The Dude and the Zen Master Read online

  BERNIE: When you first start doing Zen meditation, we give this instruction: Thoughts will come; the brain’s job is to produce thoughts. Don’t try to stop them, and also don’t follow them. Pretend it’s an open door; let the thoughts come in and let them go. Don’t try to manipulate them because you’ll get into trouble.

  I love talking about Zen and jazz bands. We’re instruments of life. You perfect your instrument, which is yourself, to become a player. But playing in a band, where you hear the sounds of all the instruments, is very different from playing alone.

  JEFF: Playing in a band makes you bigger. It takes you to places you’d never go just on your own.

  BERNIE: Imagine if you’re sitting there as part of the band and you say, I’m gonna play these chords no matter what the other guys do. It kills the whole thing.

  JEFF: Or I’m gonna force these guys to do what I do. You don’t get the benefit of hearing another aspect of yourself. The creativity’s gone.

  It’s a little like that when I work on a movie. I can see that everyone is different, that we serve different purposes and are all aspects of the whole. For instance, one of the things that I find very freeing in making a movie is to turn it over to the director. I hold his opinion above mine unless I get something that comes from a higher power; if it’s that intense, I’ll be subversive and try to sneak my way in there. But generally, I like to empower the director and give him power over me so that I can transcend myself and make something bigger than what I have in my own mind, maybe even surprise myself. All the folks there have different opinions and visions of what’s going on, which enrich my experience and also make for a better movie.

  My stand-in, Loyd Catlett, is a deep friend. He’s from Texas, a hunter with trophies on his wall, and was raised very differently from me. I’ve probably spent almost as much time with him as I’ve spent with my wife. My father’s name was spelled with two ls, Catlett’s name is spelled with one. Over the last forty-five years we’ve done around sixty films together. That may be a record: Most Movies Made by an Actor & Stand-in Team. I met him on The Last Picture Show in 1971 and he’s been the thread that runs through most of my movies. The stand-in’s job is to work with the director of photography to set up the lights and cameras before the actual shooting takes place. This can be tedious and go on for hours, but Loyd is a professional and he knows how I move and speak, which is very helpful in getting the movie made.

  We have a wonderful relationship; he’s invaluable to me in so many ways, not only as a stand-in and occasional stuntman but also as my role model for many roles, from The Last Picture Show to True Grit. Anytime I’m playing a western character, he’s my go-to guy. And beside all that, he’s my dear friend. Being a Texan, he’s got a lot of one-liners that are music for the soul, like, “You know what your problem is? You don’t realize who I think I am.” Or sometimes he switches it: “You know what my problem is? I don’t realize who you think you are.”

  We have different skill sets and different opinions about things, but all are useful perspectives and tools.

  BERNIE: So how do I just let it all be, bear witness, and get into the swing? I love Ellington’s tune, “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” Just let it be. Bear witness to the voices and the instruments—whether it’s a jazz band or life—and then move with them, flow with them. If you can do that, then you’ll be a lot happier because in life you’re always in a band and you’re always swinging. You’re not forcing anything and you’re not being forced, you just flow. Like your friend T Bone said, people think that if you’re not figuring it out and forcing it in certain ways, you’re not going to get things done. The opposite is true. You’ll get more done because you’re allowing the creativity to flow.

  To paraphrase Linji, founder of the Rinzai school of Zen, the whole world is a puppet stage, so who’s pulling the strings?* If you’re in there pulling the strings and telling people what they have to do, it’s not going to be a great puppet show.

  JEFF: Or, going back to The Dude is not in, if you really are not in, and that’s what’s pulling the strings, that’s pretty fucking cool.

  BERNIE: As soon as you know something, you’re not completely open and you can’t bear witness to life. Bearing witness is like plunging, becoming completely one with something. Meditation is a practice for not-knowing and bearing witness. When you just sit, you let go of thoughts and feelings and bear witness to what arises moment after moment.

  In Zen we have different practices to help us do that. There are koans, like what Huineng said to the monk who pursued him: What was your original face before your parents were born? Your brain tells you that it makes no sense. You let go of that, you go into the state of not-knowing, bear witness to the koan, and something happens.

  I’ve developed the practice of doing street retreats, where a small group of us lives on the streets without ID or money and just with the clothes on our backs. That’s a plunge into life on the streets. Things become gritty and immediate; instead of worrying about business or work, you’re thinking about where to get your next meal, how far away it is, where you can use a bathroom, and where you can sleep. For a short while, you become one with the streets. No matter what your life is like back home, during that week you feel raw and vulnerable. Another plunge is our annual retreats at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. You can read books and see movies about Auschwitz all you want, but it has nothing to do with the experience of being there.

  If we go back in history, Zen masters used shouting and hitting to get you to the place where you’re not in, where you abide nowhere. When we have some sense of self, we feel secure. But when there’s a shout or a hit—

  JEFF: —it clears everything. That sense of self is gone.

  BERNIE: That’s what I look for when I work with students. I’m not interested in their understanding terminology or reciting scriptures, I want them to embody The Dude is not in; I want their systems to work that way.

  Generally, I find that a lot of people use words and terms without knowing what they mean; they’re sort of hiding behind their own talk. My Ph.D. is in applied mathematics. My advisor used to say, “If you can’t explain it, you don’t know it.” If you can’t put it in regular, simple language that people can understand, then you don’t really know what you’re talking about.

  The great thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master Eihei Dogen talked about dotoku, which means the way of expression. Do is Tao, the way, and toku is expression. The way of expression is to express yourself so that somebody can really understand. It goes even further than words; in fact, it doesn’t have to be verbal. It can be an emotion, a slap, a sudden, great laugh, it can be anything.

  Would it be correct to say that an actor empties himself of his own identity to let the role come through, while a movie star relies more on being sexy or charismatic? The two are very different. So when you say, That person’s an actor, you perceive him as coming from his whole body and embodying that emptiness.

  JEFF: When I make a movie, I often do something to create my own empty space. I’ll give you an example. Say I come in, I do all my due diligence, study my lines, think about how to play the character, and feel I’m really ready. But now the other actor is not doing it how I imagined in my hotel room, or the director seems kind of pissed, or it’s raining though it’s supposed to be sunny in the scene. So I’m starting to feel tight, you know?

  So what I sometimes do is start singing or do somersaults around the stage, do something that’s apparently inappropriate. I’ll scream, get over on my back and just let it rip. Once, I led the cast and crew in a big om session. They all chanted this weird syllable: Ommmm! And it shifted the vibe; it changed the tightness to looseness. When you do the unexpected, everyone starts wondering what else can happen. They start reassessing all the givens of that moment.

  What’s great about movies is that all of this is totally allowed; it’s even encouraged. Creativity is what’s called for. The idea is
to get empty so the thing can come through you, you know? What I try to go for is that thing you’re talking about, The Dude is not in. I’m taking advantage of everything and letting it rip.

  It’s a little like what you do when you put that nose on. You’re doing something unexpected, shattering the boundaries that people assume are there: What, a Zen master is acting like a clown? It’s also an important reminder to yourself: All this is nothing but space to be danced in. There’s no need to feel harnessed or limited in any way.

  Letting go and emptying myself is such a strong force for me—almost like gravity—that it does me, I don’t do it. When the Dude is not in, life just blossoms.

  BERNIE: Shakyamuni Buddha said that everything and everyone, as they are, are enlightened. On the other hand, the founder of the Japanese tantric Shingon school, Kobo-Daishi, said that the way you can tell the depth of a person’s enlightenment, how much she or he realizes the oneness of life, is by how she or he serves others. So the one who’s always in, the one who thinks exclusively of herself, is only seeing the oneness of her own self and that’s whom she’s going to serve. If what’s in is her family and her, then she sees their oneness and that’s whom she’s going to serve; the depth of her enlightenment is her family. If you see people serving society, the depth of their enlightenment is society. I always point to the Dalai Lama as somebody who’s serving the world, not just himself or even his own Tibetan nation. So the depth of his enlightenment is the world, meaning that he sees himself as the world and the world as himself.

  To say that someone is completely not in represents an extreme case of a person who has totally let go of attachment to his or her identity. That’s a state that none of us is really going to achieve, except sometimes, like during that scream that you mentioned. During that scream there is nothing. Nobody’s in.

  JEFF: My album, Be Here Soon, was a takeoff on Ram Dass’s book Be Here Now. I thought that nobody would get the title so I kept trying to drop it, but it kept on coming back. The title comes from lyrics in a song, “I’ll Be Here Soon,” which is a little paradoxical. I mean, don’t those words imply that you’re already here?

  BERNIE: People hear that the practice is to live in the now, and they feel like a failure that they can’t do that. I give lots of talks, and almost always at the end somebody raises his hand and says, You know, I’ve been trying to practice this for so long, and I still can’t be here now. At that point I always say, Whoever is not here now, please stand up. Of course, nobody stands up because we’re all here now. Where else can we be?

  JEFF: I have to admit that I’ve had the same feeling as that student. Be here now. Okay, but I’m not feeling like I’m here right now. I’m feeling like I’ll be here soon. In some way, my saying that I’m not here now feels sort of like an acknowledgment that I am here now, only feeling that I’m not.

  BERNIE: “The Dude is not in, leave a message.” That’s our life again. We’re not in, and everybody’s leaving messages. Not being in—not being attached to Jeff or Bernie or whoever you are—is the essence of Zen. When we’re not attached to our identity, it allows all the messages of the world to come in and be heard. When we’re not in, creation can happen.

  JEFF: It can have its way, man.

  The Dude does his best to take it easy. And that brings to mind going with the grain. When I think of Lily, my goddaughter, I think of the first syllable of her name, Li. In Chinese, that literally means the veins of a leaf, the grain in wood or in marble. I did a scene in Surf’s Up where I’m trying to give a lesson about going with the grain while making a surfboard. You come across a knot, so where’s the grain in the knot? Where’s the path of least resistance?

  BERNIE: When you do judo, you’re working with the energy of the person. If you want to go in a certain direction, you wait until the energy of the other person goes that way, too. If it doesn’t, you wait awhile, knowing that change happens. As the Dude says, New shit comes to light, and when it does, you’ll pick it up again. We wait for the grain to go in the direction we want to go, and then we move with it. But new shit keeps coming to light, things keep on changing, and we run into another knot in the wood. So we wait again. We have a little patience.

  In 1980 I wanted to build an interfaith community, but there was resistance from different people. It didn’t flow, so I stopped and waited. Ten years later it came more naturally and we flowed right with it. That happens all the time; otherwise, you just bully it out and you end up hurting yourself and others.

  Some people ask, how long do you wait? Maybe five lifetimes, maybe ten, I don’t know. We have to think big.

  JEFF: Don’t abandon it. Keep it burning.

  BERNIE: The grains in the flow of life are always there. At certain times there are unexpected knots, but the grains are still there. One of the key messages of Shakyamuni Buddha was that everything is change. That’s why the phrase New shit has come to light is so important. Eihei Dogen wrote a treatise called Genjo Koan (Actualizing the Fundamental Point), which is all about how we live this life in its essence, as both The Dude is not in and The Dude abides. Toward the end, he adds: “Beyond this, there are further implications.” No matter how hard we practice and how strongly we feel that we’ve mastered our life, new shit will keep coming to light. The situation will change as often as every split moment, and we will find a way to flow with the grain instead of fighting it.

  JEFF: When you start opening your heart, the world responds. There is such a need for open hearts that the world will challenge you: Come on, how much are you willing to give?

  Isn’t it the underachiever’s manifesto not to be the highest blade of grass because life is just going to cut you down?

  BERNIE: In Japan there’s a phrase that says that the higher a tree grows, the more wind it has on it. It’s a natural part of what it means to grow. You could try to force the wind to stop, but you could also work with it, just like you do in sailing. Be patient; let the circumstances take you there. Go with the wind, and you’re either going to get there or you’ll get somewhere else.

  JEFF: But I sometimes fear my own excitement. Excitement and creativity are wonderful things: Open, open, do, do! But the other side is saying, You might be writing checks that your ass can’t cash, buddy. That’s the reason for Take ’er easy, because I can get too excited. This is another reason why my wife, Sue, is so good for me. She dampens my excitement in the most beautiful way.

  BERNIE: When you talk about the highest blade of grass getting cut, or that life snuffs out those who reach too high, I often think about how true that is for people who try to change the system. For example, take Mother Teresa. She worked hard all her life to make things better for the poor and we all loved her. But she wasn’t trying to change the system; if anything, she took care of the fallout from the system, the people whom the system ignored, like the poor and the dying. On the other hand, Martin Luther King Jr. tried to change the system itself. He started out being a spokesman for African-Americans, but he ended up talking against the Vietnam War and the social inequalities in our country—against the entire system—and he got killed. Not everybody is ready to stand up like that because it’s dangerous; no system wants to be changed.

  Primo Levi, who wrote about his survival at Auschwitz, described Elias, a dwarf who was interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. He was enormously strong, bestial, and quite insane, and with those qualities he not only navigated the Auschwitz system, where so many died all around him, but actually thrived. He ate, stole, and seemed quite happy. It was clear that in the world outside Auschwitz, which is a different system, he’d survive only on the outermost fringes of society, maybe even get put away in an insane asylum. But in the system called Auschwitz, Elias was a master player.

  So each system forces us to play in certain ways, and you have to look not only at what it’s doing but also at what it forces you to do. We have the capacity to sail in any system; we also have the capacity to try to change it. Th
at’s the dangerous way to go, because we’re going to be criticized, rejected, excommunicated, and maybe even killed.

  Lenny Bruce tried to change the system, in his way. He was a stand-up comedian who not only ranted about the system—the system could deal with that—but would also improvise, use obscenities, talk about sex, and say things even he didn’t expect to say. That kind of unconstraint and freedom scares people.

  My friend the clown and activist Wavy Gravy also tries to change the system, but in a very different style from Lenny Bruce. Wavy once told me he was picketing against the nuclear work at the Livermore National Laboratory in California. The police came to break up the sit-in and he was in a Santa Claus clown costume. They grabbed him, took off his Santa Claus costume, and beat the shit out of him.

  JEFF: That’s the power of the clown, right? They couldn’t beat him up with the costume on. Humor is very good grease, man. Richard Pryor was another guy like that.

  But I wonder: Were they trying to change the system, or were they just being naturally themselves? Maybe all Pryor wanted to do was just be who and what he was. It’s almost like you can’t help it, that’s how you address life and the universe; it’s who you become. Maybe you even get addicted to that identity. So are you doing it or is it doing you? Is it even a matter of choice? Do the circumstances bring forth the guy or gal who wants to change the system, or is it the guy or gal who decides to change the system?

  BERNIE: Everything is interconnected. Take a forest, for example. It has a redwood that grows ten feet a year and an oak tree that grows one inch a year. There are also circumstances like sun, rain, and soil. But the circumstances include the characteristics of each particular tree. One is going to grow ten feet a year, and one’s going to grow one inch a year. Our body’s like that, too. Due to circumstances, the hands do certain things and the feet do something else. They share the same environment, they share the same body, but at the same time each has its own aspects.