimed.

David left.

Irene, Edward, and I continued our discussion. Edward said there was a time when he carpooled to and from the temple with Ryan, Daly, and Mark and the discussion, he said, was always about the master and the temple.

"Sometimes in that car I felt I was the only defender of what goes on here," Edward said.

I included this in my journal.

"This behavior," the master said, "can be poisonous."

Though he acknowledged that we all sometimes lapse into it the master said he took pains to avoid it.

"If somebody speaks to me negatively about another person," the master explained, "I cut the conversation off and direct him to speak first to the person who needs to hear it."

The master had felt, and heard, he said, since most things got back to him eventually, that Mark and Daly were frequently "badmouthing" him to others, and the master said that he had once confronted Daly about it.

"She denied it," the master said.

I did not share his concern.

Not at all.

I had heard nothing from either Daly or Mark that I would call "badmouthing." At the college students continually analyzed, judged, and compared their instructors, a process that appeared to me natural, necessary, and impossible to prevent. How else could a student learn of the people so instrumental to his education, profession, and future? In college I had done it myself. How much more important, then, might such analysis be to new Zen practitioners whose teacher regularly praised a patriarch who according to Zen legend had severed his own eyelids to keep from falling asleep in meditation, praised another who had amputated an arm to demonstrate to his teacher the depth of his devotion and need, and frequently enjoined students at the temple to step off a hundred-foot pole and to throw away their lives for the teaching?

Gossip?

Poison?

I saw little harm in it.

After our dharma study I visited with Edward and with Dean, who sat on the couch to pull on his socks and shoes. I mentioned that I was writing a book about the temple and that eventually I'd have to ask members of the sangha about my referring to them, if at all, by name or by pseudonym.

"Like Dean," I teased. "He's become a major character in the narrative."

Dean looked up to gauge my seriousness.

I grinned.

Then with a half smile and a sigh of resignation Dean looked back down at his shoes. He remained silent for several seconds as he occupied himself with his laces. Edward and I waited for further reaction.

Finally, sounding both weary and amused, Dean replied.

"Bob," he said, "you can use my name, you can write anything you want to write about me—"

Dean paused.

"You can even make things up about me and put them, too, in your book."

He paused again.

"Go ahead," Dean said as he looked up into my eyes. "I don't care."

He smiled.

I loved this attitude and I hoped one day to make it my own.

At noon in the street beside our cars Irene and I talked still more of Ryan and of his lack of trust in the master.

Irene didn't beat around the bush.

"I don't trust him either," she said.

I included these scenes, too, in my journal and I thought nothing of it. I trusted the master as I trusted teachers at my job. It did not even occur to me that anyone would ever think that I was trying to get somebody in trouble. To the contrary, I thought it might help the master in his teaching to know that students had doubts about him. More than that—I was certain that the question of trust and doubt in the relationship of Zen student and Zen master was a regular and predictable feature of practice. I knew that the issue was frequently discussed in Buddhist literature. It appeared often in the books and journals I read.

"Jeezus!" said the master of Irene's remark. "But you have to realize that Irene has lots of problems and lots of issues. I always try to remember this when things Irene has said about me get back to me even when it hurts."

Of any other things I knew nothing.

But as we continued to talk in the street Irene had reversed herself and gone on to praise the master for ten minutes.

"Kudo has even changed the opinion of my therapist!" Irene said. "When I told her about Kudo, in the beginning she did not want me even to continue to see Kudo. Now when I tell her what Kudo has told me she agrees with him!"

This reversal, too, I included in my journal.

"Has Kudo changed from the beginning to now?" the master asked in his comments on it. "I don't think so. The opinion of Irene's therapist has from the very beginning been based only upon what Irene has told her."

Kent joined us in the street as we talked and offered his opinion of the master's sterner side.

"It's deliberate," Kent said. "He wants us to stand up for ourselves."

When I got home I told Ruth all of this.

Ruth was puzzled.

"What does the word 'trust' mean in that context?" she asked.

"Good question," I said.

"I don't understand," Ruth said.

"Kudo doesn't have any ulterior motive," I suggested. "He doesn't have any money. He depends on the sangha for his support."

"Kudo always seems so straightforward and direct," Ruth said. "What's not to trust?"

"I don't know," I said.

This, too, I included in my journal.

"Tell Ruth thanks for me," the master replied. "It is always nice to hear someone agree that I'm a trustworthy person which is what I deeply know about myself."

After further reflection I put it this way in my journal:

It was important to Ryan that he study with an enlightened teacher; and his perception that the master was verbally abusive for Ryan constituted evidence that the master was egoistic and not what a Zen master should be—

Enlightened.

To this observation in my journal the master replied.

"Ryan has never fully entered this practice nor has Ryan fully entered the relationship between student and teacher," said the master, "so he sees things only from the outside and not from within."

I had read some of the same literature Ryan had read and, like Ryan, I, too, believed, as some of the ancient masters insisted, that it was critical that the teacher be an awakened being. But I knew, too, that the kind of verbal abuse I had observed in the master was not atypical in the Zen tradition—and I also found persuasive the master's explanation that in life there were only enlightened acts and no enlightened beings. I didn't know what to think. But I had learned from the master, his instruction had helped me, the daily practice of zazen had made me feel complete, fulfilled, and I was learning from the master still deeper and subtler implications of the Eightfold Path and the Four Noble Truths.

I remembered what my old friend Billy had said when I asked him if his own teacher was enlightened.

"I don't know—but he knows a lot more than I do!"

That was exactly how I felt about the master; so for the time being I would give the master the benefit of the doubt.

Forward.