On Sunday Dean had given the dharma talk. He read a passage or two from Steve Hagan's book Buddhism Is Not What You Think and then spoke about being in the present and needing a teacher. Dean also talked about his recent experience at a retreat he called "Zen Lite" and he compared it to our temple sesshins which got the better of the comparison in every regard.
"This made me feel funny," I journaled.
I had not intended the remark as serious criticism of Dean.
It was only a tiny ripple of feeling that I had offered the master unedited—
Per his instruction.
"Pretty snide, Bob," the master wrote.
Okay.
The master seemed determined once more to confront me.
So be it.
The master continued.
"Is this so unusual? Some sesshins are more beneficial than others, aren't they? What exactly do you mean?" the master asked. "Nothing makes you feel funny. Funny comes up from within. Besides, what do you mean by 'funny'? Was it Dean's attitude that you didn't like?"
Scolded.
So much for entering feelings and thoughts off the top of my head.
Sheesh!
With regard to the need for a teacher I had also mentioned in my journal that Alison once remarked that the master did not now have a teacher and that Alison had wondered about that and that I had wondered, too.
"I guess you get to the point where you don't need one," I suggested.
So it seemed.
"Or is it," I asked, "that because your teacher dies you just have to go on without one?"
I wondered.
The master seemed defensive.
"Wondered about what?" he asked in his reply.
Jesus!
Was it not obvious that because of the master's own situation we wondered if a teacher were necessary throughout life or if one eventually reached the point where a teacher was no longer needed?
Independent.
Had the master reached that point?
Free.
That was certainly what I wondered at least.
Did the master have a teacher to whom he must simply listen, as I did, if his teacher so demanded?
Did the master have a teacher who confronted him as the master so often confronted me?
Did the master have a teacher who attributed to him unacknowledged fear, anger, denial, evasion, avoidance, and cowardice?
An assassin.
Was there a teacher whom the master could not interrupt whenever he so desired? When the master told me to shut up and listen, I shut up and listened. Was there anyone on earth for whom the master had enough respect to do the same?
I wondered.
His therapist perhaps?
Did anyone ever tell the master, as the master so often told others, that their conversation was not a debate?
Dharma gates are boundless, we recited every day, and we vowed to enter them all.
The master had a lot to teach, I believed, and a lot to learn.
"I have had and still do have many teachers," the master said.
He named none.
To whom he referred I did not know.
"Besides," the master added, "I am not Alison nor am I you."
No.
"What does my having or my not having a teacher have to do with the both of you?"
How defensive the master sounded!
Why?
"Once your teacher authorizes you to teach independently," the master said, "you may."
Ah! so—
At that point it was not necessary to be any longer engaged in formal student training, the master explained, except in the sense that the teacher is training along with his students.
Understood.
"But the teacher is training as a teacher, however, and not as a student."
Finally—
Civil discourse.
How difficult my communication with the master, my teacher, had become!
Forward.
Participation in the practice period meant, I thought, that I was required to keep a daily journal.
But did it?
By his own admission Edward had often gone weeks, even months, without writing, yet there seemed to be no penalty attached to the omission. Might I do simply as Edward did? But I wanted to follow my teacher's instructions so I continued as best I could to write even though his instructions seemed to me contradictory. Write whatever comes up for you, the master told me but, when I had done so, the master acted as though I had done wrong. I had asked impermissible questions, I had confused the profound with the banal, I had denied the truth, I had gossiped, and then, when questions had come up for me about what seemed to be the master's peevish comments and replies and I had asked them in order to try to understand what the master wanted, I had been told to stop guessing what he wanted and to stop trying to please him and to write whatever came up for me. At first from these circles I had inferred that the master wanted me to stop writing and speaking altogether and to remain silent and just sit.
But when I suggested as much—
"No."
This was not so.
Hmm.
Our communication was not a debate, the master told me many times, and the master told me, too, that neither was our communication even a dialogue, and so, then, just what was it?
What did the master call it?
Teaching.
"The Tao is not furthered by contention," I wrote in my journal—
A line from Lao Tsu.
"Contention, however, is one aspect of the Tao," replied the master.
Is it?
I don't think so.
No.
Shall we have an argument?
Submit.
Try as I might, and I had tried mightily and then tried and tried again, I could not seem to avoid the conclusion that one cause of my difficulty in my relations with the master might be his own insecurity and pride. No one is free of neurosis, I had learned long before I met the master, and it did seem in his communications with me, through my journals especially, that the master worked out his own neuroses as he tried to help his students work out their own. The teacher is learning from us, too, Edward had suggested to me when I quit, and at that time I believed it was true. But the master denied such reciprocity.
Or so it seemed in my situation; and I did not know what to write.
Impasse.
My entry for Monday, February 27, 2006—
"Duh."
On Tuesday I mentioned, simply as preface to questions I had, that in his dharma talk Dean had said, as the master had often said, that Zen practice is not about being comfortable. But to me it seemed obvious that no religion practiced seriously was about comfort.
The master inferred that I didn't understand.
"What do I mean by that?" the master responded. "I mean that Zen Buddhist practice is about digging deeply into ourselves and about transformation. This process can be difficult and painful and difficulty and pain are necessary and unavoidable when we cultivate growth and awareness."
"Is it about cessation of suffering?" I asked in my journal.
"Yes, it is," replied the master.
Ah!
"But remember that the cessation of suffering is temporary like everything else."
Yes.
"Is it about being happy?" I asked.
"This is not something that we stress because it can mislead people," the master explained.
"I often wonder if I should continue," I said.
"Everyone who practices wonders this from time to time," the master remarked.
The master often said that people come to the temple because they suffer, that if they did not suffer they would not come, and that because they suffer they return. I had always wondered if I should even be at the temple.
"You never suffer?" the master replied.
Never—
Never—
Here we go again.
"Did you not suffer last Sunday," the master inquired of me, "when I told you that you were responsible for setting up and checking the altars before we began lay initiation?"
Hmm.
I had been annoyed.
Unknown to the master I had been assigned three other jobs which had given me more to do than just one person could perform at the ceremony—but in my opinion my frustration in that instant hardly warranted the name of "suffering." But then in Buddhist literature the meaning of the word dukkha, usually translated in English as "suffering," is problematic.
Was it to this kind of petty annoyance that the master referred when he said people come to the temple because they suffer?
Daily mundane turmoil.
No.
I thought not.
Would Zen practice free them from such suffering?
I thought not.
No.
The master himself seemed far more often frustrated and annoyed by petty matters than anyone else in the sangha.
So—
This did not seem likely.
I had meant by the word "suffering" in my original remark something much different from the ripples of minor frustration and petty annoyance that every human being experiences moment by moment in daily activity. I had meant the deep suffering I saw in my students—chronic dissatisfaction, boredom, discontent, lack of fulfillment, incompletion, the sense that something critically important is missing in their lives, unhappiness, depression, despair, the yearning and ache that so many of them sought to escape in parties, sex, alcohol, drugs, sleep, self-mutilation, and what Krishnamurti calls "feeble amusements."
For me that suffering had ended.
For good.
"I have no history of mental illness, clinical depression, or panic attack as so many in the sangha do," I reported in my journal. "I have never taken antidepressant medication and I have never consulted a therapist nor ever thought I needed one."
"You have told me some things about your early life and your wild years," the master replied. "Don't you think in retrospect that at times you might have benefited from counseling or from therapy?"
No.
I did not see myself as a person ever in need of that kind of professional help.
I do not.
But, hey, I was not dead yet, anything could happen, and I could not rule it out. I had family and countless friends who benefited from counseling and from therapy and prescription.
"I sought out the master," I said in my journal, "because my friend Billy said I needed a teacher."
I felt almost immediately that sitting helped me—teacher, too, and sangha.
Yes.
That is why I stayed.
"You came on Billy's advice?" the master asked.
Yes.
"Didn't you feel as if you needed a teacher?"
No.
No, I write now as I edit this book, no, I did not feel I needed a teacher, no, not at all until Billy suggested that I did; but after he had said so, I did—then, immediately, I, too, felt that I did. I trusted Billy. I still do. He was right. Instruction helped me. The master helped me.
Kudo.
"Doesn't sitting, having a teacher, and practicing with the sangha still help you?"
Yes.
Sitting, teacher, and sangha helped me very much.
Yes.
I had said so many times.
Yes.
"Why are you here?"
The master had asked me that question more than once in dokusan.
Hmm.
"I don't know why," I said in my journal.
I tried to explain.
"I want to do what I can to foster nonviolence, kindness, and generosity."
Tao.
The practice and the fixed standard that the master provided helped me do this.
Yes.
I felt it did.
"Don't you want to wake up?" the master asked.
"Want"—
No.
I felt no "want" like that.
Should I?
I felt I had everything I needed.
This.
This.
Until the master asked this question I would have said that I did not want anything. But if pushed I supposed I could say I wanted the virtues we named and recited in the precepts and vows.
Was this what the master meant?
Not even thirty years earlier when I first stepped onto the path had I any desire to "wake up" and today I had still no desire to wake up—none at all—unless my waking up would help me to foster nonviolence, mercy, and kindness.
Would my waking up help me to stop the killing?
To end war?
To be honest I did feel awake—at least compared to the man I once had been. But I understood, too, what the master meant by our having to wake up every instant, moment after moment, in order to be fully present in the present, and of course I wanted that; that, obviously, would help me help others. From the master I had learned to sit and how better to let go; and that had helped me more than I could say; but I had not come to Heartmind and to the master because I suffered and sought an end to my suffering. That had not been my motive.
"I don't understand what you get out of it," Ruth tells me often.
"I don't either," I said in my journal.
"Is getting something out of it why we practice?" the master asked.
My point exactly and yet—
"When Zen is thoroughly understood absolute peace of mind is attained and a man lives as he ought to live."
D.T. Suzuki.
"What more may we hope?" Suzuki asks.
His question and the master's were rhetorical; but bodhisattvas, it seemed, would perhaps not hear them so. Each month on the night of the full moon in Ryaku Fusatsu the master asked us if we would receive and maintain the ten prohibitory precepts and the three pure precepts. Kneeling we promised—one precept at a time—to be unselfish, nonviolent, honest, frugal, modest, and kind, and in general to do no harm, to do good, and to serve all beings.
In this way each precept is conferred.
Truth.
Peace.
Love.
"Will you receive and maintain this precept?" the master asked.
"Yes, I will," in unison each of us answered.
Is getting something out of it why we practice?
What more may we hope?
"May all beings understand fully the wisdom of the teaching and the Way and, free from hindrance, may all beings support harmony in the community."
Every morning the bodhisattvas pray.
"May all beings embody the great Way, resolving to awaken!"
I tried.
The Bob I am today, I wrote in my journal for lack of anything better to say, rereads, evaluates, and edits the Bob I was yesterday, and the Bob I was the day before that, and the day before that, and the Bob I am now edits the Bob I was just a few seconds ago, and now this Bob even newer still edits Bob and Bob and Bob and Bob and the red red robin goes bob bob bobbin along.
"How about giving this up?" asked the master.
Editing?
Oof!
I had tried before to write in my journal and to submit it each week without editing but to do so was for me extremely difficult. The scholastic habit developed over a lifetime of writing and editing died hard and on the rare occasion when I had been able to submit to the master my journal unedited I often found myself criticized and even attacked for expressing what many times I myself recognized as an "inverted view," the term, I gathered, for Buddhist heresy, though I was not sure the concept of heresy even existed in Buddhism, or as Buddhist "error" or misunderstanding, or as politically incorrect, or more often as an observation or remark likely to provoke the master and which I could easily have rewritten or deleted; and so the usual result was a muddle, part "first thought best thought," in Jack Kerouac's mot, and part polished document. Even now as I write this account of my experience and practice with the master and the sangha at Heartmind I remain confused about the purpose of the practice journal and feel certain that in my case at least it was not only ineffective but also in fact counterproductive and unnecessarily provocative.
Yes.
I felt about the journal just as I felt about student evaluations of me in my job.
Yes.
They were counterproductive.
To what—
Mutual respect? Cooperation?
Harmony?
Instruction? Learning? Understanding? Reason?
Love?
All of the above.
Yes.
"I require the journal," the master had told me on more than several occasions, "because students do not communicate with me otherwise and I need a way of finding out what is going on in their lives and what they feel and think."
"Why don't you just wait until students tell you what they need to tell you?" I had inquired.
I was curious.
"Or until they ask of you what they need to know?"
"They're afraid of me!" the master had exclaimed.
Fear.
This was true for some of the students at the temple. They felt intimidated—but although the master had more than once either stated or implied that this was also true of me it simply was not so. I did wonder why the master did not try harder to appear less scary to his students, the new ones in particular, but then maybe the master did try and just did not know how. Students of Suzuki and Katagiri had remarked that, although both teachers were little men, when students were in their presence both seemed big. Kudo on the other hand was a very big man and more than once it had occurred to me that as a teacher he might have found it useful to seem small—but then at six feet three and two sixty how might the master accomplish that?
I wondered.
Billy and I both had worked to develop sophisticated academic tactics by which we tempted students, lured them, seduced them, intrigued them, drew them in, engaged them.
Cunning.
Art.
In the master I had seen nothing comparable.
Just the opposite.
Alas—
"They're afraid of me!"
Had the master ever asked himself why?
I did wonder but—
Forward.
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