The Dude and the Zen Master Read online

  If you do that, you’re going to, little by little, grok the interconnectedness of things. You’re out there serving others, who are aspects of yourself. Buddhism, of course, is known for its practice of meditation for the sake of awakening; I think we can awaken through social engagement, too.

  JEFF: I was just thinking of Jon Kabat-Zinn* and his expression the full catastrophe. The whole picture is kind of catastrophic. He also talks a bit about hopelessness, right? There’s the hope of reaching some kind of perfect attainment or happiness, and then that goes bust. But hope continues to bubble up, you know?

  BERNIE: I have lots of hope. Expectation is the bummer; that’s where I get into trouble. As long as hope is without expectation or attachment, there’s no problem. For instance, I like to make vows. The first of the Four Great Bodhisattva Vows is: Beings are numberless, I vow to free them. That’s a pretty big vow and it will cause me to work very hard. The important thing is not to have expectations.

  There are things you want to see happen, too, like meeting President Obama’s goal that no child will be hungry by 2015. If you were to expect that, it would be a little tricky, because the odds of it happening are still pretty small. But if your hope and energy are strong enough, you’re going to work like crazy to get it done. So the loving action is important.

  JEFF: And that’s the role of the Bodhisattva. But do beings need freeing? If it’s all one body doing its thing, what needs freeing?

  BERNIE: If you experience yourself as one body, then you’re right, there’s no problem. The Bodhisattva works in the world of delusion, with people who suffer because they see themselves as separate from others. She vows to awaken not for her own sake, but in order to relieve everyone’s suffering. She doesn’t sit around smoking a cigar without doing anything. Bodhisattvas, by the way, smoke a lot of cigars,* but they also do things. No matter where you are, to whatever degree of enlightenment that you have, you should do the best you can.

  JEFF: Is a mensch sort of a Bodhisattva?

  BERNIE: I think it’s exactly the same thing. He’s a little like the Dude, his good deeds don’t draw any attention. He’s a Bodhisattva in hiding, humble and unassuming.

  JEFF: One of the things I like to do for my mensch friends is give them a little head to let them know I love them. Whenever I make some kind of pottery piece, I always have a hunk of clay left over, and I let my hands go to town with it without thinking too much. So over the years all these small heads have popped out; they’re almost like my dolls. Each has its own aspect, its own little vibe and personality, just like people in the world, and they’re all aspects of me. Some look pissed off, some look startled, some look like they’re singing. Generally, I give them to people I love. I’ve given you a little head and you seemed to enjoy it.

  BERNIE: Definitely. I call him Charlie and I’ve taken him to all the places where I work: Brazil, Israel, Palestine, India, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, he’s been with me everywhere.

  Bernie’s head, Charlie.

  JEFF: So this thought came to my mind: Why don’t I do a project called Head for Peace and send these heads out to work for peace?

  That set off a whole stream of different feelings and emotions. One said, Well, yeah, but I don’t want these guys to go, I’m really fond of them. Another said, Nobody’s going to like these heads like I do. They’re just hunks of clay, but I’ve invested a certain something in them. I don’t name them or anything like that, but I put them in my office, they’re all over the place, and they like to hang out together. Or maybe I like to put all these different beings, or expressions of humanity, together. So I was split about holding on to these heads or letting them go. When did I first talk to you about this, five or six years ago?

  BERNIE: Around nine years ago.

  JEFF: And you said, “Let’s do it!” But I wasn’t ready: No, it’s gotta cook, you know, the bread’s still in the oven. So now, nine years later, I’m ready to pull the bread out. We decided to do this book, Head for Peace, with the head that I gave you on the cover.

  We both feel that feeding each other and ourselves is a big signpost on the journey toward peace. I’ve been involved with the movement to end hunger internationally, and more recently in our country, for a long time. You started these Zen Houses and Let All Eat Cafés, so I thought that this Head for Peace project would be a way for us to play together. Each head is for sale with the proceeds going to Zen Peacemakers. It comes resting on a pillow in a nice little box, which also serves as the stand for the head, and can be put on display.

  The head sits on your desk, or wherever you want to put it, and somebody might come around and say, What’s that? And you say, That’s a Head for Peace. And he says, What do you mean? So this gives you the opportunity to talk about your peace work and the Let All Eat Cafés, and hopefully it grows into a whole family of people who want to take care of others. And maybe every couple of years there’s an invitation to bring all the heads to one place, because, like I said, they like to hang out together. And people can trade heads or hang out together, just like their heads. It’s a work in progress.

  Say something about the Let All Eat Cafés.

  BERNIE: The Let All Eat Cafés are also a work in progress. Maybe they started in 1991, when I went to live for a while on the streets of the Bowery in New York City, and I invited people to come with me. We ate at different soup kitchens and churches. Some of the churches, usually Baptist, sent out food trucks to reach street people. That’s when it hit me that there should be a different-style soup kitchen that will give service with dignity and love.

  What do I mean by that? The food, of course, would be free. Let them all eat. But the style of service would be such that you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between poor and rich, homeless and housed. Everybody would eat together. The servers might be the homeless people, those who’re underfed, or they might be millionaires volunteering to work in the café.

  For example, we had a prototype of a Let All Eat Café in Montague, Massachusetts, which served maybe fifty to a hundred people every Saturday. It was family-oriented, which was very important for me. In the soup kitchens I’d gone to on our street retreats, it was rare to see families with kids. Little by little, I discovered that many families don’t want to bring their children there, because they don’t feel they’re safe, or sometimes they don’t want their kids to feel looked down on. I wanted our café to be a place where you want to bring your kids and they want to come. So we had music programs and games, the kids created puppets and did shows and arts and crafts. They went on short hikes into the woods and they also learned how to garden.

  The meals were served buffet-style but we put out a menu, and on the back we taped a dollar bill. People were told that they can keep the dollar bill or, if they wished, they could put it in a pot to be used for food for the next meal. My sense is that kids should learn at a young age about money and giving. European cities have a big street scene, with mimes, bands, and all kinds of clowns on the streets. Families walk by, pause to watch, and the parents give their kids a little money to give the entertainers. Kids love to be able to give. That’s what I mean by service with dignity, service with love.

  Meantime, the adults were offered mindfulness-based stress-reduction programs, counseling, massage, and acupuncture, as well as some medical and dental treatment. An AA meeting took place. The food was nutritious because much of it came from our own organic garden or from other local farms. It was the full monty. That’s why we called it a café instead of a soup kitchen, and our goal was to make it a model for cafés across the country. We’re now developing something similar in the neighboring city of Greenfield, Massachusetts.

  JEFF: Let All Eat.

  BERNIE: Somebody once wrote a little note saying, “Thanks for the café. I eat in many soup kitchens, and I really appreciate the food here. But what I appreciate most is that I don’t feel needy.” That feeling of neediness, of separation between you and someone else, was exactly what I hoped would di
sappear. We’d like to train more people in this methodology so that more such cafés can arise.

  JEFF: It’s like bringing everybody to the table, not leaving anyone outside. We’re all here on this earth together.

  BERNIE: Exactly. If we can get to the moon, we can feed our kids.

  JEFF: And we made it to the moon.

  11.

  NOTHING’S FU**ED, DUDE

  JEFF: People complain a lot about the notion of instant gratification in our society: I want this now, I want it this way, and I’m gonna get it, watch me, boom! But since everything is changing and new shit is always coming to light, we can always learn, right? Let’s say someone gets drunk. She wakes up hung over and thinks: Oh yeah, that wasn’t such a good idea. She learns something.

  BERNIE: Unless she likes going unconscious with alcohol and wants to repeat that again and again. If you hang on to the gratification, new shit can’t come to light because you’re attached to it and will try to repeat it.

  The other side of that is someone who wakes up in the morning and thinks, I can’t believe what I did, I’m so screwed up! If she obsesses over it, that will also keep her in the same place. Either way, she has to let go, and that’ll move her toward less suffering. It may not move her closer to some expectation she has, but overall it will move her in the direction of less suffering. That’s just my opinion, and it’s a driving force for my practice.

  JEFF: Shakyamuni Buddha said in the Four Noble Truths* that life is dukkha, suffering. Is he saying there’s a way to get rid of that entirely?

  BERNIE: He said there’s a cause to suffering and therefore a path out of it, which is described in the last of the Four Noble Truths.

  JEFF: Are there people who have ended suffering completely?

  BERNIE: I doubt it. When I teach, I encounter all kinds of ideas about delusion and enlightenment. For instance, I tell people to write down the names of all the people who they think are fully enlightened, and on a separate list the names of those they think are deluded. It usually turns out that all the people on the fully enlightened list are people they’ve never met; often they’ve been dead for a thousand or two thousand years, like Shakyamuni Buddha, Jesus, Moses, people like that. Whoever they’ve met and is alive and kicking is usually on the deluded side.

  Eihei Dogen said, “Delusion is enlightenment.” He meant, this is it, man. It’s not like you get to some place where the suffering ends.

  JEFF: What’s the difference between delusion and illusion?

  BERNIE: I used to do magic long ago when my kids were young. I think that when I set something up so that what you see is different from what’s really happening, I’m creating some kind of illusion. But delusions are any ideas or concepts that you think are true, anything you’re hanging on to.

  JEFF: Making movies is full of magic. There are two kinds, really. One is the kind of magic that you’re talking about, creating an illusion, like sleight of hand. In movies, that type of magic appears in special effects, makeup, the audience not seeing the fake nose from the real one. But there’s another kind, what I call real magic, or alchemy, where all the artists show up, throw their best shit into the pot, and something comes out that no one expected, something that reflects the human experience so deeply and meaningfully that it touches the heart of all those who see it.

  Enlightenment is magic.

  BERNIE: And there are various depths of it. If I’m attached to this skin-and-bones Bernie, and I think of that as myself, that’s a delusion, and whatever I do—my loving actions—will be oriented toward taking care of this bag of bones.

  Now I think my family is myself, my community is myself, even the whole universe is myself. These are all deeper levels of enlightenment. But no matter how far I go, even if I realize that the whole universe is me and now I’m working for everyone and everything, there’s still a delusion I’m hanging on to, there’s some kind of cap I’m putting on who I am. As long as that goes on, I’m in the realm of knowing, which is the realm of delusion.

  A rock has its stage of enlightenment; a cockroach has its stage of enlightenment; Hitler had his stage of enlightenment. We have ours, and our Zen practice is to keep working on letting go of delusions and be in the state of not-knowing. That’s why we say it’s a continuous practice.

  As long as you’re experiencing yourself as separate from anything else, that’s delusion. And as I said before, I’ve never met the person who doesn’t have some sense of separate self, no matter how small. The reality is that you yourself are everything, you are the universe. So delusion is also enlightenment.

  But these are just words. It’s theoretical, and it’ll stay theoretical till I actually experience what I’m talking about. So I can think, People are killing each other, delusion is everywhere, and that’s enlightenment, just like there are cells in my body killing other cells, it’s all chaos, and it’s still all one body, it’s still Bernie. That’s an abstraction; it doesn’t feel real till you actually experience it.

  JEFF: Delusion and enlightenment are both going on at the same time.

  BERNIE: They’re two sides of the same coin. Whatever you do is a reflection of the degree to which you are enlightened. You’re going to pick up the person who falls in the street because you know that person is you. You’re not going to say, I’ve fallen, too bad, and walk on. So your degree of enlightenment will define what you do.

  And as you do things, new shit will come to light, you’ll be at a new stage of enlightenment, and new practices will be appropriate. So maybe right now you only pick up the person falling down in your street but not someone falling somewhere else, because that person is not your neighbor. Time goes by, new shit comes to light, and you now see that you are not just your neighbor, you are also any person who falls down in the street. You’re at a new stage of enlightenment, so your practices and actions will be different. That’s why we say that once you cross the river, get rid of the boat. Don’t keep on carrying it, because you’re in a new place, so what are the appropriate practices now?

  All this is not so easy to see, so find a guide or a teacher to bounce off of; it’s hard to do it all by yourself. It’s good to have somebody who’ll be honest with you and point out to you where you’re sticking or attached.

  The Dalai Lama basically echoes what the Buddha said. He says again and again that everybody wants to reduce suffering; everybody wants love and happiness. Can we come together around that instead of killing each other and watching children starve?

  You can think of the Bodhisattva as Don Quixote, the man of La Mancha, who was both deluded and enlightened all at the same time, and his song is “The Impossible Dream.” Beings are numberless, I vow to free them.

  JEFF: Isn’t feeling that you have to free them kind of arrogant?

  BERNIE: In some way. I’ve played with changing that vow to: Beings are numberless, I vow to serve them. It sounds less arrogant and more possible. But whether you serve them or free them, you’re helping people see that there is no one truth, that everything they believe or that others believe is just an opinion. If people can grok that, they’ll be freed.

  JEFF: What if somebody has cancer and is in a lot of pain, is that just an opinion? How do they get freed then?

  BERNIE: Freeing people has nothing to do with changing what is. Freeing is seeing what is:

  “Okay, I have cancer. What do I do?”

  “Take chemotherapy.”

  “That’s one opinion. What’s another opinion?”

  “Talk to a Native American healer and get his medicine.”

  “That’s another opinion. Is there another?”

  “I don’t want to do any of it. I am ready to die.”

  Or: “I want to live and I’m ready to try everything.”

  I had two close friends who both came down with stomach cancer at around the same time. One decided he only wished to work with Eastern medicine, and if that was not successful, he was ready to go. The other was ready to try everything, and he di
d: radiation and heavy medications, holistic medicine, peyote in South America, everything he heard of.

  You can’t eliminate sickness or death, but you can greatly reduce the mental suffering if you see that there is no one truth, that they’re all opinions you can play and dance with rather than second-guess yourself, your family, or your doctors. So if you think, I’m going to do the chemotherapy because only chemo will take care of it, you may run into problems. But if you see it as an opinion that you can choose or not, that’s living with a greater degree of freedom.

  Either way, I’m not coming out of some fixed truths or falsehoods. They’re opinions and I listen to the one that feels right to me. It’s the same if it’s someone else’s cancer rather than mine. If I have some kind of fixed idea—This is what you have to do!—then that doesn’t help anyone. Instead, if I can say, “My opinion is that you should do this,” it loosens up the world. It doesn’t get rid of everything; cancer will still happen, wars will happen, whatever. But when they do, how do I take care of them? Expecting that they won’t happen isn’t taking care, it’s just adding more mental pain.

  JEFF: Suffering also leads to the birth of compassion. I’m going through this, and so is he. Acknowledging that we all go through pain and suffering can be the key that lets you out of prison. Bearing witness to terrible things can point the way to liberation and freedom. A John Goodwin/Bobby Terry tune comes to mind, “What I Didn’t Want.” You know, Thank God, He gave me what I didn’t want. Another knot.

  I read The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. The gods condemn Sisyphus to push a large, heavy rock up a mountain, and as soon as he gets to the top, the rock rolls down and he has to roll it up again. So he does this useless, endless, frustrating task of rolling the rock up the mountain and seeing it roll down again, day in and day out. That’s a terrible life, you know? I mean, if we’re going to push the rock up there, then at least let’s build a castle or something groovy. If all you do is just work, work, work, what kind of life is that?