Then the master asked why I did not want to take part in the practice period.
He frowned.
"You say you don't have the stomach for it," he said.
I nodded.
"For practice period?"
"Yes."
This puzzled him and he asked me to explain.
"That doesn't sound good."
Ruth had advised me to avoid any mention of what I considered the master's pattern of verbal abuse. I had decided to try to follow her counsel. My argument with the master over the issue of verbal abuse in my journal and in emails had first escalated and then degenerated to the point that I felt I could hardly communicate with him through language at all. Perhaps this was the point—I was to just shut up, be quiet, submit, and practice. I could and I would gladly and contentedly perform my duties at the temple and interact with members of the sangha and with the master in silence; in fact I liked the idea and I hoped this was indeed the subtext the master intended and expected me, somehow, mysteriously, to intuit from his correspondence.
No problem.
Okay.
I would just be quiet.
Ha.
Avoiding the subject now was impossible.
"What is it specifically that you find hard about practice period?" the master inquired.
I remained silent for several seconds while I considered a number of possible answers. There was the demanding job of ino, which I had already mentioned; and there was my increasing ambivalence towards the devotional practices and observances, the altars and shrines, the lineage, the bowing, the chanting, the lighting of candles, the offering of incense, the wearing of vestments, all the churchy stuff; but the main thing, of course, had been what I perceived as his picking a quarrel with me in his comments on my practice period journal in the spring. I had reread them a dozen times or more over the summer and still I did not understand their purpose. I found no reason to subject myself voluntarily to that kind of verbal abuse ever again.
"The journal," I said. "The argument we had."
"Specifically?" asked the master.
"Your accusing me of dishonesty and cowardice."
The master leaned forward in his seat, towards me, our eyes locked.
He raised his voice.
"Do you remember when you told me you had been dishonest?"
Ah!
There was the familiar tone of entreaty in his voice, parental and stern, as if the master were addressing a small, forgetful child who had misbehaved and then fibbed about it.
I had heard that tone many times.
The master slid easily and often into condescension, disdain, and contempt when he was frustrated and annoyed by his students. I thought for what seemed a long time about his question, more than several seconds, perhaps a minute. I felt no anger—only futility, curiosity, and wonder at the shifting sand of language, meaning, and ego. I watched the words of T.S. Eliot coast through my head and later when I got home I looked up the passage.
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
Weary—
Weary—
I knew to what the master referred. In his comments on my journal and in our subsequent email correspondence he had repeatedly exhorted me to confess what he called my dark side—fear, anger, and sadness which I had not felt—and he had mocked my smiles and small talk of weather and literature when I walked up the stairs to his room to say hello before I opened the windows, tidied the cushions, and lit the altar before evening zazen on Tuesdays. To arrest his namecalling, bullying, and mockery I had confessed to an anger which I had not really felt, at his urging I conceded that I had been angry with him and that I had not said so, but once I was home, no longer in his presence and subject to his demands, in my journal the next day I had recanted and I had explained why.
On my part, the master had insisted, all this was dishonest.
Yes.
I could see it all from his perspective.
Yes.
I had succumbed to his bullying and badgering and I had in a sense falsely confessed.
Yes.
In this there had been—should one choose to employ such language—elements of dishonesty and cowardice.
But had I really been dishonest?
No.
I did not think so.
No.
Was I afraid of the master?
No.
Was I afraid of truth?
No.
His conduct had been confusing.
Yes.
I had been confused.
Yes.
What could I do then but recant and try to correct the record?
That I had tried to do.
Did not his version of events omit any acknowledgement of his own complicity in them? Through all of it, I thought, the master himself had seemed much more angry than I. Indeed, then, and now as I write, I felt and feel less angry than puzzled and sad. In fact the only enduring negative and dark side of my life was my disappointment and sadness that my relationship with the master, which I had felt to be so strong and good, had gone sour and that my teacher, for reasons I did not understand, seemed now determined to quarrel with me and—I had begun to believe—also determined to alienate me and to drive me away from him and from the temple. I knew for certain that in my relations with the master I had not ever been deliberately dishonest.
How strange this scene—
How odd this demanding man!
"Do you remember when you told me you had been dishonest?" the master asked again.
Again he increased the volume and intensity of his voice.
"Do you?"
This time in his query I heard also indignation, as if the master felt that the extended silence of my reflection were itself some form of dishonesty, and now the master sounded and looked annoyed—
Angry.
Yes.
I had never told the master that I had been dishonest.
Determined not to make the same mistake twice, on this occasion I would not be hurried.
Silent I sat and thought.
Hmm.
"I remember when you told me I had been dishonest," I said finally—
My emphasis on the pronouns "you" and "me."
He scowled.
"Do you remember when you told me you had been dishonest?" the master asked a third time.
The master again leaned forward in his chair and looked directly into my eyes. This time he had taken a peremptory tone. I met his gaze. Now I felt calm, good, not nervous at all. I felt my breath move lightly and coolly through my nostrils and into my lungs and lightly and easily back out through my nostrils and into space again. This good friend of mine—and, yes, I was his friend though he had warned me he was not mine—this teacher who had taught me so much and helped me, he and I had returned to the crux of what for me seemed a deep misunderstanding and disagreement. I felt a tiny ripple and wave of sadness and hurt as it rolled through my heartmind.
"I remember when you told me I had been dishonest," I repeated.
"And had you?" asked the master.
"No," I said.
"But you said, 'I'm just fine!'" the master exclaimed.
His argument I grasped instantly.
But those exact words were not mine and neither had I nor would I ever use them to describe myself in the sense that the master now intended. I felt a sad and sentimental kind of awe. I pitied us. I pitied all human beings struggling in the web and net of language and ego, of me and you, of us and them, of true and false, of right and wrong, of good and bad.
"Those weren't my words," I said.
The master frowned.
"You were having conflict with me and you didn't say so in our practice group meeting," the master said sternly.
No.
"That's dishonest."
No.
I remained silent as I considered this misrepresentation of what had actually transpired.
It was not deliberate.
I knew that.
The master was an honest man and his intention was good. There was no transcript of the text of our conversations to consult nor would it have been conclusive even had there been. We now seemed characters in the fiction of Henry James. Language had been both window and mirror and we each only darkly and dimly saw the other through our own reflection in the glass between us. Trying now to reconstruct the intimacy and the truth of this scene I feel for an instant the tiny sickening sense and shiver of its impossibility. I could not think of a thing to say. I sat silent, calm. We explored one another's faces. I enjoyed the coming in and the going out of my breath, cool, gentle, easy, soft. I felt at peace. We gazed into one another's eyes.
"That's dishonest!" the master insisted a second time.
I simply did not know how to respond to this. It didn't make me mad. I was puzzled. It seemed to me now that our relationship would indeed end after all. I felt now exactly as I had before—and that feeling was not anger but confusion, mystery, and curiosity.
How odd that it had all come down to this.
I guessed it was over.
"Impasse," I said.
"If you won't come forward my way," the master said, "I don't think I can help you."
Help?
Was it help I wanted?
No.
The teaching?
Yes.
Was it help I needed?
Hmm.
So the master thought.
Why?
I thought not.
No.
So this was it then.
"I think you're stuck in emptiness," the master said solemnly.
I laughed.
Oops.
Stuck in emptiness!
The master's use of this epithet I had not at all expected and it startled me. I did know that for a Buddhist practitioner this was bad, very very bad, perhaps the worst possible, the equivalent, I supposed, of a Christian awakening from the deep sleep of death to be informed that he was in hell. If you get stuck in emptiness, I remembered one of the ancient patriarchs had warned, not even the Buddha can save you.
"I don't think I can teach you," the master added.
Ah.
For this remark I had prepared myself—and as well for the corresponding and equivalent remark that might issue from my own heartmind and mouth. One morning on the road to work sudden hot tears had risen to my eyes and welled there until two salty drops spilled over the rim of my lower lids and crawled down my cheeks and then hung spent and pendant from my jaw as I contemplated the end of my relationship with this teacher. The master had taught me a lot and I knew I had a lot yet to learn. But I had accepted the possibility of this loss. Now, sitting there in his room, I felt not pain but a calm acceptance and—that's just me I guess—curiosity. In silence he and I looked, again, deeply, into one another's eyes, and I remember enjoying the soft red, pink, beige, and cream colors of the human flesh of his rosy and asymmetrical face, his big hard bald head, his ears, his nose, and the deep folds, creases, and wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, and the softness of his lips so softly closed now in neither smile nor frown, silent and at rest and at peace. I felt that way, too, as I watched his eyes explore mine and my face and me. I liked Kudo. He had always been honest with me, sincere. I had never doubted his good intention. I considered him a man of integrity. I could not imagine him doing or even wanting to do anything seriously wrong. I trusted him. I wanted our divorce—yes, to me that's what it felt like—to be amicable.
"You're a good man," I said.
"Thank you."
A moment of silence—
"Am I your teacher?" the master asked.
"Yes," I said. "I've learned a lot from you."
"Thank you," he said.
"I love zazen," I said and I meant it.
The master bent his head just slightly to his right and smiled at me so tenderly that I was suddenly astonished by the simplicity and grace of this gesture, and describing its sincerity and beauty just now—five days later—sent a quick unexpected squint of tears to my eyes.
"You love zazen?" the master asked softly.
"Yes."
"That's good," he said.
We sat together in silence for a moment or two—I'm tempted to call it prayer—while I collected my thoughts and gathered my resolve for what I wanted to say to the master.
"But as a teacher you possess a couple of characteristics that are very difficult for me," I said.
"What are they?" he asked.
Only a few seconds passed, but they seemed like a long time as the words of possible answers to this question rolled through my mind and I examined and considered them. It was "verbal abuse" which led the parade and I rejected it. That was only a symptom.
The problem now seemed to me broader and more fundamental than that.
Silence.
"Pride," I said, "and arrogance."
"Yes, that's true," said the master gently. "I know that."
We thought about that.
The master had replied immediately without a moment's hesitation. I felt the tug of love for him. Now he appeared to me astonishingly beautiful, inexpressibly vulnerable, and precious.
The master had more he wanted to say.
"When it arises, tell me," he said.
Silence.
"Will you?" he asked.
"Really?" I asked.
"Yes."
The master meant it.
"Ruth told me to stop pointing at that," I said. "That was her advice for me in this meeting."
The master laughed.
"She may have had something there," he said.
We thought about that.
"No, I want you to tell me," the master said, serious again.
Silence.
"Anger has been a problem for me my whole life," he continued, "but I've worked hard on that and now I feel that I've improved myself and that I'm much better with my anger than I used to be."
The master looked at me.
I wondered.
I had known him only four years. In my opinion it was not anger exactly but annoyance that seemed always to be with him like a very slight but constant and incurable fever surfacing and manifesting unpredictably and unexpectedly and often in divers ways—impatience, annoyance, peevishness, sarcasm, scorn, mockery, ridicule, disdain, contempt, superiority, pride, arrogance, vulgarity, and cursing. Were he a good friend, there would have been no problem, I thought. I would simply have accepted this minor flaw in his character and gone on with my life and our relationship. But the master was not my friend—indeed more than once he had reminded me that he was not and could not be my friend because to be so interfered with his role as my teacher—he was both more and less than my friend, and as my teacher he had made clear to me that in some ways he was special and that he expected me to honor him and to treat him as such; and that he reserved for himself certain privileges and liberties that I would not have granted to just a friend. At times he acted as if we were equals, at other times—and who knew when or why—he pulled rank. At times he seemed just an obnoxious and vulgar man way too full of himself; but when I had asked about this he had defended his conduct as the intuitive Zen pedagogy he called trusting his gut. His admission tonight, though, had changed things for me, at least temporarily. Had I known that I was going to say what I did, I would have expected denial. But both my words and his had come as a surprise.
"Why is my arrogance difficult for you?" the master inquired.
I didn't know.
"I guess it seems odd to me that a monk who has practiced and sat every day for twenty-five years would still act that way," I said.
Even as I spoke I realized and understood that I had compared and was still comparing the master to some imaginary ideal I had myself manufactured and now carried around in my head. I understood, too, that this meant that I had also constructed an ideal of myself for myself and to which in spite of myself I aspired. The master and I recognized this dynamic almost simultaneously.
"Oho!" the master hooted.
I nodded.
"So I can't just be me!" the master crowed.
"No, you need to be better than you," I conceded.
"And you better than you?" he added.
"Yes."
The master summarized for us in his own words the argument I had already understood.
I did not mind.
There was no further mention of my being stuck in emptiness nor of his being unable to teach me. The master explained again that I did not have to assume a temple job if I didn't want to; he suggested again that I take on a little job like the temple flower bouquets and arrangements or cleaning the altars and monitoring supplies in the doan closet. I had never done the latter job and for a second time I agreed to do it. The master also said that if I didn't want to I did not have to participate in the fall practice period. We agreed that I would—but with fewer and less demanding commitments than in the past. I would attend the one-day sesshin in the middle of the period but I would skip the two-day sesshin at the beginning of the period and also the seven-day sesshin which would conclude it. In place of the daily journal I would meet with the master for forty minutes before zazen to talk.
Tuesday evening every other week.
No more.
"Are we all right?" the master inquired.
"Yes," I said.
"Anything else?"
"No."
"Good."
We bowed, palms together, in gassho. We stood up from our chairs and we bowed again, palms together in gassho. Then I walked downstairs to prepare the temple for evening zazen. I unlocked the front door and flipped on the porch light. I turned on the lamp in the corner of the buddha hall, illuminating on the small table the sculpture of the ox with the ring in its nose and the small white vase holding a single, wilted, browning zinnia and a single, crisp, dead sprig of greenery cut from the shrub along the parking lot to the west. Had I time, I thought, I would cut some replacements. I walked into the dark, silent zendo and pulled the string that turned on the ceiling light that hung over the statue of Manjusri, the personification of wisdom, sitting on the wooden altar at the center of the room.
The zendo was hot.
I propped open two windows with the footlong boards that lay on the sill for that purpose. The candle on the altar was too short to burn ninety minutes so I took it to the kitchen, replaced it with a fresh candle from the doan closet, and returned it to its proper place on the altar. I checked the zabutons and brushed off any obvious lint or animal hair, and I squared them up to the wall—the master had reprimanded me the previous Tuesday about a couple of mats that had been slightly out of line—and I fluffed up the zafus and made sure their single white stripes were all centered and facing outward. I checked to be sure a sutra book was tucked under the front of each mat. I passed through the doorway of the zendo, and twice I pulled the string to the ceiling fan in the buddha hall—clicka clicka—and I brushed the dust and lint and the dog hair that Sammy had left from the master's bowing mat in front of the main altar. By then Eleanor had come downstairs for zazen and she and I talked quietly for a few minutes about her new life as a monk in training at the temple.
At 6:50 I returned to the zendo.
I lit the candle.
I bowed and offered incense to Manjusri and I bowed again when I had finished.
At 6:55 I bowed in gassho before the thick wooden han which along with its wooden mallet hung in the buddha hall near the stairs. Then with the mallet I struck the han in the rolldown which in the monastery called the monks—for us the students and lay practitioners—to the zendo. I replaced the mallet in its noose and I bowed again. Eleanor and I took our seats in the zendo and a few minutes later the doshi, Kudo, the master, arrived.
At 7:00 sharp I struck the inkin three times to announce the beginning of zazen. For fifty minutes I sat, silent, my legs crossed in the half lotus position and I followed my breath in and out, in and out, in and out, waking and returning to breath and to the present when I found myself drifting off on the thought stream of discursive reasoning or reverie. Then I got up for ten minutes of kinhin, walking meditation, in the buddha hall, before I came back into the zendo, bowed, and assumed my position on my cushion for the final twenty minutes of zazen.
Breath in, breath out.
Breath in, breath out.
Breath in, breath out.
Breath in, breath out.
At 8:20 I pulled the sutra book out from under my mat and opened it to page fifty-eight. Holding it with both hands as I had been instructed, thumb and little finger of each hand on the inside and the middle three fingers of each hand on the outside, I began reciting "Fukanzazengi," the "Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen," Eleanor and the master joining in the ten-minute recitation immediately after I had chanted the title. At the conclusion of the chant I rang the inkin—one bell—and Eleanor and I knelt at our cushions, brushed off our mats, fluffed our cushions, turned and stood, bowed in gassho, and waited until the master had done the same. When the master had bowed at the altar, in gassho, and then had bowed again at the second bell when we all bowed, in shashu, he left the zendo, and as soon as he had stepped through the door I hit the third bell. Eleanor and I bowed in shashu one final time. I stood at attention and waited as she left the zendo.
I waved at the candle—
Out.
I lowered but did not close completely the two windows, and I turned out the light. In the buddha hall I folded my rakusu and tucked it back into its soft cloth envelope. I said goodnight and bowed, palms together, first to Eleanor, who was just starting up the stairs to her room, and then to the master, who was in the kitchen, as usual after evening zazen, pouring dry dog cereal into the big, hollow white plastic bowl for Sammy.
How it clattered!
"Good night, Kudo!" I called.
"Good night, Bob," he said. "Take care."
I switched off the lamp in the corner. I turned off the porch light. I closed and locked the front door. I pushed the storm door shut and turned its handle to secure the latch. I slipped on my sandals and stepped off the porch into the night. I stepped off the curb into the street. I unlocked my car and climbed in. I fastened my seatbelt, started the engine, and drove home. I felt the deep, wide, lukewarm sea of sadness within me as I wrote this account and—with inadequate words—tried to reconstruct the ordinary events of that late afternoon and evening. I wondered then, and I wondered still as I tinkered with my text, if I would remain the master's student or soon learn that he felt he had to sever our relationship or that I had to do so—a second time—and leave the temple and my teacher. I was reminded of the poem by Arnold I had often taught in my classes. I felt this way:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
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