In September I met Sosan Davis.
I attended a seminar Davis offered at Heartmind. Many of my friends attended, too, Ivan, Edward, Dean, Irene, Nikki, and four or five other practitioners I did not know well or had never met.
The topic: "How to Study the Dharma."
"We'll discuss how study relates to the rest of practice," Davis said in the promotion the master had emailed to the sangha, "how study can be a disease, and how study can be medicine."
Davis emphasized both nonthinking and reading and reflection.
"Not two."
Davis emphasized what he called the essentiality of questioning and patience.
"Questions are good," Davis said.
I liked that.
"There are no simple answers," he said.
Indeed.
"Reflection is good," he said.
I liked that.
Liked, disliked—my empty personal preferences.
Delusion.
The master rested all morning upstairs, he did not take part in the proceedings, and he made only a brief appearance when he came downstairs to prepare his lunch in the kitchen.
The master did not look good.
Gaunt.
"Hello, all," the master said from the lower landing of the stairs.
Voice raspy.
The master looked very weak, very sick, yes, almost dying.
The master smiled.
He had lost a lot of weight and though he still had a pot belly it was not much of one and compared to the big, strong, fat man he had been two years before he appeared almost thin.
The master appeared tentative.
Fragile.
Yet the master seemed in good spirits.
One week later I attended midmorning zazen and service on Sunday.
The master did not sit.
Did not talk.
Later he greeted us outside at the picnic table where we drank coffee.
"Good morning."
"Hi."
The master was smiling, cheerful.
"Hi, Bob."
But the master looked gaunt and sick.
Weak.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
He smiled.
"It has been a struggle," the master said, "but I am getting better."
He smiled.
Later the master emailed the sangha.
An update.
"I still feel as if I have been hit by a truck," the master said.
But he said also that over the past few days he had felt some improvement.
"It's about time."
The master offered details—painkillers, limited energy, restricted activity, the nerve damaged in surgery that had made a raspy whisper of his once booming voice, the daily injections of blood thinner for the clots in his leg, the final two treatments of chemotherapy.
"I'm hanging in there."
The master asked that the sangha keep chants and good thoughts coming his way.
"I need all I can get."
His recovery from surgery the master said was like wrestling a bear.
"Very discouraging at times."
By the end of October the master seemed stronger, better. He stopped in the kitchen on his way out the back door to his blood thinner shot to say hello to me. He had almost no belly.
But the master was happy.
Grinning.
"Doctors say I'm cancer free," the master said.
"Great."
But the master was still too weak to sit or to teach.
Time.
He improved.
By January the master could walk the dogs and even hike.
He was teaching again.
Sitting.
By February the master was leading sesshin.
Wonderful!
Every time I heard the master speak the master expressed his gratitude.
His appreciation.
His thanks.
In class I repeated what I had said a thousand times about secrets and lies.
My student from Togo raised his hand.
He was a political refugee.
"Yes?"
"Without our secrets and lies," he said, "my family and I would be dead."
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continued.
The murdered.
The dead.
Here's what just a hundred look like.
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
Fan through the six hundred pages of this book.
Text.
Black "a," "b," "c," "d," thousands of them.
Text.
If every single character of the alphabet in this book were a "k," this book might represent the total number of human beings murdered by the Korean war, or the total number of human beings murdered by the Vietnam war, or the total number of human beings murdered by the Cambodian revolution. It would take all the characters of the alphabet in five full volumes of this book to represent just the total number of Jews murdered by the Nazis, all the characters of the alphabet in twenty-five full volumes of this book to represent the total number of human beings murdered by the second world war.
Conservative estimates all.
Enemy.
The central question is how I am to live in health, wealth, and privilege with the knowledge that others struggle, suffer, die, and are neglected, oppressed, persecuted, arrested, "disappeared," tortured, murdered, bombed, and forgotten. May I feast while others starve? I may. Should I? This returns me to the crux of the matter. Given the knowledge of such injustice, cruelty, and suffering, what am I supposed to do? What am I able to do? What am I willing to do? What can I do? I know how Buddha and Jesus answered the central question—by renunciation. In the traditional expressions of Buddhism, for others they "threw their lives away," they "stepped off a hundred-foot pole," they moved immediately to the task and they never looked back. Buddha and Jesus relinquished and renounced everything most of us hold dear—family, friends, home, country, ideology, wealth, and property. When we actually do that, the meaning of the Three Refuges and "living in the present, in the moment" is radically changed, radically deepened, and transformed. It seemed absolutely clear to me that both Buddha and Jesus demanded this same renunciation of their disciples. But for most of us the counsel of Jesus and Buddha is too hard. I tried for ten years. It was too hard. My friends John and Jane tried for ten years. It is hard, too hard. The personal sacrifice demanded by total renunciation makes most bourgeois "believers" and lay practitioners Buddhists and Christians in name only. It is renunciation that makes the Triple Treasure critical to real Buddhists and just a pleasant—or unpleasant—game to bourgeois Buddhists. We play at it. We pretend. We confess our egoism, our selfishness, our suffering, our "thinking too much," if we are Christians our "sins," our failures, to the priest, to the master, in confidence, in private, in a little drama with traditional religious enhancements calculated to create ambiance and to encourage honesty—robe, vestments, candle, incense, bows—and once a month or so the master makes for us a theatre of the temple and we put on a play; and, for two days or for a week, for a few people a month or even a year, we pretend to be monks and nuns and renunciates, and then we go home after ceremony or sesshin and find our real "refuge" again in our homes, families, jobs, pensions, insurance, and vacations. Yes, the belief in religious authority, in a guru, in a priest—"better not to practice at all than to practice without a teacher"—in "submission," in obedience—"just do it"—in the rote recitation of precepts, ideals, and even gibberish, in the making of promises and vows, in "not thinking," in submitting to parental nagging and scolding, even to verbal abuse, can be a great comfort to many people and it is; but it has little if anything to do with renunciation and the actual teaching of Buddha or Christ; and unfortunately, in a sad and terrible irony, even many renunciates, monks and nuns who do commit themselves to the true way, learn to their disappointment years, even decades, later that their major life decision, their personal sacrifice, their surrender and devotion, has not brought them happiness or contentment. The question my old friend John had posed to me so many years ago remained for me the ultimate koan.
What am I supposed to do?
How?
My first grandchild Dylan was born in 1997, his sister Katy in 2001 three months before Nine Eleven; in 2006 my oldest daughter Donna and her husband David traveled to Vietnam to adopt their baby girl Emma; in January 2009 my son Michael and his wife Ivana gave birth to my fourth grandchild Marlena; and just two months later to his twin sister Mary and her husband Sam my fifth grandchild Leo was born. In the summer I moved in with Mary and Sam in Lincoln to babysit Leo when his mother returned to work.
Renunciation.
No.
Thursday evenings from 7:00 to 8:30 in Lincoln I sat with the six or seven Heartmind practitioners from Lincoln who for the sake of convenience met each week in a tiny room at the local Unitarian church. One night after zazen and a half hour of discussion I was in the hall slipping on my sandals while the three Lincoln regulars put away the mats, cushions, sutra books, bells, bowls, and buddhas; as they worked they talked of the master.
I could not help but overhear.
I listened.
"He's such an asshole."
Fred laughed.
"He is."
Mike and Dean, too, laughed.
"He is an asshole," Mike said.
"He is."
"But he's less an asshole than he was."
"He's an asshole," said Fred.
"He has mellowed," Mike insisted.
"Really?"
"It's been months since I heard him bawl somebody out."
"Yes."
Dean nodded.
"He's still an asshole," said Dean.
They laughed.
I stuck my head in the door and waved.
"Next week."
"Good night, Bob."
"Bye."
"See you."
"Bye."
"Good night."
"Bye."
On my free and easy slow drive back to the house I could not help but laugh.
I slept.
The year passed.
I sat in the living room with my laptop, browsing my inbox and rereading my recent replies. Across the room from me Ruth was working on a Sudoku; and on the couch to my right my mother was watching closed caption television the sound on mute. There had been a break in the ice and snow of our long cold terrible winter and I had brought Mother up to the city for the weekend.
"Your dad's funeral was twenty-two years ago today," Mother announced.
I looked up.
"Three days after he died," she said.
Ruth's eyes met mine.
"It had not even crossed my mind," I said.
"Mine either," Ruth said.
We returned to our amusements.
In her email to me an old friend had described a stranger she'd observed weeping in the library. Her vignette evoked many memories for me and I had replied with one of my own.
Years ago a young woman in my class had been weeping silently at her computer in the lab where she and her classmates had been working on their autobiographical narratives.
I didn't know what she was writing about.
I felt concern.
"You don't have to write about this if it's too painful," I whispered.
"Oh, no, I want to!" she said. "It all just seems so much more terrible and real written down like this in black and white."
I glanced at her screen.
In the scene she had composed, her enraged father was whipping her with his belt.
He yelled.
"I wish you had never been born!"
Again.
With each word he struck her.
Again.
"I wish you had never been born!"
Again.
"I wish you had never been born!"
Again.
I wondered if my dad had ever felt that way.
I had.
I often told the anecdote in class and it sometimes brought tears to my eyes.
I had never shared it with Ruth.
I thought I would.
"Let me read you something."
Ruth looked up.
I read.
My eyes poured silent tears so profuse I lifted both hands to my face to wipe it dry.
Then the fact that I was crying struck me funny.
I laughed.
Even more tears streamed from my eyes and again I wiped my face.
At myself again I laughed out loud.
More tears.
For forty seconds I was caught in a quiet loop of moderate hysteria.
Mother stared.
Ha!
That, too, struck me funny.
I laughed.
I cried.
"Look at yourself!" Ruth scolded. "That's just what Kudo was trying to tell you!"
I laughed.
I cried.
It was hilarious.
In August of 2010 I told the master I had finished my book.
"Will you read it?" I asked.
"Yes."
We would both be out of town for six weeks.
"Bring me a hard copy."
I did.
When I returned from New York I learned that the master was in the hospital recovering from another major surgery, this one to correct a massive hernia and to reposition his ileostomy.
"He is still too weak to see visitors," I was told.
I waited two days.
Then at 11:30 in the morning I stopped at his room. From the door I could not see the master but Irene was visible at his bedside. She did not invite me to enter. Instead for several minutes she whispered with the patient so softly that I could not hear and I knew then that there was a problem.
Irene gestured for me to enter.
Finally.
The master's face was puffy but his color was good.
From his bed he placed his palms together.
The master nodded—
A bow.
I did the same.
His demeanor was grim.
"I don't think we're friends anymore after what you said about me in that book!"
He scowled.
"Now I'm trying to recover from surgery!"
He put his palms together and as best he could from bed again he bowed.
I had been dismissed.
I nodded.
I bowed and I left.
At the college I assigned a new prompt to my student writers.
I wrote, too—
If I knew I'd die in twenty-four hours I would, if I could, apologize to everyone I have wronged in my life. When I told a friend of this topic he said the words that first popped into his head were "I'm sorry." I, too, regret all of the harm and hurt and pain, intentional and unintentional, I have caused others. For all of it I am every day sincerely sorry. I would forgive, and I do forgive, everyone who has ever wronged me. I want to begin and to end each day free of resentment and I want to end my life that way. I would be, and I am, thankful. Generous people have given me many many opportunities in my life and second and third chances I did not deserve. For this I feel profound appreciation and deep gratitude and for my family and for my many friends I feel love, love, love, love.
Love!
Sound too mooshy?
I don't care!
In this spirit I would sit zazen—but just my normal forty minutes. I would do my usual chores, feed the cats, wash the dishes, do the laundry, update our checking, shop for this week's groceries, and shovel the walk or mow the lawn. I would call my mother just to check and see if she needed anything. Totally deaf since age fifteen, she is 91 and still lives alone in her own home, such a sweetheart, and I love her dearly. Then I would ask Ruth if there were anything she needed me or wanted me to do for her and, if so, then I would do that.
Daily duties done, I might sip a cup of coffee and glance at the morning paper while our two little birds chirp and warble and fly around the room. If I could guarantee that my death would not alarm any innocent passersby nor impose upon them any obligation maybe I would take an aimless, long, and leisurely walk, a stroll, and marvel one more time at the myriad miracle of the earth and stop and stand and stare up in silent joy and awe at the impossibly beautiful sky.
For forty-four years I taught English.
In May I retired.
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