Those of us who practice some form of Buddhism -- for me it's a sort of slap-dash version of Soto Zen -- do so with the certain or uncertain knowledge that things as they appear to be, things as they are, aren't.
Maybe it was that suspicion that led us to Zen or Buddhism in the first place, the suspicion that what we could perceive was not all of reality, wasn't reality at all. Through the practice of Zen -- or most any form of Buddhism and many other spiritual endeavours -- we come to a better understanding of the incompleteness of ordinary perception, and if we're diligent or lucky enough, we might gain the ability to perceive much deeper or more fully into 'what is.' Suchness.
The practice is a form of training that alters our consciousness, and for most of us, there is no going back once that's happened. What we perceive and the way we perceive it goes through a transformative process which I can't explain though i have experienced it a number of times over the decades - satori and samadhi they call it -- that is often taken as 'enlightenment' though I doubt it's anything like that of Shakyamuni Buddha's Enlightenment. Or maybe it's the same. I don't know. It can be debated to the finest of grains, and yet cannot be resolved. We know it when we feel it, but what it is, who can truly say?
I came to Zen at a difficult time in my life, the dreaded teen-age years, awkward adolescence. Zen practice helped to get me through it, and it's helped to ground me through an often chaotic life ever since. I'm grateful, since otherwise I probably wouldn't be here to tell the tale.
Part of Soto Zen and much of Buddhism in general is the recognition that our Buddha nature is to serve. This is often expressed as following the Bodhisattva Way, living a Bodhisattva life. That was the study we engaged in during the intensive Spring Practice Period Ango I participated in earlier this year.
Shantideva's A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life was our text. He'd run away to a monastery -- run away from the kingship he was supposed to assume on his father's death, run away to the largest and most famous Buddhist monastery and teaching institution Nalanda -- where he found himself beset by bullying and self-doubt. He felt he didn't fit in on the one hand and he was the victim of constant abuse on the other. He felt like leaving the monastery, running away again, but what would be the point? Instead, he stuck it out and in the process formulated the Guide which he presented as a teaching to the other monks at Nalanda, probably to much mockery and derision, but which has long survived him and them and Nalanda itself (destroyed during the Moslem invasion and conquest of northern India in the early 1200s.)
While bemoaning his fate throughout the Guide, Shantideva argues compellingly for keeping on with the practice and developing bodhicitta, awakened compassion on behalf of all sentient beings, perhaps most especially those which had been his tormentors.
It's not really necessary to go into all the details, for we have other things to do, but the point is that one on the Bodhisattva path is called to serve with compassion those they meet along the way with the intent of bringing them along to Enlightenment or at a minimum helping them to do so.
I never knew I was on that Bodhisattva path myself, because that really wasn't a conscious part of my practice; compassion, service to those I encountered along the way was simply what I did naturally, or so I thought, and there was no great argument or self doubt about it.
And so time passes, much time, and time came to a few days ago, and an encounter with someone new to me, a youngish man maybe 30 years old, tall, muscular, blond, standing across the street from my house staring at me as I trimmed weeds in my front yard. I greeted him simply and informally and asked if there was anything I could do. He stood still for a moment then came threateningly across the street, getting right up to me, and after some back and forth it appeared that 1) he was on drugs, possibly meth, and not fully aware; 2) he was delusional, paranoid; 3) he had a violent intent.
What was I to do? I'm a pretty frail old man these days (though I don't like to admit it), and he was young and strong and full of rage and paranoia and whatever substances he had ingested or injected. I asked him, "Is there anything I can do for you?" He fumed and raged some more, ordering me to stay away from the children who lived in the house where he was staying and threatened dire consequences otherwise, and I told him not to worry, I had no interest in the children and that I was going in to my place now. He stomped away back into the house where he was staying.
I didn't think that that was the end of it. I thought there would be more somehow, when or where or how I didn't know, and fleetingly I thought I had met the image of Death -- and not for the first time -- and that he would be back.
Sure enough.
The next day, I was sitting in my chair in my living room taking a break from trimming weeds in the back when I sensed someone standing behind me, and I turned and it was him. He'd come into my house through an unlocked gate and door to the laundry room and kitchen, quietly -- I had no idea -- and stood with a hammer or ax in his hand, breathing hard, ready to commit mayhem and violence. I got up and told him to get out of my house. He advanced on me, threatening without words, waving his weapon around, breathing hard, eyes riveted on me. He got within inches of my face. I could smell chemicals in his body, alcohol on his breath. He advanced and retreated, waving his ax or hammer around, passing it from hand to hand, threatening me with it. He said little, maybe nothing most of the time as I remember almost nothing of what he said. The closer he got to me, the more threatening he was, the less I felt fear.
I said, "What's wrong? You can tell me. What's wrong?" When I did, he seemed to calm down for a few moments, but then he would become emboldened and puff up and wordlessly threaten me again, and I repeated "What's wrong?" several more times. Each time, he would seem to calm down for a moment or two. He went to the french door in the living room and I said, "You can leave that way if you want." He opened and closed it several times and seemed to be bewildered by how to work it and the screen door beyond. He motioned me to come to the door, and I did, and I tried to show him how easy it would be to leave that way, but he pulled me away from the door and shoved me back toward my chair, threatening with his weapon, which I saw now was a tomahawk, and becoming more and more agitated. I asked him his name; he said I didn't need to know. I asked him again what was wrong. He said nothing. I asked about Barbara who lives across the street. He said she wasn't there -- and I flashed on a vision that he'd murdered her. I asked about the kids, Barbara's kids, and he became enraged: "What do you want with them?" and became threatening again. He told me to sit down, pushed me into my chair. "What do you need? How can I help?" I asked him. He breathed hard, waved his weapon around and all of a sudden hauled off and whacked me hard on the forehead with it. I got up, shocked, blood gushing from the wound, and shouted at him "Get the fuck out of my house, NOW!" He retreated, bewildered, but he didn't leave. "Look what you did! GET OUT!" I shouted as blood dropped in big splashes on the floor, down my face and arm. As I shouted at him, my wife came from the bedroom where she'd been napping. "Who are you? What are you doing here? Get out!" she shouted at him, and he seemed to retreat somewhat further, but he didn't leave. She shoved him, but he stood still. I looked around, saw my phone on the chair arm, and took it into the bathroom and locked the door and called 911.
I could hear my wife at first shouting then talking calmly to the man with the tomahawk in the living room as I reported what had happened to the dispatcher. I staunched the blood from the wound with paper towels while I talked to the dispatcher and listened for anything in the living room.
I heard my wife say, "Is there anything you need, anything I can do for you?" meaning the man in the living room, the man who had assaulted me. I did not hear him speak at all. But later she would tell me what he was doing: going to the french door, opening and closing it, and seeming to be bewildered by it. Then he went to the front door, she said, puzzled by how to work the lock on the screen door. Then she said he went toward the bathroom door, and she saw an opportunity to escape. She said she ran across the street, calling on Barbara to help but realizing eventually that Barbara wasn't there. She said she saw the man with the tomahawk coming across the street toward her, and she realized she was in a sense trapped and she had to be calm. Suddenly, she said Barbara's huge Pyrenees dog appeared beside her and sat down as the man got to Barbara's front gate. "Is this your dog?" she asked. "Yes," said the man. She said, "You know he gets out and runs around. You really need to keep him inside the gate or he'll get hurt." She said she showed him how to keep the gate latch closed as she inched out of the yard while he went inside it with the dog. They passed so close to one another they touched. He didn't seem to know who she was, and he didn't try to harm her. She would tell me that she thought Douglas, the dog, was her angel at that moment. She said with the guy inside the gate, she could escape and she ran across the street to the house next door to ours trying to raise help, but no one came to the door. The first police car arrived seconds later -- no more than five minutes after I called -- and my wife told him where the man was. He took his AK style rifle and went to Barbara's house where the man surrendered without a fight.
Shortly many police and sheriff's deputies arrived, my wife came back to our house, and I could hear her say through the bathroom door, "Are you all right?" and then "The police are here." I was still on the phone with the dispatcher, who was talking to the police and with my wife.
I said, "OK," and still bleeding and woozy, I came out to witness the rest of the drama unfold.
There was of course quite a lot of drama to come, but it was anti-climax, so it's unnecessary in the context of this story.
I'm OK, and I'm extremely grateful that my wife was not harmed and was able to handle the situation so calmly and well. She said she was trained to do it when she worked at the courthouse in California, and she was surprised and delighted that her training came in so handy in real life.
We had used similar tactics in dealing with this violent stranger. Be calm, express concern for his well-being, offer to help, don't agitate him, don't threaten. My approach was through my Zen training and practice, her's was through professional situational training in a courthouse setting. It's not much different. Someone is violent and seemingly out of it, you do better to try to empathize than to confront and further agitate.
The fact that I was assaulted and wounded in this encounter with a "demon" was in a Zen context something like the shock that sometimes accompanies Zen training -- of which there are many stories. The shock from the Zen teacher whacking the student or pushing him into the mud or from life-experience is supposed to lead to satori -- sudden enlightenment -- and sometimes it does. Physical wounds can happen, but they heal. The point is to awaken. And by awakening, more fully take in the nature of things.
I see what happened in those terms, and the awakening is still unfolding. So many layers of lessons. What happened was not the first time I have faced "Death." Far from it. Each time, I learn, but not always as quickly or as much as I should. The lessons and awakening and enlightenment this time is coming in spurts, not all at once, as each layer peels back. I physically sleep a lot since the events described, and I see it as symbolic of my non-awakening. And then when I'm awake, realizations tumble down on me. So much illusion and delusion still to dissolve away.
Just a part of the realization, the Zen of Being, is that "I" am not. Not separate, that is. Each element, every participant, was "me." I confronted myself, I was saving myself, I whacked myself on the head with a tomahawk, I was my attacker, I was my wife, I was the police and medics who came to help. I was the ER personnel who seemed overwhelmed by the crush of patients, and I was every one of those patients.
I've since talked to Barbara our neighbor with whom this stranger was staying. He's now in jail on a no bail warrant, and he probably will not be released before trial. Well... you never know. Judges in New Mexico are notorious for releasing people they shouldn't. Barbara says he's an old friend of the family who'd been in rehab but had gone AWOL and he had discovered his brother in bed with his girlfriend. Which was why he was staying with Barbara and her family. Further, he was diagnosed schizophrenic and had not been taking his medication since departure from rehab. He'd self-medicated instead. He'd always been nice to her and she let him stay at her house out of loving kindness -- and in hopes that he would be able and willing to help her get the house fixed up. But he'd been acting odd since he got there. She knew he'd been partying and suspected he'd taken some drug but she didn't know what. She did not, she said, expect him to be violent, though she said he'd run off a pizza delivery guy and another friend of the family who came to visit. She said he was seeing every man as a predator. But she was shocked he'd invaded my home and attacked me.
She wanted him to get help because "he's really a good guy" and he's fine when he's taking the right meds and stays away from drugs he shouldn't be taking. But this time he went way over the edge, and she was really sorry for what had happened to me.
Of course, we hear these kinds of stories a lot, and many of us become numb to them. Too many "really good guys" turn into violent monsters, no? Statistically, no. It doesn't happen a lot. It happens much less statistically than it used to, but it still happens, and the victims are multiple, often whole communities with tragic consequences. "Something should be done," but nothing seems to work, right?
Well, actually, some things do work, and they're not always what we think. The guy who assaulted me is in custody, and he should stay there for a long time. Some are saying permanently, and in a sense I agree. But not in the sense of imprisonment, because I don't believe in imprisonment except for the most incorrigible and the most dire crimes.
No. If this guy is schizophrenic and if medications do work (I've known a number of schizos who are fine on appropriate meds) then he should be confined for so long as necessary to 'train' him to use the correct medications essentially automatically. And to stay away from self-medication substances. As you might expect, there's a Zen program for that. 😃
There are still many more layers to this incident, and I might describe more in time. But for now, let us be grateful.
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