134 Group

On Sunday, following mid-morning zazen, the service, and the dharma talk, the master convened the meeting of the practice period group. There Nikki expressed disgust with my report.

I liked my job, I said, my marriage was solid, I loved my wife, there had been no recent family trauma, I sat every day and, I added, except for little things too insignificant to mention and the big things already familiar to everyone—ego, desire, aversion, delusion—I encountered no insurmountable obstacles to my practice.

"I just feel so thankful, so grateful," I said, "so glad that twenty-five years ago I heard the dharma and that I have the opportunity now to practice with Kudo and with my many friends at the temple."

My usual speech.

Others present described problems in their relationships, in their jobs, in their practice, the usual, and Nikki just could not and would not believe, she said, that my work, my marriage, my zazen, my journaling, and my life in general were as good as I said.

To Nikki it seemed I must be either concealing or denying reality.

She was quite exasperated.

"I frankly just do not believe it!" she finally exclaimed.

Gee—

I didn't know how to respond.

The master tried to help by reminding Nikki of the terrible nervous anxiety that I had once felt whenever I was scheduled to serve as jisha, shoten, or doan. Then the master prodded me to relate the conflict I had created when I agreed to accompany Ruth to Independence the next weekend to see her mother after I had already committed myself to dharma study on Saturday and to lay ordination on Sunday. But when I had checked with the master he had set me straight and I had so informed Ruth. I would characterize her reaction as a combination of mild disappointment and understanding. The matter had already been resolved and I did not want to talk about it and make it seem bigger than it was.

Hey, no problem.

I said so.

But Nikki still wanted me to confess, I think, that my life was not as free of conflict and suffering as I claimed.

Hmm.

I wracked my brain.

Nothing.

As a last resort I offered some thirty-year-old garbage from my first marriage—my secrets, lies, and infidelities, my drinking and drugs. It was old news and nothing I concealed.

This seemed to satisfy Nikki.

In addition the master reminded her of my crying at sesshin.

"There are issues there," declared the master.

"Yes," Nikki agreed.

The reference to my crying for half a day at Rohatsu and to my shedding tears during the informal concluding discussions at two other sesshins seemed to me misleading to say the least. All three times I had wept in gratitude and joy. I thought for an instant of trying to correct the false impression my tears and the master's mention of them might have created. His remark felt like manipulation. I was offended by the way he had used my crying as evidence of "issues" in order to appease Nikki. The master had never before told me that he thought my crying was a symptom of what now he called issues. Until now—in front of my friends in the practice period group—the master had not mentioned it.

This was new to me.

I had about the same daily ups and downs as everyone else in the world, I assumed—true, false, yes, no, right, wrong, good, bad, happy, sad—but I had grown old and time and practice and resignation and acceptance and luck had resolved problems I struggled with in my youth and with which my younger temple friends now wrestled. Yet I had no illusions about my good fortune. There would be suffering, old age, illness, and death in my future. In the recent past, however, my life had been relatively free of anxiety and trauma.

We adjourned.

Of my account of this odd confrontation at our practice group meeting the master had this to say:

"Don't forget the difficulties you were having last year with disgruntled students and a disgruntled superior. You wrote a lot about them in your journal and you were quite upset from time to time."

That's what I should have mentioned?

Hm.

Last year's routine conflicts at my job?

Hm.

I didn't mind.

But over, long gone, and done with, they simply had not occurred to me.

Vanished.

To me this seemed to be the master trying—for reasons I did not understand—to make mountains out of my mole hills. I emailed Nikki and told her that I had been reflecting on her comments to me and about me at our practice group meeting on Sunday. I had never before been accused of being too positive, I told her, just the opposite in fact. Almost every quarter three or four of my students accused me of being morbid, and it was true that as a way of deepening the thinking and the writing of my students I encouraged them to address in their stories and essays the subject of human suffering—the great matter of birth, life, and death. In my email I explained to Nikki that every day in my job I came into contact with the dark side of life; and to my email I attached half a dozen narrative essays, each from five to fifteen pages long, by my students for Nikki to read if she had time enough and interest.

The master read this as an evasion.

"But what about the dark side of your life?" the master asked. "That was Nikki's point."

Enigma!

The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde!

No.

In mid-afternoon I sat forty minutes and chanted the Heart Sutra. Three times I dozed and when I finished my sitting I crawled into bed and napped for an hour. When I woke I walked downstairs and made an entry in my journal. I sat again for twenty minutes before I went to bed.

I slept like a baby.