142 Sophomore

On Sunday, Dean, too, had put his palms together in gassho to ask a question about suffering and the cessation of suffering. Dean tried to preface his question with an explanation of how in meditation he had been practicing wrong in the past, an inference to which the master instantly objected, but finally now understood how to do it right. Three times the master invited Dean to ask his question and three times the master interrupted Dean in mid-sentence. To this observation in my journal the master responded.

"Yes, I did the best I could here. I'm not sure whether Dean got it or not. I know that you didn't!"

I thought I did.

It appeared, from the way Dean began each of his three attempts to explain, that Dean believed that the wrong thoughts had occupied his mind in sitting zazen in the past and that now he believed he had learned to sit zazen with the right thoughts in his mind; but of course there are neither bad thoughts nor good thoughts in zazen, just thoughts arising and thoughts passing away. The master recognized immediately this misunderstanding in the first few words of each utterance.

"No!" the master objected.

To me his interruptions appeared peremptory and unnecessarily rude.

"No!"

Again—

"No!"

But Dean himself seemed utterly unfazed by them. He exhibited not a hint of frustration or annoyance. Each time the master interrupted, Dean stopped, waited politely, calmly, and listened, collected his thoughts and, when the master permitted him to continue, Dean tried again to express what he wanted to say. I was impressed by Dean's forbearance, by his patience, by his equanimity, and by his deliberate, slow perseverance and good humor. It was what I hoped I might teach my own students. As I almost always did at the temple I learned from observing this interaction. To such equanimity I, too, aspired. Dean and the master had developed a solid relationship. I thought the master and I had, too, until this our recent conflict. I was intrigued. When after three tries Dean was finally allowed by the master the space to say what he wanted to say, his remarks had been beautiful. Even in the presence of suffering, Dean pointed out, we can still find pleasure in the steady flame of the candle and beauty in the slant of light pouring through the window pane. But the master's response reminded me of his reaction when Martin had tried to offer a healing and conciliatory remark in our discussion of suffering and I was determined to say so.

"Kudo scoffed," I reported in my journal.

To this characterization the master objected.

"If I did scoff," the master asked, "why?"

I wondered.

"I say 'if I did' because how you've presented what Dean said is not something I would scoff at," the master explained. "I agree that in the middle of suffering we can still find beauty and pleasure."

A concession—

"But this beauty and pleasure is transitory," the master added.

Impermanent.

"For me," I had written, "Dean's remark was the most beautiful of the day."

"Do you find beauty only in pretty things or in pleasant remarks?" asked the master.

Insult.

At first I chose not to dignify with an answer the master's barb but later instead of my usual entry I decided to respond to the comments the master had offered and the questions the master had asked.

In an entry about my teaching at the college I had suggested that the master and I were teaching the same thing.

The analogy offended him.

"To get to the bottom of things reason is worthless," the master declared.

Worthless?

"Don't you know that?"

Worthless?

"To get to the bottom of things," the master had gone on to explain again, "we need intuition, awareness, wisdom, understanding."

Yes.

No disagreement there.

"How do you teach that?" asked the master.

"Reason is not only logic and words," I replied. "It is also nonviolence, attentive silence, careful listening, patience, forbearance, honesty, trust, courage, openness, vulnerability, respect, perseverance."

"You haven't answered my question," the master insisted. "I asked you that question because you said that you and I were teaching the same thing."

The master asked a second time.

"How do you, Bob Skank, teach intuition, awareness, wisdom, and understanding?"

"One has to have intuition, wisdom, and understanding to teach them and to foster them," I replied.

"No, one doesn't," said the master. "One can teach the way to intuition, wisdom, and understanding without exhibiting them at the moment."

Can a man teach what he does not know?

That was my point.

"They are taught just by being, by living, by example," I had gone on to explain. "There's no other way."

"No."

"To the degree that I have them, I teach them," I said.

"No, you don't," the master objected. "These qualities are not taught by example."

To support my statement that the qualities in question were taught by example I had cited a line from the Fukanzazengi, the Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen, that we chanted at the conclusion of evening zazen three nights a week at the temple.

"Revere the one who has gone beyond learning and is free from effort."  

The master would have none of it.

"All you are doing is arguing and putting forth your point of view," responded the master. "I am not interested in your point of view. I'm interested in getting you to go beyond your point of view and to see things as they are."

To see things as they are—

"A process that you sometimes mightily resist," the master added. "You are stuck."

Uh oh.

I knew that was bad.

"Nonviolence isn't reason by any definition," the master declared, "nor are attentive silence, careful listening, patience, forbearance, honesty, trust, courage, openness, vulnerability, respect, and perseverance. All these words mean different things or actions or mental states."

I disagreed.

"My dictionary offers 'good judgment' as one definition of reason," I said. "In that sense nonviolence, patience, forbearance, attentive silence, and tolerance are inferences of reason."

I explained.

"That's the sense I intended."

"Sometimes nonviolence can be the result of bad judgment," the master corrected me, "as can attentive silence or patience or endurance or tolerance."

But I had no disagreement with this.

I had not been speaking in absolutes. It felt to me now like the master just would not take yes for an answer. I had grown weary of what seemed a sophomoric exercise in semantics.

 I, too, offered a concession.

  "But if we're not teaching the same thing," I said, "okay, so be it—my mistake. I thought we were."

The master demanded the last word.

"Then you're unclear," the master said, "as to what the terms 'intuition,' 'wisdom,' and 'understanding' mean as I use them."

Sheesh!

The master still was not finished.

"Also in the way you used the word 'reason' it means mental powers or intellectual capacities—cognition—used to form judgments, conclusions or inferences. You can't get to the bottom of human life, awaken, and see into the nature of things by using reason."

No, I thought, that was the way the master used the word "reason," not I. It was the master who said over and over in dharma talk and dharma study that reason was good only for building bridges. The master seemed to confuse reason with its applications in engineering; and at any rate I did not believe, as the master seemed to think I did, that the faculty of reason alone could get one to realization, awakening, and understanding. Neither, however, did I believe reason "worthless" in that endeavor. But I was weary of argument.

How had I gotten into this?

By expressing in our practice group meeting my gratitude for the dharma? Hadn't Nikki and then the master insisted that I was somehow less happy and more discontent than I said I was?

To me this had all seemed to arise from a misperception, a misunderstanding, and now it felt like the master was determined to anger me in order to demonstrate to me—as if I needed the lesson—that I did indeed feel anger.

Jesus!

In my journal I suggested as much.

"When the disciple informed his master, 'I have transcended anger,' the master reached over and tweaked his disciple's nose," I wrote, alluding to a Zen story I had read and laughed at not long before.

"Grr!" I added.

The master responded at length.

"No, this is not what's going on but what you think is going on," the master replied. "I'm not tweaking your nose to get a response. Nikki said that she did not believe you when you said you have no problems with practice, with practice period, or with your life. Neither did I. Sometimes you sound like Pollyanna, sometimes like Cleopatra, the queen of denial. This was what Nikki was responding to. If negative mental states aren't coming up for you, they're not coming up. Things are going well. They have, however, and they will. Why can't you just say this and be done with it?"

Huh?

There were so many false attributions in these remarks I couldn't begin to straighten them all out.

Before this argument with the master things had been going well. I had said that and I had hoped to be done with it. Old age, sickness, suffering, and death lay ahead. I had said that, too.

So what was the problem?

I felt still that for reasons I could not understand my teacher had decided to pick a quarrel with me.

It complicated my life.