The issue of verbal abuse simply would not—for me at least—go away. In his dharma talk just before our practice group meeting the master had expounded on one of his favorite subjects—
The way human beings see only one side of things at a time.
To illustrate, the master talked about endurance—or patience, forbearance, tolerance, "kshanti" in Sanscrit—and he said that normally we think of endurance and tolerance as good. It is one of the six paramitas, the master explained, one of the six perfections.
"But is it good for a wife to endure and to tolerate a beating from her husband?" the master asked.
He paused.
It sounded to me like a rhetorical question but for several seconds the master pretended that his question was not rhetorical and he invited a response. When after a respectful silence no one responded the master answered his own question.
"I don't think so," he said.
The master continued with his explication of the text he had chosen and at 10:50 when he finished his talk the master invited questions and comments from the thirteen of us present.
I raised my hands in gassho.
"Yes?"
"Is it good for a student to endure and to tolerate a beating from his teacher?" I asked.
For several seconds the master was silent.
I waited.
"Who is beating you?" the master asked finally.
"No one," I answered.
"Then for whom are you asking the question?" the master asked.
"For me," I said.
"Then the question is hypothetical and abstract," said the master. "It's irrelevant."
To me the question seemed no more hypothetical and abstract than his own illustration of husband and wife but given the circumstances it also seemed to me both argumentative and fruitless to say so.
"Why didn't he simply answer the question?" I asked later in my journal.
"Because this was not the question behind your question," the master responded.
Hm.
"You didn't understand my response."
True.
"Have you sat with it?"
I had not.
I wasn't sure I even understood the concept of "sitting with it."
"Do you understand?" the master asked.
"No," I responded. "I don't think so."
But in my journal I had myself answered my question as I would have and as I thought the master should have answered.
Is it good for a student to endure and to tolerate a beating from his teacher?
No.
"If you already knew the answer to your question," the master replied, "why did you ask it?"
Uff da!
Because I wanted to know what the master thought, of course. I knew very well that Buddhist literature was full of anecdote, folklore, and legend about disciples who had endured all manner of abuse both physical and psychological from their masters and I wondered if the master had any doubts of his own about this issue. The master once told me himself that he had given up using the stick because too many of his students, women especially, had grown up under physically abusive fathers and stepfathers and thus to be struck by a man evoked in them memories of that trauma which interfered with instruction and practice.
The master objected to my memory of this conversation.
"This is not why I gave up using the stick," the master wrote in response to my recollection.
Oh.
"This is your idea of what I said, not what I said."
Okay—
Fair enough.
But the master did not explain why he stopped using the stick.
When asked questions about abuse the master did seem to me defensive and evasive. He had told me in one of our early private conversations that he had been accused of verbal abuse most of his life and that the allegation still hurt. I had been both pleasantly surprised and touched by his honesty and candor.
But now perhaps because I had raised the issue again the master seemed hostile to inquiry.
"I'm not interested in your point of view," the master had written in reply to one of my emails about his comments on and questions about my practice journal. "I'm interested in getting you to go beyond your point of view and to see things as they really are."
"But what could possibly appear in my journal—a requirement of the practice period—other than my point of view?" I asked.
Stymied.
"I cannot figure this out," I said.
"Sit with it," the master replied, "and you may figure it out. This is a process you mightily resist."
"How do I resist?" I asked.
"By refusing to look at things I ask you to look at," answered the master.
Huh?
I had no idea what the master was talking about.
I could think of nothing that my teacher had asked me to do that I had not done or tried hard to do and nothing he'd asked me to look at that I hadn't looked at and tried my hardest to see.
The obvious inference, I stated in my journal, was that according to the master the master sees things as they really are or believes that he does and that the master also sees what I do not or believes that he does.
"I see much that you do not, Bob," the master replied. "Especially you."
I did not doubt that the master saw me as I did not see myself and could not ever see myself. I believed this to be a truth of the human condition. I did not believe that anyone saw the self, the subjective psychophysical entity, as others saw it. I did not believe that the master saw or could see himself as person and personality either as I or as others saw him.
So where did that leave us?
Did the master see things as they really are?
This did seem to be my teacher's claim.
"If he does see things as they really are," I asked in my journal, "why is he so peevish?"
"When I'm peeved, I'm peeved," the master replied.
"Why does he complain so much?" I asked.
"When I have a complaint, I express it," the master replied.
"Why is he so frequently annoyed?" I asked.
"When I'm annoyed, I'm annoyed," the master replied.
"Why is he so often upset by what appear to be the most trivial of matters?" I asked.
"Trivial to you maybe," the master responded. "Perhaps you do not see these matters as I do."
Perhaps.
"Nothing we do is trivial to me," the master added. "Nothing."
Hmm.
"Everything is a matter of life and death."
The presumption and self-congratulation of this answer in particular bugged me. Were a person to say such a thing of another, it seemed to me, it would be not only permissible but high praise.
But there seemed something amiss in saying it of oneself.
The master certainly acted like a man who considered some things important and other things trivial. Had the master expressed his reality or only his aspiration? Why did the master so often berate and belittle others—the fundamentalist Christians, the insurance claim adjusters after his collision, his doctors, the editors of the local newspaper, students who did not or could not understand the mysteries of Zen, and still more?
"Why?" in my journal I asked.
I wondered.
"Not that I do not bitch about some people myself," I conceded. "I do."
"Then how about criticizing yourself with the same energy and repetition with which you criticize me?" the master asked.
Two mirrors.
"But of all of the people who congregated at the temple it was the master who seemed most often annoyed."
"To you, maybe," the master replied. "The person who has most of the floor is the person most revealed."
I wondered.
"Self-revelation is not a problem for me," added the master.
About this assertion, too, I had doubts.
Neither did I see myself as a man for whom self-revelation was a problem, the master's continual accusations to the contrary notwithstanding. I had never concealed anything from the master.
Why, I wondered still, was the master the person at the temple who seemed not just to me but to others the person most often annoyed? Given his own best testimony of the transformative power of zazen, how and why had this trait of his personality survived twenty-five years of daily practice?
It was a puzzle.
"Why are you so interested in me and in other people?" the master replied.
I had never considered this question.
For as long as I could remember I had loved human beings and I had always found them inexhaustibly curious, fascinating, and intriguing. I enjoyed just watching them—I had been told more times than I could count to stop staring—and talking with them and asking them questions, learning where they had been and where they were going, what they had suffered and what they believed and disbelieved, their traumas, their successes, their failures, their regrets, their hopes, their dreams, their nightmares, their agonies and their joys, in short their understanding of life—the "uncontrollable mystery writhing on the bestial floor."
Why was I so interested in the master and in other people?
I didn't know.
I'd never considered the question.
Asked, I felt like Eliezer Wiesel when Moche the Beadle asked him why he prayed.
"Why did I breathe? Why did I live?"
Why was I curious?
I did not know.
But I had always believed that my interest in others was healthy and the source of my happiness and joy in family and friends and the reason I had become a teacher and the reason I had loved teaching and the reason that after almost forty years in education I loved it still.
Why was I so interested in other people?
Ha.
Just because.
"The person you seem least interested in is yourself," the master continued.
Though I had never in my life been told this before, up until the master said it I would have considered it a compliment.
"This journal so far is all about me," the master wrote. "What about you?" the master asked. "What about how you feel about things? Most of your journal entries are just observations about events and other people. What about you?"
But I'd thought my journal full of "me."
The master cited Dogen.
"To study Buddhism is to study the self."
The injunction of Socrates.
"Dogen," the master added, "did not say that to study Buddhism is to study Kudo."
At that I had to laugh.
"Why is Kudo interested in my seeing things as they are?" I asked.
"Because that's my job," the master replied.
"Will it end my suffering—the comparatively tiny thing it is?" I asked.
"Suffering is a tiny thing?" the master asked in reply. "The truth of suffering is the first noble truth!"
But it was "my" suffering that I had called "a tiny thing," not human suffering itself.
"Kudo says practice has not ended his suffering," I had written.
"This is again your idea of what I said and not what I said," the master replied.
Oh.
"Practice has taught me the way to the end of suffering."
The way.
"Kudo says practice will not end anybody's suffering," I had written.
"This is again your idea of what I said and not what I said," the master responded.
Oh.
"Practice teaches us the way to the end of suffering."
Yes!
Getting this concession from the master had been like pulling teeth!
Sheesh.
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