144 Doubt

Early Saturday morning I sat forty minutes and then twenty minutes more at 3:00. It was the master who taught me how to sit and the master who inspired me to continue. When I experienced difficulty I said so in my journal and the master offered advice and counsel. When the master noticed oddities in my posture, in my breathing, or in my routine at the temple, he gently corrected me.

I remembered several such instances.

At first, for example, I sat the full ninety minutes of zazen without moving. When the master had become aware of it he told me to sit forty and walk ten and then to switch legs and sit forty.

On another occasion, in the last period of zazen at a two-day sesshin, three times the master corrected my posture, pushing down on my left shoulder and lifting up on my right. My stiff neck was killing me and I had been compensating for pain. I could hardly swallow.

"You're all twisted around," the master had whispered. "Usually you sit up pretty straight."

On yet another occasion I was breathing too loudly. I had mentioned in my journal that I noticed it sitting at home and hoped I was not doing it also at the temple. The master said that he had never noticed it there but that if he did he would mention it to me.

"Breathe soft," the master whispered to me one day.

In kinhin I had been watching my feet as I walked. One day during kinhin the master placed one hand gently on the back of my head and with his other hand he gently raised my chin.

For the past year when I sat for some reason I had begun leaning slightly to the left and lifting my chin. On three or four separate occasions the master gently placed his hands on my shoulders, head, and chin and corrected my posture.

"You accept it," the master said of my memories of his instruction, "but when I notice oddities of mind you deny, argue, and resist."

Oddities of mind?

"Why is that?" asked the master.

Hm.

To get to the bottom of things reason is worthless? I had acknowledged the limitation of reason. Needed I also repudiate Socrates, Plato, Russell, Freud, Einstein, Hubble, and Krishnamurti and accept the categorical statement of my teacher that to get to the ultimate truth reason was worthless?

I wondered.

I had not been persuaded.

I had experienced god—and though reason had not taken me all the way to god it had been of inestimable value to me on the way. It had been priceless. I felt fulfilled, committed, determined, forgiving, and—in spite of the horror of life—happy, yes, and grateful. Needed I accept the judgment of my teacher that what I felt I did not really feel and that the gifts of truth, peace, and love that I had received in 1975 and carried in my heart ever since were but a delusion and a lie?

Oddities of mind?

Fat chance.

"You deny, argue, resist."

Yes.

"Why is that?" asked the master.

Curiosity.

Doubt.

The master, my teacher, seemed lonely, unhappy, anxious, sick, and angry.

I sat zazen at least forty minutes every day and I rarely missed—usually only on an all-day road trip to Texas—and during practice periods I sat another twenty minutes in the late afternoon or evening. When I sat zazen, first the day's concerns would come up—most recently the conflicts with the master, next any difficult situations at work, then the various aspects of my relationships with my mother, with my wife, or with my children, and more often than almost anything else the advice I had been given or had read on meditation and how to do it, and then memories of one kind or another—but then after my almost four years of daily sitting a feeling of gratitude would arise in my thought stream each time I sat and for a moment my thinking would turn to thanking and then thanking, too, would pass away and some other thought would arise.

I liked sitting.

Sunday was my birthday, I was sixty-two years old, and given my difficult and confusing email correspondence with the master over the past months I did not know what to say at the practice group meeting after zazen, the service, and the dharma talk that morning. I had wondered about our meeting all week and even after it was over I was not sure what actually had come out of my mouth.

The main thing I remembered was my sympathy for David, who had been on the verge of tears over his wife Sally's difficulties with her doctoral thesis and the effect of her struggle on their marriage. Compared to me, they had not been married long, perhaps a year, two at the most. Now for the first time ever in my presence David uttered the word "divorce" although David added hastily that he loved Sally dearly and was determined this would not happen. I remembered, too, my empathy for Jane, who always seemed to struggle mightily to find the right words to express her feelings about her difficulties at work. There seemed to be so much pain for Jane in her job and also in trying to articulate her situation for the master and for all of us present at the meeting. By the end of her remarks, though, Jane was laughing, smiling, and seemed in good spirits. But David seemed still troubled and pensive. He agreed with the master that David needed to focus more on David. But in his remarks he kept returning to his marriage.

"It seems like this ordeal with Sally will just go on and on endlessly!" he exclaimed.

"And how about Bob?" the master asked in response to this account of our group meeting in my journal. "What was going on with Bob?"

At our meeting I had stammered, uncertain of what to say, and talked briefly of the student who had been disruptive. But I had now nothing in my life comparable to the problems my friends in the sangha had described. Only after coming up empty on other topics had I said that my only real conflict in my practice was with my teacher.

"How so?" Nikki asked.

"When I state my most fundamental principles and my commitment to them and express my deepest feelings and ideals," I said, choosing my words carefully, "Kudo says it is bullshit."

Both Nikki and Edward looked shocked.

"That must really hurt!" Nikki exclaimed.

"Yes, it does," I said.

This dialogue I also included in the record and later, responding to my journal, the master said this:

"You and I have talked about how the most appropriate remarks would have been about the difficulties you have been having with the teacher. What people should bring up in practice period meetings is what practice period has been like for them or what insights they have had or what difficulties or gripes. What you usually bring up is how well things are going even if they are not. How about in the future talking honestly about what is going on with you? Even when you talked about the problem student you did not offer any information about how you were feeling or about how the situation affected you. In your practice journal you rarely express any negative things about yourself or about how you are feeling."

This was not the first time that the master implied that I had somehow been dishonest and it would not be the last. Eventually the master would make such allegations explicit.