The Dude and the Zen Master Read online

  We have a figure in Zen, sort of a fat guy, looks a little bit like Santa Claus without a beard.

  JEFF: I know him; it’s Hotei, right? Sue gave me a beautiful wood sculpture of Hotei to put in my office.

  BERNIE: Hotei’s got this bag full of tools and those tools are everything in the world. He’s got talcum powder, he’s got condoms, he’s got a screwdriver.

  JEFF: Vibrator in there, you think?

  BERNIE: He’s got a vibrator, he’s got books, whatever you can think of. That bag contains every object that exists, and he walks around the marketplace talking to everybody he meets and taking care of them using those tools.

  You know who that reminds me of? You live in Santa Barbara. I used to live there, and whenever I saw Jonathan Winters walking around Montecito he always reminded me of Hotei.

  JEFF: Did you hang with him at all? I first met him with my parents when I was a kid. Some thirty years later I ran into him in Santa Barbara shopping in a pharmacy aisle. I felt from him an immediate familiarity. He went straight into character with the raspy Maude Frickert voice, and I assumed some bizarre voice. We just kept going and going. Finally we both broke out of it and started talking about painting. He paints, too, you know.

  BERNIE: Hotei is a little like that. He walks places and hears the pecking—peck peck peck peck—of what needs to be born, and he reaches into the bag and pulls out the right tool to allow the birth to happen. In Zen, our ideal of training is that we become simple, like Hotei, like a mensch. Nothing special, just Jonathan Winters walking around Montecito talking to anybody. We listen to the pecking of the universe wanting to be born and take out an appropriate tool to help that happen.

  So Hotei, who can be a man or a woman, is a great Bodhisattva,* a great mensch. To the extent that he abides nowhere, which means that he abides everywhere, he can help more people.

  JEFF: Let me tell you what popped into my mind: I’m having a great outing with my buddy Dawa, a Tibetan Buddhist. We’re walking in the hills of Santa Barbara to an old hotel that burned down about a hundred years ago. We’re feeling like Indiana Jones exploring the old stone foundations. There are also these great hot springs up there. We go in and the mineral water bubbling out of the ground is just the perfect temperature, not one degree too hot or too cold. We soak in all those great minerals, feeling great, and then we start going back, talking dharma stuff together and getting off on it. We notice that as we walk side by side, one of us may stumble or even slip and the other catches him reflexively, just like you catch yourself when you’re going off balance. And I’m thinking, Oh yeah, this is interconnectedness, man, self as other, this is oneness, this is nirvana, you know, walking down the hill like we’re one and feeling great.

  All of a sudden, a crazy man comes down the trail—I mean, quivering crazy. And he’s pissed, frightening, like a demon or something. And all my airy-fairy stuff goes WHOMP! Instead I start thinking, I hope he doesn’t hurt me. I’m glad I’ve got my dogs, I’m glad I’ve got this Tibetan guy, maybe he knows some kind of jujitsu to defend us. There’s nothing in my heart like What can I do to help you, man? You look a little troubled. He passes us and then he looks back and says, “You want to fuck with me?” And I’m not so high anymore and full of all those ideas.

  Life does that to you constantly, like the earthquake. You think you’ve got it together? WHOMP! And what we try to do is get one up on life, figure it out, get enlightened, whatever, just so it won’t trip us up again.

  BERNIE: We all have different degrees of realization, of seeing the oneness of life, and our job is to actualize this understanding. It’s a lifelong, endless path. But you know what your story reminds me of? Those dolls that are full of sand at the bottom. You push them and they oscillate quickly from side to side, and then come back to center. So as you practice, you’re filling up with sand. At first, even a weak force hits you and almost knocks you over, but you oscillate in big arcs till you come up standing again. As you practice more and more, it takes a stronger and stronger force to get you knocked over, and even then the oscillations aren’t so big, and before you know it you’re back to center.

  JEFF: It’s not like you never get knocked over.

  BERNIE: No matter how much sand you put in, no matter how much you practice, there will always be some force that’s big enough to knock you over. Life’s not about not getting knocked over, it’s about how fast you come back. So if you think, Oh, I got knocked over and that’s a sign that I’m not practicing well enough, all that happened was that you met a situation that was a little bigger than you, and that gave you a new opportunity for more practice.

  JEFF: Situations like that sometimes cause me to shy away from taking chances and doing things, because I feel that nothing I do is ever going to be enough. Or maybe it’s always enough.

  BERNIE: What matters is that you do it; everything else is extra.

  JEFF: Speaking of the hen and the chicken, the hen doesn’t just have one egg, she’s got a bunch, so which does she tend to? What do I tend to? Do I tend to the pain in myself, to someone who wants help, or to that piece of wood over there that I’d like to carve something out of?

  BERNIE: It’s like your body. Your wrist and finger get cut. Which one are you going to tend to first? Naturally, you deal with the wrist first.

  JEFF: Tending to the wound that needs it the most. Life as triage.

  BERNIE: There’s only a problem if you get frustrated. Oh, there’s too much going on, I can’t take care of everything. I cut my wrist and I cut my finger, it’s too much to handle! People can get so frustrated they don’t do anything.

  JEFF: Being alive, you have to do something. Not doing anything is also some kind of action.

  BERNIE: When he was very young, my son, Marc, would look at his plate, and if it had foods on it that he didn’t like he would say, “Gross choices.” But even with gross choices, you have to do something. All the second-guessing and thinking—Should I have done more? Should I have done less?—are extra. You open up to the degree that you do; all the rest is internal commentary, which is not necessary. It’s already done, man.

  JEFF: Like Popeye’s I am what I am, right? And that’s all that I am.

  BERNIE: I am that I am. That was God’s answer to Moses when Moses asked Him for His name.* My wife, Eve, likes to say: That’s that.

  JEFF: Going back to the chicken pecking, you have to be sensitive to hear the pecking. But you can have too much sensitivity and then you often need earplugs, you know? We say that we want to be more alive and sensitive to hear the pecking and respond in a timely way, but sometimes life can get too loud: Please, there’s a racket, I need some earplugs, or It’s too bright, I need some dark glasses here. To use the analogy of the hen and the egg, maybe the hen has really fine hearing. She thinks she hears the chick pecking so she pecks back at the egg, only it’s too early and the chick dies. Or else she’s covered up her overly sensitive ears and now can’t hear too well.

  BERNIE: Meantime, the little chick inside, or whatever needs to be born, is screaming, Let me outta here! Let me outta here! In some sense, once the screaming starts it’s already too late. So you befriend yourself and say, Okay, next time I’ll respond earlier, I’ll listen better. In my opinion, the screaming is a sign not that you were too sensitive but that you waited too long. Timing’s critical. If we wait too long, the chick suffocates.

  JEFF: Sometimes it feels so intense that I need to dull myself, or just try to relax, like I do with cigars. You also like cigars. How do cigars jibe with, you know, the view that the body is the temple and all that stuff?

  BERNIE: The body is the temple, so you should offer it some incense. There are a number of traditions where tobacco is used almost as a sacrament, like with the Sufis and the Native Americans. But I don’t want to put it on such a high plane, I just dig cigars.

  JEFF: It’s a kind of refuge, man. Buddhism has three refuges, right?

  BERNIE: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The awakened one, his
teachings, and the community of practitioners who vow to awaken as he did.

  JEFF: There are also false refuges, refuges you think will ease the pain but in the long term cause even more, like booze or drugs. Some people will say cigars, too. I’m kind of a slow learner, or I learn at my own speed, and I’ve done many different things to take the edge off, so to speak, to distract me and help me relax. Otherwise that sensitivity is too intense.

  BERNIE: Knowing when is the appropriate time to act is a learning curve. That’s true in acting also, right? If you don’t respond at the right time the director yells at you, “It’s too late!” Or if you respond too quickly: “It’s too soon! Why are you rushing in here?”

  Luckily, we have practices to build up our sensitivity and improve our sense of timing. One practice is: The Dude is not in. When you’re not attached to Jeff and I’m not attached to Bernie, when we see we’re not separate from each other and the rest of the world, we can now raise the mind of compassion, no longer working just on our own behalf but for the sake of all beings. It’s no longer about me; it’s about everything and everyone in the universe. My first awakening experience was great, and it caused me to be a tough Zen guy demanding that everyone else in the meditation hall practice hard to have the same experience. But the second one was much broader. It wasn’t about me or other practitioners; it was about all the hungry spirits in the world. And that’s everyone, including you and me.

  In Zen Peacemakers we have Three Tenets, and the first is not knowing, which corresponds to abiding nowhere, being in that state of non-attachment. That’s The Dude is not in. If I say, Bernie’s not in, in most cases there is still some Bernie left in, some attachment I have to an aspect of myself. It could be as basic as my attachment to being a man, a teacher, or a father. Those may all be very positive things, but if I’m attached to them then they’ll condition me, and they will limit the possibilities of action in my life.

  Say I identify too much with the teacher part of me. If someone asks me for help, I may give her a lecture about Zen when what she really needs is some listening, money, or just a big hug. My conditioning to teach will limit my flexibility and responsiveness.

  It’s very rare to be in a state where there’s nothing in, where you have no attachment to any idea or concept about yourself. In that state you’ve immediately raised the mind of compassion, because if nothing is in, everything is in, and you are now free to experience yourself as the world. Much of Zen training is about helping us get to that state.

  The second of the Zen Peacemakers Tenets is bearing witness to the joys and suffering of the world, which means not backing away from anything that comes up inside you or that you see and hear in life.

  JEFF: There’s a difference between somebody who is enlightened and someone who thinks, It’s all me, it’s all for me. That’s seeing things only from your conditioning, only from your opinions, which is the opposite of not being in.

  One of the cool things about acting is that it’s all about getting inside other people’s skin, other people’s reality. I’ve played some sociopaths and psychopaths. Of course, the sociopath doesn’t view himself as a sociopath; it’s all a matter of perspective. So what is the correct perspective? Wherever you’re standing, you’re going to see something else, right?

  Take the characters in Jagged Edge or The Vanishing. The Vanishing is about a guy who buries people alive. Jagged Edge is about a sociopath who kills his wife. What I discovered in my exploration of those characters, especially with the guy in The Vanishing, is that he’s alive. He senses his aliveness; he feels the world and the people in it as extensions of himself. In a way, he wants to express himself and even serve people, only his way of doing that is burying them alive. So we all have different views of what it is to serve others. It goes back to That’s your opinion, man.

  The character in The Vanishing is a little like Jack Nicholson when he says, in A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth.” You can’t handle that you need some motherfucker like me who’s willing to do your dirty work. So the character in The Vanishing says, I’m gonna murder these people, and it’s a blessing because it’s good for the whole. Hitler might have felt the same way, and all those others who do terrible things. They had their dream and their vision; they were capable of love and all the basic human emotions. So why do we call one dream good and another one bad?

  BERNIE: For me it’s about not-knowing and bearing witness. The Dude is not in refers to a pure state of no attachment whatever, nothing there. That’s not true about the characters you described. As you said, the guy in The Vanishing thinks of people as extensions of himself, which is the opposite of The Dude is not in. When we bear witness to something, there’s almost no distance between myself and what I’m observing, between subject and object. In acting, you get completely inside the skin of the character you’re playing; you totally bear witness to him or her. I call the actions you do out of that, loving actions. If the characters you played were bearing witness to the people they killed, their loving actions would have been pretty different from what they ended up doing. Imagine bearing witness to what it feels like to be buried alive! There’s no way he’d do what he did.

  Taking loving actions is the Third Tenet of the Zen Peacemakers. In terms of practice, we have to learn how to bear witness to all these folks, including the sociopaths and the psychopaths, and then the appropriate loving action arises.

  JEFF: Because all those folks are us. We’re all aspects of the same thing.

  BERNIE: Part of my practice is to try to bear witness to everything that feels ugly or that scares me. That’s why I started to do our yearly retreats at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps in Poland, where 1.3 million people were murdered. I meet all aspects of myself there: victims, killers, children, guards, bureaucrats, even the electrified fences that surrounded the place. All of them are nothing but me.

  My definition of enlightenment is realizing the oneness of life. And whatever you exclude and call not me, or whatever you’re not willing to deal with, is going to thwart you. Any action you take that does not include all viewpoints is going to fail, and it will fail exactly in the areas you excluded.

  Lenny Bruce liked to say, What’s the deal here? In each of these situations, what’s the deal here? What are we leaving out? Who are we leaving out? That’s where we’re going to have problems. We’re everything and everyone, and that’s whom we should bring to the table. Instead, we invite the people we feel good about and we leave out the others. But those people are still us. We’re going to fall short wherever and whenever we put on blinders and refuse to deal with everyone.

  So bearing witness to as many people as possible is very important. But in order to do that we have to be totally not in, with no attachments whatsoever, and as I said before, I’ve never met the person who’s completely not in. We are in to a certain degree and we’re not in to a certain degree. We have attachments to some things and not to others. The world pecks away, sending us messages; we listen to some, and we don’t listen to others. We bear witness to some; we don’t bear witness to others. One message may be this nightmarish guy that’s burying people alive, like your character in The Vanishing, only we don’t want to bear witness to him, he’s too scary. Another may be Adolf Hitler. We don’t want to bear witness to him, either, we want him dead. But if we do bear witness to the part of humanity that all these different people represent, we grow, and our loving actions will reflect that, too.

  JEFF: There’s also an aspect of how quickly and deeply we’re ready to go. There’s a story of the Hindu god, Brahma. One of his angels comes to the king and says, “Brahma would like to show himself to you. How would you like him to show himself? Think about it and give me your answer.”

  Then he goes to a very humble man, not a king by any means, and says the same thing: “Brahma’s going to show himself to you. Think about how you would like him to show himself.”

  The next day the angel goes back to the king, w
ho says: “I would like Brahma to show himself to me and all of my subjects in his full glory. And since I’ve got some meetings at noon, I’d like that to happen at, say, eleven o’clock.”

  The angel agrees. Eleven o’clock rolls around, the king’s guys assemble, Brahma shows himself in all his glory, and they all disintegrate because they can’t handle his full glory. There’s nothing left, not even ashes; they’re just gone.

  Then the angel goes to the humble man and asks, “How do you want Brahma to show himself?”

  The man answers, “I want Brahma to show himself in all of the faces that I see every day, in ordinary life.” That’s what he gets, and he doesn’t die because he took the glory in manageable doses.

  So the question is, how much are you ready to take on? How much are you ready to bear witness to? What’s it going to cost you?

  6.

  NEW SH** HAS COME TO LIGHT

  JEFF: T Bone Burnett told me this about performing with my band: You don’t have to feel like you’re pulling the train. When you’re up there on the stage with the rest of the band, you’re opening the door for them to go through. You don’t have to push them—Come on, we gotta do this!—thinking that otherwise it’s not going to get done. It’s more of a moving out of the way than trying to muscle it through.