Dharma Sangha Centers –  

“There was a psychic at Tassajara that I visited with my best friend, Bob, and my sister,” David Chadwick tells me. David is Shunryu Suzuki’s biographer and chronicler of the San Francisco Zen Center. “He was a very powerful psychic, and we’d each gotten readings which were kind of cool. And then we just started asking him about people – you know? – Bob would say, ‘What do you think about so-and-so.’ He didn’t know anything about these people, but he’d go, ‘Boy, is this guy ambitious. He oughta get a motorcycle and ride up mountains.’ But Dick Baker, he said – now, this is 1969 – he said, ‘Here’s a guy who can be knocked down three times and get up each time.’ He said, ‘Most people can’t do that. So he’s a survivor.’ And I tell him he hadn’t really been knocked down, and he said, ‘Well, he will be.’ And that’s what I’ve seen. I’ve seen Dick getting knocked down and always getting up.”

Richard Baker is a central figure in the development of Zen in North America. Elsewhere I compare his role at the San Francisco Zen Center to that of St. Paul in the development of Christianity. His story is often told as something akin to a Shakespearean tragedy: at the age of only 35 becoming abbot of the most prestigious Zen institution in America and then being pressured to resign a dozen years later because of inherent character weaknesses. On the other hand, it can also be seen – as David suggests – as a story of resilience and commitment.

Richard tells me he first encountered Buddhism through his reading, and he developed a romantic idea “of meeting a Chinese Zen Master, but it seemed rather farfetched. I imagined the Zen Master would have a large crowd around him and I would be on the outer fringe of the crowd where I could listen to him and feel his presence.  At the same time, I imagined he would only speak Chinese.”

He was in a bookshop in San Francisco with a friend, and the store owner overheard them talking about a samurai movie they were going to see, and he told them they should visit “Suzuki Sensei” on Page Street who was giving a talk that night. They dropped in on their way to the movie.

“I was completely entranced from that moment on. He was great, unfathomable, present, and also beyond – beyond something I knew anything about. I decided almost right away, if he did take students, I would stay with him as long as he lived.”

Richard is 89 when we speak and is recovering from a stroke. He has aphasia and occasionally struggles with proper nouns. His Dharma heir, Nicole Baden, is with him and assists him from time to time.

I ask what it was about Suzuki Roshi that struck him so powerfully.

He tells me about a person he’d met while in Iran, where he’d gone with the Merchant Marine after spending three years at Harvard. “Maybe he was a Sufi, I don’t know. He must have been in his mid-30s or so. He was just a totally fine person. I was 20 years old or so, and I always kept in mind that here was somebody who clearly was the way human beings ought to be – compassionate, present, accessible. So when I met Suzuki Roshi, he felt a little like the person I had met in the Near East. But Suzuki Roshi had a whole other level. He was a teacher. He had something to teach. He was a person committed to life. An ideal person, he was genuine and humble. He did not come to teach Zen Buddhism in the USA. I would say he came to teach what Zen Buddhism gave to him. It was a way in which it gave him life. I think that is what he taught.

“From the very first, there was a quality about Suzuki Roshi. There was nothing like it. It was an ordinary humility, just being present.  No nonsense.  Yet every possibility was present. He was ready with everything. It felt like his presence penetrated all aspects of my life. He seemed informed and ready. Within one day, or the next few days, I decided, ‘This is the most important person I’ve ever met. I will just give my life to him. I will simply do what this person says.’ So every time I did dokusan with him, I said, ‘Whatever you want me to do, I will do.’ Buddhism was very important to me. Zen was very important to me. But Suzuki Roshi was more important than both.”

Suzuki recognized Baker’s commitment and his organizational talents. Nicole stresses that while “Suzuki Roshi’s presence, his particular presence, had a kind of magnetism that created a movement, it took somebody who created the institutional framework to show other Americans of that generation what it is like to follow this person whole-heartedly. So I think Baker Roshi brought a framework that allowed others to follow Suzuki Roshi.”

“Maybe so,” Richard demurs. “But Suzuki Roshi was, for many people, mind-boggling. They’d come to meet him, and right away, ‘This is a sage. This is a person who’s from another transmission. Another way that appeared.’ So, that’s how I felt, and I just stayed with him ’til the day he died. I even feel I am still staying with him today.”

Through Richard’s activity, Zen Center’s growth was staggering. He found the Tassajara site and managed to finance it. He developed the organic farm at Green Gulch. It was inevitable that as Suzuki came to the end of his life and was giving thought to how Zen Center would continue after his death that he should see Richard as his heir and the future abbot. It was, to some extent, a pragmatic decision. According to David there had been other people that he would have given transmission to as well had he been in better health, but in the end it was only Richard who received formal transmission.

The transition, however, turned out to be more difficult than Suzuki could have imagined. As a result of a book about the history of Zen Center published in 2001, a distorted understanding of what happened has emerged. The book implied that Baker was sexually promiscuous with students. To some extent it is a matter of how one defines “promiscuous,” but David – who, in addition to having been Baker’s jisha for a long while, has been conducting interviews with Zen Center members for decades – denies it.

“During my 12-year tenure as the Abbot of SFZC,” Richard admits, “I had three extramarital relationships. These have sometimes been portrayed as dozens; that’s not true. But the number isn’t the point. What I’ve come to understand very clearly is that these relationships were completely inappropriate because of my role regardless of the genuine emotional connection that existed. If I’d been an artist or a poet, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. But I was an abbot.”

David points out that the more significant issue was Richard’s management style, noting that he was “resented and criticized by his fellow students even before he was abbot.” Richard agrees that there were other reasons people “didn’t like him.”

It was an emotionally fraught period. Soon after leaving Zen Center, Richard visited Taizan Maezumi’s center in Los Angeles. Maezumi was away at the time, and it was Chozen Bays who received him. “Maezumi Roshi and Genpo and Tetsugen [Bernie Glassman] and all the guys happened to be gone,” she recalls, “and it was just us girls running the Zen Center, and so we received Baker Roshi. And I remember very distinctly sitting down with him, me and a couple of other women, and we just had this very down-to-earth conversation. And he said the most interesting thing. He said, talking about the empire he had built and that we had built, and he said something like, ‘You know, everything is impermanent, and it may all come crashing down one day.’ Well, in retrospect, he had left San Francisco Zen Center and was on his way to Tassajara, and everything was coming crashing down, but we didn’t know that. But he said it with such poignancy and emotional depth.”

“Looking back now,” Richard tells me, “if I’d been the person I am today, many of the injuries I caused would not have happened. I had a kind of insecurity and self-importance that I didn’t see at the time. I deeply regret that lack of awareness. It was bad for community dynamics. My behavior caused people to lose their trust in Zen practice. For that, I carry a huge responsibility. For that, I offer my sincerest apologies.”

Although he resigned as abbot of Zen Center, he remained committed to practice and to teaching. At first, he met with a small group of people who remained loyal to him in the Potrero area of San Francisco, then he moved to Santa Fe.

“So,” I ask, “you still felt – what? – an obligation to Suzuki Roshi to keep teaching?”

“There was no question at all. Things happened; everything happened. But even when everything fell apart, the one thing I was clear about was continuing to practice Zen. I wanted to stay with what I received from Suzuki Roshi. This is all I have ever really cared about.”

He maintained the group in Santa Fe for five years, during which time he was also attending meetings of the Lindisfarne Association at their retreat center in Crestone, Colorado. Lindisfarne was a collective of scientists, religious thinkers, and artists who were developing the idea of a new “planetary culture.”

“The people at Crestone couldn’t make it work as a community. They offered it to me in ’83, and I turned it down. Then they offered it again in ’86, and I took it. Lawrence Rockefeller helped me build the Zendo and the Guest House in Crestone. For a while I tried to keep both places going – Santa Fe and Crestone – but eventually I gave the Santa Fe center to Joan Halifax and concentrated on Crestone. One could say I have always been incredibly lucky with people supporting me and with real estate. Crestone is one of the most spectacular sites in the US, ideal, really, for monastic training.”

At the same, he was invited to participate in conferences in Europe.

“Europe in the ’80s was redoing America in the ’60s,” is the way Nicole puts it. “There was a whole circuit. Fritjof Capra, Ralph Metzner, Francisco Varella, Bill Thompson, Baker Roshi and others were part of it. Some of the people from those conferences, like Gerald and Gisela Weischede, came to Santa Fe to practice with Baker Roshi. Later they became Directors at Crestone, and then they started our Johanneshof center in Germany.”

The two communities form what is now called the Dharma Sangha.

“In Germany there are hundreds of people,” Richard says. “In Crestone there are usually five to ten residents: and there are seminars, practice periods, and sesshins twice a year. People come from Santa Fe, Boulder, all over.”

“He’s just talking about residents,” Nicole clarifies. “There’s a larger community around both centers. In order to hold this geographically dispersed community together and also in order to be more active in how to bring contemplative teachings into the world, we started an online platform, the Dharma Academy.  At first, we were suspicious of connecting online with people. But as David Chadwick said about Zoom, ‘It ain’t going away, so, you better learn how to work with it.’ That’s the attitude we took.”

Richard is now retired, and Nicole is the current abbot of both Crestone and the community in Germany. But – as David points out – Richard remains active, “He’s full of energy. He has more energy than me. Vision. Indefatigable. Never stops. Right now, he’s not abbot, but he’s still thinking how to keep Crestone going. How to keep Johanneshof going.”

I ask Richard what the role of a Zen teacher is.

“To be fully present with each person. To have a feeling for the movements in them – from their past, their present, and their potentials in the future. And, once in a while, to say, or to do something, which makes people feel themselves in a new context. A context where they can decide what to do with their life. Buddhist meditation changes our mental space. It changes the dimensions of consciousness, changes the loci of self. And through meditation, teacher and disciple discover together a kind of interior consciousness that is not part of our usual way of being.

“At first, meditation is like discovering a window that looks within and without. We can’t really see through the window. We can’t see past the endless forms of self trying to come into better balance. However, we feel something through the window, and meditating keeps this window open. At some point, the student begins to feel that the teacher is beside them, looking through the same window.

“Sometimes the teacher is on the other side of it, planting seeds in a new kind of garden. It takes faith in practice – and in the teacher – before it becomes our shared garden, the student’s garden, the teacher’s garden, and everyone’s garden too, where we plant and cultivate together. That’s my job. To be beside a person at the window. And eventually, to garden together.”

“And the people who come to one of these centers, what draws them?”

“People come for many reasons. Some come because of an emotional crisis or loss. Some come because a friend introduced them and they found they liked meditative sitting. But often, I’ve observed over nearly sixty years, people look for something like Zen practice because they have lost their cultural story.  They’ve had experiences – sometimes non-normative, sometimes what you might call paranormal – that their culture couldn’t explain.  Sometimes such experiences are locked away.  Sometimes they make one crazy.  Sometimes they are held in the background, awaiting hints of confirmation.  And sometimes that confirmation arrives in the simple act of not-moving in meditation.

“There are also practical reasons. Zen practice gives you a chance to observe, accept, develop, and intervene within your emotional habits and psychological patterns. If your mind becomes freer, more open, more flexible, and more integrated in its functioning, then our deepest intentions and emotions have a wider field in which to play and evolve and change us into the person we feel most satisfied being.

“And then – this is harder to explain – joy returns to ordinary things. Perceiving and thinking return to their roots in appreciation. We often lose touch with such simple things as ease, rest, caring, the sound of birds, a leaf, another person, the shine of water, the sound of rain, the wideness of this spacious earth.

“Growing up, I had grown away from much of the joy I had known as a child.  Meditation brought joy back, first as a taste, then as a presence that has become the basis of living. There is a feeling of connectedness with people even when first meeting them, familiarity with situations even when situations are new. You feel you belong in and to this world. You feel at home. This is a direct experience of interdependence, and it is the foundation of compassion.”

At the end of our conversation, he talks about the process of reconciliation now taking place with the San Francisco Zen Center. “It took forty years,” he notes. “But now it seems like it was waiting to happen.

“Nicole initiated the process. She reached out first to the people directly involved, then to the leadership at San Francisco Zen Center. She wanted to understand the whole story before accepting the responsibility of continuing my work.

“And then there has been a generational shift. The current leadership is no longer the generation of the conflict. The new leaders have different intentions. They knew it wasn’t good for either sangha to keep functioning in the shadow of an unresolved conflict. What moved me was the feeling I got from the younger generation: I felt that they expected their teachers to figure this out, to resolve these conflicts, to learn from the past, and to heal wounds that were inflicted. And they were right. If we as practitioners are not able to clean up our conflicts and the harm we create, to learn from our mistakes, to become better human beings, who is? That’s the whole point of practice. If Zen doesn’t help us do that, what is it for?”

“So I am very grateful. I feel there is a realistic understanding of the past. When I had my stroke, it happened at the San Francisco Zen Center, Green Gulch. The people there saved my life. They nurtured me back to health in San Francisco, in the same little apartment where I had accompanied Suzuki Roshi in dying. It’s actually the Abbot’s apartment! So, it was a big honor that Abbot Mako Voelkel of City Center and Central Abbot David Zimmerman allowed me and Nicole to stay in this apartment for two weeks. That’s where I came back to life after my stroke. That time resolved many things. Now it’s a mutual relationship, a real bond. The Sangha at Zen Center treats me and the students from our community like family.”

“There are still people who think your story ended in 1983, when you left Zen Center,” I point out. “What is it that you’d like people to know who are only familiar with that part of the story?”

“Well, I wish they’d know the Dharma Sangha Centers! I don’t care much about my personal story, but I do care about the continuation of the lineage. The main thing to know is my commitment – to Suzuki Roshi and to continuing the Dharma. That never changed. That’s the only story there is, really.”

Bluegrass Zen –

I was a member of an amateur bluegrass group while in university, so am charmed by the idea that there is Bluegrass Zen community in Lexington, Kentucky. It’s resident teacher, David Parks, was born in Phoenix, Arizona but grew up in Kentucky.

“When I was born, my father was a doctor with the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the Tohono O’odham reservation. Shortly after I was born, he went back to Boston to do a psychiatric residency. Dad was a spiritual sort of guy and fell in with the Vedanta Society at BU. Swami Akhilananda was the Swami there at the time. I look at Swami Akhilananda as my spiritual grandfather. My father wanted to become a Vedanta monk or a Hindu monk. And Swami Akhilananda said, ‘No, no, no, no, no. You’re Western; you’re a Christian, and maybe you should go to seminary instead of getting the saffron robes.’ And he considered that, but then he became the psychiatrist for the divinity students up at Harvard Divinity School. So, the spiritual search was important to my dad, and my mother too. They meditated before it was a thing. I grew up with people who were meditating every day. I look at that as an important formative thing. It was the norm rather than, ‘Oh, this is something cool we’re gonna try.’”

David’s father was a friend of Walter Pahnke who organized the Good Friday experiment in 1962 during which divinity students were given psilocybin to see if it were able to induce mystical experience. The test was supervised by the psychedelic pioneers, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Baba Ram Dass).

“So my dad was part of the early psychedelic thing before it was illegal. He was on the cutting edge of psychospiritual exploration. He became a leader in the United States in psychosynthesis, a transpersonal psychology not unlike Jung and positing a transpersonal self that linked everybody together. In the house where I grew up people were meditating, talking about spiritual growth, pondering what it is like to be human. Sometimes my dad would wander a bit far into the margins. My mother was always there to anchor him, ground him in his explorations. All that’s background. My upbringing was really eclectic spiritually and – this is important – based in experience. That was at home. At the same time, here in Kentucky, the religious environment is based on belief about right and wrong, heaven and hell – more or less a morality rather than a spirituality – and I grew up with all my friends around me convinced I was gonna go to Hell ’cause I hadn’t been baptized.”

“Was that environment meaningful to you?” I ask.

“It was meaningful, and it was certainly unique. I became a minister later; it was certainly unique among my minister colleagues. And somewhat unique among the Zen people that I’ve come across. As Zen has come into this country, Zen folks have a mystical/spiritual thing going on, to be sure, but often it’s through a psychological lens, and mine actually wasn’t like that. Even though my father was a psychiatrist, I felt myself tending more in the direction of the religious. The question for me has been, ‘What is this universe and how do I fit in?’ That seems to me to be a religious question. And most likely because of the religious environment I was in, that question moved me towards God, but not God as someone to believe in or someone at all, but as an experience of the wonder and mystery.”

His ministry was in the United Church of Christ, which – he tells me – is “a non-doctrinal, non-creedal liberal protestant church in the US.”

He explains that he felt drawn to the ministry while in college.

“I went to this small college in Kentucky – Centre College – and I met two professors there. You know, I’d been sort of in this conservative theological environment, and I got to Centre, and I thought, ‘Oh! People can think and be Christians too! So I hit the religion courses hard, World Religions, Bible, Native American Religions, Indian Philosophy. And I’d been meditating on a regular basis since I was 15 years old. That was still a part of my life. After college I thought, ‘What am I gonna do?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’ll go to seminary.’ It was almost that simple. I wanted to study religion, so I decided to go to Yale. And I was there for four years; receiving two degrees, a Master of Divinity and a Master of Arts in Religion.

“Yale is an interdenominational seminary, but it was Christian. And given my background, my family and the sort of things I was interested in, it was bit conservative. Perseverance furthers and I graduated. And though I had spent four years in a professional school training ministers, I did not have a strong sense that I was going to enter the ministry. We have a koan that goes, ‘The great Way is not difficult, simply avoid picking and choosing.’ Well, I guess that is what I did. Without strong preference, a life-long desire, or even a ‘call,’ I eventually decided, ‘I’ll go ahead and be a minister.’ And I served for ten years in rural Pennsylvania. It was a fairly fundamentalist environment in terms of theology, but I knew the mind-set, being from Kentucky. And it was ten good years with the people of Pennsylvania. I’d married my last year of seminary, and we went there together serving half-time in a hospital chaplaincy and half-time in a parish. After Pennsylvania I was ten years in Massachusetts and then seventeen years in California.”

I wonder if the faith of the people he ministered to was the same as his own belief.

“Well, see that’s why I finally left the ministry in 2016. There were many reasons, but at root it came down to belief. I felt like part of the minister’s job was carrying everybody’s belief for them, whether they had that belief or not. But more importantly, I was carrying beliefs that I didn’t have for myself. And there were expectations of me to believe a certain way and act a certain way. And I said, ‘I can’t do that anymore.’”

One of his postings had been at the First Congregational Church of Santa Rosa, California, where he served for fourteen years. He had already practiced for a bit with the Korean Zen teacher, Seung Sahn, during a posting in New England, but then became – as he puts it – “unattached to the Zen side of things for a while, but later it became important for me to find a sangha and a teacher. Along came Pacific Zen and John Tarrant right there in Santa Rosa.

“I found John very human, and most importantly, interested and available. John had time for me as I explored my life in dialogue with the koans. Whenever you go into the room for an interview with John, somebody had just been in before you, and you go in and he looks up from whatever he is involved with in the moment, and then he’s just totally there for you. I had gone through a rough patch in the early 2010’s, and I had weekly meetings with John. I’d bring him coffee and we’d sit together as I spun that week’s tale of woe. He was patient with me. The discovery was always to be my own. But he called the bullshit, the ways that I would get away with myself, attaching to whatever demons might show up. That was hard but I appreciate John’s unwavering alliance with my awakening. He can be hard, but he was uncompromising in the Dharma. But, as I look at it, whatever seemed hard, this path, it was because it was hard in my own heart, not because of the difficulty I was having with John. And that’s one thing I’ve found in my teaching is I’m here for the student even when the student’s not here for themselves in the deepest way.”

The Pacific Zen Institute focuses on koan work in a fairly informal fashion. David tells me that he found koans sometimes easy but at other times rather daunting.

“So I would pass them, and there was kind of a thrill, and, ‘I’m good at this.’ So right away there was the self image, ‘I am good at this.’ But something more subtle was going on, something that is hard to put in words. Something like a grammar of the heart, a vocabulary beyond the words of the koans, a vocabulary of spirit, if you will, was forming. The koans give you a pathway, a way of relating the vastness of things, an approach to my questioning, ‘What is this and how do I fit in?’ Koans are a relationship that always opens. They are trustworthy like that, and bottomless. I never fully exhaust what they have to offer. Because of this, when I work with students now it’s like – God! – I learn so much from what they say. The koan’s just limitless in terms of what it can offer. And so my relationship with you becomes my relationship with the koan becomes my relationship with myself. On the other hand, I’d sorta mastered the Christian thing, and I was doing pretty well with it. But it didn’t . . . You could see in the Bible and in the person of Jesus, even Paul, you could see, ‘Oh, he’s got something.’ But the gateways weren’t there.”

I ask how it was he returned to Kentucky.

“My father was sick, and my marriage was ending. And my church . . . I was beginning to think I was carrying things for them that I didn’t believe myself, and I was uncomfortable doing that anymore. Things were in transition, reaching an end. In 2016, my father’s second wife got a brain tumor and died. I was back and forth from California for much of that. After she died, my dad said, ‘Now my wife’s gone, what am I gonna do?’ I said, ‘Well, I could move here.’” He smiles at the memory. “Those words were a surprise to me. My life, as I knew it, had sort of disappeared. So I ended up back here in Kentucky. And I don’t regret it at all. It feels more like home.”

I ask if he still self-identified as a Christian minister when he made the move.

“That is a question that comes up again and again. People look for a label to hang on me. ‘Are you a Buddhist or a Christian?’ I usually stick out my hand as to shake and say, ‘Hi, my name is David.’ When I arrived here I had already been teaching. John had made a sensei, and I had a small meditation group at the church in Santa Rosa. Interestingly, while I felt committed to that small group, I did not feel a strong connection to my work at the church anymore. There wasn’t much for me to hold onto there. So I drifted away. The Unitarian Church in Lexington allowed me to run a Zen group, and that’s how Bluegrass Zen started. I knew there was a tradition of that, Zen groups finding a home beneath UU roofs. And so I went and asked them, and they said, ‘Sure.’ And eventually the minister became a student of mine. So I had a place, and then they sort of embraced it.”

“Why did you want to do that? Get a group started?”

“Oh, a couple of reasons, in no specific order. When I moved into Christian ministry, I said there was not a deep sense of call. Well, here there was. In retirement I needed something to do and there is something about the heart, when it is open it wants to reach people. If not that, what is all this for?”

“So you establish this group in Kentucky. What do you see your role as?”

“I see the teacher/student relationship as a mutual relationship. We each can live into the relationship as it opens to the heart of things. In our meetings, however, this mutual relationship is for the one, the student. I do not look to students for my spiritual growth. I have a role inside that group of people. I’ve experienced and studied. My whole life I have been oriented towards spirit. Either in person or on Zoom, I meet people in individual interviews, using the koans as a gateway for the conversation. Together we explore how deeply we can dive into the relationship as it opens into Life’s vastness or – as the Daoist might say – Way. This is a profound meeting beyond the reach of self-image or personality or any defining characteristic. My effort in this exploration, again, is for the student. I do carry a certain ‘authority’ culturally and personally for the student. Sometimes that might interfere as hearts open. But it becomes grist for the mill and then a gate for further discovery as we continue on the path to an open heart.”

“What is it that you hope for for the people who come to you?”’

“That they can touch grace. That they can touch love. That they can be present to their own lives.”

“You admit that you carry a certain authority both culturally and personally for the student. I’m guessing that’s because you’ve got the label ‘roshi’ now tacked onto your name.”

“There are assumptions that live in the culture about Zen and about teachers. Sometimes people think I have something that I can give them. There’s one guy who finally got disillusioned and said I wasn’t enlightened enough and quit. And so I guess he had some expectation of a perfectly enlightened being who could pass along whatever. What I hope that I can do is live an authentic life. It’s like you hear those stories of Suzuki Roshi where he’s just one of the gang laying the rocks in a wall or whatever. I’d like to be that sort of person. And I’d like to be the person that you can come to, and we can talk about the deeper things, and that we can enter into a koan together and see what it can do for us.”

“And what about the people there in Lexington who come to you. What are they looking for?”

“Well, enlightenment.” We both chuckle at that. “Nah, let’s be honest about it. They’re looking for peace. And the culture tells them, ‘Oh, yes, you meditate, and you don’t have thoughts, and you don’t get mad. You don’t do this; you don’t do that.’ They’re looking for that when they show up. And I say, ‘Well, that’s nice. You will have experiences in meditation where it feels like that’s the case. But then you go back into your life. What I’m interested in is helping you move into that life.’”

“I’m guessing at least some of the people who come to you still self-identify as Christian. What can Christians get out of Zen?”

“So there’s a place for Zen as a contemplative tradition in Western culture. I think it’s headed to the same place John of the Cross went with The Dark Night, going the same place that the anonymous author went with The Cloud of Unknowing. So there is a contemplative tradition within our western heritage, largely available to monastics, as it was in China and Japan. What I think Zen adds to the equation for us is its emphasis on practice. You can believe what you want, that’s fine. Only you’ve got to practice. I have found meditation and koan practice effective in my life, and I think – in our current Christian climate with its emphasis on belief and morality – it can be so for others. Zen provides a practice that is effective and one that can be transformative for religion in America. Currently Bluegrass Zen meets in a sanctuary of a Unitarian Church in Lexington. Musing one day with my Unitarian minister friend, I said ‘This is a practice for Unitarians. In Zen we don’t ask you to believe anything. We offer no certainties. Instead, we point you into the not known, the uncertain dark. Pagans will ask you to believe something; Christians do. But we don’t ask you to believe anything.’ There is the rich potential of that, and the nature of this world is that it always is coming towards us. Always coming. Calling to us to open our hearts. A phrase that I often use from the gospels is that part in the gospel of John where Jesus says, ‘I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.’ Taking the ego of Jesus out of that statement – which I believe it is safe to do – you can say that ‘the abundant life’ wants to be experienced. And as I live life, I find that I am a part of all this . . . uh . .  . It’s even deeper than being a part of it, because that still denotes some kind of separation. There is no separation. When Dongshan was about to go on pilgrimage, he asked his teacher Yunyan what he should tell others about his teaching, Yunyan said, ‘Just this is it.’

“And koans . . . God, what a rich literary tradition! It’s like they’re really alive. You know, you’re walkin’ through a day and then all of a sudden one comes to you. And it’s like, ‘Okay. Thank you.’ And that’s what I like about the curriculum. It’s not like you go through it one time. The first time is like an introduction to a whole new set of friends. Three hundred friends, if you will. And you’re going to have a lifetime relationship with those friends. And they will change your heart. They will change your life. John uses the metaphor that they are like being with a dog. You know? The koans are just with you, following you around. When you’re with your dog, it’s a different life than when you’re not with your dog. When you’re with your koan, it’s a different life. And the wonder of it is what you discover in relationship with that koan. That dog? It is really just a relationship with yourself. It’s your life, and as you get out of the way, life opens. And as Bob Dylan said, ‘It’s life and life only.’ Only life, just this is it.”

Seven Thunders –

Leonard Marcel is a founding member – and current teacher – of Seven Thunders Zen Sangha in Portland, Oregon. He is also a retired psychiatrist and Jungian analyst. He grew up in Brooklyn, ten blocks away from Bernie Glassman’s home neighborhood. “We never knew each other, and, of course, he died a few years ago, but we were about the same age.”

He was raised in a Catholic family and still goes to church. “But not in the same way. So Catholic background, Catholic education. Had the nuns in grade school and the Jesuits in high school and college and medical school.”

I ask if it meant anything to him.

“It did. I valued that education and that upbringing in a particular tradition. I think it’s important for children to have an upbringing in a particular tradition even if they don’t agree with it and rebel against it. It gives them a basis for values and for how to live. They can do what they want with it later, although as Jung pointed out, if one moves away from one’s natal tradition, it is important for emotional health in adulthood to resolve any unfinished conflicts related to moving away.

“I also valued the emphasis on the eucharist as the ‘real presence,’ the Christ-spirit present and alive in each person. And so I took that with me as I was growing up. At the same time, there was something missing. It wasn’t enough.

“Another thing I really liked about my childhood experience of Catholicism was that as an altar boy we had First Friday adoration. And I loved when the church was dark and it was just the candles and the Blessèd Sacrament. And there were two of us young kids – took turns, an hour at a time – just being there in silence and stillness. That spoke to me very deeply. It was my first experience with something akin to meditation. I think, when the time was ripe, that experience moved me on the path towards Zen.”

His introduction to Jung – and the inspiration for his career – came when he was 17 and still in high school. “The Atlantic Monthly published a series of pre-publication excerpts from C. G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. And there was a candystore/soda shop near our house where I often went to get sports magazines and things like that. So, I was standing there in front of the newsstand with all these magazines, and I see this on the bottom row, and it sparks my curiosity. So,I started reading it. I read the whole article standing there. I came back the next month and read the next article. And I thought, ‘That would be a fine career, a fine way to help people and make a living.’”

After high school he went to the Jesuit-run Georgetown University and followed that by attending medical school in Omaha. “Creighton, which was also run by the Jesuits.”

He first learned about Zen through the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton.

“You may recall that in those years – ’50s/’60s, at least until ’68 – Thomas Merton was well-known worldwide and certainly within the Catholic community. So, I knew that there was this thing called Zen out there and that Merton had been attracted to it.”

But it was not yet something he felt drawn to. Then in 1980 – while he was in private practice in Portland – “I had a patient who said to me, ‘My father goes out to the Trappist abbey for his retreats.’ I thought, ‘Hunh! There’s a Trappist abbey around here. I never knew that.’ So, I started going there. It’s forty-five minutes from Portland, a Cistercian Abbey, Our Lady of Guadalupe. I started making private retreats there whenever I had a free weekend. And after three or four of those, the guest master said, ‘You know, with your interest, I think you’d like to meet our abbot.’ And this was Bernard McVeigh. And Bernard was the one who invited Robert Aitken to come and lead the first sesshin in Oregon in ’79. Bernard was very interested in Zen, and so I met Bernard, and we became good friends. And he invited me, when I was there, to do zazen with the monks at 3:00 in the morning before their first service in the church. So that’s how I came to Zen, through Merton and through Bernard McVeigh.”

The draw – as when he had been an altar boy – was sitting in silence. I ask what it was about that that attracted him.

“I cannot put it into words. It was something very profound. Very deep. It was a clearing away of the busyness of the mind and touching something beyond words. There was something powerful in the silence and stillness, something foundational.”

In 1984, Abbot Bernard announced that a German Benedictine monk and Zen Master, Willigis Jäger, was going to lead a Zen sesshin in Portland, and he encouraged me to go.

“So, I went to sesshin with Willigis. And by the morning of the third day, my legs were killing me.” He’s laughing as his speaks. “And I said to myself, ‘You’re not going to get out of here alive.’ But I looked around, and there were sixty people, and they all seemed to be sitting like little stone Buddhas. I didn’t know that they were all thinking the same thing, but I said, ‘If they’re not gonna leave, I’m not gonna leave.’ And you know how it is. The second half of a sesshin always goes more smoothly. And then you start thinking about, ‘When’s the next one?’ That’s how I got started.”

Willigis came to the Pacific Northwest regularly, leading both retreats in Catholic contemplative prayer and Zen. By 1987, however, he was so busy in Germany it was difficult to continue the American visits. So that year he brought Pat Hawk with him.

“Pat was not the Zen Master that I had in mind. He was from a different mold. He was quiet – a man of few words – but he always was right to the point. He had a delightfully dry wit.” Willigis turned responsibility for his American students – Leonard included – over to Pat. “And I became Pat’s first koan student.”

“Was that at your initiative or his?”

“It was at his. I didn’t know what a koan was. I was just a happy Zen student going along. I had a busy medical practice. I was doing this, and it seemed to be enriching my spiritual life. I liked koans, always have, but it took me a while really to get the presentational aspect of koans. They were engaging, and I felt, ‘There’s something here that I want to get, and I can’t get to it in my usual way.’ You know, we professionals often have lots of trouble with koans because we are so left-brain oriented. D. T. Suzuki once said that koans are something that keeps the mind engaged while something more important is going on under the surface.”

After Leonard had spent a couple of years travelling to Seattle to attend retreats with Willigis and then  Pat, Abbot Bernard suggested he should consider establishing something in Portland.

“Bernard was in contact with all sorts of lay people – for a cloistered monk, he knew more lay people – so he said to me, ‘You know, there are a lot of people around here who would like to sit together more than once a year with Willigis.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you get them together, and, if you do that, I’ll give you a place here in the monastery where you can sit.’ A couple of weeks later I called a few people, and we had a little organizational meeting, and started sitting at the Trappist Abbey in August of 1985 – we just had our 40^th anniversary – sitting on the first Saturday of every month for contemplative prayer practice. That was the beginning of the group that has subsequently become our Seven Thunders Sangha. So that group started forming and gradually increased in number. And because Pat and Willigis were both Catholic priests and Zen Masters, we’ve always had dual programs for spiritual practice. We offer Christian contemplative sittings on the first Saturday of every month, and we do two Christian intensive retreats – several day retreats – twice a year. And we do weekly Zen sittings and zazenkai and sesshin. But we do not combine the forms. Some of our members just follow the Zen Buddhist program, others the Christian contemplative program and still others, like myself, are ‘crossovers’.”

Then in 1992, Leonard left the United States.

“I had been the representative from Oregon to the General Assembly of the American Psychiatric Association in Washington DC. In that capacity, I would go back to Washington three times a year, and we’d have our meetings, and then I would come back and report to the members of the Oregon Psychiatric Association. In going back to Washington, I got to know people at APA headquarters, and knew one fellow who contacted me in 1992, and he said, ‘How would you like to work in Saudi Arabia?’ And I said, ‘Oh, well, probably not.’ And he said, ‘Well, let me tell you about this. The Saudi Arabian Oil Company has a big medical center. They have a lot of Western ex-patriot employees. They’ve been asking for a Western psychiatrist. They’ve opened up a new position. I think you’d be a good fit.’ So I went to Pat, and I said, ‘This has come up. I’m not sure what to do.’ And he just very directly said, ‘They need you.’ And so, I sold my practice to one of my office colleagues, and I went to Saudi Arabia – I thought it would be a year or two – just to have a change of pace and assess the need. I was there for ten years. I would go back to Amarillo or Tucson – after Pat moved there – and I would sit sesshin with him at least twice a year. And in-between times we would carry on our koan work by phone. This was before Zoom.”

He explains that the oil company had been looking for someone to work with, “the Western employees and their families. It was the usual mental health problems: anxiety, depression, marital difficulties, whatever, and so the Western employees were asking for someone of their own culture.”

I express surprise he was able to maintain his practice with Pat throughout this period, and he tells me he even started a small sitting group in Arabia. “Mostly for Westerners, and it was very much an underground group because there’s a lot of sensitivity in Arabia about other religions. So sometimes people would come to me and say, ‘I hear you have a Zen Buddhist group.’ And I would say, ‘No. It’s just a meditation group.’ The Saudis were okay with meditation. They could see that as part of general health care. But if we called it ‘Zen’ or anything to do with Buddhism, that was not acceptable. Eventually, from this group, a coterie of serious American practitioners coalesced, so that we were able to have weekly zazen and monthly zazenkai there. A few of those people have continued attending Seven Thunders events over these thirty years.”

During one of his visits back to the United States, Pat asked him, “‘Are you taking notes on your koan work?’ And I said, ‘No. Should I be?’ He said, ‘Well, when you’re on a teaching track it’s a good thing to do.’ And I said, ‘Am I on a teaching track?’”

“It was a surprise to you?” I ask. “Was it something you were open to?”

“I wasn’t quite sure what it was going to entail, but it seemed to me that it was important, and, if he felt I had something to offer to people, not just as a clinician but as a spiritual guide, I wanted to see what that would entail and to what it would lead.”

He began to attend Diamond Sangha Teachers’ meetings, and through them met Rolf Drosten, a teacher from Germany who is one of Robert Aitkens’ Dharma heirs. “He invited me to co-lead sesshin with him in Germany twice a year, which was very generous of him and was an important part of my teacher training. We did that from 1998 to 2003. In 2001, Pat came to Germany to perform a final transmission for me. In 2003, I came back to Oregon. Now by this time, Pat had been diagnosed with the cancer and was slowly declining. So, when I came back, I began to assume more of the teaching responsibilities at Seven Thunders.”

I have interviewed several Zen teachers who are also therapists or analysts, and I inevitably ask them to define what distinguishes the two traditions.

Leonard tells me, “Koun Yamada Roshi, my great-grandfather in the Dharma, said that Zen is ‘perfection of character’ and that is exactly correct. I would add that it is also to help a person find out who he or she really is beyond all the roles we all play; beyond all the ways one has defined oneself over the years. And to clear the mind and heart from all that has been sticking, from all of our self-centered concepts and cherished opinions, so that an experience of the ultimate dimension – what Buddhism calls ‘emptiness’ – may be possible.

“Psychotherapy is to help you resolve any conflicts, difficulties, complexes you may have, and in the process get to know yourself better. While psychotherapy helps to build and strengthen an ego-self, Zen requires taking the further step of relinquishing that artificially constructed sense of self in order to experience the interconnectedness of life.”

“Okay,” I say, pursuing it a little further, “if I came to you as a Zen teacher, what am I most likely looking for?”

“We are all suffering. We are all wounded in some way. Some people are looking for a spiritual path that they’ve never felt comfortable with previously. Some of them are looking for whatever it is they think ‘enlightenment’ is. Some of them are looking for just a way to feel more centered and at peace.”

“And if someone comes to you as a psychiatrist, what are they looking for”

“Ways to resolve their conflicts or the patterns that keep repeating in their lives or the relationship difficulties they keep getting into, or help with recurrent depression, or ways to deal with anxiety. Some have more serious mental health problems that require medication in addition to psychotherapy.”

For Leonard, Zen is “the foundation of all religions. I think it is that from which all religions spring.

“You view it as something more than a sect of Japanese Buddhism?”

“Yes, It is a sect of Japanese Buddhism, but Zen in its purest form is foundational.”

“Something universal?”

“A universal source for a life of faith, a life of upright centeredness, a life of a bright awareness to the interconnectedness of all existence.”

I want to make sure I’m not misinterpreting him. “So, a kind of innate capacity or potential in people? Every dog has Buddha nature?”

“Yes. I think everybody is called to a Zen life or a contemplative life. Most people don’t pay attention to the call, but I think it’s there in each one of us.”

“What has this practice done for you?”

“It gets me back to basics. Just this straight back. Just this breath. Just this moment. This is the only moment in which I am alive. If I am not present to this moment, where is my life? It’s not an hour ago when we started talking. It’s not tomorrow. It’s only right now. That is  the purity of Zen. Apart from all the doctrinal and metaphysical teachings. Right here. Right now. It has also given me a clear way to live an upright life that is helpful to others.”

“And if right here, right now I am miserable. I’ve got cancer. My wife has left me. The bank’s foreclosing on my house. My dog died.”

“Yes. And every day is still a good day. How is that so?”

We both laugh.

“As a teacher,” I ask, “what is it that you hope for for the people who seek you out?”

“That they will awaken to the true nature of reality and who they really are.”

“And what is it that they hope for from you? What do they look to you for?”

“Well, I’m sure a lot of them look to me for the answers. So, I always point them back, and I always say, ‘The answer is inside of you.’ How sad that people ignore the near and search for truth afar, as Hakuin tells us. What I hope for is that they will learn to trust their own experience and stand on their own two feet.”

Atlanta Soto Zen Center –

Taiun Michael Elliston is the founder and guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Georgia.

He grew up in Centralia, Illinois. “Named after the Illinois Central Railroad. Due east of St. Louis, about 300 miles south of Chicago. Pretty much in the middle of the state,” he tells me.

His family weren’t actively religious, although, “They would drop us off at Sunday School. I actually went through baptism. I had some friends who were in the church. They went through baptism, so I went through baptism.”

I ask if it meant anything to him.

“Not as much as it meant to them. One guy, a friend of mine, became very emotional. So it was obviously deeply meaningful for him. Then an incident came about where you were expected to tithe, to bring in some kind of donation that you could afford. I think I was bringing fifty cents or something, and one time I couldn’t. We didn’t have enough money for me to take it to church, so it was a little embarrassing. And the teachings were strange for me. It was all just belief-based, of course, and it was a story about reality, a creation myth and all that. And it was like – you know – that could be true, but it just seemed very remote.

“We lived on a small farm – 20 acres – and had a barn and some sheds. We didn’t own the place; we rented it. And there was an opening between all the buildings out back which was overgrown, almost like a jungle, vines and everything. My sister said she’d come out there, and I’d be sitting on a chair in the middle of that space just staring into space. I was standing on my head and walking around on my knees with my legs crossed, just getting into yoga as a 6/7/8-year old without knowing what it was. So I spent a lot of time in isolation. Anecdotally, folks who are recognized as being creative, having careers in the arts, seem to share this trait, a lot of time alone as a child. You learn to entertain yourself.”

Michael is a visual artist. His brother and father were jazz musician. “Jazz was very big before rock-’n’-roll came along,” he reminds me. “My brother was very well known in Chicago; he played all the big jazz clubs there. So he had a lot of musician friends, and the LSD revolution was happening. And one of his drummer friends and I were talking, and I mentioned LSD, and he said, ‘Oh, I don’t do that anymore. I just do Zen.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s interesting. Tell me about that.’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you come this weekend? I’m going this weekend.’ So, I went with him and met Soyu Matsuoka Roshi, my teacher. And, as we say, the rest is history. I hadn’t read much about Zen. I’d read a little bit. But I was impressed by his warmth and his friendliness. His down-to-earth-ness and so on.”

Michael became a regular attendee,

“What you did when you came in, you had a place to put your shoes and things. It was a railroad apartment, and what would be the living room/dining room was the zendo. The altar was against the far wall of the dining room. And the baths and kitchen and his bedroom and stuff were in the back, and there was a back porch – typical railroad apartment, brownstone three storey walk up – and afterwards we’d sit back there and have tea, and he would talk a little bit; he would answer questions. It was mostly guys about my age. It was also hippie-dippy time, and Matsuoka Roshi would meet us in the vestibule by the door with a basket of clean socks. Because you had these – he couldn’t understand this at all – you had these guys walking in off Halstead Street bare-footed walking into his carpeted living room to learn meditation, sitting on his cushions with their filthy feet and legs. So there was this big basket of white socks, and he’d give each person a pair of socks to put on before they could come in. He was very fastidious, like most Japanese. And some of the Western American attitudes just really astonished and repelled him.”

Michael was studying Bauhaus Design at Illinois Tech at the time, and he discovered that Zen made a lot of sense in that context.

“Bauhaus was a design school set up to humanize the outputs of the industrial revolution. The whole foundation – the first-year approach – is immersion. You are immersed in certain media like stone, clay, plaster, wood, drawing, painting. In that way you sort of absorb the way in which physical media work.”

Meditation, he recognized, was another form of immersion. “So immersion in consciousness as a medium, I recognized that it was something familiar. ‘Oh! That’s what we’re doing here. I see what we’re doing.’ The theory is that if you sit still enough, straight enough, long enough, your own consciousness will start to break down. It will deconstruct. This is common in Zen teaching; the reality that we experience is actually a construct of the mind. And the only way to get past that construct is to sit still enough, straight enough, for long enough. The closest thing to sensory deprivation that they would have had back in India or China or Japan and so forth. As the meditator sits facing a blank wall, everything starts to break down. And so I could see it started happening right away. All those methods in the Bauhaus about training the senses had a one-to-one correlation with Zen.”

Fairly quickly Matsuoka recognized that Michael was someone he could rely upon.

“I started taking on teaching assignments. The schedule was Sundays, 10:00 and 2:00; there’d be two different groups coming, 10:00 in the morning and 2:00 in the afternoon. And then Tuesday and Thursday evenings. And that was it other than special meetings. We’d go out – he’d speak at the YMCA – he liked me to accompany him. He could see I’m articulate. He’d bring me to the public talks, and I would field the questions. The Q & A at the end. He liked the way I answered the questions; he wasn’t that comfortable with that kind of dialogue. He would give the talk, and he wrote them out so that he could read them in his thick Japanese accent.”

Then one day in 1967 or ‘68 – “Just before I moved to Atlanta, Matsuoka Roshi took me aside and, said, ‘You must become a priest. Not for yourself, but so that others will listen to you. We live in a credentialed society. If you don’t have credentials, no one will listen.’

“So I said, ‘Okay,’ and we did my ceremony. We did a discipleship  ceremony, and later a priesthood ceremony.”

In 1970, an employment opportunity took Michael to Atlanta. When Michael moved to Georgia, Matsukoka turned the Chicago community over to his heir, Richard Langlois, and moved to California.

“I was only with Matsuoka Roshi in Chicago from the beginning 1965 to 1970 when we both left. It was a little over a five-year stint in Chicago.”  

I ask how he established the Zen community in Atlanta.

“There were places in Atlanta that were dedicated to offering such programs. I found a big house in a residential neighborhood, where they had rooms dedicated to things like yoga classes, where I began offering meditation sessions. It was kind of informal. So after some time floating around from place to place, I went to the Unitarian Church on Cliff Valley Way, the biggest Unitarian Church at that time in Atlanta. And somehow I found out that they had a Buddhist study group. I don’t remember all the details. Sure enough they were happy with allowing me to start a sitting group. In a church, you typically find rooms full of furniture. I would push the furniture back, clearing a space, carrying big garbage bags full of zafus in for the sitting, and taking them out at the end, right? Set up; take down; repeat. Until, after some time, they give you your own room because enough church members are now participating.

“By 1975, I had a regular group of Zen followers. We were meeting in lofts and storefronts, places like that. We found a little corner shop in the Candler Park neighborhood where the owner had a jewelry shop in one part of it. There was an area that used to be the service bay – it had once been a service station – and that was our sitting room for a long time. It was a room something like 15 x 15 feet square. Later we moved to the location where we are now. where we have a larger zendo connected to two small bungalows.”

Michael admits he was fairly isolated from other Soto teachers at the time because Matsuoka had ceased supporting the Soto-shu in North America and, as a consequence, his Dharma heirs were not registered in Japan. But, as Matsuoka put it, we live in a “credentialed society.” So Michael took steps to regularize his situation with the help of Barbara Kohn of the San Francisco Zen Center and Shohaku Okumura who was located in Bloomington, Indiana.

“Barbara Kohn had students in the southeast inviting her here. When we moved in 2000 to the new space, I invited her to use our space, so she started coming there, and her students would come. She did a couple of my interim ceremonies there, the novice priest or black robe ceremony called Shukke Tokudo.” When she learned Michael was not officially associated with the Soto community in North America, she offered to help. “She was very practically oriented, very down-to-earth. She said, ‘Well, we can fix this. You should be recognized. You should have credit for time served.’ She started putting it all together. I went and met Okumura Roshi in Asheville at a friend’s house, hosted by one of our members from Candler Park days who had moved to Asheville. Okumura Roshi was visiting Asheville, giving talks on translating poetry derived from Dogen’s poems about the Lotus Sutra. And he was asking us for suggestions on the translations. I had attended a talk he gave in Palo Alto, so he and I knew each other vaguely by the time Barbara talked to him about me. She talked to me about going through the transmission ceremony on a formal basis, and training in the advanced ceremonies, or priest protocols which she called forms. She said I should go spend a 90-day practice period at Austin Zen Center with her, in the middle of the summer of 2007.”

It wasn’t feasible, but Okumura stepped in and agreed to do the ceremony. It was Okumura’s intention that Michael – as he put it – not “do anything to break off the Matsuoka line. He said, ‘If you go back to Japan and train under another lineage, that cuts off the Matsuoka line.’ So what he did for me  by doing my transmission ceremony, as I understand, does not cut off that line. I still represent the Matsuoka line – lineage – but at the same time I am also in the Sawaki-Uchiyama lineage through Okumura.”

Okumura came to Atlanta for seven days to conduct the ceremony. “There’s a seven-day version and there’s a twenty-one-day version, in Japan. We opted, naturally, to do the seven-day version. He was in residence for that whole week. I painted the large silk certificates, during that week. Fortunately I’m trained in design, so it was easier for me than for most candidates. You have to paint on silk with water-base sumi ink – black and vermillion – lines and names. Fine lines in red without blurring and blotting, with ink, on silk!” He laughs at the memory. “They can’t make it any harder.”

Michael is in his 80s when I speak with him, an age at which even Zen Masters begin to think about retirement, but he is still active.

“I lead workshops. I lead daily meditation and retreats. Just came back from a five-day retreat in North Carolina. We have a hundred-acre farm, a farm one of my senior students owns. He’s a prison psychiatrist. His wife is a yoga teacher, a licensed yoga teacher. We have four events a year there, roughly a week long. Four or five days. Every fourth Sunday is my morning to teach at the Zen Center. First Sunday features guest speakers from outside our lineage. Second Sunday we present interviews; I interview a member from inside our community, typically a leader-type person, but not necessarily. Third Sunday my eventual successor at ASZC gives a dharma talk. We have a vice-abbot and a co-abbess who will assume leadership in Atlanta. We just think that everybody should get to know what kind of people are practicing Zen. Why they’re practicing Zen, why they keep coming back, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

I ask why they do keep coming back.

“I think it is, first of all, real life. The point I make is . . . Do you know what the kyosaku is?”

I do. It is the stick which meditators are sometimes struck with on the shoulder.

“So my point is that you either get the kyosaku in the zendo under controlled conditions or you get it out there under uncontrolled conditions. So I think what forces people back is getting whacked by the vicissitudes and vagaries of circumstance that are our daily fare in the 21st century.”

Zen Desert Sangha –

Dan Dorsey is the resident teacher at the Zen Desert Sangha in Tucson. He grew up in Texas, and first encountered Buddhism in the library at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches where he was studying forestry. “There were only three books in the library on Buddhism, and I read them all. Don’t remember the titles. I was one of those people who at an early age was drawn to Buddhism and meditation. In my apartment I constructed a sitting bench made from concrete blocks and a flat wooden board and started doing zazen from reading the instructions in one of the books.”

I ask him why.

“Maybe karma; it’s a mystery to me why some people go into Buddhism at an earlier age and others take it up when they’re seventy. At first, I thought there must be some benefits that would accrue to me personally – like strength, better control of my emotions, inner power, and inner peace. I think I watched too many kung fu movies in my teens where that kind of self-mastery seemed to be the point of meditation. In a deeper sense though, from an early age there was this feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong with life. Not just the ups and downs, but a very deep feeling that something wasn’t right with all the suffering people go through – the wars, starvation and economic inequality, the person-to-person violence – everything I read about in the daily news.”

His first encounter with formal Zen practice was in Japan in 1982.

“The U.S. Army put me through four years of college in exchange for me serving as an officer for four years of active duty after graduation. As a new officer, I could choose a number of places where my first assignment would be if there was an opening, so I chose Japan because Buddhism was practised there. I was also interested in the culture. There was an open position with a small Army detachment on the northern tip of the main island of Honshu near the city of Misawa, so that’s where I went.”

“And did you, in fact, come upon any Buddhists in Japan?” I ask.

“There are plenty of people in Japan who identify as Buddhist, just like in the U.S. there are plenty who identify as Christian. There are plenty of Buddhist temples and shrines around, but it took a while to find a place where zazen was practised even a little.”

He did, eventually, find a Soto temple where if he made “a donation to the temple, then the monks would sit a round of zazen with me, and I could have tea with the head of the temple for about fifteen to twenty minutes. Even after months of searching around northern Honshu, I could not find a temple or lay group that kept a regular schedule of zazen, aside from one or two small monasteries, and those were not open to the public.”

Then he was transferred to a base outside Tokyo, and there he saw an article in the newspaper announcing that a Soto priest, Sensei Gudo Wafu Nishijima, welcomed both Japanese and foreigners. “I started sitting with his group. I would take the train every Sunday morning into downtown Tokyo to where we met on the eighth floor of the YMCA. The schedule was each Sunday Sensei would give a Dharma talk to his Japanese students, then his foreign students like me would arrive, and we would all sit together for two rounds of zazen. His Japanese students would then leave, and Sensei would give his talk in passable English to us. When he did retreats, he borrowed a Soto temple.”

First retreats are always challenging and probably even more so in Japan. “I found them difficult both mentally and physically. Although I had been sitting fairly regularly for 25 to 30 minutes on my own each day, I still sometimes used a chair instead of a cushion. There were no chairs available at the temple, and the cushions were small, flat, and firm. I found doing round after round of zazen to be difficult.

“At the same time, there was something about sitting still for round after round that drew me in. We’re in a society where doing something about the situations in our lives is highly prized. It’s encouraged to be proactive. And this was really the first time I had sat for longer periods with just myself, not doing anything except sitting, turning inward instead of outward. I was also getting a small inkling of what true peace is. I experienced something at those retreats and that kept me coming back.”

During his final year of active duty, he was stationed at Fort Huachuca near Tucson. “There was no Zen group there, so I continued practice on my own and stayed in touch with my Japanese teacher via letter correspondence. After being discharged from active duty I moved to Tucson.”

There he came upon a group that had just formed about 18 months earlier.

“There were five or six of us sitting in a mobile home at a trailer park. One small bedroom was converted into a Zendo. The group had already adopted the name of Zen Desert Sangha.” The group was affiliated with Robert Aitken’s Diamond Sangha, and Aitken’s heir, Nelson Foster, visited the group several times a year. Aitken also visited occasionally.

The sangha changed locations a few times and then, “We ended up at Indiana Nelson’s big blue house in an upper-class section of Tucson with a good sized Zendo. It was at that time that Pat Hawk Roshi started coming to Tucson a few times a year and giving retreats. That’s where I met him and became his student.”

After being discharged from the Army, Dan earned a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture then became certified in Permaculture. He was able to combine his forestry degree with these and began a business providing workshops and courses on sustainable landscape design.

He tells me he also was dedicating more time to his Zen practice. I ask why he kept at it.

“Well, one thing that’s kept me going is the alternative to not practising is worse. If you know what I mean,” he adds with a laugh. “Thinking on how I could have turned out if I didn’t keep up a steady Zen practice makes me shudder. I was driven to do it. Maybe it’s karma. I just stuck with it from age 20 or so. Once I found Zen teachers to work with, the practice naturally fell into place and has stayed with me.”

Then in 2010, Pat Hawk invited him to have coffee at the Redemptorist Renewal Center where he resided. “And he asked me if I would be willing to become an Associate Teacher in the Diamond Sangha. After considering it for two days, I called him and said, ‘Okay. I’ll do it.’ I was already giving classes on Buddhism before I became an associate teacher because no one else was giving them at ZDS at the time. Preparing for them helped me to understand Buddhism in more depth. Pat was fine with me doing this. At the time, I was also teaching some non-credit classes on Buddhism at a community college in Tucson. I had already been studying with Pat for sixteen years at that point. After some consideration, it seemed like the natural next step.”

He became an Associate Teacher in the Diamond Sangha in 2010 and then a fully independent teacher two years later.

“And what does a Zen teacher teach?” I ask. It is a question I frequently ask.

“As far as individually working with students, I’m there to facilitate and encourage their practice, point out pitfalls they might fall into, and support them in practice through all the ups and downs. I give pointers along the way and try to offer the right phrase or action at the right time. However, I don’t think Zen can be taught in the usual sense.

“Zen has no end, since there is no end to Zen practice. We say at our Zen Center that the Buddha was only half-way there. But we as teachers can point students toward experiencing their own true nature through their own efforts. The Sangha plays a big role in this also; we support each other. I sometimes say, ‘You’re not going to get anything from Zen.’ But other times I’ll talk about the benefits of practice, the ‘fruits’ of doing zazen as an expedient if someone needs encouragement.”

“Which benefits are those?” I ask.

“I’m still waiting for most of the benefits myself, but based on studies using brain scans and other techniques, regular and long-term zazen calms the central nervous system. Also, the part of your brain that deals with reactivity and how quickly we automatically react becomes a little larger. That seems to have the effect of calming our reactions. We don’t react as quickly, which can help with various drug additions and also calm routine and damaging expressions of emotions like anger.”

“Those are physiological benefits. Are there spiritual benefits?”

“I can’t separate the two exactly. Spiritually if Zen has a purpose, it is to allow or make more likely the experience of our true nature – experiencing the emptiness of it all. Although I like the phrase ‘no abiding self’ rather than emptiness. And I also emphasize experiencing true nature as a process rather than one all-encompassing life changing event as many people imagine it will be. So, this sitting practice of zazen is both experience of and inquiry into that true nature or no-abiding self.”

“And when people first take it up, what draws them? What are they looking for?”

“They’re looking for a number of things. They want to get rid of their suffering, which is a universal experience. They want to get some benefits from meditation to help in sports or martial arts. They want to get rid of specific uncomfortable emotions like anger and learn to stay calmer. Some show up with a genuine will to discover the truth.”

The Diamond Sangha derives from Sanbo Zen and makes use of koan study. I ask about the value of working with koans.

“Koans function to get a person out of those extremes that we’re always caught up in. Right and wrong. Life and death. This and that. Me and you. So, what transcends that? Koans are usually a back and forth between the relative world and the empty one. When a person comes to a master in a koan, he’s coming from one of those places; the teacher answers from the other side. And then finally, what transcends that? The student has to do a presentation at that point to show that right here and now. Sometimes words will work too. The main thing is the presentation has to be a personal presentation within the context of the koan and not too general.”

In his own continuing development, Dan is in regular contact with another Pat Hawk heir, Leonard Marcel. “We talk once a week when we are both available via Zoom, and we do a review of koans. We’ve gone through additional books that might be used after the standard Diamond Sangha curriculum of the four classic koan books. Right now, we’re finishing The Recorded Saying of Layman P’ang.”

“And the reason you do that?”

He answers with a shrug. “To explore new Zen books I might one day use with my students and to keep sharp on koan practice with another Diamond Sangha teacher.”

“And how has your practice changed over the years. How is different now from when you were first going to the 8^th floor of the Tokyo YMCA?”

“My practice is more integrated into everyday life. There is more openness to this moment.”