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

Hogen Bays and his wife, Jan Chozen Bays, are the co-abbots of Great Vow Monastery in Oregon as well as being the spiritual directors and primary teachers with the Zen Community of Oregon.

“In 1968 or so, a friend and I went up to Rochester. He had done a sesshin with Philip Kapleau at Florida Presbyterian College. He said, ‘This is really interesting. Let’s go.’ So we got on an airplane in 1968 and went up to Rochester and spent a week – or a weekend – at the country place they had then. And I remember I didn’t say a word. I asked something about vegetarianism, which was the only thing I could think to talk about. But it was sort of in my mind. So, after my second year of college, I had some angst, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to go back to my parents’ house. I went to Rochester. So the marker in my mind is that at 6:00 a.m. on June 9^th 1969, I drove into Rochester just about sunrise, and I remember thinking at the time, ‘This is a new beginning of something.’ In a way, maybe, I think my birth is 1969.”

When I ask him what he was anxious about, he corrects me.

“Not anxious. Angst. Angst about the existence of life. Angst is about, ‘What’s the meaning of this?’ Angst is angst in the sense of those fundamental questions which gnaw at one’s heart.”

“Did you associate that angst with a particular set of circumstances?”

“Well, I think many people – certainly me – were just afflicted with doubt, with depression, with the kind of deep, core feelings unresolved. So the impetus to resolve that movement inside has been with me my whole life. And that’s the particular shape it took.”

He eventually left Rochester and moved to the west coast, where he started practice with Taizan Maezumi and the Zen Center of Los Angeles. It was there that he met Chozen, with whom he would revive the Oregon Zen community which originally had been established by one of Walter Nowick’s students ten years prior.

He has been a full-time Zen priest since the mid-1990s. I ask what prompted him to be ordained.

“Some people have a calling, and this just called to me. What I tell people sometimes, I say, ‘Look, if you find something that is helpful and beneficial, you want to share it.’ And you want to find the most skillful way to share it. If you’ve something that has liberated you from suffering, then what way can you help other people be liberated? And I think the commitment, the kind of vow of me stepping forward overtly and consciously as an ordained person was important. Is important.”

“What is the role of a priest?

“There are so many different aspects. There is a story I like to tell about Yamada Mumon Roshi and my teacher, Shodo Harada, who was his disciple.[1] Mumon Roshi was ardently against war. And, after World War II, as an act of atonement, he travelled to places of violence offering ceremonies for all the war dead. One day, when they were travelling together Mumon Roshi saw a person in a military uniform. He said, ‘Isn’t that wonderful.’ And Harada said, ‘Why wonderful? That is a person dedicated to violence.’ Mumon Roshi said, ‘Yes, but this person really shows what they believe in. They are expressing their faith, and that – in this time and age – is very important.’

“I think it is vital that we are people of visible dedication. I think it is significant when people step forward and say, ‘I am reliably confident in this path of Dharma. I wear my faith overtly.’ As you know, in the traditional story about the Buddha encountering the four messengers, the fourth messenger was an ordained priest, a spiritual seeker, a monk. That willingness to be recognized as one who points out that there is a path to awakening is an aspect of being a priest.

Over the years, Great Vow has hosted teachers from several different traditions.

“We have had many Buddhist teachers come here such as Ajahan Amaro from the Theravadan school and several Vajrayana teachers with a Dzogchen perspective and others. In recent years I’ve worked with Byron Katie. My Zen practice has been quite rich, quite wide, looking at the truths of life from many different perspectives.”

“Is there something, in your experience, that distinguishes Zen from other forms of Buddhist?” I ask.

“Well, I think that’s exactly it. It’s experience. If you’re involved with the Theravada or Vajrayana or so other forms of Buddhism, they often first require intellectual understanding, a cognitive understanding of the Path. This is fine. But, in Zen, scholarly understanding is secondary.  For example, often in the Vajrayana tradition the teachings go through layer after layer of, ‘This means this, that means this, this means that, therefore, therefore, therefore.’ So when I read the teachings of Tsongkhapa or Kalu Rinpoche, they appear to divide Buddhism up like the early Indian texts do. They describe Dharma as a granularized teaching. Modern Zen – or at least the Zen I’m familiar with – does not do that. It just asks, ‘What is at the root?’ The mind can endlessly think and particularize things, but what is at the heart of the matter? How can you step into that? Emphasizing what is before words does not make Zen special – because fundamentally everything begins before words – but in Zen Buddhism there is an emphasis on recognizing truth before words, before differentiation. This is important. And this insight can be embodied. It can be lived.”

Further Zen Conversations, Pp. 47-48; 63-65; 119; 133-34; 157.

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[1] Both Yamada and Harada are common names. Yamada Mumon was a Rinzai teacher who lived from 1900 to 1988. Harada Shodo is the residing abbot of Sogen-ji in Okayama. He also maintains Tahoma Sogenji in Washington State.

When I first looked up the website for the Louisville Zen Center, Bodhin Kjolhede of Rochester was identified as the Guiding Teacher. The local “Group Leader” and “Resident Novice Priest” was Jeanette Prince-Cherry. At the time, I asked her what the difference between the two roles was.

“A Group Leader is just a hands-on person that helps make things happen,” she explained. “So, because I’m in Louisville and Roshi’s in Rochester – ten hours away – I make sure sittings happen, and I’m authorized to do some instructing. But for people who really want to connect and do longer retreats, they need to go to Rochester to work with Roshi directly.”

“You’re ‘resident’ there in Kentucky?”

“Yeah, it’s my home that we use for most of our sittings, for our retreats, for when we have teachers come. I raised my family here, and I’m the only one left. It just made sense to use this house in some useful way other than there being the echo of me talking to the cat. So this is where most of the things happen with the Louisville Zen Center.”

Because at the time she’d been identified as a “novice priest,” I ask how her situation will change when she receives full ordination.

“It won’t,” she says with a laugh. “I’ll just wear different robes. The thing about our tradition is that regardless whether it’s for ordination or head cook, you start slowly doing more and more of that work until you’re doing it all the time, then it gets recognized. ‘Yeah, okay, I guess we can call you Head Cook now ’cause you’re doing that already.’”

After I interviewed her, she received full ordination on October 23, 2022, and was give the Dharma name Jissai, meaning “True Encounter.”

She grew up in North Carolina in a Southern Baptist family. “My sister is a minister. My father did ministry. So we were well steeped in religious tradition.

“I grew up in this little city High Point, North Carolina. And it was very, very segregated. I grew up in a Black neighborhood. My parents owned their home, but we lived across the street from a sprawling housing project. People in the projects thought we were rich because we had our own house. But we were ‘house poor.’ Most of my parents’ income went towards paying the bills for the house. We were just as poor as my friends in the projects were. Not only was my hometown segregated, it was racially hostile with few meaningful job opportunities for Black people, so I left when I was 18 and went into the Air Force. My older brother had gone into the Marines, and I was like, ‘I’m getting’ out of here, too!’ And I think the Air Force, the military, and those experiences opened the door in allowing me to practice Zen. Opened up that possibility in my mind and my heart.”

When I ask how it did that, her answer surprises me.

“The military lifestyle. Everything was standardized. We wore uniforms. Everything was uniform. But even within all of that structure, there was so much freedom. It’s like when one of my sons, before he learned to swim, he would hold onto the side of the pool for support. Because he didn’t know how to swim he could only circle the perimeter of the pool holding onto the sides. Then when he learned to swim,he could go anywhere in the pool – on top of the water, under the water, the shallow end, the deep end – but it was still a pool. He was still bound by the swimming pool. But he had all this freedom in it. That’s how I felt in the military. There was this firm, stable structure that let me find out what I liked, what I didn’t like, who I was. I was able to explore with the help of the supports.”

When she left the Air Force after eight years, she found the transition to civilian life challenging.

“I’d spent my entire adult life in the Air Force. I mean, I didn’t know how to dress. I didn’t know the language. I’m in a new area. I was working as an industrial engineer here in Louisville, and I was used to military etiquette. As a civilian that’s different. I was a supervisor, and as a supervisor in the military, you just tell people what to do, and they just do it. It’s not quite the same as a civilian. I’ve got to be nice and all that. I didn’t know any of that. Truly. I had no idea. So I had a hard time.”

Then she was house bound for a while, recovering from gallstone surgery. “Feeling sorry for myself and flipping channels on television. And all the talk shows seemed to have got on the same programming. I would go to the Oprah Winfrey show, and she had this segment on meditation. I’m like, ‘Nope.’ Click. Went to the next talk show, and that person had a section on meditation. Click. And then with the third one, ‘Okay. Maybe I need to pay attention to this.’ And so I watched the show and went to our public library to get a book on meditation.”

She read all the books the library had on secular meditation but was reluctant to look at the Buddhist books. Eventually, there were no more secular meditation books left.

“But I’d gotten enough insight to see the resistance about these Buddhist books. I still identified as Christian. And as a Southern Baptist, you don’t even touch books about other religions. But it felt really unhealthy to reject them out of hand. So, I was, ‘I’m going to pick up the most Buddhist book I can find.’ The thinnest, but the most Buddhist book. ’Cause I don’t want to be committed to reading some big book. The book I chose was What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula, and I was so embarrassed to check that out of the library! So I read this book and discovered the way I feel about the world in its pages. I could not believe it. I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t believe how . . . Yeah . . . It was like reading my heart.”

“In what way?” I ask.

“In Christianity there’s all this talk about original sin and original impurity, and that was absent. It talked about original perfection, and how it is through our own habits and conditioning where we don’t function out of that perfection. That really resonated with me. It talked about suffering, and I could immediately understand suffering. I remember it said dukkha was like a wheel not being right on its axle. And it reminded me of grocery carts, ’cause there’s always this cart that’s not rolling right. And you can function. You can go to the grocery store, get your groceries; you can make your way through the grocery store, but it’s a pain and a struggle. Okay! I understand that. Dukkha. You could still function, but it’s a struggle. And these concepts, even the realms of unenlightened existence as psychological states of mind. Hell and hungry ghosts and thirsty spirits and fighting humans and animals and all of that, I could so relate to it. Maybe I could relate to Christianity now, as an adult. I don’t know. But the dharma – the Buddhadharma – it just really spoke to me. I felt like I had been trying to fit myself into the mold of Christianity, whereas in Buddhism, it just flowed in me. I flowed with it. There wasn’t the need to put this round peg into this square hole.”

Further Zen Conversations: 106-08; 119.

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Mountain Cloud outside of Santa Fe has recently been designated the hub Sanbo Zen community in North America, although for many years it was barely hanging on.

The building was constructed in mid-1980s by members of Philip Kapleau’s Rochester Zen Center who skillfully and beautifully combined the structure of a traditional Japanese zendo with local architectural features such as exposed vega beams and adobe walls.  It was intended as a place for Kapleau to retire to, although that didn’t work out as he had hoped.

“I think there were two factors that entered into his leaving after a year,” Mitra Bishop tells me.

One was the situation in Rochester where the person left in charge – Toni Packer – realized she could no longer claim to be a Buddhist. The other had to do with the community that had formed in Santa Fe.

“I picked him up at the airport when he moved here. We’d already bought a house for him and renovated it to work for him, but I took him directly to a picnic that the sangha had planned as a welcome for him.  At the picnic, one of the sangha members – one of the local sangha members – stood up and said, ‘Roshi, we love having you here. We want to have you here. But we don’t want you to tell us what to do.’ He quietly took it in.”

When I visited Mountain Cloud in 2013, the teacher – Henry Shukman – and Mitra both told me about Will Brennan; it would be another nine years, however, before I meet him. Will is from Chicago where, after a short stint in the Peace Corps in the late 1970s, he first encountered Zen Practice at a local center maintained by Wally Muszynski. “Wally was really part of the Rochester Zen Center,” Will tells me, “and he was stern. But there was some sweetness underneath there. But when I sat down there in the zendo – oh, boy! – I knew I was home. I knew I was home; however, I got the impression, ‘Well, yeah, this is the practice, but this,’” he laughs, “‘this is not the group I want to work with.’ I’m an intimate fellow. I’m one of these touchy, huggy guys. And I didn’t feel it there.

“But I was down in the basement one day about three or four months after I started – that’s where we hung our coats – and I noticed a sign, and it said, ‘Zen Center starting up in Santa Fe, New Mexico.’ And I said, ‘Oh, shit! I had a dream one time about New Mexico.’ So, I immediately got my airplane ticket.”

The group in Santa Fe was very different from the people he had met in Chicago and Rochester. “Everyone was laughing, everyone was smiling. I stayed here for a week – stayed in Santa Fe for a week – and I knew immediately that, ‘Yeah. This is my home. This is where I’m going to practice with these people.’”

But first he needed to return to Chicago to tie up some business, including explaining to Lucie – the woman he was seeing at the time – that he was moving to New Mexico. The next thing he knew, she had packed all her belongings in her old Volkswagen, and they drove west together.

Over time, however, the group which established the Santa Fe center dissolved.

“I’d say by about 1985, Lucie and I looked around. ‘Where is everybody?’”

They and a handful of others kept the center open in part by renting space to a local Vipassana Meditation Group. Rachel Belash was a member of the Vipassana Community.

“The Vipassana people were renting from the Zen community because the Zen Community had shrunk to almost nothing,” she tells me. “There was Will and Lucie and two or three others, and that was it. And so they needed the income from the Vipassana group. And I sat with the Vipassana group for ten years on a Tuesday night, but then they lost their teacher, and they decided they were going to continue without a teacher. But I began to feel the practice melting away because I didn’t have a teacher.”

In the meantime, Will – who had established a plumbing business in Santa Fe – was commuting to Albuquerque in order to study with Joan Rieck, a Sanbo Zen teacher there. She eventually introduced him to Henry. “Henry is a person who exudes love,” Will tells me. “So it felt just right for me.”

“Will Brennan brought me here,” Henry told me in 2013. “He’s a friend and kind of sometime-student of Joan Rieck. And at a certain point when our abbot – Yamada Roshi – had appointed me as a teacher, Will invited me to come here and join the very last remnants of the original Kapleau group that had built the center, which was basically he and his wife, Lucie, and maybe one or two other people. And they were sitting here regularly on Wednesday nights and had never stopped for twenty-eight years!” he says in amazement.

When the Vipassana group lost its teacher, Rachel noticed that the Zen community appeared to have acquired one. “And this was Henry. So I made an appointment with him one day and said, ‘I would like you to be my teacher.’ Of course, I had no knowledge of Zen at all. I just wanted him to be my teacher, and he said, ‘Well, we’ll see.’ And I was so amused and taken by that response that I thought, ‘Mmm. I’d better find out what this is all about.’”

Karen Klinefelter had a similar experience. She had been working with another Zen teacher in the area but felt uncomfortable with him.

“A good friend of mine was one of the originals at Mountain Cloud with Will, and she kept saying, ‘Karen, you should come. There’s this guy. I really like him. Will found him. You should come.’ And first I just went to one of the daily early morning sits. And then I did a week-long sesshin with Henry, who I really admired because he said to me, ‘Karen, you know what? You are someone else’s student. Until you clear that up, I’m very happy to see you in dokusan, but I cannot formally be your teacher.’”

So she spoke with the teacher she had been working with and formally separated with him, after which she was able to join the Mountain Cloud community.

The community has thrived since Henry has been there, and he is no longer the only teacher. Valerie Forstman – an heir of Ruben Habito – is now teaching at Mountain Cloud as well. I also mention to Will that I’d heard that he too had recently been appointed an Assistant Teacher in the Sanbo Zen lineage.

“Yeah,” he says. There is a sense of wonder in his tone. Then he laughs. “But don’t tell nobody! You know, I had a wonderful time with Valerie and her husband, they came over and we had a little gathering at our house. So we were sittin’ there, and I said something to the effect, ‘You know, this Assistant Teacher business, it’s kinda like a meditation robe. But it doesn’t fit!’” He laughs and shakes his head in amazement. “It doesn’t fit! Maybe someday, some year, but it just feels so weird.”

I suspect it fits him better than he imagines.

During my conversation with Ruben Habito, he mentioned that his wife, Maria, was now the principal teacher at a Zen center in Indiana. “Where in Indiana?” I asked.

“South Bend, near the campus of Notre Dame.”

“I grew up in LaPorte, about 25 miles west of South Bend,” I told him. “It’s been a while.” (Well, fifty years; however, childhood memories linger.) “But certainly, when I was living there, there was no Zen anything in Northern Indiana.”

“Well, you never know where these Zen communities will mushroom up,” Ruben said.    

It is a basic principle of Buddhism and Zen that all things change – even, it appears, Indiana.

Maria grew up in Germany, and like many Europeans is multi-lingual. When I ask how many languages she speaks, she tells me,  “I think about six maybe. Five or six.”

“So many you can’t remember!”

“Well, of course, you don’t speak Latin as such. We start out with German and then, of course, French and English. Chinese. Japanese. And now I’m learning modern Hebrew.”

I ask how she came to learn Chinese and Japanese, and thereby hangs a tale:

“After I graduated from high school, my mother knew a Chinese Catholic priest in Taiwan. And he had invited her and my aunt to visit, and so she said as my high school graduation present she would bring me along. So I went, and I fell in love with the country and the language, and it was very easy for me to pick up everything. I had already been involved in the university in Saarbrücken to study sociology and philosophy, but I had always been interested in Chinese philosophy, so I decided to go back to Taiwan and learn the language. And that’s what happened.”

She enrolled in the Taiwan Normal University in Taipei and resided in the international students’ dormitory. When she had been there a few months, one of the other residents asked if she would like to meet a Buddhist hermit. “And I said yes, and that’s when I met my Buddhist master, Hsin Tao. Now he’s well-known, but then nobody knew him. He was meditating in graveyards and lived in this little tiny tucked-away hermitage near a lake in the middle of Taiwan.”

Hsin Tao was still a young man of about 30 at the time, although he was already being addressed as Shih-fu, or Master. “He grew up in Myanmar,” Maria tells me. “He was born of Chinese parents in Myanmar in  ’48, and there was still some struggle going on between the Communists and the Taiwan Kuomintang. He got caught up in this. So he lost his mother when he was three, lost his home, and his father died when he was about four, and so he was an orphan and became a child soldier.”

“Really!”

“Yes. At age eight. So he saw so much wars, suffering, death. And as a child he had all these questions on his mind, ‘What is life all about?’ So when he came to Taiwan, he continued being in the army school, and actually it was not easy for him to leave. But he finally decided to become a Buddhist monk to explore these questions of ‘What’s the truth of life?’ And ‘What’s suffering?’ And he found that the traditional training that he received as a monk wasn’t enough for him. So he decided to go on and practice on his own in the wilderness.”

There were several other people at the event to which Maria had been brought. “I didn’t speak Chinese then. I had just been in Taiwan for three months, and I knew a little bit but not too much. And Shih-fu was sitting on the terrace, serving tea to a handful of people. I was just contemplating the lake until I realized that they were talking about me. And then I asked the gentleman who’d brought me, ‘What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘They are all excited because the master has said there’s a very deep karma between him and you.’ And I said, ‘Karma? What does that mean?’ I wasn’t even familiar with that expression. And then the Dharma Master said, ‘It’s a connection from a previous life.’ And I thought to myself, ‘What connection can there be between a Buddhist master and a German Catholic?’”

At the end of this visit, Hsin Tao told her, “You are a tree that can bring rich fruit. Therefore I want to plant your roots in fertile ground.” He invited her to come see him as often as she wished, and, although she felt her roots were firmly planted in Christianity, she did feel drawn back to the hermitage and returned frequently.

In 1983, he told her that because she understood him better than many of his other visitors, he would like her to formally become his disciple. He was planning to undertake a world tour, and he would value her assistance as a translator.  When Maria explained that she felt her German-Christian heritage made her an unlikely disciple of a Buddhist master, he said that in order to open up “to truth completely, you need to learn not to make an image of yourself. Don’t cling to your German ‘I’ and to your Christian notions. Don’t make them into hindrances on your path but let them help you instead.” She took refuge vows and was given the Dharma name Hui-yueh (meaning “Wisdom Moon”). With that, she said, she became a “freshly hatched Buddhist Christian.”

Catholicism and Zen: 68, 107-119, 145

Just a month after the official opening of the Buddhist Temple of Toledo on April 23, 2022, a young woman in the sangha died. Her body was brought to the temple where a public visitation was held followed by a 24-hour vigil. Such rituals are vitally important to families, friends, and communities, but they are not the type of activity that a Zen Center would ordinarily be able to host. That, perhaps, is the major distinction between a “temple” and a “center.”

It takes me a while to realize that the temple’s abbot, Rinsen Weik, uses the term differently than I do. For him the temple is more a concept than a physical structure. “The temple predates the facility,” he tells me in a conversation I had with him and his wife – Do’on – who received final Dharma transmission during the opening ceremonies.

“So it is not a temple in the sense that it is a building,” I say.

“The temple has a building, but the temple was in a different building. Same temple, different building. I think of it more like a sangha.”

The way Rinsen and Do’on explain it, the temple is the culmination of a process. When they first moved to Toledo and were not yet ordained as priests, they established a “sitting group.”

“We became a temple when Do’on and I got ordained. So initially it was a sitting group because we were under the auspices of other organizations, and we were calling it the Toledo Zen Center for a while. Once we got ordained – which was in 2010 – we renamed it a temple, and we made a big thing about renaming it. But that was still a micro-version of what it now is. Now it actually is what we’ve been approximating for all that time. Now it actually is the thing.”

“Okay, so you originally called it a Zen Center,” I say, “and I know what that means. I’ve been to lots of Zen Centers. But why call it a temple? Which, at least to me, implies a place of worship.”

“It started off as a sitting group, a meditation group,” he explains. “Then a Zen Center, and then finally a temple. When we first got here, we were not near to being teachers yet. And there was also some concern about is Buddhism – is Zen – going to be anything the people of Toledo can relate to? So it’s been a progression from the secular, digestible kind of meditation-based thing to more and more overtly what it actually is, which is a Mahayana Zen Buddhist temple. It’s a religious practice, a religious community. And also before we were ordained, we really couldn’t do any of the officiating for services or anything like that, so our ability to facilitate and do the ritual things was not there yet.”

“There’s a kind of spiritual evolution inside of that as well,” Do’on adds. “We emphasize the Mahayana religious aspect of Zen training. We totally emphasize the village temple where you bring your kids and where you have your funeral and where you have your wedding and where you do your retreat every month, you do your workshops. It’s pretty like much non-stop activity going on at the temple that really is well-rounded.”

The meditation and koan practice remain central, but that is “just one thread,” she tells me. “It’s very important – it’s the golden thread – but there are a lot of other threads around it.”

“When it was a sitting group, it was just about zazen,” Rinsen continues. “And then we started adding components.”

The first new component came about when they were authorized to offer retreats.

“And that was a big deal,” Rinsen says. “We had the derivative authority to lead retreats. The next thing to happen was creating a Sunday service. And when the Sunday Service came online then a whole other aspect opened up. A Dharma School for kids quickly arose as an interest that for the sitting group it would not even occur. It just wasn’t relevant. And then it was kind of balancing the Sunday Sutra Service community family kind of thing with the Wednesday night sitting meditation group. And for years – decades really – those were the two feet of what we had going. And now, in the new facility, now we have a whole other series of things coming online. We can have morning sitting every day. That’s new. We’ve never had a facility that allowed that. That’s been a huge thing.”

And – as in the Village Temple model Do’on described – they can perform the traditional rites associated with religious communities.

“We had our first funeral,” Rinsen says, “where a tragically young sangha member – she was in her early 30s – passed away of ovarian cancer. And we had a full Buddhist funeral with the body and a vigil and all the rites and rituals that would not have been able to happen in the earlier settings. But interestingly, it turned into a retreat for everybody. Not a sesshin, but a very powerful practice with people reciting the Diamond Sutra with the body for a twenty-four vigil between the community visitation and the final rites that we did. All that texture, it’s way more than what we consider a secular meditation group. It’s a much fuller thing.”

Valerie Forstman is the Guiding Teacher at Mountain Cloud in Santa Fe. Previously she had been a professional orchestral flutist. “Finding Zen,” she tells me, “came out of my life of music.”

She was living in Dallas and preparing for an audition, which, she says, “is rather like Olympic training. For three months, I did all the things that I knew to do to prepare. Yet as the time came nearer, I found myself waking up in the night visited by past failures. Disappointments. During the day, I was practicing and training in order to play a certain way at a future time. It was all oriented to that. In the process, what you might call the present moment became increasingly elusive. It felt like the space where the present would be was opening up like a chasm between the past and the future, and I was losing my love for playing. The week before the audition, a friend said, ‘Hey! How are you?’ I said, ‘Well, something needs to change.’ I told him briefly about this sense of a gap in time and of having lost the joy of playing. He said, ‘I’ve got just the thing. Come and sit.’”

He brought her to Ruben Habito’s  Maria Kannon Zen Center in Dallas.

“The audition was on that Saturday. The next Monday I was at the Zen Center for the orientation talk, and the next Wednesday for the second orientation talk. I had done spiritual practices; had had some taste of that experience, but somehow it felt like coming home. In the beginning, I would sit for three twenty-five-minute rounds facing the wall, five minutes of kinhin – walking meditation – in between. Sometimes, turning around at the end felt almost dizzying. In three periods of sitting, there might be just a handful of moments of real stillness; otherwise, it was what we call monkey-mind. Then, chanting, bowing. Going out to the car and driving home, the street signs were more clear and distinct, and the light on the pavement was somehow more luminous. There was something happening. I didn’t even try to say, ‘Oh, this is clarifying,’ or ‘This is bringing the world to life,’ or ‘Something’s falling away.’ I didn’t have any of that language. I just knew the need to be doing this.”

That October, she attended her first sesshin. “When I arrived and saw the schedule, I thought, ‘Whoa! I can’t do that,’ but there was no turning back. It was just wonderful, potentiating naiveté. It can be so helpful not to have a clue what you’re getting into.” The venue had, as she puts it, “no particular symbols. Just a small altar with a photograph of Yamada Koun Roshi, Ruben’s teacher, and Yasutani Roshi, Yamada Koun’s teacher, and a candle, a flower. In kinhin, we walk by this altar and might glance at it. Otherwise, it was a concrete block room that had been turned into a zendo.”

On the third day of the sesshin she had an unexpected experience. “I grew up in a progressive Protestant environment. My father was a theologian, but I had not been in a church for a long time. And I’m sitting zazen and suddenly . . .” – she laughs softly as if a little reluctant to proceed – “. . . there appears a figure before me. It’s white. The sense was that this is Christ. And I heard the words, ‘This is my body.’” She pauses, then resumes speaking more slowly. “For a few moments, I was riveted, utterly transfixed. Then came the thought, ‘That’s blasphemy. This is my body?’ And, of course, it all went away. I came back to breathing, following the breath. Soon the bell rang and the clackers, and we began walking kinhin. And as I passed by that altar, my eye happened to fall on the photograph, the image, of Yamada Koun Roshi, this person I knew was my teacher’s teacher, a person obviously loved by Ruben, but for me, an inscrutable Japanese face. Right? In that moment of walking by, of the eye just chancing to glance at the face, suddenly that face was flooded with an outpouring of compassion, and I knew why. Not discursively, ‘Oh, I can explain this to you.’ It was just compassion – boundless – just pouring out, as I was walking back to the seat. Fairly soon I was tapped for dokusan. Fortunately, there were four people waiting ahead of me and one person in the dokusan room. So I sat down, sitting with the koan Mu. Just sitting there, not reflecting, but with tears coming down. By the time I got to the seat right before the door, my lap was wet. The bell rang, I went in, and Ruben said, ‘What’s happening?’ And I said, ‘Nothing.’ Then, somehow, this experience came, and I simply told him, ‘Well, I was sitting, and this appeared and . . .’ He began to ask checking questions, guiding questions. And suddenly they were just answered. It just came. Just so.

“That was just a beginning. But what a relief! For each one it’s so different, but there are clear characteristics that are common. This sense of walking and no one walking, or of creation coming up here and here, here, here! Totally new. Nothing at all and yet this! In some sense, it feels like a baby being born, and the protective film on the eyes falling away, things coming into view. Just getting used to that amount of light. In the beginning, it’s blinding. Gradually you focus, and you see this world as it is, this world in which we can practice.”

She didn’t get the position for which she had been auditioning. “I ended up as runner-up. Had that not happened, it’s likely life would have still been full of Zen, but it was a glorious failure. I’m really grateful.”

The Story of Zen: 410-13, 425, 435.

Further Zen Conversations: 29, 66-67.

At the inauguration of the Buddhist Temple of Toledo last April, Karen Do’on Weik received “denbo,” the second stage in full authorization within the Soto tradition. Do’on is the wife of the temple’s abbot, Rinsen Weik. They met in an aikido class. “I punched him,” she tells me. She was studying to become an Episcopalian priest at the time.

Her first encounter with Buddhism occurred during a high school outing to the Rhode Island School of Design.

As she describes her childhood, it sounds like a novel written by one of the Brontë sisters. She was born in a mental hospital where her mother abandoned her two weeks after her birth. When she was about a year old, and the authorities could not locate her mother, she was placed in foster care. “I think I probably couldn’t talk or walk and probably wasn’t that responsive to much because they sent me to a foster home for handicapped children. So I grew up with mentally and physically challenged kids. You can see how this all threw me back on my own resources.”

She was eventually adopted – as a four-year-old – by a family which, as she puts it, had its own issues. Her adoptive family was Catholic, as her birth mother had been, and Do’on found solace in church services. “I loved the security of it. I loved the ritual of it. I loved being able to sit inside that ritual and have it work on me. Because I knew what was coming, I didn’t have to do a lot of extra work. I could just sit in the ritual and let it just wash over me and work on me.”

Then when she was in high school, her class visited RISD.

“They have a lovely museum there. And that’s what we were there to see. The largest wooden Buddha in the country is there. I distinctly remember walking into this room and sitting down with the Buddha, and I was like . . .” She makes a face of open-mouthed astonishment. “That level of peace, and that level of, ‘Yes,’ of fundamental okayness. I recognized that I’d been functioning with that for a long time. At the same time as the tears and the trauma. I immediately recognized that.”

“You recognized that as a state that you were personally familiar with?” I asked.

“Yes. That was what was sustaining me.”

When she was seventeen, a friend took her to a Zen gathering hosted by Richard Clarke, a controversial student of Philip Kapleau who – it is generally held – began teaching without Kapleau’s authorization to do so. But the practice appealed to her, and she found Clarke a supportive teacher. So she began sitting regularly and attending sesshin. She had also enrolled in Divinity School, leaving when she realized it wasn’t a good fit.

After meeting Rinsen, she accompanied him to retreats at Zen Mountain Monastery. They had the opportunity to work with Daido Loori and, later, Myotai Treace. But the situation became difficult after her daughter was born, and she was no longer able to attend regularly.

Eventually she and Rinsen came to study with Melissa Blacker and James Ford at the Boundless Way Temple in Worcester. They became so deeply involved in the practice that eventually Melissa told them, “‘Hey. You guys are priests. You’re doing it. So let’s just ordain you.’ We’d been studying for decades and were doing the retreats at Lourde’s College,[1] which is a nunnery basically, and we decided to do the ordination at the nunnery. So, I think I’m the only woman to get ordained as a priest in a convent.”

I ask her what her responsibilities are now that she has received denbo.

“Well, my primary responsibility,” she tells me, “is to fully inhabit Buddhahood.” She resists any efforts to get her to be more specific. It is, for her, a matter of embodying the Dharma.

“You’d considered being an Episcopal priest at one time,” I point out. “Is there a pastoral aspect to your work with students now?”

“I’m just there for them. It’s just living my life and making my life available for everybody. So my priesthood is like, ‘My hands are for you. My eyes are for you. My brain is for you. My life is for you.’”

I ask how she expects Zen practice to impact people.

“I fully expect that everyone is going to recognize they are a Buddha.”

“That’s your hope for your students?”

She nods her head. “Yeah. That everybody fully awakens to their Buddhahood. Buddhas are here to make sure all people are Buddhas. So you are constantly giving your practice away, and God knows there’s plenty of work to do.”

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[1] Now Lourdes University: https://www.lourdes.edu/