The Dude and the Zen Master (2 page)

BERNIE’S INTRODUCTION

All my life I’ve been interested in expressing my truth in ways that almost anyone can understand. A famous Japanese Zen master, Hakuun Yasutani Roshi, said that unless you can explain Zen in words that a fisherman will comprehend, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Some fifty years ago a UCLA professor told me the same thing about applied mathematics. We like to hide from the truth behind foreign-sounding words or mathematical lingo. There’s a saying:
The truth is always encountered but rarely perceived
. If we don’t perceive it, we can’t help ourselves and we can’t much help anyone else.

I met the Dude on DVD sometime in the late 1990s. A few years later I met Jeff Bridges in Santa Barbara and we started hanging, as he likes to put it, often while smoking cigars. Jeff has done movies from an early age; less known, but almost as long-standing, is his commitment to ending world hunger. I was an aeronautical engineer and mathematician in my early years, but mostly I’ve taught Zen Buddhism, and that’s where we both met. Not just in meditation, which is what most people think of when they hear Zen, but the Zen of action, of living freely in the world without causing harm, of relieving our own suffering and the suffering of others.

We soon discovered that we would often be joined by another shadowy figure, somebody called the Dude. We both liked his way of putting things and it’s fun to learn from someone you can’t see. Only his words were so pithy they needed more expounding; hence, this book.

May it meet with his approval, and may it benefit all beings.

Bernie Glassman,
Montague, Massachusetts

1.

SOMETIMES YOU EAT THE BEAR, AND SOMETIMES, WELL, HE EATS YOU

J
EFF
: We’re making the movie
The Big Lebowski
, and everyone who’s seen the movie knows that the Dude and Walter dig bowling, right? Now, I’ve bowled a little bit in the past, but I’m not an expert like the Dude. So the Coen brothers hire a master bowler to teach John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, and me how to bowl. The master bowler is a world champion and he brings his assistant along.

I ask the bowling master, “How do you think the Dude might bowl? Does he prepare for a long time? Does he have to get his mind set? Is he like Art Carney in
The Honeymooners
?” Whenever Art Carney would be asked to sign something, say a document, Jackie Gleason would tell him, “Sign there, Norton,” and Carney would start twitching and fidgeting, carrying on for so long that Gleason would finally yell, “SIGN THE DOCUMENT!” So I ask the bowling master if the Dude might be like that.

His assistant starts laughing so hard he just about pees in his pants. The master bowler shakes his head and rolls his eyes, looking embarrassed, so I ask him what’s going on.

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” the assistant says.

The master says, “Go on, you can tell him.”

The assistant says, “No, you tell him.”

Finally the master tells his story. It seems that years ago he tried to bowl like in the book
Zen in the Art of Archery
. That book teaches the student to completely let go of his ego in order to hit the bull’s-eye. If the mind is settled and clear, the pins are practically down before the bowler cocks his hand back to throw the ball. So the bowling master tried to get into that mind-set and ended up like Art Carney. He had certain tics to release tension in his body and he’d do this little stress-relieving dance that would go on five, ten minutes, all in the middle of a tournament. Meantime, his teammates are sitting on the bench doing their version of Jackie Gleason: “JUST THROW THE BALL!”

Things got so bad he couldn’t throw the ball at all. He would not release it from his hand because he couldn’t get into the right mind-set. Finally he went to a shrink and they worked it out.

“So what do you do now?” I ask him.

“I just throw the fucking ball! I don’t think.”

I dug that. And isn’t it interesting that after all that, you never once see the Dude bowl in the entire movie. So is thinking the problem? We’re so good at it; our brains are set up to think, man.

B
ERNIE
: Thinking’s not the problem. We freeze up because we expect a certain result or because we want things to be perfect. We can get so fixated that we can’t do anything. Goals are fine; what I don’t like is getting caught up in expectations or attachments to a final outcome. So the question is, how do you play freely?

J
EFF
: Just throw the fucking ball!

Yeah right, only sometimes I care so much. When I was a kid, I stuttered pretty badly. Even now I still stutter every once in a while, feeling like there’s something I want to share but I can’t get it out. I become anxious and that causes things to get jammed up.

It happens in movies, too. I’ll often worry for a long time about a big scene:
How am I going to do this?
Meantime, there’s another little scene I’m not concerned about at all, I’m sure I know what to do there. Now comes the day when I’m filming, and the big scene is a snap while the little one is trouble. And I’m reflecting,
All that time
you were worried about the wrong thing!
Mark Twain said, “I am a very old man and have suffered a great many misfortunes, most of which never happened.”

My brother Beau turned me on to Alan Watts by giving me his book
The Wisdom of Insecurity
when I just started high school. Later I read his other books and listened to his tapes. I’ve always liked Watts because he wasn’t pompous, didn’t think of himself as a guru or anything like that, didn’t want to convince you of anything, he just liked to share his thoughts with you. And one of them was that if you’re going to wait to get all the information you think you need before you act, you’ll never act because there’s an infinite amount of information out there.

B
ERNIE
: And it’s constantly changing. That’s why it makes no sense to be attached to outcomes. Only how do you not get attached to outcomes?

J
EFF
: Just throw that fucking ball. Just do it. Get into the thing, see where it takes you.

I was working with Sidney Lumet on this movie with Jane Fonda called
The Morning After
. His method was to run through the whole movie twice every day. He would tape out the dimensions of all the sets on this gymnasium floor so that we would have a sense of the space we would be acting in. His general direction to us was: “I don’t want you to indicate how you’re going to do this, I want you to do it. Don’t save it. Learn your lines as best you can, get off book, and then just do it
.
”

Sidney was an actor himself; he wasn’t afraid of rehearsals. Some actors and directors have this fear that if you rehearse too much, you won’t do well when you’re actually shooting. You’ll do your best work—you’ll be your freshest and most spontaneous—in rehearsal, and when the actual filming takes place you’ll be stale and just re-create what you did before. I hear their concern. When the camera’s rolling, I want it to capture me discovering the character, not re-creating what I discovered or figured out days ago. What I admire and strive for is the kind of acting that shows no apparent obligation to the audience; the audience is just a fly on the wall. In life we’re spontaneous, we just orgasm, we just go.

Sidney wanted it fresh, too, but his way of getting this was different. I think he was kind of practicing orgasm, practicing not-practicing. In rehearsals he wanted you to get facile with the role and bring as much to it as you could without holding back. Each time you did that you discovered little things that informed the next time you did it. You had to do it over and over and over again and still come back to emptiness, the place where nothing has been figured out. That’s the trap. If you can’t get back to emptiness, you’re just saying words instead of doing the work, you’re just repeating instead of discovering it anew each time.

With Sidney, we practiced starting from scratch. Twice a day we went through the whole movie, so we also learned the story that was being told. Don’t forget, when you actually shoot a movie you’re shooting out of sequence, so you don’t get really steeped in the story even though that’s the most important thing. In fact, when you shoot the scenes out of sequence, there’s the danger that each particular scene will seem so important that you’ll put too much emphasis on it. It’s easy to forget that a story is being told.

When we went through the whole movie, we didn’t work the scene, we just ran through it once. It was like practicing freshness. He used to say that that was the only way we were going to peel the onion, that each time we did it we were going to discover new things as long as we were fully engaged.

On the day we actually shot the movie, it was a snap. Once we got all the costumes on and were on the set, the scenes just took one or two takes; Sidney would be picking up the batteries, saying, “Let’s go,
bubeleh
,” and move on to the next setup. We’d all be going at a pretty good clip, and you know what? It felt even fresher than it did during the rehearsals because we were in costume and on the actual location.

When we made
Tucker,
Francis Coppola did a great exercise with Martin Landau and me. The two of us have a strong relationship in the movie, so Coppola said something like this: “I want you guys to do an improvisation right now. We’re only going to do it once, but once you do it, you won’t have to think about it again because it will be part of your personal history, it will be in your brain. I want you guys to improvise the first day you met. It was on a train and here are the seats.” And he pulled out a couple of chairs, putting one next to the other. “Now, Marty, you sit down there. Jeff, you come down and sit next to him. All right, guys—action!”

That improvisation informed the whole movie. You invest, engage in it fully, it becomes a part of you and does its thing.

B
ERNIE
: People get stuck a lot because they’re afraid to act; in the worst case, like the master bowler, we get so attached to some end result that we can’t function. We need help just to move on, only life doesn’t wait.

J
EFF
: And it doesn’t help to say,
I’ve got to have a mind-set with no expectations
, because that’s also an expectation. So you can get into a spinning conundrum.

B
ERNIE
: There’s a little ditty that sort of sums this up.

J
EFF
: Hit me with it.

B
ERNIE
:

Row, row, row your boat,

gently down the stream.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily.

Life is but a dream.

Imagine that you’re rowing down a stream and you’re trying to figure out how to do it. Do I first row with the right oar and then with the left, or is it the other way around? What does my shoulder do, what does my arm do? It’s like Joe, the centipede with a hundred legs, trying to figure out which leg to move first.

J
EFF
: Art Carney of the centipedes.

B
ERNIE
: He can’t get anywhere, just like the person in the rowboat. And while he’s hung up with all those questions, the stream is pulling him on and on. So you want to row, row, row your boat—gently. Don’t make a whole to-do about it. Don’t get down on yourself because you’re not an expert rower; don’t start reading too many books in order to do it right. Just row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.

J
EFF
: Merrily, merrily.

B
ERNIE
: That’s important. An English philosopher said that whatever is cosmic is also comic. Do the best you can and don’t take it so seriously.

J
EFF
: When I was really young, my mom enrolled me in dance classes. “Mom, I’m too young to dance,” I told her. She kind of forced me, but I ended up loving it, and after the first lesson I came back and said, “Come on, Mom, I’ll show you the box step.” That introduced me not just to dancing but also to working with someone without having a goal; after all, you’re not going anywhere, you’re just dancing. Years later, whenever she sent me off to work, she’d always say, “Remember, have fun, and don’t take it too seriously.” So I have this word for much of what I do in life:
plorking
. I’m not playing and I’m not working, I’m plorking.

You know, play doesn’t have to be a frivolous thing. You may think of a Beethoven symphony as something serious, but it’s still being played. I think Oscar Wilde said that life is too important to be taken seriously.

B
ERNIE
: I always have this red nose in my pocket, and if it looks like I’m taking things too seriously, or the person I’m talking to is taking them too seriously, I put the nose on. It doesn’t matter what we’re doing or talking about, it doesn’t matter if we agree or disagree, the nose changes everything.

J
EFF
: Clownsville, man. Tightness gets in the way of everything, except tightness.

B
ERNIE
: You can’t get arrogant or pompous with a nose. I always tell people that if you get upset over what someone says, imagine him or her with a clown’s nose on and you won’t get so angry.
Merrily, merrily
. Our work may be important, but we don’t take it too seriously. Otherwise, we get attached to one relatively small thing and ignore the rest of life. We’re creating a little niche for ourselves instead of working the whole canvas.

Another thing about
Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream
. There are different streams. Sometimes you come to a fall and sometimes you come to white water. Your rowing has to adapt to the situation. You can’t do the same stroke coming down a small stream as you would coming down Niagara Falls. Even if you’re only rowing down a stream, different things happen: maybe the wind changes, maybe the current, and suddenly everything’s different. So
gently
is really important. Don’t power yourself or blast through; rock with the way things are. Ask yourself:
What’s the deal here?
I want to get over there but there are things in the way. How do I flow with the situation? Do I wait or go on? If I wait, do I wait one day, one year, five years?
If I go on, do I tack?
Bear witness to the situation and have faith that the right thing to do will naturally arise. Otherwise I get stuck and think,
I can’t do anything, everything’s all wrong.

J
EFF
: And we take it so seriously! Thoughts will change and shift just like the wind and the water when you’re on the boat, thoughts are no different than anything else.

Kevin Bacon and I recently worked on a move together,
R.I.P.D.
Just before we’d begin a scene, when all of us would feel the normal anxiety that actors feel before they start to perform, Kevin would look at me and the other actors with a very serious expression on his face and say: “Remember,
everything
depends on this!”