Here's a funny skit by the Upright Citizen's Brigade:
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that playing the role of the uber enlightened spiritual master is mentally and physically devastating to the people who attempt it. I've retold the story a few hundred times about the serene and tranquil spiritual master I met in my teens who turned out to have been an accessory to murder, very probably at the exact time as I was sitting starry eyed at his feet imbibing what I thought were mystic truths imparted by one who seemed clearly to have transcended the agitated and restless state of ordinary people.
The other day my publishers told me that a lawyer representing "concerned people in the Buddhist community" called them threatening legal action should my upcoming book say anything unflattering about his clients — all serene and blissful Spiritual Masters, I have to assume. His clients needn't have worried their perpetually undisturbed little minds. No Zen Masters were harmed in the making of my new book. None expect me, of course. I come off like a complete and total prick (in more ways than one -- you'll see!). Maybe I should sue!
Such nice people, these spiritual masters. So unruffled by life's troubles.
Feh!
It's like these guys have to be just as nasty behind the scenes as they are bland and unperturbed in the public eye. It happens so often it's scary. Balance, it seems, will be established of its own accord no matter how we try to tip things in the direction we'd like them to go.
It's too late for these guys and probably their legal counsel too. But maybe the rest of us can learn something. Zen practice is not about trying to re-make yourself in your own image of an enlightened saint. That image is born out of your unenlightened confusion. How could it be worth achieving? No, Zen practice is about seeing yourself for what you really are and working with that. Even Jesus himself wasn't all that "Christ-like" when you met him in person. Not that I ever met him, of course, or imagine I ever will. It's just that "Christ-like-ness" is an image that has no basis in reality.
Our problem isn't that we're so unlike our image of the saints we wish we could be. Our problem is that we make the fact that we're so unlike our images into a problem.
