I returned to the zendo.
I felt grateful and good.
Had the master just given me permission to include in my book what he had told me?
Yes.
It seemed to me that he had.
What he had said to me sounded absolutely unambiguous. Though I tried to follow my breath as I sat, again and again to myself I repeated what my teacher had said. "So now I've told you and now you know and you may treat this information however you wish and do with this knowledge whatever you want." The master had been so open and candid and comfortable and so at ease in the telling that I wondered now if what the master had told me was in fact the secret to which he had first alluded. Had his original reference to past acts the public disclosure of which could ruin his reputation been to something else?
To something altogether different?
To something more?
Uff da—
My mind, my mind, my mind, my mind, my mind!
Thinking.
In the zendo I sat and followed my breath.
Out.
In.
I thought.
Now it seemed to me that my original questions remained still unanswered.
Echo—
"Do you have something to hide?"
I wondered.
Echo—
"Is it an obstacle to your teaching?"
I wondered.
Why—
Why—
Why could I not just leave well enough alone?
Why—
In the shosan ceremony that would conclude the sesshin on Sunday I had decided to ask my teacher again about keeping secrets in order to protect reputation. It was still the only question on my mind, a relic of my practice with John, the teaching of Stephen Gaskin, the practice of honesty and trying always to tell the truth, and what I had thought then was Zen.
Could reputation, secrecy, honesty, openness, and truth all be reconciled to Zen and to the Way?
Though I did not know how they could be, I had been persuaded now that perhaps they could be.
Trust.
Still I knew my question would be daring.
Trust.
In the ninety minutes that I sat zazen before shosan I worried and rehearsed my question. But I knew that in shosan both student and teacher were to be fully present, right there, both minds stark naked—"thus come"—and that both my job and the master's was to be honest and real.
When the wooden kitchen chair, the small, wobbly wooden table, the koro, and the kyosaku had been set up and all items properly positioned and arranged, when the candles on the main altar had been lit and the stick of incense pre-lit for its offering, the ino rang the inkin.
Our hands in shashu we filed into the buddha hall and stood silent and waited in line for shosan.
One at a time each of us approached the table and knelt carefully on the small square black bowing mat.
We bowed.
We offered one pinch of powdered incense, then a second pinch, and then still kneeling, spine erect, we brought our palms together in gassho.
When the master responded in kind, his hands in gassho, each of us asked our question. I remember only one question other than my own.
"Why don't you trust me?" Dean asked the master.
The master seemed startled and he hesitated a moment before he replied.
"I do trust you," he said.
"Thank you."
Dean performed the requisite bows and returned to the end of the line.
My turn.
"You told us at a meeting last spring," I began, "that you had done a couple of things in your life that you could tell very few people because the public knowledge of them would ruin your reputation."
The master made an ugly face.
He scowled.
Uh oh.
"Is that right?" I asked.
The master looked totally disgusted with me.
I waited.
The master remained silent.
He breathed.
I waited.
He thought.
I followed my breath as I waited.
Finally—
"That's about right!" the master said.
Bitter.
"Why would a follower of the Way conceal something like that?" I asked.
The master remained silent.
I waited.
I waited.
"It does not make sense to me," I said.
The master remained silent.
I continued.
"It sounds like a hindrance of the kind you mentioned in your dharma talk."
To this he responded.
"You mean why don't I tell you?" inquired the master.
"No."
That wasn't it.
"No."
He waited.
"I mean why don't you just pour it all out and let the chips fall where they may?"
"It's none of your business!" the master replied.
Silent, thinking, wondering, breathing, following my breath, my palms together still, I looked at the master and waited for the gesture that meant he'd had enough of me and that I had been dismissed.
The master looked disgusted still.
Yet it seemed to me also that the master remained open still to another question. I remembered again that Jane had admired Nananda because on more than one occasion in shosan Nananda had challenged the master, had refused to accept an answer she considered unsatisfactory, and had demanded clarity. All of this passed through my mind in an instant.
"Is your concealing it duplicitous?" I asked.
The master frowned.
"It's none of your business!" sternly the master exclaimed.
Whoa!
In silence I considered my options.
Few indeed.
I was no Nananda.
Enough.
I dared say no more.
I considered myself fearless on the vast cosmic ocean of mind.
I did.
I believed it absolutely essential that I be unafraid to ask my teacher any honest real question about the Way.
But in the presence of the master I tried without exception always to be deferential and polite.
I bowed.
"Thank you," I said.
The master bowed.
I stood.
I bowed.
I walked three steps to my left, I performed one full prostration on the large thick black mat placed there for that purpose, and I returned to the end of the line. I stood and I listened as each of my Heartmind friends asked his or her question, one or two a second question, even a third.
Finished.
The master directed us as usual to arrange our mats and cushions in a semicircle on the floor of the buddha hall for our informal discussion of the sesshin experience. The master first thanked the tenzo, Dean, for our meals, and the ino, Eleanor, for her efficient management.
His gratitude echoed in everyone present and then we all thanked the leader of the sesshin.
The master.
Then I listened as my friends recounted their private personal struggles with pain in their legs and backs, with anxiety, with vexation, and with boredom. Their efforts had inspired me and when it came my turn to speak I thanked them. There was more that I wanted to say.
I had rehearsed my remarks in my head.
I explained that in my life I had been fortunate to have known a lot of really good people but that I wanted to take this opportunity to express special gratitude to my old friends John and Billy, who had pulled me onto the path, and to all of my friends present at Heartmind for seriously trying to change, for really trying hard to be good, for stopping their worlds for two days, for stopping their lives, for having the patience and courage in practice to let the avoided and the ignored and the denied come up for them, and for really working hard at it.
"In sesshin I am always inspired by that effort," I concluded, "by your all trying so sincerely to be good."
I felt hot tears moisten my eyes.
"More than once these two days," I said, "a powerful flood of love poured over me."
My voice trembled.
"I had to will myself not simply to surrender to the urge to go around the room—"
I stopped to gather myself.
"From one to another of you and just hug you all!"
"Thank you for not doing that!" joked James.
We laughed.
Monday I did not sit. I rested my legs sore from sesshin. I thought more of the master and of his relationship to Nananda. Both of them had been divorced and lonely, the master had told me, and not in formal relationship as student and teacher when they had become lovers.
When I told Ruth about it—I told Ruth everything—she asked if they both had been single.
"Yes!"
I nodded.
"They were," I said.
"Had the master taken a vow of celibacy?" Ruth asked.
"He had not," I explained. "No."
"So—"
Ruth shrugged.
"No big deal."
Ruth thought the whole matter hardly worth mentioning.
Hm.
I journaled.
To me it seemed that their students should have been told. The knowledge that they had been lovers did color my perception. I had heard them praise one another as followers of the Way.
Their praise had been effusive.
Did the fact that they had once been lovers compromise the legitimacy of the transmission and lineage?
I did not know.
Should students have been informed so they might themselves consider and decide?
I wondered.
I wondered, too, about what the master had told me of his feelings for Eleanor.
Had the master told Eleanor such things?
Why had the master told me?
I did not know.
The master had said that he and I could not be friends—only teacher and student—but was this intimate information about Eleanor and Davis and Nananda and Katagiri a part of the teaching?
What the master had said about Eleanor was the kind of confidence that two men friends shared.
But we were not friends.
He said.
Did the master tell other students this kind of thing?
I wondered.
Did Eleanor think it proper for our teacher to speak to me of her this way?
Trust.
To speak of her this way to other students, too, perhaps?
Trust.
Did considerations of propriety even enter into Zen Buddhist instruction?
I wondered.
I journaled.
I supposed any man had to tell somebody such things.
Trust.
In my practice journal I speculated that maybe I just happened to be the guy.
Hormones—
Hormones—
I want you
I want you so bad
I want you
I want you so bad
It's driving me mad
It's driving me mad
I want you
I want you so bad
I want you
I want you so bad
It's driving me mad
It's driving me mad
Zen—
Zen—
I felt ill.
In my practice journal I included an account of my participation in the shosan ceremony, my four questions to the master about concealment and reputation, and his responses.
There was something wrong.
A secret.
Is the Zen priest less free than the layman?
I wondered.
Is that why clergy feel lonely?
I wondered.
Did that make sense?
No.
Yes.
No.
I did not know.
I had been lonely, I supposed, as a child in the hours I dreaded the return of my father from work and the spanking I knew I would receive when he got home; I had been lonely for the two months that I had lacked the courage to tell my parents that my girlfriend was pregnant our senior year of high school; I had known the loneliness of men and women who had a private experience of god and learned they were unable to share it; but my parents and family had loved me and I had loved them and I had made many friends in my life and loved them and been loved and I had loved and been loved by two wives, both beautiful, loving, kind, caring women, and I loved my four children and my three grandchildren and they loved me; and in sum I did not believe it dishonest of me to say that in my life I had never suffered seriously from loneliness of the kind to which I thought the master alluded. Even now, as I edit and I write, my loving and lovable mother, 91, sits and snoozes on the couch across the living room from me and I hear Ruth, my loving, lovable wife, putzing around in the kitchen—the beep of the microwave, the clink of dishes in the sink, the Beatles playing on her iPod—as on Christmas Eve we three await the arrival of the rest of the family, lovable, loving, and fun.
Hey, Jude—
Don't bring me down
Take a sad song
And make it better
Remember—
To let 'em into your heart
Then you can start
To make it better
Anytime you feel the pain
Hey, Jude—
Refrain
Don't carry the world
Upon your shoulders
Don't you know that it's a fool
Who plays it cool
By making his world
A little colder
Lonely—
No.
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