But I had already decided to attend the entire Rohatsu at Heartmind in December; and though I still did not consider myself a person who needed help I thought that the following year I would try, as the master said, to spend the whole month of June at Laugh Out Loud.
I had mentioned at the practice group meeting that again I had been annoyed by the responses of the master to my journal. The master asked me once more to sit with his question.
"Who is annoyed?"
This I did.
But when I looked my annoyance dissipated and there was nobody home.
So who—
I did not know.
I also replied in writing to the master's responses to my journal.
But—
Then I thought better of it and I did not send them.
Enough.
They would only irritate the master, I was certain, and provoked he would respond in kind.
I had nothing new to add.
Why revisit in the very same way the very same conflict I had addressed just the previous spring?
It made no sense.
I did report that my wife had been amused by my problem.
"Two men doing the man thing," Ruth said.
I laughed.
"It's just a personality conflict," Ruth added.
Maybe.
I could see it that way.
"Both of those observations make a lot of sense really," I journaled.
I felt weary.
Tired.
The master responded.
"The relationship between student and teacher is not a relationship between two equals."
There's the rub.
"If you make it so," the master added, "you miss the point and get nowhere."
Had I made it so?
How?
Had I missed the point?
What point?
Was there somewhere to get?
Circles.
I knew we were not Buddhist equals nor had I ever considered us so. My teacher knew much more about Buddhism and practice than I. But why did he seem so often displeased and unhappy? Several of my colleagues at work shared a similar discontent. Their students were to blame, these teachers said, because too many were unprepared, unmotivated, and unwilling to exert the necessary effort. Perhaps the master, too, felt this way.
Frustrated.
"What makes me mad is when students blame me for their failure to practice!"
Emphasis on the second "me"—
"Me!"
That I had heard the master exclaim four or five times just in my first few months at the temple.
Perhaps he felt that way about me.
Bob.
But I had been committed to the Way for a long time, I felt highly motivated, and short of quitting my job and divorcing my wife and becoming a monk I did not know how I could try any harder. I wanted to learn what the master had to teach. But except for this conflict with the master I was happy. For the first time in my life I had even enough money. The vanities and cruelties of my past I had confessed, I had apologized, and I had been forgiven; and at sixty-two I felt eager in the time I had left to be of comfort and service to others. Yet to the master, it seemed, this opinion of mine, this attitude, was my issue.
Dishonest.
Denial of my dark side.
Vanity.
An obstacle.
Fear.
The master to me was a puzzle.
I was curious.
It was March, spring was just around the corner, and I was eager for summer so I could work on my book. There in my book I thought I could think, yes, think to my heart's content, about my relationship with my teacher. In my journal I mentioned once more that in his replies to my daily entries the master had said that I was struggling, that in fact I had many questions about practice, and that it was not as easy for me to let go of my daily problems as I claimed, pretty much the same charge of "denial" that had brought me to impasse the previous spring. I did have questions about the master; but these questions, I had learned, were not germane.
"This isn't about me, Bob."
Yet the only real struggle I felt in my practice was in our relationship. When the master imputed to me feelings, beliefs, and motives I did not recognize, I explained, my tendency was to defend myself; and my teacher, I added, exhibited the very same tendency.
"My job is to point out what I see," the master responded.
Understood.
"Yours is to take it to heart and to work with it."
To sit.
I had finished reading the text the master had assigned for our dharma study on Saturday morning, "Foundations of Mindfulness and the Abhidharma." I loved Buddhist literature. It made sense to me and it always had—from the very first time I had really listened and heard the dharma. The master lectured and offered explication of the Five Hindrances and led our discussion of them. The main hindrance for me, I later reported in my journal, was obviously doubt. But my doubt was not at all about the buddha, the dharma, or the sangha.
No.
My doubt was about the master.
Kudo.
Nothing else seemed to get in my way like he did.
Why?
In our discussion of the text the master had said that the antidote to doubt was reflection and sustained thinking. To me that seemed right on target, yes. If I were "stuck" that is where I would say I was stuck—in doubt about my teacher and in my reflection and sustained thinking on the matter.
The master replied.
"If I were your teacher there would be no doubt."
Huh?
I did not know what this meant.
"Because of this doubt you have not made me your teacher," he explained.
I did not understand.
I doubted neither the master's integrity nor his intention. I did test his counsel and instruction against my experience. Maybe "doubt" was the wrong word. I had questions about the master. I was curious about him. I did not know how to let go of this curiosity or even if I should.
Should I?
If the master had a secret he felt he had to protect to preserve his reputation then the master was not free.
1 Reputation.
2 Delusion.
3 Ego.
4 Attachment.
5 Fear.
6 Suffering.
The text of "Foundations of Mindfulness and the Abhidharma" as the master explained it seemed to me an obvious product of intellect, careful observation, reflection, analysis, and discriminative thinking, in short, of reason—a helpful tool, a raft that carries us to the shore and that we must then abandon, then must use again, and abandon again, and so on.
Yes.
That was identical to reason as I understood it.
I understood.
"No."
The master said.
"You hold onto your opinions like a pit bull holding onto someone's leg."
Funny.
To evoke from the master a remark like this all I had to do was say something positive about reason—anything, no matter how slight. I had learned. It was one of the master's buttons.
Reason.
The aim of Zen training, writes psychologist Carl Jung in his 1934 foreword to An Introduction to Zen Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki, is "the complete destruction of the rational intellect."
Suzuki himself writes: "Zen has come to the definite conclusion that the ordinary logical process of reasoning is powerless to give final satisfaction to our deepest spiritual needs."
I once felt like this.
But it seemed to me that I had emerged from the other side of the mystery and that I now required the service of both intuition and reason.
"No."
Zen considers us prisoners of language and logic.
Suzuki explains.
"So long as we remain thus fettered," he writes, "we are miserable and go through untold suffering."
But not only was I not miserable I felt that my deepest spiritual needs had been satisfied.
"No."
The master insisted otherwise.
"No."
The next day a shock—
Horror.
The terrible news that two teenage grandchildren of a dear friend—for twenty-five years a colleague of mine—had died in a fire early on Saturday morning and that a third grandchild had survived in critical condition.
I noted this tragedy in my journal.
Pain.
The master's first comment was cold.
"Suffering is a condition of existence," the master remarked. "You're alive so suffer."
God!
My other entries I had written and then edited radically to avoid provoking further abuse from the master. I no longer felt that I could tell the master what I really thought of him though clearly the master did not feel the same about me. But if I could not be honest and open with the master—and indeed I felt now that I could not be—I supposed our relationship was over.
The end.
I skipped my morning sitting and slept another hour.
I was tired.
I read yet one more time the master's most recent replies to my journal and considered again the koan the master had given me. Who or what is annoyed? It felt like reading last month's news magazine—old and stale. Now what had all that been about? I could hardly remember. Did I not want to wake up? That, too, the master had asked. Had this question been rhetorical? To me it had seemed so. It sounded as though the master thought I should want to wake up. I wanted to be peaceable, brave, intelligent, and kind so that if at all possible I might help at least to slow the killing. That was pretty much it. I had so far been a failure, the murder and war went on and on, but other than less hate and more love there was little that I wanted in the world.
The rest I had.
I thought, too, of the master's remark that my considering myself his equal was an obstacle to my progress.
He was the teacher and I was the student.
I thought.
I thought.
I thought.
Had I really not made him my teacher?
I knew not.
I questioned everything.
Him too.
Now the master had said he had secrets he could not reveal for fear that their disclosure would ruin his reputation. It was important to him, he had said, and it was obvious that it was.
Hm.
Feeling that way and with something to hide how could the master do his job?
I wondered.
I was glad that kind of thing was out of my life.
I slept.
Four or five times in the night I woke up thinking of my dear friend and of her unbearable terrible loss. I rolled out of bed at 4:00 and sat and the tragedy rose up from my mind again and again and again.
But not only that—
The mundane usual topics, too, arose like the blobs of my lava lamp, the master, my wife, my teaching, the lay initiation, and dozens of petty concerns that later I could never remember.
I just sat.
I just sat.
The master learned more details of the tragedy from the local newspaper and he had been impressed. The two dead children had thrown themselves over their helpless brother, crippled by cerebral palsy, to shield him from the fire, and by their sacrifice they had saved his life. The master called their deaths "unspeakably tragic" and he expressed his condolences.
"Life is suffering," the master said, "and sometimes tears are the only response."
I had met the mother of the dead children only two or three times many years ago and I knew the children not at all. But for days every time I was asked about the tragedy I felt a tug on my heart and a spasm in my demeanor that brought me to the verge of tears. Even one year later, as I edited this section of my book, tears rose again to my eyes. My dear friend and colleague had lived a hard life, too hard to explain even briefly here, and in spite of everything she remained loving and kind.
Her faith sustained her.
Jesus.
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