The Dude and the Zen Master (7 page)

J
EFF
: It’s a kind of refuge, man. Buddhism has three refuges, right?

B
ERNIE
: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The awakened one, his teachings, and the community of practitioners who vow to awaken as he did.

J
EFF
: There are also false refuges, refuges you think will ease the pain but in the long term cause even more, like booze or drugs. Some people will say cigars, too. I’m kind of a slow learner, or I learn at my own speed, and I’ve done many different things to take the edge off, so to speak, to distract me and help me relax. Otherwise that sensitivity is too intense.

B
ERNIE
: Knowing when is the appropriate time to act is a learning curve. That’s true in acting also, right? If you don’t respond at the right time the director yells at you, “It’s too late!” Or if you respond too quickly: “It’s too soon! Why are you rushing in here?”

Luckily, we have practices to build up our sensitivity and improve our sense of timing. One practice is:
The Dude is not in
. When you’re not attached to Jeff and I’m not attached to Bernie, when we see we’re not separate from each other and the rest of the world, we can now raise the mind of compassion, no longer working just on our own behalf but for the sake of all beings. It’s no longer about me; it’s about everything and everyone in the universe. My first awakening experience was great, and it caused me to be a tough Zen guy demanding that everyone else in the meditation hall practice hard to have the same experience. But the second one was much broader. It wasn’t about me or other practitioners; it was about all the hungry spirits in the world. And that’s everyone, including you and me.

In Zen Peacemakers we have Three Tenets, and the first is
not knowing
, which corresponds to abiding nowhere, being in that state of non-attachment. That’s
The Dude is not in
. If I say,
Bernie’s not in
, in most cases there is still some Bernie left in, some attachment I have to an aspect of myself. It could be as basic as my attachment to being a man, a teacher, or a father. Those may all be very positive things, but if I’m attached to them then they’ll condition me, and they will limit the possibilities of action in my life.

Say I identify too much with the teacher part of me. If someone asks me for help, I may give her a lecture about Zen when what she really needs is some listening, money, or just a big hug. My conditioning to teach will limit my flexibility and responsiveness.

It’s very rare to be in a state where there’s nothing in, where you have no attachment to any idea or concept about yourself. In that state you’ve immediately raised the mind of compassion, because if nothing is in, everything is in, and you are now free to experience yourself as the world. Much of Zen training is about helping us get to that state.

The second of the Zen Peacemakers Tenets is bearing witness to the joys and suffering of the world, which means not backing away from anything that comes up inside you or that you see and hear in life.

J
EFF
: There’s a difference between somebody who is enlightened and someone who thinks,
It’s all me
,
it’s all for me
. That’s seeing things only from your conditioning, only from your opinions, which is the opposite of not being in.

One of the cool things about acting is that it’s all about getting inside other people’s skin, other people’s reality. I’ve played some sociopaths and psychopaths. Of course, the sociopath doesn’t view himself as a sociopath; it’s all a matter of perspective. So what is the correct perspective? Wherever you’re standing, you’re going to see something else, right?

Take the characters in
Jagged Edge
or
The Vanishing
.
The
Vanishing
is about a guy who buries people alive.
Jagged Edge
is about a sociopath who kills his wife. What I discovered in my exploration of those characters, especially with the guy in
The Vanishing
, is that he’s alive. He senses his aliveness; he feels the world and the people in it as extensions of himself. In a way, he wants to express himself and even serve people, only his way of doing that is burying them alive. So we all have different views of what it is to serve others. It goes back to
That’s your opinion, man
.

The character in
The Vanishing
is a little like Jack Nicholson when he says, in
A Few Good Men
, “You can’t handle the truth.”
You can’t handle that you need some motherfucker like me who’s willing to do your dirty work.
So the character in
The Vanishing
says,
I’m gonna murder these people, and it’s a blessing because it’s good for the whole
. Hitler might have felt the same way, and all those others who do terrible things. They had their dream and their vision; they were capable of love and all the basic human emotions. So why do we call one dream good and another one bad?

B
ERNIE
: For me it’s about not-knowing and bearing witness.
The Dude is not in
refers to a pure state of no attachment whatever, nothing there. That’s not true about the characters you described. As you said, the guy in
The Vanishing
thinks of people as extensions of himself, which is the opposite of
The Dude is not in
. When we bear witness to something, there’s almost no distance between myself and what I’m observing, between subject and object. In acting, you get completely inside the skin of the character you’re playing; you totally bear witness to him or her. I call the actions you do out of that,
loving actions
. If the characters you played were bearing witness to the people they killed, their loving actions would have been pretty different from what they ended up doing. Imagine bearing witness to what it feels like to be buried alive! There’s no way he’d do what he did.

Taking loving actions is the Third Tenet of the Zen Peacemakers. In terms of practice, we have to learn how to bear witness to all these folks, including the sociopaths and the psychopaths, and then the appropriate loving action arises.

J
EFF
: Because all those folks are us. We’re all aspects of the same thing.

B
ERNIE
: Part of my practice is to try to bear witness to everything that feels ugly or that scares me. That’s why I started to do our yearly retreats at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps in Poland, where 1.3 million people were murdered. I meet all aspects of myself there: victims, killers, children, guards, bureaucrats, even the electrified fences that surrounded the place. All of them are nothing but me.

My definition of enlightenment is realizing the oneness of life. And whatever you exclude and call
not me
, or whatever you’re not willing to deal with, is going to thwart you. Any action you take that does not include all viewpoints is going to fail, and it will fail exactly in the areas you excluded.

Lenny Bruce liked to say,
What’s the deal here?
In each of these situations, what’s the deal here? What are we leaving out? Who are we leaving out? That’s where we’re going to have problems. We’re everything and everyone, and that’s whom we should bring to the table. Instead, we invite the people we feel good about and we leave out the others. But those people are still us. We’re going to fall short wherever and whenever we put on blinders and refuse to deal with everyone.

So bearing witness to as many people as possible is very important. But in order to do that we have to be totally not in, with no attachments whatsoever, and as I said before, I’ve never met the person who’s completely not in. We are in to a certain degree and we’re not in to a certain degree. We have attachments to some things and not to others. The world pecks away, sending us messages; we listen to some, and we don’t listen to others. We bear witness to some; we don’t bear witness to others. One message may be this nightmarish guy that’s burying people alive, like your character in
The
Vanishing
, only we don’t want to bear witness to him, he’s too scary. Another may be Adolf Hitler. We don’t want to bear witness to him, either, we want him dead. But if we do bear witness to the part of humanity that all these different people represent, we grow, and our loving actions will reflect that, too.

J
EFF
: There’s also an aspect of how quickly and deeply we’re ready to go. There’s a story of the Hindu god, Brahma. One of his angels comes to the king and says, “Brahma would like to show himself to you
.
How would you like him to show himself? Think about it and give me your answer.”

Then he goes to a very humble man, not a king by any means, and says the same thing: “Brahma’s going to show himself to you. Think about how you would like him to show himself.”

The next day the angel goes back to the king, who says: “I would like Brahma to show himself to me and all of my subjects in his full glory. And since I’ve got some meetings at noon, I’d like that to happen at, say, eleven o’clock.”

The angel agrees. Eleven o’clock rolls around, the king’s guys assemble, Brahma shows himself in all his glory, and they all disintegrate because they can’t handle his full glory. There’s nothing left, not even ashes; they’re just gone.

Then the angel goes to the humble man and asks, “How do you want Brahma to show himself?”

The man answers, “I want Brahma to show himself in all of the faces that I see every day, in ordinary life.” That’s what he gets, and he doesn’t die because he took the glory in manageable doses.

So the question is, how much are you ready to take on? How much are you ready to bear witness to? What’s it going to cost you?

6.

NEW SH** HAS COME TO LIGHT

J
EFF
: T Bone Burnett told me this about performing with my band: You don’t have to feel like you’re pulling the train. When you’re up there on the stage with the rest of the band, you’re opening the door for them to go through. You don’t have to push them—
Come on, we gotta do this!
—thinking that otherwise it’s not going to get done. It’s more of a moving out of the way than trying to muscle it through.

B
ERNIE
: When you first start doing Zen meditation, we give this instruction:
Thoughts will come; the brain’s job is to produce thoughts. Don’t try to stop them, and also don’t follow them. Pretend it’s an open door; let the thoughts come in and let them go. Don’t try to manipulate them because you’ll get into trouble
.

I love talking about Zen and jazz bands. We’re instruments of life. You perfect your instrument, which is yourself, to become a player. But playing in a band, where you hear the sounds of all the instruments, is very different from playing alone.

J
EFF
: Playing in a band makes you bigger. It takes you to places you’d never go just on your own.

B
ERNIE
: Imagine if you’re sitting there as part of the band and you say,
I’m gonna play these chords no matter what the other guys do.
It kills the whole thing.

J
EFF
: Or
I’m gonna force these guys to do what I do
. You don’t get the benefit of hearing another aspect of yourself. The creativity’s gone.

It’s a little like that when I work on a movie. I can see that everyone is different, that we serve different purposes and are all aspects of the whole. For instance, one of the things that I find very freeing in making a movie is to turn it over to the director. I hold his opinion above mine unless I get something that comes from a higher power; if it’s that intense, I’ll be subversive and try to sneak my way in there. But generally, I like to empower the director and give him power over me so that I can transcend myself and make something bigger than what I have in my own mind, maybe even surprise myself. All the folks there have different opinions and visions of what’s going on, which enrich my experience and also make for a better movie.

My stand-in, Loyd Catlett, is a deep friend. He’s from Texas, a hunter with trophies on his wall, and was raised very differently from me. I’ve probably spent almost as much time with him as I’ve spent with my wife. My father’s name was spelled with two
l
s, Catlett’s name is spelled with one. Over the last forty-five years we’ve done around sixty films together. That may be a record:
Most Movies Made by an Actor & Stand-in Team
. I met him on
The Last Picture Show
in 1971 and he’s been the thread that runs through most of my movies. The stand-in’s job is to work with the director of photography to set up the lights and cameras before the actual shooting takes place. This can be tedious and go on for hours, but Loyd is a professional and he knows how I move and speak, which is very helpful in getting the movie made.

We have a wonderful relationship; he’s invaluable to me in so many ways, not only as a stand-in and occasional stuntman but also as my role model for many roles, from
The Last Picture Show
to
True Grit
. Anytime I’m playing a western character, he’s my go-to guy. And beside all that, he’s my dear friend. Being a Texan, he’s got a lot of one-liners that are music for the soul, like, “You know what your problem is? You don’t realize who I think I am.” Or sometimes he switches it: “You know what my problem is? I don’t realize who you think you are.”

We have different skill sets and different opinions about things, but all are useful perspectives and tools.

B
ERNIE
: So how do I just let it all be, bear witness, and get into the swing? I love Ellington’s tune, “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)
.
” Just let it be. Bear witness to the voices and the instruments—whether it’s a jazz band or life—and then move with them, flow with them. If you can do that, then you’ll be a lot happier because in life you’re always in a band and you’re always swinging. You’re not forcing anything and you’re not being forced, you just flow. Like your friend T Bone said, people think that if you’re not figuring it out and forcing it in certain ways, you’re not going to get things done
.
The opposite is true. You’ll get more done because you’re allowing the creativity to flow.

To paraphrase Linji, founder of the Rinzai school of Zen, the whole world is a puppet stage, so who’s pulling the strings?
*
If you’re in there pulling the strings and telling people what they have to do, it’s not going to be a great puppet show.

J
EFF
: Or, going back to
The Dude is not in
, if you really are not in, and that’s what’s pulling the strings, that’s pretty fucking cool.

B
ERNIE
: As soon as you know something, you’re not completely open and you can’t bear witness to life. Bearing witness is like plunging, becoming completely one with something. Meditation is a practice for not-knowing and bearing witness. When you just sit, you let go of thoughts and feelings and bear witness to what arises moment after moment.

In Zen we have different practices to help us do that. There are koans, like what Huineng said to the monk who pursued him:
What was your original face before your parents were born?
Your brain tells you that it makes no sense. You let go of that, you go into the state of not-knowing, bear witness to the koan, and something happens.

I’ve developed the practice of doing street retreats, where a small group of us lives on the streets without ID or money and just with the clothes on our backs. That’s a plunge into life on the streets. Things become gritty and immediate; instead of worrying about business or work, you’re thinking about where to get your next meal, how far away it is, where you can use a bathroom, and where you can sleep. For a short while, you become one with the streets. No matter what your life is like back home, during that week you feel raw and vulnerable. Another plunge is our annual retreats at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. You can read books and see movies about Auschwitz all you want, but it has nothing to do with the experience of being there.

If we go back in history, Zen masters used shouting and hitting to get you to the place where you’re not in, where you abide nowhere. When we have some sense of self, we feel secure. But when there’s a shout or a hit—

J
EFF
: —it clears everything. That sense of self is gone.

B
ERNIE
: That’s what I look for when I work with students. I’m not interested in their understanding terminology or reciting scriptures, I want them to embody
The Dude is not in
; I want their systems to work that way.

Generally, I find that a lot of people use words and terms without knowing what they mean; they’re sort of hiding behind their own talk. My Ph.D. is in applied mathematics. My advisor used to say, “If you can’t explain it, you don’t know it.” If you can’t put it in regular, simple language that people can understand, then you don’t really know what you’re talking about.

The great thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master Eihei Dogen talked about
dotoku
, which means
the way of expression
.
Do
is
Tao
, the
way
, and
toku
is
expression
. The way of expression is to express yourself so that somebody can really understand. It goes even further than words; in fact, it doesn’t have to be verbal. It can be an emotion, a slap, a sudden, great laugh, it can be anything.

Would it be correct to say that an actor empties himself of his own identity to let the role come through, while a movie star relies more on being sexy or charismatic? The two are very different. So when you say,
That person’s an actor
, you perceive him as coming from his whole body and embodying that emptiness.

J
EFF
: When I make a movie, I often do something to create my own empty space. I’ll give you an example. Say I come in, I do all my due diligence, study my lines, think about how to play the character, and feel I’m really ready
.
But now the other actor is not doing it how I imagined in my hotel room, or the director seems kind of pissed, or it’s raining though it’s supposed to be sunny in the scene. So I’m starting to feel tight, you know?

So what I sometimes do is start singing or do somersaults around the stage, do something that’s apparently inappropriate. I’ll scream, get over on my back and just let it rip. Once, I led the cast and crew in a big
om
session. They all chanted this weird syllable:
Ommmm!
And it shifted the vibe; it changed the tightness to looseness. When you do the unexpected, everyone starts wondering what else can happen. They start reassessing all the givens of that moment.

What’s great about movies is that all of this is totally allowed; it’s even encouraged. Creativity is what’s called for. The idea is to get empty so the thing can come through you, you know? What I try to go for is that thing you’re talking about,
The Dude is not in
. I’m taking advantage of everything and letting it rip.

It’s a little like what you do when you put that nose on. You’re doing something unexpected, shattering the boundaries that people assume are there:
What, a Zen master is acting like a clown?
It’s also an important reminder to yourself:
All this is nothing but space to be danced in. There’s no need to feel harnessed or limited in any way
.

Letting go and emptying myself is such a strong force for me—almost like gravity—that it does me, I don’t do it. When the Dude is not in, life just blossoms.

B
ERNIE
: Shakyamuni Buddha said that everything and everyone, as they are, are enlightened. On the other hand, the founder of the Japanese tantric Shingon school, Kobo-Daishi, said that the way you can tell the depth of a person’s enlightenment, how much she or he realizes the oneness of life, is by how she or he serves others. So the one who’s always in, the one who thinks exclusively of herself, is only seeing the oneness of her own self and that’s whom she’s going to serve. If what’s in is her family and her, then she sees their oneness and that’s whom she’s going to serve; the depth of her enlightenment is her family. If you see people serving society, the depth of their enlightenment is society. I always point to the Dalai Lama as somebody who’s serving the world, not just himself or even his own Tibetan nation. So the depth of his enlightenment is the world, meaning that he sees himself as the world and the world as himself.

To say that someone is completely not in represents an extreme case of a person who has totally let go of attachment to his or her identity. That’s a state that none of us is really going to achieve, except sometimes, like during that scream that you mentioned. During that scream there is nothing. Nobody’s in.

J
EFF
: My album,
Be Here Soon
, was a takeoff on Ram Dass’s book
Be Here Now
. I thought that nobody would get the title so I kept trying to drop it, but it kept on coming back. The title comes from lyrics in a song, “I’ll Be Here Soon,” which is a little paradoxical. I mean, don’t those words imply that you’re already here?

B
ERNIE
: People hear that the practice is to live in the now, and they feel like a failure that they can’t do that. I give lots of talks, and almost always at the end somebody raises his hand and says,
You know, I’ve been trying to practice this for so long, and I still can’t be here now.
At that point I always say,
Whoever is not here now, please stand up
. Of course, nobody stands up because we’re all here now. Where else can we be?

J
EFF
: I have to admit that I’ve had the same feeling as that student.
Be here now. Okay, but I’m not feeling like I’m here right now. I’m feeling like I’ll be here soon.
In some way, my saying that I’m not here now feels sort of like an acknowledgment that I am here now, only feeling that I’m not.

B
ERNIE
: “The Dude is not in, leave a message.” That’s our life again. We’re not in, and everybody’s leaving messages. Not being in—not being attached to Jeff or Bernie or whoever you are—is the essence of Zen. When we’re not attached to our identity, it allows all the messages of the world to come in and be heard. When we’re not in, creation can happen.

J
EFF
: It can have its way, man.

The Dude does his best to take it easy. And that brings to mind going with the grain. When I think of Lily, my goddaughter, I think of the first syllable of her name,
Li
. In Chinese, that literally means the veins of a leaf, the grain in wood or in marble. I did a scene in
Surf’s Up
where I’m trying to give a lesson about going with the grain while making a surfboard. You come across a knot, so where’s the grain in the knot? Where’s the path of least resistance?

B
ERNIE
: When you do judo, you’re working with the energy of the person. If you want to go in a certain direction, you wait until the energy of the other person goes that way, too. If it doesn’t, you wait awhile, knowing that change happens. As the Dude says,
New shit comes to light,
and when it does, you’ll pick it up again. We wait for the grain to go in the direction we want to go, and then we move with it. But new shit keeps coming to light, things keep on changing, and we run into another knot in the wood. So we wait again. We have a little patience.