There are koans that I keep returning to. Gutei’s one-finger Zen is one. Maybe it is wasted on most students in our lineage because we come to it so early, the third koan in our first koan collection, the Gateless Gate. We are Zen babies when we tackle Gutei.
The core of the story is simple. Gutei is a Zen master who always answers by raising one finger. I imagine great dynamism in Gutei’s finger, highly nuanced, sometimes pointing, sometimes wagging, an infinite well of inflections. A young monk, admiring his master, emulates Gutei. Guiding visitors on a tour of the monastery, our monk answers inquiries by raising one finger. When Gutei hears of this, he calls the monk to him and cuts off the monk’s finger.
Initially stuck on the Zen master’s brutality, I managed to go on. Our monk understandably is staggered, but as he is leaving the master’s presence, Gutei calls to him. When our monk turns, Gutei holds up one finger. In that moment, the monk is greatly enlightened. I got it, or at least I got something. If I try to copy someone else’s understanding, even Bernie’s, I am lost. My expression of understanding must come from the depths of my presence.
I love the koan despite the brutality, and I am still working with it. Emulation is not an adolescent problem, like acne which we rid ourselves of once and forever. As Roshi Pablo Picasso famously said, “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” We learn by emulation. It is true of painters and writers and psychotherapists and soldiers. There is no shame in emulation.
I began by copying Bernie. When we began our work toward leveling the playing field for people living with mental illnesses, when we created an organizational form, a not-for-profit organization, I named it “The Verrazano Foundation” because Bernie had called his vehicle “The Greyston Foundation.” Pure adolescent emulation – harmless, I think – and I’m glad that Bernie apparently thought so too. I still have all my fingers.
That was a low-hanging emulation. It took me longer to fully realize that Bernie’s Greyston work, bringing the homeless to the societal table, was Bernie’s way of healing himself and others. I was awed by the hugging that happened between Bernie and homeless folks he’d never met before. I was disappointed that the homeless didn’t call to me the way they called to Bernie. People living with mental illnesses did.
For years, I’d worked with psychiatric patients without any hugging, and then, as we began to build The Verrazano Foundation, there I was hugging people just out of hospital whom I’d never met before. Through the Foundation, we did some wonderful things, eventually birthing our network of charter schools, bringing students living with emotional and other challenges to the societal table.
In the last years of his life, “It’s just my opinion, man,” became Bernie’s mantra and a wonderful teaching for many of us. It offered me a way into Not Knowing. Bernie had been talking for years about Not Knowing, pointing us towards letting go of fixed ideas. The problem was how to actually do that. Bernie’s mantra was a way to get there.
At first, when I parroted, “It’s just my opinion,” I was reminding myself. It was my self-conscious Zen self reminding my everyday me that my certainties were not eternal or even objective truths. I could chant the mantra, but in the beginning my truths were still true whether I humbly called them “my opinions” or not. Then, magically, things morphed: my most profound and brilliant ideas were just my opinions. How could I tell? I no longer fought or argued over differences of opinion. There was nothing to get angry about.
I still had work to do. Opinions were for me the tips of the icebergs, far easier to spot than what lies beneath the surface. I have a new mantra. “It’s just my story, man.” Our stories tell us who we are and ground our life choices. They ground us, behind our backs. We don’t even realize that our stories are who we are. For better and for worse.
I am into telling my stories, and my story today is that I am a storyteller. It took me a while to get here. (I’m telling you a story). My father was a storyteller, a wonderful storyteller, such a good storyteller that you could call him a raconteur. He could hold a circle of friends enraptured. Dad would tell the story of a movie he’d just seen. People would go to see the movie and report back: the movie was never as good as Dad’s telling.
I wanted to be like Dad. I would tell stories. I would hold forth and people would listen. It took someone I loved and trusted to tell me that I was only loud and drunk. I stopped telling stories. I “worked it through” in my analysis. I was not the storyteller my father was. I chalked it up, another fantasy. I would never play for the Knicks either. I let go of lingering dreams of fiction writing. I was not a storyteller.
Fifty years ago, I had that epiphany, but in the last decade a strange thing happened. I noticed that I was telling stories, and without the aid of alcohol. I was telling stories not at parties. I was telling stories at work and in the zendo. Gradually at first but then with increasing regularity, storytelling became my way of teaching and leading. When my story ends, others respond with their own stories. They don’t bother to try to explain the connection. Stories pile on stories with the richness of Mayan tapestries.
I tell my stories and I tell stories which I have heard. I tell Bernie’s stories as I remember them and my father’s stories. I tell stories from the Zen koan tradition and tales of the Hasidim. I tell stories that I have heard from people whose memory I cherish, who live in my heart through their stories, and other stories, I can’t remember where I heard them. And I’m again trying my hand at fiction, another way of storytelling.
Bernie has been gone now for six years, and I am still working with him, and I am still working with Gutei. I am still emulating as a way of learning, today reading Toni Morrison and Alice Munro, James Baldwin and Henry James, Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen, trying to learn how to tell a story: emulating and letting go of emulating. Again and again.
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