I read and I reread my entries at the end of the week and I edited and I edited some more and I deleted any of my questions and replies to questions the master had asked me that I thought might provoke my teacher. It disturbed me to wonder if I dared simply to be honest and direct with my teacher. It had been through the effort to be honest always that I had first stepped onto the path and it seemed now that if the master and I broke up this would be the issue that broke us up. If I just wrote what I wanted, what I felt, whatever came up, as the master himself continued to advise me, it seemed to provoke him and to make him mad.
"This isn't about me, Bob."
I mentioned that I had sat forty minutes in the morning with the annoyance koan.
"It was empty," I said.
"Who or what is annoyed?" asked the master.
I did not know.
"Penetrate to the bottom of this!" the master demanded.
I tried.
But it seemed life had moved on and I with it.
Forward.
I could not sit with my annoyance if I no longer felt it.
Forward.
Two war stories the previous week had given me a jolt. Bodies found in Iraq had shown evidence of torture by power tools. I'd first heard of such an atrocity ten years before. It was difficult to understand how and why one human being would drill a hole in another human being.
Horror.
Hell.
Then I read a magazine article about the civil war and genocide in the Congo and I knew once more why in retrospect ignorance sometimes looked like bliss. Until the article I had known nothing of this horror—just as in Iraq, unimaginable, hideous, horrible atrocity, feet, hands, arms, legs, even lips, cut off of tortured victims, heads hacked off by machete, the abyss of horror, at the bottom of the human experience an ever present hell, the reason I opened up to religion again in 1974 ten years after I had dismissed it I thought once and for all—and yet ever present, too, the magic and miracle and marvel of consciousness, life, beauty, and leisure. The cool torturer drills the hole into his howling prisoner's knee or face at the same instant on this same earth the vacationing golfer wiggles his butt and waggles his club and lines up his putt for an eagle.
How do we live in such contrariety?
Shall we sleep, hide, arm, warn, fight, bomb, scream, bow, beg, cry, pray, journal, chant, write poetry, get drunk, get high, make jokes, laugh, dance, walk, shop, wish to die, wait to die?
Kill ourselves?
Sit?
Hamlet.
"You and the torturer are the same," the master replied, "different but the same."
Yes—
Yes—and I and the golfer.
The horror!
The horror!
In the morning I sat again with the koan of my annoyance.
Who?
"Nobody home," I journaled, "so I just followed my breath."
I sat.
"Following the breath is sitting with the annoyance koan," the master explained.
Understood.
"Who or what is annoyed?" the master persisted.
I am patient.
The next morning when I sat my left knee was sore from sitting at the temple the previous night, my eyes watered just before my alarm sounded the end of my regular forty minutes, and I had to yawn three or four times—but I was reminded yet again of how much I liked sitting even though I did not know why. I liked giving up, I reported in my journal, surrendering, just sitting still, silent, watching the moving sky of consciousness, the changeable, changing weather of my mind, and letting go.
Just sitting.
"Much nicer than thinking, eh?" the master inquired.
Hmm.
Well—
I liked thinking, too.
"Please remember," he added, "that thinking, not thinking, and nonthinking are all zazen."
Then what was not zazen?
I wondered.
What was not Tao?
I had decided not to respond in my journal to the master's replies to my entries. It seemed clear that was not what he wanted, I explained, and my responses seemed unnecessarily provocative.
"I'll work with your observations," I promised. "I'll sit with them."
"Good," the master replied.
The master often reminded us students that emotions and mental formations arise from within and are not caused by something "out there," a reality, I noted in my journal, that I knew and that I had accepted intellectually—but a reality that I nonetheless still puzzled over.
The master corrected me.
"If you still puzzle over it you have not accepted it intellectually."
Oh.
"If you had," the master explained, "it would not be a puzzle."
Hmm.
Irritation, annoyance, anger, impatience—the origin of those mental formations I thought I saw clearly and I believed I understood that they arose in "me" and were not caused by what only seemed to evoke them.
But it was much harder for me to accept the idea that sadness and dread were also like this and that they, too, arose from within and were not caused at least in part by the injustice, violence, and war that seemed to evoke them; and it was even harder to accept that compassion, pity, and empathy likewise arose from within and were not evoked by our perception of the exploitation, victimization, and suffering of the powerless and the poor.
How might wisdom, perfect understanding, manifest?
Pity?
Service?
It was an ancient question.
Had the images of the infirm old woman, the sick and dying man, the dead woman, her corpse, and the sadhu "caused" the Buddha to renounce his life as prince, to divorce his wife and son, to fast and to pray and to meditate, to wander the earth as an ascetic and mendicant monk, and to sacrifice all to learn the answer to the eternal mystery and cruel riddle of death, pain, suffering, and discontent?
No?
What "caused" the Buddha to block the path of the warrior king on his way to war? What "caused" one man to block the path of the monstrous tanks in Tiananmen Square?
What "caused" the master to call people assholes? What "caused" him to write letters to the editor?
What "caused" the bodhisattva to forsake his own nirvana in order to free, to save, and to serve others?
I remembered the master's review of a recent movie.
"It made me cry three times!"
Made me.
Or had the master said only: "Watching it I cried three times."
I wondered.
"Is this an important distinction?" I asked in my journal.
Thinking.
Thinking.
In his answer the master tried hard to explain. He contrasted the philosophical premise of English grammar with the philosophical premise of Japanese grammar, an argument with which I was already familiar. The simultaneity of all phenomena in the present moment obviates both subject and object in present and past.
Just this—
Just this—
Just this!
But I am a curious man, awed, confused, bewildered, astonished, appalled, and amazed.
Candide.
In my journal I had offered an analysis of the practice period journal requirement. Just to demand words, any words at all, I suggested, is to demand less than whole truth—as the teacher then points out in his replies. No matter what the writer writes, by definition it is out of context. Yet we speak and we write and, if readiness is present in the student, understanding can result from a word no less than from the flower the Buddha held up to Mahakasyapa.
"Aha!"
"According to Bob," the master remarked. "So you win?"
Oh shit—
No.
No.
No.
He had misunderstood.
I had meant to suggest by "Aha!" only the moment of realization and not some silly victory I thought I had won in debate. Such misunderstandings occurred continually and many like this one seemed too inconsequential even to try to correct. Perhaps in the practice of Zen all misunderstandings between student and teacher were considered too inconsequential to try to correct—by the student at least.
Fuck it.
"Just sit with it!"
In the academic world it was different, though, and I admired the dedication and devotion and patience and perseverance of scholars who maintained their faith in and their commitment to truth in spite of its relativity and ephemerality and to its expression in language.
Yes.
I thought of Plato and his record of Socrates; of Lao Tsu and his Tao Te Ching; of Ananda and his recitation of the teachings of the Buddha, and of the scribes who preserved them; of Patanjali and his codification of yoga; of the Christian apostles who recorded the gospel, the life and the teachings of Jesus; of the pacifist Leo Tolstoy and his explication of Jesus and the nonresistance to evil; of the pacifists Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud and their faith in reason; of the pacifist Bertrand Russell and his agnosticism and logic; of the pacifist Jiddu Krishnamurti and his repudiation of authority; and of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his passionate and righteous documentation of the horror of the gulag.
His book—
The book that destroyed it.
"You cursed brat! Look what you've done! I'm melting! Melting! Oh, what a world, what a world! Who would've thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?"
School!
Yes.
Just sit?
No.
God bless these men!
God bless these men!
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