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.”

Albuquerque Zen Center –

When the founding abbot of the Albuquerque Zen Center – Seiju Mammoser – let it be known that he was contemplating retirement, the board of directors began looking for someone to succeed him. Seiju had been a disciple of Joshu Sasaki in the Japanese Rinzai tradition. The search process – according to one member of the hiring committee – lasted more than three years. Approaches were made to form alliances with other Zen sanghas, and letters were sent. They told the American Zen Teachers’ Association that they did not care what lineage or heritage the teacher represented, but they wanted someone who was the equivalent of a roshi, who would agree to live in Albuquerque, and who was authorized to meet with students in private interviews. The teacher they finally found was a Zen Master in the Korean Seon tradition.

Anita Feng – Zen Master Jeong Ji – grew up in a Jewish neighbourhood33 in Detroit. Her grandparents had been immigrants from Eastern Europe.  She tells me the family was culturally Jewish and “broadly speaking spiritually too but not in any organized way. I think that of everyone in my family, I was probably the most spiritually oriented. My first interest was in Hasidic Judaism. But growing up in the ’60s, it seemed untenable with the liberating forces of the ’60s.”

I ask how she first learned about Zen.

“I was playing in a Balkan band in Maine where I was living at the time in my early 20’s. A member of our band showed me the book by Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. And that was it. The teachings made perfect sense. I had never subscribed to any kind of movement particularly, and I was never much of a joiner. But after reading that book, within six months I sold my house, got rid of all my belongings, and left to study with the nearest Zen master, who happened to be Zen Master Seung Sahn in Providence.”

The people I’ve been interviewing often have intriguing backstories. I want to ask about Balkan bands and how she got to Maine but stick to the main story-line and ask what it was about the Suzuki book that had grabbed her attention.

“Oh, I think a couple of things grabbed me right off the bat. One was the title, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I loved that. I was already a poet and worked as a ceramic artist. The concept of a beginner’s mind was always something that was really important to me as a creative type. The poetry in Suzuki Roshi’s teaching resonated with me very deeply. There’s a phrase in his book that roughly goes: ‘The reason the whole world is so beautiful is because the world is constantly losing its balance against a background of perfect balance.’ That image touched me. The other thing I admired about the book was that it had instructions. So I followed them. Even though it was the very first time I sat down to try meditation, somehow, after I got up from that first sitting, the grass looked more sparkly and the experience of walking down the street seemed more vibrant. I had always wanted to live as completely as possible, and this first experience of meditation gave me a pathway that I could trust.”

I do ask about the ceramic art. She tells me that by her mid-20s she had “established a career of making musical instruments out of mud, out of clay.” 

“You made clay flutes?”

“And clay drums, clay horns. It was my livelihood for many years, until I switched to making Buddhas out of clay fifteen years ago.”

“Tell me about meeting Seung Sahn.”

“Well, meeting him was a bit unusual from the beginning. Actually my first meeting with him was at the Cambridge Zen Center because that was a little closer to where I was living at the time. I came down to do a retreat for the first time at the Cambridge Zen Center, and I was very nervous. I was pacing around in the parking lot, hesitant to go in. Finally I got up the courage to open the back door and at that very moment Zen Master Seung Sahn was coming out, and we practically butted heads. There we were, entangling eyebrows from the beginning.[1] Aside from that first encounter, my lasting impression of him was his complete presence, his way of being in the world inspired me deeply.”

Several people I’ve interviewed – including Bobby Rhodes and Richard Shrobe – were practising there at the time.

“In retrospect, it may have been the golden age of that center because there were more than forty people living there at the time. The Zen Center was full. There were people who bought houses, rented houses in the area. We were all new. The Dharma was new. We were there to do hard training and wake up. New teachers appeared. People were working, starting families. All of us were trying to behave like monks and nuns. But nobody had figured out yet how you could live in a community and do hard training and work and have relationships. It was untenable,” she adds, laughing.

“I remember Chozen Bays telling me, that the atmosphere at ZCLA when she was there was a mix of hippie commune and Buddhist monastery, and that it wasn’t a particularly workable mix.” 

“That sounds pretty accurate to me,” Jeong Ji agrees. “With all of us being in our 20s and 30s we had a lot to learn. I think one of the main lessons we learned from Seung Sahn in the early days was simply how to behave. There was also the fact that as young Americans, we just idolized Asian teachers. And while we struggled with learning how to behave appropriately, these Asian teachers were struggling with the same thing. But because of their unquestioned authority, they could almost get away with just about anything.”

“They got away with a lot.” 

“They did,” she admits. “Zen Master Seung Sahn felt that our behaviour was a little too wild. So he encouraged everybody to get married, and he even arranged marriages. And none of them worked. Not a single one lasted. So that was a rocky time. It was a golden era in terms of the number of people who were interested in doing hard training in Zen, but it was also a dark time in terms of Asian masters getting lured in by the freedom of American culture. There were a lot of boundaries crossed.

“Another thing that I saw was that everyone was talking like Seung Sahn in pidgin English. But we were, for the most part, all Americans!  I was a poet and writer, and it was unbearable to me to hear this kind of mimicry. It could be funny, but if you’re living in a community, and people are doing this kind of ‘Zen speak’ day-in and day-out, I thought, ‘This is not the Zen that I want to live with. I want to live in a world where Zen has no flavour. A Zen that can go anywhere and speak in any language.’” 

After living in the community for three years, she left.

“It’s kind of a complicated story. Zen Master Seung Sahn really liked the fact that I had my pottery studio there and that I had taken on apprentices from the community, so he – and I also – thought this could be a very nice cottage industry for the Zen Center. In retrospect, it was a ridiculous idea. I mean, what did I do? I made musical instruments out of clay. This was never going to be a big business. Nevertheless I went as far as to buy two tons of bricks to build a big wood-fired kiln on the premises, and I just couldn’t bring myself to build it. I even got a huge load of wood to use. I’m very much of a doer kind of person – not a hesitator – but on that I hesitated quite a bit.  And then I married the head monk of the school. And since this was from a celibate tradition, it was kind of big news. Zen Master Seung Sahn, when he realized he couldn’t talk us out of it, married us at the Zen Center. And then my husband and I felt like it was time to live a kind of normal life, start a family, not in the Zen Center. So we moved away. I went for a fifteen-year period not being involved with a Zen Center.”

“Did you continue to practice?”

“Yes. I had my practice, but I was on my own. No sangha. No contact with any sangha. Not until many years later.”

“And what brought you back?”

“After that first marriage ended, years later when I was married to my current husband, living in Seattle with our three children, I was writing a book, and I wanted to draw from my experience of living at the Zen Center all those years ago. So, for research purposes, I looked up the nearest Kwan Um Zen Center, which was right there in Seattle. When I attended the first session, as soon as I heard the Heart Sutra and the Great Dharani being chanted, the tears just started to come down my face. I was deeply moved. And even though I didn’t know any of these people, I immediately felt that I had come home in a new way, and that was it. I had rejoined sangha.”

The teacher in Seattle was Bob Moore, Zen Master Ji Bong.  

“He was one of the first Zen Masters given final transmission by Zen Master Seung Sahn along with Bobbie Rhodes, George Bowman, and Richard Shrobe. There may have been others. But Bob Moore was in that group. And I’ve been his student ever since. With Ji Bong as my teacher I felt I could be who I was and not have to be anybody different. He was also very independent-minded and well-spoken, a professor of music. So he clarified a lot of these basic teachings for me that had originally come from Zen Master Seung Sahn with his limited English.

“For example, when I studied with Zen Master Seung Sahn, I couldn’t have cared less about koans, but I did the koan training with him because all his students did. The koans’ wisdom didn’t really sink in until many years later with Zen Master Ji Bong. In some ways, koans are like poetry which I already had a lot of appreciation for. And also I was older and more mature and could see the wisdom of their teaching better.”

Ji Bong, however, was located in Los Angeles and only visited Seattle on occasion. The Kwan Um School eventually assigned a teacher to the community, but – from Jeong Ji’s perspective – it wasn’t a “good fit. So I ended up quitting the Kwan Um School again. I think my independent nature felt confined by certain teaching routines. In part the way the koan training was becoming systematized. And, again, I was rebelling against this propensity to imitate or mimic others that we admire.  Do you know the story of Gutei’s finger?[2] It’s kind of like that. Gutei had his awakening experience when his teacher raised a finger, and his mind opened. So then for the rest of his life, as a teacher himself, Gutei raised his finger. But he had this problem with a disciple. Do you remember the story?”

“Mm-hmm. So he cuts the kid’s finger off.” 

“Yes. The student figured he understood this teaching and could easily transmit it. It was very straightforward! So a visitor came by one day, asking to see the master when the master wasn’t at home, and the disciple said, ‘Oh, I’ll tell you what the teaching is.’ And he raised his finger. What this suggests to me is that if a student or a new teacher just follows the teaching of his teacher – like Fa-yen said – he diminishes that teaching by half. There’s no energy left. No vitality. We have to show up as ourselves and teach as who we are. Accordingly, for my own practice, I have sought to express this in my creative work, asking the question, freshly, ‘What is Buddha?’”

She began sculpting Buddhas which, as she puts it, “reflect who we are now, in all our diversity. Bottom line – if Zen becomes too systematized, becomes a corporate Zen, if you will – then it doesn’t grow, it doesn’t evolve. So I left the Kwan Um School again.”

A few years later, Ji Bong left as well.

“It was easy for me because I wasn’t anybody special, but for him to leave was a big deal. And one of the most important things for him – and later on for me as well – is that if someone has the title and the authority of a Zen Master then they need to have some independence. Of course there are risks involved, but in terms of developing one’s teaching and relationship with one’s sangha – both of which are entirely unique – there has to be some autonomy in how that’s carried out. So he left. The sangha split apart. I came back to rejoin the Seattle Sangha that remained. And a little while after that – maybe a few years – I became a Ji Do Poep Sa. That was in 2008, and in 2015 I received final transmission and became a Zen Master.”

Her transmission comes through Ji Bong, but there is a process “we kept from Zen Master Seung Sahn which is that prospective Zen Masters need to be tested by other Zen Masters of other schools in other traditions. I met with Wendy Egyoku at the Zen Center of Los Angeles which was really wonderful. Ji Bong left it up to me to pick who I wanted to study with, and I wanted to study with a woman teacher. American born. So I went to see her, and it was very humbling and inspiring and encouraging. I think it’s a wonderful thing to get out of your zone, get out of the Zen culture that you’re familiar with and throw yourself into something that’s completely different. It inspired a richness and depth to my practice and to my thoughts about what it means to be a sangha, to be a teacher, to be a student. I also met with two other Zen teachers—Jack Duffy, from Aitken Roshi’s lineage, and Steve Hagen, from Katagiri Roshi’s lineage. I enjoyed this aspect of my training a lot.”

Eight years later, Jeong Ji gave transmission to two of her students. “In Seattle I could see that we had a number of wonderful teachers-in-training. It was a good time for me to step back. Again, I feel it’s important that the way the teaching is transmitted is unique, that it come through different voices. That’s just the nature of change and growth and vitality. So I’d been thinking, ‘I’m going to pull back and give these new teachers time and space to discover their own voices.’”

She wasn’t entirely sure what she would take on next. “I didn’t know if I was going to be doing more pottery, write a book or just take up knitting. One day I received word from the American Zen Teachers Association that there was a position open for a new guiding teacher at the Albuquerque Zen Center. And as it happens, I had been to Albuquerque twice that year because my older daughter, Katrina, moved here. I loved the weather, the sunshine. I loved the arts community which I thought was vibrant and welcoming.”

A decade earlier, the community had survived the turmoil of the revelations regarding Joshu Sasaki’s behaviour and the departure of members who began smaller sitting groups. It persisted and was determined to find someone to take over from Seiju.

I ask her about the community.

“Well, people in general are appreciative and hungry for the teaching. The facility and grounds are beautiful. Retreats hadn’t been done for quite a while, so we started that up a couple of months ago. Just one-day retreats, and they’ve been completely full. The sangha seems to be growing steadily. A number of young people are involved, due in part to the fact that the Zen center is close to the university of New Mexico.”

“And you’re happy there.”

“I am. I like it very much. I like to throw myself into something radically new. It’s something I’ve done throughout my life periodically. I just like to shake everything up and begin again. I think one of the interesting and creative aspects of this transition is to give the process plenty of time, plenty of space, for all of us to evolve as it seems natural, as seems fitting.”

“What do you think the community is looking to you for?”

“I think that the overwhelming thing that I’ve heard from the sangha is they’re looking for guidance and teaching.”

“Guidance to what end? To what are they being guided?”

“Oh, meditation. Presence of body, heart, and mind. Though it is very simple on paper, very straightforward in its instructions, for each person there is a unique challenge. And by meeting with students one-on-one or giving talks, I strive to provide guidance for that.”

“What does a Zen teacher teach?”

It’s one of my standard questions, and Jeong Ji takes a moment to think about it before replying.

“On the face of it, it doesn’t look like much. I think – going back to my first impression of Zen Master Seung Sahn – it’s more about presence than anything else.”

---

[1] Mumon comments on the koan Mu: “If you pass through it, you will not only see Jõshû face to face, but you will also go hand in hand with the successive patriarchs, entangling your eyebrows with theirs, seeing with the same eyes, hearing with the same ears.”

[2] The third case in the Mumonkan.

Great Plains Zen Center, Monroe, Wisconsin –

Susan Myoyu Andersen was the tenth person to whom Taizan Maezumi gave Dharma transmission. She later received full authorization – inka – from Dennis Genpo Merzel. Currently she is the resident teacher at Great Plains Zen Center in Wisconsin. She is also a good old-fashioned activist. After a career in social development work, I am glad to see that the flames haven’t gone out. She is a member of the Wisconsin Poor People’s Campaign Coordinating Committee, NAACP, Justice Overcoming Borders, and is active in advocating for the rights of formerly incarcerated people through WISDOM Wisconsin and other organizations. The Great Plains Zen Center has an active Racial Justice Circle and maintains an anti-racism resource list initially created by a group of White Plum Asanga members.

“As a kid I was pretty interested in Hinduism. I did a lot of reading about Hinduism, and Buddhism always sounded kind of scary to me.”

I ask where the interest in Hinduism had come from.

“I read the autobiography of Paramahansa Yogananda. My older brother and sister read a lot of interesting stuff, so that’s probably how I first came in touch with it. Clearly I was kind of a seeker, although I never would have described myself that way. I just thought, ‘Well, this is interesting, so I’ll read this.’”

“What else were you reading?”

“It was pretty much inner exploration of the self, the ‘who am I?’ question. When I went to Oberlin College, there was actually a Buddhist sitting group, but I thought it sounded really dumb and didn’t want anything to do with it. But then when I went to grad school, at UC San Diego, I needed a clarinet player for a piece I had written and ended up with a woman named Joan George who was a practitioner at Zen Center of Los Angeles, and she talked to me about ZCLA. We were in San Diego, a couple of hours from Los Angeles, and it sounded interesting, so I thought, ‘I’ll give it a try.’ When I first met Maezumi Roshi, I was surprised because I had thought he would appear special and holy, and he seemed kind of ordinary. I later came to appreciate that his power was actually in his ordinariness. After that, I returned every Saturday for the morning program with sitting and work and lunch. Soon, I went to sesshin and then began looking at how I could move there. I was still a graduate student in music. So I finished my master’s thesis while I was living in Los Angeles ’cause I thought, ‘I want to do Zen now, but I really should finish my music degree.’ And for a while I was part of a group of composers putting on concerts, and I taught music at a community college, but meanwhile I was just getting more and more involved at the Zen Center.”

“What was the allure?” I ask.

“What was the allure? I just knew it was what I should be doing with my life. I just knew this was an important thing to do.”

“Important in what way?”

“I guess I was looking for a way to appreciate life in a deeper way, and this seemed to offer the way to do it. In our lives we’re busy with what we’re supposed to do, what our roles are, who we are – blah, blah, blah – but it rarely occurs to us, apart from these roles, apart from these names, who am I? What is this? Who is this? And that is the question that began to grab me, and, of course, Maezumi Roshi – being the very clear, straight-forward teacher that he was – immediately connected with me in that way, and it was clear that this is where I belonged.

“So Zen is a practice that might seem extreme to people, and yet what it does is to focus us on that question of who are we really and what is really most important. That’s what it’s done for me. And what I’ve found is that one of the things that’s really important in my life is compassion and connection with other people. So when I learn about the suffering of other people, I can’t just say, ‘Oh, that’s too bad. That’s their problem.’ I realize I need to pay attention to that and address that because when they hurt, I hurt too.”

“And how did Zen help you accomplish all this?”

“I think Zen helped me see that I can’t just live my own separate little life and everybody else will manage the best they can. I think sometimes, not always, with other religious traditions, we may do charitable things but there is a sense of doing what we can when it’s convenient for us. Or we help from a sense of what we think is best for someone instead of really serving that person with what they need and ask for. Compassion in Buddhist practice is more like walking beside them and carrying some of their pain along with them. Not necessarily having all the answers, just being there with them and their suffering. My Dharma brother, Bernie Glassman Roshi, had a way of saying it that I think is really helpful. It’s like supposing my toe hurts. I can’t just say, ‘Oh, good. It’s just my toe. It’s not me.’ When my toe hurts, I hurt. So as I’ve gotten more and more into practice, when I am aware of injustice and disparity and the suffering of others I respond, and ask how I could be of service to them.”

“I’m still not clear about the ‘how.’ How does Zen bring that kind of perspective about?”

She reflects for a moment before responding.

“Okay. So basically Zen has three aspects, all of which are important. The first aspect that many people are familiar with is meditation. We don’t call it meditation, though, we call it sitting. When we’re sitting, we’re not meditating on something like a separate object. We are like a pail of water that’s not being sloshed around anymore. The surface of the water becomes very still. We can’t force the water to settle down; we can only put the pail down, stop stirring it around and let the water naturally settle. So when I’m sitting, my mind begins to just calm down and settle down, and I begin to see things more clearly. And I begin to see that this idea that I’m this person who’s independent of other people and I can do what I want and it doesn’t necessarily impact other people, I begin to see, ‘Whoa! That’s not actually true!’ When I breathe my carbon dioxide out, somebody else breathes it in. Or a tree breathes it in and breathes out oxygen for me. So, I begin to see my connectedness, and I begin to see that the source of my suffering is actually thinking and acting as though I am separate. And in particular my suffering comes from seeing only myself, what I need, and what I want, and not seeing the larger picture, not seeing myself as part of a community, as part of a family, as part of a world, as part of an interconnectedness with other things. As I begin to become aware of this, I begin to feel a lot more at peace, and at the same time I also begin to feel more of a sense of a larger responsibility toward the family, the community.

“So the meditation or the concentration that allows the mind to settle is one part of it. And then another part of it is Precepts which are very important in Zen because Precepts are a lens, a way of looking at things. For example, when I was younger, I was vegetarian, but I began eating meat again because a health professional told me I should probably eat meat for various reasons. But then living here in Wisconsin, I remember driving by these little white, plastic containers on farms and finding out that farmers put calves in there and that’s how they raise calves for veal. By putting the calves in there, making them live their lives in these little white boxes, the meat is very tender because they don’t develop muscles, and it’s just a horrible way for a calf to live. And after I saw that, I said, ‘I’m not eating veal again.’ And later on, I learned how cows are slaughtered for meat, and I decided that I did not want animals to go through that on my behalf and stopped eating animal meat. I realized it’s not really possible for me to avoid animal products altogether, but I could minimize the harm I caused at least a little by not eating animal meat.

“That’s just one example of how the Buddhist Precepts work. As we become aware of the consequences of our actions, we can choose not to do some things that cause unnecessary harm. Another example is becoming aware of not taking more than we need and thoroughly using what we do have. This is reflected in how we do our gardening, composting and our regenerative agriculture practices here at the Zen Center. Precepts are not like the Ten Commandments or a fixed set of rules – do this, don’t do this – they’re a lens to help you see that your actions have consequences, and that you can adjust what you do and how you do it.

“And then the third is the wisdom of waking up, just being awake and clearly seeing our life together as it is, not our ideas or concepts about it. When I’m awake, I can make better choices, be more fully present and see the inherent wholeness in everything and everyone, despite our flaws and weaknesses. They are part of our wholeness, too.”

I bring the conversation back to her biography and ask when it was that she moved to Los Angeles.

“So that was 1973 and I was 23. I was a second-year graduate student. I’ve come to understand that in many ways I was really immature, and I pretty much grew up at Zen Center of Los Angeles.”

“Chozen Bays told me ZCLA around that time was something ‘part monastery and part hippie commune.’”

“Yes. It was really the product of an era and a time; I think that’s what she means by ‘part hippie commune.’ I lived in a walk-in closet, and I got $25 a month as a stipend when I was on staff. I pretty much owned nothing, a few Zen books, a few clothes and robes. That was it. And I don’t think most people these days – even people coming to a monastery to practice as a monk – would live in that way. It was an era, and I don’t know if it was good or bad; I know it is not something I can reproduce at Great Plains Zen Center. Nor should I. Practice needs to adjust according to the time, place and circumstances. At the time, though, it produced an atmosphere where people could go deep into their practice. But – you know – there were personal consequences for me that I’ve often thought about. While I was there, totally enmeshed and deep in the practice, yes, it was very effective. On the other hand, I really wasn’t paying attention to my birth family very much. For example, I had a nephew who lost his father. He is bi-racial, and he’s told me he was subject to a lot of racism. I wasn’t there for him. And that was a consequence of my putting everything else in my life aside and being at that monastery. Other folks had different experiences. For me, it was an invaluable experience, but somewhat imbalanced in that, with such an intense focus on one aspect of my life, I was neglecting others. I’m still working on how to create the practice environment at GPZC where people can experience both intensely focused practice and bring all aspects of their life – family, work, everything else – into the practice arena as well.”

“Did you have an outside job, or were you a full-time monk?”

“I was full-time for quite a while, and I held so many different positions. I was involved with our in-house publishing company. I did a lot of work with liturgical positions for our services, gardening, and eventually cooking for retreats. And later on, the Zen Center could not support so many staff and it seemed like a good idea for people to have outside jobs and sources of income. I had learned accounting while I was at the Zen Center, so I did some work for an accounting temp agency. I wasn’t doing my music career anymore because that was something that would have required a lot of time and involvement to maintain. I had really switched careers to becoming clergy. It was hard to give up my music career, but I never regretted my choices, and music still finds its way into my life.”

“And somewhere along the line you got on the path to become a teacher.”

“So,” she says smiling, “something happened before that. I actually got married and had a child while I was at Zen Center. Which is interesting because I thought I would never have children. And then somehow my biological clock decided otherwise. So my son was born in 1987 while I was living at the Zen Center, and I can remember doing a seven-day sesshin when I was nine months pregnant wearing a nun’s robe.” She laughs softly at the memory. “This must have been very difficult for Maezumi Roshi because here I was, his picture-perfect nun who was supposed to live a celibate life, and suddenly I wasn’t doing that anymore. And to be honest with you, having children was one of the best things that ever happened to me. If you yourself have children, you know of what I speak. I mean, there’s nothing like the depth of love I have for my children and the joy they still bring.”

I tell her that I’m a great-grandfather.

“Wow. And I’m a grand-mom, and hopefully I’ll live to be a great-grandmother too. So that is the heart of my life in many ways. But the other thing was, as I say, I came to ZCLA when I was pretty young and immature, and I had difficulty seeing things from other peoples’ points of view sometimes. Especially the parents at the Zen Center I thought, ‘They have a spouse. Why can’t the spouse just watch the children and they come to sesshin?’ I was a little hard-nosed about it. I think having children helped me have much more empathy and compassion not just for other parents, but for people in all different situations. It also helped me learn how to serve others. As parents, especially of babies, we give up any hope of being able to do what we want when we want to do it.”

“Did you have a partner at this time?”

“I did, and he shared the responsibility, absolutely. In fact, he went to work which helped me to be the kind of mom that I wanted to be, which was to be there with our infant son all the time. And for the first time ever at the Zen Center of Los Angeles I wasn’t at everything always. It was a very different thing for me. I was a mom; I was with our baby a lot. And I think, too, I was a different parent than I would have been if I hadn’t been a Zen practitioner. There’s just no comparison. I wasn’t abused or anything like that as a child. It’s just that I had no idea about parenting, I had no idea how strong and deep the connection between parents and their children could be. I think I learned a lot just living at Zen Center of Los Angeles, watching various people have babies and parent their children. I got a whole different idea of how you could be a parent. So getting back to how I got to be a teacher: At that point, I was really pretty far along in koan studies. I was on the Precepts koans, which are the last part of koan study. Then, my husband and I decided we did not want to raise our children in Los Angeles. And at that point there was no internet; there was no Zoom, of course. So I continued koan study with Maezumi Roshi via snail mail.”

This was in 1987, after what she calls the “blow up,” when Maezumi confessed his alcoholism and his sexual affairs with students and went into treatment. “So the Zen Center was much smaller. It was a very different place than in its heyday when we had seventy staff members.”

“Why didn’t you want to raise a child in Los Angeles?”

“There were several reasons. First, the town seemed dominated by a larger-than-life Hollywood mentality. Didn’t feel like home. The other reason is that my husband’s mom was ill, and we wanted her to get to know her grandson. We wanted to spend some time with her in Chicago, which is how I ended up in the Midwest. And then Maezumi Roshi at a certain point contacted me and said, ‘I’d like you to come out, and I’d like you to have Dharma Transmission.’ I was living in Chicago at the time, and I had been leading a sitting group in the Chicago area, the Northwest Chicago Zen Group. We didn’t have property so we had to rent retreat facilities which was a lot of work because we had to bring all the equipment each time. So that’s kind of where I was. So I came out to Zen Mountain Center, where Maezumi Roshi was living, and did the week-long kegyo practice, which is a week when the person receiving Dharma transmission copies the sacred documents of transmission, does a lot of services and ceremonies and at the end, receives Dharma Transmission. That was in 1994.

“After that, I returned to Chicago and continued leading the Zen group at a Unitarian church in Palatine, a Chicago suburb. Eventually, the group decided that we really needed to have our own space, our own property. The property around Chicago was too expensive, so I began looking at property in Green County, Wisconsin, which was about two hours away from where we were, and we bought the property where we are presently. At that time, I also became interested in land where we could practice regenerative agriculture, restore prairie, and model good ecological practices as an expression of the Buddhist precepts. Which is what we are doing. And we were looking for a new name for the group now that we spanned two different states. It was actually James Ford who suggested ‘Great Plains Zen Center.’”

“You mentioned the importance of the Precepts in your understanding of Zen.” She nods her head. “You’ve worked with some men who had some difficulties in that area.”

“Very much so. Of course Genpo is one of them. I appreciated some things about him but also want to be clear that none of his positive qualities excuse his sexual misconduct and spiritual power abuse in my view.”

“How do you reconcile that?” I ask. “These are people, after all, who were responsible for passing on the tradition, for embodying the tradition. And, of course, it wasn’t just Maezumi and Genpo. When I began this series of interviews back in 2013, CNN – CNN! – was reporting on Joshu Sasaki’s sexual exploits. Maybe this is really a question about male biology, but there seems to be this gap between the centrality of the Precepts in the theory of Zen and the actual lived practice of Zen. Nor is just sexual misconduct. There have been financial problems as well.”

“You’re absolutely right about that. So, first of all, I don’t condone the misconduct. It’s spiritual abuse and a violation of the Buddhist precepts. Period. But at ZCLA, we were unprepared for dealing with the misconduct by Maezumi Roshi, Genpo, and others. We really struggled with how to handle it. We needed outside help. To that end, Chozen contacted the FaithTrust Institute which specialized in education and investigation around spiritual power abuse and misconduct by clergy. Some of us at ZCLA attended their trainings and eventually we realized it would be good to have a Buddhist-specific training around power dynamics and pitfalls in the Sangha. Several of us put together a Buddhist-specific Healthy Boundaries Course and we shared the teaching responsibility. I learned a tremendous amount from helping to teach that. I require it of my Dharma successors. Most of us did not receive that kind of training at the temples where we trained. At ZCLA, we grew up in a sort of dysfunctional Zen family and did not necessarily recognize that or know how to deal with the crisis that emerged when all of it came out into the open. ZCLA provided an unparalleled opportunity for training in some regards, but it was also very dysfunctional in terms of basic ethics and awareness of power dynamics that can occur in a spiritual community and how to keep people safe in a spiritual community.

“It all comes down to power abuse which can manifest as sexual misconduct, financial misconduct, bullying or any number of other ways. We have to start by admitting we have a problem and taking responsibility for it. I’m not sure the majority of Zen Centers are actually doing that even now. Responsibility includes recognizing the ways in which Zen practice as we’ve inherited it can easily lead teachers with certain personality types to take advantage of the adoration of their students to get their own personal, often unexamined shadow needs met. It also includes recognizing and naming abuse when it occurs, fully acknowledging and bearing witness to the harm that has been caused, making amends and creating better structures, education, and safeguards to prevent it from happening in the future. And I think Zen, right now, is finally beginning a very important reckoning with this and how to conduct ourselves and teach people – both teachers and sanghas – in a way that these abuses of power don’t happen. We have a long way to go, though. Still, I think within the teaching of Zen, it’s possible for teachers to rethink the teacher/student relationship in a way that doesn’t allow this to happen.”

“As a teacher, what is it you hope for for the people who study with you?”

“That they grow in those three areas, in wisdom, in precepts, and in concentration, that they grow and realize their own Buddha nature; that they awaken to who they truly are.”

“And what do they hope for from you?”

“I think what they’re hoping from me is someone who has experience walking the path, maybe has more experience than they have, and who can see when they’re veering off and help bring them back. Because we all have blind spots and places where we’re stuck and places that we don’t see clearly. And maybe I can be a bit of a mirror to hold up to people where they’re getting stuck and where they’re getting confused. I can’t open their eyes to who they truly are. Only they can do that. I can encourage them to keep on going, to stay with it. And that’s sometimes one of the most important things people hope for from a teacher. Maezumi Roshi used to say to me, ‘Just to keep on going.’ So sometimes people need encouragement, sometimes they need to be challenged, sometimes they need to be reminded of their vows. People also want help with following the Precepts, recognizing when they have drifted away and help getting back to them. As I talked about, the Precepts are a living, moving, creating thing. They are a lens. They are not a set of rules that we follow. And people really appreciate that. People really want to look at their life more clearly through the Precepts.”

Ordinary Mind Zendo, New York  –

“Like a lot of people in the 1960s,” Barry Magid tells me, “I encountered Zen through the Beats, in reading Kerouac and Gary Snyder. I found Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki  and those folks. So at some point I noticed the characters who were still alive – who didn’t drink themselves to death – were the ones who actually began practicing. And by the time I was in medical school, I started to try to find out some way to begin practicing.”

It started when his college approved a three-month course of study at the Associates for Human Resources in Concord, Massachusetts. “It was trying to be Esalen East. Jack Kornfield was on the staff. They did all this Gestalt training and encounter groups, Reichian analysis, and TM. All sorts of stuff like that. They brought in Gregory Bateson and Bucky Fuller. I can’t believe I got medical school credit for it,” he says, laughing. “I think Jack Kornfield taught everybody walking meditation.”

“What prompted you to take that on?” I ask.

“Well, you know, very early on I was interested in mixing up psychoanalysis or psychotherapy and meditation practice. It looked like these were two profound systems of character change, but it didn’t look like they were communicating with each other very well.  I wanted somehow or another to put those two things together. And there were a few things pointing me in that direction. Alan Watts was trying to be psychologically minded. We were reading books like The Freudian Left by Paul Robinson, and so there was a whole counter-cultural mixture of those things. If you were reading Wilhelm Reich you were probably reading Jack Kerouac and reading about Gary Snyder. So it was like, ‘How are you going to put all this stuff together?’”

“I can see the interest as an academic subject of study, but what drew your interest to meditation as a practice?”

“I don’t know. It was probably the spiritual equivalent of, ‘I’ll have what she’s having,’” he suggests with a chuckle. “You know, you read these idealized pictures of Japhy Ryder in Kerouac, and you say, ‘I want to be one of those guys.’ Right?”

Like his other books, Kerouac’s Dharma Bums is a roman à clef. The central figure, Japhy Ryder, is a thinly veiled portrait of the poet, Gary Snyder. Kerouac’s portrait of Ryder is exuberant and appealing—a Zen practitioner, an outdoorsman and poet; a scholar, in addition to being both sexually accomplished and wise in the ways of the natural world. “He did not look like a Bohemian at all,” the narrator of the novel notes; instead “he was vigorous and athletic.” It was a portrait which would intrigue and inspire many young readers. Barry was in his early 20s when he read the book. It would still be a while, however, before he took up formal Zen practice.

“So maybe towards the end of my residency, ’77/’78. I applied for analytic training. I tried to find an analyst who had some sympathies with Eastern ideas, and I started going to Eido Shimano’s Zen Studies Society three times a week and my analyst three times a week and did my best to get them all mixed up.”   

“Was it a successful mix?”

“Well, I’ve made a career of mixing those two things up ever since,” he says with a laugh.

“In some ways, I was probably precocious as a meditator, and something quickly grabbed me about that. But it was also the case that these were the days of the big scandal with Eido Roshi who was sleeping with his students. You know, at one point somebody took red paint and wrote ‘shame’ on the front door of the place. There was a big exodus of people. It quickly became clear that enlightenment might not be all that it was cracked up to be, that there was clearly character pathology that was not washed away by the enlightenment experience, because the idea at the time was that you just had to have a big enough enlightenment experience, and it would be a sort of a universal solvent for the ego and all its problems. But when you have the teacher being the one having all these unresolved problems, something isn’t computing. So there was a way in which the problem of dissociation was clearly manifesting itself, and that made it all the more important to try to determine what’s the relationship between meditation and western psychology and therapy.”

Barry withdrew from the Zen Studies Society but not from the practice.

“Then Bernie Glassman came to town. People at the time referred to him as the Great White Hope. He was going to be the Westerner who had received Dharma transmission and was going to be an alternative to Eido and having Japanese teachers. So I spent some time in the ’80s with Bernie. Did koans with him for a while.” Barry was also, by then a practicing psychiatrist.

Bernie founded the Zen Community of New York in 1980. Barry tells me. “It was fun. But it was a complicated place. It was running on its own mythologies. But it had an interesting group of people there. Lou Nordstrom was a good friend. Peter Matthiessen. Larry Shainberg (the brother of my analyst at the time, David Shainberg) and Diane Shainberg (a brilliant woman  and one of my instructors during my analytic training and also my analyst’s ex-wife). There were a lot of smart, interesting people hanging around Bernie in the early ’80s. And he started out saying he was going to have this kind of open community with some residents but lots of people coming in. It wasn’t monastic. Although at some point Bernie told me, ‘If you’re really serious, stop being a psychiatrist and come here to practice fulltime.’ That was a non-starter. And then he had the idea of running a bakery, which ended up destroying the community because the work-practice just took over the place. There had been this big community center in Riverdale which they then got rid of, and they just moved up into Yonkers for the bakery, and that whole thing imploded.”

Bernie started the Greyston Bakery two years after the Zen Community. It has been admired by many as an example of social enterprise, but Barry found it problematic.

“That was a real disaster as far as I was concerned. Everything got shifted towards work practice. And  for a lot of people, it was just a lousy low-paying job. It wasn’t practice. The whole center of gravity of the place shifted. And – as Bernie often does – he sort of got in over his head financially and then asked everyone to bail him out. He tended to be somebody who got very enthusiastic about projects, took them a certain length for a few years and then moved onto something else, and a lot of people felt left in the lurch by that.”

It was something Bernie himself was aware of. When I met him in 2013, he told me that he thought of himself more as an entrepreneur than a businessman. “I’m not a great person to run a business, but to start one! I’m not sure what year, but one year I was voted by US News and World Report as the social entrepreneur of the year.”[1]

“He was charismatic and high energy and made things happen,” Barry told me. “But he was not somebody to establish a stable community, and I think that’s much more what I would have wanted.”

Barry does not view the teachers with whom he worked with an uncritical eye. He points out, for example, the tendency for there to be – as he put it – “a dissociation between the psychological life and the spiritual life.”

“What is the difference between them?” I ask.

“Well, there shouldn’t be any but what happened was that it turned out to be a big split in all these characters. Eido and Daido Loori and Bernie would tend to talk about the ‘merely psychological.’ Those were the kinds of problems you should go get cleaned up somewhere else, but we were going to explore some more essential truth. And that, I think, was just very split off. I remember in the Eido Roshi days, I talked to somebody who was one of his Dharma successors; he said, ‘I think of Eido as like a great musician or conductor. He creates this fabulous music, and what he does in his private life should be irrelevant.’ And I just thought that was utter nonsense. I said, ‘What is the music a Zen teacher creates if not an ethical life?’ What is the teacher’s talent for? That you get to answer koans? What does that correlate with if it doesn’t correlate with compassion, if it doesn’t correlate with a sense of personal well-being and how you treat other people? So the idea that there was this kind of beautiful insight that you’d get through meditation and if you’re screwing all the students on the side or you’re getting drunk all the time, well, we can brush that under the rug because there’s this beautiful thing you’re contributing. Well, what the hell is it? What’s that for? That just ended up seeming specious nonsense to me.”

After the focus of Bernie’s group turned to the bakery, Barry was among the participants who withdrew.

“For a few years we had a sort of a peer sitting group in Manhattan run by a wonderful woman potter named Nora Safran. She’s not alive anymore, but she was a wonderful potter. She had been around in the days with Yasutani Roshi and Soen Nakagawa in New York before me. But she was sort of a fellow refugee. And she had a big loft where she had her studio. Larry Christensen was there at the time. He had been a student of Maezumi’s in LA, and I guess he knew Joko Beck from the LA days, and he had been going out to see her. He persuaded her to come to New York to lead sesshins for us. I remember the way we got her to New York was we got her tickets to the US Open. She was a big tennis fan. That’s how we bribed her to come lead sesshin. So she did that a few times. And I very quickly hit it off with her and started going out to San Diego several times a year doing sesshins with her.”

“You were still resident in New York and commuted to San Diego?”

“Yeah. It was a hell of a thing to do. But, as they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time. It must have been about ten years of that.”

“I know from personal experience, living 500 miles from Montreal where I worked with Albert Low, that travelling some place for sesshin – even regular sesshin – is different from living there and being part of the sangha,” I say.

“Yep. Yep. That’s right. Although Joko didn’t have a residential place.”

“No, but she had a local community.”

“She had a community there; she had a sangha. But there’s also a way in which Joko liked people to be independent. She didn’t like the idea of people becoming too tied to her. So I think the fact that I could come and go was sort of a plus. It was a funny thing. But that was practice that was much more grounded in emotional honesty than doing koans. She completely repudiated koan practice after her experience with Taizan Maezumi. She felt koans did not engage any of the emotional reality in his life and his student’s life. And she just wanted no part of it, although once in a while I could bug her and ask her about one if I wanted to. But she was really very sour on all that.”

“She was soured on Maezumi in general,” I note.

“Well, he had an affair with her teenage daughter while she was a student there. His behaviour was just unconscionable as far as she was concerned.”

“There are several of these people in the history of American Zen, people who have less than stellar personal lives.”

“That seems to be a theme,” Barry agrees, “And so what I’ve been writing about and trying to teach are all the dissociative pitfalls or curative fantasies that come up in practice. In part, it’s been a kind of acknowledgement that Buddhism – or Zen – is not a timeless, ahistorical revelation or universal truth. It’s a cultural artifact that was devised in a community of celibate, ascetic mendicants, and psychological well-being was not high on the list of things they were trying to achieve. So I don’t feel any fundamentalist allegiance to this ancient truth. I think it’s a method that we’re constantly trying to adapt to a new reality.”

Barry received transmission from Joko in 1998.

“I feel like I’ve inherited a tradition,” he tells me. “I’ve embodied it after my own fashion in the present, and, as a teacher, I have a responsibility to pass it along. But I’m passing it along not unchanged. I think that’s part of what Dharma transmission is. Joko did not pass on unchanged what she got from Maezumi, and I don’t pass on unchanged what I got from Joko. So it’s not this sense, again, of a timeless truth.”

“You pass on what you received from her ‘not unchanged.’ What is it that you received from her?”

“Are you asking, what is the essence of her teaching?”

“The word used is ‘transmission.’ Something is transmitted. So what is the essence of the thing that’s being ‘transmitted’? What are you transmitting to your successors?”

“What I ask for from my successors is a psychologically minded Zen practice. So what I’m interested in is a kind of psychological wholeness where the point of the practice is to be able to own all those parts of yourself that you came to practice to get rid of. Your vulnerability, your anxiety, your anger, your sexuality. There has to be someway in which you can look in the mirror and say, ‘This is me.’ We’re not here to create an idealized version and then push everything aside.”

“That’s what you’re doing, but what I asked was what’s being transmitted?”

“What’s transmitted is, very literally, a practice – a practice of sitting – and of an orientation to sitting that is, again, not about the cultivation of particular states but the owning and acknowledging of all states and of everything that’s coming up.”

“And the value of that is?”

“The value is that basically character-pathology is the result of an endless attempt to fix or extirpate the parts of the self that you think are the source of suffering. But that whole processing/fixing/excluding is the ego that’s causing the problem. So psychoanalysis and Zen and Wittgenstein’s philosophy leave all these things just as they found them. Right?  But that’s the thing we can’t tolerate doing. We don’t know how to leave our self as we find it. That is the dynamic engine of the suffering, that sense that I have to extirpate my anger. I have to extirpate my sexuality or my anxiety.”

I wonder if this doesn’t give an out to people like Eido who, I suggest, could have discerned that being a philanderer is just part of who he was.

“Well, that is not just, ‘This is essentially who I am, like I have brown hair and blue eyes.’ I think these habits have long histories and dynamic forces that generate them. It’s like saying, ‘I’m just angry’ without looking at how your expectations, your need to control, or your emotionally vulnerability leads to anger. You can’t just take anger as a simple given in your personality and say, ‘That’s just who I am. I’ll leave that alone.’ That’s either blind or dishonest. And I think somebody like Eido, his need to seduce and control people and to have that kind of narcissistic gratification is not just a given of his personality. It’s the end point of a whole history that was split off and never engaged with his Zen practice. One of the pernicious byproducts of some realization experiences is that they basically say, ‘Doing this, I can feel really wonderful without dealing with any of that other messy psychological stuff. I can just keep doing this and feel better and better and more and more okay in this one compartment.’ But I’m not dealing with any of the things that make me want to go out and get drunk at night. So there’s a way in which these dissociated parts of the personality don’t get swept into the hopper sufficiently. And that’s what Joko was mostly trying to do, make you engage all of it. Not cultivate one piece of it and split the others off.”

“Earlier you questioned the value of this practice if it doesn’t lead to an ethical life.” He nods his head. “What’s the value of an ethical life?”

“There’s no value outside of that. That’s what value is.”

I wait to see if he will add more to that statement, and, when he doesn’t, I say: “We have already mentioned several teachers who couldn’t have been said to have led particularly ethical lives. There are others of course. Have all these distorted the tradition they’d been entrusted with passing on?”

“No, I think they actually exemplify the tradition. I think the tradition was such that dissociation is not a bug; it’s a feature. That’s why I said I don’t think that traditional practice thought about or was very good at dealing with psychological issues. I think culturally certainly a lot of the Japanese teachers came from a tradition where very explicitly what you do in your private time doesn’t matter – that there’s the daytime personality and then the go-out-drinking-at-night personality – and they’re very comfortable culturally with that kind of split. And I don’t think it was as if there were these wonderfully, psychologically healthy teachers in a previous generation and these guys just fucked it all up. I don’t think it was a practice made to deal with that stuff in the first place, and America exposed that.”

“Regardless of which, you remain loyal to the heritage as it was transmitted to you.”

“It’s like psychoanalysis. I’m not a Freudian but I’m a psychoanalyst. You feel that’s part of what being part of a tradition is. There’s a whole stream that gets you to where you are today, and, of course, the people who came before you were dealing with things in different ways than you’re dealing with them now. But you can still be part of it without feeling like you have to do what they did or feel like what they did had to have been perfect because they’re the forefathers.”

“Why do people take up Zen practice now? A lot of people our age first came to Zen because they read Kerouac or they read Kapleau and they wanted that enlightenment experience which was going to miraculously redirect their lives. But what do people come to Zen for now?”

“Well, I say that almost by definition everybody comes to practice for the wrong reasons because you’re coming with all sorts of self-centered preoccupations. Everybody’s got that, and they are bringing whatever it is to that. These are what I call peoples’ curative fantasies. And I think the people who come to the zendo, and the people who come to my psychoanalytic practice are, a lot of the time, interchangeable. I think the Zen people these days are more likely to come for psychological problems than as kensho seekers. I think there’s less of that in this generation and just more overt looking for some kind of psychological well being.”

“What kind of psychological well being?”

“I’ve talked about these things in different kinds of categories. There are the spiritual anorexics, the ones that are seeking purity and want to shed the parts of themselves they think are greedy or needy or vulnerable. Then you get the people who have taken a vow to save all beings minus one. They’re the compassionate do-gooders who don’t know how to deal with their own needs and often come to practice as a way to escape their own needs into what they think is going to be compassion. And then there are the people who are looking for mastery. That happened more in the Rinzai crowd, where you want to have people that are so tough nothing will ever perturb them again. They will be able to master any situation. I can sit seven-day sesshin, I can handle anything. Right? I’ll be the toughest son-of-a-bitch in the valley. So you could say that, just like in psychoanalysis, people all come trying to perfect their own neurotic solution, take it up a notch.”

“So they come for the wrong reason, and what do they discover if they stick around?”

“Well, we try to make explicit what that wrong reason is and where it comes from. Why do you try to get rid of this aspect of yourself?”

“Okay, suppose one of the people we’ve mentioned woke up one days and thought, ‘The way I’m going, I’m hurting people. I’m harming others. Maybe I better go see somebody, try to get help.’ And they come to you. What is it that you could help them with?”

“Trying to tolerate the vulnerability in themselves that they’re trying to compensate for with this behaviour.”

“And do you expect that behaviour to alter as a result?”

“Yes. That’s what the point of therapy is. You expect some of that to alter if you see that it has a cause, and you can begin to deal with it.”

“You’d said that some people are drawn to take up practice because they identify what they consider greediness or neediness in themselves. Is getting rid of that greed a reasonable end for this process?”

“Joko used to say that the point of practice is to learn to suffer intelligently.”

I hadn’t heard that quote before and smile. “That’s a nice line.”

“I’ve added that it’s also to learn to become dependent intelligently. What is your relationship to others; how are your needs expressed; how are you going about that without putting all the neediness into other people so that you can always feel like you’re the strong one? That’s a very typical teacher syndrome. I’m the one with the answers; I’m not the one with the needs. So we have teachers having affairs with students because this was the one place they finally found someone they themselves could be vulnerable with, and they could be on the receiving end of something. See I remember, certainly in the old days, we were always told about how important it was to be compassionate. Right? But the arrow always went in one direction. I never heard anybody talk about the need to receive compassion, to need love. It was always, ‘You have to give this. You have to give this.’ Teachers – you know – often need to be at the receiving end of it, and, if there’s not a legitimate way to do that, they start doing it illegitimately.”

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[1] Interview July 15, 2013