176 Misrepresented

In February 2006 the winter practice period began. I signed on for my regular daily practice at home, my regular temple practice, the three scheduled sesshins, the dharma study, my temple job, and of course, despite my apprehension, the daily practice journal. In my five years at the temple I had attended a dozen or more sesshins, and this two-day sesshin which opened the practice period was the first at which I felt no anxiety. In the concluding shosan ceremony as usual I had no question. I had asked four questions in dokusan, all of them feeling obligatory and forced, and now I felt empty. But an hour before shosan I remembered the expression the master had used two or three times in the past.

"Nothing is trivial to me. To me everything is a matter of life and death."

I decided to ask the master to explain it.

"What does this mean?"

"It means to live fully in the present, moment to moment," the master replied.

He paused.

"We are born and we die in every moment."

Dogma—

"Thank you."

I bowed, and stood, and bowed, and walked to the bowing mat, and offered the requisite one full prostration, stood, and waited at the end of the line and listened as my dharma friends asked their own questions.

Later I wondered.

"Do you yourself really live fully in the present, moment to moment," I asked the master in my practice journal, "or is that just an aspiration, something that you want to do and try to do?"

"You think too much!" the master exclaimed.

I was undeterred.

"Do you live fully in the present every moment?"

I persisted.

"This is not about me," the master replied.

No?

Overall my sesshin had felt very quiet, deep, and calm. Nothing had happened. There had been no drama, no anxiety. I had felt myself at least adequate in all of the ceremonial jobs and tasks and even competent at most. With sore legs and sore knees and bored, I had stared hour after hour at the yellowing white wall. As the master often suggested, zazen had seemed the perfect container for my thoughts and questions and for my letting go.  The sesshin had been just what I felt I needed.

In dokusan I told the master so.

He smiled.

"It sounds like the sesshin has been a refuge for you," the master responded.

"Yes."

It felt that way.

On Friday I attended morning service, one of my practice commitments. Edward was doan, Eleanor shoten, I jisha, and the master, the doshi, led the service. The master had asked that I begin attending one morning service a week. For five years it had been difficult for me to do so. Four mornings a week I had to be at work by 7:00 and often on Friday or Saturday mornings I babysat one or both of my grandchildren. But now Katy, the younger, had started preschool and it looked like Friday early morning service would work best for me. It felt good to get out into the bitter cold and then into the temple, I journaled, to meet friends and teacher.

I was glad the master had suggested it.

It felt right.

"I'm glad that you'll be coming on Friday mornings," the master remarked.

But I was already again having trouble with my daily entries in my practice journal. I had not forgotten the master's past complaints about my entries. I felt no profound nor unusual fear, anger, or sadness, I wrote, and I had no new questions about the dharma.

I had no idea what I should write.

None.

It seemed I was right back where I had started.

Now what?

The master commented. 

"This is all part of your struggle as a Zen student," he said. "Just keep trying."

I had tried.

"From the very beginning the dharma has made sense to me," I had written.

I believed.

"I don't know what to ask about it."

I felt good.

"When a question comes up," the master instructed, "ask it."

Of course.

Yes.

But that's what I did.

I did!

Had done.

"From my experience in previous journals I feel pressured to find the negative."

I complained.

"I feel pressured to avoid being too positive."

The master replied.

"This pressure comes from your trying to give me what you think I want."

Yes—

To follow instructions!

To follow instructions!

No?

I mentioned that several of the master's replies to my entries had annoyed me.

Reprise.

"Who or what was annoyed?" the master inquired.

Ego.

"Why do you suppose annoyance arose?"

Ego.

"Were not some of my comments to the point and maybe even helpful?"

Hmm.

No.

I thought not.

"Why do you focus on the annoyance?"

Focus?

It had come up so I had written it down.

Yes.

His instructions.

Yes.

I was annoyed.

Thus I had also been feeling as if I should not ask a question of the master—not even in shosan—until from within one naturally arose. This, too, I stated in my journal. In retrospect it is possible to see the master's reply as the beginning of the end of our relationship.

"You must have a question for shosan," the master insisted.

Submit.

Submit.

"Open yourself to it rather than think about it and one will arise."

But I had tried.

"To formulate a question on demand—in journal, in dokusan, or in shosan—feels inauthentic."

I explained.

"I do not have many questions."

I did not.

"Yes," the master insisted, "you do."

But—

"You have many questions about this practice, about working with a teacher, and about what we do here at the temple. You struggle with practicing the dharma. You struggle with the journal. You struggle when your ideas of how things should be conflict with how things are. With what else do you struggle? How about bringing to me your questions about all this?"

Jesus!

My communication with the master had become a struggle certainly.

Uff da!

But the rest—

No.

"I wake, I sit, I eat, I teach, I sleep," I had written, "and when I look inside I really do not find much of anything, not anger, not fear, not happiness, not unhappiness, not pessimism, not optimism, not hope."

Mystery.

"Look inside what?" asked the master.

A quibble!

"Learn to take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward."

Fukanzazengi.

I recited it every Tuesday night.

I had recorded my thoughts and my feelings as I wrote. The master chose to extrapolate from my remarks a generalization much broader than I had intended. I was not a fearful person. Fears rarely troubled me. Since my children had found and made their own way in life my worries seemed to be few. I seldom got angry, my anger never escalated to rage, and, though as a younger man I tended to brood, now even when I did get angry I did not remain angry long. I had long ago surrendered both my dream of utopia and my nightmare of apocalypse. I felt at peace, actually, contented, capable, and brave. More than ever before in my life I felt able now in my own little academic way to help people and the fact made me glad.

Thanks to John, once my best friend, I had heard the dharma; at his urging I had begun to practice; and with the help of my friend Billy I had experienced the immediate and overwhelming result.

Good.

God.

Tao.

It.

My story was as simple as that.

Truth.

But the master objected, strenuously, it seemed, to my "testifyin"—

I did not and do not to this day know why. The master just did not believe me, I guessed, but it had been years since I felt the kind of deep unhappiness, depression, fear, anger, and sadness that the master insisted that I acknowledge and confess.

Deep, I said.

Again—

Deep!

"Maybe not at the moment you wrote this," the master remarked, "but anyone who says he never feels any of the above is dead."

"Never?"

How silly! Who says that?

I had never said I "never" felt any of those emotions. It seemed to me now as it had seemed so often in the past that by such a remark my teacher was simply trying to pick a quarrel with me. He would attribute to me a statement I did not make and had not ever made or a belief I did not hold and had not ever held and then judge it false and me fatuous.

Deep vexation?

No.

Deep fears?

No.

I had not forgotten the master's dismissal of his own.

Fears—

"Oh, little ones," he'd said. "You know."

Ditto.

At such times it seemed that the practice was simply for me to sit and to let my teacher call me names. If that was in fact the practice I could see that it might do me some good.

Lay on, Macduff, and damn'd be him that first cries, "Hold, enough!"

Forward.

"Sitting," I said in my entry, "I feel pretty much free of attachment."

Empty.

"Though thoughts arise of course," I added, "and pass away."

Evaporation.

"It's rare that anything keeps me from or knocks me off my cushion."

Discipline?

No.

Routine.

"About this," I explained, "I don't have any curiosity. Little selfish desires and aversions arise continually every second but for the most part they just sort of bump 'me' and bounce off and I go on my daily way—I wake, I sit, I eat, I teach, I walk, I sleep—and once in a great while there is a big bump."

Then—

"I deal with it as I can," I added, "one day at a time."

Platitude.

In his reply the master chose again to misrepresent me, replacing my "pretty much" and my "rare" with his "never," and then again to respond to his own misrepresentation of me.

"So you never hold on to anything, eh?" the master asked.

Never?

"You never get tangled up in likes or dislikes or greed, anger, and delusion on a daily basis?" the master inquired.

Never?

How silly! Who says that?

Never had I understood this kind of response from the master and even as I write now many months later I still do not understand. When I wrote what I did I had been making an observation only about my sitting.

To wit—

Sitting I felt pretty much free of attachment and it was rare that anything kept me from or knocked me off my cushion. No matter what thought or feeling arose I continued to sit. More than once I had heard others at the temple say that some thoughts and emotions that came up for them made them literally get up from their cushions and walk or stretch or even leave.

They could not sit.

For me that just did not happen. I don't know why.

I could remember only once in five years that an emotion had actually made me cut my sitting short and get up before my forty minutes were up. But for reasons that remain still a mystery to me the master seemed to want to turn this simple observation against me and pretend as though I were claiming always to be serene.

"Never" hold on?

"Never" get tangled up?

"Never" was not my word, it was the master's, and, yes, I resented his attributing it to me. It was, well, yes, annoying or—to express this thought in what I had begun to call buddhaspeak—his attribution had been one of the infinite interdependent causes and conditions from which matrix for me annoyance had arisen.

In our conflict I was "tangled up."

Yes.

Indeed.

To it I "held on."

Yes.

Yet at the same time I did believe that the master was sincere.

I did not doubt his good intention.

I persevered.

"The Zen master endeavors to take away from the disciple all footholds which he has had ever since his first appearance on earth," explains D.T. Suzuki, "and then to supply him with one that is really no foothold."

An assassin. 

"During zazen this morning," I had written to conclude my day's journal entry, "I tried to remember my last breath."

In.

Out.

"It's impossible, of course—the next breath overwhelms it, and the next, and the next."

Gone gone, gone beyond, gone beyond beyond.

Only this!