Writing this now, even after all that has happened, I can't help but laugh in incredulity. I was sixty-three years old, twice married, the father of four children, the oldest forty-four, the grandfather of two children, the oldest eight, and Eleanor was the age of my youngest child, twenty-nine. Eleanor was childless, single, and had never been married, yet I was supposed to ask Eleanor to help me understand the sexual relationship and romance of her two Buddhist teachers sixteen years earlier—and what would be the supposed purpose of our conversation?
To help me understand how such a thing could happen?
Yes.
That was how the master saw its purpose or so he said.
My understanding.
But by my own surmise both the real purpose and the possible consequence of such a conversation with Eleanor were less sanguine. Surely it could only pull me even deeper into this intimate circle of confidentiality the purpose and end of which seemed ever more obvious.
To protect the reputation of the master.
Would my discussion with Eleanor result in fewer secrets or more?
More.
In my greater freedom or less?
Less.
I felt sick to my stomach.
Trust?
Was this really an effort by my teacher to wake me up and to help me to see and to understand reality or had our conversation and our other conversations like it become communications primarily about the master and his own unresolved ambivalence over his sexuality, his secrecy, and his reputation?
It seemed absolutely clear to me at the time that it was the latter. It felt to me that a reversal of our roles had occurred, that my teacher had offered me his confession, that the master now asked of me forgiveness and absolution, and that my participation in this new additional intrigue would increase the burden of my silence and secure only my own complicity in it.
My forgiveness and absolution?
Granted!
Yes.
Of course granted!
I was less certain even than the master that he had done anything wrong.
My silence?
No.
It seemed that because I had somehow unwittingly become the secular priest to whom my teacher had confessed his secret I was being informed now that like a priest I was forever bound by religious vow and federal law to respect this communication as privileged.
Hey—
Too late for that!
Believing that I had received the explicit permission of my teacher to do whatever I wanted with the knowledge, I had already told family and friends of his romance. The master had not asked me to keep it secret; to the contrary he had explicitly released me from such a promise. But even if the master had so asked I would not have agreed to do so. "No, don't tell me!" I would have told the master just as the master had once told me he responded to students who requested from him a promise of confidentiality. "I don't want to know," I would have said. "I can't keep a secret!" How mysterious and strange life is! All of this passed through my mind and heart in an instant as I sat silent in my chair not three feet from my teacher.
I listened.
"Eleanor has sat with this knowledge and worked with it—" the master said.
The master paused.
"Until she could understand it and accept it," the master continued.
I was silent.
"I really do wish you would speak with Eleanor about it," the master repeated.
I remained silent still.
"It would help you," the master said.
No.
Help me?
No.
I thought not.
I could not see that happening.
To use one of my teacher's own favorite expressions I trusted my gut. Me talk confidentially with Eleanor about the master and Nananda and sex and then keep forever secret all that I learned?
Why?
To effect my own realization and transformation?
To protect his reputation?
Which?
In just a few weeks I would sit on my cushion in the zendo ten hours a day for seven days straight at Rohatsu sesshin and right beside me would sit the master and Eleanor and Nananda, the four of us in possession of the secret, so that Bob could understand how such things happen. I knew very well my own crazy mind. I knew very well the kind of questions that would arise for me in the zendo. I knew very well the kind of questions that would knock at my heartmind and knock again and knock again and demand to be asked in dokusan and in shosan; and I knew very well the one fundamental question about all of these questions that would not let me rest ever until I had asked it.
Why shouldn't I ask these questions?
Why shouldn't I ask these questions?
Why shouldn't I ask these questions?
I was incorrigible.
I waited.
"Speak with Eleanor!" the master exhorted me again.
Noncommittal, I nodded and tried to make a face that meant only that I would consider it. It was a signal for the master to proceed. He resumed reading from my journal. Most of the time my entries had been carefully considered and edited before I sent them onto the master, the more so now that he had begun confronting me about them, but on occasion, usually in response to the master's urging and taunting, I had also written down my thoughts as I thought them, a kind of thinking out loud so that my teacher could get a good clear look at just exactly what was inside my head. It had been in this spirit that I had written that though hiding our past mistakes to protect our reputations was something everyone did or had done I believed that for a Zen priest to hide such a thing from his students in order to protect his reputation was not the Way.
The master read—his contempt dripping from every word—the statement I had made.
"That may be the most self-righteous thing you've ever said!" the master exclaimed.
The master was pissed.
Mad.
Disgusted.
"Criticizing others and extolling yourself!" the master exclaimed.
Ow!
Here we go again, I thought, here we go again, and again I wondered why I continued voluntarily to subject myself to this. It was the master who had demanded that I submit a journal, the master who had demanded that in it I record unedited whatever came up for me, it was the master who appeared now to have been wounded by my having done what he demanded I do.
"I thought it would encourage you to tell the truth!" I whined.
The master made an ugly face.
Disgust.
"I tell my students all the time," I told the master just as I had told the master many times before, "that if there were only one thing that I could give them it would be that if not now then one day they be able to experience life free of the need for secrets and lies."
"Everyone does it!" the master exclaimed.
Keeps secrets he meant.
Again—
"Everyone does it!"
Then without warning the master leaned from the waist suddenly forward in his chair until his red face was just three or four inches from my own—until the master was almost literally in my face—and for only the second time in our relationship the master shouted at me.
"Who do you think about when you masturbate?" the master demanded.
Whoa!
Startled, taken completely by surprise, I laughed.
Repeat—
"Who do you think about when you masturbate?" the master demanded.
Again—
I laughed.
My laughter seemed to disarm the master.
The master leaned back normally in his chair and together we both sat in silence for several seconds. I wondered whether the master really expected from me an answer to his question.
I decided not.
No.
I waited.
"Everybody has secrets," the master said finally. "Even you!"
I considered.
Hmm.
I explained to him that because I thought it was what he wanted I had tried in my journal to record what was really in my heart and mind and that this time I had refrained from editing it only because he had asked me to and that even then I still had profound doubts about sending it to him but that I had sent it and that when I had then gotten his email asking me to come in to talk to him I had instantly thought oh no oh no oh shit why in the hell did I write all of that down and then send it.
Why—
Why—
"I'm sorry," I said, sincerely, again. "I didn't mean to hurt you."
Intent.
"You did hurt me," the master said this time more calmly.
"I'm sorry."
"You did piss me off," he said.
I did.
I hung my head in remorse.
In rue.
"But I'm glad you sent it," the master said.
He paused.
"If you hadn't we wouldn't be having this talk."
I nodded.
"I want you to continue to journal."
I nodded.
"If it's too complex to comment on," the master said, "I'll call you in again to talk."
I nodded.
The master resumed reading aloud, more quietly now, from my journal.
The fear of the loss of reputation, I had learned from the master, was one of the five fears. How glad I was, I said, that I no longer had secrets and lies in my life. I had taken my medicine in '75, I had lost my reputation, I had lost everything but the Way, and I had spent four years as the village pariah. I suffered but the suffering passed and it was worth it.
The master read.
"Today?" I had written. "Another day free of secrets and lies."
"You're stuck," the master said.
I nodded.
"Drop it."
I nodded.
The master talked of his time in Japan. There, he said, many people must live in a very small space. They learn that just to get along is more important even than principle and they learn to compromise and to forgive.
I nodded.
"Sometimes a little hypocrisy is good," the master said.
He smiled.
I smiled, too, and I nodded.
Maybe so.
It was ten minutes of seven.
Time.
The master and I placed our palms together in gassho and we bowed. I hustled downstairs to hit the han. Eleanor had tidied the mats and the cushions in the zendo and she had already lit the candle and had offered one slender green stick of incense to the bodhisattva of wisdom. At 7:00 I rang the inkin three times to announce the beginning of the zazen period. Delayed by our long talk the master entered the zendo several minutes later.
We sat.
For sixty minutes I sat and followed my breath and then for ten minutes in the buddha hall I walked kinhin before I returned to the zendo and sat ten more minutes before I chanted the Fukanzazengi.
I thought.
I did not know what to do.
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