The Dude and the Zen Master Read online

  JEFF: He does his thing, he’s very authentic, but the chaos of life throws him off time after time. He’s rowing his boat merrily, but new things always happen and he has to make an adjustment.

  BERNIE: Because there’s no perfect place anywhere. One of the Buddha’s first teachings was that life is suffering. He didn’t just mean heartrending, painful, traumatic suffering, but something more basic than that. It doesn’t matter how good we have it or how basically happy we are, things arise every day that leave us feeling discontented or disappointed.

  So the movie opens up with a bit of suffering for the Dude because somebody peed on his rug, the rug that ties the room together. Till now he was just rowing his boat merrily down the stream, taking his baths, drinking his White Russians, listening to whales, and bowling. But now something happened, so he makes an adjustment, goes out to meet the wealthy Mr. Lebowski, and the movie goes on from there. At exactly the point when the rug doesn’t bother him anymore, something else comes up. And when he’s no longer upset about that, there’s something else. Things keep happening and the suffering gets deeper. Why? Because the Dude expects that nothing else is going to go wrong. He’s like everyone else, thinking that around the corner is some perfect place where everything will be okay; all he has to do is round that corner. Then something else comes up, and something else.

  But the Dude abides, so it doesn’t take him too long to be at ease with the new situation. Not so his bowling buddy Walter. Walter plays the Dude’s great foil: This won’t stand, man. He’s like all the rest of us. Someone just found out that he has cancer, or that his wife left him for someone else, or that he lost his job. Unexpected things keep happening, which is what the Buddha referred to when he talked of suffering. And what do we say? This won’t stand, man. But that’s what life is, constant change, ups and downs. And like the Dude, we have to abide. Walter, on the other hand, can’t accept that life is this way, so he keeps on suffering.

  JEFF: I love the scene when the Dude is freaking out at Walter: “Will you just take it easy?”

  And Walter says, “Calmer than you.”

  “Walter, take—will you take it—”

  “Calmer than you.”

  People think the Dude is so unflappable and calm, but in that scene he’s really uptight. In fact, the whole movie is about this loose, relaxed guy who gets all upset by life. But he’s not embarrassed about it, he’s not trying to live up to some persona, he’s always the Dude.

  I relate to that because I really dig comfort. And part of being comfortable is living up to others’ expectations of you. For instance, many people think I have this persona, that I’m the Dude. But that’s not who I am. I got some Dude in me, but I’m more and other than that. I can get tight and nervous, and unlike the Dude, I’m not always comfortable showing people those cracks in my persona.

  I’ll give you an example. Thomas Nellen has done my hair and makeup for several movies. He’s a wonderful Swiss guy, very meticulous, a great artist, and we like to talk and share ideas when I’m getting made up. One of his jobs is to provide continuity and consistency in how I look for the movie. For example, my hair always has to look right for each scene, so if it’s cut a certain way for my character and the character ages, the hair also has to age. If the character doesn’t age in the movie, the hair has to look the same even if the filming takes months. And don’t forget, you’re shooting out of sequence all the time, so the hair has to be right for whatever scene you’re filming that day. It’s Thomas’s job to pay attention to all these little details. Making movies is all about the tiny details. It’s like doing a magic trick. When you create an illusion, the audience doesn’t want to see how it’s done. If a guy has a fake nose, you don’t want to see the lines between the real thing and the fake, you want it all to look real, and for that there has to be consistency. If it’s a little off, the audience loses the spell and gets out of the story.

  So at the end of an especially stressful day Thomas wants to cut my hair a little. That’s his job, right? And he’s very respectful. “When do you want to have your hair cut, Jeff? It’s getting longer and longer.”

  But I have this thing going on with my hair that dates back to the time when I was a kid, when having my hair cut and getting the clippings in my shirt drove me crazy. I could never get the hair out. It also feels a little like Samson: you cut your hair and you lose your power. Or it’s like the superstitions in sports, when somebody says, “Hey, don’t you want to wash those socks?”

  And you say, “No, these are my lucky socks, don’t touch them.”

  “Awww, come on, wash your socks. What’s the difference?”

  “Don’t touch my socks, man!”

  All these things are going on, I’m feeling irritable and I want to get home, so I keep putting him off: “If you cut my hair now you’ll have to cut it again later, and I want my hair to be as long as I can have it for the next movie.” Thomas would also be working on that one.

  And he says, “Yes, Jeff, but you’ve now gone three weeks without a cut.”

  And I say, “Thomas, my hair has to be long for the part anyway. If I was supposed to be bald and hadn’t shaved my head in three weeks, you’d notice. But with this much hair, nobody’s going to see any difference.”

  The argument goes on, and finally I give up: “Okay, just cut my fucking hair. You’re the makeup guy, you’re the expert, go on, do it.”

  So he’s cutting my hair while I sit there trying to meditate, right? I do an angry meditation for a half-hour, all that time feeling and hearing every little snip. Finally he’s done and I say, “Thank you, I appreciate your conscientiousness.” But I am pissed.

  So now I go home and I’ve got two days off. For those next two days I can’t sleep because this hair thing keeps coming up. I’m thinking, What are you doing? Why are you obsessing about this? It’s ridiculous. But I’m just churning it over and thinking about it all day and all night. At the same time I’m reading about the Tibetan Lojong practices, which are basically slogans all about leaning into these uncomfortable situations and opening up to them as if they’re gifts. One in particular strikes me: Always maintain a joyful mind. Appreciate the struggles as opportunities to wake up.

  After two days I get back to work: “Thomas, how you doing, man?”

  He goes, “I’m fine.”

  I say, “Well, I was fucked. For the last three nights I haven’t slept at all, I keep on thinking about this ridiculous hair thing.”

  And Thomas says, “To tell you the truth, I felt shitty the whole weekend, too.”

  And finally the whole thing shifted. It started looking like a segment from 30 Rock or The Office, you know? We laughed about it and I told him what I’d gone through. I mean, we’re talking about a quarter inch of hair and look at all the stuff that came up! That’s what I mean by wanting to live up to expectations. I’m supposed to be so cool, and look at how upset I’m getting about almost nothing.

  I said, “This has a lot of juice for us, man. This can be our hair koan.”

  Thomas said, “What do you mean?”

  So I suggested we do something that my wife and I do sometimes. We sit opposite each other. One person expresses what’s on his or her mind and the other person just listens and receives, till the first person has no more to say, and then we switch. We keep on doing that till both of us feel like we’re done. Sometimes the shift happens, sometimes it doesn’t; it’s a jam. So Thomas and I did this and we found a lot of humor and intimacy in it. It was uncomfortable for both of us, but it also deepened our relationship because all these little bumps and discomforts are actually opportunities to explore and keep the curiosity going: Oh, this is interesting, what’s this about? Why did I get so upset? That’s what I mean by leaning into things. And here was an opportunity for Thomas to see this: Hey, you think I’m a calm, cool, easygoing guy. Truth is, I can be tight and pissed and as dumb as the next guy. There’s embarrassment there, you know? It’s like the Dude freaking out and Wa
lter keeps saying, “Calmer than you. Calmer than you.”

  People think I’m laid-back and that nothing gets to me, and it’s embarrassing to show them a whole other side. But if I acknowledge it rather than deny it, it also can be the path to healing instead of obsessing about it at home: That goddamn Thomas has no idea. Doesn’t he understand that it’s not about simply matching the hair, that there’s an inner life to the actor that he shouldn’t interfere with? You can pump it up and defend yourself all you want, but you’re just suppressing the self-consciousness and the embarrassment, you know? With Thomas I worked it out by just being who I am without living up to something.

  But the Dude isn’t uncomfortable with his discomfort. He’s authentic, and he and Walter jam with each other. He can get pissed at Walter but he loves him at the same time. I love that scene where they hug in the end, with Donny’s ashes all over the Dude, coating his shades.

  BERNIE: The other thing I like about the Dude is that he doesn’t corner a rat. Do you know that expression? If people do things we don’t like, we sometimes set them up in order to show them how wrong or bad they are. It’s like trapping a rat. If you force a rat into a corner where there’s no way out, it’s going to attack. You don’t see the Dude doing that. He’s opinionated, but he leaves the other person a way out. Walter constantly tries to trap the rat, pushing people into a place where they’re now going to fight back.

  JEFF: You have to leave a way out. In Zen, don’t they tell you to kill yourself? I don’t mean literally, but to kill your ego, kill your identity. Isn’t that the way out in Zen?

  BERNIE: A lot of old Zen masters talked like that. They said that in order to get enlightened, in order to experience the oneness of life, you had to drop body and mind. But there’s an easier way out than that, and that’s to realize, Oh, that’s just your opinion, which is what the Dude says in the movie: “That’s your opinion, man.” When you say that, there’s always a way out. If we take certain things to be the truth, we’re going to fight and kill for them, but it’s hard to battle over an opinion.

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

  BERNIE: 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.

  JEFF: Did he know what the words meant?

  BERNIE: 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.

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

  BERNIE: 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.

  JEFF: 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.

  BERNIE: 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.

  JEFF: 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.

  BERNIE: And that’s your opinion, man.

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

  5.

  PHONE’S RINGIN’, DUDE

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

  BERNIE: 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.

  JEFF: 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.

  BERNIE: 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.