Last week, I was sitting cross-legged on my plump little black cushion on the floor of the Zendo I visit regularly and listening to a talk about cleaning incense burners. And as I listened, the very deep and profound thought that came to me was, “I seriously am never going to volunteer to clean incense burners at this place.” It wasn’t that the task sounded unpleasant — it didn’t — but the volunteers who hadn’t done it right, who hadn’t been sufficiently thorough in their cleaning, were the subject of the dharma talk. Yikes! Wouldn’t want to be those guys!

Now the leader of the Zendo… (Or is it master or priest or teacher? I never know, because everyone refers to him as Bob, which sounds odd when trying to put him in context.) In any case, Bob had built his talk around these slacker volunteers — who remained nameless (but they knew who they were…) — who were occasionally leaving little butt-ends of incense in the burners.

Bob wanted to make the point that we need to put our whole hearts and our full effort into everything we do. But instead of being inspired, I was thinking, “Damn, that job cleaning the incense burners sounds like way too much pressure. Not only that, everything sounds like way too much pressure. I’ve already tried to put my ‘full effort’ into everything. It’s what led me to crawl, broken and bleeding, into both the rooms of 12 Step and this damn Zendo. This is so not a good talk for a recovering perfectionist to hear…”

At the end of the talk, there were questions, and as I struggled to formulate mine, someone else asked it for me. “I don’t understand,” one woman said, “This week you tell us to put our full effort into perfectly cleaning the incense burners, but last week you told us this story about a student who thoroughly raked all the leaves in a courtyard, only to have the Zen master throw the leaves back on the ground and make him do it again. The student raked the leaves perfectly, but was told that was too much effort. How do we know when we’re giving our full effort and when we’re doing too much?”

I have a habit, born of years of training as a straight A student, of always trying to answer another student’s question before the teacher does. I give myself extra points if my answer (as scored by an independent panel of judges in my head) is better than the instructor’s. But in this case, all I could think was, “Good question! Let’s see you get out of that one, Bob!”

Bob paused and said, “You stop when it is no longer a gift. In the story, when the master threw the leaves on the ground, it was because the student asked for the master’s approval. He wanted to be praised for what a good job he did. So he did the work, not as a gift, but to gain something: to gain the master’s approval. When you seek to gain something, it is not a gift. And when your work is not a gift, it’s time to stop. That is your full effort, even if the job is not done.”

Oh.

Good answer. Wish someone had told me that about 40 years ago. Maybe I can learn to clean those incense burners better than I thought I could.