Atlanta Soto Zen Center –

Taiun Michael Elliston is the founder and guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Georgia.

He grew up in Centralia, Illinois. “Named after the Illinois Central Railroad. Due east of St. Louis, about 300 miles south of Chicago. Pretty much in the middle of the state,” he tells me.

His family weren’t actively religious, although, “They would drop us off at Sunday School. I actually went through baptism. I had some friends who were in the church. They went through baptism, so I went through baptism.”

I ask if it meant anything to him.

“Not as much as it meant to them. One guy, a friend of mine, became very emotional. So it was obviously deeply meaningful for him. Then an incident came about where you were expected to tithe, to bring in some kind of donation that you could afford. I think I was bringing fifty cents or something, and one time I couldn’t. We didn’t have enough money for me to take it to church, so it was a little embarrassing. And the teachings were strange for me. It was all just belief-based, of course, and it was a story about reality, a creation myth and all that. And it was like – you know – that could be true, but it just seemed very remote.

“We lived on a small farm – 20 acres – and had a barn and some sheds. We didn’t own the place; we rented it. And there was an opening between all the buildings out back which was overgrown, almost like a jungle, vines and everything. My sister said she’d come out there, and I’d be sitting on a chair in the middle of that space just staring into space. I was standing on my head and walking around on my knees with my legs crossed, just getting into yoga as a 6/7/8-year old without knowing what it was. So I spent a lot of time in isolation. Anecdotally, folks who are recognized as being creative, having careers in the arts, seem to share this trait, a lot of time alone as a child. You learn to entertain yourself.”

Michael is a visual artist. His brother and father were jazz musician. “Jazz was very big before rock-’n’-roll came along,” he reminds me. “My brother was very well known in Chicago; he played all the big jazz clubs there. So he had a lot of musician friends, and the LSD revolution was happening. And one of his drummer friends and I were talking, and I mentioned LSD, and he said, ‘Oh, I don’t do that anymore. I just do Zen.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s interesting. Tell me about that.’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you come this weekend? I’m going this weekend.’ So, I went with him and met Soyu Matsuoka Roshi, my teacher. And, as we say, the rest is history. I hadn’t read much about Zen. I’d read a little bit. But I was impressed by his warmth and his friendliness. His down-to-earth-ness and so on.”

Michael became a regular attendee,

“What you did when you came in, you had a place to put your shoes and things. It was a railroad apartment, and what would be the living room/dining room was the zendo. The altar was against the far wall of the dining room. And the baths and kitchen and his bedroom and stuff were in the back, and there was a back porch – typical railroad apartment, brownstone three storey walk up – and afterwards we’d sit back there and have tea, and he would talk a little bit; he would answer questions. It was mostly guys about my age. It was also hippie-dippy time, and Matsuoka Roshi would meet us in the vestibule by the door with a basket of clean socks. Because you had these – he couldn’t understand this at all – you had these guys walking in off Halstead Street bare-footed walking into his carpeted living room to learn meditation, sitting on his cushions with their filthy feet and legs. So there was this big basket of white socks, and he’d give each person a pair of socks to put on before they could come in. He was very fastidious, like most Japanese. And some of the Western American attitudes just really astonished and repelled him.”

Michael was studying Bauhaus Design at Illinois Tech at the time, and he discovered that Zen made a lot of sense in that context.

“Bauhaus was a design school set up to humanize the outputs of the industrial revolution. The whole foundation – the first-year approach – is immersion. You are immersed in certain media like stone, clay, plaster, wood, drawing, painting. In that way you sort of absorb the way in which physical media work.”

Meditation, he recognized, was another form of immersion. “So immersion in consciousness as a medium, I recognized that it was something familiar. ‘Oh! That’s what we’re doing here. I see what we’re doing.’ The theory is that if you sit still enough, straight enough, long enough, your own consciousness will start to break down. It will deconstruct. This is common in Zen teaching; the reality that we experience is actually a construct of the mind. And the only way to get past that construct is to sit still enough, straight enough, for long enough. The closest thing to sensory deprivation that they would have had back in India or China or Japan and so forth. As the meditator sits facing a blank wall, everything starts to break down. And so I could see it started happening right away. All those methods in the Bauhaus about training the senses had a one-to-one correlation with Zen.”

Fairly quickly Matsuoka recognized that Michael was someone he could rely upon.

“I started taking on teaching assignments. The schedule was Sundays, 10:00 and 2:00; there’d be two different groups coming, 10:00 in the morning and 2:00 in the afternoon. And then Tuesday and Thursday evenings. And that was it other than special meetings. We’d go out – he’d speak at the YMCA – he liked me to accompany him. He could see I’m articulate. He’d bring me to the public talks, and I would field the questions. The Q & A at the end. He liked the way I answered the questions; he wasn’t that comfortable with that kind of dialogue. He would give the talk, and he wrote them out so that he could read them in his thick Japanese accent.”

Then one day in 1967 or ‘68 – “Just before I moved to Atlanta, Matsuoka Roshi took me aside and, said, ‘You must become a priest. Not for yourself, but so that others will listen to you. We live in a credentialed society. If you don’t have credentials, no one will listen.’

“So I said, ‘Okay,’ and we did my ceremony. We did a discipleship  ceremony, and later a priesthood ceremony.”

In 1970, an employment opportunity took Michael to Atlanta. When Michael moved to Georgia, Matsukoka turned the Chicago community over to his heir, Richard Langlois, and moved to California.

“I was only with Matsuoka Roshi in Chicago from the beginning 1965 to 1970 when we both left. It was a little over a five-year stint in Chicago.”  

I ask how he established the Zen community in Atlanta.

“There were places in Atlanta that were dedicated to offering such programs. I found a big house in a residential neighborhood, where they had rooms dedicated to things like yoga classes, where I began offering meditation sessions. It was kind of informal. So after some time floating around from place to place, I went to the Unitarian Church on Cliff Valley Way, the biggest Unitarian Church at that time in Atlanta. And somehow I found out that they had a Buddhist study group. I don’t remember all the details. Sure enough they were happy with allowing me to start a sitting group. In a church, you typically find rooms full of furniture. I would push the furniture back, clearing a space, carrying big garbage bags full of zafus in for the sitting, and taking them out at the end, right? Set up; take down; repeat. Until, after some time, they give you your own room because enough church members are now participating.

“By 1975, I had a regular group of Zen followers. We were meeting in lofts and storefronts, places like that. We found a little corner shop in the Candler Park neighborhood where the owner had a jewelry shop in one part of it. There was an area that used to be the service bay – it had once been a service station – and that was our sitting room for a long time. It was a room something like 15 x 15 feet square. Later we moved to the location where we are now. where we have a larger zendo connected to two small bungalows.”

Michael admits he was fairly isolated from other Soto teachers at the time because Matsuoka had ceased supporting the Soto-shu in North America and, as a consequence, his Dharma heirs were not registered in Japan. But, as Matsuoka put it, we live in a “credentialed society.” So Michael took steps to regularize his situation with the help of Barbara Kohn of the San Francisco Zen Center and Shohaku Okumura who was located in Bloomington, Indiana.

“Barbara Kohn had students in the southeast inviting her here. When we moved in 2000 to the new space, I invited her to use our space, so she started coming there, and her students would come. She did a couple of my interim ceremonies there, the novice priest or black robe ceremony called Shukke Tokudo.” When she learned Michael was not officially associated with the Soto community in North America, she offered to help. “She was very practically oriented, very down-to-earth. She said, ‘Well, we can fix this. You should be recognized. You should have credit for time served.’ She started putting it all together. I went and met Okumura Roshi in Asheville at a friend’s house, hosted by one of our members from Candler Park days who had moved to Asheville. Okumura Roshi was visiting Asheville, giving talks on translating poetry derived from Dogen’s poems about the Lotus Sutra. And he was asking us for suggestions on the translations. I had attended a talk he gave in Palo Alto, so he and I knew each other vaguely by the time Barbara talked to him about me. She talked to me about going through the transmission ceremony on a formal basis, and training in the advanced ceremonies, or priest protocols which she called forms. She said I should go spend a 90-day practice period at Austin Zen Center with her, in the middle of the summer of 2007.”

It wasn’t feasible, but Okumura stepped in and agreed to do the ceremony. It was Okumura’s intention that Michael – as he put it – not “do anything to break off the Matsuoka line. He said, ‘If you go back to Japan and train under another lineage, that cuts off the Matsuoka line.’ So what he did for me  by doing my transmission ceremony, as I understand, does not cut off that line. I still represent the Matsuoka line – lineage – but at the same time I am also in the Sawaki-Uchiyama lineage through Okumura.”

Okumura came to Atlanta for seven days to conduct the ceremony. “There’s a seven-day version and there’s a twenty-one-day version, in Japan. We opted, naturally, to do the seven-day version. He was in residence for that whole week. I painted the large silk certificates, during that week. Fortunately I’m trained in design, so it was easier for me than for most candidates. You have to paint on silk with water-base sumi ink – black and vermillion – lines and names. Fine lines in red without blurring and blotting, with ink, on silk!” He laughs at the memory. “They can’t make it any harder.”

Michael is in his 80s when I speak with him, an age at which even Zen Masters begin to think about retirement, but he is still active.

“I lead workshops. I lead daily meditation and retreats. Just came back from a five-day retreat in North Carolina. We have a hundred-acre farm, a farm one of my senior students owns. He’s a prison psychiatrist. His wife is a yoga teacher, a licensed yoga teacher. We have four events a year there, roughly a week long. Four or five days. Every fourth Sunday is my morning to teach at the Zen Center. First Sunday features guest speakers from outside our lineage. Second Sunday we present interviews; I interview a member from inside our community, typically a leader-type person, but not necessarily. Third Sunday my eventual successor at ASZC gives a dharma talk. We have a vice-abbot and a co-abbess who will assume leadership in Atlanta. We just think that everybody should get to know what kind of people are practicing Zen. Why they’re practicing Zen, why they keep coming back, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

I ask why they do keep coming back.

“I think it is, first of all, real life. The point I make is . . . Do you know what the kyosaku is?”

I do. It is the stick which meditators are sometimes struck with on the shoulder.

“So my point is that you either get the kyosaku in the zendo under controlled conditions or you get it out there under uncontrolled conditions. So I think what forces people back is getting whacked by the vicissitudes and vagaries of circumstance that are our daily fare in the 21st century.”

Zen Desert Sangha –

Dan Dorsey is the resident teacher at the Zen Desert Sangha in Tucson. He grew up in Texas, and first encountered Buddhism in the library at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches where he was studying forestry. “There were only three books in the library on Buddhism, and I read them all. Don’t remember the titles. I was one of those people who at an early age was drawn to Buddhism and meditation. In my apartment I constructed a sitting bench made from concrete blocks and a flat wooden board and started doing zazen from reading the instructions in one of the books.”

I ask him why.

“Maybe karma; it’s a mystery to me why some people go into Buddhism at an earlier age and others take it up when they’re seventy. At first, I thought there must be some benefits that would accrue to me personally – like strength, better control of my emotions, inner power, and inner peace. I think I watched too many kung fu movies in my teens where that kind of self-mastery seemed to be the point of meditation. In a deeper sense though, from an early age there was this feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong with life. Not just the ups and downs, but a very deep feeling that something wasn’t right with all the suffering people go through – the wars, starvation and economic inequality, the person-to-person violence – everything I read about in the daily news.”

His first encounter with formal Zen practice was in Japan in 1982.

“The U.S. Army put me through four years of college in exchange for me serving as an officer for four years of active duty after graduation. As a new officer, I could choose a number of places where my first assignment would be if there was an opening, so I chose Japan because Buddhism was practised there. I was also interested in the culture. There was an open position with a small Army detachment on the northern tip of the main island of Honshu near the city of Misawa, so that’s where I went.”

“And did you, in fact, come upon any Buddhists in Japan?” I ask.

“There are plenty of people in Japan who identify as Buddhist, just like in the U.S. there are plenty who identify as Christian. There are plenty of Buddhist temples and shrines around, but it took a while to find a place where zazen was practised even a little.”

He did, eventually, find a Soto temple where if he made “a donation to the temple, then the monks would sit a round of zazen with me, and I could have tea with the head of the temple for about fifteen to twenty minutes. Even after months of searching around northern Honshu, I could not find a temple or lay group that kept a regular schedule of zazen, aside from one or two small monasteries, and those were not open to the public.”

Then he was transferred to a base outside Tokyo, and there he saw an article in the newspaper announcing that a Soto priest, Sensei Gudo Wafu Nishijima, welcomed both Japanese and foreigners. “I started sitting with his group. I would take the train every Sunday morning into downtown Tokyo to where we met on the eighth floor of the YMCA. The schedule was each Sunday Sensei would give a Dharma talk to his Japanese students, then his foreign students like me would arrive, and we would all sit together for two rounds of zazen. His Japanese students would then leave, and Sensei would give his talk in passable English to us. When he did retreats, he borrowed a Soto temple.”

First retreats are always challenging and probably even more so in Japan. “I found them difficult both mentally and physically. Although I had been sitting fairly regularly for 25 to 30 minutes on my own each day, I still sometimes used a chair instead of a cushion. There were no chairs available at the temple, and the cushions were small, flat, and firm. I found doing round after round of zazen to be difficult.

“At the same time, there was something about sitting still for round after round that drew me in. We’re in a society where doing something about the situations in our lives is highly prized. It’s encouraged to be proactive. And this was really the first time I had sat for longer periods with just myself, not doing anything except sitting, turning inward instead of outward. I was also getting a small inkling of what true peace is. I experienced something at those retreats and that kept me coming back.”

During his final year of active duty, he was stationed at Fort Huachuca near Tucson. “There was no Zen group there, so I continued practice on my own and stayed in touch with my Japanese teacher via letter correspondence. After being discharged from active duty I moved to Tucson.”

There he came upon a group that had just formed about 18 months earlier.

“There were five or six of us sitting in a mobile home at a trailer park. One small bedroom was converted into a Zendo. The group had already adopted the name of Zen Desert Sangha.” The group was affiliated with Robert Aitken’s Diamond Sangha, and Aitken’s heir, Nelson Foster, visited the group several times a year. Aitken also visited occasionally.

The sangha changed locations a few times and then, “We ended up at Indiana Nelson’s big blue house in an upper-class section of Tucson with a good sized Zendo. It was at that time that Pat Hawk Roshi started coming to Tucson a few times a year and giving retreats. That’s where I met him and became his student.”

After being discharged from the Army, Dan earned a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture then became certified in Permaculture. He was able to combine his forestry degree with these and began a business providing workshops and courses on sustainable landscape design.

He tells me he also was dedicating more time to his Zen practice. I ask why he kept at it.

“Well, one thing that’s kept me going is the alternative to not practising is worse. If you know what I mean,” he adds with a laugh. “Thinking on how I could have turned out if I didn’t keep up a steady Zen practice makes me shudder. I was driven to do it. Maybe it’s karma. I just stuck with it from age 20 or so. Once I found Zen teachers to work with, the practice naturally fell into place and has stayed with me.”

Then in 2010, Pat Hawk invited him to have coffee at the Redemptorist Renewal Center where he resided. “And he asked me if I would be willing to become an Associate Teacher in the Diamond Sangha. After considering it for two days, I called him and said, ‘Okay. I’ll do it.’ I was already giving classes on Buddhism before I became an associate teacher because no one else was giving them at ZDS at the time. Preparing for them helped me to understand Buddhism in more depth. Pat was fine with me doing this. At the time, I was also teaching some non-credit classes on Buddhism at a community college in Tucson. I had already been studying with Pat for sixteen years at that point. After some consideration, it seemed like the natural next step.”

He became an Associate Teacher in the Diamond Sangha in 2010 and then a fully independent teacher two years later.

“And what does a Zen teacher teach?” I ask. It is a question I frequently ask.

“As far as individually working with students, I’m there to facilitate and encourage their practice, point out pitfalls they might fall into, and support them in practice through all the ups and downs. I give pointers along the way and try to offer the right phrase or action at the right time. However, I don’t think Zen can be taught in the usual sense.

“Zen has no end, since there is no end to Zen practice. We say at our Zen Center that the Buddha was only half-way there. But we as teachers can point students toward experiencing their own true nature through their own efforts. The Sangha plays a big role in this also; we support each other. I sometimes say, ‘You’re not going to get anything from Zen.’ But other times I’ll talk about the benefits of practice, the ‘fruits’ of doing zazen as an expedient if someone needs encouragement.”

“Which benefits are those?” I ask.

“I’m still waiting for most of the benefits myself, but based on studies using brain scans and other techniques, regular and long-term zazen calms the central nervous system. Also, the part of your brain that deals with reactivity and how quickly we automatically react becomes a little larger. That seems to have the effect of calming our reactions. We don’t react as quickly, which can help with various drug additions and also calm routine and damaging expressions of emotions like anger.”

“Those are physiological benefits. Are there spiritual benefits?”

“I can’t separate the two exactly. Spiritually if Zen has a purpose, it is to allow or make more likely the experience of our true nature – experiencing the emptiness of it all. Although I like the phrase ‘no abiding self’ rather than emptiness. And I also emphasize experiencing true nature as a process rather than one all-encompassing life changing event as many people imagine it will be. So, this sitting practice of zazen is both experience of and inquiry into that true nature or no-abiding self.”

“And when people first take it up, what draws them? What are they looking for?”

“They’re looking for a number of things. They want to get rid of their suffering, which is a universal experience. They want to get some benefits from meditation to help in sports or martial arts. They want to get rid of specific uncomfortable emotions like anger and learn to stay calmer. Some show up with a genuine will to discover the truth.”

The Diamond Sangha derives from Sanbo Zen and makes use of koan study. I ask about the value of working with koans.

“Koans function to get a person out of those extremes that we’re always caught up in. Right and wrong. Life and death. This and that. Me and you. So, what transcends that? Koans are usually a back and forth between the relative world and the empty one. When a person comes to a master in a koan, he’s coming from one of those places; the teacher answers from the other side. And then finally, what transcends that? The student has to do a presentation at that point to show that right here and now. Sometimes words will work too. The main thing is the presentation has to be a personal presentation within the context of the koan and not too general.”

In his own continuing development, Dan is in regular contact with another Pat Hawk heir, Leonard Marcel. “We talk once a week when we are both available via Zoom, and we do a review of koans. We’ve gone through additional books that might be used after the standard Diamond Sangha curriculum of the four classic koan books. Right now, we’re finishing The Recorded Saying of Layman P’ang.”

“And the reason you do that?”

He answers with a shrug. “To explore new Zen books I might one day use with my students and to keep sharp on koan practice with another Diamond Sangha teacher.”

“And how has your practice changed over the years. How is different now from when you were first going to the 8^th floor of the Tokyo YMCA?”

“My practice is more integrated into everyday life. There is more openness to this moment.”

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.