139 Bullshit

On Monday I taught only one class, my 8:00 morning class in academic discourse, and in my journal I mentioned that I had continued my explanation of reason and the pursuit of truth, the value of global perspective, the scholastic convention of appeal to authority, and the factors influencing credibility. By the end of the week the master felt good enough to respond.

"Reason won't get you to truth," the master declared.

Certainty.

He'd broken into the middle of a sentence of mine to tell me so.

Certainty.

"Reason is useful for many things," the master added, "but not for that."

Certainty.

Would I ever be certain of anything?

I hoped not.

At 6:00 p.m. I met Edward and Alison at the temple to plan and to discuss membership activities. The best news of the day concerned the master. No cancer in his colon.

Thank g—

Back at home, just before I walked inside to enter this news in my journal, I dragged the garbage to the curb. The twilight sky was a beautiful pale blue and gray and through a thin gray gauze of clouds shone an ivory crescent moon. I felt certain of the dharma.

The Way.

But I could not prove it.

"Health," I wrote to conclude my entry.

Like a prayer.

"No health," the master replied.

That too.

In class I spoke of my father's illness and death and about the profound gratitude he felt for the competent, cheerful care he received from his nurse when, weak from surgery, suffering from diarrhea, and still woozy from morphine, my father had fallen in the hospital bathroom and made a big shitty mess which his nurse had to clean up for him.

She just smiled.

"Don't even think twice about it!" she demanded.

My father felt humiliated—and ashamed of the extra work he had made for her.

But his nurse had simply not permitted him to feel this way.

"It's nothing."

When my father told me this story I, too, felt grateful.

I still do.

"There are a lot of good people out there," the master said.

Yes.

On my way to work in the early morning I made a mental note to mention in my journal the beauty I experienced on the drive—the powder gray blue sky in the west, the pale lavender in the southern sky, the dark orange sun glowing like an eerie eyeball in the narrow slit between the upper and lower eyelids of cloud on the eastern horizon, the pairs of bright white headlights streaming endlessly my way like a double string of pearls on West Maple Road, the blinking stoplights and countless colored neon signs. Then as I walked from the parking lot to the building I heard the distinctive call call and warble of a cardinal. To my description the master appended this statement from Zen Master Hakuin:

"This very land is the Lotus Land of purity, this very body the body of Buddha."

Label.

On Friday the master returned my journal.

Reply.

I responded to his comments and questions in an email.

Opinion.

Then again the master replied to me.

Thus:

"Why don't you talk to Nikki about the darkness that comes up for you?" the master asked.

"What comes up for me is gratitude," I said.

"Only gratitude?" the master asked. "Bullshit."

Sheesh.

I could not understand the master's addition of the word "only." I had written many times in my journal of the daily vicissitudes of my job and family. But, still, compared to so many others in the world I considered myself fortunate. My wife and I loved each other, I was on good terms with my children and extended family, I liked my job and, although minor conflicts with students and colleagues occurred daily, unlike some members of our sangha I experienced no serious conflict of principle with my employer. Nonviolence, silence, study, reason, language, honesty, truth—hey, we were on the same page. In short, though I experienced the normal ups and downs of every human being, I never ceased to feel grateful for having heard the dharma thirty years before.

"Why don't you write about that darkness in your journal?" the master persisted.

"What darkness?" I asked.

"The darkness inside you," the master said. "You get angry; you get sad."

"I've been angry," I conceded. "I've been sad. But nothing current, nothing recent."

"Nothing within the past year, or month, or week?" asked the master. "I don't believe it."

Oh.

Was that what I was supposed to do in my journal—

Write about last year's anger, last month's fear, last week's sadness?

When I had felt those emotions I had written about them. Indeed in my stories and in my poems I had written about them for most of my life. When I did not feel them I did not write about them. But more than once I had written in my journal that for me the door to the Way had opened when I realized that I was an ordinary person living in hell and, each time I said so, the master reminded me that hell—like heaven—was but a state of mind.

Agreed.

Of that truth I did not need reminding.