Now the master apologized.
"I didn't mean to hurt you, Bob," the master said. "I'm sorry I hurt you, I'm only human, Bob, I make mistakes, I didn't intend to hurt you, and if you will show me which of my comments on your journal hurt you I will try to explain what I meant."
I remained silent.
The master's face aged as I watched and I listened. The skin around his eyes and nose and mouth sagged and wrinkled and creased, his jowls grew heavy and sank and hung from the bone of his jaw, his color grew sallow, and he seemed to age from sixty-three to eighty-three in fifteen minutes. Before my eyes the master had become an old sad man. He placed the palms of his hands together in gassho. Now the master begged and begged and begged and begged.
"Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, attend the sesshin," the master begged, "please, don't quit, please, please, please, please, don't quit, please, please, attend the sesshin, please, push through this, Bob, please, sit with your turmoil, please, please, I beg you!"
Whoa!
The master spoke urgently, his words tumbling from his lips.
"Please!"
He whined.
"Please!"
His palms pressed together in prayer the master leaned far forward in entreaty.
"Please, please, I beg you, please!" the master pled. "I beg you, please!"
I sat still.
"Please!"
The master pled and begged like this again.
"Please, Bob, please, please, please, please, please, Bob, please, please, attend the sesshin," the master begged, "please, don't quit, please, please, please, please, don't quit, please, Bob, please, attend the sesshin, please, push through this, Bob, please, sit with your turmoil, please, please, I beg you!"
Then again the master begged and pled.
"Please!" he cried. "Please, push through this and attend the sesshin!"
I was moved.
No man had ever in my life spoken to me like this. I was touched deeply and moved in spite of what I had considered my adamant resolve. His sincerity seemed undeniable. The master had humbled himself, humbled himself utterly, before me, he'd thrown himself wide open in front of me, opened himself totally, and he appeared to me totally vulnerable and unashamed of it. Only my first wife when I told her that I was filing for divorce and my father when he realized that he would die of his diabetes had ever appeared to me so naked and exposed themselves so completely as had this crazy man in front of me now. As I struggle now to find the words to relate to my readers this scene my eyes moisten with tears at the memory. I had prepared myself for my meeting with the master, I thought, but not for this, no, no, not for this, no, for this I had not prepared.
My defenses melted and I cried.
I cried.
"I can't, I just can't!" I exclaimed. "I have hardly slept for four days! I wake up at one and two and three in the morning and you are in my head and I am totally exhausted! I can hardly work!"
I gasped.
"I do not understand your criticism of me!" I explained.
The master looked distraught.
Tears.
"I cannot continue like this!" I said. "I just can't!"
The master's eyes glistened with tears.
"I can't!"
"My heart ached last night, too, Bob," he said crying, "it woke me up last night, too, you were on my mind, I was hurting, too, I didn't sleep either, because I was thinking about you!" he said. "Please, do it for yourself," he begged, "and for the sangha, please!"—and he begged some more and more and more, it went on and on and on, he was shameless—"please, please, please," he pled, "please please please come to the sesshin and sit through this turmoil, please do it, do it, please do it for yourself and for the sangha, please, please!" he begged, and he clasped his hands together, not in gassho but as if in prayer, his ten fingers interlocked, and he begged some more—he wouldn't stop though I protested again and again.
"I can't!" I said crying. "I can't, I can't!"
Four times I reached for my notes and read aloud to him the statement I had prepared:
"Until I understand its purpose I will not subject myself further to your verbal abuse."
Each time I did, the master dismissed it and he continued his begging and explaining—
"Please please please, Bob, please sit through this!"
Agon—
"Until I understand its purpose I will not subject myself further to your verbal abuse."
"Please please please, Bob, please sit through this!"
Until it was a parody of itself!
My god, what on earth was he doing? It finally made me laugh—as I cried—in amazement and tenderness. The master must be crazy, he's nuts, I thought, and I laughed, and then when my heart melted, and my mind, I surrendered and I said I would attend sesshin.
Exhausted.
"Yes, all right," I said, "I will, okay, I'll come."
"Really?" the master exclaimed.
He burst into tears.
"Really?"
He cried.
The master cried—in happiness, for joy—and then when I cried, too, the master took my hands in his and cried with me, his whole face split in two by his wide, lopsided smile, health fully restored.
Now the master looked strong, vigorous, pink and happy.
Smiling broadly the master beamed.
"Do you promise?" the master insisted. "Do you promise you will come?"
I laughed.
I thought he was joking.
Of course I would come—I had said I would, hadn't I?
But he wasn't joking.
"I'm serious!" he said. "Do you promise you will come, do you, do you?" the master asked again.
"Yes."
"Promise me!"
"Yes."
"Really, Bob, really? Do you promise you will come? Really do you?"
"Yes, yes, I'll come!" I said. "I promise."
"One more thing," the master said.
"Yes?"
"You wrote in your email that we'd be friends," he said.
"Yes?"
"I've never been your friend," he said. "I'm your teacher."
"I understand."
As I recorded all this later not for my journal but just for myself, I laughed, I cried, I laughed, I cried. Who was this man? What was he doing to me? Now that I had somehow—and I did not know how—just been talked out of doing what I had been absolutely determined to do, there was the weekend sesshin to prepare for and I was still ino. Eleanor helped me assemble the dozen or so oryoki sets, the bowls, utensils, and cloths, and then she helped me to ready and set the big table where all of us would eat on Saturday and Sunday. I got home an hour later and told Ruth that I had changed my mind.
Ruth grinned.
"I knew you couldn't say no to him," she said.
I nodded.
She laughed.
Sigh.
Now I had to recant.
"The master talked me out of it, out of all of it," I wrote Irene, Jane, and Joe. "I don't know how, but he did. I'll be at sesshin."
Joe replied.
"I was pleased to see your car parked in front of the Temple when I came by to mow the lawn," he wrote. "I'll see you in the wee hours."
Morning.
I arrived at the Temple at 4:35.