“Memoirs of an American Zen Pioneer”

I have not interviewed Lou Nordstrom. This profile is gleaned, in part, from his book, Memoirs of an American Zen Pioneer.[1] My only communication with him was through a student who replied to my request to quote material from that book. The student wrote back: “Lou says of course it’s okay for you to use his quotes. He said you have good taste.”

I first heard of Lou when I interviewed his former wife, Shinge Sherry Chayat, who – at the time I met her – was abbot of the remarkable Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-ji monastery outside Livingston Manor, New York.

I visited Dai Bosatsu in June 2013. I had only been conducting interviews for three months at the time, and it was the 14^th stop I made. I have admitted elsewhere that Dae Bosatsu was the only place I visited in those first few months where I did not immediately feel at ease. I suspect I would be less uncomfortable were I to return there now that I have completed 300 interviews and gained a clearer understanding of the breadth of practice on this continent.

I was received graciously and warmly. Shinge herself was easy to talk with; she was relaxed and forthcoming. But my feeling while I was at Dai Bosatsu was of people play-acting; another teacher would call it “cosplay” in a later interview with me.

In Cypress Trees in the Garden, I wrote:

About fifty miles away from [Zen Mountain Monastery], on the other side of the Catskills, is Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-ji, the first Rinzai monastery to be built outside of Asia and arguably the most significant architectural accomplishment of North American Zen. It’s not an easy place to get to. One travels along a narrow county road and then up a gravel lane which was partially eroded by the rain at the time of my visit. I had thought that Zen Mountain Monastery, with its 235 acres, was large, but the front gate of Dai Bosatsu is still two miles from the main buildings. This 1400 acre property includes Beecher Lake—the highest lake in the Catskills—and what is now the guest house had been the hunting lodge of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother. It is a two-storey L-shaped structure with a steeply sloped roof and is pretty much what one would expect a wealthy 19th century family to have built as a private mountain getaway, although one marvels at the effort it must have taken to construct it here. Across the lake, there is a large bronze Buddha seated on a boulder gazing serenely across the water.

But any sense of wonder at finding the Beecher family’s lodge hidden back here is quelled when one notices the monastery building itself. A local architect, Davis Hamerstrom, had traveled to Japan to study Zen architecture in Kyoto and, using imported craftsmen when necessary, had recreated a traditional Japanese temple complete with classic tiled roof, tatami mats on oak floors, and sliding shoji screens (inside storm windows). There are stone lanterns on the grounds, a huge bronze bell—sounded by a log suspended from chains beside it—and, within, there are antique Asian treasures. The whole is a work of art.

From the moment I was met at the door by a young, robed monk, I felt challenged by Dai Bosatsu. It did not help that the monk’s first words to me were a warning to be careful while walking back to my car because the ticks carried Lyme Disease.

Dai Bosatsu is unquestionably beautiful; architecturally, it is magnificent. But it is also—as the man at the diner [who had directed me here] had said—Japanese. The monk who greeted me is not, but, when I call to him after he shows me my room, he turns and responds with a sharp, “Hai!” At lunch, a Japanese woman seated opposite me wordlessly demonstrates how to use the three nested jihatsu bowls, precisely where to place the chop sticks, how to unfold the napkin. Nor am I used to having someone kowtow before me after serving tea.

I recognize that to some degree it is a matter of taste. The very elements which make me slightly ill at ease might give others a sense of the authenticity of the practice here, a feeling of being immersed in a tradition with a vibrant cultural and aesthetic—as well as spiritual—heritage. And then, of course, is not part of Zen surrendering what Shinge refers to as “agency,” those personal preferences we cling to so tenaciously?

It is a style of Zen practice that Lou would come to eschew, although he and Shinge were both instrumental in establishing this marvel.

They came upon Zen almost by accident. They met in New York. “He was doing a Ph. D. in Western religions, writing a book on Plato. Columbia,” Shinge tells me. “And when we decided to get married I asked him, ‘Can we have a Zen wedding?’ he was in love and said, ‘Okay.’”

In Lou’s rendition of the story, the suggestion occurred while on LSD. It isn’t a trivial detail. Psychedelics played a significant role in the Zen boom of the 1960s and ’70s.

They looked in the phone book under Z and found that the Zen Studies Society was only four blocks away. They walked over. “I was wearing my little mini-dress,” Shinge continues, “and Lou’s hair was probably a huge Afro. He was white, a white Afro. Part Cherokee, part Norwegian. So we probably looked like a very un-Zenlike couple.”

Eido Shimano answered the door. “He looked us over. And we told him what we wanted, and he said” – she imitates his accent – “‘Mmm. Well, come in for tea.’ So we did. Had a cup of tea. And I gather he felt our sincerity was enough that he would do it. And when we went back to discuss details, he said, ‘You’re very fortunate, this karma. Yasutani Roshi is coming. He will be here September 2nd, wedding date, he will conduct your wedding.’ Okay. Fine. We had our circle of friends. I remember telling them, beforehand, ‘You cannot get high before this! You have to come straight! This is a Zen temple!’ So . . . who knows? But they were there, and we had a wonderful wedding ceremony that no one could understand. And we lived on Riverside Drive and—you know—started sitting. It was kind of funny. This is what I’d been searching for. I had to get married to find it!”

Lou describes them as a “Zen couple,” which he acknowledges was both a strength and a weakness. Although they eventually separated, they were together for a long while and even after their paths diverged, they both remained engaged in Zen practice.

In his memoir, Lou describes the psychological baggage he carried which Zen would help him deal with. The opening essay, taken from a teisho he gave in 2021, is entitled “Zazen Saved My Life.” His mother abandoned him when he was only three years old, and he was raised by his father’s parents, whom he describes as senile and hating one another.

He was academically gifted and earned a Ph. D. from Columbia. He was teaching at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York, when he attended his third sesshin with the Zen Studies Society, during which he had an experience of – using Zen language – “body and mind dropping off.”

“There was an incredible explosion of light, coming from inside and outside simultaneously, and everything disappeared into that light. I felt completely suffused by this light, which seemed ‘joyous,’ and swooned into a condition of absolute non-entity for an indeterminate lengths of time.”[2] The tense atmosphere of sustained practice in Rinzai sesshin can be conducive of such events, and the initial goal of that practice is specifically the attainment of what is called “kensho.” Ken [見] “seeing,” sho [性] “true nature.” But without someone to identify the experience as kensho, one wouldn’t necessarily realize that was what it was. In fact, Lou at first suspected it was a psychotic break. He continued the practice seeking an enlightenment he had already experienced.

He would later point out that the Soto school of Zen faults Rinzai for equating kensho with enlightenment. For Soto practitioners, enlightenment is “a transformed perception of . . . reality, along with transformed action and thinking.” In Soto Zen, “traces of the enlightenment experience must be eliminated by ‘actualizing’ it, by fully integrating experience into the fabric of one’s life.”[3] That understanding was still in the future, however.

Shinge and Lou became active members of the ZSS community and were on the board when the decision was made to purchase the Beecher Lake property. In 1974, just before construction started, they came up for the summer as co-directors. In her conversation with me, Shinge describes the time as a great adventure.

“Lou was teaching at Marymount College in Tarrytown, and I was working there as publications designer in the PR department, and, when the end of the summer came, we didn’t want to leave. So Lou gave up a tenured position, and we stayed on. And that year, construction of this building began. We lived with five other people in the original building down the road. It was extremely cold. We had no heat, and it was a really hard winter. We would have to go out in a little pickup truck and throw down shovelfuls of salt and sand so the construction vehicles could keep coming up. And—as you know—the road is not an easy one to come up even when it’s in fairly good shape. It was not a good road then. It was an exciting time. We were real pioneers. No one knew what this would be like. Eido Roshi had a vision. We started with great idealism, and, in a way, everything was kind of up for grabs. How we were going to form this community, and how much it would find its shape in the Rinzai container of Japan and China. How much it would find its own shape. It grew organically.”

Lou’s description of living on the site as the temple was under construction is less sanguine. The rigidity of Rinzai practice, the hard labour involved, and the natural proclivity of the young Zen students to treat the experience as a form of summer vacation did not mix well together. He was in the position of “foreman,” and so the object of complaints when the demands made of the students were too strenuous. “The heavy formality of Japanese Zen tradition and the light informality of American life attempted unsuccessfully to co-exist peacefully.”[4]

He was also engaged in editing the papers of Nyogen Senzaki, who had died in 1958. Lou describes falling in love with Senzaki’s writing, in particular the emphasis he put on deinstitutionalizing Zen. The irony that Lou himself was actually engaged in the founding of an institution in the Catskills was not lost on him.

Then during Rohatsu sesshin in New York with Soen Nakagawa, he discovered during dokusan that his experience from the earlier sesshin was the sought-for kensho. Soen confronted Eido to ask why this had not been acknowledged. The fact that one could have had kensho without realizing it led Lou to realize that Rinzai practice was – as he put it – “no longer suitable.” But by this time he was already ordained a Rinzai monk.

Eido Shimano claimed to have built Dae Bosatsu in honor of Nakagawa, his teacher, but when Nakagawa visited, he felt it was unnecessarily luxurious. In his journals of this period, Peter Matthiessen expressed doubt about the necessity of using exotic materials – like Tasmanian Oak – in the construction of the monastery. Lou served as Nakagawa’s “assistant,” and heard him say that no true student of the Dharma would come there.

Eventually it was the revelation of Eido’s inappropriate sexual relationships with students that caused the community to come apart. Both Shinge and Lou left, although he admits it wasn’t just the sex scandal that led him to leave. “I left also because I wanted to leave.” Shinge later was convinced – inaccurately as it turned out – that Shimano’s behaviour had changed, and she returned. Lou did not. He went back to college teaching.

After leaving Dai Bosatsu, he received a letter from Taizan Maezumi inviting him to come to California and serve as Executive Director of the Zen Center of Los Angeles. He declined the offer. Later he was teaching a course at the Naropa Institute in which he identified the elements of Zen practice with which he quarrelled. Maezumi was one of the attendees and met with him afterwards to commend him on it. He said he’d like to make Lou one of his heirs. The first step, however – he explained – would be to help Bernie Glassman establish the Zen Community of New York in Riverdale and begin koan practice with him. After that, he could come to LA to complete the transmission process.

“How strange! Just when I was thinking that I’d left Zen practice – temporarily at least – here I was being offered Dharma transmission. It was an offer I couldn’t very well refuse.”[5]

His marriage to Shinge ended. He moved to New York and worked with Glassman. He ceased to be a Rinzai monk and eventually ordained as a Soto monk.

The people who were attracted to Glassman were very different from the people Lou had previously been with. He describes them as “an impressive group of sophisticated intellectual professional people from New York. Not the young dropouts I’d been used to.”[6]

When the situation in Los Angeles was rocked by the revelation of Maezumi’s alcoholism and serial affairs, Lou was disappointed and had no intention of going through that again, so took Glassman as his primary teacher instead. That, too, would prove to be a doomed relationship.

Bernie eventually decided to turn the community into a social enterprise and started Greystone Bakery. It would be written up later as a prime example of how social enterprise can work, but it ruptured the community. “Bernie had the idea of running a bakery,” Barry Magid told me, “which ended up destroying the community because the work-practice just took over the place. There had been this big community centre in Riverdale which they then got rid of, and they just moved up into Yonkers for the bakery, and that whole thing imploded.” Lou describes the condition of the students as “cheap slave-labor working in an oppressive sweat-shop atmosphere . . . [Bernie] single-handedly destroyed what we’d worked so lovingly to create.”[7]

Lou had now been disappointed by all of his teachers, Eido Shimano, Taizan Maezumi, and Bernie Glassman. Zazen may have saved his life – he writes – but it also broke his heart.

The memoir, he admits, was an attempt to define the relationship between Zen and his personal life.

I’ve abandoned my life in favor of a Zen-practice life, and I’ve abandoned my Zen-practice life in an attempt to find “my life.” And then this morning I realized something wonderful: I’m no longer in a relationship to or with Zen – I AM IT! IT IS I! This isn’t meant to be boastful; it is the point of the practice. TO BE ZEN. To embody it so that there’s no longer an “it.” Embodying it doesn’t mean being the exemplar of some ideal state of affairs. It means IN YOUR BODY, BEING IT! “This very body is the body of the Buddha.” And I realized that, miraculously enough, I no longer experience my life and my Zen-practice as separate. They are not-one and not-two. There is the lonely old man hoping to fall in love again; there is the old man “SITTING ALONE,” all-one. Not lonely, just BEING ONE. Loneliness and aloneness are not separate. Zen as the loved-one was after all a phantasm, to whose courtship I devoted much of my life. The phantasm has been revealed as a phantasm, and therefore the story of my relationship to Zen has also been revealed as being the tale of my pursuit of a phantasm.[8]

He had informal authorization from Maezumi to teach, and on the basis of that began to lead retreats. “I decided that I would just be a maverick, anti-institutional Zen teacher who would honestly declare that he didn’t have the Sensei title.”[9]

As it happens, after accidentally running in Bernie on the street in New York, the two were reconciled and in 1998 Bernie gave him transmission, making Lou a formally authorized Zen teacher, who taught in North Carolina and Florida until his health prevented him from continuing to doing so.

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[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Memoirs-American-Pioneer-Mitsunen-Nordstrom/dp/B0BSGGGW8T

[2] Memoirs of an American Zen Pioneer, pp. 42-43.

[3] Pp. 47-48.

[4] P. 97

[5] P. 142

[6] 155

[7] 158-59

[8] 166

[9] 166

American Zen Facebook Page

Zenki Salad has cycled through a number of careers. He was a New York cab driver, he was a teacher of the deaf, he taught English in Japan, he held a number of adminstrative posts both in hospitals – including the Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles – and with the enterntainment group, Viacom, he became a lawyer, and eventually a therapist. He is now in his seventies and is beginning formal training to become a Zen Buddhist priest. He is also the chief administrator of the American Zen Facebook page.

He grew up in Brooklyn but tells me he moved to Los Angeles the day he graduated from college. “And out there in Los Angeles there was this bookstore called the Bodhi Tree that had many different rooms, and each room is dedicated to another thing. And when I went into the Buddhism room, I was kind of drawn into that room. And I started just picking out a few books on Buddhism. Just basics of Buddhism. I was starting to read these books and really feeling that, ‘Oh, wow! This is actually showing a very valid way to live if you can live by these principles.’ But I was a very young man; I had a whole head of hair; I was attractive. It was hippie time with lots of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, and when I was reading in Buddhism about ‘letting go of your ego,’ and ‘letting go of the self,’ I was like, ‘No. I don’t want to do that. I’m too young. I just want to go out and party and have fun. I don’t want to let go of my “self.”’ You know? My ego was a cool thing. So I told myself, ‘I’m going to put this Buddhism in my back pocket.’ Which is exactly what I did. I just always kept it in my mind, and I never really did anything about it. I never said I was a Buddhist or anything, but I guess I was meditating at that point. I was doing, like, transcendental meditation. I took a course in that.”

In California he worked in a school for the deaf and later took up secretarial work in health care. He even spent a year teaching English in Japan. “I have this total Japan-fixation. The only way I can explain this – and I don’t really believe in this – but I must have been Japanese in a former life. This Japanese woman opened up a store on Flatbush Avenue when I was a kid, and it was the weirdest thing. She was in full kimono. She had come from Japan, and she had opened up, like, a curio shop. And I would go there everyday to hang out with her as a kid.”

He lived in Japan for a year. “But I was not a Zen Buddhist then. So that realm didn’t touch me at that point. Then I came back to California, ’cause the year was up, and I was working in a hospital as a nursing administration manager, and both my parents got really ill. My dad got cancer, and my mom’s kidneys failed, and she needed a transplant. So they needed me to be there. My father was just lookin’ at me, like, ‘Please. I don’t have anybody else.’ And so I moved back to New York to take care of them.”

He was forty at the time and a long while had passed since he’d browsed the volumes at the Bodhi Tree bookstore.

He took a job in the financial department of Viacom but had difficultly with one of the men he was supposed to assist. The situation became so difficult that one day the idea came to him that he needed to “detach” himself from this individual. “I started hearing this word, ‘Detach.’ You need to detach from him. You have to detach from this situation.’ And I kept hearing that, and I wondered, ‘What is that?’ Then I realized, ‘That’s Buddhism talking.’ And so I said, I have to get back to that; I have to explore that and figure this out. So I was living on the upper east side of Manhattan at the time, and I used to walk by this place all the time. It was this beautiful carriage house front; it had a plaque on it, and it had Japanese writing on it. And I would think, ‘Isn’t that pretty?’ And I’d walk by. But one day it caught my eye, and it said something like Zen Something Institute.[1] Something like that. And I said, ‘That’s Buddhist.’ And so when I got home, I looked it up in the phone book and called them up, and they said, ‘You can come here and we’ll do beginning instruction.’ I had yet to be trained how to sit. So I went. And there was a handful of us, and this guy with a brown robe came in, and it turned out to be Eido Shimano’s place, which is still going. And this guy – not Eido Roshi – was so nice and peaceful, and he showed us how to sit. To do zazen. You know, how to count your breath.”

Zenki tells me he took to the sitting “like a duck to water. I was just, ‘Wow! This is amazing! It’s calming me down. It’s getting my mind still so I start to make some decisions about this guy at work. I just really liked it; I liked meditating every day in that kind of situation. But I also felt that that particular place at that particular time was a little bit colder. It was very chilly in there. I don’t mean the temperature; I mean the atmosphere of the individuals. It just seemed I wasn’t really welcomed there as much as tolerated. Like, ‘You beginner meditators, you go sit in the back.’ So I practiced with them for about three months, and then I went back to the phone book. Looked up Zen Buddhism, and, sure enough, there was another place on the west side called Fire Lotus Temple which was a satellite temple in New York City of Daido Roshi’s  Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper in the Catskills in New York.”

It can take a few tries before finding the sangha in which one feels at home. This group was run by Myotai Treace, with whom Zenki immediately felt at ease. “I am still in contact with Myotai; I love her dearly, and I am eternally – eternally – grateful to her and Daido for giving me the best foundation in Zen practice. So lucky!”

However when Myotai and Daido ceased being romantic partners, the community was fractured. “I wound up practicing informally with Pat Enkyo O’Hara at the Village Zendo. And she was lovely. She was kind of like a sister Dharma person. And so I went to the Village Zendo and practiced there for about three years, until I left New York. But informal. I did not take her as a teacher, and – you know – I went there when I felt like it.”

He didn’t, however, leave New York before getting a law degree by attending night school classes.

“While I was in law school, they had this program where you could go to a foreign country for a semester and practice or study the law in that country. So I went back to Japan. And the program was in Kyoto, and as fate would have it, the American guy that was running the program found out that I was a Zen Buddhist, and he said, ‘That’s incredible. I am too.’ And he said, ‘Do you want to practice at a temple here?’ He didn’t say it at the time, but it was the temple Ruth Sasaki started, and it was in Daitoku-ji, which is the gigantic mass temple complex; it was this little temple on those grounds.”

The abbot was of leery about taking Zenki on until he demonstrated he was able to sit properly and then he was welcomed. “Before I went to school, I would ride my bike there every day and sit with him. He was the nicest, most wonderful person. He died of cancer just a couple of years ago. But he let me sit with him. What an experience to sit in that temple! I’ve been very fortunate how Zen has touched my life in terms of people that I was able to practice with.

“Then I came back from there, graduated, and then I practiced law for a while in New York, but – corporate law – but I didn’t really like it all that well, and the last job I had there was pretty awful. And I got sick of being in New York. It was not holding its allure for me anymore. My parents were dead, and there was nothing there for me that I needed to be there about. And I wanted to get back to the California kind of lifestyle, but I couldn’t afford it. California had become so expensive. So I started to explore Florida.”

He landed on the gulf coast of Florida and eventually found the Tampa Zen Center.

“It was run by an old, old hippie student of Suzuki Roshi from the San Francisco Zen Center. She had been a student of his in the ’70s. So she opened up this little place, Tampa Zen Center, and I kinda liked it because it was very grassroots. And I liked her at first, and I was interested in this Suzuki Roshi, and I was interested in this San Francisco Zen Center. So I started reading about him; I read his book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and really liked it, really was enjoying getting to know this Soto group because my background was White Plum. And I said, ‘Soto is nice. It’s more relaxed, and it seems a little lighter. It’s like White Plum Lite.’ And at one point they had a Branching Streams meeting in San Francisco, and we represented Tampa in the Branching Streams meeting, and I fell in love with that place like there was no tomorrow.”

The first San Francisco Zen Teacher he worked with was Reb Anderson, then, when that didn’t quite work out, he met Blanche Hartman. “I asked her to be my teacher, and she accepted readily. Told me to just come on out – I was living in St. Petersburg – and take jukai with her. I became her student in 2008 and then went back there to take jukai in 2009. Blanche was the greatest human being I ever met. She accepted me unconditionally. I was to sew a rakusu for jukai, so went there and had a personal session with her. When the others went to the zendo for meditation, I sat with her in her sewing room and sewed my rakusu during that week, after which we had the jukai ceremony. It was definitely a highlight of my life and one of the most meaningful ceremonies I’d ever been through. I remained her student until her death in 2016.

“After her death, I realized there are no Zen teachers down here in Southern Florida at all. Nothing that’s viable, or nothing that’s even worthy of attention. There are other Buddhist organizations but not Zen.”

So he practiced online for a while. “I proved you can practice online. I did zazenkai, sesshin, dokusan, koan work. I did everything online. So you can do it, you can practice it, it’s just a real discipline you have to develop. But I wanted something closer to home, I said, ‘I really need to study with somebody.’ So I saw this Atlanta Zen Center and Michael Elliston, and he was like, ‘Yeah, sure. I’ll be your teacher.’ So I started practicing with him. He’s a remarkable individual. He reminds of Blanche, who I adore still to this day. Anyway, I studied with him for about a year, and I was on the priest track with him. And so something happened where I felt a call to practice solo for a while.”

And then it turns out that I influenced Zenki’s decision to contact Michael again. “I got in touch with him because you sent me your profile of him, and I published it. And so I went back to him, and I said, ‘Hey. I hope you’re well. I haven’t spoken to you in a while, but your interview is up if you want to read it. And, thank you, and goodbye.’ And so he wrote me back.”

He had decided to pursue ordination with Michael – “If Blanche were still alive, I’d already be ordained” – and made arrangements to spend a month in Atlanta to complete the training. “And then I’ll be ordained. And then I can come back here and open up a Zen sitting group here in Fort Lauderdale which is what I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. The situation here seems ideal. There’s nothing. I think, particularly for the gay community here, that would be a needed – sorely needed – and a successful operation. I’m hoping. But I wanted to do that after I was ordained; I didn’t want to do that just opening something up, because I – for one – want to have the credentials behind me to offer it as a more formal way of getting into Zen practice. So we’ll see how that goes. But, yeah, I’m on that track now, and it seems finally that this will be it.”

I ask him how the “American Zen” Facebook page came about.

“I think it was 2009 when I joined Facebook, and, of course, I looked up Zen groups and Zen this and Zen that, and I found this one that I was fascinated by called ‘American Zen.’ Because I’m extremely fascinated by American Zen and how it’s manifesting in this country and the culture around it. I love it. That’s why I love all these interviews and stuff about these notable American Zen people, because I feel like – hopefully – I’m contributing to that in a good way, in a positive way. Someway. I hope I am. So I saw this American Zen page and I recognized Suzuki Roshi was on top of the banner, but I didn’t know who the other guy – Soyu Matsuoka – was. So I got in touch with the guy that started American Zen, Jyozen Anjyu out in California. He’s a Zen priest out there who is a student of Watanabe Osho. He’s Matsuoka’s Dharma grandson. And so it was his page. I started to communicate with him. He told me who Matsuoka Roshi was, and I looked him up. And I started communicating with him, and I started helping him ’cause he was having a hard time. At that time, the page was little. And he had many other Facebook pages. He’s also into aikido and some other things, and I think he was kind of having a problem keeping up with the American Zen page. So I said, ‘Let me help you.’ I did that more and more, and, after a while, I just took over the page. He moved into the background and let me just do it.”

I ask what he sees the intention of the page to be.

“Well, for one thing, I’m hoping that the page is a respected repository for Zen material, info on Zen, how to live a Zen life. Or what tenets – you know – are being put forward or what sages should be looked at. All that information is contained in the American Zen page, I’m hoping. And the other thing that I’m hoping is it’s a repository of notable people in American Zen that you can look them up and see if you want to go and study with them or not, or what they have to offer to the culture of American Zen. That’s what I want the page to be. A place you can really rely on for information on Zen in America. I’m hoping that that’s what it is.”

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[1] First Zen Institute

Dharma Sangha Centers –  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bluegrass Zen –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I ask how it was he returned to Kentucky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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