Upaya Zen Center –

I have a spiel I use before starting an interview. I assure the person interviewed that I am less interested in what they say than in what they intended to say and that I recognize there may be a difference between the two. Therefore, I will send them a transcript of our talk, and they are free to modify it in any manner they see fit. They may rephrase, delete, expand as they wish. I often flippantly add (because I tend to be flippant) that I don’t care if they tear the interview up and send me an essay instead. If they do choose to emend the transcript, I promise to delete the original document from my files and any further work I do will be based only on the emended document.

Fewer than half the people I interview change the transcript. Most are content to let the original conversation stand. And, of course, no one has ever written an essay. Until I interviewed Joan Halifax.

It was the 311^th interview I’ve conducted since I started doing them in 2013, but she was unwell the day we spoke and unhappy with the way it went. We had already postposed the interview once before because of my health. So she decided to take me at my word and write an essay instead. This is what she sent to me:

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I came to the Dharma the long way around, through the streets first, before I ever sat on a cushion. In the 1960s I was a very engaged social activist. Those were years when the country was tearing at its own seams, and it seemed to me that anyone with eyes had no choice but to take a side. I gave myself to the anti-war movement and to the civil rights movement, marching, organizing, showing up wherever there was suffering that could be named and resisted. I believed, as so many of us believed then, that the world could be changed by the force of our conviction and the weight of our bodies. I still believe a version of that. But in those days my activism ran hot. It was fueled by moral outrage, and outrage, I would learn, is a fire that consumes the one who carries it as surely as it scorches the injustice it is aimed at.

What I did not yet have was an interior life equal to the work. I was pouring myself out, and I had no well to draw from. I sensed the lack without quite knowing how to name it. I knew I was angry, and I knew that anger was righteous, but I could feel it hardening me, and I did not want to become hard. I wanted to be of use to the world without being broken by it, or worse, without becoming a smaller version of the very thing I was fighting.

It was in the middle of that decade that I went to hear Thich Nhat Hanh speak. He had come to talk about ending the war in Vietnam, his country, his war, his people dying on both sides of a line drawn by others. I went expecting a political appeal. What I encountered instead changed the entire trajectory of my life.

Here was a monk who carried the suffering of his country in his body and yet spoke from a place of immense stillness. He was not less committed than the activists I knew. If anything, he was more committed, because his commitment did not depend on his mood, on whether the news was good or bad, on whether he was winning. It rested on something underneath all that. He embodied a truth I had not known was available to me: that one could be a contemplative and a social activist at the same time, and that these were not two lives competing for a single heart, but one life, undivided. The activist and the meditator did not have to take turns. They could be the same person, breathing the same breath.

That recognition was the seed of everything that followed. I did not become his student then. That would come decades later, in its own season. But I walked out of that talk understanding that I had been trying to do half a thing. From then on, I went looking for the other half.

I became, in those first years, what I have always called a book Buddhist. I studied. I read everything I could find, the early teachings, the Mahayana sutras, the commentaries, the histories, Alan Watts, D. T. Suzuki.  And what astonished me was how much sense it all made. I had half expected mysticism, something to take on faith. Instead I found a teaching that was practical, almost clinical in its honesty about the human condition. It began not with a god or a doctrine but with a plain observation: there is suffering, and there are causes of suffering, and there is a way to work with both. The Dharma did not ask me to believe anything. It asked me to look. That suited me. It met me where I was, a person who had spent time looking hard at the suffering of the world and wanted, finally, to understand its roots and not just its symptoms.

And I meditated. Clumsily, alone, without a teacher and without a sangha to hold me. I sat because the books told me sitting was the heart of the matter, and because something in me knew it was true. There is a particular quality to those early years of solitary practice, a kind of innocence, and also a kind of loneliness. I had no one to tell me when I was deceiving myself, no one to confirm or correct what was arising. I was building a house without a plumb line. But I was building, and the foundation laid in those solitary years held.

In the early seventies that solitude began to open into community. I met Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Joseph Goldstein at the Insight Meditation Society. These were people roughly my own generation who had gone east, sat with the great Asian masters, and come home to translate that experience into a language and a form that could take root in American soil. I appreciated their perspectives on practice enormously. They had something I lacked, direct lineage, hours on the cushion under the eye of teachers who knew the territory. To sit with them, to talk through the fine grain of practice with people who took it as seriously as I did, was a homecoming. The book Buddhist was becoming a practitioner among practitioners.

By the middle of the seventies, I was ready to give something back to that emerging world, and the form it took was ambitious. Together with Jack Kornfield, I produced a six-week intensive on Buddhism at the Esalen Institute – six full weeks, an extraordinary container – and we brought together some of the most remarkable Buddhist teachers then alive or then active in the West. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche came, Tarthang Tulku, Seung Sahn, whom we called Soen Sa Nim, Jon Kabat-Zinn – who would go on to bring mindfulness into the heart of Western medicine – Jack himself, Lama Govinda, Huston Smith – that great translator of the world’s religions for the American mind – and others, each a river feeding into what was becoming a wide American confluence. To be in a single place for six weeks with that company was to stand at a kind of headwaters. Tibetan, Korean, Theravada, Zen, traditions that had developed for centuries in separate valleys were suddenly in conversation, sometimes in friction, always alive. I have never forgotten the privilege of it, and I have never since taken for granted how rare such gatherings are.

It was Jack who suggested that Soen Sa Nim might be a good fit for me as a teacher. He saw something, perhaps the directness in me that Korean Zen, with its blunt and vigorous style, would meet head on. He was right. I began to practice with Soen Sa Nim, and I continued in that rigorous Korean practice for eleven years. Eleven years is not a small thing. It is long enough to be at least someone repurposed. Korean Zen is demanding, uncompromising, physical; it does not flatter you, and it has no patience for the spiritual ego. Soen Sa Nim would cut straight through my cleverness with a single question, and I am grateful for every one of those cuts. The discipline of those years gave me a spine. It taught me to stay, to sit through what I wanted to flee, to meet the great matter of life and death without turning away.

And yet. There was an ache running underneath those eleven years, and it was the same ache I had carried out of that first Thich Nhat Hanh talk. Soen Sa Nim was a great teacher, but he was not a social activist. The world’s suffering, the political suffering, the suffering of the oppressed and the dying and the imprisoned, was not at the center of his teaching the way it was at the center of my longing. I had found the contemplative depth I had gone looking for. But I had, in a sense, set down the other half again. The undivided life that Thay had shown me was a possibility I still had not been able to embody. I was a contemplative who used to be an activist, and that was not what I wanted to be.

In the middle of the eighties, the chance came to close that gap. I was given the opportunity to spend real time with Thich Nhat Hanh and Sister Chân Không at Plum Village, the community they had established in France. To be there was to see in daily, ordinary practice the very thing I had glimpsed in theory years before. Here was a sangha where mindfulness and engagement were not in tension. The same hands that arranged flowers for the altar wrote letters on behalf of refugees and the persecuted. Sister Chân Không in particular, fierce, tender, tireless, showed me what engaged Buddhism looked like worn into the grain of a life. I asked Thay to be my teacher. I practiced directly with him, and I spent many summers at Plum Village over the years that followed, sitting, walking, breathing, learning the slow patient art of being present without abandoning the world.

In the early nineties, Thay gave me the Lamp Transmission. To receive the lamp from him was, for me, the completion of a circle that had opened in the mid-sixties when I first heard him speak. The contemplative and the activist had finally come home to the same hearth, lit by the same flame.

It was out of that integration that Upaya was born. In 1990 I established the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and from the very beginning I built it on two pillars that I refused to let stand apart: rigorous contemplative practice on one hand, and deep social and environmental engagement on the other. Upaya, the word means skillful means, was to be a place where sitting and serving were understood as a single gesture. I had spent decades learning, the hard way, that you cannot serve the world well from an empty interior, and that you cannot call interior cultivation complete if it leaves the world’s suffering untouched. Upaya was my attempt to build a house with both rooms and a door between them always open.

The engagement was never abstract. In those years I was working with men who were dying of AIDS, sitting at bedsides during an epidemic that the wider world was still too frightened or too cruel to face. There is no theory left when you are holding the hand of a dying person whom society has turned away from. There is only presence, only the willingness to stay. Out of that work I founded the Project on Being with Dying, both to accompany dying people themselves and to train clinicians, the doctors and nurses and caregivers, in contemplative care. I had come to believe that the way we die, and the way we care for the dying, is one of the truest measures of a culture’s heart, and that our culture had grown estranged from death in ways that harmed everyone and the dying most of all, but also the living who had forgotten how to be with them. To train clinicians to bring presence, equanimity, and compassion to the bedside became, and remains, some of the most important work of my life.

I also created the Upaya Prison Project, and I went, with some of my students, as a volunteer into some of the hardest places a person can go: death row and maximum security. People sometimes ask why. The answer is simple, and it is the whole of the Dharma in a sentence: there is no one outside the circle of compassion. A human being condemned to die, a human being locked away from the world for what they have done, is still a human being, still capable of waking up, still deserving of someone willing to sit with them and bear witness to their life. Some of the most genuine practice I have ever encountered was behind those walls. I did not go to save anyone. I went to be present, and to learn, and I was taught more than I taught.

There was, too, a thread reaching back even further and toward an entirely different landscape. In the early eighties I had established the Nomads Clinic, bringing clinicians on foot into the high-altitude villages of the Himalayas, to people who live beyond the reach of ordinary medicine, in some of the most remote and beautiful and demanding terrain on earth. That project continues to this day. The pilgrimage of it, the bodies pushed to their limit at altitude, the encounter with cultures shaped by Buddhism for a thousand years, the simple act of bringing care to those who have none has been a school of its own. It taught me that service and practice and the raw encounter with mountains and mortality are not separable. They are the same path, climbing.

If I look for what binds these projects together – the dying, the imprisoned, the villagers beyond the last road – I find it is always the same thing. Each of them is an encounter at an edge, the edge where ordinary life thins out and the great matters press close: mortality, isolation, the limits of the body, the question of who counts as one of us. I have never been drawn to a comfortable, decorative Buddhism, a practice that polishes the self and asks nothing of it. The Dharma that seized me in the sixties was a teaching about suffering and its end, and I have tried to keep faith with that by going, again and again, to where the suffering actually is. Not to fix it – often as much of it cannot be fixed – but to refuse to abandon it. Bearing witness, Bernie Glassman would have called it. Interbeing, Thay would have called it. Just this, Soen Sa Nim would have called it. Different words for the single discipline of staying present at the edge without turning away.

The work at Upaya expanded over the years, and Upaya itself deepened as a place of both practice and service with a residential community, a refuge for practitioners, a training ground for chaplains and caregivers, a base from which all of these projects could go out into the world and return. I watched it grow from a vision into a living institution, and I have tried never to let it lose the double heartbeat it was born with.

In the middle of the nineties, my path crossed again with Bernie Glassman. I had known of him for years. There was no one in the world of engaged American Zen who did not know of Bernie. But now I re-encountered him in a way that changed my formal life in the Dharma. Bernie had taken the integration of practice and social action further into the streets than almost anyone alive. His bearing-witness retreats, his plunges into homelessness and into the sites of genocide, his insistence that meditation was not a refuge from the world’s pain but a total entry into it, all of this spoke directly to the life I had been trying to lead.

I took refuge in him, and I became a founding member of the Zen Peacemaker Order, which he established with his late wife Jishu as a community of practitioners committed to peace and to social justice. The Three Tenets at its heart of not-knowing, bearing witness, and taking compassionate action were, for me, a precise articulation of everything I had spent so many years learning to live.

Under Bernie, my path through the Zen forms reached its formal fruition. I was ordained as a Zen priest in 1996. Several years later, I received Dharma transmission. And in 1999 I received inka shomei, the final seal of approval, the confirmation of a teacher’s full authority.

To hold transmission from both Thich Nhat Hanh and Bernie Glassman is to stand at the meeting place of two great rivers of engaged Buddhism: the mindful stream of Plum Village, and the fierce, street-level activism of the Zen Peacemakers. I have never experienced those two as a contradiction. To me they have always been the same water.

Bernie died in 2018. His passing was the loss of one of the great originals of American Buddhism, a man who broke open our idea of what Buddhism could be, who fed the hungry and cared for the sick and bore witness to the world’s worst pain without ever losing his capacity for joy, even for foolishness. I carry his teaching forward as I carry Thay’s, and Soen Sa Nim’s, and all the teachers who shaped me. None of them are gone, really. They are in the way I sit, the way I serve, the way I stay with the dying and the imprisoned and the forgotten.

I continue, still, as abbot of the Upaya Zen Center, and I serve there. That word, serve, is the one I would choose if I could keep only one. Across all these years, through activism and study and the long discipline of the cushion, through Korean Zen and Plum Village and the Peacemaker Order, through AIDS wards and prisons and Himalayan villages, the through-line has never changed. It is the line I first saw, dimly, walking out of a talk by a Vietnamese monk in the middle of the 1960s: that the contemplative life and the engaged life are one life. That you sit down in order to stand up. That you cultivate stillness not to escape the world but to be of more use to it. That compassion is not a feeling but a practice, and that the deepest practice is simply this: to be present, fully and without flinching, with the suffering that is here, in front of you, now.

I came to the Dharma the long way around. But I have come to understand that there was no other way for me to come, and that the streets were always part of the path.

Zen Fields, Ames, Iowa – 

Sara Jisho Siebert is a Soto Zen priest who teaches at Zen Fields in Ames, Iowa. Her back story is striking.

“When I was fourteen, a number of people in my life experienced sexual violence and talked to me about it. My mom is a great listener, and I guess I picked up some skills, so people would come to me and tell me the thing that was bothering them. By the time I was 17, I was just so tired of not knowing what to say to people when they had experienced this, and my mom brought it to my attention that there was this training for volunteers to do a crisis hotline. So I went through that training. It was a joint program between sexual violence and domestic violence, and I realized: this is just it. This is where I need to be. It’s so relevant in so many peoples’ lives. We need to do something about it. So I just let it drag me around, for a long time. I was working a lot. It is very easy to get burned out in spaces like that because they’re understaffed and underfunded and everything else. So I was doing a lot. For the first seven years it was direct service crisis response work. And then I really started to ask more questions around prevention, and most of the interesting prevention work at the time seemed to be happening outside of the US. So my work led me around to eleven different countries, living in different spaces, doing that work. And I’d been in Haiti probably the longest but also Uganda and some other places. And that is definitely what led me to Zen. I had in all of that time a number of cycles of burnout around the levels of pain, thinking: ‘This is never gonna stop!’ And the Buddhist stories made so much sense.”

The books she read on Buddhism stressed the importance of finding a teacher, something she thought it was unlikely she’d be able to do in Iowa.

“So I moved to Los Angeles and found an apartment and looked in the yellow pages, and I called about four places. I called the Vietnamese place, the Korean place. I was just calling places that looked near my apartment in Los Angeles. I thought, ‘I can’t possibly fight through three hours of traffic to get to a place regularly.’ So I was looking in the area where I’d found an apartment. Nobody who answered the phones spoke English. I’d say, ‘I’m so sorry, but I don’t speak your language. Do you have any offerings in English?’ ‘No. Sorry.’ And then I called Zenshuji, And, ‘Moshi moshi!’ And I was like, ‘Oh, crap, not again!’” She’s laughing as she tells the story. “It was Rev. Shumyo Kojima who has been an amazing person in my path. And I said, ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t speak any Japanese. Do you have any programs in English?’ And he said, ‘Yes. No problem. Come on Monday if you want to.’ So I came on Monday.”

Zenshuji, established in 1922, was the first Soto temple on the US mainland. It was the temple Taizan Maezumi was sent to in 1956 to serve the Japanese American congregation. As in San Francisco, during the ’60s there was an influx of non-Asian youth inquiring about Zen, and by 1967, under Maezumi’s leadership, they established a separate entity, the Zen Center of Los Angeles.

It was a matter of chance that Jisho began her formal practice at Zenshuji rather than at ZCLA, but as a result she has a particular perspective about Zen. The majority of people who seek out a Zen Center are looking for a meditation center. For Jisho, Zen is a denomination not limited to zazen and sutra study, though those still have great importance. Also her understanding of the history of American Zen practice differs from that of many of the people I have interviewed. She stresses that Zen in the West did not originate with people like Taizan Maezumi or Shunryu Suzuki, that Zen temples had been part if active denomination in both Los Angeles and San Francisco – and somewhat later in Chicago – for decades before those particular priests arrived.

“It is important to recognize how Asian American sanghas are continuing to feed what Zen looks like in the United States. It didn’t just happen in the past or in some specific time period. It’s continuing to be cultivated. We just have so much honoring to do to the Asian American traditions and structures that have supported and continue to support Buddhism.”

I tell her that the story – as I am familiar with it – was that in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, the ethnic communities for whom the temple were originally established came to resent the amount of time Suzuki and Maezumi spent with the non-ethnic population. I ask if there had been any residual resentment when she arrived.

“Yeah. It’s a really good question. So my teacher, Rev. Gengo Akiba, was the sokan – or representative of the Soto Zen school in North America – at the time, he was in Oakland but was coming down to Zenshuji each month, and I met him that way. My teacher has spent most of his time in this country going back and forth to Japan trying to bring together the whole gamut of Japanese American, US born with no Japanese ancestry, and Japanese Japanese in the Soto structure together, and trying to figure out how to create harmony and hear each other and cross-pollinate the learning. He feels that maybe all sides have something to learn from each other. I think he has about ten disciples, some in Japan and some in the United States. He has been kind of gently pulling people together the whole while. And I’ve had so much encouragement from him, and from Japanese American priests at Soko-ji who work with him. Real open-hearted acceptance.

“I feel like it’s been somewhat harder sometimes for lay people who spent a lot of their lives experiencing discrimination outside the bubble of the temple environment. At Zenshuji, the older generation that was there when I started –– many have passed away now – but when I started many of them grew up in or had close family members in internment camps.”

I ask how she became a priest, and she tells me it’s a terrible story.

“Well, I went to Zenshuji for about four years, and it never, honestly, occurred to me until someone who started almost the same week I did was asking to ordain. And I went out to dinner with him and another priest, and they’re like, ‘Well, why don’t you do it too?’ And I was like, ‘Why would I do that?’ And then I started to think about it. And I felt that something was palpably different about my life since I started this. I made a ton of mistakes in those four years; I screwed up a ton of things, and yet something is different about the way that I am in them, and something is really helpful about this practice, so why wouldn’t I want to devote my life to that? And I saw that happening with other people too. So why wouldn’t I want . . . Not because I have the answer already, but why wouldn’t I want to invest every fiber of my being into figuring this out? And so it made sense to me.”

“And that’s not something you could have done as a lay person?” I ask.

“Well, it’s about what is your primary purpose? So my life looks a lot like a lay person’s life now – right? – I have kids, I have a husband, I live in a house, I work part-time at another job that is not directly on the surface of it Zen-related in any way. But all of that, to me, is part of my vow. The main point is the practice of awakening for all beings. And anything else I do under that, it’s a twenty-four hour a day practice, so anything else we do under that, it shifts in and out over time, but the main purpose is that purpose.

“And then, practically, there are just a lot of practice opportunities that open up if you are ordained. It depends on lineage too in a lot of ways. There are teachers who have figured out lay ordination; there are teachers who have figured out a really rigorous training process for lay students who are very deeply dedicated who, for some reason, don’t want to ordain. Again I’m in more of a Japanese/Japanese American system, and that just didn’t exist. So if you want to work closely with a teacher, you ordain.”

Her husband, Daishin McCabe, received Dharma transmission before she did, and they moved to Iowa, where she had grown up. “He started offering things online, trying to find a space, finding ways to offer Zen practices to people. After a couple of years, I had my transmission ceremony and we happened to have a couple of lawyers who were part of our community, and they told us, ‘You need to make a 510c3 so we can support you and make this beyond you and have a board and all these things.’ So . . . It’s been slow. We still don’t have our own space. We use a Quaker Meeting House.”

“They make good places to meet,” I note.

“It’s a wonderful place to meet. Our expenses are next to nothing, so we do interesting things with our money. It’s been a wonderful experience of listening to the community we’re building about what’s needed next.”

“You have sangha there?”

“Yeah, we do. I have one ordained student that is in training, and there are quite a number of people who are regulars. It is a small group. Although I do some guest teaching for the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, and I was laughing with them one time that––though their sangha is huge––if you looked at percentage of the local population that comes to our events compared to theirs, we’re not doing too bad.”

I ask what kind of relationship she has with other American Zen lineages.

“I belong to the Soto Zen Buddhist Association. There was also a peer group that I was part of for, like, five years, and most of the people who were in that group – who I loved dearly – were from lineages that are no longer connected with the Japanese denomination in any way. It was good for all of us, I think, to have that different take from each other, and they were just beautiful, deep practitioners as well. And then, of course, the Association of Soto Zen Buddhists is the group that is still connected to the hierarchy in Japan, and there’s a conference a couple of times a year. And that’s a good mix of Japanese and Japanese American temple representatives as well as mostly American-born priests. So having those connections to something wider is really helpful, and having those connections with individuals is also important. It stops us from having a really surface black and white narrative of anything. There’s a lot of diversity out there in terms of how people see this practice.”

“Okay,” I say. “So you are a Zen priest, and you’ve told me that zazen is not the only practice that defines the school. So, tell me: What is Zen?”

She takes a moment to consider her response, and I elaborate my question. “Say I’m someone who lives in the neighborhood, and I’m walking down the street, and I see a sign saying ‘Zen.’ And I knock on the door, and I’m not being aggressive or anything, but I am curious. What is Zen?”

She nods her head then speaks slowly and carefully: “It is how we live the moments of our life – of this life – with the awareness and presence and compassion and wisdom that will allow us to fully embrace and be in our lives in a helpful way. It’s difficult to measure. It’s an expanded version of how you would usually live your life. And that appears in all our different daily activities. It’s how we clean; it’s how we cook; it’s how we eat. It’s how we make our beds or don’t. It’s about how we relate with one another and the challenges that come up. It’s how we relate with our own minds in any given moment in any given activity in our life.”

It is very much a Soto answer. Other schools might have talked about the importance of awakening. I mention that one of the things I have noticed with other Soto priests is the way they focus in a precise way on the activities with which they are engaged, for example, if I were to pass them a cup they don’t take it thoughtlessly but would receive it, consciously, with both hands. How important, I ask, is that attention to what I call “minutia”? This time there’s no hesitation in her reply.

“It’s all we have. Whatever’s in front of us is all we really have; the rest of it is just a figment of our imagination. In the relative world, what’s in front of us is all we’ve got. Whatever it is, if we can bring our full care to it, our full attention and care, that’s all we’ve got; that’s all there is. If I’m worrying about this thing over here and I can’t be present, then what’s the point? So there isn’t anything that is too mundane or too small. And it’s not about kind of an obsession with minutia. It’s about, ‘What else is your brain going to be doing?’ Our brains are pretty smart as human beings, and, a lot of the time, they can get in the way of our just being here. You can think that’s nitpicking or something like that, but the thing we are doing now is important. It’s not something to be skipped over to get to something important. We miss our lives if we make things too small to care about.”

“And when people come to you, when they seek you out, what are they expecting you to do for them?”

She laughs: “Like the expectation that there will be some kind of a magical equanimity that you won’t be bothered by the conditions in the world in any way. And – you know – we try to talk regularly about that not being what this is about. And it’s tricky, because . . . In my first years of practice in the Japanese American context, there was a bit of a humorous kind of almost flippant response to that kind of inquiry that was very much like, ‘This won’t do anything for you. If you’ve come looking for something, you’re not going to find it.’ I often refer to the tea master at Zenshuji – she’s wonderful, Hiromi-san – she is the tea ceremony teacher. Because she’s been there forever and because of her status, she can say the most wonderful, irreverent things, like, ‘We do the same thing in tea as you do in zazen. We make people sit in an uncomfortable position for a really long time, but at least they get a cup of tea out of it! Why do you people do this?’ But I think there was a lot of humor around that. I think the joking also helps because it acknowledges that people do want . . . They want a purpose; they want an outcome. And if we’re looking for that in some kind of rational way, we close ourselves off from what actually might be. And so if we can let up on looking for that type of outcome and just be, we might actually find . . . something.” She smiles; she has a great smile. “But don’t count on it.”

In addition to the Soto missions established for the benefit of the immigrant populations on the West Coast, and the Asian-trained teachers who sought to introduce a new spiritual tradition to the West, there was a third route by which Zen came to North America: Catholic missionaries who returned from their tours of service in Japan enriched by the practices they encountered there.

Hugo Lassalle was a German Jesuit who came to Japan as a missionary in 1929. In 1935, he was appointed Mission Superior and stationed in Hiroshima. There, professors at Bunrika University convinced him that to understand the character of the Japanese people he needed to understand Zen Buddhism. He was not particularly familiar with Buddhist theory at the time, but the traditional description of Zen was intriguing:

A special transmission outside the scriptures;
Not dependent on words or letters;
By direct pointing to the mind of man,
Seeing into one’s true nature and attaining Buddhahood.

When war broke out in 1939, Lasalle remained in Japan. He was sympathetic to the populace which endured enormous sufferings during the conflict, and he admired the strength of character that Zen monks and lay practitioners exhibited in the face of those hardships.

In the spring of 1943 Lassalle attended sesshin for the first time at Eimyo-ji outside Hiroshima. It was a significant step in the development of Western Zen. There had been a handful of Zen students in the west already, but they practiced as Buddhists. Lassalle’s unique contribution was to question if Zen were as it claimed “a special transmission outside the scriptures” could it be a practice available to people who did not subscribe to doctrinaire Buddhism?

Lassalle was in Hiroshima when the atom bomb fell on August 6, 1945. 80,000 persons were either killed immediately by the blast or in the firestorm that followed. The priests’ residence was destroyed, and Lassalle was seriously injured. The scope of the devastation wrought by the nuclear explosion, its impact on civilians as well as the military population, deepened Lassalle’s sense of solidarity with the Japanese people and was a factor in his decision to become a naturalized citizen after the war. He did so in 1948, taking the Japanese name Makibi Enomiya. “Enomiya” was the name of a Shinto shrine in Hiroshima, and Kibi no Makibi had been an 8^th century Japanese reformer. For the remainder of his life, the Jesuit signed his name “Hugo M. Enomiya-Lassalle.”

After the war, Enomiya-Lassalle continued his Zen practice with Daiun Harada and, later, Hakuun Yasutani, who authorized him to teach Zen to others even though he wasn’t Buddhist. In the 1970s, Yasutani’s heir, Koun Yamada, gave Enomiya-Lassalle full transmission, recognizing him as an awakened Zen teacher and a fully authorized teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition. When Westerners, including priests and nuns, asked Lassalle about Zen, he directed them to Yamada’s zendo. A surprising number of Catholic missionaries did study with Yamada, who routinely told them that he had no intention in converting them to Buddhism but that he believed Zen could make them better Christians. One of those priests was an American Jesuit named Thomas Hand.

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Thomas Hand spent nearly thirty years in Japan beginning in 1953. During that time, he came to view the West’s encounter with Buddhism as a major factor in “the advance and evolutionary revitalization of Christian spirituality.”[1] In this, he went a step further than Enomiya-Lassalle and in later life did not hesitate to call himself a Buddhist-Christian.

He had been raised in rural California and felt drawn to religious life while very young. He had given thought to becoming a Trappist monk while in high school but was unsure how to go about doing that, so instead entered the nearby Jesuit preparatory school – Bellarmine – where some of his elementary school classmates were already enrolled. He admitted that to some extent he had just been following his friends, but it proved to be a good fit.

After ordination he was sent to Japan and was eventually assigned to the Kamakura language school where he was appointed the students’ spiritual director. Japan, he felt, was a country where people not only had different cultural institutions but seemed to have a different consciousness as well. For a long while, however, he had difficulty defining where that difference lay. After reading Enomiya-Lassalle’s Zen: A Way to Enlightenment, he wondered if Zen training might help him get a better feeling for the unique consciousness he sensed. Enomiya-Lassalle’s teacher, Koun Yamada, lived in Kamakura, and Hand sought him out. It was not a rash decision on his part; he had been in Japan for more than fifteen years before he took this step.

When Yamada asked Hand what his aspiration was in taking up Zen practice, and Hand admitted he wasn’t entirely sure. He was, he explained, a Roman Catholic priest and had no intention of becoming Buddhist or changing his vocation. Yamada told him that was quite all right. There were two types of Zen practice, Yamada said. “The first is really strict Buddhist Zen. You have all the statutes and everything else like that; you follow all the Buddhist teaching and everything. And then there is just pure Zen. You will follow that, and that will make you a better Catholic.”

Hand did not find zazen easy. The sitting was painful, he was shy about being in groups, and he didn’t have a strong enough command of the language to always be able to understand what was going on. But he felt it was important, and he persisted. It was not a pleasant experience, but it proved to be rewarding. Whereas the long, careful Jesuit training he had gone through had focused on academic studies – had been, as Hand expressed it, head-oriented – Zen practice brought one down to the gut, to the primacy of physical experience. Hand encouraged students at the language school to consider Zen practice as a means of deepening their spiritual lives.

As it turned out, he returned to the United States before completing his Zen training and was never formally authorized as a Zen teacher. In 1984, he joined the staff at the Mercy Center Institute of Contemporary Spirituality in Burlingame, California, where for the next twenty years he served as a retreat director and spiritual guide. He established the East-West Meditation Program there which provided more than meditation instruction. Buddhism speaks of “upayas,” the variety of “skillful means” by which the Dharma can be presented. Zazen – seated meditation – is one upaya, but there are others.

Hand had been fascinated with haiku while in Japan, and, in the language courses he taught, he’d had his Japanese students compose haiku in English as a means of improving their command of the language. In California, he taught his Christian retreatants to compose haiku as a spiritual activity. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively. The brevity does not allow for the development of intellectual concepts, but it does allow the poet to present, effectively and often beautifully, a concrete experience. Hand told his students that good haiku were “direct experience directly expressed.”

In addition to seated meditation, Zen students do walking meditation, a practice which emphasizes that focused attention is not to be limited to the time spent on the cushion but can and should extend to all activity in which one is engaged. On the grounds of the language school in Kamakura, Hand had cleared a walking trail through a forested region. He designed and cleared trails at the Mercy Center as well.

Seated meditation (zazen), walking meditation, and haiku composition were all intended to promote mindfulness. The more mindful one is of one’s activity and surroundings – including those other persons with whom one interacts – the less one is conscious of the personal self. The less that sense of self intrudes, the more one is aware of one’s interconnectedness with the totality of Being. As Hand puts it, “– Zen is primarily concerned with the self/Self. We are to forget the self, come to the Self and ultimately to the self/Self.”

The term “self/Self” is Hand’s awkward attempt to emphasize that the “essential Self” is not just another category opposed to the “individual self.”

If the one Self is just an “other” category, then it is distinct from the phenomenal self, and our separation is only compounded. The Self is not some thing or some one that is in opposition to our self. Each one of us is simply self/Self.

Although the contrast with traditional Christian spirituality is obvious – the focus of western spirituality is on seeking not the Self but God – Hand insists that “it comes to the very same process.”

By the time he returned to the United States, Hand’s time in Japan had transformed his understanding of his Catholic faith. He noted three elements in particular. First, his loyalty to the church was no longer determined by his loyalty to canon law. Second, his loyalty to Christ was not dependent on loyalty to Church dogma. And finally, his understanding of God had so changed that he could no longer think of God as a person in the way God is generally portrayed in Christian doctrine. To identify God as a person, Hand now believed, amounted to limiting God to a particular category of being.

In the late 1980s, he co-wrote a book entitled A Taste of Water with Chwen Jiuan Lee. Lee was a Chinese convert to Catholicism who had become a nun in the order of the Sisters Missionary of the Immaculate Conception, where she was known as Sister Agnes. In the book, Hand recounts a moment after he had begun his Zen training – and “the whole Zen world, which was still so full of enigma to me, had begun its powerful impact on my consciousness” – in which it suddenly occurred to him very powerfully that “God was different,” by which he meant that God was different from whatever one imagined God to be. There is no category which could be applied to God, including the fundamental concept of “other.” Even to consider God as an entity – for lack of a better word – of an entirely different order than the universe was inadequate:

– when we conceive of an actual distinction and relationship between God and creatures, we are in effect putting God into a category separate from the creature category. To separate the formless and forms (its manifestations) into two is to place the formless into a category. True, God’s category is called “infinite” and “absolute,” but nonetheless it is a category. We have given boundaries to the boundless. The east would say that such a conception of God is a product of relational experience. That it does not spring from the ultimate experience of the actual God. The real God is different from all such categorization. In the final experience of God there is no question of separation, distinction or relationship. The distinguishing intellect is useless and gives way to that intuitive seeing which is best described as being . . .

– in the western spiritual traditions, especially in their popular form, there is a strong tendency to conceptualize God. These concepts become dogmas and take on paramount importance. It is the opinion of most eastern masters that this conceptualizing, dogmatizing tendency, although somewhat helpful, is actually dangerous and can easily create real obstacles to the experience of God.

For Hand and Sister Agnes, God is not “a separate reality ‘out there.’ Rather . . . God [is] the absolute commonality found in all relationship, person to person, person to thing, thing to thing.” In this understanding, individual persons – in Sister Agnes’s words – are “manifestation[s] of unrestricted being” which is the true or essential Self one is unaware of because of one’s sense of being an individual.

Thomas Hand died in 2005, shortly before what would have been his 85th birthday. The East-West Meditation Program has since been maintained at the Mercy Center under the direction of Greg Mayers and his Dharma heirs.

[1] Chwen Jiuan A. Lee and Thomas Hand, A Taste of Water (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), p. 67. Cf., the suggestion of the British historian, Arnold Toynbee, that “The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the twentieth century.”

Rochester Zen Center –

At one point in the course of our Zoom conversation, Bodhin Kjolhede has to get up from his desk and leave the room. As he comes back, I notice he is wearing a t-shirt with the Latin phrase: Ego Sum Abbas.

“My students give me a lot of gag gifts,” he explains, “and this was from one who explained that it’s a line from the Carmina Burana. I can’t wear it when I go the Zen Center anymore because I’m no longer the ‘abbas,’ so I just wear it around the house.”

Bodhin had been Philip Kapleau’s successor as abbot of the Rochester Zen Center from 1987 to 2022. When he retired, he turned the center over to two successors, John Pulleyn and Dhara Kowal, who now serve as co-directors. He does, however, return yearly, to lead a seven-day sesshin.

During the thirty-five years of Bodhin’s tenure as abbot, Zen transitioned from what was at first seen as an exotic and foreign practice to one which has become respected as a mainstream spiritual tradition in the Americas and Europe.

His first visit to the Rochester Center was in 1970. Two of his sisters had preceded him there, and the three of them were later joined by two more sisters. “At one point there were five of us at the Zen Center going to sesshin.”

It was a vibrant period for Zen growth. Many young people were making their way to places like Rochester, California, and Hawaii seeking authentic Zen teachers.

“It was a time of great tumult in society with the Vietnam War and Watergate, especially with psychedelics and other drugs. And somehow that all came together to foster more questioning of existential things than I had heard of before then or even since then. I felt at the time why wouldn’t everyone be arriving at this point where they were asking basic questions about life and death and meaning.”

When I first met Bodhin, thirteen years prior to this conversation, he and I had had a frank discussion about our use of psychedelics. They were certainly a factor for many members of the baby boom generation. As he puts it now, “Psychedelics really split me open and got me wondering. There’s a Danish poet, Piet Hein, who said, ‘I want to know what this whole show is all about before it’s out.’”

I point out that there is as much tumult and chaos in society today as then, there may even be more polarization and divisiveness.

“I agree. It’s been approaching madness, especially this past year (2026). But in those days – ten or twenty years ago – there wasn’t social media, this enormous influence of social media. And that, possibly, distracts people from existential matters.”

Six years after his first visit to the Center, he was ordained a priest. During his time at the Center, there had been multiple changes in the way in which Zen is presented. He tells me that when he returns to conduct sesshin, the people he sees in dokusan are those who have – as he put it – “entered the first gate.” That is, they have resolved their first koan and moved on in the curriculum. Although a great deal of emphasis had traditionally been put on  the importance of this step at Rochester, he admits the people who have passed that gate remain “a small minority of Zen Center members.”

“And when I go back and give this one seven-day sesshin a year, I am struck by the difference of tone of the sesshin. It used to be, back in the ’70s when I came up the ranks, it was a very martial environment. Roshi Kapleau came trailing vines of Japan when he came there. He was an autocratic leader who had really, really absorbed the martial spirit of Japanese Zen. And at that time, in the 1970s, there were so many of us who responded to that, who felt an affinity with that – myself included – that we just had to turn people away all the time. There was what I thought at the time was a great ardour for the truth – I think that’s fair – but, in addition, I think there was greed. Greed for kensho. And when I took over in 1987, not with any particular agenda, I started to feel that people weren’t responding. People who came to the center and came to their first sesshin or their fourth sesshin, they weren’t responding in the same way, for example, to the heavy use of the stick that I and my cohorts had been used to.”

He is referring to the kyosaku, the so-called “encouragement stick,” with which Zen students were struck on the shoulder to ward off drowsiness. In The Three Pillars of Zen, Philip Kapleau describes its use in Japan in exalted terms, and he brought it with him to Rochester. But by the mid-’80s – when many aspects of Zen came under scrutiny – its use began to be questioned.

“I think it was just an evolution,” Bodhin says. “I tried, as the abbot, for thirty-five years to adapt, to see where people were at, to read the room. And I think over the years, it got to the point where now we use the stick a lot less, and certainly it’s only when people want it. We never use it unless it is requested. When I first came to the center, you would get the stick whether you wanted it or not, and people knew that coming in. But I changed that pretty quickly.”

One of the reasons its use had been tolerated as long as it had been was that people felt it promoted the high degree of alertness needed to achieve that first breakthrough – the kensho experience – which many came to Rochester specifically to attain. I ask if sesshins are as effective now that the use of the stick has abated.

“It’s a fair question. I don’t see more people having a breakthrough then than now. It’s still quite infrequent. I haven’t done any studies on it, but my sense is, my impression is it’s about the same. So it’s fascinating to me. You may have heard, there was one sesshin at Hoshin-ji, Japan, where something like seventeen people got through Mu. And what I remember it being attributed to was the unusual ferocity of the stick. Over the years I’ve come to be skeptical about that. What does that really mean that you can force people into kensho? What does it mean in the long run?

“The assumption, Rick – the assumption on my part and others, I suppose – was that the stick was being wielded by people who had your interests in mind. It helped me, by the way. I sometimes half-jokingly say I’d still be working on Mu if they hadn’t wailed on me so much with the stick. So it definitely has that effect of deepening your concentration. If you can work with it.”

By his own admission, it is still fairly rare for people to be passed on Mu, and, even when they are, he warns them not to confuse this with full awakening. “I say, ‘Don’t even think of this as kensho. It’s just that you’ve seen enough into Mu that my judgement is that you’ll be able to work well enough with the koans subsequent to Mu.’ But, of course, the habit forces, the different degrees of greed, anger, and delusion continue to operate. You see this over and over. Roshi Kapleau used to say that the value of kensho – or even less than kensho – is that it gives you the faith to keep going, a new kind of faith, and I think that’s true. That first breakthrough reveals how much work there is yet to be done.”

He tells me that as a teacher, he had put less emphasis on the need for that initial breakthrough than Kapleau had. He even suggests that putting too much emphasis on “attainment” in this sense can “backfire.”

“It can set up these expectations that after you’ve been passed on your first koan you should be sailing free from then on. So I talk less about a first breakthrough and more about continuing on after that and how we’re all in the same boat, and we all can struggle for lifetimes to come to full enlightenment. I once read a psychological study that supports this. They weren’t talking about Zen, but they said the more emphasis that is put on a goal, the more likely the person will quit after that goal has been reached.”

I mention that other Kapleau heirs had told me that they felt that their training had placed too much emphasis on attaining wisdom (prajna) and not enough on developing compassion (karuna). Bodhin nods his head and remarks, “Without compassion what does wisdom mean? Wisdom has to express itself in compassion.”

“How do Zen teachers teach?” I ask.

“I think what I’ve come to see is the most effective teaching we can do is to be an example.”

“So modeling.”

“Yeah. I mean it’s not the only way. But whatever you say isn’t going to count for much unless students can see that you’re living it. You’re walking the walk. I certainly looked upon Roshi Kapleau as a model. When I first took over the center, I got a call from somebody at the Minneapolis Zen Center who asked if I wanted to participate in a forum in which we were to respond to the proposition ‘All Zen comes down to one word: imitation.’ And at that time I flinched because all I hear with ‘imitation’ is ‘inauthenticity.’ But over the years I’ve come to see that there is something to that, especially in Japanese culture. You know, a calligraphy student will start by tracing the characters of a master calligrapher. You trace them to get it in your body. Dogen says that being with a master is like walking through a mist, somehow you absorb it.”

Which, he stresses, “makes upright conduct all the more important. I believe more than ever that the greatest harm to a sangha is from a teacher’s misconduct. I’ve come to see that the practice, the actual practice of zazen – sitting and moving zazen – is so powerful that all we’ve got to do is be good enough for it to work for the student and not upend the boat by doing outrageous things that we say are ‘crazy wisdom’ or whatever.”

The invitation from the Minneapolis Center had been significant, because in the early days of the transfer of Zen to the West, there had been little communication – and often a significant deal of competition – between lineages. It was something Bodhin was conscious of when he became abbot of the Rochester Center and hosted the first meeting of what would become the American Zen Teachers’ Association.

“It was second-generation teachers. At the time, it was kind of hopeless to get the first generation of teachers together. I’d heard stories that they got together once and that it went nowhere. There was just too much baggage or some generational thing. What I’d hoped to do was to get the second generation together and see if we could communicate better and have a more fraternal relationship.”

That meeting came about as the result of an initial step taken by Kusan Sunim, a teacher in the Korean Lineage, who held a meeting in Ann Arbor for Zen teachers, scholars, and the general public. There were academic presentations from scholars such as Ken Kraft (a Rochester board member) and talks from various Zen teachers. The general public, Bodhin notes, “was free to wander in and out as they wished. And I was not comfortable with that format. What I wanted was more of a means of confiding in one another as teachers, never mind scholars and the public, but just having it kept to Zen teachers to be able to share the struggles that we were going through. So at the end of that weekend, Kusan Sunim said to me, ‘How about having Rochester doing the same thing next year?’ And I took a breath because I had just stepped into Roshi Kapleau’s shoes and was feeling a little insecure. But I said, ‘Okay, we’ll have a meeting, but it has to be just Zen teachers.’ And he said, ‘Okay.’ And that’s what led to what would become the AZTA.”

Although it was eventually necessary for AZTA to establish criteria for membership, from its inception it chose not to present itself as a credentialling organization. James Ford had been the first person to talk to me about AZTA. When I met him in 2013, he described it essentially as a “support group. They don’t even want to call themselves a professional organization.” He estimated at the time that its membership probably included 80% of the teachers in North America. But then, he added, “there’s this whole question of who’s a Zen teacher? It’s more than who authorizes them. The great struggle in the AZTA is it doesn’t want to be a credentialing body, but they have to have a standard for membership. And they’re cross-tradition. So there’s nobody who’s a teacher in the AZTA who would be qualified to be a teacher in every other group. Their expectations are so different.”

Still, the entity provided a means for traditions to interact with one another, and, although since he retired Bodhin is no longer a member – “I don’t even get emails from the AZTA” – it is to his credit that the organization was initiated.

One result of better communication between centers has been that Zen students have the opportunity to practice with a variety of teachers. Previously, there had been a tendency for teachers to require that students commit themselves to working only with them.

“Roshi Kapleau,” Bodhin explains, “wouldn’t even give you dokusan until you had formally become his student in a ceremony. And I just over the years – again, gradually – I just felt that’s not suitable. That strikes me as more of a Japanese thing, that absolute fealty to one lord, one daimyo. Although I do think there’s a good argument for not formally getting advice from different teachers. But all of that just faded over the years.”

The argument for getting advice from a variety of teachers – as Josh Bartok explained to me when I first began collecting these interviews – is that the student learns to distinguish between what is “personality” and what is “Dharma.”

Bodhin nods his head. “Yeah. That’s the argument against one teacher. And that’s also how things have changed in Rochester. Now with any given person I might see in dokusan, I can’t tell for sure whether they’re formally my student or Dhara’s or John Pulleyn’s or someone else’s. Again without any kind of intention, we’ve seen a shift so that some of the people going to dokusan with me will also go to one of the other two teachers in Rochester or others. Everything has kind of opened up, and it seems to be working.”

“How are your successors different from you?” I ask. “How have they changed things?

“I think they have gone further in making it an even kinder and gentler place. I think both of them – how shall I put this? – are even more open to people just finding their own way. And, I might add, Dhara at least is more tuned into the whole identity thing. Pronouns and other identity things. I was kind of blustering about that pronoun thing, and Dhara said, ‘You know, even the Stafford Fire Department puts on their application form, “What is your preferred pronoun?”’” Stafford is the township near Rochester’s Chapin Mill Retreat Center.

Bodhin feels confident he has left the Zen Center in good hands. The evolution of North American Zen naturally continues, but at the same time, he points out, its core values remain constant.

“We’ve got away from that heavy emphasis on a first awakening experience that Roshi Kapleau emphasized. I think John and Dhara share my commitment to neither giving too much emphasis to awakening nor denying the importance of confirming this Buddha Nature.”

In my talks with other centers, I know that fewer people take up Zen practice with the “greed” for kensho that drove people of my and Bodhin’s generation. They are more likely to come seeking peace of mind or relief from stress.

“I think that’s fair,” Bodhin says. “Don’t we all want peace? But when people say that to me, I say, ‘Okay, but how are you going to get real ultimate peace?’ And I want them to see – I suppose – that the only way to do that is to see beyond the whole world of duality and self-and-other and us-and-them.”