149 Taunting

Since my talk with the master on Wednesday I had listened for the anger, the sadness, and the fear that are always present in the world. But in my journal the best I could do was to quote Katagiri, a passage I loved and used often in my classes. In his reply to my journal the master broke into the passage to comment and to point out applications to me and to the issue about which he and I were experiencing conflict.

Katagiri:

Only you can live your life.

So our practice is to be genuine, not an imitation of someone else.

Look at your life.

"Good advice!" the master exclaimed. "Look at your life, not at the lives of others. Not mine, not the lives of your students, not the lives of the people in the newspaper."

Katagiri:

In truth you can't put any kind of label on it.

Are you stupid?

No.

Are you great?

No.

Are you completely average?

No.

We think we have to supply answers to these kinds of questions, that we have to pin down who we are, but we only have to live our lives, day by day, and only you can live yours.

Added the master: "And share it with others, with me, with those in the practice group, and, especially, with your son who has bravely asked you to share it with him."

Yes.

"We share our lives with you, don't we?" the master continued.

Yes.

"And what do you do?" the master demanded.

Huh?

I could think of nothing that I was unwilling to share with my son, with the sangha, or with the master.

I had no idea what the master meant.

Share what?

I believed that I lived in hell and that the dharma and the practice helped me to help others in hell.

What more was there to say?

Hakuin:

As for sitting in meditation, that is something which must include fits of ecstatic laughter, brayings that will make you slump to the ground clutching your belly and, even after that passes and you struggle to your feet, will make you fall anew in further contortions of side-splitting mirth.

Yes!

Yes!

Yes!

"Hi!"

Before I met the master, for twenty-five years I had practiced in my own way. I had told the truth. I had lain on my back and followed my breath. I had walked and followed my breath. When I felt fear I had moved toward its origin and not from it; when I felt sad I had returned to my breath, focused on what was right in front of me, done my chores, renewed my vows, and then rededicated my life to nonviolence, honesty, openness, kindness, and service; and when I felt anger I had practiced forbearance, patience, silence, and art. The longer I practiced the shorter the time I felt fearful, sad, and angry and the more I felt I was on the right path. The deluding passions are numberless. I vow to extinguish them all.

Never down?

Absurd.

Always serene?

No.

Of course not!

But I felt good, real good—fulfilled, grateful, committed, unafraid, calm, helpful, happy—and how fondly I now recalled the question that Dean had one day asked the master.

"Why do we have to say anything?" 

"But what are you?" Katagiri had asked. "If you really study yourself, you will hear a strange sound. There's a cry. It's the sound of the world, the sound of everyone. It comes from inside you. Inside yourself you will hear the quiet cries of the world."

Yes, I heard the cry.

I had heard it since I was ten years old. It was the cry of the suffering, the dying, and the dead of industrial killing and the eternal war, the cry of those who had been oppressed, exploited, detained, enslaved, tortured, executed, shot, slaughtered, gassed, bombed, burned, and buried by the millions and tens of millions—by the hundreds of millions just in my lifetime alone—and the cry of those like me tormented by their knowledge of this horror and by their impotence and inability to arrest it.

"Inside yourself, not outside," the master wrote. "Can you hear it?"

I heard it.

"To hear this sound means you really want to know how to live," Katagiri had written.

I heard it.

"Only Avalokiteshvara hears this sound," the master commented. "Do you know her?"

I heard it.

"Beyond our likes and dislikes," Katagiri had continued, "we have to pay attention to how we actually live. Right in the middle of good and bad, right and wrong, our lives go on constantly. Whatever kind of label you put on your life, or on the lives of others—good, bad, or neutral—there is always a cry."

"Can you hear it?" the master asked.

I heard it.

"If you become happy," Katagiri wrote, "right in the middle of happiness there's a cry. If you become unhappy, there is still a cry. Even if you say, 'I don't care,' right in the middle of your not caring, there's a cry. Even when you sleep like a log, there's still a cry. Whatever you do, there's always a cry."

I heard it.

"But you don't hear it," declared the master.

A taunt.

For most of my adult life I had heard the cry. It was the reason that in college I had dumped engineering—my father's plan for me—and begun studying literature, history, and philosophy. It was the reason I had become a teacher and the reason I had remained one.

I didn't hear the cry?

"Your life is just peachy keen," the master added.

A taunt.

"When you shed tears they're tears of gratitude, right?"

A taunt.

I had cried perhaps ten times total in my entire adult life—once with friends at a tavern in Reunion in the summer of 1975 when completely out of the blue I had been suddenly overcome by emotion at the miracle I had experienced and was then still experiencing; once, maybe even twice, when Ruth had encouraged me to cry to release the torment I felt at my powerlessness to stop the killing; once when my father died and I felt I should cry; once when I learned that my dear friend and colleague Don had died from the cancer he'd fought bravely for six years; and once all morning long on the last day of the Rohatsu sesshin when the flood of wonder, joy, and gratitude for life, precious life, and for the dharma had drowned me in sobs of my own wet tears. On two other occasions at the temple my eyes had grown moist and perhaps one tear had leaked out or two—though I doubt it—as I expressed my appreciation for our practice there, and over the past ten years there had been many times when I could have cried—at sad movies, for example, and at sad papers my students had written of their sad lives—and I did not. My son, too, had suggested that my tears at Rohatsu were not tears of joy and gratitude but tears of angst and despair over the fact of death. In the past I had despaired, yes, often, many times.

Who had not?

But the simple truth—and only I was in possession of it—was that the tears in question had arisen from something else entirely, not from the fear of death and loss but from awe and the wonder and love of life.

"It's the same thing, isn't it?" my son had responded.

I had to laugh.

Yes.

Yes.

In one sense yes!

It was!

Not two.

I did not know why the master had again attributed to me the claim that my life was "peachy keen," an expression I had never in my life used nor would ever use to describe either my own life or the lives of others or life itself in general. The master had simply indulged his penchant for mockery, sarcasm, and ridicule. Did the master imagine that this invective was the "skillful means" by which he would effect my realization and wake me up?

I called it verbal abuse.

Yes.