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."