The Dude and the Zen Master Read online

  As that understanding grew bigger and deeper, my rowboat changed many times. I still meditate every day, but I’ve had to learn new practices, too, particularly as I began to work with people who never did meditation.

  JEFF: In acting, it’s constantly letting go of the rowboat. You do a scene for the first time and you think it was great. Then somebody says, “Oh, no, I’m sorry, there was a hair in the gate, something between the lens and the film, we can’t use it.” So now you’re thinking: Oh shit, I thought we had that. Now I’ve got to do it again. Well, gee, it was so good last time, let’s see if I can do it exactly like that again. Instead, you’ve got to put down the boat, let go of the way you did it before, and get in that empty space again.

  Let’s say the question is timing. You might think, See how you paused there two and a half seconds? That was so great, that’s the right timing. That won’t be necessarily true the next time around, because everything changes.

  BERNIE: To get to a new other shore, we have to choose a different path from the first, like getting a different vessel: rowboat, sailboat, dirigible—

  JEFF: —submarine, pogo stick—

  BERNIE: —glider. We choose our vessels and the methods to propel them, which are our practices, to get where we want to go. But now there’s a problem; something is not right. So maybe we’ve got to set down the vessel we chose and say, Okay, here I am. Using that vessel and oars got me into a bad situation, so what should I use instead to get to the next step? And there’s always a next step; it’s a continuous practice. Keep on trucking. We say that life flows, but we’re always choosing the vessels and the means of propulsion that we want for the next part of the trip. That includes people, too. The people who’ve had an impact on our lives are also in some way vessels that take us to the other shore. As we aim for a new destination, we often choose new company.

  JEFF: Different people have had a strong spiritual impact on me at different times in my life. From the beginning, my mother used to pass around the Daily Word, which was my basic spiritual training when I was growing up. It comes from Unity, which is Christian-based and also very open. I think it has a lot of Zen Buddhist leanings. She would pass it around and make all the kids read it.

  When I was eighteen, I was in boot camp in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve for ten weeks. It was the first time I was away from home that long. In boot camp they strip away your identity, they humble and humiliate you, give you a number. One day the company commander says, “All right, assholes, tomorrow is Sunday. All you assholes who wanna go to church fall in this line. All you other assholes fall in this line, you’ll have to run on the grinder all day.” So of course, everybody goes to church. The priest was a guy named Don Harris, and this is what he told us: “When you’re here in this church, you are not in the military. You are in the house of God.”

  Try to imagine it. Here we are, getting our butts kicked in boot camp, slammed and broken down, and he tells us that we’re in the house of God, where our identity and individuality are celebrated rather than crushed. That little reminder meant so much to me. It helped me make an adjustment and click into a whole different consciousness from where I was at the time. Don turned me on to Christianity, though probably not your traditional Christianity. He suggested I read books like Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ and The Saviors of God.

  He invited me to sing and play my guitar during services. Not the guy to always follow the rules, he gave me some civilian clothes one day when our company was on leave, which you weren’t supposed to do, said he wanted to turn me on to something, and took me to the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco to see Janis Joplin and the Jefferson Airplane. This was long before they had made it.

  So Don was very important in my life. In fact, ten years later he married Sue and me.

  Two other guys who influenced me were Burgess Meredith and John Lilly. In the early seventies, after making a movie together, Burgess introduced me to John. John Lilly is perhaps most famous for his work with dolphins and interspecies communication, as well as experimenting with LSD. A scientist exploring the nature of consciousness, John invented the isolation tank, a lightless, soundproof tank containing water infused with about a hundred pounds of salt. He was interested in what consciousness is like when the senses have no input from the outside.

  He asked Sue and me if we would like to help him out, making us his guinea pigs. Wearing a jumpsuit and looking like some kind of astronaut, John brought me over to the tank and told me to get in, lie down in the water, and get out a total of three times in order to program my mind to know that I could get out if I wanted to. Then I settled back into the buoyant, 98.6-degree water, my ears underwater and my face floating above. I could hear my heart beating and nothing else. Almost instantly my mind started kicking in: John seemed kind of weird—did he have breasts?—what’s in this water anyway? PANIC! Then I caught myself—my mind was just doing its thing—and started to relax.

  In some way, I think that was probably the first time I did meditation. I wondered what I could think about, and then realized I could just watch what was happening. I noticed my breathing. I noticed how much mental energy and thoughts I was producing in the tank even when the outside world didn’t engage with me at all. In fact, I could almost see my mind as some kind of screen with thoughts and images projected on it. I also began to appreciate the power of my own intention to somehow control these projections.

  I was in there for three hours. When I came out all the colors and sounds rushed in. I sensed them as never before, appreciating their richness and beauty. I also realized that the projections of my mind, so clear to me inside the tank, were continuing to be projected outside the tank. But outside the tank the blankness/emptiness was missing. Instead, my projections were being cast on everything that my senses were receiving, so it was less apparent that so much of the information I had about them was actually coming from inside me. This was a very helpful bit of knowledge and very useful in my life.

  I got into Alan Watts and of course, being a child of the sixties, drugs. Watts came from a Christian background like me—in fact, he was a choirboy—before getting into Buddhism, so he could relate to both Christian and Buddhist mythologies. He also dropped acid and got with the culture of the times, like me.

  I guess everyone you meet is your guru, teaching you something. But it’s like you say, if I want to get to another shore, and another one after that, I change the boat, the oars, and also the people I hang with.

  Speaking of boats, I love the term trim tabbing, which Buckminster Fuller popularized. You see, giant oceangoing tankers need a giant rudder to make them turn. But engineers discovered that it takes too much energy to turn the giant rudder. Instead, they came up with the trim tab, a tiny rudder attached to the big rudder. The little rudder turns the big rudder and the big rudder turns the ship.

  Bucky said that we’re all trim tabs. The way to turn society around is to realize that you’re connected to something bigger. I like to think that you and I are both trim tabs and that we want to turn other people on to becoming trim tabs and turn the rudder a little bit, which will turn this big ship in the direction where we want to be heading.

  3.

  DUDE, YOU’RE BEING VERY UNDUDE

  JEFF: The hip counterculture of each generation has sayings that have poetic wisdom for me, words like dig, groovy, or grok. Karass is another, from Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Your karass is your family in life, not necessarily your biological family. It may even include people you loathe, but they’re in your sphere in a very strong way.

  Dig is beyond understand. I like digging where I am and what I’m doing, I like jamming with myself. So when uptightness happens, I notice that: You want to be uptight? You can do that; in fact, see how uptight you can get. Some days I let myself play with it and really go wild. Acting is about tricking yourself, using your imagination to go all over the place. You can do that even if you’re not an actor; you can always dance with how you’re fe
eling.

  But even playing and jamming require some kind of practice, you know? Preparation is really important to me, especially when I feel tight or afraid.

  BERNIE: Practice is critical before you jam with other musicians. But once you start jamming, something happens that you didn’t and can’t prepare for. Everything starts shifting and you’ve got a new song coming out, a new riff, and you flow with that because you’re jamming. That’s what happens in life, too. I can plan and prepare as much as possible, but then I walk down the street and step on a banana peel, and I’m jamming with that.

  JEFF: And life will keep throwing it at you, like it does to the Dude. Oh, you handled this? Well, what about that? And what about that? It just piles it on.

  If you’re open, it’s not a problem. Take Orson Welles, for example. Have we made many movies better than Citizen Kane? What was he, twenty-five years old when he directed that movie? Man! Gregg Toland, the wonderful director of photography, shot that film, and Orson Welles wanted Gregg Toland’s name to appear alongside his in the credits at the end because Toland had been so important to the final production of that film. Toland felt the same way toward Welles. He loved that Welles was so new to moviemaking and that his imagination was so open. Welles didn’t know anything about making films. I’ve found the same thing with first-time directors. The jam factor is very high; they don’t know what they can’t do.

  It’s also interesting to see how different people react to pressure, including me. You can imagine the pressure on directors. They have a finite time and budget to make a movie, and so much is on their plate every day. How am I going to do it? I’ve never done this before. Problems keep coming up, taking more and more out of them.

  With one particular film, right from the beginning of the read-through, I said, “There’s something off about that last scene, which is the climax scene for my character.” The director and the writers agreed and said we’d fix it together as we got down the line. But the schedule progressed with no time to do that. When you’re making a movie, it’s like triage, you have to do just what’s in front of you, and one problem came up after another. Still, I didn’t stop bringing it up to the director.

  As we got closer to shooting that scene toward the end of the movie, she would just “show me the hand” when I would come over, sort of like “Shut the fuck up, Donny!” She had a great sense of humor, called me the Prince of Ideas. I got depressed. How was I going to deal with this?

  Part of the problem is caring. On the one hand, you want to care, but if your aim is too tight, caring can get in your way. I often write the word aimless in my scripts to remind myself not to get my aim so tight that I miss the target. It’s a little like what happened to the master bowler, who finally couldn’t even release the ball. So I was getting very uptight and she kept putting her hand up every time I came over. We had a few more days before we were going to shoot this scene and I couldn’t sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night and said to myself, Okay now, come on, stop doing this. You’re trying to get orange juice out of an apple; figure out what to do. Then it occurred to me to get help from other people.

  I got along well with the director of photography, the producer, and the technical advisor. I went to them and said, “Let me work with you guys and help the director make this the best movie it can be.” And that’s what they did; they became my virtual director. In the end the scene still wasn’t perfect, but it got better. So instead of making it perfect, I made it workable, but not before I was hammered, pressured, and upset; I didn’t sleep. And that’s just minor stuff. When the big stuff comes, you can get crushed. It’s like what the Stranger says in Lebowski: “Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes, well, he eats you.” It gets kind of funky, you know? And what do you do then? You notice: Oh yeah, this is what I do in these kinds of situations. That’s interesting. Do I want to do this now? Is it the best way to get through this? Maybe I should just dig, you know, and jam.

  So perfection is one of the other shores. There are lots of others: If I could only be better, if I could only be happier, if I could only be more successful.

  BERNIE: If I could only be enlightened.

  JEFF: That’s a big one.

  There was a wonderful Benedictine monk and potter, Brother Thomas Bezanson, who created gorgeous glazes and shapes but was the kind of artist who broke ninety-eight out of every hundred pieces because only two were good enough.

  On the other hand, you have an artist like Picasso, who did something similar but in a whole different spirit. He says, Well, it’s like this, and he draws this scene of the French Riviera.

  And you say, Wow, that’s so cool.

  He looks and says, Nah, but—no, this is not it, maybe—while you say, Wait! Wait, you’re fucking it up. You’re fucking it up. Oh. Oh, I see. Oh, that’s interesting. Oh, God, that’s beautiful. Okay, just leave it there now. Oh, no, no, you’re fucking it up again!

  He does this about five or six times, and then he crumples up the paper, throws it away, and says, Now I got some ideas.

  There’s nothing precious there. It’s all precious, or none of it is, you know what I mean?

  BERNIE: There’s a whole style of Japanese pottery where the accidents that occur are actually relished by the potters.

  When you care about perfection, you care about an expectation. But there is also caring for where I am right now, for what’s happening right now. When I spend time with students, they tell me that they’ve read something in a book or heard something from a teacher that they don’t think they’re living up to. And I tell them, “Take care of yourself right now. Befriend what’s happening, not just who you’re supposed to be or what the world should be like. This is where you are now, so how do you care for yourself this minute?”

  The only way to do that is to drop the expectation of perfection or any other shore that you have in your head, and jam with what’s going on instead. So if part of the situation is that I’m a perfectionist, I’ll take care of that perfectionist. I probably know I’m not going to get perfection, there’ll always be something a little better, but I’ll still care for the guy who wants the perfect sound to come out of that instrument. Not because it’s right and not because it’s wrong, but because that’s who I am this minute and I want to take care of myself.

  JEFF: That’s got some beauty to it, man.

  BERNIE: It gives direction, it gives a path. You’ve got to take care of yourself on the path, not just when you cross the goal line, because don’t forget, wherever you are, that’s the goal line.

  4.

  YEAH, WELL, YA KNOW, THAT’S JUST LIKE, UH, YOUR OPINION, MAN

  JEFF: I dig the Dude; he’s very authentic. He can be angry and upset, but he’s comfortable in his skin. And in his inimitable way, he has grace. He exudes it in every relationship: an unexpected kindness, unmerited good will, giving someone a break when he doesn’t deserve it, showing up even when he has a bad attitude just because it means so much to the rest of the team. Hugging it out instead of slugging it out. You know what a Lebowski fan told me once? He thought that Donny was a figment of Walter’s imagination, an old army buddy of his who may have been killed in Vietnam. And the Dude was going along with the fantasy, participating in the three-way conversation even though he knew Donny didn’t exist. I talked to Ethan and Joel Coen about it and they hadn’t intended any of that. Either way, it says a lot about the Dude; he can just go with the flow.

  BERNIE: You might call him a Lamed-Vavnik. In Jewish mysticism, there are thirty-six righteous people, the Lamed-Vav Tzaddikim. They’re simple and unassuming, and they are so good that on account of them God lets the world continue instead of destroying it. But no one knows who they are because their lives are so humble. They can be the pizza delivery boy, the cashier in a Chinese takeout, the window-washer, or the woman selling you stamps in the post office.

  JEFF: You also like the word mensch, which is German and Yiddish for a real human being. It takes a lot to be a mensch,
but the real mensch doesn’t know that she’s a mensch; she’s just living her life.

  And what does that mean? My life isn’t only my life; everything has brought me to this point: my parents, their parents, everyone before them, and everything else in life, too.

  BERNIE: Eons of karma, trillions of years of DNA, the flow of the entire universe—all lead up to this moment. So what do you do? You just do. I think the mensch is not caught up with how to do things or even what to do.

  JEFF: And The Dude abides. According to Merriam-Webster’s official definition, to abide means to wait patiently for something, or to endure without yielding, accept without objection. That is no easy feat, especially in a culture that is success-driven, instant-gratification-oriented, and impatient, like ours. True abiding is a spiritual gift that requires great mastery. The moral of the story, for me, is: be kind. Treat others as you want to be treated. You never know when the stranger you meet on the road may be an angel—or the Dude—in disguise. I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least among you, you did not do for me.* Whether the Dude is a Lamed-Vavnik—

  BERNIE: —or Lamed-Lovnik—

  JEFF: —an angel in disguise, or merely a kindhearted loser, we should treat him as he treats us, with respect and compassion. We should all treat everyone we encounter as a righteous soul on account of whom the world abides. That’s very Dude.

  BERNIE: At the same time, the Dude’s a lot like us. Stuff upsets him, like when someone pees on his rug. He has thoughts, frustrations, and everything that we all have, but he doesn’t work from them. He works from where he is.