Interest (16 page)

“No, sir!” several people yelled.

“No, we will not! We will fight to the last man! The devil may have unimaginable magic, but we have something even better: the grace of the Almighty!”

Len couldn’t help but notice that Donald had a gift for addressing an audience.

“Hallelujah!”

“And now to the nitty-gritty. Our twenty-four-hour watch starts now. We will add an additional mealtime at midnight for those on the night shift…”

Len got up and slinked out while Donald was speaking. With the entire community at the meeting, it was a good time to sneak Natalia’s case of bourbon into the Freehold so he could drink away the stupid.

After the booze had been snuck in and the meeting had let out, Len found out he’d been assigned to night duty on the East Wall. Basically that meant that he had to sit there with binoculars and a rifle between dusk and dawn, waiting for something to happen.

Nothing happened. At least, not at first. Len did the night watch for a week without seeing anything but stars and distant headlights once in a while. After that he was rotated to day shift for another week. Once the Dranthyx took out global communication, news from the outside world became scarce. There were no local TV stations within broadcast range of the compound, so the occupants had to rely entirely on radio to find out what was going on. The Freehold had a radio room in the basement where a round, ponytailed man sat and scanned a multitude of frequencies for news from the outside. The news came quickly, even though the Dranthyx seemed to be taking their time. From Australia, a ham operator told of the Dranthyx going door to door, testing the genetics of all the occupants, leaving some people while taking others away to an unknown location where they weren’t heard from again.

The way the residents of the Freehold regarded Len made him uneasy. They looked at him with a sort of unsophisticated obsequiousness. Undue admiration, that’s what it was. They honestly and truly believed Len was a prophet. Whenever Len tried to explain otherwise, they complimented him on his divine humility.

Sometimes, while he sat out on the wall with time to think, Len would wonder: what if there really was a God who had chosen him? Over and over again, he’d catch his psyche flattering itself with these little flights of egotism. Repeatedly, he’d patiently remind himself that his presence at the Freehold was simply a product of circumstance.

Or was it?

30

Some years ago, there was a spoiled-rotten trust-fund baby whom we will call Sid. Sid’s mother had died when he was quite young, and he was raised from that tender age by his overprotective father. Sid’s father was stupid wealthy, lived in a huge mansion, and could afford to buy all kinds of fancy stuff and hire like a million servants. Sid’s father wanted only the best for his son and did his best to shelter precious little Sid from the harsh realities outside the mansion walls.

Sid, however, had a redeeming quality that kept him from becoming decadent and lazy: an inability to believe bullshit. No one quite knows where he got that trait, given his materialistic, narcissistic father, but he had it. Over the years, Sid began to grow increasingly suspicious that his father was keeping him away from something. At twenty-nine years of age, Sid pulled off his very first act of rebellion: he snuck out of his dad’s house one night.

Sid’s father was a very well-known rich guy in the area, and to avoid being spotted, Sid had to go out in disguise. Wandering through town incognito, Sid saw certain things for the first time that his father had taken great pains to hide: an old man, a sick man, and a dead man. Sid’s underwear twisted into a bunch at the sight of these things, because for the first time in his life, he realized that everything sucks.

Against his father’s wishes, Sid left the mansion to backpack through the land. He wanted to find himself, and maybe also discover why the real world sucks so much. Sid hooked up with a yoga teacher who was laying down some groovy philosophy, stuff he had never heard before that really made him think. But after a while, he realized that this so-called yogi wasn’t so great. The dude had all kinds of interesting questions but no answers. So Sid found another teacher. Same thing. Then another teacher. Again, no answers.

After several years of this nonsense, Sid said screw it and wandered off into the woods to figure shit out for himself. He decided to do something crazy: he’d stop eating. Sid was testing a hypothesis, that the root of suffering was attachment to needful things, and that suffering couldn’t end suffering unless the attachment ended.

One day, after a few months of fasting, Sid was bathing in a river when he collapsed. His body had grown so weak from malnutrition that he was no longer able to hold himself upright. There, under the surface, with water in his lungs, he realized how wrong he’d been. Memories came like a freight train, the way memories do when the mind thinks the end is near. One of these was vivid as day and changed his path forever.

River water has the answers. Had Sid pulled a glass of water out of the powerful Ganges, it would have been brown with mud due to the water’s constant movement and agitation. However, if he’d taken that same glass of water and let it sit undisturbed on the counter for a day or two, the mud would have settled to the bottom and the water would have become clear.

As a young boy, Sid remembered sitting under a tree on a beautiful spring day while watching his father do some gardening. As he sat there, at peace, watching his dad work, his mind spontaneously became clear and free of thoughts like the glass of undisturbed Ganges water. Waves of ecstasy and joy rippled through his body. A feeling of bliss and limitless possibilities.

In the nick of time, one of his friends pulled Sid out of the river before he drowned. Lying there on the riverbank, coming back to consciousness while his friends tried to pump the water out of his lungs, Sid had a thought: starvation and austerity were just a pointless backlash against his pampered upbringing. Sort of a screw you, Dad. They wouldn’t get him anywhere but dead. If he wanted any real understanding, he’d have to explore more of that weird, magical feeling he’d had as a child.

So that’s what Sid did. He picked a big tree and resolved to sit under it until he became awakened. Sid sat there under that tree for weeks without moving. In the process, he became an inspiration to others, who would bring him food and water. That state of rapture he’d experienced as a child came back to him. He went into it fully, and it became more subtle and more quiet. The water became clearer than ever.

Then, at the end of the seventh week, at the age of thirty-five, it happened: Sid finally
woke the fuck up
. Like he’d gotten a vision from on high, he figured out why life sucks: everything is constantly changing. Seriously, that’s it. That’s the reason. Everything is constantly changing and we’re always wishing it wasn’t. Your favorite TV show gets canceled, an earthquake destroys your house, your best friend moves to Milwaukee for a job. And the worst part of all this impermanence, he discovered, is our mortality: we get old, we get sick, we die—and we hate it all because we want to stay twenty forever.

Sid saw that the way to end suffering was to not cling to false notions of permanence, because nothing can be permanent. Just gotta accept the change, man. Sid came up with a whole system of living that would help wayward souls end their torment. Sid traveled all over the place, preaching his new philosophy. He acquired thousands of followers. He became a guru, a celebrity. Sid, whose full name was Siddh
a
¯
rtha Gautama, acquired a new nickname in the process: the Buddha, meaning the fully awakened one.

___
_

Twenty-four hundred years later, a miserable twenty-two-year-old Leonard Savitz came to the door of a Japanese monastery, hoping for the same sort of amazing revelation. He’d been to five monasteries before, all of which had turned him away. This one, however, accepted him.

The head teacher of the monastery, Dukkha Roshi, was a gregarious sort who took him in and made him tea. Dukkha had an easy smile and glitter in his voice that made people feel welcome. He listened intently to Len’s story about his father dying, as though nothing else mattered more. Len was comforted by the fact that Dukkha Roshi seemed to care. Dukkha took him in and allowed him to practice with the rest of the monks as a layperson, which was quite unusual in Japan.

At first, Dukkha Roshi was a good teacher who seemed to really understand the practice. However, as the months went on in the monastery, Len began to notice that he was a bit odd. Dukkha Roshi was always talking about himself, wistfully or with gravitas, as though recounting stories of his deeds were for the benefit of all who heard. Dukkha Roshi had a talent for describing his own actions as though they were weighty enough to change the course of human events. It was subtle. His salesmanship was rarely overt or theatrical, but it was delivered as though he were a great martyr-messiah come to save everyone all from themselves. That very subtext pervaded everything in the monastery: Dukkha Roshi was a Very Important Person.

And being that this was Japan, where complaisance to authority was considered a virtue, Dukkha Roshi wore the doting and deference his students heaped upon him like a crown. The young monks didn’t know any better; anyone who spoke so highly of themselves in a culture that encouraged humility must be a spiritual luminary, right? Clearly, this great teacher would show them the way to enlightenment.

Len had heard stories of other
roshis
, great teachers, who were so humble that they cleaned toilets in the monastery or gave away their last bits of food to hungry travelers. Dukkha Roshi was nothing like that. He didn’t do any menial labor, he didn’t sacrifice anything. Instead, Dukkha Roshi felt that it was the job of others to labor and bestow gifts upon him. He was, after all, a beacon of light unto them.

Dukkha Roshi had exceedingly specific rituals that everyone was expected to follow in order to honor him. Before he entered a room, everything was to have been laboriously prepared for him exactly the way he liked it. The cushions and teapots had to be aligned perfectly. He had a golden teacup that had to be placed in a very specific location on a certain meal board. If everything wasn’t done exactly the right way, he’d berate whoever had arranged it. There were other odd behaviors, too. What Dukkha Roshi told a student, the student was expected to keep secret. What a student told Dukkha Roshi in confidence, however, frequently made its way around the monastery. Dukkha Roshi didn’t believe in secrets unless they were his own.

Dukkha Roshi was wonderful at ingratiating newcomers, but he seemed to have trouble retaining students who had been there for a while. In fact, people cycled through the monastery as if it were a revolving door. The fallings-out he had with students were spectacular and emotionally explosive at times. To maintain morale and avoid dissent in the monastery, Dukkha Roshi would completely cut off any student who voiced objection to his teaching methods, and he would further require that the entire community cease all contact with the offending party. In essence, any monk who dared to question Dukkha Roshi was summarily excommunicated.

Len watched all of this with hesitation during his time in the monastery. He knew Dukkha Roshi was a bit of a control freak, so Len avoided stepping on his toes and, when necessary, played the dumb foreigner to avoid conflict. However, it was impossible to avoid confrontation with the passive-aggressive.

Around Len’s second year as a lay practitioner living in the monastery, Dukkha Roshi offered to formally ordain Len into the Zen clergy. Len would finally become a real Buddhist monk. Len was thrilled at the invitation and gladly accepted. However, on the day on which his initiation ceremony was to be held, Dukkha Roshi said in front of everyone that he’d changed his mind about the ceremony. “People just aren’t ready,” Dukkha Roshi said cryptically before calling the whole thing off.

The rejection stung. Len spent several weeks in a deep funk, wondering what went wrong. What happened? Who wasn’t ready? Len? Dukkha Roshi? The other monks? Len wondered if it had been some kind of test, or if Dukkha Roshi was trying to teach him something obliquely. Was Len clinging to the idea of monkhood? Was his meditation not good enough? Perhaps Dukka Roshi was trying to show him that he was attached to something.

Len got over it eventually, and life went on in the temple. Len helped cook meals, he worked in the garden, he sorted the recycling. During Len’s third year in the temple, Dukkha Roshi again offered to induct him into the priesthood. Len again accepted, happy that he, or whoever, was now ready. Len again spent several nights studying the scriptures, preparing for the ceremony.

Right before the ceremony, the same thing happened. Again, Dukkha Roshi said, “People just aren’t ready.” Len’s heart sank as he began to wonder why students who hadn’t been there as long as he had were being ordained, while he’d been rejected twice at the last minute. Was it because he was Western or Caucasian? Was there something he was not understanding or hadn’t learned?

The third time it happened, in his fourth year, Len just gave up on his hopes of being a monk. Dukkha Roshi was clearly playing some sort of game with him. At that point, Len had been in the monastery long enough to notice that Dukkha Roshi manipulated others, too. He was constantly lulling people into a false sense of security, then pulling the rug out from under them. Len began to wonder whether it was a teaching device or if Dukkha Roshi was just sadistic. The weird thing was, on the rare occasions when someone inadvertently changed plans on Dukkha Roshi—the way he delighted in doing others—Dukkha Roshi would throw a hissy fit.

The fourth time led to an insight. At the end of Len’s fifth year in the monastery, Dukkha Roshi again invited Len to be ordained. It was the fourth such invitation in as many years. This time, Len had had enough of his shit and let the old man have it. He called Dukkha Roshi out publicly, in front of several other students, saying he was catty and malicious, that there was no wisdom, compassion, or teaching behind his actions, and that he simply enjoyed causing emotional distress in his students.

Needless to say, it didn’t go over well. One of Len’s longtime friends in the temple escorted him to the door with his scant possessions in an old suitcase. Len stepped outside into the daylight. He was homeless on the streets of Japan, and for some reason, he had never felt freer.

Once his visa finally expired, Len returned to the States. Upon doing some research, he found there was an established pattern of abuse by Zen teachers, involving sex scandals and misappropriation of funds. It seemed there was a significant number of Zen masters who had problems with alcohol and drug additions, and who were abusive or compulsive manipulators. In short, Zen Buddhism was full of assholes, like any other religion. Len wrote a story about his experience and the misadventures of others in the Zen world, which was picked up by a prominent magazine. It was his first real piece of journalism, the one that got him through the door and eventually caught Jack’s eye at the
Pittsburgh
Examiner
.

The wrenching dissonance was that Len had found truth and meaning in the meditation practice. Learning to still his mind and examine his own thinking was life changing for him. Len never found the alleged end of suffering, but he felt his insights had opened him up to profound growth as a human being. However, there were problems, politics, and big egos in Buddhism that were marring and overshadowing the original message.

Len’s experience with Dukkha Roshi had also shown him the dangers of being in a position of power and admiration. If enough people kissed your butt on a daily basis, you started to think your shit smelled good. You’d believe it smelled so good, in fact, that you’d be struck with the urge to rub it in others’ faces so they could enjoy it too. Dukkha Roshi had been doing meditation for over forty years, and despite all that supposed practice at examining his own ego, he was still unable to acknowledge or check his self-centeredness and megalomania. Perhaps the limitation was genetic, Len thought. Dukka Roshi certainly behaved like a narcissist. In any case, finding himself in a similar position of reverence fifteen years later at the Freehold, Len did his best to constantly remind himself he wasn’t special.