162 Exhausted

The next day I drove the master in the pickup to Dean's farm to get a dresser for Eleanor, who would move into the temple the following week. Eleanor would spend six months, the master said, maybe a year, as a resident to decide if she should commit to full-time study to become a priest. I had first met Eleanor at Rohatsu and then again later at the two-day sesshin at the temple when I had quit for one day and then changed my mind.

"It will be a new challenge for me," the master explained, "after so many years of my living alone to share the temple residence with a beautiful woman still in her twenties."

The master told me that he had already explained to Eleanor that the intimacy of their arrangement would demand on the part of both of them a special attention to modesty.

"I'm old," the master said, "but I'm not dead!"

He'd told her that.

Eleanor had just ended her relationship with an older man, the master informed me, in order to study Buddhism and to practice Zen at the temple under the master's supervision.

This man, the master said, fully supported her decision.

"He's in his sixties," the master told me.

After a tour of Dean's farm, which I had never visited, the master and I sat at the dining room table while elsewhere in the house Dean gathered items for us to take back to the Bluffs. The master used the phone to call the Honda service department to see what mechanics had found out about his car which the master already knew needed a tail light and a muffler. Now he learned that it also needed alignment. When he hung up he rattled off a string of expletives.

"Jesus shit fuck god damn," the master said.

He grinned.

The master recited these words like a shopping list—milk bread fruit coffee cheese—in a flat even tone of mild defiance, not anger but irony, to demonstrate his indifference to what little remained of the general taboo on the use of such language and to the greater surviving taboo on its use by clergy, the idea that a priest especially should just not talk like that.

The master didn't care.

Did I?

By the end of August 2005, I had served three terms, eighteen months, as ino, the last six quarreling with the master if not in my journal or at the temple then in my head. His accusing me of dishonesty and cowardice had poisoned not only my relations with him but also the stream of my consciousness in general, both in my waking moments and in sleep, so that a low-grade but insidious unhappiness seemed to have crept into my life where it had not existed before and I looked forward to relief in September when the master had promised he would make the new temple work assignments two months delayed first by his illness and then by his sabbatical.

Irene, my junior co-ino, had also been ill and unable to assist me and she had only recently emailed to inform me—without a hint of explanation—that although now she was well she was quitting the temple. Irene added, however, that she enjoyed the midmorning service on Sundays and wondered if on occasion she might continue to attend.

I had replied yes that she was welcome.

But when I informed the master of my correspondence with Irene and of her request he directed me to inform Irene that I had been in error and that she could not return to the temple at all until she first scheduled an appointment to speak to him and explain.

"Students may not set the conditions of practice," the master said.

This I had heard before.

The master had told me the same thing when I had requested that he cease his repeated, rude, strident interruptions of me in private conference and of me and other speakers in group discussion.

Now I complied with his request and I heard no further from Irene.

Nor did the master.

One evening he stopped to discuss the matter at the bottom of the stairs as I sat on the bench to put on my shoes. I explained to him that I had invited Irene to continue to attend Sunday services because I was vaguely familiar with the special circumstances both physical and psychological that might have prevented Irene from keeping her temple commitments.

My circumlocution made the master impatient.

"Bob!" the master exclaimed.

I waited.

"She's mentally ill!"

I had not heard it put so starkly.

Whatever.

I emailed the morning and evening doans and asked them to let me know if they wished to renew their commitments and I asked two or three newer sangha members whom I thought capable to consider serving as doan on the two mornings left vacant when Irene decided to quit.

I informed the master of the results.

"Eleanor can serve as doan the two mornings in question," the master told me. "I'll have you train her as ino this fall if you're willing to be ino again and then she'll be senior ino in the spring."

"I'll do it," I said.

I don't know why.

I don't know why.

I felt utterly exhausted the instant I hung up the phone. I had already informed my wife weeks earlier that I felt I just could not serve as ino any longer and that I was eager and almost desperate for relief.

Why had I not simply said no?

I could have—

I should have!

Only a day later I emailed the master to tell him that I'd changed my mind and that I had decided to decline a temple job this term—not just the job as ino but any temple job—and that I had also decided not to participate in the fall practice period which would begin in three weeks.

"At present," I said, "I just don't have the stomach for it."

But I knew from past experience that I needed to meet with the master face to face to discuss these decisions and I suggested that he and I meet before evening zazen on Tuesday to talk about my plans and my practice.