In my journal I had made no entries for Thursday or Friday. On Saturday I had made yet another list, this one of the things the master had told me he did not want me to write about.

 

Not stories of my day—

 

"You can write about events of the day," the master commented, "but you need to include all important events, not just the nice, pleasant ones."

 

What had I omitted? To what did he refer?

 

"You also have to edit them so you do not just write a rambling narrative."

 

Edit?

 

"You also need to include your reactions or responses to the events," the master added, "and how the events bear on your practice and also how they reveal the Buddha Way."

 

New instructions!

 

"I'm not interested in intellectual analysis."

 

Yet explain how?

 

Not my point of view—

 

"Yes," replied the master, "you spend too much time arguing and trying to convince me of the truth of your point of view. It is a waste of time to try to convince a Zen teacher of this."

 

Not my past—

 

"Yes," the master said, "that's right. In your journal entries I am interested in what is happening now, and you should be, too. The experience with the flower happened many years ago and was only a minute, brief glimpse of the ways things are. Now it is just a memory or an idea you have in the present of something that happened in the past."

 

Not people—

 

"You can write about people as long as you don't gossip," the master responded.

 

Not the master—

 

"You can write about me," the master replied. "You can also direct anything to me that you want to direct. However, I'm not interested in your analyzing my behavior and ascribing to me motives that I don't have. I'm interested in your looking deeply into what I direct you to look into."

 

Not peace—

 

Not beauty—

 

"You can write about peace and beauty," the master commented, "but not as abstract ideas or entities. You should also balance being at peace with not being at peace and the beauty with the ugly. Each depends on the other for existence and seeing one only is one-sided."

 

Not gratitude—

 

"You can write about feelings of gratitude," the master responded. "You can write about any feelings or—as I prefer to call them—mental states. In Buddhism we do not use the term feelings. What Westerners usually refer to as feelings we call mental states. One of the five skandhas is sensations but this refers to bodily sensations such as hot, cold, contact, and so on."

 

Not—

 

On Sunday I thought maybe I had some negativity to include in my journal.

 

"Hey, I got mad yesterday!" I exclaimed. "Some negative states to write about!"

 

The master objected.

 

"So now you're going to go over to the other side and write only about negative things?" the master asked.

 

Only?

 

"Is this what you think I want you to do?" he inquired.

 

No.

 

I wrote that I was buried in student papers that I had to read, mark, grade, and return by Tuesday—almost sixty of them. Over forty of them were ten-page essays and a couple of them were over fifteen pages long. I called my daughter-in-law and cancelled my babysitting on Friday and also emailed and found substitutes for me at the Temple on Sunday. I had marked papers Thursday evening, all day Friday, all day Saturday, I was still marking papers on Sunday, and I'd still be marking papers on Monday. I was mad at myself for the scheduling and procrastinating that had put me in such a fix. I didn't have time. Yes, I had been frustrated and annoyed but in reality it had been a matter so petty that I thought I could also have laughed at it and at myself if the master had demanded that.

 

Perhaps the inauthenticity of my journal entry had been obvious to my teacher.

 

"This is your intellect working," the master commented. "This is not a clear understanding of how anger arises. The time was right and conditions were arranged. Then anger came up."

 

Just as Thich Nhat Hanh had described the process in his book, I'd written, I had felt my anger in my body.

 

"Then where was it in your body?" the master asked.

 

I just felt it fill me up, I said, and I observed it.

 

"What organs were affected?" asked the master. "Exactly where did it begin and where did it move to?"

 

I had watched it lead me down to the deeper fears and anxieties below, to its connections to money, income, job, reputation, livelihood, and to my desire to maintain my good opinion of myself as a reasonable and responsible citizen and teacher, and—I added as a joke—as a husband who was an especially good and possibly quite enlightened practicing Buddhist.

 

The master was not amused.

 

"You watched it lead you down to the deeper fears and anxieties below?" asked the master.

 

So I said.

 

"This is all in your head, the functioning of the cognitive processes," the master corrected me. "This is not feeling the anger in the body, observing it, and working with it through the body."

 

Sheesh!

 

"This is not," the master declared, "Thich Nhat Hanh's process of working with anger."

 

He suggested I watch a videotape of Thich Nhat Hanh on working with anger.

 

Thank you.

 

No.

 

My own anger had not been a serious problem for me for a long long time.

 

I had to laugh.

 

Now I had gotten my job done, my anger had dissolved, and reading over my account I could see that my entry was still both a story of my day and an expression of my point of view and if that were not enough here I was at its end still seeing the positive side of it all.

 

Oh, Bob—