Benevolent Zen Sangha, Providence

James Córdova was a member of the Boundless Way community in New England, which – as he puts it – “sort of split apart, and then I was affiliated with Greater Boston Zen Center for a while, and then we sort of split apart from them, and now we’re doing another thing.”

“So you were part of the group that separated from Boundless Way?” I ask. I didn’t mean the question to imply a criticism – Zen communities are as susceptible to internal conflicts as any other human endeavor – but I did want to be clear.

“Yeah, that split away from Boundless Way and then split away from Boston. We’re malcontents,” he adds with a laugh.

The “another thing” he’s now doing is the Benevolent Zen Sangha in Providence, Rhode Island.

Zen appeals to a fairly narrow segment of the general population. Zen practitioners, for example, tend to be college educated. A surprising number of Zen teachers are academics or psychologists. James is both. He is the chair of the Psychology Department at Clark University and a licensed clinical psychologist. He encountered Zen while a student at the University of Washington.

“There was a professor, Alan Marlatt, an addictions researcher. The University of Washington was full of a bunch of bigshots, so mostly they didn’t teach; they did their research. But if they ever fell into one of these gaps where they were between grants, then the university made them teach. This is what happened to Alan. He was in a gap between grants and so he agreed to teach a graduate course on the Psychology of Mindfulness, which entailed meeting at his house at 7:00 in the morning and drinking overly strong coffee and browsing through his collection of Buddhist books and then sitting on his couches. He would try to teach us how to meditate, and then we would leave borrowing some of his books and hyper-caffeinated.”

“And that got you interested?”

“It did. It really clicked for me. There were aspects of other things that had been compelling to me up to that point, including,” he says chuckling, “existential psychotherapy and radical behaviourism. And there was a long interest in and exploration of – what? – a  sort of spiritual quest, I suppose, that I fell into as I fell out of Catholicism and started to engage that journey of filling that space and meaning-making in that particular way. So of all the things I’d encountered, the stuff I was making contact with at that point about Buddhism and about Zen just consolidated it.”

He was working on a Ph. D. and didn’t have time to join a practice group, but he did a lot of reading. “All the big ones, like Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.”

“The Three Pillars of Zen?” I suggest.

“Everybody had to read The Three Pillars of Zen! Right?” he says with a laugh. “The ones that you could find at the university bookstore. So whatever I could find, I gobbled up. There was a sitting group just down the street from me when I was living in Illinois, and I played with the idea of going to sit with them, but I never did. I actually didn’t start sitting with a group formally until I moved to Worcester in 2002.”

“Why were you reluctant to join the group in Illinois?”

“I was an assistant professor and there was the mad scramble for tenure. And I think there’s just enough of the barrier of weirdness.”

Then he got a job at Clarke University.

“When I moved here, one of the promises I made to myself was to try to find a community and to start to get serious about Zen and about practice. I knew this was where Kabat-Zinn had started MBSR[1] stuff, and so I wondered about maybe starting there as part of my research work. So I went to talk to the head of their research arm here at U Mass in Worcester.” He laughs at the memory. “They weren’t so much interested in cooperating on research. They had their research arm pretty well locked down. But as I talked to the guy and we played with some ideas and he was politely ushering me out the door, I said, ‘I’m interested in finding a sitting group here. Do you know of any in the area?’ And he just walked me down the hall and introduced me to Melissa Blacker who was working for them at the time. It was like a warm handoff. He introduced me to her, and we clicked right away.”

He joined the group Melissa and her husband, David Rynick, were hosting at a local Unitarian Church. Eventually he would become Melissa’s Dharma heir, which was one of the reasons I wanted to clarify that he was part of the group which later “split apart” from Boundless Way.

I ask, “What do people get from Zen practice?”

James chuckles and says, “I hope they come away with more of a sense of humor.”

“A sense of humor wasn’t always associated with the early Zen pioneers,” I point out.

“Right? That picture of Bodhidharma just scowling! But I think there’s a lightness, a presence, a playfulness that is, for me, one of the hallmarks of intimacy, one of the hallmarks of a thorough-going coming-to-terms-with, ‘Oh! This is what it’s like to be a human being.’ And there’s a sense of community and a sense of common humanity that comes with that, and the letting-go-of, the putting-down-of of the struggle. Like, it’s a little bit like being let in on the joke.”

“I have a basic notion that the default nature of people is to be happy,” I tell him, “even though I don’t know a lot of people who share that opinion.”

“Yeah, I think there is something to that. There is a joy that bubbles up that has nothing to do with anything.”

“What about koans?” I ask. “Do they play a role in helping people encounter what you called intimacy? Help them become good humored?”

“Wow!” as if surprised by the question. “I think, honestly – this is oversimplifying it – but there is something in koan practice that is exhausting, and I think that’s their function. I think they are that part of our human experience that wants to figure something out. That wants to conquer something. That wants to climb to the top of something. It’s like something I once read about encountering a poem. This poet was saying that people basically want to throttle meaning out of a poem. I can’t remember the exact words he used, but it was sort of like, ‘I want them to drift through it.’ So there is something in the koan tradition that I think ultimately allows us to encounter the koan and meet it as art, as the moment, as something the expression of which is lively and fluid and temporary. And the, ‘What does it mean?’ or the ‘Did I pass?’ – right? – doesn’t matter.”

Further Zen Conversations: 67-68; 75; 80-81; 99; 122-23; 143.

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[1] Mindfulness Based Stress Relief

When Karin Kempe was 17 years old, she walked into the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and came upon a copy of Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects by Alexandra David-Neel. “Reading it, I absolutely recognized, ‘This is it! This is what reality is actually like. This is the way things operate.’ The way these masters described the nature of reality was what I saw.”

Her parents were both physicians. Her father, C. Henry Kempe, along with Brandt Steele, first defined the “battered child syndrome” and founded the Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse in Denver. Her mother was a pediatrician and psychiatrist. Karin herself eventually became a physician, although she first thought she would have a career in art and attended the Rhode Island School of Design.

Henry Kempe’s family escaped from Germany during the Nazi era when he was only 16. Karin’s mother was raised Lutheran. “My mom converted to Judaism,” Karin tells me. “But because she wasn’t – you know – a Jewish woman, we didn’t have a super Jewish household.” Karin remembers arguing with the Temple Rabbi when she was only 13 years old about how he knew God existed. His answer didn’t convince her.

I ask her what she meant by saying that the Tibetan masters described things as she saw them.

“That really we only know this moment. Our conception of time is a conceptual process that links together different aspects of what we call reality. It’s a made-up concept. But our actual life, our actual experience is this moment.”

“That’s pretty heady for a 17-year-old, isn’t it? Had you been questioning the nature of reality?”

“Absolutely because like many second-generation survivors – although I didn’t realize all of this until much, much later in my life – I had huge survivor guilt. My dad felt that to be alive, you had to deserve it. He had a great deal of survivor guilt. He was absolutely determined to save these kids, and he wanted all of us – me and my four sisters – all to do something in the world to make a difference. And I felt a great deal of angst, although I didn’t understand it for a long time. And it’s interesting to me that although I decided I wasn’t Jewish – while still only 17 or 18 or 19 years old – I was interested in a religion in which the first vow is to save all sentient beings. Do you see what I’m saying? I think for me, karmically, there was a big relationship between my affinity with Buddhism and my past.”

She was in her teens during the 1960s, a turbulent period in American history when thousands of young people abandoned their traditional religious heritages and flocked to places like Philip Kapleau’s Rochester Zen Center. While Karin was attending RISD, she managed to convince the school “that going to Rochester would be a good part of my schooling. So I went to do a training period at the Rochester Zen Center.”

The experience was profound enough that after graduation, she moved to Rochester.

“I thought I had found my path, and I was very determined. It was a very intensive practice. There was a whole group of people who were not monastics.” Many of these – including Karin – would go on to be significant figures in the development of Zen in North America.

“There were about 300 people in the community, living in houses very close, and we were doing very intensive practice. We’d go early in the morning to sit. We’d go every evening to sit. And then we’d often sit during the day. Many of us were sitting four to six hours a day and going to multiple sesshin a year.”

Karin was cleaning houses to earn money. When she realized that that was not going to be an adequate way to support herself, she received help from her family to enter medical school. While at university, she passed her first koan, married, and became a mother. After completing her residency, she and her family lived for a while in Northern Florida, which turned out to be a political environment which, as she puts it, “was very much at odds with how I wanted my kids raised. I had a few encounters with colleagues which made it clear that their views on racial issues was dramatically different than mine, and the year before I left, the school board labelled ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’ a Satanic piece of writing and outlawed it in the schools.”

They moved to Denver, where – in addition to maintaining a medical practice – she eventually received Dharma transmission from both Danan Henry (a Kapleau heir) and Shishin Wick.

I go back to her remark about being drawn – while still only 17 – to a religion whose first vow is to “save all sentient beings.”  

“What does that mean?” I ask. “To vow – not just promise, not just consider, but to vow – to save all sentient beings.”

“The vow means that we align our life in a particular way, that we align our energy in a particular way. Sometimes these are called the ‘impossible vows’ ’cause they’re never accomplished, but still we align our energy in that way. That we recognize that that alignment is an expression of who we are together. You and me. And ‘liberate’ does not mean that from the outside I liberate you, but rather that because we are not separate this awakening, opening, which is sort of the functioning of the awake universe – I can’t explain it another way – that that happens simultaneously.”

Or one could say that it was a vow “to do something in the world to make a difference.”

Further Zen Conversations: 44-45; 69-70; 98-99; 113; 131; 157.

Scott Thornton is an Assistant Teacher in the Sanbo Zen lineage. He is also married to Valerie Forstman, who recently moved to Santa Fe to share teaching responsibilities with Henry Shukman at Mountain Cloud. Scott’s introduction to meditation came through theatre. The school he attended staged the first college production of the musical Hair, and he had been cast in the role of Claude.

“So Claude meditates at the beginning of the play. He comes out and sits down with kind of an Indian blanket around himself and just sits there for – oh – about fifteen/twenty minutes before the show starts, and the cast kind of gradually starts sort of meandering through the audience and comin’ around and finally the music picks up. So I acted like I was meditating, and, in retrospect, I was meditating. I mean . . .”

“What else was there to do?” I suggest.

It’s a little surprising that the college was in Memphis, Tennessee, where Scott grew up. He still has traces of a Tennessee accent.

“We were Baptists. My mother was very devout. My father went along for the ride.”

“And you?” I ask.

“I was a pretty reverent kid.”

He describes himself as having a naturally devout nature and tells me a story about an event that took place shortly after his baptism.

“So Baptists, supposedly, when we’re kids, we choose to be baptized. There’s really a lot of social pressure to do that.  But I decided to get baptized sometime around fourth grade. I don’t remember a whole lot about the dunkin’, I just remember it happened and yeah, okay, I’m done. About a week later, I was playing army with my friend, who had also been baptized at the same time. And we were out diggin’ trenches with our plastic shovels and our plastic canteens and our plastic helmets and our plastic machine guns. And we were in the shadow, literally, of the church. And I don’t know how to put it, but I stood up, and something came down on me. It had a visual component – I’d call it synesthesia now maybe – but this kind of silvery light came down on me. I turned to my friend, and I said (I’ll do it in my Tennessee dialect) ‘Arncha glad we’re saived?’ And he looked at me like I was nuts. But I just had this glow. It was like I really felt God’s love.”

The sense of devotion lessened as he got older and by the age of 17, “The tenets of the church didn’t hold together for me anymore. So I just sort of eased out. I never declared, ‘I’m not a Baptist,’ but I just kind of eased out and quit going to church.”

A few years after the college production of Hair, he came upon the popular guidebook to marijuana use, A Child’s Garden of Grass.

“There was one section in there about, ‘Can Grass Enhance Meditation?’ Yes! So I tried it. They were debunking TM. They said, ‘You can pay a lot of money to some guru who will give you a “secret” mantra’ or you could use the mantra the book provided for free. And I remember it! As you breathe in, oon; as you breath out, yellimon. And so I practiced, ‘Oon / Yellimon’ quite often. And then I abandoned that.”

Somewhat later, while Christmas shopping, he bought Lawrence LeShan’s How to Meditate. “I was going to give it to a friend, but I started reading it, and I just kept it. And it kinda simmered there in the background for a while. But I remember this moment. My then wife and I were remodeling our house, and it was a construction site. And I had just got licensed as a psychologist about two weeks prior, and I was having one these, ‘Is this all there is?’ moments. And so I sat on top of a pile of construction material in my backyard in March and started counting my breath as Le Shan described. He gave several techniques, but that was the one that caught me for some reason. So I practiced breath counting for twelve years really regularly. And it morphed into what I called, ‘Listening to the Sounds of the World.’ I became absorbed in sound. And that’s what I practiced for a long time. My stepdaughter, meanwhile, had been going to the Maria Kannon Zen Center, and she told me, ‘Hey, Scott, we got this place over here.’”

There he met Ruben Habito.

 “To my delight, the first or second time I met Ruben, he gave me the koan Mu and that fit like a glove. It took – you know – two and a half years, maybe, before I had some breakthrough with Mu. And then that set me on the course of koan study.”

“And if someone – say an old college friend from Hair – were to ask you, ‘Scott, what are koans?’”

“I love that question. In a setting like that, I usually say, ‘They’re pointers; they’re these pithy little exchanges between Zen masters and other masters or sometimes lay people, but basically there’s an exchange with a master, and it can be about anything. They are little stories, little exchanges or anecdotes that help clarify enlightenment.’ And I’d say, ‘You’ve probably heard this one. “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?”’”

“So what do they do? Even if you figured out what the sound of one hand is, what use is that?”

“Yeah . . .” he says, then pauses to collect his thought. “The experience when you (quote) ‘pass a koan’ often is sort of like” – he holds his hands before his face and suggests a series of veils being lifted – “one more film of this opaque view of the world drops off. So there’s little bit more clarity.”

“And how do they do that?”

He sighs forcefully, then we both laugh. “Yeah. How do they?”

Further Zen Conversations: 28-31; 50-51; 66; 67; 75-76; 130-31; 148.

Jean-Luc Foisy informs me that after the death of Albert Low, the Montreal Zen Centre went through an “inevitable period of confusion with regards to who was going to do what. A lot of people had relied on Albert’s presence. He was really the center of the Centre. He was the founder, as you know, and what he built was quite remarkable. The way he dedicated his life to the teaching, the books he wrote, the time and energy and effort he invested created what I guess we call in our language a ‘Dharma’.”

Towards the end of Albert’s life, Jean-Luc served as his attendant, “helping him physically to go to sit for the dokusan to meet the people, to go to the zendo when he was still doing the teishos. And I could definitely appreciate the pain and the difficulty that he was going through. And also his stubbornness, his determination to carry on until his last breath. It was quite remarkable. So after he died, I was invited to join the board.

“The fact that he did not appoint a successor left most of the senior members in an unknown zone. And I find that was actually pretty wise of Albert.” He smiles and chuckles softly. “It’s a very good way – let’s put it this way – especially for the long-term people to reflect, ‘Are you in or not? Are you willing to carry on with this in spite of the difficulty? Are you able to get along together? Are you able to work this out together? And if not, you might as well move onto something else.’ And that’s what many people did, to be honest. I guess I was determined to stay. I have a huge debt of gratitude towards the work that he did, and, as a result, for me it’s a no-brainer. I just cannot go away. So anyway, shortly after I became a part of the board, I took the role of president.”

Not long after Albert’s death, Jean-Luc along and two other senior students – Monique Dumont and Louis Bricault – attended a sesshin in Philadelphia offered by Jeff Shore of Hanazono University in Kyoto.

“I was not really interested in working with another teacher, but Louis insisted. And I am happy he did because it was very interesting to meet somebody completely different from Albert in a personality perspective and from a teaching approach as well. Having worked with Albert for so many years, for me, he was the absolute. There was nothing other than that, and nothing was possible other than this approach, this way of being a teacher. So that kind of opened up a door, I would say.”

Jeff was invited to offer a sesshin in Montreal, which led, as Jean-Luc puts it, “to a lot of concern. Especially some of the long-term members were not able to adjust to this style that Jeff had. You know, he was very amiable, very open, not as autoritaire as Albert was. It was a completely different style, and many people were not able to adapt. And they were questioning, ‘Is this going to be the new teacher in the Montreal Zen Centre?’ And there were people saying, ‘Well, he should not be.’”

At Jeff’s suggestion, Jean-Luc and Louis continued holding the introductory workshops the center offered and facilitated short retreats.

“Jeff said his only reason to be in Montreal was to support the community to go through this transition so that we – among ourselves with our own resources – would be self-sufficient. I took this very seriously, and as a result, I engaged even more into the community. And so we started to do retreats. I started to do what we traditionally called teisho, which we then called ‘Dharma talk.’ One thing I learned from Jeff – and I thought was very interesting – is that the early Buddhism, it was not the master talking and the people listening silently. It was someone talking to people and gathering their input, their feedback, their impressions, their questions, and that – I find – is a very, very interesting way to work.”

Jean-Luc admits readily that he is not formally authorized. “I am kind of on my own doing this. Albert left some material, and I feel a very strong connection with his Dharma and with him. And the feeling is clear: as much as I’m willing to engage, he’s there. As simple as that. And it is not only him, but it’s the whole line of people who dedicated their lives to this . . . this . . . And I don’t have a name for it. But when you line up with this, you feel really a very strong support. And yet you are always in the dark, always in doubt, always wondering if this is the right thing to do.

“So, in a nutshell, that’s where we’re at in the Montreal Zen Center right now.”

I am reminded of the decision taken by Walter Nowick’s students to keep the Morgan Bay Zendo operating on their own after he withdrew from teaching, and, for that matter, of what Toni Packer established with her Springwater Center. These are the outliers. It is a model that probably wouldn’t satisfy people searching for an authorized lineage, but it is a model that appears to work for people who are more interested in practice and community than in formalities and orthodoxy.

Further Zen Conversations: 101-02; 131-33.

Judy Roitman is one of the primary voices in Further Zen Conversations. She and her husband, Stan Lombardo, are the founding teachers of the Kansas Zen Center in the Kwan Um School of Zen. Kwan Um is a Korean Linji (J: Rinzai) lineage established by Master Seung Sahn. Judy has the official title of Zen Master in the school, which puts her fairly high in their hierarchy of teachers. Her first encounter with Buddhism, however, wasn’t auspicious.

“In my senior year at Sarah Lawrence College, it was advertised that a Buddhist monk would come and give a lecture. It turned out he was Tibetan. I didn’t know what he was at the time because I knew nothing about Buddhism. He had the one-shoulder robe, and he was accompanied by an American guy also wearing the same kind of robe, and the American was very hairy. And the other guy – the teacher – his facial skin was so tight he was like a mummy. And the American attendant/translator looked like a Marine. And they’re just sitting there as everyone’s coming in. You know, the way I tell this story is: I’m from New York; I’d never seen anyone sit still. And that’s actually sort of true. And I was just completely freaked out by these people. The deal was, you’d write a question, and then you’d put it in a little basket, and then they’d open them up sort of randomly and pick one out and answer it. And the answers didn’t make sense. In my memory somebody would ask something like, ‘Is there life after death?’ And the teacher would respond with something like, ‘A butterfly lands on a flower.’ The answers had nothing to do with the questions, so I was getting really freaked out by this, seriously freaked out. I reached a point where I couldn’t sit there anymore, and I walked out. And when I got out of the building, I started screaming. That’s how affected I was.”

It seemed unlikely, at the time, that she would have anything more to do with Buddhism.

She had a difficult time after leaving Sarah Lawrence.

“I’d had an emotionally very difficult childhood and suddenly it was all coming out. I was so angry I didn’t know I was angry. I was over-bearing; I was unpleasant. I didn’t have a sense of proportion. I was delusional. I was suicidal.  I was just sort of weird and strange and deeply, deeply unhappy. To soothe myself I was a binge eater; if I’d known about bulimia, I would have thrown up. That had started my freshman year in college, but I stopped binge eating by becoming a smoker my second year in college, and immediately lost a whole bunch of weight and became a chain-smoker. But then I stopped smoking, and I became a binge eater again. I was deeply, deeply miserable. And I called up this woman, Ludmilla Hoffman – back then you’d call up shrinks and they would actually answer the phone themselves – and so I would call these people up and say, ‘I need an appointment.’ And it was, ‘Well, I have an appointment in six months; I have an appointment in three months.’ And so I called Milla. She goes, ‘I have an appointment in six weeks.’ Then she goes, ‘Is this an emergency?’ And I said, ‘Yes! Yes! It’s an emergency!’ ‘Oh, okay. I can see you next week.’ She saved my life.

“I was very intellectual. I really lived up in my frontal lobes. And with regular shrinks, which I’d had since I was 15, I knew how to dance and step aside and never really look at what I needed to look at. But Milla was a Gestalt shrink. I don’t know if you know anything about Gestalt technique, but here’s an example. One time I walked in Milla’s office, and I said, ‘I actually remembered a dream.’ ‘Oh, great. Tell me about it.’ ‘Okay, so I’m walking down this road.’ And she, ‘Oh. What’s it like to be the road?’ I said, ‘No! That’s not what my dream is about.’ And she says, ‘Well, tell me about the road.’ ‘The road. Let’s see. It’s made of asphalt, and it’s grey, and everybody walks on it, and nobody loves me!’ It’s like kong-ans.[1] They get you from the side. You know? You don’t see it coming. So you can’t dance around it.

“So Milla cured me. Around the same time, I saw an article in the New York Times on relaxation response meditation. And I grabbed that and started doing relaxation response meditation. I worked with Milla, and I did relaxation response meditation for about two years. Then one day I was in Milla’s office, and I looked at her, and I said, ‘I don’t have to be this way, do I?’ And she said, ‘No, you don’t.’ And it lifted, like a tornado. It was just gone. I still get unhappy and angry, but that hint of insanity, that skewed vision, that weird kind of distortion that colours everything, that was gone. It was just absolutely amazing.

“That’s when I decided I could meditate with a group. Before that, I just couldn’t do it. I was too unstable, too self-absorbed. But then I thought, ‘Okay, now I can go sit with a group.’ So I was living in Cambridge, and I would take walks, and there was this beautiful Zen Center that I would walk by. It was just beautiful. Broad manicured lawn and beautiful old building gorgeously maintained. So I looked up Cambridge Zen Center, and I discovered it was in Allston. And I thought, ‘That’s weird. I guess they moved.’ And, of course, it was a different Zen Center. But I didn’t know that. So I walked into this funky old building and Mark Houghton – who later became a teacher – and the woman he was married to at the time, Dyan Eagles – who is also a teacher now – they were in long robes and were chasing each other around with little brass plant sprayers. And Larry Rosenberg, who later became a Vipassana teacher, was in the kitchen, washing the dishes with another guy, Peter Harrington, and I just felt like, ‘Oh, these are my people.’ I walked into the kitchen and one of either Larry or Peter said, ‘Well, what practice do you do?’ And I said, ‘Well, I count my breaths.’ And Peter whirls around and said, ‘How many have you counted?’ And I just thought, ‘I’m home!’”

Further Zen Conversations: 36-39; 62; 110; 141.

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[1] The Korean term for “koan.”

When Jeff Shore was twelve years old, he was enrolled in a class to prepare him for baptism in the Presbyterian Church. “We were learning the catechism, and the teacher was a young girl, older than us, but a teenager. So she was trying to get us to memorize the catechism, and I would ask questions about it, ‘What does it mean that life is eternal?’ And she would kinda, ‘Please don’t actually ask difficult questions. We just need to memorize this.’”

In spite of his doubts about what he was being taught, “There was a longing there – for lack of a better word – to live truth. No matter how difficult or demanding that may appear, that’s got to be the thing to do somehow. It was pre-rational in me. To live the truth is what we must do no matter what, and it’s not always easy.”

When he was 16, he had a cleaning job in a department store. “I would mop the floor and collect the trash. But they had a very shitty bookstore – department stores don’t have very good bookstores – but they had An Introduction to Zen Buddhism by D. T. Suzuki. So at night, I would dust-mop my way over to the bookstore and open up D. T. Suzuki. In about a week I had read the whole book, and it made an impression on me.”

“What about it grabbed your attention?” I ask.

“One was those Zen koans, those mondo exchanges. I remember going home and telling my mother them, and she just thought they were wonderful. But underneath there was some kind of . . .” He pauses. “It was okay to have doubt. It was okay to not know. In a way, it was almost a good thing to realize that you don’t know and that you need to make a search.”

“So you grew up in a Protestant Christian environment in which they tried to teach you a creed that you were then supposed to profess you accepted as true – even though you didn’t necessarily – and that was contrasted with the Zen book which essentially said, ‘You know, you really don’t have to believe anything. It’s alright to ask questions.’ Is that about right?”

“You put it a lot more succinctly than I did,” he says with a laugh.

It was the ’60s, and interest in Asian religions was part of the culture. “I hitch-hiked to Woodstock when I was fifteen. I experimented with soft drugs. A lot of us were desperately seeking something, but we didn’t know what it was. But Buddhism and Zen spoke to me. I remember reading the life of Gautama Buddha, and I just felt like an arrow that had been shot twenty-five hundred years ago. Like, he had the same questions, and he refused to compromise. He wanted to live the truth. No matter what. And he was able to do it. That really hit me.”

He experimented with sitting but didn’t begin formal practice until attending graduate school in Hawaii, where he had an opportunity to do a sesshin with Robert Aikten. It did not go as he expected.

“There was this strange kind of vegetarian fare and some of the rituals and things. I was never much into that. I was able to do dokusan, to do the Mu koan with Robert Aitken, but it didn’t work for me it seemed. So what happened at the end of the retreat, ‘Well, I finally got to do a sesshin.’ It didn’t appeal to me at all somehow. But about two days or three days later, I happened to be cooking, and the garlic – I love garlic – the smell of the garlic wafted up from the frypan, and it just went right through me. And I realized Mu. I realized everything is Mu. Just completely. The world was translucent, and I had no idea what to do with it. I went over and sat on the bed, and I think I tried to chant the Four Vows as best I could.”

The next morning he went to see Aitken. “He was able to confirm it, but he could also see that I was very stuck to it. So – if I remember exactly – he said, ‘Yes. But you have very much the stink of Zen.’ And I realized, ‘He’s right. What do I do about this?’ So I continued to practice, but I really struggled. The way I would put it now is I wasn’t ready for that experience. I didn’t have a foundation and so I struggled very badly for a couple of years. Finally everything fell apart. That’s when I first got serious. I decided to go to Japan and practice.”

He remained in Japan training at Tofukuji and eventually became the sole non-Japanese full-time professor at Hanazono University in Kyoto, where until his retirement he taught what he called “Blue-eyed Zen.”

He explains that formal Zen training in Japan is arduous, and many of the students at the university are bewildered by why Americans and Europeans have any interest in it. “Westerners, look at Zen in a very peculiar way.” Most of his students were the sons of priests who would inherit their father’s temple. For these young men, “It’s a very different system. They don’t want to be a priest, but they have to be. And then here’s people like us coming halfway around the world. We’re not even going to become priests; we’re not going to have a temple. And yet we’re putting ourselves through this. Why? So that’s how I try to interest the students because the Japanese students are not interested.”

“You’re teaching Japanese students how westerners see Zen?”

“More or less, yes. What do we see that they don’t?”

The Story of Zen: 423-24, 440

Further Zen Conversations: 53-54; 72-73; 127; 131; 132

In 2023, Donna Kowal was appointed co-director of the Rochester Zen Center along with John Pulleyn. When I interviewed her in October of 2021, she was the Head of Zendo at the Center’s retreat house located at Chapin Mill, where I once practiced Tai Chi Chuan beside Philip Kapleau’s grave, then laid a stone on it and was glad to have had the opportunity to do so.

Donna also practices Tai Chi, as well as Kung Fu and Qigong, disciplines which eventually led her – in an indirect manner – to Zen.

“The reason I took up Kung Fu is that I wanted to learn how to fight in the wake of an assault. I was living in Pittsburgh, and I was the victim of a random physical assault that was incredibly traumatizing on many levels. I was hanging out with friends in a club; there was a band playing and a lot of people there. All of the sudden a woman came through the crowd and choked me. Out of nowhere. It turned out she had been discharged from a psychiatric hospital the day before. What really stuck with me was how I didn’t fight back. I just froze. If not for the quick response of the people around me, it might have turned out differently. That’s why I started studying martial arts.” 

“So you took up Kung Fu, Tai Chi, and Qigong. Qigong is a meditation technique, isn’t it?”

“So is Tai Chi,” she tells me. I don’t disagree with her. “It’s very intensive physical training, and it requires you to be fully present.”

“And how did this get you to Zen?”

“At around the same time, there was this new vegetarian café that opened in town, and I went to check it out and got to know the owner. I started talking to her, telling her about tai chi and qigong, and then she tells me, ‘Oh, you would like the Zen Center.’ And I said, ‘What’s that?’ And it turned out she was an early member of the Rochester Zen Center from back in the ’70s. She’s like, ‘Yeah, they offer workshops.’ So I signed up for a workshop.”

“And what was it like?”

“It was a powerful experience. After I signed up for the workshop, the Zen Center sent a brochure in the mail. I opened it up, and there was a picture of Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede. That was my first time seeing him. I didn’t know what a teacher did in the context of Zen, but I immediately felt like there’s something here, something I’ve been looking for. And when I walked into the main entrance, it immediately hit me that this place is for me. This was before the workshop had even started.”

We talk a little about what brings people to Zen practice. The first students to seek out Philip Kapleau in Rochester often did so because they had read his book, The Three Pillars of Zen, and they came seeking awakening, enlightenment, kensho. I ask Donna if that’s still what draws people to Rochester.

“I don’t think so. It is for some but not for all. There are people who are looking to practice with others, they’re looking to learn how to do meditation, and what brings them here is their struggles with stress, anxiety, life difficulties that they’ve encountered. So many people have stories to tell about dramatic life events that led them to pursue meditation, while for others it’s everyday dissatisfactions. On the other hand, in my interactions with new people, there are still those who are inspired by reading Roshi Kapleau’s Three Pillars. They feel this drive, this aspiration to awaken, and I, myself, experienced that. When I first started, I had this drive to experience kensho. But at the same time, I was also seeking to be part of a community of like-minded people.”

“And the people who come because of stress, anxiety, dramatic life events,” I ask, “are they coming to practice as a kind of therapy?”

“I think that is the case for some people, at least initially. They may hardly know anything about Zen and Buddhism. They may not know about the Rochester Zen Center and its reputation at all. Even in the city of Rochester there’s lots of people who don’t have a clue about what the Rochester Zen Center is. I think we are more recognized nationally and internationally than we are locally. There are people who come to the center to sign up for a workshop whose only sense of meditation is from doing it in a yoga class, or maybe they read a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn or some other reading about mindfulness. Or they learned about it at work; there was some meditation program at the organization they work at, and they got a little taste of it, and that led them to see what resources there are locally, and then they come upon the Zen Center, not really knowing anything about Buddhism.”

“I’m still not clear what it is that they’re looking for in that case,” I admit. “Is it that they’re just looking for a technique?”

“Perhaps. I think it runs the spectrum. There’s no one thing that people are looking for that draws them to the Zen Center. Some do aspire to awaken while others are just seeking relief.”

“And as Head of Zendo, what is it that you hope for for the people who come here?”

She laughs. “I hope that they get hooked on zazen, so to speak. I hope that they practice with persistence and patience, that they give it a try long enough to see what fruits might come from it.”

Further Zen Conversations: 121-22; 149-50.

Chris Amirault is a practice leader with Shining Window Zen in Tulsa, a satellite center associated with Boundless Way Zen in New England. When I ask if being a “practice leader” puts him on tenure track, he says, “You know, that’s part of what I’m trying to figure out, whether I am on tenure track, and how you square that with ‘no attainment.’”

Around the year 2000, a series of events occurred which changed the direction of Chris’s life. Political corruption in the local school system put his family at risk, his first marriage broke up, and his brother “went through two years of extremely dangerous, troubling behavior which ended with his very successful suicide. So in the midst of all of those things, I felt that there were other ways to live my life than the way I was doing it, and I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but I started paying greater attention to those spiritual dimensions that I had been ignoring for quite a while.”

“How did you do that?”

“Doing things like going on walks and talking to certain people. I made some pretty clear decisions about who I wanted to spend time with and who I didn’t. And one of the things that resulted was meeting and then becoming involved with and marrying my current wife, who shares a lot of my same values and ethics in a manner that is more aligned with the way that I lived. She’s not religious, but we were both big travellers. One of the first places we went was to Thailand in 2008, and in preparation I spent about six months reading about Buddhism. And my trip to Thailand was very powerful, spending time in a place that was structured by different understandings about humans and individuality and community that seemed at least to partially derive from Buddhism.”

That led to further reading, and eventually the reading brought him to understand that something more was required. “I spent a lot of time reading and then finally decided, after I don’t know after how long – at least a year, maybe more – that maybe I should actually sit down on a goddam cushion and meditate. I was reading everything, and I was a little annoyed at everyone talking about this thing called ‘zazen’ as if I was supposed to do that too. But then, of course, I finally started doing that, and around that time I met James Ford who was also the minister of the First Unitarian Church of Providence. And I had already read two books about koans, and so I went to a few sits, and then I went out to coffee with him, and I’m like, ‘You’ve gotta give me Mu! You’ve gotta give me Mu!’ And he said,” [speaking in a tired tone], “‘All right. “This student walks up to Chao-chou and da-da-da-da . . . Buddha Nature . . . no.” All right, now you have Mu. Good luck. God bless.’ And – you know – I spent a whole bunch of time chewing on the iron ball.”

James, who has since moved to California, is no longer directly involved with Boundless Way, but Chris continues to think of him as his first teacher. “One of the most important experiences I had was being rung out of dokusan by James and then we went out and had coffee afterwards and talked about it. The pedagogy of dokusan is very well suited to my spiritual needs and learning style, which continues to this day. And I’m also someone who really believes that Dogen was right, that practice, enlightenment, and bodhicitta are one. And I happen to work in a job where I literally think about those questions every minute of every day. I take care of families that are in the foster-care system or homeless or dealing with economic challenges. These are not empty questions. They are not abstractions that pop up while you’re on a mat. And I think James’ commitment to social justice activism, his pastoral care training, his ability to interweave other spiritual traditions in a manner that reflects Unitarian practice, I think, those are all very, very helpful for me, from where I was coming from, even though I’ve never been interested in Unitarian practice particularly, I think that tolerance is important to me.”

“Did you ever resolve Mu?” I ask.

“Oh, gosh. Yeah.”

“Are you comfortable telling me about that?”

“Oh well, you know, for the first several months I had great diagrams, I had written several short papers on Mu. Anybody who wanted to know about Mu, I was ready to explain it. I was the Wikipedia of Mu for about eighteen months, I think. And my breakthrough conversation on Mu was with Melissa Blacker in dokusan, where I gave an answer that was grounded in my thinking brain, and she said, ‘We’re looking for something more intimate.’ That was a turning point for me with my practice. Thinking about this practice as an intimate practice. You know, I have a lot of letters after my name. I teach in higher ed. I’ve written a book. I’ve lived in the world of words and ideas, and I’ve really had to learn about an embodied awareness that is more intimate, that is the ground of my practice. That took a really long time, and I still struggle with it.”

Further Zen Conversations, Pp. 99-100; 145-46; 153-54.

Rick McDaniel’s two-book set, Zen Conversations and Further Zen Conversations, goes to the horse’s mouth – Zen teachers themselves – to open up the evolving tale of North American Zen.

Most of the contemporary teachers interviewed are homegrown, having trained in the US or Canada, not in Japan. Many did so with first and second generation Western, not Asian, teachers. Plus, as they are spread across a number of active lineages, these thematically organized conversations offer readers an expansive view.

How Rick, a long-time Zen practitioner, came to travel around North America in-person and, later, after COVID, by Skype and Zoom to chat with contemporary teachers is a tale in itself, one that gets told via the Prefaces of the two books. Yet once he gets these conversations going, he rarely intrudes further but simply allows each teacher or senior student to speak for themselves.

Because of Rick’s earlier series of books on the teacher-by-teacher transmission of Zen from China to Japan and then on through the recent North American generations, his Zen Conversations and Further Zen Conversation rest on a solid foundation and the questions he asks are wide ranging: Where is North American Zen teaching and practice at these days? How’s it doing? What are the challenges and issues? How does it deal with tradition and innovation, with the balance of personal and communal practice, with monastic and lay styles and forms, with the demands of citizenship – i.e. environmental awareness and action and politics – while at the same time not watering down actual, intimate, ongoing practice? And what about psychology? In short, how’d we get to where we are and what might the future (or possible futures) of North American Zen look like? In fact, is there even such a thing as “a North American Zen” or are there many, each with its own views and responses?

Rick organizes the conversations he’s gathered thematically rather than teacher by teacher. And it works. And, yet . . . it’s such a rich meal it’s almost like a buffet of deserts – pies, cakes, petit fours – piled high. Reading too much at one time can lead to a sugar high or a bit of a tummy ache. So, even though some of my own conversations with Rick are included in Further Zen Conversations, my recommendation is to go slow, read a section or so, then, stop and digest. Adding some leavening between such “reads” might be wise, too. Which might mean dipping into the Zen writings of such gifted ancestors as Hakuin, Dogen, or Ryokan. Or facing the work of actual practice as presented in Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen or Robert Aitken’s Taking the Path of Zen or in Aitken or Shibyama’s books on the Gateless Barrier (Wumen kuan; Mumonkan). Or just sitting and facing a wall, letting everything go, discovering how little we know, how little can be known, and, indeed, known by whom? Such little bits of bitterness will help the sweet medicine go down. You won’t simply be coasting in on someone else’s words.

Regardless, Rick has graciously done all the necessary legwork. Or, to turn to a food-related old Zen metaphor: he’s kindly peeled the lychee for us and put it in our mouths. All we have to do now is chew. (By the way, Zen Conversations’ introduction offers a history of North American Zen.) To be clear – for one person to report on the state of North American Zen, allowing teachers of diverse styles and lineages to speak for themselves is rather remarkable, revealing deep faith in Zen’s many current North American forms. (A good number of the teaching lines now active in North America are given voice here, though not all.) Admirably, Rick seems to have no personal ax to grind, and shows no need to defend what he himself might think Zen should or should not be. Of course, he selected each conversation and organized them into sections but both books show only openness toward and respect for all the various viewpoints presented. A trustworthy guide, Rick remains truly non-judgmental. Given our deeply polarized times, this is refreshing, even healing in itself. Sitting down with all sorts of Zen teachers – lay, ordained, monastic/celibate, householder; Soto, Rinzai, combined or in-between; those with large centers, those with little zendos, those with many students, those with a handful; experienced teachers and those just starting out – he puts everyone at ease and raises questions central to all.

Hats off to Rick. We are his beneficiaries and owe him a debt of gratitude. Fifty or a hundred years from now when students of religion and historians of Zen look into how what was originally an Asian religion came to flourish so naturally in North America, they will seek out these books. In them they will uncover what Zen teachers of today, themselves a living bridge between East and West were saying, doing, and thinking. The story of the creation of an ordinary, real, genuinely North American Bodhisattvic Zen can be found in these books of simple, straightforward, thoughtful, and often heart-felt conversations.

Get a set. In the future they’re bound to become heirlooms of Zen’s many-roomed house.

Rafe Jnan Martin, founding teacher

Endless Path Zendo, Rochester, New York