There was one other topic on his mind. The master had twice overheard me in response to a question tell someone at the Temple that I'd been practicing thirty years. The master thought this was misleading. No matter what I thought I'd been practicing before I arrived at the Temple, the master told me, it definitely was not Zen Buddhism. The master asked me half a dozen questions about what I had then called my practice and about the men I had called my teachers, Stephen Gaskin, John Seward, and Billy Boyar. The master had heard me explain many times that the simple central principle of that practice—as I understood it—was to tell the truth all the time. The master knew, too, of my commitment to nonviolence. In Dharma Study the master had himself once referred to what he called my "precept practice," a term I'd never used myself nor ever heard. I thought the master might now ask me to repudiate my whole idea of what I'd been doing for the past thirty years—what I had called my practice—but he didn't go that far, a concession for which I was grateful. The master asked only that from now on I say that I had practiced Zen Buddhism for four years, the term of my association with him at the Temple.
I didn't mind.
My previous commitment had no name.
To me it seemed the teaching of Krishna, the teaching of Buddha, of Purna, the teaching of Lao Tsu, the teaching of Socrates and of Plato, the teaching of Nigantha Nataputra, the Mahavira, the teaching of Jesus, the teaching of the first Christian martyr Stephen, the teaching of Patanjali, the teaching of Shakespeare, the teaching of Tolstoy, the teaching of Gandhi, the teaching of Martin Luther King, Jr., the teaching of Suzuki, the teaching of Trungpa, the teaching of Stephen Gaskin, the teaching of my friend John—before his conversion on September 11, 2001, to the politics of George W. Bush—and the teaching of my friend and teacher Billy and of his secular teacher and mine the supreme ironic nihilist Glenn O'Malley, and the teaching of the millions of anonymous, nameless, and unknown women and men over the millennia who had renounced violence and struggled to survive, to live, and to be happy by means other than violence, threat of violence, and force. I did not and do not know any proper name of the broad and eclectic discipline which had revealed to me my reality and my god but I knew it by experience and I knew that in spite of the unhappiness this conflict with the master had caused me my faith in the power or the god or the mind or the nothing that had been responsible for my own personal awakening and commitment could not and would not ever be shaken.
"It's nothing."
"I agree."
"Let it go."
"All right."
"It's mind," the master said.
"Everything is mind," I said.
"Yes."
Forward.
I told the master how much I had enjoyed his essay in the most recent issue of Prairie Wind. It had been about his experience in monasteries in Japan and about the opening of his third eye. I'd immediately sent it to my friends Billy and John and to my youngest son Stephen. Billy and Stephen had liked it just as much as I had and I told the master so.
I thought it was by far the best piece of writing the master had done.
"Thank you," he said.
The master was reminded of my day of crying during Rohatsu sesshin in December and now he asked me questions about it. I'd emailed Billy about it the day after it ended and since then I'd not thought again of it at all.
First the master wanted to know if it had scared me.
"Oh no!" I said. "Not at all."
"There was no fear in it for you?" the master asked.
"No, none."
"Would you want to experience something like it again?"
I had to think about this.
It had not been an experience I wanted to repeat. Why should I? What for? Nor had I any desire to experience again what I had experienced in 1975 and that experience had exceeded my weepy day of joy in Rohatsu by a trillionfold. Dharma gates are boundless, I recited almost daily. I vowed to enter them all.
"I don't know about all that crying," I said finally.
"Why do you dislike crying?" asked the master.
It was an old subject between us and I really did not want to go over it all again.
"Conditioning," I guessed.
The master did not press the matter. The master and I had talked before of our two fathers and of the old saw that boys don't cry. The master claimed to be a big cryer. I had seen him shed silent tears—though not many—half a dozen times in the Temple when telling stories of his relationship to the men he had called master. He had told me, too, that he cried at sad movies and even at sad literature and he'd once mentioned in my journal that he had cried reading the short anecdote I'd told of one of my students. Though I had cried from 4:00 in the morning till almost 11:00 on the sixth day of Rohatsu the master thought I still hadn't cried enough. He misunderstood, I believed, some things I had written about war and the Holocaust and about my father and his diabetes and his death.
"You need to cry more," the master said.
Need?
Ugh.
"Were you here for service on Sunday?" the master asked.
"Yes."
"How was Eleanor with the Dharma Talk?"
"Good—in command, knowledgeable, confident, calm, at ease."
"Tell me about her Talk."
"She used various forms of the word 'fuck' about ten times," I said smiling. "I figured that was your influence."
The master blushed and laughed.
"Is that all you remember of it?" he asked in mock disgust. "Her saying fuck?"
He made a face.
I laughed.
I summarized Eleanor's Talk.
"Did she handle questions well?"
"Yes."
I assured him that she had.
He was pleased.
I told the master that after Eleanor's Dharma Talk I'd had a good visit with Dean at the picnic table in the backyard. I explained that Dean had much appreciated the master's Dharma Talk on the Sunday of the most recent sesshin, a service and Talk that I'd missed.
"Yes?"
"Dean said your main point was that the student must submit. That was key—submission. The student must submit to the master. He himself had submitted, he said, to his master. There was no other way."
I paused.
"The student must submit."
Huh—
The master screwed his face into the funniest most extreme caricature of astonishment and incomprehension I'd ever seen the master make and that is saying something.
Whaa—
The master looked like he thought Dean had lost his mind or that I had or that we both had. I had thought that perhaps the master would demand of me the same kind of total submission to him that Dean had understood as the supreme requirement of practice. But the master's reaction was not at all what I expected. Instead the face he made was hilarious.
I laughed.
The master did not acknowledge it.
The master remained silent, wondering, it seemed—for a moment or two lost in thought. I could imagine. It was funny! As I wrote this account I was remembering it and laughing again. But this was my impression—not his. The master had not a word to say to me on the subject of submission. Instead he changed the subject. He mentioned that he needed a person to give the Dharma Talk on Sunday while he was in Milwaukee for the annual meeting of the Association of American Zen Masters. It was an inquiry. I felt good now about our talk. I had been the only senior student at the Temple who had not given a Dharma Talk in the master's absence over the summer.
"I'll do it," I said.
"Good."
We sat a moment in silence.
"Is there anything else?" the master inquired.
We had talked for forty minutes and the master had noticed me checking my watch. I still had the candle in the zendo to light, the stick of incense to offer at the altar, and the mats and cushions to check—and the sutra books—before I hit the rolldown on the han at 7:55. I pulled from my pants pocket the small card on which I had noted the issues I had hoped the master and I might address. At the bottom of my short list were two items I had added and forgotten. On numerous occasions the master had shared with me—just in passing—information, recent news, and sometimes even his opinion of other students.
"Do you talk with others about me and my practice?" I asked.
The question startled the master. Taken aback and perplexed he made a quizzical face as he thought.
"Only good things," he said tentatively. "I've told others of your strong home practice."
The master appeared concerned.
"Have you heard something?" he asked.
"No, no," I said, "I just wondered."
Breath.
"Anything else?"
This would be delicate.
Breath.
"There is one more wild thing I'd like to try out on you," I said.
I made a silly face—a look I hoped meant I don't know—and shrugged my shoulders and gestured with my hands to try to indicate that what I was about to say was totally speculative and that I intended no offense.
"Go ahead."
"Do you ever apologize?" I asked.
My question amused him—thank god—and in his astonishment the master laughed and smiling made a face of mock disgust.
"You know I do," the master said. "More than once in the past I've apologized to you."
"Yes—for little things," I said. "But I wondered if you had ever apologized for your conduct in situations like the one I have just been through with you."
"If I've been wrong—yes," the master said. "With you I don't think I'm wrong."
"Thank you."
In spite of all I had been through with this teacher, my teacher, the master, I felt grateful for the directness, for the honesty, and most of all for the equanimity of this reply.
"May I say one more thing?" I asked.
"Go ahead."
"I think it would be a very positive and healing gesture if you could say to the sangha what you have said to me—that anger has been an issue for you your entire life and that although you have worked on it and believe you have made considerable improvement you also know that anger is still an issue for you and that you know you sometimes manifest excessive anger when it may be inappropriate."
"But I already have, Bob, more than once!" the master exclaimed.
I waited.
"You know that," he said. "You've heard me."
I waited.
"Have you apologized for it?"
"No."
I waited.
"I do think it might be a healing gesture for our sangha," I suggested a second time.
The master thought for a moment and then smiled awkwardly and blushed as he replied.
"No, Bob, no, that's just way too New Agey for me," he said. "I won't do that."
The master shook his head.
No.
He smiled.
No.
"Okay," I said. "It was just a thought."
He smiled.
I too.
We agreed to meet again in two weeks and palms together in gassho we bowed.
"Thank you," I said.
He smiled.
I left his room and walked downstairs.
It was 6:50.
Eleanor had turned on the porch light, the table lamp in the corner of the Buddha Hall, and the ceiling light in the zendo, and she had propped open the windows. I asked Eleanor about the extra chair in the zendo and she explained that the master had been using it. His knees had been bothering him again. I made a cursory check of the mats and cushions and I lit the candle and offered the incense. At five minutes to seven I hit the han.
I remembered when I got home and recorded all this how cool and light my breath felt in my nostrils as I inhaled that night and how freely and easily it seemed to sail and coast in and out of my body and how solid I sat on my cushion. The mental pain of my confusion and doubt had dissolved and evaporated. I sat for fifty minutes, then walked for ten minutes, and then I sat the twenty minutes remaining before I began the evening chant. When I left the Temple at half past eight Eleanor locked the door behind me and waited until I had slipped into my sandals and had stepped off the porch and onto the front walk before she turned off the light. I was happy again. The quiet presence of life in the flowers and trees felt heavy and wet in the dark.
I could feel its pulse.
Oh—
I felt a strange urge to kneel and pray.
I did not.
"So how'd it go?" Ruth asked when I walked in the door.
"Fuman complained that I think we are equals," I said.
"Aye," she said, "there's the rub."
I laughed.
memoir