The Dude and the Zen Master (15 page)

There’s also the opposite approach, which is getting too arrogant. We start thinking that we can do or take care of everything. The more arrogant we become the bigger the fear that we’re going to fail, that we won’t live up to expectations. There are people who give the impression that they’re superstars or gurus, but inside there’s a nagging fear that they can’t really do it all.

Going back to the tall tree that gets more wind, if you think you’re some big, impervious tree that can outlast anything, you’ll find yourself getting buffeted pretty badly. On the other hand, if you’re just growing without worrying about whether you’re big or small, then you’re just blowing in the wind, you know? There’s nothing extra. Stuff comes up and you bend with it.

When I did judo as a young man, I discovered that beginners can get to a place where they think they know it all, and they start looking for people they could beat. But my judo master said, “When you get into trouble, the best judo defense is to run.”

The more you learn, the more you know that you’re not so hot.

14.

SOME BURGERS, SOME BEERS, A FEW LAUGHS. OUR FU**ING TROUBLES ARE OVER, DUDE.

J
EFF
: There are a number of spiritual traditions that say that you should treat the other person as God, or divine. Turning that around, you should treat yourself the same way, and with compassion.

B
ERNIE
: That’s my opinion, too. Just don’t wallow in self-pity. Take a look at the Dude. Someone pees on his rug, his home is ransacked, he’s drugged and beaten up. People take advantage of him and manipulate him, but he doesn’t pity himself.

J
EFF
: There’s a difference between pity and compassion.

B
ERNIE
: The Dude befriends himself, which is very different from wallowing in self-pity. At the end of the movie he confronts the wealthy Mr. Lebowski about how he was set up. Talking about himself, he says, “You figured, he’s a loser, a deadbeat, someone the square community won’t give a shit about.”

Mr. Lebowski says, “Well, aren’t you?”

And the Dude confesses, “Well, yeah, but . . .”

Right there he’s befriending himself. He’s not denying, he’s not getting defensive or angry, he’s not saying
How dare you!
Nor does he pity himself. He’s ready to admit that he may be all those things, but there’s a sense of befriending there. People knock other people because they don’t see them as themselves, but we also knock ourselves and get down on a lot of things that we do. I’m for befriending them, at the same time knowing they could change.

J
EFF
: Sometimes I can give myself shit no matter which way I go. Was it the Dalai Lama who said that people are going to criticize you if you’re this, or you’re that, or even if you’re right in the middle? Or was it Lincoln? I guess a lot of guys have said that. I tend to do that to myself. One day it’s:
You’re not pushing it hard enough, dude, you’re too laid back.
Another day it’s the opposite
.

B
ERNIE
: So the practice of befriending the self is a good one for you.

J
EFF
: Oh man, yeah. The more things I do, the more I need this compassion. When you acknowledge and see things as they are, your life feels authentic, which feels good, and those good feelings actually lead you to want to do even more, and that brings up all those voices again. On the one hand I want to do more, and on the other I don’t. It’s a hard choice because we affect people all the time in ways we’re not even aware of, little things that have a meaning we’ll never know.

I get fan letters that say,
Gee, what you’ve done means a lot
. Or:
You did this movie, and this one particular scene made me feel this. Please, it would mean everything to me if you’d write my son, sign something, and send it to me
. Sometimes I do it.

I mean, I’m a fan myself; I go crazy over certain guys. But how much of your time do you want to spend? On the one hand, I’m given something, I’m being acknowledged, and on the other hand I don’t respond. I wish I could, or did.

There’s this new thing that I’m going to try. I’m going to get a chop. You know what that is? It’s one of those Chinese seals. I’ll make a ceramic chop with my design and make it my official stamp. I don’t know if that’ll scratch the itch—it’s kind of turning sour in my mouth even as I say it—because it’s an awkward thing. I mean, how do you digest all that love coming at you? How do you honor the love?

I think about unrequited love, letting someone down who’s asking you for something and you’re not giving it. In the case of fan mail, there’s too much. I can’t sit down and answer it all because there are other things I want to do. But it builds up inside.

B
ERNIE
: You know, I’m an engineer, and the first thing that comes up for me is to suggest
a solution, a way out
.
But living with my wife, I’ve learned that answering the problem—

J
EFF
: —doesn’t get it. That’s right.

B
ERNIE
: There’s something else going on, and it’s in the realm of emotions and feelings.

J
EFF
: It’s not about an answer, man.

B
ERNIE
: You could simply put on your web site:
Hey guys, I get a lot of fan mail. I love you all, but I can’t answer everyone
. That’s an answer. It may solve the problem, but it doesn’t solve the problem in life. So when there are things that bother us, what’s the real issue there? As a Zen teacher, I do one-on-one study with students. I’ve done this for some forty-five years, many, many times with lots of people, and the general sense I have is that people want to be heard. They don’t necessarily want answers, they don’t want to be told anything, they want to be heard. So the question becomes for me, can I listen? Can I acknowledge what they’re saying?

J
EFF
: But in this case, with all the people who write me letters, I don’t have the time.

B
ERNIE
: So the issue that you’re dealing with is: How do I feel good even in a situation that feels overwhelming, where I can’t do everything I’d like to do? How do I feel good even in those times when I feel bad or inadequate? It’s not about how you deal with all the fan mail, because you can’t.

J
EFF
: It’s like the snoring situation. Normally, I leave the room, or not answer letters. But sometimes I stay. So in this case, every once in a while, I’ll take the box, read the letters, and answer. It’s almost a kind of meditation.

B
ERNIE
: You need to befriend Jeff. It’s got nothing to do with the letters. You’ve got to befriend the fact that Jeff can only do so much.

J
EFF
: He does what he does.

B
ERNIE
: And because he’s famous, he’s overloaded by requests. But Jeff’s Jeff, he can’t do everything. You can’t kiss the whole world; you can only kiss so many. Sure, you could have an automatic system for answering fan mail, but the bigger issue is—

J
EFF
: Cutting myself slack. Don’t be so un-Dude.

B
ERNIE
: The Dude does not get angry with himself for all the things he’s not doing. He befriends the self. The number of things that we’re asked to do grows as we grow, like the tree that gets more wind the taller it grows, but everybody has a limit. So the issue is cutting yourself slack.

Befriending is a beautiful thing. Don’t get down, be patient. You’re still going to be here the next moment, but it’s going to be a whole new moment.

J
EFF
: I see what you’re saying. You have to befriend yourself if you’re going to be a Bodhisattva and work with the suffering. It’s like the lenses, man. When I look with a wide lens at the whole thing and see it’s all one body, you know there’s nothing really wrong, but at the same time, if I look with greater magnification, I can see people suffering, including myself. The healing of both is basically the same thing. So you learn to lean into that a little bit and find your ground, at least till the next earthquake.

I can get so enthusiastic that things get overwhelming. I get into that spot with you sometimes, too. You’d like me to go on the Auschwitz retreat or do a street retreat, or else you’re asking me to support your work financially. It’s like you’re asking,
What’s up, man? What’s the deal here? Just how generous are you?
In some ways that’s great, because once again, it’s as if you’re really asking,
Who are you? What are you?
It’s an opportunity to befriend my limits and kind of surf with them a bit.

It’s like when you saw the little heads I make from clay and you urged me to start the Head for Peace work right away, but I needed a little time. Sometimes I feel you’re out there pulling on the grass to make it grow faster; I have a slower gestation period. I need downtime because I don’t want to give in to my manic impulses. The things that I really want to nurture are slow-growing; they need space and time so that they can flower and mature.

I notice that when I’m generous, accepting, and loving toward myself, all that’s reflected out into the world. The more I cut myself slack, the more I don’t judge myself for not being other than I am, the more I’m aware of who I am, see it, honor it, and respect it, the more I do all those things for others. I push them less and I respect their different rhythms. You’re very fast, you expand, and it’s sometimes faster than I want to do it, you know? Neither one’s right or wrong; it’s just how it is.

I got an interesting teaching, or at least I took it as one, from this lama from Bhutan, Khyentse Norbu Rinpoche. Alan Kozlowski told me about this lama who decided he wanted to direct movies. It’s almost like the punch line of a joke, you know?
I’ve always wanted to direct
. Anyway, Alan said that he was coming to Santa Barbara to do a talk and would be interested in hanging out. So I went to his talk, sat up in the first row while he did his thing. I saw him kind of look at me and smile, and he said out loud, laughing a little, “You make me very nervous, sitting there looking at me.” We chortled.

So I am really looking forward to hanging out with him. He has a bunch of attendants, and at the end I go up to one of them and say, “Hi, I’m Jeff Bridges, I’d like to go in and see Khyentse Norbu Rinpoche.” He says, “I’ll go ask.” He goes in there, comes back, and says, “He doesn’t want to see you.” And I say, “Oh, okay.” And that was the most significant teaching that he could have given me. Because one of the things that I deal with in my life is struggling with saying no, I don’t have to do what everybody wants me to do.

It really lightened my load when he said no. It showed me that when someone says,
Hey, could I have your autograph?
or,
Can I take your picture?
it’s okay to say,
I’ll tell you what, how about a hug?
Or,
No, thanks. I love you
. Or just say,
No
.

No
is beautiful. It clears the way for a
yes
. If you feel
no
and you don’t express it, it just festers inside and gets expressed unskillfully. The freedom to say no, on the other hand, helps you experiment, open up a little more.

B
ERNIE
: You’re dealing with the hunger in you. You’re feeding and taking care of it, so you feel better, which also makes the world around you feel better.

J
EFF
: [singing]
We are the world . . .

B
ERNIE
: That world is no other than us. When you made
Lebowski
, did you think that there would be so many people learning from the Dude? The worlds we create are way beyond anything we imagine, and the same goes for the effects we have on life. Every time we take care of some piece that we have a little resistance to—
it’s going to take too much of my time, it scares me
—we become more whole, more alive. We’ve dealt with stuff that’s been bugging us consciously or unconsciously, and it’s not bugging us anymore. As we do that, we help the whole interconnected life be less bugged. Something else will come up soon, and that’s okay because that’s how we keep growing. We’re taking care of everything, whether we’re aware of it or not; it’s what we call cosmic resonance. When we take care of something we think is just in us, we’re affecting the whole world. With every little step we take, we’re affecting everything and everyone.

Now, you talked about all the love you’re getting, so let me ask you: What do you do with the hate?

J
EFF
: My experience is that most of the hate that comes at me comes from myself. I judge myself,
You should be, you could be
, you know.

B
ERNIE
: I think you’ve got to honor that piece, too, and the best way of doing that is acknowledging:
That’s your opinion, man.
You don’t judge it as something bad, you don’t have to call it hate or love; it’s just another opinion. That’s how you honor it.

15.

SAY, FRIEND, YA GOT ANY MORE OF THAT GOOD SARSAPARILLA?

J
EFF
: When I turned sixty, I read the Buddhist
Five Remembrances
. Let’s see if I can remember them:

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.

I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
*

These
Remembrances
had a lot of resonance for me. When you’re young, you feel like you’re going to live forever, so you don’t think about those things. Now you do. You don’t let them stop you or give you the blues; they can even inspire you, if you know what I mean.

B
ERNIE
: You’re reciting some of the things that happened to Shakyamuni Buddha when he left the palace grounds for the first time.
*
He saw somebody who was sick, someone who was old, and finally somebody who’d died, a little like what these
Remembrances
are trying to remind you. But those meetings instilled some deep questions in him:
What’s at the bottom of all of this? What’s this life about?
I don’t know if that’s what happened to you. Realizing you’re going to die can give you the freedom to be born again.

J
EFF
: There’s a little guy inside saying,
You’re going to kick outta here pretty soon. You wanna do some stuff, and what you do will have consequences
. Consequences are a kind of immortality. All the things that you love are going to change; you’re going to lose them one way or another.

B
ERNIE
: It makes them all of a sudden very dear.

J
EFF
: Not only the things you love, but also the things you don’t love, because you know they’re going to go, too.
I’m of the nature that I’ll get sick
. I can feel my health going in a gentle kind of way, but it doesn’t bum me out so much. If I was younger, I think I would have reacted differently.

B
ERNIE
:
I’m of the nature that I will die
. Imagine really grokking that when you’re younger. Imagine if we could live our whole life that way:
Hey, I’m going to die, so let’s live!
The things I’m surrounded by are going to change and disappear, so let me enjoy their beauty as they are right now
.

J
EFF
: Remembering that the stuff that we do has ramifications and that everything is connected.

B
ERNIE
: The word
karma
has entered our Western vocabulary. It means that everything has consequences. That implies that everything is interconnected. Touch a little thing and it ripples throughout the universe, it affects everything.

J
EFF
: I’m older and I’m open to scaling down, selling the house we live in now and getting something smaller. There’s something great about that, but it also means that the game is kind of over. I sense these two impulses. One says,
Do, do, do, achieve, achieve, achieve.
The other says,
Ssssshhhh, please relax. Do you want to spend the rest of your life doing some sort of never-ending homework assignment? Ssssshhhh . . .

There’s a tale I relate to that goes back to Greek mythology, about the nymph Daphne, whom the god Apollo falls in love with. She doesn’t want him and runs away, but Apollo keeps coming:
You don’t understand who I am, baby. I am the guy who’s the king of all art, medicine, poetry, and all that stuff; you don’t know what you’re missing.
But she doesn’t want all that, it’s too intense for her, so she goes to her father and says,
Dad, here’s the deal. This god wants me. He’s coming after me, talking about all this stuff and all this drama, but I just don’t want it, you know, it’s too much, I want simplicity. Look at that beautiful tree, it doesn’t have to worry about any of this. There’s nothing extra, no separation anywhere, it’s just a tree.
And her father, a demigod himself, says, “Fine,” and turns her into a laurel tree.

Working on my movies, getting married, having kids, doing my music—that’s the stuff Apollo talks about. At some point you start cutting down to live simpler. You’ve done your thing, it’s getting time to die. Every time you take a large step, like marriage, it takes you closer to that last step. And I notice that I’m feeling this sense of
Come on, realize all the things you want to realize, because pretty soon you won’t be here, so do it now
.

I’m in the process of writing a song. I do it like I do the little heads, I don’t think too much about the words, they just come out and then I wonder what they mean. I remember meeting the artist Mayumi Oda at your Symposium for Western Socially Engaged Buddhism. I looked at her gorgeous prints and asked her, “How do you do this?” And her answer was, “It’s like I’m already dead.”

I relate to that in a big way. It’s not like
I know I’m gonna die
, which is the hopeless, rote way of looking at it, like
Nobody gets out of here alive
. I think what she meant was that it gives her a place to act from, a carefreeness that maybe she didn’t have before. You’re going to go anyway, so you no longer have to be afraid of failing or what people think about you, or any of that. I noticed that with my mom and other people who got old. You’re getting there yourself, how old are you now?

B
ERNIE
: I’m young, I’m seventy-three.

J
EFF
: You’re a baby, man. But older folks like my mom didn’t give a shit. There was no time for mincing any words, just:
This is it.
And there’s something beautiful and kind of relaxing about that.

Here’s the song I’m working on:

I’m living like I’m already dead.

Like I’ve said what I’ve said.

Like I am what I am.

Like Popeye and my mom,

Like my dad and this song.

I’m gone, and here I come again.

I’m living like I’m already dead.

Juggling diamonds and lead.

Jumping over the sky.

And I don’t care if I can sift through all this sand.

Cuz I’m gone, and here I come again.

I’m living like I’m already dead.

Turning black and white to red.

My kids know that I love ’em.

And I’ve done what I do.

Magically, I found you.

I’m gone, and here I come again.

I don’t know where I’m going with it. It conjures up a feeling of being here and not being here, so you might as well do what you need to do.

Gone, gone, gone
. How does that go?

B
ERNIE
:
Gaté, Gaté, Paragaté, Parasamgaté
. It’s a mantra at the end of the
Heart Sutra
.
Gone, gone, completely gone, gone beyond
.

J
EFF
: What is that about?

B
ERNIE
: It means
gone to the other shore
. But again, the other shore is right under our feet
,
so it’s back to
: Row, row, row your boat.

J
EFF
: Live your life, only this time live it as if you’re gone or not there, as if you’re already dead.

B
ERNIE
: In Zen, when we push people to realize the state of not knowing, completely letting go, we’ll use phrases like
You’ve got to kill yourself
, or
You’ve got to die on the cushion
. What we really mean is that you have to get into the state of
The Dude is not in
. It’s a little like you say, live as if you’re gone, live without attachment to who or what Jeff is. But at the very instant that you die you must get reborn in order to do things. That could be what you were alluding to when you talked about your mother, who had no patience for nonsense anymore. You do things as if you’re already dead, which means that you can do a lot. In some way, that can really empower you to be whatever you want to be.

You could have also done that much earlier in your life, say at the age of five:
Man,
I’ve lived a whole five years. I’ve lived my life, and now I can do whatever I want
. You could do that at the age of twenty:
I’ve lived a whole twenty years; I’ve lived my life and now I can do what I want
. You can live your life like that whenever you wish; you don’t have to wait till you get old.

J
EFF
: What is living your life? Is it doing what you want?

B
ERNIE
: For me, it’s doing what comes up, like the jazz band. It’s not just you or me, and it’s not just everybody else, it’s the vibe of the whole scene. But you’re your main instrument and you’re doing your thing completely. You’re not thinking twice, you’re not saying,
Hey, I shouldn’t play this riff
or
I gotta think about it
. You’re jamming. Things happen, life happens, and you’re jamming.

J
EFF
: You get in the zone and you’re gone, but something’s coming through you somehow.

But all this is just our opinion, man.

B
ERNIE
: Exactly, it’s just our opinion.

J
EFF
: This is fun, Bern. Enjoyed the hang.

B
ERNIE
: So, Jeff, do you think we’ve been rowing our boat merrily down the stream?

J
EFF
: Can’t help but, Bernsky.

B
ERNIE
: We haven’t gotten into any fistfights.

J
EFF
: No, no.

B
ERNIE
: Or stuff like that. It’s been great jamming with you.

J
EFF
: I’ll say.
[singing]
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream.

B
ERNIE
: [singing with Jeff]
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream.

J
EFF
: Now let’s do it as a round. You start.

B
ERNIE
:
Row, row, row your boat.
[in a round]

J
EFF
:
Row, row, row your boat.
[laughter] I fucked up! [laughter]
Life is but a dream!
[laughter]

B
ERNIE
: That was great. Let’s do it again sometime.

J
EFF
: Yeah.