Dan Dorsey

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.

Pat Hawk

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 8th floor of the Tokyo YMCA?”

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

Nona Strong

Empty Cloud Zen, California –

Nona Strong of the Empty Cloud Zen Sangha in Northern California grew up in Oklahoma City.

“Both my parents were from smaller towns in Oklahoma. And after World War II, they moved to Oklahoma City and bought a house. They were both educators – teachers – and they had me. I’m an only child. I have no sisters or brothers. Very few cousins. So, I grew up in Oklahoma City. Went all the way through high school there. And after high school, I went off to Washington, DC, to go to college at Howard University.”

I ask if her family belonged to a faith tradition.

“We attended the AME church – African Methodist Episcopal Church – there in Oklahoma City, but they weren’t real church goers. My maternal grandfather was a pastor of sorts. A pastor who read tarot cards for people. He was an eccentric. My paternal grandparents were devout AME church members. My aunt and grandmother were both members of the Eastern Star and all of this stuff.”

“Did it mean anything to you?”

“No. It was just what one did.”

“More cultural than spiritual?”

“More cultural. Exactly. They sent me to Sunday School where you learned ‘Jesus Loves Me This I Know’ and stories and so on that they teach kids. But my parents did not go to the church service that followed Sunday school. There was . . . I remember this! One Easter we went to church. My parents came and picked me up from Sunday School and said, ‘We’re staying for church today.’ And the pastor noticed them in the congregation and said, ‘Oh! We have Brother Paul and Sister Evelyn here today with their daughter!’ He called them out because they weren’t usually there. So that was, I’m sure, very embarrassing to them. Mortifying, in fact! It was a little embarrassing to me, too.”

She studied languages at Howard.

“I graduated in 1968 and went to work for IBM. IBM was recruiting very heavily on Black college campuses in those days in order to comply – probably – with the government rules. So I moved from DC to New Jersey and places farther west. In the ’70s I was living in Minneapolis and something welled up in me and dragged me kicking and screaming to this whole New Age mysticism movement that was flourishing in those days.”

I ask her how that came about.

Thomas Merton

“It just welled up inside from no place I could pinpoint even now. But there was a spiritual . . .” she pauses reflectively “. . . birth, you might call it, a spiritual resonance that began to sound within me to which I responded. And I responded by reading – if you can believe this – the novels of Taylor Caldwell. Great Lion of God about Peter and a bunch of other Christian figures. And that led to an interest in New Age spirituality, mysticism. I had the feeling there was something that I needed to connect with, and whatever path that led me on, I just had to follow that pull, that connection. So I started reading, Ouspenskii and Gurdjieff, Jane Roberts, all of those New Age thinkers and mystics, and eventually came to Thomas Merton. And Thomas Merton was the pivot for me to get into serious study and seriously consider what this whole mysticism thing was about, what it meant, and why I was there.”

Reading Merton, she decided she needed to be baptized. “I got baptized a Catholic. Because of Thomas Merton. Blame Thomas Merton for that. So I was a Catholic from Oklahoma. I mean, Oklahoma doesn’t do Catholics,” she says with a laugh. “I was living in Los Angeles at the time, but I had grown up in Oklahoma. So it was kind of a big step for me to do that, but it seemed necessary.”

After the baptism, she went on a private retreat at the Mary and Joseph Retreat Center in nearby Palos Verdes, and there she met Father Greg Mayers, a Dharma heir of  Willigis Jäger in the Sanbo Zen lineage. “I felt he was a mystic. So there was an immediate attraction there just because of the style and content of his teaching. And it was only later that I learned he was a Zen teacher. I didn’t know what Zen was at that time, but I knew what he was.”

At the time Greg was the director of the Bishop DeFalco Retreat Center in Amarillo, Texas, but he came regularly to the Mary and Joseph Center to lead retreats.

“So I started to attend these retreats. I’d never done meditation or anything like that. It was just part of this pull toward silent, mystical spirituality that I was undergoing. Like I said, I don’t know where it came from. It was just there.”

The point she returns to frequently during the conversation is that whatever was drawing her was not a matter of doctrine. “I recall telling someone, a friend, ‘I just need to find out who’s in here,’” pointing to her heart and head.

“And so after you met Father Greg, did you take up formal Zen practice?”

“Yes. I asked him if I could attend only his retreats because there was . . . You know, I think the transmission that I ultimately received from him actually occurred at the very beginning. Transmission sort of occurs when you first meet your teacher. ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.’ So I said, ‘Can I just attend your retreats?’ And he said, ‘Yes. You can come to Amarillo.’ And I was self-employed by that time. So I had the freedom to do that.”

That was 1996. The next year she was in London, England, on business and decided “I needed to make a break with my life in Los Angeles and go ‘find myself.’” She elaborated on this in an email she sent me after the interview. “In early 1998, I gave away all my stuff, rented out my LA house, and struck out, by car, for a long stay at the Bishop DeFalco Center. I stayed there for ten weeks, during which time I sat by myself, made sesshin with Pat Hawk, and had dokusan with Greg. After Amarillo, I spent eight weeks alone at the Desert House of Prayer, a Redemptorist hermitage in Tucson, where I sat in meditation daily and gratefully took in the beauty and sacred quiet of the Sonoran Desert, along with a few other crazy hermits from around the US.”

Willigis Jäger

Greg encouraged her to go to Germany to study with his teacher, Willigis Jäger, a Benedictine Dharma heir of Koun Yamada. Nona describes the six weeks she spent with Jäger as a “most profound and enjoyable experience for me. Willigis was a remarkable man, a wonderful teacher, and a most gracious host.”

When she returned to the US, she moved to Sacramento to be closer to her father, and she continued travelling to Amarillo to attend sesshin with Greg Mayers.

“And somewhere along the line,” I say, “Father Greg decides that you’re going to do more than just practice. You’re going to take on a leadership role. How did that come about?”

“Lord! I couldn’t tell you,” she says, laughing. “I couldn’t tell you what was in his mind when he conferred that honor and obligation on me. Sometimes I see it as an honor, but sometimes I see it more as an obligation. First, I was one of his assistants. That’s kind of the way it came about. He had me ring the bell and do the readings and all that stuff from pretty early on. And then, probably in 2017, he asked me, ‘What would you think if I wanted to make you my Dharma successor?’ And it came out of nowhere. Now, I have a near-pathological level of self-doubt, and I said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’”

“You said that having transmission is not only an honor, it’s an obligation. What’s the obligation?”

“The obligation is to be there for other people. I’m a pretty solitary person by nature. Having been raised as an only child and having gone through life as a solitary person, it’s difficult for me to be called out of myself, out of my own space and have to – have to – devote myself or take my own time to attend to someone else’s needs. Although at one time I imagined myself as this kind of helpmeet for other people. There was a time when I considered being a psychologist, a psychotherapist. But that disappeared, that compulsion or interest dissipated when I looked at it practically and said, ‘But you won’t be able to go on vacation. People will need you, and you’ll have to be there.’ So the whole thing of being a teacher or a guide brought up that same reluctance of having to surrender my own privacy and my own solitude to the needs of other people. And, of course, there’s my sense of inadequacy and my self-doubt. I’m not that comfortable being out in front. But as it turns out, I’ve kind of been able to put my fears in my pocket and keep on stepping up, doing what’s been asked of me. That’s all I can really do.”

Nona with Greg Mayers

“What brings people to Zen practice?”

“Just based on the people I know who come for retreats, they come for several things. Some come because they think that there is some kind of peace of mind to be gained through Zen practice and meditation that they don’t get elsewhere.”

“So they come to it as a psychological practice.”

“Partly, maybe. But the peace they’re seeking is more about experiencing a sense of the sacred. Contemplating the mystery of life, I guess. People see meditation as a way to connect with something quiet, something sacred, something spiritual. I think we are all responding to the same pull that got me onto this path in the first place. Of course, people want to have a mastery of life. That’s the other thing that comes up. They want to be above all the bumps and pimples and stuff that they have in their lives now. They want peace within themselves. Some, probably most, want peace among others in society, and they figure that in finding inner peace, they’ll be able to spread that gospel of peace throughout society. Some may want to be enlightened. I mean, meditation practices are a lot more popular now than they were in our day.”

“So you’re saying that when people come to meditation now, they do so – at least in part – looking for a psychological technique. How does it become a spiritual practice?”

“Well, some people have gone through mindfulness training as they do in the corporate world now. Some people are Christians. The Mercy Center and Father Greg have this East-West dimension, him being a priest and having embraced Eastern wisdom. And I think a growing number of people sense that there is something within their Christian tradition that leads to a more inner-directed practice. I think more people are looking for something that’s more inner-directed because the outer is so messed up now, and people are looking for a way to immerse themselves in a space that’s beneath the turmoil. Or above the turmoil. Or outside of the turmoil. But not wrapped up in the turmoil, not tossed and battered. And people are looking for a way not to be tossed and battered, I think. And so much of what is happening now and has been happening over the past umpteen years is a tossing and battering of ourselves, of our wishes and desires, or our need to escape our wishes and desires.”

“So I suppose if I were a Buddhist, I’d call that dukkha.”

“Dukkha. Suffering. Yeah. Yeah. Some people have started referring to suffering as angst or anguish, rather than suffering. When I hear ‘suffering,’ I think of someone in terrible pain. You know? Or someone suffering through a divorce or the loss of a child.”

“Albert Low pointed out that the etymology of dukkha is that it basically means out of alignment. He would use the example of a grocery-cart where one of those wheels just isn’t rolling smoothly. That’s dukkha. It isn’t just big things like the death of a child; it’s all those little petty grievances like that grocery-cart wheel.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“So,” I ask, “when people come to get relief from all those petting little things, what is it that they look to you for?”

“I don’t know. I have a group that meets – fifteen or twenty people – every Thursday. And they come to sit in silence, but I also give a Dharma talk each week. So I don’t know if they come to hear the talk or they come to sit. I always worry that I’m not giving them enough when I give the Dharma talk. But then I think, ‘Well, maybe they just come to sit, and – you know – the Dharma talk is an interruption in their sitting.’” She laughs heartily. “I don’t know why they come.”

“But they show up.”

“But they show up. They’re there.”

“And they come back.”

“They’re there every week.”

“So they’re finding some kind of nourishment. What is it that you hope for them?”

“I hope that they can find within themselves a deeper and more solid connection to what is, to . . . I don’t know – call it cosmic reality if you want – than when they came in. A deeper . . . Not more committed, but a broader understanding of who they are and where they fit in the whole universal paradigm.”

“The word you’re not using here is ‘God.’”

“No. It’s not about God. I don’t even know what God is. I have a kind of a resistance to the use of that word because I think it tends to personify what’s real in a way that can be detrimental to a person’s experience of being. ‘God’ is such a loaded word, loaded notion, a loaded concept.”

“Tell me about koans.” She doesn’t immediately respond. “That friend you talked about earlier, the one you told that you ‘need to find out who’s in here,’ if they’d asked what koans were all about, what would you have told them?”

“At the time? I would have said they were scenarios that allowed us to penetrate through life situations and find the truth – quote/unquote ‘truth’ – that lives in those life situations. They’re, of course, supposed to produce kensho – the explosion, the fireworks – that brings you from lower case life to Upper Case Life, if you know what I mean. In other ways, they’re just little obscure stories designed to confound you – to completely confound us – and to exhaust our thinking minds.”

“That’s what you would have said at the time? What about now?”

She reflects a moment, then says, “I’d go for the penetrating purpose. I want people who are working with me to be able to read these stories and through them get a glimpse of what has been, is now, and ever shall be. Going back to my doxology from Sunday School. I mean it’s that which endures. That which is. That which is out of time. And these little stories are supposed to be – or can be, at least – a trigger for us to be able to see through the life situations down to the uber-life situation or the under-life situation or however you want to phrase it. That’s what I would say now.”

“You said koan study was supposed to ‘of course’ (your term) produce kensho. Did it?”

“No. For me, my ‘enlightenment,’ or ‘awakening,’ experiences all came from or came through or came as that same pull that got me on this path in the first place. Koans can get in the way for me because they almost point to doctrine, and that’s a little scary for me to say. But they want to point you in a certain direction. But what’s at the end of that direction is already within you.

“Are you suggesting they point you to an experience of what the doctrine is an expression of?”

“The experience of what the doctrine is an expression of. Exactly. Thank you for that phrasing.”

As the conversation winds down, she says she’d like to speak about “the subject of how that whole pull toward mysticism and mystical spirituality has crept into my Zen practice and my Zen teaching or guidance or whatever. And I’m kind of in the middle – right now – of an Experience. And if you write that down, please write it with a capital E. It’s like one of those things that happen, another pull that’s happening in which I am drawn to emphasize or to – yeah, ‘emphasize’ is the only word I can think of – emphasize the mystical element in Zen practice, Buddhist practice. I’m more settled in the mystical aspect of spirituality than I am in the doctrinal. And there is Zen doctrine. I mean, koans are part of it. There’s Buddhist doctrine; the Precepts are part of it. I feel like I’m distancing myself from all of that and going more to what those traditions represent, what they’re trying to express. And what they’re trying to express lies beneath the traditions themselves, the doctrines themselves.”

“Traditionally I would understand ‘mystical’ to refer to the experiential rather than the reasoned or rational understanding. Is that the way you’re using the term?”

“Yes. Precisely.”

“So going back to that sense that the work of koans is to assist one in experiencing directly that which the doctrine is an expression of.”

“Yes.”

“And when you work with students in this way, how do you help them achieve that experiential understanding?”

“I let them sit with the koan and then encourage them to express what that koan has awakened in them. What the story has awakened, what the story is pointing them to. It’s not just about understanding the story. It’s standing with the story.”

Fr. Greg Mayers, C.Ss.R, Roshi, with (L-R) Nona Strong, Tony Tackitt, Alice Cabotaje

Soyu Matsuoka

A conversation with Tim Ryuko Langdell –

Tim Ryuko Langdell is the guiding teacher at Still Center Zen in Pasadena. He contacted me after I had written a post about the Japanese teachers who first brought Zen practice to North America. I had neglected, he informed me, to include Soyu Matsuoka. In fact, I was unfamiliar with Matsuoka.

Although Tim is British by birth, he began coming to the United States regularly in 1973 – at the age of 20 – to practice at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. He’s an easy and fluid speaker who can run with the answer to a question faster than I, at times, can keep up.

“I instantly felt a connection to the Zen Center of Los Angeles. But one of the feelings I had about being there for many, many years, is – and this isn’t a criticism; it’s just a personal preference – that rather being Zen for an American audience it’s trying to be Japanese Zen here in America. And it’s not alone in that. Most of the Zen centers I know around America are trying to bring the Japanese experience to American people. So they will shave their heads, they will wear the full robes. They will do chants in Sino-Japanese. And it all seems very . . . To me, it feels like, ‘Well, that’s nice, but we’re not Japanese.’ What struck me upon learning about Soyu Matsuoka is that not only is he the first Soto priest to bring Zen to the west, but rather than set up a Zen center styled on the monastic constructs of the Japanese Zen temples, he focuses on talking to his audiences as regular North Americans. Therefore, his followers can have robes – it’s not that they can’t wear robes or don’t wear robes, some of them do – they have rakusus, but the level of formality is pretty light. It’s definitely Soto-shu lite. He never formed a formal Zen Center in the sense of ZCLA or the San Francisco Zen Center. The Zen Centers he formed are usually in peoples’ houses. So they took over homes, or they rented a house to become a Zen Center. I think that’s one reason he isn’t as well-known. Because it’s not, ‘Here’s the Zen Center called something with -ji on the end that was founded by Matsuoka Roshi.’ Which is why we’ve heard of Maezumi, which is why we’ve heard of Suzuki or Sasaki or Shimano; so he slipped through the cracks in the histories for that reason.

Tim Langdell

“He styles his Zen as Zen for the average person. And he has a very simple structure compared to, for example, Maezumi’s White Plum structure which is partly Soto, partly Rinzai. They have several different layers. You can take all Sixteen Precepts. You can become a novice priest or a monk. You can work on the teacher path. Or you can go up the priest line which involves such things as Dharma Holder, Head Priest, all the way up to fully ordained priest, all the way up to being fully transmitted. Inka shomei. Many, many stages. Matsuoka simplified it to basically three or four. Take the Precepts. If you feel called to something more, become ordained as a novice priest, then as a priest, and very rarely also have people as roshis. So there only have been something like six roshis in his tradition of which I am one, where there would be many of them in all the other traditions I’m aware of. He wanted to flatten the hierarchy, to keep a more human level, more aimed at the average person. And the impression I get from his teachings is that although he did ordain people, they didn’t suddenly become the important people in the room. I don’t mean that to sound critical. I appreciate that it could do because I have been in situations where you can have it very clearly indicated to you what the hierarchy in the room is from the roshi all the way down, depending on the robes you are wearing. He tried to start it in a much more egalitarian way.

“His Dharma talks quite frankly stunned me when I first read them. He was as likely to go the local Police Confederation and talk to the local Police Academy or local firefighters or give a talk on Zen at the local high school as he was to invite people into one of his Zen Centers and have a formal Dharma talk in the way that you might be more familiar with Maezumi or Suzuki. So all of this, to me, adds up to not only the first attempt to bring Zen practice to North America by a Soto priest that I’m aware of, but it’s also the first attempt to bring a more truly American Zen practice rather than a transferred or transposed Japanese practice into a North American setting.

“The core of Matsuoka’s teaching was Zen in everyday life. Not Zen on a cushion in a zendo in a quiet time once a week, once a day at home or whatever, but moment to moment to moment Zen practice. And he taught that over and over again. Something that I’ve been teaching for many years now, and I’ve got some strange looks because it’s like, ‘No. Soto Zen is shikantaza; it’s sitting on a cushion, facing a wall, and you’ll become enlightened.’ Our approach for many years has been, ‘Maybe. But except possibly Siddhartha Gautama himself, we don’t have even one story of a person becoming enlightened on the cushion.’ It’s just an historical fact. If we believe the writings, it’s never happened. But we do believe very much in zazen in a very real sense. Yes, it means ‘sitting meditation,’ but it can also mean walking meditation; it can also mean moment to moment meditation as you drive your car, work in your office at work, do the dishes, cook the meal, do the gardening. Whatever it is. That moment to moment, that can be zazen.”

I ask if we can back up a bit and get some biographical data.

“Okay a quick overview of his early life. He’s born near Hiroshima in 1912. He attends Soto-shu’s Komozawa University in Tokyo and graduates with a Bachelor’s degree. He then trains at Soji-ji Monastery which, of course, along with Eihei-ji, is one of the two main Soto-shu monasteries. And after several years at Soji-ji he’s given the assignment to establish a temple in the far north of Japan on Karafuto Island which is also known as South Sakhalin, and that was a very demanding task because it was a very remote island, and it would have been very hard to start a temple on it. The island was then claimed by Russia about 1945, so whatever he established there was probably no longer there a few years later. In about 1938 or ’39 – I have two different accounts of that – he comes to the United States, by far the earliest Soto priest . . .”

I interrupt again to point out that Zenshu-ji in Los Angeles had been established in 1922.  

“I’m making a small distinction but it’s an important one,” Tim explains. “Whilst he’s initially sent over to assist at Zenshu-ji, he very quickly then goes on to spread Zen practice to the non-Japanese Americans. Hosen Isobe, who founded Zenshu-ji, and the others with him came over to support the Japanese American population, not to spread Zen to Americans. So Matsuoka was the first to come over who was on that route. After Zenshu-ji in LA, he gets moved to Soko-ji in San Francisco to run that. And then he gets put in the internment camps for the entirety of World War II.

“After the war, instead of going back to Soko-ji, Matsuoka goes to New York to do post-graduate studies with D. T. Suzuki at Columbia. And from Columbia, he then goes to Chicago. Why he went to Chicago, I’m not sure. He happened to love Chicago, and he loved California too. So he moved to Chicago and, in 1949, establishes the Chicago Soto Buddhist Temple which later becomes the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago, which is still active today and is still being run by Matsuoka’s Dharma heirs. And as far as we can tell, almost from its formation, it wasn’t aimed at Japanese Americans. It was attracting, from a very early time, Americans interested in Zen. We’ve got this lack of clarity about the 1950s. We know he was based in Chicago. At the moment, I would have to guess that there was a combination of supporting Japanese Americans in Chicago and welcoming non-Japanese Americans who wanted to learn about Zen. But when we get to the early 1960s, it becomes clear that his outreach is very much to non-Japanese Americans. By the early 1960s he is very active in the Civil Rights Movement. We have a copy of a talk he gave in ’65. So during the ’60s he’s gathering a following of relatively young people. There’s a lot of hippie-like references.”

He also began meeting with other early Zen pioneers including Shunryu Suzuki and the Korean master, Seung Sahn

“And somewhere in the ’60s period, he is given the very senior title of Gondai-kyoshi, which can mean ‘highly respected authorized great teacher.’ Some translate it as Vice President of Soto-shu. Or some translate it as bishop or archbishop. And it’s the same title that Suzuki eventually gets in October of 1969. Matsuoka gets that honor substantially before Suzuki, and he’s eight years younger than Suzuki. That’s an interesting observation. Again, this is a man overlooked by history and yet he got that title.”

By the late 1960s, Matsuoka – as Tim puts it – split from Soto-shu, the formal administrative structure of the Soto school. “His very first Dharma heir was Daikaku Kongo Langlois. He’s the only person he gave transmission whose name he registered with Soto-shu. So when he made Langlois a novice priest, he did put his name down, and that would have been in ’67. Then he decides he’s breaking from Soto-shu. His Zen is going to be American Zen, not Japanese Zen, and he formally disengages from Soto-shu. I believe this is another reason he’s not mentioned, because there’s tremendous pressure from the Japanese side of things to ghost him because he left them. He stopped giving them money of course. It’s actually quite expensive to belong to Soto-shu. Thousands of dollars a year to retain title of Gondai-kyoshi, for instance. So when Langlois becomes fully transmitted in 1971, Matsuoka doesn’t report that to Soto-shu. There has also been a suggestion that Soto-shu thought they had some kind of claim over his Chicago temple because it had started as a mission to Japanese Americans, but he turned it into a mission to American-Americans.”

Matsuoka with Shunryu Suzuki

“And did his temple follow the same structures common elsewhere?” I ask. “Courses in zazen, extended retreats, work periods. That kind of thing?”

“Again, his approach to do Zen was not to borrow from the monastic way of doing things, and what you just described is the monastic structure. It is said that his life was one long sesshin. He led a very simple life. It was quite strict. And he retains an informal approach in each of the centers he’s involved in, because he then goes and forms a center in Long Beach, California. And Chicago and Long Beach have the same hallmarks which are that both have zazen; he has a tremendous focus on zazen; he’s very Soto from that point of view. They’re having sesshins and osesshins. They’re having talks; there are lots of talks and discussions. They had – I think they were called tea-talks – basically they were having tea and a talk. So less formal than what people were doing at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Definitely less formal than Rinzai. And I think that’s why he attracted so many American members who were not necessarily going there to become priests. He’d make a number of priests, but that wasn’t the primary reason that people were coming. He wasn’t there to train priests in the way you do in more formal Zen centers.”

After giving Langlois full transmission, Matsuoka had him take over the Chicago center, and he moved to Long Beach.

“This is around ’71. And he forms the Long Beach Zen Temple. He becomes involved to some degree with the Long Beach Buddhist Church. I did my Soto-shu training there, and his photograph is on the altar. That’s where I first learned of him, when I asked, ‘Who’s that photograph on the altar?’ And they said, ‘Oh, that’s Matsuoka.’ I thought Matsuoka was one of the main Soto-shu people because why was he on the altar with the other Soto-shu people? So he’s the only non-Soto-shu person on the altar. And he forms this group, and it flourishes during the ’70s, and basically he stays there the rest of his life until he becomes very sick in his 90s. Then he moves back to Chicago for his remaining days. And now there is almost no sign of anything left in Long Beach.”

“What is it that you think people should know about him?” I ask. “What is his legacy?”

“Well, as I said at the beginning, the fact that he was one of the first Soto-shu priests to come to America. And he was also the first to teach Zen practice to Americans rather than to Japanese Americans. We started because you named four people as the original Japanese missionaries to America,[1] and I said, ‘Shouldn’t it really be five?’ Matsuoka should have been included in that initial list.”

“And I had not heard of him.”

“Which most people haven’t. I hadn’t heard about him until just a few years ago when I lighted upon this group, and I said, ‘Who’s Matsuoka?’ And then I dove into it. And the other thing I wanted to say is that I am still finding Matsuoka heirs. There are websites all over the world – definitely all over America – where there are Dharma heirs of Matsuoka. An Giao[2] who sadly just passed away but ran the Dessert Zen Center in Southern California is known to me as a Vietnamese monk and teacher. I didn’t know that he was also made a priest by Matsuoka. He’s all over the place. And I think his importance is that of those initial people – Maezumi, Sasaki, Suzuki, and Shimano – he’s the one who tried to come up with an American Zen rather than transplanting the Japanese Soto monastic tradition to America. So his vision, to me, was an extremely valid vision. And because he was not trying to do it monastically, it didn’t get reported on as much, it didn’t leave behind a physical temple or Zen Center that people could write about and get to know and even visit. It was more ephemeral because he tended to set up in peoples’ houses. He had a really good grasp of American culture, I think. And I think that’s another reason he should be remembered, because he’s the one who rather than say, ‘I represent Soto-shu and I’m here to convert you into American Soto-shu men,’ said, ‘I’m going to give you an American Zen that has its roots in Soto-shu, that has its roots in Dogen, in particular, but I’m trying to make it first and foremost American Zen rather than Japanese Zen.’ As one of the few remaining Matsuoka roshis, since we are the lineage bearers, it falls on my shoulders to keep Matsuoka’s memory and his teachings alive and to continue to pursue his vision of a more truly western form Zen better suited to both American and European lifestyles and culture.”

[1] https://rbmcdaniel.ca/2024/03/20/joshu-sasaki/

[2] https://desertzencenter.org/monks/

Glenn Webb

Conversations with Genjo Marinello and Kurt Spellmeyer –

“I came to Seattle in 1976 as a VISTA volunteer,” Genjo Marinello tells me. Genjo is the abbot of Dai Bai Zan Cho Bo Zen Ji. “I had already started studying Zen in 1975 with Daizen Victoria at the College of Oriental studies and a little bit of bumping into people at Zen Center of Los Angeles, so I was already meditating daily by the time I came to Seattle. And I started looking for what was then called the Seattle Zen Center. I had heard it was on the University of Washington campus, but this was before the internet, and I couldn’t find it. I walked around campus and looked into some rooms but didn’t see anything that looked like a zendo. It wasn’t until 1977 that I met somebody who knew somebody who said, ‘This group meets at such-and-such a room on the UW campus on such-and-such a day.’ And so I showed up, and that’s when I met Dr. Glenn Webb.”

Genjo and Glenn Webb

Webb was a Protestant minister’s son from Oklahoma who earned a Ph. D. in Asian Art from the University of Chicago. He had a studio in the Art History Department a UW where – Genjo explains – “there were cabinets with all the zafus and the bells and whistles, as it were, to construct a zendo by moving the tables aside and bringing out the zabutons and the zafus and setting up a zendo. And that’s what they did every week.”

Webb’s Zen practice began in 1964, when he was in Japan to study ink block prints.

“The story that I heard,” Genjo tells me, “was that he wanted to study a particular series of prints which were housed in a Zen temple – temples are treasuries of Zen art in Japan – and the roshi of the temple said, ‘Well, you won’t even see this work unless you are doing zazen. You won’t be able to appreciate it. So, why should I go to the trouble of accessing this material for you, even if you’re a scholar, if you don’t do zazen?’ So that’s how he began zazen. And then he went to a sesshin and kind of got hooked and had some experiences. He also studied the Japanese tea ceremony. And when he came back to Seattle, he taught the History of Japanese Art.”

I ask what Webb’s official teaching status had been.

“It is my understanding that he had transmission, but I never saw him dressed in the robes, and he wasn’t really playing the role of a priest or a Roshi; he was more an art history professor who had a Zen group. He was also a tea master. He had more than enough to do as a tea master and an art history professor and a part-time leader of a Zen group, but he didn’t want to be a Zen teacher. He just wanted people to have the opportunity to appreciate art and tea and felt that to do so they needed – as he had – to do Zen.”

“Do you remember your initial impression of him?” I ask.

“Affable. Sincere. Enthusiastic about everything Japanese. And I was already interested in Zen, so it was a place to come and sit. And I thought it was a great bonus, his love for everything about Japan, Japanese art, and the tea ceremony. He was fluent in Japanese, and he had spent so long there, and he had connections with temples in Japan, and I was already thinking that I might go down that path of going to Japan myself. So this was a great bonus to know an American who had done all this training.”

“You said he didn’t ‘want’ to be a Zen teacher. So he didn’t present himself as one?”

“He did present himself as a teacher of a meditation group. But he wasn’t trying to say, ‘I’m the roshi,’ or, ‘I’m the osho.’ He just said, ‘This is how to do meditation, and this is something the west could really be served by.’ So he was interested in sharing Zen, tea ceremony, and Japanese art with the world, and being an ambassador for those things. That was his way of sharing Japan with the world.”

“Did you take tea lessons from him?”

“I took a few lessons. I wouldn’t say that . . . I can whisk a good bowl of tea – yeah – and I enjoy doing that.”

“And then he recruited a teacher from Japan.”

“Yes. The group was getting pretty solid and had – even before I got there – sent somebody to Japan to train with some temple that he had been associated with. So the group was budding, and it was like, ‘I can’t do all of this. So maybe on one of my trips to Japan I’ll find someone who will be able to take over that part of leading the group.”

Kurt Spellmeyer

Kurt Spellmeyer is Glenn Webb’s Dharma heir. He tells me, “Originally Glenn had invited a friend, a Soto monk from Eiheiji, Hirano Katsufumi, to lead the emerging Zen Center. He had been the monk in charge of training novices there. But Hirano-san had commitments elsewhere and left. So Webb invited Genki Roshi, whom he had met through his Rinzai connections.”

“Genki Roshi” was Genki Takabayashi who had had been at Daishu-in in Kyoto at the sufferance of the abbot, Soko Morinaga, after being expelled from a previous temple for inappropriate sexual behaviour. In a letter to Kobutsu Malone, Webb explained that Morinaga had taken Genki in as a favor. “But he made Genki’s life hell: when I met him at Daishu-in he was low man on the totem pole, relegated to menial tasks and never allowed to engage in anything important. He showed no remorse for his sexual misconduct, but he seemed determined to go as far in his training as he could. He was a kind of Zen fundamentalist regarding his sitting and his adherence to the tiniest detail of Rinzai Daitoku-ji liturgy.”

Webb invited to Seattle although Morinaga disapproved of the idea. At first the situation in Seattle went well, but eventually Webb and Takabayashi had a falling out.

Genki Takabayashi

Genjo sighs. “Yes. It became a little like too many chief cooks in the kitchen. Something like that. Genki had such a terrible reputation in Japan and was essentially being punished. From what I understand, he was a rising star in terms of doing koan work and going up the echelons, but then disappointed and embarrassed the Japanese hierarchy by getting a woman pregnant, which was not kosher, but then not marrying her was really not kosher. And I think there were some financial dealings that he had mishandled. And so they did not think at all that he should go anywhere like the United States and represent Zen. And Genki was looking for a way out and thought, ‘I’ll just come and visit America. Maybe it will be a nice place to be.’ And he decided it was. And he was very humble to begin with. But then, as he began to pick up the adoration of Americans and the idealization of Americans, this really fed him.”

“Here, in the United States, I think at first he behaved quite well,” Kurt says. “But imagine that you’ve just come from Japan. You have all these adoring people around you, and they’re treating you like a god and that includes some very attractive women. Genki had been adopted as a child by Yamamoto Gempo Roshi; his Dharma father was a famous Zen Master who didn’t know anything about how to raise a kid. In fact, Genki was forced to attend sesshin when he was twelve years old, wishing an earthquake would pull the temple down on his head, as he once told me. So, imagine that this is your background and you’re suddenly in the United States with the Sexual Revolution underway. So he had another affair here in the US, and my understanding is this woman also had a child.”

That affair caused tension with Webb, but the community finally came apart after arrangements to buy a dedicated space for the center fell through.

“There was a house that we were trying to buy,” Genjo explains, “and Glenn was in China or out of the country, and I had put up some down payment money for this house, and even though there had been this falling out, people were still struggling to bring it all together and have our own place. And then Genki decided, ‘Well, I don’t want to live in that place.’ And, of course, it would be impossible if he didn’t live there. And Webb was pissed at him because it caused the whole deal to fall apart. And everybody was mad at everybody. And we lost – personally, my family at that time – lost the money we’d put up for the house. So everybody was mad at everybody because the house that we were trying to buy as the Seattle Zen Center fell through. Glenn was out of town. Genki was being kind of obstinate and stubborn. And that finally did it. Genki announced, ‘Well, I’m just going to start my own thing.’”

“And what did Webb do after Genki took off?”

“Glenn stayed with and remained the teacher of the Seattle Zen Center which continued to go forward independent of Genki, and the Genki faction split off. The Webb faction continued as the Seattle Zen Center until he moved onto Pepperdine in Malibu, and then the Seattle Zen Center essentially fell apart.”

“What took him to Malibu?”

“He became the head of the Art Department at Pepperdine.”

Genjo stayed with the group in Seattle and his contacts with Webb became less frequent after that.

“I would visit him in Pepperdine, probably maybe once a year or so. Then even when he retired from Pepperdine, I would go visit him in Palm Springs where he retired. And I did that a couple of times when he was retired in Palm Springs. He would come up to Seattle and visit Chobo-ji.”

Kurt chose to practice with Glenn after the break-up:

“When Genki had the affair, that crossed a red line for Glenn, and eventually our group split more or less in two. You know how divisive these events are. Whatever the initial issue might be, it becomes a focal point for other tensions and jealousies. And so it wasn’t just an argument between two people but between different groups within the community.

“When the split happened, somewhat to my own surprise, I went with Webb. I suppose I went with him because he was a deeply ethical person, thoughtful, kind and sensitive. As you know, Protestants are no more ethical than anybody else, as we can see from the endless scandals in the Protestant world, but sexual ethics are important to Protestants in a way that people from other traditions might not look at them. Webb, as a minister’s son, was deeply affronted by Genki’s behavior. For me personally, not so much. I was more troubled, even angered, by his indifference to the woman involved.

“So after we had our community Civil War, I was ready to quit Zen. It was so discouraging. People had to choose sides and were attacking one another, impugning each other’s motives. It was ugly and sad. People who had sat through sesshins side by side were suddenly yelling at each other. It was like a nightmare, and I’d just had it. I decided that I would quietly bow out, as many other members of our group did at the time. But all the same, Webb was organizing a sesshin. We had built a temple up in the mountains, which we were now about to lose because financial support had dried up, but Webb was going there one last time before we put the place up for sale.  One evening after meditation, Glenn approached me and asked if I planned to attend. And I very much wanted to say no, but when I looked at his face, I thought, ‘I can’t do this to him. He’s organized this last sesshin; I can’t say, “No.”’ And when I arrived at the temple, instead of our usual eighteen or twenty people, I think we had five – Webb and four others including me. Arriving at the empty, half-finished temple, I felt quite sad and lonely, but that was where I had my dai-kensho, my great awakening experience. It was like nothing else ever. I think I cried for seven days, and at first I wasn’t even aware that I was crying.”

Glenn Webb died on January 6, 2024. I ask Genjo about his legacy.

“He was a key transmitter of the love and art of Japan. From Japan to the West. A little bit like D. T. Suzuki, on a smaller scale of course, but bringing the love of Japanese art and culture from Japan to the United States and having it appreciated on a much wider scale. Whether it was the art of flower arranging or the tea ceremony or sitting zazen or appreciating any of the other Japanese arts, he was just this wonderful ambassador of Japanese culture to the West.”

Issan Dorsey

Maitri Compassionate Care –

Issan Dorsey died thirty-five years ago on Sept 6th, 1990, nearly a quarter of a century before I began this pilgrimage into the landscape of North American Zen. What I know about him comes from reading, especially David Schneider’s biography, Street Zen.[1] For me, Issan is a stellar example of a contemporary Bodhisattva.

Doubtless he was the most unlikely person to earn the right to be addressed as “roshi.” Tommy Dorsey was a drag performer, heroin user, and prostitute who once described being raped in prison as “rather interesting.”

He engaged in a lifestyle that was exciting but dangerous. Twice he almost died from drug overdoses. He engaged in the San Francisco gay scene wholeheartedly but was also known for demonstrating a deep compassion for those who were less able to navigate those waters safely.

After surviving an accident in which all the other people in the car died, he was given LSD by a friend who treated the drug as something sacramental. The friend also introduced Tommy to meditation and chanting, and Tommy joined a psychedelic-centered commune on California Street in San Francisco. Over time, the commune degenerated into a messier hard drug scene, and Tommy began doing speed.

On Christmas Eve 1967, his younger brother was the only person in a car crash to die. The contrast with his own accident struck Tommy sharply. He stopped doing speed and had a sudden sense of personal accountability for both the people around him and the physical and social environments. He surprised the people who knew him by taking on responsibility to police the Haight Asbury neighborhood for trash.

Shunryu Suzuki

Eventually out of curiosity – and because it had become a popular destination for many – he came to Soko-ji, the ethnic Japanese temple where Shunryu Suzuki was teaching Western kids how to meditate. Tommy was charmed by Suzuki and spoke without embarrassment about loving him. Suzuki had that type of charisma, but Dorsey was also someone who loved others easily. Their coming together led to a major transformation of Dorsey’s life.

Tommy left the commune and moved closer to Zen temple. He threw himself into the discipline of practice. And when the non-Asian Zen students separated from the Japanese temple and moved into their own place on the corner of Page and Laguna Streets, Tommy moved into residence there. In 1970 he “took the precepts” and formally became a Buddhist. He was given the name Issan Dainei – “One Mountain, Great Peace.” For people who were unsure how to pronounce his new name, he told them it rhymed with “piss on.”

Suzuki had cancer when they met and died in 1971. But before he did, he asked Issan – and his other disciples – to accept his successor, Richard Baker, as their teacher and address him by the formal title, “Roshi.” After some initial reservations, Issan did as he was asked. He even formally became an “unsui” – or monk – in a ceremony with Baker which included a profession of loyalty to his new teacher.

Baker came to value Issan as someone whom he could trust to carry out the responsibilities entrusted to him without fuss and with good humor. He assigned Issan to positions of more and more responsibility. In 1977, Issan became the head monk – or shuso – at the San Francisco Zen Center’s remote mountain monastery at Tassajara. This, in effect, made him Baker’s second-in-command at Tassajara, and it was recognized that the position was a preliminary step towards eventual transmission.

In 1980, a group of gay practitioners came together at Zen Center to discuss issues of common concern. Zen as a teaching is intended to guide people to an experiential understanding in which all human beings are recognized to have the inherent capacity to experience awakening; however, there can still remain challenges for people who do not belong to the majority population. As a teacher in Boston once explained to me, “There is a real difference in the sense in which one can feel secure and relaxed and open if one’s been a part of any kind of marginalized community, a difference between being in a community in which one is or is potentially marginalized by other people in the group and a group in which you feel that you can let that guard down.”[2]

S/W Ver: 85.97.F1P

Issan joined the group, which he referred to flippantly as the “Posture Queens.” The group called itself “Maitri,” the Buddhist term for friendship. They eventually moved out of Page Street and established a separate center on Hartford Street. By 1981, it was formally inaugurated as an affiliate zendo of the San Francisco Zen Center, and Issan was appointed its “spiritual advisor” with Baker’s support.

Richard Baker was an extraordinary man in many ways, and he took what had been a fairly small religious community with annual revenues of around $8000 a year and transformed it into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. But he also had what many thought of as an imperial manner, and in 1983 the situation became such that Baker was pressured by the SFZC board of directors to resign as abbot.

The community split after Baker’s resignation, but Issan – remembering his promise to Suzuki – remained loyal to Baker and went with him when he relocated to Santa Fe. However, in his absence, the discipline at the Hartford Center declined. One resident suggested it had become “a collection of gay men living together in the middle of the Castro district who keep a pet zendo in the basement.”[3] They petitioned Baker to send Issan back, and he did so, appointing Issan the center’s Teacher in Residence

As the resident teacher at Hartfold, Issan was called upon to lead retreats for gay and lesbian people, and provide other services, including funerals. And the funerals began to become more frequent. The situation was dire. There were support services for people with AIDS, but, as Schneider put it “ – on the street level, the gutter level, the level on which Issan himself had spent most of his life – the care was very flimsy indeed.”[4]

Issan by now was also HIV positive, and he saw all around him people who were gravely ill but who had no resources or support systems in place.  They were, in effect, homeless and dying in the street.

In November 1987, he arranged for one of the members of the Hartford Center to become a resident. The man had AIDS-related dementia and peripheral neuropathy, which meant that he needed help to move about. Doctors estimated that he had less than six months to live. The only apparent option was for him to go into a hospital, where conditions tended to be sterile, where he would be kept from contact with others. Issan envisioned something more humane, a homelike environment where the dying could feel loved and supported and were able to continue to interact with others. And as it happened, with the care he received at what was now called Maitri, the patient rallied and lived longer than expected.

Other end-of-life patients were invited in. The gradual transformation of the Zen Center to a hospice was not universally approved of. Some saw the proximity to the dying emotionally distressing. But Issan had been taught by Suzuki that all that occurs provides an occasion for practice, including one’s last days and the care others could provide at that time.

Issan formed a board of directors; he found a medical director. He organized fund-raising. The place next to the Hartford Zen Center was bought, and the patients were housed there. They avoided the term “hospice” because of the legal ramifications, but Issan knew what he was creating. “What we are doing is renting rooms to people who need twenty-four hour care and who are in the last six months of their lives.”[5]

Former Zen students came to assist. For some, ironically, it was their way of finding their way back to a practice they had fallen away from after Baker’s departure. 

Baker remained supportive of Issan and in November of 1989 a formal ceremony full of archaic ritual and fancy robes (“I’m still wearing a skirt,” Issan said, “just not the heels”) was held in which 57 Hartford Street was declared to be a temple – Issan-ji – and Issan himself was elevated to the rank of abbot. The ceremony was briefly interrupted when a patient fell out of bed and Issan had to excuse himself to help the person off the floor. 

Issan would not be abbot for long, but he did live to see a successor take his place as abbot. His health deteriorated throughout 1990, and that May he was diagnosed to have AIDS-related lymphoma. The pain levels were excruciating as was the treatment. Issan had gone from being a caregiver to a care receiver.

Two months before his death, Baker took him through another ceremony in which he was given full teaching authority and could claim the title “Roshi.” Baker insisted that it wasn’t something he did out of sympathy. “If he did continue to live, he would have been a great teacher.”

The Hartford Zen Center still exists and promotes itself as “a Soto Zen temple for the LGBTQ+ community, friends and allies in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood.” Maitri Compassionate Care – no longer on Hartford Street – also continues to operate and has expanded its work to offer care to people going through transition. Their website states: “The heart of our work is our Residential Care Program, which provides medical and mental health care to people in need of hospice, 24-hour respite care, or recovery support after gender affirmation surgery.”

Issan’s death was difficult, but there were flashes of genuine grace right up until the end. John Tarrant recounts a story about his last days, by which time he needed assistance to go from one place to another. “A friend was helping him come back from the bathroom. They paused on the first-floor landing. The friend, a person himself so fiercely nonconformist that he was nicknamed ‘the feral monk,’ was overwhelmed by feeling, a previously unheard-of event. He took a deep breath and said, ‘I’ll miss you, Issan.’ Issan turned his large, liquid, seductive eyes on his friend and said, ‘I’ll miss you too. Where are you going?’”[6]

[1] Shambhala, 1993.

[2] Julie Nelson

[3] Street Zen, p. 160

[4] P. 168

[5] P. 174

[6] John Tarrant, Bring Me the Rhinoceros. Boston: Shambhala, 2008, p 80

Toni Packer

An excerpt from The Story of Zen –

Toni Eggert was born in Berlin in 1927. Her parents both held Ph. D.’s in chemistry; her father was instrumental in the development of color photography. When Toni was six years old, the Nazis came to power, putting the family at risk because her mother was Jewish. While her father’s position at IG Farben afforded them some protection, the family still needed to be circumspect. When she was eight years old, Toni copied some negative remarks she had heard about the Nazi Party in her journal. Her father found the passage and lectured her on the danger of putting such things in writing.

Although her parents weren’t religious, the children were baptized and raised Lutheran. Toni had a naturally religious attitude and chose to be confirmed when she was fifteen. As she grew older and more aware of what was happening in Germany, however, her belief in the concept of a caring God faltered. The Nazi years also left her with a profound suspicion of all forms of external authority.

After the war, her family moved to Switzerland where she met and married an American university student – Kyle Packer – who eventually brought her to the United States. They settled in western New York, and she enrolled at the University of Buffalo. She acquired an interest in Zen from reading and began sitting on her own guided by the instructions provided in The Three Pillars of Zen. When Kapleau opened the Rochester Zen Center, only 75 miles from her home, she and Kyle became members.

Philip Kapleau

Toni was older and more mature than most of the members of the center, and she was driven by more profound life experiences. She attended as many sesshin as she was able and progressed rapidly in koan work, gaining Kapleau’s notice and respect. By 1975, he invited her to give Dharma talks at the center and even entrusted her with leading sesshin both in Rochester and in Europe.

When Kapleau began to think about retirement, he told Toni it was his intention that she become the resident teacher at the center in his place. He explained that he believed the community would respond well to a lay leader with family responsibilities. Toni was nonplussed by the suggestion, but, since Kapleau’s retirement was still some years off, she didn’t argue with him. Besides which, as she later admitted, she felt an obligation to do whatever her teacher asked of her.

Kyle wasn’t comfortable with the ceremony and ritual at the Zen Center and withdrew from formal practice. Toni also came to question the necessity of certain structures such as the use of the kyosaku and the practice of prostrating before the teacher, especially when she was the one to whom the prostrations were being made. Then she and Kyle began reading Jiddu Krishnamurti’s books.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

When he was still a child in 1929, Krishnamurti had been identified by the Theosophical movement as the incarnation of Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, and they groomed him to become the “World Teacher.” When he reached the age of 34, however, he dissolved his association with the Theosophists, denied their claims for him, and advised would-be disciples and followers to question all forms of authority or religious formulae. Toni and Kyle attended several talks given by Krishnamurti, and his thinking began to impact the way Toni looked at both Buddhism and Zen.

In 1981, Kapleau left Toni in charge of the Rochester Zen Center and went to Santa Fe where he hoped to open a new center and eventually move. Toni struggled with the forms Kapleau expected her to maintain in his absence. In an interview she gave to Lenore Friedman just a few years after these events, Toni said:

I myself was doing all these prostrations, and lighting incense, and bowing, and gassho-ing and the whole thing. I realized that I was influencing people, just by the position I was in, the whole setup. I could see it, and I wasn’t going to have any part in it anymore.

She believed that people could become dependent on the structures of Zen in an unproductive manner.

The system is very supportive to not questioning some things. Even though it claims to question everything. You question everything and you “burn the Buddha,” but then you put him back up!

I examined it very carefully: did I have any division while I was bowing? It had always been said, “When you bow, you’re not bowing to the Buddha, you’re bowing to yourself. And when you’re prostrating, everything disappears, you disappear, the Buddha disappears and there’s nothing.” I tried to look, and it wasn’t completely clear. I could see there was often an image, of the bower, or of the person who “has nothing.” Often there was a shadow of something, somebody there who was doing it. Or maybe the idea of being able to do it emptily![1]

Rochester Zen Center

She decided to loosen some of the structures and relax the atmosphere at the center, but her action caused a rift between members. Many supported and even welcomed her changes; others however – perhaps proving her point – believed the changes subverted the taut atmosphere they felt necessary for Zen practice. People wrote to Kapleau, and, under pressure, he returned to Rochester. A meeting was held in which the members who were unhappy with the way Toni was running things were allowed to voice their complaints. Some of the things said reminded Toni of the denouncements which had taken place in the Germany of her youth, and she found it hurtful. In the end, Kapleau expressed his support for her and gave her permission to bring about whatever changes she felt appropriate. It was too late, however. Toni had already begun to wonder if she could continue to view or present herself as a Buddhist.

Instead of returning to Santa Fe that June, Kapleau went to Mexico to work on a book. Two weeks before he was scheduled to return for a trustees’ meeting, Toni flew there to inform him that she could no longer continue to work within the Buddhist tradition.

She left the Rochester Center and established the independent Genesee Valley Zen Center. Nearly half of the Rochester members went with her. Others, discouraged by the division in the community, fell away from practice altogether.

Toni explained that the term “Zen” in the title of her new center was not intended to imply affiliation but was rather a descriptor of the method of seated meditation used. The group continued to meet in Rochester until 1984, when they purchased 284 acres of undeveloped farmland in Livingston County. In an interview recorded with Joan Tollifson, Toni explained that she wanted a place where people could “be in close touch again with land and sky and running water.”[2]

The new place was called the Springwater Center for Meditative Inquiry.

A period of stripping down followed the break from Kapleau’s group. At first, Toni continued to have students work with koans, then she gradually ceased to do so. Rules – even those governing retreats – became flexible. Participants were free to attend scheduled sittings or not as they chose. Nothing was mandatory except a daily work assignment and silence in certain places at certain times.

Springwater

Toni encouraged her students to examine and question their assumptions about practice, about the roles of student and teacher, and to challenge any concept that came between themselves and the direct perception of self, others, and the external environment. She may have questioned Buddhism as an institution, but, in a classic sense, her approach was that of the Buddha himself when he told his disciples: “The bhikkhus must not accept the words of the Tathagata out of respect. Nor should they believe the words of the Tathagata solely because others do. The bhikkhus must analyze the teachings of the Tathagata as a goldsmith analyzes gold by cutting, melting, scraping, and rubbing it.”

There was, Toni pointed out, no “technique” for doing this. As a result, some people found the approach discouraging. They wanted direction, and she refused to define procedures. There were, she insisted, no “authorities” who could lead one to what she called “awareing” or the “work of the moment.” One needed only to attend simply and directly to what was happening moment to moment. She advised her students to maintain a “not knowing” mind. “Not knowing,” she explained, “means putting aside what I already know and being curious to observe freshly, openly, what is actually taking place right now in the light of the question. Not knowing means putting up with the discomfort of no immediate answer.”

She went on to say that the “essence of meditative inquiry is not obtaining answers but wondering patiently without knowing.”

Toni Packer raised the question whether Zen insight necessarily needed to be cultivated within a Buddhist framework. Essentially she was asking whether that insight was linked with a specific spiritual tradition or if it was universal.

[1] Lenore Friedman, Meetings with Remarkable Women (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), pp. 52-53.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se9iyLdRtYE

Don Stoddard

Memories of Robert Aitken –

“I’ve been a member of the Diamond Sangha since 1966 when the term referred only to the group practicing in Honolulu,” Don Stoddard tells me. “Now the term embraces groups in many places around the World.” He had also been personally involved with much of the construction work that took place over the years both on Oahu and Maui.

Don was born in 1937 – a decade earlier than me – and first learned about Zen in the 1950s. “When I graduated from high school a friend of the family gave me a copy of a small, hardbound book called, Buddhism and Zen which was a collection of pieces translated, compiled, and edited by Nyogen Senzaki and Ruth Strout McCandless. It was originally published in 1953 by the Philosophical Library and reissued in a paperback with a foreword by Aitken Roshi a few years ago. So, this was given to me in 1955. I read it through, and it was my first taste – you might say – arousing an interest in Zen. Then, when I was between my sophomore and junior years in college, a collection of D. T. Suzuki’s essays came out in a Viking paperback edited by Bill Barrett.”

In 1960, he was in graduate school but decided, “I’d had enough years of going to school. In those days eligible males faced the possibility of being drafted if they were not in school. The military obligation was ten years. There were various ways of dealing with it, but, for me, the most appealing way was to join the Navy, go to OCS, become an officer, do three years of active duty, and then the seven remaining years would be in the reserve. It happened I had a choice in what type of ship I would be assigned to and what home port. So, I called my wife, who was still in North Carolina where I’d been in school, and asked, ‘Where would you like to go?’ And we decided on Hawaii.

“When I completed my active duty, I stayed in Hawaii. I was already practicing Zen a little bit on my own based on my reading. One day at a Honolulu bookstore there was a copy of Philip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen. I bought it and read it through and thought, ‘There must be other people here engaged in this practice.’ I checked a couple of the established Zen Buddhist Temples, but there was no sign of an active zazen practice going on. I wrote to Philip Kapleau care of his publisher telling him my situation. Very quickly I got back a postcard and it said, ‘Contact Robert and Anne Aitken. They’re in Honolulu.’ With a phone number. I called the number right away. Anne answered. I told her what I was looking for, that I had been sitting on my own, and was looking for a group to practice with. She said, ‘Well, we’re sitting tonight. Why don’t you come up early and speak to Bob, my husband, and he’ll talk to you and show you what the forms and procedures are.’

Bob and Anne Aitken

“Koko-an, the Aitken’s home in Manoa valley, was about a fifteen-minute walk from where I was living. I went early, met Bob, told him I’d already been doing a self-assigned Mu as a practice, and he said that was fine. At that time there were public practice meetings on Sunday and Wednesday evenings. However, every weekday morning the front door would be open at 6 a.m.” Don got into the habit of joining the Aitkens and a few others for those morning sits before heading out to the boatyard where he worked.

“Bob and I got along well, but he was twenty years older, and his formative experiences were quite different from mine. He’d been a prisoner in Kobi during the war, seeing Japanese families with their belongings on their backs escaping from the bombing and the destruction of everything in their lives left a lasting impact on him. His pacifism was very deep, very serious. He counselled people who were resisting the draft during the late sixties. There was a close connection with the Quaker community in Honolulu. One of the main reasons the Aitkens bought this old farm building that became the first Maui Zendo was because of his sympathy for the many young people kind of – what do you want to say? – drifting, seeking, looking for something. So, for Bob, the move to Maui was partly to set up a kind of environment, a kind of community, a kind of support for people who were seeking, who were open. And one of the things many of them were interested in – or at least had heard about – was this meditation practice, this Zen.”

There were two branches of the Zen group practicing now, an older one still associated with Koko-an in Honolulu and the newer Maui community.

“I had been involved in the planning for the move to Maui as a Board member of the official organization that was being set up to facilitate the legal aspects. Making use of a book put out many years earlier on how to grow vegetables in Hawaii, I drew up a planting plan that was used on a portion of the new property. I made a suggested daily schedule of activities. For some reason, at the time, I thought it was important to have the wakeup bell while it was still dark at all seasons. I collected information on various ‘craft’ projects that might be produced by residents for income. And when the Aitkens moved there in the fall of 1969, I purchased land a few miles away and began to build a home.”

Koun Yamada

He continued to work in Oahu, however, and travelled back and forth, so he was not present for all of the changes that took place once the Maui Center was established. Chief among these was that Aitken – who had seen as a “elder brother” in the practice until this point – was given authorization to teach by Koun Yamada in 1974.

“Part of the intention in moving to Maui was to provide a supportive residential setting for these young people who were searching for something. Eventually the Maui Zendo developed a reputation for being a particularly – and I will use a word they might use – ‘spiritual’ place. I met all kinds because in those days on Maui you gave people rides when you could. So I’d be giving people rides, and they would tell me stories about how they came there. Sometimes they would have heard of the Maui Zendo and want a ride there. And then they would often ask what my ‘sign’ was. And I’d make up a sign, and they’d say, ‘Of course, I would have known you’d be such-and-such.’ You know? And then they’d explain why you’d demonstrated all these characteristics associated with that sign.

“Then that period began to die down, and there weren’t so many people that were coming and going on the road. Between 1972 and 1977 my contacts with the goings on at the Maui Zendo were episodic. I might get a call from Roshi or his wife, Anne, to help with some practical matters. But I was often on the Big Island or in Honolulu doing boat designing or building.

“The next major change came when there was an opportunity to buy a large house on a hill about one mile from the original Maui Center. It was rumored to have been a brothel during World War II. There was a large room that would serve well as a zendo, a number of small rooms in a row for residents, and a large kitchen. There was a large, covered porch. Parts of the structure were unfinished. One wing still had dirt floors in the rooms. Roshi asked me, because of my building experience, if I would do a survey and see if it was structurally sound or if they would be buying major problems. So, I did, and the purchase was made. That building then became the Maui Zendo and the older one became the Aitkens’ home.

“There were many jobs to do on the new Zendo and there were many sangha members who came to help as we poured concrete over the dirt to make solid floors, put a new roof over the large porch, replaced much of the water piping, replaced some rotten structural framing. There were always people in residence, but quite a few of the members now were at an age when marriage, or education for a career, or starting a career were beginning to affect the time that they could devote to sangha matters. Some had set up their own households and came for practice and workdays but were no longer in residence when a lot of maintenance had to get done.

“Meanwhile, the Honolulu sitters at Koko-an had grown and solidified around a group of dedicated students. When Aitken Roshi began to lead sesshin he would, in addition to holding them in Maui, go to Honolulu and provide practice opportunities there. There was a multi-year transition period where the group in Honolulu was becoming more active. People would come there to practice including some that may have begun on Maui but moved to Honolulu for educational or work opportunities. Roshi would go back and forth to lead events in Honolulu and lead events in Maui. He and Anne were still going to Japan regularly to continue practice with Yamada Roshi.”

The Aitkens eventually moved back to Honolulu, but they were also getting older. “Koko-an was being used as the practice center. It was still their home though for many years they had been donating a percentage of the property to the Diamond Sangha. But the overall layout made it less suitable for an older couple to share with an ongoing residential practice program.”

The Aitkens eventually rented a house “– that was just around the corner from Koko-an. Roshi could walk over for zazen. It was less than half a block. That seemed ideal. They were there for a while, and then that owner decided there was enough room – if he dug out from under the building, in the crawl space – that he could fit in another whole rental unit. Some of these old houses were built up on posts kind of high. So they came in with their excavating equipment and started digging. The house where the Aitkens were living kept changing shape. Anne might, one morning, go into the kitchen to open a cupboard door, and it wouldn’t open anymore because the house was settling. And the next day she’d go to shut the front door, and the door wouldn’t stay closed. At the same time, dust was coming up, and Roshi had had asthma and lung trouble of one kind or another since he was young. It became a terrible place for them to live.

“Eventually, a group of us said, ‘Look, this is wrong.’ Anne was seven years older than Roshi, so by now she is in her mid 70’s. We said, ‘This is just not right. Let’s find another place we can purchase so there will be no more moving around.’ I suggested, and others agreed, we look for a piece of property, and we’ll just build something. That way we can build something that had always been a dream of Roshi’s from an earlier time of having a place where he and Anne could live and other people, including families, could come and live too. He had this image from somewhere. I knew what he meant because in New England – where I grew up – there were these summer campgrounds, often religiously associated. They’d have a little church, and then they’d have cabins spread around. And church members would come, and they’d live in the cabins for the whole summer or part of the summer. An arrangement like that for Zen practitioners.”

Don found the appropriate location by accident. He was driving around the area “and I found a realtor sign that had fallen in the weeds. It was a 13 acre parcel a group of investors had tried and failed to develop for multiple houses. It was one valley over from Manoa, Palolo Valley. The investors had been blocked in their building plans because the water pressure in the nearest hydrant was too low for the fire department to be able to provide protection. If they built a reservoir for a million or more gallons on the property, then the fire department would sign off on their plans, but that requirement made the project uneconomical. I went to the fire department and asked, ‘If I put in an approved sprinkler system will that satisfy you folks?’ They said, ‘Yeah, sure. A sprinkler system’s fine.’ So, we bought the property.

“There were a few other hoops to jump through on zoning and some things with the water department, but we settled all that, and over a period of six years built the Palolo Zen Center, which is still the home of the Honolulu Diamond Sangha.”

Anne died in 1994, and Bob retired a year later. With Don’s help, he located a property near his son’s house on Kaimu Bay.

“His son, Tom, was a public-school teacher, and his mother, Roshi’s first wife, who was bed-ridden, lived with him. Then Tom decided to move back to Honolulu. Roshi at this point had an attendant to help manage things, but he had had some health challenges in recent years. Though a group of us would drive out to sit on Sunday morning, being there in Kaimu he was sort of isolated for most of the week. When he decided to sell and move back to Honolulu a sequence of events occurred. He slipped and had a fall. He probably had had a small stroke, as it turned out, and at that point he was in a wheelchair.”

Aitken had to move into assisted living for a while

“The place he stayed when he went back to Honolulu was a very nice location with different levels of assisted living. But there were problems that may have been related to his recurrent lung infections. I really don’t know any details. I was in Hilo and got irregular reports. But I felt, as did others, why isn’t there a way that he can live back in the residence we’d built for him and Anne at Palolo? Participating in practice, surrounded by friends and Zen students. Eventually things were worked out and with three Tongan woman as aides to help him with his daily activities he was able to remain there except for some hospitalizations due to lung infections, the last of which ended his life.”

Robert Aitken died in 2010.

Don is still active with the Diamond Sangha. He is a member of the Diamond Sangha Teachers Circle and a practice guide with the Hilo Zen Circle.

Kathy Ratliffe

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?’”

Toni Packer

“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.”

Kathy with Michael Kieran

“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.

Robert and Anne Aitken

The Diamond Sangha –

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese warships encircled the island of Guam. American military personnel posted there were outnumbered and surrendered without a fight. Robert Aitken, who had been working construction on the island, was among the civilians detained and transported to Japan as non-combatant internees.

R. H. Blyth

He was first incarcerated in the old British Seaman’s Mission in Kobe which had a library to which the detainees were allowed access. Aitken decided to make the best use he could of his imprisonment by improving his general literacy. The book that redirected his life, however, did not come from the library but was loaned to him by one of the guards. It was Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics by Reginald Horace Blyth, who had taught English at the high school the guard had attended before the war.

Blyth’s Zen was literary. He didn’t practice zazen but valued Zen insight, which he believed was universal. In his book, he sought to demonstrate that Zen themes—such as the quest for enlightenment—were common throughout world literature. Zen, as he understood it, was found not only in China and Japan but as well “in Christ; in Eckehart [sic], and in the music of Bach; in Shakespeare and Wordsworth.”

It was an unorthodox approach to the subject but an ideal introduction for Aitken, who already admired Japanese haiku poetry. He reread the book so often that the guard, fearing the binding would break, took it back.

Coincidentally, Blyth was not far away in another camp for civilian prisoners where, in spite of his Japanese wife, he was detained as an “enemy alien.” In 1944, the prison camps in the area were combined, and Blyth and Aitken were housed together in the same complex. They met, and Blyth introduced Aitken to D. T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism.

Nelson Foster

Nelson Foster is one of Aitken’s Dharma heirs and was his immediate successor as teacher at the Honolulu Diamond Sangha and its sister group on Maui. He tells me that, in a peculiar way, Aitken’s time as a prisoner of war was a period of personal growth. “He was fascinated by Blyth. Bob was a guy who’d flunked out of college. This exposure to literature through the super well-read and linguistically talented Mr. Blyth lit him up intellectually, and when he got back to the United States, he finished his bachelor’s degree, then went on to a master’s degree in Japanese literature. So in many ways, that time in Japan ignited Bob Aitken, turning him from a college drop-out to a fellow who found his feet in the world and really got started.”

After the war, Aitken earned an English degree from the University of Honolulu in 1947, following which he and his first wife, Mary, left for California where he planned to do graduate studies at UC-Berkeley. He remained interested in Zen, and when he heard about Nyogen Senzaki in Los Angeles, he and Mary relocated there, transferring his graduate study to UCLA.

His first meetings with Senzaki were discussions about philosophy and literature. Eventually, drawn by Senzaki’s personal manner, Aitken realized that what he wanted was not information about Zen but a way to develop the insight which animated Senzaki. The Aitkens joined Senzaki’s meditation group, and Senzaki assigned him, as a koan, Meister Eckhart’s statement that “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”

In 1950, the Aitkens returned to Honolulu, where he completed his master’s degree at the University of Hawaii. When Aitken expressed an interest in returning to Japan in order to pursue further Zen training, D. T. Suzuki helped help him obtain a fellowship to do so. Mary had recently given birth to their son, Thomas, and remained in Hawaii.

Aitken took part in a week-long sesshin at Engakuji under the direction of Asahina Sogen. This was Aitken’s first experience of extended zazen. Although he was thirty-three years old and not very flexible, he was expected to sit in the traditional cross-legged posture for ten to twelve hours a day. There was no formal instruction given to the participants, although the monk seated beside Aitken in the zendo had responsibility for showing him zendo protocols. When they were introduced, the monk said, “How do you do? The world is very broad, don’t you think?” Aitken admitted later that he had no idea what the monk meant but was, nevertheless, charmed.

Asahina Sogen

As the sesshin began, Aitken enthusiastically took his place on the tan (platform) where the monks were seated. The atmosphere in the zendo was all he had imagined it would be – incense burning, black-robed monks steeling themselves for the ordeal ahead, the sounds of the various clackers, drums, and bells, even the staccato chanting of the opening ceremonies – then the teacher got down from the tan and prostrated himself before the altar and the image of Manjusri, the Bodhisattva who oversees sesshin. Nine times, Asahina Roshi lowered himself to his knees and bent forward until his forehead touched the floor. Aitken was appalled to realize that he, too, was expected to prostrate himself before the statue. His western sense of dignity and a cultural aversion to idol worship rose up in protest. He had not fully comprehended until that moment that Zen was more than a psychological practice; it was a religion.

In the private interview called dokusan, he informed Asahina that Senzaki had assigned him the Eckhart statement as a koan, and Asahina told him, instead, to meditate on Huineng’s “Original Face” which, he explained, had the same intent. The koan demands that the student “show his face before his parents’ birth.” It was difficult to remain focused on it, however, because Aitken struggled both with the pain in his legs and rising doubts about the ritual elements of the sesshin.

He persisted, however, and, in December, returned to Engakuji to take part in the Rohatsu sesshin. Still unused to cross-legged sitting postures, Aitken found the ordeal even more excruciating than the November sesshin had been and, in desperation, thought to search elsewhere.

Soen Nakagawa and Nyogen Senzaki

Nyogen Senzaki had spoken of his friendship with the Zen monk and poet Soen Nakagawa. Aitken wrote to Nakagawa and received an invitation to visit Ryutakuji. The men shared an interest in haiku among other things and got along well. Nakagawa explained that it was not unusual for Zen students to attend sesshin at a number of temples and with different teachers until they found the one best suited to them. He suggested Aitken take part in the January sesshin at Ryutakuji.

The teacher at Ryutakuji, Gempo Yamamoto, felt that Aitken’s approach to “Original Face” was too intellectual, so he assigned the American Joshu’s Mu, which allows no room for rational analysis.

Gempo Yamamoto

Aitken later wrote: “I felt a little resistance to this change, but on returning to my cushions, I discovered what zazen really is. No longer was I aware that the cracks in the tile floor formed a weird pattern. I could sink at last beneath the surface of my mind.”

Once back in Hawaii, he needed to focus on earning a living and supporting a family; however, things did not work out well. His marriage unravelled and, after his divorce, he returned to Los Angeles in order to continue study with Nyogen Senzaki.

In 1956, another of Senzaki’s students told Aitken that the Krishnamurti School in Ojai was in need of an English teacher. Aitken applied for the position and was interviewed by and hired by the school’s assistant director, Anne Hopkins. Within a year the two married. It proved to be an auspicious union.

Their wedding trip to Japan was not, however, what most newlyweds would have considered a honeymoon. The day after their arrival, Aitken went to attend sesshin at Ryutakuji, where Nakagawa had been installed as abbot. Anne supported her new husband’s desire to take part in the sesshin but had no intention herself of spending seven days sitting immobile with aching knees. Nakagawa made one of the monastery’s guest rooms available to her.

Later, in August, they went with Nakagawa to a small temple outside Tokyo where Nakagawa—although a Rinzai Zen Master in own right—was attending a sesshin and serving as assistant to a teacher from the Soto tradition, Hakuun Yasutani.

Again Anne had not intended to take part in the sesshin but was inspired to do so by the example of an elderly woman in the house where she was staying. Yasutani provided her a western-style straight-back chair and invited her to attend dokusan if she wished. It was those private meetings with Yasutani that washed away her resistance to zazen, and by the end of the sesshin she was making a serious effort.

Hakuun Yasutani

Two of the participants in the sesshin attained kensho, and, while Aitken had not done so himself, he was convinced, in a way he had not been before, that awakening was achievable.

That May, Nyogen Senzaki died, and Soen Nakagawa went to Los Angeles to perform the funeral rites and hold a memorial sesshin in Senzaki’s honor. It was the first full seven-day sesshin to be conducted on the US mainland. Both the Aitkens participated.

They then moved to Honolulu so Aitken could be nearer his son. “They opened a bookstore in the Chinatown area,” Don Stoddard tells me. Don began studying with Aitken in 1968, four years earlier than Nelson had. “And they had a section in the bookstore labeled ‘occult’ that would contain the theosophical titles and also Buddhist and Indian philosophy. They kept track of people who bought books out of the occult section to create a mailing list. So, when they were going to have their first sitting at their house, they invited people on the list to come and do zazen. And one couple came,” he adds, laughing. “So that’s how it began. Didn’t have a name yet. Then Soen Roshi came for the first sesshin that was held there. It is a very nice location, kind of an upper-class area still in Honolulu. It’s on the ocean, looks south-southwest, and it’s near a prominent feature that’s called Koko Head. When Soen asked what the name of that was, they told him, ‘It’s called Koko Head.’ So, he decided that the place should be called Koko An, which in Japanese means, ‘The little temple right here.’ When the Aitkens later moved to another house in Manoa Valley, close to the university, that also became Koko An.”

In 1961, Nakagawa led a sesshin at Koko An which Aitken approached with determination. He put as much vigor into his sitting as he was able to muster and continued late into the night after the formal meditation periods had ended. Then, on the fifth day of the sesshin, Aitken writes, “—Nakagawa Roshi gave a great [shout] in the zendo,and I found my voice uniting with his, ‘Aaaah!’ In the next dokusan, he asked me . . . a checking question. I could not answer, and he simply terminated the interview. In a later dokusan, he said that I had experienced a little bit of light and that I should be very careful.”

Between 1962 and 1969, Yasutani made a series of regular visits to the United States and conducted sesshin in Hawaii, Los Angeles, and on the East Coast. Aitken took part in as many of these as he could and was now considered a senior student.

In 1967, Aitken turned 50. Anne was 56, and they began to think about their eventual retirement. They fully intended to continue their Zen activities, however, and to that end purchased an old farmhouse at 220 Kaupakalua Road on Maui. In 1969, the Maui Zendo was formally established there. It had a quasi-monastic program with daily zazen, gardening and other manual labor, frequent day-long sits – zazenkai – and sesshin.

With the Aitkens in residence, Don tells me that “a fairly stable group of residents and community members were practicing together.” It ranged from young social “dropouts” to retired couples. After one sesshin, seven attendees were confirmed to have achieved kensho.

Don had been stationed in Hawaii while in the Navy, and he remained there after his tour of duty ended. When he was younger, he had read a few books on Zen which he enjoyed, and, in 1966, he came upon a copy of Philip Kapleau’s newly published The Three Pillars of Zen. “I’d been sitting by myself, and at that point I thought, ‘You know, there must be groups around.’ I tried in Honolulu. I’d gone to the Soto temple, I’d gone to other places, but there was no active sitting going on in those local Buddhist organizations. So, I wrote to Kapleau in care of his publisher, got back a postcard, and it said, ‘Contact Robert and Anne Aitken. They’re in Honolulu.’ With a phone number. I called up. Anne answered. I told her I had been sitting and was looking for a group to practice with. She said, ‘Well, we’re sitting tonight. Why don’t you come up early and speak to Bob, my husband, and he’ll talk to you and show you what the forms and procedures are.’”

“I met Robert Aitken first as a disembodied voice,” Nelson Foster tells me. “It was 1972, the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I stumbled suddenly into Zen practice at Koko An Zendo, in Honolulu, where my family lived. And on Wednesday or Sunday night after zazen we would have tea and listen to a tape made by Bob Aitken. He was not Aitken Roshi at that time; he was Bob. He and Anne were spending an extended period – two or three months – in Kamakura in order to do intensive study with Yamada Roshi, and every week or so he’d send us a cassette tape recording in which he recounted interesting events and observations.”

Nelson met him in person at the end of the summer. “We were told to think of him as our elder brother in the Dharma. He hadn’t yet received a formal appointment to teach but was in a sort of apprentice capacity to Yamada Roshi. He had a little bit of an austere aspect. A tall, thin man, rather reserved in his manner. Friendly but reserved.

“Koko An was never large,” Nelson says. “It was a nice old home in a pleasant urban district of Honolulu; the living and dining rooms had been converted into the zendo. It probably seated twenty-two or so, something like that. On a Wednesday night, as I recall, we’d usually occupy just the living room, so a dozen people or thereabouts. There were a few old-timers both in age and in terms of their tenure as members of the sangha.”

The following year, Nelson joined the community on Maui and discovered there was a difference in character between the two communities.

“Maui was mostly a gathering of the younger slice of the sangha. There were a couple of seniors who had retired to Maui, but almost all of us were young, in our twenties. Some younger but very few older. There was much more of a back-to-the-land, hippie – if you will – and questioning spirit to the group on Maui. They were members of the generation that was rejecting the war in Indochina, questioning existing authority, trying marijuana and other substances, and looking for a new way to be in the world. Koko An had started earlier and had a base of practitioners with more years of practice. And it was more mature in the age spectrum as well. A couple of years before, when the Aitkens moved over to Maui to start the Maui Zendo, they rented out Koko An, and by 1972, the people who lived there, mostly in their twenties, were required to participate in zazen five days a week, but the scene was pretty loose by Zen standards. The senior occupant was a practitioner of biofeedback who’d actually sit there during zazen plugged into his biofeedback device. It was a group finding its way, by no means homogenous. Actually the president of the sangha at that time was a Korean doctor, a man with grown children, whose wife also was a member. It’s hard to make any tidy generalizations about the group. The atmosphere was welcoming, though.”

Koun Yamada and Robert Aitken

After Yasutani retired, his successor, Yamada Koun Roshi, came in his stead to Hawaii to lead sesshin, and it was Yamada Roshi who authorized Aitken to teach in 1974, making him the first North American to receive transmission in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition.

Don tells me, “Yasutani Roshi came in 1969, led sesshin in Honolulu and Maui. That was the last time he came. And then the transition was made to Yamada Roshi, who was his successor. A couple of years later, we started to call Bob ‘Aitken Roshi,’ although he later expressed regrets about that because when he was still ‘Bob,’ if the gang was going to get together and get into somebody’s VW bus and go down to the beach and have a good time, well, Bob would go along. But when he became Roshi, the invitations didn’t come. He had liked the intimacy of just being ‘Bob’ with the other folks.”

In addition to his work as a pioneer Zen teacher in the West, Aitken was actively involved in a number of social justice issues including opposition to the US military intervention in Vietnam.

Nelson continued, “I would say that, when I got to know him, it was a pacifist orientation that was first and foremost for him, but his politics were progressive across the board.” Aitken’s internment increased rather than diminished his anti-war sentiments. “His direct experience of seeing Japanese families with their belongs on their backs escaping from the [U.S.] bombing and the destruction of all of their life left a lasting impact,” Don explains. “His pacifism was very deep, very serious.”

I ask Nelson if the sangha members in general were equally concerned about these matters.

“Some members were, and some members weren’t. That was important to him too, that he didn’t insist on anybody sharing his politics. While I was living on Maui, the Aitkens and I and others founded the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. He and I became members of its initial board of directors, but others in the Maui sangha never joined it.”

“At his retirement gathering,” Don tells me, “I gave a welcoming speech, and I said I’m sure that he was disappointed over the years that many of the people that he was practicing with for long periods of time didn’t join him in these activities. But then I made the point that, in the dokusan room, it never made any difference. He did not favor or disfavor people along this particular dimension.”

I ask Nelson, “How would you like him to be remembered?”

“I’d hope people would remember Aitken Roshi as a man who loved the Dharma, who loved the tradition and did his utmost to convey it in a vigorous and true way that was thoroughly consistent with ethical living. He was an upright guy. He felt it was extremely important to live rightly in one’s economic relations, political relations, social relations, in all aspects of one’s life. That was deeply stitched into his character. When the painful, painful news came out not just about [the sexually inappropriate behavior of] Eido Shimano but the scandals surrounding Richard Baker Roshi and Taizan Maezumi Roshi, he felt confirmed in his concerns about such things, and he ratcheted up his own emphasis on what he considered the implicit ethics of practice and realization. There’s no question that the collapse of dichotomous thinking implies, for example, right relationships with non-human beings of all kinds. So the environmental movement was a natural for him. The women’s movement was a natural for him. Those concerns all came in addition to his longstanding concern about war and peace, honesty, fairness.”

Robert and Anne Aitken

Throughout the conversations, both Nelson and Don emphasized that Anne’s role in the development of the Diamond Sangha was nearly as important as her husband’s.

“She was a generous donor,” Nelson says. “A gracious and motherly presence. A very dedicated practitioner herself. A sweet, lovely person dedicated to Aitken Roshi and a source of tremendous support, in ways ranging from domestic to financial to in-house critic of his work, first reader of things that he was going to publish eventually.”

“I’ve heard from others that she may also have shared some of Aitken Roshi’s anti-establishment views,” I mention.

“Well, he was sort of a black sheep of his family, and, in many respects, she was a black sheep of hers. She came from a wealthy San Francisco family but was artistically inclined and married a fellow who was never going to make it big in business, who eventually became a Zen teacher, of all things!”

“Anne was a wonderful person,” Don says. “Warm, welcoming, supportive in all respects.” He describes her looking after the younger members of the Maui community. “A lot of the young people that came to Maui were the so-called hippies of the time. And so, when Anne got up each morning, when it was residential, she had to make sure that the people who needed to take pills had taken their pills so that they didn’t spiral down. She was foundational to the success of the community. If you contact any of the female members of the sangha from the early days, you will find out just how important she was. She would find ways – if they didn’t have much money or any at all – she would create jobs, whether it was sewing or mending clothing, or she used to sometimes bring out broken crockery on a tray and they could spend time putting it back together Japanese-style.”

Anne died in 1994 at the age of 83. Robert retired a year later. He lived another fifteen years, and by the time of his death in 2010, he was recognized – as Helen Tworkov put it – as the “unofficial American dean of Zen.” It can be argued that Zen as a discipline that would come to draw hundreds of practitioners, rather than a largely literary phenomenon, started in 1959 with the arrival of Shunryu Suzuki in San Francisco and the establishment of the Diamond Sangha in Hawaii.