Lawrence Shainberg’s interest in Zen began at age fifteen, when his father introduced him to the teachings of Alan Watts — and later introduced him to Watts himself. From this promising beginning, Shainberg went on to study with a long list of renowned spiritual teachers, each of them lacking in some fashion. Finally, he came across the obscure figure of Kyudo Nakagawa Roshi, the teacher at SoHo Zendo, an unassuming Manhattan meditation center whose students practiced a rigorous form of meditation called zazen. In Kyudo Roshi, Shainberg found a wise, paradoxical, often irritating personification of the spiritual practice he had followed most of his life.
— Andrew Snee
Roshi wears his Yankee cap to breakfast, doesn’t remove it even after we sit down. He has a large collection of hats, but he has worn this one exclusively since I bought it for him last week at Yankee Stadium. Slightly self-conscious about his shaved head, he never goes without a hat, but the Yankee cap has the added advantage of making him look, if not like an American, at least at home in the culture. Like any Zen master, he aims to walk the streets as if invisible, attract no attention, leave no trace of himself in anyone’s mind. The robes he wears in the zendo are seldom worn outside it. He favors flannel shirts and khaki pants, Saucony running shoes, a Yankee jacket in the fall, and, when the weather turns, a parka and black woolen watch cap purchased through the L. L. Bean catalog. In addition to hats, he collects watches and seems to wear a different one every day. He has no money (his only source of financial support being the dues we pay in the zendo), but he owns at least a dozen watches, and none are inexpensive. The fact that I wear a Timex even though I can afford a better one strikes him as a flaw in my character, even perhaps — as he sometimes hints — an elemental shortcoming in my understanding of Zen.
On the street, he walks very fast and purposefully, as if he knows his way around the city. Unfortunately, he doesn’t. He has been in New York for more than six years, but outside his own neighborhood, the only one he knows is Chinatown, which he calls “my territory.” As we walk, he talks incessantly, asking questions he’s asked me dozens of times, grabbing my arm and turning toward me so that, since I cannot help but do likewise, both of us are virtually walking sideways. I have bumped into fire hydrants and stumbled off curbs while walking with him. “Larry-san — this Greenwich Village? Side street? Avenue? Those people over there — they artist? Homosexual? Why so many standing around?” Yankee cap or not, he is not, most definitely, at home in the culture. He reads Japanese newspapers, watches the Japanese station on cable TV, and, despite the fact that he studied English in high school, speaks as if he did not encounter the language until a few months ago. An expectant woman in our zendo is “four months president.” Vagina — a word that occurs frequently in his lectures — is “pajama.” He says “minimum” for “maximum,” and vice versa. One of his favorite foods is “penis butter.” Last week, in order for him to obtain a license to perform marriages and funerals, one of his students took him down to “shitty hall.” The idea of English lessons, constantly suggested by one or another of his students, strikes him as absurd. “Study English? What you talking about, Larry-san? I grown man! I learn myself!” If asked how his studies progress, his reply is always the same: “Wonderful! One new word a year!” He finds this funny, but I don’t. His condescension toward language has lately been wearing thin on me. He seems to resent the fact that he has to speak, but this does not prevent his giving lectures in the zendo that can last as long as an hour and a half. Is the anger I feel at such moments the logical response of a mind that is being tormented or proof that my commitment to Zen is insufficient?
We went to the stadium to see the Yankees play the Red Sox. In addition to the hat, I bought him two hot dogs and a quart-sized Pepsi, which he forced himself to finish because he is, after all, a monk and, serious to the point of fanaticism about his vow against waste, cannot throw anything away. He lives in a sort of dread of the gifts his students bring him. Soon after he came to New York, I brought him a quart of lentil soup I had made, not knowing that the taste of lentils makes him nauseous. Only after eating it all did he beg me, “Please, Larry-san, don’t bean soup anymore.”
For days before the Yankee game, he had been working me over on the subject of bravery and cowardice. Ever since we met, he has remarked on the frequency with which I speak of fear, how many of my sentences begin with phrases such as “I’m afraid that . . .” or “What I’m worried about is. . . .” Whether this is because I am actually consumed with fear or because the shape of my relationship with him requires that I present myself in terms of certain assumptions of inadequacy, I never know for sure. Lately, we have rarely had a conversation in which he has not scolded me for my cowardice or timidity, and today, as we wait for the subway that will take us to Yankee Stadium, he brings it up again. “Larry-san, why you always afraid? Forty-five years old talk like baby! What you think? Zen about quiet mind? Relaxation? No! No! Zen about bravery! Zazen mind bravery mind! Must bravery, Larry-san! Must sincere!” I know this, of course, have heard it from him before, but, even so, my mind becomes alert with that particular combination of self-criticism, excitement, and defensiveness that makes me, so often in his presence, annoyed with him and annoyed with myself for being so. Reminding myself that Zen masters become more brutal with students the more they like them, I tell myself that I should be thankful for his criticism, but who wants to be lectured in a subway station, on the way to a ballgame, like a six-year-old? It does not help that before and after this outburst, giggling and asking his silly questions, he has been acting like a six-year-old himself. It is easy to forget that he is a Zen master, and most of the time he seems to forget it, too. Even so, he never strays too far from what is, after all, the only subject that concerns him, and in my case, at this moment, that means instructing me on the subject of fear. Later, in the seventh inning, when Willie Randolph, the Yankee second baseman, lays down a bunt, and I explain to him that another word for bunt is sacrifice, he snaps, “Larry-san, if you sacrifice everything, you won’t be afraid of anything.”
The admonition, of course, is a quick summation of Buddhist logic: The source of my anxiety is not the succession of objects to which it attaches itself but that volatile heap of memory and habit I have come to call “myself.” Give it up, and you give up your fear; cling to it, and fear will haunt you always. There is nothing unfamiliar about these ideas, but at this moment, in the grandstand behind first base at Yankee Stadium, their effect on me is, like so much of what he says, neurochemical. I feel undermined and I feel exhilarated, free of my self entirely, and I cannot believe that it will ever return again.
Is the insight for him as remarkable as it is for me? Two years later, I have occasion to remind him of it. We are on a plane headed for Israel, where I am to assist him at a retreat with his students in Jerusalem, and we’ve both had a bit too much to drink. As usual, alcohol has made him silly and me a little maudlin. I am overcome with love for the practice, love for him, love for the ultimate truth that always seems to be just beyond my grasp when I am sitting in meditation, staring at the wall. “Roshi, do you remember that day we went to the Yankee game and someone laid down a bunt and I told you that the word for bunt was sacrifice? Remember what you said to me?”
Sipping his drink (his favorite: Scotch and Coca-Cola), he shakes his head. He is always a little annoyed when pressed for memory, either because this particular neurological function is not one of his strengths or because the very act of remembering interferes with his desire to jettison the past. Once, when I used the word amnesia in conversation with him, he looked it up in his English-Japanese dictionary. “Ah!” he cried, repeating the Japanese word several times. “Ahm-nee-jah! That’s me!”
“You told me that if I sacrificed everything I wouldn’t be afraid of anything. I’ve never forgotten that! It was one of the best things you ever said to me.”
He stares at me blankly, rattles his drink, and takes another sip. For a moment, I’m convinced he hasn’t heard me. Watching him shift his lips from side to side, I know that he is engaged in the practice he claims to offer sure-fire protection against hangover: holding alcohol in one’s mouth for fifteen seconds before swallowing. “Nothing to sacrifice,” he says.
“What?”
“You don’t have anything, Larry-san. How you sacrifice?”
There are those who say that an infinite number of Buddhas preceded the prince named Siddhartha Gautama, but, for better or worse, the Buddhist narrative is usually thought to begin with him. Since most of what we know of Siddhartha — or Shakyamuni, as he is known by Buddhists after his enlightenment — derives from tales collected two hundred years after his death, it is not always easy to separate his myth from his history, but most accounts agree that he was the son of the great king Suddhodana, who ruled over the city of Kapilavastu in northern India. He was a contemporary of Socrates, Confucius, and Laotzu. As a child, he seems to have been rather spoiled, more than a little decadent. At the insistence of his father, who had been warned by prophecy of his son’s spiritual destiny, he lived a life of privilege and extreme insulation until he discovered, almost by accident, the realities of illness, old age, and death. His response to this discovery was both defiant and unselfish. How was it possible, he asked, that human beings persisted in their pursuit of pleasure while the shadow of decay hung over their lives? How could they be so oblivious to the nightmare in which they lived? “You cling to sense-objects among the most frightful dangers, even while you cannot help seeing all creation on the way to death. By contrast, I become frightened and greatly alarmed when I reflect on the dangers of old age, death, and disease. I find neither peace nor contentment, and enjoyment is quite out of the question, for the world looks to me as if ablaze with an all-consuming fire. If a man has once grasped that death is quite inevitable, and if nevertheless greed arises in his heart, then he must surely have an iron will not to weep in this great danger, but to enjoy it.”
Clearly, Shakyamuni himself was lacking in such will. So excruciating was his pain that ordinary life became impossible for him. His father’s castle seemed “a burning house,” his relationships “like the baited hook which draws a fish toward death.” Abandoning his wealth and his kingdom, his family, his new wife, and his recently born child, he set off on a pilgrimage at once quixotic and obstinate in its pursuit of solution: nothing would satisfy him but “escape from the sad ocean of birth and death.” For three years, he wandered among the gurus and seekers of his day, exploring yoga, silence, introspection, and the philosophical dialogues and religious practices of the ashrams. He learned a great deal but remained dissatisfied. Ideas did not persuade him, philosophy seemed nothing more than reiteration of the questions that plagued him, and the ritual and faith embraced by many of his companions struck him as deluded and theatrical. Joined by five fellow seekers, he embarked on a sort of kamikaze asceticism, turning to fasting, abstinence, and self-mortification in the hope that purification of the body would open his mind to spiritual insight. Typically, his zeal far exceeded that of his companions. For six years, he practiced austerities so extreme that they brought him to the brink of death. Finally, while bathing in the river one day, he fainted and nearly drowned. He was saved by a young woman named Sujata, who lifted his head and gave him water, stroked his brow and forced tiny morsels of rice down his throat. This simple act of compassion transformed him. All the wisdom he had gained on his pilgrimage, he said, was dwarfed by Sujata’s kindness.
His disciples were dismayed. In their view, he was betraying their vows by acquiescing to the needs of his body. Indifferent to their anger, accusing them of trying, by means of their asceticism, to “tie the air into knots,” Shakyamuni continued to reflect on what he had learned from Sujata. Early in his quest, he had understood the dangers of self-indulgence, the extent to which the need for comfort and sensual gratification obstructed the spiritual path. Now, edging toward the famous “Middle Way” that would become the cornerstone of his theology, he saw that self-punishment, which then as now was more or less the rule among those devoted to spiritual practice, was no less dangerous than its opposite. It was obvious to him that the body and mind could not be separated. To punish one was to punish the other. How could one hope to defeat ignorance by strategies that were based in ignorance themselves?
Taking leave of his disciples, he wandered alone for many days until, despairing and exhausted, he sat beneath a Mucalinda tree in the manner he had first discovered seven years before — erect, alert, stationary, attending to thought but not pursuing it. “So long as I have not done what I set out to do,” he vowed, “I shall not change my position.” Neither eating nor drinking, he remained thus for forty-nine days. You don’t have to be a Buddhist or a practitioner of meditation to imagine what torment and temptation he must have suffered during this time, but, defiant as he’d always been, he refused to be intimidated. Gradually, he came to understand that his quest, until now, had been misguided, an effort to escape the world of suffering, subdue the anger, greed, and ignorance that poisoned his mind — in other words, an attempt to deny the reality to which all human beings are born. What he saw now was that such escape was impossible; the only hope was to accept things as they are. If reality was groundless and impermanent, one must not deny it with illusions of continuity. The state of mind that followed this realization was unlike any he had known before. When the morning star appeared on the forty-ninth day, he knew that he had found at last what he had sought since leaving his father’s palace. His great realization, variously interpreted throughout the centuries by different Buddhist sects, is distilled by Zen masters into two related statements:
- All beings, as they are, have the Buddha-nature.
- Above the heavens and below the earth, I alone am.
The religion known as Buddhism, followed today by more than 500 million people, began with these realizations — the perception, first, that enlightenment is not a singular, ecstatic experience but an unavoidable fact of human existence; and, second, that it consists at its root in a dissolution of personal boundaries. In other words, the discrete, particularized self in which suffering congeals — the realm of thought and memory, the physical body, the whole spectrum of psychological conditioning — is a dream that dissolves in the light of wakefulness. In effect, the basic equation of Buddhism is tautological: self equals ignorance; ignorance equals suffering; suffering equals self. The great realization, no less available to all human beings than it was to Shakyamuni, is nothing more than dissolution of what has never actually existed.
Nothing makes sense anymore, I tell him, and Zen makes less sense than anything. “Yes! Yes!” he cries. “Very nice! You making progress, Larry-san!”
The coffee shop where Roshi and I are having breakfast is only two blocks from our zendo. It’s called Elephant and Castle but he calls it “Elephant.” When he wants to go out for breakfast after morning sitting, he sidles over to me soon after we stand up from our cushions. “Go Elephant?” Chronically blocked on names, he often shortens them like this or, in the case of students, replaces them with labels. One fellow is “Washington” because that is where he lives; another, who meditates on two thick cushions, straddling them like a horse, is known by no other name than “Horse Riding.”
When the waitress comes, he asks me to order for him. His appetite is robust, especially in restaurants, but he often defers to me like this. Is it because he has trouble reading the menu or because the Buddhist prejudice against discrimination (“One instant of discrimination,” says the sutra, “and heaven and earth are set apart forever”) is more than a concept for him? Is taste simply a function of ego, another thing that must be sacrificed?
He asks the waitress for a coffee refill. Before we leave the restaurant, he will drain four cups, each with two heaping teaspoons of sugar and plenty of milk. On his return to the zendo, he will make himself a cup of green tea, which packs such a wallop that in Japan they give it to racehorses before sending them to the starting gate. Despite the fact that it makes him manic and as giggly as a child, he claims that caffeine, like alcohol and cigarettes, has no effect on him.
It wasn’t he who suggested breakfast this morning. I have asked to meet with him because I am having problems and want his advice. Now I can’t remember any problems and there is nothing I want to ask him. As often in his presence, I am feeling lucid and carefree, slightly reckless, high as if on amphetamines. Either that or my brain is dysfunctional. My memory isn’t working and, like his, my mind has gone maniacally concrete. When we first sat down, I mentioned that for dinner last night I prepared the miso soup he taught me to make, and he’s been talking miso ever since — where to buy it, how it is manufactured, why Japanese miso is better than American or Korean, miso’s medicinal properties, a technique by which miso, placed in a circle around a woman’s navel, can improve her chances of becoming “president,” and, of course, how to handle miso in half a dozen recipes he’s dictated, while I wrote them down on my napkin. My voice is too loud and pitched about an octave higher than usual, and I am no less giggly than he is, and my language has more and more come to resemble his. “I go sleep last night eleven o’clock, Roshi, but I no sleep well.” Is this liberation or regression? If you were watching us from an adjoining table, you’d think both of us were looped or stoned, but what’s our drug? Zen? The endless expanse and compassion of the Buddhist vision? Or simply the energy released when past and future are jettisoned and one lives, as Roshi always seems to do, entirely in the present?
But when I am with him, all my moods are volatile. A single wave of passing thought can take me from joy to sorrow, love to anger, clarity to confusion. Now I am suddenly claustrophobic. His incessant talk and compulsive laughter are grating on my nerves. There is too much energy at this table. We have exceeded not only my tolerance for discontinuity but my capacity to treat it as a teaching. A few minutes ago his face was an inspiring mix of ferocity and compassion, but now his honey-colored skin looks jaundiced, his narrow eyes cold and manipulative. Why must everything he says be punctuated with a giggle? Not for the first time, this habit strikes me as weak and a bit hysterical, a leak of energy through a hole in his self-containment, absolutely antithetical to everything I believe a Zen master should be. The happiness I feel (yes, even now) seems dangerous, unhealthy, like the pleasure one takes, while calling the habit suicidal, from alcohol or cocaine.
But a few minutes later, as we leave the restaurant, I remember what I wanted to speak to him about — a feeling of disorientation, bewilderment verging on panic, which has lately come upon me whenever I sit in meditation. Nothing makes sense anymore, I tell him, and Zen makes less sense than anything. “Yes! Yes!” he cries. “Very nice! You making progress, Larry-san!”
Soon after Roshi and I go up to Yankee Stadium, I have what I take to be an enlightenment experience. Roshi’s remarks about sacrifice have been almost constantly in my mind, but one day, as I sit in meditation, it seems to me that I am living them out instead of merely understanding them. My mind is unmarked space. Memories, fears, expectations — everything falls away. There is no self. I’ve sacrificed everything. For the next half-hour I live in a blissful state of immediacy, each instant a self-contained unit, untainted by past or future. So great is my exhilaration that when I stand up from my cushion I phone Roshi at once. I have never done this sort of thing before, but then again, I have never felt this sort of thing before. Isn’t it his job to confirm, as masters have since Zen began, the enlightenment of his student? He listens patiently while I describe my experience, and then, as I ought to have known he would, takes it all away from me. “Larry-san, listen to me, OK? In the word Buddha, even the letter B is nothing but dust.”
Dust is his word for all that’s ephemeral, all that, if one becomes attached to it, gets one into trouble. In other words, all that, at Yankee Stadium, he admonished me to sacrifice, everything the Buddha relinquished when he sat beneath the Mucalinda tree. The logic is always the same: the source of fear is attachment to the impermanent. Conversely, if you befriend impermanence instead of denying it, you won’t be afraid of anything. What complicates the issue is that ideas like this are dust as well. Since Buddhists become attached to Buddhist theory more than anything else, there is no greater source of dust, as he’s just pointed out to me, than Buddhism itself. Once, I asked him if monks “improved” as a result of their training, which is to say the training he had himself received, and he said: “No. Usually become more worse. Develop fixed ideas. Develop pride.” It isn’t Zen practice or meditation he questions. It is Zen concepts, Zen excitement. Zen ego. He views the mind in general as a dust factory and meditation as a means of wiping dust away. He likens our formal meditation — which we call zazen — to taking a shower, and advises us to think of our breath as a windshield wiper that, sweeping back and forth with inhalations and exhalations, cleans dust from the mind as wipers clean a windshield.
Between internal and external dust he makes no distinction whatever. To wash this dish perfectly, or clean this mirror till it shines, or handle a vacuum cleaner with authority is no different from sitting with one-pointed concentration — washing away your mental dust with the vacuum cleaner of awareness — on your cushion. Ask him about his plans for the weekend, and without a trace of irony he’ll answer, “Clean zendo,” or, “I washing my undershirts.” Such chores, far from being onerous, are in his view therapeutic, purifying. A student who complains of depression is advised to clean his toilet, a woman contemplating suicide to wash her car. He cleans the zendo three or four times a week and resists all offers of help. It is not just that he believes we don’t know how to clean properly but that, as he admits, he is selfish and doesn’t want to share his pleasure. There is no cleaning chore — dish washing, window cleaning, snow shoveling, etc. — about which he is unknowledgeable or unenthusiastic. He mops with his hands, at high speed, bending from the waist and sweeping a rag across the floor, and cleans the brush attachment of the vacuum cleaner with a pair of tweezers. If he catches you vacuuming perpendicular to the seams of the floor, so that you are not picking up the dust that collects between the boards, he concludes that you are a child and, even though he knows he is supposed to teach rather than penalize, he will do his best to see that you are not assigned this job again.
An immaculate shoe rack, cleaned every day, stands just inside the door of the loft that contains our zendo. A rag, freshly dampened twice a day, is placed at the door of the zendo itself so that we can clean our feet of this, if not the deeper, dust we bring from the outside world. You don’t step inside the loft and then remove your shoes. You wipe them on the doormat — also cleaned every day, of course — and remove them before you enter. In the dressing room, you hang your clothes on one hanger, preferably the one from which you’ve just removed your robe. He does not like to be explicit about it, but he views the use of more than one hanger as taking up more space than you need. In other words, an egoism, an act of selfishness, inattention. The way in which you wear your robe is crucial. More than once, he has told us that he can look at a Zen student, especially a monk, and discern from his or her robe how long he’s been practicing. All of this seems compulsive until it strikes you, as it does with greater and greater frequency the more you hang around him, that your wrinkled robe or sloppy habits with the vacuum cleaner are symptoms of inattention and distraction, the mindless fog in which most of your life is spent. During retreats, when you go to the kitchen for food and bring it back to your cushion, you walk behind rather than in front of others because, if you don’t, “dust come out” in the direction of their food. The vacuum cleaner is stored with the hose folded on top just so on a particular shelf with the orange extension cord wound like a rope and its plugs connected to each other. For loan when the weather surprises us, six umbrellas on which he’s painted SOHO ZENDO hang from the shoe rack. We have two floor brushes for the vacuum cleaner; the one labeled ZENDO is not to be used anywhere else in the loft. In the bathroom, hand towels hang by their labels, which he’s cut in half so that they fit neatly around the hook. Replacement facial and toilet tissues are as carefully centered on the toilet tank as the Buddha, the water bowl, and the incense burner are centered on the altar. On a recent Saturday, he tells me, he went out early in the morning and did not return until late at night. In his mail, he found a telephone bill. He climbed to the zendo on the fourth floor, removed his shoes, went to his desk, wrote out a check, placed it in the envelope, put on his shoes again, went downstairs, and walked to the corner mailbox in order to send it on its way. It was mid-December, very cold, almost midnight, and he was fifty-five years old. “Why the hurry?” I asked. “Why not wait until you went out again?” “No!” he cried. “I want to clean it up!”
On the other hand, one of his favorite expressions is “Fish not grow in pure water.” Though he is orthodox and reverent and attentive to the precepts, nothing arouses his revulsion like piety. “You in the jungle, tiger attacking you, you raise your rifle and think, ‘Oh, no, cannot shoot! I Buddhist!’ Such a one not Buddhist! Such a one attachment to Buddhism! Not understand at all!” He proudly describes how he killed cockroaches while living in the monastery. “I help cockroach! Cockroach help me!” If Buddhist excitement is dust, Buddhist orthodoxy is mud. Any suggestion that he is “religious” strikes him as insulting. Most spiritual seekers are “like drunk.” Though his reverence is obvious when he speaks of the Buddha, he never tires of reminding us that, just before his death, after teaching for sixty years, Shakyamuni said, “I have taught nothing at all!”
After his realization, the Buddha remains in meditation for a period of seven weeks. Rising at last, he heads for Isipatana (modern Sarnath, near Benares), 250 kilometers to the north, in search of his former companions in asceticism. Crucial though his realization is, this walk will be equally important in Buddhist history because it is now that he processes and assimilates what he has learned, and prepares himself to teach. First, of course, he must deal with the paradox inherent in this impulse. On the one hand, he knows that his enlightenment is meaningless unless it is shared, but, on the other, he is well aware that what he has to share is nothing more than the birthright of all human beings. How does one teach what is already known? By his own definition, there is no one alive who does not have the Buddha-nature. It is like bringing water to the river. Still, water does not appease one’s thirst until one drinks it. Though all possess what he possesses, most remain no less oblivious to it than he himself a few days before. Insulated by ignorance and egoism from their true nature, identified with the limited, impermanent self of body and mind, they live in constant fear of suffering and death. River or not, they are dying of thirst. What choice has he but to share his water with them?
“You in jungle, tiger attacking you, you raise your rifle and think, ‘Oh, no, cannot shoot! I Buddhist!’ Such a one not Buddhist!”
His former companions have gathered at the Deer Park in Isipatana. Despite the fact that they remain angry at him for his rejection of the ascetic path, his radiance and conviction are such that they cannot help but listen to him. He tells them that he has found — by direct experience, not by thought — the truth that they were seeking, the holiest of laws. It begins with the understanding that there are two extremes that all true seekers must avoid. “One is to plunge oneself into sensual pleasures, and the other is to practice austerities which deprive the body of its needs. Both extremes lead to failure. The path I have discovered is the Middle Way, which leads one to understanding, liberation, and peace. . . . It is a path which does not avoid or deny suffering but allows for a direct confrontation with suffering as the means to overcome it.”
Thus, his teachings begin with what may be the most difficult of all the paradoxes he will offer: a task that involves the dissolution of self and ego, the most threatening of all prospects, can be achieved only through moderation. Both effort and its absence, the two great poles of ego desire, are challenged. Problems recognized by ego can only be solved by its dissolution. What makes his message really threatening, however, is not its content but its explicitness. After all, as he so often acknowledges, there is nothing he says that they do not know already. Who among them is unaware that, as far as spiritual undertakings are concerned, self-indulgence is a cul-de-sac, and all but the most subtle effort is sure to be self-defeating? But why, if they know this, have they continued to deny it? What the Buddha’s Middle Way attacks is the need within the rational mind to make the obvious inaccessible and mysterious. Mystery fuels desire, and desire fuels ego. It is not insignificant that these ardent seekers need to believe that the truth is outside of and beyond them, a goal accessible only by means of effort and self-denial. The basic equation of desire requires that it be directed toward that which is not, and it is precisely this equation that the Buddha challenges. Mild though it seems, his first teaching is fierce and uncompromising. The target toward which he directs their consciousness is the one that, above all others, consciousness abhors.
Confused about a decision I must make, I go to Roshi for advice. My girlfriend and I are having problems, and I know it’s because we’ve both got one foot out the door: should we break it off or take the leap into commitment? Never mind that this is a man who went to all-male schools before he entered the monastery, who’s never had the sort of relationship I’m talking about, who, by his own testimony, never had sex in his life. On the day he graduated high school, sitting around with a group of classmates, he suddenly announced, “I will never marry!” When I ask him why he made this decision, he says, “I don’t know. Just come out!” But a moment later he makes a stab at it. “You know, Larry-san, marriage very beautiful. Two people live together, do each other laundry, cook each other. Slowly two people become one. But me — I one already!” It is seventeen years since he left the monastery, and he still finds it difficult to look at a woman. Only recently, he tells me, has he overcome the impulse to turn his head away when he sees a man and woman kissing on television. Now fifty-five, he likes to brag about his diminishing potency. “Until I fifty, my sausage much stand up! Now, almost never! Very good for practice! All my energy for zazen!”
We’re having tea at the zendo before evening zazen begins. While he stands at the sink preparing the Japanese brew he serves (along with a bowl of Pepperidge Farm cookies), the telephone rings, and we hear a voice on the answering machine. It’s a prospective student, seeking our zendo schedule, leaving his name and address so that we can send him information. “Larry-san,” Roshi begins, pointing to the note pad next to the phone, “please you take down name.” But then he pauses for a moment, listening hard to the man who’s speaking. “No, don’t bother — insincere voice.”
Not long ago, another man found our number in the phone book, and this time Roshi answered.
“Are you a Zen master?”
“Yes, I am.”
“I need to talk to you. I want to commit suicide.”
“Good idea!” Roshi said. “But do it right away! Don’t hesitate!”
In contrast to our usual, informal meetings, when we discuss business matters relevant to my role as vice-president of the zendo or make small talk, Roshi has donned his robes and assumed a serious demeanor, as if to remind us both that my request for advice this afternoon requires him to be my teacher rather than my friend. We sit at the table in his kitchen, which serves as his living and dining room. The only social area in this loft, it is adjacent to his tiny, windowless bedroom, the interior of which is hidden behind a sliding glass door and a set of Venetian blinds. Down the hall is the zendo, a large, sunlit room with an immaculate altar, tropical plants, scrolls on the walls, and, of course, the cushions on which we sit in meditation. Looming above us, covered with a yellow brocade altar cloth embroidered with Japanese calligraphy, is his favorite possession, the television set and VCR the membership gave him for his birthday last year. His favorite show is professional wrestling — especially when Hulk Hogan fights — but he also fancies reruns of Kojak and Dallas and beauty contests like Miss Universe and Miss America.
When I’ve finished describing my quandary, he remains silent for several minutes. Erect in his chair, eyes half closed, it’s as if he’s doing zazen in order to give me full attention. Finally, he says, “Larry-san, must make great decision.” He makes a fist and extends it slowly, like a piston, into the air between us. “Even if terrorist gun to your head, you not change your mind!”
“Well, sure, Roshi, I know that. But it’s not so easy. Something tells me we won’t be able to make it, but I can’t bear the thought of hurting her.”
“Always, you too kind! Want to please everybody! Irresponsible, Larry-san. In the end, cause more pain.”
“But isn’t dharma about compassion? Aren’t we supposed to think of others before we think of ourselves?”
“The dharma,” he says, “is only going in one direction. You make great decision, you make great dharma. You wandering, you wasting your life. Forty-seven years old, Larry-san! You wandering now, you wandering under cemetery.”
This is not, of course, the first time I’ve heard such advice from him. Such is his belief in willpower and self-motivation that no aspect of behavior seems beyond their influence. Even one’s own neurochemistry can be mastered with the proper mix of faith and courage. Depressed? “I give you advice,” he said to one woman, “must cheerful!” And to another, despondent about the failure of her marriage: “You make decision, Sarah-san: forget it!”
I know I should not be surprised by sentiments like these. What else should one expect from a man who believes that any problem can be dissolved by keeping one’s back straight and watching the mind in which confusion percolates? He likes to quote the Buddha’s famous parable about the wounded warrior on the battlefield. Though dying from an arrow in his back, the warrior resists when someone offers to remove it, insisting that he must first know who shot it, what direction it came from, what mistake he made that caused him to be hit, etc. The belief that growth proceeds from understanding and description, unraveling the chain of cause and effect, is a recipe for paralysis. The first arrow is the analytic mind. How can you hope to heal your wounds with more analysis?
There are days when I am amenable to this point of view, but today, as it happens, is not one of them. I feel as if he’s dismissing my pain, offering bromides. What’s the good of advising a man who can’t sleep and has no appetite and, most important, is suffering from a paralyzing case of indecision to “make a great decision”? It’s as if I’ve got a broken leg and he’s telling me to run the marathon.
“Listen, Roshi, I’ve come to you with a problem. I don’t know what to do, OK? In America we call this ‘indecision.’ Are you familiar with the word?”
“ ‘Indecision’?” He pronounces it “indeeseeshun” with accent on the last syllable. “Yes, I understood, Larry-san. Cannot decide. Wandering mind. Indeeseeshun. Very good word!”
“And yet you’re telling me that the cure for it is to make a decision?”
“Yes, yes. Great decision! Never shaking! Never turn back!”
“But Roshi . . . I’ve just been telling you, a decision is precisely what I can’t make. Have you never had that problem?”
He puts out his cigarette and reaches for another. Again and again, like other students here, I’ve complained about his smoking, arguing that he owes it to us, if not to himself, to care for his body so that he can remain healthy and be our teacher as long as possible. “Why I want that?” he says. “I live too long, everybody die, then I lonely!”
“Of course I have that problem,” he says. “Twice.”
“Twice?”
“Yes, after high school, when I cannot decide what to do. And again before I go to monastery.”
“Before the monastery! That was thirty years ago! C’mon, Roshi, admit it. You don’t know anything about indecision! I’m a fool to ask you for advice. It’s like I’m crawling up a mountain and you fly past me in a helicopter.”
“Hellicopper?” He squints at me, puzzled. “What you mean ‘hellicopper’?”
Thinking he’s trying to evade the issue, I snap, “It’s a kind of airplane.”
He hands me a piece of paper. “You write for me, OK?”
I print out helicopter while he fetches his dictionary from the bedroom. Still annoyed, I watch his lips shape the word while he searches out the definition. At last, pronouncing the Japanese word, he cries, “Yes! Yes! Hellicopper! I hellicopper! You crawling on mounting! I flying! You crawling! Ha, ha, ha!” He takes a long drag on his cigarette, stubs it out in the ashtray, then suddenly turns serious again. “Listen, Larry-san. I fly over you, I see what you not see.”
“What’s that?”
He presses his thumb against his forefinger and holds them poised together above his teacup. “You and mountingtop — only this far apart.”
“Ambivalent Zen” is excerpted from Lawrence Shainberg’s Ambivalent Zen, © 1996 by Lawrence Shainberg. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
