One of the most evil bastards I ever met was a Zen master.
He was pushing 90 and had severe rosacea. His nose was as big as a fist. He would smile warmly and nod and stare ahead through half-closed eyes, and then he would fuck your world.
He’d come from Japan after my teacher died. His aim was to take over the temple in LA where I was supposedly in charge. This is a very long and a very ugly story. It involves a sex scandal, a broken community, and spiritual politics, which is the worst kind of politics, because where God, dharma, sacred real estate, and the like are involved, people play for keeps and don’t play fair. They’re fighting for absolute truth, after all, and apparently absolute truth likes to put bastards on the payroll.
When it was cold out he wore a red hunting cap that gave him a certain Elmer Fudd quality, and I’ve come to think of him as a kind of Elmer Fudd Roshi. Anyway, the first thing Roshi Fudd did was undermine the spiritual leadership at our temple—mainly me. Here’s how he did it.
I spent all day preparing a welcome dinner for Roshi Fudd and his retinue as they flew in from Kyoto. That night, as the sake flowed and the miso soup was ladled, Roshi Fudd spontaneously rearranged the seating in the dining hall, pulling the five members of our temple’s board of directors close to him.
You can be forgiven, as a normal human being, for not understanding how important a Zen seating chart is. At a fancy informal dinner, with lots of monks and students, where you eat is who you are. The higher up you are in the hierarchy (and traditional Zen is all about hierarchy), the closer you sit to the head teacher. My place was now practically in the kitchen, with Nimbus, the mouse-hunting cat.
About halfway through the dinner, Roshi Fudd turned to the board president. “Hey,” he yelled so everyone could hear. “You know Shozan not real Zen priest, yah?”
This was a complicated diss meant to point out that because my teacher had not entered any of the Zen priests he’d ordained into the official Myoshin-ji registry in Japan, none of us technically had permission to teach Zen now that our teacher was dead. Never mind that some of our priests had spent up to five decades practicing and teaching the dharma full-time. To Roshi Fudd we were just schlemiels wearing robes we didn’t deserve, playing at a practice we would never understand. In fact, Roshi Fudd claimed, no American could ever become a true Zen master, because we weren’t taught to be adept in the classical Chinese in which the koan literature is originally recorded.
I dislike authority figures, and I distrust systems built around them. I’d made an exception—perhaps too big an exception—for my teacher. But he was dead now.
The five board members—all friends of mine, regular middle-class Angelenos—nodded, laughed, and avoided my eyes.
But Roshi Fudd was just getting started.
In one evening—an evening I had prepared in his honor—he stripped me, in full view of those who had all the legal power in our organization, of the trust and respect that I’d struggled to earn during my thirteen years of full-time Zen practice.
OK. There’s a lot to unpack here. Because, let’s be honest, this really isn’t about Roshi Fudd. What it’s about is my shame over how weak—how servile and passive, how like a little boy—I was in his presence.
I remember driving Roshi Fudd from our monastery in the San Gabriel Mountains back to our LA temple. We stopped for gas, and he bought me an ice cream cone. I sat there in the driver’s seat licking and nodding pleasurably, while riding shotgun beside me was this guy who, metaphorically speaking, had spent the last week dipping his hand into my wallet and rubbing his ass all over my clean towels.
“Thank you, Roshi, for the wonderful ice cream!”
But give the guy credit for being honest. He was making a play for our temple, which he wanted to bring into his fold, and he made no bones about it. That’s just how some people roll, including some Zen masters. They want power, they know how to get it, they know how to keep it, and they know how to use it. Fine.
Still, I could have pushed back. I could have stood up for myself. I could have said something, anything, instead of sitting there licking my little ice cream cone like an idiot.
In the end, I did what I do—I processed the whole experience by writing about it. In a chapter for my second book, I detailed the sexual misconduct, scandal, and collapse of our community that led to Roshi Fudd’s arrival on the scene. When Roshi Fudd got wind of this chapter-in-progress, he let me have it at the next board of directors meeting.
He shouted at me, then he laughed like he wasn’t angry, then he shouted some more, and when he’d finally had his fill, he leaned back and roared: “You’re desecrating the dharma! What is wrong with you? Writing about your dead teacher’s sex scandal?!”
I remember staring into his eyes and going perfectly still inside. It was the stillest I’d been since I’d watched the final breath leave my teacher’s lips three years before. At one point I tried to defuse the tension by making a joke. It took some doing for the translator to interpret my stab at humor. When Roshi Fudd finally got the gist of what I’d said, he started cackling and screaming, “I see your character! I see your character! I see your character! Hahahahaha—I SEE YOUR CHARACTER!”
In that moment I saw my character too. It’s simple, really. I dislike authority figures, and I distrust systems built around them. I’d made an exception—perhaps too big an exception—for my teacher. But he was dead now. Why was I sitting here taking punch after punch from a guy who clearly didn’t respect or even like me?
At a retreat the following week, my peers at the monastery did that thing where they talked about me behind my back to my face, like they were speaking about a ghost. Their inner circle was now one body lighter. Board members consulted a lawyer over my upcoming book. They seemed to be on the verge of threatening me with legal action. People thought that in writing about my teacher’s sex scandal I was challenging his legitimacy and desecrating his legacy.
I wasn’t. I was writing about—or against—the propensity in Buddhist communities to put teachers way up high on pedestals. My teacher’s death had left an enlightenment-size hole in our community, and people were rushing to fill that hole with yet another absolutely powerful authority figure.
But where my teacher was, in my view, a tragically flawed human being, he was also a humble and pretty spectacular Zen master. Roshi Fudd, on the other hand, seemed more like an off-the-shelf theocrat with a taste for power and little interest in the people he was grabbing it from and lording it over.
And honestly? God bless him for this.
After thirteen years of often blind devotion to my teacher, my sangha, and formal Zen practice, it was time to start thinking (no-thinking?) for myself again.
Roshi Fudd taught me, wittingly or not, an invaluable lesson: Don’t ever surrender your personal integrity to a spiritual teacher. Surrender your ego to the practice.
In hindsight, Roshi Fudd was less of a prick than a mirror. I think he ultimately wanted the best for our community, and it was in coming from this place that he put me in my place—the bottom of the ladder. Once there, I had a choice to make. Grovel or grow up and move on.
Roshi Fudd taught me, wittingly or not, an invaluable lesson: Don’t ever surrender your personal integrity to a spiritual teacher. Surrender your ego to the practice.
It is, perhaps, a universally applicable lesson. At your job, for example, surrender your ego to the work. Don’t just do stuff to make your boss happy. In love, surrender your ego to the relationship. Don’t throw away your boundaries and abase yourself because you’re afraid of losing somebody. When making art, surrender fully to your artistic vision, don’t chase after gallery space. Integrity is like the light of your inner north star. Navigate by that light. Otherwise you can get lost in a maze of other people’s expectations.
My mistake was that I thought I needed Roshi Fudd’s affirmation. I thought I needed him to tell me I was a good boy, a good monk. Well, guess what? Needing someone’s affirmation always makes you into a “thing,” a mere object of another’s wishes. Neither Roshi Fudd nor any teacher is the sole owner of the Netflix Account of Universal Truth. We all have a password. It’s our natural birthright.
My teacher used to call this fact “true democracy.” Even a flea has flea integrity, he said. And a flea’s integrity is equal to the integrity of a lion. You might have no power in a situation—as in my dynamic with Roshi Fudd—but just because you have no power doesn’t mean you automatically forgo your integrity. Integrity can’t be taken from you. It’s yours to give up. If you surrender that, you will regret it. Trust me. Sometimes integrity is all you have, and once given away, it’s hard to get back.