When I got home from work I saw that I had received the master's most recent replies to my journal and I commented that in this round of replies at least I found nothing to irritate me.
"Irritation does not come from outside," the master reminded me. "It comes from within."
Yes.
In his replies the master asked many questions.
I inquired.
"Prompt answers are not necessary," the master explained. "Take what I say to heart and work with it."
I tried.
"If I ask a question I want you to consider the content of the question," he said.
I tried.
The following day I skipped my morning sitting and slept till 5:00 and I didn't get the opportunity to make it up—there was my job, my office duty at the temple, and then in the evening the visitation at the mortuary for the grandchildren of my friend. In life I had never met them.
Dead—
So still.
So mysterious and so blank.
Sphinx.
Their funeral would be in the morning and coming up for me now and then in meditation had been the thought of my own death. I did not dwell on it. It evoked no emotion in me. It inspired and motivated me. In my morning zazen before the funeral death came up again and again, the waxen faces of the two dead children in their coffins, the loud, long, heartrending moan of grief from a friend bereft of the boy—his father I guessed—and the knowledge that 160000 other people on earth would be buried this day, 160000 every day.
Impenetrable fact.
The tide of my sadness, the ebb of my sadness, the tide of its return, and its ebb.
Its eternal return.
"Life is suffering," the master responded to this meditation and reflection in my journal.
Truth.
"To be alive is to suffer," the master added. "We are constantly reminded of this over and over again."
Truth.
"There is no escape."
Truth.
In his autobiographical Chronicles Bob Dylan writes that his grandmother was filled with nobility and goodness.
"Happiness is not on the road to anything," she told her grandson.
No goal.
"Happiness is the road."
Ah!
The master rarely spoke of happiness. I could not remember his ever mentioning it except to explain that he did not emphasize the third truth, the end of suffering, because it created expectation that, unmet, might seem a promise false or broken. His recurrent themes were unhappiness and its origin, the subjects of the first truth and the second, and discipline, the subject of the fourth truth, the path, the practice, zazen, the precepts, the six perfections.
It made sense.
"Be kind," Dylan's grandmother told him, "because everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
No exceptions.
In the discussion following his dharma talk, the master said that awakening, realization or enlightenment, does not necessarily transcend cultural milieu, cultural prejudices about gender, sexuality, skin color, race, ethnicity, caste, class, and nationality; that is, even in awakening one might not totally "break through" all ignorance and come to truth and right understanding in every part of living. But total liberation was the romantic idea I'd had about enlightenment—as had Nikki, too, and Edward—in the early years of my involvement in the Way; and now the more I learned of the Buddha and of the very first sangha and of the sexism, racism, and nationalism in Buddhist cultural history the better I understood my error and its magnitude. Upon awakening to his enlightenment not even the Tathagata had been freed from his prejudice and become instantly smart about everything.
Ignorance.
"It never ends," the master said.
Practice.
He taught the need for continuous vigilance, the need to wake up every moment.
Now—
Now—
Now—
The subject arose when Eleanor asked the master about the names of the teachers in the lineage she recited every morning at the temple. All of them were male, an aspect of Buddhist organization and hierarchy that repelled Ruth and had also bothered Daly. It bothered me. To my account of this discussion in my journal the master responded at length. The master first insisted that the organization and hierarchy of some schools of Buddhism had nothing to do with the teaching.
"This is not an aspect of Buddhism," the master declared.
Not Zen.
"This is the way that some people represent it."
The master explained.
"There is nothing in Shakyamuni Buddha's teaching that discriminates between a man's and a woman's capability to awaken. If one sees into things clearly one sees that male egoism and dominance are just that. They have nothing to do with the way things exist at the core. If one does not see things clearly, one blames it on Buddhism, which does not exist as an entity. Some do transcend cultural milieu. In his view of women Dogen did."
But the daily recitation of the lineage—
All men.
The question remained.
Why—
The master did not address it.
Why—
He continued.
"People do have moments of insight and do experience emptiness; but this awakening is neither complete nor permanent. It is never complete and never permanent. Some people go deep, some go very deep, some go very, very deep, some go as deep as one can go."
He concluded.
"These people are rare."
Not two—
Nondiscrimination.
Lennon:
Imagine—
There's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine—
All the people
Living for today
Imagine—
There's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
No religion too
Imagine—
All the people
Living life in peace
Monday it snowed.
I woke and sat at 4:00—then came downstairs and turned on the television to see if the college had cancelled classes. At 6:00 I caught the announcement. When the snow stopped I shoveled the driveway, sidewalks, and back patio. I liked the purity of shoveling snow, its solitary nature, the white of it, the silence, the physicality of it, the effort, the repetition, the labor and the breathing, the visible realization of progress and completion, its practicality, its benefit to others and to myself, the absence of language and speech, its beauty. I associated the activity with Zen. I always had. I did not know why. My back and my shoulders were tired and sore but in a good way that reminded me that I had done real work. After shoveling I napped for an hour in the morning and for another hour in mid-afternoon.
A two-nap day—
Ah!
It felt so good.
I sat.
Who was annoyed?
I sat.
Did I not want to wake up?
I sat.
Was the master my teacher?
I sat.
Did I doubt him?
I sat.
Why did I doubt him?
I sat.
Had I not made him my teacher?
Why?
"I don't know what this means," I said in my journal.
I sat.
"Sit with it," the master instructed.
I sat.
I mentioned also in my journal, facetiously, I hoped, and in self-deprecation, that in spite of my best intentions I could not seem to resist snacking on chips, candy, soda, nuts, cookies, and desserts or filling my plate with a second helping.
Even a third.
I guessed this behavior was just Bob.
"Just me."
The master addressed my confession more seriously than I had tendered it.
"This is just who you are?" he asked. "Is this fixed and permanent?"
No but—
To diet was hard.
"Who is it that cannot resist?"
Who?
Like other fat people I had failed at dieting many times and like them I had not given up.
I remembered, too, the master saying once at a practice group meeting that he'd had to accept the fact that anger, resentment, and anxiety would always be issues for him, yes, always, that was just who he was, and that indeed he would probably always be that way.
Unfixed, constantly changing, impermanent, and yet—
"Always."
"This isn't about me, Bob."
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