The Dude and the Zen Master Read online

  JEFF: Hunger has gotten really bad in this country, but maybe this had to happen before people finally reacted. There’s no bad that doesn’t create some good.

  Again, it’s like those Lojong teachings that the knots in your life can also be the keys to your liberation. A little adjustment changes the whole damn thing. That’s a different way of looking at those bumps—not as barriers but as inspirations, even callings: Come on!

  BERNIE: The Chinese language is made of symbols rather than letters. Their word for difficulty consists of two characters, and one of the characters is opportunity. Hidden within every difficulty is an opportunity. I’ve worked a lot in the world of business, and the problems you run into in business become golden opportunities.

  JEFF: I’ve been often asked in interviews, Why do you do the movies you do, and is there a thread that runs through them? I initially thought there wasn’t, but then I realized that many of my films have the theme of exactly what we’re talking about, that what appears to be a drag is actually a wonderful opportunity. One that really comes to mind is called American Heart, about a guy getting out of prison and the last thing he wants is to see his fourteen-year-old kid and have to take care of him. He desperately wants to go straight and make something of his life, and he thinks he won’t be able to do that if he’s burdened with a kid. Of course, it turns out that getting together with his boy and taking care of his needs really show him what life is all about. They give joy and meaning to his life.

  Another practice I find interesting is tonglen. That’s a Tibetan practice that helps us connect with others’ suffering and our own. I’m kind of a beginning student of it, but one idea I really like is that your feelings are not just your feelings, we all have them. So in some ways, you’re a representative of what it is to be alive. As an actor, I feel that I represent a community, the family of man and woman, and my job is to show how different people will act in different situations, like the father in American Heart. So when it comes to feelings of struggle and suffering, you’re not alone; your suffering is on behalf of the whole group, on behalf of all of us.

  That thought alone eases things. It’s also the beginning of compassion.

  8.

  YOU MEAN COITUS?

  JEFF: We had a group of guys up here, Alan Kozlowski, John Goodwin, and Chris Pelonis,* playing music and doin’ a hang, and the discussion turned to A440. A is a note in the musical scale above middle C and 440 refers to its frequency, 440 Hz. When musicians tune up together, they use A440 as their standard for setting musical pitch. And the discussion was: Is A440 an absolute truth or is it just something arbitrary we use to create the standard? Johnny’s point of view was that A440 is a relatively modern standard of tuning and basically it’s an arbitrary thing. Pelonis, who is an acoustical engineer, said that A440 is not just the frequency of the note A but is also the earth’s vibration. Earth has a basic resonance, and that’s why A became the standard. He summarized it this way: “The region of 440 is by Supreme design and not arbitary or coincidental.”

  So is there an ultimate reality? And if there is, how do you know what it is?

  BERNIE: In Zen we talk about bearing witness, or being one with something. First you have to be in a space of not-knowing, letting go of attachments to who you think you are, and then you can bear witness to life around you, which means becoming it. And I mentioned that Zen has practices to help you do that, like koans.

  One of those koans is Contemplate A. The first letter in the Sanskrit alphabet is pronounced Ah. In the Tantric tradition, Ah is the seed syllable of the universe. So you can expound on Ah or explain Ah, you can even pronounce Ah, but none of these are enough. To work on the koan Contemplate A, you have to come into total resonance with Ah, you have to become that vibration, Ah.

  The same with the basic resonance of the earth. Let’s say you want to tune your life to be in resonance with the earth, just like you want to tune your guitar to be in resonance with the rest of the band. You don’t talk about A440, you play it. Similarly, you don’t talk about the resonance of the earth, you become it. The resonance of the earth was there before anyone knew about A440, so how do you be that? Leaves turning, flowers popping open, rain falling on a leaf, the leaf bending under the weight of the raindrop, and the raindrop hitting the ground—these are all resonances of the earth. How are you in resonance with them?

  I can say, “Birds are flying in the sky.” Those are words I’ve learned. If you didn’t know the word bird, what would you call it? When the first ships came to America, the natives didn’t see them as ships because they had no word for ship. What they saw were new patterns; they didn’t call it this or that.

  Once we have words, we get stuck to them, especially to what we think they mean. Don’t forget, a word may mean different things to different people. I’ve heard that the Eskimos have ten words for snow. They may say, It’s such and such, and people who’re not of their culture won’t understand, because they don’t experience snow like the Eskimos do. But if you pick up a handful of snow and put it against somebody’s cheek, she experiences snow; she doesn’t need the word.

  Words are important because they give us a way of informing and dialoguing with each other, but they don’t necessarily help us experience the thing itself. You can’t use words to experience an apple, you taste it. To experience life, you can’t just give out names, like A440, resonance of the earth, apple, snow, enlightenment, whatever. It’s the experience that counts.

  JEFF: Didn’t you mention that the Heart Sutra, which is a famous sutra in Mahayana Buddhism, begins with the letter A, as in Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva,* and that you could sum up the entire Heart Sutra in that one letter?

  BERNIE: Yes, but again, not just by reading A. You have to become one with it, plunge into A, and then you’re at one with the whole sutra. That sutra talks about the state of not knowing, so if you’re at one with the sutra you’re in resonance with the entire universe. Of course, we are always in resonance with the entire universe because we are that universe. But how do we become aware of it? How do we experience it? By getting into that space where that’s all we experience, where there’s nothing but A.

  Isn’t that what happens in acting? Somebody plays a role. He does everything right but you don’t feel that he really embodies the character. It’s got nothing to do with the words or even with what he’s doing, it’s something deeper. It’s that extra step that I believe makes a great actor. He’s bearing witness, he’s embodying; there’s no subject-object separation. If there is, he can speak the lines and go through all the right motions, but there’s that extra little thing, that layer of separation, that the audience can feel. It’s the same with a great speaker. You go to a lecture, the speaker is fantastic, but you know there’s something not real about it. He’s talking about things he hasn’t borne witness to, hasn’t lived. That’s the extra step that we try to get you to take in koan study.

  JEFF: One of my favorite actors is Tommy Lee Jones. He brings an intensity to his characters that is so rich and mysterious. He’s very opaque; you don’t see all the wheels turning, which I admire in actors. To me it seems more the way people act in real life. I don’t particularly care for the kind of actors who feel obligated to show you everything; that’s what we mean by indicating. They’re going to show you what they think the audience needs to see, to tell the story. But with Tommy, like a lot of other actors, you don’t see the work. You don’t see the practice, the effort; he’s not trying to do anything, he’s just there.

  BERNIE: There was this wonderful ninth-century Chinese Zen master, Zhaozhou. He trained for forty years with his teacher, and when he finished his studies he said, I’m going to go on the road, and if I run into an eight-year-old girl who embodies this path, I’ll stay and learn from her. And if I run into an eighty-year-old master who’s got all of the answers, I’ll move on. He didn’t want answers, he wanted the life. So he went out searching for people who were just people, who really had embodied living t
his life fully, in the moment.

  JEFF: When I make a movie, I attempt to get deep as quickly as I can with the guys I’m working with, both the cast and the production crew. I don’t even do it consciously anymore, because it’s become second nature to me. I want to get as deeply connected as possible with the director so that we can become almost like different impulses in the same brain. That intimacy is the snake I referred to earlier. The final movie is the snakeskin, which is nice by itself, only it’s not the snake.

  The most important thing is to exercise this closeness we have together. It’s a chance to overcome resistance to birth, opening, growth, and life. Coitus, man. Making a movie is just the place to do it, like a church is the place to pray. It provides the safe, generous space to cook in. We’ve got all these artists together working to make something very special in two or three months, maybe six, that’s it.

  So the intimacy you develop on a movie set is really something. Most movies—and stories, for that matter—have something to do with love, you know? When you do a love scene with somebody, loving becomes so accessible and easy, especially when two people are doing it on purpose, really opening their hearts. That’s why people fall in love with their costars. Then they make the misstep of fucking and that can screw it all up. My wife, Sue, is my leading lady in the real movie. We’ve just celebrated our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary and our relationship is the most precious thing to me. But that doesn’t close down my intimacy with other people. If anything, it makes me love Sue all the more. The freedom that she gives me, loving me as I am, causes me to want to get closer and closer to her all the time and inspires me to give her that same freedom. We practice our love.

  Practice, man. That’s what scratches my itch. It’s like when I’m making a movie. Each time I have the same kind of panicky feeling in the beginning: Am I gonna be able to pull it off? Am I gonna be prepared? Am I gonna be able to do what’s called for? And every time I prepare, I feel much better.

  BERNIE: We have to practice in order to experience being in tune with what’s going on. When you play your guitar with your band, everybody’s instruments have to get in tune using the same frequency; everybody has to get in resonance. That requires a common intention.

  JEFF: Not only are the instruments in tune, everyone’s intentions are also in tune.

  BERNIE: But all that’s gone once you’re playing. You’re not thinking anymore, Hey, I’m in tune with the other guys. You’re just playing and experiencing the resonance.

  JEFF: The song is playing you.

  BERNIE: There’s the phrase freely playing, like the phrase at play in the fields of the Lord. In that state you’re no longer practicing, you’re just freely playing. Say the entire group is in that state, and now you’re joined by another musician, who comes from a whole different culture than yours with no sense of A440 but with a different tonal scheme instead. If that person joins you, the whole group is going to pick up on it and will play a different song or riff from what it would have played otherwise. That’s what happens if you’re in the realm of freely playing. If, on the other hand, you’re in the realm of practice, and this new musician starts playing, you might think: Hey, that’s weird. Let’s stop for a second and figure out what to do.

  In life, it’s very important to practice. That’s one of the ways that we’re going to get in harmony with everything. But the most enjoyable times are when we’re just freely playing in the fields of the Lord, in the fields of the Pure Land.

  JEFF: What I dig is that it’s having its way with us, you know? It’s so great when that happens in a movie or any kind of art. The tricky part is getting hooked. The kind of fish I am, I try not to get hooked. That’s kind of my approach in life. I have a lot of resistance to getting hooked because I know the engagement and the investment that will be required. And you only have so much time to do things, so once you choose to do one thing you’re not going to do others. But once you get hooked and it’s pulling you along, a wonderful thing starts happening, where it starts to do you instead of you doing it.

  BERNIE: Lovemaking is very similar.

  JEFF: Again, coitus, man.

  BERNIE: There’s foreplay, during which you try to get in resonance with each other, and then there’s the time of coitus itself, where you’re not doing any of that.

  JEFF: It’s doing you.

  BERNIE: That’s playing. The other is practice.

  JEFF: There’s a very fine line between those two. Can you play and practice at the same time?

  BERNIE: We say that the distance between heaven and earth is the breadth of a hair.

  JEFF: And you can kind of go back and forth.

  BERNIE: You’re always going back and forth.

  JEFF: I got a one-track mind, man. Coitus keeps coming up. It’s wonderful to get in that groove. You can’t make a mistake if you wanted to, and neither can the other. It’s like what Miles Davis says: “Don’t worry about mistakes, there aren’t any.”

  BERNIE: We’ve talked about practice and freely playing, but there are certain people who seem to jump into freely playing without any preparation. How would you relate to people like Sid Caesar or Robin Williams? I heard that Sid Caesar never went by a script, though he always had one. He just reacted to the other people or the situation.

  JEFF: I remember watching his show as a kid. And I played with Robin Williams in The Fisher King.

  When I got the gig I was a little worried, you know: Robin Williams! He riffs all the time, he can’t help it, it’s like a tic. I’ve got this scene in the end where I’m supposed to give this big soliloquy while he’s lying there in a coma, and I can imagine him suddenly going, AAAAH, you know, fucking with the scene and with me. Instead, I got to that scene and his presence was so beautiful. He didn’t have anything to say because he was supposed to be in a coma, so he could have gone to sleep while I did my lines. But he was awake and present. He supported me in the most wonderful way without saying one word.

  Robin went to Juilliard; he’s a trained actor. The way I look at it, comedy’s just one of many things he can pull out of his kit bag. When we did Fisher King, we’d be working long, sixteen-hour days, it would be four in the morning, and we’d be dragging. All of a sudden Robin would plant his feet and just riff on everybody in the room. He had us all in stitches. It was like jazz, you know. Many directors would laugh a bit and then tell everybody to get back to work. But not Terry Gilliam. Terry would egg him on. He’d have him go on for half an hour or so; Robin would have gone on forever. We were so energized we’d get back to work and have three or four more hours of juice. The power of the clown, man.

  BERNIE: Would you say that Robin Williams spends a lot of time in the world of practice, or does he just play?

  JEFF: Both, I think. You practice going a little further, making that insult a little sharper. At some point it becomes playing, things come out and you can’t help it, it becomes a reflex thing. So he probably goes back and forth. You can practice playing, can’t you? I mean, you practice getting into that groove, into that spot. Isn’t that meditation?

  There’s another way of looking at practice. A doctor might say, I practice surgery. That’s a little bit different, isn’t it?

  BERNIE: For me, I’m practicing when I’m in a place of no subject-object relationship. I could be working, but if I’m just totally in my work it becomes play.

  JEFF: In that instance, practice and play become the same thing, right? In acting, rehearsal might be thought of as a practice. But when I’m rehearsing, that’s the time to also really get down and play. Just get into the thing, see where it takes you. As Sidney Lumet said when we were going through The Morning After day after day, it’s like peeling the onion. Each time you do it you’re going to find new things. You practice freshness, practice playing.

  BERNIE: So can people just play their life, or do they have to practice their life?

  JEFF: Or indicate their life? Or rehearse their life?

  BERNIE: In my termi
nology, if you bear witness, which means you’re living it, then you’re playing. If you follow your ideas about what you’re doing, you’re practicing. I like to work with people in their lives, whether at the workplace, their home, whatever. So how do you get them to play their life, to totally plunge in, do what you did with Sidney Lumet, do the whole movie? Say you’re doing your life, and now it’s changed a bit. You’re not stopping every three seconds to say, Did I do it right? What’s a better way of doing it? Did those people do it right? Are they screwing up? You’re just fully living your life. For me, that’s play. And I think we can train to do that, and that training is the practice.

  My experience is that when you really play your life rather than rehearse it, it’s beyond joy and sadness, you just feel much more alive. When you’re in a planning mode, all kinds of stuff come up: I should have done this, I should have done that, why didn’t I do that?

  If at some point you decide you want to teach acting, I’m sure you’ll teach people to be alive in their acting. That will be a practice. And I think certainly in Zen or Buddhism in general, the role of the teacher is to try to help a person be alive in their life. And they have to practice.

  JEFF: Those knots we were talking about earlier can be invitations to practice. We’re busy playing, only now our clown gets knocked over or life hits us in a bad way; those are all reminders to practice.