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side. But if I acknowledge it rather than deny it, it also can be the path to healing instead of obsessing about it at home:
That goddamn Thomas has no idea. Doesn’t he understand that it’s not about simply matching the hair, that there’s an inner life to the actor that he shouldn’t interfere with?
You can pump it up and defend yourself all you want, but you’re just suppressing the self-consciousness and the embarrassment, you know? With Thomas I worked it out by just being who I am without living up to something.
    But the Dude isn’t uncomfortable with his discomfort. He’s authentic, and he and Walter jam with each other. He can get pissed at Walter but he loves him at the same time. I love that scene where they hug in the end, with Donny’s ashes all over the Dude, coating his shades.
    B ERNIE : The other thing I like about the Dude is that he doesn’t corner a rat. Do you know that expression? If people do things we don’t like, we sometimes set them up in order to show them how wrong or bad they are. It’s like trapping a rat. If you force a rat into a corner where there’s no way out, it’s going to attack. You don’t see the Dude doing that. He’s opinionated, but he leaves the other person a way out. Walter constantly tries to trap the rat, pushing people into a place where they’re now going to fight back.
    J EFF : You have to leave a way out. In Zen, don’t they tell you to kill yourself? I don’t mean literally, but to kill your ego, kill your identity. Isn’t that the way out in Zen?
    B ERNIE : A lot of old Zen masters talked like that. They said that in order to get enlightened, in order to experience the oneness of life, you had to drop body and mind. But there’s an easier way out than that, and that’s to realize,
Oh, that’s just your opinion
, which is what the Dude says in the movie: “That’s your opinion, man.” When you say that, there’s always a way out. If we take certain things to be
the
truth, we’re going to fight and kill for them, but it’s hard to battle over an opinion.
    J EFF : You can respect opinions. You both have the same thing going on, only you have your version of it and someone else has theirs.
    B ERNIE : One of the most famous figures in Zen in China is known as the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng. He was an illiterate peasant who cut wood to support his mother and himself. One day he goes to the market to sell his wood and hears a monk chanting a line from the
Diamond Sutra
: “Abiding nowhere, raise the Mind.” If you can abide nowhere, you are raising the mind of compassion. So here’s this guy who knows nothing about Buddhism, a woodcutter, but when he hears that verse he has a profound enlightenment experience.
    J EFF : Did he know what the words meant?
    B ERNIE : No. Enlightenment doesn’t happen because you understand some words. You could say that the words triggered his transformation, but actually it was his whole life that brought him to that place of hearing a verse and experiencing a deep enlightenment.
    So he asked the monk where he heard this, and the monk said that there’s a monastery up north where they teach this kind of stuff. He goes north and the abbot says, “Why are you here? You’re a southerner.”
In that period, the northern Chinese considered the southern Chinese inferior. According to the story, Huineng answered: “In the Way there is no difference between north and south
.
” The true nature of the Way, of life, is that it’s all one, there are no differences.
    It turns out that the abbot was getting ready to retire and was looking for a successor. It was a big monastery, with some monks who’d been training for twenty, thirty years; naturally, everybody thought one of them would take over. But the abbot recognized Huineng as his successor just from this answer. Still, instead of accepting him into the monastery, the abbot sent him to work in the rice mill.
    One night he went to the rice mill and told Huineng that