The Dude and the Zen Master Read online

  ALSO BY JEFF BRIDGES

  Pictures by Jeff Bridges

  ALSO BY BERNIE GLASSMAN

  Infinite Circle: Teachings in Zen by Bernie Glassman

  Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Living a Life That Matters by Bernie Glassman and Rick Fields

  Bearing Witness: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Making Peace by Bernie Glassman

  On Zen Practice: Body, Breath, and Mind by Bernie Glassman and Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi

  Hazy Moon of Enlightenment: On Zen Practice III (Zen Writings Series) by Bernie Glassman and Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi

  On Zen Practice (Zen Writings Series) by Bernie Glassman and Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins St., Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2013 by Zen Peacemakers Inc. and Jeff Bridges

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bridges, Jeff, date.

  The Dude and the Zen master / Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-60075-7

  1. Big Lebowski (Motion picture). 2. Philosophy in motion pictures. 3. Zen Buddhism—Doctrines. 4. Conduct of life. I. Glassman, Bernard (Bernard Tetsugen). II. Title.

  PN1997.B444B75 2012 2012037782

  791.43'72—dc23

  Photographs here, here, here, here, here, and here by Alan Kozlowski

  Photograph here by Jeff Bridges

  To all the hungry spirits

  CONTENTS

  Also by Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction by Jeff Bridges

  Introduction by Bernie Glassman

  JUST THROW THE FU**ING BALL, MAN!

  1. Sometimes You Eat the Bear, and Sometimes, Well, He Eats You

  2. It’s Down There Somewhere, Let Me Take Another Look

  3. Dude, You’re Being Very UnDude

  THE DUDE ABIDES AND THE DUDE IS NOT IN

  4. Yeah, Well, Ya Know, That’s Just Like, uh, Your Opinion, Man

  5. Phone’s Ringin’, Dude

  6. New Sh** Has Come to Light

  THAT RUG REALLY TIED THE ROOM TOGETHER, DID IT NOT?

  7. You Know, Dude, I Myself Dabbled in Pacifism at One Point. Not in ’Nam, Of Course.

  8. You Mean Coitus?

  9. What Makes a Man, Mr. Lebowski?

  10. What Do You Do, Mr. Lebowski?

  11. Nothing’s Fu**ed, Dude

  ENJOYIN’ MY COFFEE

  12. Sorry, I Wasn’t Listening

  13. Strikes and Gutters, Ups and Downs

  14. Some Burgers, Some Beers, a Few Laughs. Our Fu**ing Troubles Are Over, Dude.

  15. Say, Friend, Ya Got Any More of That Good Sarsaparilla?

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  JEFF’S INTRODUCTION

  So . . . my buddy Bernie Glassman says to me one day, “Did you know that the Dude in The Big Lebowski is considered by many Buddhists to be a Zen master?”

  I said, “What the fuck are you talkin’ ’bout, man?”

  He said, “Oh yeah.”

  I said, “You gotta be kidding. We never talked about Zen or Buddhism while we were making Lebowski. The brothers* never said anything about that.”

  “Yeah,” laughed Bernie, “just look at their name—the Koan brothers.”

  Koans are Zen stories that only make sense if you can see that life and reality are different from your opinions about them. Most of the famous ones were written in China a long time ago.

  Bernie went on: “The Big Lebowski is filled with koans, only they’re in the ‘parlance of our time,’ to quote the Dude.”

  “What are you talkin’ about, man? What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “It’s filled with ’em, like: The Dude abides—very Zen, man; or The Dude is not in—classic Zen; or Donny, you’re out of your element, or That rug really tied the room together. It’s loaded with ’em.”

  “Really?” I said.

  Now, my buddy Bernie is a Zen master himself. In the early sixties he left his job as an aeronautical engineer at McDonnell Douglas to study at the Zen Center of Los Angeles with his teacher, Maezumi Roshi, a great Japanese master who helped bring Zen to this country. Bernie became one of the first American teachers. He not only started the Zen Peacemakers, he also built homes for homeless families, child-care centers, housing and medical treatment for folks with AIDS, and companies—including a big bakery—to hire people who didn’t have jobs. That bakery won an award one year for best New York cheesecake and now makes brownie products for Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. He’s considered a major player in socially engaged Buddhism around the world.

  I met Bernie at a dinner thrown by a neighbor of mine for him and Ram Dass, author of Be Here Now and many other wonderful books. I sat between these two guys and had a great time. Bernie and I really hit it off; we both cared about a lot of the same stuff.

  This is where Lebowski comes in. Bernie has been interested for some time now in making Zen more accessible to our times and culture, relevant and down-to-earth, and he felt that Lebowski did that big-time. So he asked me if I wanted to write a book about that.

  I said, “Okay.”

  So here’s what we did. We went up to my ranch in Montana with our fellow jamster, Alan Kozlowski, and jammed for five days. Alan was the photographer/recorder cat; he recorded our dialogue, took pictures, gave his opinions, etc. After that we went home. Bernie’s wife, Eve, started working with the transcripts. We met some more, hung out on the phone and on Skype, tweaked some things, and . . . here it is.

  To me, this book is sort of like a snakeskin. A snakeskin is something you might find on the side of the road and make something out of—a belt, say, or a hatband. The snake itself heads off doing more snake stuff—getting it on with lady snakes, eating rats, making more snakeskins, et cetera.

  I look at movies the same way. The final movie is the snakeskin, which can be pretty interesting and valuable. The snake is what happens while we’re making the movie—the relationships, the experience. I try to open wide and get really connected with the people I’m working with—the director, the cast, the production crew—all of us cooking in a safe and generous space, trying to get the job done. And we have to get that fire going as soon as we can, because our time together is finite, two or three months, maybe six. That’s all the time we’ve got to come up with what
we intend. Or, every once in a wonderful while, with something that transcends all our desires and intentions. I love it when that happens, and it does quite often because of all the unknowns involved. I think that’s why I’m still making movies.

  The actual “snake” of this book was the hang, the jam, with Bernie, Eve, Alan, and everyone else who helped. It was the chance to dance, create, be intimate, and be free.

  So, here it is. Hope you dig it.

  Hope’s interesting, isn’t it? I can’t turn hope off, it’s hopeless.

  Jeff Bridges, Santa Barbara, California

  BERNIE’S INTRODUCTION

  All my life I’ve been interested in expressing my truth in ways that almost anyone can understand. A famous Japanese Zen master, Hakuun Yasutani Roshi, said that unless you can explain Zen in words that a fisherman will comprehend, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Some fifty years ago a UCLA professor told me the same thing about applied mathematics. We like to hide from the truth behind foreign-sounding words or mathematical lingo. There’s a saying: The truth is always encountered but rarely perceived. If we don’t perceive it, we can’t help ourselves and we can’t much help anyone else.

  I met the Dude on DVD sometime in the late 1990s. A few years later I met Jeff Bridges in Santa Barbara and we started hanging, as he likes to put it, often while smoking cigars. Jeff has done movies from an early age; less known, but almost as long-standing, is his commitment to ending world hunger. I was an aeronautical engineer and mathematician in my early years, but mostly I’ve taught Zen Buddhism, and that’s where we both met. Not just in meditation, which is what most people think of when they hear Zen, but the Zen of action, of living freely in the world without causing harm, of relieving our own suffering and the suffering of others.

  We soon discovered that we would often be joined by another shadowy figure, somebody called the Dude. We both liked his way of putting things and it’s fun to learn from someone you can’t see. Only his words were so pithy they needed more expounding; hence, this book.

  May it meet with his approval, and may it benefit all beings.

  Bernie Glassman, Montague, Massachusetts

  1.

  SOMETIMES YOU EAT THE BEAR, AND SOMETIMES, WELL, HE EATS YOU

  JEFF: We’re making the movie The Big Lebowski, and everyone who’s seen the movie knows that the Dude and Walter dig bowling, right? Now, I’ve bowled a little bit in the past, but I’m not an expert like the Dude. So the Coen brothers hire a master bowler to teach John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, and me how to bowl. The master bowler is a world champion and he brings his assistant along.

  I ask the bowling master, “How do you think the Dude might bowl? Does he prepare for a long time? Does he have to get his mind set? Is he like Art Carney in The Honeymooners?” Whenever Art Carney would be asked to sign something, say a document, Jackie Gleason would tell him, “Sign there, Norton,” and Carney would start twitching and fidgeting, carrying on for so long that Gleason would finally yell, “SIGN THE DOCUMENT!” So I ask the bowling master if the Dude might be like that.

  His assistant starts laughing so hard he just about pees in his pants. The master bowler shakes his head and rolls his eyes, looking embarrassed, so I ask him what’s going on.

  “Oh, nothing, nothing,” the assistant says.

  The master says, “Go on, you can tell him.”

  The assistant says, “No, you tell him.”

  Finally the master tells his story. It seems that years ago he tried to bowl like in the book Zen in the Art of Archery. That book teaches the student to completely let go of his ego in order to hit the bull’s-eye. If the mind is settled and clear, the pins are practically down before the bowler cocks his hand back to throw the ball. So the bowling master tried to get into that mind-set and ended up like Art Carney. He had certain tics to release tension in his body and he’d do this little stress-relieving dance that would go on five, ten minutes, all in the middle of a tournament. Meantime, his teammates are sitting on the bench doing their version of Jackie Gleason: “JUST THROW THE BALL!”

  Things got so bad he couldn’t throw the ball at all. He would not release it from his hand because he couldn’t get into the right mind-set. Finally he went to a shrink and they worked it out.

  “So what do you do now?” I ask him.

  “I just throw the fucking ball! I don’t think.”

  I dug that. And isn’t it interesting that after all that, you never once see the Dude bowl in the entire movie. So is thinking the problem? We’re so good at it; our brains are set up to think, man.

  BERNIE: Thinking’s not the problem. We freeze up because we expect a certain result or because we want things to be perfect. We can get so fixated that we can’t do anything. Goals are fine; what I don’t like is getting caught up in expectations or attachments to a final outcome. So the question is, how do you play freely?

  JEFF: Just throw the fucking ball!

  Yeah right, only sometimes I care so much. When I was a kid, I stuttered pretty badly. Even now I still stutter every once in a while, feeling like there’s something I want to share but I can’t get it out. I become anxious and that causes things to get jammed up.

  It happens in movies, too. I’ll often worry for a long time about a big scene: How am I going to do this? Meantime, there’s another little scene I’m not concerned about at all, I’m sure I know what to do there. Now comes the day when I’m filming, and the big scene is a snap while the little one is trouble. And I’m reflecting, All that time you were worried about the wrong thing! Mark Twain said, “I am a very old man and have suffered a great many misfortunes, most of which never happened.”

  My brother Beau turned me on to Alan Watts by giving me his book The Wisdom of Insecurity when I just started high school. Later I read his other books and listened to his tapes. I’ve always liked Watts because he wasn’t pompous, didn’t think of himself as a guru or anything like that, didn’t want to convince you of anything, he just liked to share his thoughts with you. And one of them was that if you’re going to wait to get all the information you think you need before you act, you’ll never act because there’s an infinite amount of information out there.

  BERNIE: And it’s constantly changing. That’s why it makes no sense to be attached to outcomes. Only how do you not get attached to outcomes?

  JEFF: Just throw that fucking ball. Just do it. Get into the thing, see where it takes you.

  I was working with Sidney Lumet on this movie with Jane Fonda called The Morning After. His method was to run through the whole movie twice every day. He would tape out the dimensions of all the sets on this gymnasium floor so that we would have a sense of the space we would be acting in. His general direction to us was: “I don’t want you to indicate how you’re going to do this, I want you to do it. Don’t save it. Learn your lines as best you can, get off book, and then just do it.”

  Sidney was an actor himself; he wasn’t afraid of rehearsals. Some actors and directors have this fear that if you rehearse too much, you won’t do well when you’re actually shooting. You’ll do your best work—you’ll be your freshest and most spontaneous—in rehearsal, and when the actual filming takes place you’ll be stale and just re-create what you did before. I hear their concern. When the camera’s rolling, I want it to capture me discovering the character, not re-creating what I discovered or figured out days ago. What I admire and strive for is the kind of acting that shows no apparent obligation to the audience; the audience is just a fly on the wall. In life we’re spontaneous, we just orgasm, we just go.

  Sidney wanted it fresh, too, but his way of getting this was different. I think he was kind of practicing orgasm, practicing not-practicing. In rehearsals he wanted you to get facile with the role and bring as much to it as you could without holding back. Each time you did that you discovered little things that informed the next time you did it. You had to do it over and over and over again and still come back to emptiness, the place where nothing has been f
igured out. That’s the trap. If you can’t get back to emptiness, you’re just saying words instead of doing the work, you’re just repeating instead of discovering it anew each time.

  With Sidney, we practiced starting from scratch. Twice a day we went through the whole movie, so we also learned the story that was being told. Don’t forget, when you actually shoot a movie you’re shooting out of sequence, so you don’t get really steeped in the story even though that’s the most important thing. In fact, when you shoot the scenes out of sequence, there’s the danger that each particular scene will seem so important that you’ll put too much emphasis on it. It’s easy to forget that a story is being told.

  When we went through the whole movie, we didn’t work the scene, we just ran through it once. It was like practicing freshness. He used to say that that was the only way we were going to peel the onion, that each time we did it we were going to discover new things as long as we were fully engaged.

  On the day we actually shot the movie, it was a snap. Once we got all the costumes on and were on the set, the scenes just took one or two takes; Sidney would be picking up the batteries, saying, “Let’s go, bubeleh,” and move on to the next setup. We’d all be going at a pretty good clip, and you know what? It felt even fresher than it did during the rehearsals because we were in costume and on the actual location.