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Meaty Koans of Crazy Wisdom

And once again Mick the Bodh, the Naked City Cafe’s resident Bodhisattva, Zen Lunatic, Holy Fool and Master of Crazy Wisdom, answered through his red, foam-smeared beard: "Don’t you ever bother me with that dumbass question again! Jesus Christ, Sid Arsehole!"

"Sid Arthur," I corrected, wiping off the froth that had sprayed my face.

"I’ll call you any name I goddamn well please. Now, go home and wash your freakin’ dishes." He downed a half-mug slug of draft beer, then turned back to Kandi, the Dionysian priestess who resumed teasing the tip of his nose with her trim pubic triangle. His muttering return to bliss should have warned me not to question his wisdom.

But Mick the Bodh’s nightly koan wasn’t what I wanted to hear. While he partied all night in Macho Picar’s most celebrated Crazy Wisdom Monastery, I’d have to trudge my dreary, drudging path to enlightenment alone in my dingy apartment. While five-dollar lap-dances bumped and ground the denim loins humping below the skull-and-crossbones bulging across Mick’s paunch-filled tanktop, my knuckles would bump and grind against pots, pans and plates till my sun-starved skin turned red and raw. Well...maybe tonight the friction of my dedication would spark satori’s sudden light. Suuure! Every night for nearly a year I’d washed my dishes, whether they needed them or not.

"Why can’t I stay here and learn The Way your way?"

Kandi’s pink feather boa slithered lightly across her abundant breasts, teasing their nipples to firmness and our eyes to bulging fixation on them. The kiss that breezed through her pouting lips tingled at the fringe of my aura, intensifying my sense of the moment’s is-ness. Her turning buns wagged a sassy goodbye. She strutted toward the five-dollar bill waiting for her along with the squint-eyed sage hunched in contemplation at the far end of the runway. Mick’s eyes followed her, then rolled back to me. His stare narrowed to a tightness that threatened to explode with profundity.

"Because my Way is My Way, so it can’t be Your Way. That’s why."

"But I---"

"Must wanna wash my dishes too. Right?"

"No. I just want to see satori."

Mick’s liquor-red face raged to the verge of purple. "You don’t go wash those goddamn dishes, Sid Arsehole, I’ll give you a koan that’ll make you see stars."

He didn’t mean the Hollywood variety, either. Some of the koans I’d seen Mick the Bodh deliver to other, less dedicated disciples had fractured ribs and teeth. When he left them moaning on the gravel parking lot behind the Cafe, they must have experienced moments of satori as bright as their bruises were dark. But the Way of Suffering wasn’t My Way. At least, I hoped not.

For yet another night I scrubbed my plastic plates and aluminum pots till they glowed like moons under the 100 watt sun of the bare bulb hanging over my sink. And once again the is-ness of household chores bruised my fingers, but didn’t bring me brilliant revelations. It didn’t bring me anything but more questions, more doubts. What if The Way Mick the Bodh had chosen for me really wasn’t My Way at all? What if My Way was nothing more than a tune every wannabe Sinatra crooned in the lounges where I’d worked on weekends in college, washing what I’d thought of back then as a lifetime of dishes? No. Even if that was all it was, it would still be the illusion that everything was, and therefore as false as it was true. Maybe Mick’s koan was merely a signpost to guide me toward finding My Own Way, different from---but related to---washing dishes. On the other hand, maybe I just didn’t belong with the Ultimate Masters like Mick, whose breakneck motorcycling down sidewalks routinely scattered silver-haired churchgoers over Macho Picar’s front pages. Mick the Bodh liked to brag that Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche, one of Crazy Wisdom’s seminal Masters, had declared him a bodhisattva after they’d polished off three cases of beer apiece. Would Mick ever declare me a bodhisattva? Even though I spent every night after my job at the Barley Buddha Food Co-op meditating with Mick the Bodh and the other Crazy Wisdom monks at the Cafe, I couldn’t keep pace with their rowdy, boisterous consumption of malt-based nectar. Was my self-doubt illusion, truth, illusion as truth, or truth as illusion?

My mind became a thick fog from meditating over faith and doubt and dishes and my legs a long ache from standing over the sink. When I finished, I sprawled across my favorite and only armchair, stretched my legs across the last threads of hassock, reached for the palm-sized The Little Zen Companion on my second-hand end table and bumped its binding. Klutz! The book landed on the floor, pages splayed to:

"When you understand one thing through and through,

you understand everything."

-- Shunryu Suzuki

Suzuki’s wisdom glowed with the brilliance I’d always imagined satori must radiate, like William Blake seeing infinity in a flower and eternity in an hour. Now I understood! Mick the Bodh didn’t want me to wash the dishes literally. The dishes were the single object he wanted me to understand through and through. I couldn’t wait to tell him what I’d learned.

"Wash the dishes, don’t wash the dishes. It’s all the same to me," Mick the Bodh snorted. Without turning his serene gaze from Kandi’s sumptuous breasts swinging circles directly above us, he lit an unfiltered Camel and took a long drag without coughing, further impressing me with the inner strength Crazy Wisdom had given him. Finally, my guru had given me permission to find the One Thing that suited me best.

But, what was that One Thing? At Sacerdotal State Teachers College, in the Massachusetts Berkshires, my friends and I had explored Zen, Tao, Hindu and TM. None of them seemed to fit my needs exactly, although parts of them promised to when I mixed and matched them with what I’d read of Blake and Kerouac in freshman English. The following year, I discovered Scoop Nisker’s book, Crazy Wisdom, which fused Eastern and Western thought into a single philosophy that seemed uniquely suited to me. I tried to explain Crazy Wisdom to my friends but they told me, in the hushed voices that passed for inner peace, that I was a fool and not a Holy one. They dismissed my enthusiasm as sophomoric, then returned to their stiff-backed meditations.

Instead of starting my junior year, I flew to Macho Picar, where the monks of the burgeoning Crazy Wisdom Cults sat in secular monasteries like the Naked City Cafe answering the questions of thousands of seekers like me.

But there seemed to be as many fools as wise men in the California coastal town. When I first arrived, I waited every night in lines behind hundreds of people seeking the right guru. Many nights the monasteries closed before I could even speak to the wrong one. After months of despairing over ever finding the help I needed to attain enlightenment, I stumbled down a seedy dead-end street and into the Naked City Cafe, where Mick the Bodh and his monks ordered me to go home and wash dishes while they meditated on the Wisdom of the Flesh, to use terms more elevated than theirs.

That was It! I thought. No more washing dishes. The Wisdom of the Flesh would be my One Thing too! It wasn’t pretentious, it wasn’t esoteric. I couldn’t hope to be one of the Great Masters, not even of Crazy Wisdom. No, Holy Fool was more my style. The longer I looked at Kandi shaking her beach-tawny pelvis an inch from Mick’s searching nose and tossing her blonde spikes of Big Hair to Led Zeppelin, the more the Wisdom of the Flesh appealed to me. "I bet I could attain enlightenment very quickly by knowing her through and through," I told Mick the Bodh, continuing the One Thing theme I’d started the minute I stepped inside.

The minute I paused, Mick turned away from the pubic hairs brushing oh so lightly against his bushy red mustache and aimed a pair of blue-eyed bullets at me. "You are an Unholy Fool, Sid Arsehole," he said, then shook his head hopelessly from side to side. "You didn’t listen to what I told you last night. Did you?"

"But I did. I came here to tell you that I read---"

"I don’t give a damn what you read. You mess with My Way, and I’ll give you a koan that’ll make you see beyond the stars." Was that the untranscendent sound of jealousy I heard in the Zen Biker’s low, scraping voice?

"But, you’ve always told me, ‘Everything is Everything.’"

"Everything is Everything. But you don’t get anything. Not off her. Get it?"

"I wasn’t really thinking of her," I said, knowing Kandi frequently gave Mick the Bodh Mystical Unions of Orgasmic Ecstasy when she got off work. "But maybe Cheri, or Honey or Sweetcakes..."

"No way you’re ready for them, kid."

"The longest journey begins with the smallest step," I countered, the cleverness of a budding Master rolling off my tongue.

"The smallest step might get you the biggest stomping." Mick nodded toward the row of burly monks in tight ponytails and tanktops hulking to his right. Their baleful stares beaded on me. "Look, Sid Arsehole. Don’t go thinkin’ these broads are like those little chickies you useta bang in college. You’re outa your league here. Way out. You want meat, go buy yourself a freakin’ hamburg. Har har har!"

Mick slapped my back, driving my nose into my mug of Mountain Pete’s Fountain Spring Natural Malt Liquor. His paw pressed down on the back of my head. The sound of my nose blowing bubbles through the brew merged with the roaring laughter that filled both the room and my consciousness. I might have perceived the sensation as oneness if my concurrent sensations of humiliation and drowning hadn’t overwhelmed it.

Finally, Mick raised his hand off the back of my head. As my nose cleared the way for a long, desperate suck of air, it blew foam in all directions.

"You sprayed me, asshole!" Kandi snapped. She jumped away, disturbing Mick’s contemplative gaze.

"I-I-I’m---"

"You sprayed me too, asshole." The hook of Mick’s callused forefinger scooped a booger of froth off the bump of his beer-boiled nose and looped it toward my forehead.

Splat! It trickled between my eyes, then dripped off the tip of my nose. "I really didn’t mean it. I mean---"

"What you mean is what you are," Mick rumbled from the back of his throat. His hand scooped my T-shirt, then twisted it around the ham-sized fist pushing tight against the tip of my chin as it lifted me off the floor.

"Uh...T-Try to look at it as merely an illusion," I suggested.

"Try to look at my fist as an illusion."

"Everything is an illusion," I said, even though the knuckles of the brick-sized chimera shaking just below my eyes made me wonder whether my philosophical stance itself was more of an illusion than anything else.

"You’d better make yourself an illusion around here. If you don’t, I’ll make you dead meat."

Mick released me. My left ankle twisted when it hit the floor. I turned and limped toward the door. The gale of jeers whisking me out of the Naked City Cafe whooshed me down every empty street in Macho Picar as if through a wind tunnel.

When the coastal wind died down, I realized that spiritually as well as physically, I was at Land’s End. Every doubt I’d ever felt about the sincerity of my quest knotted in the pit of my quivering stomach. When the knot loosened, my overwhelming spiritual hunger left me faint, dizzy and resentful. My Master had rejected me so harshly that the Void within me palpitated. Each wave of my unworthiness crested with Mick the Bodh’s voice mocking again and again, "You want meat, go buy yourself a freakin’ hamburg. Har har har!"

Hamburg!

The sound of the word itself filled the Void in my stomach with an indescribably spiritual nourishment. The wisdom of Suzuki’s saying and Mick’s jeering imperative merged when the next wave surging from my stomach unified my mind and body under the phantasmagoric is-ness of neon lights. McDonald’s winked at me through its arches, Burger King grinned and Wendy’s sang a siren’s song. But the red letters that read "Joe’s" flashed the beacon closest to my inner hunger.

After two years of brown rice and tofu, Joe’s well-done burger filled the Void in my being with a dense but gratifying dullness. Later, when I walked past the bay windows of Macho Picar’s white seaside cottages, only my queasy stomach’s churning up the greasy aftertaste kept me from sprawling on the nearest manicured lawn and dozing. Wait a minute! I thought. What am I doing, reducing myself to the level of the carnivore? My fellow seekers at Sacerdotal State Teachers College had always lectured me that meat was a lingering but unnecessary link to the lower-consciousness animals on the phylogenetic scale. How comforting their quiet, studious questing seemed, compared to the gurus of Macho Picar’s midnight monasteries! How soothing their hierarchical lectures on levels of spirituality sounded, compared to the crude koans Mick clanged against my ears! The mendicant in me wanted to beg in the streets for airfare, then take the first flight back to the serene rural womb of the college.

Or did it? The vegetarian diet I’d followed even after leaving my friends had always left me feeling half-full and seeking more...More of what? I finally asked myself. The fullness glowing in the pit of my stomach trickled through my veins like the juice of rare roast beef, then coursed outside me to culminate its flow with a blinding neon blood vision of

MEAT!

Of course! How could I have ever doubted Mick the Bodh? Mind and Body were One through...through Meat! Washing dishes was part of the process of eating meat, part of its is-ness. It was an act of spiritual fullness, not an act of spiritual hunger. Meat was protoplasm. We were all protoplasm, each and every one of us. Therefore, we were all meat. In meat lay our true unity. Now I understood what Mick had meant. Because the grease from meat was harder to scrub off a plate than brown rice, the extra work increased a person’s awareness of the cyclical relationship between eating and cleaning. Mick was right all along, and I was wrong. No more of these rarified scholastic faiths that removed me from the masses! If I could understand everything by learning one thing through and through, I would learn Meat. It was a Way I hungered to learn.

When I closed my eyes to contemplate it, the World of Meat opened before me, an endless farmland filled with cattle, sheep, pigs, chicken and lamb. Which one should I choose? Beef seemed the most convenient; I’d already started eating it at Joe’s.

Every day I cooked a different piece of beef a different way. I baked pot roast, broiled sirloin, fried sandwich steaks, then broiled what I’d baked and fried what I’d broiled. In exploring all the permutations, trying to learn beef through and through, I discovered that I was not only learning more than one thing, but going broke as well. Narrowing my focus was essential to gaining knowledge and keeping food in my stomach. What could be more simple, more single---and more cheap!--- than ground beef on a roll?

But even simplicity isn’t as simple as it appears. There were more ways to prepare hamburgs than I had ever realized: rare, medium rare, medium, well-done, just for starters. There were plain burgers, cheeseburgers, bacon cheeseburgers, with or without lettuce and tomato, with or without mayo. There were Big Macs, Double-whoppers and other fast food specialities. There were half-pound burgers smothered with Monterey Jack in nostalgic goodtime parlors with peanut shells littering the floor, not to mention daily new developments such as honey mustard topping. How fitting that so many varieties of hamburg should converge on one of those few points in the Universe where the Many merges with the One!

But the convergence wasn’t exactly harmonic. The diversity of the burgers distracted me so much from my quest for one burger to study through and through that sometimes washing dishes seemed more to the point. But eating in restaurants replaced the deadening monotony of scrubbing pots and plates at home with the more fulfilling monotony of eating burgers out.

It took me months to single out the subject of my Meat Meditation. As with all things, my taste came full circle to where my quest for meat had started: Joe’s Diner. Every day at lunch and dinner I ordered a plain burger, well done, no ketchup, nothing. There would be no distractions to my pursuit of The Way which had brought me the fullness of Being I’d felt so few times since leaving my parents’ Westport estate for college. Joe’s standard-size burgers, virtually tasteless except for the grease, gratified my need for asceticism, my need for fullness and my need to learn one thing through and through, all on the same white porcelain plate.

Every day, with every bite, the revelations came in such rapid-fire abundance and clarity that a feeling of unreality pervaded my awareness. Was it really revelation, or just the byproduct of eating hamburg? The answer: both. Hamburg fed my growing insight into the phylogenetic scale and its hierarchy as it relates to cattle and man and, by extension, to all living things. It taught me to appreciate the harmony implicit in the symbiotic relationship of the chewer and the chewed. I came to understand the relationship between Master and Subject by observing the relationship between manager and short-order cook and experienced the cosmic unity that occurred when the manager was also the short-order cook---an insight which a place like Joe’s readily afforded me, and at a price only slightly higher than a fast-food chain would charge.

Every day, with every bite, I felt a new fullness. The skin and bones of my questing asceticism rounded until my physical being resembled the brass-bellied Buddhas on sale in Macho Picar’s myriad curio shops. A year of experiencing the is-ness of the universe through eating plain hamburg added a hundred pounds of serenity to my frame. Before my recollections of washing dishes vanished in a fatty haze, though, I reminded myself that all was not mindless serenity. No matter how advanced one became, one nevertheless experienced hardship, stress and pain. Despite my inner and outer fullness, now blended into a comfortable, almost complacent unity, I had to find out whether I had really attained the level of wisdom and insight I’d been seeking. Was eating hamburg sufficient unto itself? Did I need to leave Joe’s microcosmic monastery to find out just how much I had really learned?

There’s an old saying that if you wait long enough, all things will come to you. So it was that one day, Joe, normally taciturn in his stained T-shirt, clunked my plate down on the formica counter, raised his three-days-unshaven face to me and said, "I never seen no one like you before. Don’t you eat nothin’ else?" He pointed to the plastic folder wedged between the napkin holder and the sugar bowl. "There’s a menu right here, y’know."

"Aw, go wash the dishes," I told him.

At that moment all doubt vanished. I licked the grease off my lips and waddled to the Naked City Cafe.

Mick the Bodh was sitting there as if through all eternity, watching Kandi practicing tantric positions to heavy metal tunes while his monks and disciples chanted their devotion, reverence and joy in tones far more raucous than you’d hear in traditional monasteries.

The seats on each side of Mick were empty, one reserved for Kandi, his partner in Mystical Union, and the other, no doubt, for one of his new students. Without hesitating, I squeezed between the runway and the seat, and noticed how much tighter the space had become now that I had achieved physical and spiritual fullness.

Mick glared his annoyance at me, but I accepted it with the same equanimity with which I now accepted bliss. It was all One, after all.

"Hey!"

"Hay is for horses," I said, initiating a dialogue of Masters.

Mick squinted at me, then grunted. "Now I remember you," he grumbled around the Camel clenched between his teeth. "You’ve gotten fat, Sid Arsehole."

"I’ve become the Beefcake Buddha."

"And I told you that if you didn’t make yourself an illusion around here, I’d make you dead meat. Now, why don’t you just go on home and wash some more dishes. If you can fit your fat ass through the door, that is."

"Fuck you," I said, knowing he’d understand. How exhilarating! Two Masters, one old and one new, were sharing their Crazy Wisdom.

Mick’s fist cocked next to his right ear.

My beef would absorb the illumination of his next koan. Mick the Bodh would gasp for breath under the weight of my next meaty insight.

I grinned like the Holy Fool I’d become.

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