It’s Father’s Day. Maybe a good time to consider the lineage and some of the implications of patriarchy, fatherhood, responsibility.
There is the koan that asks: what is your original face before your parents were born? Some people will take this as an invitation to think about an essential spirit or soul, like Wordsworth in his poem about “intimations of immortality'', where he says that the child before birth comes “not in entire forgetfulness” but somewhat ready-made and “trailing clouds of glory” before he or she is incarnated.
But this is not what we mean at all. This would assume that we have already been formed, that we bring our spiritual as well as our biological baggage with us (and not just in the form of karma or DNA), that there is some self that is transcendent and essential, unchanging and substantial, that has always been and always will be.
But everything changes. What manifests in this life is temporary, form out of emptiness, emptiness into form. And because it is temporary it is more sacred than the eternal.
I’m thinking more of the real aspects of this idea of fatherhood. All of us have our own father experiences, unique. Some of us will bristle at the idea of fathers, having had not such a good experience. Some of us will lack that experience altogether, or have a very indifferent experience of physically or emotionally absent fathers. Some of us have not been very good fathers, it’s true. But our unique experience is, in a sense, our inheritance, our lineage, if you like. This is what we have to deal with, just as the kechimyaku serves as the family tree for those of us who have been ordained and taken the precepts. That’s the lineage of our own karma. It has nothing to do with transcendent souls, which is just a pretty platonic idea, much less with rewards and retributions, which is just a sophomoric notion of karma. And it has nothing to do with biological fatherhood, which is just an accident.
The choices we make with (or as) emotional fathers, spiritual fathers, that’s what counts. I am reminded of the story about Hakuin, the great Rinzai master. He was accused by a young girl of fathering her child. Sounds like one of those scandals we hear of in churches all the time. He didn’t deny it. He accepted the responsibility, even though he lost his reputation. He raised the child as though it were his own. A year or so later the mother admitted that she had lied and the biological father was a fishmonger. And while Hakuin loved the child as his own, he let it go without attachment. This is what true fatherhood is. Whether it is a spiritual father or a biological father or an emotional father or an adoptive father. Accepting responsibility. Without self-aggrandizement. Without attachment.
My own father was very different from me. Not that we didn’t get along. We just didn’t have anything in common, except the accident of genes. I had several surrogate fathers instead, all three of them (perhaps not surprisingly) teachers. Father figures, we call them, in a very strange turn of phrase.
The first was my history teacher in high school, Walter Bodlander (1920-2019). One day when I fell asleep in his class (I was that kind of student) he sent me outside and told me to hop around the building on one foot. I said the hell with this and went home. But we remained friends for the rest of his life until he died a few years ago, at 99. He very generously hosted the reception for my first marriage in his house in the Hollywood Hills. Over the years we met up in Oregon, London, Los Angeles, always as though no time at all had passed. During all those years I never realized what a remarkable man he was. Born the same year as my father, Walter was a German Jew who joined Army intelligence during the war, something I did not know until, at the age of 95, he received the French Legion of Honor for his role in the invasion of Normandy and the liberation of Paris. But isn’t this how we treat our fathers, not recognizing their worth until it is too late?
My dissertation advisor in graduate school, Professor Robert Peters (1924-2014), served a similar role. Bob was an accomplished scholar and critic who became a powerful poet and performance artist. He could be a ruthless critic, but he was always generous with me, more generous than I deserved. It was the death of Bob’s son that prompted his first book, Songs for a Son, and shocked him into embracing his own true identity as a gay man, giving him insight into his true self, giving him his authentic voice. It was perhaps not coincidental that the dead son happened to have been named Richard and would have been about my age if he had not died as a child.
The third and final father figure, of course, was Robert Livingston Roshi (1933-2021). As with my own father, Robert and I did not communicate that much, you might be surprised to hear. Over the course of twenty years, we had surprisingly few profound conversations. We were not friends. Our connection was not emotional or intellectual, as it was with Walter Bodlander and Bob Peters, much less biological as it was with my father. There is no one word to express the foundation of our relationship, except perhaps the mind-to-mind transmission of shiho. There was a total acceptance of each other, from the very beginning, unconditional acceptance. (This is not to say that there weren’t moments of falling asleep in class and punishments imposed and ignored, even authority rejected; but just as with Walter Bodlander, even though I never hopped around the building at Robert’s whim, I always returned to the dojo.) I hesitate to call it love, which is a very pale term for a vivid mystery that fits into no category. But I suppose that is what in a sense it was. Love. Like that love-without-attachment of Hakuin and his son.
What, then, was my original face before these father figures were born?
Of course I have to say “I don’t know.” None of us knows who we were before we were, before our fathers (and mothers) made us who we have become. Just as we don’t know what our eventual face will be when our great-grandchildren have forgotten us, and we have passed back into ku, emptiness, the heavens, sky.
— Richard Collins
仙厓義梵 Sengai Gibon (1750-1837)