But each day when I sat down at my computer and placed my fingers on the keyboard to make my daily entry in my practice journal usually the first thing in my mind was my gratitude for what I had learned and experienced in 1975. I had, I have, practiced a long time, and on those occasions when the horror of this hell of life on earth made me, makes me, so sad and so sick and so weary of it that the thought of my own death surfaces for an instant on the vast sea of mind and bobs there for a moment as a bubble of comfort in oblivion, then, in the next instant, I remember my vow and I wake and for an instant I rejoice and, grateful and glad for "god," I dedicate my life again to good. For me this is it.
The deluding passions are numberless; I vow to extinguish them all.
Yes!
Sentient beings are numberless; yet I vow to enlighten them all.
Yes!
Yes, I rejoice.
Forward.
"If you say you don't experience anger and sadness then you're not paying attention," the master insisted.
"I don't say I don't," I replied.
"You just did," the master insisted.
Huh?
Did the master seriously believe that I claimed never to experience anger and sadness?
No.
I thought not—unless the master believed me a complete dimwit.
No.
I had no idea what in the hell my teacher was talking about.
To me it made no sense at all.
None.
I believed that for some reason unknown to me the master was simply picking a quarrel with me.
I did not know why.
From moment to moment every day I experienced the ripples and waves of frustration, annoyance, rue, fatigue, sadness, and ennui that we all experience. I had never denied this. My journal was replete with it. But compared to the Africans I watched starving on television, the Iraqis I read about in the newspaper, tortured and bombed, the local babies shaken into coma by their angry guardians, the bobbing of me and my ephemeral minor discontents seemed hardly worth mentioning. I returned to breath, again and again if I had to, and I did my job and my chores. That was what I had been doing now for thirty years. Both the master and Nikki had heard me read my poems at the temple—my rant on war and my whine of despair. Yet now the master seemed to be accusing me of claiming to be continuously free of all vexation.
"If it's not coming up, don't worry," the master warned, "it will."
"Until then, I'll help others," I responded.
"No, you won't," the master wrote back. "You will help yourself first and you'll try to avoid anything unpleasant."
For whatever reason, the master, I was now certain, was picking a fight with me.
"I didn't help you?" I asked. "I was there with you at the hospital because I was trying to help myself first? I was there because I was trying to avoid anything unpleasant?"
"How about telling Nikki about the horror I saw on your face when I was puking my guts out in the recliner?" the master continued. "That would be a start."
"I didn't experience horror," I replied, "although I had never seen shit-colored puke before."
"These are just more words, more self-assertion, more avoidance," the master responded. "If you want to discuss these issues or any others please see me privately face to face."
I gathered that the master believed, contrary to anything I had written or said, that I denied I experienced negative states and that I avoided anything unpleasant—and I also inferred that the master was determined to have me experience something very unpleasant.
I did not know why.
Now I did indeed feel both attacked and verbally abused.
Was this the master's way of teaching?
From his last remark it sounded like the master did not want me to assert anything at all in my journal until he had the opportunity to confront me in person about what I had already written.
I had not even the vaguest idea of what all this might be about.
Zen.
I was not eager to submit to what I anticipated would be the master's typical interrogation, his accusations, his namecalling, his rude and constant interruptions when I attempted to answer and to respond. But maybe this was all some kind of Buddhist practice in which I was expected to sit silent and attentive, following my breath, while my teacher insulted me for an hour, called me a liar, and demanded that I confess I felt what I was not feeling.
"Submit."
Buddha warned his disciple Purna of the inevitable vituperation he would suffer from a neighboring people notorious for their cruelty if he persevered in his mission to enlighten them.
"What then?" he asked his devoted student.
Hm.
Purna was undeterred.
"Then I will thank them for not giving me the beating I deserve and bless them."
Submit.
I had no doubt that I was up to the task—I had spent five years as a village pariah—but I could not help but wonder why the master was behaving towards me the way he was. Apparently he had decided that I needed confronting and now I was being confronted.
Was I supposed to defend myself if I were maligned?
Or was I supposed to demonstrate to my teacher that I could grin and bear it?
I felt capable of either.
But which?
I did not know.
I sat forty minutes at home on Saturday before I drove to the temple for dharma study. Alison's teenage daughter Heather was there babysitting Dean's two sons. It felt good to hear small children playing and laughing in the temple—too rare an occurrence. I was just about to hit the han to call everyone to the big table in the office upstairs when Dean asked a question.
"Bob, do you think it would be all right if my boy hit the big bell just once?"
Hmm.
The question was too hard for me. My thinking for only a second made me frown.
"It'll be fine!" Dean told his son. "Go ahead."
Bong!
"I wish I had said that," I wrote later in my journal.
My admission was not enough for the master.
"This is something you had to think about," the master remarked. "You think too much."
Too much?
"You know that, don't you?"
No.
I thought what I thought.
I had no idea what "too much" might mean. I had nothing with which to compare it. I added at the end of my journal entry that at the temple I sometimes felt like a character in the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
"What does that mean?" the master asked.
I did not explain.
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