Irene met me almost as soon as I walked through the front door. She had not read my last email and assumed that as junior ino she would be managing the sesshin in my absence. She had already begun laying out mats and cushions for the 6:30 morning service which would follow our ninety minutes of zazen. I helped her tuck a sutra book under the front of each mat. I laid out on the main altars the slender green sticks of incense to be lit and offered before the service. I put the usual small wedge of charcoal briquette in the koro to be ignited later for the offerings of powdered incense. Irene had prepared the first day's assignments—doan, shoten, jisha, servers, dishwashers—so until the second day I was able to sit free of the worry I normally experienced as senior ino at sesshins and on both Saturday and Sunday I enjoyed practicing with my friends in the sangha.
In spite of all that had transpired I thought hardly at all of the conflict.
"I'm glad I came," I told the master in dokusan.
"Good."
"I don't have a question," I said. "I just wanted to let you know how I felt."
"In all my years of sesshin," the master said, "I do not remember a student who had been reluctant to participate ever saying when it was over that he wished he had not come."
I smiled.
"I want you to promise me something," the master said.
"What is it?"
"I want you to promise me," the master explained, "that at the first opportunity that presents itself you will talk with your son Michael face to face and open up to him and let him in to really know you."
I nodded.
"I loved my father," the master said.
I nodded.
"To this day I regret that as adults we never really got to know each other before he died."
"All right," I said.
"Do you promise?"
"Yes."
"Thank you," the master said—he put his palms together and bowed.
"Thank you," I said—bowing back.
I rose from my cushion, moved it to one side of my mat, put my palms together, bowed first from the waist, then knelt and pressed my forehead to the floor in the customary one full prostration which concluded dokusan, I lifted my hands, palms up, just slightly, in the symbolic gesture of lifting the Buddha, and then I stood, palms together, and I bowed one more time from the waist before I made my exit and returned to the zendo.
I sat.
At the end of the last, long, two-hour period of zazen we all assembled informally on the floor of the buddha hall—our mats and our cushions arranged in an irregular circle—to share our reflections on our experiences of the sesshin.
I was surprised to be present at all, I explained when it was my turn to speak, since only forty-eight hours earlier I had quit and had vowed not to attend but, I added, in spite of myself I'd had a good experience and I was glad that I had come.
"Kudo changed my mind," I laughed. "I don't know how."
The master said again what he had already told me—that he could not remember a student ever regretting his participation in a sesshin no matter how reluctant the student might have originally been to participate.
"Would anyone like to say anything to Bob?" the master asked.
Nikki raised her hands in gassho.
"Nikki?" asked the master.
"If Bob doesn't mind my asking," she said, "I'd like to know why he quit."
"Kudo insulted me," I said.
The master blushed.
"Thank you!" Nikki exclaimed. "That's the dirt I was looking for!"
We laughed.
"I didn't insult Bob," the master said.
I looked at the master, I made a face I hoped ironic, and I smiled.
Silence.
We all waited.
Silence.
Smiled.
Silence.
"Thank you all," the master said.
"Thank you!" we all replied.
It took only a week or two before the echo in my subconscious of the master's parting denial that he had ever insulted me began to haunt me and I again felt vaguely troubled by the issue I hoped he and I had put to rest once and for all. But this third time—or was it the fourth or fifth—it did not seem that I would have to sever my relationship with the master over our conflict and our differing perceptions of his language and tactics.
I did feel a weary resignation.
When my brother and his wife visited one afternoon and I recounted the details of my conflict with the master and my quitting and then re-enacted the private interview during which the master had warned, begged, and cried and persuaded me to return they exclaimed in unison at its conclusion.
"Manipulation!"
No.
No.
I smiled and shook my head.
No.
The master would be spending the month of June in sesshin at Laugh Out Loud and then another month and a half there in sabbatical recuperation and rest. The master hoped this might be good for his irritable bowel.
My time apart from him might heal me, too, I thought.
I hoped so.
At a meeting of the Iowa Zen Center Board of Directors in May, when we assigned jobs to be performed at the temple in the master's absence, Jane told me she was glad that I had not quit and that I had instead decided to continue.
"Oh," I joked, "I quit and rejoin six or seven times a day."
Jane smiled.
In the world of my mind it was true.
At home I found I had an email from Billy. I had sent Billy—just as I had my nephew Adam and my son Michael—two of the most contentious of my weekly journals along with the master's replies.
"How is your relationship with the master going?" Billy asked me now. "Even just standing on the sidelines I was feeling the heat—with my habitual patterns alive and well. Perhaps the only real progress for me is that when they rear their heads I do not feel so rotten about myself."
I didn't feel rotten.
No.
I seldom had.
"Maybe there is a little maitri—kindness—so I'm grateful for that," Billy added.
Good.
"One thing I liked in the master's responses to you," Billy added, "was the phrase 'that's what you think.'"
The phrase reminded him of a story about Suzuki in which someone had criticized him for teaching his students to count their breaths.
"Oh, they're not really counting their breaths," Suzuki had replied. "They just think they are."
I didn't know what this meant.
Think.
Not Adam, not Michael, and now not even Billy had even in part validated my perception of the master and by doing so validated me. I told Billy that I had attended the two-day sesshin which concluded the practice period.
"But my questions about the master continue to test me," I confessed.
I was tired.
"If he were just my friend there'd be no problem," I said, "but his being my teacher complicates it."
It was hard to explain.
"I don't know what will happen with me and the master," I wrote my friend, "other than old age, sickness, and death."
In his Sunday dharma talk near the end of May the master mentioned a monk by the name of Doshin.
"Do not be disturbed by confusion," Doshin advised disciples. "Do not be disturbed by stillness."
"Why are people disturbed by stillness?" Nikki asked.
The master explained.
Twice.
But Nikki and several others present did not understand the master's answer or felt it unsatisfactory. They asked more questions or made statements of their own and the master soon tired of their inquiry.
"Intellectual curiosity is good for building bridges," the master said, "not for understanding the self."
In my four years at the temple I had heard the master make a statement like that a dozen times.
This time the master added:
"Put a lid on it!"
Dismissed.
From The Cloud of Unknowing—
Our intense need to understand will always be a powerful stumbling block to our attempts to reach god in simple love and must always be overcome. For if we do not overcome this need to understand, it will undermine our quest. It will replace the darkness which we have pierced to reach god with clear images of something which, however good, however beautiful, however godlike, is not god.
The master left for Philadelphia and Laugh Out Loud just a few days later, and I'd have most of the summer to reflect and to sit on what had transpired between my teacher and me. For eighty days the monkeys would manage the zoo. Incredibly, in spite of my conflict with the master, my quitting, and then my unquitting, I remained senior ino, and with the help of other regulars I would be responsible for maintaining the temple and its activities for the two or three months that the master planned to be gone.
My teacher's absence I felt might do me good.
Time passed.
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