Single White Monk by Shozan Jack Haubner

Author:Shozan Jack Haubner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

9

The Surrender Bender

In my first memory of Daishin, he is on his knees, tucking the top kimono part of my disheveled student robes into the bottom hakama part. He looks up at me from under vintage wire-rim glasses. His warm blue eyes are a good place for your own eyes to land when you’re anxiously glancing to and fro.

It is my first weeklong dai-sesshin retreat. I’ve been minding my own mind on the cushion for five days, but now I have a job. He has just given me detailed instructions on how to serve a Zen meal—a formal affair with bells and clappers and chanting that is only slightly less choreographed than a Broadway musical. He is fit, vibrant, sixty going on thirty, and speaks with a trace of a lisp, like an extremely intelligent child.

“Zen practice is strict, but the great thing about it is that even if your life is falling apart and you’re a total mess inside, at least your robes are on straight.” He rolls his shoulders back. He does this a lot. Such gestures are both rhythmic and compulsive, like he’s taught his tics to dance. “A formal meal isn’t a performance. It’s a practice. Zen is a practice that you teach yourself.” He hands me the bronze gong to ring the zendo down for breakfast. “If you get lost during the meal, I’ll be right here.” He points to the table at the far end of the dining hall.

I am looking at that table now. It’s a decade later. The dining hall is empty. Daishin is speaking to me through the phone. He’s just given me the diagnosis. If it were up to me, cancer would target assholes, and the cure would be: stop being an asshole. But cancer does not have human logic. It does not have a human heart. Six months later I rent a thirty-foot RV and set out for Daishin’s deathbed with Roshi and Lizzie. The trip is complicated by the fact that Roshi is dying too, slowly, of old age. He is like the sun, setting. Still luminous, but there’s less and less of him on our side. The trip is his idea, but can he make it?

Not long ago, cancer came for Lucy, our temple cat—ate her from the inside out. The vet put her down one morning, which seemed like a strange time to die, as everyone was going to work, and the sun was shining, and the birds were chirping and landing on the windowsill.

I’ve lost pets, friends, family, and more than a few illusions this past year. Some days, I feel haunted by the ghosts of grief, which take the form of anger, resentment, despair—the howling banshees of the inner life. We so desperately want to find something to hold on to, but everything changes, everything dies, and so we grasp after absences, we hurl our hearts into the vacuum where the things that we have loved and lost used to be. One thing I’ve

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