Alison organized a small gathering of past and present members of our local sangha on Tuesday evening at The Meeting Place, a new coffee shop in the Old Market. At 6:00 she and Mark—her husband—were there, Jane and Henry, Edward, Daly, Ryan, and I. It seemed I hadn't seen Daly and Mark for ages. Daly had been expelled, I'd heard, for exactly what I was not certain. Mark, his wife had told me, quit after a quarrel with the master over a comment on the journal. We traded stories of our lives and our situations, caught up on kids, and then Ryan offered a brief account of his exit interview with the master.
Ryan felt it had gone well.
He and the master had agreed that the problem was Ryan's fault, the result of his laying back, he said, staying on the outside, and not fully committing to practice and to his teacher. There was no bad feeling that I could detect from anyone. We exchanged fond anecdotes of the master and the temple. I offered only a general summary of my own meeting with the master on the subject of verbal abuse. Neither Daly nor Mark volunteered anything—I had been curious about their absence and their perspectives—but they seemed to enjoy the conversation. They offered no criticism of the master. But then Ryan broached the subject of verbal abuse. Interruption of another was indeed a form of verbal abuse, he said, and certainly namecalling, ridicule, and mockery. A recent conflict in a personal relationship, Ryan explained to us, had made him realize that in the verbal abuse of their communication he had been repeating this same old painful pattern. In the communication of the master, too, he'd recognized it. Now Ryan said he had formulated a new resolution.
"No more bullshit."
Before I returned home I loitered in the beautiful cold and dark and the colored lights and radiant windows of the Old Market shops and cafes with my friends and exchanged goodbyes. I was home by 8:00. Upstairs I sat twenty minutes on my cushion and then came back downstairs to share with Ruth stories of our day. Ruth knew some of the sangha skeptics, dissidents, and heretics—whatever the right word—had met and she was curious.
I had nothing new to relate.
"Fine."
On Thursday the master returned my journal from the previous week with comments and questions and I decided I would respond. I soon learned, and I know now in retrospect, that this was a bad idea. The master had suggested that I make an appointment to discuss gossip and confidentiality.
I mentioned this in my journal.
"How about it?" the master asked. "When you gossip in your journal I let it slide."
Let it slide?
"I don't comment."
Huh?
"You started gossiping about Esther one day in the kitchen and I allowed myself to fall into it," the master said. "I tried to turn it into something positive by discussing how we could help Esther but it had already gone too far."
Huh?
My own intention had not also been to help Esther?
"I regretted the whole discussion," the master stated. "It was inappropriate."
Sheesh—
The master set the standard and I had followed his lead.
I had not forgotten his interrogation of me after Daly had in his absence led a discussion of his alleged verbal abuse. I had but the foggiest notion of the parameters of propriety in conversation between ino and doshi. I had simply trusted my teacher to inform me if and when I behaved improperly. The master often treated me like a friend, indeed often as if we were close friends, yet the master insisted also that we could not ever be friends. To me our relationship was confusing. On occasion the master had asked my opinion of people at the temple and I had volunteered my opinion. Why should I not? It seemed to me that it might be useful to his instruction and it was never any more than they had already told him or he had told them. But now it appeared that the master did believe I had behaved improperly. He himself had also misbehaved, the master conceded, by engaging with me in what he called gossip, but I was the man primarily to blame, he concluded, and I had sucked him into it. Now he was rightly asserting his authority, the master suggested, and putting a stop to it.
Hmm.
This was not at all how I would have formulated what transpired between us. For the life of me I could not think of anything I had done or said wrong in this affair but neither had I any objection to his directive.
So be it.
He was the teacher.
Master.
Everyone at the temple felt free, it seemed, both to discuss the psychology of practice and to offer opinion of others and it had been the master who set this example. In group meetings the master often encouraged students to ask questions of other students and to offer them counsel. I thought this a good thing. So far I had not formulated a specific question about the issue of gossip. I was not sure that I even had a question about it.
The master did.
Hm.
But if the master had something he wished to say to me about gossip—other than not to—I knew the master would do so. I did not myself consider any of my journal to be gossip. I had been told by the master simply to write of the events of my day, whatever came up, and that he would find in it the connection to the dharma. That is what I had done.
On one occasion after I had recorded my short conversation with Irene and Kent about the master and the issue of trust between teacher and student my wife had read my journal.
"Did you send Kudo that tattletale stuff?" she asked.
Tattletale?
I had—
Though until Ruth used that language I had not considered it so.
It was only when I also included her remark in my journal—I never hid anything from the master—that the master had chastised me. Ruth had made it sound like I included such things in my journal just to get my friends in trouble with the teacher—juvenile junior high school crap—when the reality was that I had not even considered it possible at the temple for one student to get another student in trouble with the teacher. Nor had any student in the sangha ever asked me to keep private what I was told. In fact, other than Esther, no one had ever shared with me any information that I considered intimate or private and, other than what I told the master of Esther, I had never heard and passed on anything from or about anybody that I had not also heard in group discussion. My journals were replete with references to my family and friends, to my students and colleagues at the college, and to my associates at the temple, but I had never thought of any of this as gossip. Nor could I remember ever being critical of the persons I mentioned—with the sole exception of the master—and he had encouraged me to be honest and direct with him.
Gossip?
I had trusted Kudo only too much.
Teacher.
Teacher.
I had mentioned in my journal that I had sent Nikki essays by students of mine, on their suffering and unhappiness, and the master had commented that Nikki wanted to know the dark side not of their lives but of my life.
Emphasis on "my."
I understood.
"But I'm not a secretive man," I replied to my teacher. "Do I appear reticent?" I asked. "I'm not hiding anything," I explained, "and I don't know how to respond to the insinuation that I am."
"Why don't you talk to Nikki about the darkness that comes up for you? Why don't you write about it in your journal?" the master asked. "You get angry; you get sad. If you say you don't, then you're not paying attention."
Huh?
Had I ever written or said that I never get angry or sad?
No.
"If it's not coming up, don't worry," the master said. "It will."
No doubt.
The truth of suffering.
Pain.
Those were our last words before the master was hospitalized.
Emergency.
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