The Dude and the Zen Master (8 page)

In 1980 I wanted to build an interfaith community, but there was resistance from different people. It didn’t flow, so I stopped and waited. Ten years later it came more naturally and we flowed right with it. That happens all the time; otherwise, you just bully it out and you end up hurting yourself and others.

Some people ask, how long do you wait
?
Maybe five lifetimes, maybe ten, I don’t know. We have to think big.

J
EFF
: Don’t abandon it. Keep it burning.

B
ERNIE
: The grains in the flow of life are always there. At certain times there are unexpected knots, but the grains are still there. One of the key messages of Shakyamuni Buddha was that everything is change. That’s why the phrase
New shit has come to light
is so important. Eihei Dogen wrote a treatise called
Genjo Koan
(
Actualizing the Fundamental Point
), which is all about how we live this life in its essence, as both
The Dude is not in
and
The Dude abides
. Toward the end, he adds: “Beyond this, there are further implications.” No matter how hard we practice and how strongly we feel that we’ve mastered our life, new shit will keep coming to light. The situation will change as often as every split moment, and we will find a way to flow with the grain instead of fighting it.

J
EFF
: When you start opening your heart, the world responds. There is such a need for open hearts that the world will challenge you:
Come on, how much are you willing to give?

Isn’t it the underachiever’s manifesto not to be the highest blade of grass because life is just going to cut you down?

B
ERNIE
: In Japan there’s a phrase that says that the higher a tree grows, the more wind it has on it. It’s a natural part of what it means to grow. You could try to force the wind to stop, but you could also work with it, just like you do in sailing. Be patient; let the circumstances take you there. Go with the wind, and you’re either going to get there or you’ll get somewhere else.

J
EFF
: But I sometimes fear my own excitement. Excitement and creativity are wonderful things:
Open, open, do, do!
But the other side is saying,
You might be writing checks that your ass can’t cash, buddy
. That’s the reason for
Take ’er easy
, because I can get too excited. This is another reason why my wife, Sue, is so good for me. She dampens my excitement in the most beautiful way.

B
ERNIE
: When you talk about the highest blade of grass getting cut, or that life snuffs out those who reach too high, I often think about how true that is for people who try to change the system. For example, take Mother Teresa. She worked hard all her life to make things better for the poor and we all loved her. But she wasn’t trying to change the system; if anything, she took care of the fallout from the system, the people whom the system ignored, like the poor and the dying. On the other hand, Martin Luther King Jr. tried to change the system itself. He started out being a spokesman for African-Americans, but he ended up talking against the Vietnam War and the social inequalities in our country—against the entire system—and he got killed. Not everybody is ready to stand up like that because it’s dangerous; no system wants to be changed.

Primo Levi, who wrote about his survival at Auschwitz, described Elias, a dwarf who was interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. He was enormously strong, bestial, and quite insane, and with those qualities he not only navigated the Auschwitz system, where so many died all around him, but actually thrived. He ate, stole, and seemed quite happy. It was clear that in the world outside Auschwitz, which is a different system, he’d survive only on the outermost fringes of society, maybe even get put away in an insane asylum. But in the system called Auschwitz, Elias was a master player.

So each system forces us to play in certain ways, and you have to look not only at what it’s doing but also at what it forces you to do. We have the capacity to sail in any system; we also have the capacity to try to change it. That’s the dangerous way to go, because we’re going to be criticized, rejected, excommunicated, and maybe even killed.

Lenny Bruce tried to change the system, in his way. He was a stand-up comedian who not only ranted
about
the system—the system could deal with that—but would also improvise, use obscenities, talk about sex, and say things even he didn’t expect to say. That kind of unconstraint and freedom scares people.

My friend the clown and activist Wavy Gravy also tries to change the system, but in a very different style from Lenny Bruce. Wavy once told me he was picketing against the nuclear work at the Livermore National Laboratory in California. The police came to break up the sit-in and he was in a Santa Claus clown costume. They grabbed him, took off his Santa Claus costume, and beat the shit out of him.

J
EFF
: That’s the power of the clown, right? They couldn’t beat him up with the costume on. Humor is very good grease, man. Richard Pryor was another guy like that.

But I wonder: Were they trying to change the system, or were they just being naturally themselves? Maybe all Pryor wanted to do was just be who and what he was. It’s almost like you can’t help it, that’s how you address life and the universe; it’s who you become. Maybe you even get addicted to that identity. So are you doing it or is it doing you? Is it even a matter of choice? Do the circumstances bring forth the guy or gal who wants to change the system, or is it the guy or gal who decides to change the system?

B
ERNIE
: Everything is interconnected. Take a forest, for example. It has a redwood that grows ten feet a year and an oak tree that grows one inch a year. There are also circumstances like sun, rain, and soil. But the circumstances include the characteristics of each particular tree. One is going to grow ten feet a year, and one’s going to grow one inch a year. Our body’s like that, too. Due to circumstances, the hands do certain things and the feet do something else. They share the same environment, they share the same body, but at the same time each has its own aspects.

Nuclear energy appeared, and somebody like Wavy Gravy responded by doing antinuclear work. Much earlier, nuclear energy appeared and the scientist Richard Feynman responded by helping to produce the atom bomb. Both people shared similar circumstances, but they had different personal characteristics, so the result is different. And part of the game also is that Feynman got honors and medals while Wavy gets beaten up by a policeman after he takes off his Santa Claus suit.

There are the Feynmans, the Pryors, the Gravys, and the Bruces. There are the Bridges and the Glassmans. This garden called
us
is a wonderful mixture of totally different trees, plants, and flowers. All of them are different aspects of ourselves, so why kill them or beat them? Why not honor them instead?

7.

YOU KNOW, DUDE, I MYSELF DABBLED IN PACIFISM AT ONE POINT. NOT IN ’NAM, OF COURSE.

J
EFF
: Years ago I asked you this question. If the world is one body, what about all the violence we see around us? What about the war and the fighting? If the other shore is right under our feet and everything’s perfect the way it is, what is all the killing about?

And it’s not just about competing people or countries, it’s also competing ideas. During the Holocaust the Nazis didn’t want to just wipe out Jews, Gypsies, and others, they also wanted to destroy their ideas and culture. Remember how we talked about the hen and the egg? The hen may think she’s pretty important, but all she may be is just another way to make eggs. Again, are you living life, or is life living you?

B
ERNIE
: If we’re only here as an engine to move life forward, it certainly affects our sense of our own importance.

J
EFF
: Have you ever looked underwater at sea anemones? They don’t seem to move at all. But if you look at them again using time-lapse photography, you see them pushing against each other, like:
Get outta here! This is my rock, my survival
. Not only do people do the same thing, ideas do that, too.

I don’t like all this fighting and killing, I want peace. You might think it would be wonderful if we could go in and extract all the evil people out of this world, like we extract cancer out of a body. But as Solzhenitsyn says, evil runs through all of our hearts, and who wants to cut out a piece of her own heart? We are part of nature and nature uses violence and war to make its blade sharper and sharper. Life becomes more intelligent, but we only see that after the fact.

When we experience the fighting up close, we don’t understand it; we think it’s horrible and destructive. Time passes, enabling us to step back, and we get a different perspective. We step out even further back and now there’s order instead of disorder.

It’s like looking closely at a blood cell through a microscope. Unless you know it’s a blood cell, all you see is chaos. You step back, look at it through a wider lens that captures the entire cell, and you say,
Oh, I see, it’s a cell
. You look at it through an even wider lens and you say,
Cells are fighting other cells all the time. There’s a war going on there!
There are also germs, viruses, and bacteria, lots of things like that, all trying and fighting to live. And why not? I mean, germs have a right to live, too, right? But when you look through an even wider lens you see that all these cells make up your body, and it’s one body. And it hits you that you want those battles to go on, because if they didn’t, your body would probably not go on living. You look again through a wider lens and you see one body fighting another, but an even wider lens—like history, maybe—shows you something else:
Oh, that’s this whole constellation of relationships.
Even wider:
It’s all one thing
.

Or you can go the other way, looking at life through greater and greater magnification, revealing finer and finer components. So you’re dividing and dividing, trying to figure out who’s right, who’s wrong, breaking life down even more, and you know what you find in the end? Space.

So depending on how far or how close you get to something, the perspective changes.

B
ERNIE
: You might say that the Buddha had the widest lens of all when he said that everything is one, and that everything is enlightened exactly as it is. But another way of talking about it is connecting it once again to our body. From the Buddha’s lens, you’re Jeff. He’s not that interested in all the pieces that make up Jeff, like your legs, hands, veins, or arteries. He sees it’s all one, all Jeff. If you look at Jeff through greater magnification, there are lots of blood cells destroying other blood cells, synapses, membranes, and bones, and they can all look chaotic and even violent. There are desires and attachments, nerve impulses rushing up to the brain and then back down to tell the rest of the body what to do. There’s a lot of action there. But if you use a wide lens, it’s all one thing, and that one thing is Jeff.

In the same way, if you look at life with the lens of a newspaper, what you’ll see is the same competition, action, and conflict. You’ll see a country called North Korea fighting another country called South Korea; you’ll see floods in Pakistan, the Arctic melting, and politicians arguing. But if you look at it with a wide lens, it’s all one, and that’s what we call enlightenment. Only you can’t just look at oneness, you have to actually experience it, really grok it, not just read, think about, or understand it. And the life you live out of that experience we call an enlightened, or awakened, life.

Jeff’s body is one whether all the cells and pieces that make up Jeff realize it or not; in the same way, we are all one and interdependent whether we actually realize it or not. But it’s nice to experience it, because then we can bring our actions into congruence with what’s real, and what’s real is that everything is one. When we see that, we begin to treat everyone and everything as one. But in order to see it, we have to practice.

The Bodhisattva sees that there is no separate self and that everything is one, but in order to fulfill his vow to free all beings, he will work with all the pieces. He will recognize Jeff as separate from Bernie, Sue, or Eve and work with him as a separate entity. That means that he’s purposely working in the world of delusion, but he’s doing this to fulfill his vow rather than to serve his ego.

J
EFF
: And yet, we have this dream of peace. Is that unnatural?

B
ERNIE
: For me it’s utopia, and I don’t believe in utopias.

J
EFF
: Do you believe in peace?

B
ERNIE
: I believe in working toward peace. I believe in trying to reduce suffering. One kind of suffering comes out of people fighting and killing each other, and I’ve worked a little in that area. But I don’t believe I’ll ever reach peace if what’s meant by that is that no one will ever fight or kill.

Take my body again, for example. I feel my body’s at peace, but does that mean that I want my white blood cells to stop attacking the cancer cells in my body? No, sir. For me, being at peace means I’m interconnected. That doesn’t mean that blood cells don’t engage with other cells, and it doesn’t guarantee that cancer cells won’t rise up and take over my body one day. That’s the flow of life, and it won’t stop whether we find a cure for cancer or not. If I can somehow take a leap and see the workings of the whole universe, I’ll see lots of things that are not at peace with others. Wolves attack sheep, weeds kill flowers; that’s life. I’ve worked all my years to reduce suffering, but I don’t try to change the wolves or the weeds.

J
EFF
: The name of your organization is Zen Peacemakers, right? So when you say making peace, what are you making, exactly?

B
ERNIE
: I’m Buddhist, but as you know, I’m also Jewish. The Hebrew word for peace is
shalom
. Many people know that word, but what they may not know is that the root of
shalom
is
shalem
, which means
whole
. To make something
shalem
, to make peace, is to make whole. There’s a Jewish mystical tradition that at the time of the Creation, God’s light filled a cup, but the light was so strong that the cup shattered into fragments scattered throughout the universe. And the role of the righteous person, the mensch, is to bring the fragments back and connect them to restore the cup. That’s what I mean by peace. For me, peace means whole. The Hebrew
oseh shalom
is “peacemaker,” as in the verse “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall inherit the Earth.” They shall work to restore the fragments into a whole. And in Zen, as you know, our practice is to realize that wholeness and interconnectedness of life.

J
EFF
: Wholeness reminds me of the word
context
. President Obama declared that by 2015 we’re going to end childhood hunger. In doing that, he created a context, a national agreement that childhood hunger has no place in our country. So the question now becomes, how are we going to do it? By providing the context, the general agreement, he gets us basically on the same team. That means that while we can still argue, there’s a sense that we’re all in this together. You start intercourse, man, you make love with each other in all the different forms.

It’s similar to what John Kennedy did, when he said in ten years we are going to put a man on the moon. You were in that biz of putting a man on the moon, right?
*
There must have been all kinds of disagreements on the kind of rocket, the fuel, how we were going to do it. But once the context was created—
we’re putting a man on the moon
—then those disagreements became a good thing, because now we were working together. Everyone had their own theories, testing them, arguing and discussing, all in an effort to figure out the best way to get to the moon.

B
ERNIE
: It’s like the Dude’s rug that tied the room together. A bunch of thugs peed on it, but in the end that’s still the rug that tied the room together.

J
EFF
: You know what this also reminds me of? The characters in
The Honeymooners
. We already talked about Ralph and Norton earlier, but there were also Alice and Trixie. Each of them separately was not so interesting. Ralph Kramden was the bus driver full of dreams about how to become more successful; he was also a bully. Alice, his wife, was commonsensical, flat, and down-to-earth. His friend, Norton, was good-natured but simple-minded, and Trixie, Norton’s wife, was kind of ordinary and a little bossy. Alone, they were not interesting, but when the four of them came together every week for thirty-nine weeks, they were terrific and millions of people tuned in to see them.
The Honeymooners
,
with its stories and situations, provided the context where those four very different characters all worked together, and that changed everything.

I hope that the context of ending childhood hunger by 2015 will transcend the strong political divisions in our country. In fact, that’s what motivated me to speak at both Republican and Democratic conventions last summer. Let me tell you that story.

I was finishing a film and looking forward to stopping for a while and spending more time with my family, when Billy Shore, founder of Share Our Strength, asked me to go to the two conventions and talk to the state governors of both parties about Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign. No Kid Hungry connects children and their families to nutrition programs created by local partnerships of government, nonprofits, and businesses. Many states, Republican and Democrat, are already part of the campaign and we’re trying to enlist more.

Now, you’d think an actor wouldn’t be that uptight about giving a speech, especially about something he cares about. But I get anxious; I want to do a good job. So I start learning my lines just like I do when I make a movie. I work with Billy, Jerry Michaud, my partner in my hunger work, and others to write the speech, which turns out to be four pages long. Being an actor, I look at it like a monologue I’ve got to do in a movie, only unlike the movies you don’t get a number of takes. You’ve got just one shot to pull the thing off. So I have some serious anxiety during the two months before the Republican Convention.

We arrive in Tampa. The meeting with the Republican governors is scheduled for 10:30 at night at the end of the convention, which seems to me to be a strange time to be talking to them, but they say that that’s the way these things go. We drive to see where the meeting with the governors is going to be, and it’s a bar. I’m thinking there will be drinks and music and everybody’s going to be drunk. I also have to give the speech a second time at a No Kid Hungry party afterward. I go check that venue and it’s a bowling alley.

My talk with the governors gets postponed to eleven, then midnight. By now I’m feeling like a ship, you know?
God, I’ll go wherever you take me
. Finally both talks are combined to take place at the bowling alley.

Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, who is chairman of the Republican Governors Association and already part of the No Kid Hungry campaign, arrives, gives me a wonderful introduction, and splits. It turns out that there are no other governors there at all. I end up giving the talk I’d agonized over for two months to an audience of seventy-five college girls at the bowling alley bar. And I don’t change a thing, either. I memorized my lines so well that I just give the entire four-page speech written for state governors—
I hope you’ll join Governor McDonnell and others to develop state solutions to childhood hunger
—to a bunch of college girls.

B
ERNIE
: Did you bring your nose with you?

J
EFF
: Damn, I did and I forgot to use it.

B
ERNIE
: Not-nosing, man.

J
EFF
: Right.

And the Democratic Convention, a week later, wasn’t much better. In addition to advocating for No Kid Hungry, I also did a concert with my band, The Abiders, playing for a few thousand people on an outdoor stage. We’re about three or four songs into the show when the sky opens up and it starts pouring, with lots of thunder and lightning. I see my brother, Beau, out in the audience, so I call him on to the stage and tell him we have to do a rain dance to stop the rain. So I’m doing these elegant tai chi moves while Beau starts hopping up and down and waggling his hands and elbows like a rooster, only now it’s raining and thundering even harder, so I tell him, “No . . . no . . . you’re dancing the wrong steps, man—reverse your power . . . you’re making the storm worse!” Finally we had to pull the plug, stop the concert. We didn’t want to electrify our asses.