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.

 

I met with the master again at 6:30 on the evening of Tuesday, September 20. I had prepared a short list of questions and I had tinkered with their wording.

 

Have I ever lied to you?

Have I ever deceived you?

Have I ever intentionally [or deliberately] misrepresented myself to you?

Am I frightened [or just plain scared] of you?

Have I ever—out of fear of you—avoided speaking with you face to face?

Am I afraid of revealing anything about myself to our sangha or any member of it?

Am I afraid of the truth?

Have you discussed me or my practice with other people in our sangha when I was not present?

 

To all but the last of these questions the master had over the past nine months either stated or implied that he believed the answer was yes. To all but the last of these questions I had explicitly stated that I believed the answer was no. I did not know how now to proceed. The master had tried to explain why he believed as he did and I had tried to explain why I believed as I did. Neither of us had been persuaded. I was more confused than ever. I hoped now that by a careful and deliberate examination of the issue I might at least learn more precisely both what the master thought of me and why. In spite of the sincerity of his many efforts to explain still I did not understand. By the time of our appointment on Tuesday I had decided to ask only—and for the last time—whether the master really thought I had been dishonest. The master looked unhappy and tense when he entered the room, awkward and uncomfortable. The master had a frown on his face.

 

His demeanor was grim.

 

"You always walk in here acting like we're equals!" the master exclaimed.

 

Yes.

 

It was true.

 

He made it sound like the idea was wholly preposterous.

 

"Yes," I said.

 

The master remained silent.

 

"Aren't we?" I asked.

 

This question seemed to make the master uncomfortable.

 

He thought.

 

"As human beings, yes," he said, "but you're the student, I'm the teacher!"

 

"I know that."

 

The master put on his rakusu, lit and offered a stick of incense, and bowed, palms together, and then, unsmiling and sober, the master sat, and we bowed to each other.

 

He had decided that I was incorrigible, I imagined, stuck in emptiness.

 

At any minute, I thought, he would terminate our relationship and ask me to leave the Temple.

 

Hands in gassho, I inhaled deeply, caught my breath, exhaled and began.    

 

"For the past eight months," I explained, "the only significant conflict in my life has been with you. I feel like a person whose good friend, totally out of the blue, has begun calling him a dishonest chickenshit, and who has no idea why."

 

"I'm not your friend," the master said. "I've never been your friend."

 

I waited.

 

"I'm your teacher."

 

The master summarized the familiar explanation I'd heard before and I interrupted.

 

"I understand," I said as he continued.

 

"If a student considers me a friend and I have to confront him he may feel betrayed."

 

"I am only describing my feelings," I said. "I'm telling you how I feel."

 

The master nodded.

 

"I have not changed my mind," the master said. "You are always arguing with me."

 

I waited.

 

"I am not arrogant," he said.

 

I listened.

 

The master had leaned forward in his chair until his face was less than two feet from my own, maybe fifteen inches. It was a gesture with which I had become familiar. The master liked literally to get in my face. Tonight it was the master who had something to say.

 

"After our conversation two weeks ago I asked four or five people in the sangha if I was arrogant and they all said no. I really think that is your projection," the master continued, "I think it is you that is arrogant—that it is your ego that is involved—and that you are projecting it onto me."

 

I laughed.

 

"And I think that's what you do," I said. "You think I am projecting and I think you are projecting. Last week you asked me to name the characteristics I found difficult to accept in my teacher and when I said that they were pride and arrogance you said I was right."

 

To this he objected.

 

"I said you were not the first to tell me that."

 

No.

 

I shook my head.

 

"No, you said, 'That's true,'" I said.

 

"No," said the master.

 

I was stunned by this recantation and denial.

 

"Yes!" I insisted. "'That's true.'"

 

He waited.

 

"The first thing I did," I said, "when I got home after our talk was to write those words down!"

 

For a moment we were silent.

 

Breath.

 

He reconsidered.

 

Breath.

 

The master said that the people he had asked were not new members but old ones whom he trusted. I had done likewise, I said, and I suggested that everyone had perhaps told the both of us what they thought we wanted to hear. The master disagreed but his vehemence and mine were spent. Now I felt a slight sickness and sadness at our resemblance to quarreling children—did too, did not, did too, did not, did too—and at the hopelessness of our ever agreeing on a mutual formulation of the truth. I remembered the passionate arguments and debates on these very same issues—your ego or mine—when I first followed my friend John onto the path of Stephen Gaskin thirty years before. How committed we had been to the idea that with enough intelligence, determination, compassion, and will we could and would hash it all out and be able to explain—to the world and to our wives and to friends and colleagues—in terms so clear that no one could help but understand that the vows of the bodhisattva to nonviolence and to honesty and truth and to voluntary nonviolent communism made perfect sense.

 

Ha!

 

Hey, it had made sense to me!

 

It had been inevitable then, too, that in disagreement one would accuse another of ego. For Buddhists in conflict and locked in a seemingly hopeless and personal quarrel it was the bottom line—for Communists individualism, for Christians sin, for Buddhists ego—and I felt weary and very sad now for what seemed the empty and platitudinous sameness of it all.

 

Did not!

Did too!

Did not!

Did too!

 

"Why can't you believe me?" the master pled.

 

I want to write that the master whined. With these five words of his question the reversal of our positions was complete. My plea had now become his! Why could I not believe him? Why could the master not believe me? I could see no way out of this impasse.

 

The master insisted again for what seemed the hundredth time that I had been dishonest.

 

"Fuman!" I whined in turn. "I can't agree to what I do not believe and do not feel is true."

 

"Ego."

 

He stated this like a verdict.

 

"Fuman, you're not egoless in these conferences!" I exclaimed.

 

"No," he conceded.

 

He looked down.

 

"You get defensive," I said. "I've seen you!"

 

"Yes," he said nodding.

 

"Stop telling me what I feel."

 

"I'm not telling you what you feel," the master said. "I'm telling you how you act."

 

By this time, strangely, I felt totally relaxed and at ease, and so, too, now, did the master, or so at least he appeared. I sat and I felt myself sit. I breathed and I followed my breath. I collected myself.

 

Deep, I inhaled.

 

I held it.

 

Three times with both hands I ran my fingers through my hair from front to back.

 

Audibly now I exhaled.

 

I felt good again.

 

I arched and stretched my back and I stretched my neck and shoulders as I sat and I thought. The two of us were silent for only a few seconds, just a minute at most, yet in my first recollection it seemed a long time. In the past two weeks I had reread my journals and my notes. I had not the shadow of a doubt about the event that had led us to this.

 

"This all started," I said, "when I accused you of verbal abuse."

 

"There is no verbal abuse at this temple!" the master stated emphatically.

 

It was a declaration.

 

Dictat.

 

For emphasis the master had enunciated slowly and distinctly each word.

 

"There—is—no—verbal—abuse—at—this—temple!"

 

I was silent.

 

"It makes me mad!"

 

The master sounded mad.

 

He was mad.

 

It was first time in four years that the master had ever actually, literally, shouted at me.

 

I waited.

 

"When people accuse me of verbal abuse I come down on them with both feet!" said the master.

 

The master paused.

 

"Hard!"

 

The master paused again and thought for an instant.

 

"Boots on!" the master exclaimed.

 

I think the master had forgotten completely the larger context of our discussion.

 

Not that it mattered.

 

I had learned long before that neither our email correspondence nor our private talks would be conducted according to the principles and procedures of academic discourse.

 

How did I teach intuition, insight, and wisdom?

 

The master had asked me that question more than once when I'd dared to suggest that I taught the very same things he did; and as means to those ends—intuition, insight, and wisdom—he'd summarily dismissed both reason and personal example. Interrupting me repeatedly, raising his voice, talking me down, mocking me, calling me names, vulgarity—these were to the master not forms of verbal abuse but the teaching techniques of necessary confrontation and what he called trusting his gut. I sometimes wondered if the master would ever dare refer to them—his badgering and bullying—as "skillful means," upaya, "expedient means," though he never had. I could learn to endure them and accept them or I could seek another teacher; and I did believe that his intentions were indeed honorable and good.

 

Yes.

 

I could accept his version of things and stay or I could go.

 

Period.

 

There was no third option.

 

Fini.

 

"I think you're an honest person," the master said. "I believe you're trustworthy."

He paused.

 

"But no one can be one hundred percent honest and forthright all the time," the master added.

 

"No," I said. "I know that."

 

I wanted to be.

 

"You can't, I can't."

 

I'd tried to be.

 

"Of course not," I said.

 

I hadn't been.

 

No.

 

I supposed it was true that I could not be—not ever. But I'd never lied to the master. I'd never consciously concealed anything from him. I'd never even wanted to do so. I'd never deliberately withheld anything from him that I could remember. Why would I? Fuman was my teacher. I was not playing around. I was over sixty years old. I had been practicing as best I knew how for thirty years. My practice was not some silly game to me. I could honestly say that the thought of deception in my relationship with the master had never entered my mind. I'd told him everything, I'd volunteered, unprompted, all the facts of my life I thought might help him teach me, both good and bad, and I'd tried to present to him at every moment my mind and heart as open and transparent as I could possible make them. From the master I had nothing to hide, absolutely nothing to hide. I had no secrets, none. Yet for reasons I could not understand the master had inferred otherwise and exhorted me to confess emotion I did not feel to the degree he insisted that I did; and when I could not and would not confess as the master demanded the master had called me dishonest and berated me.

 

Why?

 

What in the hell was all of this really about?

 

My waking up?

 

To what?

 

How strange life seemed! Confess you were pissed off, the master had demanded, and to put an end to his demands and to please him I'd said I was; and then at home and at rest I had recanted.

 

Tell me my flaws, the master had requested and, when I'd told him he was arrogant and proud, he'd said that he was; and now, like me, he, too, had recanted. How strange life seemed!

 

Mirror.

 

Mirror.

 

Reading this account now, editing it, tinkering, I'm able to laugh, I do laugh, I am laughing, at us, and, should I choose to cry for us, too, I feel able, too, to cry.

Who knows why?

 

The master sounded utterly exasperated.

 

"Then why are you hung up on this?" he exclaimed. "Why are you stuck on this?" the master asked. "Why can't you just accept what I say and admit that you were dishonest?" the master implored.

 

This was exhortation.

 

Entreaty.

 

"Fuman, I can't say what I do not feel is true."

 

Silence.

 

We rested—it felt not at all uncomfortable. We sat, silent, resting, breathing, gazing, one at another, bodies, posture, dress, faces, sixty-year-old fleshy faces, bulbous noses, big drooping ears, creases, wrinkles, our mouths softly closed, one lip softly pressed to the other, our pink and purple lips, our old eyes looking, gazing, seeing, meeting, locking, resting there in peace, empty, content, and moving on. How fat and old and mottled and soft and odd and funny we were.

 

Two cartoons.

 

Yes, but—

 

How beautiful he was!

 

I asked the master then about my being stuck in emptiness, the term the master had used to describe my situation the last time we had talked. The master said he meant he thought I was stuck in the essence.

 

I didn't know what that meant.

 

The master said he thought my not letting go of the memory of what in 1975 I had called my enlightenment had something to do with it. It was an experience to which I had only alluded. I had never really discussed it with the master. With him I had not called it enlightenment—a designation I'd learned from John who'd learned it from Gaskin—and instead referred to it if and when I mentioned it at all only as "my religious experience" or as "my awakening" or—if I were confiding in a Christian friend—as "my possession."

 

"You have to let go of it," the master said.

 

"Yes."

 

I agreed with him.

 

Yes.

 

I'd tried all day every day for thirty years.

 

Yes.

 

"I've had dozens of such experiences," the master said.

 

I wondered how he knew.

 

In the little over four years I had known the master I had mentioned hardly more than a single detail of the most powerful experience of my life. On only three or four occasions had I alluded to it at all and even then only to parts of it and—with the single exception being the epiphany of flower and sun—at my every reference to my experience the master had scoffed in incredulity. It didn't matter. I hadn't cared. In less than two years after my yearlong experience of heaven I had already accepted the impossibility of my ever communicating to others the reality of it.

 

My annus mirabilis—it might as well have been my anus.

 

I waited.

 

"It's just a memory," the master said. "Let it go."

 

"I try."

 

"Let it go."

 

"Yes."

 

"Think of it as nothing."

 

"Yes."

 

"It's nothing!"

 

"Yes."

 

I didn't disagree.

"The master opened me up," Dean said. "He opened my mind."

 

Dean paused and then with his index finger he pointed to and then touched a spot on his forehead just slightly above but exactly between his eyebrows.

 

"He opened my middle eye right here," Dean said.

 

I had never heard anyone, not even the master, say something so bold as this in person. In Buddhism it just wasn't done—in fact I'd come to believe that it was taboo. For Dean, though, it was not a boast but an admission. He had said it innocently and now he continued.

 

"I'm so open now," he said, "so open to anything."

 

Dean related a story about a friend of his who had seen Hare Krishnas offering lunch to a busload of children but in order to receive the food the kids first had to sing the mahamantra.

Hare Krishna

Hare Krishna

Krishna Krishna

Hare Hare

Hare Rama

Hare Rama

Rama Rama

Hare Hare

 

His friend had told Dean he would never do that.

 

"But I would!" Dean said. "I would! No big deal."

 

I waited.

 

"Hare Krishna, Catholicism," Dean explained, "anything, whatever."

 

I nodded.

 

"Thanks to the master I'm just so open to anything now."

 

I listened.

 

Dean said that last winter he had planned to go to California and spend a month in retreat at Green Gulch, the farm associated with the San Francisco Zen Center. Dean asked Mikiko, who had spent a year there, what it was like. To Dean's question, Mikiko had responded with a long awkward silence, Dean said, before she finally replied. She had hated it, she told Dean. You can go too far with Buddhism, she told him, and the Zen master there, Reb Anderson, she said, goes too far.

 

"Can you go too far?" Dean asked me. "What does that mean?"

 

"I'm not sure," I said.

 

"How can you go too far?" he asked.

 

"I don't know."

 

Together we sat silently and considered this question. Both John and Billy had attended talks by Anderson after which he had invited the audience to come to the stage to marry him.

 

To marry—that was the expression he had used.

 

Had that been going too far? Gaskin and his wife had married another couple, and then a third, and a fourth, I remembered, arrangements he had called four-marriage, six-marriage, and eight-marriage. I had not thought of that in years and I wondered how it had all turned out. I thought I'd read that Gaskin had been divorced twice and maybe three times even before the event he called his enlightenment. Had his multiple marriages also failed? I had not heard. Had Gaskin gone too far? He had both condoned and encouraged the smoking of marijuana. How had that worked out?

 

I wondered.

 

Had he gone too far?

 

Buddhism had first burned itself into my consciousness in 1963 when at a busy intersection in Saigon the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc had crossed his legs in the full lotus posture, doused himself with gasoline, and set himself on fire to protest governmental prejudice, injustice, and war.

 

Had he gone too far?

 

Bodhidharma and his eyelids, Huiko and his arm—had they gone too far? The disciples of both Buddha and Christ who had renounced home, family, marriage, and children and committed themselves to nonviolence, taken vows of poverty, and become ascetics and mendicants and monks—

 

Had they gone too far?

 

Jiexian:

 

The master has to instill in practitioners a will that is as strong as iron and to make them take a vow that is as imperishable as a diamond…. He has them vow that they would rather have their bones broken and their sinews dry up than stop their studies before they have a lucid understanding of the great matter. That they would rather lose their bodies and relinquish their lives than stop before they penetrate the barriers. 

Too far?

 

"I trust the master," Dean said. "I've submitted."

 

Dean no longer looked into my eyes as he spoke. He had lifted his chin just slightly and cocked his head so that his eyes were fixed on the distant sky just slightly up and to his right toward two o'clock and he seemed now to stare off dreamily into space.

 

For an instant he did appear to be almost in a kind of trance.

 

"Fuman is my teacher," Dean said. "He's my master."

 

Dean considered the word.

 

I waited.

 

"Fuman is my master!" Dean said again.

 

He was emphatic.

 

That specific word clearly was important to him. I didn't like it, not the way he used it, the way he said it. It made me slightly sick to my stomach.

 

Dean's eyes returned to mine.

 

"When you weren't here for sesshin," Dean said, "I thought you had quit."

 

"No," I said and I began to explain. "A personal—"

 

Dean interrupted me.

 

"It doesn't matter really," he said. "People here come and go—Daly, Mark, Ryan—that's just how it is."

 

I'd heard the master say the same thing.

 

It was true.

 

"Yes."

 

I agreed.

 

"In his Dharma Talk last Sunday in sesshin the master said that it is all about submission."

 

Dean paused.

 

I waited.

 

"The student has to submit."

 

I listened.

 

"Submission is key," said Dean. "You have to submit."

 

Hm.

 

I didn't feel entirely comfortable with this assertion.

 

"Yes, well," I stammered, "I do understand the importance of that concept but more than once I have heard the master say also that the student just has to be himself and to accept himself just as he is and to stand up for himself, too."

 

Dean considered.

 

Breath.

 

Breath.

 

In fact I had heard the master say that was exactly what he thought Dean most needed to do and that the master would stand and applaud if and when Dean ever did so. But I didn't tell Dean this though I do not think now as I write that either the master or Dean would have minded. I was still uncertain about what I had been told in confidence and what not. In my four years at the Temple the master had volunteered to me in private both personal knowledge and personal appraisal of more than a dozen people, maybe more, and the indefinite line between ordinary conversation about mutual acquaintances and Temple friends and gossip—for which the master had once reprimanded and warned me—left me confused. This writing, my thinking, this memory, my reflection, this contemplation of people and events and their meaning to me, their meaning, period, was it gossip, merely, or was it a part of the search for and exploration of life and its meaning, its truth? I considered it practice. It was one way I stood up. Kent, too, had told me once that he thought one of the main things the master was trying so hard to teach us was to stand up for ourselves.

 

I said so.

 

"Yes, that's true, too," said Dean. "You know—"

 

Dean made the slightest of gestures with his left hand, the slightest of waves, and I did know exactly to what it referred. Dean meant the paradox, the other side of truth, the truth of the opposite, the everpresent complement, the eternal irony, to the yang the yin, to the yin the yang.

 

It was a point that the master stressed often.

 

Not two.

 

The noon sun was a bright yellow twinkling through the limbs and branches of the tall oak and today its gift to the Temple and yard was a shimmering and gently rocking mottle of light and shade. The wooden boards of the picnic table felt sturdy, solid, and good beneath my elbows. I had interlocked my fingers and folded my hands in the mudra of Christian prayer I had been taught as a child by my mother. It was still one of the most comfortable and restful positions I knew for my hands. I folded them often that way. In that position, in that mudra, my hands felt at rest and at home. With my interlocking thumbs I touched my chin and rubbed its stubble of whiskers. The wide hard heavy wooden plank of the bench felt stable and solid and good under my butt. I squared up my hips and legs and knees and my bare feet on the black dirt and green grass beneath them. I stretched and arched the small of my back and rocked forward and back to vertical. Deeply I inhaled one long breath and caught it in my lungs and held it there an instant—life and health and faith—and then ever so slowly and deliberately through my slightly tightly pursed lips I blew back out audibly into the still and cool and perfect air the breeze of breath and life I had taken from the vast vault and hemisphere of brilliant clear blue sky. How good I felt! How glad to be alive! How grateful for the Dharma! When I got home I bowed in thanks as I had in the mid-70s, prone in full prostration, my legs fully extended, my arms, too, fully extended in front of me, and my fingers, and my forehead pressed to the rug on the floor of my room, my eyes closed, and I remained there, grateful, silent, following my breath out, following my breath in, out and in for I don't know how long.

Harrison—

 

My sweet lord

Mmm my lord

Mmm my lord

I really want to see you

Really want to be with you

Really want to see you lord

But it takes so long my lord

My sweet lord

Mmm my lord

Mmm my lord

On Sunday Eleanor gave the Dharma Talk. She described her growing up, her anxiety, her shyness, her pain, her solitude, her loneliness; her struggles with her father's illness and the burden it had created for her family and for her; her going to college and earning her degree in psychology; her determination to earn her doctorate so that she could help to support her parents, her abandonment of that plan; her yearning for fulfillment and completion; her interest in yoga, her discovery of Zen and beginning to practice; her family's disapproval of her interest in eastern religion; her meeting Mikiko and then the master; her feeling compelled from within to practice with the master; and finally her decision to move into the Temple to study and practice.

"Fuck."

 

Eleanor was not shy about expressing her feelings. She punctuated her talk with the word "fuck" or with various forms of "fuck" ten or twelve times. This profanity issued naturally in the course of her exposition and no one in her audience expressed discomfort.

"Fuck."

 

Eleanor also described her experience so far as a resident at the Temple. She explained how submitting to the forms—bowing, chanting, ringing the bells—and working to master the forms had forced her to look at herself and to see herself as she really was.

"Fuck."

 

She spoke also of what she considered the two principal difficulties of being a Temple resident, first, the loneliness and, second, being or at least feeling constantly watched.

 

I understood exactly what she meant.

Every breath you take

Every move you make

Every vow you break

Every smile you fake

Every claim you stake

 

I'll be watching you

I'll be watching you

I'll be watching you

I'll be watching you

 

Following her talk and two or three questions and answers afterward Dean and Joe and I conversed at the picnic table in the backyard. There I told them the story—an abridged version—of my most recent meeting with the master, of his demand that I admit I had been dishonest, of his own admission of pride, arrogance, and anger, and of his inference that I was stuck in emptiness.

 

Joe listened intently.

To me he seemed absolutely rapt.

Still.

 

"Thank you for sharing that with me," he said. "That was really interesting to me."

 

I wondered why.

 

"Really helpful," he added.

 

I wondered how.

 

Curious, so curious, always so curious that's me—

 

Bob.

 

Joe excused himself.

 

As the new ino he had to train new people to be doans, shotens, and jishas—the ceremonial service positions—and others to be zazen instructors; and Joe had also to offer instruction in oryoki, the intricate ritual by which all meals are served and eaten during the largely silent religious retreats known as sesshin.

 

Dean stayed to discuss further what I'd told him about the master and my meeting with him.

 

"The master has a lot of demons, more than you, more than me," he said, "and I respect that."

 

I waited.

 

"He keeps coming back, he keeps working on them, working on them, day after day after day, year after year after year."

 

I nodded.

 

"It's hard for him, harder for him than for you or for me, I think, really, but he continues, he keeps coming back, coming back, sticking with it, just keeps coming back and working on them again and again."

 

"Yes," I said. "That's true."

 

"He never stops."

 

I nodded.

 

"Yes," I said. "That's true."

 

Yes.

 

I had not considered it all from that perspective. I had thought mainly and often solely of myself.

 

I remembered again what Dainin Katagiri had said in one of his books. He wrote that as a student occupied exclusively with his own suffering he had never considered the suffering of his master. The teacher suffered, too, Katagiri had eventually and sadly realized, yes, the teacher suffered, too.

 

I had made the same mistake.

 

I had expected my teacher to be free of suffering, to be the man with the answer, and when he had not met my expectation I suffered disappointment and disillusionment and blamed my teacher for it.

 

First I had demanded that he be extraordinary, and then I had searched everywhere high and low for evidence that he was only ordinary and no better than I, and then when I had found it—ha!—it was just as I had suspected.

 

I remembered a conversation I once had with Billy about the very same subject, the way I look and look and look for a special person, a special teacher, someone extraordinary, and then when I think I just may have found such a person I search, I hunt, I investigate, I inspect, I look and look and look again for blemishes and for flaws, for evidence that he is ordinary, normal, average, nothing at all special, no better than I. I was no different from the teenage girls and housewives who fawn over the celebrities of music, television, and movies and then ache and thrill when their affairs and divorces and addictions and depression and unhappiness are exposed and the contradictions and conflicts of their lives are revealed and the superstars are found ordinary.

 

We have to relearn the same lessons time and time again do we not?

 

I do.

Fu—

The master and I briefly discussed the personal problems both physical and mental which for the past six months had made it sometimes impossible for the junior ino to assist me with my duties at the Temple. The master assured me that I did not have to be ino again, and he understood, he said, that it was a demanding Temple job. The master suggested that I assume a lesser job this term—cleaning the altars, perhaps, or arranging the bouquets—and said that I did not have to perform any job at all this term if I so preferred.

 

I was relieved.

 

Encouraged by his conciliatory gesture I agreed to do the altars.

 

Then the master asked why I did not want to take part in the practice period.

 

"You say you don't have the stomach for it," he said.

 

I nodded.

 

"For practice period?"

 

"Yes."

 

This puzzled him and he asked me to explain.

 

"That doesn't sound good."

 

Ruth had advised me to avoid any mention of what I considered the master's pattern of verbal abuse. I had decided to try to follow her counsel. My argument with the master over the issue of verbal abuse in my journal and in emails had first escalated and then degenerated to the point where I felt that I could hardly communicate with him through language at all. Perhaps this was the point—I was just to shut up, be quiet, submit, and practice.

 

No problem.

 

I could and I would gladly and contentedly perform my duties at the Temple and interact with members of the sangha and with the master in silence; in fact I liked the idea and I hoped this was indeed the subtext the master intended and expected me, somehow, mysteriously, to intuit from his correspondence.

 

Okay.

 

I would just be quiet.

 

Still.

 

But avoiding the subject now was impossible.

 

"What is it specifically that you find hard about practice period?" the master inquired.

 

I remained silent for several seconds while I considered a number of possible answers. There was the demanding job of ino, which I had already mentioned, and there was my increasing ambivalence towards the devotional practices—the altars and shrines, the bowing, chanting, the lighting of candles, the offering of incense, the wearing of vestments, all the churchy stuff—but the main thing, of course, had been what I perceived as his picking a quarrel with me in his comments on my practice period journal in the spring.

 

I'd reread them a dozen times or more over the summer and I still didn't understand their purpose. Simply put, I found no reason to subject myself voluntarily to that kind of verbal abuse ever again.

 

"The journal," I said, "the argument we had."

 

"Specifically?" asked the master.

 

"Your accusing me of dishonesty and cowardice."

 

The master leaned forward in his seat, towards me, our eyes locked, and he raised his voice.

 

"Do you remember when you told me you had been dishonest?"

 

There was the familiar tone of entreaty in his voice, parental and stern, as if the master were addressing a small, forgetful child who had misbehaved and then fibbed about it.

 

I had heard that tone many times.

 

The master slid easily and often into condescension, disdain, and contempt when he was frustrated and annoyed by his students. I thought for what seemed a long time about his question, more than several seconds, perhaps a minute. I felt no anger—only futility, curiosity, and wonder at the shifting sand of language, meaning, and ego. I watched some words of T.S. Eliot coast through my head and later when I got home I looked up the entire passage.

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

 

Weary.

 

I knew to what the master referred.

 

In his comments on my journal and in our subsequent email correspondence he repeatedly exhorted me to confess what he called the dark side—fear, anger, and sadness which I had not felt—and he mocked my smiles and small talk of weather and literature when I walked up the stairs to his room to say hello before I opened the windows, tidied the cushions, and lit the altar before evening zazen on Tuesdays. To arrest his namecalling, bullying, and mockery I confessed to an anger which I really had not felt, at his urging I conceded that I had been angry with him and that I had not said so, but once I was home, no longer in his presence and subject to his demands, in my journal the next day I had recanted and I had explained why.

 

On my part, the master had insisted, all this was dishonest.

 

Yes.

 

I could see it all from his perspective.

 

Yes.

 

I had succumbed to his bullying and badgering and I had in a sense falsely confessed.

 

Yes.

 

In this there had been—should one choose to employ such language—elements of dishonesty and cowardice.

 

But had I really been dishonest?

 

No.

 

I didn't think so.

 

Was I afraid of the master?

 

No.

 

Was I afraid of truth?

 

No.

 

His conduct had been confusing.

 

Yes.

 

I had been confused.

 

Yes.

 

What could I do then but recant and try to correct the record?

 

Anew.

 

That I had tried to do—and did not his version of events omit any acknowledgement of his own complicity in them?

 

Through all of it, I thought, the master himself had seemed much more angry than I. Indeed, then, and now as I write, I felt and feel less angry than puzzled and sad. In fact the only enduring negative and dark side of my life was my disappointment and sadness that my relationship with the master, which I had felt to be strong and good, had gone sour and that my teacher for reasons I did not understand seemed now determined to quarrel with me and—I had now begun to believe—also determined to alienate me and to drive me away from him and from the Temple.

 

But I knew for certain that in my relations with the master I had not ever been deliberately dishonest.

 

How strange this scene.

 

How odd this demanding man!

 

"Do you remember when you told me you had been dishonest?" the master asked again.

 

Again he increased the volume and intensity of his voice.

 

"Do you?"

 

This time in his query I heard also indignation, as if the master felt that the extended silence of my reflection were itself some form of dishonesty, and now the master sounded and looked annoyed—

 

Angry.

 

Yes.

 

I had never told the master that I had been dishonest.

 

Determined not to make the same mistake twice, on this occasion I would not be hurried.

 

Silent I sat and thought.

 

Hmm.

 

"I remember when you told me I had been dishonest," I said finally, with emphasis on the pronouns "you" and "me."

 

He scowled.

 

"Do you remember when you told me you had been dishonest?" the master asked a third time.

 

The master leaned slightly forward in his chair and looked directly into my eyes. This time he had taken a peremptory tone. I met his gaze. Now I felt calm, good, not nervous at all. I felt my breath move lightly and coolly through my nostrils and into my lungs and lightly and easily back out through my nostrils and into space again. This good friend of mine—and, yes, I was his friend though he'd warned me he was not mine—this teacher who had taught me so much and helped me, he and I had returned to the crux of what for me seemed a deep misunderstanding and disagreement. I felt a tiny ripple and wave of sadness and hurt as it rolled through my heartmind.

 

"I remember when you told me I had been dishonest," I repeated.

 

"And had you?" asked the master.

 

"No," I said.

 

"But you said, 'I'm just fine!'" the master exclaimed.

 

His argument I grasped instantly.

 

But those exact words were not mine and neither had I nor would I ever use them to describe myself in the sense that the master now intended. I felt a sad and sentimental kind of awe. I pitied us. I pitied all human beings struggling in the web and net of language and ego, of me and you, of us and them, of true and false, of right and wrong, of good and bad.

 

"Those weren't my words," I said.

 

The master frowned.

 

"You were having conflict with me and you didn't say so in our practice group meeting," the master said sternly.

 

No.

 

"That's dishonest."

 

No.

 

I remained silent as I considered this misrepresentation of what had actually transpired.

 

It was not deliberate.

 

I knew that.

 

The master was an honest man and his intention was good. There was no transcript of the text of our conversations to consult nor would it have been conclusive even had there been. We now seemed characters in the fiction of Henry James. Language had been both window and mirror and we each only darkly and dimly saw the other through our own reflections in the glass between us. Trying now to reconstruct the intimacy and the truth of this scene I feel for an instant the tiny sickening sense and shiver of its impossibility. I could not think of a thing to say. I sat silent, calm. We explored one another's faces. I enjoyed the coming in and going out of my breath, cool, gentle, easy, soft. I felt at peace. We gazed into one another's eyes.

 

"That's dishonest!" the master insisted a second time.

 

I simply did not know how to respond to this. It didn't make me mad. I was puzzled. It seemed to me now that our relationship would indeed end after all. I felt now exactly as I had before and that feeling was not anger but confusion, mystery, and curiosity.

 

How odd that it had all come down to this.

 

I guessed it was over. 

 

"Impasse," I said.

 

"If you won't come forward my way," the master said, "I don't think I can help you."

 

Help?

 

Was it help I wanted?

 

No.

 

The teaching?

 

Yes.

 

Was it help I needed?

 

Hmm.

 

So the master thought.

 

Why?

 

I thought not.

 

No.

 

So this was it then.

 

"I think you're stuck in emptiness," the master said solemnly.

 

I laughed.

 

Oops—

 

Stuck in emptiness!

 

The master's use of this epithet I had not at all expected and it startled me. I did know that for a Buddhist practitioner this was bad, very very bad, perhaps the worst possible, the equivalent, I supposed, of a Christian awakening from the deep sleep of death to be informed that he was in hell. If you get stuck in emptiness, I remembered one of the ancient patriarchs had warned, not even the Buddha can save you.

 

"I don't think I can teach you," the master added.

 

Ah—

 

For this remark I had prepared myself and for the corresponding and equivalent remark that might issue from my own heartmind and mouth. One morning on the road to work sudden hot tears had risen to my eyes and welled there until two salty drops spilled over the rim of my lower lids and crawled down my cheeks and then hung spent and pendant from my jaw as I contemplated the end of my relationship with this teacher. The master had taught me a lot and I knew I had a lot yet to learn. But I had accepted the possibility of this loss. Now sitting there in his room I felt not pain but a calm acceptance and—that's just me I guess—curiosity. In silence he and I looked, again, deeply, into one another's eyes and I remember enjoying the soft red, pink, beige, and cream colors of the human flesh of his rosy and asymmetrical face, his big hard bald head, his ears, his nose, and the deep folds, creases, and wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, and the softness of his lips so softly closed now in neither smile nor frown, silent and at rest and at peace. I felt that way, too, as I watched his eyes explore mine and my face and me. I liked the master, I'd learned a lot from him. He had always been honest with me, sincere. I had never doubted his good intentions. I considered him to be a man of integrity. I couldn't imagine him doing or even wanting to do anything seriously wrong. I trusted him. I wanted our divorce—to me that's what it felt like—to be amicable.

 

"You're a good man," I said.

 

"Thank you."

 

A moment of silence—

 

"Am I your teacher?" the master asked.

 

"Yes," I said. "I've learned a lot from you."

 

"Thank you," he said.

 

"I love zazen," I said and I meant it.

 

The master bent his head just slightly to his right and smiled at me so tenderly that I was suddenly astonished by the simplicity and grace of this gesture, and describing its sincerity and beauty just now—five days later—sent a quick unexpected squint of tears to my eyes.

 

"You love zazen?" the master asked softly.

 

"Yes."

 

"That's good," he said.

 

We sat together in silence for a moment or two—I'm tempted to call it prayer—while I collected my thoughts and gathered my resolve for what I wanted to say.

 

"But as a teacher you possess a couple of characteristics that are very difficult for me," I said.

 

"What are they?" he asked.

 

Only a few seconds passed but they seemed like a long time as the words of possible answers to this question rolled through my mind and I examined and considered them. It was "verbal abuse" which led the parade and I rejected it. That was only a symptom. The problem now seemed to me broader and more fundamental than that.

 

Silence.

 

"Pride," I said, "and arrogance."

 

"Yes, that's true," said the master gently. "I know that."

 

We thought about that.

 

The master had replied immediately without a moment's hesitation. I felt the tug of love for him. Now he appeared to me astonishingly beautiful, inexpressibly vulnerable, and precious.

 

The master had more he wanted to say.

 

"When it arises, tell me," he said.

 

Silence.

 

"Will you?" he asked.

 

"Really?" I asked.

 

"Yes."

 

The master meant it.

 

"Ruth told me to stop pointing at that," I said. "That was her advice for me in this meeting."

 

The master laughed.

 

"She may have had something there," he said.

 

We thought about that.

 

"No, I want you to tell me," the master said, serious again.

 

Silence.

 

"Anger has been a problem for me my whole life," he continued, "but I've worked hard on that and now I feel that I've improved myself and that I'm much better with my anger than I used to be."

 

He looked at me.

 

I wondered.

 

I'd known him only four years. In my opinion it was not anger exactly but annoyance that seemed always to be with him like a very slight but constant and incurable fever surfacing and manifesting unpredictably and unexpectedly and often in divers ways—impatience, annoyance, peevishness, sarcasm, scorn, mockery, ridicule, disdain, contempt, superiority, pride, arrogance, vulgarity—and cursing. Were he a good friend, there would have been no problem, I thought. I would simply have accepted this minor flaw in his character and gone on with my life and our relationship. But the master was not my friend—indeed more than once he had reminded me that he was not and could not be my friend because to be so interfered with his role as my teacher—he was both more and less than my friend, and as my teacher he had made clear to me that in some ways he was special and that he expected me to honor him and to treat him as such; and that he reserved for himself certain privileges and liberties that I would not have granted to just a friend. At times he acted as if we were equals, at other times—and who knew when or why—he pulled rank. At times he seemed just an obnoxious and vulgar man way too full of himself; but when I had asked about this he had defended his conduct as the intuitive Zen pedagogy he called trusting his gut. His admission tonight, though, had changed things for me, at least temporarily. Had I known that I was going to say what I did, I would have expected denial. But both my words and his had come as a surprise.

 

"Why is my arrogance difficult for you?" the master inquired.

 

I didn't know.

 

"I guess it seems odd to me that a monk who has practiced and sat every day for twenty-five years would still act that way," I said.

 

Even as I spoke I realized and understood that I had compared and was still comparing the master to some imaginary ideal I had myself manufactured and now carried around in my head. I understood, too, that this meant that I had also constructed an ideal of myself for myself and to which in spite of myself I aspired. The master and I recognized this dynamic almost simultaneously.

 

"Oho!" the master hooted.

 

I nodded.

 

"So I can't just be me!" the master crowed.

 

"No, you need to be better than you," I conceded.

 

"And you better than you?" he added.

 

"Yes."

 

The master summarized for us in his own words the argument I had already understood. I did not mind. There was no further mention of my being stuck in emptiness nor of his being unable to teach me. The master explained again that I didn't have to assume a Temple job if I didn't want to, but the master suggested I take on a little job like the Temple flower bouquets and arrangements or cleaning the altars and monitoring supplies in the doan closet. I'd never done the latter job and I agreed to do it. The master also said that if I didn't want to I didn't have to participate in the fall practice period. We agreed that I would but with fewer and less demanding commitments than in the past. I would attend the one-day sesshin in the middle of the period but I would skip the two-day sesshin at the beginning of the period and also the seven-day sesshin—Rohatsu—which would conclude it. In place of the daily journal I would meet with the master to talk every other Tuesday evening for forty minutes before zazen.

 

No more.

 

"Are we all right?" the master inquired.

 

"Yes," I said.

 

"Anything else?"

 

"No."

 

"Good."

 

We bowed, palms together, in gassho. We stood up from our chairs and we bowed again, palms together in gassho. Then I walked downstairs to prepare the Temple for evening zazen. I unlocked the front door and flipped on the porch light. I turned on the lamp in the corner of the Buddha Hall, illuminating on the small table the sculpture of the ox with the ring in its nose and the small white vase holding a single, wilted, browning zinnia and a single, crisp, dead sprig of greenery cut from the shrub along the parking lot to the west. Had I time, I thought, I would cut some replacements. I walked into the dark, silent zendo and pulled the string that turned on the ceiling light that hung over the statue of Manjusri, personification of wisdom, sitting on the altar at the center of the room.

 

The zendo was hot.

 

I propped open two windows with the foot-long boards that lay on the sill for that purpose. The candle on the altar was too short to burn ninety minutes so I took it to the kitchen, replaced it with a fresh candle from the doan closet, and returned it to its proper place on the altar. I checked the zabutons and brushed off any obvious lint or animal hair, and I squared them up to the wall—the master had reprimanded me the previous Tuesday about a couple of mats that had been slightly out of line—and I fluffed up the zafus and made sure their single white stripes were all centered and facing outward. I checked to be sure a sutra book was tucked under the front of each mat. I passed through the doorway of the zendo, and twice I pulled the string to the ceiling fan in the Buddha Hall—clicka clicka—and I brushed the dust and lint and the dog hair that Sammy had left from the master's bowing mat before the main altar. By then Eleanor had come downstairs for zazen and she and I talked quietly for a few minutes about her new life as a monk in training at the Temple. At 6:50 I returned to the zendo.

 

I lit the new candle.

 

I bowed and offered incense to Manjusri, and I bowed again when I had finished. At 6:55 I bowed in gassho before the thick wooden han which along with its wooden mallet hung in the Buddha Hall near the stairs. Then I struck the han with the mallet in the rolldown which in the monastery called the monks—for us the students and lay practitioners—to the zendo. I replaced the mallet in its noose and I bowed again. Eleanor and I took our seats in the zendo and a few minutes later the doshi—Fuman, the master—arrived. At 7:00 sharp I struck the inkin—a bell—three times to announce the beginning of zazen. For fifty minutes I sat, silent, my legs crossed in the half lotus position and I followed my breath in and out, in and out, in and out, waking and returning to breath and to the present when I found myself drifting off on the thought stream of discursive reasoning or reverie. Then I got up for ten minutes of kinhin, walking meditation, in the Buddha hall, before I came back into the zendo, bowed, and assumed my position on my cushion for the final twenty minutes of zazen.

 

Breath in, breath out.
Breath in, breath out.
Breath in, breath out.
Breath in, breath out—

 

At 8:20 I pulled the sutra book out from under my mat and opened it to page fifty-eight. Holding it with both hands as I had been instructed, thumb and little finger of each hand on the inside and the middle three fingers of each hand on the outside, I began reciting "Fukanzazengi," the "Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen," Eleanor and the master joining in the ten-minute recitation immediately after I had chanted the title. At the conclusion of the chant I rang the inkin—one bell—and Eleanor and I knelt at our cushions, brushed off our mats, fluffed our cushions, turned and stood, bowed in gassho, and waited until the master had done the same. When the master had bowed at the altar, in gassho, and then had bowed again at the second bell when we all bowed, in shashu, he left the zendo, and as soon as he had stepped through the door I hit the third bell. Eleanor and I bowed in shashu one final time. I stood at attention and waited as she left the zendo.

 

I waved at the candle—

 

Out.

 

I lowered but did not close completely the two windows, and I turned out the light. In the Buddha Hall I folded my rakusu and tucked it back into its soft cloth envelope. I said goodnight and bowed, palms together, first to Eleanor, who was just starting up the stairs to her room, and then to the master, who was in the kitchen, as usual after evening zazen, pouring dry dog cereal into the big hollow plastic bowl for Sammy.

 

How it clattered!

 

"Good night, Fuman!" I called.

 

"Good night, Bob," he said. "Take care."

 

I switched off the lamp in the corner. I turned off the porch light. I closed and locked the front door. I pushed the storm door shut and turned its handle to secure the latch. I slipped on my sandals and stepped off the porch into the night. I stepped off the curb into the street. I unlocked my car and climbed in. I fastened my seatbelt, started the engine, and drove home. I felt the deep, wide, lukewarm sea of sadness within me as I wrote this account and—with inadequate words—tried to reconstruct the ordinary events of that late afternoon and evening. I wondered then, and I wondered still as I tinkered with my text, if I would remain the master's student or soon learn that he felt he had to sever our relationship or that I had to do so—a second time—and leave the Temple and my teacher. I was reminded of the poem by Matthew Arnold I had often taught in my classes. I felt this way:

  Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.