On Sunday Eleanor gave the dharma talk. She described her growing up, her anxiety, her shyness, her pain, her solitude, her loneliness; her struggles with her father's illness and the burden it had created for her family and for her; her going to college and earning her degree in psychology; her determination to earn her doctorate so that she could help to support her parents, her abandonment of that plan; her yearning for fulfillment and completion; her interest in yoga, her discovery of Zen and beginning to practice; her family's disapproval of her interest in eastern religion; her meeting Nananda and then the master; her feeling compelled from within to practice with the master; and finally her decision to move into the temple to study and practice. Throughout her talk she cussed.
"Fuck."
Eleanor was not shy about expressing her feelings. She punctuated her talk with the word "fuck" or with various forms of "fuck" ten or twelve times. This profanity issued naturally in the course of her exposition and no one in her audience expressed discomfort.
"Fuck."
Eleanor also described her experience so far as a resident at the temple. She explained how submitting to the forms—sitting, bowing, chanting, ringing the bells—and working to master the forms had forced her to look at herself and to see herself as she really was.
"Fuck."
She spoke also of what she considered the two principal difficulties of being a temple resident, first, the loneliness and, second, being—or at least feeling—constantly watched.
"Fuck."
I understood exactly what she meant.
Police.
Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I'll be watching you
I'll be watching you
I'll be watching you
I'll be watching you
Following her talk and two or three questions and answers afterward, Dean and Edward and I conversed at the picnic table in the backyard. There I told them the story, an abridged version, of my most recent meeting with the master, of his demand that I admit I had been dishonest, of his own admission of pride, arrogance, and anger, and of his inference that I was stuck in emptiness.
Edward listened intently.
Silent.
He seemed absolutely rapt.
Still.
"Thank you for sharing that with me," he said. "That was really interesting to me."
I wondered why.
"Really helpful," he added.
I wondered how.
Curious, so curious, always so curious that's me—
Bob.
Edward excused himself.
As the new ino he had to train new people to be doans, shotens, and jishas—the ceremonial service positions—and others to be zazen instructors; and Edward had also to offer instruction in oryoki, the intricate ritual by which all meals are served and eaten during the largely silent religious retreats known as sesshin.
Dean stayed to discuss further what I had told him about the master and my meeting with him.
"The master has a lot of demons, more than you, more than me," he said, "and I respect that."
I waited.
"He keeps coming back, he keeps working on them, working on them."
I nodded.
"Day after day after day, year after year after year."
I nodded.
"It's hard for him, harder for him than for you or for me, I think, really, but he continues, he keeps coming back, coming back, sticking with it, just keeps coming back and working on them again and again."
"Yes," I said. "That's true."
"He never stops."
I nodded.
"Yes," I said. "That's true."
Yes.
I had not considered it all from that perspective. I had thought mainly, often solely, of myself. I remembered again what Dainin Katagiri had said in one of his books. He wrote that as a student occupied exclusively with his own suffering he had never considered the suffering of his master. The teacher suffered, too, Katagiri had eventually and sadly realized, yes, the teacher, too, suffered.
I had made the same mistake.
I had expected my teacher to be free of suffering, to be the man with the answer, and when he had not met my expectation I suffered disappointment and disillusionment and blamed my teacher for it. First I had demanded that he be extraordinary; and then when I found evidence that he was only ordinary and no better than I—ha!—it was just as I had suspected. I remembered a conversation I once had with Billy about the very same subject, the way we human beings look and look and look for a special person, a special teacher, someone extraordinary, and then when we think we just may have found such a man we search, we hunt, we investigate, we inspect, we look and look and look again for blemishes and for flaws, for evidence that he is ordinary, normal, average, nothing at all special, no better than we. I was no different from the teenage girls and housewives who fawn over the celebrity of music, television, and movies and then ache and thrill when the affair and divorce and addiction and depression and unhappiness are exposed and the contradictions and conflicts of his or her life are revealed and the superstar is found ordinary.
Lame.
We have to relearn the same lessons time and time again do we not?
I do.
"The master opened me up," Dean said. "He opened my mind."
Dean paused.
With his index finger he pointed to a spot on his forehead between his eyebrows.
Just slightly above.
There.
Then with the tip of his finger he touched it.
Ah!
"He opened my middle eye right here," Dean said.
He smiled.
I had never heard anyone, not even the master, say something so bold as this in person. In Buddhism it just was not done—in fact I had come to believe that it was taboo. For Dean, though, it was not a boast but an admission. He had said it innocently and now he continued.
"I'm so open now," he said, "so open to anything."
Dean related a story about a friend of his who had seen Hare Krishnas offering lunch to a busload of children but in order to receive the food the kids first had to sing the Mahamantra.
Hare Krishna
Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna
Hare Hare
Hare Rama
Hare Rama
Rama Rama
Hare Hare
His friend had told Dean he would never do that.
Never.
"But I would!" Dean said. "I would! No big deal."
I waited.
"Hare Krishna, Catholicism," Dean explained, "anything, whatever."
I nodded.
"Thanks to the master I'm just so open to anything now."
I listened.
Dean said that last winter he had planned to go to California and spend a month in retreat at Green Gulch, the farm associated with the San Francisco Zen Center. Dean asked Nananda, who had spent a year there, what it was like. To Dean's question, Nananda had responded with a long awkward silence, Dean said, before she finally replied. She had hated it, she told Dean. You can go too far with Buddhism, Nananda told him.
"The Zen master there, Reb Anderson," Nananda had said, "goes too far."
Dean paused.
"Can you go too far?" Dean asked me. "What does that mean?"
"I'm not sure," I said.
"How can you go too far?" he asked.
"I don't know."
Together we sat silently and considered this question. Both John and Billy had attended talks by Anderson after which he had invited the audience to come to the stage to marry him. "To marry"—that was the expression he had used. Had that been going too far? Gaskin and his wife had married another couple, and then a third, and a fourth, I remembered, arrangements he had called four-marriage, six-marriage, and eight-marriage. I had not thought of that in years and I wondered how it had all turned out. I thought I had read that Gaskin had been divorced twice and maybe three times even before the event he called his enlightenment. Had his multiple marriages also failed? I had not heard. Had Gaskin gone too far? He had also both condoned and encouraged the smoking of marijuana.
How had that worked out?
I wondered.
Had he gone too far?
Buddhism had first burned itself into my consciousness in 1963 when at a busy intersection in Saigon the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc had crossed his legs in the full lotus posture, doused himself with gasoline, and set himself on fire to protest governmental prejudice, injustice, and war.
Had he gone too far?
Bodhidharma and his eyelids, Huiko and his arm, Gutei and the boy's finger—
Had they gone too far?
The disciples of both Buddha and Christ who had renounced home, family, marriage, and children and committed themselves to nonviolence, taken vows of poverty, and become ascetics and mendicants and monks—
Had they gone too far?
Jiexian:
The master has to instill in practitioners a will that is as strong as iron and to make them take a vow that is as imperishable as a diamond…. He has them vow that they would rather have their bones broken and their sinews dry up than stop their studies before they have a lucid understanding of the great matter. That they would rather lose their bodies and relinquish their lives than stop before they penetrate the barriers.
Too far?
"I trust the master," Dean said. "I've submitted."
I waited.
"I've submitted."
Dean no longer looked into my eyes as he spoke. He had lifted his chin just slightly and cocked his head so that his eyes were fixed on the distant sky just slightly up and to his right toward two o'clock and Dean seemed now to stare off dreamily into space.
For an instant he did appear to be almost in a kind of trance.
I waited.
"Kudo is my teacher," Dean said. "He's my master."
Dean considered the word.
I waited.
"Kudo is my master!" Dean said again.
He was emphatic.
That specific word clearly was important to him. I didn't like it, not the way he used it, the way he said it. It made me slightly sick to my stomach. Dean's eyes returned to mine.
"When you weren't here for sesshin," Dean said, "I thought you had quit."
"No," I said and I began to explain. "A personal—"
Dean interrupted me.
"It doesn't matter really," he said. "People here come and go."
Dean paused.
"Daly, Mark, Ryan—"
He thought.
"That's just how it is," he said.
I nodded.
I had heard the master say the same thing.
It was true.
"Yes."
I agreed.
"In his dharma talk last Sunday in sesshin the master said that it is all about submission."
Dean paused.
I waited.
"The student has to submit."
I listened.
"Submission is key," said Dean. "You have to submit."
Hm.
I didn't feel entirely comfortable with this assertion.
"Yes, well," I stammered, "I do understand the importance of that concept but more than once I have heard the master say also that the student just has to be himself and to accept himself just as he is and to stand up for himself, too."
Dean considered.
I waited.
In fact I had heard the master say that was exactly what he thought Dean most needed to do and that the master would stand and applaud if and when Dean ever did so. But I did not tell Dean this, though I do not think now as I write that either the master or Dean would have minded. I was still uncertain about what I had been told in confidence and what not. In my four years at the temple the master had volunteered to me in private both personal knowledge and personal appraisal of more than a dozen people, maybe more, and the indefinite line between ordinary conversation about mutual acquaintances and temple friends and gossip—for which the master had once reprimanded and warned me—left me confused. This writing, my thinking, this memory, my reflection, this contemplation of people and events and their meaning to me, their meaning, period, was it gossip, merely, or was it a part of the search for and exploration of life and its meaning, its truth? I considered it practice. It was one way I stood up. Kent, too, had told me once that he thought one of the main things the master was trying so hard to teach us was to stand up for ourselves.
I said so.
"Yes, that's true, too," said Dean. "You know—"
Dean made the slightest of gestures with his left hand, the slightest of waves, and I did know exactly to what it referred. Dean meant the paradox, the other side of truth, the truth of the opposite, the everpresent complement, the eternal irony, to the yang the yin, to the yin the yang.
It was a point that the master stressed often.
Not two.
The noon sun was a bright yellow twinkling through the limbs and branches of the tall oak and today its gift to the temple and yard was a shimmering and gently rocking mottle of light and shade. The wooden boards of the picnic table felt sturdy, solid, and good beneath my elbows. I had interlocked my fingers and folded my hands in the mudra of Christian prayer I had been taught as a child by my mother. It was still one of the most comfortable and restful positions I knew for my hands. I folded them often that way. In that position, in that mudra, my hands felt at rest and at home. With my interlocking thumbs I touched my chin and rubbed its stubble of whiskers. The wide hard heavy wooden plank of the bench felt stable and solid and good under my butt. I squared up my hips and legs and knees and my bare feet on the black dirt and green grass beneath them. I stretched and arched the small of my back and rocked forward and back to vertical. Deeply I inhaled one long breath and caught it in my lungs and held it there an instant—life and health and faith—and then ever so slowly and deliberately through my slightly pursed lips I blew back out audibly into the still and cool and perfect air the breeze of breath and life I had taken from the vast vault and hemisphere of brilliant clear blue sky. How good I felt! How glad to be alive! How grateful for the dharma! When I got home I bowed in thanks as I had in the mid-70s, prone in full prostration, my legs fully extended, my arms, too, fully extended in front of me, and my fingers, and my forehead pressed to the rug on the floor of my room, my eyes closed, and I remained there, grateful, silent, following my breath out, following my breath in, out and in for I don't know how long.
Harrison—
My sweet lord
Mmm my lord
Mmm my lord
I really want to see you
Really want to be with you
Really want to see you lord
But it takes so long my lord
My sweet lord
Mmm my lord
Mmm my lord
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