In my journal for Friday I said that all week I had felt nervous as I waited for the master's replies to my journal of the previous week. I hoped that this time I had not written anything that hurt him or pissed him off.
I mentioned our talk.
"The pain that brought tears to my eyes," I explained, "was my learning that I had caused you pain, upset, and anger."
I explained.
"My main fear lately has been that you will fire me, kick me out of sangha, for what I am not sure, for my being stuck in emptiness, or to protect your reputation, or for who knows what."
"That would really hurt," I confessed. "I know it could happen."
To this the master offered no reply.
I had written also in my journal of his question to me about masturbation. Of course, I acknowledged, everyone has embarrassing thoughts—wishing people dead, sexual fantasies. I remembered that in an interview Jimmy Carter had admitted that he had felt lust in his heart—but his interviewer had not followed up and asked his subject the question my teacher had asked me. Thoughts like that which pass through the mind and pass away were not the kind of thing most people would hold against a president or against a priest or against anybody really though I conceded that some might. I had known Christian students who believed that such thoughts were "sins" and that they should not have been thinking them; but most educated liberals considered this notion silly and naïve, a kind of headbanging, and maybe even psychologically dangerous. But because masturbation was a private intimacy that really involved no one else most people would, if asked about it, feel discomfort.
"It is not a question I would ask anyone," I said.
The question he asked me seemed different in kind from the question I asked him.
I told him so.
"I gather you think not," I added.
The master replied.
"Here you go again, debating, justifying."
Thinking—
Yes.
The master explained again.
His point had been that everyone has thought, said, and done things that he would rather others did not know.
"Myself included," he said, "and even you."
Yes.
"Fear of the loss of reputation is one of the five fears shared by all human beings."
Yes.
My point I restated.
There had been no need for the master to explain to me that every man had thoughts that would embarrass him if human beings could read minds. That was obvious. The secrets to which the master had alluded were not just thoughts, I explained, but past acts—like my getting drunk, my spending a night in jail, my use of pot and peyote, my infidelity in my first marriage.
My helping four women get abortions.
"That kind of thing."
"I'm not interested in your point," the master said. "This is not a debate."
I continued.
"I must say, too, that your giving me a speech on how the rules of confidentiality and privileged communication in dokusan should apply to students just as they apply to a priest and then asking me whom I think about when I masturbate would by a lot of people probably be considered a bit odd and even improper and maybe even deserving of apology."
I was still thinking.
I was still thinking.
"If you asked that same question of other students," I had informed the master in my journal, "I would not consider them bound by rules of confidentiality not to tell others what you asked nor forbidden to ask friends what they thought about your asking them that question."
"You've missed the point completely," replied the master. "Give it up."
Too late.
"When you called me in to talk with you about my journal," I had informed the master in my journal, "thinking you had meant what you said about your hating secrets and about my being free to do whatever I wanted with the information you had told me about you and Nananda I had already told my daughter and my wife, my niece, a colleague, and Ryan and Ivan."
"What I meant was in your practice," the master responded.
I was lost.
"I told you what I told you to help you understand how such things happen and, most important, to try to stop you from pointing fingers at other people, like Sosan Davis, as if they were pariahs."
It had been the master who told me of Davis and of his situation and of the young children involved.
I had never heard of him.
Had the master not told me I would not have known of the affair nor of its circumstances. It had been the master who first expressed amusement at Davis's use of the term "soul mate" to describe the woman with whom he had fallen in love and at the irony of the situation as a whole. The master had laughed at the word "soul mate" and I had laughed with him. It had been the master, too, who told me of the infidelity of his teacher Katagiri.
I had known nothing of it.
"Pariahs"—
I thought none of these men a pariah.
I saw them as monkeys just like me and like so many other men I had known in my life and like countless other men I had heard or read about. I had not worried about telling family and good friends what the master had told me.
"Six people?" the master exclaimed.
Oh.
I had forgotten my friend Billy.
Seven.
"You're like an old lady who runs to the phone after she's heard something juicy!"
Old lady—
The permission that I had received from the master I had considered explicit. Unqualified, unequivocal, categorical.
"Stop gossiping," the master commanded. "This kind of behavior is poisonous especially within the sangha!"
Eleanor, he said again, had known about him and Nananda and his early mistake for quite some time. Eleanor had spoken to Nananda about it, too, he said, but to no one else. Eleanor had worked with the information, the master explained, and she had spoken with him about it a couple of times to help her process it within the context of her trying to understand how these things happened and how people can and must keep them from happening. Eleanor had done a good job of this, the master said, and he would not hesitate to speak to Eleanor again about incidents from his life that he thought would help her on the Way.
Even as I read the master's reply still further questions arose in my mind.
Inquiry.
Why had the master told Eleanor of his sexual relations with Nananda?
To awaken Eleanor?
For the same reason the master said he had told me?
To help Eleanor understand?
Had Nananda given the master permission to tell Eleanor?
To tell me?
Did the master need her permission?
Their permission?
Mine?
Did the master in his roles as abbot, priest, monk, and teacher have implicit permission?
The freedom and the right to tell whomever he wanted when he wanted?
Did I?
If not why not I?
Was what the master had told me of Eleanor and Nananda and Katagiri and Davis not gossip?
Why not?
Had my motive and intention in informing my friends and my family of these matters involving my teacher been any different from the master's motive and intention in telling me?
How?
Yes, I had laughed at the news that another priest had been caught with his pants down. But my teacher, the master, had laughed, too, and until the revelation of his own "mistake" his attitude toward such a "mistake" had appeared to me almost identical to my own—surprise, recognition, acceptance, resignation, irony, humility, forgiveness, and amusement.
Men—
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
In my five years with the master, two as ino, the master and I had spoken many times and he had told me just in passing many things, none malicious nor mean, that I had not known about members of the sangha. In my five years at Heartmind I met not one person I disliked; nor had any person at the temple ever made me mad, the sole exception the master perhaps and my frustration and confusion that he insisted were anger. Not even months later when the rupture of our relationship as teacher and student was complete could I recall a single instance when I had been critical of a member of our sangha, the master again the only exception. On the rare occasion that I had told the master something about another student I had done so only because of my understanding that the master was our teacher, because of my faith and trust in him as our teacher, and because I believed that the information I shared with him might benefit the master in his teaching, the student in his or her practice, and all of us on the Way.
This I did believe I swear.
The one constant in our relationship remained his criticism of me.
The pain that it caused me.
My confusion.
Hurt.
The master warned me now.
"I will definitely be more guarded with you in the future."
Finished.
The instant I read this statement I knew that our relationship was essentially over.
It hurt.
"I regret having told you what I told you," the master explained.
Hurt.
"It did not seem to help you in any way at all," he added.
Hurt.
"It only solidified your self-righteousness."
Hurt.
In my journal I mentioned that after my talk with the master I had written both Ivan and Ryan and told them that in his roundabout way the master had withdrawn his permission for me to do what I wanted with the information he had shared with me and that the master hoped I would be discreet.
To this the master responded.
"I never gave you permission to disclose that information to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who comes along," the master remarked in his comments, "which is what you seem to have done."
I had never concealed anything from the master and into my journal I had simply pasted a copy of the email that I had sent the two Heartmind friends with whom I had shared what the master told me of him and Nananda.
Had the master given me permission to do what I wanted with the information?
"Not as I recall," the master now objected.
Had the master later withdrawn his permission?
"This is how you recall it," he said.
The master continued.
"I recall it differently and if I had known that you would be spreading the information I gave you to everyone you came into contact with instead of processing it in the light of how these things happen in an intimate student and teacher relationship and deepening your understanding I would never have told you."
"So you see the awkward position I am in," I had concluded my note to my two friends.
"You put yourself there," the master declared.
Neither Ivan nor Ryan had thought the sixteen-year-old past relationship any big deal nor had my family, I reported in my journal. The people I had told considered the news just normal male human behavior.
"If you didn't think otherwise," the master asked me, "why did you need to share the information with so many people?"
"Need"—
I had felt no need.
"Why"—
Why not?
The master knew a lot about me, too.
Indeed he had once told me that he knew more about me than I did.
I did not doubt it.
No man can see himself as others see him.
Impossible.
I knew I could never be a priest. The unrealistic expectations for even an ordinary school teacher like myself seemed difficult enough. I had barely survived. For priests such expectations rose to a whole nother level. I thought this was at least part of the reason my friend Billy had been attracted to Trungpa.
Trungpa seemed to frustrate and to defy every expectation of him.
His insouciance—
"Yes, I did that," Trungpa had seemed to say. "So what?"
Crazy wisdom.
Had the master considered the sex with Nananda a big deal?
Yes.
It seemed so—else why the secret?
Nananda?
I did not know.
Had I?
No, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no—I did not know.
I still don't.
The master had asked me in a previous journal what I meant when I referred to "realization" and the master had suggested that perhaps I meant a moment of insight. No, I meant more than a moment of insight, I explained. I had meant a transformative experience which totally changes the way one lives. I said that I supposed the best description of such an experience was still the allegory of the cave in The Republic of Plato.
The master was not interested.
"The questions I ask you are rhetorical," the master replied.
Oh.
Rhetorical.
"Take my comments, process them, and work with them rather than debating and justifying."
Rhetorical—
Hm.
I had been thinking also of some questions I had about feelings, I noted in my journal, "feelings" in the colloquial sense of emotions, not sensations, and about the master's suggestion that I leave out of my book anything that might hurt somebody's feelings. I wish it were that simple, I said. I would not want to hurt someone's feelings, I explained, though we all sometimes screw up and do that, but I knew, too, from my own personal experience that the master would not necessarily refrain from saying and writing what he considered useful truth simply to avoid hurting somebody's feelings. I reminded the master that he himself had many times obviously hurt people's feelings with his sarcasm, ridicule, mockery, and criticism even though his purpose and end had been not to hurt their feelings but to teach them, to free them, to save them, and to serve them. The master had in the past even reprimanded us in the sangha for trying to comfort the persons whose feelings we thought he had hurt. The master had explained, sternly, that by our so doing we were in fact undoing the lesson he had presented and for which he had perhaps for months prepared a student.
"You want me to be niiice?" the master had mocked us. "Zen is not nice!"
Compassion? Honesty? Wisdom?
Truth.
There seemed no single rule that worked in all cases.
Each case was different.
Unique.
We all of us each had to decide—love, honesty, truth, feelings, hurt. There had been hurt in Stephen Gaskin's practice of honesty and truth and I knew that I had caused a lot of hurt when I had behaved as I thought he and John insisted was the Way and I myself had tried as they had always to be honest.
I had never told the master anything that I wanted kept private.
I had told him everything.
In the expression of truth I had at the temple seldom if ever felt constrained.
Until now.
Until now.
Friends in the sangha had, I assumed though I did not really know, confided in the master and I respected such intimacy. That was their business and I had no interest in it. I did not want to know. Uninvited I had never probed into their private lives. Yet the people whom I knew at all well at Heartmind had been open all, honest and forthright. In practice group meetings and in group discussion they had related anecdotes of their past mistakes and they had expressed regret, remorse, anxiety, grief, anger, outrage, frustration, fear, dread—you name it. Until this odd conflict with the master over secrecy and reputation I had not felt that religious practice at Heartmind was in any way incompatible with the principle of openness, honesty, inquiry, and truth. Like Dean I had sometimes wished we did less talking at Heartmind and certainly I had come to resent the journal but I had felt always that the master wanted to foster and to encourage openness, honesty, inquiry, and truth and only rarely if ever had I heard him stress confidentiality. It had been simply unnecessary—even in our quarrel over his verbal abuse. My friends at Heartmind were not a gossipy bunch, indeed they were unusually sensitive to the suffering and sadness of other people, more so in fact than their teacher—or so to me it seemed.
Perhaps I had heard only what I wanted to hear.
I didn't know.
Don't.
On the subject of sex, I told the master in my journal, I thought the philosophy of the '60s had been pretty good. Sex between competent consenting adults, then my friends and I believed, was nobody's business but their own. But I was certain that the master could think of exceptions. No assertion, I understood, was absolute and free of holes. If the master truly believed that my private sexual fantasies were the evidence that contradicted my sense that I lived my life free now of lies and secrets then I was certain that the master could find also more than one exception to my liberal philosophy of sex and free love.
In my journal I had continued in this vein, offering a random smattering of details about my sex life past and present as a way of indicating that they were not secrets the disclosure of which I feared. My sexuality had been the cause of all of the big problems in my life and I now much appreciated and enjoyed in old age the diminishment of lust and sexual desire. From personal experience I knew well, better than most men I thought, how we underestimate the power of sexual desire. I recalled my nineteen-year-old student whose father had married eleven times.
"What!"
I had been shocked.
He had married more times than Elizabeth Taylor?
"Why?" I asked.
"He falls in love easy," the young woman said.
"What?"
She just smiled and shrugged.
Men?
In another class not so many months later I told her story to my new students. An eighteen-year-old girl raised her hand. Her mother, she informed her classmates and me, had been married eight times.
I smiled wanly and slowly shook my head in incomprehension, acceptance, and resignation.
"My mother is in New York right now!" my student told the class.
Ironic smile.
"To meet a man she fell in love with on the internet."
Luv.
My own libido now felt to me to be .01 of what it had been when I was sixteen, twenty-six, and even thirty-six, I told the master, and I did not miss, I said, what I did not feel. Contrary to what seemed to be prevailing opinion I considered its absence a blessing and a gift.
Good riddance.
I knew there was a lot of blah blah blah in my journal this week, I confessed in its final entry, yet I had planned to edit and to delete nothing at all; but before I clicked on "send" I had been unable to refrain from cutting out some things and now, I did admit, I felt like cutting even more. Much of what I had written would sound to my teacher like disapproval of him, I was sure, just as his replies and comments so often felt like disapproval of me.
"No good, no bad," he and I taught. "No right, no wrong."
Ha.
"No true, no false."
Ha.
How ironic and strange and sad that two old men abjuring personal preferences and the cherishing of opinion could come to such a pass—and in my saying even this I imagined the master might object to even the slightest implication in my remark that I considered the two of us equals.
How dare I—
How and why had this all happened?
I wondered.
Everything I had written during the week now felt utterly ephemeral and outdated.
With that I concluded.
To this comment the master did not reply.
Ashes.
Ashes.
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