The Dude and the Zen Master (11 page)

In general, I feel that you’ve made your whole life about working with people who are suffering, and you invite me to do the same thing:
Come on, you wanna play in this?
And I say,
Yes, that’s my game, too
. The invitation to me—from my mom, from Sue, and now from you—is:
Open, open, open
. Without that, nothing gets born. At the same time, giving birth and getting born can get really uncomfortable.

B
ERNIE
: But it’s the only game in town. There are lots of reasons why we don’t open, apologize, and make amends easily. They’re also the reasons why, when we’ll finally turn around and take those actions, the effects will be immeasurable.

10.

WHAT DO YOU
DO
, MR. LEBOWSKI?

J
EFF
: Remember the movie
The Graduate
? Remember that party scene in the beginning of the movie when Murray Hamilton tells Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin, “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word . . . Plastics.”

Well, I just recently got turned on to the terribleness of what we do with plastic. I learned about ocean gyres, which are large spirals of currents. There are five gyres in the world’s oceans and a couple of them are filled with plastic—bags, bottles, all kinds of stuff. The material is indestructible. We say it’s biodegradable, but it’s not, it just breaks down into smaller and smaller bits that microscopic animals eat. Fish eat them, then we and the birds eat the fish. We’re addicted to these bottles and bags, it’s kind of insane. How do we become more aware of that and what can we do about it?

B
ERNIE
: We do what we can do. You came to our Symposium for Western Socially Engaged Buddhism in Massachusetts in the summer of 2010. We didn’t buy plastic bottled water, people drank our own delicious well water. If you think about it, there’s always something you can do. Saying it’s just too much and not doing anything is no answer at all.

What I see again and again is that when we look at what to do in life, we tend to be constrained by what we don’t have instead of appreciating what we do have. In my book
Instructions to the Cook
, I emphasize looking at the ingredients you have. So let’s say that you and I are going to make breakfast and you’ve got certain things in the refrigerator. We want to make the best meal that we can make, and we’re going to eat it and enjoy it. But imagine that if instead of doing that, we say,
I want chorizo and there’s no chorizo here, so I’m not going to have breakfast
. Or
I want hot oatmeal and there’s no oatmeal so I’m not going to eat
. That’s what we do in our life. We say,
I don’t have enough time so I’m not going to do anything
;
or
I don’t have enough money so I’m not going to do anything
;
or
I’m not trained to deal with plastic so I’m not going to do anything
;
or
I don’t have enough enlightenment so I’m not going to do anything.

Instead, we could say,
Okay, I have no chorizo or oatmeal, but I have green peppers, an egg, Cheerios, and Parmesan cheese.
We cook, eat, and appreciate the meal, whereas if we just sit around bitching about all the things we don’t have and not eating anything, we’d starve. And that goes for life, too. Look at the ingredients you have, make the best meal possible, and offer it. Don’t forget to offer it. If you make the meal just for yourself, you don’t get the same pleasure. It could be as simple as saying hello to a homeless person on the streets. Use your ingredients, and take action.

J
EFF
: You remind me of a guy who passed away, Rozzell Sykes. I met him shortly out of high school. My girlfriend at the time, Kaija Keel, worked at his place on Sunset. He was an artist and he welcomed me, told me I could bring my guitar. So I would play, he would paint, and we’d just have a great art jam. I think he was originally from St. Louis and he created this whole Jamaican persona, talking in poetry in this Jamaican accent. I got the feeling that he’d done that so long that that’s who he became. Maybe he found that to be a Jamaican artist was much easier than being a black guy from St. Louis, you know?

He had this place on St. Elmo Drive, in the middle of the so-called ghetto, right off La Brea; I think it used to be Mary Pickford’s stable house. He turned that place into a glorious art space, with galleries showing his and other people’s art, plants, filling the grounds with gardens. Everything to him was an opportunity to make art. It became a meeting place for the community. He shared his beauty, his meal, and inspired a lot of folks. Rozzell used to say very much what you’re saying:
Be your best you
,
be love
, and he lived his life like that. Work with whatever you have, and make something beautiful.

B
ERNIE
: With the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the best ways for realizing the interconnectedness, or the oneness, of life is through social action. Many people say that as a good human being, as a good Buddhist, you should be doing that anyway. I say something more. The way to deepen that realization and actualization is to do social action based on our Three Tenets: approaching a situation from not knowing, bearing witness, and then taking loving action.

If you do that, you’re going to, little by little, grok the interconnectedness of things. You’re out there serving others, who are aspects of yourself. Buddhism, of course, is known for its practice of meditation for the sake of awakening; I think we can awaken through social engagement, too.

J
EFF
: I was just thinking of Jon Kabat-Zinn
*
and his expression
the full catastrophe
. The whole picture is kind of catastrophic. He also talks a bit about hopelessness, right? There’s the hope of reaching some kind of perfect attainment or happiness, and then that goes bust. But hope continues to bubble up, you know?

B
ERNIE
: I have lots of hope. Expectation is the bummer; that’s where I get into trouble. As long as hope is without expectation or attachment, there’s no problem. For instance, I like to make vows. The first of the Four Great Bodhisattva Vows is:
Beings are numberless, I vow to free them
. That’s a pretty big vow and it will cause me to work very hard. The important thing is not to have expectations.

There are things you want to see happen, too, like meeting President Obama’s goal that no child will be hungry by 2015. If you were to expect that, it would be a little tricky, because the odds of it happening are still pretty small. But if your hope and energy are strong enough, you’re going to work like crazy to get it done. So the loving action is important.

J
EFF
: And that’s the role of the Bodhisattva. But do beings need freeing? If it’s all one body doing its thing, what needs freeing?

B
ERNIE
: If you experience yourself as one body, then you’re right, there’s no problem. The Bodhisattva works in the world of delusion, with people who suffer because they see themselves as separate from others. She vows to awaken not for her own sake, but in order to relieve everyone’s suffering. She doesn’t sit around smoking a cigar without doing anything. Bodhisattvas, by the way, smoke a lot of cigars,
*
but they also do things. No matter where you are, to whatever degree of enlightenment that you have, you should do the best you can.

J
EFF
: Is a mensch sort of a Bodhisattva?

B
ERNIE
: I think it’s exactly the same thing. He’s a little like the Dude, his good deeds don’t draw any attention. He’s a Bodhisattva in hiding, humble and unassuming.

J
EFF
: One of the things I like to do for my mensch friends is give them a little head to let them know I love them. Whenever I make some kind of pottery piece, I always have a hunk of clay left over, and I let my hands go to town with it without thinking too much. So over the years all these small heads have popped out; they’re almost like my dolls. Each has its own aspect, its own little vibe and personality, just like people in the world, and they’re all aspects of me. Some look pissed off, some look startled, some look like they’re singing. Generally, I give them to people I love. I’ve given you a little head and you seemed to enjoy it.

B
ERNIE
: Definitely. I call him Charlie and I’ve taken him to all the places where I work: Brazil, Israel, Palestine, India, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, he’s been with me everywhere.

Bernie’s head, Charlie.

 

J
EFF
: So this thought came to my mind: Why don’t I do a project called
Head for Peace
and send these heads out to work for peace?

That set off a whole stream of different feelings and emotions. One said,
Well, yeah, but I don’t want these guys to go, I’m really fond of them
. Another said,
Nobody’s going to like these heads like I do. They’re just hunks of clay, but I’ve invested a certain something in them
. I don’t name them or anything like that, but I put them in my office, they’re all over the place, and they like to hang out together. Or maybe I like to put all these different beings, or expressions of humanity, together. So I was split about holding on to these heads or letting them go. When did I first talk to you about this, five or six years ago?

B
ERNIE
: Around nine years ago.

J
EFF
: And you said, “Let’s do it!” But I wasn’t ready:
No, it’s gotta cook, you know, the bread’s still in the oven
. So now, nine years later, I’m ready to pull the bread out. We decided to do this book,
Head for Peace
, with the head that I gave you on the cover.

We both feel that feeding each other and ourselves is a big signpost on the journey toward peace. I’ve been involved with the movement to end hunger internationally, and more recently in our country, for a long time. You started these Zen Houses and Let All Eat Cafés, so I thought that this Head for Peace project would be a way for us to play together. Each head is for sale with the proceeds going to Zen Peacemakers. It comes resting on a pillow in a nice little box, which also serves as the stand for the head, and can be put on display.

The head sits on your desk, or wherever you want to put it, and somebody might come around and say,
What’s that?
And you say,
That’s a Head for Peace
. And he says,
What do you mean?
So this gives you the opportunity to talk about your peace work and the Let All Eat Cafés, and hopefully it grows into a whole family of people who want to take care of others. And maybe every couple of years there’s an invitation to bring all the heads to one place, because, like I said, they like to hang out together. And people can trade heads or hang out together, just like their heads. It’s a work in progress.

Say something about the Let All Eat Cafés.

B
ERNIE
: The Let All Eat Cafés are also a work in progress. Maybe they started in 1991, when I went to live for a while on the streets of the Bowery in New York City, and I invited people to come with me. We ate at different soup kitchens and churches. Some of the churches, usually Baptist, sent out food trucks to reach street people. That’s when it hit me that there should be a different-style soup kitchen that will give service with dignity and love.

What do I mean by that? The food, of course, would be free.
Let them all eat
. But the style of service would be such that you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between poor and rich, homeless and housed. Everybody would eat together. The servers might be the homeless people, those who’re underfed, or they might be millionaires volunteering to work in the café.

For example, we had a prototype of a Let All Eat Café in Montague, Massachusetts, which served maybe fifty to a hundred people every Saturday. It was family-oriented, which was very important for me. In the soup kitchens I’d gone to on our street retreats, it was rare to see families with kids. Little by little, I discovered that many families don’t want to bring their children there, because they don’t feel they’re safe, or sometimes they don’t want their kids to feel looked down on. I wanted our café to be a place where you want
to bring your kids and they want to come. So we had music programs and games, the kids created puppets and did shows and arts and crafts. They went on short hikes into the woods and they also learned how to garden.

The meals were served buffet-style but we put out a menu, and on the back we taped a dollar bill. People were told that they can keep the dollar bill or, if they wished, they could put it in a pot to be used for food for the next meal. My sense is that kids should learn at a young age about money and giving. European cities have a big street scene, with mimes, bands, and all kinds of clowns on the streets. Families walk by, pause to watch, and the parents give their kids a little money to give the entertainers. Kids love to be able to give. That’s what I mean by service with dignity, service with love.

Meantime, the adults were offered mindfulness-based stress-reduction programs, counseling, massage, and acupuncture, as well as some medical and dental treatment. An AA meeting took place. The food was nutritious because much of it came from our own organic garden or from other local farms. It was the full monty. That’s why we called it a café instead of a soup kitchen, and our goal was to make it a model for cafés across the country. We’re now developing something similar in the neighboring city of Greenfield, Massachusetts.