The Dude and the Zen Master (6 page)

J
EFF
: You can respect opinions. You both have the same thing going on, only you have your version of it and someone else has theirs.

B
ERNIE
: One of the most famous figures in Zen in China is known as the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng. He was an illiterate peasant who cut wood to support his mother and himself. One day he goes to the market to sell his wood and hears a monk chanting a line from the
Diamond Sutra
: “Abiding nowhere, raise the Mind.” If you can abide nowhere, you are raising the mind of compassion. So here’s this guy who knows nothing about Buddhism, a woodcutter, but when he hears that verse he has a profound enlightenment experience.

J
EFF
: Did he know what the words meant?

B
ERNIE
: No. Enlightenment doesn’t happen because you understand some words. You could say that the words triggered his transformation, but actually it was his whole life that brought him to that place of hearing a verse and experiencing a deep enlightenment.

So he asked the monk where he heard this, and the monk said that there’s a monastery up north where they teach this kind of stuff. He goes north and the abbot says, “Why are you here? You’re a southerner.”
In that period, the northern Chinese considered the southern Chinese inferior. According to the story, Huineng answered: “In the Way there is no difference between north and south
.
” The true nature of the Way, of life, is that it’s all one, there are no differences.

It turns out that the abbot was getting ready to retire and was looking for a successor. It was a big monastery, with some monks who’d been training for twenty, thirty years; naturally, everybody thought one of them would take over. But the abbot recognized Huineng as his successor just from this answer. Still, instead of accepting him into the monastery, the abbot sent him to work in the rice mill.

One night he went to the rice mill and told Huineng that he’s making him his successor, the next in the lineage of Zen masters. But he warned him that the others would kill him, because they’d been training for so long and believed it should be one of them, not some illiterate woodcutter from the south, so he advised him to run for his life. He gave Huineng the robe and the bowl, which are signs of transmission, and Huineng escaped.

Sure enough, one of the head monks, a former general, chased him down. When Huineng saw that the monk was catching up with him, he left the robe and bowl on the ground and hid behind a rock. The monk tried to pick them up, but he couldn’t lift them. Full of fear, he apologized to Huineng and asked him for a teaching. Huineng asked him: “What was your original face before your parents were born?” That’s like asking, what is there before your parents and their parents, before anything and anyone you can conceive of? At that point, the monk had an enlightenment experience. He thanked Huineng, but Huineng told him not to forget his many years of practice and training under the old abbot. He’s your teacher, Huineng said, this is just a moment, like the crest of a wave that has traveled the seas for a long time.

Certain moments can set something off, but it won’t happen without lifetimes of work beforehand.

Abiding nowhere, raise the mind of compassion
. The Dude abides nowhere, which is the same as saying that the Dude abides everywhere. The Dude is not attached to some self-image, identity, or a life narrative. Since he abides nowhere, he is free to abide everywhere.

J
EFF
: As he says in his phone message,
The Dude is not in
.

B
ERNIE
: If you abide in one particular place, you’re stuck, because you’re attached. On the other hand, if you abide everywhere, in the whole world, you’re not attached to anything, so you’re free. As soon as you get attached—
Hey, he peed on my rug!
—you’re abiding somewhere and the suffering begins.

J
EFF
: Shunryu Suzuki, who founded the San Francisco Zen Center, said that if something is not paradoxical, it’s not true. If you say that abiding nowhere is the same as abiding everywhere, then abiding and not abiding are kind of the same thing, too. It can get very confusing, and true at the same time.

B
ERNIE
: I believe that’s because we’re steeped in Aristotelian logic, where you can’t abide and not abide at the same time. But light is both a wave and a particle. When you’re stuck to it just being one or the other, you don’t see the whole thing. So we need a new kind of paradigm, one that will help us perceive that you can be here and not be here at the same time.

J
EFF
: Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who preceded Aristotle, was the guy who said that you could never step in the same river twice, because the river’s always changing. And I’m always changing, too; I’m not the person I was a minute ago. So one does not equal one, because there are no two ones that are exactly the same.

B
ERNIE
: And that’s your opinion, man.

J
EFF
: That’s right, that’s my opinion.
Two . . . two . . . two mints in one!

5.

PHONE’S RINGIN’, DUDE

J
EFF
: We got shook out in L.A. with the earthquake in 1994. That earthquake was something; have you ever been in one?

B
ERNIE
: There was a big one in Los Angeles way back, around 1970, and the Valley really got hit. I was sitting in the meditation hall. The building shook pretty hard but we sat through the whole thing.

J
EFF
: We were living on the edge of Santa Monica Canyon, on a street called Adelaide. Later I saw a small map of the faults and realized that we had our own little fault right around our house. I usually sleep naked, and that night—BOOM! I thought it was war or an invasion from outer space. Glass was breaking all over the place. I got up and raced to the other end of the house to get the kids, trying not to step on the glass. And then there were the aftershocks. I’d lived in L.A. all my life, but I’d never experienced an earthquake like that one. It would stop and then go on, again and again.

I still remember the problem of turning off the gas in the house. You want to do that right away in such a situation, and I always think of that as a man’s thing, you know, going down to the basement in the middle of an earthquake while upstairs your wife and kids are standing under the doorway. But I was away so much making movies that I had no idea where the gas valve was, so instead it was my wife, Sue, who went down to turn it off while I huddled upstairs with my daughters under the doorway.

We spent the rest of the night in the front yard in sleeping bags, wondering what was going to happen. But when we woke up, life was back to normal, guys pedaling on their bikes, everybody acting almost as if nothing had happened, in complete denial.

But it had a big impact on me. We rely so much on the ground being stable and it’s a shock when it starts moving and shaking instead. That night left me with a profound feeling of fear and the realization that there was absolutely nothing to count on. Before the earthquake I counted on the earth staying in one place; I didn’t think about it, I just took it for granted. But afterward I realized that anything can happen. I also became aware of the possible function of denial in allowing us to carry on in some sort of fashion, helping us forget how precarious and transitory the universe really is.

People had made an adjustment.

B
ERNIE
: In life we have to make adjustments because everything is always changing. You know what this reminds me of? Hens lay eggs to have little chicks. When the chick is ready to come out of the egg, it pecks at the eggshell:
peck peck peck peck peck
. Hearing that, and sensing it’s the right time, the hen clucks a little bit and also goes
peck peck peck peck peck
, using her beak to peck from the outside. Together, they break the shell and the chick is born. If the hen does it too soon, the chick dies, because it’s not fully formed. If the hen does it too late, the chick suffocates. So timing is really important here.

In the same way, in every instant there’s a new universe or a new me about to be born. If you’re attuned enough, you can hear the pecking of the universe saying,
Peck peck peck peck peck, I want to be born!
Maybe it’s a new Jeff that wants to be born, or a new Bernie, or a whole new world. I’m outside and I want to help, so I have to peck back. But what tool do I use to give birth to this new world? I’m not a hen. I’ve got choices. I’ve got a screwdriver, I’ve got love, I’ve got an elbow, I’ve got lots of different tools.

We have a figure in Zen, sort of a fat guy, looks a little bit like Santa Claus without a beard.

J
EFF
: I know him; it’s Hotei, right? Sue gave me a beautiful wood sculpture of Hotei to put in my office.

B
ERNIE
: Hotei’s got this bag full of tools and those tools are everything in the world. He’s got talcum powder, he’s got condoms, he’s got a screwdriver.

J
EFF
: Vibrator in there, you think?

B
ERNIE
: He’s got a vibrator, he’s got books, whatever you can think of. That bag contains every object that exists, and he walks around the marketplace talking to everybody he meets and taking care of them using those tools.

You know who that reminds me of? You live in Santa Barbara. I used to live there, and whenever I saw Jonathan Winters walking around Montecito he always reminded me of Hotei.

J
EFF
: Did you hang with him at all? I first met him with my parents when I was a kid. Some thirty years later I ran into him in Santa Barbara shopping in a pharmacy aisle. I felt from him an immediate familiarity. He went straight into character with the raspy Maude Frickert voice, and I assumed some bizarre voice. We just kept going and going. Finally we both broke out of it and started talking about painting. He paints, too, you know.

B
ERNIE
: Hotei is a little like that. He walks places and hears the pecking—
peck peck peck peck
—of what needs to be born, and he reaches into the bag and pulls out the right tool to allow the birth to happen. In Zen, our ideal of training is that we become simple, like Hotei, like a mensch. Nothing special, just Jonathan Winters walking around Montecito talking to anybody. We listen to the pecking of the universe wanting to be born and take out an appropriate tool to help that happen.

So Hotei, who can be a man or a woman, is a great Bodhisattva,
*
a great mensch. To the extent that he abides nowhere, which means that he abides everywhere, he can help more people.

J
EFF
: Let me tell you what popped into my mind: I’m having a great outing with my buddy Dawa, a Tibetan Buddhist. We’re walking in the hills of Santa Barbara to an old hotel that burned down about a hundred years ago. We’re feeling like Indiana Jones exploring the old stone foundations. There are also these great hot springs up there. We go in and the mineral water bubbling out of the ground is just the perfect temperature, not one degree too hot or too cold. We soak in all those great minerals, feeling great, and then we start going back, talking dharma stuff together and getting off on it. We notice that as we walk side by side, one of us may stumble or even slip and the other catches him reflexively, just like you catch yourself when you’re going off balance. And I’m thinking,
Oh yeah, this is interconnectedness, man, self as other, this is oneness, this is nirvana
,
you know, walking down the hill like we’re one and feeling great.

All of a sudden, a crazy man comes down the trail—I mean, quivering crazy. And he’s pissed, frightening, like a demon or something. And all my airy-fairy stuff goes WHOMP! Instead I start thinking,
I hope he doesn’t hurt me. I’m glad I’ve got my dogs, I’m glad I’ve got this Tibetan guy, maybe he knows some kind of jujitsu to defend us.
There’s nothing in my heart like
What can I do to help you, man? You look a little troubled
. He passes us and then he looks back and says, “You want to fuck with me?” And I’m not so high anymore and full of all those ideas.

Life does that to you constantly, like the earthquake. You think you’ve got it together? WHOMP! And what we try to do is get one up on life, figure it out, get enlightened, whatever, just so it won’t trip us up again.

B
ERNIE
: We all have different degrees of realization, of seeing the oneness of life, and our job is to actualize this understanding. It’s a lifelong, endless path. But you know what your story reminds me of? Those dolls that are full of sand at the bottom. You push them and they oscillate quickly from side to side, and then come back to center. So as you practice, you’re filling up with sand. At first, even a weak force hits you and almost knocks you over, but you oscillate in big arcs till you come up standing again. As you practice more and more, it takes a stronger and stronger force to get you knocked over, and even then the oscillations aren’t so big, and before you know it you’re back to center.

J
EFF
: It’s not like you
never
get knocked over.

B
ERNIE
: No matter how much sand you put in, no matter how much you practice, there will always be some force that’s big enough to knock you over. Life’s not about not getting knocked over, it’s about how fast you come back. So if you think,
Oh, I got knocked over and that’s a sign that I’m not practicing well enough
, all that happened was that you met a situation that was a little bigger than you, and that gave you a new opportunity for more practice.

J
EFF
: Situations like that sometimes cause me to shy away from taking chances and doing things, because I feel that nothing I do is ever going to be enough. Or maybe it’s always enough.

B
ERNIE
: What matters is that you do it; everything else is extra.

J
EFF
: Speaking of the hen and the chicken, the hen doesn’t just have one egg, she’s got a bunch, so which does she tend to? What do I tend to? Do I tend to the pain in myself, to someone who wants help, or to that piece of wood over there that I’d like to carve something out of?

B
ERNIE
: It’s like your body. Your wrist and finger get cut. Which one are you going to tend to first? Naturally, you deal with the wrist first.

J
EFF
: Tending to the wound that needs it the most. Life as triage.

B
ERNIE
: There’s only a problem if you get frustrated.
Oh, there’s too much going on, I can’t take care of everything.
I cut my wrist and I cut my finger, it’s too much to handle!
People can get so frustrated they don’t do anything.

J
EFF
: Being alive, you have to do something. Not doing anything is also some kind of action.

B
ERNIE
: When he was very young, my son, Marc, would look at his plate, and if it had foods on it that he didn’t like he would say, “Gross choices.” But even with gross choices, you have to do something. All the second-guessing and thinking—
Should I have done more? Should I have done less?
—are extra. You open up to the degree that you do; all the rest is internal commentary, which is not necessary. It’s already done, man.

J
EFF
: Like Popeye’s
I am what I am
, right?
And that’s all that I am
.

B
ERNIE
:
I am that I am.
That was God’s answer to Moses
when Moses asked Him for His name.
*
My wife, Eve, likes to say:
That’s that
.

J
EFF
: Going back to the chicken pecking, you have to be sensitive to hear the pecking. But you can have too much sensitivity and then you often need earplugs, you know? We say that we want to be more alive and sensitive to hear the pecking and respond in a timely way, but sometimes life can get too loud:
Please, there’s a racket, I need some earplugs
, or
It’s too bright, I need some dark glasses here
. To use the analogy of the hen and the egg, maybe the hen has really fine hearing. She thinks she hears the chick pecking so she pecks back at the egg, only it’s too early and the chick dies. Or else she’s covered up her overly sensitive ears and now can’t hear too well.

B
ERNIE
: Meantime, the little chick inside, or whatever needs to be born, is screaming,
Let me outta here! Let me outta here!
In some sense, once the screaming starts it’s already too late. So you befriend yourself and say,
Okay, next time I’ll respond earlier, I’ll listen better
. In my opinion, the screaming is a sign not that you were too sensitive but that you waited too long. Timing’s critical. If we wait too long, the chick suffocates.

J
EFF
: Sometimes it feels so intense that I need to dull myself, or just try to relax, like I do with cigars. You also like cigars. How do cigars jibe with, you know, the view that the body is the temple and all that stuff?

B
ERNIE
: The body
is
the temple, so you should offer it some incense. There are a number of traditions where tobacco is used almost as a sacrament, like with the Sufis and the Native Americans. But I don’t want to put it on such a high plane, I just dig cigars.