On Tuesday, September 26, I received an email from Ivan. Ivan described what he called his dilemma with Zen. The revelation of the master's involvement with Nananda did not matter to Ivan. But he had come to feel that he needed Zen, Ivan said—not just that it was good for him but that it was something he needed to do.
"I don't want to be swallowed up by it."
The master had told Ivan that he lived in his head and this Ivan knew to be true. Ivan acknowledged that the big part of the life in his head was his distance, his reserve, his skepticism. The notion of his surrendering completely to the master all authority over the answers felt to Ivan alien.
"I get shaky," Ivan said.
Had this issue come up for me?
Ivan wondered.
Had it come up for me when I had been new to the practice?
Ivan inquired.
"Am I supposed to stop asking questions?"
Echoes.
I assured Ivan that everything he was experiencing was normal and common.
"Been there," I said, "done that, still doing it."
I told Ivan, too, to stop worrying about the feeling that he needed Zen. I had recently heard Rick say the same thing, and Edward, and Dean, and I added that I, too, could say the same without my worrying at all about being attached to the practice. A mysterious deepening does occur, I said, and the feeling that Zen is something we need to do is positive. I repeated what my friend John had told me Suzuki-roshi once said—that something deep within all of us needs and yearns to sit zazen—and I remembered how in one of his books the monk Thich Nhat Hanh had described sitting meditation as stopping, calming, resting, healing.
"Need that?" I asked Ivan. "I sure do!"
I promised Ivan that he need not worry about being swallowed up by Zen. It was true, as Ivan said, that the master did indeed seem to teach that the answer to everything is more Zen. The more you do, the more you are asked to do; the more you sit, the more you are asked to sit; if you attend a retreat, you are asked to attend an even longer retreat; and so on.
"I do what I can," I said, "but I have no interest in becoming a monk."
None.
I practiced so that I could be helpful to others, I explained, and not just pass on my own neuroses.
I acknowledged—
The master said I, too, thought too much.
Yes.
I did not agree.
"I do not share his simplistic understanding of reason."
Reason or intution—
"I reject the polarity he presents."
Reason or intuition—
"Not two!"
But I conceded that the master was right when he said that we would never "figure it out" with the stream of discursive thought that rolls constantly through our minds in a movie starring "me" as either incomparable hero or incomparable victim. In my universe, however, skepticism was healthy and curiosity sacred and I would never stop asking questions. I could be silent, yes, I could listen, yes, even for a long time, and when my teacher told me to shut up—"This is not a debate!"—I did shut up, yes, I did, and then when I was permitted to speak again, I said, and to ask again, I asked. You don't have to give up testing against your own experience what you are told, I explained to Ivan. We are supposed to do that. The counsel of the Buddha was to test everything and to accept nothing on faith or authority. Try it and see for yourself, the Buddha advised. I did not think the master wanted Ivan to surrender his common sense, his integrity, his caution, or his skepticism to the authority of the master. I remembered one of the master's favorite remarks.
"If the teaching is not conducive to peace and harmony, throw out the teaching."
Yes!
In dokusan, I told Ivan, the master might seem combative, rude, vulgar, angry, profane, loud, intimidating, obnoxious, insulting, poignant, sentimental, authoritarian, dictatorial, arrogant, proud, sad.
Whatever—
"He can be really hard to take," I admitted.
Not just difficult—
Impossible.
Yes.
"It kills him to admit that he is wrong and to apologize," I added.
But it was all just emotion and words, I said, not so different really from other arguments I had been in except—here I borrowed a remark I had heard from Edward—that the master is trying to knock us loose from some pet notion that we do not want to give up. Several very good people had quit because of that, perhaps, in the five years I had practiced with the master, I reminded Ivan, I had even quit myself, but then in my exit meeting the master had run me through the gamut of emotion and mental formation and talked me out of it.
"I am glad he did," I said.
True.
"But every other day or so I think of quitting again."
True.
Even Eleanor had said in a recent practice group meeting, I told Ivan, that all she could think about lately was quitting, getting the hell out of there, moving to New York City, and living the life other women her age were living. Ivan had never participated in a practice period and I encouraged him to do so. I thought Ivan would like the practice group meetings in which we talked informally of our frustrations, struggles, and pains and tried with our shared experience and advice to help one another. I did not have anymore the woes of jobs and relationships that most in the group did, I told Ivan, but it felt good just to be present there for them.
Ivan asked, too, about reincarnation.
Karma.
Law.
But I myself thought not at all of rebirth.
To me it appeared obvious that the entire universe dissolved and reconstituted instant by instant endlessly on and on and on. I had more than enough to do trying to be fully present in the here and now. Every moment seemed the sum of all the moments that had preceded it. Every day was Judgment Day, the just and perfect consequence of all the collective actions that created it. Good actions, selfless actions, good results; bad actions, selfish actions, bad results.
Other than that—
"To me the concept of reincarnation is as meaningless as the concept of heaven and hell."
I had not stopped asking questions, I assured Ivan, and I could not even really imagine it, I said, yet strangely in sesshin when I had sat all day or two days I could often not think of a single one. All of my questions dissolved and just faded away, I explained, and in shosan I often had to invent one and I told Ivan that I had even complained to the master about it.
It sounded to me like Ivan was doing well.
I told him so.
Then, after I had removed specific references to Ivan, as usual I forwarded a copy of my remarks to the master so that he could read and evaluate what I had said and inform me if I had made any egregious errors in my explanation of practice and the dharma and I could correct them and pass on to my correspondent the verdict and opinion of our teacher.
On the first day of October my friend Billy replied to the summary I had sent him of my situation.
"How fortunate that I do not have a teacher to interact with on a weekly basis!" Billy wrote.
I laughed.
His allusion was not lost on me. It had not been long since Billy had told me how fortunate I was to have a teacher to interact with on a weekly basis. Billy responded, too, to my story of sex and secrecy.
"I had to laugh," Billy added. "You haven't lost your sense of humor."
Mercy!
It felt good to hear my friend offer on this whole matter of silly secret sex a point of view totally different.
Or—
Was this matter deadly serious?
Grave—
I didn't know myself.
Jesus!
I still don't.
The master returned with his comments my journal of the previous week. I had made no entry on Monday and on Tuesday I had commented on the requirement of the journal itself. At our practice group meeting the observations Dean had made had struck a chord in me.
Dean struggled with his journal. He wondered for whom and to whom he was writing it.
"Am I writing for myself?" Dean wondered.
I struggled, too, with this question.
"Am I writing to the master?" Dean asked.
I wondered, too.
Twice in the past I had tried in my journal to address the master directly in the second person, to "you," but this, too, felt awkward and odd.
"This isn't a debate," the master had responded.
He said again that I should write whatever I wanted and that he would find the dharma in it and comment. My job was not to defend my pet ideas, not to justify my behavior, not to argue, not to debate. My job was to take in what he said and to work with it. Ours was a relationship between teacher and student, the master explained, and his job was to steer me wherever he believed I needed to go in my practice and personal transformation.
I acknowledged that my remaining silent was easier for me than contributing inadvertently to the escalation of emotion and accusation that seemed to occur if I did respond.
Yet I continued nevertheless to try to explain myself.
I didn't know what to do.
It seemed I was right back where I had started.
Confused.
Was I supposed to submit in silence to the master's criticism even if and when I felt it undeserved and unjust?
"Work with it."
What did that mean? The same as to sit with it?
If my questions continued to arise each day when I was expected to write in my journal what then?
Enter them?
Not?
I was unable to figure this out.
"If people are not interested in transformation, then this is not the practice for them. If people cannot accept criticism, then this is not the practice for them. If people cannot follow the direction of their teacher, then this is not the practice for them," the master had explained.
Could I follow the direction of the master?
It seemed not.
I couldn't understand it.
I tried.
Could the master accept criticism?
I wondered.
First-person narrative felt the most natural and most fun to me. In it I wrote for a general audience interested in the practice and in the Way and in so doing I felt like Candide, one part passive experiencer, one part agent, hanging on for dear life in this astounding, confusing, and ultimately deadly adventure. In my journal I had recorded these feelings and many times I had explored the suffering that seemed to have brought my friends to Heartmind, the pain of a job and having to earn a living, the pain of relationship, marriage, and children, the pain of loneliness, the pain of anxiety and depression, the pain of addiction, the pain of illness and mortality, for me the horror of eternal war and the pain of my inability to do anything about it—and now this pain of my conflict with the master.
"Yet I had to come back and add this statement," I wrote in my journal to conclude this reflection, "that I feel grateful and confident in the Way."
"No gratitude towards and confidence in the teacher?" the master replied.
Oof—
"If not," the master asked, "what are you doing here?"
Lord!
The master wanted me to quit I now felt certain.
Tired of me.
Sick.
I couldn't blame him.
I mentioned in my journal that I had told my youngest son Michael about the most recent conflict I'd had with the master, about my book, about the portrait of my teacher in it, and about my wondering and worrying if I would one day have to quit a second time or if the master would kick me out.
"So," asked my son, "are you saying that the master is not a good teacher?"
This caught me by surprise.
"Oh no, no, no!" I exclaimed. "Not at all."
"Are you working with my comments on your journal entries?" asked the master.
Yes.
"Or are you just talking to people about them?"
Jesus—
Every day I sat.
Breath.
Breath.
Breath.
I had loved the master.
I had.
"Why?" my brother Ronald wanted to know.
For his commitment to the practice, to the religion, for his giving up the world of competition and business, for his renunciation, his vow of poverty, his frugality, for his commitment to and his practice of nonviolence, for his service to prisoners, for his kindness to dumb animals, his love of them, for his vegetarianism, for his commitment to ethical conduct, for his devotion to education and to teaching, just for his getting up so early every morning for thirty years and sitting on his cushion, for trying so hard to improve himself, to transform himself, and to be good, for his perseverance, for instructing me in how to sit, for his tender touch, for the sincerity and passion of his chanting, for his caring, for the grace of his sitting silent bow in the zendo, for putting up with my doubt and resistance, for his patience, for his hug. We all got to choose—either the way of the world or the way of "god"—and the master had chosen the way of "god." I had, too, once upon a time, I had given up everything for "god," and it hadn't made me happy—a big problem—I had failed, I had come back to the way of the world, and this time I had found there what I sought.
It was hard to explain.
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