Our practice group met and talked.
Edward cried.
Edward felt guilty about the triviality of his thoughts and his activities at home, computer games for example, and he believed that he had not been doing enough in his practice.
The master spoke of his illness, his health—he couldn't sit, he was behind in his work, he'd been unable to read and to comment on our practice journals, and for all that he felt guilt.
Then Eleanor.
It had been her impotence in the perception of injustice that pained Eleanor, so much suffering in the world, and unable to address it she had been feeling inadequate. The stress of this conflict, she said, had aggravated her colitis, and in her practice, too, she was feeling incomplete. Though Eleanor did know intellectually that in Zen practice there is no goal, nothing to be attained, nevertheless, she said, she could not stop wanting some beautiful, wonderful feeling at the end of it.
Dean, too, just wanted to help.
To help—
"That's Avalokitesvara arising," the master remarked.
Pity.
Nikki complained.
In her practice she had been feeling resentment that it demanded so much effort and time.
"Why don't you transfer to another religion?" asked the smiling master.
No.
Nikki shook her head.
"It's because you know that this practice has substance," the master said.
He answered his own question.
"It is not just an entertaining social club and a lot of nice pretty words."
He paused.
"Here we work hard to transform ourselves."
Nikki nodded.
"Yes."
Wanting to help—
Now one week later I had still the same short list of topics and questions I had prepared the previous week and I had added just one more that had arisen over the past seven days. The formality of our meetings still felt to me unnatural, even artificial, since I rarely had questions that I could not answer myself or that I had not heard the master answer in dharma talk or in dharma study or in just ordinary conversation with me or others.
Neither did I feel at all fearful, angry, sad, confused, unhappy, dissatisfied, discontent, or unfulfilled, though in our private talks the master continued to insist, lately with less vehemence than before, that I did. Perhaps it was just a matter of degree. Like everybody else, I supposed, I felt the daily waves and ripples of frustration, annoyance, and disappointment in my teaching, in social interaction, and in my awareness of national and world events, but I felt I needed from the master no help with these vexations since they did not ever remain with me for long. I continued to sit for at least forty minutes every day and during my daily activities I recognized aversion quickly when it arose—so it seemed—and the act of recognition itself seemed to dissolve it just as the literature promised.
Though I no longer felt the transcendence and joy I felt in the spring, summer, and fall of 1975—indeed it had now been thirty years since that unforgettable experience—I felt neither the need nor the desire to experience it again.
Diamond.
Nor was I tormented—as periodically I had been in the decades since—by my failure to pass on to others the gift of peace and the miracle of mind I felt so profoundly and thought so certain that I had received from the universe itself and been asked—yes, by "god"—to teach.
But how—
How!
How I had pled in my darkness!
That, too, had passed, and I had finally acknowledged the complete subjectivity of my experience and accepted as ordinary both myself and my failure in what had once seemed my mission. It had been a private, painful, and lonely struggle to understand as ordinary what had been to me so special and so extra ordinary.
Indeed it had been in part to help me regain the ordinary that I had come to Heartmind Temple and to the master. This help I had in fact received and for that help I felt profoundly grateful.
Thank god—
No.
It was—and I am—only me! I felt I understood now why at the age of twenty the words of the aging J. Alfred Prufrock had seemed to strike my inner being like a bolt of lightning.
No!
I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
Almost, at times, the Fool.
Finally, now, at sixty-two, I was a happy and contented ordinary man and I wondered if I should end my formal relationship with the master and reduce further my time at the temple. The master had told me more than once that people come to the temple and stay at the temple because they suffer and seek an end to their suffering, and though I knew that I and my friends and family would age, sicken, and die, and perhaps even worse, I was reminded again and again in practice group meetings and in discussion following dharma talk that I no longer felt the profound yearning, fear, rage, and regret that at the temple so troubled my friends.
I didn't know why.
The master seemed to infer that since I was still present at the temple I must be in denial, that I was somehow lying to myself, that if my equanimity were as real as I seemed to believe I would not be present. If I were not on a deep unconscious level unhappy, the master seemed to be asking—
Why was I there?
Why?
It was a good question, one I had begun asking myself almost daily, and so his teaching of me had reduced itself to confrontation, a continual probing and prodding in an effort to reveal to me the darkness that the master sensed I was concealing from myself, from him, and from my friends in the sangha—and so here I was once again in his room at 6:00 on a Tuesday evening, a slender stick of incense burning on his altar, our knees hardly two feet apart as he and I sat face to face and bowed from the waist, palms together, to commence again our intimate talk.
"Good evening," said the master.
"Good evening," I replied.
"So what have you got?" the master asked—
His usual cue.
I had already pulled from my pocket the list of topics and questions I printed in eight-point type on my home computer and then trimmed with the scissors to a two-inch by four-inch rectangle that I could carry conveniently in my breast pocket. The first item—the bad cold I had struggled with for three weeks and from which I had still not fully recovered—I had mentioned at our practice group meeting on Sunday. I glanced at item two.
"You often speak of deepening one's life," I said. "You urge us to deepen our lives. What do you mean by the words 'to deepen' and by the word 'deepening' in that context?"
Uh oh.
The master looked disgusted—a reaction to which I had become accustomed. Every day I saw the very same look on the faces of many of my colleagues at the college where I worked when they spoke of the abilities and efforts of their students. It communicated impatience, frustration, weariness, superiority, condescension, arrogance, disdain, contempt.
It meant:
How many times must I explain the obvious to you! Why are you so slow! So obtuse! Why do you not try harder to understand! Why have you not come prepared! What a stupid question!
Many times I had felt the same way myself. Every teacher had—even Jesus. I could cite gospel. The master rolled his eyes and audibly inhaled. It was in part genuine, in part performance. As I recall this theatre now I am reminded of a remark by Kurt Vonnegut: "Since we are what we pretend to be, we must be very careful about what we pretend to be." If my comments and my questions evoked such a reaction, I wondered, should I continue to participate in this ritual?
It seemed to annoy the both of us.
"It means to act from down here," the master said finally, moving his right hand in a circle at his abdomen, just below the navel, the omphalos, the dantian, the hara—I knew many words for it—"instead of from here," the master continued, raising his hand to his temple and wiggling and waggling his fingers in a silly way around and over his head, "right, wrong, good, bad, true, false, thinking thoughts, me, you, this, that, preferences, judgments."
His hand returned to his lap and the master looked at me and waited for my response.
"Kudo, I don't know who you're talking about," I said. "I don't see the world in those terms."
He listened.
"I don't see myself that way at all," I said, "and I don't understand why you do."
"How do you see yourself?" the master asked.
"Nonjudgmental."
The master scoffed.
"You judged Eleanor for her language!" he exclaimed.
"No."
"Yes, you did!" the master insisted.
No.
I shook my head.
No.
"I don't care what language Eleanor uses," I said.
No.
"You're the one who raised the issue!" the master insisted.
"Kudo, the issue comes up constantly in my classes," I explained. "I don't care about cussing, I'm just interested in it, I'm just curious about the origin of it. I didn't judge Eleanor!"
Now myself I felt aggrieved.
Now I felt judged, wrongly accused. I did not give a fuck if Eleanor and the master said fuck. I wondered only why those words came up for them and for me and for anyone against intention.
"I just wanted to hear what you had to say about it!" I said.
The master made a face.
Incredulity.
"There's something there," said the master, "behind your interest and your curiosity."
Jesus!
But the master seemed at least temporarily persuaded.
Even days later I would feel still annoyed by this part of our exchange. I wondered if Eleanor, feeling that I'd judged her for her use of taboo language, had told the master and if the master had then felt obliged to defend and protect his postulant. The master could be combative, indeed he had a warrior mentality and, if his young new disciple had been hurt or even just confused by my remarks about her language or his, I understood that the master would counterattack the person whom he believed responsible for it.
That was me.
"There is something there!"
I inhaled.
I exhaled.
"I do not care what language Eleanor uses," I said evenly.
Our eyes met.
Silent we examined one another.
We gazed.
Peace.
The master dropped the subject.
Forward.
He returned now to the general allegation of my being judgmental.
Me.
"What about your judgment of George Bush?" the master asked.
Huh?
The question puzzled me.
Unlike many of my liberal friends and, I thought, the master himself, I did not hate George Bush. I did not think the president evil, only privileged and simplistic and, yes, dangerously judgmental.
"I see the other side of George Bush," I said.
I thought.
"The truth is that you are yourself much more judgmental of Bush than I am."
"Pfft!"
The master tossed his head and expelled his breath in an audible expression of objection.
"Yes," I continued, "and you are much much more judgmental about fundamentalist Christians than I am, too, yes, and more judgmental about Christians in general!"
I nodded.
This was true and the master knew it.
Yes.
"How do you see yourself?" the master asked.
Again.
"Nonjudgmental," I said a second time.
I waited.
This time the master didn't argue. He returned to my original question about deepening one's life. He simply repeated his remarks—and his gestures—about acting not from the head but from a deeper place near the abdomen.
Hmm.
I remained dissatisfied with this answer.
No.
I wanted to know why acting from one place was preferable to acting from another.
"Why?" I asked.
"Why!" the master repeated sarcastically.
"What's the point?"
"There is no point!" said the master almost shouting. "It's pointless!"
For a moment I sat silent.
Quiet.
Without warning the master lunged suddenly forward in his chair, bending from the waist so that his face was less than a foot from my own, and he shook his head vigorously back and forth so that his thick lips and heavy jowls jiggled to the goofy noise he made.
"Booga booga booga booga!"
I smiled.
"Does this deepening change observable behavior?" I asked.
The master looked puzzled.
He frowned.
"What do you mean?"
"After this deepening does one act different?"
"You have a goal!" the master said.
It was a reprimand.
"There is nothing to be attained."
I considered.
"With deepening it seems one would be more peaceable, gentler, kinder," I said.
"No!" the master said.
I waited.
"You're thinking again."
"But—"
"Stop thinking!"
I laughed.
"Then what's the point?"
"There is no point!"
"It seems—"
"You think!"
I laughed.
"Doesn't—"
"You think!"
I laughed.
I remained silent and looked down at my lap, considering how I might proceed.
"Thinking!" the master exclaimed—an accusation.
I looked up.
The master was smiling.
I laughed.
I remained silent.
I tried to collect my thoughts and to figure out how to continue.
I was not frustrated.
I wasn't mad.
Each of the master's interruptions had made me laugh. It was an interaction with which I felt familiar from my reading of Zen literature, from my study of Zen with my friend Billy, from my observation of the master in his interaction with Nikki and Charles and other members of the sangha, and from previous conversations of my own with the master.
I knew that the purpose of his interruptions was to stop my thinking.
To stop my mind.
Silence.
"You're thinnnking againn," the master drawled.
I laughed.
The master interrupted me ten or twelve times.
Maybe more.
I have abridged our dialogue.
As I had concluded before in similar situations with my teacher—in our talks and also in our email correspondence—I thought perhaps the master simply wanted me to shut up.
Fine.
I would have preferred sitting silent to what seemed to me now a circular, repetitive, and unproductive dialogue. I gazed expectantly into the master's eyes and smiled and returned to the comfort of my breathing and waited. More than several seconds elapsed.
There was nothing uncomfortable about this silence.
I liked it.
"What's next on your list?" asked the master.
I smiled.
I lifted my hands palms upward and open in the gesture of emptiness and made the face of complete surrender.
"Just more thinking," I said apologetically. "More thoughts."
"Let's hear it."
"Why?"
"Let's hear it."
"Why?"
"Let's hear it!"
Sigh.
I looked at the short list in my hand.
For a moment or two I considered just saying no and ending our talk. I looked up at the master, into his eyes, following my breath, looked down at my list again, and then up again into the eyes of my teacher.
"You talk often of breakthroughs," I said finally.
He waited.
"What do you mean by breakthroughs?"
"Insights."
I felt a gentle wave of futility flow over me. It seemed useless to travel around this circle again. If this "deepening" did not result in more peaceable behavior I was not sure I was interested in it. If these insights did not make me kinder did I care about them? No, actually, I did not think I did. The master had said that he practiced Buddhism because he didn't want to suffer. If practice neither ended nor reduced his suffering why did he continue? It seemed that it had reduced my own. Yet I also understood the paradox that to practice with a gaining idea was counterproductive and that the master did not want to speak of reward.
"Do you think you have special wisdom or insight?" I asked.
The master looked startled.
I waited.
The master thought.
"Do you think you have special wisdom or insight?" he asked me.
"I asked you first."
"Do you think you have special wisdom or insight?"
"I asked you first."
"Do you think you have special wisdom or insight!" he demanded.
Submit!
Submit!
Submit!
Jesus—
The master waited this time while I thought about it. I knew my awakening thirty years before was rare; but all of my efforts to share what I had learned from it and to teach it had—so far as I knew—failed. Indeed it was my record of failure that had made me despondent nine years later. What good had my so-called "awakening" really done? None that I could see. The master was right. My suffering had returned although it, too, had proved impermanent. From my religious experience, from my rebirth, from my baptism, from my drowning, I had emerged with one relic only—my weapon of peace. My commitment to nonviolence, my experience and understanding of it, had provided me with a point of view—into all psychological, social, political, religious, and philosophical issues and events—unlike any other I had known. Though it had never been tested, it was a knowledge for which I would risk my life—I hoped—and if necessary die. But was what seemed to me the common sense and mystic wisdom of nonviolence an insight in any way special to me?
No.
Obviously not.
"No."
"That's good."
There was a moment of silence as the master thought and I waited for his own response to my question.
I wanted to know.
Did the master think he had special wisdom or insight?
He thought.
"If I say yes," the master said, "I sound vain and egoistic."
He paused.
"If I say no then why am I here?"
The master raised his open empty hands, palms up—
The same gesture I had myself employed not many minutes before.
His meaning was clear.
If he had no special wisdom or insight then why did he present himself as master and teacher? I saw my question now as the master had seen it though I had not seen it so before I asked it. I had not formulated my question as some kind of clever conundrum by which I might trap my teacher.
I had been simply curious.
Bob.
Did the master think he had special wisdom or insight?
"What do you think?" asked the master.
He waited.
"Do you think I have special wisdom or insight?"
Hmm.
This question I had expected and I had thought for several days about my answer.
Now I thought some more.
For both my teacher and for me I badly wanted to be able to answer in the affirmative. I looked down at my hands in my lap and I breathed and I thought and I tried to determine my honest answer.
I looked up and into the eyes of the master.
"No."
"That's okay," the master softly said. "That's what you think."
Think.
He emphasized the word "think."
Relief—
I had not made him mad.
No.
The master did not seem in any way disappointed nor at all disturbed. My response had not hurt him or so it appeared to me at least and for that I felt thankful; but I remained concerned nevertheless and now I felt even slightly guilty and I hastened to explain.
"I think you're intelligent—"
No.
He waved me off.
I waited.
"That's what you think."
Think.
Yes.
We sat comfortably together now.
So it seemed.
As usually happened in our talks the slight nervousness I felt initially at the formality of the ritual—created by the arrangement of our two chairs and the proximity of our knees and our faces, his robe and our rakusus, his offering of the incense—had worn off and now to me it seemed little different from conversation between any two friends, two honest old men, about the meaning of life, occasionally veering off into argument, irony, sarcasm, comedy, and an intimacy of a kind that at one time I might have called masculine in so far as that word still meant anything to me. But the master was not my friend, he often reminded me, and I had accepted the fact though I did feel myself a friend to him. The master was in his own opinion both something less and something more than my friend.
I checked my watch again. I had done so three or four times during our talk, aware that I was responsible still for checking and tidying the mats and cushions in the zendo and for lighting the altar.
"We have a few minutes," the master said. "Don't worry about that."
I nodded.
"Is there more?" he asked.
"This is more personal," I said, "and it may be none of my business."
I paused.
"Yes?"
The master nodded.
"But I'm curious about what seems to me your alienation from your family—"
The master interrupted.
He was obviously annoyed by what I said.
Objection.
"I'm not alienated from my family," he declared. "I love my daughter very much."
Enough.
The master waited for me to explain myself.
I tried.
"You have told me that you were not close to your father," I said, "and I have never heard you speak with affection of your mother," I added. "You also told all of us not long ago in one of your dharma talks that you wished your daughter would deepen her life by taking up a spiritual practice like yoga or Zen and that after sharing only a few days of her busy life you wanted to get back to Laugh Out Loud where you felt closer to the people of the sangha there than to your daughter and her family because at Laugh Out Loud people lived life more deeply."
"Yes, that's true," the master said. "I do feel closer to the people of the sangha than to her."
The master paused.
"The human race is my family now," he said. "I make no distinction between people."
The master paused again.
He thought.
"I loved my father very much," he continued. "When he died I cried and cried."
I listened.
"I cried for three days."
I waited.
"I loved him very much and I missed him terribly."
I nodded.
"Now it's just dust."
I nodded.
"Impermanence," the master said.
I waited.
"I didn't like my mother," the master said.
That was it.
The master clearly had no more to say on that subject.
Enough.
For the remaining five minutes of our talk we discussed the difficulty of giving to others what they wanted—contentment, fulfillment, "completion"—that was the word Eleanor had given to what she envied in the master and wanted for herself, yes, and more than that even, what she also called "the light at the end of the tunnel." When I said that I felt I had that sense of completion and that I wanted to give to others what I had but that I didn't know how, the master reminded me that I was much older than other members of the practice group, Eleanor in particular. It was a good point—one I considered myself when I contemplated the peace I felt in my heart. Indeed I often wondered which factor was the most important in my happiness—my experience of "god," my practice with the master, or my simply growing old, the fire of aversion and desire burning itself down to a winking ember almost out and a thin grey skein of slowly ascending smoke. Death often seemed close to me now, no more remote than the room on the other side of every door, just one short step from being to nonbeing.
The master asked when I had first felt this sense of completion.
"Recently?"
"No."
I replied that I felt it when I had first come to Buddhism. But later as I thought again at home I realized that this was not quite true, that in a way hard to explain this sense of completion had come much later, and that it was deeper than and different from the joy of awakening I had experienced thirty years ago. Perhaps it was just my being sixty-two and not thirty-two.
Yes.
Perhaps I just got old.
But my learning to sit and to love it had played a part in it, too, and the master.
The practice definitely—
Yes.
Fulfillment.
When Eleanor and Edward and Nikki had described their longing I wanted very much to be able to offer them the way to what I felt I had, yet I did not know how, and now I told the master this.
Didn't he feel this, too, I wondered—
I asked.
"I can only provide opportunity," the master said.
He was silent for a moment.
I waited.
"Yes, I want to help," the master added.
Thwack!
Eleanor began the rolldown on the han.
Thwack!
Thwack!
The master and I put our palms together and bowed.
We rose from our chairs.
I stepped to the door of his room and opened it and prepared to go to zazen.
"See?" the master said.
He smiled.
With a nod he gestured to Eleanor downstairs.
I smiled.
"Such a good student!" the master exclaimed.
I nodded.
"Whatever needs to be done she takes care of it," he added.
"Yes."
I descended the stair and stopped and bowed in shashu as I passed in front of the main altar of the buddha hall and then I walked to the zendo where I saw that Eleanor had offered the incense and had assumed the doan seat. I bowed in gassho inside the doorway and then twice again at the cushion I selected beneath the southwest window open just a crack for ventilation.
I sat.
The master never came down to join us.
I sat.
I followed my breath.
I sat.
Now and then during zazen I could hear thumps and creaks and knocks upstairs as the master busied himself with the tasks and chores that had taken priority over his evening sitting—or perhaps the problem was his legs and chest. The master had complained that he was still sore and he wondered if he would ever again be able to sit on a cushion and fold his legs into an x.
I sat for an hour before I walked ten minutes in the buddha hall and then returned to the zendo to sit ten minutes more before Eleanor sang the title to the sutra and she and I chanted.
"Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen."
At 8:30 she rang the bell.
We bowed.
Out—
We said goodbye at the door.
"Oh!"
I halted.
Eleanor returned to me the two journals I had loaned her. They weren't my practice journals. These journals I had kept by hand when I babysat Dylan, my first grandchild, once or twice a week for two years after his birth. In the small dark entryway I set my journals and my rakusu on the dark shelf high in the cloak closet and wrestled my arms into my hooded sweatshirt. As I was about to leave, Eleanor opened the door to the entryway.
"Bob?"
Eleanor wanted to speak to me of my journals.
I waited.
"I like the way you write," she said.
"Thank you."
"It's funny."
"I'm glad you thought so," I said.
"I did!"
"That was the idea I guess," I said.
Eleanor smiled.
"The writing I'm doing for the book is different," I said.
"Oh."
"More serious."
"Oh."
I wondered how much of what Eleanor had said about my writing was real and how much was simple courtesy. In a way it was the very same question the master and I had debated for so many months. Everyone hedged, I supposed, the master, too. More than once I had heard the master say the polite thing to people and then confide to me something else in private. But simple courtesy, too, is a kind of truth, an acknowledgment of relativity and subjectivity, a gesture of humility, an admission, a confession of how little we really know.
Surrender.
I wondered if this was what Dean had felt when he asked why we had to say anything. Sometimes it was difficult, indeed impossible, to articulate any truth big or small. I had read somewhere that this is what a schizophrenic suffers. Every situation presents infinite possibilities of word and deed, and given no single absolute criterion he is unable to select only one option and speak it or do it. Paralyzed by opportunity, possibility, and relativity, he is, as existentialists say, "condemned to freedom," catatonic, mentally ill, helpless.
Hopeless.
It had been thirty years now and so far as I knew I had not freed nor saved a single soul from murder or war. The killing continued unabated just as before, like always, day after day, year after year after year, and in spite of my marvelous private and subjective astonishment and awakening and experience of god and my personal sense of completion and contentment what, if anything, did I know for sure—really, what for sure did I know?
Nothing.
"Good night," I said.
"Good night."
I swung open the heavy front door with a clank and then gripped and turned the handle of the aluminum storm door and pushed it open and stepped outside onto the porch.
Forward.
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