I stayed up with Ruth and watched TV until ten, and in the morning, still tired, I turned off my alarm when it beeped at 4:00, but I could lie there feeling guilty for only three or four minutes. I knew that if I skipped my sitting in the morning I would have to choose between my sitting and my exercise after work in the afternoon, so I got up, and I sat, and then when I got home at 3:00, following my breath and watching my step, I walked my five miles.
Ah!
I felt born to walk.
The following day I overslept—I must have screwed up the alarm when I hit the hay—and I had not woken up until 6:00 and had to rush off to work and never did feel I had caught up.
But I walked.
"Beautiful day!" I noted in my journal. "Tonight zazen!"
Then—
For ninety minutes at the temple—
We sat.
In the morning I managed to get up and sit at 4:00, my usual schedule on a workday, but at 2:00 in the afternoon I felt so tired that I thought of rescheduling my job at the temple office so that I could nap before Ryaku Fusatsu that night. Instead I gutted it out and by the time zazen started I felt fine, not tired at all, and I enjoyed both the sitting and the service. The experience showed me what I already knew, I reported in my journal, that a part of fatigue, maybe even most of it, is psychological. Sleep is so mysterious—a greater mystery than the moon—yet we do not usually think this way about sleep. Awake we are wary, cautious, prudent, so defensive that we wear all our armor; but when we sleep we are utterly vulnerable and this is the risk and the thrill of sleeping together.
Surrender.
Helpless as a baby.
"Sounds pretty mystical to me!" the master remarked.
It is.
Whitman:
Now I pierce the darkness, new beings appear,
The earth recedes from me into the night,
I saw that it was beautiful, and I see that what is not the earth is beautiful.
I go from bedside to bedside,
I sleep close with the other sleepers each in turn,
I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,
And I become the other dreamers.
I am a dance—
"You can be in my dream," Bob Dylan says, "if I can be in yours."
Mysticism.
Hindu and Buddhist adepts, it is said, awakened, fully realized, and enlightened beings, master the "siddhi," the magical powers and mystical gifts of invisibility, clairvoyance, clairaudience, telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, metamorphosis, levitation, flight, divination, prophecy, immunization, invincibility, reincarnation, rejuvenation, and immortality.
Even more.
By their wisdom, knowledge, skill, faith, renunciation, selflessness, aspiration, austerity, discipline, devotion, compassion, practice, and prayer they become supermen. It is said that in unknown realms there are untold trillions of them, Buddhist angels, Heavenly hosts faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
They did not and could not prevent WW1.
Nor Nanking.
They did not and could not prevent WW2.
Nor Auschwitz.
Nor Hiroshima.
They did not and could not enlighten Pol Pot.
Nor save Tibet.
They did not and could not prevent my neighbor in his driveway one summer from drenching his wife with gasoline.
From igniting her.
Fire.
How she burned!
"How does it feel, bitch?" he yelled.
Mysticism—
The siddhi—
Eh—
Not interested.
Thursday morning once more I had turned off my alarm and slept another hour, the second morning that week that I had missed my sitting. I could not even remember the last time that happened.
Sloughin off—
But I sat again early in the morning on Friday at Heartmind.
Then on Saturday and Sunday was the sesshin.
It was difficult.
I was way behind in my grading, my stack of student papers was two inches high, and the thought that I should have stayed home to read and to mark them arose again and again in zazen.
Nor was that all.
Boredom tortured me. I felt encased in concrete. I was clumsy, I kept dropping things, and I was drowsy. To keep myself awake I did a lot of walking, a lot of kinhin, yet still I suffered boredom.
Beauty woke me.
During the master's dharma talk on Saturday the bright green of trees in the windows behind the master was an extraordinary beauty and I reveled first in the cool wind that blew through the open windows and then in the thunderstorm and in the heavy rain that fell for a solid hour.
The following day—
Easter!
At the Lutheran church next door the congregation held a morning service in their parking lot. From the front porch of the temple after breakfast I sat and listened to the Christians sing hymns I remembered from my childhood.
Amazing grace—
How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch
Like me—
I once was lost but
Now am found
Was blind—
But now I see—
Nonviolence.
Jesus.
Later I sat in a different place in the semicircle around the master and now my new perspective on Sunday afforded me a vision not of green but of bright white—white windows, white houses, white blossoms, white sky.
Glory!
Nonviolence.
Jesus.
I listened and I breathed—in wonder.
Air.
Impermanence.
Jesus.
In zazen the master's digestive tract groaned and moaned and whistled and whined and rumbled through the zendo and all of these amazing noises were also incredibly loud. Many sounded as if they were internal but others were clearly and obviously farts—loud long tremendous epic farts. I had myself begun at age fifty to suffer from infrequent but occasional colonic cramping and I had learned to hustle to the bathroom at the very first warning. If I did not, in only a few moments I could be doubled over in intense pain and, if I were at work, I would then have to step tippy toe in a slow stiff-legged stagger down the long corridor to the restroom. I had so far not failed to reach in time my destination but more than once I had come perilously close to perhaps the ultimate personal workplace embarrassment. In the zendo every rumble, whistle, and whine that issued from the intestinal tract of the master delivered to my mind and to me a dull stab of concern for his health.
Helpless.
Helpless.
As usual the shosan ceremony concluded the two-day sesshin and as usual I struggled to formulate a question. This time, however, a question had arisen for me in zazen. It was personal and I worried about it. I had wondered about the secrets the revelation of which the master said would ruin his reputation. I decided to proceed slowly one step at a time. When my turn had come and I stood at the head of the line I stepped to the small, black bowing mat in front of the master, put my palms together, knelt, and bowed my head in gassho. Twice I offered a pinch of powdered incense on the smouldering charcoal briquette in the koro, I bowed again, and when the master put his palms in gassho to invite my question I put my palms in gassho, too, and I took a deep breath to calm and to steady myself.
I began.
"Is any question forbidden?" I asked.
"No," the master without hesitation replied. "You may ask any question."
"Do you have something to hide?" I asked.
The master hesitated only slightly before he responded.
"I won't tell you, Bob," the master said.
Emphasis on "you."
In silence for only a moment I considered his answer.
I thought.
I looked at the master's face and I gazed into his eyes in order to ascertain if I had been dismissed. But the master appeared to be only mildly annoyed and willing still to entertain a second question.
"Is it an obstacle to your teaching?" I asked.
"I won't tell you, Bob," the master said again.
Emphasis on "you."
The master put his hands in gassho.
This signaled the end of my audience and terminated our exchange.
I did the same.
In the past the silent bow in gassho by students had been thank you enough, a gesture of honor, respect, reverence, acceptance, and gratitude, but today my friends in line ahead of me had in addition all thanked the master specifically—"for your answer"—a reply I had not heard before so I assumed that the master had informed Eleanor, now the senior ino, that this should be our protocol and I would do as others had done. In the past I had heard from Edward and from Jane that Nananda was much more demanding of our teacher in shosan than we were and that she had more than once sharply and simply refused to accept from the master an answer she thought unsatisfactory; but I myself would not have been comfortable doing so. I was just a lay practitioner, not like Nananda a monk and dharma heir. Within the forms and procedures of the Buddhist practice my teacher had taught me I felt unafraid to ask any question of the master to which I sincerely wanted an answer, but I had without exception always treated the master with the utmost respect. Indeed it had never entered my head to do otherwise and why would it? The master had devoted much of his adult life to the Way. The master had taught me to sit and for that I felt grateful. Never in his presence had I been discourteous, rude, or impolite. I do not believe I had ever behaved in that way towards any person at the temple. Just as the master often said, at the temple all of us were always on our very best behavior. No matter how dissatisfied I might feel about an answer I received from my teacher I was not ever going to argue with him and contend in the public rite of shosan. Had I ever witnessed what Jane and Edward said they had witnessed or had I ever witnessed them so contend perhaps I might have felt different.
But I doubt it.
My two dharma friends exhibited exactly the same deference, appreciation, and gratitude towards our teacher that I did. I had learned in large part from their personal example.
Yet still I did not at all understand how the master's keeping secrets could be reconciled with what I understood of the Way and I had expected an explanation; but neither did I want to appear discourteous and rude.
I bowed.
"Thank you for your answer," I said.
I bowed.
I stood.
I bowed again.
I walked three steps to my left to the larger bowing mat and offered the obligatory one full prostration. When everyone had asked his or her question the shosan ceremony was over and the master asked us all to arrange our mats and cushions in an informal circle for our usual concluding discussion in which we thanked our cooks and our inos and the doshi, the sesshin leader, the master, and then each of us in turn described our sesshin.
The master began.
"I apologize for the noises I was making in the zendo," he said. "For the past several days and more I have again been experiencing intestinal distress. I have been preoccupied with it. It has been constantly in my thoughts, the worry about new blockage, the possibility of hospitalization."
The master paused.
"I just sat through it."
The master paused.
We waited for more.
Nada.
There was none.
No.
"That was my sesshin," the master concluded.
The look on his face registered sadness, resignation, acceptance, determination. All of us knew what the master had been through the past three years—the increasing severity of symptoms of irritable bowel, the colonoscopies, diverticulitis and the big scare, hospitalization, antibiotics, the return of relatively good health, then a year later a similar problem and now, it seemed, the very same problem again for the third consecutive spring.
We all felt terribly sorry for him.
Pity.
"For those embarrassing noises I apologize," the master said a second time.
We waited.
Dean raised his hands in gassho.
"Yes?"
"Is it stress?" Dean asked. "From leading the sesshin?"
"No," the master replied. "It started before the sesshin."
Dread.
Dread.
Dread.
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