148 Sneering

On April Fools' Day the master returned my previous week's journal with his questions and comments. Despite his nagging, the purpose of which I did not understand, I appreciated his patience, his perseverance, and his commitment. I knew very well the time and labor involved in reading carefully and responding thoughtfully to student writing. Then I sent my journal and his comments to my youngest son Michael, who emailed me in turn a statement of his agreement with the master, and that I forwarded to the master.

But now I did not know what to write in my journal. The master had said he wasn't interested in stories of my day—his original assignment and the staple of my journal—and neither was he interested, he said, in my point of view. The master wanted to know what had come up for me—unless of course it was what he considered criticism of him, or too much thinking, or avoidance, or denial, or resistance, or blah blah blah, or fatuous pollyanna bullshit.

Just writing this made me laugh.

"Why am I laughing?" I asked myself. "This is serious!"

Later that day I babysat Katy, age three and a half. We took two long walks, one to downtown Benson, and as I wrote about it in my journal I was still filled with the joy of it.

Her happiness and joy were contagious.

"Hi!"

To everybody she saw, Katy shouted, "Hi!"

"Hi!"

"It's a good day for a walk!" she called to Ruth who was cleaning the flower beds as we left.

Then had come a long series of random meetings and greetings.

"Hi!"

"I love saying hi to strangers!" Katy explained to me.

The innocence of this remark stopped my mind—to use one of my old friend Billy's favorite expressions. Katy was so happy. She loved life and people so much that she inspired me.

"Hi!"

Then that afternoon Ruth and I drove up to DeSoto and rode our bikes around the wildlife refuge for the first time that year. It was almost too cold in the wind and Ruth bundled up with long johns under her pants, two shirts and a hoody, a scarf and gloves. We rode our usual route of twelve miles and saw several dozen deer, several dozen wild turkeys, a circling vulture, and not twenty feet from us two calm, still geese in superslow motion afloat on the water and dark mirror of a still, calm pond astonishingly beautiful, perfect.

Oh!

Oo!

Ah!

On Saturday the master responded to what my son had said.

"Bright kid you've got there and brave to be able to talk to his father this way!" the master wrote. "How about opening up to him a little more?"

I didn't know what this meant.

"I think he'd like it."

I had no objection.

"My question is—" the master added. "Can you?"

The master continued.

"You have not revealed yourself to either him or me, not in the way Ruth has revealed herself to him or I have revealed myself to you. He said that he doesn't know you."

I wondered.

"What is your response to that?" the master asked.

The master had punctuated his concluding question by holding down the keys first for the exclamation point and then for the question mark.

Thus:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!????????????????

I wrote my son.

I didn't agonize as I once did, I explained, over kids, jobs, and marriage, and I had outgrown my desire for pot and beer. I had mellowed, I said, and I attributed the change in me to age, practice, and luck. I promised my son that I'd tell him if and when the agony returned.

"I love you," I told him. "I love you."

The master I sent a copy.

"So you still won't reveal yourself to him," the master replied. "This is sad."

Huh?

I had no idea what the master meant.

Enigma.

"Hi!"

"Hi!"

"Hi!"

The usual horrors had been related in the morning's human carnage report and I had mentioned them in my journal—the execution of innocents by death squads in Argentina, meth addicts murdered by meth addicts, a baby molested, tortured, and killed—but I mentioned also that according to the local paper after forty years of exile the monk Thich Nhat Hanh had visited Vietnam to try to reduce suspicion, hate, and violence with the peace and forgiveness of engaged Buddhism.

For his reply to me—typically, I now believed—the master chose ridicule and sarcasm.

"Of course, you would glom onto this," the master sneered. "How sweet!"

His mockery was a teaching technique, I was supposed to believe, intended to wake me up.

Hm.

A stretch.

The rest of my life remained both orderly and calm. The criticism by my teacher did not affect me in the performance of my duties and responsibilities as ino at the temple nor in my interaction there with temple associates and friends nor even in my relations with the master in the ordinary communication and cooperation required simply as a practical matter in the maintenance of the temple and in the regular schedule of activities and events. We were both focused and busy and in passing courteous and polite. I felt neither bothered nor preoccupied by our conflict as I photocopied documents in the office or cleaned the altars or arranged bouquets or cleaned the bathrooms—nor did our conflict interfere with my training of doans, shotens, and jishas. Neither at the temple nor at home did I dwell on my thoughts of the matter when I sat. In meditation my mind functioned as always, my thoughts on a wide variety of topics both banal and profound arising, sometimes lingering, briefly, then evaporating and passing away entirely. All dharmas were empty, I had learned and, I thought, learned well, and no matter what came up I understood it as an opportunity to practice.

"Hi!"

Nonviolence, silence, forbearance, patience, honesty, empathy, understanding—this list and even longer versions of it had been my mantra for almost thirty years, my vow, my prayer, my creed, the names and masks of my god.

"Hi!"

Plus—

Do the chores.

"Hi!"

For only the second time in this practice period I missed a sitting. The first had been my twenty-minute evening sitting on my birthday when I got back late from the party at my mother's home in Emerson and now after an eleven-mile bike ride in the wind I was just too tired to sit and went straight to bed.

My first miss had not bothered me at all.

My second did.

But I never missed two days in a row and the next morning I sat when Ruth left at 10:00 for the calligraphy workshop at the temple and I was all alone. To conclude my morning sitting I chanted the Heart Sutra. When I got to this line—"All buddhas of past, present, and future rely on prajna paramita and thereby attain unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment"—a big bubble of light and joy rose up in me and made me giggle and when I tried to suppress it and to continue the chant an even greater bubble of light and joy rose up in me and made me laugh out loud for several seconds. I had to stop chanting until my laughter subsided and I could go on. I had no idea why this laughter had happened or what it meant. Only two or three times in four years had I even smiled while sitting zazen at home and never had I cried at home as I had several times at the temple.

Whatever it was it felt really really good.

Then in the afternoon at 2:00 I sat again for twenty minutes and recited the Repentance, the Refuges, and the Vows. No joy, no laughter, this time, just the usual thought of this and of that arising and passing and drifting away.

How good it had felt to laugh!