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But 2,500 years have passed since then and a lot of things have changed. In Japan, it’s not all that hard to find the head of some temple, some guy who “has transmission” who will give it to you if you can show him you’ve got a good reason to have it—and unfortunately having just inherited the family temple from your old man counts as a good reason. Oh, and you also have to have enough bank to pay certain associated “fees” to the head temple. Many Japanese priests today give transmission for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with real understanding of Buddhist truths; a lot of it’s simple politics, business, or nepotism.

To me, though, as for a lot of American Zen students, Dharma Transmission was always a big deal. So when Nishijima told me, very casually one day, that he wanted to give me transmission, I was taken aback. I resisted the idea. It scared me. Who the hell was I? How I could possibly “deserve” that? But Nishijima made it clear that while I could delay the actual ceremony, as far as he was concerned I had already “gotten” transmission. Still, I put it off.

I TOOK NEARLY A YEAR to decide to accept Dharma Transmission. To accept such a thing is to become an authority figure and I’ve always had a problem with authority. I never liked authority figures, never wanted to be an authority figure, and never gave a shit about the people who did. Never trusted ‘em. In my whole life I’ve hardly ever come across an authority figure who really deserved the power that had been conferred upon her or him. My teachers and school administrators had by and large shown themselves to be hardly worthy of my contempt let alone my respect. Mister Walters, my junior high principal, once put me through such intense psychological torture I nearly puked all over his floor—and in retrospect I wish I had!—and then he revealed that he had no idea who I was or why I’d been called to his office. It’s hard not to feel contempt after such an experience. The few people in positions of authority I did respect never played the whole Authority Figure role.

And as authority figures go, religious authority figures were definitely the worst—and now here I was about to become one. I was conflicted, to the say the least.

Of course rebellion against authority, as any pop-psychologist will tell you, is just an immature and maladjusted psychological reaction to the traumas of a childhood, when the Big Bad Adult told us we were forbidden from doing something or other we wanted to do, and learning not do everything we want all the time is part of the normal process of socialization. Every child rebels against this to some degree, but eventually, a mature person accepts some amount of authority.

Unfortunately, what happens to most people is that they don’t just accept authority, they believe in it. We have, buried within us, an unspoken, unacknowledged belief that there are some people who are somehow better than others, more deserving than ourselves—that authorities are somehow worthy of the authority they wield.

We don’t believe in divine kings anymore but we still believe in our celebrities in much the same way. Intellectually we know they’re just like us. But on a deeper psychological level we regard them somehow as special beings, endowed with some kind of extraordinary powers lowly creatures like ourselves do not possess.

Why did so many people take notice in 1966 when John Lennon said The Beatles were bigger than Jesus? Because he was a celebrity. He was special in our eyes because he wrote good songs and so he became an Authority. Happens all the time.

I was personally shocked to discover this particular belief buried in my own psychological makeup, despite the fact that I’d spent much of my life penning sarcastic ditties about stupid people who trusted their stupid leaders and prayed to their stupid God and stupidly worshiped their stupid pop heroes.

It never occurred to me to examine my unspoken belief that my heroes—John Lennon, Syd Barrett, and Robyn Hitchcock—were obviously worthy of reverence and that therefore my unquestioned