Richard Bryan McDaniel

Thomas Hand

Abridged from Catholicism and Zen –

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.

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.”

Bodhin Kjolhede

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.”

Philip Kapleau, Larry Johanson, and Bodhin Kjolhede circa 1982

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.”

Zazen Peace Vigil, June 1982, with Dosho Port

“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.”

Philip Whalen

Adapted from The Third Step East –

For many people in the 1950s and early ’60s, their first encounter with Zen came not from reading Philip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen or Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginners Mind but rather from reading Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums.

By the 1940s, information about Zen was plentiful and accessible outside of Asia. The number of actual practitioners in North America was small, but there were active communities on both coasts. It might have remained a minor religious and intellectual curiosity, however, had there not been an audience which found something compelling about this very foreign tradition. The circumstances which would come together to make Zen a cultural phenomenon in the United States began with an unlikely group of writers who first met in New York in 1943.

Jack Kerouac coined the term “Beat” to refer to a small cadre of poets and prose writers which included himself and friends like Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs. He was inconsistent about what he meant by the term. At times, it referred to being “beat down” by the circumstances of their lives and the difficulties they had with contemporary culture; at others, it referred to the “beat” of jazz music and the spontaneous improvisations which the writers emulated in their own work; and at times he suggested it referred to “beatitude,” to an effort to develop a spiritual basis in one’s life.

By the 1950s, many of the Beats had relocated to San Francisco where Ginsberg was enrolled in classes at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. He also attended the poetry soirées of poet, Kenneth Rexroth, who introduced him to a few young West Coast poets, including Gary Snyder. None of the younger poets were yet published, but Rexroth admired their work and had confidence in them.

These writers were the harbingers of the counter-culture movement of the 60’s, railing against contemporary mores and standards. Ginsberg began his most famous work, Howl, with the lament that he had seen “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” They were deeply aware of the injustices they saw in America and the disenfranchisement of marginalized members of society – homosexuals, racial minorities, or people whose ideas were considered socially or politically suspect. They were sexually adventurous; they flaunted their use of alcohol and experimented with drugs, including peyote. Their books and poems inspired a generation of young readers to question the structures of previous generations—institutionalized and legal racism, conservative Christian moral and religious values, an assumption that the natural role of women was that of being sexual partners and helpmates for the men in their lives, the belief that homosexuality was a psychological aberration, the unquestioning acceptance of what was generally referred to as the American Way of Life. It was a generation which would be receptive to new ideas from distant cultures.

In 1954, Kerouac visited Ginsberg in San Francisco, who introduced him to Gary Snyder. Snyder was, at the time, preparing to go to Japan to work with an authentic Zen Master. He became the inspiration for the character Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums, the book Kerouac released after the success of On the Road.

Philip Whalen is generally considered a Beat poet, although he wasn’t a member of Kerouac’s original group of friends. He was, however, a friend of Snyder. They he met at Reed College, which Whalen attended on the GI Bill. He had served in the Army during the war. Poor eyesight had kept him from going overseas, but he was trained to be a radio mechanic and instructor. Like Snyder, he was already writing poetry when he arrived at Reed and was reading Asian literature and philosophy, although at the time Whalen’s interest was in Vedanta rather than Buddhism. When Snyder came to San Francisco after dropping out of graduate school at Indiana University, Whalen joined him, and, through Snyder’s intervention, became one of the poets who took part in the famous Six Gallery reading where Ginsberg first read “Howl.” He appears in The Dharma Bums as Warren Coughlin, whom Kerouac described as a “big fat bespectacled quiet booboo.” Japhy Ryder, however, tells the narrator that there is more to Coughlin than meets the eye.

Although he was seven years older than Snyder, Whalen often followed the younger man’s lead. Snyder, for example, was able to convince him to apply to be a fire lookout for the Forest Service, and Whalen proved better able to handle the position than Kerouac would. It provided him solitude and time to read and write. He spent three seasons in the Cascades. The Forest Service managers were particularly happy to have him because of his skills as a radio operator.

He also practiced a desultory form of self-taught meditation while on lookout based on his reading of Patanjali’s Yoga Aphorisms. He dipped into Tibetan Buddhism but found the complex hierarchies of bodhisattvas and deities—which would fascinate Ginsberg—bewildering and off-putting. While staying with Snyder in San Francisco, he read his friend’s copies of D. T. Suzuki, and, while this was more to his taste, he did not yet see it as a path appropriate for him.

Another way in which Whalen followed Snyder’s lead was in using peyote. The hallucinogenic cactus buds were easily available in San Francisco, and many of the Beat writers used them. Snyder respected peyote as a traditional Native American aid to developing spiritual insight; Ginsberg included a reference to peyote in the litany that forms the first part of Howl. Whalen, however, remained cautious until 1955. When he did try it in the spring of that year, he reported that it acted on “my spirit and mind and body and everything else as a great cure.” He had visions which drew upon his interest in Vedanta, and he found himself identifying with the gods Vishnu and Ganesh. He used it again in June and still felt energized by the effects of the drug and the insights he derived from that second trip when he returned to the Cascades to take up his Forestry Service responsibilities.

The journey to his lookout on Sourdough Mountain was made on horseback accompanied by pack mules to carry the supplies. These animals, however, first had to be ferried by raft across Ross Lake. In order to accustom them to the raft, they were corralled on it the night before departure. During that night, one of the horses fell off the raft, waking everyone with its frantic splashing. Whalen was the first of the crew members to reach the horse, and he hooked his arm under its neck, keeping its head above water while another crew member went to fetch a boat to tow the animal ashore. As he struggled there, Whalen saw the moon rising over Jack Mountain.

“I was kneeling over the edge of this raft in my underwear,” he wrote later, “holding this horse under the chin. It was two o’clock in the morning and it was a beautiful summer night, and the mountains were all around, and the lake, and this horse, and me—and I suddenly had a great weird kind of satori, a sort of feeling about the absolute connection between me, and the horse, and the mountains, and everything else. And you can’t describe it very well—the feeling—because the feeling is a feeling. But it was . . . a big take of some kind.”

The event seemed particularly significant because his given name, Philip, meant “lover of horses” in Greek. The “horse in the water” became, for him, a kind of totem animal and its significance was confirmed to him when he discovered that the old Chinese Zen Master, Mazu Daoyi, was known as “Master Horse.”

That summer he came to think of his experiences on peyote not so much as “visions” but as what he called “identifications.” Peyote was like the finger pointing to the moon in the frequently quoted Zen admonition that if one paid too much attention to the finger, one would miss what it was pointing to. Whalen found himself becoming more interested in what the peyote “identification” was indicating.

In 1966 Whalen followed Snyder’s lead once again, joining him in Japan where he found work teaching English at the YMCA of Kyoto. Here, at last, he discovered his own way. He was oddly at home in the spiritual capital of Japan and spent long periods of time wandering the city absorbing the atmosphere of the temples, gardens and shrines he came upon. The Japanese, likewise, responded warmly to his open and friendly manner. A man who knew Whalen in Japan at the time described him as “the kindest looking man I ever met.”

Kenneth Rexroth, who visited Whalen and Snyder in Japan, noted that when “Philip Whalen, in his red whiskers, looking like a happy Ainu bear-god, walks down Omiya-dori in Kyoto’s weavers’ quarters, every face lights up with that old-time Buddhist joy, even though most of the inhabitants are Left Communists, militant atheists, Koreans and Untouchables. . . . I have in fact seen Philip ambling past the market stalls and running into a march of demonstrating strikers, and everyone smiled and waved and he waved back.”

He still resisted taking up formal Zen practice with a teacher, but he learned the fundamentals of zazen from – and occasionally sat with – Richard Baker, who was also living in Kyoto at the time. Morning zazen became part of his daily routine; no matter how late he had stayed up the night before, no matter how much alcohol he had consumed, he rose early enough the next morning to sit.

By the time Whalen returned to the US, Baker had been installed as Shunryu Suzuki’s successor as abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, and he invited Whalen to live there. The only demand put upon him was that he should join the rest of the community in morning zazen practice. Since this was already Whalen’s habit, it was not a difficult condition to meet.

Baker admired Whalen as a poet and, as Whalen later discovered, had arranged for him to gain residence at Zen Center ahead of a number of people who had earlier applied to stay there. Whalen found his living circumstances pleasant; they afforded him ample opportunity to write and pursue his own interests. Over the next ten years, while Snyder attained respectability as a member of the Board of the California Arts Council and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Whalen almost inadvertently underwent ordination and training in the Soto Zen Tradition.

When a former drag-queen and drug addict, Issan Dorsey—who was also living at Zen Center—moved out to establish a hospice and practice center for AIDS victims, Whalen joined him with Baker’s encouragement. In 1987, Dorsey and Whalen became the first individuals to whom Baker gave “Dharma transmission,” and, when Dorsey himself succumbed to AIDS, Whalen became his successor as abbot of the Hartford Street Zendo.

While researching his book, One Bird, One Stone, Sean Murphy made a number of unsuccessful attempts to arrange an interview with Philip Whalen, who was then abbot of the Hartford Street Zendo. Finally, Murphy determined to visit the center without an appointment on the chance that he might be able to meet Whalen. When he arrived, a ceremony was in progress marking the tenth anniversary of Issan Dorsey’s death. The organizers assumed Murphy had come to mark the occasion, and he was conscripted to take part in a ritual procession.

During the ceremony, Murphy was able to identify the elderly Whalen who by then was very nearly blind and had to be accompanied by an attendant. At the reception that followed, Murphy took the opportunity to approach Whalen. He pulled up a chair beside Whalen and introduced himself as the writer who had been trying to arrange an interview.

“Ah, yes,” said Whalen. “I haven’t called you back.” He sighed an old man’s raspy sigh. “I’ve done so many interviews, you know,” he said, reaching moodily for a stuffed mushroom h’ors d’oeuvre. “I find them terribly irritating.”

Philip Whalen died in 2002 at the age of 78.

John Tarrant

Pacific Zen Institute –

I first interviewed John Tarrant at his home in Santa Rosa in 2013. His was the third interview I conducted in this project, and I was still finding my way as an interviewer. I did a second interview with him last November; it was my 289^th.

He is Australian and grew up in Launceston, a small, town in Tasmania. “It’s the kind of place people ran away from and then went all over the world. People I went to high school with ended up in Long Island, Africa. I came to America. It’s that kind of place. Like many British colonial places, it had a traumatic history; it was a prison colony, and you can still feel the darkness on it. Some of the most loved and architecturally prized buildings were prisons that had been abandoned. When I was about twenty, I kept getting migraines and I realized that if I left Tasmania, they would go away. And they did.

“At first I fled further into darkest Tasmania, I went down into the smelters in Queenstown. Worked swinging sledgehammers and tended the blast furnace with the fire spilling out of it. And eventually I went fishing in North Queensland. I don’t know what I was doing there, but I was trying to find a way to change, to get out of my conditioning. And eventually I thought, ‘This isn’t really going anywhere.’ I was working in Brisbane as a proof-reader, a low-level job. And on a street corner, I ran into a woman who was an editor for that book company, and she said some Tibetans were coming to town. I didn’t know anything about Tibetans or meditation or Buddhism, but I said, ‘How do I get hold of them?’ She immediately recognized that I was interested in a more than casual way, and she said, ‘Well, you can go, but, if you do, you won’t come back.’ Which was clever in a way. And I did go and study with them; it was what I was looking for.”

The Tibetans were Lamas Yeshe and Zopa, who had been working with western students in Darjeeling since the mid-60s and were, in the mid-70s, offering retreats elsewhere, including Australia.

“They had a road show. They would come through and hold a month-long retreat and some meetings with their senior students.” Later he found some people who were trying to form a Zen group; they didn’t have a teacher but were guiding themselves by books they read. “So they would hold these little retreats, one day retreats and more, and I’d drive up and sit with them.”

The group approached their practice, as he puts it, with a convert’s zeal. “They thought, ‘Well, we should do it the way they do it in Japan.’ But nobody really knows what the spirit of that is. If you’re in Zen and you go to Japan, you find out, ‘Oh, the Japanese are different.’ On the one hand, Zen belongs to them, so they’re at ease. On the other hand, Westerners who go to Japan to study often struggle since it’s very hard for the Japanese to promote people who aren’t Japanese. I could tell that the Tibetans wanted help preserving their culture and the Japanese did too. So I decided to study in America.”

The group sent out letters to various Zen centers, and they received a reply from Robert Aitken in Hawaii, so that’s where they went.

I ask what he was looking for, first with the Tibetans and then with the Zen group.

“Well, I had noticed first through poetry and then through meditation that my consciousness could change. My mind was like a wild animal. I’d go hiking out in the bush for a week, and I noticed how my mind calmed down when I was hiking, and that was somewhat like what happened when I was meditating but more so. I learned to meditate in a casual kind of way. And l liked the koan tradition because it depended on metaphor.”

“Had you been investigating koans before you went to Hawaii?”

“I just read the usual things you would have read. D. T. Suzuki, whom I liked. People didn’t like him later because he didn’t seem to emphasize practice, but – I don’t know – I liked his work.”

I ask what Robert Aitken was like.

Robert Aitken, Subhana Bargazhi, and John Tarrant

“He was very scholarly but generous about Zen, and his wife funded the zendo. He really didn’t charge as long as you did the zazen and worked to maintain the zendo, kept the garden up, and fixed the roof and things. So it was an ideal thing for a young person who was broke and from another country and didn’t have a work visa. He was great in that way. He was a scholar, and he had read a lot, and his introduction to Zen had been through R. H. Blythe and Basho, the poet. Blythe was very interested in Basho, who had those kind of spaces in his consciousness that coded as Zen to a Westerner. And Blythe had also shared koans with Aitken in the camp in Japan, where they were imprisoned together during the war. Aitken always had great reverence for him, he always called him Mr. Blythe. Which tells you about Robert Aitken’s old-fashionedness itself. He didn’t call him Reginald or Blythe. It was Mr. Blythe. It was touching. And he had very strong feelings for him and also for Nyogen Senzaki who had survived the internment camp at Hart Mountain in Idaho. That was the only zendo in America during the war. And after the war, Aitken studied with him. Aitken was a reflective, scholarly person, but spontaneity was outside his realm. You know? So he’d walk into the meditation hall, and he wanted to say something like, ‘You must concentrate on your koan,’ but he’d pull a little slip of paper out of his kimono sleeve and just read, ‘You must concentrate on your koan.’ He was very socially anxious, and you had to take account of that. But he was a good teacher for me because he was literate.”

As it happened, John’s first breakthrough came not with Aitken but with the Korean, Seung Sahn.

“I was training pretty much in the zendo in Hawaii, and didn’t take weekends off, though you were allowed to. And after six months, they’d give you a month off, and they’d say, ‘Go somewhere.’ So I went to hike in the Rockies, and then I had connections on the East Coast so I went to New York, which was overwhelming. I heard that Seung Sahn was giving a four-day retreat on Long Island in a basement dojo. And so I met him. And I was ready – I’d been sitting a lot, four to six hours a day at the zendo – I was ready for things to open up for me. If you really sit a lot, an old text makes sense: ‘purifying mistaken knowledge and attitudes you have held from the past.’ I found that it changes your character and softens you. So that had been happening for me. And so with Seung Sahn I had my first opening. Everything became clear and I could answer his koans. It seemed that a gate was opening, and he was pretty happy about it, and he wanted me to travel with him. But I thought, no, he didn’t seem like a good teacher for me.”

I ask how Seung Sahn’s approach differed from Aitken’s.

“Well, he was Korean. The Japanese – you know – they’re a very precise and literary culture. Koreans are wild in a way in terms of Zen. He wouldn’t say, ‘What koan are you working on?’ He’d say, ‘Who are you!’ I walked in, and he said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘Well, my name’s John.’ ‘Where do you come from?’ And I said, ‘Australia.’ He said again, ‘Who are you?’ And he lifted his stick, and I realized the question wasn’t about coming from Australia. But I was full of life, and a yell came out of me. And he liked that, so he paid attention to me. I passed my first couple of koans with him, they were from a classic text, the Wumenguan. Something was opening but it was still in process. He gave me his own ‘Dropping Ashes on the Buddha’ koan to take with me. Something the Japanese would call a miscellaneous koan. So I went back to Hawaii and sat more retreats. There was a Japanese teacher, Koun Yamada, who had a lot of influence in America. He lived in Kamakura, and he visited America, and Robert Aitken eventually got transferred to him and was sort of under his wing. So then in one of those sesshins everything opened up for me.”

He ended up going through the formal koan curriculum with Aitken, and eventually Aitken suggested he consider teaching.

“Teaching wasn’t on my horizon really. I was studying and getting a master’s in psychology. I didn’t know that I wanted to be a psychologist so much as to get to a different realm of the mind to complement the Zen. A lot of people go into psychology and then go into Zen, but it was the other way around for me. I thought I wouldn’t mind a Western point of view on what’s going on here. And that turned out to be important to me, the whole soul and Zen notion. So I started to teach, and I wanted to have a child, and I don’t know, I just didn’t want to live in Hawaii for the rest of my life. After you’d been in Hawaii for ten years, you either settled in and it was your world, or you left. So I left.”

He moved to Santa Rosa where he was offered a job at a psychotherapy institute, although as it turned out the institute closed before he arrived.

“So I just settled down and got a license and opened a private practice and started a zendo straight away because of somebody I know you’ve interviewed.” The somebody is James Ford. “I went into a bookstore to buy a gift for Robert Aitken. I got a Lafcadio Hearn Japanese book on crepe paper, and I bought that, and this guy was very persistent, and he said, ‘Why are you buying this?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s a gift for a friend.’ ‘Who’s your friend?’ ‘Somebody in Hawaii.’ ‘Well, who?’ He was nosy but amusing, and he was very interested in Zen, and he eventually came and sat with me. And he was very into running this very good second-hand bookstore. But it was one of those things where you realize, ‘This is a wonderful thing, but I’m going to starve if I keep doing it.’ Eventually he went off and went to theological school. Yeah. So he came and sat. I was in a one-bedroom apartment, and we’d meditate on the porch. Then I got a bigger house and did dokusan outside on the lawn with umbrellas when it rained.”

Gradually his understanding of the practice began to change.

“I realized that in its own way, the American Zen scene had a very particular cultural attitude. Partly it was trying to be Japanese, but also it was very American in a way that I wasn’t. I mean, I liked Americans, and I liked America. I liked the freedom in America, that you can think. Ondaatje, the novelist, said if he hadn’t moved to North America – it was Canada in his case – there were things it wouldn’t have occurred to him to think. So there was a kind of freedom. He said he would have been a good poet but not a good novelist. And I noticed that kind of thing in America, but also there were disadvantages, of course.”

I ask, “Such as?”

“People who went into spiritual traditions in America were rigid. And they were always looking for somebody to find fault with. And they’re outraged about all sorts of things a) that I didn’t care about, and b) and I didn’t think were necessarily true or well understood. I noticed that I didn’t really enjoy being around the temples. Not because I was so uptight or anything, but there was a lot of: ‘He did this, and he shouldn’t have.’ And I noticed it in myself. I thought, ‘Hang on, this is not good for me.’”

One of the things that I admire about John is the way in which he has brought koan work out of the dokusan room and integrated into the lives of his students. I tell him that when I interviewed Shishin Wick, he had told me that when studying with Taizan Maezumi they were specifically told not to bring personal matters into dokusan. However, when he became a teacher in his own right, he said, personal stuff was the only thing students came to him with.

“Well, Yamada Koun and Robert Aitken didn’t want to talk about non-koan things and actually couldn’t listen very well,” John tells me. “Yamada compensated by his warmth, Aitken by being very knowledgeable about the history. Americans do love to talk about their feelings, so I had to learn. I realized that I don’t listen either. In temples, what’s pushed down is the shadow, the negative elements in one’s personality. So in the end those have to be taken into account. I found the Jungian work was the thing that most went with any kind of spirituality for me. So I studied that.”

I suggest that if nothing else psychotherapy is certainly about listening.

“Indeed. It’s also about psyche, which is a Greek word. You know, the Greek character, Psyche. I did that spirit and soul thing in the book Light Inside the Dark, but a lot of people still go into a zendo to get away from their lives. Perhaps I did that. But sooner or later you have to let life back in and let the material transform in some way. If you want a whole life rather than a perfect life, then you let the passions back in. And you don’t censor. If somebody comes and tells me, I’m traumatized about X – you know – I might or might not believe them. I don’t necessarily believe the explanation, but it’s worth listening to people.”

I mention that when, twelve years prior, I had first written to him, he’d replied to me by saying he wasn’t the “same type of animal” as the other people I was interviewing at the time. “And yet,” I say, “you’re wearing a rakusu as we speak now.”

“Ritual and ceremony provide a container and allow the soul to go deep. For me, it makes me aware, ‘Oh, I’m in the temple.’ And that’s one of the ceremonies we’ve kept at the Pacific Zen Center, the rakusu ceremony and the vows. Although we’ve made it a transformation path. Rather than ‘Don’t steal; I’ll never steal.’ It’s ‘Oh, I wonder what stealing is about for me.’ You know? It’s a different kind of path.”

I had been told that students at PZI wrote their own vows, and I ask how that worked.

“It works best if you have a group of people; you’re looking at it together. Because almost everybody wants certainty, and as a Zen person it’s my job to stop people from being certain. And people want to be good when they take the rakusu, but I’d rather they tried to be whole. Nobody can keep all those vows because they’re contradictory and nobody does anyway.”

Having students write their own vows is one way in which John and PZI differ from other Zen groups. I ask what he believes some other significant differences are. He takes a moment to reflect.

“Let me try and work out what I do. I’m uncertain how to describe it. It’s pretty orthodox Zen in someways, but it’s not in the forms. We had a lot of people who really liked the keisaku” – the stick students were slapped on the shoulder with to “energize” them – “but too many people felt traumatized, so we just decided, ‘It’s not that important, so we won’t use it.’ So we don’t beat people with the keisaku now. Which was a very Japanese, or very Chinese thing. Also we’re not that interested in people who want to learn mindfulness. In that tradition, there always seems to be someone in charge. But in koans it’s sort of out of control. And we are a koan tradition. We expect you to take on a koan after a while. And if you want to go deep into the bowels of the community, then you do koans, and you stay with it and have some sort of opening experience and transformation. And it’s our job to try and make that as capacious and as generous an experience as possible, though it’s not always possible. And then if somebody’s talented and they look like they might be somebody who might take up teaching, then I want to take them through the thousand koans we use these days. The Kapleau tradition, we’ve drifted from that a bit and we’re a bit more in the Rinzai lines. But – you know – the Kapleau tradition is fine. There’s some question about is a thousand koans better than a hundred koans.”

I point out that Kapleau didn’t finish the curriculum with his teacher, and so his heirs only do about 400 koans.

“Yeah, for that reason Bodhin Kjolhede who was a successor of Kapleau came to study one of the books with me that he didn’t get to do. It’s all right though. It’s not the worst thing not to have finished the koans. So what do the koans do? If you walk around Daitokuji in Kyoto, you’ll be walking through a beautiful garden, and suddenly you’ll see a sign that says, ‘The universe is in a teacup.’ There’s no explanation or handholding; you just walk on. So the koans do that. They shock your imagination and they always start out with a predicament.”

He refers to the fifth case of the Wumenguan:

You’re hanging from a branch by your teeth, your feet cannot find the trunk, your hands cannot reach a branch. Somebody comes beneath the tree and asks you, “Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?” And if you do not answer you fail in your duty. If you do answer, you lose your life. What will you do?

“Well, if you’re hanging from a branch by your teeth, your hands can reach something, so there’s clearly an absurd element to it. And the question you are asked might seem arcane but that’s exactly how the mind works, wandering off. But it points to what it is to be human and the kind of difficulties, predicaments we find ourselves in. The psyche might map onto that. That for some reason touches people. Or you find yourself in a stone crypt and you can’t get out. Your cellphone doesn’t work, that sort of thing. That’s the archetype of imprisonment. So there are a lot of koans that are just plainly predicaments. But not all of them offer this. Some of them are more about your mysterious karma or why you are here. But the metaphor of the koan interests the psyche without providing sensible reasons. That’s what I loved about koans. I felt, ‘Oh, it changes me.’”

I have a card John gave me in 2013. I use it as a bookmark. On one side there is a calligraphy of the characters for “Moon on Water.” On the other side, there is a text:

OK. Here is one koan method for happiness in all its simplicity. Just find a relationship with the koan. You don’t have to get ready or settle yourself down. You just start living inside your own life and let the koan keep you company like a good dog or a friend. The koan doesn’t go anywhere else or ever leave you. . . . You can keep company with a koan without assessing, criticizing or judging yourself. The koan doesn’t find fault. And even if you do criticize yourself, don’t criticize that. Compassion finds an entry. This is important.

Walter Nowick

Moonspring Hermitage –

Walter Nowick was one of seven children born to Russian immigrants who were potato farmers on Long Island. It was a cultured family. Walter’s mother insisted that her children take piano lessons. A local teacher came to the farm every Saturday from 9:00 in the morning until 6:00 in the evening to provide individual instruction to each of the children. Walter, who started his lessons at the age of four and proved to have perfect pitch, showed the most talent, and the teacher encouraged him to apply to Juilliard while still in high school. He was accepted in 1940 at the age of fourteen.

Henriette Michelson, a woman he would revere throughout his life, was his piano coach at Julliard. Henriette spent her summers in Maine, where she taught at the Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Program. Each year, she brought some of her New York students with her, and Walter was invited to be among them. While in Maine, he lodged at the farmhouse of Leverett and Addie Morgan in Surry.

He was drafted into the armed forces as soon as he finished high school and was sent to the Pacific Theater where he was engaged in the “mopping up” campaign on Okinawa. The brutality Walter witnessed there affected him profoundly.

After the war, Michelson, who was a friend of Ruth Fuller Sasaki, was instrumental in introducing Walter to Zen. He returned to Juilliard after demobilization, and, one day in her waiting room, he found a booklet of translations that Sokei-an Sasaki had made of the Zenrin Kushu, a 17^th century Rinzai text. The sensibility expressed in one verse, in particular, struck Walter:

Bamboo shadows sweep the stairs, yet not a speck of dust is stirred;
Moonlight penetrates the bottom of the lake, yet not a trace remaind.

He began to accompany Henriette to zazen at the First Zen Institute. After he completed his music degree, Ruth suggested that he consider traveling to Japan to study with the teacher with whom she had been working – Zuigan Goto at Daitoku-ji. Ruth provided an introduction and used her influence to help Walter acquire the necessary documents to travel to Japan, then still occupied by US forces. He went to Kyoto in 1950.

Daitoku-ji was a training center for young men preparing to become temple priests. At 24, Walter was older than most of his fellow students, but, because he was the most recent person to come to the temple, they were all considered his superiors. The training was rigorous. Depending on the time of year, the day began at either 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. with two hours of meditation and a chanting service; there were another four hours of meditation in the evening, which did not end until 10:00 p.m. During the day, the monks were engaged in various maintenance tasks. Once a day, each student met with Goto to report on their koan practice. As at other Zen Centers, all activities – whether meditation, chanting, preparing vegetables, or working on the grounds – were to be undertaken with full-attention. The monks slept in quarters which had paper walls and only small space heaters to ease the chill of winter. Toilet facilities were primitive by American standards. There was never enough to eat; monastic fare was modest to begin with, but there were still food shortages in Japan at the time and meals were sparse. During sesshin, the schedule and conditions were even more arduous.

After a period as a resident student at Daitoku-ji, Walter moved out of the temple and continued as a lay student. There was a great deal of interest in western classical music in Japan at the time, and he earned a living by performing as well as teaching at the Kyoto Women’s University and the Kyoto Music School.

In all, Walter spent sixteen years in Japan. He took the precepts from Goto and was given the Buddhist name Gessen, which translates as “Source of the Moon” or Moonspring. Apparently the name was chosen because Goto was fond of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Walter remained a lay person. It had never been his, or his teacher’s, intention that he become a priest.

He made several visits back to the United States during his time in Japan, and, when the Morgans died, his family bought the farm on the Morgan Bay Road for him, possibly as an incentive for him to return home. He did not do so, however, until Goto died in 1965. And when he did return to Maine, he brought one third of his teacher’s cremated ashes with him.

It would later become an issue of some controversy what type of authority – if any – Walter had to teach. The fact that he had been entrusted with a portion of Goto’s ashes indicates a close relationship between the two. But it is likely that Goto did not foresee the unlikely emergence of institutional Zen in North America, so the matter of giving formal transmission – in the sense of authority to continue a particular teaching lineage – is not something that would have occurred to him.

The sculptor, Lenore Straus, had met Walter in Japan when she had been supervising the installation of an exhibit there. He gave her her first zazen instruction during that visit, and, when she returned to the US, she attended sesshin with Hakuun Yasutani when she was able to. She resolved the koan Mu during a retreat at Pendle Hill, Pennsylvania, and her awakening experience is one of the eight “enlightenment” stories in Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen. She wanted to maintain and deepen her practice, and, when she learned that Nowick was back in the United States, she made her way to Surry to ask him to be her teacher. Zuigan Goto had told him to wait ten years before teaching and that period of time had not yet passed, but Walter found it difficult to refuse her. She became his first American student. Other students were referred to him by the First Zen Institute. Still others found their way to Maine on their own.

In 1968, with some reluctance, Walter agreed to work with a small number of students he felt were sincere enough to commit themselves to practice. He established a board of directors, consisting of Lenore, himself, and a third member, and they incorporated “Moonspring Hermitage.”

Walter developed a teaching environment based on what he was familiar with from Daitoku-ji. A woodshed was converted into a small zendo, and a sanzen room for private interviews was improvised in Walter’s living quarters on the second floor of the farmhouse.

Ever since the eighth century Chinese Zen Master, Baizhang Huaihai, had declared that “a day of no work is a day of no food,” manual labor has been a traditional part of formal Zen training. So Walter, guided by his experience working on his father’s potato farm, revived the Morgan farm in order to provide work and income for the community. In addition to crops and extensive vegetable gardens, there were dairy cattle, hogs, and poultry. Walter was not a vegetarian and took charge of slaughtering the poultry.

This emphasis on physical work and personal contact was not unique, but it was distinctive. For Walter, Zen was never an end in itself. Moonspring Hermitage didn’t have the type of competitive atmosphere found in places like Rochester, where – as one of Philip Kapleau’s students put it – students vied with one another to demonstrate who could be the most “Buddha-ish.” It was a practice which – by focussing on the things in which they were involved – students could be led to greater self-awareness and a sense of harmony with the world.

Unlike other Zen pioneers to the Americas, Walter deliberately stayed under the radar. An article in Tricycle Magazine in 2009 put it this way:

Back in the late sixties and seventies, when gurus, yogis, and roshis were in particularly high demand, Nowick had avoided the limelight, choosing instead a life of quiet practice. Even after the Dutch novelist Janwillem van de Wetering published an entire book about Nowick’s group, A Glimpse of Nothingness: Experiences in an American Zen Community, in 1975, they managed to stay off the radar, thanks to Nowick’s stipulation that his friend Janwillem (who later moved to Surry to live near Nowick) not use his real name or say where he was. And while other roshis lectured in multimillion-dollar facilities, Nowick ran a sawmill and lived in a shack.[1]

For those who did find him, and who he allowed to stay, he could be very generous, selling one-acre parcels of land for $1 on which students could build homes.

In spite of the isolated location and the challenges of winters in Maine, students continued to arrive, and by 1969 it was necessary to build a larger zendo to accommodate them. Walter had a sawmill on the farm, and the lumber was milled on site from trees harvested on the property. After allowing the boards to dry for a year, the community—under the supervision of a student, Ken Weinberg, who had worked on set-designs for motion pictures – completed the construction of the new zendo in 1971. A pond was designed near the zendo and paths cut in the wood. One led to a glacial rock known as the “Roshi Stone” where, three years prior, Nowick had interred the ashes of his teacher. A plaque, marking the spot, reads: “Here lie some of the ashes of the Japanese Zen Master Goto Zuigan, my teacher. They were placed here in October 1968, with hope that his teaching will continue.”

In 1984, while the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union was still simmering, Walter saw a television program, The Day After, about the probable after-effects of a nuclear war. The program stunned him. A student, who was with him at the time, reports: “He said, ‘I actually realized everything could come to an end: Mozart, Beethoven, Zen, Buddhism, everybody could stop.’” He felt it particularly strongly because of his Russian heritage.

“When Walter saw ‘The Day After,’” another student tells me, “it deeply affected him. And I suspect in part it goes back to his experience in World War Two and seeing the devastation in Japan. But he would go for months, never leaving the farm. He was really centered and focused on practice and his students there. He would play the piano on a Sunday evening in the summer. Music was always there; it was a huge love of his but not something he could spend time on. After he saw that film, he decided to play all of the Beethoven sonatas in Ellsworth, to give the money to Ground Zero.[2] And for him to go away from the farm to go to Ellsworth to perform was just unheard of. He didn’t put time into music. He didn’t practice. He certainly didn’t go off the farm. It was a change of focus. And it wasn’t really music that brought him off the farm, it was his concern about the larger issues. And wanting to engage in them in some way. He said, ‘What I can hold up, personally, is music, and that’s what I’m going to hold up. This is something we should not lose. The world should not lose Beethoven. I can hold that up, and I can give the money from it to Ground Zero.’”

That same year, he formed the Surry Opera Company. While in Japan, he had been the accompanist for a choral performance of Verdi’s Aida. He followed the format of that production for renditions of both Aida and Mozart’s Magic Flute. Launching the Opera Company with non-professional singers – made up of (as one description put it) sangha members, lobster fishermen, pulpwood cutters, and homemakers – was just as improbable an endeavor as establishing a zendo in rural Maine, but within a year of its inception, the Company was invited to perform at Wolf Trap near Washington DC. The following year they performed Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov in Russian and, in 1986, made the first of several trips to the Soviet Union, inaugurating more than two decades of musical collaboration between Walter’s Company and musicians from Russia, Japan, France, and elsewhere.

Several Moonspring students were members of the chorus, but others felt that Nowick was spending too much time with music and not enough time teaching. They wrote him a letter in which they expressed their concerns. He responded with a brief hand-written reply:

It has become distinctly clear to me that I have fully involved myself in music and that it has taken me from my work with you as a teacher. Because of this situation, I wish to inform you without further delay of my decision to resign from Moonspring as teacher. I will help in any way I can to support its growth. I hope you will accept this decision along with me as the wisest one for all of us concerned.

A handful of students formed a board in order to maintain the zendo, and Nowick turned Moonspring Hermitage over to them in 1993 with the stipulation that the name – which had been derived from his Dharma name – be changed. They reincorporated as the Morgan Bay Zendo and evolved into a center for meditation practice unaffiliated with any particular school of Buddhism.

Walter continued to reside at the farm, and, for the remainder of his life, his energy was focused on music. As Cold War tensions eased after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Surry Opera Company gradually faded, but Walter still gave piano recitals in the barn as well as in Russia and Japan. Russian musicians continued to come each summer.

Walter maintained his personal Zen practice, but, although he visited occasionally, he remained separate from the operations of the zendo and did not resume formal teaching.

He suffered a stroke in 2012 and went into care at the Maine Veteran’s Home in Bangor but eventually chose to leave and return to Surry where he spent his last day.

Walter Nowick died on February 6, 2013, three months before I began the visits to Zen communities throughout North America that are the basis of these profiles. That April, a memorial service was held at the zendo where friends and former students – many of whom had taken turns at his bedside during the last weeks of his life – shared stories. The following November, a portion his ashes were buried at the Roshi Stone alongside those of his teacher, Zuigan Goto Roshi. Another portion were flown to Japan and scattered near the plot where the remainder of Goto’s ashes had been interred.

[1] https://tricycle.org/magazine/down-east-roshi/

[2] A charitable organization of the time that sought to reduce the threat of nuclear war

Nicole Baden

Dharma Sangha –

September 2024 Mountain Seat Ceremony – Nicole Baden and Richard Baker

Nicole Baden succeeded Richard Baker as the abbot of the two Dharma Sangha practice centers, the Crestone Mountain Zen Center in Colorado, and the Zen Buddhistisches Zentrum Schwarzwald in Germany. Her first encounter with Richard, however, was not particularly auspicious.

“I was born in Northern Germany in a small village just south of Hamburg. I grew up in a big family with my grandparents owning the farm where I grew up, and with all my cousins. I am the oldest of thirteen cousins all on the same farm. My father was the first person in that family who didn’t continue the farming; he became a banker. And later when my grandfather started being too old to do the farming, my father learned how to do it. And then for the longest time he did both banking and farming on the weekends, and now he is still taking care of the farm together with my cousin.”

The family was Christian Protestant, and Nicole’s grandparents, in particular, were very devout.

“I learned to read by reading the Bible. A children’s version at first and then I graduated to the adult version. My grandparents very much believed, but what they really brought into the family was the compassion aspect. Like the way they understand Jesus as a person who really cares about others, and they brought that into the family. And I was raised with the understanding that your job in the world was to be a good person. And I’m feeling like that led me into Buddhism. I did try to cultivate from early on, as a child, the sense that God sees you in a true way somehow, so you should learn to see yourself the way God sees you.”

However, when – as a teenager – she began to consider the significance of her life, she found that the Christian God failed to meet her needs. “I really tried, and I just never heard back. So at some point, I gave up. So I thought, maybe I need a therapist or something. I was starting at fifteen/sixteen, as any teenage person would be, to be concerned about, ‘What’s my identity? Do other people like me? And am I good enough?’ The core issue was I noticed very clearly and painfully that all of my decisions were based on what I thought other people were thinking of me. There’s a German word for it –ferngesteuert – as if you’re remote controlled. That was the feeling, and I kept writing that into my journal. I felt as if I was remote controlled by others essentially. I noticed how I was trying somehow to become the person that I thought others would want me to be or how they would like me better. And I could not escape; I could not not watch my mind. There was my thinking, but there was always an observer to the thinking. I could not not observe the thinking. And so I noticed that feeling of how I was totally about ‘what do other people think.’ And I started asking the question, ‘But what do I really want?’ So I asked my parents if I could go to therapy or something.”

Her father had an acquaintance who had investigated several meditation centers in Germany; they discussed Nicole’s situation, and the friend gave her father a number of brochures, suggesting these places and programs might be more suited to her condition than therapy would be. But she had no way of evaluating the various offerings and eventually chose one at random.

“I just put them all on the floor, sat next to them, closed my eyes, and I said to myself, ‘If intuition actually exists, I really need it to work right now.’ I put my hand into the pile, waited until I found a brochure that just felt right, picked it up, opened it, and it was the Zen Buddhist Studies Center in the Black Forest. It was about something called ‘Work Practice.’”

As a gift for her 18^th birthday, her parents paid the program fee and drove her 900 km to the Black Forest.

The program was supervised by Gisela Weischede, one of the founding directors of the center. “It was a small group, but she was there. She was the leader at the time. And then a handful of residents. Baker Roshi wasn’t there. She was his disciple. It was Baker Roshi’s center in Johanneshof.”

It was not a retreat as such but, as the brochure stated, a Work Practice.

“At that time there was no culture for receiving new people. So it was super small. It was a couple of monks basically who were beginning to make the place work more or less. And so we got up at 4:00 a.m., which was hell. And then we meditated for fifty minutes, ten minutes kinhin, forty minutes sitting, and then service which was also hell for me. There was almost no break. Oryoki breakfast. It was all in silence. And then – I don’t know – up to seven hours work per day.”

It was her first experience of meditation, and it was difficult.

“They said, when I first arrived, ‘Have you ever sat before?’ And I thought – I mean, literally – I thought, ‘Have I ever sat before? Yes. Sometimes I stand, sometimes I walk, and sometimes I sit. Like, we sit at school, for example.’ And then they clarified it. ‘No, no. We mean like meditation.’ ‘Oh! No, I’ve never done that before.’ And they said, ‘Well, we do that a lot here.’ And I said, ‘Oh, okay. That’s fine. I’ll figure it out.’ They didn’t give me much of an instruction. They just said, ‘Don’t move.’ That was like the main thing.” She smiles then laughs softly. “And be on time! Be on time and don’t move.”

It was, she admits, horrible. And yet, “What opened up for me, that was just mind-blowing. I don’t want to go overboard here. There was a whole lot of inner stuff that made me do what I did. First of all, I was committed. I needed help so badly, and Gisela felt like the first real person that I had ever met. I loved my family very much – that was all good – but what I mean by ‘first real person’ is that I could just feel that she was located in the world in a different way. The very doubts and insecurities that I had, I could see she doesn’t have them. I saw everything I wanted in her. So for me, the commitment – even though it was horrible doing it – was that I could see whatever it is that she’s doing is making a person like that, so I need to do what it is that’s creating that person. I was from the first moment deeply committed to staying, to making it work, and to figuring out how it worked.”

The program was two weeks long, then she returned home where she began a meditation practice before going to school each morning.

The following year, after graduating high school, she planned to do a trip around the world, but she also decided to start by returning to Johanneshof. She had not yet met Richard.

“When I was there in the work practice, sometimes there were references. Right? Again, there was no formal instructions, so I had to figure out everything myself. So I created the most ridiculous ideas of how things were hanging together. And they kept referencing something called ‘Baker Roshi’ – ‘What Baker Roshi says’ – and it had the feel the way my grandmother says, ‘The Bible says.’ So ‘the Bible says such-and-such,’ they said the same when, ‘Baker Roshi says.’ So I thought, ‘Oh, “Baker Roshi,” that must be an old Tibetan book.’

“So I came back after I had graduated from high school. I thought I would do a trip around the world, and I would start at Johanneshof. But then it ended up being the only station. I had all-in-all one-and-a-half year’s time, and I ended up just staying there. And the second time I was there, I came back for Gisela who was the person who had really inspired me, and I wanted to see her again, and I wanted to meditate there and stuff. I was in much better shape at that time. And it was in the summer, and it wasn’t work practice. It was all more relaxed, so that was very interesting to see the place so much more relaxed and lit up and nice and green everything. So when I was there again, the first time I met Baker Roshi is he came down the stairs. I was sitting on the couch in the corner of our main room, and he came down the stairs, this tall guy with a shaved head, and he stopped and he said, ‘Oh, you must be Nicole.’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Hello. My name is Richard.’ And so we greeted, and he moved on, and he went into the office. But I was super suspicious of this person. ‘Why’s this guy just going into the office?’ Because I knew from Gisela that people weren’t just supposed to go into the office. So I followed him to make sure he didn’t steal anything or do anything funny. Right? So I was standing in front of the office door, and I saw Gisela – she, of course, was sitting in the office – relate to him in some way that I didn’t expect. She bowed to him and was very respectful, and she called him, ‘Baker Roshi.’ And I said, ‘Oh, wait. It’s not a book!’”

Richard invited her to a seminar he was participating in at another location, and it was there that she had her first formal teacher/student interview – dokusan – with him. She felt immediately that he was someone she could ask any question at all. “That was the major for me, that now there’s this person, I know where they live, and I can ask this person every question. It was like the best thing ever. I didn’t think of him as my teacher or as a teacher or anything, but I had so many questions and he had real responses to my questions. That meant the world to me. I decided to stay at Johanneshof because I realized I don’t have to travel around the world.”

When her parents and grandparents became concerned that she might have fallen in with a cult, she explained that “Baker Roshi was the most intelligent person that I’d ever met, and I think intelligence was a currency in my family. He’s someone who can explain the questions of life or who can open the questions of life. I guess that was the main thing, and everyone who knew me would have known what a big deal that is for me, that I had so many questions about life, and that I felt here was somebody who could help me with them.”

“What kind of questions?” I ask.

“Like one of the big questions I had was how do you make decisions? How do you know what is right or wrong, for example. And the kind of answer that he would give is, he would never directly answer, ‘Well, here’s how.’ But he would just give me guiding principles. He’d say, ‘There’s no right or wrong; there is only decision and consequence,’ for example. He would just give me a way to think about the questions in such a way that I could start – much like Rilke would say – living the question. The questions that were stuck in the head, he would turn them into liveable and practical questions, as he did over and over again.”

And if her parents and grandparents asked what Zen was about?

“It’s a practice that allows you to meet yourself and life in a true way.”

She stayed at Johanneshof for eighteen months, then went to college to study psychology.

“I chose the university where I ended up going because I was walking through the university, and there was a poster at the door of the professor I was interested in, and he was known to do something called trans-personal psychology. And he was the only person in Germany who did that, and that would have a contemplative component to it. So at the door of this professor that I wanted to meet just to get to know him before I signed the papers of matriculation, on that door there a poster for a conference in Todtmoos which is ten kilometers north of Johanneshof. And on the poster it had the name of the professor, and the second name was Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi as a co-presenter at that conference. So the professor wasn’t there and I never ended up meeting him, but I thought, ‘Oh! He knows Baker Roshi!’ So then I decided to study in Oldenburg.”

During the four years she was in university, she continued to travel to both Johanneshof and Crestone Mountain for sesshin. And as things turned out, although she graduated, she did not take up psychotherapy as a career but found her life practice in Zen.

It wasn’t an entirely smooth journey however.

“I had several crises. I think the first one was when I left Crestone. I ended up leaving Crestone in 2013. My visa was running out anyway, but I also had health issues at that time. Crestone was super understaffed. That’s always been the case in Crestone. I had like five staff positions at the same time for a couple of years. It was just . . . I was burned out basically. And I realized it was too harsh, and I didn’t have enough nourishment, but the main thing in that crisis is that it was also too male. There were no women, and I didn’t have a female role model. And it felt at that time as if had to make a choice, either I can be a woman or I can be a practitioner. I realized, ‘Well, I can’t not be a woman! That’s just not a choice I have. So the other thing has to go.’ What I said to Baker Roshi at that time was, ‘I am always going to keep practicing.’ But I didn’t find the circumstances at that time conducive anymore. They weren’t nourishing, and I couldn’t make them nourishing. It just didn’t work. I was trying it for a long time, and I couldn’t make it work. So at that time I left for several weeks. Like two or three months even. But I stayed in touch. I really wanted to practice, it was just I needed more sleep, I needed to grow my hair – I had a shaved head and so forth – and I just wanted to be a female person or the person I was biologically. And I wanted to stop not listening to what was physically going on for me.

“Today, I think the reason that Johanneshof is flourishing with a lot of young people – and definitely right now more women than men – is that we’ve learned how to acknowledge different bodies and just make the practice work. At that time, the imaginary ideal was the iron man. And when I really understood that, I was, ‘I don’t want to be an iron man. Is that what I’m becoming?’ And that’s what I started feeling. My muscle tone was getting harder and harder, and I couldn’t not do that. And I also realized the system of the people living around me, they kept discouraging femininity somehow. It was viewed like a weakness or something. It wasn’t neutral. And I realized, ‘Oh, my God! I’m becoming like that.’

“You can learn a great deal from monasticism and from meditation. And I was at a point – I think – when my eyes opened to those aspects. They weren’t open to those aspects for several years – for pretty much exactly ten years, I would say – but there was a point when I realized I’m fine now. It was like I wasn’t so desperate in my own suffering anymore, I realized I don’t need to do this for myself anymore. And at that point, it was like my view widened. I was like, ‘What’s really going on here?’”

She helped shift the culture of the centers both in Colorado and Germany. “The core thing we shifted is we’re widening the feeling – oftentimes it’s just an implicit feeling – about what the Buddha (or the ideal practitioner) includes. When I first lived in Crestone it seemed to only include male properties. And just by implicit feeling and understanding, there’s a lot more ‘allowing’ practice now. ‘Allowing’ is one of the big things that I do in practice.”

I ask what she means by that.

“The standard thing I say is that meditation is a mind in which everything may be, is allowed to be, but nothing has to be. Nothing must be; it doesn’t need to be a certain way. And the way I mean that it is fundamentally an ‘allowing’ space, a space that allows anything to be, no matter what it is. And that emphasizes a certain tenderness toward our experience rather than trying to have our experience be a certain way.”

I ask how she came to become a teacher in the Dharma Sangha.

“I don’t know,” she muses. “It’s such a super gradual process of an unfolding relationship within the sangha for decades really. After I had been there for ten years or something Baker Roshi called me to a meeting. And that was seldom; he does meet with people, but he doesn’t call people to meetings. If Baker Roshi calls you to a meeting, it’s serious. So he called me to a meeting, and he said, ‘Well, I would just like to tell you that I think you have everything it takes to practice.’ And I said, ‘Well, okay. Thank you. That’s great.’ And then he said, ‘I think you can become a teacher.’ And that’s all he said. He said, ‘I just wanted you to know that. I think you have the potential to become a teacher at some point.’ And I just took note of that. Then five years nothing happened. Nothing at all. He never picked up on that conversation. Nothing. And he said to me five years later, ‘So that was a test by the way.’ And I said, ‘What was a test?’ He said, ‘Well, I wanted to see if you’d start talking about it.’ And I never did. It just never occurred to me that I’d bring that topic up by myself, and I didn’t think about it.”

When it became clear that Richard was also considering her his potential heir, she had initial reservations because of his continued estrangement from the San Francisco Zen Center

“I knew Baker Roshi well enough to know that I could completely trust him. I had no doubts about that. But I did want to make sure, as much as that was possible, that during his lifetime the unresolved issues were resolved. I wanted that for him, but I wanted that for the lineage also. And I wanted to at least know where are we at in the situation. So first what I did was I said, ‘If you want me to be your successor, I need to understand your life better.’ So I just had him tell me his life. I just let him talk, and I tried to understand it. And then I identified the points that – for me – I found problematic, and I wanted to see can there be process or transformation on those. And the core one, I think, was there this one particular sexual relationship that I really struggled with that he had when he was the abbot that he told me about, which was the one with a person who clearly was a student.

“I heard his version, and I felt, ‘Mmm. I need to hear from her; I need to know how she feels.’ So I reached out to her. She immediately responded and was very happy I reached out, and got into a very, very good contact. She’s very touched, and she told me her story, and that made me feel better. And I noticed in the conversation, the way it came across was like this relationship really is the reason that Baker Roshi is a persona non grata. And I didn’t know until actually when I had contact with her that she didn’t want that at all, that the thing she wanted the most was for there be reconciliation also for her own life. I don’t know how or why, but it was one of those things I just felt had to happen. Like it has to happen. So she and I talked together and what could she possibly do? She wanted to do something that would allow for reconciliation.”

What the woman did was write an open letter addressed to the SFZC leadership expressing her desire for reconciliation. After that, as Nicole puts it, “It took several interrelated – like dominos or something – interrelated pieces to fall into place before things could happen. It turns out Baker Roshi felt a lot of guilt around his relationship with this woman. That was the main thing he felt guilty about. He told me that now that she wrote this letter he feels like he has permission to get in touch with San Francisco Zen Center again. Before he was just too ashamed; he didn’t want to. He hadn’t visited San Francisco Zen Center for a long time. But that was one of the things that if I was going to accept this responsibility, I needed to be with them in that situation while he was still alive. I just had to be there and feel what that is like. And so Fu Schroeder reached out and it was just clear from her presence – she was the abbot of Green Gulch, and she was still in a position with high responsibility – and it was clear. She didn’t call it that at first, but she definitely reached out her hands and wanted reconciliation. Nobody thought it was possible, but it was clear that she hoped for it somehow. And so with that feeling, it was easy for Baker Roshi and me to go to San Francisco although the first visit was very scary and made both of us quite nervous, and he was super careful and didn’t know quite how to be there.

“We had a meeting in one of the last evenings in Green Gulch, we’re all sitting, the whole staff, a lot of people from the old days happened to be there that day. And so it was a big circle of people, and it was a meet-and-speak with Baker Roshi primarily. People from the past came to support him a little bit, and I really appreciated how they addressed the possibility of actually figuring out how to remove wounds or how to actually get a real – not just a verbal, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s be friends again’ – but a real feeling what is it that would be needed for reconciliation. And I think what was different in that meeting versus all the other times before when Baker Roshi had apologized and so forth, but it never really landed for people, this time, I think, because of the new generation being present also, he handled the situation very differently. He was absolutely not defensive. All he did was just be present, just acknowledging the harm that had been caused and took responsibility for his actions. And everyone was just so moved by how his heart was so vulnerable and totally present. It just became clear how he was part of the sangha. Like, nobody could deny it; he was definitely an important part of the sangha. And so after that meeting and that evening, people just poured over; it was as if a valve had opened, that they finally had permission to say, ‘Thank you’ for all he did in establishing Zen Center. And for the third generation it was very clear that that came as a relief. It came as a relief to be allowed to say, ‘Thank you.’”

On their return to Germany after this initial meeting in California, Richard Baker formally installed Nicole as the new abbot of the Dharma Sangha in a four-day Mountain Seat ceremony in September 2024.

Lou Nordstrom

“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^thstop 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.

[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

Stephen Zenki Salad

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.”

[1] First Zen Institute

Sheng Yen

Conversations with Rebecca Li

Rebecca Li is a second-generation Dharma heir of Chan Master Sheng Yen, whose Dharma Drum Foundation now has affiliate centers in fourteen countries.

“The first time I met Master Shen Yen in person,” she tells me, “was when I was in grad school, and he visited Los Angeles. It was very rare for him to make it over there at that time. I was already part of a weekly meditation group led by a student of his, and that’s how I heard of the visit and that he was going to be in LA to give a public lecture and give the Three Refuges. I wanted to be there because I wanted to take the refuges with him.”

“How did you first learn about him?” I ask.

“When I met my now husband, he was already practicing with this group, and he kept talking about this Master Sheng Yen. So I started borrowing books from a library run by a temple in the Monterey Park area, east of LA, a big Chinese community. I picked up a couple of Master Sheng Yen’s books on Buddhism. I think they are books he wrote during his six-year solitary retreat, and that was my first exposure to someone talking systematically about the teachings, and that really resonated with me. And I felt, ‘Yeah. I think this is the right person for me to study with.’”

Sheng Yim had been traveling to New York since the 1970s, Rebecca met him in 1995. I ask if she knows what first brought him to America.

“He came to North America after he finished his graduate studies in Japan, after he did his six-year solitary retreat in Taiwan. So after the solitary retreat practice, he realized that he had to go and get more education because he believed what was needed to reinvigorate Buddhism in Taiwan was to have a more educated sangha, monastic sangha. And he felt he should do that so he would be qualified to train others and whatever was needed. But when he was done with the education in Japan, there wasn’t a place for him in Taiwan at that time. But he was invited to teach as a Buddhist monk at the Temple of the Great Enlightenment in the Bronx by one of his main benefactors, Shen Chia-Theng, a very devoted lay Buddhist who built this temple in the Bronx. I don’t know much about this temple, but Master Sheng Yin was invited to go there, and I think he actually became the abbot there. And that’s where he started teaching meditation because he found there were a lot of Westerners in the ’70s who were interested in learning kung fu or something like that, and he thought this was a way to get people interested in Chan practice. So that’s where he started to teach. And actually when he was in the Temple of the Great Enlightenment, he started leading seven-day intensive Chan retreats. If you look at historical photographs, it was a quite small group. They borrowed a villa owned by this benefactor, Shen Chia-Theng, on Long Island to run these retreats. That’s when Master Sheng Yen started running seven-day residential meditation retreats. He wasn’t doing that prior to that.”

“The early Japanese teachers on the west coast usually had two communities they worked with,” I point out. “There was the cultural community, which basically wanted a temple and had little interest in meditation, and then there was the non-Asian community who had no interest in the temple activities but wanted to learn how to meditate. Did Master Sheng Yen find himself in similar circumstances?”

“The way it developed was a little bit different because Sheng Yen was familiar with Suzuki Roshi’s story. And because Master Sheng Yen was not brought here in that same way, he wanted to develop mainly a Western sangha. He believed his mission was to bring Chan practice to the West. To bring the Dharma, to the West. But what happened was, he was doing that, leading these retreats while he was based in the Temple of the Great Enlightenment, then his master in Taiwan passed away in 1988, so he had to go back to Taiwan where he inherited a Buddhist Cultural Institute that his master had established, and he needed to take care of what his master left behind in terms of a congregation, and I think some publishing affairs. And he was there for a long time, and by the time he returned to the US the Temple of Great Enlightenment had a new abbot because they needed to continue to operate in his absence. So when he returned he was no longer the abbot, and he decided he had to find some other way to develop a sangha in the US.

“So he started to divide his time between Taiwan and the US. Some lay practitioners helped him find a location in Queens – not the current location, but close to it – to establish the Chan meditation center in Queens. At the same time he was also developing what his master left behind in Taipei, the Nung Chan monastery in Taipei. My understanding is because he had students in the US, in Taiwan they started seeing him as like an important Chan master and so people were attracted to follow him. That was also the beginning of people immigrating to the US from Taiwan, and so his center in Queens also started to have a larger number of people who were originally from Taiwan whether they were recent immigrants or not and who had established a life in the US. I have been told in the beginning most of his students were Westerners and then the proportion began to change because of his popularity in Taiwan.

“By the time I first went to it, the center was mostly bi-lingual programs. And Master Sheng Yen has always been giving these open house talks, and he spoke in Mandrin Chinese and somebody would translate it in English. So always bi-lingual, and the retreats were always bi-lingual. So of course there are people who only understand Mandarin, and then there are some people who don’t understand Mandarin, so they needed their translations. So really three groups of people – Mandarin-speaking only, bi-lingual, English-speaking only – are all practicing under the same roof. Then when I turned up in the late ’90s and moved to the East Coast, I was asked to join the teacher-training program because it involved people giving presentations. So there’s the Mandarin-speaking side and the English-speaking side; I was very much part of the English-speaking side.”

I reminded her of an earlier conversation we had had in which she’d said that one of the things that had led Sheng Yen to teach in the west was a belief that by doing so he would be strengthening the Dharma as a whole.

She nodded her head and said, “Yes. In the 1970s, there was a feeling that there was this vibrancy in the West. And so that would be a good place to bring the Dharma and breathe some fresh life into it. Not just Master Sheng Yen, many teachers felt this way. And so I think that’s exactly what happened. Buddhism before the first part of the 20^th century largely had been taught in these very homogeneous cultures. And so they developed in this mode and largely they did do well in accommodating a particular set of characteristics in certain cultures. But that means that if you live in those cultures and you don’t have those characteristics, you won’t find the Dharma very accessible because of the way it was institutionalized in those times. But when the Dharma came to the United States, the marvelous thing about here – especially the development in the last couple of decades – is the cultural diversity here meant that teachers had to teach in a way that’s not speaking to one culture. I also think the recent years’ discussion on identity explicitly – it’s always been around – and the effort to push Dharma centers to pay more attention to that is really healthy for the development of Buddhadharma.”

“Do Westerners respond to the Dharma differently than Asians?” I ask.

“Master Sheng Yen has been asked this question before, so I will convey his answer to you. He said that, in his experience, Westerners – actually, I like to call it Western-educated people – respond to teaching very differently. He said traditionally educated Chinese people, you could tell them go do something, they just go do it. They don’t ask any question. Now that does not mean that they actually understand what they’re supposed to do. They just go do it. Whereas the Western educated people, ask a lot of questions, like, ‘How does it work?’ ‘How long will it take?’ All that stuff. We need to understand the ins-and-outs of how the whole thing works. And when you’re convinced of that, then, ‘Ah, okay, I understand it,’ then you will start doing it. And he always said his Western students tend to be much more serious when they actually practice.”

“Okay, I’m a Western-educated person. How would Master Sheng Yen – or you or another teacher in his lineage – explain what Chan was about?”

“It is to help us understand how our mind works so that we can understand clearly why we do what we do.”

“And how does it do that?”

“So, with Chan practice one important aspect, engaging some sort of meditative practice – whatever type of meditative practice you use – is to have you settle your mind so that it is possible for us to begin to see the subtle actions of the mind. A lot of the time we don’t actually know the thoughts and the feelings behind our actions. If we’re alert, we might be aware that we said something, otherwise we may only be aware of what we said by the effect of it. Like, we just got someone really upset, and ‘Oh! Did I say something?’ So you’re aware that someone’s upset. Some people are completely oblivious. So when the mind is settled and clear enough then we can actually see what’s coming through the mind in response to what’s happening. And there are different ways that we can respond to it. Like, most of the time we are compelled to blurt out something or just react in a certain way. So seeing how mind works, we see how we are being controlled by certain habitual way of perceiving the world because of certain habitual ways of believing how things work. And even though, in the moment, there may be some part of you seeing that, like, maybe that’s not a good idea, you act anyway. I call all that ‘layers,’ layers of very subtle thought, mental habits. But being able to see that, then you have a chance of breaking out of unhelpful habits.

“So in Chan practice, what we’re doing is recognizing that these layers are there. If we’re not aware of them, that’s how they take over. By cultivating more clear awareness you become very familiar with how they show up, how they work. Because any kind of habit is our reaction to what’s going on, but it’s thought after thought after thought. So to engage in meditative practice, the mind is still and clear so that we can see these very subtle thoughts coming up in very rapid succession. Then we can say, ‘Oh. Okay. It’s this chain.’ But they’re not on autopilot. It feels like they’re on autopilot because of the habitual tendency. But actually every thought that arises we can stop. We don’t have to add to it. We don’t have to pick this next moment and take that step. So instead of taking the next step, you can say, ‘Okay. I’m standing here.’”

“What is the most significant thing people who practice Chan or Zen should know about Master Sheng Yen?” I ask as our conversation draws to a close.

“I think two things. One is the dedication and commitment that he exemplified through his own lifelong work engaging in the practice, really actualizing the vows, the Great Vows. So that’s one very important thing. The other is the importance of bringing together the Dharma study with meditation practice. That Chan practice is not only about the meditation. It’s also very important to engage in theory and study, sutras, various Buddhist philosophies, to understand what it is that we are doing, to come to the Right View. Because it’s easy often to have your own idea about what this is about. And so to study, to recognize the persistence of various erroneous understandings. So those two would be, I would say, the most important. And something I think that has not been mentioned was his Dharma successors.

“One other important element – I could add it as a third part of his legacy – is how Master Sheng Yin gave full Dharma transmission to several lay practitioners in the west, giving them the responsibility and, of course, the authority to pass on the lineage in the west. So my understanding was when he did that it was relatively ground-breaking because at that time people understood those were things that only happened to monastics. So in ’89 he gave transmission to John Crook,[1] an Englishman who had started practice Chan in Hong Kong in the ’50s. But basically they were of a similar age. John Crook also studied Tibetan Buddhism. He actually established a retreat place using his farmhouse in Wales and was teaching. Then he discovered Master Sheng Yen and started attending retreats with him in New York and really followed Master Sheng Yen. So Master Sheng Yen basically saw that he would be someone who would really be instrumental in helping him bring Chan practice to the west and so he gave him transmission in ’89 designating him as his senior Dharma heir to provide guidance to the later Dharma heirs. Simon Child was his second lay Dharma heir who received transmission from Master Sheng Yen in 2000. Simon Child is actually my current teacher, I received Dharma transmission from him.”

“And all of these heirs – including you – are lay?”

“Yes. And they are creating their own sangha in their home territory. This is a very important way in which he brought Chan practice to the west.”

[1] According to the lineage chart of the Western Chan Fellowship, John Crook received transmission in 1993, followed by Simon Child and Max Kälin in 2000. Rebecca received transmission from Child in 2016. – https://westernchanfellowship.org/about-the-western-chan-fellowship/lineage-of-the-teachers/lineage-chart/