I met with the master again at 6:30 on the evening of Tuesday, September 20.
Have I ever lied to you?
Have I ever deceived you?
Have I ever intentionally [or deliberately] misrepresented myself to you?
Am I frightened [or just plain scared] of you?
Have I ever—out of fear of you—avoided speaking with you face to face?
Am I afraid of revealing anything about myself to our sangha or any member of it?
Am I afraid of the truth?
Have you discussed me or my practice with other people in our sangha when I was not present?
To all but the last of these questions the master had over the past nine months either stated or implied that he believed the answer was yes. To all but the last of these questions I had explicitly stated that I believed the answer was no. I did not know how now to proceed. The master had tried to explain why he believed as he did and I had tried to explain why I believed as I did. Neither of us had been persuaded. I was more confused than ever. I hoped now that by a careful and deliberate examination of the issue I might at least learn more precisely both what the master thought of me and why. In spite of the sincerity of his many efforts to explain still I did not understand. By the time of our appointment on Tuesday I had decided to ask only—and for the last time—whether the master really thought I had been dishonest. The master looked unhappy and tense when he entered the room, awkward and uncomfortable. The master had a frown on his face.
His demeanor was grim.
"You always walk in here acting like we're equals!" the master exclaimed.
Yes.
It was true.
The master made it sound like the idea was wholly preposterous.
"Yes," I said.
The master remained silent.
"Aren't we?" I asked.
This question seemed to make the master uncomfortable.
He thought.
"As human beings, yes," he said, "but you're the student, I'm the teacher!"
"I know that."
The master put on his rakusu, he lit and offered a stick of incense, and he bowed, palms together, and then, unsmiling and sober, the master sat, and we bowed to each other.
The master had decided that I was incorrigible, I imagined, stuck in emptiness. At any minute, I thought, the master would terminate our relationship and ask me to leave the temple.
Hands in gassho, I inhaled deeply, I caught my breath, I exhaled.
I began.
"For the past eight months," I explained, "the only significant conflict in my life has been with you. I feel like a person whose good friend, totally out of the blue, has begun calling him a dishonest chickenshit, and who has no idea why."
"I'm not your friend," the master said. "I've never been your friend."
I waited.
"I'm your teacher."
The master summarized the familiar explanation I had heard before and I interrupted.
"I understand," I said as he continued.
"If a student considers me a friend and I have to confront him he may feel betrayed."
"I am only describing my feelings," I said. "I'm telling you how I feel."
The master nodded.
"I have not changed my mind," the master said. "You are always arguing with me."
I waited.
"I am not arrogant," he said.
I listened.
The master had leaned forward in his chair until his face was less than two feet from my own, maybe fifteen inches. It was a gesture with which I had become familiar. The master liked literally to get in my face. Tonight it was the master who had something to say.
"After our conversation two weeks ago I asked four or five people in the sangha if I were arrogant and they all said no. I really think that is your projection," the master continued. "I think it is you that is arrogant, that it is your ego that is involved, and that you are projecting it onto me."
I laughed.
"I think that is what you do," I said. "You think I am projecting and I think you are projecting. Two weeks ago you asked me to name the characteristics I found difficult to accept in my teacher and when I said that they were pride and arrogance you said I was right."
To this he objected.
"I said you were not the first to tell me that."
No.
I shook my head.
No.
"No, you said, 'That's true,'" I said.
"No," said the master.
I was stunned by this recantation and denial.
"Yes!" I insisted. "'That's true.'"
He waited.
"The first thing I did," I said, "when I got home after our talk was to write those words down!"
For a moment we were silent.
A breath.
He reconsidered.
A breath.
The master said that the people he had asked were not new members but old ones whom he trusted. I had done likewise, I said, and I suggested that everyone had perhaps told the both of us what they thought we wanted to hear. The master disagreed but his vehemence and mine were spent. Now I felt a slight sickness and sadness at our resemblance to quarreling children—did too, did not, did too, did not, did too—and at the hopelessness of our ever agreeing on a mutual formulation of the truth. I remembered the passionate arguments and debates on these very same issues—your ego or mine—when I first followed my friend John onto the path of Stephen Gaskin thirty years before. How committed we had been to the idea that with enough intelligence, determination, compassion, and will we could and would hash it all out and be able to explain—to the world and to our wives and to friends and colleagues in terms so clear that no one could help but understand—that the bodhisattva vows of nonviolence, honesty, truth, and voluntary communism made perfect sense.
Ha!
Hey, it had made sense to me!
It had been inevitable then, too, that in disagreement one would accuse another of ego. For Buddhists in conflict and locked in a seemingly hopeless and personal quarrel ego was the bottom line—for Communists individualism, for Christians sin, for Buddhists ego—and I felt weary and very sad now for what seemed the empty and platitudinous sameness of it all.
Did not!
Did too!
Did not!
Did too!
"Why can't you believe me?" the master pleaded and I want to write that the master whined.
With these five words of his question the reversal of our positions was complete. My plea had now become his! Why could I not believe him? Why could the master not believe me?
I could see no way out of this impasse.
The master insisted again for what seemed the hundredth time that I had been dishonest.
"Kudo!" I whined in turn. "I cannot agree to what I do not believe and do not feel is true."
"Ego."
He stated this like a verdict.
"Kudo!" I exclaimed. "You're not egoless in these conferences!"
"No," he said.
The master looked down.
"You get defensive," I said. "I've seen you!"
"Yes," he said nodding.
"Stop telling me what I feel."
"I'm not telling you what you feel," the master said. "I'm telling you how you act."
Ditto.
By this time, strangely, I felt totally relaxed and at ease, and so, too, now did the master, or so at least he appeared. I sat and I felt myself sit. I breathed and I followed my breath. I collected myself.
Deep, I inhaled.
I held it.
Three times with both hands I ran my fingers through my hair from front to back.
Audibly now I exhaled.
I felt good again.
I arched and stretched my back and I stretched my neck and shoulders as I sat and I thought. The two of us were silent for only a few seconds, just a minute at most, yet in my first recollection it seemed a long time. In the past two weeks I had reread my journals and my notes. I had now not the shadow of a doubt about the event that had led us to this.
"This all started," I said, "when I accused you of verbal abuse."
"There is no verbal abuse at this temple!" the master stated emphatically.
It was a declaration.
Dictat.
For emphasis the master had enunciated slowly and distinctly each word.
"There—is—no—verbal—abuse—at—this—temple!"
I was silent.
"It makes me mad!" he exclaimed.
The master sounded mad.
He was mad.
It was first time in four years that the master had ever actually, literally, shouted at me.
I waited.
"When people accuse me of verbal abuse I come down on them with both feet!"
The master paused.
"Hard!"
The master paused again and thought for an instant.
"Boots on!"
I think the master had forgotten completely the larger context of our discussion.
Not that it mattered.
I had learned long before that neither our email correspondence nor our private talks would be conducted according to the principles and procedures of academic discourse.
How did I teach intuition, insight, and wisdom?
The master had asked me that question more than once when I had dared to suggest that I taught the very same things that he did; and as means to those ends—intuition, insight, and wisdom—he had summarily dismissed both reason and personal example. Interrupting me repeatedly, raising his voice, talking me down, mocking me, calling me names, vulgarity—these were to the master not forms of verbal abuse but the teaching techniques of necessary confrontation and what he called trusting his gut. I sometimes wondered if the master would ever dare refer to them—his badgering and bullying—as "skillful means," upaya, "expedient means," though he never had. I could learn to endure them and accept them or I could seek another teacher; and I did believe that his intentions were indeed honorable and good.
Yes.
I could accept his version of things and stay or I could go.
Period.
There was no third option.
Fini.
"I think you're an honest person," the master said. "I believe you're trustworthy. But no one can be one hundred percent honest and forthright all the time," the master added.
"No," I said. "I know that."
I wanted to be.
"You can't, I can't."
I had tried to be.
"Of course not," I said.
I hadn't been.
No.
I supposed it was true that I could not be—not ever—but I had never lied to the master. I had never consciously concealed anything from him. I had never even wanted to do so. I had never deliberately withheld anything from him that I could remember. Why would I? The master, Kudo, was my teacher. I was not playing around. I was over sixty years old. I had been practicing as best I knew how for thirty years. My practice was not some silly game to me. I could honestly say that the thought of deception in my relationship with the master had never entered my mind. I had told him everything, I had volunteered, unprompted, all the facts of my life I thought might help him teach me, both good and bad, and I had tried to present to him at every moment my mind and heart as open and transparent as I could possible make them. From the master I had nothing to hide, absolutely nothing to hide. I had no secrets, none, yet for reasons I could not understand the master had inferred otherwise and exhorted me to confess emotion I did not feel to the degree he insisted that I did; and when I could not and would not confess as the master demanded the master had called me dishonest and had rebuked and berated me.
Why?
What in the hell was all of this really about?
My waking up?
To what?
How strange life seemed! Confess you were pissed off, the master had demanded, and to put an end to his demands and to please him I had said I was; and then at home and at rest I had recanted.
Tell me my flaws, the master had requested and, when I had told him he was arrogant and proud, he'd said that he was; and now, like me, he, too, had recanted. How strange life seemed!
Mirror.
Mirror.
Reading this account now, editing it, tinkering, I'm able to laugh, I do laugh, I am laughing, at us, and, should I choose to cry for us, too, I feel able, too, to cry. Who knows why?
The master sounded utterly exasperated.
"Then why are you hung up on this?" he exclaimed. "Why are you stuck on this?" the master asked. "Why can't you just accept what I say and admit that you were dishonest?" the master implored.
This was exhortation.
Entreaty.
"Kudo, I cannot say what I do not feel is true."
Silence.
We rested—and it felt not at all uncomfortable. We sat, silent, resting, breathing, gazing one at the other, bodies, posture, dress, faces, sixty-year-old fleshy faces, bulbous noses, big drooping ears, creases, wrinkles, our mouths softly closed, one lip softly pressed to the other, our pink and purple lips, our old eyes looking, gazing, seeing, meeting, locking, resting there in peace, empty, content, and moving on. How fat and old and mottled and soft and odd and funny we were.
Two cartoons.
Yes but—
How beautiful he was!
I asked the master then about my being "stuck in emptiness," the term the master had used to describe my situation the last time we had talked. The master said he meant he thought I was stuck in the essence.
I didn't know what that meant.
He explained.
The master said he thought my not letting go of the memory of what in 1975 I had called my enlightenment had something to do with it. It was an experience to which I had only alluded. I had never really discussed it with the master. With him I had not called it enlightenment—a designation I had learned from John who had learned it from Gaskin—and I had instead referred to it if and when I mentioned it at all only as "my religious experience" or as "my awakening" or—if I were confiding in a Christian friend—as my "possession."
"You have to let go of it," the master said.
"Yes."
I agreed with him.
Yes.
I had tried for thirty years.
Yes.
"I've had dozens of such experiences," the master said.
Hm.
I wondered how he knew.
In the little over four years I had known the master I had mentioned hardly more than a single detail of the most powerful experience of my life. On only three or four occasions had I alluded to it at all and even then only to parts of it and—with the single exception the epiphany of flower and sun—at my every reference to it the master had scoffed in incredulity. It didn't matter. I hadn't cared. In less than two years after my yearlong experience of heaven I had already accepted the impossibility of my ever communicating to others the reality of it.
My annus mirabilis—it might as well have been my anus.
I waited.
"It's just a memory," the master said. "Let it go."
"I try."
"Let it go."
"Yes."
"Think of it as nothing."
"Yes."
"It's nothing!"
"Yes."
I didn't disagree.
There was one other topic on his mind. The master had twice overheard me in response to a question tell someone at the temple that I had been practicing thirty years. The master thought this was misleading. No matter what I thought I had been practicing before I arrived at the temple, the master told me, it definitely was not Zen Buddhism. The master asked me half a dozen questions about what I had then called my practice and about the men I had called my teachers, Stephen Gaskin, John Ward, and Billy Boyd. The master had heard me explain many times that the simple central principle of that practice—as I understood it—was to tell the truth all the time. The master knew, too, of my commitment to nonviolence. In dharma study the master had himself once referred to what he called my "precept practice," a term I had never used myself nor ever heard. I thought the master might now ask me to repudiate my whole idea of what I had been doing for the past thirty years—what I had called my "practice"—but he did not go that far, a concession for which I was grateful. The master asked only that from now on I say that I had practiced Zen Buddhism for four years, the term of my association with him at the temple.
I didn't mind.
My previous commitment had no name.
To me it seemed the teaching of Krishna, the teaching of Buddha, of Purna, the teaching of Lao Tsu, the teaching of Socrates and of Plato, the teaching of Nigantha Nataputra, the teaching of Jesus, the teaching of the first Christian martyr Stephen, the teaching of Patanjali, the teaching of Shakespeare, the teaching of Tostoy, the teaching of Gandhi, the teaching of Martin Luther King Jr., the teaching of Suzuki, the teaching of Trungpa, the teaching of Stephen Gaskin, the teaching of my friend John—before his conversion on September 11, 2001, to the politics of George W. Bush—and the teaching of my friend and teacher Billy and of his secular teacher and mine the supreme ironic nihilist Glenn O'Malley, and the teaching of the millions of anonymous, nameless, and unknown women and men over the millennia who had renounced violence and struggled to survive, to live, and to be happy by means other than violence, threat of violence, and force. I did not and do not know any proper name of the broad and eclectic discipline which had revealed to me my reality and my "god," but I knew it by experience, and I knew that in spite of the unhappiness this conflict with the master had caused me my faith in the power or the god or the mind or the nothing that had been responsible for my own personal awakening and commitment could not and would not ever be shaken. Of that I felt certain.
"It's nothing."
"I agree."
"Let it go."
"All right."
"It's mind," the master said.
"Everything is mind," I said.
"Yes."
I told the master how much I had enjoyed his essay in the most recent issue of Flat Land. It had been about his experience in monasteries in Japan and about the opening of his third eye. I had immediately sent it to my friends Billy and John and to my youngest son Michael. Billy and Michael had liked it just as much as I had and I told the master so.
I thought it was by far the best piece of writing the master had done.
"Thank you," he said.
The master was reminded of my day of crying during Rohatsu sesshin in December and now he asked me questions about it. I had emailed Billy about it the day after it ended and since then I had not thought again of it at all. First the master wanted to know if it had scared me.
"Oh no!" I said. "Not at all."
"There was no fear in it for you?" the master asked.
"No, none."
"Would you want to experience something like it again?"
I had to think about this.
It had not been an experience I wanted to repeat. Why should I? What for? Nor had I any desire to experience again what I had experienced in 1975 and that experience had exceeded my weepy day of joy in Rohatsu by a trillionfold. Dharma gates are boundless, I recited almost daily. I vowed to enter them all.
"I don't know about all that crying," I said finally.
He thought.
"Why do you dislike crying?" asked the master.
I considered.
It was an old subject between us and I really did not want to go over it all again.
"Conditioning," I guessed.
The master did not press the matter. He and I had talked before of our two fathers and of the old saw that boys don't cry. The master claimed to be a big cryer. I had seen him shed silent tears—though not many—half a dozen times in the temple when telling stories of his relationship to the men he had called master. He had told me, too, that he cried at sad movies and even at sad literature and he had once mentioned in my journal that he had cried reading the short anecdote I had told of one of my students. Though I had cried from 4:00 in the morning till almost 11:00 on the seventh and last day of Rohatsu the master thought I still had not cried enough. He misunderstood, I believed, some things I had written about war and the Holocaust and about my father and his diabetes and his death.
"You need to cry more," the master said.
Need—ugh.
I remained silent.
"Were you here for service on Sunday?" the master asked.
"Yes."
"How was Eleanor with the dharma talk?"
"Good."
He waited for more.
"In command, knowledgeable, confident, calm, at ease."
"Tell me about her talk."
"She used various forms of the word 'fuck' about ten times," I said smiling. "I figured that was your influence."
The master blushed and laughed.
"Is that all you remember of it?" he asked in mock disgust. "Her saying fuck?"
He made a face.
I laughed.
I summarized Eleanor's talk.
"Did she handle questions well?"
"Yes."
I assured him that she had.
He was pleased.
I told the master that after Eleanor's dharma talk I'd had a good visit with Dean at the picnic table in the backyard. I explained that Dean had much appreciated the master's dharma talk on the Sunday of the most recent sesshin, a service and a talk that I had missed.
"Yes?"
"Dean said your main point was that the student must submit. That was key—submission. The student must submit to the master. He himself had submitted, Dean said, to his master."
I paused.
"The student must submit," I said. "There was no other way."
Huh—
The master screwed his rubbery face into the funniest most extreme caricature of astonishment and incomprehension I had ever seen the master make and that is saying something.
Whaa—
The master looked like he thought Dean had lost his mind or that I had or that we both had. I had thought that perhaps the master would demand of me the same kind of total submission to him that Dean had understood as the supreme requirement of practice. But the master's reaction was not at all what I expected. Instead the face he made was hilarious.
I laughed.
The master did not acknowledge it.
The master remained silent, wondering, it seemed—for a moment or two lost in thought. I could imagine. It was funny! As I wrote this account I was remembering it and laughing again. But this was my impression—not his. The master had not a word to say to me on the subject of submission. Instead he changed the subject. He mentioned that he needed a person to give the dharma talk on Sunday while he was in Milwaukee for the annual meeting of the Association of American Zen Masters. It was an inquiry. I felt good now about our talk. Over the summer I had been the only senior student at the temple who had not given a dharma talk in the master's absence.
"I'll do it," I said.
"Good."
We sat a moment in silence.
"Is there anything else?" the master inquired.
We had talked for forty minutes and the master had noticed me checking my watch. I still had the candle in the zendo to light, the stick of incense to offer at the altar, and the mats and cushions to check—and the sutra books—before I hit the rolldown on the han at 7:55. I pulled from my pants pocket the small card on which I had noted the issues I had hoped the master and I might address. At the bottom of my short list were two items I had added and forgotten. On numerous occasions the master had shared with me—just in passing—information, recent news, and sometimes even his opinion of other students.
"Do you talk with others about me and my practice?" I asked.
The question startled the master.
I waited.
Taken aback and perplexed he made a quizzical face as he thought.
"Only good things," he said tentatively. "I have told others of your strong home practice."
The master appeared concerned.
"Have you heard something?" he asked.
"No, no," I said. "I just wondered."
A breath.
"Anything else?"
This would be delicate.
I inhaled.
"There is one more wild thing I'd like to try out on you," I said.
I made a silly face—a look I hoped meant I don't know—and I shrugged my shoulders and gestured with my hands to try to indicate that what I was about to say was totally speculative and that I intended no offense.
"Go ahead."
"Do you ever apologize?" I asked.
My question amused him—thank god—and in his astonishment the master laughed and smiling made a face of mock disgust.
"You know I do," the master said. "More than once in the past I've apologized to you."
"Yes—for little things," I said. "But I wondered if you had ever apologized for your conduct in situations like the one I have just been through with you."
"If I've been wrong—yes," the master said. "With you I don't think I'm wrong."
"Thank you."
In spite of all I had been through with this teacher, my teacher, the master, I felt grateful for the directness, for the honesty, and most of all for the equanimity of this reply.
"May I say one more thing?" I asked.
"Go ahead."
"I think it would be a very positive and healing gesture if you could say to the sangha what you have said to me—that anger has been an issue for you your entire life and that although you have worked on it and believe you have made considerable improvement you also know that anger is still an issue for you and that you know you sometimes manifest excessive anger when it may be inappropriate."
"But I already have, Bob, more than once!" the master exclaimed.
I waited.
"You know that," he said. "You've heard me."
I waited.
"Have you apologized for it?"
"No."
I waited.
"I do think it might be a healing gesture for our sangha," I suggested a second time.
The master thought for a moment and then smiled awkwardly and blushed as he replied.
"No, Bob, no, that's just way too New Agey for me," he said. "I won't do that."
The master shook his head.
No.
He smiled.
No.
"Okay," I said. "It was just a thought."
He smiled.
I too.
We agreed to meet again in two weeks and palms together in gassho we bowed.
"Thank you," I said.
He smiled.
I left his room and walked downstairs.
It was 6:50.
Eleanor had turned on the porch light, the table lamp in the corner of the buddha hall, and the ceiling light in the zendo, and she had propped open the windows. I asked Eleanor about the extra chair in the zendo and she explained that the master had been using it. His knees had been bothering him again. I made a cursory check of the mats and cushions and I lit the candle and offered the incense. At five minutes to seven I hit the han.
I remembered when I got home and recorded all this how cool and light my breath felt in my nostrils as I inhaled that night and how freely and easily it seemed to sail and coast in and out of my body and how solid I sat on my cushion. The mental pain of my confusion and doubt had dissolved and evaporated. I sat for fifty minutes, then walked for ten minutes, and then I sat the twenty minutes remaining before I began the evening chant. When I left the temple at half past eight Eleanor locked the door behind me and waited until I had slipped into my sandals and had stepped off the porch and onto the front walk before she turned off the light. I was happy again. The quiet presence of life in the flowers and in the trees felt heavy and wet in the dark.
I could feel its pulse.
Ho.
"So how'd it go?" Ruth asked when I walked in the door.
I grinned.
"Kudo complained that I think we are equals," I said.
"Aye," she said, "there's the rub."
I laughed.
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