At midmorning zazen and service on Sunday there had again been a big crowd with half a dozen newer practitioners; four or five people from Lincoln returned regularly now each Sunday; and my mention of this attendance was the conclusion to my practice journal for the week.
To see Heartmind grow felt good.
In spite of all my misunderstanding, conflict, and confrontation with the master I was determined to persevere. Required daily to record in my journal my feelings, thoughts, and questions, my hands and mind and heart felt like lead. What in my mind arose for me the master did not like.
This was obvious.
Yet still I wondered if the master might not ask me to serve as ino while Eleanor was in retreat in California. That I believed this to be even a remote possibility is an indication of how oblivious I was to the reality of my relationship to the master and of my situation at Heartmind. Dean was the logical choice for ino; but, living and working on his farm outside of Lincoln, Dean would be unable to attend to temple matters five or six days a week as I had in the position. Edward had a new job which required more time of him than in the past and, besides, Edward had just served again as ino for the umpteenth time. Nikki was ready and perhaps it would be she; but Nikki would need to be trained. Ivan and James were also ready, I believed, but neither had been through lay ordination. Was lay ordination a prerequisite? I did not know. If I myself were asked to serve again as ino I had decided that I would. I state this here and now to give my reader an idea of how lost, confused, and clueless I really was in my practice with my teacher. For at the same time I thought also that perhaps I should quit and yet I was determined not to quit again. I thought, too, that perhaps without explicitly telling me so the master was trying in fact to pressure me to quit; and I thought also that the master might himself quit me, terminate me, and end our relationship. Yet here I was at the very same time thinking also that the master might ask me again to be ino. It made no sense. As I edited I recalled my favorite passage from Chuang Tsu.
Among the ancients knowledge was very deep. What is meant by deep? It reached back to the time when nothing existed. It was so deep, so complete, that nothing could be added to it. Then came men who distinguished between things but did not give them names. Later they labeled them but did not choose between right and wrong. When right and wrong appeared, Tao declined…. Therefore the sage seeks insight from chaos and doubt. Not making distinctions but dwelling on that which is unchanged is called clear vision. When you wrack your brain trying to unify things without knowing that they are already one, it is called "three in the morning."
I loved it.
For me it was three in the morning.
I wracked my brain.
Stuck again, for my journal on Monday I wrote nothing.
Nada.
The following day I recorded a few stories of my students. A young woman in my class in academic discourse had called abortion the "murder of a child" and had not considered any of the issues involved in such a judgment. I had returned her paper after speaking only briefly with her. She had been determined not to listen and reacted as if I were trying to undermine her belief in God.
To her I was.
In my presence she had first struck a self-righteous pose, like Joan of Arc before her burning, and then left to talk over my remarks on her paper and to her in person with her friend in class who in her essay had argued that love of God was necessary before one could love others or love even oneself and in support of her thesis she had cited only passages from the epistles of Paul. Both women were young, innocent, to me just girls really, enjoying their commitment to what they believed was right. I did not know how I would be able now to trick them into thinking still more deeply about their subjects, I confessed in my journal. I had given my students much more freedom than usual to choose their own topics.
Now I wished I hadn't.
If we contended, they would report me to the boss and I would be cast as the villain who had demanded that they renounce their belief in God and countenance the murder of babies. Or I could just look the other way, give them both B, and no one would be ever the wiser. Teaching was so hard and so fun, I told the master, and that was why I loved it so.
"I'm sure I seem just as difficult a student to you as these two girls seem to me," I said.
I thought.
"If not more so," I added.
I had been working on my book and thinking about it. Regarding the koans and the stories of transmission recorded in the literature of Zen, I had inferred that either the student or the teacher had decided that the event, the mystic moment of awakening and enlightenment, was not private, I reported in my journal, or we would not have this record. Either teacher or student, I said, must have been proud enough, excited enough, thrilled enough, to tell somebody else what had happened—or believed that the telling might be of use to others.
Had Shakyamuni Buddhi practiced and sanctioned dokusan?
I wondered.
Had the knowledge, the wisdom, and the authority of the teacher been his emphasis?
I wondered.
Confidentiality?
Hmm.
Secrecy?
I did not know.
What would Shakyamuni Buddha think of his disciples bowing and chanting daily in unison that they took "refuge" in buddha as the "perfect" teacher, "refuge" in dharma as the "perfect" teaching, and "refuge" in sangha as the "perfect" life?
I wondered.
Had such accretions come later from priests determined to protect and defend a priesthood?
I wondered.
I had described for my daughter the situation with Irene. I told my daughter what the master had said about it and I told her, too, what he had told me about my including it in my book.
"Not if it would hurt her feelings."
Hmm.
"What do you think?" I asked.
I waited.
"The master wants you to leave it out?"
"I think so."
She frowned.
"But isn't this language a central question of your book?"
"Explain."
"The way the master speaks?"
I waited.
"Thoughtless hurtful remarks?"
I wondered.
"Verbal abuse?" my daughter suggested.
"Yes."
"Then you should probably leave it in."
Hmm.
"I suppose so."
Trust—
Truth—
The journal.
Though now I had already written quite a lot again I felt I had little really to write about. When I did write, I said, I wrote about the same old things, the horror of war and poverty way way out there somewhere, the effort and intimacy of classroom teaching and the fulfillment I found in it, the friendship and comfort of my wife and family, the beauty of earth and sky, the discipline and spirit of repetition in practice. My life, I explained, did not move far from these things ever.
The Four Truths—
Suffering?
Obviously! How could there be any doubt?
Its origin?
Craving, clinging, desire, aversion, wanting what isn't, not wanting what is—
Yes, clearly!
Its cessation?
Acceptance, letting go, my presence in the present—serving others.
The Way—
For me no doubt!
Be kind.
I thought often of my Heartmind sangha friends, their loneliness, their yearning for companions, their doubt about whether to be monks, their anger at injustice, poverty, and war, their love and pity, their hope, their conflicts in their jobs, their agonies over moral compromise, their addictions, their suffering, their pain, their service to others, their practice.
I had liked in dharma study the remark by Candy, an old woman I had not met before, about the perspective of age, its comfort, its wisdom, the melting away of passion, the sense of proper proportion, the greater ease of surrender and acceptance, contentment, tolerance, forgiveness, the experience and knowledge of human absurdity, humility, the absolute certainty of "don't know" mind, the appreciation and love of little babies and small children, tenderness for the infirm, old, and feeble, with old age the comedy of sex, and the vast lukewarm sea of sadness upon which float the bobbers of Earth, Sun, Moon, Star, the ugly, graphic, specific, and real horrors in the morning news, the ache of exquisite beauty in a rain drop, a rain drop, a rain drop, a wet black tree, the distant whimper of a cold, crying dog, two warbling parakeets in my living room, my white gray computer screen, the soft pink pads of my finger tips, the key pads of the keyboard, the soft tapping of my typing, the intricate tiny black symbolic characters, mystic beads on a taut straight string.
My memory of writers past.
Lao Tsu.
"Do you think you can improve the universe?" the sage inquires of me.
I think.
"I really do not believe you can," he answers.
Oh.
On Thursday morning I shut off the alarm at 4:00, skipped my sitting, reset the alarm for 5:00, and then when it beeped again I could hardly believe I had slept another hour.
I slept so hard I had been out cold.
I thought of suffering.
Now that our furnace was on, my itching had returned—to my arms, my legs, my lower back, my shoulders, my neck, my fingers, even to my scalp. I had refilled my prescription for anti-itch cream, flourocinide .05, and like a woman I put a moisturizing lotion over my whole body every morning. The morning newspaper offered a photograph of what the caption called a "lake of blood" after two suicide bombings in Baghdad; and though this "lake" was only a pond it was plenty horrible enough. The origin of this suffering? War generated war, I knew or thought I knew, and killing killing. But the torment of my itching? Who knew? Allergies, old age, my asinine diet, carbohydrates, sugar, untold causes and conditions. It was a strange feeling, I reflected in my journal, to be so hyperaware of the thin skin between what was "in" and what was "out." I had learned not to scratch so that I made raw sores, yeast infections, as I did when this itching had first begun several years before. But its cessation? Ha! I had used cremes, lotions, I had tried and failed to watch what I ate, I tried not to think about it, and I practiced acceptance.
My beloved Lao Tsu.
"All problems come from the body. Without a body what could be the problem?"
Ho.
At the college I applied for an unpaid leave of absence the first week of December so that I could attend the sesshin all seven days of Rohatsu, and my colleagues in English agreed to substitute for me in the classes I would miss. It had always been difficult for me to attend the whole week. In five years I had attended only one Rohatsu. During the others I had come to every evening period of zazen and during the most recent Rohatsu also to every early morning zazen period I could manage. This year I looked forward to all of it.
The Way.
"Just writing the word makes me happier," I reported.
Delusion.
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