Joen Dempsey is a practitioner with Thousand Harbours Zen in Halifax. She grew up in the community of Herring Cove, just south of the city, which is the current location of the Theravadan Atlantic Buddhist Meditation Center, whose facilities Thousand Harbours used for day retreats prior to the pandemic. I interviewed her, however, during the period when restrictions were in place and groups like Thousand Harbours were only able to meet through Zoom.

She tells me that when she reflects on her childhood, “I actually remember looking forward to being an adult. I remember explicitly thinking, ‘I can’t wait until I’m an adult.’ And I remember in my late 20s feeling like I’d come out the other side of a dark tunnel. It sounds so bleak. Who knows why?”

She uses terms like anxiety, depression, and even trauma. Which may be a factor in why at the time I interviewed her she was training to be a clinical psychologist.

One of the ways in which Zen has been viewed by people in the west is as a form of Eastern Psychology. The Zen popularizer, Alan Watts, wrote a book on the subject, entitled Psychotherapy East & West. I find myself wondering how closely related psychology and Zen actually are. Joen believes the goals are different.

“When I think about Zen, if you have a goal when you sit down to do zazen, then there’s something wrong with that picture already. That’s how I’ve been trained and how I practice. That ‘simply sitting’ is the point of Zen. Being present. Maybe it is like making friends with oneself. People talk about that in Zen, and it kind of resonates with me, the idea of getting to know oneself not in a discursive way where you’re asking probing questions and responding internally or anything like that. But where you sit and notice and see and being okay with that. That’s what I understand Zen to be about.”

“If one sits without a goal,” I suggest, “doesn’t that imply it’s purposeless? Why would you do it if it were without purpose?”

“Because it’s honest. It feels honest.”

“Honest in the sense that one doesn’t have an intention?”

“For me the reason to do it, despite no goal, is that it feels like an honest thing to do. I’m being truthful with myself; I’m being authentic in the moment. I’m not avoiding; I’m not trying to escape. So, I guess, to be more in touch with the moment, to be more in touch with reality. I think these are important reasons to sit. Just with the caveat that if one sits down with the idea, ‘Okay, now I’m really going to get in touch with reality,’ then you’re projecting yourself onto reality and you’re not doing it anymore.”

“And what are the goals of psychology?”

“Well, the goals of psychology are the goals of the person you’re with. So, in my training the goal is understand a person’s suffering and then help them to make changes.”

“Are the issues which lead people to Zen similar to those that lead them to therapy?”

“Well, I’m told that there are people who are drawn to Zen because they have spiritual curiosity, or they’re interested in enlightenment. So, that, obviously, is quite different from the folks that I work with. But do you mean, ‘I have mental problems, so I want to try Zen’?”

“Is that what people say when they go to a psychologist? ‘I have mental problems, I need help’?”

“Sometimes. But usually there’s a problem. They come to you because they have a problem. And I started sitting in Zen because I had a problem. But in psychology, the problem has to be inside you. I can’t help you with your husband; I can help you with how you respond to your husband – that might help your relationship – but I can’t change anybody else. So, yeah, you come to psychology with an internal problem. Now, a lot of people actually don’t. A lot of people come to psychology with an external problem. Then the job of the psychologist is to help them see whether there is or there isn’t an internal problem that can help them with their external problem.” She pauses a moment. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot because of this kind of dual interest in my life or occupation or what have you. So I wonder if in a way Zen sort of opens a door to introspect, to seeing oneself in context, seeing the patterns in one’s mind, and seeing how one responds habitually. So, it can be informative in a psychological way, particularly on retreat or something, if you’re interacting with a lot of people, and you’re starting to anticipate responses from them that they have given you reason to anticipate, then you begin to see the way that your past experiences inform your anticipations of others. Basically, your psychology – how you understand others now – is based on how you understood others in the past. And Zen can help you see those things and identify them and understand them through meditation and through community. I think when people have a clinically significant problem that they’re seeing a psychologist for, I’m not sure Zen would help them see these patterns. And I know that for some populations, some forms of meditation can be counter-indicated depending on the type of mental issue the person is working with. But the ability to introspect and to understand oneself in context, I think, can be compromised by one’s life history to the degree that psychological intervention – that’s just not about ‘look inside and see what’s there,’ but that’s more structured – can be helpful in ways that I don’t think Zen could be helpful.”

Further Zen Conversations: 85-87; 119.

Other links:

https://thousandharbourszen.com/

https://www.facebook.com/thousandharbourszen/

Nancy Hathaway was a resident student of Seung Sahn in Providence at the same time as Bobby Rhodes. “We raised our babies together.” When I met her – several years before the pandemic – she was living in Maine and hosting a weekly meditation session at the Morgan Bay Zendo.

I ask her how her sits differed from other opportunities offered at the zendo at that time.

“That’s a good question. The Kwan Um School of Zen has its own traditions. And there’s an etiquette here, in this zendo, that’s used on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights, so I’m incorporating the Kwan Um Zen School traditions into this setting but trying not to make it too disruptive to people who sit both. So, for example, we chant the Evening Bell Chant. It’s a special Kwan Um School bell chant. If someone were to ask for instruction, I would give them Kwan Um School of Zen, Dae Soen Sa Nim, Zen instruction. Which all goes to the same place, but . . .”

Susan Guilford – a board member at Morgan Bay and the person who organized my first visit there – is with us, and both she and Nancy stress that, while the Morgan Bay Zendo has hosted teachers from various lineages, it has avoided establishing a resident teacher since Walter Nowick resigned in 1985.

“I think there is, in fact, a little resistance to having a teacher,” Nancy tells me. “In the past, there’s been resistance to the word ‘teacher’ and having a teacher. My guess is that people here have just sort of had it with teachers.”

The issue of what the term “teacher” implies in a Zen context is frequently challenging. I know, for example, that Nancy leads retreats at the zendo, and I ask if the people who attend those don’t look upon her as a teacher. She admits they probably do but points out that she is only one teacher among others. Hugh Curran, she points out, also teaches at the zendo.

Susan senses the difficulty I’m having with this. “Nancy and I are very good friends, but I don’t think of her or her role here as ‘teacher’ with a capital T. Or Hugh. I think of it as lower-case t. I think of Nancy’s role in this context as a person who has tremendous wisdom and in other parts of her life teaches, does workshops, is part of the Kwam Um Zen School.”

“So you are officially a teacher in the Kwan Um Zen School?” I ask Nancy.

“I’m trained in the Kwan Um Zen School to be a teacher. I think that’s an important fact. I don’t talk about it much, because people think of me as a peer, and that word ‘teacher’ has held so much . . . Walter was the teacher. So that relationship to ‘teacher’ is very powerful.”

Susan explains that at that time the zendo still occasionally received requests from people seeking to do personal retreats at the location. It’s a service that they hoped to explore further, recognizing that if it did so, it would require someone to be resident on the site.

“A caretaker?” I ask.

“We’d call him a resident manager or something,” Nancy says.

“But not a teacher. You’re not looking for someone guests can go to and ask for spiritual guidance.”

“I think that’s the last thing that Morgan Bay Zendo wants.”

While there are people here to whom those guests could turn to if they wished, the goal remains to maintain the zendo without a central authority figure. It’s a model I find appealing.

I ask Nancy what, in her view, the purpose of Zen is. “What’s its function? What’s it do?”

“So, it’s sitting here talking to you.”

The three of us laugh.

“Let’s say I’m someone from the area who just drops by to find out what’s going out here,” I suggest, “I’ve known you were here for a while, and I’m just curious. So I come out and ask, ‘What’s this all about?’”

“Yeah, I would probably give that answer, and then he would want more, would ask for more, and I would explain that Zen is a practice, and we’re a practice center, and it’s to encourage, to cultivate the mind that’s before thinking and to open to what we call in this school ‘not knowing.’ Master Seung Sahn was really big on ‘Only go straight don’t know.’”

“And what good does that do?”

“It allows me to sit here and talk to you without going into my thinking and thinking about, ‘I wonder what I’m going to have for dinner tonight?’ I just start thinking, like, ‘Who is this guy I’m talking to?’ So it allows me to be here, talking, talking with you.”

Other links:

Morgan Bay Zendo

Kwan Um Zen

Like Tenney Nathanson, Sarah Bender is a Dharma heir of Joan Sutherland  and teaches within her Open Source network. Sarah is the resident teacher of the Springs Mountain Sangha in Colorado Springs.

“I started out in 1979 with Robert Aitken Roshi in Honolulu. I practiced in that sangha for four years, but then we moved to Colorado.” Her time in Hawaii overlapped with John Tarrant’s tenure as senior student.

“Later on, when I attended retreats at St. Dorothy’s where John was teaching, I have a strong memory of a talk where someone was asking a question about, ‘How to make this safe. How to make this practice safe.’ And John sort of laughed and said, ‘Well, if you’re looking for something that’s safe, maybe you’re in the wrong place.’ That kind of stuck with me, because I think on the one hand, we want to feel safe in the community in which we practice, but the practice itself . . . to practice this way, if you’re looking for safety, may be not the best way.”  

The approach that Sarah takes to her own koan teaching derives from the time she spent studying with Joan.

“It was actually Father Pat Hawk who connected my sangha with Joan through John. Pat was going to lead our first retreat in Colorado Springs and then got diagnosed with prostate cancer and couldn’t come. And he suggested that I call John, and John said, ‘I can’t come, but I have this brand-new teacher, Joan Sutherland. Give her a call.’”

Joan agreed to facilitate the retreat, assisted by David Weinstein who acted as Head of Practice.

“Was your experience with her different than with your earlier teachers?”

“I can’t say that Aitken Roshi or Father Pat ever asked me to exclude my life, but when I started to work with Joan, there was a way in which any kind of separation between a formal response to a koan or sort of an expected response to a koan and my life was unnecessary. And it was not at all that she was being psychological—you know—taking a psychological approach. I wouldn’t call it that at all. I would just say that there was no longer any barrier there at all. And the creativity of response to koans was given its full play. So not very long after starting to work with Joan, I had a dream in which I was with a woman in a room, and we each had a knitting needle, and we were tossing a ball of yarn, back and forth, catching it on our knitting needles. And there was that quality to my work with Joan. We were playing with yarns.”

“And was that first retreat a satisfying experience?”

“Thrilling. It was so nourishing. On the last morning of that retreat, I remember speaking up in our closing circle. And that morning at breakfast, I’d had an experience I’d never had before of actually taking a bite of oatmeal or something and literally feeling that nourishment spreading through my body. And when it came time for the closing circle, the image that was just right there for me was just as I had felt the nourishment of the breakfast spreading through every cell of my body, I felt the nourishment of Joan’s—and David’s—teaching spreading through every cell of my body.”

Traditional koan work can be very formal. Some teachers expect the student to come up an orthodox response. I ask Sarah if there was much difference in how she responded to this less formal way of working with koans.

“I guess in a way. I was still aware that the koan was looking for something to happen to me, and I didn’t want to go on until I was pretty sure that what the koan was looking for had in some sense happened. And Joan would sometimes have to boot me out of a koan and onto the next. ‘No! No! It’ll stay with you. Don’t worry. We’re going on!’  You know? But I’m not sure how different that was because it was not only how she did koans, it was how I did koans. And I think I had been doing koans that way already and meeting them with what was most real for me. And I already didn’t have that wall between the koan and my actual experience. Because I think that’s what koans are about, your actual experience. So it was not a hard transition at all, and it never, never occurred to me to say that ‘This is Buddhism-lite’ or something like that. Never. There was no diminishing of the power of the koan in this way of doing things.”

Cypress Trees in the Garden: 175, 183-84, 189

Further Zen Conversations: 51-52; 59; 113-14; 144; 151.

Other links:

Springs Mountain Sangha

Joan Sutherland Dharma Works

Roger Brennan is a priest in the Scarboro Mission Society who – until COVID restrictions were imposed – sat regularly with Patrick Gallagher’s Oak Tree in the Garden Sangha.

“I grew up in a typical Catholic ambiance. Went to Catholic schools; had nuns for teachers. So we got a lot of stories of the saints and even as a very young person, I was intrigued by these. And although I wouldn’t have known to describe it in this way at that time, I would say the mystics particularly intrigued me, that people could have these experiences. Growing up, I can remember that there was this curiosity, but when I went to Jesuit high school, I never really took to Jesuit spirituality, the Ignatian exercises. We certainly got them,” he says with a chuckle. “But it never clicked with me. It was just not my spirituality. Then in the novitiate we studied this book by a priest named Adolphe Tanqueray. It was quite a thick book; it was considered a classic in mystical theology at that time. It gave a very, very detailed analysis of the road to perfection, and I kind of realized I was not on that road and figured I was never going to get on that road. It was not a very appealing road. It seemed to be something for people who were somehow extraordinary. It wasn’t me at any rate. And that kind of allowed me to let go of that type of spirituality. It was something I couldn’t do and didn’t particularly want to do. So I just said my prayers and received the sacraments, and that was sort of it.”

His first posting was to the Philippines, then in the mid-’70s, his superiors called him back to Canada to do a course of study on scripture. He enrolled at St. Paul’s University in Ottawa. One spring day he was in the library. “Ottawa can be beautiful in the spring, and it was one of those days when you would really like to be anywhere but in a library, and I would have given anything to be anywhere else but in that stack room. And I was just flipping through the books looking for the one I wanted and came across this thing a little bigger than a pamphlet on Eastern religions. And because it had nothing to do with scripture, I picked it up and just started flipping through it, looking at the index, looking to see what was in there. I can’t even remember if it was about Buddhism in general or Zen. I suspect it might have been on Zen. And I started reading it. Well, then I forgot about the book I was looking for. I took the book and sat down and read through it. And it reawakened in me all the interest I had had years before with the saints and the mystics and that sort of thing. It looked at that reality or that possibility from a completely different perspective. It was no longer something for extraordinary people in certain circumstances. This was saying, ‘You can experience the transcendent. Anybody can. You don’t have to be a special kind of person.’

“So that really tweaked me; however, I still had to get my paper finished. So I put it back. Got the scripture book, finished my paper, decided not to continue, and got permission to go back to the Philippines. In the meantime, I was talking with some of Our Lady’s Missionary sisters that I worked with, and I was telling them I was going back to the Philippines. And they said, ‘Oh, isn’t that great. One of our sisters who’s been in Japan for years and has been studying Zen has been assigned not just to the Philippines but to Hinunangan,’ which is the town that I was working in.”

The sister was Elaine MacInnes, and, in Hinunangan, she introduced Roger to formal Zen practice. Shortly after this, she moved to Manila, where he occasionally went to attend sesshin. After this initial training, however, he did not have direct access to a Zen teacher for long periods of time and had to practice on his own – although he made use of sabbaticals to do brief stays with Koun Yamada in Japan and Willigis Jäger in Germany – until he retired to Toronto in 2009 and resumed practice with Sister Elaine.

I spent an evening with the Oak Tree in the Garden sangha and was intrigued by the ease with which the participants used the word “God.” It is not a concept associated with Buddhism and I wondered how they reconciled a belief in God with Zen practice. It’s a difficult issue to deal with, but Roger took it on.

“We just celebrated Trinity Sunday, and how do you explain that? The Trinity. We have all these words, and all these explanations, and all this theology, but we have to finally come to the fact that we don’t know what we’re talking about.” There is gentle laughter and murmurs of agreement from the others. “We don’t. I often like to say in groups when I’m talking to them – sometimes from a Zen perspective or whatever – but I say to them, ‘God is nothing.’ And then I’ll write it on the board. ‘God is no thing.’ Things are creations. Things come from God. But Zen is trying to get rid of all the concepts so that when you have the experience it’s pure. Things are creations. God is not a creation. God is beyond creation. So God is nothing. I have no problem with that nothing. The problem is with the concepts. We carry around in our little heads all these concepts. The more theology you study, the more of them you’ve got. I think the important thing to remember is that God is not a thing.”

Catholicism and Zen: 187-90

Further Zen Conversations: 39-42; 94-95; 145.

Other links:

Oak Tree in the Garden 

https://www.scarboromissions.ca/Scarboro_missions_magazine/Issues/2013/Jan_Feb/china.php

Hadrian Abbott is an occasional participant in the sitting group I host in Fredericton. He spent 7 months – December 2009 to June 2010 – at Shodo Harada’s temple, Sogenji, in Japan. He’s a nurse, and a year after he returned to Canada, he spent another six months at Enso House, the hospice associated with Harada’s center on Whidbey Island in Washington State.

In 2013, after my visit to Enso House, I asked Hadrian about his first impressions of the temple in Japan.

“I got there by at about 10:30 at night. To get there you drive through Okayama and up into the mountains, through settlements, villages, towns. Then the taxi driver turned off the road, and it became pitch black. And we went on and on until his headlights illuminated this really ornate Japanese gate.”  

As soon as he arrived, he was taken to the men’s zendo. “They gave me my futon to sleep on and some blankets and said, ‘We’re chanting in five minutes.’ So I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, but ten minutes later I’m chanting and then thirty minutes later I was in bed. The next morning, I was up at 3:30, getting ready to chant again and sit.

“By Japanese standards, Sogenji is not that old, only about four hundred, five hundred years. And it’s set in sort of a V between two steep hills. There’s two zendos. One for the women; one for the men. And in the middle there’s the hondo where the formal chanting took place.”

“Like a Buddha Hall?” I ask.

“A Buddha Hall, yes. All the meditation was done in the zendo that I lived in. So the men lived and slept where we meditated. It’s long and thin with a concrete floor and raised tans [platforms] to sit on. And it’s furnished with tatami and then each person is given a zafu [cushion] and a zabuton [mat on which to place the zafu]. And around the walls there’s shelves with curtaining, so each person is given an area where you keep your rolled-up futon and blankets, and there’s a little shelf to put personal things on.

“I’m still not quite sure of the system of Japanese temples, but Sogenji is a royal temple, which means it receives a little bit of money each year from the royal family. The grounds are fairly extensive. There’s a very old graveyard there that the monastery was built around. The hondo burnt down, I think, a hundred or two hundred years ago and was rebuilt exactly as it was. When I was there, construction was just finishing on a building where the monastery was going to teach traditional flower arranging. So it’s a mixture of new and old.”

I ask him what Shodo Harada is like. Hadrian frowns and considers a moment.

“I remember some of what he said, but mostly it’s just being in the presence of somebody who has reached quite an advanced level of awareness. I suppose by Japanese standards, he’s small. Five foot one or two. He’s thin. It’s hard to guess his age. He’s got quite an incredible charisma when he goes into a room. He’s got a real presence.”

There were 16 residents, a few Japanese, but the others came from Canada, the US, the Netherlands, Southern India, Hungary, Poland, Australia, Belgium, and Switzerland. The working language was English.

I ask what language is used during retreats, and he explains that an interpreter usually translated Harada’s talks. Then he adds, “There was one month when she was away, and I actually liked that retreat. He speaks English very well. He has a thick accent, but you can understand him. Mostly it was done in Japanese and English. Teishos [formal lectures] were like the movie Lost in Translation, where he would speak for twenty minutes and people who spoke Japanese found it funny as hell and would laugh and nod and listen. The interpreter would translate for two to five minutes and then go on.”

The residential schedule was highly disciplined.

“You’d get up anywhere between 3:30 and 4:00, at 4:00 you’d be in the hondo for chanting in Japanese and English. There was a little bit of English, not much. Mostly in Japanese. Then we’d go back to the zendo and sit for an hour or an hour and a half and during the sitting people would go off to do sanzen [personal interviews]. Then we’d have breakfast. Then we’d have a twenty minute, half hour period to clean up our living quarters before meeting for samu, the work period. That would take us to lunch.”

“What kind of work?” I ask.

“Anything to make the monastery run. So you’d be cleaning, you would work in the kitchen. Somebody always had the job of getting the fire going. People would be assigned to clean the administrative building, to clean the hondo. Any kind of gardening, cleaning.”

“And after lunch?”

“We had time off. You could have a bath. Then around 4:30 the tenzo would leave some leftovers in the kitchen if people wanted. You could do whatever you wanted as long as it was in the monastery grounds.”

“You had to stay on the grounds.”

“There was a shop that we called ‘Happy Town’ where, if you asked, you go to get supplies.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, candy, apples, tea. Then it’s time to get ready for the evening sit which could be anywhere from two to four hours. That would take you to about nine. And then there’s chanting at the end. Which is incredibly quick—fifteen minutes. Then bedtime.”

“You said that when you first arrived, it was just as they were getting ready for that chanting.”

“Yeah. It was the fastest chant you ever heard. They gave me my book. I was still on the first page while they were on the fourth. Incredibly quick chanting.”

Hadrian is light-hearted as he describes the temple discipline, but he recognizes it is something that could be misused. “I remember raking one day with a young American monk, and we were laughing because we could see how very easily this could be a way of training soldiers, as it was in the Second World War.”

Hadrian now works in a methadone clinic where he offers meditation instruction to clients.

“We work with the harm reduction model which is to work with each patient as they are. We don’t start with the premise that you’re going to quit all of your drugs immediately. We can provide medical care, opioid substitutes or opioids. But after that it’s to work with people to foster a way for them to improve, for them to develop, or for them to explore other choices. ‘Harm reduction’ is hard to define in the sense that it’s a lot of different things. At the center is human dignity – and this is the hard bit – working with each person to foster a sense of dignity and value. If you have a chance to sit in meditation,  working on breathing and relaxing, that could seep through into how you interact with other things. You can develop a way of being with other people that’s different than anything you’ve experienced.”

“What has the practice done for you?” I ask.

“I think it’s made me more aware of myself, of others. Of being open. It’s developed a spiritual practice that I never thought I’d have. I’d also say it’s knocked some of the bullshit out of me,” he adds with a laugh.

Further Zen Conversations, Pp. 124-25.

Other links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shodo_Harada

https://www.tahomazenmonastery.com/

The original Zen (Chan) masters in China were, at times, difficult to access. Their temples were often hidden away in the mountains, intentionally located far from larger population centers. Nor were they necessarily welcoming. Prospective students who found their way to the temple gates could be refused entry for days on end in order to test their sincerity. In the early 1970s, something similar was happening in a remote coastal village in Maine.

Walter Nowick was a Julliard-trained musician who may also have been the first American authorized to teach in the Rinzai School (there are people who question how “official” Nowick’s teaching authority was). After he had completed his training under Zuigan Goto Roshi at Daitokuji in Kyoto, he returned to a farm his family had purchased for him on the Morgan Bay Road outside of Surry, Maine. It wasn’t his original intention to teach, but gradually people learned about him and made their way to the farm.

“The standard practice was to come to the tree in the front yard and stand there for a little while,” Hugh Curran tells me. “I came here in 1975 and stood in front of the tree, and he would send someone out and you would say, ‘I’d like to be a student,’ and he would respond. ‘No. No, I’ve got too many.’ So I came back another time.” Hugh did three vigils by the tree before being accepted.

Hugh was my host during my first visit to what is now called the Morgan Bay Zendo. He was born in Ireland and still has the accent. Before coming to Maine, he had studied with Hakuin Yasutani and, later, served for a while as Philip Kapleau’s attendant. Since then, he has also worked with Master Sheng Yen – the Chinese Chan teacher with whom Rebecca Li practiced – and Ruben Habito of Yasutani’s Sanbo Zen lineage.

Hugh’s house is half a mile from the Zendo. The couple who organized that first visit for me – Susan and Charles Guilford – live half a mile on the other side. In the mile between their homes, there are several houses on lots notched out of the thick Maine woods most of which were built by people who, decades ago, had made their way here to study Zen.

In 1984, when the Cold War was still waging, Walter became concerned about the possibility of a nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, and he stopped teaching Zen in order to focus on trying to promote understanding between the two nations through a shared appreciation of music.

Hugh and Susan and few others formed a board of directors to maintain the Zendo.

“Walter donated the farm to the Moonspring Hermitage, Inc.,” Hugh explains. “We became a religious non-profit. This was facilitated by a member’s husband who was a lawyer in Maryland, so it was incorporated in Maryland. Ten acres had been included which was transferred to the corporation.”

“Walter didn’t have a Dharma successor,” I say. “So you did this with no resident teacher.”

That’s not “quite accurate,” Hugh tells me. “We have myself and Nancy Hathaway [of the Korean Kwan Um tradition]. I would say Senior Dharma Leaders, you could call us.” Later he tells me, that Ruben Habito had “designated me as a facilitator, so I like that term, that I facilitate. Which is pretty much what I do on seminars and everything else.”

He has taught courses on “Ecology & Spirituality,” “Buddhism & Contemplative Traditions,” and “Early Celtic Spirituality” in the Peace Studies Program at the University of Maine, and he has offered retreats at the Zendo, including one on “Zen and Deep Ecology.” Nancy offers training in the Kwan Um tradition. Teachers from other traditions have offered retreats here as well.

Zen tends to be hierarchical, and I find the idea of a community of practitioners coming together to maintain a center without a specific teacher intriguing. For Hugh, it’s a practical matter.

“We ended up being fairly eclectic and tried to suit different people coming here. I mean, in a relatively remote area, far from large urban areas, you have to suit the people that come. And if they say, ‘Oh, well, you guys are into a particular form of Japanese Zen. We’ll go someplace else.’ Or, ‘You’re just a Chinese group; we won’t get involved.’ Or just a Burmese group or this or that. So we try to cover the whole gamut.”

He admits his own approach is still based on the training he had received in the Sanbo Zen tradition. When he is introducing people to the practice, he explains, “I might say, ‘this is a little like the Suzuki method of playing the violin, just learn to play and when questions come up, we’ll work on that.’ Basically, we encourage getting out of the thinking process. Get your mind on the body-mind. Work on moving the attention into the hara.[1] When you’re walking, put your whole focus on each step. Feel your feet sink into the floor, whatever way helps you to get out of the thinking process and into the experience of just walking.”

“To what end?” I ask.

He doesn’t talk about enlightenment or deep spiritual awareness. His answer is quite simple: “To achieve some degree of tranquility, some peace of mind, learn to focus without stress and without nervousness.”

Other links:

Morgan Bay Zendo

Hugh Curran

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[1] A point just below the navel which is considered an energy center in several Asian traditions.

Seiju Mammoser is the abbot of the Albuquerque Zen Center, as he was when I visited it in 2013. “My interest in starting the center here in the city was basically working man’s Zen. You had a job. You had a family. You had responsibilities. You wanted to do practice. I wanted something you could do every morning. I wanted something you could do in the evening. So, you could work around your responsibilities and your life, and you could do practice.”

Seiju denies being a teacher. “I wouldn’t teach you how to sit. I would sit. I would say a few things, and what you understood hopefully you’d do. You know, it’s like, am I gonna teach you how to breathe?”

Seiju’s involvement with Zen began in the early ’70s when he came upon a book left on a coffee table. “An eminently forgettable book. But it made me realize that I was hungry for something, and it got me started.”

He visited the San Francisco Zen Center briefly. “Stayed for a chanting service in the afternoon and left immediately. Made my way to LA. Stopped at a place called Cimarron Zen Center at the time. It’s called Rinzai-ji now. It was interesting. But it was in Los Angeles, and I grew up in Chicago. I didn’t need another big city. They said they had this place up in the mountains. Mount Baldy. So I went there for a week. Liked it.”

Rinzai-ji and Mount Baldy were established by the controversial Japanese teacher, Joshu Sasaki, who at the time of my visit to Albuquerque – when he was 106 years old – had been revealed to have been making unwanted sexual advances to many of his female students for decades. Regardless, many of Sasaki’s students – including Seiju (and Leonard Cohen) – remained loyal to him.

“You meet somebody who inspires you. Motivates you and moves you and demonstrates—in front of you, in his manifestation—exactly what he’s talking about. He was the first living teacher I’d met. He was sufficient. I didn’t have to go see somebody else. I knew what I was dealing with.”

Seiju doesn’t deny that Sasaki interfered with some of his female students, but he cautions that the tendency of people “to get to a mind of judgement impedes understanding. Once I make a decision—‘That’s right; that’s wrong; this or that’—then I line up behind my judgement and act. I haven’t found a mind of judgement to be particularly helpful for a mind of practice.

“In the human scope of things, everything becomes a thing. Things are entities. So Sasaki Roshi is a person. That’s a dog,” pointing the dog, Jemez, who has been accompanying all morning. “That kind of thinking. Very common. Very understandable. Very human. That’s not what Buddhism teaches us. Everything is activity. Sometimes I manifest skillful activities. Sometimes I manifest foolish activity. And sometimes I manifest selfish activity. I can be a loving parent, and I can be a terrible co-worker. And I can be both of those and all of those in the same day. And anything else. And in my experience around Sasaki Roshi, he’s been a remarkable, deeply committed teacher.

“People presume that if you’re quote ‘enlightened’ end quote—whatever that means—or ‘awake’ or anything else, you can’t possibly do this other stuff. I don’t know the answer to that. But it’s pretty obvious to me that the one person I’ve spent time with who seems to come closest to what a lot of people would think of as an ‘awake’ person has also done these other things. And that, to me, is just skillful activity and unskillful activity. Which, again, we all do in our lives.”

Seiju is not insensitive about these matters, and in 2018 the Albuquerque Center issued an Ethics policy which explicitly states:

We are clear that any sexual relationship between a teacher, or any other person in a position of power, and his or her student is inappropriate and unacceptable.

We are committed to identifying and understanding sexual misconduct and to empower our Sangha members and teachers to respond compassionately and appropriately should an issue of this nature be brought to their attention.

We also recognize the great harm created by gossip, innuendo, rumors, retaliation, intimidation, mistreatment of others, and other forms of unethical behavior generated by anyone and directed towards any member. We recognize that a breach of ethics is at the root of misconduct and that everyone is accountable for his or her behavior.

All AZC teachers and members are fully aware of the ethical standards expected of them and have wholeheartedly and without reservation agreed to live by these standards.

It was, in some ways, an awkward interview. Given the media attention being paid at the time to the issue of Sasaki’s behavior, Seiju had cause to be wary of me. I, on the other hand, came away with a sense of admiration, in particular, for his uncompromising attitude about the nature of Zen practice.

As we are touring the facility, he calls my attention to a sheet of paper on a bulletin board by the door. It’s a quotation from a talk Sasaki gave at Bodhi Manda in 1982:

The standpoint of this Zen Center is our own practice of Dharma Activity. Therefore we accept those who want to study Dharma Activity. Those who are not interested in Dharma Activity should leave immediately.

Seiju states it bluntly: “Teaching is doing. Words are words, but teaching is doing.” It all comes back to sitting down, being still, and breathing. If you’re not up to that, “have a nice drive home.”

Joshu Sasaki died nine months after my visit to the Albuquerque Center on July 27, 2014.

Cypress Trees in the Garden: 45-55, 56-57, 66, 99, 121

The Story of Zen: 288-90, 325, 329

Other Links:

Albuquerque Zen Center

https://rickmdaniel.blogspot.com/2013/10/106-seiju-mammoser.html

When I visited Sunyana Graef’s Vermont Zen Center in May 2013, she introduced me to Dharman Rice who, at that time, taught the “Metta” course at the center.

“There are many practices in Zen,” he tells me. “Zazen is the main one. There is chanting practice. The Metta practice is a practice of Loving Kindness, which is the six stages of sending metta to yourself, to a benefactor, to a dear friend. It’s the Buddhist practice in which I think beginners can make the most progress. It’s essentially learning how to be friends with ourselves and others. And this practice of learning how to be happy and extend our feelings of loving kindness to others goes hand-in-glove with the concentration meditation. It’s just a fact that the more we pay attention, the friendlier we feel. Paying attention is an act of love. Something every teacher, every character, every parent—we all know that. And it just is a fact, too, that the friendlier we are, the easier it is to pay attention. So in a way, our paying attention and our being friendly and happy and extending loving-kindness to others—opening our compassionate heart—are practices that go hand-in-glove.

“One of the things that happens, there are a number of people who come to the Center, take an introductory workshop, but for them sitting – endless hours sort of sitting, looking at walls – becomes kind of daunting. And the metta practice is easier in the sense that it’s more something we can get in touch with in an everyday kind of way. So I do a continuing metta group, and once you’ve taken the course you can come back once a month. We meet on the second Monday of every month for an hour in the evening. I bill it as a Lifetime Warranty for the Metta Class. If you’re having problems with the practice, come back and we’ll do it again. The idea was to keep people in the orbit of the Center until they felt able to do or were willing to do or felt desirous of doing the more intense kind of zazen practice. Some of them don’t get to that place for all I can tell. And that’s fine. That’s just fine. To me, it’s been a real eye-opener and something I love teaching over and over again, ’cause I love taking the course over and over again,” he says, chuckling

“The standard way of getting started in metta is with certain things that we say to ourselves in an attempt to rouse this loving-kindness energy and then radiating it to ourselves and others. This practice was given to monks by the Buddha originally—so the story goes—because he had sent some of them to a forest to do some practice, and there were some spirits in that forest that didn’t like them being there, and they began making weird noises and giving off weird smells. And the monks came running back to the Buddha and said, ‘Can you send us someplace else?’ And the Buddha said, ‘No, no, no. You need to go back, and here’s what I want you to do.’ And he prescribed this course of metta practice, which was said invoking these sayings: ‘May I be happy. May I be well. May I be free from suffering. May I be at ease.’ The point is to arouse the kinds of feelings that we have when we look at a baby or look at a puppy or look at a kitten or look at a calf and to direct those to ourselves, then to our benefactor, then to a teacher—to somebody who’s had a positive formative effect on us – to a dear friend or a family member, to what’s called a ‘neutral person,’ and finally the difficult person, what used to be called the ‘enemy’ and is now called the ‘difficult person.’ All of these stages are aspects of ourselves as well, and we practice with them in that way as well. The first phase is one that gives Westerners, in particular—and I think North Americans especially—a lot of difficulty. Sending metta to ourselves is not something many people feel comfortable with. It was very natural for the Buddha; it was very natural for Aristotle; it’s very natural for archaic peoples to love themselves. The Buddha asked how we can love anyone else if we can’t love ourselves. So we start with that, and Westerners—North Americans – for a variety of reasons apparently feel that that’s somehow selfish or self-indulgent and can be uncomfortable with it. I don’t normally mention this to start with because I don’t want to present the problem, but – after we get started – some will come back, and I’ll say, ‘How did it go? What kind of experience did you have?’ And some of this starts to come out. And after we deal with that, we proceed by these phases to finally we get to the point where we’re sending metta to the whole universe, which makes more sense to Buddhists, perhaps, than to other people. I mean, how can we send metta—loving-kindness—to all creatures throughout the whole planet and throughout the whole Milky Way and so on? But what astonishes me, teaching this course over and over again, is the extent to which people can get the idea—not only get the idea as an idea—but actually start doing it, and have inexplicable, wonderful experiences.”

Other Links:

Vermont Zen Center

What is Metta Meditation?

Debra Seido Martin and her husband, Bill Booth, operate Hortan Road Organics in Oregon, a working farm and apprenticeship program for people seeking to learn organic techniques. Seido is also a Dharma heir of the late Kyogen Carlson in Jiyu Kennett’s lineage, and the farm is the location of her Zen West Empty Field zendo.

“Which came first?” I ask. “The farming or the Zen?”

“Farming,” she says.

She had grown up in Massachusetts under difficult circumstances and fled to the west coast where she eventually found work on a farm in the Santa Cruz area. “I just felt found. I fell in love with it. Just bending over picking tomatoes, being out in the natural world, getting out of my head. I began to experience a whole other way of being, a full-bodied way of being. My anxiety fell away. Sometimes I joke that my first Zen teacher was really a tomato. A ripe, juicy tomato completely expressing the moment.”

She met Bill – who had an agriculture background – and moved with him to Oregon to establish their own farm.

She describes this period as a time of healing. “Without understanding it at the time, I was trying to heal my body, heal the past. I had a yearning to reconnect with something fundamental. You know, I grew up in a typical family, very meat and potatoes, but also having its unspoken trauma including alcoholism and violence. I developed an inner life at a very early age in that environment. The organic farms were magical places full of welcome, of the mystery of the natural world, and good wholesome food. My body and mind completely changed immersed in that environment. Later, after many years into the farm, I once again felt pulled towards something new. That was my entry into Zen.

“For the first six or seven years, farming was all absorbing. You eat, sleep, breathe it. If you’re trying to build a farm, it’s your whole life. It’s a bit of an addiction in a way. Perhaps a healthy one; but sometimes unhealthy. After some time though, that earlier sense of dukkha – if you will – reasserted itself. That sense of nameless unease. ‘Is this it?’ The seeking emerged to resolve that anxiety, an existential anxiety that one can’t outrun. And so after working so hard to establish a good life through farming, I saw that was still there. Having been a bit of a seeker prone to self-help books and other types of alternative spiritual traditions, I bought a book one day that trumped all others. It was Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen. The first statement that grabbed me was, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’ And that’s the line I needed. That was the koan, and I didn’t know how that could be. It was so outside everything I believed, and the way I’d been living. Joko Beck said you should sit, and I was like, ‘What’s that?’ So I was reading in my kitchen, and I just closed the book and sat on the dirty kitchen floor. I just sat down there. And nothing happened!”

“How perfect,” I say, and we both laugh.

“I know! I know! Now I know that, but at the time, I thought, ‘I think I might need some direction here.’ I decided rather than head on down to San Diego, I’d seek out a group in Eugene. And I was very wary of joining a spiritual group. I was a well-guarded person and didn’t want to become part of some strange cult.  I remember down in the Bay Area, when I was working in a produce room in San Francisco, we’d get these produce deliveries from Zen students from Green Gulch farm.[1] They always seemed so inordinately happy. I was really suspicious of that. I’m like, ‘What are you guys on?’ being a rather cynical politically-minded person. But they were just so full of life and sincerely generous. That was just my east-coast cynicism in the lead. So I sought out a local group in Eugene. I remember driving by the front door of this house for a couple months before I actually parked and knocked on the door to go in. And my rule of thumb was, ‘If they’re at all solicitous of me . . .’ If they’re like, ‘So good to see you! Are you coming back?’ I was not coming back. And they ignored me! They ignored me. It was great. I sat. It was like, ‘Okay. I can do this.’”

For Seido, farming and Zen are the same practice.

“To be a farmer is to be constantly shown a world ‘beyond self.’ In the fields, there is nothing but constant change – death and dying, birth and living, and letting go. If one surrenders to the condition completely, there is the same spirit of practice in the field as in the zendo. You eventually let go into a life of service. If you talk to long-time farmers, you see they have a practice. Attachment to gain and loss takes a backseat to being. Close to the earth, a life force comes through you. Day to day farming is very much like sesshin. You must show up, whether you like it or not. Whether you like that period of zazen or not; it doesn’t matter. You keep showing up. Keep showing up. When you realize farming as this kind of practice, the roles become reversed. You stop doing something to the land and allow the land to farm you. You are being gardened. The soil literally becomes you. You are basically composted by your farm over time. Like my hands, I’m thoroughly saturated with the waters and life of this landscape. It offers a kind of mystical experience if you give yourself to it. And resistance, too, is part of it. To show up and care for one place on this earth – to actually touch one corner of the land in the ecological crisis that we are in – is a profound practice. There is an intelligence within which we are embedded, and if we are listening through the body, that is a deep communion. That’s Zen.”

Further Zen Conversations: 87-88; 91; 117-18; 143-44.

Other links:

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[1] Operated by the San Francisco Zen Center.