141 Priests

In the afternoon Ruth and I drove to our favorite spots to observe wildlife. We saw two bald eagles perched on the limb of a tall cottonwood at Dodge Park. At DeSoto we saw two pheasants, two dozen turkeys, a dozen geese, fifty ducks, and on one of our walks a possum which appeared to have been wounded. There was hair and even some hide missing from its left flank and it favored its left rear leg and walked with a slight limp. My wife took photos of three shapely young trees, of the eagles, of the possum, of two geese resting on the water, their necks and heads turned and bent oddly back and down, and of a shockingly white dead tree all of its bark just recently stripped from its trunk.

When Ruth and I got back home I sat twenty minutes.

Later I thought more of Hawthorne and then of the poem by William Blake.

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door;

So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be;

And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys & desires.

There were only nine at the temple on Sunday, just half of what we had been seeing.

"It was Palm Sunday," I noted in my journal. "Was that it?"

"Who knows?" the master replied.

But Ben was present again for the fifth or sixth time in a row. A high school senior, Ben had become almost a regular at the temple.

"I wonder if it will last," I wrote.

"It won't," the master replied.

Cold.

"Eventually everyone leaves," he added. "The only question is when."

Hmm.

In his dharma talk the master spoke at length of the limitation of reason, a subject the master frequently addressed in my journal since I taught academic discourse, language, and reason and I wrote often about them.

To indicate my understanding and acceptance of the limitation of reason I included a line from Lao Tsu.

"The unnamed is infinitely greater than the named."

But the master took issue with my observation about his comments on reason.

"This is not why I address it in your journal," wrote the master. "I am trying to get you to see something that you resist seeing."

Later in his talk the master had spoken of the omnipresence of suffering, and over coffee and tea and cookies in the kitchen the master talked of his illness, his diet, and his doctors.

"Suffering," I said to end my entry.

"No suffering," replied the master.

Later in my journal I wrote that I was still thinking about his dharma talk.

"Kudo spoke again," I said, "about the limitation of what he calls reason."

I knew the master would object to the implication of my saying "what he calls reason" and not just "reason."

He did.

"What he calls reason?" asked the master. "So this is just some funny idea in my head? The cognitive processes do not cultivate understanding, awakening, wisdom, or intuition. Therefore they are limited in that they cannot take us to the deep parts of our life. Too much involvement in them limits our capability to plumb the depths of human existence."

Too much.

In the question and answer period following the dharma talk Kent tried to restate in his own language the point he thought the master had made about the ubiquity of suffering.

"Life is fucked up!"

We waited.

The master remained silent.

Kent and others, myself included, were confused by what seemed to be the master's emphasis of the first truth, the truth of suffering, and by his de-emphasis of the third truth, the cessation of suffering. Kent said, as the master often said, that our personal suffering had brought each of us to the temple and to practice in our hope of finding the means to an end of it. As Kent spoke I remembered David's telling me once of his own initial innocence.

"I thought if I practiced I wouldn't feel sad ever again."

With a wry smile part exasperation and part resignation Kent concluded his summary of what he considered the master's main message.

"So we do all this practice for twenty years and still life is fucked up!"

Silence.

The master offered no comment but in his response to my account of Kent's speech in my journal the master said that Kent finally understood what the master had been talking about and, as evidence of this, in his reply to me the master included an excerpt from Kent's practice journal.

"The false idea ingrained in my thought pattern is the idea that suffering can be pulled out of the mix and that somehow there is a perfect world—a heaven—without suffering."

Nirvana—

No?

That was its reputation.