Telling the Truth

Now and Zen
by Syvlia Boorstein

     A traditional Zen teaching story begins with the account of elders in a rural Japanese village bringing a newborn infant to the mountaintop home of the local Zen priest, knocking at the gate, and saying, "The unmarried woman who is this child's mother says that you are the father. You need to take care of it." The priest says, "Is that so?" and accepts the baby. Three years later the elders return, saying, "The real father of the child has returned to the village, confessed, and agreed to marry the mother, and now you need to give the child back to us." The priest says, "Is that so?" and gives them the child.
     I appreciate the story more now than when I first heard it. It was told to me as an example of nonattachment, of the priest's capacity to let go of something he could no longer have. I wanted the priest to say, “I raised him! He is mine!" or "You can't do this to me!" or “I feel so terrible about losing this child. How can you do this to me?" or “I worked so hard. I don't deserve this." The story upset me because I thought it meant the priest didn't care about the child, that he was indifferent. I think that my discomfort may have been some alarm on my part about the possibility - in the event that my practice worked and I did change my habits of grasping - that I might become indifferent to my own children. I see now that the story has nothing to do with whether the priest liked the child or didn't, or had enjoyed him or hadn't. He was able to recognize the truth of the current situation - the elders were going to take the child-and whatever had been his experience would remain just as it was.
     It's difficult to keep the emotions of the present moment from rewriting history. If we are angry, insulted, or embarrassed, the mind often designates the person (or people) we feel caused our distress as "enemies," and substantiates that label by highlighting past experiences that support such a view. It's probably a reflexive, protective attempt of the psyche to soothe our feelings. It doesn't work, though. A revised history isn't the truth, so it requires constant maintenance to keep it going. And it's painful.
     A woman I met recently on the New Englander - the train that begins in New Hampshire and passes through western Massachusetts on its way to Philadelphia - might have, but didn't, rewrite her history. There were very few people on the train when I boarded it in Springfield. I noticed one couple, clearly older than I am by a significant number of years, sitting together in the last row, holding hands.
     I immediately imagined a history for them: more than fifty years married, several children, many grand - children. I noticed, as I settled into a seat some rows before them, that they weren't talking to each other, and I wondered whether when Seymour and I have been together fifty years we too will have run out of things to say
     My habit on long train rides is to get up from my seat periodically and walk back and forth up the length of the car several times, just to stretch. On my second or third stretch break, the woman smiled at me, and I stopped to talk. They were still holding hands.
     "Are you going all the way to Philadelphia?" I asked.
     ”We are," the woman answered.
     "Do you live there?" I asked. "Are you going home?'
     The man spoke. "No," he said. "We live in New Hampshire. But I need a certain surgery that they do only at one particular hospital in Philadelphia. We're going there."
     I thought about how wonderful it was that these two old people, having been together so long) were now able to face old-age challenges together.
     "How long have you been married?" I asked. I wanted to give them the pleasure of telling me, and anyway, I wanted to know.
     “We're not married," the woman replied. “We just met each other three years ago. We live together."
     I tried not to look surprised. Then they both told me their stories. The man told his story first. He had married young. His wife had died seven years previously. They'd had five children. His grandchildren were grown. His children still lived in New Hampshire, but most of his grandchildren lived farther away. Many of them came back every summer for a family reunion.
     Then the woman told her story. She said, “I was a bit older when I married than he was. I had four children, right away, each a year apart from the next. My husband and I raised them all," she continued, “ and they all got married. And then, after forty-four years - after all that - I came home one day and found a note from my husband that he'd left with another woman. That was three years ago. I was furious. Can you imagine?"
     I tried to imagine. I thought about two mismatched people struggling through so many years, trying to raise their family.
     "It must have been a really bad forty-four years," I ventured - half question, half answer. I mainly was aiming for a sympathetic tone as a response to her disclosure of having been furious.
     "Not at all," she answered. "It was the best forty-four years of my life! We had a good time together. We had great children. His business did fine. We all went on holidays together. It was fine. Then he got this nonsense going .... " She stopped in midsentence and waved one hand at the wrist as if to brush the story away. "It's all right now," she said. “I run into him all the time. Just this morning we passed him at the train station as we were getting on the train."
     Then she asked me why I was going to Philadelphia. "I'm going to teach," I said. I knew she had seen me writing at my seat as she had passed me on her trips through the car. "I write books about having a good attitude, and I'll probably write a story about you."
     She looked puzzled. "What good attitude?" she said. "I just told you I was furious."
     “But you didn't let the furiousness leak out over your whole life," I offered, feeling a bit awkward. I had been trying to compliment her for making a wise choice between two possible attitude options, one skillful and one not, and apparently the unwise one - the one that would not have been truthful or helpful - hadn't even appeared on her radar screen.
     "You could have continued to be mad at him," I said, "mad that he left you. You could have resented the forty-four years."
     "No, I couldn't," she said. "At the end there, it was rough. But they were the best years of my life. That's the truth."
           - from Pay Attention For Goodness' Sake by Sylvia Boorstein