Tess Beasley

Pacific Zen Institute –

Tess Beasley, although located in Connecticut on the East Coast, is the current board president of the Pacific Zen Institute on the West. And she grew up far from either ocean in Utah.

“Neither of my parents were Mormon. They ended up there by just strange karmic circumstances and decided to stay. It’s an odd place to grow up if you’re not Mormon. The whole social sphere revolves around the church. As a kid that meant no one could play on Sundays.”

I ask if her family was perhaps associated with a different faith tradition.

“Not really. When I was about five, my mom tried to go to a couple of different community churches, but they were just not quite what we were looking for. She did have some friends who were convert Sikhs, so the first religious sort of memory I have is in their living room. They had a dedicated prayer space, so white sheets would hang down, and they wore turbans and all sorts of things. And I remember being very curious about what happened in that sheet space.”

When I ask what it was like to grow up in that kind of environment, she reflects a moment before replying.

“You know, it was interesting because my dad was a marriage and family therapist and was a person who had had a very difficult childhood, so he tended to work with pretty intense issues. I say that because a lot of his clients were Mormon people, and I learned that there’s the presentation side of what happens, and then there’s the shadow side of everything that’s hidden. I guess I was always very aware of the complexity of all that, and there was a certain frustration because I always wanted people to include more of their actual lives and not just be ‘good.’ I guess that’s just an aspect of many religions, I suppose. People want to be a good Zen student or a good Catholic. They want to be a good whatever, but between my dad’s world and the fact that my mom was also a social worker, mostly for teenage foster kids at that time, I was just always so aware of the other side of all the ‘good.’”

She attended Weber State University on a scholarship but felt out of sync with other students. “The Mormon students were mostly married or looking to be, which made it even more . . . uh . . . insular. I tried a couple of other schools. I tried going to Salt Lake. I had been working with a veterinarian – ’cause I thought I wanted to go into veterinarian medicine – and through a kind of synchronicity surrounding Siamese cats, I met a woman who became a mentor of mine. Growing up in the household I did, I’d developed a very strong resistance to the pathological orientation of helping people – meaning I was really just tired of the DSM4 and with everything that went along with that – and this mentor began to open me up to the larger psycho/spiritual terrain of human development. All that to say that I studied something called Integral Coaching for a while, which drew together Zen, hermeneutics, phenomenology, the Enneagram, psychology, many traditions.”

I note that she had included Zen in the list and ask if that were her first introduction.

Daniel Doen Silberberg

“Yes. Because the Integral Coaching Program was very strongly shaped by a student of Reb Anderson’s, Pam Weiss. I believe she did receive transmission but then went over to Vipassana after a while. She was a very strong shaping force in this Integral Coaching Program, so we started going to the Zen Center in Salt Lake, which was Genpo Roshi’s scene. My first real teacher was Daniel Doen Silberberg.”

“What made the Zen part of all that interesting?”

She pauses for a moment again.

“I did a lot of martial arts when I was young – Tae Kwon Do mostly – so the notion of having a practice, and being part of a community of practice, was very strong for that reason. I guess what I was most interested in at that time was that there was a whole way of beginning to understand consciousness and what’s happening about being human that didn’t have to do with pathology.”

“Which you associated with what your parents were engaged with.”

“Yeah, particularly my dad. He tended to wield that language even on people he loved, and so there was always a sense of ‘something’s wrong with you.’ You couldn’t just have a bad day, that meant you might be depressed. Or you couldn’t be excited, you must be manic. Everything took on that connotation, which I think gave him a sense of control over the world or understanding it. But when I met the Enneagram, I liked the idea that you have a range of consciousness, of awakening I guess, as it’s really a range of being free from your habitual patterns and ego structure. It’s just ways of being free or not. That was a relief, really.”

She was invited to work for New Ventures West, the Integral Coaching School in San Francisco. “Basically as the person who would enroll people in programs. Then I started doing a little bit of teaching for them, serving on their certification committees, just started holding aspects of the process.”

Pam Weiss

She also started sitting regularly with Pam Weiss.

“Early on, she did a workshop on the Bodhisattva Vows, and she had us write our own versions, which opened something in me. And its funny as it’s an echo to PZI’s whole refuge ceremony process, which does an expanded version of the same thing as a kind of initiation path. Anyway, at the time, beginning to deepen into my feeling and experience of what the Bodhisattva path might be was something that really spoke to me.

“I worked at New Ventures for about two years, during which time I was only . . . Gosh, I think I was 22? My dad got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died within about three months. I was very confused about my sexual orientation. I was living in a big city or at least what was to me a big city at the time, coming from Utah. It was both a very revolutionary and opening time, but it was entirely, completely overwhelming. And so I was there about two years and then got the chance to go back to Utah and work for my original mentor. She had a leadership development business, and also a family product business, so I really just got to learn, ‘How do you make your way in the world?’ She was very good to me during that time. I was her companion in all these things, and she kind of nurtured my interests and pushed me and exposed me to the world. At that time, also, Doen was starting to make his break from Genpo and started a group that was Zen at heart but wove in a lot of Gurdjieff and Fourth Way stuff that I thought was strange and interesting too.”

As it happened, she still hadn’t finished college.

“And I had guilted myself a lot about that. But the truth was, all the things I was studying outside of college were phenomenally more interesting, and my career was moving along, and so although I kept trying to drag myself back to study, I didn’t find anything that stuck. And then when I was about 27, I moved to Seattle. I never wanted to stay in Utah, but it was very good for me to come back and grow up a little bit, integrate all that had happened. So I went to work for a non-profit in Seattle. I tried a few places to sit around there but was less intimately connected to a teacher or a practice at that time. And I stayed there for a couple of years and then went back to California for another opportunity. What I suppose is most significant about that time is that right around my 30th birthday, I went into a very deep depression – like a true what Jung would call an encounter with the unconscious. I was clearly at the end of something . . . a certain way of being in relationships, a certain way of conducting myself in the world . . . and clearly had had a number of things happen that I had never really grieved including the death of my father. When I moved back to California, I slept on the floor in a basement room for about six months, because something – this is where John Tarrant’s notion of the soul will come in – I was in some kind of deep descent. And even more interesting about that time was that given the whole pathology orientation, being depressed would have been something that would have been very frightening to admit, but there was something freeing about realizing, ‘Oh! I’m depressed. What is this? What’s happening?’”

I point out that she’s smiling as she says that.

“Well, depression is a far underrated experience. I personally think it’s vital to transformation if you know how to work with it and you have a proper guide of some kind. And nothing that I had studied – including Zen – at that time could touch where I was, because they all involved trying to get out of it in some way or get through it.  Doen was a very good teacher, and I had started studying with him again when I had moved to California, but I think his base orientation is if you’re anxious or you’re sad or you can’t get out of bed, you just don’t be that way. You just work with your mind, or don’t get snared in your material. And he’s got a point from the perspective of emptiness, but I could tell that wasn’t gonna do it for where I was. So I worked at my job, thankfully mostly from home, and I would walk by the bay and just cry for three or four hours a day. And I would read really intense books about grief and devastation and loss. And after a while, I could feel almost like an invisible hand, something holding me down, and I started to learn to trust that hand; that whatever was happening, I started to learn to respect it as a process. And right at the end of it, as I could feel it beginning to lift – a  very dear friend of mine was killed in a freak accident, one of Genpo’s monks – and I could feel, ‘Oh, wherever I’ve been is in the same territory as this.’

“So all these things converged, and I became very interested in trying to understand what had happened to me. Part of what was very obvious when I was going through it all was that I could immediately tell if someone had been there themselves or not. And it was so comforting to me when I could tell that they had, but it was rare. Most people seemed to be outright avoiding it. And also when I made it through this passage, it was clear that it was a gateway into a whole new life that began to open. New career. New partner. The complete flowering of everything that had been so decimated and constrained. And so that process of death and renewal then became something that I really wanted to learn more about. I just didn’t know how.

“I somehow ended up falling in love with a luxury fashion executive, which is its own crazy story. But I kept trying to find some way of understanding what I had been through. I tried shamanic journeying. I tried eco-psychology. I tried all these different things. ‘Ahh! Yes! This is some part of it! But it doesn’t quite . . .’ And then this same mentor who had been in my life, said, ‘You know, I’ve been talking to this guy, John Tarrant. Maybe you should just chat with him.’ And John agreed to talk to me, and he had such an intimate and real understanding of the territory that I was just like a fish in water and haven’t really looked back.”

“When you first met him,” I say, “when your mentor tells you, ‘Hey, there’s this guy you should meet,’ what was your initial impression?”

“You know, we have a joke now that we call ourselves the ‘Pirate Ship’ because during COVID when our organization went through such a radical change, we were talking about it and there was one person who was expecting us to follow the rules or something, and John said, ‘Don’t you know we’re all fucking pirates here?’ Something like that. And I laughed, and I said, ‘Yeah. We’re pirates.’ So I could feel that when I met him, that he’s more interested in what’s alive and true than what is conventionally acceptable, which given all I said about growing up in Utah and the shadow of always trying to be ‘good,’ was a relief. Apparently he got into an argument with someone once, where they said something like, ‘Well, we’re in the morality business . . .’ And he said, ‘I’m not in the morality business. I’m in the awakening business.’ And so I could feel that freedom in him, and I could also feel that he really knew where I had been. And I had had such a hard time finding anybody who really knew where I had been, so there was a comfort and an intrigue with that.”

She had been working on koans with Doen, but Tarrant took time to try – as she puts – “to just feel what’s my psyche like, what’s my practice like, what’s my mind like. He gave me the Original Face koan, and I really loved that. Such an amazing koan, and then I went very quickly after that to what PZI calls an ‘Open Mind Retreat.’”

Tess with John Tarrant

I ask what an Open Mind Retreat is.

“So much of what John Tarrant started doing back in the day – this was before I joined – much of his interest was the intersection between Jungian and archetypal psychology and Zen, and poetry and Zen, Western poetry and Zen; obviously there’s Eastern poetry and Zen, too. The Open Mind retreats really began as a way of exploring those intersections explicitly. And particularly because early on most people John knew thought, ‘This doesn’t belong in Zen.’ But if you spend time with these traditions – particularly what Jung was up to – if you follow the activity of the psyche all the way down, and you have a practice, and you enter images, and learn to enter images very deeply which is what koan study is – you get to many of the same experiences and realizations. In Zen I think the inclination is to see the emptiness the feeling and figures and emotions that arise, and to sort of transcend the difficult material, but I think John saw, ‘Oh. We’re gonna have to work with some of this because otherwise it’s going to come out sideways.’ Which I would also say is why you get a lot of scandals. Everyone just wants better rules and accountability, but it’s clearly deeper than that. I remember when I first started Zen – long before I met John – and someone said to me, ‘You can have a lot of people who have had kenshos and are still assholes.’ And it’s true. So the Open Mind approach was a way of looking at, well what is it to be a Westerner and actually try to have a transformation process happen. It recognized that Zen does that a lot but that there are things that it doesn’t address as well, and there are traditions that are compatible with Zen and koans that are worth investigating.”

PZI’s approach to koan work is often considered controversial, and I ask Tess how she would describe the difference between their way of working with koans and the more traditional approach taken by other schools.

“I think the biggest difference is back in the day when John and then with Joan Sutherland started doing what they call the ‘in your life’ koan method. It wasn’t meant to replace the Hakuin response which is more traditional – that you just enter the room with a teacher, and you see what appears, which is an amazing, alive thing – but they really started looking more poetically and psychologically, that if I take, say, The Ghost or Being Stuck Down a Well or Being Lost in the Middle of the Night, [1] if I take that out into my larger life in the world, what kind of material will collect around it? What might I see? John and Joan noticed profound effects in terms of openings and the practice extending further into people’s lives. In this same vein, we also have formats like koan salons, where we explore them psychologically and conversationally. I think there’s real value to both ways of engaging koans, but the ‘in your life’ approach fosters an openness that goes beyond just, ‘Have I passed the koan or not?’ and allows awakening to permeate your life. And you may have a very big experience, and we still encourage that; we still try to provoke that with these deep retreats, and with dokusan and with different things. But there are a lot of people who may not have a big experience, and yet the teachings and the insights just start to brighten everything slowly.”

I point out that people who become interested in Zen today have multiple choices. “And I suspect if they choose PZI they do so recognizing that it has certain unique characteristics. So the people who do choose you, what is it they’re looking for when they first come to the door or first search you out online?”

“I’ve heard people call it warm-hearted Zen. I’m sure a lot of other Zen schools would say, ‘Nah, come on!’ So maybe the thing to say is we have these wild musicians who improv what feel like teishos on their instruments; we use a lot of poetry, have a lot of conversations. We’re creative; we’re strange.”

“Are there people who come and see what’s going on and decide, ‘Oh, my God! I can’t do this!’ and rush off somewhere else?”

“Oh sure. During one of our Sundays, we have this incredible musician – Jordan McConnell – who, in addition to being a guitar-maker, plays the bagpipesand other things, and we’ve had him play the bagpipes, and someone wrote in the chat, ‘Is that a bagpipe?! This is Zen!’ Or something like that, and they left, and we said, ‘Yes, it’s bagpipe Zen.’ So in one sense we’re less traditional, but if you look back on the wildness of the tradition, I might venture that in many ways we’re more traditional.”

As my conversations with these teachers are wont to do recently, it eventually turns to the political situation in the United States, and we talk about how that is impacting what people look for in their practice.

“A teacher that I used to know,” she tells me, “has just become so full of despair and rage. And it’s interesting because there’s plenty to be concerned about but insisting the world should be different is not quite what these teachings are; they’re not trying to make the world a certain way. And that’s where this vision of kindness or equality or something, like my initial impression of the bodhisattva path, is actually trying to impose a better world view, and that’s not the real path. The original Chan is very familiar with persecution and instability. The story is the rakusu came about in large part because people had gotten kicked out of their temples and weren’t allowed to practice, so they made this small robe that could go under their clothes. And then there were periods where, ‘Okay, well, the emperor is funding us again, and we can go back. Oh, no, we’re all under persecution again.’ So there’s an intrinsic inclusion or curiosity about times that are difficult. There’s that great Zhaozhou line where someone asks him, ‘When difficult times come, how should we greet them?’ And he says, ‘Welcome!’ And I think so much of what we have tried to provide is a place where people are neither running from the world nor overly despairing about it. That we can just have what it really is – beauty and terror –  and realize that there are real dangers and that we want to not be naïve about that, but we don’t want to drown in it all either. And the responsiveness of Chan is knowing ‘what’s possible here.’”

I tell her I find it interesting that she is talking about the earlier Chinese form of Chan rather the later Japanese.

“I think that’s where the real ethos of it started in a sense. Zen’s been reinvented so many times. Buddhism in general, but Zen especially. The Japanese, for a while, couldn’t get good translations, so they just started making koans up with the teachers that they had on hand. And then it evolved with haiku and samurai culture, and there are things the Japanese have brought to it and shaped it to be. And now we’re sort of having our hand at it, and we can include all the Japanese discovered, but not try to be Japanese ourselves. And the Chinese sensibility was just . . . a little more on that pirate side perhaps. You get flares of that in Japan with Ikkyu and Hakuin and other people who would reinvigorate things from time to time and try to mop up all the fox slobber, but that original interest in uncertainty and the Dao, I guess, I like that.”

[1] Koans from the so-called Miscellaneous Collection usually undertaken before moving onto classical texts like the Mumonkan.

Joko Beck

A conversation with Peg Syverson –

Joko Beck died in 2011, before I began doing these interviews. I never met her but have spoken with several people who knew her. Peg Syverson was one of the most informative of these.

Joko was the founder of the Ordinary Mind School of Zen and became one of the most influential Zen teachers to arise after the first generation of teachers had established the practice in North America, and yet she didn’t take up the practice until late in life.

Peg Syverson

“I think she was in her late 40s,” Peg tells me. Peg is one of the senior teachers with the Appamada Zen Sangha and was first authorized to teach by Joko.  “She had been married in Michigan to a professor who developed schizophrenia – they had four children – he had to be institutionalized. She moved to California and ended up being the administrator for the Chemistry Department at UC San Diego. She was a brilliant administrator for a department with a lot of very renowned chemists. She said, ‘They would wait until my boss was outside the room, and then they would come and ask me questions.’ Even before she had any Buddhist practice she was already kind of a resource for people.

“What she told me was that she went to a talk by a roshi – I don’t remember who, it might have been Soen Nakagawa – that she was completely struck by, and so she began to find out more. She signed up for a sesshin with Soen Roshi, and she told me she went in to have dokusan with him and told him she was ready for enlightenment. So he put her to work in the kitchen. For that entire intensive, she only worked in the kitchen. She never got out! She was cleaning every square inch of it. They took shelves apart. They cleaned things with toothpicks. She was cleaning, cleaning, cleaning all day. She never even got to sit in the zendo. But, she said, something shifted in her; it moved something in her. She has a talk about this. I don’t know if you have access to any of the recordings of her talks, but they give a great sense of her personality. She was tart and funny and pragmatic, a very witty and mischievous kind of person sometimes. After that, she started a regular practice, going back and forth to the Zen Center of Los Angeles from San Diego.”

“Did she choose ZCLA because of its proximity to San Diego?”

“Soen Roshi was going back to Japan, and he told her to work with Maezumi Roshi. And she said, ‘I was so naïve, I just thought a roshi was a roshi.’ So she was going back and forth to LA. Her daughter, Brenda, had a huge opening when she was fourteen. I’m not sure about the timelines of all this because Joko gave me these stories in pieces. But she got involved with ZCLA and ultimately took early retirement from the university – they gave her some kind of golden parachute – and she went into residence up there.

In 1978, Joko became the third person – after Bernie Glassman and Genpo Merzel – to whom Maezumi gave Dharma transmission.

“She told me, laughing, that, ‘He had to give me transmission because people were waiting in lines outside my cabin.’ And he kept asking them, ‘What is she doing in there?’ So he gave her Dharma transmission, but she told me it split the sangha, I believe it was A) because she was a woman, and B) because she was an American.”

“Maezumi had at least four female American heirs, didn’t he?  Chozen, Joko, Susan Andersen, and I’m pretty sure there’s another.”[1]

“Yeah, after Joko. So he had transmitted Chozen, and that was famously controversial.”

“Because of their affair. But Joko’s transmission was controversial because she was a woman and an American?”

Taizan Maezumi and Joko Beck

“I think that was maybe because up to that point Dharma transmission was not yet well established here. Transmitted teachers came from Japan, but they had been transmitted in Japan. So it was one thing when they started ordaining priests in America; it was another thing when they started giving Dharma transmission.”

In 1983, Joko went to San Diego with the intention of founding a center there.

“Her daughter, Brenda, was with her.” Maezumi had said that Brenda was the foremost expert on Soto ritual in North America. “Then Brenda went to medical school, and when she came back to visit, she said, ‘Mom, mom, mom, this isn’t working at all. These people aren’t trained; they don’t know what they are doing.’”

“She meant Joko’s students in San Diego?”

“Yes. Brenda said, ‘They’re fumbling around. They need to be trained in the roles, or you have to strip down to just what is essential.’ Joko told me, ‘Everybody thinks I’m opposed to the forms. I’m not opposed to the forms. When they are properly done, they’re beautiful. But,’ she said, ‘we couldn’t carry them out properly with a householder sangha coming and going, coming and going.’ It’s not like when you have priests or residents. When you have residents, they learn the roles. ‘So,’ she said, ‘I did what Brenda suggested. I pared it down to just what essential.’

“What I learned at her center was a very spare form of Zen, where there were three bells to start zazen, two bells to end it if there was going to be kinhin, a little talk, not much chanting. I never saw a ceremony the whole time I was there. Not a single ceremony. It was very simple. Very basic, but very deep. I’ve learned since then that there are different models of sangha. There’s the monastic model; there’s the residential model with householders who come and go; there’s a straight-up householder sangha. And they each have their own set of challenges to deal with. One of the challenges for Joko, I think, was she was not sangha-minded. She was individual-minded. So she had individual practice discussion, individual daisan with students, but there wasn’t anything organized – other than sesshins – that brought people together in an intimate way or connected them with each other. Yes, friendships formed, and people would go off to lunch together; they’d recognize one another from being in multiple sesshins or everyday practice, and there was a board that worked together. There were some people who were regulars, but there wasn’t a sense of a bonded sangha, in my view anyway, maybe because people were travelling pretty far distances. You know, even in San Diego, you get on the expressway for forty-five minutes to get anywhere. So when Saturday morning program would end, everybody would just go home. Usually a couple of people would go out to lunch together. Maybe, with my limited schedule, I just wasn’t aware of deeper bonds of sangha among members.

“Still, everybody was devoted to Joko, and I call this the hub-and-spoke model, where everyone has a relationship with the teacher but not so many relationships with each other. But I think it was a very beautiful environment to be learning in in a certain kind of way, because it was very peaceful, and from what I saw, there wasn’t a lot of drama. At least until the end. There wasn’t gossip and backbiting and that kind of thing going on. It was just very peaceful. It was exactly what I needed. My marriage had blown up; I was in graduate school fulltime; I was working three jobs; I was a single parent. So I really, really needed that peaceful environment for at least an hour or two a week. I could only go to Wednesday evenings, and, occasionally, friends would look after my son, and I could go to sesshin. Yet Joko and I formed a really strong, deep bond right away, from the moment I met her. And I think she always appreciated what we were doing at Appamada.”

Peg and Joko

“What do you think was the basis of that bond?”

“Well, she had been a single parent struggling to make ends meet with four kids, and she had found her way to a devout practice, and that was where I was headed. So . . . I don’t know.  When I first met her, it was like putting my bare hands on an electric fence. I couldn’t understand why the other people in the room, their hair wasn’t standing on end. It was like a bolt of lightning right into me. So it’s one of those kinds of experiences I’ve never had with another person until I met Flint, of course.” (Flint Sparks is her teaching partner at Appamada.) “It was more like a recognition than anything else.”

“You said Maezumi had to give her transmission because people were already treating her like a teacher. Why? What drew people to her?”

“I think it’s almost impossible to describe those qualities. She had a deep, deep, profound love of her students. But she was not sentimental. You wouldn’t say she was tender-hearted. She was more like the Sword of Manjusri, but there was so much clarity in it and so much care in it that you could tell she was seeing something you were not able to see about your own life that sort of righted things somehow. She had such immense clarity it was quite astonishing. And watching her working with people when they asked questions was always so profound. Like one of these young guys after a sesshin during the questions-and-answers asked her, ‘Are you enlightened?’ She immediately said, ‘I hope I should never have such a thought.’ I mean, just imagine that lightning response. It was just like people were drawn to her unique perspective, I think, and her depth of understanding. One of her German students, Claudia Willke, did a documentary of her life,[2] and it gives you such a sense of her personality. It’s so clear. She says in it, ‘Zen is not therapy. But I have students who need therapy. They really need a therapeutic response. And so,’ she said, ‘for those students I take a therapeutic approach.’ I think she felt that the psychological element had been lacking in her training and in her experience with the traditional center.”

“It was generally lacking in Japanese Zen,” I note.

“Yes, or any other understanding of the significance of emotions in practice. Not just having emotions, but the powerful effect of our emotional response to practice. She was very understanding about that. She was very interested in psychological perspectives.”

“You said, ‘There wasn’t much drama until the end.’”

The drama had to do with two of Joko’s transmitted heirs who felt that she was showing signs of dementia. As a result, the board met and changed the by-laws so that the center was no longer established to foster Joko’s teaching, and her role was now that of an employee of the center. Eventually Joko left San Diego, severed her ties with the center, and rescinded the Dharma transmission she had given the two perpetrators. She moved to Prescott, Arizona, with her daughter, where she began a new center. Peg and Flint visited her there, and Peg asked Flint – who was a psychotherapist – if he say any sign of mental deterioration in Joko. He said he didn’t, and that she was “as sharp as a tack.”

Toward the end of Joko’s life, Peg received a call from “one of Joko’s senior students, Barb, who told me, ‘Joko wants to start a new school that’s headed by you and Flint and me.’ Joko at that point was too old to really head up that new endeavor. Still, I was so touched by that, because I thought she really . . . You know, all I ever wanted in my practice was that bond with her. Just that sense that she saw me and that she approved of what I was doing. When I would take her pictures of Appamada, she was so pleased. Towards the end, when Flint and I visited her in Prescott, we knew it was probably for the last time; I was weeping in daisan, and the last thing she said to me, with such love in her eyes, was ‘Look what’s become of you.’ She was so proud. Her approval meant so much to me. It touched me so much.”

“What’s the most important thing I should know about her?”

“Her deep, deep love for her students, that deep, abiding love for her students. I think her book, Everyday Zen, was a reason people outside the sangha came to know of her. One of her students had edited her talks and put it together. It was a real labor of love. And for a while it was the best-selling book on Zen in English. It had a broad reach. It was so approachable. It was so down-to-earth. People could really relate to it, and I think that was a big part of its success. So those were the pair, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and Everyday Zen that we always gave people who were new. It was a great combination. A great American woman teacher with her practical down-to-earth approach and the beloved traditional Japanese Zen master Suzuki Roshi. A good combo.”

David Bruner, Daido Loori, Joko, Shishin Wick

[1] Nicolee Jikyo McMahon

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py0exdNnvBM

Leonard Marcel

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.”

Leonard with 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.

Pat Hawk with Bernard McVeigh

“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 40th 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.”

Pat Hawk

Abridged from Catholicism and Zen –

Combining Zen practice and Catholicism is based in “the recognition in experience of a resonance between the two traditions. Many Catholics remark, after their first Zen experience, that it is what they have always been seeking.” So wrote the first Catholic priest born in America to receive Dharma transmission. Patrick (always known as Pat) Hawk went on to note that what such people are seeking is “not a thing, nor even understanding, but rather a living awareness of no separation from” that Ultimate Reality that may be variously understood by different religious traditions but that is innate in everyone. This “direct, non-mediated experience has been the central focus of Zen in Buddhism and contemplation in Christianity;” therefore, the technique of Zen is able to offer a way of practice for those seeking to pursue the contemplative tradition in Christian prayer.

Pat Hawk was a member of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer or Redemptorists. He died in 2012, before I had a chance to interview him, and much of the information I have about him comes from his biographer[1] and student, Helen Amerongen. “He grew up in Granite City, Illinois,” she tells me, “across the river from St. Louis, one of two children. He was the first child, and then he had a sister seven years later.”

“Was it a devout family?”

“Yes. Very Catholic. Very standard Catholic family. Happy to have a child become a priest.”

Pat claimed that he knew he wanted to be a priest by the time he was seven years old.

In the 1950s, it was common for young boys to begin training for the priesthood while still in high school; he was 13 when he entered St. Joseph’s College, the Redemptorist minor seminary in a suburb of St. Louis.

Greg Mayers entered St. Joseph’s two years later, in 1958, at the age of 12.

“One of the requirements in seminary, everybody had to play sports. I wasn’t very good at sports, and it was baseball. And they organized the teams as majors, minors, and rookies. So I was in the rookies, and Pat Hawk was in the rookies. And we were all out on the diamond, and Pat Hawk was the team captain. And I was very embarrassed, ’cause I didn’t know how to play. But I was smart enough to know that nobody ever hit a ball to right field. So I decided that was what I wanted, to play right field. So Pat Hawk comes out, and all these kids gather screaming about what position they wanted, and I got close enough to him to say, ‘I want right field.’ And he looked at me with the withering eyes of a fourteen-year-old and said, ‘That’s my position.’ That was my first encounter with Pat Hawk.”

Greg Mayers

“What was he like as a student?”

“Quiet. He was a very quiet person. And private.”

“Introverted?”

“Introverted, yeah. Very much so.”

As is common with introverted persons, Hawk was reflective, and, Helen tells me, when he was in the major seminary he had a crisis of faith.

“In what way?” I ask.

“Losing his faith in God. He never doubted that he should be in the seminary or that he would be a priest. Even in spite of the crisis of faith, he did not doubt that this was where he wanted to be.”

He was only in his 20s at the time, and the Second Vatican Council was taking place, which allowed seminarians greater freedom in their reading than earlier generations had had. “He was a prodigious reader,” Helen notes. He was also the assistant to the seminary’s librarian and saw new books as they arrived. One by Jean-Marie Déchanet was entitled Christian Yoga. Following the instructions provided in the book, he began a private meditation practice.

Greg and Pat’s training overlapped during the four years of theological study in the major seminary prior to ordination. “We had an extremely competent Dean of Men who had started counselling and group counselling sessions with the students. And I met Pat in the group counselling sessions, and we kind of had a bonding there. Then after seminary, those of us who were in the group counselling thing would meet every summer to develop and sharpen our skills at counselling.”

Greg and Pat fell out of touch for a while, although Greg knew that Pat had developed an interest in Asian spirituality. In addition to Dechanet’s book, Pat read the Zen popularizer, Alan Watts – whom he recommended to Greg – as well as   Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, which he admired. So when the Palisades Retreat Center, where Greg was on staff, sponsored a Zen retreat for Christians facilitated by Robert Aitken, he informed Pat of it.

The retreat came about largely because of Aitken’s involvement with the peace movement, which had brought him into contact with members of the Catholic Worker Movement. Helen explains that in 1977 he, “was participating in what came to be called the Bangor Summer at the Trident Missile Base in Bangor, Washington. There were all these demonstrations, and the Catholic Workers of Seattle were major movers in them. And some of those Catholic Workers and some other people – who were spiritual advisees of some of the Trappists at Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey in Lafayette, Oregon – knew each other. So one of the Catholic Workers took Robert Aitken down to meet Bernard McVeigh, the abbot of Guadalupe Abbey, and together they cooked up this idea of offering a Zen retreat ‘for Christians and other travellers.’ And that first retreat was at Palisades. Greg Mayers was a spiritual advisee of Bernard McVeigh. So although he was not in on the initial conversation, Greg heard about it from Abbott Bernard and invited them to use Palisades.”

Bernard McVeigh said Bob Aitken

“So after Bernard McVeigh said Bob Aitken had agreed to do sesshin for Christians,” Greg tells me, “I thought, ‘Oh, Pat Hawk practices Zen! He would be interested in this.’ So I called him up and told him about it and said, ‘Why don’t you come out and attend?’” It wasn’t until later that Greg learned this would be Pat’s first formal Zen retreat.

“He said he took to it like a duck to water,” Helen tells me. “I said to him, ‘Did you find it awkward?’ You know, all the ritual and everything. It was not actually the full-blown ritual of a Zen sesshin. They did have some Zen ritual, but they modified and Christianized a lot of it. He immediately formed a relationship with Aitken. Aitken told me that he saw, right from the beginning, that Pat should be a teacher. ”

Greg informs me that shortly after that retreat, Pat entered “a rehabilitation center for alcoholism for priests. After that, he came out to the retreat center I was working at and stayed with us for about six months.”

“He was a patient?”

Greg nods his head. “He was an alcoholic,” he says gently.

“When did that start?”

“I don’t remember. He was teaching at the seminary – the minor seminary – and the other professors there did an intervention.”

“Did he shake it? Did he acquire sobriety?”

“For a while, and then he had to go again. Alcoholics don’t . . . There are often a lot of slips in the disease.”

Pat Hawk and Helen Amerongen

The Redemptorists at Palisades hosted several sesshin conducted by Aitken, but eventually Aitken came to feel that the tone of these was growing too Christian for his comfort. “People were bringing him things that he couldn’t handle,” Helen explains. “Their experiences often were within a Christian framework. He had a Dharma brother, Willigis Jäger in Germany, who was also a Yamada Koun student, and he recommended Willigis to the group, and they invited him to come. So Willigis Jäger took over leading those retreats. Pat did one or two retreats with Willigis, and Willigis invited him to come to Germany. Pat got approved to do a year’s sabbatical in Germany, so he did that from August ’84 to August ’85.”

After the year with Willigis, Pat returned to the US and completed his Zen training with Aitken, who gave him transmission in May 1989.

By 1986, Pat was offering Christian contemplative retreats modeled after those conducted by Jäger in Germany. The first of these, co-facilitated by Greg, took place at the Bishop DeFalco Retreat Center in Amarillo, Texas. They were not Zen retreats, but the format had clearly been influenced by Zen.

Although Pat was given permission to teach Zen in August 1988, he did not lead sesshin until after his transmission in 1989 when Jäger – who found travel between Germany and Washington State taxing – asked him to take over the Northwest group. A little later, Greg was also authorized to teach by Willigis, and he and Pat began leading sesshin in the Northwest and at the DeFalco Center where they were then both located.

“The Bishop of Amarillo at the time, Leroy Matthiesen, was very supportive,” Helen tells me. “But then he retired, and Bishop John Yanta took over, and he dismissed the Redemptorists.”  Yanta was fundamentally opposed to the idea of the Zen and contemplation retreats. He is reported to have once said that “Cowboys don’t need contemplation.”

Greg returned to Palisades. Pat moved to Picture Rocks Retreat Center in Tucson, Arizona – now known as the Redemptorist Renewal Center – which would be his home until his final illness.

Pat Hawk and Steve Slottow

Like many of Pat’s students, Steve Slottow was not Catholic. He had been drawn to Zen by Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen. While still a very young man, he moved from Illinois to Rochester, New York, in order to practice at Kapleau’s center, although he didn’t become a resident.

Kapleau had sought to duplicate the intense Japanese training style of Sogaku Harada Roshi. “People screaming Mu in chorus and very, very heavy use of the kyosaku. So there was a lot of bushido/samurai spirit in Rochester at that time. And everyone was very young, of course, all the students. It was too bushido-ish for me.”

Steve played in an Old Time music band in the Rochester area for a while and then, when the group broke up, went to the City University of New York to do graduate work in music theory. “I was looking for places to practice. I bounced around, and I eventually found out that Robert Aitken’s heir, Nelson Foster, had a small group in New Haven, and he would go a couple of times a year and give short sesshin there. It was called the East Rock Sangha. And I had been attracted to the Diamond Sangha and to Robert Aitken for a long time because it seemed much less bushido-samurai than Rochester.”

Steve found Foster helpful. “He was very nice; he was very impressive.” But he only visited New Haven periodically. At the time, Steve was also engaged in an early internet chat-line dedicated to Zen practice. One of the other members mentioned attending a sesshin with Pat Hawk. “I knew that Pat was a Dharma brother of Nelson Foster. But Nelson wasn’t around that much. And Pat sounded interesting because Pat was . . .” He pauses to reflect, then says, “He was a curmudgeon. He was very quiet. He wasn’t exactly reclusive because the order he belonged to wasn’t an eremitic order, but he was as much of a recluse as he could be. He was extremely plain and down to earth. He was very understated. There was no charisma. You see? I distrusted charisma. So somehow he sounded like my type of guy. Kinda grouchy. Very quiet. Didn’t care about impressing people. So I went down to Tucson, and I did a sesshin with Pat.

“He liked to meet prospective students in a very informal setting before the sesshin started. So we just went to a little table outside. He was a very plain guy dressed in old clothes. Totally unassuming. He didn’t talk very much, just asked a few questions about where I was from and what my interests were and why I was there. He was this plain, quiet, dry – extremely dry – guy. He didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic. I was totally charmed. He was just this kind of desert rat. He was living in Tucson, but, of course, he wasn’t from there. But he sort of fit into the landscape, although I’m not sure he even liked it. There were no frills, no airs. Nothing to stand out. I told him about my Rochester Zen Center experience and said that I felt a little burned-out with Rochester. And he replied, ‘Well, we’re used to dealing with Rochester burnouts here.’”

I mention to Helen that another of Pat’s students had described him as a curmudgeon.

“Yeah. He had that side. He had a curmudgeonly side, for sure. Although that’s misleading too, because he was mostly a gentle soul. And he had a dry wit that could be gut-splittingly funny.”

She tells a story to help give me an impression of him.

“A student of Pat’s was working with him in Santa Fe, and there was only Zen sesshin at that center. Then this person moved to the Northwest, where for a long time Pat’s retreats were all Christian contemplative. He eventually offered Zen retreats up there, too, but for years it was just Christian contemplative. So this person was travelling from the Northwest to either Tucson or Santa Fe to do Zen retreats, and it was expensive. So Pat said, ‘You know, you can come to the contemplative retreats.’ But, as with many people, this student wasn’t interested in getting involved with anything Christian. And Pat said, ‘It’s the same silence. You can just sit.’ So the man went to the contemplative retreat. And first time going into interviews, there’s Pat sitting in a chair instead of on a cushion on the floor – just one of the small differences in format between Zen and Contemplative retreats. And the man says, ‘What’s with the chair?’ And Pat says, ‘In Christianity, we have a merciful God.’”

The forms of the Christian retreats and the sesshin were distinct. Although Zen students were welcome to participate in the Christian retreats – and vice versa – there were no overt Buddhist elements in them, nor were there Christian elements in the sesshin.

“He kept them entirely separate,” Steve tells me. “I compare Pat’s approach with Ruben Habito’s approach. Habito was sort of after a kind of fusion. Pat was after a kind of apartheid where the Christian stuff was quite different from the Zen stuff. So the Zen sesshin were Zen sesshin. The Christian stuff, there were Christian figures on the altar; instead of sutra-chanting there were readings from the Psalms. There was the mass with the Eucharist, which was optional. People who were there primarily for the Zen aspect could simply continue working on their Zen practice during these and have dokusan. In the Contemplative Intensive Retreats, the CIRs, it wasn’t called dokusan; it was called ‘interview,’ I think.”

“But it was a meditation retreat?”

“It was basically a sesshin format, but the schedule was easier. As Pat said, ‘We change the idols on the altar.’ And some of the people who went to them didn’t follow the forms very precisely. The CIRs had forms and rules. It’s just that some of the participants – the ones, I think, who were not very interested in the Zen side – were not very invested in following them precisely.”

“Mostly they were both silent sitting facing the wall,” Helen tells me. “But the rituals were different. The Zen retreat started a little earlier in the morning. The bells were pretty much the same, regulating standing and sitting and so on. The first thing in the morning with the Zen retreat there’s a thing called kentan where the teacher walks around the room; it’s a formal inspection of the zendo that’s not in the contemplative retreat. In the CIR, first thing in the morning you chant ‘shalom’ for five minutes. So there’s a little difference there. The schedule for dokusan – the one-on-one meetings are called ‘interviews’ in the CIR – the schedules were a little bit different. There were a few things like that. In the CIR, there was ‘conference,’ which was the talk in the morning after breakfast. On the Zen side, there was teisho, and that was after lunch. The conference topic could focus on the Desert Fathers, a story from the Desert Fathers, or perhaps the Christian mystics, Eckhart, people like that. On the Zen side, most teisho began with a koan; he’d read the case and go on from there.”

I ask Steve if he had a sense of how well Hawk was accepted by other members of the Redemptorist Congregation. “I don’t know about the whole congregation, but in the part that was at Picture Rocks Retreat Center, he was very accepted. He basically ran a whole program of Zen and contemplative retreats at the center called the Pathless Path. And the order had no problem with this whatsoever. He was well-regarded, well-respected.”

“The Redemptorists were supportive,” Helen tells me. “And two of his Redemptorist confreres, one being Greg, went to his transmission ceremony in Hawaii. The other was Bob Curry, who at the time was Pat’s superior. As far as I know, nobody opposed it on the Redemptorist side. Were there others who were kind of suspicious of this Zen thing? Yes, I think so.”

The broader church hierarchy was not always sanguine about Zen. 1989, the year of Pat’s transmission ceremony, was also the year that then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – later Pope Benedict XVI – spoke out about what he felt were the dangers attendant upon Catholics taking up Eastern meditative practices.

“Pat would allude to this sometimes,” Steve says. “He was reluctant to have anything recorded. He only published two articles in rather obscure journals because he wanted to keep a very low profile. He was very straightforward about that. He didn’t want to draw a lot of attention to himself.”

I ask Helen what made Pat an effective Zen teacher.

“I felt totally received by him. That was perhaps his greatest gift. Also, the very fact that he had his own struggles, his own demons, and that he had faced them, gave him a kind of trustworthiness. And he had a nose for guiding people. He had a good instinct for giving people what they needed at a given moment to move them along.”

“I stayed with him till he died,” Stephen tells me. “When I began working with Pat he had already been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and eventually the schedule of his sesshin was lightened – you got up later, there were fewer rounds – mainly to accommodate Pat. It was hard for him. And eventually he sent a very, very short note to his fellow teachers in the Diamond Sangha, to his students as well, saying, ‘I’ve been told I only have so long to live. I have some things to take care of. I’m retiring as of now. No more sesshin, no more dokusan, no more Skype. We’ll figure out what to do. But that’s it.’ And he stopped teaching at that point. And then he got worse and worse. I talked with him a couple of days before he died. I had a short phone conversation with him. And then we got some daily bulletins from the people who were taking care of him. Then he died. I don’t know how long it was after he retired. Maybe a month or two. It wasn’t a long time.”

Helen tells me: “He died in Liguori, Missouri, which is where the Redemptorists have a healthcare facility including hospice care. He was flown out there in mid-April 2012, and he died May 8, 2012. So he was there for about three weeks.”

I ask Greg Mayers if he worked with any of Pat’s students after his death.

“Very briefly. I think they were hoping somehow to revive the program that he was involved in in Tucson, and I was invited to give sesshin. But there were very few students that showed up. You can’t really step in. I tried to tell them that. ‘Look, this stuff gets really personal with the teacher. Nobody else can come in and step in and take that person’s place.’”

Steve tells me: “When Pat announced his retirement, I knew I wanted to work with another teacher, but I cast around for a while. I went to some all day sits with Ruben Habito, who’s nearby. His center is in Dallas, very close to Denton. And I went to a sesshin with Leonard Marcel, Pat’s Dharma heir.”

Pat Hawk viewed his Catholicism and his Zen practice as complimentary. What tension there was between them he compared “with the tension of having two arms. With practice one becomes ambidextrous. It is just a matter of doing. Let not your right hand know what your left hand is doing and it is done.”

[1] Across the Empty Sky

Michael Elliston

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.”

Soyu Matsuoka

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.”

Shohaku Okumura

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.”

Dan Dorsey

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.

Pat Hawk

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 8th floor of the Tokyo YMCA?”

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

Nona Strong

Empty Cloud Zen, California –

Nona Strong of the Empty Cloud Zen Sangha in Northern California grew up in Oklahoma City.

“Both my parents were from smaller towns in Oklahoma. And after World War II, they moved to Oklahoma City and bought a house. They were both educators – teachers – and they had me. I’m an only child. I have no sisters or brothers. Very few cousins. So, I grew up in Oklahoma City. Went all the way through high school there. And after high school, I went off to Washington, DC, to go to college at Howard University.”

I ask if her family belonged to a faith tradition.

“We attended the AME church – African Methodist Episcopal Church – there in Oklahoma City, but they weren’t real church goers. My maternal grandfather was a pastor of sorts. A pastor who read tarot cards for people. He was an eccentric. My paternal grandparents were devout AME church members. My aunt and grandmother were both members of the Eastern Star and all of this stuff.”

“Did it mean anything to you?”

“No. It was just what one did.”

“More cultural than spiritual?”

“More cultural. Exactly. They sent me to Sunday School where you learned ‘Jesus Loves Me This I Know’ and stories and so on that they teach kids. But my parents did not go to the church service that followed Sunday school. There was . . . I remember this! One Easter we went to church. My parents came and picked me up from Sunday School and said, ‘We’re staying for church today.’ And the pastor noticed them in the congregation and said, ‘Oh! We have Brother Paul and Sister Evelyn here today with their daughter!’ He called them out because they weren’t usually there. So that was, I’m sure, very embarrassing to them. Mortifying, in fact! It was a little embarrassing to me, too.”

She studied languages at Howard.

“I graduated in 1968 and went to work for IBM. IBM was recruiting very heavily on Black college campuses in those days in order to comply – probably – with the government rules. So I moved from DC to New Jersey and places farther west. In the ’70s I was living in Minneapolis and something welled up in me and dragged me kicking and screaming to this whole New Age mysticism movement that was flourishing in those days.”

I ask her how that came about.

Thomas Merton

“It just welled up inside from no place I could pinpoint even now. But there was a spiritual . . .” she pauses reflectively “. . . birth, you might call it, a spiritual resonance that began to sound within me to which I responded. And I responded by reading – if you can believe this – the novels of Taylor Caldwell. Great Lion of God about Peter and a bunch of other Christian figures. And that led to an interest in New Age spirituality, mysticism. I had the feeling there was something that I needed to connect with, and whatever path that led me on, I just had to follow that pull, that connection. So I started reading, Ouspenskii and Gurdjieff, Jane Roberts, all of those New Age thinkers and mystics, and eventually came to Thomas Merton. And Thomas Merton was the pivot for me to get into serious study and seriously consider what this whole mysticism thing was about, what it meant, and why I was there.”

Reading Merton, she decided she needed to be baptized. “I got baptized a Catholic. Because of Thomas Merton. Blame Thomas Merton for that. So I was a Catholic from Oklahoma. I mean, Oklahoma doesn’t do Catholics,” she says with a laugh. “I was living in Los Angeles at the time, but I had grown up in Oklahoma. So it was kind of a big step for me to do that, but it seemed necessary.”

After the baptism, she went on a private retreat at the Mary and Joseph Retreat Center in nearby Palos Verdes, and there she met Father Greg Mayers, a Dharma heir of  Willigis Jäger in the Sanbo Zen lineage. “I felt he was a mystic. So there was an immediate attraction there just because of the style and content of his teaching. And it was only later that I learned he was a Zen teacher. I didn’t know what Zen was at that time, but I knew what he was.”

At the time Greg was the director of the Bishop DeFalco Retreat Center in Amarillo, Texas, but he came regularly to the Mary and Joseph Center to lead retreats.

“So I started to attend these retreats. I’d never done meditation or anything like that. It was just part of this pull toward silent, mystical spirituality that I was undergoing. Like I said, I don’t know where it came from. It was just there.”

The point she returns to frequently during the conversation is that whatever was drawing her was not a matter of doctrine. “I recall telling someone, a friend, ‘I just need to find out who’s in here,’” pointing to her heart and head.

“And so after you met Father Greg, did you take up formal Zen practice?”

“Yes. I asked him if I could attend only his retreats because there was . . . You know, I think the transmission that I ultimately received from him actually occurred at the very beginning. Transmission sort of occurs when you first meet your teacher. ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.’ So I said, ‘Can I just attend your retreats?’ And he said, ‘Yes. You can come to Amarillo.’ And I was self-employed by that time. So I had the freedom to do that.”

That was 1996. The next year she was in London, England, on business and decided “I needed to make a break with my life in Los Angeles and go ‘find myself.’” She elaborated on this in an email she sent me after the interview. “In early 1998, I gave away all my stuff, rented out my LA house, and struck out, by car, for a long stay at the Bishop DeFalco Center. I stayed there for ten weeks, during which time I sat by myself, made sesshin with Pat Hawk, and had dokusan with Greg. After Amarillo, I spent eight weeks alone at the Desert House of Prayer, a Redemptorist hermitage in Tucson, where I sat in meditation daily and gratefully took in the beauty and sacred quiet of the Sonoran Desert, along with a few other crazy hermits from around the US.”

Willigis Jäger

Greg encouraged her to go to Germany to study with his teacher, Willigis Jäger, a Benedictine Dharma heir of Koun Yamada. Nona describes the six weeks she spent with Jäger as a “most profound and enjoyable experience for me. Willigis was a remarkable man, a wonderful teacher, and a most gracious host.”

When she returned to the US, she moved to Sacramento to be closer to her father, and she continued travelling to Amarillo to attend sesshin with Greg Mayers.

“And somewhere along the line,” I say, “Father Greg decides that you’re going to do more than just practice. You’re going to take on a leadership role. How did that come about?”

“Lord! I couldn’t tell you,” she says, laughing. “I couldn’t tell you what was in his mind when he conferred that honor and obligation on me. Sometimes I see it as an honor, but sometimes I see it more as an obligation. First, I was one of his assistants. That’s kind of the way it came about. He had me ring the bell and do the readings and all that stuff from pretty early on. And then, probably in 2017, he asked me, ‘What would you think if I wanted to make you my Dharma successor?’ And it came out of nowhere. Now, I have a near-pathological level of self-doubt, and I said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’”

“You said that having transmission is not only an honor, it’s an obligation. What’s the obligation?”

“The obligation is to be there for other people. I’m a pretty solitary person by nature. Having been raised as an only child and having gone through life as a solitary person, it’s difficult for me to be called out of myself, out of my own space and have to – have to – devote myself or take my own time to attend to someone else’s needs. Although at one time I imagined myself as this kind of helpmeet for other people. There was a time when I considered being a psychologist, a psychotherapist. But that disappeared, that compulsion or interest dissipated when I looked at it practically and said, ‘But you won’t be able to go on vacation. People will need you, and you’ll have to be there.’ So the whole thing of being a teacher or a guide brought up that same reluctance of having to surrender my own privacy and my own solitude to the needs of other people. And, of course, there’s my sense of inadequacy and my self-doubt. I’m not that comfortable being out in front. But as it turns out, I’ve kind of been able to put my fears in my pocket and keep on stepping up, doing what’s been asked of me. That’s all I can really do.”

Nona with Greg Mayers

“What brings people to Zen practice?”

“Just based on the people I know who come for retreats, they come for several things. Some come because they think that there is some kind of peace of mind to be gained through Zen practice and meditation that they don’t get elsewhere.”

“So they come to it as a psychological practice.”

“Partly, maybe. But the peace they’re seeking is more about experiencing a sense of the sacred. Contemplating the mystery of life, I guess. People see meditation as a way to connect with something quiet, something sacred, something spiritual. I think we are all responding to the same pull that got me onto this path in the first place. Of course, people want to have a mastery of life. That’s the other thing that comes up. They want to be above all the bumps and pimples and stuff that they have in their lives now. They want peace within themselves. Some, probably most, want peace among others in society, and they figure that in finding inner peace, they’ll be able to spread that gospel of peace throughout society. Some may want to be enlightened. I mean, meditation practices are a lot more popular now than they were in our day.”

“So you’re saying that when people come to meditation now, they do so – at least in part – looking for a psychological technique. How does it become a spiritual practice?”

“Well, some people have gone through mindfulness training as they do in the corporate world now. Some people are Christians. The Mercy Center and Father Greg have this East-West dimension, him being a priest and having embraced Eastern wisdom. And I think a growing number of people sense that there is something within their Christian tradition that leads to a more inner-directed practice. I think more people are looking for something that’s more inner-directed because the outer is so messed up now, and people are looking for a way to immerse themselves in a space that’s beneath the turmoil. Or above the turmoil. Or outside of the turmoil. But not wrapped up in the turmoil, not tossed and battered. And people are looking for a way not to be tossed and battered, I think. And so much of what is happening now and has been happening over the past umpteen years is a tossing and battering of ourselves, of our wishes and desires, or our need to escape our wishes and desires.”

“So I suppose if I were a Buddhist, I’d call that dukkha.”

“Dukkha. Suffering. Yeah. Yeah. Some people have started referring to suffering as angst or anguish, rather than suffering. When I hear ‘suffering,’ I think of someone in terrible pain. You know? Or someone suffering through a divorce or the loss of a child.”

“Albert Low pointed out that the etymology of dukkha is that it basically means out of alignment. He would use the example of a grocery-cart where one of those wheels just isn’t rolling smoothly. That’s dukkha. It isn’t just big things like the death of a child; it’s all those little petty grievances like that grocery-cart wheel.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“So,” I ask, “when people come to get relief from all those petting little things, what is it that they look to you for?”

“I don’t know. I have a group that meets – fifteen or twenty people – every Thursday. And they come to sit in silence, but I also give a Dharma talk each week. So I don’t know if they come to hear the talk or they come to sit. I always worry that I’m not giving them enough when I give the Dharma talk. But then I think, ‘Well, maybe they just come to sit, and – you know – the Dharma talk is an interruption in their sitting.’” She laughs heartily. “I don’t know why they come.”

“But they show up.”

“But they show up. They’re there.”

“And they come back.”

“They’re there every week.”

“So they’re finding some kind of nourishment. What is it that you hope for them?”

“I hope that they can find within themselves a deeper and more solid connection to what is, to . . . I don’t know – call it cosmic reality if you want – than when they came in. A deeper . . . Not more committed, but a broader understanding of who they are and where they fit in the whole universal paradigm.”

“The word you’re not using here is ‘God.’”

“No. It’s not about God. I don’t even know what God is. I have a kind of a resistance to the use of that word because I think it tends to personify what’s real in a way that can be detrimental to a person’s experience of being. ‘God’ is such a loaded word, loaded notion, a loaded concept.”

“Tell me about koans.” She doesn’t immediately respond. “That friend you talked about earlier, the one you told that you ‘need to find out who’s in here,’ if they’d asked what koans were all about, what would you have told them?”

“At the time? I would have said they were scenarios that allowed us to penetrate through life situations and find the truth – quote/unquote ‘truth’ – that lives in those life situations. They’re, of course, supposed to produce kensho – the explosion, the fireworks – that brings you from lower case life to Upper Case Life, if you know what I mean. In other ways, they’re just little obscure stories designed to confound you – to completely confound us – and to exhaust our thinking minds.”

“That’s what you would have said at the time? What about now?”

She reflects a moment, then says, “I’d go for the penetrating purpose. I want people who are working with me to be able to read these stories and through them get a glimpse of what has been, is now, and ever shall be. Going back to my doxology from Sunday School. I mean it’s that which endures. That which is. That which is out of time. And these little stories are supposed to be – or can be, at least – a trigger for us to be able to see through the life situations down to the uber-life situation or the under-life situation or however you want to phrase it. That’s what I would say now.”

“You said koan study was supposed to ‘of course’ (your term) produce kensho. Did it?”

“No. For me, my ‘enlightenment,’ or ‘awakening,’ experiences all came from or came through or came as that same pull that got me on this path in the first place. Koans can get in the way for me because they almost point to doctrine, and that’s a little scary for me to say. But they want to point you in a certain direction. But what’s at the end of that direction is already within you.

“Are you suggesting they point you to an experience of what the doctrine is an expression of?”

“The experience of what the doctrine is an expression of. Exactly. Thank you for that phrasing.”

As the conversation winds down, she says she’d like to speak about “the subject of how that whole pull toward mysticism and mystical spirituality has crept into my Zen practice and my Zen teaching or guidance or whatever. And I’m kind of in the middle – right now – of an Experience. And if you write that down, please write it with a capital E. It’s like one of those things that happen, another pull that’s happening in which I am drawn to emphasize or to – yeah, ‘emphasize’ is the only word I can think of – emphasize the mystical element in Zen practice, Buddhist practice. I’m more settled in the mystical aspect of spirituality than I am in the doctrinal. And there is Zen doctrine. I mean, koans are part of it. There’s Buddhist doctrine; the Precepts are part of it. I feel like I’m distancing myself from all of that and going more to what those traditions represent, what they’re trying to express. And what they’re trying to express lies beneath the traditions themselves, the doctrines themselves.”

“Traditionally I would understand ‘mystical’ to refer to the experiential rather than the reasoned or rational understanding. Is that the way you’re using the term?”

“Yes. Precisely.”

“So going back to that sense that the work of koans is to assist one in experiencing directly that which the doctrine is an expression of.”

“Yes.”

“And when you work with students in this way, how do you help them achieve that experiential understanding?”

“I let them sit with the koan and then encourage them to express what that koan has awakened in them. What the story has awakened, what the story is pointing them to. It’s not just about understanding the story. It’s standing with the story.”

Fr. Greg Mayers, C.Ss.R, Roshi, with (L-R) Nona Strong, Tony Tackitt, Alice Cabotaje

Soyu Matsuoka

A conversation with Tim Ryuko Langdell –

Tim Ryuko Langdell is the guiding teacher at Still Center Zen in Pasadena. He contacted me after I had written a post about the Japanese teachers who first brought Zen practice to North America. I had neglected, he informed me, to include Soyu Matsuoka. In fact, I was unfamiliar with Matsuoka.

Although Tim is British by birth, he began coming to the United States regularly in 1973 – at the age of 20 – to practice at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. He’s an easy and fluid speaker who can run with the answer to a question faster than I, at times, can keep up.

“I instantly felt a connection to the Zen Center of Los Angeles. But one of the feelings I had about being there for many, many years, is – and this isn’t a criticism; it’s just a personal preference – that rather being Zen for an American audience it’s trying to be Japanese Zen here in America. And it’s not alone in that. Most of the Zen centers I know around America are trying to bring the Japanese experience to American people. So they will shave their heads, they will wear the full robes. They will do chants in Sino-Japanese. And it all seems very . . . To me, it feels like, ‘Well, that’s nice, but we’re not Japanese.’ What struck me upon learning about Soyu Matsuoka is that not only is he the first Soto priest to bring Zen to the west, but rather than set up a Zen center styled on the monastic constructs of the Japanese Zen temples, he focuses on talking to his audiences as regular North Americans. Therefore, his followers can have robes – it’s not that they can’t wear robes or don’t wear robes, some of them do – they have rakusus, but the level of formality is pretty light. It’s definitely Soto-shu lite. He never formed a formal Zen Center in the sense of ZCLA or the San Francisco Zen Center. The Zen Centers he formed are usually in peoples’ houses. So they took over homes, or they rented a house to become a Zen Center. I think that’s one reason he isn’t as well-known. Because it’s not, ‘Here’s the Zen Center called something with -ji on the end that was founded by Matsuoka Roshi.’ Which is why we’ve heard of Maezumi, which is why we’ve heard of Suzuki or Sasaki or Shimano; so he slipped through the cracks in the histories for that reason.

Tim Langdell

“He styles his Zen as Zen for the average person. And he has a very simple structure compared to, for example, Maezumi’s White Plum structure which is partly Soto, partly Rinzai. They have several different layers. You can take all Sixteen Precepts. You can become a novice priest or a monk. You can work on the teacher path. Or you can go up the priest line which involves such things as Dharma Holder, Head Priest, all the way up to fully ordained priest, all the way up to being fully transmitted. Inka shomei. Many, many stages. Matsuoka simplified it to basically three or four. Take the Precepts. If you feel called to something more, become ordained as a novice priest, then as a priest, and very rarely also have people as roshis. So there only have been something like six roshis in his tradition of which I am one, where there would be many of them in all the other traditions I’m aware of. He wanted to flatten the hierarchy, to keep a more human level, more aimed at the average person. And the impression I get from his teachings is that although he did ordain people, they didn’t suddenly become the important people in the room. I don’t mean that to sound critical. I appreciate that it could do because I have been in situations where you can have it very clearly indicated to you what the hierarchy in the room is from the roshi all the way down, depending on the robes you are wearing. He tried to start it in a much more egalitarian way.

“His Dharma talks quite frankly stunned me when I first read them. He was as likely to go the local Police Confederation and talk to the local Police Academy or local firefighters or give a talk on Zen at the local high school as he was to invite people into one of his Zen Centers and have a formal Dharma talk in the way that you might be more familiar with Maezumi or Suzuki. So all of this, to me, adds up to not only the first attempt to bring Zen practice to North America by a Soto priest that I’m aware of, but it’s also the first attempt to bring a more truly American Zen practice rather than a transferred or transposed Japanese practice into a North American setting.

“The core of Matsuoka’s teaching was Zen in everyday life. Not Zen on a cushion in a zendo in a quiet time once a week, once a day at home or whatever, but moment to moment to moment Zen practice. And he taught that over and over again. Something that I’ve been teaching for many years now, and I’ve got some strange looks because it’s like, ‘No. Soto Zen is shikantaza; it’s sitting on a cushion, facing a wall, and you’ll become enlightened.’ Our approach for many years has been, ‘Maybe. But except possibly Siddhartha Gautama himself, we don’t have even one story of a person becoming enlightened on the cushion.’ It’s just an historical fact. If we believe the writings, it’s never happened. But we do believe very much in zazen in a very real sense. Yes, it means ‘sitting meditation,’ but it can also mean walking meditation; it can also mean moment to moment meditation as you drive your car, work in your office at work, do the dishes, cook the meal, do the gardening. Whatever it is. That moment to moment, that can be zazen.”

I ask if we can back up a bit and get some biographical data.

“Okay a quick overview of his early life. He’s born near Hiroshima in 1912. He attends Soto-shu’s Komozawa University in Tokyo and graduates with a Bachelor’s degree. He then trains at Soji-ji Monastery which, of course, along with Eihei-ji, is one of the two main Soto-shu monasteries. And after several years at Soji-ji he’s given the assignment to establish a temple in the far north of Japan on Karafuto Island which is also known as South Sakhalin, and that was a very demanding task because it was a very remote island, and it would have been very hard to start a temple on it. The island was then claimed by Russia about 1945, so whatever he established there was probably no longer there a few years later. In about 1938 or ’39 – I have two different accounts of that – he comes to the United States, by far the earliest Soto priest . . .”

I interrupt again to point out that Zenshu-ji in Los Angeles had been established in 1922.  

“I’m making a small distinction but it’s an important one,” Tim explains. “Whilst he’s initially sent over to assist at Zenshu-ji, he very quickly then goes on to spread Zen practice to the non-Japanese Americans. Hosen Isobe, who founded Zenshu-ji, and the others with him came over to support the Japanese American population, not to spread Zen to Americans. So Matsuoka was the first to come over who was on that route. After Zenshu-ji in LA, he gets moved to Soko-ji in San Francisco to run that. And then he gets put in the internment camps for the entirety of World War II.

“After the war, instead of going back to Soko-ji, Matsuoka goes to New York to do post-graduate studies with D. T. Suzuki at Columbia. And from Columbia, he then goes to Chicago. Why he went to Chicago, I’m not sure. He happened to love Chicago, and he loved California too. So he moved to Chicago and, in 1949, establishes the Chicago Soto Buddhist Temple which later becomes the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago, which is still active today and is still being run by Matsuoka’s Dharma heirs. And as far as we can tell, almost from its formation, it wasn’t aimed at Japanese Americans. It was attracting, from a very early time, Americans interested in Zen. We’ve got this lack of clarity about the 1950s. We know he was based in Chicago. At the moment, I would have to guess that there was a combination of supporting Japanese Americans in Chicago and welcoming non-Japanese Americans who wanted to learn about Zen. But when we get to the early 1960s, it becomes clear that his outreach is very much to non-Japanese Americans. By the early 1960s he is very active in the Civil Rights Movement. We have a copy of a talk he gave in ’65. So during the ’60s he’s gathering a following of relatively young people. There’s a lot of hippie-like references.”

He also began meeting with other early Zen pioneers including Shunryu Suzuki and the Korean master, Seung Sahn

“And somewhere in the ’60s period, he is given the very senior title of Gondai-kyoshi, which can mean ‘highly respected authorized great teacher.’ Some translate it as Vice President of Soto-shu. Or some translate it as bishop or archbishop. And it’s the same title that Suzuki eventually gets in October of 1969. Matsuoka gets that honor substantially before Suzuki, and he’s eight years younger than Suzuki. That’s an interesting observation. Again, this is a man overlooked by history and yet he got that title.”

By the late 1960s, Matsuoka – as Tim puts it – split from Soto-shu, the formal administrative structure of the Soto school. “His very first Dharma heir was Daikaku Kongo Langlois. He’s the only person he gave transmission whose name he registered with Soto-shu. So when he made Langlois a novice priest, he did put his name down, and that would have been in ’67. Then he decides he’s breaking from Soto-shu. His Zen is going to be American Zen, not Japanese Zen, and he formally disengages from Soto-shu. I believe this is another reason he’s not mentioned, because there’s tremendous pressure from the Japanese side of things to ghost him because he left them. He stopped giving them money of course. It’s actually quite expensive to belong to Soto-shu. Thousands of dollars a year to retain title of Gondai-kyoshi, for instance. So when Langlois becomes fully transmitted in 1971, Matsuoka doesn’t report that to Soto-shu. There has also been a suggestion that Soto-shu thought they had some kind of claim over his Chicago temple because it had started as a mission to Japanese Americans, but he turned it into a mission to American-Americans.”

Matsuoka with Shunryu Suzuki

“And did his temple follow the same structures common elsewhere?” I ask. “Courses in zazen, extended retreats, work periods. That kind of thing?”

“Again, his approach to do Zen was not to borrow from the monastic way of doing things, and what you just described is the monastic structure. It is said that his life was one long sesshin. He led a very simple life. It was quite strict. And he retains an informal approach in each of the centers he’s involved in, because he then goes and forms a center in Long Beach, California. And Chicago and Long Beach have the same hallmarks which are that both have zazen; he has a tremendous focus on zazen; he’s very Soto from that point of view. They’re having sesshins and osesshins. They’re having talks; there are lots of talks and discussions. They had – I think they were called tea-talks – basically they were having tea and a talk. So less formal than what people were doing at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Definitely less formal than Rinzai. And I think that’s why he attracted so many American members who were not necessarily going there to become priests. He’d make a number of priests, but that wasn’t the primary reason that people were coming. He wasn’t there to train priests in the way you do in more formal Zen centers.”

After giving Langlois full transmission, Matsuoka had him take over the Chicago center, and he moved to Long Beach.

“This is around ’71. And he forms the Long Beach Zen Temple. He becomes involved to some degree with the Long Beach Buddhist Church. I did my Soto-shu training there, and his photograph is on the altar. That’s where I first learned of him, when I asked, ‘Who’s that photograph on the altar?’ And they said, ‘Oh, that’s Matsuoka.’ I thought Matsuoka was one of the main Soto-shu people because why was he on the altar with the other Soto-shu people? So he’s the only non-Soto-shu person on the altar. And he forms this group, and it flourishes during the ’70s, and basically he stays there the rest of his life until he becomes very sick in his 90s. Then he moves back to Chicago for his remaining days. And now there is almost no sign of anything left in Long Beach.”

“What is it that you think people should know about him?” I ask. “What is his legacy?”

“Well, as I said at the beginning, the fact that he was one of the first Soto-shu priests to come to America. And he was also the first to teach Zen practice to Americans rather than to Japanese Americans. We started because you named four people as the original Japanese missionaries to America,[1] and I said, ‘Shouldn’t it really be five?’ Matsuoka should have been included in that initial list.”

“And I had not heard of him.”

“Which most people haven’t. I hadn’t heard about him until just a few years ago when I lighted upon this group, and I said, ‘Who’s Matsuoka?’ And then I dove into it. And the other thing I wanted to say is that I am still finding Matsuoka heirs. There are websites all over the world – definitely all over America – where there are Dharma heirs of Matsuoka. An Giao[2] who sadly just passed away but ran the Dessert Zen Center in Southern California is known to me as a Vietnamese monk and teacher. I didn’t know that he was also made a priest by Matsuoka. He’s all over the place. And I think his importance is that of those initial people – Maezumi, Sasaki, Suzuki, and Shimano – he’s the one who tried to come up with an American Zen rather than transplanting the Japanese Soto monastic tradition to America. So his vision, to me, was an extremely valid vision. And because he was not trying to do it monastically, it didn’t get reported on as much, it didn’t leave behind a physical temple or Zen Center that people could write about and get to know and even visit. It was more ephemeral because he tended to set up in peoples’ houses. He had a really good grasp of American culture, I think. And I think that’s another reason he should be remembered, because he’s the one who rather than say, ‘I represent Soto-shu and I’m here to convert you into American Soto-shu men,’ said, ‘I’m going to give you an American Zen that has its roots in Soto-shu, that has its roots in Dogen, in particular, but I’m trying to make it first and foremost American Zen rather than Japanese Zen.’ As one of the few remaining Matsuoka roshis, since we are the lineage bearers, it falls on my shoulders to keep Matsuoka’s memory and his teachings alive and to continue to pursue his vision of a more truly western form Zen better suited to both American and European lifestyles and culture.”

[1] https://rbmcdaniel.ca/2024/03/20/joshu-sasaki/

[2] https://desertzencenter.org/monks/

Glenn Webb

Conversations with Genjo Marinello and Kurt Spellmeyer –

“I came to Seattle in 1976 as a VISTA volunteer,” Genjo Marinello tells me. Genjo is the abbot of Dai Bai Zan Cho Bo Zen Ji. “I had already started studying Zen in 1975 with Daizen Victoria at the College of Oriental studies and a little bit of bumping into people at Zen Center of Los Angeles, so I was already meditating daily by the time I came to Seattle. And I started looking for what was then called the Seattle Zen Center. I had heard it was on the University of Washington campus, but this was before the internet, and I couldn’t find it. I walked around campus and looked into some rooms but didn’t see anything that looked like a zendo. It wasn’t until 1977 that I met somebody who knew somebody who said, ‘This group meets at such-and-such a room on the UW campus on such-and-such a day.’ And so I showed up, and that’s when I met Dr. Glenn Webb.”

Genjo and Glenn Webb

Webb was a Protestant minister’s son from Oklahoma who earned a Ph. D. in Asian Art from the University of Chicago. He had a studio in the Art History Department a UW where – Genjo explains – “there were cabinets with all the zafus and the bells and whistles, as it were, to construct a zendo by moving the tables aside and bringing out the zabutons and the zafus and setting up a zendo. And that’s what they did every week.”

Webb’s Zen practice began in 1964, when he was in Japan to study ink block prints.

“The story that I heard,” Genjo tells me, “was that he wanted to study a particular series of prints which were housed in a Zen temple – temples are treasuries of Zen art in Japan – and the roshi of the temple said, ‘Well, you won’t even see this work unless you are doing zazen. You won’t be able to appreciate it. So, why should I go to the trouble of accessing this material for you, even if you’re a scholar, if you don’t do zazen?’ So that’s how he began zazen. And then he went to a sesshin and kind of got hooked and had some experiences. He also studied the Japanese tea ceremony. And when he came back to Seattle, he taught the History of Japanese Art.”

I ask what Webb’s official teaching status had been.

“It is my understanding that he had transmission, but I never saw him dressed in the robes, and he wasn’t really playing the role of a priest or a Roshi; he was more an art history professor who had a Zen group. He was also a tea master. He had more than enough to do as a tea master and an art history professor and a part-time leader of a Zen group, but he didn’t want to be a Zen teacher. He just wanted people to have the opportunity to appreciate art and tea and felt that to do so they needed – as he had – to do Zen.”

“Do you remember your initial impression of him?” I ask.

“Affable. Sincere. Enthusiastic about everything Japanese. And I was already interested in Zen, so it was a place to come and sit. And I thought it was a great bonus, his love for everything about Japan, Japanese art, and the tea ceremony. He was fluent in Japanese, and he had spent so long there, and he had connections with temples in Japan, and I was already thinking that I might go down that path of going to Japan myself. So this was a great bonus to know an American who had done all this training.”

“You said he didn’t ‘want’ to be a Zen teacher. So he didn’t present himself as one?”

“He did present himself as a teacher of a meditation group. But he wasn’t trying to say, ‘I’m the roshi,’ or, ‘I’m the osho.’ He just said, ‘This is how to do meditation, and this is something the west could really be served by.’ So he was interested in sharing Zen, tea ceremony, and Japanese art with the world, and being an ambassador for those things. That was his way of sharing Japan with the world.”

“Did you take tea lessons from him?”

“I took a few lessons. I wouldn’t say that . . . I can whisk a good bowl of tea – yeah – and I enjoy doing that.”

“And then he recruited a teacher from Japan.”

“Yes. The group was getting pretty solid and had – even before I got there – sent somebody to Japan to train with some temple that he had been associated with. So the group was budding, and it was like, ‘I can’t do all of this. So maybe on one of my trips to Japan I’ll find someone who will be able to take over that part of leading the group.”

Kurt Spellmeyer

Kurt Spellmeyer is Glenn Webb’s Dharma heir. He tells me, “Originally Glenn had invited a friend, a Soto monk from Eiheiji, Hirano Katsufumi, to lead the emerging Zen Center. He had been the monk in charge of training novices there. But Hirano-san had commitments elsewhere and left. So Webb invited Genki Roshi, whom he had met through his Rinzai connections.”

“Genki Roshi” was Genki Takabayashi who had had been at Daishu-in in Kyoto at the sufferance of the abbot, Soko Morinaga, after being expelled from a previous temple for inappropriate sexual behaviour. In a letter to Kobutsu Malone, Webb explained that Morinaga had taken Genki in as a favor. “But he made Genki’s life hell: when I met him at Daishu-in he was low man on the totem pole, relegated to menial tasks and never allowed to engage in anything important. He showed no remorse for his sexual misconduct, but he seemed determined to go as far in his training as he could. He was a kind of Zen fundamentalist regarding his sitting and his adherence to the tiniest detail of Rinzai Daitoku-ji liturgy.”

Webb invited to Seattle although Morinaga disapproved of the idea. At first the situation in Seattle went well, but eventually Webb and Takabayashi had a falling out.

Genki Takabayashi

Genjo sighs. “Yes. It became a little like too many chief cooks in the kitchen. Something like that. Genki had such a terrible reputation in Japan and was essentially being punished. From what I understand, he was a rising star in terms of doing koan work and going up the echelons, but then disappointed and embarrassed the Japanese hierarchy by getting a woman pregnant, which was not kosher, but then not marrying her was really not kosher. And I think there were some financial dealings that he had mishandled. And so they did not think at all that he should go anywhere like the United States and represent Zen. And Genki was looking for a way out and thought, ‘I’ll just come and visit America. Maybe it will be a nice place to be.’ And he decided it was. And he was very humble to begin with. But then, as he began to pick up the adoration of Americans and the idealization of Americans, this really fed him.”

“Here, in the United States, I think at first he behaved quite well,” Kurt says. “But imagine that you’ve just come from Japan. You have all these adoring people around you, and they’re treating you like a god and that includes some very attractive women. Genki had been adopted as a child by Yamamoto Gempo Roshi; his Dharma father was a famous Zen Master who didn’t know anything about how to raise a kid. In fact, Genki was forced to attend sesshin when he was twelve years old, wishing an earthquake would pull the temple down on his head, as he once told me. So, imagine that this is your background and you’re suddenly in the United States with the Sexual Revolution underway. So he had another affair here in the US, and my understanding is this woman also had a child.”

That affair caused tension with Webb, but the community finally came apart after arrangements to buy a dedicated space for the center fell through.

“There was a house that we were trying to buy,” Genjo explains, “and Glenn was in China or out of the country, and I had put up some down payment money for this house, and even though there had been this falling out, people were still struggling to bring it all together and have our own place. And then Genki decided, ‘Well, I don’t want to live in that place.’ And, of course, it would be impossible if he didn’t live there. And Webb was pissed at him because it caused the whole deal to fall apart. And everybody was mad at everybody. And we lost – personally, my family at that time – lost the money we’d put up for the house. So everybody was mad at everybody because the house that we were trying to buy as the Seattle Zen Center fell through. Glenn was out of town. Genki was being kind of obstinate and stubborn. And that finally did it. Genki announced, ‘Well, I’m just going to start my own thing.’”

“And what did Webb do after Genki took off?”

“Glenn stayed with and remained the teacher of the Seattle Zen Center which continued to go forward independent of Genki, and the Genki faction split off. The Webb faction continued as the Seattle Zen Center until he moved onto Pepperdine in Malibu, and then the Seattle Zen Center essentially fell apart.”

“What took him to Malibu?”

“He became the head of the Art Department at Pepperdine.”

Genjo stayed with the group in Seattle and his contacts with Webb became less frequent after that.

“I would visit him in Pepperdine, probably maybe once a year or so. Then even when he retired from Pepperdine, I would go visit him in Palm Springs where he retired. And I did that a couple of times when he was retired in Palm Springs. He would come up to Seattle and visit Chobo-ji.”

Kurt chose to practice with Glenn after the break-up:

“When Genki had the affair, that crossed a red line for Glenn, and eventually our group split more or less in two. You know how divisive these events are. Whatever the initial issue might be, it becomes a focal point for other tensions and jealousies. And so it wasn’t just an argument between two people but between different groups within the community.

“When the split happened, somewhat to my own surprise, I went with Webb. I suppose I went with him because he was a deeply ethical person, thoughtful, kind and sensitive. As you know, Protestants are no more ethical than anybody else, as we can see from the endless scandals in the Protestant world, but sexual ethics are important to Protestants in a way that people from other traditions might not look at them. Webb, as a minister’s son, was deeply affronted by Genki’s behavior. For me personally, not so much. I was more troubled, even angered, by his indifference to the woman involved.

“So after we had our community Civil War, I was ready to quit Zen. It was so discouraging. People had to choose sides and were attacking one another, impugning each other’s motives. It was ugly and sad. People who had sat through sesshins side by side were suddenly yelling at each other. It was like a nightmare, and I’d just had it. I decided that I would quietly bow out, as many other members of our group did at the time. But all the same, Webb was organizing a sesshin. We had built a temple up in the mountains, which we were now about to lose because financial support had dried up, but Webb was going there one last time before we put the place up for sale.  One evening after meditation, Glenn approached me and asked if I planned to attend. And I very much wanted to say no, but when I looked at his face, I thought, ‘I can’t do this to him. He’s organized this last sesshin; I can’t say, “No.”’ And when I arrived at the temple, instead of our usual eighteen or twenty people, I think we had five – Webb and four others including me. Arriving at the empty, half-finished temple, I felt quite sad and lonely, but that was where I had my dai-kensho, my great awakening experience. It was like nothing else ever. I think I cried for seven days, and at first I wasn’t even aware that I was crying.”

Glenn Webb died on January 6, 2024. I ask Genjo about his legacy.

“He was a key transmitter of the love and art of Japan. From Japan to the West. A little bit like D. T. Suzuki, on a smaller scale of course, but bringing the love of Japanese art and culture from Japan to the United States and having it appreciated on a much wider scale. Whether it was the art of flower arranging or the tea ceremony or sitting zazen or appreciating any of the other Japanese arts, he was just this wonderful ambassador of Japanese culture to the West.”