The following Sunday was Dean's turn to give the Dharma Talk. Dean spoke on Gutei, the Zen master who according to legend cut off the index finger of the boy who had been his attendant.

Here is the story in brief:

Gutei raised his finger whenever he was asked a question about Zen. A boy attendant began to imitate him. When anyone asked the boy what his master preached, the boy raised his finger. Gutei heard about the boy's mischief. He seized him and cut off his finger. The boy cried and ran away. Gutei called and stopped him. When the boy turned his head to look, Gutei raised his own finger. In that instant the boy was enlightened.

This obscene act of cruelty is offered in the Zen canon as an object lesson—to eschew the imitation and repetition of a teaching you do not fully understand. In his commentary Dean interpreted the tale metaphorically. He mentioned how the master—in his response to Dean's entries in his practice journal or to his questions in dokusan—criticized and even ridiculed Dean's remarks and interrupted Dean's questions, especially when it seemed to the master that Dean was merely imitating or parroting his teacher or simply repeating something he had read rather than expressing and being himself.

"The master cut off my finger," said Dean.

To Dean this was the main point of the story of Master Gutei and his young attendant.

"The master cut off my finger," said Dean.

But Dean also questioned the cruel irony and blatant hypocrisy and double standard of Gutei, who stated that he himself had learned his one-finger teaching from his own teacher yet had not himself incurred the loss that he inflicted upon the innocent boy. I myself remembered many times that the master had repeated verbatim words he had learned from his master Katagiri. Indeed the whole Zen genealogy is the transmission of the Way from teacher to disciple.

"What is the difference?" Dean asked.

He waited for us to hazard a guess.

Silence.

"Perhaps the idea is that one must make the teaching one's own," Dean said.

Dean paused.

"Maybe Gutei had done that and his attendant boy had not."

Hmm.

But was the story of Gutei and his attendant boy history, metaphor, or both?

"The master cut off my finger."

To the master and perhaps to Dean—who seemed to have resolved the problem to his own satisfaction—the distinction did not matter because the point of the lesson was clear.

To me it did matter.

I did not know if in my own life I could practice what I preached.

Only time would tell.

But I felt more certain than ever that the right road for me was total repudiation of the cruelty and ignorance intrinsic to the Zen romanticization of physical and verbal abuse.

Enough.

While the master vacationed in Philadelphia the senior students were giving the Dharma Talks. The master had given me a list of the names of those he wanted me to ask to speak.

 

Alison talked.

 

Not long before her Talk I had sent to several members of our sangha a short online explanation by Sheng Yen on the difference between zazen and psychotherapy. In my brief preface to the link I mentioned that the concept of a Zen master's psychotherapist seemed to me weird.

 

What did Zen practice lack that therapy provided?

 

I wondered.

 

Alison mentioned her depression following the difficult illness and death of her father and then the birth of her first son who as an infant had cried and cried for the first nine months of his life. Alison described how she struggled to admit to herself that she was indeed depressed, how she resisted seeking help for her depression, and how she then struggled again and resisted accepting medication for it. Depression, psychotherapy, and antidepressant medication all three seemed to Alison signs of weakness, but eventually she had confided in the master. His counsel, she said, persuaded her to accept reality and to do what she needed to do.

 

The master often mentioned his own psychotherapist.

 

Did his therapist agree with the master that reason is worthless in the study of the self?

 

I wondered.

 

I joined Joe and Dean in the backyard at the picnic table for coffee.

 

"I don't see anything weird about a Zen master seeking therapy," Dean volunteered.

 

"No?" I replied.

 

It wasn't a characterization I wanted to defend.

 

But—

 

"I understood what you meant," Joe said.

 

The master had once recommended that Joe visit a psychotherapist, Joe told us. Joe had refused, adamantly, he said, and at the picnic table Joe explained that he could not imagine himself ever taking a pill—an antidepressant—to ameliorate depression and to be happy.

 

"To me it's a chemical lobotomy," Joe said, "and personally I have no interest in that."

 

"Yes, I do think medication is a chemical lobotomy," Dean said, "and it helped me when I needed help."

 

Dean described his own struggle with depression, anxiety, and panic attacks, and with the ordeal he had related in more detail two years earlier in his first Dharma Talk at the Temple.

 

I shared Joe's prejudices and those Alison had discussed in her Talk. I was reminded of the two or three books I'd read decades before by the British psychologist R.D. Laing.

 

"Laing thought that given the social and political horrors of the twentieth century maybe all of us should be really really sad," I explained, "and that in a twisted way a prolonged and severe depression might be the most appropriate, natural, and healthy human response."

 

"I like that," Joe said.

 

"I think zazen is a lobotomy!" Dean exclaimed.

 

Dean meant the way that Zen practitioners turn their attention to the breath and follow it in and out if consciousness arises in meditation and they drift off into discursive thinking and daydreaming.

 

So following the breath then was a kind of lobotomy, the zazen way of not thinking.

 

Nonthinking.

 

That's what Dogen called it.

 

The means of arresting the egocentric reflection and analysis of personal, social, and political affairs and stopping the stories that in our heads we constantly tell ourselves about ourselves, the stories in which as either hero, victim, or antihero we are always the main character—just as I am the main character here in this story of myself and my mind.

 

To Dean zazen seemed a kind of nonsurgical excision of the discursive and egoistic intellect.

 

"An intellectual lobotomy?" I asked.

 

"Yes."

 

I had often wondered the same.

 

Riding my storylines into the pain of history, war, and injustice gave my personal identity—my "me," my "I," my "my" and "mine"—the courage and virtue to which I aspired. Though it was all just the play of my imagination and ego, I felt so good and so right as the heroic pacifist dissident.

 

"Behold! I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves."

 

Jesus.

 

"I shall take as my defense the only arms I permit myself—silence, exile, and cunning."

 

Joyce.

 

But zazen and meditation stopped cold this romantic self-idealization and brought me back to the present, back to the here and now, to the ordinary, to the silence and to the light almost as beautiful and strange as it appeared the night I first practiced zazen, the night I "set up dreaming" according to the instructions of Castaneda, the night I woke up from my sleep and from my dream on my knees in my bed staring at my hands.

 

On most days it was all so simple—1 killing and war, 2 pain, anger, and fear, 3 depression and despair.

 

On other days there was so much to describe, so much to explain, so much to understand.

Too much.

Eliot:

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball,

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"—

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.

That is not it, at all."

 

  

At a meeting of the Omaha Zen Center Board of Directors in May—when we assigned jobs to be performed at the Temple in the master's absence—Jane told me she was glad that I had not quit and that I had instead decided to continue.

 

"Oh," I joked, "I quit and rejoin six or seven times a day."

 

Jane smiled.

 

In the world of my mind it was true.

 

At home I found I had an email from Billy. I had sent Billy—just as I had my nephew Adam and my son Stephen—two of the most contentious of my weekly journals along with the master's replies.

 

"How is your relationship with the master going?" Billy asked me now. "Even just standing on the sidelines I was feeling the heat—with my habitual patterns alive and well. Perhaps the only real progress for me is that when they rear their heads I do not feel so rotten about myself."

 

But I didn't feel rotten.

 

I seldom had.

 

"Maybe there is a little maitri—kindness—so I'm grateful for that," Billy added.

 

Good.

 

"One thing I liked in the master's responses to you," Billy added, "was the phrase 'that's what you think.'"

 

The phrase reminded him of a story about Suzuki in which someone had criticized him for teaching his students to count their breaths.

 

"Oh, they're not really counting their breaths," Suzuki had replied. "They just think they are."

 

I didn't know what this meant.

 

Think!

 

Not Adam, not Stephen, and now not even Billy had even in part validated my perception of the master and by so doing validated me. I told Billy that I had attended the two-day sesshin which concluded the practice period.

 

"But my questions about the master continue to test me," I confessed.

 

I was tired.

 

"If he were just my friend there'd be no problem," I said, "but his being my teacher complicates it."

 

It was hard to explain.

 

"I don't know what will happen with me and the master," I wrote my friend, "other than old age, sickness, and death."

 

In his Sunday Dharma Talk near the end of May the master mentioned a monk by the name of Doshin.

 

"Do not be disturbed by confusion," Doshin advised disciples. "Do not be disturbed by stillness."            

 

"Why are people disturbed by stillness?" Nikki asked.

 

The master explained.

 

Twice.

 

But Nikki and several others present did not understand the master's answer or felt it unsatisfactory. They asked more questions or made statements of their own and the master soon tired of their inquiry.

 

"Intellectual curiosity is good for building bridges," the master said, "not for understanding the self."

 

In my four years at the Temple I'd heard the master make a statement like that a dozen times. This time the master added:

 

"Put a lid on it!"

 

Dismissed.

 

From The Cloud of Unknowing—

Our intense need to understand will always be a powerful stumbling block to our attempts to reach god in simple love and must always be overcome. For if we do not overcome this need to understand, it will undermine our quest. It will replace the darkness which we have pierced to reach god with clear images of something which, however good, however beautiful, however godlike, is not god.

The master left for Philadelphia and Laugh Out Loud just a few days later, and I'd have most of the summer to reflect and to sit on what had transpired between my teacher and me. For eighty days the monkeys would manage the zoo. Incredibly, in spite of my conflict with the master, my quitting, and then my unquitting, I remained senior ino, and with the help of other regulars I would be responsible for maintaining the Temple and its activities for the two or three months that the master planned to be gone.

 

My teacher's absence I felt might do me good.

 

From Stephen I had hidden nothing, of course, at least not deliberately, though Stephen had indeed told me that he felt he didn't know me. I informed Stephen of what the master had asked of me and at the first opportunity a month or two later I did as I had promised and invited my son to tell me or to ask me anything that he believed might facilitate the revelation of the intimate knowledge of his father that my son had said he felt he lacked.

 

Poor Stephen—

 

He seemed embarrassed that his remark had traveled so far.

 

It was awkward.

 

Stephen could think of nothing specific to ask.

 

"Dad!"

 

He made a goofy grin.

 

I laughed.

 

I could think of nothing specific to offer.

 

We hugged.

 

"I love you," I told him.

 

He kissed me.

 

"I love you," he told me.

 

It had been a feeling he'd had.

 

Yes.

 

I understood.

 

I did.

 

Perhaps it is a feeling every son has about his father.

 

"I'm sorry," he said.

 

"No."

 

That wasn't right!

 

Me.

 

"I'm sorry!" I said.

 

Love—

 

Wordless mutual love.

 

A hug—

 

I almost wished that I did have something to confess, something to offer, to open up, but I didn't—just my profound love for my son, which I expressed yet again, as I often had—and I thought again, too, of the master and of his own unsatisfying relationship with his father. We human beings love, yes, deeply we love, but we cannot merge, we cannot become one, be one, and there had been many many times I wished it were possible.

 

We love—

 

We love—

 

Lucinda Williams:

I want to watch the ocean bend
The edges of the sun—then
I want to get swallowed up
In an ocean of love

God!

 

How we yearn for love!

 

God!

 

How we yearn! 

 

Time passed.

 

The horrible wars went on. 

kk kkkk kkkk

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kk kkkk kkkk

kk kkkk kkkk

kk kkkk kkkk

In his column of June 13, 2005, journalist Bob Herbert explained to his readers that the soldier's job is to kill. Though it had been decades since he himself had been in basic training, Herbert wrote, he could still hear the drill sergeants screaming at their recruits.

 

"What are you?"

 

"Killers!" recruits would scream back.

 

"What are you?"

 

"Killers!"

 

"What is your purpose?" drill sergeants would yell.

 

"To kill! To kill!" recruits would shout.

 

"What is your purpose?"

 

"To kill!"

 

I arrived at the Temple at 4:35. Irene met me almost as soon as I walked through the front door. She had not read my last email and assumed that as junior ino she would be managing the sesshin in my absence. She had already begun laying out mats and cushions for the 6:30 morning service which would follow our ninety minutes of zazen. I helped her tuck a sutra book under the front of each mat. I laid out on the main altars the slender green sticks of incense to be lit and offered before the service. I put the usual small wedge of charcoal briquette in the koro to be ignited later for the offerings of powdered incense. Irene had prepared the first day's assignments—doan, shoten, jisha, servers, dishwashers—so until the second day I was able to sit free of the worry I normally experienced as senior ino at sesshins, and on both Saturday and Sunday I enjoyed practicing with my friends in the sangha.

 

In spite of all that had transpired I thought hardly at all of the conflict.

 

"I'm glad I came," I told the master in dokusan.

 

"Good."

 

"I don't have a question," I said. "I just wanted to let you know how I felt."

 

"In all my years of sesshin," the master said, "I don't remember a student who had been reluctant to participate ever saying when it was over that he wished he hadn't come."

 

I smiled.

 

"I want you to promise me something," the master said.

 

"What is it?"

 

"I want you to promise me," the master explained, "that at the first opportunity that presents itself you will talk with your son Stephen face to face and open up to him and let him in to really know you."

 

I nodded.

 

"I loved my father," the master said.

 

I nodded.

 

"To this day I regret that as adults we never really got to know each other before he died."

 

"All right," I said.

 

"Do you promise?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Thank you," the master said—he put his palms together and bowed.

 

"Thank you," I said—bowing back.

 

I rose from my cushion, moved it to one side of my mat, put my palms together, bowed first from the waist, then knelt and pressed my forehead to the floor in the customary one full prostration which concluded dokusan, I lifted my hands, palms up, just slightly, in the symbolic gesture of lifting the Buddha, and then I stood, palms together, and I bowed one more time from the waist before I made my exit and returned to the zendo.

 

I sat.

 

At the end of the last, long, two-hour period of zazen we all assembled informally on the floor of the Buddha Hall—our mats and our cushions arranged in an irregular circle—to share our reflections on our experiences of the sesshin.

 

I was surprised to be present at all, I explained when it was my turn to speak, since only forty-eight hours earlier I had quit and had vowed not to attend but, I added, in spite of myself I'd had a good experience and I was glad that I had come.

 

I looked at the master.

 

"He changed my mind," I laughed. "I don't know how."

 

The master said again what he'd already told me—that he could not remember a student ever regretting his participation in a sesshin no matter how reluctant the student might have originally been to participate.

 

"Would anyone like to say anything to Bob?" the master asked.

 

Nikki raised her hands in gassho.

 

"Nikki?" asked the master.

 

"If Bob doesn't mind my asking," she said, "I'd like to know why he quit."

 

I looked at the master.

 

"He insulted me," I said.

 

The master blushed.

 

"Thank you!" Nikki exclaimed. "That's the dirt I was looking for!"

 

We laughed.

 

"I didn't insult Bob," the master said.

 

I looked at the master, I made a face I hoped ironic, and I smiled.

 

Silence.

 

We all waited.

 

Silence.

 

Smiled.

 

Silence.

 

"Thank you all," the master said.

 

"Thank you!" we all replied.

 

It took only a week or two before the echo in my subconscious of the master's parting denial that he had ever insulted me began to haunt me and I again felt vaguely troubled by the issue I had hoped he and I had put to rest once and for all. This third time—or was it the fourth or fifth—it did not seem that I would have to sever my relationship with the master over our conflict and our differing perceptions of his language and tactics.

 

But I did feel a weary resignation.

 

When my brother and his wife visited one afternoon and I recounted the details of my conflict with the master and my quitting and then re-enacted the private interview during which the master had warned, begged, and cried and persuaded me to return, they exclaimed in unison at its conclusion.

 

"Manipulation!"

 

No.

 

I smiled and shook my head.

 

No.

 

The master would be spending the month of June at Laugh Out Loud and then another month and a half there in sabbatical recuperation and rest. The master hoped this might be good for his irritable bowel.

 

My time apart from him might heal me, too, I thought.

 

I hoped so.

 

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.