161 Karen

As a vocal nonchristian for four decades I, too, had been the object of unwanted attention from Christians, but it didn't really bother me, and in fact often I even enjoyed wrestling with them over interpretation of the gospel of Jesus, whose absolute pacifism, honesty, irony, wit, and commitment to empathy, understanding, compassion, forgiveness, mercy, and kindness seemed to me identical to the teaching of Buddha. Indeed I had explained till I was blue in the face that there were many ways to interpret Jesus' "I am the way" and "only through me" in addition to the exclusivity demanded by those I considered intolerant Christians—all to no avail. Yet my antagonists were not the irritant to me that they were to the master. My response was to follow my curiosity and ask questions.

"What did Jesus mean when he said, 'Let the dead bury the dead'?"

"What did Jesus mean when he said, 'Why do you call me good? There is none good but god.'"

"Can a person in heaven be happy if she knows that her mother or daughter is in hell to be tortured for all eternity?"

Or more crudely for my students who knew little about their own infallible holy book:

"Now how many animals did Noah get on his boat?"

"Who did Cain marry?"

It was elementary, kid stuff really, the last question cribbed from Inherit the Wind, but it took only two or three such questions, and the few additional questions evoked by student replies, to unearth the innocence and ignorance just below the surface of shallow certainty, to inspire in them doubt and then curiosity, to confuse them, and then to engage them in relatively reasonable discussion. In response to their claims about the perfection of Jesus, the last judgment, salvation, heaven, and the blessings of capitalism and the accumulation of wealth, I invited my students to explicate one of my favorite incidents in the life and teaching of Jesus.

And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running who kneeled to him and asked him, "Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" And Jesus said unto him, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God. Thou knowest the commandments. Do not commit adultery. Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Defraud not. Honor thy father and mother." And the man answered and said unto him, "Master, all these have I observed from my youth." Then Jesus beholding him loved him and said unto him, "One thing thou lackest. Go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give the proceeds to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, take up the cross, and follow me." And the man was sad at that saying and went away grieved for he had great possessions.

Likewise the opponents of welfare I invited to explicate Matthew 25: 31-46 in which Jesus threatens with everlasting fire all who fail to aid even one of the needy. But the master could be doctrinaire and dismissive of the slow and deliberate intellectual improvisation and exploration which I understood as reason and he seemed therefore always quickly impatient with and even contemptuous of the kind of Socratic dialogue without which I felt I would have learned almost nothing, would know almost nothing, and could teach almost nothing. This was not, as the master insisted, the sterile and finite antonym of intuition, but both reason and intuition.

Not two!

In my classes normally it did not take very long before my students asked me questions.

"Do you believe in a god?"

"Define god."

"What do you believe in?"

"This."

"What's this?"

"This!"

"What do you think is the peak experience of life?"

"This!"

The following day I met a friend of the sangha to do a small academic favor for her and afterwards we talked. Karen was apologetic about her increasingly infrequent appearance at the temple and she felt obliged to try to explain to me why she had been attending instead the ecumenical Unity Church.

"I just need more of the warm fuzzy stuff than Kudo offers at the temple," Karen told me, "more touches, more hugs, more tender human contact, more happiness, and more joy."

I nodded.

"At Unity everyone hugs when we enter."

I smiled.

"I know that not everyone needs this kind of thing," Karen said, "but I do."

I nodded.

"I don't know why," she said. "I just do."

I smiled.

Karen was not the first person who had told me such things; indeed I had felt some of this lack myself in the first year of my practice there. Ryan, too, had been troubled by what seemed to be the absence of joy and more than once he and I had spoken in private about it. But over time my reservations had faded. There were many opportunities in my life at home among friends and family and at school with students and colleagues for the kind of happiness, joy, and love that sometimes seemed absent and even alien at the temple where in practice we deliberately averted our eyes and kept silent.

"I hugged the master once," I said.

"No!"

Karen was incredulous.

"Yes," I said, "when he got out of the hospital."

"Really?"

"I told him I loved him," I said.

"No!"

"Yes."

"What did he do?"

"He hugged me back—hard. We embraced and he thanked me."

Karen grinned, astonished.

I laughed.

"I hugged Edward once, too, during sesshin," I said.

"No!"

"Yes."

"What did Edward do?"

"He laughed! It shocked him and then he hugged me back."

Karen laughed.

"I do love the master," Karen said, "I really do, and I've learned a lot over there, but something about him just rubs me wrong—his arrogance—and his profane and vulgar language really bothers me deeply, his cursing, and one time at dharma study he talked at length of his drug use, he glorified his drug use really, yes, glorified it, and that really bothered me."

Karen paused.

"I didn't like that and I thought it was wrong."

I thought.

"Yes, the master is honest about using drugs in the past," I said, "but he hasn't used illicit drugs in twenty-five years."

Karen looked skeptical.

"Really!" I insisted.

Karen thought.

"Everyone makes mistakes," Karen conceded, "but in dharma study it wasn't his admission of his past use of drugs that bothered me, it was his glorification of it, and he did glorify it!"

I was silent.

"Yes, he did!" Karen said once more.

I had to consider carefully Karen's use of the words "glorify" and "glorification." I could remember many occasions when the master had related at some length his smoking pot and dropping acid.

"I dropped acid maybe thirty or forty times," the master had told me and others more than once, "but I learned only from the first three or four times or maybe half a dozen. The rest I did out of boredom or self-indulgence."

Glorification?

No.

I thought not.

No.

My good friend Billy felt as the master did. He had told me more than once that acid had been an important experience for him. It taught him, Billy said, that the key to truth and happiness lay in mind. I had done acid a dozen times myself, maybe more, but I couldn't say as Billy and the master did that I had learned from the experience. Acid was too powerful for me and I had always fought its effects and wrestled its power in order to maintain my control. Under its influence I always felt taut, "wired"—that was the expression we had used. Pot I loved—but it was an escape for me. It softened the sharp hard edge of reality and dissolved any sense of urgency in my duties and responsibilities. If I got high, all my annoying chores and onerous obligations evaporated. But in retrospect both pot and acid seemed digressions I thought I'd try to avoid if I could do my life all over again—and alcohol, too. At twenty-five and thirty I had enjoyed the heavy mellow introspection and self-absoption that came of getting stoned, being stoned, but gradually, eventually, it made me only foggy, sleepy, groggy, the high became a low, unpleasant, and my use of marijuana dwindled. Then when I learned from my students and their essays of the mess it and other forms of intoxication had made of their lives and the lives of their friends, lovers, and families I had given it up altogether so that I might conduct an open forum on the subject in my classes without my own lies of omission. Eventually my repudiation of illicit drugs was complete. For me they had been and were a mistake and now without exception I preferred lucidity.

"I haven't talked to the master about any of this," Karen said, "and I know I should do that."

On the issue of drugs I could think of nothing more to say to Karen. We stood together, silent, on the walk. Karen waited for me to reply but I allowed her characterization of the master and her admission to be our last words on the subject. It was a beautiful day in mid-August and though the temperature was in the 80s an occasional gentle puff of cool breeze held a hint of fall. I am sure my awkward silence communicated the ambivalence I felt.

"Do you attend another church?" Karen asked finally.

"No."

"The temple is enough for you?"

"Yes."