A conversation with Ruben Habito

The Sanbo Kyodan school was founded by Yasutani Hakuun in 1954 when he formally cut ties with the Soto Establishment in Japan and promoted a style of Zen based on the work of his teacher, Harada Daiun. The suffix “-un” in both given names means “cloud” and would become common in the Dharma names used in the lineage. The name of the school refers to the Three Treasures of Buddhism: Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.

Harada had entered a Soto monastery at the age of 7 but came to feel the Soto system of training was insufficient and, as a consequence, took up Rinzai training at Shogen-ji in Shizuoka. There he undertook koan practice, which had been discontinued in Soto circles in the 18^th century, and achieved a kensho (awakening) experience. Although he went onto become abbot of several Soto temples, contrary to Soto custom he advocated koan practice and worked with lay students.

Yasutani – one of Harada’s fourteen successors – also worked with lay students and had several Western students, notably Philip Kapleau, who would be instrumental in the process of adapting Zen to the West. Yasutani’s immediate successor as Abbot of the Sanbo Kyodan school was Yamada Koun, who may be credited in large part with the substantial success the school achieved internationally during the Zen boom of the 1960s and ’70s.

Ruben Habito was a Filipino Jesuit seminarian in Japan when he met Yamada and would go on to become one of his several Western Dharma heirs. His Dharma name is Kei’un-ken, “Grace Cloud.”

“I first met Yamada Koun Roshi in the fall of 1971. I had arrived in Japan the year before to start my language classes to prepare for further education and then ministry in the Catholic Church with the Jesuits in Japan. The first thing we were assigned to do is to learn the language for two years. So I was living in Kamakura where the Jesuit language school was located. And there was a Japanese student at Tokyo University who had asked me to coach him in English and in exchange he was coaching me in Japanese. And this student comes to our lesson one day and said there was a special Zen retreat for students at Engakuji, this Rinzai temple just one railway station from Kamakura where I was. He said for the equivalent of $10 in US – 1000 ¥ – you could get two nights lodging and food for all the meals that you would need and guidance in Zen. So, I felt, ‘Hmm.’ I had heard about Zen from D. T. Suzuki’s  books and so on. I had also been told that to be able to understand Japanese culture, it might be helpful to learn about Zen from a theoretical angle. My then spiritual director at the language school, Father Thomas Hand, was already practicing Zen with Yamada Koun.

“It was a three-day retreat beginning Friday afternoon and ending Sunday noon in a big temple which has a hall that can take more than a hundred sitters at the same time. It was Rinzai so it was on elevated platforms called tans. And those tans were also our living space. That was where we slept. It was the rough Rinzai style. We would be awakened at 3:00 in the morning, and then by 3:20, just twenty minutes rushing to the common washrooms and so on, getting washed up, and then we have to be back on our tan by 3:20, already seated facing one another. And there were easily a hundred or 120 students, male and female. Anyway, I came out of that with aching muscles and aching bones and so on, but with some kind of sense that there was something exhilarating in what I experienced. And so I felt I should have some more of that.

“So I went back to the language school, and Father Hand asked me, ‘Would you like to come with me to the zendo, the San’un Zendo, and meet Yamada Roshi?’ And I said, ‘Sure. Of course.’ So I went for orientation. First you have to listen to talks. There were six introductory talks that were given on certain days before the formal introduction to the roshi. So I took those, and after that I was formally introduced to Yamada Roshi in a one-on-one dokusan. And that was my first meeting with him formally. I had, of course, seen him seated among the other sitters, and he would be there and giving talks and so on. But my first one-on-one, person-to-person contact with him was in that dokusan context.”

“How old was he when you met him?” I ask.

“That was in 1971, and he was born – I believe – 1907, so he must have been 63 or 64.”

“Do you remember your initial impression of him?”

“I was awed, frankly. He had a sense of gravitas. And yet at the same time, he had this kindly heart that took you in, and you felt that you had a place in his heart. He didn’t show it in a kind of an oozing way that you might imagine. He was very formal, but you know that he was there, and that he was holding you in his heart and listening to you. That was what really struck me then. So I was totally free in opening my own heart to him.”

The San’un Zendo where Thomas Hand brought Ruben was very different from the elaborate Engakuji temple. Although Yamada Koun was an authorized Zen teacher, he was not – nor had ever been – a monk. He was a lay practitioner and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Kenbikyoin, a large Tokyo clinic in Tokyo, where his wife, Dr. Yamada Kazue, was medical director. He continued in this role until his death, teaching Zen on evenings and weekends, as well as presiding over frequent weeklong sesshin. When Yasutani Hakuun retired in 1969, the Yamadas built the San’un Zendo in their family compound. It was neither a temple nor a monastery, but a small center where lay persons could practice. It would be a model of the type of center which would become common in North America. The name “San’un” meant “Three Clouds” and referred to the first three masters in the lineage, Harada Daiun (Great Cloud), Yasutani Hakuun (White Cloud), and Yamada Koun (Cultivating Cloud). The Center attracted not only Japanese practitioners but Western students as well, including several Catholic priests, seminarians, and Sisters.

Like Yasutani and Harada before him, Yamada had a sense that Zen was floundering in Japan.

“He could be critical,” Ruben tells me, “saying that, ‘Zen in Japan has now become a funeral service. The priests are not really sitting seriously anymore, and they don’t offer opportunities for really going deep into the practice. They have their livelihood; they have to go and visit the families within their area, those that are registered in a temple. So they have become temple functionaries.’ He was known to have made that critique of Zen in Japan, so that’s why he said that ‘We need to revitalize Zen.’ And he saw that the Western students were very zealous and engaged in it, so he saw that maybe there was something there that could really revitalize Zen, and he encouraged us to do so.”

The first Canadian to be authorized to teach Zen was a Roman Catholic nun from my province of New Brunswick, Elaine Macinnes. She told me that Yamada had even expressed hope that Zen as a tradition might find a home within the Catholic church.

Ruben tells me he had heard the same thing. “He had that idea. And this is what he told us at some point; maybe on more than one occasion when there were a good number of us from other countries whom he knew were Christians. So he said, ‘My advice to you is really, go deep into the heart of Zen, that Zen which is beyond words and beyond concepts and really soak yourself in that. Before you think of teaching or anything you can do to help others, first soak yourself in that Zen experience and let it be what sheds light on your own life. And then from there, learn the language to be able to offer pointers and guidelines to people who are within your religious context. So learn your Christian scripture; so learn your theological vocabulary. And let that language and conceptual context be what you offer so that they can go to that place that is beyond words and language, words and concepts.’ So that’s how he encouraged us. And he also told us, ‘I’m a Buddhist, so I can only talk to you and give you guidelines from my Buddhist terminology and from my Buddhist background.’ So he was encouraging Christians to look into the heart of Zen and then use their Christian vocabulary so Zen students can really find a home within their religious organization.”

After Yasutani’s death in 1973, Yamada became the second “abbot” in the Sanbo Kyodan School, although Ruben suggests the term is problematic, because it is derived from Western monasticism.  “‘Abbot’ is really an anglicization. The word in Japanese is kancho. ‘Kan’ means ‘institution,’ and ‘cho’ means ‘head.’ So, ‘Head of the Institution.’ And so just an English way of saying that it’s a religious institution, and so it is like an abbot in a monastery, so they just borrowed that term.”

I ask Ruben what qualities, in his opinion, Yamada had which permitted him to work with North Americans and Europeans so successfully.

“Well, he could somehow understand English, and he could utter a few sentences. But he would always be helped by a translator, of course. When he noticed there were more and more non-Japanese coming to his Zen group, he asked one of those who were bilingual to translate his teishos. So he gave recognition to these non-Japanese practitioners, and he welcomed them. That’s one thing. Another thing is Yasutani Hakuun was known for his very rigid Buddhist understanding of Zen, that Zen is Buddhist and he would tell people who came from other religious positions, ‘You have to check your religion at the door before you enter the Zen hall.’ Especially this sense of God, he said. That’s a distraction, and you have to get rid of that before you can really go into real Zen. That was Yasutani. For Yamada, however, he noticed that those who were coming to him from other countries were not just lay Christians but also priests, nuns, Protestant clergy, and so on. And he didn’t say anything to them. He just welcomed them and gave them basic instruction in Zen and led them in koans. And he noticed that they were also able to come to a deep experiential realization. So in the beginning he would say, ‘If you’re a Christian if you come to Zen you can become a better Christian. If you’re a Buddhist, of course, you will realize what it means to be fully Buddhist when you see your true self as a Buddha. But for Christians, you can be a better Christian.’

“So, that was his way of saying it. He did not say check your Christianity at the door. But you can be a better self. Because he noticed that Christians were also coming to practice and even breaking through and being able to practice with the koans in a way that was not different from the way Buddhists would go through the koans. There you don’t talk about theological concepts at all, but it’s a practical approach of just seeking the here-and-now in the context of the timeless infinite. And so he could see that those who remained Christian could still have that same depth.”

Ruben believes this openness to other cultures was also a factor in the success the Sanbo School achieved outside of Japan.

“It was the open-hearted way of inviting people of any background and cultural or conceptual framework or religious conviction to be able to simply sit, be aware, and go deep into that stillness. So the basic instructions for going into that place beyond words and concepts is the same across traditions. You don’t need to go into theological language to be able to taste what Zen offers. It is this adaptability to different conceptual frameworks that people have. That people are not asked to give up their religion or conceptual framework or understanding of reality before they enter into Zen. They just are invited to sit still based on the instructions that are given, breathe with awareness, and go deep into that stillness. And then the emphasis of Sanbo Zen is that it is an experiential journey. You don’t have to believe in anything as a kind of a faith commitment to be able to practice. It’s an invitation to an experience. So you can be Buddhist, you can be Christian, you can be Muslim, you can be atheist. But the practice is inviting you. So it is precisely that kind of broad appeal to people across different religious traditions that may be one of those attractions that Sanbo Zen has.”

“So,” I suggest, “rather than being a philosophical point of view – which Buddhism is – it is a practice that goes beyond the Buddhist framework and is accessible by people who adhere to other traditions. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes. It is a set of guidelines for practice and experience that is accessible to people beyond the Buddhist pale or beyond the Buddhist circle. Now it may be cached or it may be expressed in Buddhist terms, but technically one doesn’t have to be Buddhist to be able to practice Zen. That would be one way you could say it, and, in fact, there are some of the early teachers like Willigis Jäger[1] and Ana María Schlüter[2] who would say, ‘I’m not Buddhist, but I practice Zen to the full.’ Now, I’m not able to say that because I’ve also learned enough from the Buddhist tradition that I feel that I cannot disclaim it from my identities. So what people say of me is that I am both Buddhist and Catholic at the same time.”

After his death, Yamada was succeeded as Kancho by Kubota Jiun (Compassionate Cloud). Yamada and Kubota had both assisted Philip Kapleau in gathering the material included in The Three Pillars of Zen, and it is still a matter of irritation for some within the Sanbo lineage that they didn’t receive title page acknowledgement for their contributions. The fourth, and current, Kancho of the school is Yamada Koun’s son, Masamichi (Ryoun).

In 2014, the school’s name was changed because the term “Kyodan” had been associated with a terrorist group known as Aum Shinrikyo Kyodan, the Religious Community of the Truth of Aum. “And so,” Ruben explains, “because the last two terms – Kyo-dan – were the same, the leaders of our group said, ‘Let’s drop that name and just call it Sanbo Zen International. Sanbo Zen in Japan, and for those who were now operating abroad, Sanbo Zen International.’”

I note that the reference to the “Three Treasures” was retained and ask how that term is understood by non-Buddhists in the school.

“The Buddha is the awakened one, and you can be awakened. So you have that nature of being awakened; so you are Buddha. The Dharma is the truth that liberates. And Sangha is the community that supports you in your practice.”

“And it does not necessarily have to be a professed Buddhist community?” I ask.

“Correct. It does not have to be specifically Buddhist. But the Awakened One, the teaching toward awakening, and the community that supports living an awakened life would be Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Now you can interpret it in a Buddhist way, but even that kind of makes it more generic in terms of the intent of those three words.”

As our conversation draws to an end, I ask Ruben how he hopes Yamada Koun will be remembered.

“He opened Zen to people of different backgrounds and religious commitments that made it possible for them to consider it a path that they can fully take on.”

“Making Zen accessible to a wider swathe of people?” 

“Correct. Without compromising their own religious commitment. Of course, as they do so, then they themselves see the transformation they need. They can’t hold onto this or that concept any longer. They begin to have a new understanding of those concepts. A new understanding of God, for example, a new understanding of the Trinity. For a Zen practitioner it becomes a much more personal, experiential way of living one’s religious life rather than just believing in this concept and so on. So it’s a way of enabling somebody with a specific religious set of commitments to re-understand those from a more experiential point of view. Not just take it as a doctrinal statement that they have to subscribe to.”

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[1] A German Benedictine monk and Zen teacher.

[2] A Spanish professor of Ecumenical Theology.

Abridged from The Third Step East

Although Soen Nakagawa spent only brief periods in the United States, he not only helped Robert Aitken establish the Diamond Sangha in Hawaii, he was also the inspiration behind the International Dai Bosatsu Zendo in the Catskill Mountains, the first Rinzai Monastery to be established in North America. He was a complex person, renowned both for his prowess as a Zen master and a poet; people in Japan who had little interest in Zen admired Nakagawa as one of the most accomplished haiku composers of the 20th century.

He was born in 1907 on the island of Formosa (now Taiwan), the eldest of three brothers. His given name was Motoi. His father was a physician attached to the armed forces who died while Motoi was still young. A brother died soon after.

His early training was appropriate for one born in the samurai class, but he proved to be more interested in literary – rather than martial – arts and showed early promise as a poet. In 1923, he and a close friend, Koun Yamada, enrolled at the First Academy, equivalent to High School, in Tokyo. They would both have significant impact upon the development of North American Zen.

In high school, Motoi sought something meaningful to which he could dedicate his life. He found his direction after coming upon a passage by the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer: “In the real world, it is impossible to attain true happiness, final and eternal contentment. For these are visionary flowers in the air; mere fantasies. In truth, they can never be actualized. In fact, they must not be actualized. Why?  If such ideals were to be actualized, the search for the real meaning of our existence would cease. If that happened, it would be the spiritual end of our being, and life would seem too foolish to live.”

He began reading books on Zen, which he passed onto Yamada, initiating his friend’s interest in Zen as well. The two attended Tokyo Imperial University; at that time, Motoi resided in a dormitory attached to a Pure Land temple. He studied both classical and religious literature and continued to develop his skill as a poet. His graduation thesis was on the haiku master, Matsuo Basho.

He formed a Zen sitting group at the university, but it was not until after graduation that he determined to become a monk, much to the disappointment of his family who felt he was wasting the education he had received. He took the Precepts at Kogakuji and was given the Buddhist name, Soen. The master at Kogakuji was Keigaku Katsube, and it was under his direction that Nakagawa began his formal Zen training.

Although now ordained, he did not feel at ease in the communal life of the monastery and chose to follow Bassui’s example by going into solitary retreat on Dai Bosatsu Mountain. There he lived an ascetic life, foraging for wild food, practicing zazen, and writing poetry. He published a few poems in a journal dedicated to haiku and, in 1933, released a collection of poems that he had kept in draft form in a small wooden box; he entitled the volume Shigan, or Coffin of Poems. In San Francisco, Nyogen Senzaki’s landlady came across some of Nakagawa’s work in a magazine and showed it to Senzaki. He also admired the haiku and initiated a correspondence with the young poet.

Nakagawa developed a unique personal practice while at Dai Bosatsu. He composed an original mantra – Namu Dai Bosa, “unity with the great Bodhisattva” – which he chanted with fervor for hours. Aware of current global tensions, he dreamed of establishing an International Dai Bosatsu Zendo where people from all nations could come to practice Zen.

In 1935, Nakagawa served as an attendant to Katsube at a sesshin held for students at the Imperial University. When they arrived, they discovered they had forgotten to bring a kyosaku. Katsube directed Nakagawa to go to a nearby temple, Hakusan Dojo, to borrow one. It happened that sesshin was taking place there as well under the direction of a visiting teacher, Gempo Yamamoto of Myoshinji in Kyoto. Nakagawa arrived while Yamamoto was giving a teisho. Nakagawa had heard many teisho before, but none had touched him as this one did.

Not long after, Nakagawa found another opportunity to hear Yamamoto speak. The roshi quoted Mumon’s commentary on the fourth case in the Mumonkan: “If you want to practice Zen, it must be true practice. When you attain realization, it must be true realization.”

Nakagawa was deeply stirred by the statement and sought a private meeting with Yamamoto wherein he expressed his interest in working with him. It was a serious matter to go from one teacher to another, and, when Yamamoto accepted Nakagawa, Katsube is reported to have called him a thief.

Through their correspondence, Nakagawa and Nyogen Senzaki discovered they shared many opinions, and, although the political situation did not permit Nakagawa to visit Senzaki, they determined that they would meet in spirit. In 1938, Nakagawa wrote to Senzaki proposing that they set aside the 21st day of each month for a shared practice to be known as Spiritual Interrelationship Day. He envisioned a time when people all around the globe with an interest in the Dharma would sit for half an hour in zazen starting at 8:00 p. m. local time, then recite the twenty-fifth chapter of the Lotus Sutra followed by a period of chanting “Namu Dai Bosa.” The evening would culminate with a “joyous gathering.”

During the war years, Nakagawa remained with Yamamoto; however, to the annoyance of many other monks, he persisted in refusing to accommodate himself to the forms of monastic life. Several of them petitioned Yamamoto to expel him. Yamamoto not only refused to do so, he even had a small house built on the temple grounds so Nakagawa’s mother could live near her son.

Once the war was over, Nakagawa was able to travel to San Francisco and meet Senzaki with whom he had been corresponding for fifteen years. He arrived in San Francisco on the 8th of April, the day recognized on the Japanese calendar as the Buddha’s birthday.

He was delighted by the form of Zen practice he found in America, shorn of the stilted formalities of archaic Japanese traditions.

Senzaki had hoped that Nakagawa would remain in the United States and become his heir, but Nakagawa felt obligated to return to Ryutakuji, where he eventually succeeded Yamamoto. Inspired by Senzaki’s example, Nakagawa relaxed many of the formal structures associated with the abbot’s position. He chose not to distinguish himself from other monks, wore the same robes they did, ate with them, and even shared the same bath house. His unconventionality was not admired by the Zen establishment, which saw it as a sign that he had not sufficiently matured into his responsibilities. It was this lack of convention, however, which helped him to play a major role in the spread of the Dharma in North America.

Japanese society tends to be ethnocentric and little accommodation is made for people from other cultures. After the war, soldiers from America as well as from Japan made their way to Ryutakuji looking for a path which would help them deal with the traumas they had suffered. The monastery became known for being accessible to foreign students wanting to learn about Zen. Unconcerned about convention, Nakagawa was not disturbed when students were unfamiliar with the behavioral protocols and matters of etiquette upon which other Zen teachers insisted.

In 1955, Nyogen Senzaki returned to Japan for the first time since his departure fifty years prior. Nakagawa noticed how his friend was aging and was so concerned that he suggested sending his disciple, Tai Shimano, to act as Senzaki’s attendant in Los Angeles. Before Shimano could leave, however, Nakagawa received word that Senzaki had died.

Senzaki had appointed Nakagawa his executor, and Nakagawa went to California to preside at the funeral service. Afterwards, attended by Robert Aitken, he conducted the first formal sesshin to be held in the United States.

Nakagawa’s mother, Kazuko, died in 1962, a year after Gempo Yamamoto’s death. The deaths of Senzaki and then two more people who had played such important roles in his life sent Nakagawa into a depression he struggled to deal with. In 1967, he had a fall on Ryutakuji grounds and lay on the ground, unconscious, for three days before he was found by the monks. He was rushed to hospital, where it was discovered that a sliver of bamboo had pierced his brain. Doctors advised surgery, but he refused it. The fall and his injuries had consequences on his health and personality for the remainder of his life.

He had a number of disciples in the United States, particularly in New York where Shimano had established the Shoboji Zendo. Nakagawa returned there several times between 1968 and 1971 to lead retreats. During the 1968 visit, he stopped in California to lead a sesshin, after which – accompanied by Tai Shimano and Haku’un Yasutani – he visited Shunryu Suzuki at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. There Nakagawa scattered a portion of Nyogen Senzaki’s ashes.

In 1973, after having conferred Dharma transmission on Shimano in New York, Nakagawa resigned as abbot of Ryutakuji. He joked that his resignation would now allow him time to act as a midwife to the International Dai Bosatsu Center which Shimano was building. He came back to the US for a while and stayed at the lakeside lodge at Beecher Lake on the Dai Bosatsu grounds. The house was unheated and without electricity, and Nakagawa foraged for wild plants to eat just as he had as a young man on the original Dai Bosatsu. Then he returned to Japan, where he may have expected to be asked to take on various duties at Ryutakuji in his capacity of former abbot; when that invitation did not come, he went into solitary retreat.

According to the autobiographical sketch he wrote for a book published by the Zen Studies Society to coincide with the inauguration of Dai Bosatsu monastery, Tai Shimano’s introduction to Buddhism occurred while he was still a schoolboy during the war. A teacher copied out the words of the Heart Sutra on the blackboard and taught the students to recite them. It was enough to stir his interest. After the war, Shimano entered Empukuji in Chichibu, where his family had moved to escape the bombing raids on Tokyo. The teacher there was Kengan Goto, from whom Shimano received his Buddhist name, Eido; it was derived from the first syllable of the names of the two monks who brought Rinzai and Soto Zen to Japan— Eisai and Dogen. After acquiring the basics of monastic training from Goto, Shimano sought entrance to Heirinji outside Tokyo. As tradition required, he spent two days seated at the gate before gaining admittance.

In 1954, Zen Masters and abbots from throughout Japan came to Heirinji to attend the funeral of a former abbot. Shimano was one of the monks assigned to wait on these dignitaries, and, when they first gathered together, he brought them tea. Most accepted their cups without acknowledging the monk serving them. The youngest of the abbots, however, put his hands together in gassho, palm to palm, and bowed his thanks. Surprised to be recognized in this manner, Shimano returned the bow and, later, asked the other servers who the polite master had been. He was informed it was Soen Nakagawa, the recently appointed abbot of Ryutakuji.

Shimano went to Ryutakuji and—after spending another two days waiting at the gate—was accepted as a student.

Shimano proved to be a committed and insightful practitioner, and, over time, master and disciple grew close. Shimano had great respect for Nakagawa and, one summer, made a pilgrimage to Dai Bosatsu Mountain where he located the cottage in which his teacher had stayed.

As he progressed in his training, Shimano was given a number of duties within the monastery. Because of his knowledge of English, he was assigned responsibility for explaining monastery procedures and etiquette to the European and American students who made their way to Ryutakuji. He was known to them by his familiar name, Tai-san. He later wrote that he liked the Westerners he met but recognized that their to approach Zen practice was very different from that of Japanese students. Americans demanded explanations and clarifications and posed questions their Asian counterparts would have considered inappropriate. He also seems to have been attracted to the way in which many of these Western students challenged and flaunted those traditional values and mores which seemed, to them, no longer relevant.

Recognizing Shimano’s ability to interact smoothly with Americans, Nakagawa intended to send him to Los Angeles to act as attendant to the aging Senzaki. When Senzaki died, Nakagawa instead sent him to Hawaii to assist the Aitkens. The Aitkens had met Shimano in Japan and had liked him, so were happy to sponsor his immigration to the US. Shimano arrived at Koko-an in 1958; he was 27 years old.

In 1962, Nakagawa and Haku’un Yasutani were scheduled to lead a number of sesshin in the US. Just prior to departure, however, Nakagawa’s mother fell ill, and he decided to remain with her. He arranged for Shimano to act as Yasutani’s attendant and translator.

The first of these sesshin was held at Koko An in Hawaii, and, even though students needed Shimano’s assistance to communicate with Yasutani during dokusan, five were acknowledged to have achieved some degree of kensho. Shimano accompanied Yasutani on other tours and stated that it was from assisting at these retreats that he learned how to work with students.

Over time, relations between Shimano and the Aitkens became strained. The young, polite, deferential monk they had met in Japan proved to be more problematic in Hawaii. While it was clear he was committed to Zen practice, he also insisted on little extravagances, like a motorcycle which he claimed to need in order to get around. Aitken may not have been happy with these requests, but a case could be made that most of them were reasonable. Then, in 1963, two women from Koko An were hospitalized with mental stress. Their social worker informed Aitken that in both cases they had been in sexual relationships with Shimano.

Aitken, uncertain how to proceed, travelled to Japan to discuss the situation with Nakagawa and Yasutani. Both admitted that it was possible that Shimano had had relationships with the women, but in Japan such matters do not carry the same weight as in North America as long as they are handled with discretion. It would not be the last time that Japanese and North American sexual mores would come into conflict.

Aitken was unhappy with the situation but – heeding legal advice he was given – decided to deal with it quietly in order to protect the still nascent Zen community. The day after Aitken returned from Japan, Shimano left Hawaii for New York. Later he would disingenuously tell Nakagawa that he left because “the Hawaiian climate is too good—it is a place for vacationers or retired people, but not for Zazen practice.”

Shimano arrived in New York on the last day of 1964. He was newly married to a Japanese woman who apparently granted him the latitude many Japanese husbands had as far as extra-marital relations were concerned. The following day—the first day of the New Year—he began his new life on the North American continent as a Zen teacher. Later, he would suggest that he attracted his first students by sheer force of personality just walking the streets of Manhattan in his Buddhist robes. In fact, however, a number of New York students who had attended Yasutani’s sesshins provided him a base in the city. Although he had not yet received full transmission, he demonstrated skill as an insightful and inspiring teacher. He could be charming and was a sensitive and supportive friend.  He could also turn stern and forceful if needed, showing little patience with half-hearted efforts in the zendo.

The New York Zendo, as it was called, originally met in the living room of Shimano’s small apartment. There were, as yet, no membership fees, and Shimano earned a small income by going through the Manhattan telephone directory culling Japanese names for a mailing list being compiled by the Bank of Tokyo.

As the number of students increased, programs and activities grew. At first there were only regular sittings at the apartment; then day-long sits were added and even weekend sesshin. When the living room zendo was no longer adequate, the sangha discussed ways in which to raise funds to purchase or rent a larger space. In order to do so, they needed to incorporate as a religious organization and acquire tax-exempt status. The expense associated with that process, however, was beyond their means. According to Shimano’s account, it was for that reason that they approached the Zen Studies Society which had been established in the city some years prior to promote the work of D. T. Suzuki. The society was currently inactive and owned no property although it still existed as a legal entity. It was not in a position to assume responsibility for Shimano’s immigration status, but the secretary of the society, George Yamaoka, assisted Shimano to become a board member, and the Society quietly merged with the New York Zendo. When Suzuki – then living in Japan – learned of the arrangement, he requested that his name be deleted from the Society’s letterhead.

After the merger, fund-raising began in earnest, aided by a generous initial contribution of $10,000 from a Canadian student who was returning to home. Soon the group was able to move into new quarters on 81st Street, where Yasutani led their first sesshin in the summer of 1965. There was a growing interest in Zen practice throughout America, a surge never equaled since, and, before long, people were turned away from the zendo because there was not sufficient room for them.

A number of serendipitous events occurred during this period. On a visit to San Francisco, Shimano happened upon an antique shop where he found a large keisu—a bowl-shaped gong—which had been forged in 1555 for Daitokuji in Kyoto. In another antique shop, in New York City, he found a seated Buddha figure which had originally been made for a branch temple of Enpukuji, where he had begun his own training. Although the zendo was still strapped for cash, money was found to purchase these treasures. Then, in 1968, Chester Carlson—founder of Xerox—donated funds for them to move to more suitable quarters in a former carriage house on East 67th Street. Carlson’s wife, Dorris, was interested in Eastern Spiritualities, and, through her intervention, Carlson anonymously assisted both Shimano and Philip Kapleau in establishing their communities.

That summer Yasutani and Nakagawa were in California to conduct sesshin there, and Shimano joined them. Afterwards, in New York, Nakagawa presided at the ceremony officially inaugurating the New York Zendo Shobo Ji (Temple of True Dharma). He was declared the zendo’s abbot, and Shimano was the teacher-in-residence.

The pioneers who brought Zen to North America were familiar with two models from Japan: the temple and the monastery. Temples served the devotional needs of local communities, as Sokoji served its Japanese congregation in San Francisco. Monasteries had several functions; they were facilities where temple priests were trained, but they were also increasingly—especially, in the Rinzai tradition—centers for the spiritual development of both ordained and lay practitioners. Practice centers, such as Shobo Ji, were a distinctly Western phenomenon. Despite its title, Shobo Ji was not a temple in the usual sense of the term; nor was it a training center. During his visit to California, Shimano had been particularly struck by Tassajara – a remote training center dedicated to practice and formation.

No sooner had Shobo Ji been opened than Shimano and his board began to consider opening an American Rinzai temple and training center with a residential program where traditional Buddhist devotional and training activities could take place. Its primary function would be to serve as a dedicated site for sesshin. Currently, even with Shobo Ji, it was necessary to rent facilities with adequate accommodations for sesshin participants. The necessary physical apparatus – zabutons, zafus, keisus, mokugyos, and so forth – had to be transported to and from the rented site; rooms needed to be rearranged to serve as the zendo and the dokusan chamber.

Shimano envisioned an actual temple, and, because Zen temples in Asia were usually in the mountains, he hoped to find a suitable mountain setting. A Building Committee was established which explored a number of potential sites, each of which proved inappropriate. Then the chair of the committee chanced upon an ad in the New York Times for 1400 acres in the Catskill Mountains. The property had belonged to the family of Harriet Beecher Stowe; the small lake was known as Beecher Lake. There was a handsome fourteen room summer house – referred to as a “lodge” – located there, remote from all other habitations. It was an ideal spot, but the cost was would have been prohibitively expensive had it not been for another generous donation from Dorris Carlson.    

Nakagawa came to New York that summer, and Shimano took him to the site. The older man was entranced. As they walked about the property and along the shore of the lake, Nakagawa told his disciple of his youthful hope of establishing an International Zendo on Mount Dai Bosatsu. Shimano suggested that this new site, in what Nakagawa liked to call the Cut-kill Mountains, be named the Dai Bosatsu Zendo. Nakagawa’s dream would become a reality, not in Japan but in America.

The first sesshin was held in the lodge. A small tent – just large enough for two people to sit face-to-face – was set up to serve as the dokusan room. The New York community energized by the sesshin and its location took on the construction project with enthusiasm. A local architect, Davis Hamerstrom, was hired and traveled to Japan with Shimano to study temple architecture. They visited a number of temples before coming to Tofukuji, the largest Rinzai temple in the country and a designated National Treasure. They were struck by the resemblance of its setting to the Beecher Lake site. The abbot, Ekyo Hayashi, opened a presently unused building where, at one time, as many as a thousand monks had practiced. Hamerstrom and Shimano had found the model they had been seeking.

In September 1972, Nakagawa  formally gave Shimano transmission, making him abbot of both Dai Bosatsu and Shobo Ji. Following the installation, there was a “Mountain Opening” ceremony, dedicating the site to the construction of the proposed temple, and Nakagawa was declared Honorary Founder. A final portion of Nyogen Senzaki’s ashes were interred at the site.

The following spring, work began on what was, arguably, the most significant Zen construction project to be undertaken in America. Deep in the mountains, approached by a narrow county road and then another two miles of gravel road from the formal entrance gate, a Japanese-style temple of classic design was built.

Its full formal name is Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo Ji (Diamond Temple), and it was officially inaugurated on America’s bi-centennial – July 4, 1976. Rinzai dignitaries from Japan came for the occasion; teachers from throughout America were there, including Robert Aitken, Richard Baker, Taizan Maezumi, Philip Kapleau, the Tibetan teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, and the Korean Zen Master, Seung Sahn. American writer, naturalist, and Zen practitioner, Peter Mattiessen, struck the large temple bell beginning the ceremony.

The person conspicuous by his absence was Soen Nakagawa.

After Nakagawa returned to Japan in 1973, he still suffered a great deal of physical pain and sought solace in saki rather than in western medicines, which he distrusted. The drinking only made him more morose. In retrospect, his students would come to realize that he was suffering from depression; he hid his condition so well, however, that his few visitors failed to see the signs. He was always able to feign a pleasant and even merry facade when necessary.

He became increasingly withdrawn with the passing years, remaining in his quarters at Ryutakuji without interacting with the other monks. He allowed his hair and beard to grow. He stopped writing poetry. His relationship with Shimano had ruptured when he learned that Shimano was still involved in serial sexual relationships with his female students. The loss of that friendship added to his unhappiness.

In 1975, he was invited to take part in a ceremony at the prestigious Myoshinji in Kyoto, the primary Rinzai temple in Japan. The ceremony would have made Nakagawa acting abbot for a day, an honor which usually led to permanent appointment. In the history of the temple, Nakagawa was the only individual to turn down this opportunity. He said that, instead, he was preparing to take on the position of abbot at Dai Bosatsu in America. As the date neared for those opening ceremonies, however, Nakagawa put off his departure and, in the end, did not attend.

An American Zen student, Genjo Marinello, happened to be studying at Ryutakuji in 1980, and although he knew Nakagawa was on the grounds, he suspected he would spend his entire time in Japan without having an opportunity to meet him.

“During teisho at sesshin at Ryutakuji,” Genjo told me, “because my Japanese wasn’t so fluent, I would go to a little side room during the teisho time and listen to cassette tapes of Soen Roshi. So I’m sitting in zazen, and I’m listening to a cassette tape of Soen Roshi, and he’s so eloquent, and he’s so sweet, and he’s so poetic, and it’s such a treasure, I just felt honored to be listening to him. I knew that he was only feet away from me, from where I was listening, but he was such a recluse, I thought I might be in Japan the whole time and never see him. But I’m sitting in this little anteroom, sitting in zazen and listening to his teisho, and in walks this guy in a white, grubby kimono, somewhat in tatters. Long scraggly white hair and a long white beard. And he sees me, a young American in formal Zen robes listening to a teisho of his. And he had raided the kitchen. That’s what he was doing, was raiding the kitchen and hoping no one would see him because it was teisho time so he didn’t expect to see me there. If he’s startled, he doesn’t look startled. He’s a roshi. So he sees me, and my jaw drops open. Of course, I know who I’m looking at. It’s not a mystery. And then he says, ‘Gassho!’ So I put my hands in gassho, and he walks on by. That was our first encounter.”

After that meeting, Nakagawa frequently asked Marinello to take walks with him around the temple grounds. He shaved his head again, took better care of his appearance, left the hermitage, occasionally sat in the zendo, and once again joined the monks at mealtimes. He also made numerous long distance phone calls much, Marinello remembers, to the abbot’s annoyance.           

Nakagawa made a final visit to the United States in 1982 and, in his last teisho to his American students, said: “There are so many pleasures in life!  Cooking, eating, sleeping, every deed of everyday life is nothing else but This Great Matter. Realize this!  So we extend tender care with a worshipping heart even to such beings as beasts and birds, but not only to beasts, not only to birds, but to insects, too, okay?  Even to grass, to one blade of grass, even to dust, to one speck of dust. Sometimes I bow to the dust.”

Two years later he died at Ryutakuji.

Soen Nakagawa’s ashes were divided into three parts. One third was returned to the Nakagawa family; one third was buried with those of the former abbots of Ryutakji; and one third was buried along with Nyogen Senzaki’s at Dai Bosatsu, where a stupa commemorates both men.

Many of Eido Shimano’s students respected him as an effective and inspiring teacher, and, for some, that alone mattered; for others, his personal life eventually became an embarrassment and impediment to continue working with him.

Aitken had remained silent about what he knew of Shimano’s early sexual improprieties, perhaps hoping the young man would mature out of such behavior. As time passed, however, further stories emerged. The inauguration at Dai Bosatsu was the last time Aitken and Shimano were together. Afterwards, Aitken refused to attend conferences if he knew Shimano would be attending and—according to Buddhist scholar Helen Baroni—he advised other Zen teachers to do so as well.

Shortly before his death, Aitken turned over his personal papers to the University of Hawaii. Included in them were his records regarding Shimano. The release of those papers were part of a series of events which eventually forced Shimano to resign his position as abbot of Dai Bosatsu.

Within a decade of the inauguration of Dai Bosatsu, several of the most prestigious Zen Centers in America would be burdened by issues of teacher misconduct and the discrepancy between enlightened perception and unenlightened behavior.

Awakened Meditation Center, Toronto –

Matthew Sullivan is a Zen Master in the Korean Zen (Soen) lineage of Hwasun Yangil Sunim and a Dharma Teacher at the Awakened Meditation Centre in Toronto.

“What I talk about when I’m teaching meditation to new students – what remains true for me – is there is no particularly good reason to go into Zen,” he tells me. “It’s not something you do for a goal. It’s not something that you can accomplish. It’s not something that you do for any collateral benefits. I think I was originally drawn to the suchness of Zen. At the time, it was the one thing in my life that had ‘suchness.’ You do it for its own sake. And that’s a wonderful thing to encounter.”

When he was a child growing up in Southern Ontario, his family “skirted around faith. My mother was a Protestant and would take us to church every once in a while, but my older brother decided very early on that he was an atheist. And he would get into these big arguments with my mother when she would try to take him to church on Easter or Christmas, but they would come to some interesting compromises. One year he allowed himself to be dragged along to an early morning service as long as he could wear a placard over his sweater that said in big letters, ‘I AM AN ATHEIST.’ Another accommodation my parents made with him that I thought was very sweet was because he was a Communist at the time – I mean, he was about eleven – we agreed that we would have borscht for Christmas dinner every year, and that is a tradition we have maintained for the last thirty or forty years. I still have borscht every Christmas.

“My father introduced me to Buddhism because he became very interested in meditation as he got older – he was never particularly religious when I was growing up – as he got older he started meditating a little bit, and – you know – the thing that I think really drew me towards Buddhism as a young person was he had a copy of Thomas Merton’s translations of Daoist poetry.[1]”

Matthew’s father had grown up in a small town, an “outport,” in Newfoundland called Brent’s Cove; it’s current statistical information states that it has 119 persons living in 64 dwellings. “It was extremely isolated. And my dad grew up in a very big, very devout Catholic family. They were so isolated they didn’t have a priest on a regular basis, so my grandfather would be the one who would go to church and say the prayers, lead the congregation in . . . What would they say? I guess it was the Hail Mary. My grandfather owned the big town store. I think the Sullivans’ claim to fame is they opened one of the first salmon canneries in Newfoundland. So my father had been brought up Catholic, but, by the time he was an adult, he had shaken it off.”

“Do you know what got him interested in meditation?” I ask.

“I don’t to be honest. I wish I had asked him that. I suspect it was stress both with work and with – without delving too much into my parents’ life – I mean, he had a difficult time with my mother, and so I think meditation gave him some mental space to help deal with that.

“I was about six and somewhat anxious as a child. I remember working myself into this kind of tizzy when Dad started meditating, and I thought, ‘Well, where’s this going to end? He’s going to run off and become a monk. I’m going to be abandoned!’ Much later I learned there is a term for this, ‘the Dharma widow.’ I guess I was afraid I was going to become a Dharma orphan, but my fears were premature, and all he ever did was meditate in a chair for fifteen minutes a couple of times a week.”

After high school – where he was introduced to Tai Chi – Matthew went to the University of British Columbia. “I took Religious Studies at the University of BC. Mainly what I was studying was Christianity, the origins of Christianity and Judaism. Which had a big impact on the way that I would eventually approach Zen.”

“In what way?” I ask.

“Well, when you study religion in university you begin to understand that there are two ways of understanding any religion. There’s the way within the religion, the internal theological approach, and then there is the external, historical, and sociological approach, what at the time we called the phenomenological approach where you just look at the religion as a fact rather than inquiring into whether it’s good or true or useful. And that would play out, for example, when you’re studying Christianity with inquiries like, ‘Who was the historical Jesus?’ Getting beyond the picture that we have from the way the gospels are cobbled together and told as a unified story. What can we ascertain about the historical figure? Did he exist in the first place? If he did exist, how did he understand himself? How did his contemporaries understand him? How did he operate in the context of his society at the time. And also how do you critically read the sources that we do have – like the gospels or Josephus – how do we read those sources critically in order to be able to separate what was later religious or rhetorical accretions from what have been more reliable historical facts. So that dual way of looking at religion has had a big influence on my approach to Zen because I’ve tried to look at Zen both ways. I’ve practised within the religion, but I’ve never been able to remove the lens of looking at it phenomenologically, so I’ve always been interested in how to critically read our ancient texts to understand how they would have been understood at the time. I’ve tried to be always sensitive to what in Religious Studies we call the redaction history of documents, that is to say the way that they are edited over time. You have some kind of an original kernel of a story. A great example is Zen Master Linji’s koan about ‘there is a true man of no rank going in and out of the red portals of your face,’ which climaxes with Linji’s fantastic exclamation of, ‘The true man of no rank, what a piece of shit he is.’ That story has a redaction history that we can trace, where it actually starts out much more simply and less punchy, and over time it’s edited and in someways lengthened and in someways shortened to become this extremely memorable, pungent koan that I think is one of the great treasures of our tradition. But it wasn’t spoken that way by Linji. If it was spoken by him at all, it was a very different thing. So all of that is to say I’ve always had a foot in each side of the divide, and it’s given me this kind of weird 3D glasses half-in/half-out way of approaching the Zen tradition.”

While in university he “borrowed” another book from his father, Lawrence LeShan’s, How to Meditate. “I loved that book,” he tells me, “and I used it to teach myself meditation.”

I ask why.

“Well, I did it because I was very unhappy. I don’t know if I was any more unhappy than most undergraduates, but I was unhappy. And I was lucky enough to find this book and start using it at the same time that I started attending some cognitive therapy sessions through the university. And that was a real life-altering combination for me. I found that the two things worked very well together.”

“Do you mind telling me what prompted you to take up therapy?”

“I mean, I was quite unhappy. I had a tumultuous relationship with my first serious girl friend. That relationship was a proving ground for a lot of emotional literacy for me, and if it prompted me to get into therapy and take up meditation, that is something I’m deeply grateful for because it’s a wonderful combination, and it worked extremely well for me. And it really converted me to the joys of both things. The joys of good, crisp, purpose-oriented therapy and the joys of meditation as a way of understanding your own mind.

“So that made me very curious about Buddhism. And I did a year-exchange program at the University of Glasgow where I continued to study the origins of Christianity and Judaism, but I also started attending regular meditation classes associated with the Friends of the Order of the Western Buddhist. I got to go on my first meditation retreat. I was never tempted to get too deep into that particular organization, but I was grateful for the instruction that I got from them. And the pivotal entry for me was, before I left for Glasgow I married my first girl friend – the one with whom I had the tumultuous relationship – and then, while I was in Glasgow, we broke up. So it didn’t take. But I was very upset about this, and I returned to Vancouver to try and patch together the relationship.”

“She had not gone to Glasgow with you?”

“She had not.”

“And that hadn’t seemed problematic at the time?”

“Yeah, in hindsight it seems so clear. So I went back to Vancouver and was not able to patch together the relationship, but what I was able to do was a friend of mine had found a retreat centre – by chance almost – on Salt Spring Island, which is one of the Gulf Islands off the coast of British Colombia. And when I came back to Vancouver, I thought, ‘Well, I really need somewhere to put my head on straight.’ So I contacted them and asked if I could come just for a couple of days, and it was a life changing experience for me.”

It helped him gain insight into the relationship which allowed it to end well. It also introduced him to the idea that “the Dharma isn’t something that is only carried by people or books. It’s also carried in place. Sometimes places are a teacher in themselves. It was a Tibetan Buddhist retreat center in the Shangpa Kagyu tradition of Kalu Rinpoche. He had founded this retreat center to be one of the first places in North America where western students could complete the enclosed three-year retreat that is necessary if you want to become a lama in that tradition. It’s almost at the top of a pretty small mountain overlooking the water on Salt Spring Island. Very isolated. To get to it, you have to climb up a long logging road. And it has the imprint of decades of devotion. Students have built retreat cabins and retreat spaces up there. All the buildings just have a lot of love in them, and so it was a really special place to find. When I first went there, it was even more special because it didn’t have electricity. If you wanted to see in the dark, you needed oil lamps. And it’s a magical experience to rise in the morning for group meditation and light your oil lamp and go into the shrine room. A wonderful introduction for me. I really fell in love with that place.”

His first visit was only two days long. Then he did a week-long retreat. “And after that week, the lamas invited me to come up for a summer and pay for my stay by working in the kitchen and doing other tasks around the retreat center including being the librarian.” He stayed three months and considered an even longer stay, but he finished his undergraduate work and practicalities took over. He decided to return to Ontario and go to law school at the University of Toronto.

“But I wasn’t very happy in Law School. So I thought what I should do was take a year off and go on retreat back to Salt Spring Island.” The school “with some grace” allowed him to interrupt his studies for a year, and, at the age of 25, he spent a year on retreat. “Cooking. Meditating. I don’t know how well you know the Tibetan tradition, but there’s a long preparatory practice called the ngondro which involved things like doing 100,000 full body prostrations as well as doing visualizations and that sort of thing. So I took the year to do the ngondro and also learned to cook, which was probably more useful.

“But it was an immensely influential year for me. If you read my book,[2] you’ll see that even though I’m writing about Zen Buddhism, a lot of the reflections arise out of things that happened to me during the year, realizations that I had during that year. Perhaps the most important realization I had during that year was I did not want to become a monk, that I was more suited to lay life. But it was a wonderful experience. And I returned to Toronto after it, graduated law school.”

He found work at the Department of Justice where to this day, twenty-two years later, he works as a research lawyer in the Litigation, Extradition and Advisory Division. And he felt the need to find a sangha in Toronto.

“I also realized that as much as I loved the retreat center, and as close a bond as I had with the two teachers who taught there, doing the ngondro showed me that Tantric Buddhism wasn’t my bag. And so I decided to look around to what other kind of teachers I could find in Toronto.”

The teacher he found was Hwasun Yangil Sunim. “He’s a Zen monk born in Korea who immigrated to Canada in the mid-80s and started his own temple. And when I met him, I almost immediately realized, ‘This is my teacher!’ And I have been in and around his temple ever since.”

“What struck you about him?” I ask. “You said you liked the Tibetan teachers you’d met on Salt Spring but didn’t stay with them. What did Yangil Sunim have that they didn’t?”

He reflects a moment before answering. “Sunim[3] is a teacher of great charisma, as many teachers of his generation were, and almost as soon as I met him, I felt like he had something to teach. He had a Dharma, and he had a Dharma that he could transmit.”

“A sense of authenticity?” I suggest.

“It’s more than just authenticity. He has authenticity, but he also has the thing that I now realize is indispensable in Zen, which is you have to have your own take on it. It’s not a generic teaching; it can’t be a generic teaching. It’s only real teaching when it is put inside a vessel of its own shape. And when I met Sunim, I immediately realized this man is a vessel of his own shape, and if I stick around him long enough maybe I will be able to form my own shape.

It was at this point that I asked him what the function of Zen practice was, and he told me that it had none.

I take another tack. “You’re still a lawyer.”

“Part time.”

“So I’m guessing you occasionally come across people who say things like, ‘I hear you meditate; I hear you’re involved with Zen.’ If you’re talking with someone who has some familiarity with the tradition, you might be able to talk about its ‘suchness,’ but how do you explain it to someone who’s just curious?”

“It is you, Rick, who should be the lawyer. You’re doing exactly what a good cross-examiner would, which is pinning me down. And now that I am pinned down, I will absolutely confess Zen practice, attending a temple, studying under a teacher has lots of collateral benefits, and these are all collateral benefits, I admit, that I enjoy. I enjoy the sense of community. I enjoy the collateral benefits of meditation which are being happier, understanding your own mind better. A satisfying sense of transcending the worst parts of day-to-day existence and enjoying the best parts of day-to-day existence. I enjoy Buddhism because it’s changed my whole way of thinking about very important useful things like boredom, like a lack of self-improvement, like embracing your own very faulty nature, all those things I learned through Buddhism. Those are all marvelous collateral benefits. I mean, it’s fun just watching the mind pivot, and this is something that anyone who likes learning understands. But anyone who studies Zen will understand even more. It’s like learning to do yoga exercises that move your mind in ways you didn’t know your mind could move. And merely making those motions is itself a delightful experience. And so those are all collateral benefits that have kept me in Zen, but, counsel, I return to my original point which is that it has no purpose.”

I know a little bit about the Kwan Um School of Zen, and the various stages of authority people who become teachers pass through. Matthew tells me that Yangil Sunim had been influenced by that model but had also modified it. “So, like in their tradition, he would ordain someone as a Dharma Teacher first. I believe I was the first person to be ordained by him as a Dharma Teacher. Lots of people would subsequently be given that designation. And then he would ‘transmit his Dharma’ and designate people as a Zen Master. I believe he did that with me in 2016.”

“Does anyone ever get Dharma transmission and then not use it? Does not go on to teach.”

“Well, his method is very interesting. I mean, he put very few institutional requirements on any of us, I would say. Certainly not official ones; certainly not regular patterns. The strength and the weakness of the Awakened Meditation Center under him is that it is very informal. I love his Dharma partially because it has this lack of stricture. I think it’s one of the reasons why he came to North America and one of the reasons why he stayed. He doesn’t actually have a ton of time for institutionalizing things. And in fact my Zen temple right now is in a bit of a twilight period because last year Sunim announced he was retiring, and he was going to return to Korea and never coming back. His western students – myself included – would take over teaching westerners, and a new Korean monk would come from Korea to attend to the needs of the Korean congregation because his temple had always that kind of dual role. So we said tearful farewell, and then within four months he was back at the temple because he just didn’t like living in a monastery, I think. So he’s largely retired but not exclusively, and so, as I say, we’re in this liminal period where he’s still kind of the boss and yet he’s both just devolving and undevolving responsibilities to us. He has named people Dharma heirs and not everyone who does that teaches. A few people who have received that transmission have gone off on their own and done their own thing, not under the umbrella of the Awakened Meditation Center.”

“As teachers?”

“Yeah. He’s transmitted to about eight people now. Somewhere around that number. And at our temple now are three or four who regularly come who have received transmission, and three of those four take an active teaching role, myself being one of them.”

“What does a Zen teacher teach?”

“That’s an excellent question.”

“Since it has no purpose.”

Matthew laughs. “I think the most important thing we do is teach newcomers the basics of sitting. I love doing that, and it’s nice when they come back. But I just like putting it out into the world, and if I never see them again that’s just fine.”

“I’m guessing that’s most of them.”

“Yeah, but it’s enough to just put it out there.  And then at my temple, we always begin every class with a tea ceremony which has always been a big part of Sunim’s Dharma. In fact, he doesn’t give Dharma talks very often, but the last one he gave at the last retreat we had was about the unity of tea and Zen. So we always have a tea ceremony, and then we give instruction to those who are new. We sit in a group, and then one of the teachers will give a short Dharma talk usually talking about a koan or something like that.”

He explains that the Korean approach to koan introspection differs for the Japanese tradition in certain regards.

“We don’t really graduate through koans. There is no program or curriculum of koans. It would be very normal for someone to have one koan for their entire life. And the koans we use – I think this is also true in the Kwan Um School – the koans we use are often not derived from Zen stories. Often they’re just simple questions like ‘What am I?’ or ‘What is this?’ or ‘Put it down.’ That sort of thing. Someone might use one of those koans for decades.”

“What is the value of koans?” I ask. “I mean the more traditional koans like Gutei’s finger or the turtle-nose snake on the South Mountain. What do they do?”

“I think koans are the great treasure of the Zen tradition, and what they will do for us is give us a new way of reading. Instead of reading in order to gather information or to acquire information, koans are much more like poetry in that the purpose of the koan is to evoke something in you. But unlike poetry which is meant to evoke an emotion or a feeling, koans are more like what we spoke about earlier, the motions that your mind makes in Zen. The point of a koan is that when you read it – I won’t every koan but many koans – the point is that when you read it and you stub your toe on it, you’re frustrated with it. And sometimes that encounter, that hard encounter, is a long grueling ‘What-in-the-name-of-Jesus-H.-Christ-does-this-mean?’ kind of encounter, and sometimes it’s a very short, sharp, instantaneous stubbing of the toe. You know, you read something, and your mind just stops for a moment. But however it happens for the individual, the point is that your mind doesn’t work the same way as you want it to work. The koan has shoved you into a different stream. And our first instinct, of course, certainly before we study Zen – but even for most Zen students – is that you want to get out of that new rut. You want to get back into the world of understanding, or you want to get back to the way of digesting this as some information that you can assimilate into yourself. But what Zen hopefully teaches you is that, no, this getting knocked into a different route is itself precisely the point. That is a motion of your mind. And the more that you get to experience that, the more familiar you get with those kinds of abrupt, strange motions, the more interesting life becomes.”

“Okay. What is ‘awakening’?”

“Overrated,” he says with a laugh.

It’s such a delicious answer, I consider stopping the interview there.

“Coming to the realization that awakening is overrated is central,” he continues. “It’s extremely helpful. In the Blue Cliff Record it says speaking about these things isadding frost to snow. But, of course, awakening is real. It happens. It’s good . . . Until it’s bad. But it’s overrated, and there are other things to do, like sitting or being nice to people.”

This brings us to a discussion of the role of compassion (karuna) in Zen practice, as well as to the role of the Precepts – which are very important in the Kwan Um School – in Yangil Sunim’s tradition.

“That is an excellent question, and, taking a step back, I would say that is one of the great tensions within Zen. It is easy to judge a lack of compassion in Zen practice, and I think it is a mistake because it cuts you off from the great realization that ‘egoless’ and ‘compassion’ are ‘two words the same thing.’ Real compassion – not, like, abstract ‘loving every human being’ – but actual practical compassion is sort of the answer to meditation, to getting high on emptiness and that sort of thing. So it’s a very important tension. In my tradition, I can’t say that we follow the Kwan Um School as closely, which is to say that Precept instruction has never been a big part of Sunim’s teaching. I remember once asking him some question about what to do in an ethical situation, and he said to me, ‘Sometimes your Precepts are open, and sometimes your Precepts are closed. Don’t ask me when your Precepts are open and when they are closed.’ And that was the extent of his teaching on the Precepts. And this is quintessential Yangil Sunim. When he thought you were developing as a student, when he thought you were a serious student, he would also arrange to have a big formal Precept-taking ceremony for you, and everyone would gather, and there were congratulations, and it was a sweet moment. But we never knew what the Precepts we were taking were. And once you looked at the form he would give us – listing the Precepts we’d just agreed to – they would always be things that none of us would do, and he knew we would never do. I’ve sworn a Precept to never use money and never sleep on a bed higher than six inches off the ground. That’s his way. That’s what makes him what he is. And in its own way – I mean it’s wacky – but it also gets at one of the essential truths about the Dharma, which is it’s deceiving. The Dharma is a trickster, and you can’t get too attached to it because, on the one hand, it’s the most important thing in the world, and on the other hand it’s a bundle of lies and chicanery.”

“Oh,” I say, feigning to be scandalized, “are you going to tell me that Shakyamuni didn’t really twirl that flower?”

“Well, what an excellent hook-back to what we were discussing earlier about my early education in the origins of Christianity. One of the things I do in my book is I am very interested in both celebrating and talking about the myths of Buddhism, the essential myths of Zen. The Flower Sermon is one example. It was news to me, but I felt very important, when I discovered that the Flower Sermon wasn’t mentioned I think before the 11^th Century.”

“Nope,” I say. “Not in the Pali Canon. It’s like when the Protestants translated Bible into the vernacular and discovered that things like indulgences weren’t in it.”

“Exactly! But unlike Martin Luther, I think we Zen students – mature Zen students – can be flexible about what this means. It doesn’t mean that I don’t teach the Flower Sermon. It doesn’t even mean I don’t revere the Flower Sermon. It just means the Flower Sermon joins just about everything else in that it is both sacred and an invention.”

“In the way most people,” I suggest, “acknowledge that their lineage charts which are supposed to go back to the Flower Transmission and Mahakasyapa aren’t actual historical documents that stretch back with any accuracy much beyond the 9^th century.”

“That’s right. But at the same time, I think lineage is extremely important. I mean, I agree with you, and yet I think lineage is important because I think it’s good to know where someone is coming from; I think it’s instructive to know who their teacher was and how they have shaped their teacher’s Dharma into their own Dharma. And it’s useful to know if someone has had approval from a teacher in order to teach themselves. All those things are very useful.”

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[1] Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu, 1965.

[2] The Garden of Flowers and Weeds. 2021.

[3] “Sunim” is an honorific title for a senior monk.

Adapted in part from The Story of Zen–

The history of the transition of Zen to the West is a tapestry of concepts, personalities, and events. One of the most distinctive elements is the story of a Japanese-trained Englishwoman who appeared in San Francisco in 1969.

“I’ve been trying to reconstruct Jiyu Kennett Roshi’s history,” James Ford told me during the first of our several conversations. “There’s this whole hagiography machine around her at Shasta. There’s what I knew, and then there’s what I learned from secondary sources since. It’s still pretty much my belief that she had a mandate to do something in London, and she had swung by San Francisco in 1969 because it was the first successful outreach to the gaijin.  And you can say many things about Jiyu Kennett – some really good – and among those was, she was real smart. And she arrives in San Francisco. She thinks about London. She decides she’s going to put her business up in California. And she moved into a flat on Potrero Hill, and now she was receiving, and I was her first student. Now there is another fellow who claims he was her first student, but he arrived there on a Thursday, and I was there on a Wednesday.

“So I started sitting with her. I mean I had an actual teacher right there I could see every day, and I would spend all my time there. But then her parents had both died while she was in Japan, and she had an estate; not much of one, but there was something to wind up, and she had to go back to London. She brought two students with her, and I was invited to move into the flat on Potrero Hill and pay the rent. With the proviso that I marry my girlfriend. So we got married. And it caused sadness for both of us.” The marriage didn’t last, and James still feels resentment about being forced into it.

“But we moved in. And – you know – I was a residential practitioner from that point on. After Kennett Roshi had been in England – I forget, a couple of months? – she sends a note saying she’s bringing sixteen people. We better move. So we acquired a very large house in Oakland, and I ordained in Oakland. Unsui. Then it really went fast. Acquired the property on Mount Shasta within the year, and I received transmission up in Mount Shasta.”

“How old were you?”

“Twenty . . . I can’t remember now. Twenty-one or twenty-two. Yeah. A child.”

Gyokuko Carlson also received transmission from Kennett in the ’70s. “Roshi Kennett transmitted extremely early,” she tells me. “It boggles my mind how quickly she transmitted people.”

“And this gave you the authority to teach?” I ask.

“Which is why it’s staggering that it came on so early. I think it might be influenced by the fact that she was transmitted so early herself, that that early transmission felt kind of normal to her.”

“How old were you?”

“When I got transmission? I’d only been ordained two years.” She calculates the dates in her mind. “Uh . . . 1977 . . .”

“That would have made you 28.”

“Yeah,” she says, echoing James. “A child.” Then a little later, she adds, “You know, when I was ordained by Roshi Kennett, she didn’t know me.”

“Did you think of her as your personal teacher?” I ask.

“What I identified as my teacher was the abbey itself and the schedule. There was a novice master, and I was allowed to talk to him about questions I had. He was a little bit imperious and not super-approachable. You could sneak questions to other seniors as needed, but I almost never had any kind of conversation with Roshi herself. She gave lectures. She would attend teas sometimes. But she was kind of off in the distance. Before I was ordained, a couple of times, she would address me by some other monk’s name. You know, ‘round face girl.’ There are a bunch of them; they can all go by one name.”

I ask her what she meant by saying the abbey and the schedule had been her teacher.

“Well, I felt that I was being immersed and disciplined into a way of life that was structuring my mind. We sometimes say about the meditation posture is that you’re using your body to direct the mind. And I felt that everything in the schedule and the method of being, the deportment, it was all there to direct the mind.”

Peggy Kennett had been born in Britain in 1924 and studied medieval ecclesiastical music at Trinity College. For several years, she was a church organist and admitted later in life that she’d felt drawn to the priesthood; unfortunately, that wasn’t yet an option for women in the Anglican Church. That discrimination caused her to question gender roles both within the church and in society in general. It also provoked a growing dissatisfaction with Christianity as it was currently practiced.

Her father had belonged to Christmas Humphrey’s London Buddhist Society when it was still associated with the Theosophical movement. Kennett joined as well in 1954 and began a correspondence course on Theravada Buddhism through the Young Men’s Buddhist Association in Ceylon. Her interest in Zen began when she met D. T. Suzuki during one of his visits to London. Then, in 1960 the Society asked her to organize the visit of a Soto priest, Keido Chisan Koho. He was pleased with her work on his behalf and invited her to come back with him to Japan. She agreed although it took another two years before she was able to join him at the prestigious Sojiji Temple in Yokohama.

Peggy didn’t have an easy time at Sojiji. There hadn’t been a female student there since the 14th century. More traditional members of the community resented her presence not only as a woman but as a foreigner, and they made her stay difficult. With Chisan Koho’s support, however, she persisted and even achieved kensho. In her biography, she said it came about in part because of the frustration she felt with the way she was being treated. Once she let her sense of self drop, she achieved awakening and felt only gratitude for those who had tormented her.

Chisan Koho gave her Dharma transmission in 1963, and for a period she served as abbess of Unpukuji in Mie Prefecture where she worked with non-Japanese students. Koho expected that she would return to England and sent a letter to the Buddhist Society informing them that Kennett was to be the Soto bishop of London. Humphreys was surprised and wrote back, tactlessly, that they would prefer a “real Zen master.” Koho was angered at having his authority questioned and ordered his secretary to “write to this man in England and tell him he obviously understands nothing whatsoever about true Zen.” Humphries didn’t appreciate the tone of the letter, and Kennett was no longer welcome in the London Buddhist Society.

She left Japan after Koho’s death in 1967. Her health wasn’t strong at the time, and the animosity of the conservative Soto community continued. She may have hoped to establish a teaching center in England regardless of the Buddhist Society, but as it happened she undertook a lecture tour in the United States which gave her an opportunity to visit the San Francisco Zen Center in 1969. Impressed by what she saw there, she was inspired to remain in the city. She found an apartment in the Potrero Hill district and began receiving students. Within a year, she and a number of disciples she’d gathered – including James Ford – moved three hundred miles north of the city to the township of Mount Shasta.

Shasta Abbey – as her community became known – could house fifty monks, a term indiscriminately used for both males and females. At times Kennett referred to the members as “he-monks” and “she-monks.” Her experience both with the Anglican Church and in Japan made her determined to ensure that men and women were equally respected in the community. The writer Sandy Boucher noted in her book, Turning the Wheel: American Women Creating the New Buddhism, that in her personal experience – not just as a Buddhist but as an American woman – her visit to Shasta Abbey was the first time she felt she was “in an environment where women were equally visible and equally responsible with men.”

Kennett fell seriously ill in 1975. She consulted a traditional Asian healer who diagnosed that her condition was due to stress. He warned that she would be dead within three years if she didn’t change her lifestyle. So in 1976, she took leave of her position as abbess and went into solitary retreat. Over the next nine months, she claimed to have meditated both on her present and past lives and as a result had a series of forty-three visions comprised of both Christian and Buddhist elements.

It isn’t unusual for people engaged in prolonged meditation to have visions. The Japanese term for these is “makyo,” which essentially means hallucination, and they aren’t generally considered to be more significant than dreams. Kennett, however, considered her visions a form of kensho and believed they were genuine revelations. The fact that she overcame her illness – and lived for almost another twenty years – was, to her mind, evidence of their validity.

In some ways – as the content of the visions demonstrated – Jiyu Kennett never wholly abandoned her emotional ties with the Anglican church. She claimed that Chisan Koho had told her to develop Western forms for Zen practice in order to make it more accessible to Americans and Europeans. Taizan Maezumi had said something similar to his heirs. The controversy with Kennett was the way in which she chose to carry those instructions out. In the early days, the clerics of her order wore Roman collars, were addressed as “Reverend,” and resided in “abbeys” or “priories.” The chants were translations of traditional Soto texts but were sung in Gregorian plainsong with organ accompaniment.

Unlike many Soto teachers, Kennett insisted on the importance of kensho, maintaining that it was fairly easily attained through committed zazen practice provided the student remained focused on the “intuitive understanding which the teacher is always exhibiting.” Stephen Batchelor, writing about Kennett, explained:

“All theories, ideas, concepts and beliefs have to be discarded. In their place one ‘must have absolute faith in the Buddhanature of the teacher.’ Therefore, she concludes, ‘Zen is an intuitive RELIGION and not a philosophy or way of life.’ She deplores how for centuries Buddhism has been denied as a religion: ‘this was because [people] feared saying the Truth lest they set up a god to be worshipped. The Lord is not a god and He is not not a god.’”

Although the initial kensho experience, according to Kennett, was equally accessible to lay and monastic, if one wanted “to go further than that” a deeper commitment was required which was – she later insisted – not consistent with an active sex life. So, in spite of having compelled James Ford to marry earlier, she now asserted, “If you’re married, the singleness of mind, the devotion, the oneness with [the] eternal can’t take place, because you’re dividing it off for a member of the opposite sex or a member of the same sex, or whatever.”

Gyukuko met her future husband, Kyogen, while at Shasta.

“We formed an attachment that roshi was informed about, and she first said, ‘Oh, great. You two are so perfectly suited.’ Later she decided, ‘No. We’re going to be all celibate. You can’t do that.’ She would run hot and cold with us for three years. But the rule at that time was that if you were forming an attachment and wanted to pursue it, you had to leave the abbey for at least three months to get over the hot and heavy part of it. And then you could come back and live separately after that. Well in one of these hot and cold periods with roshi, she told Kyogen, ‘If you want to marry that girl you have to understand you’ll never be abbot of Shasta.’ And he said, ‘I don’t want to be abbot of Shasta.’ I can’t imagine her being speechless, but she didn’t have much of a response to that.”

“I understood that early in her career she, in fact, encouraged students to marry,” I mention. “In at least one case I know of even pressured couples to do so.”

“Yeah. Shuyu and Gyozan Singer, for example, were married by her and ordained at the same time. So, yeah, she was for it. And early in her career she wrote an article saying that any time there is an effort at control from one institution over the small branches of the institution, then religion flies out the window. So she was backtracking on a lot of her original teachings.”

Most Soto priests in Japan are married.

James was the second person to receive transmission from Kennett, the first was Mark Strathern, one of the Englishmen who came to the United States with Kennett after her visit to Britain. Like James, he too eventually left Shasta. In an on-line personal reflection,[1] Strathern points out that when he was first with her, “What Jiyu taught was a very orthodox Soto with some minor adaptations to western needs. She was a powerful and authoritarian figure but had a few personal foibles, a minor paranoia about English and Japanese authorities persecution amongst them. But nothing that got too much in the way of our training which followed the lines of her own training in Sojiji.”

When his visitor’s visa expired, Strathern returned to England, where he eventually founded, with Kennett’s guidance and authorization, Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey. During a return visit to the US, Strathern noted that in his absence Kennett had become “more erratic and autocratic.” She and some of her disciples now claimed to have been able to experience former lives.

“I did not see the relevance of this to Soto Zen, or any Zen for that matter,” Strathern writes. “But, whatever, who was I to know so I threw myself back into things and took the advice I had given to others on a number of occasions – that is to set a time limit at some point in the future and to suspend disbelief and judgement till then and see how I felt at that later time. However as time went on the experiences became more and more outlandish. I believe it was Eko[2] who had been Jesus, others including Jiyu had been, Bodhidharma, St John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and any number of inmates and guards from German World War II concentration camps. My touchstone at the time was, ‘Does this lead to the truth?’ and this sure wasn’t leading me on the path to the truth; it was blocking it.”

As her methods and perspective moved further from traditional models, Soto authorities in Japan became less at ease with her and eventually chose not to acknowledge her order or the validity of the transmissions she authorized.

Regardless, she left a legacy. She died in 1996 at the age of 72, but Shasta Abbey continues. As does Throssel Hole Abbey. Although so does the controversy.

“Some years ago,” James tells me, “a former inmate of Shasta Abbey who, when he left, went on to become filthy rich in the computer industry, offered a retreat, a little gathering in Portland for anybody who had received Dharma transmission from Jiyu Kennett and had left. And if you could get to Portland, he’d put you up in a hotel, and there were meetings. It was kind of a lovely event. I still have the ragged remains of a t-shirt which said, ‘I spent blank years at Shasta Abbey and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.’ The other thing I still have, there was a portrait of Jiyu Kennett, some official photograph, cut up and turned into a jigsaw puzzle.”

James fell away from Zen practice for a while after leaving Shasta, then resumed study with John Tarrant from whom he received transmission in 2005. He is now at the head of one of the most significant Zen lineages in North America.  Gyokuko and Kyogen Carlson became the founders of the still vibrant Dharma Rain Zen Center in Portland, Oregon. And both James’ and the Carlsons’ heirs can claim affiliation with the Soto lineage through Jiyu Kennett.

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[1] http://obcconnect.forumotion.net/t134-my-experience-and-leaving-mark-daiji-strathern

[2] Eko Little was Kennett’s assistant for many years and succeeded her as abbot. He was later asked by the Shasta Board to resign his position because of matters of personal conduct and he returned to lay life.

The May 2024 issue of Tricycle magazine includes an abbreviated description of the personal experience which eventually led me to Zen practice. I provided a fuller account of the event in the epilogue to Zen Conversations:

Epilogue in Island View

There is a story Elaine MacInnes is fond of telling about a Little Salt Doll who went on a journey to explore the world. She had many new experiences and saw many interesting places. “Then one day she came to the edge of the sea and was quite astounded by the restless surging mass of water. ‘What are you?’ she cried. ‘Touch me and you will find out,’ answered the sea. So the little salt doll stuck her toe in, and had a truly lovely sensation. But when she withdrew her foot, the toe had disappeared. ‘What have you done to me?’ she cried. ‘You have given something of yourself in order to understand,’ the sea replied.

“The little salt doll decided that if she really wanted to know the sea, she would have to give more of herself. So next she stuck in her whole foot, and everything up to her ankle disappeared. Surprisingly, in an inexplicable way, she felt very good about it. So she continued going further and further into the sea, losing more and more of her self, all the while understanding the sea more deeply. As a wave broke over the last bit of her, the salt doll was able to cry out, ‘Now I know what the sea is. It is I.’” [Elaine MacInnes, Zen Contemplation: A Bridge of Living Water (Ottawa: Novalis, 2001).]

There is a room attached to my garage which a previous owner had used as an art studio. The property is located on a high, steep bank overlooking the river that the First Nations community – to which my great-granddaughter belongs by virtue of her father’s family – call the Wolastoq, or Beautiful River. The people refer to themselves as Wolastoqiyik, People of the River.

I use the room as a private zendo. It is also used for winter storage and for several months of the year includes lawn furniture and bikes as well as my meditation cushion and mat. There is a wood stove, which I seldom have to use because the sunlight coming through the large windows warms the room even in winter. The tree tops I see through the north window as I sit are actually rooted fifteen to twenty feet further down the bank. Eagles frequently glide by on the air currents over the river, as many as a dozen at a time. Wildlife biologists suggest they are always on the lookout for food, but it’s hard to escape the notion that they are just frolicking for pleasure.

Every morning – except for, as Rinsen Weik put it, the ones I don’t – I come out here. On some winter mornings, it is dark enough that I need to light a candle. There is a Buddha figure placed not so much on an altar as on a shelf beneath that north window. There is also an abstract Haitian statue of the Virgin at the foot of the Cross, a “Stabat Mater” which I acquired when I was doing fair-trade importing. I light a stick of incense without any ceremony, then sit on the cushion, fold my legs, and sit in zazen until the incense stick expires. Outside, there is a set of wind chimes which frequently accompanies my sit along with the occasional sound of critters scurrying about in the rafters. And most morning – except for those I don’t – I look forward to this time.

In the flower bed outside, below the south window, there is a large garden Buddha now partially covered by moss. Like most of the Buddha and related figures I have, it was a gift from someone. I know only a handful of people in central New Brunswick who formally practice any form of Buddhism, but most of the people I know are aware that I seem to. They tend to be tolerant and treat it – if I may use Patrick Gallagher’s term – as an eccentric habit. It’s too difficult to try to explain that I don’t consider myself a Buddhist but rather a Zen practitioner. It isn’t a distinction that even always makes sense to those few professed Buddhists I know.

I have mobility problems, so I have not attended sesshin since Albert Low’s death. I do, however, still host the small sitting group which he asked me to organize in Fredericton. It has a core membership of about eight. The local Shambhala community has – for almost twenty years now – graciously allowed us to use their center one night a week. When Koun Franz’s Thousand Harbours Zen holds extended sits in Halifax, I try to attend. Both of these were, of course, suspended during the pandemic, so for over one full year my practice has been solitary except for bi-weekly Zoom conferences with Dosho Port with whom I am inching my way through the koan curriculum. I’m not in a hurry, and at my current pace it will be another decade before I complete it. Given that I have passed the biblically allotted three-score-and-ten-year lifespan, it’s possible I never will.

On rare occasions I will be asked about my practice. The question is usually posed something like, “What do you get out of it?” And the honest answer is, “I don’t know.” This is something I have been engaged in now for fifty years. I have no idea how my behaviour, my way of viewing things, my attitudes and values would have been different if I’d followed another path.

No one’s experience in Zen is the same as anyone else’s, although there tend to be – as these interviews have demonstrated – some commonalities.

When I was in my 20s, before I knew anything about Zen or Buddhism, I had a spontaneous experience. I had carelessly endangered another person through an act of gratuitous cruelty. I regretted my actions immediately and spent the rest of that evening, with some others, working to rectify the situation. It was nearly dawn before things were resolved, and I was able to return home. I was living in a small cottage, called Birkenbrae, on the outskirts of Fredericton. It was on a two-acre plot filled with wild flowers, fruit trees, and abandoned goat sheds. There was a wrought-iron bench in front of the house, and when I returned I was too exhausted to go to the door and unlock it, so I sat down on the bench. I was thoroughly ashamed of what I had done and felt disgusted with the type of person I had become.

And then it was as if I was just too tired to maintain the effort of being “Rick” any longer. I simply let go of that effort, and, immediately, it was like finding a clear signal on the radio dial. You move closer to the source of the signal as you drive or you nudge the dial just a bit and the static drops away and a signal comes through with absolute clarity – a signal which had always been there, but which you couldn’t pick up until the conditions were right.

It was an overwhelming feeling of connection with the entirety of Being and a sense that everything that exists is united in some way by love in the on-going process of creation which science calls evolution. That was how I expressed it to myself at the time. It was also absolutely clear to me that this was what people – although they weren’t aware of it – meant when they used the word “God.” It would be more than a year before I encountered the concept of Dao and recognized that, if a designation was needed, it was a more appropriate one.

I didn’t doubt the validity of this perception, but I did question what I had done to deserve it. In some ways, it was consistent with – although more intense than – experiences I’d had on psychedelics, which, perhaps, made me more open to accept it. I was also pretty sure that I couldn’t be unique; other people must have had similar experiences. The event redirected the academic work I was engaged in at the time and eventually led me to books on Asian spirituality in which I recognized a similar perspective. For a long time, I had an inflated sense of my own – wholly unearned – spiritual accomplishment. Many of the faux spiritual leaders of the period – like those whom John Negru encountered about this same time – had similar conceptions of their self-importance. Some even gathered disciples.

I, instead, was fortunate in discovering Zen practice. My Birkenbrae experience was acknowledged to have been an awakening, but it was also made clear to me that by itself it was of negligible significance, was little more than what Koun Franz referred to as a “burp of the mind.” It was only the first step in Torei Enji’s Long Maturation. That maturation remains an ongoing process, through which I have cultivated several qualities I treasure.

There is a sense of wonder that anything at all exists, a continual amazement at the reality of the universe and the fact that consciousness is inherent in it.

There is a sense of awe at the interdependence of Being in all its beauty and horror.

There is a – at times overwhelming – feeling of gratitude.

And there is sense of reverence, perhaps similar to what Rinzan Pechovnik referred to as tenderness with its connotation of “tending to.”

I may well have acquired these ways of understanding the world and my place in it without Zen; my initial insight, after all, came about before I had any awareness of Asian spiritualities. Nor am I proselytizing. But it remains the case that I have a sense of being understood when I speak of these matters – as I seldom do – with people engaged in Zen practice.

It is also possible that we are just journeying in tandem.

Above the river, two eagles are in synchronized flight, almost wingtip to wingtip, flying in giant loops over the water. Perhaps they are looking for food, but it seems as if they are just having fun.

Empty Cloud Zen, California –

Alice Cabotaje is Director of Spiritual Care Services at Stanford University in California. She is also an ordained Protestant minister in the Metropolitan Community Church, which (on its website) describes itself as “a diverse group of people with different perspectives and opinions.

“Many people within Metropolitan Community Churches,” the article continues, “consider us to be a Protestant Christian denomination.  We also consider ourselves to be a spiritual movement . . .  We have many straight people who are part of MCC, and they are important and cherished members, leaders, and clergy of MCC.  Most of our members, however, are from the LGBTQ+ community.  In fact, we are unique among all Christian denominations because we’re the only denomination that is primarily made up of LGBTQ+ people, has a focus on LGBTQ+ and Queer understandings, and this has been true of us for over fifty years.”

Alice is also a Zen teacher and Dharma heir of Father Greg Mayers.

She was born in the Philippines and lived there until she was in her 30s. Her father, a physician, belonged to the Methodist Church; her mother was engaged with an evangelical group. The image of God she derived from her religious education was that of a being who “was constantly looking over my shoulder.” She had a sense that the God who was addressed as “Father” actually fell short compared to her own father. And while on the one hand, she had what she describes as a desire to “merge” – a feeling that arose, for example, as she stared at the night sky as a child – she also had a profound sense of separation from God. “There was a deep pain, not only in my heart but in my soul.” In part it was due to that fact that very early on she realized she wasn’t heterosexual. “I had crushes on the girls and not the boys.”

While only 13 years old, she came upon Thomas Merton’s Raids on the Unspeakable in the school library. “There was a paragraph that said something like ‘to have an identity one has to be awake, and to be awake one has to know vulnerability and death – not for its own sake; not out of stoicism or despair – but one has to know the invulnerability of one’s vulnerable self.’”

She pondered what it meant to be vulnerable in this way, and what it meant to die. And then, in the normal course of things, members of her extended family did die. These reflections came to a head when, at the age of 16, she was on a bus which almost crashed into a ravine. At the time, she was surprised to find that her reaction was not as she might have supposed it would be. “Everything stopped, and everything just became clear. All of a sudden, I was not afraid of death. It was just this clarity, this stillness, and I felt like, ‘Okay.’”

After that experience, she felt a need for a spiritual practice which was more than “the usual Protestant services. Something that was akin to silence. I had no idea what that was.”

At university she majored in philosophy and found Chinese Chan [Zen] interesting but could make little sense of it. She also came upon literature that suggested her homo-erotic tendencies “would pass” as she matured, so at 18 she tried having a boyfriend. It didn’t work. “So I had a conversation with God, and I told God, ‘Let’s assume that this is the only life I have to live, I want to live it in a way that I am true to myself. And if you are going to send me to Hell for it, I’ll take it.’ So I severed my relationship with God at that point.”

A few years later, some friends introduced her to yogic practice and meditation. She attended a lecture by a feminist instructor who said, “In the end the only way to really transform a person is to have a change in consciousness. And the only way to change one’s consciousness is through the practice of meditation.” Although her Protestant background made her leery of meditation, she was “initiated” into the practice and given a mantra. Through the practice, the pain she had felt as a result of severing her relationship with God seemed to lessen.

She stayed with the practice for eighteen years and tells me that it helped lay the groundwork for her eventual Zen practice. “That really set for me the foundation for sitting in the Zen tradition. In the yogic tradition I would sit an hour twice a day. So that created the discipline that I needed for Zen.”

Her parents, however, were worried about her apparent interest in Hinduism as well as her sexuality, and – when she was in her 20s – they had an uncle lay hands on her to rid her of these tendencies. “In order to drive away the evil spirits. Nothing happened.”

She spent some time in India and then worked as financial journalist in Hong Kong. Eventually she and her partner relocated to San Francisco. Throughout all of this, she tells me, she found herself returning to the questions she’s first had as a small child looking up at the night stars – “wondering who am I, what am I here for?” And then one morning, when she was 39, she woke up feeling, “There is no God.” “I was dumbfounded. I fell into a deep abyss. Never-ending darkness and depression. And I thought, ‘If there is no God, what is life for?’”

She considered suicide. “Fortunately my partner had an acquaintance who talked about this Zen-Christian group over at the Mercy Center in Burlingame. It was a group led by Father Thomas Hand.”

Thomas Hand was a Jesuit who had studied Zen in Japan and introduced North Americans, especially Catholics, to the practice after he returned to the US. Alice and her partner attended a weekend retreat, and, at it, “A part of me healed a bit.”

Hand provided her an example of how one could practice both Christianity and an Eastern meditative tradition. She and her partner also began attending the Metropolitan Community Church.

During a later Zen retreat, she had an “experience of everything exploding. I just felt there was no ‘I.’  At the same time whatever exploded was also ‘I’. I was also everything.”

While other meditators went to breakfast, she stayed behind doing prostrations in gratitude. “And also asking forgiveness for all the pain and suffering I had caused.”

The next retreat she attended was facilitated by Greg Mayers, who confirmed that her experience had been kensho. He recommended that she begin koan practice in order to integrate that insight in her life. He became her official teacher in 2004 and fifteen years later he recognized her as a teacher and gave her transmission.

Catholics like Thomas Hand and Greg Mayers have found ways of retaining their Christian practice and priesthood at the same time as they are engaged in Zen, in fact they found that Zen enhanced their understanding of Christianity.[1] Alice – in spite of the fact that she is now a Metropolitan Community Church minister – readily admits to me that she isn’t a theist. I ask how she is able to reconcile a lack of theism with her role as a Protestant minister.

“There are contemplatives in the Christian tradition,” she tells me, “like the mystics who have reached the point where the concepts and even the form of God has just gone. Although when I speak within the Christian tradition, I address God as God – the Divine – I use that language in order to be understood and in order to be able to connect.”

“Are you suggesting that God is a metaphor for something else?” I ask. She seems unsure what I’m asking. “You say that you use the term to be understood, so is how you understand the term ‘God’ different from the way the members of your congregation might understand it?”

“Yes. It’s possible that they may have an image of an anthropomorphic God or however they understand God to be. People have different experiences, different understandings, use different names. They may call the Divine the ‘Creator.’ And it takes time – depending on their practice; depending on their motivation – to further go beyond that if they wish.”

“Is there something you personally identify as ‘Divine’?”

“Everything.”

“That’s a good Zen answer,” I say chuckling.

“Because it is,” she insists. “I cannot separate what is sacred from what is ordinary or what is the physical from the essential.”

We talk about the functions of Zen and Christianity. She tells me that the intent of Zen practice is assist one encounter one’s true or essential nature. When I ask about the purpose of Christianity, she tells me, “More and more, I think it is to truly understand the example and the teachings of Jesus outside institutional interpretations. I see Jesus as a wisdom teacher. And to me, I won’t say it is the invitation to ‘love your enemies,’ but the invitation to know what it is to truly love. That to me is so profound and demanding.”

She doesn’t have a congregation as such but receives frequent invitations to speak at churches. Just before our conversation, she had given the Ash Wednesday homily at the Stanford Memorial Church.

“Because it was around Ash Wednesday, one draws on the scriptures or the readings in terms of developing one’s message. But my goal both with my Christian colleagues or members of a Christian church and my Zen students is for me to be able to share with them my understanding and realization of what Ultimate Reality is. It is to live a life that honors the sacredness in one another, honors the essential nature I see in them. That’s what I try to do when I preach and when I give teishos.”

I ask if there is much difference between preaching and giving Zen teishos.

“It depends on the context. If it’s a very Christian – like over at Stanford, it’s an ecumenical service – I would lean more in citing scripture or staying within the Christian theme. But then I would still bring in concepts that are generally understood outside the Christian tradition. A Zen colleague of mine, for example, recognized I was coming from my experience in Zen. It’s just the words. But if I’m leading a Holy Week retreat over at Mercy Center, I know there will be some Christian attendees. So I will bring in both scripture and some koans maybe. I may refer to a Zen koan along with scripture. And then if it were like a Zen retreat, then I would just stick to koans or expounding on a Buddhist principle.”

“You said that Greg Mayers told you that in order to integrate the kensho insight into your life you needed to do koans. Do you believe that’s the case?”

“I do. For me, koans were the next step. My awakening experience came from my sitting practice and doing shikan taza. But koans helped me integrate that experience into daily life. They deepen my appreciation and my understanding. When I started with Mu, I could see how concepts arose, how my thinking came up, and I came to that space where everything just breaks down, falls away, and there’s nothing else. The sudden understanding or ah-ha! moment of the koan. And then each koan that I go through provides another lens or another perspective or another way of appreciating or expanding that awakening experience. For me the practice of koans is not just a question of getting through each koan. When I quote/unquote ‘get’ the koan, I sit with it. I marinate in it. I see how, ‘Okay, what does it mean?’ And I sit with it for at least another week or two before I move on and sit with another.”

She has a group of students with whom she meets online and at retreats facilitated at the Mercy Center,  all of whom work with koans. “It has to be koan work not just sitting.”

“So if they weren’t interested in doing koan work, you wouldn’t be a good fit for them? There are, for example, some Soto people who are hostile to the idea of working with koans.”

“I’m more in the Rinzai School because I have experienced and seen the growth I’ve had as a practitioner through koan study.”

“People engaged in Soto practice will sometimes argue that koan work simply creates a ‘gaining’ mind.”

“Well, I see koans more like a tool. You know? It’s another way of experiencing. It’s another way of breaking habits of perceiving or thinking or experiencing . There’s something about koans for me that when one quote/unquote gets it, or gains it – whatever language one wants to use – the fact is it opens. It’s a paradox. One may be trying to work to get it, but when it finally opens, you’re, ‘Oh, wow!’ You realize that there was nothing to gain. And so they say, ‘There is no achievement. There’s nothing to gain.’ And yet it requires effort as well. It requires dedication; it requires discipline. It even requires a desire or a motivation to gain. That’s just the paradox of the practice.”

“What do we mean by ‘transmission’?” I ask. “When we talk, for example, about you receiving transmission from Father Greg, what is it that’s transmitted?”

“Well, my experience with Father Greg when he made me his Dharma heir, it really got to a point where we recognized that his mind and my mind were . . . We were of one mind.”

“Do you mean you felt you perceived or understood or intuited things as he did?”

“Yes. Him and others. When I hear about the old Zen masters whether through koans stories, it’s like, ‘Yes! Yes!’ Or realizing through the koans, ‘Oh, yeah! I know what that person meant when he talked about that.’”

“The koan tradition doesn’t really date back all that far in the history of Buddhism,” I point out. “The stories themselves are Chinese, not Indian, and the actual practice as we’re familiar with it only goes back about 900 years or so to Japan. And yet we’ve got these transmission documents which go all the way back to the Buddha himself who passed something onto Mahakasyapa who passed it onto Ananda who passed it onto somebody else, and eventually it wound its way to Greg Mayers who passed it onto you. How realistic is that?”

“The term ‘passing on,’ for me, is a misnomer. Because there’s nothing to pass on. There really is nothing. I think for me it’s more of a recognition. Like, let’s say, when the Buddha twirled that flower and Mahakasyapa smiled. It was like he exactly saw what the Buddha saw. He saw or realized he was seeing the same thing.”

“Are you suggesting there has been a consistency of perception – a uniformity of perception – over these 2600 years?”

“The same level of realization? I don’t think so. I think over the centuries there has been in some cases a watered-down transmission. Even if we go back to Joshu. Did he really have a Dharma heir? I mean, I think his standards were so high that he would not just make someone a Dharma heir. So I think it really depends on the teacher. In my case, I think about it. I have five students; one of them has received transmission in the Soto Zen. And when I think, ‘Will I have a Dharma heir?’ The person would have to be outstanding, even better, exceeding me.”

“Since the Meiji era, it has been a matter of Soto policy that awakening – kensho – isn’t a requirement for transmission.”

“Yes. Which to me is sad. Japanese priests who have temples in Japan, they may inherit the practice but have not necessarily had a realization about their essential natures. And realizing or experiencing one’s essential nature can be just a glimpse. It’s a lifelong, daily, moment to moment practice. For me, when I had that experience at the Mercy Center, that was when I felt that the real work began. That’s when the hard work began.”

As our conversation draws to a close, we talk about the special focus that the Metropolitan Community Church has working with LGBTQ individuals. Given the intolerance still prevalent in certain Christian communities, I understand the importance of a denomination which specifically addresses this matter. But I have also recently encountered LGBTQ Zen chat groups. I ask Alice how important these are for Zen practitioners who may not identify with normative culture.

“For me,” she tells me, “Zen is a practice that encourages a smashing, a letting go of concepts of how things should be. So I would say, it would be a very attractive place for people who feel they don’t belong anywhere else.”

“That’s my question. If that’s something Zen practices provides as a matter of course, then is there a reason why, within that practice, there still need to be opportunities for people who don’t necessarily identify, for example, as heteronormative to come together?”

“From the practice itself and from an essential point of view there really are no distinctions. And yet we are expressions, unique expressions of Essential Nature. And in our uniqueness there are feelings of wanting to belong, feelings of wanting to be understood, feelings of wanting to be on the same wavelength. This is something that one desires. So for me, yes, I would feel very comfortable being part of – I may not necessarily seek it – but I would be comfortable being part of an LBGTQ group because there were be certain . . . either from language, from engagement certain things that would require less explanation. That’s one. Secondly, there is a sense of safety and comfort. A feeling of belonging. As a person of color, I feel more comfortable being with other people of color. There’s a level of understanding of the pressure we go through, the discrimination. At the same time, there are certain values that we share that don’t have to be constantly verbally articulated. There’s an intuitive understanding.”

She goes onto say, “There’s a sense of freedom that comes from the practice of Zen. There’s a sense of a lack of fear.”

“Freedom from?”

“From expectations. In other words, I can truly be myself in the unique creation that I am. So, in other words, both the essential and the formal come together. Being able to live my life that way is so liberating! It means I am able to fully accept who I am and others as well. And with that, I believe, comes true understanding, compassion, and kindness towards the other. I don’t want to use the word ‘love,’ because – you know – it’s overused. But at least in terms of one’s behavior, a true embrace of the other.”

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[1] The number of “Christian Zen teachers” has began significant. James Ford provides a partial list on his “Monkey Mind” blog: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/monkeymind/2022/10/christian-zen-teachers-a-list-in-progress.html 

Cochise Zen Center, Bisbee, Arizona –

Barry Briggs – Kwan Um Zen Master Hye Mun – first encountered Buddhism through a girlfriend. “She practiced in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition with Sogyal Rinpoche, who died several years ago.” Barry was studying the Philosophy of Religion at the time at university. “I’m interested in human behavior and what motivates it. And at least in the 1970s, there was a lot of interesting philosophical work to be done in the field of religion and belief. So that attracted me. I worked a lot on the ‘problem of evil,’ how to reconcile the existence of evil with an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing deity.

“In the early 1980s I practiced with Sogyal Rinpoche – ‘practiced’ in a loose sense – for five years. When he came to Seattle, I would go to a weekend retreat. My recollection – perhaps not to be trusted – is that he would talk a lot for two days. I remember being fascinated by it, how he would describe human mind, how mind functioned. And then, at the end of the two days, he would say, ‘Now go home and practice.’ And, of course, I didn’t. Or not for very long,” he adds with a chuckle.

“What did he mean by ‘practice’?” I ask.

“He would teach meditation over the weekend, but these were not meditation retreats as I understand it now. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these were ‘Dharma retreats.’ And at the end he would say, ‘Now go home and practice this meditation that I taught you.’”

“And you didn’t.”

“Well, for a few days. Maybe. You get a little bit of Dharma gasoline, and you can go for a short distance. And then you run out of gas. Then a couple of years later, my best friend invited me to go to a Zen retreat with him. And that was almost like the inverse of Rinpoche’s retreats. Very little talking and a lot of practice. A lot.”

The retreat was in the Korean Soen tradition.

“There was a Korean nun who had a hermitage in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains outside of Seattle, and we went there in January. I remember very clearly that she didn’t heat the place. There was snow on the ground. It was bone-chilling cold, and all we did was practice: bowing, chanting, and sitting. And I found out that I loved practice. Not talking about practice but actually doing it. It’s what I wanted.”

“What was it about it that you found appealing?”

“It was embodied. Although I was a philosophy student and – for a time – quite intellectual, I’ve always been somebody who has used my body a lot. I’m old now, so it’s different, but in my 20s and 30s I was a rock climber, a cyclist, a professional modern dancer, and just physically very active. People might not think of sitting in meditation as physical activity, but for me it was physically very active. Plus, in the Kwan Um School tradition, we do 108 prostrations every day and lots of chanting. Very physical practices.”

“It takes energy to sit still,” I point out.

“It does, and I loved it. I wasn’t looking for a spiritual practice, but when I went to that Zen retreat, I said ‘Oh, I want to do this. This is something I understand.’ There was a small sitting group in Seattle – a Kwan Um School sitting group in Seattle – at that time. Maybe ten people. Of the ten, maybe three were interested in Kwan Um School style. Some were Glenn Webb’s students or had been his students. Most of those ten eventually wandered off to various Japanese forms of practice available in Seattle at that time. So really it was just a few of us. Then it started growing. We moved around from place to place.”

Glenn Webb was a professor of art history at the University of Washington who had trained in the Obaku school of Zen in Japan and introduced many Western students – including Genjo Marinello – to formal practice.

The group was small and not formally organized. “We had a set schedule, and we just showed up. Our guiding teacher was a man named Bob Moore, now known as Zen Master Ji Bong, who lived in Southern California. He would visit several times a year, along with other Kwan Um School teachers.”

“And if someone at the time had asked you what you were getting out of this practice, what would you have told them?” I ask.

“Hmm. I would have made up a fairy tale about becoming more calm and centered, blah, blah, blah. Like that. I would have invented a story because, particularly in the first ten or twenty years, how could one possibly know? Obviously, training has impact on peoples’ lives, but any attempt to describe a benefit most often just leads to a fairy tale. At least in my experience. The Zen tradition has enough fantasy wrapped around it, at least in the West. So perhaps it’s best to keep one’s mouth closed and encourage others to find out for themselves.”

And so those ten or twenty years passed. He remained faithful to the practice and worked in the software industry. “I retired in 2005. Then I was asked to become a teacher in 2012 and that happened in 2013.”

“Who asked you?”

“In the Kwan Um School, when a practitioner seems ready, a committee is formed to assess that person. My primary teacher at the time was Timothy Lerch Ji Do Poep Sa Nim and my sponsoring teacher was Zen Master Bon Haeng, Mark Houghton, who lives in Massachusetts. If the committee agrees, then the individual receives inka, teaching authorization. For me that was in 2013.”

In 2015, he was invited to leave Seattle and move to the Cambridge Zen Center in Massachusetts.

“They asked me to be their resident teacher. It’s a wonderful Zen Center, an incredible Zen Center. It’s one of the oldest and largest residential centers in the United States, founded in 1974, I believe. And at any given time, thirty or so people live there, right in the heart of Cambridge. The Kwan Um School has quite a few Zen centers within two hours of Cambridge so there was a lot of teaching to be done.”

He was the Resident Teacher and later Co-Guiding Teacher with Jane Dobsiz, Zen Master Bon Yeon.

I ask what his responsibilities had been.

“The Zen center has formal practice every morning and every evening, seven days a week. I showed up every morning and every evening, six and half days a week. I took Sunday evenings off. On a regular basis I offered kong-an interviews, talks, and workshops. I met informally with residents and members of the non-residential community. But the primary responsibility I took upon myself was to show up for practice every morning and every evening six and a half days a week.”

Also during that time, he traveled extensively, teaching in central Europe, Russia, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, and throughout the United States.

On the other hand, as much as he loved the Cambridge Center, he didn’t feel at home in New England.

“I still have good relationships with people in Cambridge, but New England was not my home. I really missed the west. In the winter of 2016-17, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to rent an Airbnb in Southern Arizona and be warm. And do a kind of loose retreat.’ Sit in the mornings and the evenings. Walk in the mountains during the day. And as I was scheming that out, a friend in Seattle wrote and said, ‘What are your plans?’ I told her and she said, ‘I own a house in Bisbee Arizona. You could use my house.’ So, okay. I’d never been to Bisbee, but – as happens to many people who come to Bisbee – I came here, and I liked it. So, I hatched a plan to move here. As it turned out, there was already a Zen center in Bisbee. It had been here for fifteen years but had never had a teacher or a formal affiliation. It was simply organized and operated by local people who wanted to practice.”

“And did they welcome you with open arms?”

“Almost everyone was happy to have somebody who had an actual credential,” he says, chuckling. “Some of the people who welcomed me with open arms maybe weren’t so welcoming later as they realized I was an ordinary person.”

Bisbee is a small community, with a population of less than 5000 people, and yet the Zen Center has twenty-five active participants. In Zen circles, this is huge.

“I’m astonished, to be honest with you,” Barry tells me. “I’m astonished. It’s amazing. We’re the only organized meditation group for a hundred miles, so if somebody wants to practice, they come to us. For this reason, I try to keep the community very spacious in welcoming people regardless of affiliation or background. We’ve had Transcendental Meditation practitioners, somatic body work people, Tibetan practitioners, and lots of non-Buddhist types practicing with us. We welcome them all. Of course, I wear formal Zen robes and speak from my tradition when I give talks. I’m only authorized to do what I do, and so that’s all I do. I can’t pretend to be a different kind of person. But because of our unique situation, I hold the forms very loosely. When I was at Cambridge Zen Center, there was a Buddhist Center about every other block or so. If somebody didn’t like our center, they could go to Insight Meditation which is literally about six blocks away. It’s no problem. But here in Bisbee, that’s not an option for people. For this reason, I keep the forms loose. And if somebody’s not following the forms, I usually keep my mouth shut. I want everyone to feel like this is their practice home.”

There may be substantive differences between Japanese Zen and Korean Soen, but Barry is reluctant to address the issue. “I don’t know that I can speak to that with authority because I don’t have direct experience with Japanese Zen.” He is, however, willing to outline his understanding of the Korean tradition as it was organized and taught by Zen Master Seung Sahn.

“I’ve heard that when he came to America in 1972, he was a very high-ranking teacher in Korea. And according to the story, in the Korean version of Life or Look magazine, he read about hippies in America and said, ‘Oh, I can teach those people.’ So, he moved here, not speaking any English. I wasn’t around in those days, but apparently his original idea was that he would create a monastic order in the West. But Western people didn’t go along with that idea. ‘Monastic order’ in the Korean Buddhism means the traditional 250 or so precepts. I’ve heard the words ‘monk’ and ‘nun’ are used in a certain way in Japanese Buddhism; sometimes ‘priests’ is used also. These terms have a different meaning in the Korean tradition where they refer to celibate monks and nuns who live very restricted lives. So when Zen Master Seung Sahn came to America, most of his American students were not willing to follow in that path.”

“He wasn’t able to follow that path himself when he got here,” I point out.

“That’s my understanding,” he agrees. “But I wasn’t around when that behaviour occurred, so I don’t really have anything to add to what you’ve probably already heard. But despite those issues, he interpreted his Korean heritage in a way that seemed to make sense in the West and built a lasting framework for practice. And those are the same elements of our practice today. Recently I talked with someone at a Rinzai center, and they said, ‘You know, the view we have in our center is that the Kwan Um School is “Zen-lite” because you don’t do a lot of sitting.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. How long is your longest intensive retreat?’ He said, ‘Seven days.’ I said, ‘Well, take that seven-day retreat and do it for twelve weeks consecutively as a silent meditation retreat. That’s what we do every winter at centers around the world. And if you go to Korea, we do it every winter and every summer. Monks and nuns in Korea are in intensive meditation retreat for six months a year. Maybe that’s Zen-lite. I don’t know.’ So, we sit a lot. We chant a lot. We do 108 prostrations every day, although my body is old, and I can’t do full prostrations any longer. And we work with kong-ans. So those are the four elements of our practice.

“But underneath all of that is what I call ‘vow.’ Why do you practice every day? Only to get a good feeling? Or to have some calmness? Is that the only reason you practice? That’s what I ask. Zen Master Seung Sahn used to say, ‘Why do you eat every day? Why did you get out of bed this morning? Because your body is hungry? Or your alarm went off. Is this why you got up?’ Underneath everything we do is ‘vow.’ Why do you have a human body? What are you going to do with your human body? If that’s clear, you don’t need to practice. These are the elements of our tradition as I understand and teach them.”

I ask if he’s ordained.

“No, I’m not an ordained monk. In the Kwan Um School – I know this sometimes can be confusing for those trained in Japanese traditions – in the Kwan Um School the precepts path and the teaching path are independent. Somebody can have 250 precepts as a fully ordained monk or nun but never become a teacher. They’re just completely different paths.”

“So what’s the function of the precepts path?”

He answers without hesitation: “Living an upright life and helping this world. Serving as a model for helping this world. The function of the basic Five Precepts is to bring yourself upright. The next five precept are about community relationships, how to function harmoniously in community.”

As they were explained to me by Judy Roitman [Zen Master Bon Hae], the First Five Precepts in the Kwan Um School are: 1) to abstain from taking life; 2 to abstain from taking things not given; 3) to abstain from misconduct done in lust; 4) to abstain from lying; 5) to abstain from taking intoxicants to induce heedlessness.

These are followed by: 6) vowing not to talk about the faults of others; 7) vowing not to praise oneself and put down others; 8) vowing not to be covetous and to be generous; 9) vowing not to give way to anger and to be harmonious; 10) vowing not to slander the three jewels (Buddha, Dharma, Sangha).

I ask Barry if any of the students with whom he works in Bisbee have taken the Precepts.

“Yeah. When I came here, of course, they never had a teacher or formal affiliation, so it’s taken a while to migrate the community to the Kwan Um School tradition. Now we have . . .” he pauses to reflect a moment “. . . seven or eight people who have taken the first Five Precepts, and then three long-time practitioners in the Kwan Um School who are part of our community who have taken the Ten Precepts. We call these folks Dharma teachers; not Dharma teachers in the way that you and I might use that term outside the Kwan Um School, but they have taken on the responsibility of leading practice, giving instruction – meditation instruction – and generally being of service to the community. They’re not teachers in the way I’m authorized to be a teacher.”

“What’s the function of all of this?” I ask. “You said, ‘to lead an upright life.’”

“The function is liberation.”

“From?”

“It’s a good question and if you and I were talking less formally and you knew nothing about Buddhism, I would frame the question in terms of the ordinary challenges we have as human being. Problems with our partner; problems with our children; problems with our parents; problems at work. Like that.”

“You’re going to liberate me from all that?”

“No. You’re going to liberate yourself from that,” he says with a laugh. “I’m not going to do anything.”

“And how is this practice going to help me liberate myself from all these problems I’ve got?”

“You have to find that for yourself. And there’s no way of sugar-coating that if somebody’s honest. You’re the only one who can find that out. If I were going to give a nice explanation about it, I would talk about it in terms of awareness and mindfulness and watching the feelings and emotions and perceptions and impulses arise in the mind and making skillful choices about them. That’s a nice explanation. But you’re the only one that can find it. You’re the only one who can find out what it means for yourself.”

One of the issues I’ve been fascinated about as I conduct these interviews is the way what draws people to Zen practice has changed over the decades. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that a majority of those seeking out teachers in the 1960s and ’70s were on a quest for enlightenment. It was in part driven by insights often acquired through psychedelic drug use, but the search was largely for enlightenment, kensho, satori.

Barry admits that these are not words “in favor these days in the Western Buddhist world. I talk about it, but I tend to use the word ‘awakening’ – or ‘awaken’ – rather than ‘enlightenment.’ It’s a word that’s a little less loaded. When most Western people – in my experience – think about ‘enlightenment,’ they’re thinking about pixie-dust falling out of the sky. People and objects glowing with auras. But ‘awakened’ just means being awake. And there are good metaphors that connect with this. One I use is that at night, when you’re sleeping, you have no awareness of your body even though your body’s always present. And even if you’re dreaming about your body, it’s not your actual body; it’s a dream body. But the minute you wake up in the morning, you’re not confused. There’s your body saying, ‘Let’s go pee.’ You get up and you pee. You’re not confused. You’re awake. Your awakened nature – your enlightened nature – is always available, but we don’t know that because we’re dreaming. All we have to do is wake up to what’s always there.

“In Diamond Sutra,the Buddha says in various ways, over and over, that when he got enlightenment he didn’t get anything. If he’d gotten something it wouldn’t have been enlightenment. So each of us already has it. We just need to wake up to it.”

“Regardless,” I persist, “I suspect when people come to the door for the first time, they don’t say ‘I want to be awakened.’”

“Rarely.”

“So, what do they say?”

“Oh, I hardly ever ask that question. If they need instruction, I give them some instruction. And then they practice and either stay or don’t stay. You know, a lot of people don’t come back a second time.”

“Still, you have some sense of what drew them.”

“Yeah, they’ve usually got a life problem. Maybe their spouse is not cooperating or maybe their body is not cooperating. Bisbee is a town of mostly older people, and so we have a lot of loss in our sangha. People are dealing with that. Most members of our community are right up against some of the hardest things in human life. And I think that’s one of the reasons we have a large community in a small town. People have no time to waste. Just this last year we lost our board president at age 85. We lost the person who ran our weeknight practice for over a decade. He was 81. We’re all there right up against it. I’m 77. So, local people are hungry for a community and practice which helps them investigate what their life is actually about.”

“Are you saying one of the things that draws them is a desire for a community?”

He nods. “When people come to the Zen center, they’re joining a community. That’s a very important function of a Zen center, to provide community. To provide support.”

“The traditional Three Treasures,” I suggest.

“Yeah, a cornerstone of the Three Treasures. Exactly. And this last year I’ve found myself more than ever sitting with people who are dying. Or sitting with those whose partners or friends have died. This work is a little beyond my training but, really, all you have to do is show up. It’s just like practice; you just have to show up. That’s the main thing.”

There are young people in the community as well, who he encourages to take part in longer Kwan Um practice retreats at the Providence Zen Center in Rhode Island. These retreats – called “kyol che” – can be up to three months long. “‘Kyol che’ is Korean term that means ‘tight Dharma.’ If people are young and able to engage in that kind of practice, I suggest it. But I don’t encourage somebody who is 75 or 80 years old to do that kind of practice. Not that they can’t – maybe they can – but they have different concerns, most of them.”

“What is it that the people at the Cochise Center look to you for?”

“The first thing is I show up. We only practice twice a week, so I show up twice a week. I’m always there, except for the rare occasions I’m out of town. People depend on the consistency, although less than I might think that they do. To be honest. I think people are quite self-sufficient now in the community.”

“There’s more than one key to the door?”

“There are many keys to the door. Last October I was in Korea for a few weeks, and people came in, turned on the computers, ran practice. Everybody came. Nothing changed. But in some ways, they depend on me to show up. They depend on a model of the practice and the practice life. They ask me to create a safe place for people to practice. Physically safe. Emotionally safe. Spiritually safe. They depend on me to give talks that speak to real human needs and provide some clarity about what it is to be a human being.”

“And what is your hope for the center?

“The center stayed together for fifteen years before I showed up. It will continue after I die. It will grow or shrink. I can’t control that. All I can do is pour my love and commitment into the community as best as I can. Lately I’m investing a lot of energy in the younger practitioners. They’re working on kung-ans; they’re working on personal life issues. It’s not that I’m turning away from the older people at all – there’s a lot to do there as well – but I’m really encouraging the younger people to step forward. And they are.”

Barry believes that it has been a benefit to the center to be formally affiliated with the Kwan Um School.

“When I first moved here, of course, nobody knew about the Kwan Um School. Among the various Western Zen traditions, we’re perhaps less well-known than some. People knew that I practiced in a Korean ancestral tradition, and that was okay with almost everybody. They were willing to adapt the forms.

“When the pandemic started, we closed down physical operations and moved everything to Zoom. And I had the idea that rather than me giving the Dharma talk every Sunday, we would invite teachers from the worldwide Kwan Um School community and have them give talks and answer questions. And it was a real eye-opener to the community in Bisbee to realize that there were all these different people around the world teaching the same bone of Zen but with their own personal way of expressing it. People in Asia, people in Europe, people in America all teaching from the same tradition. This has had a big impact on people. Because the Kwan Um School has an online sangha, local people who practice here also practice via Zoom at Empty Gate Zen Center in Berkeley or with our center in Fairbanks, Alaska, or Boise, Idaho. It’s been a surprise to people. It’s been a surprise to me how much people have taken advantage of that network.

“It’s one of the great gifts of the Kwan Um School. We’re a school; we’re not a loose tradition in the same way that some of the Japanese lineages are. And part of Zen Master Seung Sahn’s gift is that we encourage practitioners to study with many different teachers. We say in the Kwan Um School that Zen Centers have guiding teachers, but students don’t have guiding teachers. Students can study with whoever they want, and we encourage that. As a result people develop a very broad view of the Buddhadharma, as it comes through our lineage. And I think that’s been a great gift to the people here in Bisbee and around the world as well.”

Adapted from The Story of Zen –

In his history of American Buddhism – How the Swans Came to the Lake – Rick Fields recounts the story of the time Rinzai master, Joshu Sasaki, gave a talk at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. One of the people in attendance asked if there were a place in the San Francisco area where one could get Zen training. Sasaki appeared to give the question a moment’s thought then said he wasn’t aware of any and suggested that if the inquirer were serious he should arrange to visit Sasaki’s center in Los Angeles.

There was a surprised, audible reaction from the audience, many of whom were students and friends of Suzuki-roshi’s San Francisco Zen Center, which by then had more than one branch in the Bay area, and Sasaki’s translator, a Japanese-American doctor, hastened to add, “The roshi means that there is nowhere else where one can study his particular line of Zen.” [Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake (Boston: Shambhala, 1992), p. 247.]

It is possible that Sasaki was making a distinction between Soto and Rinzai Zen; the Zen community in the United States, even in its earliest days, was divided along sectarian lines. It is also true, as Fields adds, that “it certainly appeared – to some at least – that the roshi had rather enjoyed the stir his blunt answer had caused.”

Sasaki is sometimes identified as the fourth of four Japanese missionaries – following Suzuki, Taizan Maezumi, and Eido Shimano – who helped establish Zen practice in America. He was two decades older than Maezumi and Shimano, although they came to the US before him, and only a few years younger than Suzuki. He had been born in 1907, was ordained a monk at the age of fourteen, and became an osho – or priest – seven years later. He spent several years at Myoshin-ji in Kyoto, which remains one of the principal teaching centers for Rinzai Zen. In 1947, at the age of 40, he was given Dharma Transmission and became abbot of a small temple in Nagano Prefecture.

According to an interview Sasaki gave in 1969, he’d had no idea of coming to the United States until two American aspirants, Dr. Robert Harmon and Gladys Weisberg,wrote to Myoshin-ji requesting that an authorized teacher be sent to Los Angeles.

Up until that time, I had no dreams whatever of coming to the United States and furthermore the temple I belonged to was so poor that they couldn’t entertain any such ideas. However, Myoshin-ji said that I would be very useful in the United States so suggested I come here. [sasakiarchive.com/PDFs/19691220_Sasaki_Interview.pdf.]

He arrived in America, reputedly, with only the robes he was wearing, a Japanese/English dictionary, a Bible, and a small valise. He didn’t waste time but began receiving students almost at once in a one-bedroom house in a Los Angeles suburb. Within five years, the group moved to new quarters in what had once been a luxurious residence on the corner of Cimarron and 25th streets. The neighborhood had deteriorated, and the building itself had been condemned by the city as unsafe for occupancy. Sasaki’s students, however, refurbished it, and it was officially opened on April 21, 1968 – Sasaki’s 61st birthday – as the Cimarron Zen Center. Later the name would be changed to Rinzai-ji. 200 students took part in the opening ceremonies.

Three years later the community had sufficient funds to purchase another property in the San Gabriel Mountains east of the city. This became the Mount Baldy Zen Center. A third center – the Bodhi Manda Zen Center in Jemez Springs, New Mexico – was established in 1973. The three centers quickly acquired reputations as rigorous and austere practice centers. In a talk given at Bodhi Manda, Sasaki said: “The standpoint of this Zen Center is our own practice of Dharma Activity. Therefore we accept those who want to study Dharma Activity. Those who are not interested in Dharma Activity should leave immediately.” The training provided wasn’t easy nor for the faint of heart. Sasaki’s type of Zen has been described as Samurai. Those who couldn’t cut it were invited to “leave immediately.”

Many did. More to the point, there were others who remained and flourished. Within a few years, senior students established affiliate centers elsewhere in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Sasaki received invitations to facilitate sesshin at locations throughout North America including St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Trappist Monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts.

His students worked with koans but instead of being chosen from classical collections these were often adapted to the condition of the particular student. One might be asked how he realized Buddha nature while driving an automobile. To the monks at St. Joseph’s, he assigned the question, “How do you realize God when making the sign of the cross?”

Sasaki never acquired a very good command of English and had to make use of translators throughout his time in America, even so it was the impact of his personality which his admirers most frequently reference when talking about him. The Canadian songwriter, Leonard Cohen – who spent a period of residency at Mount Baldy in the 1990s – said that Sasaki was such an inspiring figure that were he to have been a Heidelberg physicist, Cohen would have learned German and studied physics. Cohen also admitted that he and other Sasaki students “were gravitating to teachers who were quite flawed as human beings, but that’s what we cherished. We wanted to see the dark side made bright.”

Seiju Bob Mammoser was at one time thought to be in line to become abbot of Rinzai-ji after Sasaki retired, although this never came about. When I spoke with him in 2013, I was struck by how reserved and even cautious he was when speaking except when talking about Sasaki, whom he always described in superlatives. He was “amazing” and “an utterly remarkable, unique man.” I asked in what way, and he told me, “You meet somebody who inspires you. Motivates you and moves you and demonstrates – in front of you, in his manifestation – exactly what he’s talking about. I hadn’t really met other teachers. I’d read books. I’d read Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. That was a beautiful book. But he was the first living teacher I’d met. He was sufficient. I didn’t have to go see somebody else. I knew what I was dealing with.”

Father Kevin Hunt, a member of the Trappist Community at Spencer and an authorized Zen teacher, was equally fulsome in his praise of Sasaki. “We had him in choir, and he had a room in the monastery itself. So he participated; he ate in our dining room. He gave a couple of talks to the community. There was quite a lot of interest in what he said. Basically he spoke of his experience in meditation and the Zen way of doing meditation. And, you know, a novice master had once said to me, ‘If there’s any rule in prayer it is that it will always become more simple. Less verbal.’ And so he addressed that aspect, that in Zen there’s no talking. That to speak a word in Zen is already a betrayal. And that was something that we could identify with because we had a rule of silence, and silence is very, very important in our practice. And he loved it, so somebody said to him something about coming back sometime and giving a weekend sesshin. And so he said, ‘Yes. I come back next year.’”

In fact he came back ten years in succession to lead retreats at St. Joseph’s.

He did not coddle his students. When I asked Zengetsu Myokyo Judith McLean  of the Enpuku-ji center in Montreal what Sasaki Roshi was like as a teacher, her immediate answer surprised me:

“He was cruel. He was strong. He was . . .”

I interrupted to ask what she meant by “cruel” and why that was the first thing she said. She explained that she hadn’t meant it as a criticism. “I was talking with a student here yesterday, and, it seems to me, it was a very effective tool for dissolving the ego.

“The strongest teaching he gave me,” she went on a bit later, “was that he gave me a lot of responsibility.” She had been head monk of Rinzai-ji in Los Angeles in 1992 during the Rodney King riots. Sasaki, himself, was away at the time. “That was a lot of responsibility, because we were hemmed in. There were fires all around us and so on. And never any comment about ‘job well done’ or how bad it was.

“And while I was at Rinzai-ji, there was a very, very difficult older nun. She was an alcoholic. Very difficult. She used to drive people away from the Zen Center. So I was in charge of her there, and I dealt with her in an okay way. Then the Roshi turned the tables on us, and he made her the head monk. And things went kind of crazy. Like really crazy. So that was a cruel situation. And he watched and watched and no comment. He watched to see how I dealt with that. So at the time, that seemed cruel to me. But he’s just cutting off any kind of attempt to grandify oneself or to even feel competent. Because we all had something more to learn in the sense of dissolving our self.

“His methods are very effective. I mean, when your whole world falls apart, then you learn from that. And if that keeps on happening, then you keep on learning. And so if I had someone who was just kind and helped me along a little bit, that wasn’t so interesting. So I think it’s a very particular kind of character that would study with a teacher like that. I was very stubborn, but there was never a doubt in my mind that this was the person I wanted to study with, that I was glad to be studying with. No doubt. Even when it was difficult and I felt he should really give me a break once in a while, still there was no doubt in my mind.”

Others have described him as “playful,” charming, and as having an infectious laugh. He advised his students – whom he accused at times of being too serious and humorless – to practice laughing as a spiritual practice.

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When you wake up tomorrow morning, first thing, stand up, put your hands on your hips, and laugh five or ten times, and that will cure you of much of your illness. This exercise is even better than a long period of meditative sitting. As a beginner in meditation, instead of suffering a long period of cramped legs, it would be better for you every morning as soon as you get up to immediately stand in this position and laugh about ten times. This is really the best beginning of Zen. If during that time you are doing this exercise and laughing vigorously, I were to ask you “Where was God at that time?“ How would you answer? Then immediately your logic and your consciousness starts to work. That is what is bad. That is time and space learning. That is not Zen. Just simply laugh and you will begin to realize. [https://terebess.hu/zen/mesterek/Joshu-Sasaki-Roshi-About-Zazen.pdf]

Myokyo’s was the ninth interview I conducted when I began this series of conversations in 2013. I had particularly wanted to interview one of Sasaki’s osho – preferably a female osho – at the time because he had made headlines in the mainstream media as a result of reports about his sexual interference with female students that had been going on for decades.

As he drew media attention, his history was examined with greater scrutiny, and it was discovered that his claim to have come to America at the request of two students in California left out a number of significant details.

In 1944, he had been the fusu – or business manager – of Zuiryuji in the Prefecture of Toyama. Eight years later, it came to light that during his time in office he had embezzled funds intended for temple renovations in order to pay for what the judge trying the criminal case against him called “a pleasure spree inappropriate for a religious figure.” Sasaki took responsibility for his actions, telling police that no one else was involved. He also confessed that “with regard to women, this is my distress as a human being.” The guards who had charge of him during his detention before trial were impressed by his demeanour, particularly the way he sat for hours in full lotus posture on his hard bed. One even obtained a zafu for him to make the posture more comfortable. He was found guilty in 1954 and served an eight-month sentence.

When he returned to his monastery, his “distress” with women didn’t abate, and it was later reported that he had fathered at least two children for whom he assumed no responsibility. When the request came from America for a Rinzai teacher, the officials at Myoshinji may well have viewed this as an opportunity to rid themselves of a monk who continued to be an embarrassment. In Sasaki’s version of the story, he performed the ceremony for permanent departure from Japan because he intended to stay in America until he had brought Rinzai Zen to the country. Another interpretation of events is that he was sent into exile.

He was, however, an effective teacher, and students were drawn to him. Leonard Cohen and Seiju Mammoser were not alone in praising him. David Yoshin Radin   of the Ithaca Zen Center in New York told me that he had “had an immediate and very powerful bond to Sasaki Roshi as my teacher. His silence and poise were majestic. And his ability to teach that the self – my ‘self’ – was not identical to my body was direct and powerful. I had never seen anything like that before. Of course I’d studied the teachings, but it’s different when you get it live than when you get it from a book. It has the power to break through your own mental states. And that’s why all this kafuffle is of no interest to me. I mean, he gave me such a profound gift that everything else is dwarfed.”

By “kafuffle” he meant the controversies around Sasaki’s treatment of women, which hadn’t improved after his move to the US.

Complaints surfaced early and were dismissed on the grounds that Sasaki was an enlightened Zen Master and anything he did with his students was actually teaching. One of the chroniclers of Sasaki’s exploits reported that when

– a young woman who was Sasaki’s assistant (inji) at the time complained about Sasaki’s constant sexual advances, one monk replied that “sexualizing is teaching for particular women.” The monk’s theory, widespread in Sasaki’s circle, was that such physicality could check a “woman’s overly strong ego.” Sasaki claimed his sexual advances were in fact teaching non-attachment and emptiness, core Zen values.  [https://buddhism-controversy-blog.com/2017/07/16/ready-to-mine-zens-legitimating-mythology-and-cultish-behavior/#_ftnref16]

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When male students did try to intervene on behalf of the women, Sasaki threatened to stop teaching if they questioned his methods. He also noted that having sex with young women helped him remain youthful.

Sasaki’s tendencies – although they were successfully concealed from the general public for a long while – became well known within Zen circles, and women who chose to study with him were often aware of the stories. Myokyo told me that she had been aware of the situation before she began her practice, and it hadn’t discouraged her from seeking to study with him. Even women who later complained about his behaviour often continued to admire him as a teacher.  One of the women who wrote to the Witnessing Council established in response to the “Sasaki Affair” stated that she

– stayed with Roshi because my experience largely was that he was a great and gifted Zen and koan teacher, and I believe I received great benefit from the other sanzen meetings – those unburdened by his sexual interests. I had met with other Roshis and teachers, but I felt he was absolutely the deepest and best teacher.

As the number of incidents grew, even some of Sasaki’s most ardent supporters came to have doubts. In 1992, one of his senior students – Gentei Sandy Steward – disaffiliated his North Carolina Zen Center from Rinzai-ji specifically because “of my objection to the sexual behaviour and sexual teaching techniques of the Head Abbot” and “my disapproval of the lack of action by the Head Abbot, board of directors or ordained persons of Rinzai-ji to help those who have suffered on account of this behaviour.”

Things finally attracted attention outside the Zen community when in 2012 a former Rinzai-ji priest, Eshu Martin, published an open letter on the Sweeping Zen website which explicitly described the state of affairs in the community:

Joshu Sasaki Roshi, the founder and Abbot of Rinzai-ji is now 105 years old, and he has engaged in many forms of inappropriate sexual relationship with those who have come to him as students since his arrival here more than 50 years ago. His career of misconduct has run the gamut from frequent and repeated non-consensual groping of female students during interview, to sexually coercive after hours “tea” meetings, to affairs and sexual interference in the marriages and relationships of his students. Many individuals that have confronted Sasaki and Rinzai-ji about this behaviour have been alienated and eventually excommunicated, or have resigned in frustration when nothing changed; or worst of all, have simply fallen silent and capitulated. For decades, Joshu Roshi’s behaviour has been ignored, hushed up, downplayed, justified, and defended by the monks and students that remain loyal to him.

The letter spread through the internet, and its content was discussed on hard news sources like CNN and the New York Times. Seiju Mammoser spoke on behalf of the Rinzai-ji Osho Council in the New York Times article, admitting that he had been aware of the allegations against Sasaki since the 1980s and that there had “been efforts in the past to address this with him. Basically, they haven’t been able to go anywhere.” Seiju added:

What’s important and is overlooked is that, besides this aspect, Roshi was a commanding and inspiring figure using Buddhist practice to help thousands find more peace, clarity and happiness in their own lives. It seems to be the kind of thing that, you get the person as a whole, good and bad, just like you marry somebody and you get their strengths and wonderful qualities as well as their weaknesses.

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In November 2012, Rinzai-ji cooperated with an Independent Witnessing Council made up of Zen leaders not associated with Sasaki or his centers. The council collected information from 25 individuals, half of whom experienced actual or attempted sexual contact with Sasaki. The findings were substantial and damning.

This was all a matter of public record when I met Seiju in 2013, regardless of which he remained loyal.

“A  lot of people, in taking in all this stuff, have resolved it in their various ways,” Seiju told me. “What I found most difficult is that the propensity to get to a mind of judgment impedes understanding. Once I make a decision—‘That’s right; that’s wrong; this or that’—then I line up behind my judgment and act. I haven’t found a mind of judgment to be particularly helpful for a mind of practice. But the emotional urge to get to judgment, because there’s a lot of unpleasant stuff that has been talked about—and I can understand that—that would make people unsettled. But I’ve been on the inside for so long, I appreciate a great value that’s comes from studying with Sasaki Roshi. He’s a full-bore person. He completely does what he does. And in the human scope of things, everything becomes a thing. Things are entities. So Sasaki Roshi is a person. All right? You’re a person. That’s a dog. You know? This is a person. That kind of thinking. Very common. Very understandable. Very human. You know? That’s not what Buddhism teaches us. Everything is activity. Sometimes I manifest skilful activities; sometimes I manifest foolish activity. And sometimes I manifest selfish activity. I can be a loving parent, and I can be a terrible co-worker. And I can be both of those and all of those in the same day. And anything else. And in my experience around Sasaki Roshi, he’s been a remarkable, deeply committed teacher. Highly intense and highly demanding of his students. And also he can be very intense in these other areas. He’s completely consistent with his character, in terms of complete activity. And it seems that, at those times, we weren’t dealing with Joshu Sasaki Roshi; we were dealing with Joshu Sasaki, a Japanese man. And he could manifest both of those qualities. People presume that if you’re quote ‘enlightened’ end quote—whatever that means—or ‘awake’ or anything else, you can’t possibly do this other stuff. And I mean, I don’t know the answer to that. But it’s pretty obvious to me that the one person that I’ve spent time with who seems to come closest to what a lot of people would think of as an ‘awake’ person has also done these other things. And that, to me, is just skilful activity and unskillful activity. Which, again, we all do in our lives.”

Joshu Sasaki died on July 27, 2014, at the age of 107, without having named a successor. Rinzai-ji and Bodhi Manda and other centers associated with Sasaki continue to be maintained, according to the Bodhi Manda website, “by ordained Zen teachers (oshos), monks, nuns, and numerous lay practitioners.”

Myokyo was not surprised. “The tradition is that you must exceed your teacher in understanding in order to be named a successor. And I think for a lot of us, there was no one coming anywhere near that.”

When I began this series of interviews – when the news reports about Sasaki and others were casting a pall over the tradition – centre after centre I visited were struggling with the revelations and often reflecting on difficulties in their own pasts. These are issues I continue to discuss with those with whom I speak. The matter is often expressed in terms of the contrast between, on the one hand, the vows we chant – for example, to care for all beings without number – and the Precepts and, on the other, the behaviour at times of those who guide the community. Debra Seido Martin’s reflection stayed with me long after my conversation with her on this topic:

“Time to grow up, everybody. We can leave the naïve romantic chapter of Zen and become adults together. My teacher – Kyogen Carlson – was very humble about the expectations when I confronted him about the failings of [so many teachers]. As a woman new to practice, I was especially shocked when I first heard of male teachers’ sexual abuse of their female students. As an incredibly trusting new student, that I could be taken advantage of by someone in authority I trusted seemed awful. We have had much time to learn from this first generation and can now we can be adults. We can take responsibility for our own discernment and call out transgression when we see it. I wouldn’t say that teachers who transgressed had no respect for the Precepts, I think they were blind to their own shadow sides and left unchecked by an undeveloped institution around them. Kyogen said there were no guarantees as to the outcome of this practice for anyone. He was humble and said, ‘You know what? I’ve come to find out after thirty years of teaching, Zen inclines us towards wisdom, and it inclines toward compassion. That’s it. For everybody.”

Conversations with James Ford –

James Ford was among the first twelve interviews I did in 2013 when I began this tour of teachers and centers. Our most recent conversation, ten years later, was the 231^st I’ve conducted. James has transmission in both the Soto tradition – through Jiyu Kennett Roshi – and the Harada-Yasutani lineage through John Tarrant. In addition, he is a retired Unitarian minister. All of which places him in an especially good position to reflect on the matters of transmission and authorization.

Formal authorization is a matter of importance in the Zen tradition. Teachers are not self-proclaimed – or shouldn’t be self-proclaimed – but are identified and certified by predecessors who themselves have received recognition in lines of descent which are traced back in formal documents – kechimyakus – to the Buddha himself, although James estimates that the historicity of the lineages probably don’t go back further than the 7^th or 8^th centuries CE.

The concept of transmission implies not only an unbroken orthodox teaching lineage proceeding from the Buddha to the present, but – at least in its original iteration – a unbroken succession of insight. An 11^th Century Chinese story recorded as the 6^th Case in the Mumonkan gives the legendary background:

When the World Honored One was at Spirit Mountain with the assembly, he twirled a flower in front of them. Everyone was silent. Only Mahakasyapa broke into a little smile.

The World Honored One said, “I have the treasury of the true Dharma eye, the wonderful mind of Nirvana, the true form of no form and the subtle gate of the teaching. I now entrust this to Mahakasyapa.”

Mahakasyapa didn’t receive information or knowledge in this entrustment; rather, he was recognized as sharing the same insight into the nature of reality that the Buddha had. This can be called satori or enlightenment. More cautiously it is more likely to be called “awakening” today. The moment of realization – the moment of Mahakasyapa’s smile – can be called “kensho.”

While the primacy of an “awakening” is still maintained in koan traditions, it is no longer a requisite in Soto teaching. I didn’t realize that when I began this tour. I set out naïvely and erroneously assuming most Zen centers would be similar to the Montreal Center where I practiced. It was Mitra Bishop – the 14^th interview I conducted – who explained to me that in order to ensure an adequate number of priests to serve the elaborate temple system it had established, the Soto sect “officially dispensed with the need for kensho in order to be able to teach early in the 20^th century.” So James’s authorizations appear to be to differing ends.

They took place decades apart and were, he tells me, very different experiences.

He had been a teenage high school drop-out when he met Kennett. During our first conversation, he described a workshop at the San Francisco Zen Center he attended. “Went in. Got a little talk. Then got formal instruction in how to do zazen. and then off to a formal interview, and my first formal interview was with Dainin Katagiri. ‘Sensei’ in those days. And, if I recall the conversation correctly, he says, ‘How long have you been sitting?’ And I said, ‘Five minutes?’ He said, ‘Good. Keep that mind.’” James chuckles at the memory. “And, yeah, that’s good advice.”

He didn’t stay at SFZC, however. “I wanted to ordain. They had expectations. I thought that was stupid.”

Then, as he puts it, “Jiyu Kennett blew into town.” Kennett was a British-born, Japanese-trained Soto priest who came to California in 1969 on a lecture tour. “I was her first student. Now another fellow claims he was her first student, but he arrived there on a Thursday, and I was there on a Wednesday.

“I was very young, and I really had no idea what was going on. I mean, I thought I had ideas, but they weren’t very congruent with any measure of reality. But I believed in a mystical transmission. I believed in enlightenment. I had some experiences that were proved to be authentic, but – as I think I have said consistently – if people came and reported my encounters to me as theirs, I would have been encouraging, but I would not have confirmed them in any manner.”

Unlike many in the Soto tradition, Kennett valued kensho. “A little floaty about what that precisely meant. But her official teacher was Chisan Koho, and he was one of the Soto people who had done extensive koan training. Though as I cast my memory back on those days, I don’t think she had a real grasp of koan work. But she was definitely interested in experiences. And I had experiences. But it was very cultish, and eventually the dime dropped even for me, and I left.”

Before he left, however, he received transmission from her, authorization to teach. He didn’t pursue it however and, in fact, fell away from Buddhist practice for a while. “I was casting about. I thought I was done with Zen. I liked the sitting. I continued sitting for a while, though it gradually fell away. And I looked around. So I went to the local Episcopal Church, I danced with New Age Sufis. Then I found the Unitarian Church. It was a great home. It had all the community stuff. It was light on the spiritual practice, but it had good community and a way to act in the world, a social-conscience thing that resonated deeply with my view of the world. And very soon after that, I resumed sitting.”

He doubted he would persist if he practiced on his own, so he started a sitting group. After all, he was authorized to do so. One of the members had some koan training, which intrigued James. “I badgered him even though he said he wasn’t authorized to teach. We worked with koans for a little bit. We did that for maybe a year, until he decided he didn’t want to do it anymore. It was beyond what he felt he might be useful for.”

By this time, James had returned to school and was working in a bookstore. In spite of his credentials, he still felt the need to identify a teacher for himself. “I checked out the local Soto guy on the hill, and there was no juice. And so I wrote this long letter to Robert Aitken. And the day I mailed it, this guy walks into the bookstore with a woman, and he says, ‘Do you have anything unusual in Orientalia?’ And I said, ‘Ha! We have a Lafcadio Herne ghost story with hand-colored plates.’ He said, ‘Let me see it.’ We went over, unlocked the thing. He said, ‘How much is it?’ I said, ‘It’s a hundred bucks.’ And this is thirty-five years ago. And he says, ‘I’ll take it.’ I said, ‘Oh! For yourself?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘For a gift.’ ‘Who’s the gift for?’ As you can tell, I’m a pushy personality. ‘For my teacher.’ ‘Teacher of what?’ He said, ‘Zen.’” The book buyer was John Tarrant, who was the subject of the second interview I conducted in this series. “And he’s a student of Robert Aitken and he’s just come over to finish his doctorate. He had been doing this mixed extended and residential program. And – you know – we had a couple of meetings, and he’s a year younger than me. You could just smell the whiff of scandal in his aura.”

James eventually received transmission from Tarrant as well, although only after twenty years of training.

“It was a whole different set of circumstances. With Jiyu Kennett, I had the rudiments of monastic formation in the Soto style. It was, at best, only three years with her. With John, when I began I was already young-middle-aged at that point, and, with him, it lasted over twenty years. And with him, I was interested in a specific technology, koan introspection. It took me a little while to find out what that actually meant, and I thought it really worked for me. I was enormously grateful, and he gave me a lot more time than other people got. And it was blended with other things. I had to make a living. I was studying other things. About a quarter of the way in, I got an undergraduate degree. I went on to go to seminary and had all of that stuff going on at the same time. I would say that although I have had multiple mentors and teachers, John gave me the spiritual practice that continues to be the most important thing in my life. But I always consider myself responsible for my own practice even with him. And the process of acknowledgement of that was rather different and, to my mind, more real than with Kennett Roshi. I’ve come to believe transmission itself is myth and history. It is something. It’s several things. On the path of awakening, it is an acknowledgment someone has seen into the deep matter. That is, we, as ordinary caught-up-in-the-play-of-cause-and-effect humans, in this body, in this place, also see our at-one-ment, our wild boundless nature. At the same time. I believe John recognized I understood this down to my bones. And he authorized me from that place. Transmission, of course, in pure Soto at this point is simply a bureaucratic rank and has nothing necessarily to do with awakening. There is something real in monastic formation, but any actual insight and realization pops up because I think the forms incline people to realization. Realization just comes or it doesn’t come. What the Soto monastic system does do is it makes competent priests. Of course even for John, what I believe he could authorize was his sense that I had some critical insights, that I had seen into who I am, and that I had some facility with our tools, koans, et cetera.”

James continued his training as a Unitarian Minister while working with Tarrant. His first posting was to Milwaukee, “And when we moved to Milwaukee, John said it was okay to start a group. To give talks. Somewhere along the line, then, he authorized me to teach. It’s a system; kind of spins out of Robert Aitken. First there’s this kind of short-tether teaching permission where I could do koan work and such but I couldn’t give transmission. In 1990 or 1991 he presented me with a kotsu as a symbol of a Zen teacher and said to use the title ‘sensei.’ And in 2005, he gave me Inka Shomei, full authorization as a koan teacher within our lineage.”

When I first met James in 2013, he had already identified a number of successors who, through him, inherited transmission in both the Soto and Harada-Yasutani lineages. Ten years later, he had thirteen heirs, although one had given back his robes and resigned from teaching.

“Because of this blending of transmission lines,” he explains, “and reflecting the trend in North America and the West to give a two-tier transmission, I’ve come to offer three steps in Dharma transmission: denkai, denbo, and inka.  ‘Denkai’ means I think there’s something there. And, sure, try on spiritual direction, but we’re continuing, and you don’t have the authorization to identify someone else as a teacher.”

I interrupt him. “Is it just a matter of them having the potential to do spiritual direction or that they’ve attained some degree of insight?”

“It says that I believe they’ve had some insights. They’ve had kensho experiences. They’re moving in the direction that means I think they’re probably spiritual directors in the making.”

“And denbo?”

“‘Denbo,’ the way I do it, is, ‘You’re a teacher. You’re independent of me.’ I don’t make any harder claims on this, but I recommend you meet with people to deepen your practice. ‘Inka’ is they’ve been doing it for some years – and, for me, that ‘some years’ keeps getting longer – and in my best estimation, you’re a teacher. Good luck.”

When I ask about numbers, he tells me, “I’ve given denkai to five people, denbo to four, and inka to four people. Most but not all of my Dharma successors have also chosen to ordain as Zen priests within the Japanese Soto transmission I received from Jiyu Kennett.” 

“Would you,” I ask, “give these ranks to someone you knew, right off the bat, was never going to be a teacher?”

“Um . . .” he muses. “There might be a reason to do that.”

“But you haven’t done that.”

“Everybody I’ve given denkai to, I’ve given denkai because I believe they’re in the chute, and their karma is to teach.”

“Okay. So authorization to teach. What does a Zen teacher teach?”

“I think the primary function of the Zen path and, therefore, the task of the Zen teacher is the project of awakening. And awakening, I believe, is a relatively narrowly defined thing. It is our direct, visceral insight into our wild openness, its manifestation within a wild interdependence, and its expression in each little temporary thing that arises including you and me.”

“Which doesn’t answer the question because you can’t teach awakening.”

“Well, you can’t. No. So the better teachers understand that. I do notice that people say they can or such. Zen teachers can teach specific disciplines that are associated with awakening. Zazen, shikan taza, koan introspection. I’m aware other people put a lot of emphasis on breath practices and similar concentration disciplines that, putatively, are going to put us in the way of our fundamental encounters.”

“There are, of course, various ways in which one can be a ‘teacher,’” I suggest. “One can teach a technique, so – as you said – teaching how to sit zazen or do some kind of breath practice. That’s teaching a technique, I guess like a guitar teacher teaching someone how to form a G chord. Or one can teach theory. Tibetans are big on that for example. Is it the role of the Zen teacher to teach theory, the philosophy – if you will – of Buddhism? Explain what a klesha is?”

“It is an interesting question. People who are authorized to teach often don’t seem to know a lot. And sometimes that’s okay because they have big hearts, and they have some taste of the intimate and maybe they can guide people with that and maybe no. But I do believe the Buddhadharma does require some – some – technical knowledge.”

He also tells me he prefers the term “spiritual director” to teacher, which perhaps more accurately conveys what someone with transmission is engaged in.

“I think the word ‘teacher’ pops up in our language because it’s a straight translation of ‘sensei.’ Or an acceptable translation of ‘sensei.’”

“And what qualifications do someone who is authorized as a spiritual director in Zen require?”

“I think the real problem in the institution of Zen at this point is that the purpose of the practice is that’s it’s associated with our awakening. And our awakening is itself incomplete. I’ve come to have this little slogan: ‘There’s waking up, and there’s growing up.’ And these two things need each other, but they’re not the same project. And a boatload of Zen in the west is unconcerned with the whole part of growing up. And I think we’ve seen that.”

“A large portion of the Zen community fails to take maturing as seriously as they should. Is that what you just said?”

“That is my view.”

“And the term ‘transmission’? What does it mean? What is being “transmitted”?

“So that’s kind of a delightful question. In China, transmission was this thing. It had nothing to do with ordination. It was conferred upon monks, nuns, and householders. Monks and nuns tended to own the franchise, but there are dramatic historical examples that this ‘thing’ happens. The rhetoric is grand. It speaks to the mind-to-mind transmission, the sense that there is something to apprehend, and people do it. So it becomes somebody claiming that somebody else has achieved that level of insight – that kind of insight – and it implies the ability to share that, to guide others in that direction as well. As you know, in Japan, particularly in the Soto school, there’s conflation of ordination and transmission which becomes a very low level on the ordination path. I’ve come to believe that transmission is a signifier that somebody within a lineage has confidence that somebody else has some depth of insight and believes that individual can share that with others. Clearly that’s flawed and people get transmission for all sorts of different reasons. But that remains the hope as I see it.”

“Calling it ‘mind-to-mind’ implies a sense of continuity, does it not?” I ask. “Which is what lineage chants claim. The Buddha passed it on to Mahakasyapa who passed it onto Ananda who conferred it to someone else who passed it on to Robert Aitken, who passed it on to John Tarrant, who passed it on to James Ford.”

“It does. And it’s a wonderful symbol, and I believe it points to some true things. And anybody who pays attention to the history of it knows that it’s a blending of history and mythology. It used to be more important than it is at the moment, I think. In my first twenty years on the Zen way, transmission was important if for no other reason it sorted out frauds and poseurs and people who just wanted some kind of authority over other people. Now that there are so many people with transmission and the quality and the expectations of what you need to receive it that I think it has become so diffuse we’re back to square one. I think it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition for somebody who’s aspiring to find the aspirations of the Zen way for themselves. One thing that the curricular koan system offers is at least one quasi-objective standard.”

The koan myth is that there is a continuous line of transmission going back to Buddhism’s roots in India 2500 years ago. The reality is that “transmission,” as currently understood, has a much shorter history.

“I’m not sure there was a transmission as we understand the word in India 2500 years ago,” James muses. “I think transmission, as we understand it, is a Chinese phenomenon.”

“So after Buddhism’s contact with Daoism.”

“Yeah. I know currently the tendency is to minimize the Daoist influence – Zen is definitely a Buddhist school – but there are Chinese influences there, and the influences are Daoist and Confucian. I think lineage is a Confucianist thing.”

“Is what is being transmitted now in North America the same as what was being transmitted in 19^th century Japan?” I ask.

“I’m pretty sure that what Daiun Harada[1] transmitted, I received.”

“Cultural differences not withstanding? Or the fact that Daiun Harada was a Japanese imperialist?”

“Which opens that whole other question . . . Awakening is a very narrow thing, and it is not sufficient. That’s something that I was oblivious to as I threw myself into the project in the late 1960s, early ’70s. And I don’t know when the dime dropped, but today I would hope somebody would have a more holistic view. I’m interested more and more in what householder practice looks like. We live in a bourgeois democracy . . . well, an oligarchic democracy, but it’s more than pretentions currently, and I think citizens have an obligation to be involved. Earlier iterations of Zen occurred in very authoritarian cultures, and citizen participation was not welcome nor in fact invited. And you adapt to the culture that you’re in, but I believe that the insights that I have been gifted with and my obligations to family, community, and larger networks of humanity and the world have consequence. They’re not the same thing, but they intertwine.”

“And, of course,” I point out, “there have been numerous examples of people who had full inka transmission and yet still had troubled lives. So to what extent is the bequeathing of transmission not only a recognition of the experiential attainment of some level of insight as well as a recognition of one’s ability to elicit that insight in others, but also, perhaps, a call to be a kind of – I’m not sure of the term – role model? Something like the Protestant ministers you told me had been so influential on you during your childhood.”

“Well, you know, I think it’s a work-in-progress. As I said, I believe there are two separate but intertwining things I call the ‘process of waking up’ and the ‘process of growing up.’ And I kind of think they’re separated naturally because ‘waking up’ has been dominated by monastics who, in my experience, frequently have arrested growing up issues. So it’s all about this fundamental encounter with emptiness and our absolute identity with it, and what that looks like. Nothing about how to relate to other people. And it’s only in modernity and it’s only in the West that we’ve come to realize that, ‘Well, there’s this bigger world’ and it includes how to relate to each other in the ordinary course of things.”

“You’re saying these issues are a Western rather than an Asian concern?”

“At the moment it is mainly a Western thing. It has some Asian beginnings. There were two or three individuals in the early 20^th century – late 19^th century or beginning of the 20^th century – two or three teachers in the Soto and Rinzai lines in the Japanese tradition who despaired of the monastic communities as simply funnels into temples and not about awakening. And once they turned towards working with householders, then instantly you have to deal with the fact that there is more to this than just the project of insight. There’s marriage; there’s work; there’s all this other stuff. So there’s a nascent beginning in Japan, but – you know – it’s here in North America and Europe where this has become the dominant form of Zen practice.”

Throughout my conversations with James it becomes increasingly clear that transmission is always transmission in a particular line of descent. And there is not necessarily recognition across lineages. As James told me on a different occasion, “There’s nobody who’s a teacher in the American Zen Teachers Association who would be qualified to be a teacher in every other group.”

Daiun Harada and Hakuun Yasutani were examples of people in the Soto school who despaired of monasteries and turned to householders. And one line of descent from them – which James calls the Mothership but in which he is not authorized – became the Sanbo Zen School. The analogy, it strikes me, is less with an academic degree – which, wherever it is obtained, authorizes one to teach in other academic institutions – than it is with Christian sectarian ordination wherein having authorization as a Lutheran pastor – or a Unitarian minister – still does not authorize one to administer Catholic sacraments

Rinsen Weik in Toledo is one of James’s heirs. “My view on this,” he tells me, “is that I have an experience, and my teacher had the confidence in me – all the way up to inka – saying your experience is worth sharing and trustable. And so I see my job not to say what’s true and what’s right but to share publicly my practice and how I view things. And there are other ways to practice, and I bow to them. Like lay teachers. I’m absolutely convinced that it can be, and I would have no idea of how to do that because I’ve been teaching as a priest. So I hold veneration for all paths that are worthy. I’m sure my approach has shadow sides and trouble spots like they all do, but if I am going to be authentic and honest and actually teach what I have, then my experience is the only guide I have.”

I ask him, in that case, what is it that distinguishes Zen from other Buddhist traditions? His answer is much what I would expect from one of James’s heirs: “The disciplines and rigors of sesshin, and the reality of kensho and awakening and satori as encountered and matured through the koan system. I mean, that is a completely unique thing. That’s not happening – you know – in the Tibetan and the Vipassana and stuff.”

“You also just blew off most of the Soto school,” I suggest.

“Kinda,” he laughs. “But not really, no. The forms we use are Soto. I like Dogen, and I hold the Soto line in the lineage of Jiyu Kennett Roshi. But, again, for me, I gotta teach according to my experience. For my entire training experience, I practiced with teachers who hold the Harada-Yasutani koan system either from Maezumi Roshi’s successors or my transmitting teacher, James Ford Roshi, and some of his successors.  So I think that if someone has Soto monastic training, thirty years living in the same space, breathing the same air, eating the same food as the roshi – yeah – I think that shikan taza coupled with a rigorous monastic life can produce a beautiful result, and I’ll never know what that is because that’s not been my trajectory. What I know is a full contact worldly life with a marriage, a child, a career and other interests and a mortgage mixed with kensho and sesshin and koans to refine and work with my life within a Bodhisattva’s Vow base. So that’s how I teach. That’s what I see, and that’s what I know.”

There are, in other words, real differences between lineages. And transmission may not mean the same thing to them. And, yes, they may not all be heading in precisely the same direction, but they are all ways of manifesting a common heritage, and – as James puts it – “People have got to accept each other’s lineage. We’ve got to stop pretending there’s only one true way. We’ve just got to bow to each other a little bit more.”

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[1] 1871-1961