The very next evening was Ryaku Fusatsu, the precept ceremony, held at the Heartmind Temple always on the Wednesday night nearest the full moon of every month, and I was scheduled as I had been now for almost a year to serve as doan for the ceremony. As had become my custom I arrived at 6:00 almost an hour early to help set up the buddha hall—the wooden chair from the kitchen for the master and the two small tables, one for the master, who would confer the precepts, and one for the purification rite that began the ceremony. I boiled water in the tea kettle on the stove in the kitchen and with two spoonfuls of sugar I prepared the simple syrup for the cup of sweet water later to be offered steaming by the shoten to the buddha at the altar. I arranged the koros, the flower, the candle, the wooden bowl of wisdom water, and in the two koros on the altars I put the charcoal briquettes to be lit for the powdered incense offerings, and also on the altars I laid the green sticks of incense. I placed the script for the doshi, the master, on the small table in front of his chair. The master had asked me when I arrived to show Eleanor, who was learning the ceremony, how to set up the temple for Ryaku Fusatsu, and she followed me around and assisted me, asking questions of protocol about this matter and that. As I studied the flower, the candle, the bowl, the koro, the script, and the master's wooden clappers and tinkered with their placement to be sure all were properly aligned Eleanor silently watched.
"Just how anal must this arrangement be?" she asked.
"Ultimately anal," I said.
Eleanor took a long careful look at the arrangement of the ritual objects on the small wooden table—a slightly wobbly TV tray—and then together we laid out the mats and cushions and sutra books for the ceremony to be held after thirty-five minutes of zazen and five minutes of kinhin. By this time Edward, the senior ino, had arrived and at his request Eleanor agreed to be shoten for the evening. Edward continued the instruction in setting up the buddha hall and in all of the duties and procedures for which as shoten Eleanor would be responsible. This freed me to arrange my mat, cushion, keisu, and inkin at the doan seat and the lamp and my script at the lectern.
Now I took a good close look at the knob of the wooden baton.
Hmm.
Since the last time I had served as doan—at the precept ceremony exactly one month before—and used the baton it had suffered yet another chipping, perhaps even two, and now a quarter of its smooth rounded knob looked freshly broken, raw, its perimeter as uneven and jagged as three teeth of a rip saw.
Zen.
I laid the baton carefully in its proper place beside the doan mat and just behind the keisu. I checked my watch. It was 6:50. I entered the zendo, I bowed, and I turned on the ceiling light. I quickly checked the mats and cushions along the walls. I cracked open the southwest window an inch, I lit the candle on the altar and, bowing before and after, I offered one green stick of incense to Manjusri. In the buddha hall an unusually big crowd, eight plus the master, had gathered for Ryaku Fusatsu. At 6:55, I bowed before the han, the thick, solid block of wood, a kind of anvil, hanging by two ropes from the balusters of the staircase, and with the wooden mallet I had slipped from its lasso I hammered the rolldown to call monks and practitioners to the zendo for evening zazen.
For thirty-five minutes we sat.
Silence.
Then I rang the inkin twice to announce kinhin and for five minutes in single file we took baby steps slowly around the altar in the zendo while the shoten lit the candles and the koros in the buddha hall in preparation for the precept ceremony. When Eleanor hit the big bell on the wall, I rang the inkin and we returned to our mats. As we stood in front of our mats in shashu, I rang again, and we bowed in shashu, and again I rang, and again we bowed, and then we lined up in single file to offer incense in the buddha hall. Doan, I would be last in line, and as others moved forward I closed the windows of the zendo, extinguished the candle, and turned off the light over Manjusri. At 6:45 we began exiting the zendo. As we shuffled slowly forward Eleanor struck the big bell on the wall regularly about every ten seconds. Each of us knelt in turn at the wobbly table near the window, the master the last to do so, and offered two pinches of powdered incense in a symbolic purification, holding the cuffs of our shirts and the corners of our rakusus, if we wore one, over the rising smoke, and at 7:00, in one of the longest and most elaborate of the Soto Zen Buddhist ceremonies at the temple, the master, the doshi, the priest and preceptor, conferred upon us the ten prohibitory precepts—against killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, intoxication, slander, vanity, anger, and blasphemy, all of them broadly defined—and the three pure precepts:
Do no harm.
Do good.
Serve all beings.
The master had had a very hard year. In the spring he had been hospitalized with acute diverticulitis. Though the master had remained in the hospital for only one day, the night I saw him there he had looked sick enough that I thought he might die. In addition to his chronic indigestion and colitis the master had been bothered for years by his increasingly sore knees and legs. He had recently injured his right hamstring and in the zendo he now frequently sat on a chair instead of on his cushion and in services he had stopped doing full prostrations and had begun doing standing bows only. On top of all that one day in September, Alison told me, the master had stumbled and fallen near the bottom of the stair and had hit hard. Alison said the master had simply sat on the floor in silent pain for several minutes before he had been able slowly to get up. The fall had aggravated his already sore and unreliable legs. Then, only two weeks later, sixty-four years old, wearing a brace on his right leg to support his knee and thus unable to lift one foot to its normal walking height, on a walk in the woods with Eleanor and their two dogs the master had tripped on a hard root covered with leaves and hidden from view and had fallen face first to the ground where a small, strong, sharp twig had impaled his upper lip; and the beaten path had loosened slightly several of his teeth and badly bruised his mouth and jaw. There had been a lot of blood, the master later told the sangha, and he had lain there, stunned, for several minutes, holding his injured, bleeding mouth in his hands, almost afraid to learn how much physical damage he had done to his face. Ten days later his upper lip and jaw were still swollen and discolored yellow, purple, blue, and black. Ow! Then on a Friday in October just a day before a scheduled one-day sesshin the master and Eleanor were in a car wreck. Eleanor had not been seriously hurt but the master had broken his wrist and suffered severe bruises and a tear to his rib cage. If the master moved just slightly wrong, or laughed, or coughed, a knot of muscle and tissue popped out from between two ribs and protruded in a small ball like a hernia just beneath the skin at the side of his chest. The master couldn't sit, couldn't bow, couldn't conduct service. The sesshin on Saturday had to be cancelled, and also the dharma study group which would have met at ten that morning, and the practice group meeting scheduled for Sunday. The master and Eleanor were at the hospital until 1:30 in the morning. Dean stayed at the temple for the weekend, Friday through Sunday, to assist Eleanor in renting a car and handling necessary affairs. After zazen and service on Sunday people were invited to visit the master briefly in his room upstairs. I went up with Alison after everybody else had gone.
The master sat quietly, resting, in his recliner.
Near him I sat on the floor.
Alison, too.
His face was rosy, soft, and old, his demeanor mellow, kind, and philosophical. Though bald and clean-shaven, in his sardonic joviality he reminded me of Santa Claus. Alison and I expressed our concern and inquired about his injuries and his health. It was the tear and bruising of tissue connecting his ribs that were the most painful. The master was clearly pleased to see us.
He had been beat up bad.
He smiled.
He smiled wanly.
"I'll be okay," he said.
Hope.
Later downstairs in the kitchen I talked briefly with Alison and Dean at the kitchen table. Alison said she had been feeling she should quit the practice period. With two teenage children at home and the new baby she just did not have the time to attend temple events or even to sit at home and she was frustrated with the master. She had abandoned her journal—his comments, like his on mine, had seemed unnecessarily contentious and occasionally even abusive—and instead, like me, she had been meeting with the master once a week in dokusan. But this, too, Alison found frustrating, and her frustration had in turn frustrated the master.
"Why can't you just believe and accept what I tell you?" the master had implored.
"Not when I know you're wrong!" Alison had exclaimed.
It sounded as if Alison's experience with the master and the journal had been similar if not identical to my own. Alison and I continued to exchange stories of our teacher's comments and questions and anger and emotions and of our own as Dean just sat and listened.
Then we were spent.
Silent.
"You two are good to stick with it," Dean remarked.
Alison and I looked at each other.
We thought.
We smiled.
Zen.
By Halloween the master was well enough to supervise the raking and bagging of leaves on the temple grounds. Ten of us raked and bagged for two hours. We filled eighty bags. I should have excused myself from the chore. The leaves, pollen, and dust had ignited my hayfever and allergies and I had been sick with it—sneezing, sniffling, coughing, and itching—all day long on Monday.
Ah choo!
On Tuesday I had my weekly talk with the master.
"Good evening."
"Hello."
I explained again how artificial it felt for me to prepare questions for him.
"Phony."
The master frowned.
"Why do you require us to have questions?" I asked.
He lectured me at length on the relationship between teacher and student in Zen.
I listened.
There was nothing new.
I nodded.
The master told me he thought I needed to cry about my father's suicide.
I thought not.
"No."
The master said he thought I needed also to cry more about the experience I had described for him more than once of my first knowledge of the Holocaust, the morning my friends in fourth grade and I stared at the photographs of hills and open mass graves of dead Jews.
I thought not.
"No."
"Yes," he said.
I nodded.
No.
I felt entirely reconciled both to my father's death and to the horrors of world war.
I felt at peace with them.
Yes.
But in dokusan with the master it was useless to object so as he spoke I simply nodded. When he had concluded his exposition the master asked me a series of questions about sitting.
"When you sit," the master asked, "do you experience fear?"
"No."
"Sadness?"
"No."
"None?"
"No, not really."
"Do you ever experience deep sadness without cause?"
"No."
"Boredom?"
I thought for a moment.
I had grown slightly self-conscious of my answers. Except for a moderate discomfort in my legs and hips, in my lower back, and in my neck near the end of my usual forty-minute sitting I did not feel much of anything when I sat. Thoughts would come up and I would watch them rise. Occasionally I would drift off on a thought and think for a while. I would wake up and return to breath. Thoughts again would come up and on another I would ride off again, until again I would wake up, and so on, just as I had been taught. I did not know why I didn't feel the profound emotion I'd read that others felt when they sat and often I had wondered about it. I wanted to be able to answer in the affirmative to one of the master's questions. In the past he had made it quite clear that he did not believe me. Boredom—hmm, well, maybe—what I felt in zazen was much closer to boredom than to fear, anger, or sadness, which I could not remember ever feeling as I sat. I did not know what name to give to whatever it was I felt when I sat. It was hardly a feeling at all.
"Boredom?" the master prompted.
"Yes," I said finally.
"What do you do then?" the master asked.
"I just sit."
The master didn't reply.
Together we sat in silence for several seconds. When the master spoke again it was to explain that Zen was a body practice. I needed to work more with my body, the master told me, and to this end he wanted me to come to at least one morning service a week so that I performed devotional practice.
"I'll do that."
"Friday?"
"Yes."
When I got home, as usual I told Ruth about my meeting with my teacher, about his inferences regarding war and death, about his insistence that I needed to cry more, and about his request. For several years in the '80s I had read almost nothing but Holocaust literature, and my novel and most of my poems and cartoons had been about murder, genocide, and war. As for my relationship with my father, years before he died my father and I had forgiven each other, totally and completely, and reconciled. In the last year or two of his life whenever one or more of his many illnesses caused him special discomfort and pain I had called him every afternoon to inquire about his condition and his spirit and to comfort him if I could and to inspire and to entertain him. I did know that the master had not had the same opportunity with his own father. The master had told me so.
"I don't think the master really knows you," my wife said.
Yes.
I thought the same.
"He wants you to come more often to the temple because he can cause you discomfort there."
It was the first time I'd heard Ruth say something like that.
Hm.
Her words expressed what I had sometimes felt myself but had been reluctant to articulate. We all worked out our neuroses in our interactions with other people, I knew, yes, the master, too. My wife's surmise hadn't made any rational sense but I could not deny that I felt the irrational truth of it. One myth of realization is that the Zen master has freed himself from neurosis. His vision no longer distorted by ego, the master is thus able clearly to see his students as they truly are and—if they trust their teacher, practice the Way, and persevere—to wake them, to save them, and to free them.
But I had already been saved.
I felt free.
On Friday, November 4, I received an email from Edward. The master's mother had died. She had been institutionalized for quite some time, and suffering from dementia she had not known where she was when the master last visited her, he had told us, and she had hardly known him.
Funeral.
The master would leave on Monday and be back on Wednesday.
I skipped service on Sunday.
Unwell.
I was still sick with hayfever. At evening zazen on Tuesday I was losing my voice, I was coughing, and my sinuses, nose, and throat were thick with snot. I struggled again on Wednesday, and still sick on Thursday I stayed home from work. By Friday I had been sick two weeks. It took me two hours in the morning to clear my lungs and nasal passages so I sat my daily forty minutes on my cushion later in the morning or in mid-afternoon.
There I considered the master's recent questions.
Anger?
No.
Sadness?
No.
Deep sadness without cause?
No.
Joy?
No.
Euphoria?
No.
Boredom?
No.
Not even that.
Breath, the present, thought arising and thought passing away, precious fragile bubble of life and consciousness, the weight of my flesh, my body, my butt, my legs, hips, knees, ankles, feet, my hands in my lap, my arms, my elbows and my shoulders, my neck, my chin, my head, the animal of my being all settled onto my cushion, my cushion crushed onto my mat, and again my thought, my breath, my letting go, my giving up, my totally giving up.
Sweet surrender.
Ah!
But how quickly then the me, myself, and I pulled me back and, with the knots of thought, thought, thought, thought, tied me down. At times I felt like a helium balloon tethered by a string to the earth.
Bump.
Bump.
Time passed.
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