Cigarettes, Killers and Zen

Five years ago or so I had a “cosmic” breakfast with some Zen friends, among them the distinguished roshi (master) and National Book Award winner, Peter Matthiessen. What started out as a conversation about everyone’s favorite flavor of bagel turned into a profound discussion of Zen principles. Our host, my good friend Mitchel Doshin Cantor and another respected Zen teacher, is fond of saying that everything is happening right on schedule, and everything is just as it should be. This principle, according to my limited understanding of Zen, is an important concept in the practice, right up there with being present, and bearing witness.


I remember bringing up an experience I had in the Galapagos Islands in 1980. Travel to this remote destination off the coast of Ecuador had not yet become the commercial enterprise it is today, and the islands were pristine and unmolested. Walking the lava amidst the blue-footed boobies and the ground iguanas and the nesting albatross and the penguins, I could easily imagine a tyrannosaur suddenly appearing from behind a hill, or a plesiosaur surfacing just off the rocky shore. Entranced by a landscape so thoroughly untouched by human hands, I was shocked to discover a cigarette butt lying in a shallow depression in the hard black ground.


I mentioned the experience at the cosmic breakfast and was told that the sight of the cigarette shouldn’t have disturbed me because it was just as it should be and right where it belonged. I said no; it was offensive. That’s why I picked it up. I further proposed that if the cigarette’s presence was perfect, so was mine, and that my action was fully as “correct” as that of the person who dropped it there. Someone said no, because my action was filtered by my beliefs and judgments. I responded that the act of dropping the cigarette flowed from a set of beliefs and judgments too. Someone said no, the discussion heated up, and soon I found myself defending morality and ethics. I proposed that murderers and rapists and child molesters were not acceptable either, and the police needed to “pick them up” too. The argument took off from there, but I can say I was not satisfied with the idea of accepting that anything and everything we see no matter how disturbing.


While I admit that there are plenty of things in the world that I cannot abide, in recent years I have come to a better understanding of the high standard set by the Buddha regarding withholding judgment and preference, and indeed I find at least the latter presaged in early Daoist thought. Today I suddenly understood the whole issue in terms of balance rather than right and wrong, in terms of yin and yang rather than perfection or scheduling. Perhaps the cigarette represented the yin, my act of sanitation the yang. I portray this dynamic in my novels about Xenon Pearl, the neurosurgeon vigilante, a man who both heals and kills. It’s all about balance, and the ongoing and hopefully harmonious interplay of opposing forces. Seen this way, there is no argument, only the Dao—in literature and in life.