173 Faith

My weekly meeting with my teacher was quickly approaching once more and again I had to formulate questions. The words "deep" and "to deepen" were so important to the master—he used them again and again. To the extent that the master had any goal in zazen, to the extent that there was for him anything at all to be attained, it was to deepen his life. What did this mean? What were the characteristics of a deepened life? How did one deepen life? The master spoke often of "breakthroughs."

"You've had some breakthroughs," he had told me.

What were breakthroughs? From what to what? I imagined my friend Billy's answer.

From kind to kinder.

Did the master think he possessed special wisdom and insight? He often implied that he did.

There was also his apparent alienation from his family. To my knowledge the master had never spoken positively about his relation to his father, to his mother—about her there had been not one word of affection—and in his dharma talks the master had been critical even of his daughter.

"I wish she would deepen her life," the master told us.

He implied that his daughter's life and the lives of her husband and her daughter were somehow shallow compared to his own.

Yes, he had enjoyed his visit, he said.

Yes.

"But I was glad to leave and to get back to the sangha at Laugh Out Loud," the master told us.

The master thought a moment.

"Because there they practice to deepen their lives," he explained, "I feel closer to the sangha—"

The master paused and appeared to think again.

We waited.

He finished his sentence.

"Happier with them than I am with my family."

Hmm.

I talked this over with Ruth.

His daughter must feel his attitude, yes—I wondered—and her husband, too, and the master's granddaughter, they must all feel it. The master had been first a postulant and then a priest for twenty-five years. Why hadn't his daughter or granddaughter taken an interest in Buddhism? My wife took no personal interest in it either nor my children nor had my friend Billy's first wife nor his children.

Indifference.

"Why aren't family attracted to Buddhism?" I asked Ruth.

"It requires too much time," she said, "an hour a day minimum, then more, more, more, more."

"Yes."

"The unstated goal seems to be renunciation," she said. "You have said so yourself."

"Yes."

"Leave wife, husband, kids."

Hmm.

In his dharma talk on Sunday the master talked of Dogen and right speech. Dogen had urged his disciples always to consider their minds, their intentions, and their words before they spoke. Shakyamuni Buddha, it is reported, advised his disciples to ask themselves three questions before they said anything.

Is it true?

Is it helpful?

Is it the right time?

The master conceded that right speech had always been difficult for him. He related his quarrels with insurance claims adjusters after his two accidents about fair and equitable compensation for his wrecked cars.

"You son of a bitch!" the master said he'd wanted to say. "You piece of shit!"

But he hadn't.

Rather, the master said, he concurred with Dogen. We shouldn't speak when angry. The master never did, he said—no, he waited to speak until his anger was gone. I had heard this claim before and I had doubted it before.

I did again.

The master repeated his familiar objection to the words "good," "evil," "right," and "wrong" and his preference for the words "positive," "negative," "wholesome," and "unwholesome."

Was all this just semantics?

I had felt as the master did. Yet now it had begun to seem to me that only the language had changed and that the basic human mental operation involved was nevertheless still judging, approving, disapproving.

I would ask.

When I appeared at the door to the master's room upstairs at the temple before evening zazen on Tuesday for our regularly scheduled conversation, the master was not prepared to meet me. For some reason this week he had not received the regular email reminder that he asked me always to send him a day or two before we were to meet. At first the master just asked that I wait a few minutes while he prepared himself and his room for our talk but he seemed disoriented and clearly uncomfortable. The master hadn't expected me so I understood.

"If you'd rather we can just put it off a week," I offered.

"Do you mind?" the master asked.

"Not at all," I assured him.

"Thank you," he said. "I appreciate it."

"No problem."

I turned to start downstairs to wait before I set up for evening zazen. I might glance at an article or two in the recent newsletters and journals from other American sanghas, this literature was always stacked on the coffee table, or maybe I'd just lie down on my back on the hardwood floor at the east end of the buddha hall and rest there in the silence and dark.

"I don't feel good," the master said before I had taken more than a step or two.

I halted.

"From the auto accident?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"No, no," the master said. "It's not that."

I waited.

With his left hand near his temple three times he twirled his index finger around in a circle.

The cuckoo gesture.

"I have just got too much going on up here!" he explained.

Thinking.

"Oh."

We agreed to postpone our talk until the following Tuesday. The master marked the new date on the calendar on the wall of the office and I waited quietly downstairs until it was time for me to hit the rolldown on the han for evening zazen. The master did not sit.

Just Eleanor and I.

We sat.

Wednesday I felt tired.

I emailed Edward to let him know and then for the first time in over a year I didn't go to Ryaku Fusatsu. For several days I thought about my difficult year with the master, the teacher I found after my friend and dharma brother Billy had told me that I needed one. Had Billy's teacher engaged him in such continual criticism, I wondered, in this badgering and verbal abuse, this harassment?

I had never inquired.

"Hey, Billy," I asked in my single-sentence email, "how often do you meet in private one on one with your teacher Mipham Rinpoche?"

"Good question!" Billy replied. "Almost never."

What!

For a moment I felt like I had been tricked—by my best friend—into a difficult marriage to an old, poor, fat, ugly, and nagging wife! Billy went on to explain that Mipham Rinpoche had thousands of students scattered across the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Latin America, and now also in Tibet where he was mobbed by people who were, said Billy, starved for the dharma. On the rare occasions when Billy had met with the Rinpoche he had come across, Billy said, as humble and kind. Billy met individually not with lamas mainly but with the "acharyas," he explained, senior students authorized to teach other students. From acharyas, he said, yes, he had learned.

"But nothing," added Billy, "seems to take the place of the realized lamas."

Billy mentioned by name one of the old Tibetan lamas he hoped to be able to see when this lama visited Austin—before the lama died. Perhaps these wonderful old masters and teachers, Billy surmised, would be replaced by other realized beings. But maybe not.

"In any case," Billy concluded, "it seems fortunate to me from this distance that you have someone like the master with whom you can actually discuss your spiritual path face to face at any time you want."

I forwarded Billy's email to the master.

The master replied with a lengthy statement of the importance and history of face-to-face transmission, knowledge with which I was familiar from my reading. This emphasis, the master explained, arose not only because it was an essential part of the ancient tradition but also because of the sale—here the master interrupted his remark to insert two parenthetical exclamation points—the sale of dharma transmission papers in China to monks who never studied directly with the teachers from whom they received their papers. The master concluded by noting that the meaning of "face to face" in Zen transmission is not simply a matter of "discussion" but—more important—of "being in the presence of and learning from."

Yes. 

"I understand," I responded. "The literature is unanimous and clear."

Yes.

"I have never questioned it."

I would add only, I said, that even without a fully realized teacher I had experienced "the unnameable"—I called it—day after day without a break for a full twelve months. Yes, I conceded, ordinary life had returned, gradually, and, yes, suffering, too, yet thanks to my experience I had never lost faith in the teaching nor could I imagine, I added, that I ever would.

"It just does not seem possible," I concluded.