Student Striver 5
Call and Response
by Zheng Dao (Fogueira)
"One calling and other responding is one of the commonest and most practical affairs of life. Zen declares that the truth is precisely there, so we can see what a matter-of-fact thing Zen is. There is no mystery in it, the fact is open to all: I hail you, and you call back; one "Hallo!" calls forth another "Hallo!" and this is all there is to it."
--D.T. Suzuki
The last time I visited I discussed the ecstatic moment of meeting the so-called "good" teacher for which you have been waiting all your life who simply informs you of what you have always known.
I said that was the good part.
Today I will discuss the very, very bad part, in which the teacher begins to earn the money he would be making if anyone paid him what he deserves. The teacher, remember, is the mirror. He points you to your true self.
And this true self includes, of course, every damn demon and dis-ease, every "desire and design", as he would put it, that has ever filled your cold empty heart with craving, every illusion that has crashed and burned into reality.
The first stone on Buddha's Eightfold Path, he reminds me, is Right Views, which encourage us to see life truly is and not masked by the strata of "prejudice, superstition and delusion", as one translation has it.
As I mentioned before, the teacher's gift is skillful means: he has to deal with each student on an individual basis, and pierce the each one's understanding heart in a way that student can understand, in his own language.
The language my teacher shares with me is one of Art. He is a professional journalist, poet and musician. I am a wannabe journalist, poet and I will be a musician in my next life, but my mind has an occasional clue about music, in that it reaches me on a more elemental level than anything else. This is the level that "Zen" is, and is trying to convey to those who would live it.
I use that last verb, convey, very intentionally.
For my first "official" lesson, he taught me that the relationship of the master and student or disciple is that which should be the one between every human and every other human, but for some vexing reason I have been unable to ascertain, is not.
To better explain what I mean, first the obligatory Zen story:
The Master asked a nun: "Well-come or ill-come?" The nun shouted. "Go on, go on, speak!" cried the Master, taking up his stick. Again the nun shouted. The Master hit her. (Record of Rinzai, trans. R. Sasaki, XXI, p. 48)
In Official Zen Circles this relationship between teacher, student, human, human, essence and essence, is called "conveyance", or Host and Guest. As far as I can make out, this is the same phenomenon, which in music and poetry is called Call and Response.
Simply put it is, every moment, be who you are, and may whoever else to whom you communicate be the same way back to you.
In the story above, there is a communication gap. The master asks the nun a specific question, to which the answer is supposed to be the reflexive and obvious "not bad" or "sucks". Confused, perhaps, by emotions related to her trip, her life, or the master's presence, she inarticulately shouts, sending the wrong message, the unclear conveyance.
Let us consider the give-and-take, then, of the master and myself in our particular language as (professional) and (nonprofessional) poets. In good Zen fashion they were both extemporaneous with a relatively instantaneous response on my part to the original call.
Master:
2 @ the bar. TV on basketball. Music playing. She pulls her shirt down to cover. He crosses arms -- hard across his chest. The more she tugs, the higher she lifts. The tighter he clutches his ribs, The wider he stretches to embrace. She walks to the front door, He to the back. They leave together in separate cars and both go home alone.
The student's response:
Too many people with hands tight over chest Tight over lawnmower bars Searching for treasure in compost But only the worms are feeding. She wants to dance at the corner bar Where the piano plinks And the glasses wink redly But it's only her heart that is needing.
Definitely a case of too much shouting going on, just like the nun in the story.
Turns out master was just sitting at the old night café, looking around, as curious folk are wont to do, and just as it was recorded a scene between the two protagonists, in journalist/poet fashion. No emotion, no baggage, no fear, no delusion, no head on top of head that was already there.
The student, unfortunately, misread the original poem as a pregnant statement regarding the Entire Human Condition, ("too many people") involving, of course, but unfortunately, her ownself, (projecting her own pain into the character of the female protagonist) and any personal communication problems she may have had in the past or was still having ("she wants to dance").
Sometimes a cigar is, well, just a cigar, and sometimes there's no communication all the way down the line.
Why is this important for the student of Zen? Why is this important for anyone?
Because the most important thing we can do on the face of this earth is listen to the heart of another human being, really listen, as the master noted, to at least two of the ten thousand words being spoken. To do this we must rid ourselves of everything: every desire we ever held, every concept we ever cherished, in order to respond with complete understanding grace to the call which comes. We have to get rid of the notion that it is about us, and that it is about anything at all. It just is. That is glory and substance and poetry enough, and speaks without shouting.