My Zen Roots

Yesterday was Father’s Day. I’m thinking about my dad. My Zen practice is rooted in my childhood, and, as far as I can see, there was no Zen there. Until recently, if you’d asked me, I would have said there wasn’t much Jewish there either. Now, I am marveling at how Jewish I am and how my Jewishness was transmitted by my parents without their awareness. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my father was always teaching me the Talmudic way to truth. All I was aware of was that he was an overpowering arguer. I settled finally for beating him at chess. I settled for standing taller. It could have been yesterday, the first time I realized, standing together in the driveway, that I had my arm around his shoulder. I was taller than my dad.

That Talmudic way became my way of leadership: fierce argument and debate. I could be overwhelming. I could be terrifying. I wasn’t an easy boss work for, but we learned as a team, and we arrived at solutions to challenges I would never have found if my team hadn’t shown me that my first idea was missing something. When I realized how difficult my way was for others who didn’t have my “Talmudic” training, I told people what I was doing, what we were doing, how much I appreciated the challenging debate.

What I didn’t realize until much later, many years after his death when I stumbled upon Buber’s Tales of the Hassidim, was that, while Dad was training me in the Talmudic way, he was also teaching me the storytelling way of the Hassidim. Dad was a storyteller. All of his sisters were storytellers. The great lessons of my life are embodied in my parents’ stories.

I hardly noticed the shift as it was happening, but in my last decade of school leadership, my way of leadership changed. By the time I retired, argument was no longer my way to truth. I was channeling my inner Baal Shem Tov. He had been there all the time, but when I was younger, he would only emerge when I was drinking. Then I would launch into storytelling. Sober, I realized that I was trying too hard to be my dad who really was the life of the party. People loved his stories.

At first, telling a story in a management meeting, I was embarrassed – was I wasting everyone’s time? – until I heard people repeating my stories. Over time, it became my way. It’s now my way of Zen teaching. Koans are our Zen tales, like the Hassidic tales, accounts of the sayings and doing of our teachers, and like the Hassidic tales, Zen koans are fingers pointing at the moon. My instruction to the student working on a koan is “Don’t tell me about the koan, show me what it’s pointing to.” Don’t “translate” the koan into Zen philosophy. Use the koan as a pointer. To find where it’s pointing, plunge in, become the koan.

Recently, Matthew was working on The Rhinoceros Fan. It’s koan that occurs in both the Blue Cliff Record and the Book of Equanimity, so I somehow passed it twice – I have no memory of how I did that – but Matthew saw something which plunged me deeper than I’d been before. Want to know where the rhinoceros fan is pointing me? We’ll get to that on Thursday.