The receptionist told me the doctor would call me with the results of my biopsy in an hour, if she didn't go home first. I'd been waiting five days for the verdict on the mottled, nickel-sized piece of flesh that had been cut away from my scalp - what was another hour?
It was an hour to ask myself what really mattered in my life, in the distilling light of a potentially tragic turn of events. "What is that?" my friend had asked, pointing to a brown, variegated lump that had been widening and thickening, nearly unnoticed, above my right ear.
I say "nearly" - I knew it was there, and even that it was growing, buried under my hair. But there was so much else that had become shaken or awry in my life, I didn't want to think about it, until my friend's question abruptly put an end to my grace period of denial.
What was it? I asked the Web, surfing dermatology sites until I found an image that resembled the piece of myself that had undergone an unbidden metamorphosis. And the Web said, "Melanoma - perhaps." The Web said, "precancerous," "basal cell carcinoma," and many other things I didn't know much about.
So I asked my doctor, and he made one of those dread-inspiring sounds that reveals nothing more reassuring or damning than, "Something's not right," and put in a call to his friend, the dermatologist. She would see me that afternoon, he told me, and "take care of that" right away.
She took care of it, slicing the strangeness off with a scalpel, and dropping it into a tube of fluid. "It's probably not malignant," she had said.
I'd know in an hour - if the doctor didn't go home first.
Tasting truth
What was I to do for that hour?
I was 3,000 miles from home, in Wired's New York office. Even the friendly strangers who had kept the cubicles animated with chatter, familiarity, and business all afternoon had gone home for the day. I had no books with me, or any of the comforting totems of my life, beyond my black laptop bag and my worried face in the bathroom mirror.
I was pretty much alone, salving my worry with the loving concern of my buddy in California who asked me to call immediately after I got the call.
I didn't know, however, where to put my mind as I waited for the jangle of the phone. Should I meditate?
When I was 19, I was taught to "sit" in the Zen style - zazen - by Taizan Maezumi-roshi, who was a visiting Zen teacher at Naropa Institute in the summer of 1977.
The simplicity of the practice - sitting with spine straight, hands folded, counting my breaths silently from one to 10 and then back again - seemed too elemental to be wrong. Even cats did it. When thoughts arose, I didn't suppress them, I just returned to the breaths: one, two, three....
I sat daily for years. I moved out to San Francisco, in part, to study at San Francisco Zen Center. After sitting and before Zen talks, we would chant in English and Japanese. Paying attention to the sounds of the syllables forming on our tongues sharpened the mind in the same way that sitting did:
An unsurpassed, penetrating, and perfect dharma
Is rarely met with even in a hundred thousand million kalpas
Having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept,
I vow to taste the truth of the tathagata's words.
Even if you had no idea what "dharma" (Buddhist teaching), "kalpa" (eon), and "tathagata" meant, to vow to "taste" truth seemed like a profoundly worthwhile thing to the 20-year-old I was.
But now, close to 40 - a decade and a half after deciding to leave Zen practice - meditating while waiting for the phone to ring seemed too ambitious, cooler than I actually felt. I was scared, close to panic. I needed to do something. What did I have in my cubicle? A desk, a phone, a notebook - and the Web.
Where in the world visible on my computer screen, I wondered, could truth be tasted?
Sharing the stories
There's a conference on The Well - my home place in cyberspace - with the curious name of "wonderland." It's The Well's resource for those interested in Buddhism, and it's advertised in periodicals like Tricycle with ads that promote the conference as "the most active Buddhist community online," or some such.
In this case, The Well's flack is stretching the truth - just ask Judy Bunce, the most active Buddhist in wonderland.
"If this is the most active, what's the quietist?" she challenges.
A salty native San Franciscan, Judy also hosts The Well's baby boomer and hospice conferences. As conferences like media and Gen-X snowball with a couple of hundred new posts a day, wonderland inches forward, often depending on Judy to log any posts at all.
Judy came to Buddhism, she tells me, through the 11th step of sober living, which counsels seeking "conscious contact with God" through prayer and meditation. To her sitting practice, Judy added another daily exercise of mindfulness: posting on The Well.
When Judy was headed off for a week-long retreat, she opened a discussion topic called "How's Your Practice?" inviting other meditators to share their experiences. When Judy decided to take formal bodhisattva vows after eight years of sitting, she opened a topic to talk about her feelings as she sewed her rakusu, the hand-stitched vestment monks wear. And when Judy's father was near death from emphysema, she began keeping a journal in the hospice conference.
When I ask Judy if her daily immersion in The Well has helped her Buddhist practice, she laughs. "Enlightenment from looking at words on my computer screen? I don't think so."
What The Well has done for Judy's Buddhism is to increase her feeling of being a member of the sangha - the community of people practicing together, sharing their perceptions, their difficulties, the many-grained texture of reality.
"I use The Well," she explains, "the way a married person - in my fantasies - would use their spouse: as a place to share my stories."
My story got tangled up with Buddhism in a text called the Genjokoan ("The Way of Everyday Life"), which was the subject of a series of lectures by Maezumi-roshi that long-ago summer at Naropa.
The word "lectures" doesn't do justice to what Maezumi would do. He'd talk for 20 minutes about one line of the 750-year-old text, crawling inside of a single phrase, demanding that his students felt its meaning in their bones, angrily dismissing intellectual interpretations of the words.
"What is 'intimate practice?'" he once asked the roomful of cross-legged sitters, laypeople, and shaven-headed monks.
"Roshi, intimate practice is when there is no division between teacher and student."
He shook his head and made a little "no" sound.
"Intimate practice is when sitting is just sitting."
Another head-shake. Tension escalates.
"Roshi - it is hot, I sweat!" - from a black-robed senior monk. No, no.
Finally, a young man broke down in tears, the words spilling forth: "Roshi, my mother's very sick, she just called from the hospital, she has cancer, she told me they have to operate...."
Explosively, Maezumi cut him off.
"I am very sick. Will you operate on me? That is intimate practice."
The crimson leaves scatter
Twenty years later, I typed the words "maezumi roshi" into a search engine on the 11th floor of an office building in Manhattan. A few gray hairs intertwined with black over the place the biopsy was taken, a raw scab.
The search results list brought me to a compendium of Zen texts put on the Web by John Muju Bannon, a student of one of Maezumi's dharma-heirs. Maezumi himself, I learned, had died suddenly in 1995.
There was the Genjokoan, in translated cadences slightly awkward, lucid, and beautiful, just as I remembered them:
Gaining enlightenment
is like the moon reflecting in the water.
The moon does not get wet, nor is the water disturbed.
Although its light is extensive and great,
the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch across.
The whole moon and the whole sky
are reflected in a dew drop on the grass,
in one drop of water.
And there were the poems offered on the occasion of Maezumi's death:
Everywhere you look
The crimson leaves scatter -
One by one,
Front and back.
And defiant words from other Zen teachers, like Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, that rang with Maezumi's tough spirit:
"If when I die, the moment I'm dying, if I suffer that is all right, you know; that is suffering Buddha. No confusion in it. Maybe everyone will struggle because of the physical agony or spiritual agony, too. But that is all right, that is not a problem. We should be very grateful to have a limited body ... like mine, or like yours. If you had a limitless life it would be a real problem for you."
I spent an hour reading those words on my screen, feeling the young man I had been, and the older man I am now; feeling that, in such a world, even cancer could be a gift.
And the phone call came: I didn't have cancer.
But the gift has stayed with me.
