At 10:00 I walked up the stairs. The master was not in his room but the door was open and I could see that two chairs had not been arranged for dokusan so I knew that our conversation would be informal.
I moved on.
In the office the master was sitting at his desk and working at his computer. I waited at the open doorway for permission to enter.
The master bowed.
"Good morning," he said.
I bowed.
"Good morning," I said.
I waited.
"Come in," the master said.
I entered.
"Sit down."
The master gestured to the metal folding chair at the table.
I sat.
I made myself comfortable.
My feet flat on the floor, I leaned slightly forward, I arched my lower back, and then I sat up vertical and straight. I shrugged my shoulders and arms just slightly to loosen them and then, just slightly, once left and once right, to relax I stretched my neck. I rested my hands in my lap.
The master swiveled in his chair and turned to face me.
The master was solemn.
He brought his palms together slowly and gently in gassho.
Likewise I.
The master only half smiled—a sad smile.
Resigned.
The master got right to the point.
"I'm pulling out."
He paused.
"I can't do this anymore," the master said.
I listened.
The master said that he had already consulted an attorney and that if I published what he considered confidential information he would sue me. The master stated that I had engaged in "triangulation." It was a word I could not remember ever hearing. He explained. If students had questions about the teaching or about the practice or about their teacher, students were to speak not with other students about their problems but only with their teacher. If students inquired of other students about the teaching or about the practice or about their teacher, they should be told by other students only to ask their teacher. Students who spoke with other students about their difficulties and problems in their practice, the master said, created in the sangha a "poisonous" climate. It was such "triangulation" that was the primary cause of his terminating our relationship; and as for its termination—
"I find no pleasure in it," the master said.
He paused.
The master looked tired, sad, resigned.
I waited.
For a moment we sat in silence and gazed at one another.
Calm—
I felt comfortable.
Relaxed.
My body felt stable, solid, and rested.
I felt fine.
There was nothing at all in my mind.
Empty.
The temple air felt cool and smooth as it traveled in and out of my nostrils and lungs and I can remember marveling at the ease of it. Though long ago I had meditated every night for nine years on my back in bed before sleep it was the master who had taught me meditation and the quiet joy and bodily calm of zazen.
I waited.
"I will not be comfortable with your coming to the temple," the master said.
Expelled.
The master said that he would issue an email announcement to the regular practitioners and that he would also explain his decision to the board of directors when it met the following week. Though I was vice president the master made it clear that he did not expect me to attend and that in his opinion at least I was not welcome. If and when I found another teacher, subject to his approval, the master explained, he would permit me to return to the temple and to practice there with the sangha but even then only under restrictions. He cited several which would obtain even if I found a teacher but I remember only one.
"No dokusan."
The master suggested the names of five or six Zen teachers and he told me the locations of their temples. He added that if I were interested in the Tibetans I might try Kansas City. The master paused for a moment to allow me the opportunity to reflect and to respond.
I remained silent.
Empty.
The master had said nothing to which I felt the need to object.
No.
Though I had made many friends at the temple I had come to the master only because my longtime dharma friend Billy had urged me to find a teacher. From the master I had learned a lot and from him I had hoped and expected to learn much more. If I had offended my teacher to such a degree that he no longer wanted me around him—and indeed it seemed certain now that I had—I would accept it. For five years I had tried as hard as I could to practice according to his instruction and I saw no reason now to stop.
The master had made his decision.
So be it.
"I find no pleasure in it," the master said a second time.
I listened.
The master looked both mad and sad.
Weary.
I felt sorry for him.
For us.
The ripple of pity passed.
I sat.
The master explained that he first had considered filing a formal grievance against me in accordance with the procedures described in the temple statement of ethics but that upon further consideration he had then decided that such an action would serve no good purpose.
A grievance against me—
Whoa!
This was the first I had heard of it.
Grievance—
Hm.
The word shocked me.
Grievance—
The master had never used the word "grievance" in any of our previous conflicts or communications and I had had not an inkling that my teacher ever felt this way about me.
Jesus—
How I wished now that the master had just told me so and explained!
Why—
What had I done wrong?
What—
To this day I still wonder.
Why—
But even had the master filed a formal grievance against me I would not have defended myself.
To do so would have made no sense.
The master was my teacher and in this matter I trusted him. Everything in my practice at Heartmind I had learned from the master. Everything connected to my practice at Heartmind depended upon the master. It was the master only who dispensed the teaching and the master only who set and fixed the standard. I had no interest whatsoever in coming to Heartmind if the master did not want me there.
None.
"Is there anything you'd like to say?" the master asked.
Exiled.
Out.
I considered.
"No."
I had wondered how I would feel if my teacher terminated our relationship.
How—
Would I feel sad?
Yes.
I thought I would.
Yes.
Might I cry?
Yes.
Yes—
I thought I might.
But now that it had actually come to pass I did not feel much of anything.
I experienced relief.
I experienced calm.
I experienced clarity.
The master, too, seemed to have expected more of a response from me and in its absence he repeated much of what he had already said—the poison of triangulation, the fact that he took no pleasure in his decision—and then the master realized that he was repeating himself.
He stopped.
"I learned a lot from you," I said. "I'm grateful for my experience at the temple."
Enough.
I put my palms together.
I bowed.
The master did the same.
Out.
I had already started down the stairs and had pulled my car key from my pocket when I remembered my personal key to the front door of the temple and I retraced my steps to return it.
I poked my head into the office and called softly.
"Kudo?"
The master swiveled and turned in his chair.
"Yes?"
I held up the key so that he could see it.
"Yes?"
The master squinted.
"My key."
"Oh."
I walked over and handed it to him.
He smiled.
"Thank you," he said.
I smiled.
"Thank you," I said.
Out.
Out.
Out of the office once more and back down the stairs and out the front door and into my flipflops and down the porch steps and down the front walk of uneven red brick to my little white pickup I went.
I could hear a lawnmower roaring and growling in the empty lot west of the temple. I looked as I walked. I saw Eleanor dressed for the cool fall weather back near the south border of the yard pushing the machine over the sparse grass and straggly weeds, the small drifts of dead leaves, and the dirt and the dust in what I guessed would be the last mow of the year. Eleanor was far enough away that I thought a wave might appear ambiguous and be perhaps misinterpreted and since I had either nothing really to say except goodbye or much more to say than the opportunity allowed I did not wave. Her head down, her focus on the roaring mower and its bumpy path, there seemed no good reason to interrupt Eleanor at her task.
I unlocked the door to the pickup and I belted myself in. I was thinking already of the fat stack of student papers I had to read, mark, and grade before my classes met again on Monday.
Hey! I realized suddenly—
Now I would not have to clean the two temple bathrooms.
Ah!
The incongruity of the thought made me grin.
Ah!
When I got home I emailed a short note to my immediate family and to my few dharma friends to inform them that the master had kicked me out and had threatened to sue me if in my book I dared reveal his secret.
"He was very polite," I added.
Out.
Later that day as a courtesy my friend Edward forwarded to me the official announcement, "Termination of Relationship," which the master had emailed to a dozen or so Heartmind regulars just minutes before he had spoken with me in the morning. I had not been included in the list of its recipients.
Excommunicated.
In his email the master explained that for some time our relationship as teacher and student had been "rocky" and "tenuous," that it had become clear to him that he could not continue as my teacher, and that today he had so informed me. The master explained also that he had told me that he would not be comfortable with my coming to the temple unless I were practicing under the guidance of another teacher and that if I did find a teacher and was practicing under his or her guidance then I would again be welcome. The master expressed regret that he had to take such action.
"I find no pleasure in it."
Though it did seem to me peculiar that the master had not seen fit to provide me, the main subject of his communication, with a copy of his announcement, I had no serious objection to its contents and I appreciated the invitation with which the master had concluded.
"If you'd like to speak to Bob about this," the master had said, "please do so."
Good.
It sounded unconditional.
Hmm.
I wondered.
I forwarded the announcement that Edward had forwarded to me to the family and friends whom I had for five years kept informed of the ups and downs of my practice with the master.
"You'll miss it," Ruth warned.
"May be," I said.
I prounounced it not as one word but two—a spondee.
"May be."
"It has been a big part of your life for five years," Ruth reminded me.
"Yes."
"It will leave a big hole!" Ruth said.
"May be," I said.
"It will!"
"Yes," I agreed.
"It will!"
"Yes."
Ruth read my ambivalence and doubt.
"It will!"
I didn't really know how I would feel.
Not at all.
Alison was the first to call—at 8:00 on Sunday morning. I had not seen much of Alison at Heartmind the last several months, first because of her new baby, then because of her new job, and her two teenage children also required her attention. Alison knew nothing of my most recent conflict with the master.
Surprise!
"What happened?" Alison exclaimed.
There was an infectious smile of understanding and amusement audible in her voice on the phone when I answered. Alison had been through something similar to this with her husband Mark.
I laughed.
Confused, berated, and then dumped by my teacher, expelled from the sangha, disinvited to the meeting of the board of directors, banished from the temple, and then excommunicated, I gave Alison a ten-minute recapitulation of events—the master's mysterious reference to secrets the disclosure of which would ruin our teacher's reputation, my questions in shosan about whether keeping secrets to protect reputation was the Way, the revelation in dokusan of the intimacy between Nananda and the master sixteen years ago, my telling my family and Ivan and Ryan, and then my telling the master in my journal what I had done, his hurt, his change of heart, the expression of my regret and my apology for the pain I had caused him, my own tears, my agony over my journal, his exhorting me to continue to write whatever came up for me, my thoughts and reflections on the matter, my new questions about it, his mistrust of me, his defensiveness and annoyance, his question to me about masturbation, my question about my book, the most recent practice group meeting, Eleanor's counsel to the master, my final audience with him, and his termination of our relationship. I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts. I wanted to get it exactly right. For Alison I recited from memory the remarks the master now said I had misunderstood.
"I hate secrets," the master had told me in dokusan. "Secrets and I just do not get along. People often want to confide in me and tell me something, but first they ask if I will keep it secret, and I simply say no, don't tell me—if it's a secret I don't want to know."
I paused to recollect.
"So now I've told you," the master had said smiling, "and now you know and now you may treat this information however you wish and you may do with this knowledge whatever you want."
I mentioned to Alison that the master had told me also that he had considered filing a grievance against me—for what exactly I still did not know—with the board of directors but that the master had decided instead simply to terminate our relationship. I had read the temple grievance procedure when I got home, I told Alison, and learned that it would have required the master to put into writing his specific grievance against me and that it would also have permitted me to present my written response. This would have meant, I guessed, that his past intimacy with Nananda would have been disclosed, the reasons perhaps for its concealment, the context in which my teacher had revealed it to me, and the statements by my teacher which had led me to believe that I was at liberty to do as I pleased with the information.
I did not object to the action my teacher had taken.
I did not.
I did not understand, really, what I had done wrong—right up to the very end I had tried as hard as I could to do what my teacher advised—but I trusted the master to do what he thought best. If what the master thought best was the termination our relationship I was prepared to accept it. I had gone to the temple for the teaching and while I made many friends there I would not otherwise have gone without Kudo, the teacher, the only person truly necessary for there even to be a Zen center—the Zen master. The master made it all happen. If the master had determined that he could not teach me then for me it was over.
Kaput.
To me it made no sense whatsoever to oppose or to appeal his decision.
He was indeed still my teacher.
The master.
Echo—
"This is not a debate."
Understood.
Had the master not terminated our relationship I would have been practicing, painfully, still, one day at a time, under his guidance. But our conflict seemed to aggravate the condition of his irritable bowel and I believed that it had appeared to both of us that the issue at the center of this conflict—his reputation—would not soon go away. I had wondered more than once if our conflict might not also make me sick. The master had continued to exhort me to pour into my journal unedited whatever might come up for me but what continued to come up for me were questions about keeping a secret to preserve reputation.
The Way—
No.
It baffled me.
Why—
"I loved the man," I emailed Alison later, "and I hurt for him, and I hurt, too," I said, "for the unwitting part I played in all this."
Ignorance.
Katagiri had told the master that the most important thing about Zen practice was to continue and that was what the master had told me and that was what I had done and I was glad that I had and I encouraged Alison and other temple friends who called or emailed to inquire to do the same.
"Listen and practice," I advised.
Persevere.
I was not sure how, why, and when it had become my responsibility to keep secrets in order to protect and preserve the reputation of my teacher. But when the master told me he could no longer be my teacher he said that a student who had doubts and questions about him or about his comments in the journal or about his remarks in shosan or dokusan or about his teaching in general should not speak to another student about it; the student should speak only to him and, if a student approached another student with such doubts and questions about practice, that student should be told simply to speak with the teacher about it. In dokusan the student must submit to the teacher. If the teacher tells the student to shut up, the student must shut up. If the teacher tells the student the conversation is not a debate, the student must cease to express his or her opinion. If the teacher tells the student the conversation is over, the conversation is over. What is the student to do if he believes the teacher has said something improper? Return to the teacher. Until my final audience with the master I had never before heard this principle expressed in terms so stark. In retrospect I wished I had and yet, had I, I suspect my break with the master would have come even earlier than it had.
I wasn't mad.
My friends at the temple—Ivan, James, Edward, Jane, Nikki—called or emailed or both in the next day or two and I provided them the same basic summary I had given my friend Alison.
There was nothing new to add.
It was sad.
They expressed disappointment that I would no longer be practicing with them.
Exiled.
Out.
My good friend and dharma brother Dean neither wrote nor called nor had I expected to hear from him. Dean was a quiet, solitary man of few words most of the time—though not always—relatively incurious about the practice of others, the kind of student perhaps that the master had expected me to be. An acquaintance of my daughter's fiance Sam worked on Dean's organic dairy farm and from Sam he had learned of my termination.
He asked Dean about it.
Curious.
"It's no big deal," I was told Dean had replied. "People there quit all the time."
Quit—
No.
In my email to James I explained that the master had given me explicit permission to do whatever I wanted with the information he had given me—I quoted the master exactly—and I said that in any case I did not consider his secrets to be my problem. If the master were not a priest attached to some silly notion of himself—his reputation—his secrets would be meaningless, I believed, and the pitiful truth was that all together the secrets did not amount to a hill of beans.
My language betrayed the annoyance I had begun to feel and almost immediately I regretted it.
James expressed hope that the master and I might eventually reconcile. New students, he said, needed a helping hand from the senior students and I had offered him mine.
"For your guidance and help I thank you."
For his kind words I was grateful.
Edward wrote.
His words, too, were helpful.
Edward said in his email that at the time he received the announcement of my excommunication he had been firing up his email program to inquire how I would feel about taking over for him as president of the board of directors. My message obviated his own.
Edward addressed reputation.
"I don't think reputation is silly for a teacher," Edward said.
Edward inquired.
"Don't you protect your reputation?"
Did I?
His question made me think.
Ego.
Even five months later I was still thinking about it.
Reputation.
Ego.
Secrecy.
Edward said that he had always understood dokusan to be a private communication but that on one or two occasions he had revealed things about dokusan if he thought they might be helpful to someone. Kindness was still new to him, Edward explained. For most of his life he had erred on the side of truth, Edward believed, and now he was trying to lean the other way.
"Truth is important," Edward said. "Kindness is equally important."
Agreed.
I wrote Edward, James, and Alison.
Regret.
For saying that a concern for reputation was silly I apologized.
Contrition.
For two weeks I had to answer questions at work about my excommunication. I would not be attending the weeklong sesshin in December so I had to ask my supervisor and the personnel office to rescind the leave without pay I had requested and been granted and I had to inform my three colleagues who had agreed to substitute for me in my classes that I would have no need for their services. Except for Nena, whom I told everything, I tried to respond as succinctly and yet as honestly as I could to inquiries from students and colleagues. For over thirty years I had been a kind of Buddhist missionary at my job, the more so in the five years I had practiced under the master's guidance at Heartmind. I had not proselytized but I had responded freely and openly to questions about my Buddhist practice, and at the college many of my students, associates, and colleagues knew of my daily zazen and of my participation in sesshins and services and other events at the Zen temple.
They often asked about it.
I'd explain.
"What happened?" now they wanted to know.
I smiled.
"My teacher kicked me out."
"Why?"
To this question I responded in a variety of ways.
I experimented.
"I'm not really sure myself," I answered.
Evasion.
This reply invited errant speculation.
"Tell me."
"The master felt I betrayed his confidence," I suggested.
Intrigue.
"How so?" my friend inquired.
I thought.
I didn't want to go there.
Hmm.
I shrugged.
"How?" my friend persisted.
Hmm.
I told her the short story.
"Ha!"
She laughed loudly.
"Ha!"
Hmm.
"I asked too many questions," I told one good student who had been concerned.
He grinned.
"Most religions seem to be like that," he said.
I laughed.
"Yes," I said. "They are."
My good friend Jules was especially concerned. More than anyone else at the college Jules knew how deep had been my involvement at Heartmind for the past five years and how conscientious I had been about my practice. Jules and I had taught English together for twenty-seven years and no one at the college knew me better. By this news of my termination, expulsion, and excommunication my friend Jules had been absolutely stunned.
"What happened!" Jules demanded.
I smiled.
Chagrin.
First I offered circumlocution.
"Ever have a student who attended every class, who came early and stayed late, tried his best to follow directions, turned in everything on time or even early, always did much more than the minimum, and always gave his best effort, but you still had to withdraw him because he just could not get and could not understand what you were trying to teach?" I asked.
I knew my friend had.
"For Kudo," I said, "I think that was me."
No.
My evasion was not persuasive.
No.
Jules shook his head.
No.
"Just tell me the truth in plain English," he said.
I did.
We laughed.
Sex.
We laughed and laughed.
My correspondent and friend in the Soka Gakkai organization also heard and inquired. It had been my answers to her email questions about the temple, my teacher, and my practice that the master had printed in the temple newsletter. She, too, wanted to know why I had been expelled from the temple; and she asked additional questions about current events—Saddam Hussein had just been sentenced to hang—and about politics and about my relative success in integrating all that had just happened into my life and my practice. My response to her I edited only slightly and then I posted it on my blog as a poem I titled "Perseverance" and subtitled "Equanimity." Of all the emails I sent in the shock of my expulsion I still believe it the truest and the best.
My zen teacher ended our relationship. I couldn't stop asking questions, including some difficult ones about him. Banned from the temple, at home I'm still sitting forty minutes a day.
The eternal tornadoes of war roar around the planet, one day here, the next day there, the next day here.
Even places spared the whirlwind suffer collateral storms, the criminal rain of hot bullets, the random bolts of homicidal and suicidal lightning, the dread.
Today this season's monster has been found guilty and will be hanged: hooray. Tens of thousands celebrate. For the trillionth time we're told the best solution authority has to offer:
Kill somebody.
The emerald graygreen sign on the bank was very beautiful in the dark this morning on my drive to work. There'd been two deer car collisions already this morning my radio warned.
I drove only the posted speed, resisting the ego urge to race, to get ahead, to excel, to win, coasting down the black concrete ribbon of road.
How hard it is to be prudent!
Yet if speeding I were to strike a child—a human fawn—how could I bear to live?
The innocent graywhite screen of my monitor welcomes the tiny black worms that crawl from the broken egg of my brain down my arm to my finger tips.
Suspended between my yearning to help and my yearning to die, I open my tool kit and find it empty. I unfold a tiny note I rescue from a corner:
Try to be kinder.
On my walk to my sad, sleepy students waiting for me, their teacher, I follow my breath:
inspire
expire
inspire
expire
inspire
With just the briefest of explanations I emailed the link to the five members of the sangha with whom I had corresponded since my expulsion and to Ryan and Daly, the two former members of the sangha to whom I felt connected still, to family, and to my oldest dharma brothers, teachers, and friends Billy and John.
I felt fine.
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