4.05 / May 2009

FALL AWAY

isdom Of The East

A line of workers stretched out on the lawn of what seemed to be an estate, using picks and shovels to open a ditch. They were digging for an old sprinkler line with the aim of replacing it. It was a Saturday morning, and the Southern California sun was climbing higher. The workers took a short break, some wiping their brows. “This is mythic,” said one.

The people who normally change out lawn sprinkler lines do not, of course, usually use the term mythic. They work all day for not much money, and they tend to focus on the task at hand, not on the favorable cultural lights in which they might flatter themselves. To see one’s own activities as mythic implies a perspective that comes from considerable leisure, and in fact the workers on that particular lawn had leisure.

Most were middle-class kids — all male in that line of workers — who’d been to college, though there were a few drifters among them whose pedigrees were less discernable. Certainly nobody among them was receiving a wage, which meant that as a practical matter, whatever money they had to sustain them was coming from parents, a trust fund, or some version of begging, freeloading, or simple theft, however well-disguised or seemingly respectable they may have been.

If someone had walked up and asked them to explain in some satisfactory way what they were doing in digging that ditch without being paid to do it, they would have thought it was sufficient to say that they were studying Zen. That would also account for why several, blonde haired and blue-eyed, were dressed in Japanese style robes.

Ed was part of that Saturday work party, though his situation was less like the others. He had a real job, and he had his own apartment. He went to the Zen center evenings and weekends. He also wrote the place checks now and then out of the pay from his job. Some of the other people weren’t completely happy with this, but there were Hollywood types who showed up now and then and did things even more on their own terms, so nobody could complain about Ed without complaining about people who donated real money.

Ed had been gnawing at a certain question for several years, ever since, as an undergraduate druggie, he’d read the usual books about Zen. In opinions ranging from crazies like Alan Watts to respected academics like Mircea Eliade, Zen had the cure to what ailed Western civilization. And whether he was stoned or straight, it appeared to Ed that something ailed Western civilization.

For instance, he’d spent untold effort getting into a prestige university, but once he arrived, he discovered his peers were vapid and conventional. The most ambitious of those went on to prestigious law and business schools, where they prepared themselves to become embezzlers and Ponzi operators. Even those who didn’t rate terms in federal prison proved only to be massively incompetent once they reached high station, dissipating billions before finally being eased out the door with deal-sweeteners that still left them rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And more locally, why was it that the people who gamed the system most transparently were the ones who always got promoted, and the most capable people always the first to be laid off? Why did the biggest jerks get to date the real babes, for that matter?

The normal constraints of morality and religion, and indeed Enlightenment concepts like advancement based on merit, had apparently ceased to function, at least among Western elites. Maybe some sort of purgative was in order. Based on what he’d read, Zen masters had a way of shocking sense into people. Maybe there was something that could be done. One day, pondering this question, he realized he lived in Los Angeles. If you could find anything like Zen without having to schlep all the way to Japan, it was in Los Angeles. Here was his chance to get answers to the questions that had been gnawing at him since the late-night, marijuana fueled bull sessions back in the Ivy League. He’d picked up the phone book and turned to Z; sure enough, there was a real Zen master not far away.

You shouldn’t assume, by the way, that the members of the work party made up the whole population of the Zen center. Far from it. I’ve already mentioned, for instance, the Hollywood types, and it should come as no surprise that none of them would ever want to be found in close proximity to a work party. Of these, there was nobody from the A list, nor even from the B list. There were a few C-listers, though, half-forgotten from the days of acid rock. But other than to say that they showed up now and then, they moved in a different stratum, and we won’t be concerned with them in this story.

Nor were there any women in the work party on that particular day, though women occasionally did do that sort of work. And there were women at the Zen center, if not as many as the men. They kept a lower profile, but they made their presence known in various ways: if you walked into a rest room there, you couldn’t avoid seeing great stockpiles of sanitary napkins and douching apparatus, on the linen shelves, under the sinks, piled on tables. It was all so visible that there had to have been some deliberation about it. Even so, it was the men who occupied posts of formal leadership, of which we’ll hear more.

Another group not represented in the work party was the professors. There were normally several of these hovering at the fringes, always on some sort of sabbatical from one or another of the hip schools like Bard, Reed, Antioch, or Bennington. It goes without saying that a professor would not be found in a work party digging a ditch, notwithstanding any theoretical sympathy he might express for workers. These professors were of graying middle age, with retro facial hair harking back to the same days of acid rock that the Hollywood C-listers represented.

I always suspected that the professors had hopes of scoring with some of the women at the Zen center, but the place simply wasn’t Woodstock, and this may account for the perpetually disappointed expressions on their faces. For that matter, their presence at the Zen center suggests that, at least as far as they were concerned, Bard and Reed, Antioch and Bennington weren’t Woodstock, either.

At this point, a reader is likely to say, “So far, you’ve shown me some vain and flighty college boys, a few rich ex-hippies, and several horny old professors. These seem like run-of-the-mill human beings to me. Where are the better-quality people you’re suggesting Zen is capable of producing? At this rate, you aren’t even building up my hopes.” This was the question that Ed pondered, for that matter, but the answer he came up with for himself was that every religion, indeed every movement, has a big contingent that gets things wrong, and these were often the very people who hung around the fringes. He wasn’t going to give up until he’d exhausted the possibility that he might find some people who got things right.

And one of those was Thomas Forscher, the Zen center’s cook. He was German. Everyone pronounced his name toe-moss, and nobody called him Tom. He shaved his head, which emphasized a certain Prussian rigor in his features, and he probably carried forward a strong German monastic tendency as well. He didn’t talk much, but his English was perfect. The cook’s job was not only to turn out three squares a day for everyone at the Zen center, but right after breakfast to take the pickup truck around to all the supermarkets and pick up the vegetables they were about to discard as rotten. Having secured these, he brought them back and sorted them to retrieve what was still edible. Then he wheeled the remainder to the compost pile, which he also tended.

This was work enough to fill most of his waking hours, seven days a week. He also served as the jikijitsu, or supervisor of the meditation sessions. These were normally two hours in the early morning, well before breakfast, and two hours after dinner. The time was divided into four equal periods of sitting on low benches in the lotus position, separated by short breaks for walking. When Thomas supervised, the sessions were timed to the second. On the occasions when someone else supervised, they weren’t. The substitutes likely as not fell asleep, which meant the sessions lasted until the substitute woke up, or even if the person stayed awake, the timing would be varied by ordinary carelessness.

It was in large measure Thomas Forscher’s clear integrity that caused Ed to keep coming to the Zen center after his first visit. He didn’t know what to expect from sitting in the lotus position for a couple of hours; he’d never done anything like that. And his first reaction once he sat down to do it was nearly overwhelming panic: how could he stand just sitting there, doing absolutely nothing? But seeing Forscher projecting a certain basic competence reassured him that it could be done.

Soon enough, Ed began to get shooting pains in his knees — he wasn’t used to having them in that position for any length of time. But then the pain gave him something to focus on, and the panic ebbed away. When the first walking break came, Ed found himself limping and struggling to keep up with the others in line, and oddly enough, he began to laugh at himself. Something told him — surely prompted by Forscher’s sense of discipline — that this was something worthwhile to try to master.

And soon enough he found a way through it. There’s a standard piece of Japanese kitsch, a sculpture or drawing of an old fisherman walking with a fish dangling from a pole he carries over his shoulder. There’s a part of the mind that doesn’t like sitting still for long periods at all, and that part of the mind is much like a slippery fish. At a certain point, to stay with the program, you have to grab the slippery-fish part of the mind and tell it to sit still, or actually, sort of whack it with a mental hammer. It also helped, Ed found, to drink the best part of a bottle of wine before going into the meditation hall.

Ed remembered specifically doing the whack-the-fish-with-a-hammer thing, and some days thereafter he saw one of the little kitschy fisherman statues (this was LA, after all), and he suddenly understood the point of the fish at the end of the pole. And he also noticed a definite lessening of mental background noise. His respect for Forscher grew apace.

Considering the difficulties attendant on sitting in the lotus position for two-hour meditation sessions, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that even fewer people did this than signed up for work parties. Even among those who did do it, the easiest out was to fall asleep, the same reaction to boredom that happens during sermons and lectures. It was the supervisor’s job to wake the sleepers, the same job that the sexton had in old Puritan churches. Forscher did this when he could, but the meditation hall was at minimum dimly lit, and depending on the time of year, often entirely dark. If people slumped over or snored, he could catch them; otherwise not.

Ed had enough time between the end of the morning session and the start of his job to follow Thomas into the kitchen and offer help with fixing breakfast. It was plain, though, that Thomas had the cook’s routine well in hand, and any assistance would be mostly token. “Suit yourself,” he said to Ed.

The three daily meals were all the same: Thomas fried up the vegetables that had escaped the compost pile in a giant wok and served them up with rice. Ed did what he could to help with the breakfast and tried to engage Thomas in talk. It wasn’t easy. He’d had enough German in college and graduate school that he thought he might make some progress if he started a conversation in German, but Thomas always answered in English, as briefly as he could.

“Morgens ist’s schon dunkel geworden, nicht wahr?”

“Yes, it is dark.” End of conversation. Ed’s sense was that Thomas liked him, but he wasn’t going to say any more about himself than he could get away with.

Given the monotony of the meals, the people at the Zen center tended to claim they were vegan, but this was only to make a virtue of necessity. They would eat meat if someone gave it to them, and in fact those with money would duck out now and then for a restaurant dinner with a few beers. Their views on food and health were actually conventional and sometimes astonishingly inconsistent.

“Have you ever thought about how many carcinogens are in a hot dog?” one lady asked during a smoking break outside the dining hall. “All those preservatives. The food dyes. I mean, how can people be so stupid as to put those things in their bodies?” Yet she was puffing on a cigarette. Thomas was taking a break, too, though he didn’t smoke. Ed looked over at him. Thomas seemed to glance back, ever so briefly, with the tiniest twinkle in his eye.

It took Ed longer than he expected to get in to see the Zen master, or roshi. His surname was Matsushima, so he was called Matsushima Roshi, or just Roshi for short. You go in to see a Zen master in a specific ceremony called sanzen. These things don’t happen informally, but you see very little on what actually happens in Zen — most accounts give you the impression it’s just a freewheeling all-day rap session, which it isn’t. It’s a semi-monastic environment, and as you might expect from the Japanese, it’s highly structured and very formal. He gave Ed a koan to study and try to answer during subsequent sanzen ceremonies. The koan he gave Ed was — what else? — “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Actually, what he really said, in heavily accented English, was, “How you realize one-hand-sound?” I guess he thought Ed would figure out what he really meant.

It took Ed several weeks to answer it. He was limited in part by the number of sanzen opportunities he got; Roshi mostly just did them on weekends. I don’t think I’m going to spoil anyone’s Zen career or reveal any privileged information if I give the answer to that particular koan: you wave your one hand back and forth in the air in front of you as though you’re clapping it. It helps, I suspect, to act as if you’ve figured it out with some effort, and look as if you’re proud of yourself.

Ed mostly relied on clues of facial expression and body language to figure out whether his answers were getting warm or not each time he went in to give it a shot. It might be possible to say he was somehow “cheating”, but that’s how all education takes place, it seems to me. Ed wouldn’t have come any closer to an answer no matter how long he sat in meditation on the problem; in the end, he was going to have to learn what the guy wanted. In fact, he was able to answer several other koans in much the same way, and one impression he took away from his Zen study was that a Cliff’s Notes of koans was a practical possibility, though you wouldn’t make any money out of it, since almost nobody would be interested.

Matsushima Roshi was pretty much what you’d expect: he was about five feet tall, shaved head, septuagenarian, always dressed in a brown robe. He’d been in the country 30 years, but his English was rudimentary. It was hard to gauge whether the views of a Zen master were in any sense illuminating or innovative, since he always stayed within a traditional role. He ran the Zen center, but had few comments on anything else. “Roshi doesn’t like palm trees,” Thomas told Ed one day. “He wants to cut the ones on the property down.” This was intriguing: in the Buddhist view, nothing is better than anything else. Palm tree, oak tree, what’s the difference? Yet here the roshi was expressing a preference.

So it was also intriguing to see what sorts of people formed his inner circle. Thomas Forscher, for all the work he did, wasn’t really an officer of the Zen center. His position was more like a sexton in a church, though he wasn’t paid anything other than room and board. Of the real officers, there were two: Dick Rundles, the president, might be equated with a senior warden. That he was generally referred to as Dickless tells us all we need to know in his case. Doug Wilson, the business manager, was the other.

Wilson had a project. He knew a guy who sold franchises for health food doughnuts, and he’d convinced the Zen center to buy in. A big selling point for the doughnuts was that they weren’t fried, and they had no preservatives. Instead of cooking them in oil, you baked them in a kind of waffle iron, except the cavity was shaped like a doughnut instead of a waffle. These, Wilson thought, would be a big hit with the same folks who disdained hot dogs and potato chips.

The doughnuts that came out of the waffle iron were perfectly circular, with a mold parting line around the girth. They were the texture of bran muffins, and in fact Wilson and his workers had to do quite a bit of research and development to come up with a recipe that kept the doughnuts from crumbling as soon as you pulled them out of the mold. The franchise support from Wilson’s buddy was apparently less than optimal.

Once they got the first samples into the health food stores, they discovered another problem: since they had no preservatives, they grew mold within a few hours of going on display. The hope had been that they could sell them from racks next to the checkout counters, so the customers would buy them as an impulse item. But with the mold, they had to be refrigerated. Who was going to buy refrigerated doughnuts?

The Zen center had rented a storefront not far away that was going to be the focus of the doughnut business once it got going. There was a Saturday work party set up to go to a lumberyard in West LA to rent tools and pick up studs and drywall for modifications to the place. Thomas Forscher had the carpentry skills to bring it off; none of the college boys would have been able to do anything like that.

One of the angels had donated a brand new pickup truck, a gleaming red Toyota. The trip to get the drywall would be its first. One of the professors, Alfred Bigler, decided to join the work party just so he could take the pickup on its test drive. Bigler was a professor of religious studies, I think at Bennington, though it might have been Bard, but he always seemed to be on leave and hanging out at the Zen center. Bigler and Doug Wilson, the business manager, were close. Wilson apparently relied on Bigler’s experience as a religion professor to tell him how to run a business; the idea of the health food doughnuts may in fact have been Bigler’s.

Bigler drove the pickup down to the lumberyard; Ed and the rest of the work crew followed in a car. They got the truck loaded with a first installment of the drywall and headed back north up the 405. The truck, though, seemed to be having trouble up the grade. Bigler couldn’t get it above 20 miles an hour, and he was crawling along in the right hand lane, drivers honking and swerving to avoid him and gesturing in their rear-view mirrors. Ed and the crew followed him, just to be safe.

At one point, he pulled over on the shoulder, got out, and opened the hood. Ed and the others pulled up behind him. No smoke, no steam, hoses, belts, and wires seemingly all in place: the motor just sat there, clean, new, inscrutable. Bigler closed the hood, got back in the pickup, and resumed his climb. No change: he couldn’t get the truck past 20.
Once they got to the Zen center, Bigler got out of the truck. He handed Ed the keys. “I don’t ever want to drive that thing again,” he said. He walked away, shaking his head. “That truck can’t do anything,” were his parting words.

They were going to have to make another trip back down to the lumberyard, though, and it looked like Ed was elected to drive this time. Thinking they might as well get it over with, once the crew unloaded the first installment, he headed back down to the lumberyard. At least empty and downgrade, the truck seemed to do just fine. He had it up to 65 with no trouble at all. Once they got to the lumberyard, they put in another load of drywall and started back up the 405.

It was just as if the truck had been empty. Ed had it up to 65 with the drywall in back, no problem at all. They got to the Zen center without any trouble. Ed was scratching his head. He found Bigler standing around near the dining hall. “What was the problem?” he asked him. “I had the truck up to 65 with no trouble at all.” Bigler was irritated and noncommittal. He mumbled something. As best Ed could figure, Bigler had wanted to drive the truck so he could look important but didn’t know how to work a stick shift.

All this made Ed eager to know Thomas Forscher better. He was the only person there, as far as Ed could make out, who wasn’t a standard-issue bumbler. Questions kept popping into his head: did Forscher feel Zen had in some way made him what he was? On the other hand, how did he feel about the people at the Zen center who didn’t seem to be getting much benefit? Especially the ones who ran the show?

But the ability to speak freely on such matters required the development of a strong friendship and mutual trust, and that wasn’t taking place. This wasn’t for Ed’s lack of trying. About the most that resulted was Thomas now and then making a courtly bow and saying “servus”, a German students’ salute, but he was otherwise as uncommunicative as ever, and the greeting with no other information was a little too cute. Where in fact had he come from? What had brought him to California and the Zen center? Ed wasn’t learning anything.

There were more Saturday work parties at the storefront doughnut shop. They’d gotten the walls set up and the drywall hung and taped, but the work began to languish, and it never got past the phase where ugly blotches of joint compound clung to the drywall, unsanded and unpainted. The problem was that they’d moved the waffle irons into the store and started production. The heat buildup was amazing. They had to bring in big fans and leave all the doors and windows open, but even with that, the place was a literal sweatshop. Considering the doughnuts had been a commercial failure in the health food stores from the start, everyone apparently decided at some point that the whole episode simply hadn’t occurred.

In the real world, there might have been some sort of repercussion for the people like Al Bigler and Doug Wilson whose brainchild this had been. But as far as Ed could see, nothing changed. Nor could he get any information from Thomas. There was a vague rumor that Bigler and Wilson were going back to the drawing board and were going to come up with some new business plan, something that might be able to use the storefront, but weeks and then months went by with no other news. Matsushima Roshi was, as usual, impassive.

Then one morning, Ed was helping Thomas as usual with the breakfast. Maybe that day he stayed a little later, or maybe Thomas was just used to him being there, but Ed suddenly saw something different. Thomas was cooking bacon and eggs on the griddle of the restaurant stove. Bacon and eggs? “You’re cooking bacon and eggs,” he said to Thomas.

“Of course,” Thomas said.

“Why of course? Who eats bacon and eggs here?”

“Roshi.”

“Roshi eats bacon and eggs?”

“I make bacon and eggs for Roshi, Doug, Alfred, and Dick every morning. You didn’t know?”

Thomas was likely being a little too cute again. He’d probably been concealing it, at least up

to that morning.

It didn’t come as a complete surprise to Ed, since he’d been observing the all too predictable behavior of Alfred Bigler and Doug Wilson for a while. So much for health food, anyhow, and so much for vegan. And it seemed like whatever had been gnawing at Ed finally gnawed all the way through. The pattern was remarkably familiar, no matter whether people shaved their heads and wore Japanese robes or went downtown and dressed business casual: there was a privileged inner circle that was protected from reality and surrounded by sycophants and enablers. Roshi was in it, happy as a bug. Then there was a much larger rank and file, people who figured they had about as good a deal as they were going to get, however rotten it was, and who weren’t going to make waves.

Whatever the deal was for him in that, Thomas had taken it. It seemed like he was capable enough that he could do something else, even make decent money and not work all day and half the night for room and board. Maybe his visa was expired and he didn’t have any other options, but maybe it was just his sense of integrity. Ed had a sense he was never going to know more than he did right then.

He left the kitchen and went to work, maybe a little late that day. After work, he stopped off at a supermarket and picked up a bottle of high-end brandy, the stuff Roshi had made it known that he liked. He drove back to the Zen center, found Thomas, and gave it to him. “Would you make sure Roshi gets this and knows it’s from me?” he asked.

A bottle of brandy was about what he figured the whole experience was worth.


4.05 / May 2009

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