184 Lachs

The master was back in the hospital—two nights for his inflamed intestines. His doctors pumped him full of antibiotics. By the time I called he had been dismissed. The master knew—twice in the past he had said—that stress was indeed a factor that contributed to his irritable bowel. It was hard for me not to wonder if the secrets he said he kept to preserve his reputation—whatever they were—might not be the mental and emotional analog of his condition.

It seemed possible.

"I trust my gut," the master told us too often to count.

First he'd point to his head.

"We need to stop acting from up here," he would say.

Next he'd point to his hara.

"We need to start acting from down here!"

Then he always frowned darkly and moved his hand in a circle at his abdomen.

"I trust my gut."

Again—

"I trust my gut."

Uff da!

It seemed now that his gut literally could not be trusted.

Inflammation.

Pain.

I wondered—

If the master were hiding something, keeping secrets to protect his reputation, as the master himself had said, was this a kind of lie? By his telling us only what he had already told us, had the master indicated that he felt the need to open?

What in hell was his secret?

I wondered.

"The truth will out," Shakespeare said.

I believed.

This axiom had been corroborated by the experience of secrets and lies in my own life.

The truth had set me free.

The master was a man of integrity, a good man, a very good man indeed.

A man of conscience.

Virtue.

So it did seem to me possible that his secret, whatever it might be, his fear of its disclosure, the fear of his exposure, and his attachment to his reputation could in part have caused the master his physical problem; and I knew, too, that the master himself believed in the reality of just such an interconnection of body and mind.

Not two.

I had entertained such an hypothesis before and I had rejected it. 

It blamed the victim.

Karma.

In my old age I had begun to suffer from thin skin.

What might that mean?

Ha.

I rejected it again.

Days passed.

My wife visited Mitch, a local poet, who asked what I'd been up to.

Ruth explained.

"Bob still spends a lot of time at the Zen center," my wife told him.

He frowned.

"Is Bob still doing that?" Mitch asked.

Ruth nodded.

"I know several people who did try that over there but then they all gave it up."

"Why?" Ruth inquired.

"Because the Zen master there was on a big ego trip they said."

Ruth just listened.

Silent.

She told me this story when she got home.

I laughed.

"I guess that is Mark's opinion, too," I said.

"Oh."

"Alison says he quit because he thinks the master is on a power trip."

Ruth nodded.

"That's what Mitch says he heard."

Hm.

I didn't know.

That was not the language I had used to describe the less likeable side of my teacher but I did know to what these people referred. Hey, not everyone I met liked me all that much either! I had quit once and I was determined not to quit again. In Zen there was a lot of abusive behavior, I had learned. It was a part of Zen history and Zen tradition. Masters insulted disciples, hit them with sticks, slapped their faces, twisted their ears, tweaked their noses, broke their bones, and beat them senseless. It was not so different from the behavior of teachers toward students in American public schools of the recent past. I witnessed both verbal and physical abuse as a student in the public schools of Iowa, but customs had changed, and now a teacher who struck a child for any reason, belittled a student even, would be suspended, possibly fired, and might even be arrested. Zen was changing, too. Kudo and other masters, too, had given up the use of the traditional stick. Perhaps namecalling, epithets, curses, insults, interruptions, and harangues might one day also be abandoned.

I remembered Al.

"Did your Buddhist teachers ever hit students with sticks?"

"No!"

"Really?"

"That's old-fashioned!"

Yes.

Enlightenment.

Hmm.

What did that really mean?

Could we ever be entirely free of prejudice and stereotype?

Not likely.

The practice journal aside I liked the master.

I did.

I did.

At times in fact I felt I loved the man and I had even told him so.

I'll say this again—

It was from him that I had learned to sit and for that alone I felt grateful.

Enough.

I had recently read several articles by Stuart Lachs and others on what was called Critical Zen, an academic movement in which both scholars and practitioners applied the methods and techniques of western academic analysis to Zen, specifically to "realization" or "enlightenment," and to the myth of dharma transmission from "awakened" master to "awakened" student in an unbroken lineage and succession from Shakyamuni Buddha in the sixth century before Christ on down to the living temple masters of our present era. This criticism of Zen had begun, I learned, when Japanese practitioners began to investigate the reasons why Zen masters and Zen monks in Japan had supported Japanese imperialism and militarism before and during World War Two. Why and how had "realized" masters of a religion distinguished by its reputation for nonviolence, peace, and compassion been seduced by political appeals to racism, nationalism, patriotism, militarism, and war?

Had traditional Zen harbored some systemic flaw?

I was curious.

I learned from these articles and from a collection of essays titled Rude Awakenings that critics and historians of Zen had explored these questions. In the United States critical investigation of Zen had focused mainly on the allegations of financial and sexual impropriety by Richard Baker at the San Francisco Zen Center and upon his eventual impeachment by the sangha there and on similar sexual and financial improprieties at other Zen temples. Lachs suggested that the root of the problem was the myth of transmission.

Lachs believed that no such unbroken lineage existed.

More than once the master himself had acknowledged as much. In Japan, he said, temple priests granted dharma transmission to relatives, to their own sons, for example, or to the sons of generous, wealthy temple patrons, and to close friends, not because "masters" believed these students had "awakened" but for pragmatic and utilitarian reasons—because a temple needed a priest or because a temple needed money or because a temple or a master needed to repay a debt.

Expedience.

Lachs believed that this corruption in dharma transmission might explain recent failures in American temples. There often was no true dharma transmission, Lachs argued, and instead there was something more like organizational validation and certification from one pragmatic and unawakened priest to another. But the myth, Lachs argued, put pressure on both master and sangha to see and to accept the priest as special, almost magical—a sorcerer if you will—and one common result, Lachs thought, was, first, the failure of the all too human master to live up to the myth and, then, profound disillusionment in the sangha.

It made sense.

In an email to several of my friends at our local sangha I included links to Lachs.

In it I mentioned both Baker and Sosan Davis.

In her reply to me Jane sent a link to an essay by Davis in which he offered an explanation of his conduct.

I read it.

To me it seemed a circumlocution and transparent rationalization.

Bullshit.

This link I forwarded in turn to my previous correspondents and now also to Eleanor who had recently asked me for the site where I had discovered the academic essays by Lachs.

I had been down this road of student, teacher, god, and sex five years before with my old friend Billy. Now as an ironic comment on the apparently not uncommon practice of Buddhist teachers and Zen masters fucking their student practitioners I appended a personal note. It was a remark my son Michael had made when I told him of Trungpa, Baker, and Davis.

I borrowed it.

"Hey, baby, how'd you like to get enlightened?"

No harm intended.

"Just kidding," I had added. "Just kidding!"

I meant it I think.