On Thursday I had my interview with the master. I had been a little nervous about it, I confessed in my journal, because the master had been so contrary for the past several weeks.
The master broke into the middle of my sentence to object.
"Don't pass off my insisting that you look into yourself as my being contrary," the master remarked.
I found it both annoying and amusing that the master believed I resisted looking into myself.
"My being contrary has nothing to do with it," the master added. "This is not about me."
I wondered.
"It's about you," he declared.
Ah.
The meeting I thought had gone well.
I had asked the questions that had come up for me and for the most part I had been reassured and encouraged by the master's answers. I had been trying to follow his instruction.
"I've been accused of verbal abuse my entire life," the master told me, "and I am sick and tired of it!"
It seemed strange to me—and also to Ryan and to Daly when I told them later the master had said this—that an accusation so often and for so long repeated by so many people would not eventually appear credible.
I said so.
But the master offered evidence to the contrary.
I listened.
"Does Dean think I'm abusive?" asked the master.
"No."
I had to admit that Dean did not.
"Does Nikki think I'm abusive?"
"No."
Nor did Charles and several others I asked about it.
Yet I had witnessed what I had been certain was verbal and psychological abuse of them.
Now I was no longer sure.
I knew not.
But I did have several questions remaining—perhaps to be asked at another time.
The master had seemed open, honest, friendly, and kind. He had presented himself as just an ordinary human being, nothing special, who wanted to help me. Never in my association with him had the master ever affected inscrutability nor had the master ever suggested that he was an enlightened being. Face to face with the master our differences seemed much less distinct than they had appeared to me in our email correspondence.
No.
The master thought otherwise.
One part of our conversation seemed to me worth recording. It concerned the master's insistence in our correspondence that I was less than forthright about my experience of negative states, fear, anger, sadness. The master said that I should have mentioned in our first practice group meeting that I was having difficulties with my teacher.
"In my responses to your journal entries I've been poking you, poking you, poking you," the master confessed.
Poking me?
"Admit it!" the master demanded. "It pissed you off!"
Ah.
The master's admission that he had been deliberately provocative confirmed my suspicions. My belief that the master's provocations had all along been intentional had tempered my responses to them. He had been trying to provoke me, I had suspected, for some pedagogical Zen end and Zen purpose, I had assumed, and lost in conjecture and surmise I had wondered just what it might be and how by such a tactic it might be achieved.
I had given the master the benefit of the doubt.
I had felt confusion and curiosity and frustration and annoyance more than anger.
In our meeting I had told him so.
But no—
The master was adamant that I had been "pissed off."
"Admit it!" he insisted. "Admit it!"
Jesus!
"Admit it!" the master demanded.
Such an admission from me seemed strangely important to the master, peculiar indeed, and the master's insistence had become tiresome. Ultimately the distinction between what the master called "pissed off" and what I called "confused" and "annoyed" seemed to me of little or no consequence.
I wanted my teacher to be right.
I did.
"Yes, okay," I had said, finally, in our meeting, "I was pissed off."
I wanted to validate him and by extension to validate me and my practice so I conceded the point and agreed.
Later I said so in my journal.
"Baloney!" the master replied. "If you agreed for this reason it's a chickenshit response."
Chickenshit.
"Yes, you were!" the master insisted again in my journal. "If you can't acknowledge this then you're being dishonest."
Dishonest.
The master wrote at some length about what he believed I experienced and felt.
"You have been experiencing many conflicts with the teacher," the master said, "and yet in the practice group meeting nothing about it came up. You just rambled about your past."
Hmm.
"David, Jane, Edward, Kent, and most of the others brought up honestly what they had been experiencing and struggling with during practice period."
Yes.
"You did not," wrote the master.
Hmm.
No.
No, that was not so, not really.
The truth—as I experienced it—was that I had tried to offer in the meeting an acknowledgment of the vexation my teacher repeatedly insisted that I confess. Baffled, confused, I had been feeling my way. I had begun by mentioning my past transgressions in my first marriage and ended by mentioning my teacher's ridicule of my principles and ideals.
No one at the meeting had prompted me to do so.
I required no prompt.
So what was the failure for which the master now so bitterly castigated me?
For my not mentioning quickly enough at our meeting his denigration of my principles?
It was my delay that had earned me such contempt from my teacher?
"Chickenshit"—
"Dishonest"—
This because I had been in the opinion of the master too slow to express what the master expected?
This kind of verbal abuse by the master confused me. Trying hard to offer the master what he demanded I had wandered in the dark and done my best. Now my teacher again implied that I had been dishonest.
Or that at best I had been honest but had taken so long that my honesty had been dishonest?
In their entirety my remarks at our practice group meeting had taken me less than five minutes.
To me all this just did not add up.
Did not.
In the course of our conversation anger had seemed one possible inference.
But by morning again I had doubts.
Away from the rude interruptions of the master, his badgering and his bullying, his strident exhortations and demands, his red and yellow face no longer just a foot or less from my own, I felt collected and calm, able again to reflect upon my experience, and free to say what I thought.
I had not been angry.
Rather I had been confused by the master's behavior and curious about its origin.
Why did the master act this way?
Yes, I had recognized that—as the master put it—he had been "poking" me. I had even told him so—in my story of the teacher who tweaked the nose of his disciple—and the master had denied it. I understood neither why he had poked me nor why he had denied it.
It puzzled me, it made me curious, it inspired doubt.
Why did the master behave so peevishly?
I wondered.
I wondered and in my journal I said so.
Who, really now, was the angry person in this dialogue?
Me?
No.
The master.
"What about you?" the master inquired. "This is about you, not me."
"What is the purpose of his disagreeing with me so rudely?" I had asked in my entry.
I wondered.
"Rather than constantly criticizing me," the master responded, "how about looking at what I am pointing out that you need to look at?"
Hadn't I?
"No, you haven't!"
I had.
"So far," the master added, "you've done nothing but resist and try to turn it into criticism of my behavior."
Were my rising doubts about my teacher a manifestation of the anger that the master insisted I felt and denied? Or were my doubts and curiosity about him a predictable and normal reaction to the anger that the master himself expressed towards me?
The latter I was certain.
But why was the master mad at me?
Why?
What had I done?
I was well aware, I said in our email correspondence, that the master had for whatever reason determined to be contrary. To this characterization of his odd behavior the master objected.
"This is not contrariness," he responded.
No?
"Calling it so is only your idea of what I am doing."
Oh?
Yet the master had been "poking" me.
He said so.
Why?
I had never claimed that I had transcended anger, fear, or sadness. Any such claim by anyone was preposterous, indeed that was the whole point of the ancient anecdote I had cited, yet my Zen master nevertheless imputed to me such a claim and then acted to prove me wrong.
Why?
It seemed to the master and to Nikki that I was denying or resisting or avoiding negative states of fear, anger, and sadness; so the master had decided to prod me in order to get me "unstuck," I guessed, or to see if by such provocation he could evoke in me some negative state, tweak my nose, basically get my goat, and then—quod erat demonstrandum—tell me so.
Yes.
It seemed obvious.
But the master insisted this was not the case.
No.
But what then was the case?
Hmm.
I recalled a greeting familiar to everyone who lived where I'd grown up in Iowa.
"What do you know for sure?"
"Nothin."
"How's it goin?"
"I can't complain."
Home.
This reminded me of a saying by Stephen Gaskin.
"People think they're complaining because they're in hell but really they're in hell because they're complaining."
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