The Dude and the Zen Master Read online

  Nuclear energy appeared, and somebody like Wavy Gravy responded by doing antinuclear work. Much earlier, nuclear energy appeared and the scientist Richard Feynman responded by helping to produce the atom bomb. Both people shared similar circumstances, but they had different personal characteristics, so the result is different. And part of the game also is that Feynman got honors and medals while Wavy gets beaten up by a policeman after he takes off his Santa Claus suit.

  There are the Feynmans, the Pryors, the Gravys, and the Bruces. There are the Bridges and the Glassmans. This garden called us is a wonderful mixture of totally different trees, plants, and flowers. All of them are different aspects of ourselves, so why kill them or beat them? Why not honor them instead?

  7.

  YOU KNOW, DUDE, I MYSELF DABBLED IN PACIFISM AT ONE POINT. NOT IN ’NAM, OF COURSE.

  JEFF: Years ago I asked you this question. If the world is one body, what about all the violence we see around us? What about the war and the fighting? If the other shore is right under our feet and everything’s perfect the way it is, what is all the killing about?

  And it’s not just about competing people or countries, it’s also competing ideas. During the Holocaust the Nazis didn’t want to just wipe out Jews, Gypsies, and others, they also wanted to destroy their ideas and culture. Remember how we talked about the hen and the egg? The hen may think she’s pretty important, but all she may be is just another way to make eggs. Again, are you living life, or is life living you?

  BERNIE: If we’re only here as an engine to move life forward, it certainly affects our sense of our own importance.

  JEFF: Have you ever looked underwater at sea anemones? They don’t seem to move at all. But if you look at them again using time-lapse photography, you see them pushing against each other, like: Get outta here! This is my rock, my survival. Not only do people do the same thing, ideas do that, too.

  I don’t like all this fighting and killing, I want peace. You might think it would be wonderful if we could go in and extract all the evil people out of this world, like we extract cancer out of a body. But as Solzhenitsyn says, evil runs through all of our hearts, and who wants to cut out a piece of her own heart? We are part of nature and nature uses violence and war to make its blade sharper and sharper. Life becomes more intelligent, but we only see that after the fact.

  When we experience the fighting up close, we don’t understand it; we think it’s horrible and destructive. Time passes, enabling us to step back, and we get a different perspective. We step out even further back and now there’s order instead of disorder.

  It’s like looking closely at a blood cell through a microscope. Unless you know it’s a blood cell, all you see is chaos. You step back, look at it through a wider lens that captures the entire cell, and you say, Oh, I see, it’s a cell. You look at it through an even wider lens and you say, Cells are fighting other cells all the time. There’s a war going on there! There are also germs, viruses, and bacteria, lots of things like that, all trying and fighting to live. And why not? I mean, germs have a right to live, too, right? But when you look through an even wider lens you see that all these cells make up your body, and it’s one body. And it hits you that you want those battles to go on, because if they didn’t, your body would probably not go on living. You look again through a wider lens and you see one body fighting another, but an even wider lens—like history, maybe—shows you something else: Oh, that’s this whole constellation of relationships. Even wider: It’s all one thing.

  Or you can go the other way, looking at life through greater and greater magnification, revealing finer and finer components. So you’re dividing and dividing, trying to figure out who’s right, who’s wrong, breaking life down even more, and you know what you find in the end? Space.

  So depending on how far or how close you get to something, the perspective changes.

  BERNIE: You might say that the Buddha had the widest lens of all when he said that everything is one, and that everything is enlightened exactly as it is. But another way of talking about it is connecting it once again to our body. From the Buddha’s lens, you’re Jeff. He’s not that interested in all the pieces that make up Jeff, like your legs, hands, veins, or arteries. He sees it’s all one, all Jeff. If you look at Jeff through greater magnification, there are lots of blood cells destroying other blood cells, synapses, membranes, and bones, and they can all look chaotic and even violent. There are desires and attachments, nerve impulses rushing up to the brain and then back down to tell the rest of the body what to do. There’s a lot of action there. But if you use a wide lens, it’s all one thing, and that one thing is Jeff.

  In the same way, if you look at life with the lens of a newspaper, what you’ll see is the same competition, action, and conflict. You’ll see a country called North Korea fighting another country called South Korea; you’ll see floods in Pakistan, the Arctic melting, and politicians arguing. But if you look at it with a wide lens, it’s all one, and that’s what we call enlightenment. Only you can’t just look at oneness, you have to actually experience it, really grok it, not just read, think about, or understand it. And the life you live out of that experience we call an enlightened, or awakened, life.

  Jeff’s body is one whether all the cells and pieces that make up Jeff realize it or not; in the same way, we are all one and interdependent whether we actually realize it or not. But it’s nice to experience it, because then we can bring our actions into congruence with what’s real, and what’s real is that everything is one. When we see that, we begin to treat everyone and everything as one. But in order to see it, we have to practice.

  The Bodhisattva sees that there is no separate self and that everything is one, but in order to fulfill his vow to free all beings, he will work with all the pieces. He will recognize Jeff as separate from Bernie, Sue, or Eve and work with him as a separate entity. That means that he’s purposely working in the world of delusion, but he’s doing this to fulfill his vow rather than to serve his ego.

  JEFF: And yet, we have this dream of peace. Is that unnatural?

  BERNIE: For me it’s utopia, and I don’t believe in utopias.

  JEFF: Do you believe in peace?

  BERNIE: I believe in working toward peace. I believe in trying to reduce suffering. One kind of suffering comes out of people fighting and killing each other, and I’ve worked a little in that area. But I don’t believe I’ll ever reach peace if what’s meant by that is that no one will ever fight or kill.

  Take my body again, for example. I feel my body’s at peace, but does that mean that I want my white blood cells to stop attacking the cancer cells in my body? No, sir. For me, being at peace means I’m interconnected. That doesn’t mean that blood cells don’t engage with other cells, and it doesn’t guarantee that cancer cells won’t rise up and take over my body one day. That’s the flow of life, and it won’t stop whether we find a cure for cancer or not. If I can somehow take a leap and see the workings of the whole universe, I’ll see lots of things that are not at peace with others. Wolves attack sheep, weeds kill flowers; that’s life. I’ve worked all my years to reduce suffering, but I don’t try to change the wolves or the weeds.

  JEFF: The name of your organization is Zen Peacemakers, right? So when you say making peace, what are you making, exactly?

  BERNIE: I’m Buddhist, but as you know, I’m also Jewish. The Hebrew word for peace is shalom. Many people know that word, but what they may not know is that the root of shalom is shalem, which means whole. To make something shalem, to make peace, is to make whole. There’s a Jewish mystical tradition that at the time of the Creation, God’s light filled a cup, but the light was so strong that the cup shattered into fragments scattered throughout the universe. And the role of the righteous person, the mensch, is to bring the fragments back and connect them to restore the cup. That’s what I mean by peace. For me, peace means whole. The Hebrew oseh shalom is “peacemaker,” as in the verse “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall inherit
the Earth.” They shall work to restore the fragments into a whole. And in Zen, as you know, our practice is to realize that wholeness and interconnectedness of life.

  JEFF: Wholeness reminds me of the word context. President Obama declared that by 2015 we’re going to end childhood hunger. In doing that, he created a context, a national agreement that childhood hunger has no place in our country. So the question now becomes, how are we going to do it? By providing the context, the general agreement, he gets us basically on the same team. That means that while we can still argue, there’s a sense that we’re all in this together. You start intercourse, man, you make love with each other in all the different forms.

  It’s similar to what John Kennedy did, when he said in ten years we are going to put a man on the moon. You were in that biz of putting a man on the moon, right?* There must have been all kinds of disagreements on the kind of rocket, the fuel, how we were going to do it. But once the context was created—we’re putting a man on the moon—then those disagreements became a good thing, because now we were working together. Everyone had their own theories, testing them, arguing and discussing, all in an effort to figure out the best way to get to the moon.

  BERNIE: It’s like the Dude’s rug that tied the room together. A bunch of thugs peed on it, but in the end that’s still the rug that tied the room together.

  JEFF: You know what this also reminds me of? The characters in The Honeymooners. We already talked about Ralph and Norton earlier, but there were also Alice and Trixie. Each of them separately was not so interesting. Ralph Kramden was the bus driver full of dreams about how to become more successful; he was also a bully. Alice, his wife, was commonsensical, flat, and down-to-earth. His friend, Norton, was good-natured but simple-minded, and Trixie, Norton’s wife, was kind of ordinary and a little bossy. Alone, they were not interesting, but when the four of them came together every week for thirty-nine weeks, they were terrific and millions of people tuned in to see them. The Honeymooners, with its stories and situations, provided the context where those four very different characters all worked together, and that changed everything.

  I hope that the context of ending childhood hunger by 2015 will transcend the strong political divisions in our country. In fact, that’s what motivated me to speak at both Republican and Democratic conventions last summer. Let me tell you that story.

  I was finishing a film and looking forward to stopping for a while and spending more time with my family, when Billy Shore, founder of Share Our Strength, asked me to go to the two conventions and talk to the state governors of both parties about Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign. No Kid Hungry connects children and their families to nutrition programs created by local partnerships of government, nonprofits, and businesses. Many states, Republican and Democrat, are already part of the campaign and we’re trying to enlist more.

  Now, you’d think an actor wouldn’t be that uptight about giving a speech, especially about something he cares about. But I get anxious; I want to do a good job. So I start learning my lines just like I do when I make a movie. I work with Billy, Jerry Michaud, my partner in my hunger work, and others to write the speech, which turns out to be four pages long. Being an actor, I look at it like a monologue I’ve got to do in a movie, only unlike the movies you don’t get a number of takes. You’ve got just one shot to pull the thing off. So I have some serious anxiety during the two months before the Republican Convention.

  We arrive in Tampa. The meeting with the Republican governors is scheduled for 10:30 at night at the end of the convention, which seems to me to be a strange time to be talking to them, but they say that that’s the way these things go. We drive to see where the meeting with the governors is going to be, and it’s a bar. I’m thinking there will be drinks and music and everybody’s going to be drunk. I also have to give the speech a second time at a No Kid Hungry party afterward. I go check that venue and it’s a bowling alley.

  My talk with the governors gets postponed to eleven, then midnight. By now I’m feeling like a ship, you know? God, I’ll go wherever you take me. Finally both talks are combined to take place at the bowling alley.

  Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, who is chairman of the Republican Governors Association and already part of the No Kid Hungry campaign, arrives, gives me a wonderful introduction, and splits. It turns out that there are no other governors there at all. I end up giving the talk I’d agonized over for two months to an audience of seventy-five college girls at the bowling alley bar. And I don’t change a thing, either. I memorized my lines so well that I just give the entire four-page speech written for state governors—I hope you’ll join Governor McDonnell and others to develop state solutions to childhood hunger—to a bunch of college girls.

  BERNIE: Did you bring your nose with you?

  JEFF: Damn, I did and I forgot to use it.

  BERNIE: Not-nosing, man.

  JEFF: Right.

  And the Democratic Convention, a week later, wasn’t much better. In addition to advocating for No Kid Hungry, I also did a concert with my band, The Abiders, playing for a few thousand people on an outdoor stage. We’re about three or four songs into the show when the sky opens up and it starts pouring, with lots of thunder and lightning. I see my brother, Beau, out in the audience, so I call him on to the stage and tell him we have to do a rain dance to stop the rain. So I’m doing these elegant tai chi moves while Beau starts hopping up and down and waggling his hands and elbows like a rooster, only now it’s raining and thundering even harder, so I tell him, “No . . . no . . . you’re dancing the wrong steps, man—reverse your power . . . you’re making the storm worse!” Finally we had to pull the plug, stop the concert. We didn’t want to electrify our asses.

  It’s funny, all the goals I had in mind for the conventions didn’t work, but other, unexpected things happened. Isn’t that the way it always is? For instance, I’m hanging with a few folks at the Democratic Convention a week later when two kids—about eight and ten, I think—come up to me, looking like little businessmen, and say, “We’re entertainers.” They hand me their business card and ask me how they could get involved. It was perfect timing, because we’re trying to start a youth task force for No Kid Hungry and get young people fired up about it. Kids, you know, have no political representation. We generated a lot of positive media attention for the campaign, too. And, who knows, maybe one of those college girls will be instrumental in ending hunger in her state. You never know how things are affected by what you do.

  Whether it’s Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, everyone is a part of the whole deal, we can’t do without them.

  I think we’re slowly moving in the right direction. The planet realizes we have to join forces. That’s not going to get rid of all the disagreements and the fighting, but I hope there’ll be more experience of context, of wholeness.

  BERNIE: One of my goals is to work toward that kind of realization. I also have no expectation of seeing it. For example, who can find anything wrong with No Kid Hungry in 2015, which you’re working on? Many people from both parties have joined the campaign, but there are some who may say, If you, a liberal, espouse that, then there’s no way that I, a conservative, will agree with you.

  That’s what I mean by fragments. Even when people see the value of something, the desire to keep their identity as a conservative, a liberal, or anything else can be stronger than their sense of interconnectedness—even if it means that kids go hungry. How can I work with a liberal, even if we have the same goals? It makes no sense, but the differences can take over. That’s what we fight wars about.

  So we choose the spheres of life where we want to work to change this consciousness. Some of us may feel it’s enough just to work with ourselves or our families and not get involved with the rest of the world. But Buddhism has another practice, which is to work with all those whom we consider enemies and make them allies. If I look at a table as a circle of life, I want to bring everybody to the table to discuss
the issues that affect all of us. I’ll learn a lot more from working with my former enemies than if I just hang with my friends. My former enemies will learn more, too, and together we’ll create a better scene.

  JEFF: Creating that better scene doesn’t happen in one fell stroke. When we were writing up the Constitution, we put the question of slavery aside because there was too much disagreement about it. The result was that less than a hundred years later we had to fight the Civil War over it. By initially suppressing the issue, we were able to take the first steps toward creating this nation, but we finally had to deal with it because freedom is such a basic right. Long after the Civil War, racism is still with us and may be the main obstacle to our finally all coming together.

  BERNIE: Something may look like it’s gone for a minute, five minutes, a hundred years, two hundred years, but eventually it will pop up again. If you’re not working with the whole picture, if there are pieces you’re excluding, it’ll come back. Speaking of running into knots and the patience they require, you’ve been doing your hunger work for some thirty years; I’ve worked with people living in poverty for that same time. For one reason or another, we’ve run into all kinds of knots over those years and we had to wait. But I hope that now the environment’s different and we can flow again.

  JEFF: President Obama’s family actually used food stamps when he was a boy; I think that’s a first. So new shit has come to light.

  BERNIE: And obviously, we both want to invite everybody in. You know, when you feed people and provide community, you’re also providing family stability. The rules that were set up for working with the homeless actually break the family apart rather than keep it together. Food is one of the most basic needs of all, because we’ve all got to eat every day. We need housing, but we need food even more. I don’t care who you are, if you starve long enough, you won’t act so cool.