someday they may have to settle for calling me the hysterical buddha

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I was so damn sleepy, and it was even a reasonable hour. I got in bed, and the words on my magazine were swimming around. So I turned out the light and snuggled deeply with my pillow. My mind went blank and sleep hovered over me like an angel. Then I was completely awake for the first time all day. I have not slept yet.

Something has happened with the post office out here in the boondocks. Mail is not coming at reasonable intervals anymore. Suddenly my New Yorker is arriving fantastically late, and even sometimes so late as to be jumbled in order. I was out of my magazine, my big splurge on myself. I had to resort to a truly fascinating gardening catalog. Then I thought I could get up and check the blogs. Then I got back in bed, feeling the distant burn of food poisoning hovering like a devil over the lining of my innards. Then my position was askew enough to make my post nasal drip cause me to choke and splutter, and my ears got that all numb feeling again. Then I stewed about my decision to put this place up for sale and how I am going to end up a bag lady with no broadband. Then I thought, what a lot of pain I'm entertaining these days. Shit! I can't get the shampoo out of my hair and I can't read my magazine and I'm dead tired and wide awake and obsessing and being mean to myself and, did I mention? -- old.

My hand swung down from under my mountains of comforter to a dusty book on the bottom shelf of my night stand and I began reading Master Zong Mi (780-841 c.e.) without even thinking to do it. Finally! This is the first I've read from him, but most of my books I've read at least three times, some of them seven or eight or twelve. It was hard to get my hands on this translation. I'd been looking for it for years. Still, I don't just acquire masters and gobble them up like my favorite novelist. I cannot bring myself to make a "practice" of them either, to pad around my rooms in attitudes of piety and keep my date with one or the other of the real men gracing my shelves and cubbyholes and baskets and my desk and file drawers. That's so fake. Even if no one sees me, it's just as bad to be a fraud in front of yourself as anyone else. I could then come report my virtue to you I suppose... change my name to Zen 99... start attracting legions of suffering scramble-heads for fun and profit. But no. That's utterly unacceptable. And so is running to the Huayen when I'm frightened I've lost my way, disgraced myself, never going to be worth the rooms full of diamonds my teacher lavished on me. I can't run to my books, then, like someone erring and frantic to do the thing that will block the karma. I just can't. That's so supremely self-absorbed. In short, I have great difficulty seeing to my Buddhist scholarship because I am almost never clean enough to be in the same house with these masterpieces, let alone open one, or sit on the floor with five or six of them arrayed in front of me.

But just before the sun came up, I was.

So naturally I did.

And Zong Mi made perfect sense. Every word was clear to me. I could remember all the times I read these guys without the first part of a clue what they were driving at. That bit we all think is Chinese inscrutability, but actually is Western imbecility. I cannot confess how long it has been since I could pick up one of these books and start reading. You might be able to guess from the incredibly busy schedule described above.

Crikey! My teacher leapt to wake me up, bathing me in oceans of sublime fragrances, heaping jewels on me, draping me in the finest fabrics, turning the ground to mountains of gorgeous flowers and sending singing birds to fill my air, but left me to fall back into the glue pit as often as ever karma would have it! The time it is taking is deeply, deeply humiliating.

I don't even know if I will ever even lay eyes on that Noble One again! Do you know that nothing and no one has as much priority, yet might be dead before I'm fit to engage with again. I can't believe my guts aren't splattered all over the wall, so important is this... to... all of us.