Kakumyo Lowe-Charde

Dharma Rain, Portland, Oregon

Kakumyo Lowe-Charde is the Dharma heir of Gyokuko Carlson. After serving as co-abbot of the Dharma Rain Zen Center in Portland, Oregon, with her in 2017 and ’18, he became primary Abbot when she retired in 2019. Dharma Rain itself, he informs me, is currently on a fourteen-acre site which had been a former landfill. My immediate thought is about water issues.

“It sure made it interesting the first couple of years,” Kakumyo admits. “It can go from very, very hard to soup, very quickly – and vice versa – because there’s so little topsoil. But we kind of figured out how to deal with that as we built the storm water system. It’s a very open site. So we have all these little ponds and swales, and now it’s quite workable.”

Then in the next breath he tells me it’s a rough neighbourhood. “We’re three blocks off 82^nd, which is one of the real problem areas of the city. There are shootings on a regular basis; we’ve had over 30 homicides within five blocks of the temple in the last two years.”

“But you’re committed to staying there?”

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It’s been fantastic. “That’s just suffering happening. I want to show a different way of relating to that.”

He grew up in Upstate New York in a community of less than a thousand people. “It had a stop light that blinks yellow; that’s as big as it gets.”

His parents had been Presbyterian ministers, but, when he was ten years old, they both left the church. I ask if something specific had provoked that.

“I think it was a matter of feeling they weren’t doing the work they wanted to do. They wanted to see more transformation, to help people with that, and folks weren’t interested. That’s not what church was for for the people in the congregation. It was about community, about a sense of belonging, and my parents wanted to work more with the internal stuff. They veered towards therapy basically. For my dad that was fairly diplomatic; for my mom it was fairly acrimonious. And they’ve both taken Precepts in the Zen tradition since.” I make a note to come back to that.

The family moved to California where his parents went to graduate school to study psychology. I ask how the move impacted him.

“Well, it meant we moved. There was no crisis of faith or, ‘Whoa! My reality is shifting!’ It was just that we moved from a rural environment to suburbia, and from New York to California which was a pretty significant lifestyle change in terms of I had been traipsing through the woods and hills every day as a younger kid, and it was just a very built environment when we got to California. That was the big change that I noticed.”

There were social adjustments as well. “A sense of belonging was tough. I was more on the fringes of groups. Some of that was just awkwardness, and some of it was values. Kind of prioritizing things differently than most people did. I read a lot. I was into exploration. I was into trying to understand, ‘How does this thing work?’ I wanted to get it. I wanted to know it. Not for the sake of knowing but to do it better. I had a strong sense that there’s a way to do this or that. And either I’m going to get it right or I’m going to get it wrong, and I really want to get it right.”

It was a feeling he can remember having had from early childhood, although, he explains, it was expressed in different vocabularies and took different forms through the stages of his life.

“By the time I was in college, it manifested as, ‘What am I going to devote myself to? What matters most in life?’ ’Cause I didn’t know what it was. But I knew that when I found what that was, I was going to do it with both hands and feet; I would go all the way in.”

He began with martial arts, then political activism, and eventually neuroscience. “And that’s what got me into Zen. I was working in Finland in a neuroscience lab and doing research on the mechanisms of addiction and using rats.”

There are times when I have the sense that there are large parts of his story missing. For example when, a few minutes later, he mentions casually that he spoke Slovak which turned out to be because he had been a high school exchange student in Slovakia. How, I ask, did he end up in Finland?

“It was pretty random. I’d applied for a couple of different things after graduating from Reed.” At Reed he had been doing behavioural research in what he calls “the psycho-bio end of things. I was interested in the system that dealt with both pain and reward. The way the brain processes suffering basically. And motivation. So addiction taps very much into that. It was a way to work on that problem which I was fascinated by.”

I ask if there had been people in his life with addiction problems or if he himself had had difficulties with addiction.

“Not really. I don’t have that structure. I did a fair amount of experimentation. I was on heroin for a while, but I was able to quit when I decided to. But no one escapes unscathed. Right? There are regrets from that time that still impact me.”

“And after graduation you just came upon a job posting that said, ‘Come experiment on rats in Finland’?”

“Yeah,” he agreed, smiling. “It was a lab. I’d followed their research. I knew who they were. I wrote them a letter, and they said, ‘Come. We’ll pay you.’ I was doing behavioural studies. And that became an ethical question for me. Up to that point, as a student, I was fully into that game. I was, ‘This is what I’m going to do.’ And I didn’t really have time to think about it. But when I was in Finland, I was suddenly quite isolated. It was a job – right? – it wasn’t like a thesis project where I could spend 80 hours a week on it. I was only there for 40 hours a week. And I was isolated linguistically because I’d just arrived, and my life wasn’t full yet. And I did a lot of thinking about it, and I realized, ‘I’m not qualified to make this decision. I don’t trust myself. I don’t have a wisdom tradition that I can rely on.’”

“What decision specifically?” I ask.

“Is it okay for me to be doing research on animals? Is it okay for me to kill for a living in that way. And I realized that I wasn’t okay with it. So I left. I quit. Bounced around in Eastern Europe for a bit. I just did odd jobs. I taught some English. I dug a bunch of ditches. I did some field work. And a lot of qigong, a lot of long walks, and read everything I could that was about religion in English. And what I found was that the Zen stuff resonated. So after six months of that, I moved back to Portland and looked up Zen in the phone book, and I found Dharma Rain.”

He went to the address, and, as chance would have it, the door was unlocked and the temple was empty. “And so I came in and sat, and I thought, ‘Hey! This is right up my alley. I can come here anytime I want and just sit and that’s great.’” He chuckles at the memory. “That’s not how it actually worked, but that was my first impression.”

“And this is the same place you’re at now?” I ask.

“Yes. Different location. We moved but yeah.”

“Got better front door security?”

“Yeah.”

“At any rate you went back.”

“Yeah, and I started going regularly, doing what was offered. At that time there wasn’t a whole lot on the schedule. There were two teachers living there, and one or two residents who were kind of part-timey.”

The year was 1998, and the two teachers were Kyogen and Gyokuko Carlson who had been students of Jiyu Kennett at Shasta Abbey. They founded Dharma Rain in 1986. Kyogen died in 2014.

Kakumyo was studying naturopathic medicine at the time, but he became a regular practitioner at Dharma Rain. “I did retreats. And after a little more than a year, I did a month’s residency. Kind of their first attempt at an ango. And during that was when I really realized that, up until that point, I was trying to add this into my life. Then I realized, it’s the other way around. This is what I’m doing, and I need to orient to that all the way. And so I dropped out of med school, I moved in, and basically said, ‘I’m here. Train me.’ And they said, ‘Well, there are some hoops.’” He chuckles. “So I took a couple of years to jump through those.”

“What drew you to the place?” I ask. “What was the allure?”

“The sense that it works. The sense that this has worked for 2500 years, and there’s all these people for whom it has worked.”

“‘Worked’ in what sense?”

“I certainly didn’t know then. I didn’t have a sense of that, but it was what I was looking for. I wanted to know that there was a method. I wanted to know that there was a reliable way of addressing this difficulty that I was feeling.”

“And the difficulty was what? Not knowing how to live your life?”

“That was an aspect of it. A sense of being disconnected from purpose and wanting to serve. And this offered all that.”

“Do you look at Zen the same way today – as abbot – as you did back then?”

“Oh, no! Back then I was trying to define it, I was trying to fit it in a box, I was trying to ‘know’ it. And now I’m much more comfortable with, like, this vastness. It’s just moving. We are all process, and I don’t want to hinder that process. I want to be responsive to it. I don’t want to package it. I don’t want it to be smaller. I don’t want to put a definition on it.”

“When people knock on the door for the first time at Dharma Rain, what are they looking for?”

Using Buddhist terminology, he suggests that the primary “dukkhas” – manifestations of suffering – which bring people to the centre are: “Being seen, a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, and a feeling of being disconnected from ‘why.’”

“And if someone comes in saying that they aren’t sure what everything in their life is all about, that they’re struggling, how do you respond?”

“I’d ask, ‘Who are you?’ I would show interest in who they are and let that be a mirror for them to kind of see themselves more and then see where that went. That would be my first step.”

“And how would that differ from going to see a psychologist?”

“I think there might be some kinds of psychology that would look real similar. But, you know, I think the context is key. People are showing up here for a reason. The set and setting are distinctive, and the relationship is a different one. You know, I’m a priest, not a therapist. I think fundamentally I’m here to care about them, not to fix something.”

“Okay, so I come. I get a sense that you’re empathetic, that you’re showing an interest in me. What do you tell me to do?”

“Show up again.” We both laugh at that. “Show up again. And notice. Notice what it’s like, what it’s like to be you. What was that interface when you bumped into the temple like? What calls your name?

“Do you introduce me to certain techniques?”

“You know I’m pretty anarchic. I trust that I’m surrounded by a temple, and that the structures are here and that people will bump into them. So I let that happen. I don’t try to engineer it.”

“Gyokuko,” I mention, “told me that when she was working with Jiyu Kennett, it was less Jiyu who she perceived as her teacher than it was the temple itself – the structure that she was in – which created or presented an environment that she learned from.”

“Yeah. The resonance. I think you’d get different answers from people at that time, but I think that Kyogen and Gyokuko really felt that that was one of Roshi Kennett’s geniuses, was one of the things that she did that really shined. Feeling the mandala of inner connections and how that helped people practice. Dharma Rain really leans into the treasure of sangha, really making the community a place of practice. Some places are more organized around sesshin; we’re more organized around the sense of sangha. I think that there’s such a barrier for many people for coming into this type of environment that it can be very intimidating. So we start off with, ‘You’re welcome here. We’re all humans playing this game together. If you want to play, great.’”

On the other hand, he tells me that if I were to arrive as a first time participant I wouldn’t necessarily be given meditation instruction. “There are greeters to tell people, ‘Oh, your first time here? Here’s how you do stuff.’ They give the essentials of walking in and sitting down. Here’s what you need to know. Basically they’re going to say, ‘It’s okay. You’re gonna make some mistakes, just keep your peripheral vision open and notice, and let people kind of guide you if necessary. No one’s going be offended if you do something wrong.’ That’s the basic message.”

“But no one’s going to give me any instruction about what I’m supposed to do while I’m sitting there?”

“No. If they come for a meditation workshop, sure. But we don’t speak during zazen.”

I am reminded of the stories of the pioneer North Americans who travelled to Japan in the 1950s and ’60s, and whose only instruction amounted to, “You sit there.” Kakumyo doesn’t deny the similarity. “Those places weren’t known for being real welcoming environments,” I point out.

“No.”

“And yet you said that’s what you hoped to be providing. You want people to feel they’re welcome there.”

“So, we have workshops. We have one on stress; we have one on compassion; we have one on Zen meditation; we have one on starting a practice. We’ve got all these introductory ways in that give people that sense of information, that help them feel secure. But that’s not part of it if you just show up on a Sunday morning.”

In fairness, it isn’t all that different from the experience I’d had when I first went to the Montreal Zen Centre. Both Montreal and Dharma Rain assumed that proper meditation instruction can’t be provided in five or ten minutes prior to a formal sitting period.

“The workshop is two hours long, and it talks you through what you do with the body, what you do with the mind. It gives you a twenty-minute trial period, and then we troubleshoot that. And we talk a little bit about integrating it into life.”

“And how would the way you present meditation differ, for example, from that given at the No-Rank Zendo, which is also there in Portland?”

“Well, you know, they’re Rinzai. What I tell people is our basic practice is shikan taza. Which is very true, very deep, and can feed you for the rest of your life in meditation. But it’s also quite subtle, and it can be frustrating because you don’t know if you’re doing it or not.”

“That’s telling me what the practice is going to be like, but it’s not telling me what to do. Let’s say I’m one of those people who needs a diagram.”

“Okay, so the diagram is you notice your experience. If you’re trying to change your experience, then stop trying to change it. You know, thoughts are going to appear – and now I’m describing what it will feel like – but that’s the diagram. That’s it. Notice. If you’re trying to affect it, if you’re trying to change it, if you’re trying to improve it, release that impulse.”

“It’s not that easy,” I remark. “You said, ‘subtle.’ I suspect there are people who feel they can’t do it.”

“Well, they don’t think they can do it. And I would argue that more are doing it than believe it. Like my life changed dramatically long before I could put the mind somewhere and hold it still. Concentration develops, but that’s a much longer process. And transformation isn’t just dependent on concentration.”

“And do you suggest that people develop a home practice, ten/fifteen minutes a day, something like that?”

“I’d say, ‘That sounds great.’ I tell people that I’m more interested that they sit every day than that they – you know – sit for an hour once a week. And that’s primarily because I want the habit in there, and I want those more frequent reminders that there’s something more important than all the fears and hopes and tribulations that make up the identity in daily life. For that fifteen minutes sitting facing a wall, the body recognizes there’s something more important than everything else that defines them. And it doesn’t know what to do with that. But that’s an important reorientation, and to get a dose of that on a regular basis counts.”

The conversation wends its way through a number of topics: the way in which they present the Precepts to students and the way those Precepts are interpreted, the way students prepare for jukai. I even get around to asking how it was that his parents came to take the Precepts.

“I think it’s just because they’re in relation to me. I’m doing this; I’m ordained; I’m happy here. They wanted to know for themselves. So Mom did it first. And then maybe a decade later, Dad did. They aspire to sit, but I don’t think formal meditation is a big part of their life.”

I like the phrase “aspire to sit.”

“So, yeah, it was a way to be in a deeper relationship, understand my world a bit more.

“So if they were asked on a hospital admittance form ‘what religion?’ they’re probably not going to say Buddhist?”

He considers the question a moment. “I think they might. Yeah. I’m not positive. I think my mom probably would. My dad has a little more ambivalence. But I think they both basically identify as Buddhists.”

As we come to the end of our time, we discuss the hierarchy at Dharma Rain. Kakumyo is the abbot, but there are another ten people – some ordained and some not – who are also identified as “teachers.” So I ask, “What does a Zen teacher teach?”

It’s something I frequently ask; one of the chapters of Further Zen Conversations focuses on the range of responses I’ve had to that question. Kakumyo chuckles and starts to reply, then pauses and says, “What are you asking?”

“Well, it’s the term, isn’t it? It’s interesting. You could be called a minister, as your parents were. We could use a more neutral term like ‘facilitator.’ But the term we use is ‘teacher.’ So what does a Zen teacher teach?”

“I feel like the content that I’m offering is less important. I value the teachings, but knowing about the Lotus Sutra or the Shobogenzo or whatever, those aren’t the things that have really changed who I am. It’s transformation. I feel like what’s closest for me – and this isn’t true for all teachers – but what’s closest for me is the transformative process in the people that I’m working with.”

“So, you’re not teaching a theory, not teaching Buddhism as a belief system,” I say. “Are you teaching a practice?”

“I think that’s part of it. Mostly I accompany. I do it and model it, and I’d like you to do it with me. This is something deeply accurate and deeply fulfilling and if you’re around it, there’s a certain kind of osmosis with it if you bring yourself into proximity, and I don’t know what that looks like in your life, but I’m curious to see how you navigate that and am willing to help if it’s useful.”

“And how important are the Asian accoutrements? Your head is shaved, you’re wearing samue. How important is all that?”

“So, I’m a monastic, and that means the way I’m expressing it is this particular form, this particular practice. The lay teachers have a broader scope. They may live off campus, they may have jobs, they may have a family; they may do different things. For me, this is where I live, this is what I do, this is my full-time gig.”

“So the clothing, the hair, this is – what? – a declaration of commitment?”

“Yeah. I mean, if I’m painting, I wear painting clothes, if I’m exercising, I wear shorts, but if I can get away with it, yes, this is what I wear.” 

“And does your temple have an Asian ambience?

“I mean, it’s Americanized. It’s adapted. The main building, the sodo, is built to an American building code and with modern materials, but it is reminiscent of similar buildings in Japan.”

Which brings us to the discussion of the fourteen acres on a former landfill and the challenges of the neighbourhood in which the temple is located.

I end the conversation by asking what, as abbot, he hopes for Dharma Rain. He reflects a moment before replying.

“Well, I’d say there’s layers there. I would say in a deep way, I’d like to see this lineage continue. That’s a very personal mission for me that I feel a real responsibility to time for. I would say – focusing on this decade – I want to see Dharma Rain grow. We’ve grown tremendously in the last decade and gotten much broader and changed how we interact with the community. I want to see that continue. I feel like we’re poised to play a larger role in the broader community – not just in the Buddhist community – and we have a lot of collaborations. We’re just in a lucky spot, and I want to live up to that. I want to see that broader impact happen. We have this open site where people walk. It’s kind of like temples in Japan where it’s a public park. So we get a couple of hundred people a day just walking through here. They’re not here for the Buddhism, but they’re impacted by it. And we’re a place of safety. This is a rough neighbourhood, and people see us as a real support.”

“But you’re committed to staying there?”

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It’s been fantastic. “That’s just suffering happening. I want to show a different way of relating to that.”

“How would you define your relationship with the broader community?

“I’m not going to constrain it like that, but I would say that it’s who we are in relation to that that counts. Like, we’ve had someone sleeping in our greenhouse for the last four months; it’s been freezing. Right? So I’m okay with that. How I relate to him, that ripples out. I want to be a temple that sees the world accurately and with a warm heart. And when I say ‘accurately,’ I mean not through the subject/object perspective, that we’re not getting caught up in the sense of ‘other,’ by the sense of ‘separate,’ by the sense of ‘scarcity.’ I feel like that’s valuable.”