Honolulu Diamond Sangha –

“I was one of those people who in adolescence started looking for truth,” Kathy Ratliffe tells me. “Read Be Here Now.”

Be Here Now had been written by Baba Ram Dass – formerly Richard Alpert – who, along with Timothy Leary, had pioneered the use of psychedelics as a means to attain spiritual awakening and had been fired from Harvard for doing so. The primary section of the book consisted of a series of complexly illustrated pages describing the process of spiritual transformation. A friend and I developed our own posters of those pages for a public presentation when I was in college.

“Yeah,” Kathy continues. “It opened my eyes to the fact that there was possibly something there somewhere that I needed to know or find out about or discover.” She attended Oberlin College where she studied Religion. “They made us study all the religions, Western religions as well as Eastern religions. I minored in East Asian Studies and got to study Japanese language and history and Chinese language and history, which was great. But then I realized when I graduated that I didn’t want to teach religion, I wanted to figure out what it meant. So, I kept looking.”

She also took up aikido and was teaching it by the time she graduated. A friend taught aikido in Rochester, New York, and after graduation Kathy moved there to continue her practice.

In Rochester she met Mrs. March. “I never knew her first name. She ran the Rochester Folk Art Guild and was the leader of this group that was based on the ideas of Gurdjieff.”

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was an Armenian spiritual teacher who had died in 1949, but whose work became popular again in the 1960s.

“Mrs. March was very kind, and I went down there and explored it for a while. And basically what she said was, ‘If you believe what we tell you, you can join our community.’ And I said, ‘No, thank you. I’m not interested in anything that anybody can tell me. I need to find out for myself.’”

The friend she had been staying with in Rochester attended an orientation session at Philip Kapleau’s Zen Center. “So I went to an orientation there, and they literally said, ‘Don’t believe anything that we have to tell you. Here’s a way for you to find out for yourself.’”

She arrived as Kapleau was preparing to leave Rochester and retire in Santa Fe.

“He made Toni Packer the new teacher there, and all of the new students – of which I was one – went to Toni instead of to Kapleau for teaching. So I started practicing with Toni and doing sesshin with her. And I thought she was great. I was working on koans with her, but then she decided that she didn’t really want to work on koans anymore, or in the same way. She didn’t want to teach in a Buddhist context. So she moved out of the Zen Center, and there really wasn’t a teacher at that point so I went with her. She started teaching out of a Girl Scout camp, and we were holding retreats there. And I got more and more uncomfortable with working with her because she wasn’t using koans in the way that I was used to.”

Her personal circumstances were also changing. “My husband and I decided that I needed to develop a profession and work on my career, work on who I wanted to be. And neither of us were comfortable working with Toni in the way that she was working. We both loved Toni as a person, but . . . So we decided to wend our way to Hawaii and see what Aitken Roshi had to offer.”

That seemed a pretty big jump, so I ask if we could back up and fill in some gaps.

“First of all,” I say, “What was Philip Kapleau like?”

“I didn’t know him well.”

“But you had some sense of him.”

“Yeah. He was kind of a curmudgeon. I went to dokusan with him once, and he asked me what my practice was, and I told him, and he said, [in gruff tone] ‘Who gave you that?’”

“And you said you and your husband loved Toni.”

“We did. She was very sweet. She was supportive and kind and really present. She was an excellent first teacher for me.”

Kathy began her koan work with Toni.

“And it was because she changed her approach to koans that you became uncomfortable?” I ask. “Can you explain what the change was?”

She pauses for a while. It is a characteristic I had noted with teachers who continued in Toni’s wake, to consider a question carefully before responding.

“My sense was she was more interested in how people applied insights to their lives rather than through a more traditional Zen perspective which is seeing clearly into the point and being able to express that. So I just . . . I wasn’t sure that I’d really gotten the point. And I was quite young, afraid to ask questions, so I just accepted whatever she told me without questioning her about it. That was uncomfortable.”

“Then you said you and your husband decided you needed to develop a profession.”

“Right. My husband’s a nurse, and I thought, ‘I need to find something to do.’ I had been working in a tofu shop with some members of the Rochester sangha. I loved working there, but I decided it was time for me to look at what I really wanted to do. I decided to become a physical therapist.”

They had read Robert Aitken’s book, Taking the Path of Zen, and were aware of his sangha in Hawaii, so she chose a college that would bring them closer to him. She was accepted at Stanford.

I ask if they’d thought about the San Francisco Zen Center, which would have been less than an hour away.

“San Francisco is in the Soto tradition, so we weren’t tempted. We did visit there when we were living in Palo Alto, but we wanted to do koan training. And Robert Aitken was in the same lineage as Kapleau, so we thought, ‘Okay. That’s a decent fit.’”

I ask what Robert Aitken was like. She chuckles softly but doesn’t say anything. I mention I’d been told that he could also be a bit curmudgeonly from time to time.

“He wasn’t as much a curmudgeon as he was a bit socially awkward. He was very kind and sweet. But he was a little bit . . . He tried really hard to control showing what he felt in meetings and things, but he was always making facial expressions about how he felt about what was being discussed, and we would all kind of chuckle. But he tried very hard not to influence us as a group, but he couldn’t help it.”

“Michael Kieran said almost the same thing, that Aitken Roshi was committed to collaborative decision making, he just wasn’t very good at it.”

“Yes! Exactly.”

She has fond memories of him. “One time I was hospitalized for an acute illness, and Roshi and his wife Anne came to visit me in the hospital. He used to give us books to read, Zen books, when he was finished with them. He was a generous man. He and Anne threw a baby shower for me when I was pregnant. We were still living hand to mouth at that time, and they generously gave us a car seat for the baby. It meant a lot to us. He cared a lot about sangha members and relied on his wife to know how to express that.”

I ask how similar Aitken’s Diamond Center was to Rochester prior to when Toni Packer disrupted things.

“It was quite different. It surprised us how different it was. There were structural differences. In Rochester we had 35-minute rounds, and at the Diamond Sangha there were 25-minute rounds. And so, of course, we thought, ‘Oh, these people must not be as serious!’ Then we realized there’s just as much zazen, just timed differently. Of course, we were practicing at Koko An then, which was a house in Manoa – a three-bedroom house – and we were sitting in the living room/dining room area, and you could only fit twenty people max. So it was a smaller sangha. And when we had sesshin, we had only two bathrooms in the house. So the women all shared one bathroom in the early morning, and we would all just lineup in front of the toilet, waiting for our turn. Line up in front of the sink, waiting for our turn. That’s just the way it was. The men all shared the downstairs bathroom. So – you know – it was very intimate. And there were only three bedrooms in the house, so we laid futons all next to each other. A lot of the guys slept in the zendo. So, yeah, it was very intimate and intense in that way. And there was a little cottage outside where Roshi and Anne stayed, and that’s where the dokusan room was.”

“Those are physical differences,” I point out. “Was the atmosphere or teaching environment different?”

“Well, Roshi Aitken was a different person than Kapleau, and in Rochester at that time – I think it’s changed a lot now – the kyosaku was used without you asking for it, whereas at Koko An, you always had to ask for it. There was a lot more emphasis on kensho and recognizing people who had had kensho in Rochester. There was a ceremony they went through only after they’d finished all of the Miscellaneous Koans, and then they received a rakusu. So anybody wearing a rakusu, you know they’d finished the Miscellaneous Koans.”

One difference I’d been aware of was that Kapleau discouraged political activity. He wanted his students to focus on their practice rather than on social issues, whereas Robert Aitken was very socially involved.

“He was,” Kathy says. “But he divorced it from his teaching. He invited us to do sit-ins with him and whatever, but he didn’t judge us either way, whether we went or not, and he always went. So he was out there sitting with his sign on the side of the road even with his wheelchair to the end. ‘The system stinks,’ and I was there next to him.”

“You joined him?”

“I did. I joined him a number of times. Protesting against the Iraq War, just standing on the side of the road with signs.  It was an interesting experience. He put himself out there. ‘This is what I believe.’ And – you know – he didn’t pay taxes for a long time because he refused to allow his money to support the military. He put the money into a special account, and I think he later had to pay it all. But he had strong convictions.”

“What was it that attracted you to all of this?” I ask. “You moved all the way from New England across the continent to Hawaii. What were you getting from it? What was it doing for you?”

“I just needed to know. From the time I was a teenager, I just knew there was something that I wasn’t seeing.”

“And Zen helped you address that issue?”

“It has. Yes.”

“How?”

Once again she reflects for a while before answering. “It’s my way of pursuing, trying to figure out for myself what life is about.”

“So a way to address certain questions you had, but how did it do that?”

“It was a way of looking at this, my life – what this is – in a different way through doing zazen that I couldn’t do any other way. I could see more clearly. Zazen helped me see more clearly.”

The Diamond Sangha is a lay group – “We don’t do ordination” – and she is currently a “Dharma Guide.” “It’s the equivalent of what other groups call an apprentice teacher.”

I ask how that came about.

“Well, I just kept practicing,” she says with a chuckle. “I practiced with Aitken Roshi when he was alive from about 1985 ’til he retired in 1996. And then Nelson Foster became our teacher, but he only came about three times a year because he was based in California. Then after about ten years, he invited Michael Kieran to be teacher, so I switched over to Michael. He’s my fourth teacher now. I’ve been working with Michael since 2005, and he invited me to be a Dharma Guide.”

“How is Michael different from the other three? What makes him unique?”

There is another long, reflective pause. “The practice is pretty similar in the dokusan room. Michael is carrying this lineage with integrity and vigor. Nothing has been lost; there’s no watering down of the practice. Like Aitken Roshi and Nelson, Michael is fully committed to this teaching and to the Way. He is particular and exacting. I trust him. And he has gotten very involved in the sangha, looking at how everything we do supports our practice. In one example, he’s helped us develop a strong work practice – samu – in keeping up the place, making sure the place is clean and that the toilets are cleaned and the lawn is mowed. And it takes quite a lot of work. We have a large facility. And not only did it need to be done, but it is good practice. And it has worked very well. Not only has it helped our facility become a better physical place, it has helped our sangha come together and our practice come together. So that’s an emphasis that he has made. Not that the others didn’t do it, but Michael’s done it with some focus.”

The sangha members range in age from early 20s to those in their 70s.

“The aging hippies,” I suggest with a laugh.

“Yeah. But we really do span the range, and we are getting more younger folks. We have an orientation to practice that we offer once a month. During COVID we actually had to offer it twice a month because we had many, many more people interested in learning how to sit. But of the ten people who come to an orientation, maybe one will come back once or twice. And out of those, one of those will come back once or twice. Maybe one will come back and sit with us for a while. And out of those, only one will become a long-term member of the sangha. Only one percent.”

“It’s like that about everywhere,” I point out. “And I suspect it’s at least in part because they get what they want at that first orientation. They’re shown how to meditate, and that’s what they wanted. They don’t think they need to join a group to do that.”

“I think that’s right, and we emphasize Buddha, Dharma, Sangha in our orientations. I think the main reason people don’t come back is that practicing entails a lifestyle change. A change in your life. You’ve got to commit yourself to come at least once a week to sit with the group. And you’ve got to do longer-term sittings. You’ve got to do a zazenkai or sesshin to really practice. And it is a rare person who’s interested in changing their life to do that.”

I ask what she believes people look to her for now that she’s a Dharma Guide.

“Well, there’s a range, depending on where people are in their practice. Those who are working on advanced koans just want support working on their koan. Those who are new to the practice are looking for guidance. Guidance in their practice and also in their lives. Which aren’t that different. How do I deal with not knowing what to do in my life next? Or how do I deal with interpersonal difficulties? What do I do with all these emotions I’m feeling? They also are looking for guidance in how to practice. How do I stop getting carried away by these thoughts?”

“So they might come to you for the type of things somebody else might turn to a therapist for?”

“Right. The difference is that I try to provide a Dharma perspective to support them rather than a psychological perspective. The purpose of psychology is different than that of Zen practice.”

“And you? What is it that you hope for the people who work with you?”

“I hope that people will gain more insight into their own lives and be able to deal with the ups and downs of their lives. You know, I overheard Kapleau telling a story once in a gathering. It happened after Toni decided to leave, and he had come back. And there was a gathering. I think it was at the Ox Cart, Rafe Martin’s bookstore. I was standing next to Kapleau, and somebody asked, ‘How do you weather these difficulties? I mean, this is major what happened.’ And he said, ‘You just keep facing into the waves. Just like a boat. If you face into the waves, you can cut through the waves and not have quite as rough a time. If you go broad beam to the waves, you’re going to get tossed over.’ It really impressed me. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s an appropriate metaphor.’ So I hope people will learn skills to keep facing into the waves because life is going to continue to throw us waves. And if you let yourself be thrown by your emotions and all your thoughts and all the other things that assail you about change, it’s going to be very difficult for you. Whereas if you just face what’s there, that’s what is needed.”

“Has there been a continuation of Aitken Roshi’s political activism in the Sangha? Are there remnants of that legacy?”

“There is not. Although I think people feel very strongly politically individually. We are trying to address how people can include everyone and not get so one-sided in this divided world. Michael, I, and others are very interested in looking at Hawaiian culture, what we can learn from them. We have what we call a Dharma Studies series every year –the Robert Baker Aitken Roshi Memorial Dharma Study Series – it’s funded by royalties from Roshi’s books. And for the last couple of years we’ve invited native Hawaiian people who are very active in their culture and their community to share with us about the place where we are, Palolo Valley, and also about the Hawaiian culture. And it’s been fascinating.”

An implied question running through our conversation is to what degree Zen remains relevant for contemporary North Americans. As we come to the end, she tells me: “I think that people – especially people who are caught up in a lot of the online stuff today – need more grounding so they can see what’s important and what’s not important. And I think that Zen practice is a way to see through to who we are and how we can better operate in the world. By ‘better’ I mean how we can decrease anguish, sadness, our conflict with how we think things should be and how they are.”

It’s as good a reason to maintain the tradition as any I can think of.

Every Day Zen Sangha  –

Susan Moon begins our conversation by telling me she came to California from Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1960s, as “a kind of wandering hippie with my then husband.

“My parents were WASP agnostics,” she says. “God was never mentioned in the house. That worried me as a child, and I thought, ‘What if there is a God? I better check it out! He might be mad at me if I don’t believe in him.’ But they were very progressive, and I am very grateful for the values I got from them. And then they and I became interested in the Friends, the Cambridge Friends Meeting. My grandmother was a Quaker, and she was my first spiritual teacher. She was a very spiritual person, interested in Zen, and she taught me about Zen even as a child and told me about it and the adventures she’d had when she visited Zen monasteries in Japan herself. So I was always a bit of a seeker independently of my parents who didn’t have much interest in that. They weren’t upset, I guess, when I went to the Episcopal Church as a teenager and joined the teenage group. But then that lasted only a couple of weeks because I thought it was very unspiritual. So it was when I was living in Berkeley already . . .”

I hold up my hand and interrupt her, “Let’s take a step back. What took you to Berkeley?”

“Well, my husband was a writer. He’s a very smart Harvard dropout visionary type, and very active with the Civil Rights movement and a radical person. And he wanted to go to Texas – Corpus Cristi, Texas, where he’d gone as a child with his grandparents – to finish a novel he was working on. And we went there with our baby and lived in a sort of motel cottage on the beach in Corpus Cristi, Texas, which in winter there’s nobody there. We were sort of the only occupants. It was terrible! Weird and lonely. Then he had a couple of psychotic breakdowns as a result of who-knows-what, combination of drugs and kind of crazy mother. Whatever. And I was there with him in Corpus Cristi, Texas. And he was completely paranoid, and I didn’t know what to do. So I called our good friend, Adam Hochschild, who became the founder of Mother Jones Magazine later and is a wonderful writer, and I said, ‘Help! What can I do?’ And he said, ‘Come out here, and I’ll help you.’ And we came and landed in Berkeley, and he got us appointments with a psychiatrist, and we stayed with him, and he was just incredibly kind and helped us, and then we ended up staying in Berkeley and separating and divorcing a few years later.”

It was 1969 when they arrived in Berkeley, the period when a lot of young people were making their way not only to California in general but to the San Francisco area in particular, many of them paying at  a visit to the San Francisco Zen Center along the way. Zen was literally in the air in Berkeley, with Alan Watts’ talks on KPFA radio. Susan remembers hearing him in 1973, and then a friend told her, “‘Oh, there’s this incredibly hip place in the mountains. It’s so hip, and there are these people there who are being Buddhist monks in this remote valley, and they make the most amazing bread! And you can go visit there.’

“So I went there as a guest one weekend in the early days of Tassajara when it was kind of informal, and I just loved it. And this was right after my husband and I split up, and I thought, ‘Gosh, if I was not a single-mother, I would come here and be a monk.’ And then somebody said, ‘Well, if you like this here, there’s a Zen Center in Berkeley.’ Which I didn’t know. So then I came home and started going to the Berkeley Zen Center.”

The resident teacher at Berkely was Mel Weitsman. I tell Susan that Mel was one of the three people who took part in the very first interview I conducted in this series.

“Wow! Well, he was great. He was like my grandpa or something.”

I ask her to tell me about him.

“Well, he was very . . . stolid and kind of practical in a way. And he wasn’t really what I expected a Zen teacher to be. He was sort of disappointing to me at the beginning because he wasn’t wild and poetic and flamboyant in any way, and he didn’t seem like he was going inspire me to have a great awakening. But my respect for him grew a lot over the years, and I’m very, very grateful to him for his ‘thereness,’ his ability to be completely present and supportive and really selfless. He was really so unnarcissistic. His lack of charisma was a very generous thing in a way. He wasn’t trying to be something to everybody or be a star or anything.

“But I also continued to want a little more intellectual stimulation or a certain kind of understanding of my own deep existential suffering and longing which was so intense. I was always having this terrible longing that was not satisfied. And I always felt, ‘What . . . what . . . what is it? I can’t get it. I’m never going to get it. What is it?’ And I felt like he didn’t get that, although he probably did get it much more than I give him credit for. Whatever I said, he would always just say, ‘Well, just sit zazen and it will drift away.’ And that isn’t what would happen. I would sit down in sesshin, and my mind tortures would get all the more intense. It was sort of like the perfect opportunity for these different tracks dug in my brain. I’d talk to myself about how I couldn’t get it. How it was so hard, and how did everybody else get what was the meaning of life, and I didn’t? Anyway, it got worse, and I would just have to flee from the zendo, go out for a walk or something which led me to study with other teachers as well, that longing.”

I ask who the other teachers were.

“Joko Beck was very helpful to me. She used to come up to Berkeley and do retreats which I would go to, and I went down to Pacifica a few times to do retreats with her. I also really loved Maurine Stuart, but she was far away in Cambridge. She came to San Francisco Zen Center and Green Gulch a couple of times, and I sat with her there. She was really wonderful. And also Robert Aitken I loved, and he came to Berkeley sometimes to talk, and also – but that was sort of later – the Buddhist Peace Fellowship was very important to me, and that connected me with Robert Aitken. He was a really helpful teacher. And then there were two more that would be worth mentioning, Reb Anderson at San Francisco Zen Center.” Reb was Richard Baker’s successor as abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. When co-abbots were introduced and term limits imposed on abbots, Reb served as co-abbot with Mel.

“I had wanted to go to Tassajara ever since that first time long ago. I vowed to go to Tassajara and do a practice period there before I was fifty. So when I was 49, I went to Tassajara, and I did a practice period led by Reb Anderson. And I hadn’t practised with him before, and Mel and Reb were kind of alternating leading practice periods at that time, and I chose one that Reb was leading on purpose because I wanted to connect with a different teacher. And we had a good connection, and I felt Reb did see this kind of angst and existential crisis, and he responded to it. And he was almost like the opposite of Mel in various ways. He was very charismatic, and I think there was some trouble with that. So he was my teacher, my main teacher for a while. I went to Green Gulch to be in a group with him, and he helped me, and he was generous. And I was shuso[1] with him at Green Gulch for a practice period in 1996, but I also had some trouble with the adulation that his students had for him, and the sort of feeling that you had to ask him if you were going to change the type of toothpaste you were going to use. He said that one time. He said, ‘Well, if you’re practicing with me, you should talk to me before you change your kind of toothpaste you use.’ I mean, he was joking about it, but I didn’t like that way of being. And all this time, I continued to live in Berkeley and go to Berkeley Zen Center. And I would go every Saturday to the talk, and I would continue to be with Mel and really appreciated the sangha in Berkeley, and Mel, and his steadiness, and his teaching. That never changed.

“And I knew Norman Fischer.” Fischer was Mel’s heir and served as co-abbot of SFZC3 with Mel when Reb’s term came to an end. “I knew Norman as a friend because I knew people in the poetry scene. My brother-in-law, Bob Perelman – who is not at all a Buddhist – is a close friend of Norman’s and part of that poetry crowd. I had a little publishing thing years ago called Open Books, and I published books about the Peace Movement, and I published Norman’s first book of poetry, which nobody knows about anymore, which was a little small-press thing called, Like a Walk Through a Park. So I knew Norman as a friend and as a poet, and then there he was at Green Gulch teaching, and he was a wonderful teacher, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe Norman could be my teacher.’ And then I thought, ‘No! No! He couldn’t be my teacher. He’s my friend.’”

She talked about her quandary to some Zen people who assured it wasn’t a problem. “So, anyway, Norman became my teacher as well as my friend. And then, about a year later, he left Green Gulch and started Every Day Zen. So I was part of Every Day Zen from the beginning in 2000. So now Every Day Zen and Berkeley Zen Center are both my main sanghas. Berkeley Zen Center is sort of the place in a way. I’m just so grateful that it’s there. That’s made a huge difference in my life, and it’s a wonderful sangha. And I worked with Alan Senauke for many years at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship when he was Executive Director and I was editing the magazine there. So I feel like that’s my family, and it’s there, and I can go to this place, and there’s something happening there. And Every Day Zen isn’t a place. We rent a room in a church to have our meetings, but it is a sangha. It’s a wonderful sangha, and Norman is great, and it’s really enlivened my practice a lot and helped me a lot and most of the teaching I do is in Every Day Zen Sangha. Not all, but a lot.”

Although Aitken and some of the other people she studied were koan teachers, Susan tells me that she did not take up koan practice. “I did a little bit of Mu with Joko and Aitken Roshi, but I don’t think I scratched the surface. I didn’t feel like I was really doing much.”

“Sometimes it’s that sense of angst and not necessarily knowing what that angst is based in that drives people to koan practice,” I note.

“You could be right,” she says, laughing. “I could have missed my true calling because I didn’t stay with any of them as a very long-term discipline. They influenced me a lot and encouraged me a lot. Well Maurine was too far away, but I just loved her, though, I think, as a woman. That was another important thing for me to see, because in the early days there were few women teachers. And then both Joko and Maurine were very encouraging to me as a woman practitioner. And Robert Aitken was very encouraging to me as a person concerned about social justice and political activism. When I first started sitting at Berkeley there was a kind of a divide. It was the ’70s, and Mel had a very strong belief that we shouldn’t say anything political, because he wanted everybody to feel free to come there. Which I think is a very reasonable point of view now, but, at the time, I was outraged. And I was the editor of the Berkeley Zen Center newsletter for a couple of years, which came out once a month or something, and I had a kind of a battle with Mel when I tried to put in an announcement about a meeting of a group of Buddhists who wanted to come together to meet about blockading Livermore Weapons Lab or something. This separation was a painful thing for me because I had activist friends – I was an activist before I was a Buddhist – and they kind of had the feeling, ‘Why do you want to be a Buddhist? Those people just want to contemplate their navels and think about themselves all the time.’ And the Buddhists thought, ‘Why do you want to be an activist? Those people are just angry all the time; they’re lost in their anger.’ Of course, I’m totally exaggerating about what those people thought, and neither was true probably. But I felt this divide, and I was so, so grateful when the Buddhist Peace Fellowship – thanks basically to Robert Aitken and others – formed, and then those two worlds came together. And then better yet, I got a job working there, editing this magazine, so my Buddhism, my activism, and my love of writing and words and editing all came together in one job, which was very perfect for me.”

“You said Mel didn’t want people talking about political issues because he wanted everyone to feel free to attend there. What was the Berkeley community like in the early days?”

“Young, for one thing. We were a lot younger. In fact, young people are coming to the Berkeley sangha again, but at one time, nobody new seemed to be coming; we just kept getting old. Anyway, everything felt sort of homemade, and we were always having bake sales for this or that. Going up to the Sonoma Mountain Zen Center – Bill Kwong’s place – for the grape harvest, ’cause when they first bought that land it was a muscatel grape vineyard, and they continued to harvest the grapes for a few years.” Bill Kwong was another teacher associated with the San Francisco Zen Center. “So all comers were welcome to go to the grape harvest. We did sort of funky weird things like that. And the people in Berkeley were kind of Berkeley types, sort of a raggedy bunch or something. Auto mechanics and gardeners, seamstresses. And people just very enthusiastic about sitting down and staying still.”

Another teacher was Ed Brown, who was the author of very successful Tassajara Bread Book. Susan remembers a talk he gave at Tassajara about Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. “‘Buddha taught that life is suffering. And Suzuki Roshi taught that too, and we’re suffering all the time. Even when we don’t know it, we’re suffering. Even when we think we’re having a good time we’re suffering.’ And then everybody burst out laughing. I liked that paradoxical viewpoint. And later when I wrote my first book, The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi, it’s about an imaginary Zen master named Tofu Roshi – who was slightly modeled on Mel – and Tofu Roshi’s teaching was that even when we’re suffering, we’re actually having a good time

“But people at Berkeley Zen Center, there was a lot of sweeping and gardening and baking. And sometimes we would have classes. And Mel taught us about taking care of what’s in front of you, about the chop-wood/carry-water aspect of Zen practice. And we would clean the zendo and the community room on Monday mornings, and sometimes I got the job of washing the leaves of the big rubber plant with a solution of water and milk with a sponge. I mean who would think that was part of Zen practice! Or waxing the floor.”

She didn’t attend the San Francisco Zen Center very often but her impression was that it was “more dour,” which causes us both to laugh. “Everybody was in black. It was after Suzuki Roshi had died. So when I first was going there it was Baker Roshi’s territory, and people were wearing all their robes and everything all the time. And people were famous for not being friendly. It was a very famous place for not being friendly. You would knock on the door, and somebody would stick their nose out and say, ‘What do you want?’ So I wasn’t drawn to City Center, but I was drawn to Green Gulch which was so beautiful and sort of still newish and to Tassajara, of course.”

As our conversation draws to a close, I ask her how she would describe her approach to Zen as a teacher.

“Well, I would say my practice and my offering as a teacher – insofar as I am a teacher, which is a different way of being a teacher – is really to be my authentic self, to sort of model the teaching that we’re already enlightened, and our job is just to know that and rediscover that. We’re already enlightened. That’s the thing that I need to remind myself, that I’ve been reminding myself and that I try to help others with and what that looks like. I help people see that, ‘You’re not the only person that thinks you don’t know how to sit zazen. You’re not the only person who can’t overcome your greed or self-clinging or whatever.’ So I reveal myself in my vulnerability not to get people’s attention or something. I’m just talking about how it is to be a human being. And I do this in my writing, and I know from the responses I get that one of the things people appreciate is that they see that I – who has some credibility as a long-term Zen practitioner – am also a person who might get up in the middle of the night and go raid the ice box and eat the rest of the ice cream with a spoon standing at the freezer. Or I might still be beset by longing at 3:00 in the morning and think, ‘Oh, no! What’s wrong with me?’ That might still happen to me. And . . . and I have faith nonetheless in the Dharma. The word ‘faith’ means something to me. I have faith in the Dharma, that it’s there for us.”

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[1] “Head seat.” The head student in a practice activity.

Kanzeon Big Mind Zen

Dennis Genpo Merzel is the founder and abbot of the international Kanzeon Big Mind Sangha. He was the second person – after Bernie Glassman – to whom Taizan Maezumi gave Dharma transmission. Susan Myoyu Andersen was the tenth.

“Well, Genpo is complex,” she tells me. “But one thing that I will say about him, he always seemed to understand and care about my concerns and my issues. If I had a grievance at Zen Center, he would always listen. I called him a World Class Carer. He really cared about people. For all of his challenges and issues and problems – which are very real – he also really cares about people.”

I haven’t met Genpo in person. My conversation with him took place over Skype. But one gets the impression of a strong personality. He is witty and charming. I suspect he’s an easy person to like. He’s also a guy who was asked in an open letter signed by sixty-six teachers – affiliated “with all of the major schools of Zen in the west” – to no longer “represent” himself as a Zen teacher, although one of those who signed the letter admitted to me that if he were asked to do so now he would decline.

It’s complex.

“I first heard of Zen around 1969, from a man named Fred Ancheta, when I went to buy some marijuana and LSD,” Genpo tells me. He’s also a good storyteller. “I go to an unfamiliar house to pick up this stuff, and he opens the door, and I go, ‘Oh, my God! My old friend, Fred!’ We had gone to Junior High School and Junior College together. So we sat down and smoked a joint, and he sold me these hits of acid. On the way out, I notice two books lying on the floor. The Way of Zen by Alan Watts and Zen Buddhism by D. T. Suzuki. I asked him, ‘What’s Zen?’ Fred said, ‘Well, I’ve been studying Zen, and I think it’s where everything in the West is leading – Western Philosophy, Western spirituality, Western psychology, Western science – everything is leading towards Zen.’ And that was it. I left.

“Two years later, I’m out in the Mojave Desert. I was having a difficult time in a new relationship that had only been going on for about a year. And I had been divorced already. I was 26. I’d gotten divorced at 25, and I found the same pattern going on. I felt confined, restricted, and was having a difficult time, so I needed some space. So I told my partner, ‘I’m going to go to the desert, and I’m going to invite my friend, Kurt, and we’ll camp for a few days, and I’ll be back on Monday.’ So I invited my friend Kurt, and he brought along his new girlfriend, and the three of us went out to a place in the Red Rocks called Jawbone Canyon. They decided to hike off alone, and I decided to go to the top of the nearest mountain, and I climbed up the mountain.

“I sit down, and I ask myself two questions. The first question was how could I have screwed up my life so badly? I’m only 26 years old, and I’m already divorced. I’d had the expectation of being much more stable than that, living a long life with my first wife, and I’m already divorced. And I’m in a relationship with the same patterns. How could I do this to myself?

“The second question came up when I looked out and saw my VW camper where we were going to be for the next three days. I look out there, and I say, ‘Well that’s home.’ Then, ‘Wait a minute. That’s not home. Home is back in Long Beach where I live across the street from the ocean, on Ocean Boulevard.’  

“Then something happened. Body and mind dropped off. I became one with the universe, one with the interconnectedness of all things, the oneness of the universe. I am that. In other words, God, Love, the Universe, the Whole. The universe opened up, and I realized not only am I always home, it’s unconditional. There is no other place but here, now, this. I’m always here/now, and it’s always home.

“It was profound. To this day it’s probably the most influential experience of my entire life. I’ve had bigger experiences, but not one that was so influential. It changed my life. Now, my friend Kurt had a PhD in Psychology from the University of California Santa Barbara, and he said, ‘You know, the way you were talking when we got reconnected that evening, you sound very Zen. I think you had a Zen experience. They call it a kensho.’ 

“Now, if he had said, as a psychologist, ‘You sound insane, you sound really screwed up, you need to go to a mental hospital,’ I would have had a very different life. He saved my life. And for that, I’m forever grateful. He changed my life by saying those words, ‘You had a Zen experience.’ Because he could have taken the perspective that my mother did. She said, ‘Dennis you have gone insane.’ ‘No mom,’ I said, ‘I have gone sane!’

“Kurt gave me a copy of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha when we got back, and I read it. It was very powerful for me, and I started to study about Buddhism, all kinds of Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism and Hinduism. I began to study Carl Jung and Freud, Maslow and all the other great therapists and philosophers at that time. I studied, and I studied, and I studied all about this kind of transformation. I was trying to find out what happened to me – you know? – trying to grasp what happened.

“But I was most at home with Zen and the koans and the Zen Masters. And those were all Chinese. I didn’t study the Japanese, only a few like Dogen Zenji and Hakuin. It was all these Chinese. You know, Huang Po and the Sixth Patriarch, all of those great ones. But I’m not an avid reader. So I didn’t really read all of each book; I just read parts of them.

“I was teaching school, at the time. I gave notice and said in June, when the school year’s up, I’m taking my pension, and retiring. So in June, I hit the road in that VW camper. I went all over the northwest, up into Canada. I sold my camper in Montana, and I hiked up through Glacier National Park, fifty miles on my own over glaciers in Adidas tennis shoes no socks.

“I met two guys and hung out with them. I didn’t have any food. I just saw a sign, it said ‘Fifty miles to Waterton Canada,’ and I just took it. 26 years old, kind of young, dumb, and all that. I met these two men the first night, and I had a plastic bag of brown rice, and a little cooking pot with me. So I cooked this brown rice and offered to share it with them. It was all my food for a week. Then they shared their food, and they had plenty. So we became best buddies. Spent five more days together hiking. On the third day, I hiked up this mountain to where I could look down on fifty mountain peaks. It was extraordinary. On that peak I realized my destiny, I realized I was to be a Zen Master, that was my destiny. I believe that set the rest of my life in a certain direction. On the fourth night, we were visited by a grizzly. We covered our heads under our sleeping bags, and he eventually left. It was one scary moment. On the fifth day, we arrived at where they had a camper waiting, and we drove together around a few National Parks, Vancouver Island, down to Seattle, and then we split up.

“Then I spent a year in a mountain cabin owned by a man I met hitchhiking. He had a cabin five miles from town on a road that went into and through a great ranch called the Santa Margarita Ranch, one of the largest in Californian history. So after this journey, I come back and join him there. He invites me because he had been robbed three times. He was a musician, so he had guitars. He had a piano which, of course, wasn’t stolen, but he had these guitars, he had a sitar and other musical instruments, and some sleeping bags. They stole everything. Wiped him out. I said, ‘Listen. I don’t have a home. I’m a Zen person.’ A Zen monk, I called myself. ‘You let me stay here, and I’ll take care of it. I’ll look after the place for you. I’ll make sure nobody robs you.’ He said, ‘Deal!’ So I said, ‘How long?’ He said, ‘Indefinitely.’ But it became problematic ten months later in May when my former girlfriend joined me. He needed to have privacy when he came with his wife and his kids, and we were on the property, so he asked us to leave in June.

“So I was there from September to June. I believe that year alone in the mountain cabin really was the groundwork for the rest of my life. I spent it chopping wood and carrying water, alone with my own thoughts and mind which gave me an understanding of who I am. So at Christmas I decide to go spend some time with my mother. So I go down there, and in the meantime I buy an old jeep.

“So now I went down to San Luis Obispo occasionally for a few hours – you know – hanging out there. I put a sign up in the local health food store, and I invite people to come out and sit Zen with me. So in February, people started to come out and sit with me. We had a little circle, maybe twenty people, and I’m teaching them Zen. One of them happened to know yoga, so he taught us yoga. Another one was an astrologist, so he did all of our charts for us. So we had this little group of people hanging out, and once or twice a week they’d come out to my place, and I’d teach them how to sit and we’d read Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

“One day an older gentleman, probably in his 70’s – a man named Earl Eddy – comes driving up in a black Cadillac. He’s wearing all black, and he brings out this black round cushion which I later learned was a zafu. He sets it down, and he brings out this bell, and these clappers, and he says, ‘Do you mind if I organize this a little bit?’ Because he looked out and saw twenty hippies sitting in a circle on bathmats and blankets and sleeping bags. He wants us sitting more formally.

“When it was over, he said, ‘Let’s talk.’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ And he says, ‘It’s time for you to meet a teacher. You need to meet a Zen Master. I’ve been studying with this young master named Maezumi Sensei, and he has a teacher, an older man, my age coming to visit and spending some time. His name is Koryu Osaka Roshi. And they’re going to be holding this sesshin’ – this was mid-March of ’72 – ‘they’re going to be holding this sesshin beginning the third week of March. If we get out to a place where I can make a phone call, I’ll call Maezumi Sensei and ask if you can attend this sesshin.

“It was very interesting because several days before Earl arrived at the cabin, I had a very powerful experience. I was sitting, and I realized that I needed to meet a true living Buddha, a Zen Master who embodied the lineage.  I knew that I needed to be crushed, ground to dust, that my ego had become so big, so inflated, because I realized I am The Buddha. However, even though I felt I did not need any affirmation of this, it was important to be face-to-face with a living Buddha Patriarch.

“So we go to a local store, phone Maezumi Roshi, and Maezumi Roshi says, ‘Bring him on.’ So that Wednesday, I hop a freight train and ride it down to Los Angeles. Then I come over to the Zen Center, and I meet Maezumi Roshi, I meet Koryu Roshi, I meet Bernie Glassman, I meet Bob Lee, I meet Sydney Musai Walter, Charlotte Joko Beck, so many future Zen Masters, I don’t know how many. All eventually became Zen Masters, but, at that time, there was only one, Koryu Roshi.

“At the end of that sesshin, Maezumi Roshi received Inka, final seal of approval, from Koryu Roshi. And from then he was also known as Roshi. I didn’t immediately have a warm feeling with him. But I felt love for Koryu Roshi. I came into interview with him, and he said to me, ‘I want you to count your breaths.’ I did that, and I came back a few days later. He said, ‘How is it going? Can you count to 10 without losing count?’  I told him, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘You’re ready for Mu.’ He asked me, ‘What is Mu?’  

“I went out. I sat down. I came back in. I said, ‘I’m done with koan study. I know them all. It’s all me. It’s all my life. All the koans have the same answer. It’s me. Nothing else. Just this,’” Genjo says, patting his own chest. “He rings me out. And then I come back in, probably later that day, and I say, ‘Okay. What do you want me to do?’ He said, ‘I want you to do koan study.’ I said, ‘Okay. Where do I start?’ He says, ‘What is Mu?’ So that began that. Then Maezumi Roshi starts doing koans as dokusan after that. But that was my initial experience with Koryu Roshi.

“So I love Koryu Roshi. He’s so warm, so intimate. Available, open, receptive. And the most powerful human being I ever met. Enormous power. He had such energy and such equanimity and such power. And he was very personal. He really touched our hearts.

“With Maezumi . . .  I was assigned to work with him. At that time I was doing a lot of bodybuilding, so I was able to bench press nearly 400 pounds. We’re moving boulders. He’s doing a rock garden, and I was assigned to move the boulders for him. So these heavy boulders, I’m lifting them up and putting them down, and he says, ‘Nah, nah, nah. Put it over there.’ I put it over there. ‘Oh, no, no! Move it back to where it was.’ This went on for days.

“But at some point we’re doing this rock garden, and he said, ‘Who’s your teacher?’ I say, ‘I don’t have a teacher.’ He says, ‘Well, what’s your Zen experience?’ ‘I’ve read D. T. Suzuki; I’ve read Alan Watts.’ He says, ‘Alan Watts! He’s not Zen. Okay,’ he says to me,” – Genpo speaks with a gruff Japanese accent – “‘What is Zen?!’ I took the spade that I had in my hand, and I shoved it down in the ground and said, ‘Just this! He said, ‘Your Zen eye is only partially open. You need deeper study.’ So, okay, I was a little hurt because I felt he didn’t see me. But I accepted it. And I said, ‘By the way I’m leaving this sesshin.’ He said, ‘Why are you leaving?’ I said, ‘This is not Zen.’ He said, ‘What are you talking about?’ I said, ‘This is full of rituals and bowing. Zen is not about bowing to idols! Who are we bowing to? Aren’t we bowing to ourselves, the Buddha?’ He said, ‘Wow! You are the most arrogant young man I have ever met.’ He said, ‘I want you to come and visit me after lunch.’ I said, ‘Okay. I’ll come. I’ll wait till then.’ Because I was going to leave right after the work period.

“So I sit the next three periods, whatever it was. I come up to him, and he starts questioning me. Who have I studied with, where did I study, what have I done? I said, ‘I live in the mountains five miles from any other human being, and I sit six/seven hours a day on this picnic table, because there’s rattlesnakes all over the place, and the only way I can get away from them is to sit on top of this table. And I said, ‘I just sit, and I chop wood, and I carry water.’ I had no electricity. I had no stove. I had an old Coleman, a little camping stove. And that’s how I survived. So I said, ‘I’m going back home.’ He said, ‘Well, at least spend the next four days with us and finish the sesshin.’ I say, ‘Okay. I can do that. I’ll complete it. I’m not a quitter.’ So I stayed, and that’s when I had the dokusan with Koryu Roshi and so on.

“Well, I went back to my cabin until June, and I had some correspondence with Maezumi Roshi. He wrote me a few times. And I apologized for my arrogance and for the way I talked to him.

“So, when I went back down to Los Angeles several months later, Roshi allowed me to park my old van in the back yard. During that time, Roshi was having a hard time. He had been divorced from a woman who was a Buddhist nun. And his back was hurting him greatly, and he had to lie flat on his back. He was a young man, only 42 years old. But he was hurting, lying a futon on the floor in the middle of the living room. I sat in lotus posture next to him, and we got acquainted. Maybe he saw something in me. I don’t know, but we got very close and very intimate.

“We sat there for many hours and for many days just in . . .” His voice chokes up, and his eyes tear. “It makes me cry. It was a very intimate time. He was so vulnerable. There was no hierarchy. The patriarch wasn’t there. He was just an ordinary, confused man whose back was killing him and didn’t know how to be a normal human being. He was trained in a monastery, became a monk at 13 or something like that. At 18 he goes to a temple and lives with Koryu Roshi. At 22 he finishes Kanazawa University, then two years at Sojiji Zen Monastery, and then he is sent to Los Angeles as a young priest of 24. He knows how to be a temple monk. He doesn’t know anything about the world and America and relationships. So he was a confused young man in some ways, and it touched my heart. That’s when he truly touched my heart.

“Maezumi Roshi was, in my opinion, as arrogant as I was. There was a story about when he met Suzuki Roshi for the first time in San Francisco, and Jakusho Kwong Roshi was there, who told me the story. He said after Maezumi left Suzuki Roshi said, ‘That’s the most arrogant young man I’ve ever met in my entire life.’ That is exactly what Roshi said about me. ‘You are the most arrogant young man I’ve met in my entire life.” Ditto! Two of a kind. 

“Then he got married. I don’t know, things change. He became this hierarchical Maezumi the Roshi, never taking off the hat of the master. I think maybe four or five times in my entire life after that first year did he put aside that role. In 2009 or ’10, I was teaching a workshop and his wife, Ekyo, was there, and I made that statement, and she says, ‘Wow! For me, six or seven times.’”

Genpo studied with Maezumi for nearly twenty-four years.  

“I went out on my own in ’84, started sanghas throughout Europe. France, Poland, Germany, England, the Netherlands. And in ’95, Roshi dies and in ’99 I had this notion from way back in ’73 when I was living in Santa Barbara how in China Daoism and Buddhism became Zen. Before that it was just Buddhism. I felt that in the West the marriage was not going to be with Daoism but with Western psychotherapy.”

After Maezumi died, Genpo worked with Hal Stone on the Jungian concept of “shadows.” Stone is the founder of “Voice Dialogue.” Genpo describes calls him “my mentor – not teacher, mentor – after Maezumi died.”

“I had shadows like the rest of us. So many shadows, oh, my God! Everything we think is Zen, as enlightened and as right, we disowned their opposites. So I felt very spiritual, very awakened. I believed I was not competitive; that was a shadow. I was not greedy, another shadow. I was not hurtful and not mean. I was not un-loving.  Those were all shadows. We believe we are enlightened so we disown all that we believe is not what an enlightened person would be, and all these aspects of our self that we disown come back as saboteurs. They undermine our lives and the lives of others.

“One time Hal was working with Maezumi Roshi, and he asked Maezumi, ‘May I speak to the voice of anger?’ And Roshi said, ‘I don’t get angry.’ Which we all knew was bullshit. Hal said, ‘We all have a voice that’s called “anger.” Can I speak to it?’ And Maezumi said, ‘I don’t get angry!’ That’s a shadow. We all have shadows. It has been my lifelong project since then to reveal my shadows and bring them to light. Because otherwise we are really unhealthy, we are harmful to ourselves and others. We all have shadows. Nobody gets away without shadows. And if we’re willing to look at those shadows, that’s one thing. If we’re ashamed of those shadows, if we deny that we have shadows, if we disown that we have shadows, we’re really kind of screwed. And if Zen is to take root in this Western world, those shadows must be revealed to us. We must look at and recognize them, we must look into ourselves. We must do what Dogen Zenji says, which is ‘To study the Buddha Way is to study the self.’”

I ask how he believes his teaching differs from Maezumi’s.

“Many, many, many, ways. The root is the same. The core realization is one. But the way that we manifest it, the way we teach it, the way that we approach it is completely different. That was his beauty, the uniqueness of every one of his twelve successors manifested differently.

“The difference? I’m really interested in shadows; Roshi wouldn’t even know what that term means. I’m interested in where we’re stuck. Roshi’s interest was if we’re stuck, we didn’t sit enough. His answer to everything was, ‘Sit more.’ My answer is, ‘Work on yourself. Look at where you’re stuck.’”

“And when people come to you as a teacher,” I ask, “what are they looking for?”

“I don’t know. Everybody comes for different reasons. Some come because they want to become a Roshi.”

“That’s a career goal people have?”

“Some of them probably do. They come because the want to become a Roshi or an enlightened being. Or some come because they’re all screwed up. Some come because they’re hurting and in pain. They all come for different reasons. I can’t say why they come to me. But when people do come, they’re all looking for something, and I take each one as they are, who they are, and I try to work with them from that place. Not necessarily to give them what they want but eventually so that they can have what they want. Which I think, in the end, is to be free, at peace, happy, and joyful. I find very few Buddhists are free, at peace, joyful and happy. The Buddhist world is – in my opinion – often miserable and unhappy. Clinging to a lot of ideas and notions of what it means to be a Buddhist monk or a Buddhist. Buddhism is hurting in the West, and we need to recognize the elephant in the room if we want to breathe life back into it.”

“What’s killing it?”

“Ideas and notions, our Western notions and ideas. We’re very different than the Chinese or the Japanese or the Indians or the Koreans. We have lots of notions about what is right and wrong, or moral or immoral, or what’s good or bad. That was not the same in Asian cultures. They had Confucianism. They had Daoism. They had Mencius. They had a form of Zen that wasn’t conditioned by Western psychology or Western Christianity or Western Judaism.”

“Okay,” I say. “I wasn’t sure I was going to go here, but it looks like we got there anyway. You’ve got a reputation. 

“I have a reputation.”

In the late ’80s, Genpo was the abbot of a Zen community in Bar Harbor, Maine, which dissolved in part because of an affair he had with one of the members. Again, in 2011, while abbot of the Kanzeon Zen Center in Salt Lake City, he admitted to a number of extra-marital relationships, and – responding to calls for his resignation – announced he would disrobe as a Buddhist priest and withdraw from teaching. A few months, however, later he reversed his decision, arguing that too many people depended upon him spiritually for him to be able to do so. That led to the letter with the sixty-six signatures.

“Why do you think the things you’ve done bother people so much?”

“I really can’t answer that question. I’m sure it came to a head in January 2011 and has to do with my infidelity up to then.  It may also have to do with who I am, my personality, and of course who they are. However, I am grateful to those people who gave me a good reason to take a long insightful look at myself and my own shadows. Because of my past catching up with me, my karma, and they being upset with me, I saw I had allowed myself to become intoxicated with my own power, and I got stuck there. And in doing so I harmed and hurt people, people I love, people I care about, and my Dharma successors.  I certainly am not proud of my behavior and my immaturity thirteen-fourteen years ago. It has caused a split among my successors, which I would love to heal if possible. It has forced me to look deeply into myself, to take responsibility for my past actions, and to live and act with integrity and honesty, which I was not doing prior to January 2011. And I am very grateful for that.”

“Are things different now?” I ask.

“Very different. I feel very free from the Soto Zen School and from organized religion. I feel free, happy and grateful for the Zen lineage I come from. I live as a monk, not as a monastic monk or priest but as a hermit monk. I live here with my wife on the largest active volcano in the world, on the Big Island of Hawaii. Sometimes she’s here and sometimes she’s at our home in Oregon near my daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter in Newport. So I live here alone about half the time, and half the time with my wife.

“I’m a very private person in a way. I don’t have many friends on the island. I have some acquaintances, a few friends, but mostly I’m alone or with my wife and doggie, Kaya. And I teach in the mornings over Facetime or Zoom, and I have – I don’t know – about fifty personal students that I spend a lot of time with on video. They come and visit me here. Spend a week with me. We study together. Sometimes they come in groups, and we study as a group. The rest of the time, once a year we do a sesshin on the mainland. I still have several hundred students who are not as active, but a lot of people call me for help or follow me online.”