Mary Mocine

Clear Water Zendo – Vallejo, California

In 1875, a Russian woman named Helena Blavatsky and an American Civil War veteran, Colonel Henry Olcott, established the Theosophical Society in New York City. The term “theosophy” was coined from the Greek words theos (god) and sophia (wisdom) and was intended to convey the idea of a “divine wisdom” universal to all world religions. The movement was largely based on teachings Blavatsky claimed to have received telepathically from secret “Masters” hidden in the mountains of Tibet. As unlikely as Blavatsky’s claims were, the Theosophists contributed significantly to the introduction of Buddhism to the west. Chapters were established in major centers around the world, and, in it’s more mature form, it had three stated goals: 1) To establish a universal brotherhood of all humankind without distinction of race, gender, or creed; 2) To promote the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science; and 3) To investigate “unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in” human beings.

Mary Mocine’s parents and grandparents were Californian Theosophists. “My grandparents got interested in it – my dad’s parents – probably not too long after the turn of the last century. It was a time when people were interested in the occult. I don’t know how they came to it, but they did. So my dad was raised in it.”

I ask if it had been meaningful to her.

“Yeah. For a while. I think it’s not in my bones so much anymore, but it was for a long time. I left when I was about 18 or 19, so the way I think of it now is I have a Sunday School understanding of it.”

Mary was born during the Second World War, in 1944, and her parents eventually stopped attending Theosophical gatherings because of their official pacifist stance, but Mary and her sister continued. “But I think my parents didn’t change what they believed particularly. They weren’t hostile or even questioning of the doctrine. My sister is older and started going there before I did. So they certainly didn’t discourage us. They told me, you’re welcome to go if you’d like to. And probably around nine, I decided I wanted to go, and there was a family friend who used to pick us up and take us and then bring us home.”

She remained involved until 1964, when she was 18. It happened that she overheard one of the group leaders using racist language. “I was just appalled and shocked. I grew up in a liberal Adlai Stevenson-loving family, and we didn’t talk like that. I didn’t know anybody who talked like that.”

“Did the theosophy itself had any long-term impact on you?”

“I think so, in a way. God is not an issue for me. It isn’t something I think about. We thought of Buddha as a great teacher, and we studied him sometimes. We read Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia, a long narrative poem that’s about the life of Buddha, but it was closer to Hinduism than to Buddhism, I think. We studied the Bhagavad-Gita, and I don’t remember what else. So the issue for a lot of people, the painful thing for a lot of people, is struggling with some concept of God. But it just doesn’t come up for me, and I think that’s because of how I was raised. And I had a concept of reincarnation growing up. In the Theosophy I was taught you have a soul, and you are reincarnated, or your soul gets refleshed from time to time. Lifetime after lifetime. And your purpose or your goal was to . . . Oh, how do I say it? . . . Well, to become perfect; to perfect your soul. So I was comfortable with words like ‘karma.’ Karma was pretty much ‘your own comes back to you.’ That was the slogan. I remember telling my Zen teacher,  Mel Weitsman Roshi, years later, ‘I get the idea of anatman and no-self and so on, but in my bones I believe in reincarnation in the sense of being reborn and having a soul and a self.’ And he said, laughing, ‘That’s the biggest heresy in Buddhism.’ So I did feel troubled by that. I didn’t struggle with the notion of no-God, but I did struggle with that aspect of no-me. And I still struggle with no-me,” she says, chuckling. “But it’s at a deeper level I suppose I could say.”

She graduated high school when only 16 and began her college education at Los Angeles City College, where her father was in the English faculty. “And I met this young man. And he was a socialist. I don’t know if I’d ever met a socialist before. What was really interesting about him – one of many things – is that his parents were both Trotskyists. Does this mean anything to you?”

I admit that I had visited Trotsky’s house in Mexico City.

“Good. Well, they – this boy’s parents – went down there and actually stayed there. She was his secretary. They were there to support him and be of assistance, but also somewhat – I think – as bodyguards, but they weren’t there when he was killed. So they were committed Trotskyists. Then they came back here, and the husband became a member of the Socialist Workers Party and his wife stayed a Trotskyist. But they stayed married which was unusual if you know anything about the rat race on the left. Anyway, their son was my boyfriend, and he got me involved in Fair Play for Cuba. So I was started on that path, and then when I went away to Berkeley, I was involved with the Free Speech movement. And that radicalized me to some extent because I would be at a demonstration, and then I would read about it in the San Francisco Chronicle the next day, and it would be inaccurate. They would say something happened that didn’t, or they would cut the crowd size in half and whatever. So I was much more engaged in radical politics; I wasn’t thinking about spiritual things. Then I wound up in law school at Hastings and stayed somewhat engaged in radical politics, but I also got involved with Women’s Liberation. We formed something we called the Hastings Women’s Union. So that’s the stuff that I was engaged in. But Buddhism was sort of in the background. I mean, I always felt comfortable with it.”

Then while pursuing a career as a Union-side Labor Lawyer, Mary took a college extension course. “Drawing Buddha. It was an extension class at UC Santa Cruz, and I had time, so I went and took it. And the guy who taught it was a Zen student. And I was drawn to his – I don’t know – his aspect or something.”

“A course on Drawing the Buddha?” I ask.

“Yeah. He taught us how to draw . . . I think it was a Buddha head.”

“There was a course calendar, and one of the options was ‘learn how to draw the Buddha?’” Well, she was in California, it was the early 1960s, and Buddhism was in the air.

‘It was an extension class. He taught us the aspects and the relation of eyes to the chin and whatever. And he talked about the head and the topknot and the third eye. It was interesting, but it was just something about his presence, his presentation of himself or something that was attractive to me. That didn’t make me go anywhere or do anything about it. It just was interesting. And years later I lived in a communal house. There were three people who bought a house, and they were looking for three more roommates, and I was one of them. And one of my housemates had a good friend that had been a longtime Zen student and had left because of a dispute with Dick Baker, and he would talk about the San Francisco Zen Center a lot, and I found it interesting. I sort of felt drawn to it. But it also kind of demystified Zen for me, which was probably a good thing. I didn’t do anything yet. I was working, and I’d moved there because I needed to have cheaper housing because I was starting a labor law firm after I left the Farmworker’s Union. So then years later, I split up with the man I’d been living with – as happens to people – and I started seeing my friends more, and one friend was involved with Al-Anon. And I am the adult child of an alcoholic. My mother was an alcoholic. So it interested me, and she invited me to a meeting, and I went to a meeting, and I got involved with Al-Anon. And it’s a spiritual program, and I started thinking to myself, ‘I don’t believe in God – I don’t really believe in a Higher Power – but what do I believe in?’ And it came down to that I’m part of something bigger than me. And then my law partner and I went to Green Gulch to have a day-long office retreat.” Green Gulch is the organic farm operated by SFZC. “That was the first time I’d ever been at Green Gulch. I’d heard of it. And I wound up on a mailing list – because if you sneeze anywhere around San Francisco Zen Center, you’ll be on the mailing list – and I got a brochure for a women’s retreat led by Yvonne Rand. It said, ‘On Being Awake: A Mindfulness Retreat for Women.’ Something close to that. That was in March of ’88, and I went, and it just felt like I was coming home.”

She had been to a meditation workshop previously in which there had been too much emphasis on proper form and strictly adhering to the protocols of the zendo. Yvonne Rand, on the other hand, provided “a much more gentle introduction. She started us off in a meeting room and gave some instruction. I think she started us off sitting for about ten minutes. And we sat a little longer the next morning, and at some point – I think – she took us into the zendo, and there was nobody else around, and introduced us to the tans [platforms] and sitting in there. And we probably sat a little longer. And then a little longer. And then on Sunday morning she said you could go do walking meditation in the garden or you could go to the public 9:30 zazen. And I wanted to go to zazen, but I was still in that mode of feeling, ‘Oh, my God! What if I do it wrong?’ And there was a woman standing next to me, and she turns to Yvonne and says, ‘I really want to go to zazen, but I’m afraid I’ll make a mistake.’ And Yvonne roared with laughter, and she said, ‘I hope you’re prepared to make lots of mistakes.’ And for me, this burden lifted off my back. And so I went and sat zazen, and it was wonderful. And I found out there was a Berkeley Zen Center right near my house, and on Monday I went and found out where it was and how to get to it, and on Tuesday morning I started sitting. And that was that.”

In a short bio on the Clear Water Zendo website, she wrote that her “involvement grew and by 1989 I took three months off and spent a time of intensive residential practice at Green Gulch. I never really returned to the practice of law.”

“Well, that’s the shorthand version,” she admits to me with a laugh. “I mean, a lot of my work was hard, representing a union, ’cause you lose a lot, and I don’t like all the paperwork. I almost said I didn’t like fighting, but I do. I like arguing. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the law so much as I loved Zen.”

“So it wasn’t so much that you left the law as you took up Zen.”

She nods her head. “A balance had shifted, and I started saying to myself, well what do I do? Then I encountered Tassajara [Zen Center’s retreat center in the Ventana Wilderness Area] and Green Gulch and so on, and that starts to sort of fit into me. And I started sitting at Berkeley, Mel Weitsman’s community, sitting more, and started doing one-day sits and stuff. I just was more drawn to it.

“After that first weekend with Yvonne, I wrote her a long letter about how wonderful it’d been. When we started that workshop, she went around and said, ‘What brought you here?’ And I heard myself say I thought it was time to begin. And you know when you say something that you deeply mean and you had no idea that you were thinking that, and you want to say, ‘Who said that!’ So it was there but I – I don’t know – I discounted it or something. And then I’m in Berkeley, so that would have been March of ’88, and I went to Tassajara in September of ’90. I did a six week/eight-week practice period at Green Gulch in the summer of ’89. My parents died in the beginning of ’89, close to each other. And that gets your attention. Or it got mine. And . . . I don’t know . . . I had trouble . . . People would ask me, ‘Why don’t you take the Precepts? Why don’t you sew a rakusu? Why don’t you do jukai?’”

A rakusu is the bib-like garment some Zen practitioners wear. It represents taking on the Buddha’s robe. Taking the Precepts – jukai – is the process of agreeing to abide by the rules governing the Buddha’s community. These are steps traditionally taken to formally become a member of the community, to become a Buddhist. Mary was initially reluctant to take that step.

 “I felt wary because there had been a lot of turmoil in my work, and I felt like I’d got burned by that. So I was wary of Zen Center. I was hesitant at first, but I finally went to Mel and I said, ‘I want to sew a rakusu, but I don’t want you to ask me why.’ And he said, ‘Okay. How?’ And we both laughed. And I said, ‘With Blanche,’ and so I went ahead and did it. But I wound up having to work through a lot of stuff about commitment, my own stuff about commitment.”

Blanche was Blanche Hartman, the first woman abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center.

After telling Mel she wanted to sew a rakusu, Mary had difficulty getting down to doing the actual sewing. So she considered going to Tassajara to be with Blanche and work on the sewing there. I have not been to Tassajara but many people have described how remote it is and how difficult the road is. As she considered making the journey, Mary began to feel nervous. “It’s a dirt road over a pass,” she tells me. “I was experiencing a great fear and I kept saying to myself, ‘Fourteen miles down a dirt road. Fourteen fucking miles down a fucking dirt road.’ And I was just terrified. And then I found a sesshin as fast as I could, and it came to be one that Reb [Anderson] was leading.” Reb Anderson succeeded Richard Baker as abbot of Zen Center. “And I talked to him about it, and he said, ‘Well, maybe it’s too soon for you to go to Tassajara. You don’t have to go. Why don’t you undecide? You don’t have to decide to go. Just set that aside and just practice. So I did. And I spent the rest of the sesshin kind of letting the ‘no’ part come up. And I sat with it, and talked to my analyst and blah, blah, blah, and worked through a lot and went to Tassajara as I kind of knew I would.”

Mary tells me that she did not think of jukai so much as a matter of becoming a card-carrying Buddhist as a matter of “deepening your commitment and saying, ‘I want to be of use.’ It’s about, ‘I vow to live the way of the Precepts.’ It’s not that it’s not about becoming a Buddhist or becoming a formal Zen person or whatever, but I just don’t think that’s the most important thing. And so I had a calling. That’s all. I didn’t know it when I told Yvonne it was time to begin, but that is what I meant. I didn’t understand it. And it was the matter of working through the commitment that I really want to do this. That I really mean it, I guess. And I talked with Mel about it a lot. Then I told him, ‘You know, this keeps coming up. This word ‘priest.’ And he’d say, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ And I’d say, ‘No.’ But I’d be in dokusan with him, and inside me it would be going, ‘Priest, priest, priest.’ And unless I said something about it, I couldn’t let it drop.

“It got to a point where there really wasn’t much question that Mel would say ‘yes’ if I asked to be ordained. But I hadn’t asked yet. And I remember taking my hair and saying, ‘I know that I’m projecting onto my hair. I know it’s not about my hair. But I just don’t want to cut my hair.’ And that was the last thing. And we talked about other things, and at the end of that dokusan, he said, ‘Sometimes the way to make a decision is to act as if you’ve already decided. For example, why don’t you cut your hair.’ We used to laugh a lot, and I doubled over laughing, and I said, ‘Fuck you!’ We laughed some more, and I left. And I went and sat in the zendo. Nobody was around. It was the summertime. And I cried. And then it was done. I was ready. I went and found a friend, and I asked her if she would buzz my head, and she did, and that was that.”

“What’s the role of a priest?” I ask. “When someone comes to you in your role as a priest, what are they looking for from you?”

“There’s a lot of reasons why people come to Zen. The people here – the Clear Water Zendo – are looking for support in their practice and support in remembering zazen in all aspects of their lives. So we talk about a lot of different things in dokusan. And my job, I think – the way I see it – is to help them to practice with whatever. You know, to turn towards it. To be kind to themselves when they turn away from it, as we do. And to remember to turn back towards whatever and to stay with their bodies, which is important. A really important teaching to me that comes mostly from women like Yvonne: it’s the body.”

“Can you explain zazen to me?”

“Our form is called ‘just sitting,’ and it means that as you sit up straight and breathe gently through your nose, you start out by following your breath. And then at some point you let go of that, and you’re just present in your body, and you let your mind be your mind. Uchiyama Roshi calls thoughts ‘brain excretions’ – a great way of thinking about them – understanding that they don’t have any more significance than your stomach gurgling.”

“So what does that mean? I’m not trying to stop my thoughts. I’m doing what then? Ignoring them?”       

“No. You’re not ignoring them either. You’re just allowing them to come and go as they will. You don’t get entangled with them. Suzuki Roshi used to say, ‘Don’t’ invite them in for tea.’ I like to say, ‘Don’t get on the train.’ A mind is like a popcorn machine, and that’s what it’s gonna do; it’s gonna think. So just let them come and let them go. They arise, abide, and pass away, if you will let them.”

“And why would I do this?”

“What do you get out of it?”

“Yeah. What would I get out of doing it?”

Mary laughs. “Damned if I know!” And then, after a pause, “Maybe what you get is that you don’t get anything, but maybe you could say you ‘get’ not being so concerned about what you get. I really don’t know. You have to do it; you have to experience it to find out what it is.”

“And do you have a sense of how Zen is evolving now? For example, is the Japanese envelope still important? I see that you no longer shave your head, so how important are things like that?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I am in the process of semi-retiring. And something has shifted. I didn’t set out to do this, but I just don’t feel like shaving my head anymore. It hasn’t been this long since I got ordained in ’94. But I don’t want to anymore. I don’t know. I’m wearing earrings for God’s sake! Someone asked if I’d be excommunicated, and I said, ‘No. I know lots of Zen priests who are women who have hair and wear lipstick and earrings.’ But I think it’s becoming more lay, and in a lot of places it’s becoming a lot less formal. It’s pretty formal here. And the students may think it’s really, really formal, but they don’t know what it looks like at Tassajara or City Center.”

“There had been a reluctance in San Francisco for a long while to do lay transmissions,” I point out.

“Yes. I’m about to – well, I’ve already done it – I’m going to do three people this fall. I know how Blanche felt about it, that it was kind of like City Center was the flagship for maintaining this tradition. They are partly a community, but largely they are training priests, training teachers. And I remember Yvonne saying that because Blanche was maintaining the forms at City Center, Yvonne could go out and experiment and do other things. But there has been a hesitation to offer lay transmission, and I know Mel told his lay transmittees that they’re not allowed to ordain people or to offer the precepts, and so on. But that’s been changing even at Berkeley.”

“I’ve heard it called ‘lay entrustments,’” I say. “Is this one of the ways Zen is evolving? Away from the ordination model?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I think so. But . . . I’m almost 80, and I don’t care anymore.” We both laugh. I’m not as close to 80 as she, but it’s on the horizon. “I don’t know. It’s going where it’s going. And it’s okay. I am wondering about how much authority to offer my lay transmittees. The one I did a while ago, we didn’t talk enough about what it meant. And I realized that I had a lot of assumptions that she didn’t share, that she didn’t know about. So what I’ve said to them is ‘You can start a sitting group, and if you find there’s somebody who wants to take the Precepts, you can – you know – do it with a priest.’ And that’s as far as I’ve gone.”

“What did you mean by saying you’re ‘semi-retiring’?”

“Well, this place is ending at the end of the year.

“Is there no heir to take over?”

“There are those three transmitted people I consider my heirs. The problem is, I went out on my own because I wanted out of Zen Center, and because I liked the idea of starting a place. And a friend lived here. But Vallejo is not fertile ground. So it’s been hard. People get trained, and then they move away.”

“So when you retire, this community – Clear Water – will . . .”

“It will end as we know it. And the expectation has been, and the hope is, that one of those three will start a sitting group in his home not far from here but in a more settled community that is probably much more fertile ground than here. I have students that we’ve been together for twenty years. So it’s not like people leave the practice, but they leave the area. And the people that I was interested in having as successors are not interested in living here.”

The first of what Buddhism calls the Three Characteristics of Existence is annica – impermanence. All things, including Zen Centers, are by their very nature impermanent.