152 Stymied

By the first week of April I no longer had any idea what I might write in my journal. I felt completely stymied. I just had no further interest at all in voluntarily subjecting myself to the verbal abuse of my teacher.

No.

Enough.

To continue to do so made no sense to me.

None.

At the college where I work, instructors are required to distribute to their students printed institutional forms which are forwarded directly to administrative supervisors after students have evaluated, scored, and commented upon the academic competence and classroom performance of their teachers. I was reminded of the way a colleague of mine at the college had described this process.

"Here! Take this stick and beat me."

Ha.

Why should I submit to more of this? The master's most recent replies to my journal entries, I finally wrote, had been more of the same. Then, from memory only and without the text of my journal in front of me to consult, I simply listed the master's responses that I remembered.

The first:

"I'm not interested in stories of your day."

Though in the past the master had told me exactly that—he was not interested in stories of my day—the master had not said so in reply to my most recent journal entries, and thus to my recollection of this remark the master now objected.

"I keep copies of student journal entries and my responses," the master replied.

No problem.

"This response was not in your last week's journal."

Hm.

The master's reply seemed to me—to say the least—beside the point. Did he want me to include in my journal stories of my day or not? From his previous remark I had inferred that he did not. In an effort to explain my impasse I had also restated yet another of the master's previous remarks:

"I'm not interested in your point of view."

"Nor was this response of mine in your last week's journal," the master replied.

Jesus!

I mentioned also in my journal that I had emailed Kent about the issue of verbal abuse. In reply Kent had sent me a short message about the confrontational method of Zen.

"We must reach the place where people's words, whether abusive or kind, do not sway us."

Yes.

"In my experience," Kent had added, "if the master sees that weakness then he will drive it from us."

"And what," the master inquired of me, "is your response to this?"

It did seem to me possible that by deliberately subjecting myself to verbal abuse I might eventually become immune to its power. I had been called a lot of names in my life, I had even written a poem about it and listed them in it, and I had become as a result a man hard to hurt.

Had this been the master's rationale?

To call me names, to belittle me and my beliefs, until I no longer cared? Sticks and stones may break my bones but words shall never hurt me. I'm rubber, you're glue, your names bounce off of me and stick on you. Those were rhymes my brother and I learned in childhood. But Kent had also told me that he believed the master wanted us to stand up for ourselves and talk back and indeed the master himself had once told me that that was exactly what he hoped Dean, for example, would one day do. But I had done that—more than once. In my journal now I listed other responses I remembered from my teacher:

"You've done nothing but resist."

"Stupid."

"Bullshit."

"These three also were not in your last week's journal," the master replied.

I listed another of his responses:

"Blah blah blah."

The master replied that I had taken his "blah blah blah" out of context.

How funny.

I listed two more of his taunts—

Insults:

"You don't like this, do you?"

"You don't like verbal harshness."

"This is only a small part of what I said," the master replied.

I listed another:

"You don't like conflict."

"This is also only a small part of what I said," the master stated.

Indeed.

From memory I listed two more of his sarcastic remarks:

"Your life is peachy keen!"

"How sweet!"

"There was more preceding each of these remarks that you've left out," the master responded.

I listed four more:

"Pollyanna."

"Avoidance."

"Denial."

"You're dishonest."

"None of these comments were in your last week's journal entry," replied the master.

This:

"How sad."

"This wasn't either," the master explained. "After you included your response to your son, I wrote: 'So you still won't reveal yourself to him. This is sad.'"

I concluded my list:

"Chickenshit."

"This also was not in your last week's journal," the master replied. "The word was used in a longer response to something you said."

The master had then pasted into his reply his actual remarks from the preceding week.

"Maybe you should go back and look again," the master suggested, "and think about my responses more deeply in the context of your own comments that occasioned them."

Think.

"There is a lot here, Bob," the master continued. "I have spent a great deal of time and energy writing these comments in the hope that you would read them carefully and ponder them in relation to what you had written."

Think.

"Did you?" the master asked.

I had.

"If so, what did you learn?" he asked. "If not, why not?"

Uff da!

Here I was, three years later, still thinking about them.

In my journal I had made no entries for Thursday or Friday. On Saturday I had made yet another list, this one of the things the master had told me he did not want me to write about.

Not stories of my day—

"You can write about events of the day," the master commented, "but you need to include all important events, not just the nice, pleasant ones."

What had I omitted? To what did he refer?

"You also have to edit them so you do not just write a rambling narrative."

Edit?

"You also need to include your reactions or responses to the events," the master added, "and how the events bear on your practice and also how they reveal the Buddha Way."

New instructions!

"I'm not interested in intellectual analysis."

Yet explain "how"?

Not my point of view—

"Yes," replied the master, "you spend too much time arguing and trying to convince me of the truth of your point of view. It is a waste of time to try to convince a Zen teacher of this."

Not my past—

"Yes," the master said, "that's right. In your journal entries I am interested in what is happening now, and you should be, too. The experience with the flower happened many years ago and was only a minute, brief glimpse of the ways things are. Now it is just a memory or an idea you have in the present of something that happened in the past."

Not people—

"You can write about people as long as you don't gossip," the master responded.

Not the master—

"You can write about me," the master replied. "You can also direct anything to me that you want to direct. However, I'm not interested in your analyzing my behavior and ascribing to me motives that I don't have. I'm interested in your looking deeply into what I direct you to look into."

Not peace—

Not beauty—

"You can write about peace and beauty," the master commented, "but not as abstract ideas or entities. You should also balance being at peace with not being at peace and the beauty with the ugly. Each depends on the other for existence and seeing one only is one-sided."

Not gratitude—

"You can write about feelings of gratitude," the master responded. "You can write about any feelings or—as I prefer to call them—mental states. In Buddhism we do not use the term 'feelings'. What Westerners usually refer to as feelings we call mental states. One of the five skandhas is sensations but this refers to bodily sensations such as hot, cold, contact, and so on."

Not—

Not—

Not.

On Sunday I thought maybe I had some negativity to include in my journal.

I'd been looking.

"Hey, I got mad yesterday!" I exclaimed. "Some negative states to write about!"

No.

The master objected.

"So now you're going to go over to the other side and write only about negative things?" the master asked.

Only?

"Is this what you think I want you to do?" he inquired.

No.

I wrote that I was buried in student papers that I had to read, mark, grade, and return by Tuesday—almost sixty of them. Over forty of them were ten-page essays and a couple of them were over fifteen pages long. I called my daughter-in law and cancelled my babysitting on Friday and also emailed and found substitutes for me at the temple on Sunday. I had marked papers Thursday evening, all day Friday, all day Saturday, I was still marking papers on Sunday, and I'd still be marking papers on Monday. I was mad at myself for the scheduling and procrastinating that had put me in such a fix. I didn't have time. Yes, I had been frustrated and annoyed but in reality it had been a matter so petty that I thought I could also have laughed at it and at myself if the master had demanded that.

Perhaps the inauthenticity of my journal entry had been obvious to my teacher.

No.

"This is your intellect working," the master commented. "This is not a clear understanding of how anger arises. The time was right and conditions were arranged. Then anger came up."

I'd felt my anger in my body, I said, just as Thich Nhat Hanh had written.

"Then where was it in your body?" the master asked.

I just felt it fill me up, I wrote, and I observed it.

"What organs were affected?" asked the master. "Exactly where did it begin and where did it move to?"

I had watched it lead me down to the deeper fears and anxieties below, to its connections to money, income, job, reputation, livelihood, and to my desire to maintain my good opinion of myself as a reasonable and responsible citizen and teacher, and—I added as a joke—as a husband who was an especially good and possibly quite enlightened practicing Buddhist.

The master was not amused.

"You watched it lead you down to the deeper fears and anxieties below?" asked the master.

So I said.

"This is all in your head, the functioning of the cognitive processes," the master corrected me. "This is not feeling the anger in the body, observing it, and working with it through the body."

Sheesh.

"This is not," the master declared, "Thich Nhat Hanh's process of working with anger."

He suggested I watch a videotape of Thich Nhat Hanh on working with anger.

Thank you.

No.

My own anger had not been a serious problem for me for a long long time.

I had to laugh.

Now I had gotten my job done, my anger had dissolved, and reading over my account I could see that my entry was still both a story of my day and an expression of my point of view and, if that were not enough, here I was at its end still seeing the positive side of it all.

Oh, Bob—

I used to know what to put into this journal, I told the master. I enjoyed it and I wrote a lot. Now I was at a loss. It was no fun at all. I expected criticism, mockery, and verbal abuse. My main impressions of Monday, I said, were of beauty, and all day I had made mental notes to myself to include them in my entry until I remembered the "blah blah blah" I'd gotten in reply from the master the last time I had done so.

The master's exhortations to confess fear, anger, and sadness left me blank.

Empty.

"How beautiful the fog, mist, and rain were today!" I wrote finally.

I wondered if the master would find in my exclamation evidence of denial, avoidance, and evasion and respond to it with scorn and yet another splatter of his sour sarcasm.

Oh, how sweeet!

Oh, how niiiiice!