The Dude and the Zen Master Read online

  When we made Tucker, Francis Coppola did a great exercise with Martin Landau and me. The two of us have a strong relationship in the movie, so Coppola said something like this: “I want you guys to do an improvisation right now. We’re only going to do it once, but once you do it, you won’t have to think about it again because it will be part of your personal history, it will be in your brain. I want you guys to improvise the first day you met. It was on a train and here are the seats.” And he pulled out a couple of chairs, putting one next to the other. “Now, Marty, you sit down there. Jeff, you come down and sit next to him. All right, guys—action!”

  That improvisation informed the whole movie. You invest, engage in it fully, it becomes a part of you and does its thing.

  BERNIE: People get stuck a lot because they’re afraid to act; in the worst case, like the master bowler, we get so attached to some end result that we can’t function. We need help just to move on, only life doesn’t wait.

  JEFF: And it doesn’t help to say, I’ve got to have a mind-set with no expectations, because that’s also an expectation. So you can get into a spinning conundrum.

  BERNIE: There’s a little ditty that sort of sums this up.

  JEFF: Hit me with it.

  BERNIE:

  Row, row, row your boat,

  gently down the stream.

  Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily.

  Life is but a dream.

  Imagine that you’re rowing down a stream and you’re trying to figure out how to do it. Do I first row with the right oar and then with the left, or is it the other way around? What does my shoulder do, what does my arm do? It’s like Joe, the centipede with a hundred legs, trying to figure out which leg to move first.

  JEFF: Art Carney of the centipedes.

  BERNIE: He can’t get anywhere, just like the person in the rowboat. And while he’s hung up with all those questions, the stream is pulling him on and on. So you want to row, row, row your boat—gently. Don’t make a whole to-do about it. Don’t get down on yourself because you’re not an expert rower; don’t start reading too many books in order to do it right. Just row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.

  JEFF: Merrily, merrily.

  BERNIE: That’s important. An English philosopher said that whatever is cosmic is also comic. Do the best you can and don’t take it so seriously.

  JEFF: When I was really young, my mom enrolled me in dance classes. “Mom, I’m too young to dance,” I told her. She kind of forced me, but I ended up loving it, and after the first lesson I came back and said, “Come on, Mom, I’ll show you the box step.” That introduced me not just to dancing but also to working with someone without having a goal; after all, you’re not going anywhere, you’re just dancing. Years later, whenever she sent me off to work, she’d always say, “Remember, have fun, and don’t take it too seriously.” So I have this word for much of what I do in life: plorking. I’m not playing and I’m not working, I’m plorking.

  You know, play doesn’t have to be a frivolous thing. You may think of a Beethoven symphony as something serious, but it’s still being played. I think Oscar Wilde said that life is too important to be taken seriously.

  BERNIE: I always have this red nose in my pocket, and if it looks like I’m taking things too seriously, or the person I’m talking to is taking them too seriously, I put the nose on. It doesn’t matter what we’re doing or talking about, it doesn’t matter if we agree or disagree, the nose changes everything.

  JEFF: Clownsville, man. Tightness gets in the way of everything, except tightness.

  BERNIE: You can’t get arrogant or pompous with a nose. I always tell people that if you get upset over what someone says, imagine him or her with a clown’s nose on and you won’t get so angry. Merrily, merrily. Our work may be important, but we don’t take it too seriously. Otherwise, we get attached to one relatively small thing and ignore the rest of life. We’re creating a little niche for ourselves instead of working the whole canvas.

  Another thing about Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. There are different streams. Sometimes you come to a fall and sometimes you come to white water. Your rowing has to adapt to the situation. You can’t do the same stroke coming down a small stream as you would coming down Niagara Falls. Even if you’re only rowing down a stream, different things happen: maybe the wind changes, maybe the current, and suddenly everything’s different. So gently is really important. Don’t power yourself or blast through; rock with the way things are. Ask yourself: What’s the deal here? I want to get over there but there are things in the way. How do I flow with the situation? Do I wait or go on? If I wait, do I wait one day, one year, five years? If I go on, do I tack? Bear witness to the situation and have faith that the right thing to do will naturally arise. Otherwise I get stuck and think, I can’t do anything, everything’s all wrong.

  JEFF: And we take it so seriously! Thoughts will change and shift just like the wind and the water when you’re on the boat, thoughts are no different than anything else.

  Kevin Bacon and I recently worked on a move together, R.I.P.D. Just before we’d begin a scene, when all of us would feel the normal anxiety that actors feel before they start to perform, Kevin would look at me and the other actors with a very serious expression on his face and say: “Remember, everything depends on this!”

  It would make us all laugh. On the one hand, it’s not true of course, but on the other, everything does depend on this, on just this moment and our attitude toward this moment.

  Speaking of boats, there are all kinds. Take a sailboat, for example. Say I want to sail toward you, only the wind is blowing away from you. If I know how to dance with the wind, I can use its power by sailing this way, then that way, and again this way, till finally I get to you. With rowing, you’re working primarily with your arms and shoulders. But with sailing, you’re making bigger use of the wind and the waves. You’re working with more elements, including with your mind and how it perceives things, instead of relying mostly on your own muscles and—

  Uh-oh, I’m getting too serious, man. Give me your nose for a second. I need a nose hit. Nostrils go on the bottom, right?

  BERNIE: If you want to breathe.

  JEFF: I love seeing somebody act real earnest and serious, like Jackie Gleason. He makes me laugh because he reflects back to me my own serious-mindedness and how ridiculous it all is. It’s always easier to see somebody else in that position than yourself, and you laugh. It’s like the classic slipping on the banana peel, or someone getting hit by a pie in the face. Why do those things make us laugh? Is it from relief, like: Thank God it wasn’t me? Or is it something else: I’m being very serious now. I’m pontificating earnestly and solemnly about—POW! PIE IN THE FACE! The bust-up of certainty. I think that’s what makes us laugh, because we all recognize that life’s just like that, as uncertain as could be.

  BERNIE: When I studied a little clowning, I was assigned a trainer by Wavy Gravy, the famous clown and social activist. My trainer’s name is Mr. YooWho and he coordinates the American section of an international group called Clowns Without Borders, which started in Barcelona. They work in war-torn countries all over the world, especially with young kids in refugee camps. I went with him a few times, and what kids all over loved to see was somebody slipping on a banana peel, or else seeing YooWho or me get bopped on the head.

  The first time I met YooWho, he had to pick up a computer part at a store in Berkeley, California. The manager was showing some software to another customer and struggling to get a box out from the bottom of a big pile of boxes. When he finally got it out, the whole pile of boxes fell right on top of him. YooWho smiled, shook his head, and said, “You know, I have to train for weeks to do that.”

  2.

  IT’S DOWN THERE SOMEWHERE, LET ME TAKE ANOTHER LOOK

  BERNIE: Let me give you a wonderful Zen practice. Wake up in the morning, go to the bathroom, pee, brush your teeth, look in the mirror, and laugh at yourself. Do it every morning t
o start off the day, as a practice.

  JEFF: I’ve done that on occasion. Give me a definition of practice.

  BERNIE: Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Just like we choose a set of oars to row a boat, we choose oars to awaken; I call those oars practices. And there are all kinds: Zen, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, whatever. Or maybe it’s not a spiritual or religious practice but something to do with the arts, or your family, or your work. Maybe it’s looking in the mirror and laughing at yourself.

  JEFF: For me, it’s like clicking into a particular space. You do that in acting because you have to make lots of small adjustments: Okay, now play the scene this way, now play it that way. Each time you’re making an adjustment you’re clicking into a new space.

  My father offered me a part in Sea Hunt when I was just a kid, and we practiced different basic acting skills. For example, if we were doing a scene together, he’d say, “Don’t just wait for my mouth to stop talking before you answer. Listen to what I’m saying and let that inform how you talk back. So if I say things one way, you’re going to react one way, and if I say them a different way, you’re going to react a different way.” Or he’d give me this direction: “Make it seem like it’s happening for the first time.” And after that: “Now, go out of the room, come back, and do it completely another way. Make a little adjustment.”

  When you meditate, you also often make small adjustments to get back into the space of simply being.

  BERNIE: But most of us aren’t just being, we’re rowing to get someplace, to some other shore, to a goal or some ideal place we want to reach. So where are we headed? What’s the other shore?

  In Zen we say that the other shore is right here under our feet. What we’re looking for—the meaning of life, happiness, peace—is right here. So the question is no longer, how do I get from here to there? The question is: How do I get from here to here? How do I experience the fact that, instead of having to get there for something, it’s right here and now? This is it; this is the other shore. In Buddhism we sometimes call it the Pure Land.

  In practice, it’s hard to grasp that right here, where you’re standing, is it. You can hear it over and over, but there’s a piece of you that doesn’t believe it. Instead, we work to get over there. And once we get over there, we reconsider: Oh no, this isn’t it, so now I have to get over there. Off we go again, trying to get to the next other shore. And once we get there, the whole thing starts again. At first I think, Oh, finally I got somewhere; now I’m happy. But after a while I say, No, this isn’t it, I’ve got to get over there.

  JEFF: People often ask me about my other shore, like what other shore do I want to reach. What do I want to be? What do I want to do? Do I want to be a star?

  For me, the other shore hasn’t really changed. I was kind of thrown into my career at six months old. My father was visiting his friend John Cromwell. At the time, John was directing The Company She Keeps and he needed a baby, so my father said, “Here, take Jeff.” I never really wanted to be an actor. As a matter of fact, I resisted it because it felt like nepotism to me, that I had the door opened for me by my father. I wanted to be appreciated for my own talents and not because of who my father was. I wanted to do my own thing, and I didn’t know what that was because I was interested in so many different things. You can say that I rebelled against the way the river was flowing for me.

  At the same time, I would say that the other shore for me was then, and still remains, happiness. And I came to the realization that happiness is right here, available right under my feet. Robert Johnson wrote that the word happiness comes from to happen. Our happiness is what happens. That’s different from the Declaration of Independence, which states that each person has the right to pursue happiness, meaning that if we don’t have it we have a right to go after it. But Johnson says that as soon as we pursue it, we lose it. What do you think, Bern?

  BERNIE: It’s a hard one. Everybody wants to be happy. They want to get to someplace where they’re happy, where they’re enlightened, where they’re content. That’s what most people think of when they hear the words other shore. They search through books and go to lectures or to gurus, figuring there’s got to be somebody to help them get to that other shore, that other space. It’s like Dorothy trying to get home in The Wizard of Oz. People think of home as the place where they’re comfortable and everything’s okay. She goes through this whole journey, finds the wizard, and discovers that home is back in Kansas.

  JEFF: What does she say in the end? Something about never looking for your heart’s desire any further than your own backyard. And the wizard turns out to be a sham, right?

  BERNIE: A sham, but also a lure, because the idea that pulled Dorothy all over the Land of Oz is the same idea that pulls us in all directions, too. We think that what we’re looking for is somewhere over the rainbow, till we finally realize that it’s all just this.

  JEFF: We may think that this other shore is something we have to achieve, like fame, success, or enlightenment. But that prevents us from seeing that we’re already there. I think the Dude is an example of someone who doesn’t feel that he needs to achieve something. He likes lying in the bathtub drinking his White Russians with the whale music on. He’s just taking it easy, taking it the way it is. There’s a lot of generosity in that, you know? People talk about being seekers, searching for meaning, happiness, whatever. I think of myself as a finder, because I find all these things right around me.

  That was also true long ago. When I was a child, my mom had a practice she called Time. She would spend one hour every day with each of her three kids. So if it were my hour, she would say, “What do you want to do today, Jeff?”

  And I’d say, “Let’s go into your makeup. I’ll make you up like a clown and I’ll be a monster, let’s do that.”

  “Okay.”

  Or it might be: “Let’s play Space Man. You be the space guy, the spaceship will be under the table, and I’ll be the alien trying to get you. And can Tommy come and play with us?”

  “Okay, you can invite Tommy.”

  The phone would ring in the house. “The phone’s ringing, Dorothy.”

  “Tell them I’m having my time with Jeff. I’ll call them back.”

  She was totally focused on me when we had our time, and she did that with each of her kids every day. I never got the feeling that she thought it was her duty; for her it was a gas, she was digging it. Later, when we became teenagers, it would be, “Rub me, Mom,” and she’d just massage me for an hour. When I became an adult, I’d give her a call and say, “How about some time, Mom?” Her undivided attention was so nurturing. I never had to seek for anything, like time with my mother, because it was always there.

  I also saw how both my parents behaved so generously with other people. I worked with my father in Sea Hunt and different movies. As a kid, I sometimes found him a little embarrassing. I remember one occasion when he was doing one of his TV shows and a director was talking to a camera assistant or a PA, getting very angry and not showing respect. My father went up to the director and said in front of everybody, “I will be in my trailer when you’re ready to apologize to this guy that you’ve offended. Come in and let me know.” I was so embarrassed! But he had a real sense of honor and justice and would act that way at a drop of a hat.

  As an adult, I got to experience the joy he had from his work. He loved all aspects of it and his excitement was contagious. Whenever he came onto a set, people felt, This guy digs what he’s doing. I guess what I’m doing is kind of fun, too. And everybody got loose and light, which helps things get born. So even if you’re dealing with a topic that’s not joyful, that’s angry, sad, or whatever, if you approach it out of a joyful, generous, loving place, then everything comes out in a freer way. That was the kind of generosity that was available to me when I grew up, and it helped me realize that what makes me really happy is right under my feet.

  BERNIE: With all that, I’ve never met anybody who honestly says all the time, T
his is it. This shore, where I’m standing right now, is the place; whatever I need is right here. Such a person is fully in the moment, here and now, but I’ve never met anyone who’s always like that. No matter how hard we try, situations come up that we’ll want to separate from and leave behind us.

  But if you are going somewhere else, let me say this much: At least change the boat and the oars. Say I get to the other side, what do I do? Well, I got here thanks to this beautiful boat with the set of oars, so I’ll just hold on to them and carry them wherever I go. Isn’t that weird? Now I’ve got the burden of carrying around whatever got me here. Instead I get rid of it, and I’m free. Time passes and now I want to get to the next other shore. I’ll probably need a new kind of boat and different oars, because maybe now the other shore is on the other side of the ocean and that requires a whole other mode of transportation.

  When I started my Zen training, enlightenment was the other shore for me. I was sure that if I had an experience of enlightenment, I would understand everything clearly and I would be happy. That first experience did indeed show me that everything is right under my feet and that life as it is, right here this minute, is it; there’s no need to look elsewhere. But that realization, big as it was, in some way was still all about me. It could have ended right there—I think it does for some people—but I kept on working and practicing. Finally I realized that practice and enlightenment were endless so enlightenment experiences would keep happening. And since an enlightenment experience is an awakening to the interconnectedness of life, the awakening will keep deepening. It begins with the sense of my self being my body, and it stretches until my self is realized as the universe.