And I’m glad I did. One early morning in a clear, ordinary moment I realized I didn’t want dharma transmission. I didn’t need anything from this teacher in front of me. We were both free: no one could give me my own authority. I always felt great gratitude toward this teacher for the opportunity to discover that.
But that morning, forty-eight hours after being assaulted, all I thought was how I was going to dash to my car across the street, unlock it and get in before another man with a shotgun grabbed me. My imagination was wild with armed young men at every corner at 4:30 A.M., waiting for tender Zen students.
I made it to the car, got the key in the ignition, squeezed out onto the street from between a large Ford and a van, drove down the avenue to the zendo, and entered the small dokusan room. I was off-the-charts shaking, telling the teacher about what had happened three nights earlier.
He listened. “You are afraid of death.”
I reeled, then fell through. All the other details dropped away. My body relaxed. Something made sense, something I could work with.
And now, ten years later on a New Year’s morning, I thought about this again. I had gotten hard results from an early-autumn blood test. Not terminal illness, but slowly—and it had probably been happening for a long time—death was making its meandering way through my body. In the last months, though I managed to function well, underneath I was swimming in an abyss and could not find a foothold. I tried to imagine travel, things I’d never done before and wanted to do—I couldn’t think of a thing. What did I want to change? Nothing. What did I regret and wished I’d done differently? Usually I’m a great lamenter, but faced with the bold truth of my finite life, I caved in to my past, almost accepting it all.
Then sleepless nights would punctuate my dull submission, tormenting me with failure in all directions. The still night, the click of the clock in the other room, knowing that the next morning I was leaving on a trip, seemed to enhance my despair. All of my life I’d been stalked by extremes, but now the fire burned hotter, fueled by terror. In the past my most reliable elixir had been to continue under all circumstances. But now the biting thought: someday no circumstances will exist.
When my father died, I felt how very close death was; when my mother died, the veil was lifted. The illusion that my parents were a wall, a guard, a boundary between me and the end was over. Death became familial. But when the condition was mine directly, landed in my body, there was nothing vague. The day I heard of my physical condition, a Wednesday, reality opened up, like taking LSD, but this time nobody could come along on my trip.
And yet, it’s hard to stay in relation to death. An equal urge arises to race to the bank, to the grocery before it closes. Daily life is so seductive: we believe if we keep moving we can finally catch up, get our bills paid for all time.
We also believe our stories. Everyone does. But where would we be without them? They embrace the full contradictions of our lives.
I remember when I was up in Minnesota, I had to drive through the Zen teacher’s hometown to get to Hibbing, where Bob Dylan was raised. I stopped outside the teacher’s childhood home, the deep front lawn, the gray clapboard house in the distance. I remembered his telling me about his sister, who became vice president of one of the large airlines and all at once couldn’t take the pressure, the success. She moved back to their town on the Iron Range. I thought about how deep the tracks of lineage and pattern and family run.
Death is only half the story. The other half is life, how to navigate in these slippery waters, how to keep the humbling knowledge of our end in sight. We all seem to blow it one way or another, but how important it is to admit our mistakes, not turn our back on anything. It’s in the details of what we have done that we can find our liberation.
In the introduction to Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway’s book about bullfighting in Spain, he writes that he wanted to study death. It’s so easy to forget, move away from the heat and honesty of our moments. We need stories to remind us and to mirror our reality. And we need writers to record them.
Leaping
Now we get closer to what I have known
A bare cushion
a steel night
nothing moving but the mountains
and the enormous sky
20
Meeting the Chinese in St. Paul
As a Soto Zen student, I had successfully steered clear of koans for almost my full twenty-five years of practice. They were considered more a part of the fierce Rinzai Zen training and seemed enigmatic and scary. How would I know what my original face was before my parents were born? Koans were meant to stump the student, kick her into another way of thinking—or not thinking—so that she could have insight into the nature of the universe.
My old Soto teacher said, “Soto is more like the not-so-bright, kindly elder uncle.” He admired Rinzai and said it was for sharper types.
Despite my reservations, in 1998 I moved up to St. Paul, Minnesota, for two months to dive into koans through the study of The Book of Serenity, an ancient Chinese Zen text of one hundred koans (or cases). These depicted situations and dialogues between teacher and student, teacher and teacher, student and student.
Driving in the car through Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa—crossing one state border after another—I repeated to myself, Yes, I can do it.
My old friend Phil Willkie and I were going to trade homes from mid-October through mid-December. We didn’t know who was getting the better deal. I would live in his three-bedroom, fourth-floor walk-up flat on Mackubin in St. Paul, and he would inhabit my solar beer-can and tire house on the mesa, six miles outside of Taos.
Phil’s apartment was replete with photos of his family, including one of his grandfather Wendell Willkie, the 1940 contender for the presidency against FDR, and another of an aunt sitting in the backseat of a convertible with Dwight Eisenhower. A former boyfriend of Phil’s lived in the back bedroom. He, too, was studying Zen at the time. At night we’d often share a simple dinner of steamed broccoli and rice. He was a modest fellow, saving all plastic yogurt containers and calling them his fine Tupperware collection. We knew each other from years before, when he and Phil visited me in the Southwest.
During the day, I had little else to do but wrestle with these Chinese ancestors who embodied the koans.
Luoshan runs into Shishuang and asks: “When arising and vanishing go on unceasingly, what then?”
A perfectly good question, if you were thinking about the nature of the universe.
We often ask, “What should I do with my life?” Usually it’s asked in despair. I’m lost; help me. We want a concrete answer: Become a dentist and everything will be all right. But there is a deeper cry in the question. How should I live, knowing the world is a confusing place?
Shishuang replied: “You must be cold ashes, a dead tree, one thought for ten thousand years, box and lid joining, pure and spotlessly clear.”
Luoshan didn’t get it. Too complicated an answer. He only became more confused trying to figure it out.
So he went seeking Yantou and asked his question again. “When arising and vanishing go on unceasingly, what then?”
Yantou shouted and then said, “Whose arising and vanishing is it?”
Maybe the shout would have been enough.
Imagine that you’re an earnest student going from teacher to teacher, saying, “Please clarify this,” and one of the renowned, respected ones screams in your face. Maybe then you’d step back and see yourself. But Yantou offers more than his shout. He asks, Who are you that is experiencing this coming and going? This time Luoshan is enfolded into his own question. Engulfed in nonseparation, he wakes up.
I understood what was happening to Luoshan. But my understanding wasn’t good enough. The koan wouldn’t come alive until I demonstrated that understanding.
There is an old adage in writing: Don’t tell but show. I could tell you what happened in the koan, but to show it, I had to become Luoshan and exhibit his—and my—insi
ght.That’s how I would pay true homage to the lineage of old Chinese practitioners I’d come to love—by making their work and effort alive in me and vital right now.
To stay Natalie Goldberg from Brooklyn with her usual collection of needs and desires, pains and complaints, wouldn’t work. Becoming some idea of Chinese—or Japanese—wouldn’t work either. These koans might come through a particular culture, but what they are aiming at is the core of human nature: Who are we really? What is this life about?
I had to learn to become a fool, a barbarian—or the moon, a lamppost, a fallen leaf—to answer the questions. But I also couldn’t get stuck—not even as a single perfect plum blossom.
My mind had to become greased in its skull, a pearl rolling in a silver bowl. No settling; no abiding; no fixed residence. The koan mind does not dwell; instead it is alive—and empty—like a dust mote in a ray of sun. I had to let go, see fresh, like a blind donkey. Tell me, how can something sightless see?
I paced St. Paul’s streets, past Scott Fitzgerald’s old home on Summit, the vast houses on Crocus Hill, the River Gallery, the Great Harvest Bread Company. I crossed the bridge over the Mississippi, reveling in the long, slow display of burned leaves that marked the coming of the dark season. I wanted to know who these Chinese brothers—and the occasional Chinese sister, such as Iron-Grinder Lui, the woman of Taishan, and the tea cake seller—were. I was used to studying Western literature, full of elaborate stories, subplots, metaphors, and flashbacks. These Chinese tales were so digested that only a few lines were enough.
Leaning over our supper plates one evening, Phil’s old boyfriend from the back room beseeched me, “So, Aunt Natalie, tell me a bedtime koan before we drop off.” It was his second year of practice, and his early enthusiasm met my old determination.
I lunged into the koan about Luoshan. I described the rough road, the jagged mountain where I imagined the interchange had taken place. I fleshed out the two men’s ragged dress, their recent meal—“For sure, it was not hot dogs on a bun.” I wanted to plant a deep impression in my faux nephew’s mind so he would never forget these crazy wild ancestors. I made faces with lips turned out, eyes raised to the ceiling; I howled, groaned, drooled, clawed at Yantou. I demanded a response to rising and vanishing.
We both went to bed tired and giddy that night—then woke at 4:30 A.M. and drove the mile and a half to the zendo.
Later that morning, I unfolded on my bedroom floor a glossy map of the whole Zen lineage from 532 C.E. to 1260 C.E. I knelt over it, running my finger from Matsu to Pai-Chang to Kueishan. These were all characters in the Book of Serenity. I relished the link of teacher and student and how the student became the teacher in the next generation.
Below all the dates and Chinese names was a drawing of an immense fork-tongued dragon sprouting out of the clouds. He was a feral force in the orderly map of connections.
The original Book of Serenity was lost when it was first compiled by Wansong in northern China but was reconstructed by him at the urging of one of his disciples, Yelü Chucai. He was one of a group of Chinese statesmen who were desperate to save their provinces from destruction by the ravaging army of Genghis Khan, and they wanted to study the text as a way to illuminate their minds and come up with a fresh solution. Through their work they eventually softened the harshness of the Mongol ruler.
Studying these cases brings one more fully and deeply into the structures that underlie conventional life. The cases were not created to help people disappear into a mist high on a mountain. The terrible truth, which is rarely mentioned, is that meditation doesn’t directly lead us to some vaporous, glaze-eyed peace. It drops us right into the personal meat of human suffering. No distant, abstract idea of distress. Instead we get to taste the bitter pain between our own twin eyes. With practice we settle right down into the barbed wire nest, and this changes us. Working with koans creates a bigger heart; a tender, more close existence; a deeper seeing.
. . .
Near the end of November, I turned to page 108, case 25. “Rhinoceros Fan” was the title. My mind froze.
That’s my usual tactic: when anything new comes along, brake, clutch, stop dead.
What do I know about a rhinoceros? Aren’t they African? I later found out that China did have rhinos, and that their horns were carved into fans.
What stumped me even more was the juxtaposition of those two words: rhinoceros, that huge, forceful animal, probably as close to a dinosaur as we are going to find now on Earth, placed beside the word fan, something light, used to create a breeze to refresh court ladies or southern belles.
I moved on from the title to the actual case.
One day Yanguan called to his attendant, “Bring me the rhinoceros fan.”
The attendant said, “The fan is broken.”
Yanguan said, “If the fan is broken, then bring me back the rhinoceros!”
The attendant had no reply.
Zifu drew a circle and wrote the word rhino inside it.
Yanguan was an illustrious disciple of Matsu. After his teacher’s death, he wandered until he became the abbot of Fayao Temple. This was a monastery. The attendant was not paid staff but Yanguan’s student. As an attendant, the student had the great opportunity of extra time with his teacher.
In this particular story, the student was anonymous. All the better; he could be any of us—John or Sue or Sally, you or me.
I was not sure who Zifu was. I would look him up later. But for now I’d stay with the teacher-and-student interaction.
More than likely, their interchange takes place in a quiet moment, when Yanguan has a little time to put his attention on this monk. He’s going to test him, poke him—Are you there? Yanguan and the attendant are in kinship. They had both probably lived in the monastery for many years, but Yanguan can’t turn around to the attendant and say something simple like, “Do you love me?” or “Are you happy here?” Instead there is decorum. One person is made the attendant, the other the Zen master. Of course, one has been practicing longer than the other. (Out of time we create hierarchy, levels, positions. In the large space of this true Book of Serenity, we eventually let go of criteria, but we also play along.)
So Yanguan asks for a fan. The fan is the excuse for an exchange, though it could also have been one of those unbearable hot summer days. Bring me some relief. Where’s the fan?
The attendant replies that the fan is broken.
He can’t find another one? I’m thinking. What was going on here?
That evening, after I read this case, I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned.
The night became deep and endless. My mind wandered over much terrain: a particular apple orchard, a young boy who died. I remembered an old friendship I once had. This line ran through my head: The relationship is broken.
Broken! I sat up in bed. That is the word the attendant used.
I jumped up, ran to the shelf, opened the book. I took a leap: the attendant was saying he himself was broken, even if he referred to a fan. He was the fan.
But that doesn’t stop Yanguan, his teacher. Hell, if the fan—the product—was shattered, then bring back the whole rhinoceros. What a stunning concept! If the paper is torn, bring the enormous tree into the living room.
Yanguan was asking this of his student (and of us): take a tremendous step—not forward, but backward—into your essential nature. Manifest your original face. Don’t get stuck on something broken—a heart, a wish. Become the rhinoceros—reveal your full self, go to the source, nothing hidden.
And this is what I loved the most: “The attendant had no reply.” What do we do when a rhino is charging us, when a bear of a teacher is storming us? Run for our lives.
In no other case that I had studied so far was there such an abrupt stop. No action, nothing. The attendant had already given his all when he said the fan was broken, when he revealed he was not whole.
It’s a naked thing to show that we are fractured, that we do not have it all together. Broken all the
way through to the bottom. What freedom that is, to be what we are in the moment, even if it’s unacceptable. Then we are already the rhinoceros.
Think about it: We are always doing a dance—I’m good; I’m bad; I’m this; I’m that. Rather than the truth: I don’t know who I am. Instead we scurry to figure it out. We write another book, buy another blouse. We exhaust ourselves.
Imagine the freedom to let it be, this not knowing. How vulnerable.
This is why I love the attendant. He said who he was—a broken man, a shattered fan, derived from the concentrated point of a fierce beast. When his teacher asked for more, the monk didn’t do a jig to win him over. There was no more. Usually we will do anything to cover up a reality so naked.
I know the relief, and ensuing shame or terror, of making that kind of simple statement. When I was in the middle of a divorce, I visited my parents in Florida. My father was on the first day of a new diet. He was looking forward to dinner. We were going out to a steak house for the early bird special. My father made fun of my huarache sandals when I stepped out of the bedroom, ready to go.
“What are those, horse hooves?”
I was touchy and tired of his put-downs. I twirled around and marched back into the bedroom. “I’m leaving,” I screamed. I threw clothes into a suitcase, charged out the front door and onto the nearby turnpike.
I was walking on the divider line, headed for the airport fifteen miles away. A car pulled up beside me and drove the speed of my walking pace. I looked straight ahead.
My father rolled down his window. “Nat.”
I burst out crying.