Monterey Bay Zen Center, California –

Patricia Wolff is a lay member of the teaching council at the Monterey Bay Zen Center. The other three members are ordained. She is also a chiropractor, a homeopathic physician, and a psychotherapist.

“I feel like I’m the eccentric aunt in the sangha. As a teacher, it is important to me to share how my Zen practice is not just on the cushion but is how I live my life, how I use this practice to bear the unbearable or to deal with difficult emotions. I’m kind of the same in my Dharma talks as I am with my patients, as I am with my children, as I am with my friends.”

She tells me she grew up in a family which was culturally Jewish. “We were the Jews that came out of the woodwork for the High Holidays.”

“Did it mean anything to you as a child?” I ask.

“What it meant for me as a child was I couldn’t understand the liturgy. I couldn’t understand why if God was all-knowing we had to keep telling him how great he was. It made no sense to me. I just didn’t get it. I was talking to my brother about it, and he said, ‘It’s like, “Hey, God! You’re lookin’ good; you been workin’ out?”’ So, yeah, Judaism was really cultural. It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized not everyone thought the Jews were the Chosen People; that only Jews thought that Jews were the Chosen People.”

“You hadn’t encountered any form of negativity growing up?”

“Well, yeah, but I always thought it was because everyone was jealous because we were the Chosen People.” We both laugh. “Maybe a little bit,” she continues more seriously, “but not much.”

She first encountered Buddhism in her senior year at Cornell College. “I needed an art class to graduate, and the only thing that fit into my schedule was Asian Art History. And I read Alan Watts, and we studied the Southern Sung landscapes which were these giant scrolls of mountains and gorges with the human beings as these insignificant little ants. And reading Alan Watts changed me.”

“In what way?”

“The whole concept that humans are just one part of the fabric of the universe, and God not being something out there that we worshipped but this collective . . . not deity, but just that God was in each one of us. It wasn’t something ‘out there’; it was part of us. In addition to not understanding the Jewish liturgy, another of the things that boggled my imagination was the notion of infinity. I would try to grasp infinity, and it would just bring me to tears because I couldn’t get it. I couldn’t understand it. And I think there was something about Alan Watts that helped me shift my relationship with the great unknown. As a child I thought that God and Mother Nature were married. That was kind of my creation myth. God and Mother Nature were married.”

It would be a while before she actually began a meditation practice.

She earned a degree in psychotherapy which helped her realize there was still some personal work she needed to do. A woman she worked with as a client told her about TM and a Tibetan practice she was engaged in. That planted some seeds. Then she went on what she calls an odyssey. “I went through Mexico down to Guatemala and Belize. I was on a sailboat for a month with people that I met on the coast of Belize. Got hepatitis and came back to California, because I had an old boyfriend that was there who had moved back to California when we broke up. And I ended up staying in California to become a chiropractor because I wanted to do mind/body medicine. And it wasn’t until I was in practice four years later that I had a patient who said, ‘You have to meet my gynecologist. You’d love each other.’ And she was from Zen Center of Los Angeles. And she had a sitting group for women. I never had anything to do with Zen Center of Los Angeles, but that was my first sitting practice.”

The woman, Renee Potik, was a lay teacher. “She was loving and accepting. And I became aware of my internal self-judgment. She kind of showed me a different way of being with my humanness. And then she moved away.”

Patricia and her partner had a son, and when the child was a year old, they realized they wanted to leave LA. That led to another odyssey which brought them, eventually, to Carmel Valley. And there Patricia met a friend who frequented the San Francisco Zen Center’s wilderness retreat at Tassajara.

“She talked about Tassajara all the time. So once we settled there, I went to Tassajara for the first time. At the dining room, sat next to Katherine Thanas, who I didn’t know, and I said, ‘Oh, I just moved to the area. I’m looking for a sitting group.’ And she said, ‘Well, I just started a sitting group.’ So that’s how I ended up with Soto Zen. I don’t think I would have chosen Soto Zen if I hadn’t sat next to Katherine Thanas at Tassajara. I loved her. I always had an ambivalent relationship with the form, the patriarchy, the chanting in foreign language.”

“So what did you like about it?”

“The notion of facing myself and my life squarely. Really the Four Noble Truths. Also facing my restlessness as a meditator. How judgmental I was as a meditator trying to do it ‘right’.”

She describes her time sitting on the cushion as “torture,” so I’m still unclear what the appeal was.

She considers her reply before answering, speaking slowly and with care. “Because I felt that in the suffering I encountered tremendous self-knowledge and self-compassion. A few years into my practice, I discovered non-violent communication and studied that with my dear, dear friend Jean Morrison from Santa Cruz. Non-violent communication. And those two practices . . . I just felt like it was important in my life. It was the only meditation group that I knew of. Tuesday nights I got to leave my children and go to the Zen Center. No matter what happened, I’m off-duty, even if I didn’t go. Even if I just went into my bedroom, and they’d come and I’d go, ‘Uhn-uhn. This is my Tuesday night. Go find Dad.’ I loved the community; I loved my sangha brothers and sisters. I loved Katherine with all her human rough edges. She was very sincere, earnest, and honest. When she messed up, she was the first to say, ‘I don’t know how to deal with this.’ I found a sense of belonging I think; I found a community. I was new to the area; didn’t know too many people. And there was something that just rang so true.” She adds, however, “I think had I found maybe Insight/Vipassana, that might have been a better fit for me as a therapist and as a healthcare practitioner.”

But she stayed with the practice and eventually even undertook the Shugaku Priest Ordination Training Program – SPOT – offered by Steve Stücky at Tassajara. “I did the three-year teaching-training program which was wonderful. A deep dive both into the emotional world and the Buddhist world. But I think there were only two of us who didn’t become priest ordained. Everyone else did.”

“If only two of you didn’t ordain after that program, it was a choice you made.”

“Oh, I chose. It was a choice.”

“Why?”

“I don’t see Zen as religion. For me it really is a philosophy, a way of life, an invitation to see the world and ourselves the way we are with unconditional friendliness. Finding practices and cultivating skills of compassion, curiosity, and courage. I think in our very lay, house-holder community, priesthood sometimes separates in a hierarchical way.”

She studied other traditions, including the Yoga Sutras and Patanjali. “Much of what I study is not just Zen, and most of what I teach is informed by other traditions which resonate with Zen. It’s an important part of my life because I’m cultivating peace both internally and with all my relations. You know, Steve Stücky had his internal family systems and that is what he taught us a lot in our SPOT training, blending psychotherapy and Buddhist principles. The language that he used and the context of the Buddhist practices has become very important to me, peace-making with all our internal parts and each other.  Sp I use non-violent communication, meditation practices, heart-opening practices. And I do it all with the Monterey Bay Zen Center and the people I love.”

I ask if the Monterey center is affiliated with SFZC.

“Not officially. But I’m near Tassajara. So we’re back and forth.”

After Katherine Thanas, who founded the center, died without leaving a successor, a teaching council was formed which included Patricia. The fact that Patricia chose not to ordain was challenging to some, including Katherine, but – Patricia tells me – Katherine became less rigid about things at the end of her life.

“So, I have a green rakusu,” she tells. We both chuckle.

“You know, all these different centers just make this stuff up,” I suggest.

“When my son and daughter came to my lay transmission ceremony, we were in the little gathering area after the ceremony, and he said, ‘Mom, what does that mean? Is it like karate?’ And I said, ‘Well, it kinda is.’ I said, ‘Yeah. It is kind of. Different colours.’ And Katherine overheard me, and she got furious. ‘There is no hierarchy in Zen!’ At first I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t. And I’m thinking, ‘Of course there’s hierarchy!’”

She admits to feeling triggered by “the whole priest thing because the Suzuki Roshi lineage is very priest oriented, and I get upset that I am not allowed to do certain things, that I can’t transmit my own students because I don’t have the appropriate type of transmission. I can’t carry out certain roles because I don’t have the rank. I have the authority but not the rank.”

“But you’ve stayed with the community.”

And that, she says, raises an important question. “Why have I stayed with Monterey Bay Zen Center for thirty-three years?” She pauses a moment. “I don’t know. I love the sangha. Monterey is not a big area. There’s not a lot of other sanghas that meet.  But I don’t go every week anymore. I do lead a guided meditation on Zoom Mondays, Wednesday, Thursdays at 12:00. That’s free. That’s an offering to the community that I started in the beginning of COVID. So I’ve been teaching unofficially for years. Because parents of my son’s friends knew that I was a meditator, and they wanted to learn. So I would gather moms together just to teach them how to meditate. I brought it to the schools. The elementary schools and the middle schools and the high schools.”

“And if one of those parents of those school kids asked you, ‘What is meditation? What does it do?’”

Again she reflects a moment before answering. “Meditation offers us the opportunity to know ourselves deeply, to not believe everything we think, to witness the thoughts and emotions as they come and go, to be mindful, to access the great spaces of infinite potential, awareness of awareness itself. When I was leading meditation in the middle schools, the group that came to me for some bizarre reason was a group of six boys. It was lunchtime; they would tumble into the space, and they’d be pushing each other and farting and this and that. I said, ‘I don’t care if you push. I don’t care if you fart. I just want you to know you’re pushing when you’re pushing; I want you to know you’re farting when you’re farting.’ They would meditate for three minutes, maybe five minutes.”

“What instruction did you give them? What did you have them do in those three or so minutes?”

“Well, they just breathe, allowing thoughts to come and go without going on the rollercoaster of preferences and attachments. I usually have people start their practice counting their breaths, noticing sensations and sound. Opening to it all. Feel the air moving in; feel the air moving out. Feel the belly rising, the belly falling. Watch the thoughts as they arrive.”

“And what do people get out of doing that?”

“For me it really comes back down to deeply knowing myself and waking out of our trance. You know the quote, ‘In the beginning mountains are mountains, and rivers are rivers. And then mountains aren’t mountains, and rivers aren’t rivers.’ And then at the end of our cycle, mountains are mountains, rivers rivers, but in a different, more inclusive way. So it’s a process of deeply knowing ourselves, of opening to the entirety of our experience, and finding a place to settle besides our thoughts. I think that’s why guided meditation became really important to me because I didn’t know where else to go besides my thoughts.”

“And what is it that the members of the Monterey Bay Zen Center expect from you?”

“Honesty. Inspiration, perhaps, in how to work with difficult parts of their lives in skillful ways. And I think the invitation for unconditional friendliness with themselves.”

“What is it that brought them there in the first place? What did they come to the Center looking for?”

“Many come for a sense of community. A lot of people say that they don’t meditate on their own by themselves, but, coming to a group, they meditate. And I think the sangha is really important, being in community with people sharing the Bodhisattva vow. Some were looking for relief from their suffering, trying to find a way to bear the unbearable, to be with really difficult situations. Some people – especially the Catholics in our group – love the ritual and the ceremony and the incense and chanting in a foreign language, and the robes. You know, that really feels and smells like home. Some are looking for comfort. I think we’re all looking for comfort.”

“One thing you didn’t list, you didn’t say they came looking for awakening or enlightenment. That doesn’t seem to be the driving force it once was, the desire to find a practice that has the potential of altering the way one sees, understands, and relates to life.”

“I think that’s what I mean by unconditional friendliness, being with what arises, facing the entirety of our experience with wisdom and an open heart, embracing all parts of ourselves.”

“You said ‘unconditional friendliness to oneself’ earlier.”

“To yourself. I think that ripples out to the world, seeing no one as ‘other.’ That naturally flows. The more we can bring that, share that light of tender awareness on ourselves, the more we see our interbeing or – you know – our intrabeing, the sense that there is no other. And I do think that people come for enlightenment. It wasn’t what my search was. I think for me it was more because it made sense and offered relief from suffering. It was finally something that made sense of the world to me.”

“And how does Zen help relieve suffering?”

“I think wanting the world to be any different than it is is the definition of suffering, and Zen – or Buddhism – offers the invitation to really be with the world as it is beyond the world of right and wrong, good and bad, to recognize the comparative mind, to not be attached to our preferences , and to just see our constant internal chatter as an annoying radio station in another room. So for me, enlightenment is moments, moments of liberation. I’ve never known anyone that’s landed and stayed there. I don’t really know anybody that I would consider enlightened. I know people who are really wise and have deep understanding and have many moments of that peace. But everyone I know is pretty human as well.”

“So you’ve described an array of services you offer; you’ve talked about guided meditations, chiropracy, psychotherapy, non-violent communication. Where does Zen fit?”

There is another of her careful reflective pauses as she considers her response. “It’s not so much Zen as it’s Buddhism. The practice of meditation, of deeply knowing ourselves, of awakening out of our trance. I remember once talking to Bernie Glassman  at my first Lay Zen Teacher’s Association meeting and his last, and I said, ‘I don’t know whether I needed to have so many years of sitting on the cushion and suffering on the cushion.’ You know? Sesshins were horribly painful, and yet you’d go back again. And he said, ‘Well, I do my meditation now in the hot tub.’ And I still don’t know the answer to that question, whether I really needed – for my own self and personality – to face the suffering on the cushion and just to be with it. I don’t know. As a healer, I go to Tassajara every summer, and I treat the residents and the monks and the students, and – you know – I see a lot of injuries from sitting.”

“This is as a chiropractor?”

“As a chiropractor. As a doctor. I mean, I go as a psychotherapist, and I go with all my toolkit. But especially the young men – you know – there’s a lot of testosterone.” Speaking in a strained voice, “‘I’m such a good sitter I’m not moving even if my leg falls off! You can’t make me move!’ I was never that type of sitter. I was always afraid of hurting myself. And at one point Katherine Thanas, because there was some ambivalence about the forms . . . I mean, coming to our Zen Center is kind of off-putting because some people are such stickers for the forms. ‘No! You walk in with the left foot and then you bow!’ Really, I feel so bad for the new people. But Katherine Thanas did away with the forms for a while. We didn’t have any forms. We didn’t chant. And then we brought them back.”

“Why?”

“I think many people missed the forms. I was surprised that I missed some of the forms. It’s an opportunity for mindfulness. Whatever you’re doing with forms, it brings you into your body.”

“How important is all the Japanese stuff?”

“Very unimportant to me.”

“Then why is it still around, especially with Soto people? Why all these elaborate robes and shaved heads, rules about which foot you use to enter the zendo?

“I don’t know. I think the hierarchy separates, but for many, being a priest is their path of service. I feel you don’t have to be a priest to live a life of service. I think what keeps me with Zen Center is that there’s a sangha of people who love me and appreciate what I teach. Because I think many of the other offerings are more intellectual. Mine is more personal. I’m fairly self-disclosing within reason, and I think that’s helpful for people. And I think it’s important to have my voice and perspective.”

“They need that eccentric aunt.”

“I think so.”

Adapted from The Third Step East –

D. T. Suzuki was a scholar. Nyogen Senzaki was an effective teacher, but he had not been formally authorized as one. The first fully authorized, or transmitted, Zen Master to teach in North America was Sokei-an Sasaki.

He was the son of a Shinto priest who died when the boy was 15 years old. There was some expectation that he would follow his father’s career, but his natural inclination was to art, and his mother’s family arranged for him to be apprenticed to a sculptor at the Imperial Academy in Tokyo where he learned traditional Japanese woodwork and specialized in carving dragons.

As he matured, he found himself reflecting on issues which had troubled him since childhood. He later wrote: “At seventeen or eighteen, we open a doubtful eye: Why do we live? Where do we come from? Were we here before? Where do we go? If we have no such period of seeking, I should say that we are sleeping. This questioning comes to every young man’s eye.”

These concerns remained with him as he pursued his art studies. He learned samadhi – meditative absorption – not in a monastery but from an art teacher who instructed his students when they sought to paint the sea “not to sketch the waves on the seashore or to copy the waves in the ancient masterpieces. ‘Without brush or palette,’ he said, ‘go alone to the seashore and sit down on the sands. Then practice this: forget yourself until even your own existence is forgotten and you are entirely absorbed in the motion of the waves.’”

There were, Sasaki would discover, many kinds of samadhi, and Zen itself – as he put it – was an art form. “I found this knack of going back to the bosom of nature because I was an artist and worshipped Nature. From this feeling, I entered Zen very quickly.”

One day he set up his easel to paint but found himself stymied, unable to draw a line. He understood that it was time to put away his canvas and palette and seek a Zen teacher. The master he approached was one of Soyen Shaku’s disciples, Sokatsu Shaku.

Soyen Shaku had assigned Sokatsu responsibility for overseeing Ryomokyokai – the Institute for the Abandonment of Concepts – which Imakita Kosen had established in order to foster the practice of Zen among lay persons. An old farm house outside of Tokyo, surrounded by rice fields, had been converted into a temple. There were two buildings in the temple enclosure. One was the teacher’s residence, the other served as the zendo. Here Soyen Shaku and Sokatsu carried on Imakita’s hope of revitalizing the Zen tradition by working with well-educated and culturally talented lay practitioners.

Sasaki was nineteen years old when he presented himself at the temple and asked to be accepted as a student. Sokatsu asked him, “What career do you follow?”

“I’m a sculptor,” Sasaki replied.

“And for how long have you practiced this craft?”

“Six years.”

“Very well. Carve me a Buddha.”

Sasaki returned to his studio and began work on a carving which, when completed, he brought back to Ryomokyokai and presented to Sokatsu. The Zen master took the statue and demanded, “What is this?” Then he tossed it into a nearby pond.

In that way, Sasaki’s Zen training began.

He was given the Buddhist name Shigetsu (Finger Pointing to the Moon) but remained a layman. He was still enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Arts and earned a modest living travelling about Japan repairing old temple carvings. After graduation, he was drafted to serve in the Russo-Japanese War and was sent to Manchuria, where he drove a dynamite wagon. The experience made him all the more aware of the precariousness of human life.

The war ended two months later, and, once discharged, Sasaki returned to Tokyo to continue his studies with Sokatsu.

Encouraged by Soyen Shaku, Sokatsu planned to take a small group of disciples to America in order to establish a Zen community there. He invited Sasaki to join them but insisted that he would need to be married if he chose to participate. So a marriage was arranged with another lay student at Ryomokyokai, a woman named Tomeko who was a student at Japan’s only college for women.

In September of 1906, Sokatsu and six disciples left for California where they purchased a ten-acre farm in Hayward. None of the Japanese had any agricultural experience, and the land was poor and exhausted. The enterprise failed after a single crop of strawberries was harvested. Sasaki and Tomeko left the farm to go to San Francisco where he enrolled at the California Institute of Art. While in San Francisco he met and was befriended by Nyogen Senzaki. The two would remain in contact throughout their lives though they did not always see eye to eye.

Sokatsu and the other disciples were unable to maintain the farm and eventually also moved to San Francisco where they established an American Branch of Ryomokyokai. At its height, it had about fifty members, most of whom were Japanese. Eventually, Sokatsu returned to Japan, and all of his disciples, save for Sasaki and Tomeko, went with him.

Sasaki then began to explore the United States. For a while, he was able to find work in California repairing statues for an importer of Asian sculpture. Then he hiked north to Oregon where he was able to make use of his wartime experience by dynamiting tree stumps for a farmer. He also worked as a janitor in a bar and for a time as a professional dance partner at a roller rink. In the evenings, he sat in meditation on a rock by the river with a dog to protect him from snakes.

Eventually he and Tomeko came to Seattle where he worked as a picture framer. He could not afford the studio and tools necessary for carving, so took up writing and began a series of humorous reflections on American life for Japanese periodicals.

Sasaki and his wife lived in humble circumstances. For a while, they stayed with the Salish people on an island in the Puget Sound. The Japanese couple had faced a great deal of prejudice elsewhere in America, and Tomeko felt more at ease with the Native Americans than she had anywhere else. By this time, they had two young children, and when, in 1914, Tomeko became pregnant a third time, she informed Sasaki that she wanted her children to be raised in Japan. She left him and went to live with her mother-in-law who was aging and had written to ask her daughter-in-law to come care for her.

Unencumbered by family obligations, Sasaki wandered about the United States for the next two years, arriving in New York City in 1916, at the age of 34, where he naturally gravitated to Greenwich Village.

Sasaki was fascinated with the wide variety of lifestyles he came across during his travels, ranging from the conservative values of small-town America to the sophisticated charlatanism of the Bohemian community he fell in with in the Village. There he encountered people like Aleister Crowley, the British occultist and self-proclaimed mystic. The essays Sasaki sent back to Japan about the people he met and the events he encountered were popular, and he began to acquire a literary reputation. He also wrote in English, making translations of classic Chinese Poetry.

He was welcomed into the artistic milieu of the Village and led a comfortable life, but he still had not resolved the issues which had originally drawn him to Buddhism. Then on a hot and humid day in July 1919, he came upon the putrefying carcass of a horse lying in the street. The sight struck him so strongly that he immediately made arrangements to return to Japan.

He resumed his study with Sokatsu and even tried reconciling with Tomeko but remained restless and soon returned to the US. For several years, he travelled back and forth by steamship between Japan and America, studying Zen with Sokatsu at Ryomokyokai and working as an art restorer in New York. Eventually, during one of his return trips to Japan, he realized that if he were serious about his Zen practice, he needed to commit to it until he achieved full awakening.

Sokatsu assigned Sasaki the koan which demands, “Show me your original face, your face before your parents were born.” Sasaki had been reading German philosophy and, for a while during his sanzen meetings with Sokatsu, tried to reply to the koan in the light of his understanding of those writers. Often, however, he barely began to speak before Sokatsu rang the bell dismissing him. Finally Sokatsu bellowed at him, “Before father and mother there were no words! Show me your face before their births without words!”

Sasaki struggled for years before resolving the koan. Then, one day: “I wiped out all the notions from my mind. I gave up all desire. I discarded all the words with which I thought and stayed in quietude. I felt a little queer, as if I were being carried into something, or as if I were touching some power unknown to me. I had been near it before; I had experienced it several times, but each time I had shaken my head and run away from it. This time I decided not to run, and Ztt! I entered. I lost the boundary of my physical body. I had my skin, of course, but I felt I was standing in the center of the cosmos. I spoke, but my words had lost their meaning. I saw people coming towards me, but all were the same man. All were myself! I had never known this world. I had believed that I was created, but now I must change my opinion: I was never created; I was the cosmos; no individual Mr. Sasaki existed.”

When Sasaki next met with Sokatsu in sanzen, the teacher immediately recognized that his student had had a breakthrough. “Tell me about this new experience of yours,” he demanded.

Sasaki looked at him without speaking. Sokatsu smiled.

Sasaki was 47 years old when he completed his training and received inka – authorization to teach – from Sokatsu. To mark the occasion, Sokatsu also gave him the name Sokei-an. Sokatsu encouraged him to return to the United States, telling him that interest in Zen was diminishing in Japan; the tradition needed to be carried to North America if it were to survive. He instructed his student to be diligent in familiarizing himself with the people and culture of the United States because it would now be his responsibility to ensure that Buddhism was successfully transplanted there. Because of his reservations about the Zen hierarchies in Japan, Sokatsu wanted Sokei-an to remain a lay teacher. Sokei-an, however, felt that he would have more credibility in America if he were ordained. When Sokatsu refused to carry out the ordination, Sokei-an went to another priest who was willing to perform the ceremony. Sokatsu considered this a betrayal and the two remained estranged for the remainder of their lives.

To raise the funds he needed in order to return to America, Sokei-an worked in a factory for eight months. Then, in 1928, he returned to New York City, determining to be the first Zen Master to “bury his bones in America” and thus “mark this land with the seal of the Buddha’s teaching.” He supported himself by doing art restoration while he tried to determine how best to go about promoting the Dharma. He tried, like Christian evangelicals, going door to door offering to tell people about Buddhism, but that proved unsuccessful. He gave public talks in Central Park and at a bookstore on East Twelfth Street which specialized in Asian studies.

His first students were a group of eight Japanese businessmen who, in spite of the rupture between Sokei-an and Sokatsu, were successful in petitioning Ryomokyokai headquarters in Japan to authorize a branch in New York. They were incorporated in 1931 as the Buddhist Society of New York. Sokei-an tried, for a while, to teach his students to sit in full or half lotus posture and encouraged them to practice sitting that way at home. Even the students of Asian heritage, however, found the posture challenging so, instead, they used chairs during meditation sessions.

The focus of his teaching was the one-on-one sanzen interview – he called the sanzen room a “battlefield” – but he also gave powerful talks which could be witty and sharp. It was his physical presence, however, which most inspired his students.

One of these, Mary Farkas, described the format of the meetings of the Buddhist Society in an article published by the First Zen Institute of America in 1966. The gatherings took place in Sokei-an’s apartment where there was a small altar bearing only a stone. Sessions began with a short period of meditation. Farkas suggested it was Sokei-an’s silence which drew the participants into the meditation. “It was as if, by creating a vacuum, he drew all into the One after him.” Students working on koans were then called into sanzen in an adjacent room. During sanzen there were “no psychological or philosophical discussions, no worldly advice or explanations, just the business of Zen. When I was in recent years asked if we were given ‘instruction’ in Zen my considered answer had to be ‘no.’ To those of us who received Sokei-an’s teaching, the word ‘instruction’ must be a misnomer, for his way of transmitting the Dharma was on a completely different level, to which the word ‘instruction’ could only clarify the state of ignorance of the questioner. If I were to say he ‘demonstrated’ SILENCE, even that would be true but would give no indication of how he ‘got it across’ or awakened it, or transmitted it.”

Following sanzen, Sokei-an returned to the main room and took his seat behind a small desk on which he kept notes on the texts he was translating. He would read a passage from one of these then give an extemporaneous talk. He believed it was necessary to ensure that there were adequate Buddhist texts available for those who were serious about their pursuit of Zen, so he began an extensive translation project which included rendering the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch into English. He also translated The Record of Rinzai.

The group grew slowly but steadily. After seven years, there were thirty members. Sokei-an was not in a hurry. He reminded his students that it had taken hundreds of years for Zen to become established in China and Japan. What was required, he told them, was patience and perseverance. He told them of a monk he had once seen at a temple in Japan preaching to the rocks in the garden because there was no one there to hear him. Years later, when he chanced to pass the temple again, he found the same monk now preaching to a crowd of more than two hundred people. “I brought Buddhism to America. It has no value here now, but America will slowly realize its value and say that Buddhism gives us something that we can certainly use as a base or a foundation for our mind. This effort is like holding a lotus to a rock and hoping it will take root.”

In 1938, the Buddhist Society acquired an unlikely wealthy sponsor, Ruth Fuller Everett, the wife of a prominent Chicago attorney, Edward Warren Everett. Their daughter, Eleanor, was married to Alan Watts. Ruth had only been eighteen years old when she married Everett, who was twenty years older. The marriage was not a happy one, and, in self-defense, Ruth developed a forceful personality in order to resist her husband’s tendencies to bully her. Once she gained the self-confidence to stand up to him, Everett resigned himself to allowing her to pursue her own interests.

In 1923, Ruth took her five-year-old daughter to a retreat at a country club outside New York City operated by Pierre Bernard, who called himself “Oom the Magnificent” and purported to be a master of yoga and a spiritual guide. Although Bernard was a fraud and a conman, the time Ruth spent with him fostered a genuine interest in Eastern Philosophy. When she returned to Chicago, she took up an academic study of Asian philosophy and languages at the University of Chicago.

In the 30s, she and Eleanor traveled to Japan where she introduced herself to D. T. Suzuki. He gave her some preliminary instruction in Zen but advised her that if she were serious she would need to practice with an accredited Zen master. He introduced her to Nanshinken Roshi, who, at first, was reluctant to accept her as a student. He had no other female students, and he doubted that pampered Westerners would been able to sit properly on cushions. Ruth persisted in seeking admission to the zendo, and finally Nanshinken arranged for a plush armchair which he installed in his house, telling her she could use it for meditation; however, only cushions were permitted in the zendo itself. Ruth learned to sit cross-legged and in a short time was practicing with the men in the zendo. Nanshinken came to admire her perseverance and eventually introduced her to koan meditation.

In 1938, Warren Everett was confined to a nursing home with arteriosclerosis, and Ruth moved to New York. She took an apartment in the city and arranged for her recently married daughter and son-in-law to occupy the one next to it. Learning there was an authorized Zen teacher in the city, she sought him out. She was not a passive student.

When Ruth met him, Sokei-an’s students were still meditating in chairs. From her own experience in Japan, she knew that westerners were capable of adopting formal meditation postures, and she took on the responsibility of teaching them how to sit on cushions. Soon she was tightening up other aspects of the Buddhist Society program.

Everett died in 1940, leaving Ruth more time to spend with Sokei-an. Part of their time together was work; Ruth remained a committed scholar as well as a dedicated Zen practitioner and, with Sokei-an’s help, she had undertaken to do an English translation of the eighth century Chinese Sutra of Perfect Awakening. But part of their time together was, to her daughter and son-in-law’s surprise, courtship.

In November 1941, just a few weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Ruth arranged for the Buddhist Society to move into more spacious quarters on East 65th Street. With the outbreak of war, the institute drew the suspicion of government officials. Suited FBI agents kept watch over who came and went. That July, Sokei-an—like Nyogen Senzaki—was arrested as an “enemy alien.”

He was sent to an internment camp in Maryland. The camp commander turned out to be a decent man who had some sympathy for those in his charge; Sokei-an took up his old calling and carved the commander a staff in the shape of a dragon. Conditions in the camp, however, were harsh, and Sokei-an was not in good health. He lost so much weight in the camp that he was able to tighten his belt four notches.

Ruth used her social connections to intervene on his behalf and was successful in arranging for his release in August 1943. The following year, they were married, in part to provide him some protection from still suspicious authorities.

After his release, Sokei-an told the members of the Buddhist Society that it was probably still too early for Zen to take root in America. The lotus still needed to be held to the rock a while longer. “I love this country,” he is reported to have said. “I shall die here, clearing up debris to sow seed. It is not the time for Zen yet, but I am the first of the Zen school to come to New York and bring the teaching. I will not see the end.”

His health didn’t recover, and he recognized that he did not have long to live. He assured others that he was prepared. “I have always taken Nature’s orders; I will do so now.” He tasked Ruth with the responsibility of ensuring that a formally trained Rinzai teacher be found to work with the Buddhist Society after his death. He also encouraged her to return to Japan to complete her own training.

He died on May 17, 1945, after less than half a year of marriage.

After his death, the Buddhist Society was renamed the First Zen Institute of America and committed itself to preserving Sokei-an’s teachings.

As Sokei-an had hoped, Ruth returned to Japan to continue her training. She approached Zuigan Goto, who had been a member of the group that had taken part in the feckless California farming venture with Sokatsu. Goto was teaching at Daitokuji, where Ruth was accepted as a lay student and given a small house within the temple grounds, separate from the monks who were all male and Japanese.

Sokei-an had also asked her to identify a qualified teacher to carry on his work in America, and, in 1955, after six years at Daitokuji, Ruth returned to New York with Isshu Miura.

In New York, Miura gave a series of talks on koans with Ruth acting as translator. These became the basis of a book they co-authored entitled The Zen Koan: Its History and Use in Rinzai Zen.

 In 1957, Ruth returned to Daitokuji, where Goto allowed her to add a small zendo to the side of her house. This was the first zendo in Japan specifically intended to receive Western students. The following year, she became both the first woman and the first Westerner to be ordained in the Daitokuji temple system.         

After Ruth’s return to Japan, Miura stayed with the First Zen Institute for a while, but he was not comfortable with the predominantly female board of directors. In 1963, he resigned his position, although he stayed in New York and maintained a small number of private students with whom he worked until his death sixteen years later.

One of the features distinguishing North American Zen from its Asian antecedents is the active participation of women in the sangha. Ruth Fuller Sasaki was the first of these, but she was not an easy person to work with. She was strong-willed, confident of her own opinions, and often inflexible. When she informed Zuigan Goto that she intended to add a dormitory to her small zendo, he told her he would rather she did not. She ignored his request and went ahead with the construction. In Japanese culture, it was unheard of for a student to disregard a teacher in this manner. It caused a rift between the two, and Goto disavowed her as one of his disciples.

Ruth gathered together a group of scholars in Kyoto to continue Sokei-an’s work of making Chinese and Japanese texts available in English. Several of these – including Philip Yampolsky and Burton Watson – later would become significant figures in the academic world. Working for Ruth provided these young men with an unparalleled access to rare documents, but they often felt that the specific tasks she assigned them were tedious and of questionable value. She was also quick to get rid of people with whom she disagreed or of whom, for whatever reason, she became suspicious.

Simple projects could balloon out of control under her direction. She began annotating the slim Zen Koan published with Miura, eventually adding over 150 pages of footnotes – in a smaller typeface – in addition to bibliographies, maps, genealogical charts and a “Zen Phrase Anthology.” By the time it was re-released as Zen Dust, shortly after Ruth’s death in 1967, it had swollen to a 574 page tome.

To the end, she remained a formidable personality, and often a generous one. Through her efforts, and those of the First Zen Institute, several Americans – including Walter Nowick and Gary Snyder – were able to travel to Japan in order to study Zen. In her way, she made as significant a contribution to the process of bringing Zen to North America as had her husband.

The Third Step East: 57-71; 9, 10-11, 73, 89, 100, 111, 127, 187, 188

The Story of Zen: 234-40, 251, 266, 280, 298, 424

Sangha Jewel Zen Center, Corvallis, Oregon –

Mushin Abby Terris is the founding teacher of the Sangha Jewel Zen Center in Corvallis, Oregon.

She was raised in a household in the Bronx which she describes as culturally Jewish, although her mother’s family were members of the High Church of England. “My father was Jewish, although more a political Jew than a practicing Jew. But his parents had escaped Russia, and they were communist organizers. Or his father was. So they came over when they were very young. I was born in 1947, and there was a very strong Reformed Judaism tradition and subculture where I was living. So kind of by contact with my friends – many of whom were Jewish – I came to identify with that tradition. My grandmother – my father’s mother – was always raising money for trees in Israel. Two things I remember about her: she raised money for trees, and she was a great cook.”

“So culturally but not necessarily religiously Jewish?” I suggest.

“Culturally absolutely. And I went to Temple with friends of mine but was not at all interested in the spiritual aspect of things. My father was a sculptor; my mother was a poet. They both were college professors. I spent a lot of my childhood in museums and galleries and at readings, and that was much more of my spiritual – I don’t know – temperament? There weren’t beliefs involved; it was just an underlying sense of where I belonged.”

Her introduction to Eastern spiritual practices came about after she and her husband left Manhattan for the West Coast.

“It was a beautiful spring day, living on the Upper Westside of Manhattan, and my husband and I couldn’t find a place to sit down in the park. And we said, ‘This is ridiculous. We’ve got to go somewhere where we don’t have to wait every time we step outside.’ He was at Columbia in Graduate School. So he looked at programs across Canada and down the west coast, and we took a trip. When we got to Seattle, we thought, ‘Yeah.’ So he transferred to Seattle. At Columbia, he had been studying Japanese language and literature, but when we got to the University of Washington, he switched to Intellectual History and the History of Science. So I didn’t meet Zen through that connection.”

She found work at a shelter for runaway girls, and one of her co-workers was involved in Transcendental Meditation. “So I went with her to a meeting, and I got my initiation.”

I ask her why she went.

“Well, this was the early ’70s, and everything I saw around me was unsatisfactory. I was young, and I thought, ‘How am I going to live into this life?’ And so this was one possibility. So I checked it out. And it had the promise of something unarticulated. So I did that on my own for a couple of years. But there was no information, no teaching. I didn’t have a sense of context, and I wasn’t having any particular experiences except that I was developing kind of a constancy in my schedule around meditation. But then I gave it up, and I got divorced. I moved. I made friends with someone who was on his way to a yoga class and invited me, so I said, ‘Sure. I’ll go.’ And I started doing yoga. And that very same week, the same person said, ‘If you’re interested in yoga, you might be interested to come to the Zen sit with me.’ So we went to the Zen group which was being taught by Professor Glenn Webb.”

Glenn Webb was an art professor at the University of Washington who eventually became an ordained priest in the Obaku sect of Zen. He was instrumental in introducing several people I’ve interviewed – including Genjo Marinello and Wendy Nakao – to Zen practice. The sitting group he hosted met in an art studio on campus.

“And, of course,” Mushin tells me, “my father was an artist. I walked in there, and it was like, ‘Oh, wow. I’m home. The paints . . . This is so familiar. This is so much my native surroundings.’ Sat down and started doing meditation. I mean, I had no idea what I was doing. But I immediately felt like, ‘Oh! I know this!’ And what I discovered many years after, I was at a Rohatsu retreat, and I realized that I had asthma my whole life starting when I was two. So since I was two, I had many asthma attacks, and I had to pay attention to my breath. So I had actually been practicing zazen since I was two. Which in another way, how did I come to Zen? I just came back to Zen in that way.”

Shortly after Mushin began Zen practice, Webb arranged for the Japanese teacher, Katsufumi Hirano, to come to the university in order to lead a retreat. “I didn’t know his name was Katsufumi,” she admits. “I just knew him as Hirano Osho. Which just means priest. Priest Hirano. He was very impressive in his dignity. It was a seven-day sesshin, and I couldn’t believe that I had signed up for this really difficult practice.” She chuckles at the memory. “I was in so much physical pain, but I was really determined. I was really determined from the beginning.” She pauses a moment. “One thing I haven’t said about my family – and I actually don’t really want to go into it – but it was a very, very troubled family. And I always felt – maybe because I started Zen when I was two – I always felt like, ‘How can these people be so disturbed?’ You know? The whole family system was so disturbed, and I always saw so clearly what was going on. But I was pretty desperate. I came to Zen with a feeling of desperation. I needed to sort out whether I was crazy or whether I was going to go crazy or if I was actually okay. And it was my very good fortune to come across Zen.”

“What made you fear you might be crazy?”

“Well, my father was very paranoid, and so I didn’t see things the way he saw them. And now I’ve come to – especially at this moment[1] – I’m coming to appreciate how he grew up a Jew during World War II when antisemitism in New York and in this country was huge. But that wasn’t my experience at all. And he was bi-polar – what we say now, bi-polar – and didn’t get along with people. He was very difficult.”

“And how was it that Zen helped you address that?”

“I began to trust my own perception of things as being as valid as any other perceptions.”

It takes me a moment to parse this. “It helped you feel confident that your perception of things was as valid as your father’s?”

“At least. And I’ve come to recognize . . . One of the first koans that was mine to do, the daily primary koan was about the two truths, the relative and the absolute. Being able to see the samsaric view where we’re really caught by our narrative, and that there is a way of seeing that is not caught by narrative, that understands the nature of mind and narrative. That was personal koan, ‘Am I crazy?’ You know, the Genjokoan. Pre-Dogen,” she says with a laugh. “The primary koan of daily life. That’s the form it originally took, and it was very, very pressing for me to investigate. That was really the desperation that underlay my commitment to Zen practice.

“So I did that retreat with Hirano Osho, and I had one very brief moment that was crystal clear, pure, and spacious. It was like one breath. It was like ten steps during walking meditation. That was it. That was, ‘Okay. This is true. This is true.’ So then Hirano and Glenn Webb and myself and about four other people, that following week, we had an appointment at McNeil Island Penitentiary to sit with some of the prisoners. We took the launch, which actually was an incredibly beautiful old boat on a private dock, and there was a macrame pad stretched about twenty feet along to pad it so that when the boat hit against the pier it wouldn’t be scratched, and that was such an incredible work of art. And I never understood macrame before I saw that. That’s how it originated! It was a sailor’s craft. It was wonderful. Anyway, we went over there. And we were sitting in a room. There may have been twenty prisoners in that room with us. And it went for eight hours or something. It was a long day. And we were right next door to the gym, and there was a basketball game going on. And I was in so much pain that I thought the only thing that I could do is get absorbed in listening to the basketball game. And I did, and I had quite a breakthrough in that moment. So when I came back from that, at the end of the day, I was in downtown Seattle waiting for the bus to go home, and I felt like I could read everybody’s mind. I could see everybody’s state of mind. I was looking around, like, ‘Whoa! You can just see who’s thinking what, how disturbed or how happy they are.’ There was a transparency that lasted a number of days. So that was quite powerful. And also a trap, because then I tried to get back to that same state,” she adds, laughing. “So any time I had experiences like that . . . You meditate for fifty years, you have a few of those moments that stand out as particularly pure. They’re always also traps till you wise up and you know . . .” She leaves it there.

She continued to sit with Glenn Webb’s group, and one day he announced that an American Zen Master would be visiting the following week and asked people to make an effort to be in attendance.

“About a month before that I had a dream, and I’ll tell you the dream. It was at night. The air was filled with the ringing of millions of insects. And I was a woman in my 40s. It was very graphic, and it had the feel of the turn into the 20^th century, so early 1900. Maybe it had that sensibility because I had just seen The African Queen which had the same feel to it. I was in a house that had no walls, just a big roof, and I looked over into the living room area and there was man I recognized as my husband who was very tall, a missionary or a priest or something. And he was surrounded by all of these very short kings from the hill tribes around us, and there was a war going on. I was kind of in the kitchen area; I looked back, and there was my 8-year-old daughter being held by her nurse, who was looking anxiously out into the night. And I looked back, and one of the kings was reaching back and put a dart into my husband’s temple. And my husband collapsed, and a pool of blood gathered on the grass matting. Then the nurse was pushing my daughter toward me, pushing us both out the back door and saying, ‘If you can get to them out there, you’ll be safe.’ And we ran. I took my daughter’s hand, and I was very aware of her little hand in mine. Ran toward a campfire out in the darkness, jumped over a  deep divot in the ground and reached for grass to pull us up. And when we did that, I cut my hand. And at the cut of the hand at the same time I heard them talking, and I breathed this huge sigh of relief because I knew we were safe. And I woke up. That was the dream.”

“Did you actually have an 8-year-old-child at the time?” I ask.

“No. And I wasn’t 40. I was – I don’t know – younger. And when I woke up, I went, ‘Ouf! That wasn’t a dream.’ It didn’t feel like a dream. It had an uncanny feeling about it. And I’ve had experiences like that actually. It’s not unusual. I mean, it’s only occasional, but . . . So the following week, the American Zen Master was visiting us at the Zen Center, and in walks the man who was my husband in the dream. It was like, ‘Oh my God! That’s the person in my dream.’ It was Robert Aitken Roshi. So, he said that he was going to have a weekend retreat coming up, and I attended that. And I told him about the dream. And he said so wisely – I now as a teacher recognize his wisdom in this – he said, ‘It’s true we have an affinity. I have an affinity with many people.’ So what he was saying was is when you’re a teacher you get all kinds of projections on you, and he was letting me know right from the start that, of course, we had an affinity. We met. But he would often talk about mysterious affinities when he spoke about the whole realm of karma, all the karmic suggestions, the things we call karma. There are the classical teachings on karma, but there’s also what we notice about where we get born, the families we’re born into, the people we meet. This remarkable affinity with Zen. Different affinities fall under the heading of ‘karma.’ So he said, at that point, ‘You might want to consider a three-month practice period that’s coming up at the Maui Zendo.’ And, of course, I didn’t even hesitate. I got that lined up, and I went, and I studied with him for three months. That was on Maui. I only saw him about four times after that when he would come to Seattle as a peace activist. I never went back to Hawaii.

“He was very much a political activist, and I was too. And after that practice period, he was coming over to Seattle because we were organizing the Stop Trident campaign. The Trident subs. And he was involved with that. I was involved with that. And during that time, we took a canoe – I forget who else was in the canoe with us; it was a fairly large canoe – down the Puget Sound, right to the naval base. And we got off across from the naval base, and we walked back and forth chanting the Heart Sutra. It was quite wonderful. Oh, yeah! We were with the monks who were beating the drum, the monks who came for that particular action. And during that action, I met a man who I was very drawn to, but I didn’t know him very well. And he was very drawn to me. And I became pregnant just at that time. I mean, right away. We met, and I got pregnant. We looked at each other, and I was pregnant. And I said, ‘Roshi. I don’t know what to do.’ Because at that point, I wasn’t ready to have a child. And he said, ‘Well, you know, this is the way that life behaves. Go with your heart. If you want to be with him, go ahead; do it.’ Even though I wasn’t sure that he was the right person for me. So we did. We stayed together. Eventually we got married, and we have two kids. And we are divorced,” she muses, laughing gently, “after a very, very conflictual long relationship. But it’s fine. And, oh, my goodness! The two daughters that got born through my connection with him are terrific.”

She went onto to train as a psychotherapist and eventually it was time to leave Seattle.

“When I got there in ’72, it was great, but it really, really grew. And I didn’t like it. It was kind of like when we left New York. It was just too much. So I was a psychotherapist, and I was doing Zen, and I had connected with Chozen Bays in Oregon. So my husband and kids and I decided we would look for a place, a small town that had an edge where I could have a Zen group and a therapy practice. It had to have a university, so we would get good movies,” she chuckles. “And we would be closer to Chozen, so Corvallis is the place we moved.”

I ask how she met Chozen.

“Well, I became aware of her when in 1983 she published an article in The Journal of Ten Directions, which was put out by ZCLA. I think it was about being married to somebody who doesn’t practice, and what that required; how to approach that as a practitioner. And when I read that article, I said, ‘Oh, there’s somebody I want to practice with.’ And then I found out she had started a group in Portland, Oregon. That was one of the things that began to percolate the idea of moving down here.”

I ask what Chozen was like.

“Well, first of all she is so bright. So bright. And she’s a doctor. She was the golden child in her family. She was the golden child at ZCLA. So she doesn’t have any withholding energy about her at all. And she’s really very funny. I don’t know if you sampled that, but she’s really a natural comedian. She uses art and music.  They have the marimba band.  Some of those marimbas I gave them because my daughter and husband were part of a marimba band. So when everybody grew up and left, I had these marimbas that I gave to Chozen when she started the band. But everybody who trains at the monastery learns marimba.”

“As well as square dancing,” I point out, remembering my visit to Great Vow Monastery when I first began this series of interviews. Chozen’s was the third interview I conducted.

“Square dancing. And art. You know, she did that whole project on Jizo at the 50^th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan. They gathered thousands and thousands and thousands of memorial flags and sent them to Japan. She does all kinds of stuff all the time and takes advantage of any Dharma gate to teach.”

“And you have Dharma transmission through her?” I ask.

“I have sangha transmission through her.”

“Which means?”

“It means I was never transmitted as a priest. Which is a little confusing because at jukai, we all receive sixteen precepts, and our vows are all in common. If you ordain as a priest, you also make additional commitments to live at the monastery for five years and train there. And I never trained residentially with her. They’re really training people to maintain the ritual function, and, actually, since transmission, I’ve been down here in Corvalis. I started a center here which is growing. I’m about to have two assistant teachers. In one way I do feel at a disadvantage because I don’t have the ritual choreography in my body. When you train as a priest, you really get it in your body because you do it over and over and over again. But the advantage of that is that I can adapt the rituals to a lay community, which in some ways serves it. The two people who are coming in as my assistants are trained at Great Vow Zen Monastery – they are Zen priests – and I’m really glad they’re coming because I think we’re going to find a middle way here.”

“The whole issue of lay transmissions is a controversial one,” I remark. “Chozen’s Dharma brother, Bernie Glassman, specifically set aside his priestly robes. What value is there in having a priestly lineage in North American Zen practice?”

“Well, it depends. Zen and Buddhism aren’t the same. And I think we have to consider temperaments. There are different spiritual temperaments, and if I’m going have a center that serves all the temperaments, there needs to be some of the traditional trappings on offer. Because this whole idea of having services which are always the same is that some people rest into it and learn it. It can be part of resting into, ‘I belong here. This is my home.’ And it’s very intimate. It’s also in the course of developing oneself in a ritual way that you really are confronted with what you like and what you don’t like. ‘I don’t bow! I don’t bow!’ You know? And then in the end, people say, ‘I love bowing.’ It opens up a way of relating to the self project. That ‘I don’t bow’ is pure self. It has a lot of, ‘I’m this way, and I’m not that way.’ In the religious offering, which is wider, we come to be able to identify all parts of our self, all the different aspects and energies that we are, some of which have become shadow material. I mean, the thing about Zen is that we really see everything that we’re identifying ourselves as and these fixities are released. I always say, ‘What’s the liberation?’ That’s the liberation.”

I ask how her group in Corvalis first came about.

“It started as a home sitting group. The first week that I moved to Corvalis, I was at a community clinic, and I let people know that I was going to start a Zen group. I’ve always known that I was going to lead a center. I just always knew it. It didn’t even feel personal.”

“And how do you see your role there? What’s your job description?”

“The job description of an abbot? Let’s see . . . I mean, in taking on these assistant teachers, we have a long list of everything involved in being the teacher of a center. Overall maintenance. Holding the vision and running every developmental aspect through that vision to see what supports it. A vision of bringing a full practice – a full, liberating practice – forward for anybody who’s seeking it. And that involves everything. In Sangha Jewel Zen Center, every aspect of our practice is the practice. So if you have training positions – you know, the tenzo and the shuso, all that – they’re all there to support the wider mission of maintaining strong, clear practice to transmit the Dharma, to realize the Dharma, realize the significance of these teachings. And that includes giving Dharma talks, doing sanzen interviews. I’ve started something called ‘dao ran’ which is a ‘people of the way group’ for people who have received jukai. These are people who have taken refuge and want to continue to study more deeply.”

“So if they’ve taken jukai, they’ve formally become members of the Buddhist community. Can one practice Zen outside of Buddhism?”

“Absolutely.”

“In that case, what’s the advantage of formally becoming a Buddhist?”

“Practicing Zen is full presence on your own wherever you are. Right here. Clear. Responsive. Responsible. But there’s no necessary sangha to keep you company in your clarity. So there are Three Treasures in Buddhism: Buddha, Sangha, Dharma. Three Treasures. You know? There are all the teachings.”

Then she asks me if I considered myself a Buddhist, and I admit I don’t. “For me, Zen has been a very practical way of developing a spirituality that isn’t necessarily Buddhist. If I’m pressed, what I usually say is that I’m a Roman Catholic by birth and heritage and a Zen practitioner by nature and temperament.”

“Are you still a Roman Catholic?” she asks.

“By birth and heritage. In the same way that you’re still Jewish by birth and heritage.”

She nods. “Exactly. That’s the karmic . . . uh . . . soup in which we are little morsels.”

“The point is that there are authorized teachers I’ve interviewed who do not necessarily self-identify as Buddhist,” I go on. “They describe themselves, rather, as Zen practitioners. And they see Zen partially as a technique, but also as a way of life, although not necessarily connected with a specific philosophical perspective. On the other hand, other teachers have told me they are first and foremost a follower of the Buddhadharma and that Zen practice is just as one upaya they make use of. There’s a range. On that scale, where do you see yourself?”

“Yeah. I love this question. I appreciate the forms I got from Chozen. I didn’t particularly get them with Aitken Roshi. But if it’s the choice is, ‘This is Buddhist!’” – she holds up one hand – “You know, robes and all the paraphernalia, and this is Zen practitioner” – holding up the other hand some distance lower – “I’m right down here.” She indicates the Zen practitioner hand. “But I do say that this is a way of life, and a part of what people learn are the Precepts. The Precepts are part of the Buddhist teachings. So the three legs are meditation, precepts, and study, which I might call ‘not knowing.’ I mean, everything supports ‘not knowing,’ but study really supports ‘not knowing.’  Because when you start to study the history of Buddhism and all of the teachings, you’re left with the same questions that you are asking now. There’s such a wide variety. And it’s not a matter of belief; it’s a matter of self-experience. But the study can help clarify the view of your own experience. Right? The meditation is essential . . . Although some people say that meditation is not essential. But I think in a culture such as ours, meditation is quite essential because it’s a regular quieting and calming.”

“I think I’d find it difficult for someone to claim to be a Zen practitioner if they didn’t meditate,” I say. “Although I could understand someone self-identifying as a Buddhist and not meditating. You know, the original Soto Zen communities on the west coast were made up of Japanese immigrants who saw themselves as Buddhists and believed that meditation was something monks did rather than lay people.”

“Let me say one thing about that, which is I think that people who are serious poets, people who are practitioners of some very demanding activity that is not a means to something else but in and of itself, those are Zen practices.”

I tell her that David Weinstein had said something similar. I paraphrased him to her at the time, but I was pretty close to what he’d actually said to me: “Meditation is not something we have to learn, we just have to remember it, and we have moments of it all the time. So when someone new comes to me, I don’t say, ‘Okay, we’re going to count your breath.’ I say, ‘What do you love?’ And they tell me, ‘I love rock climbing.’ ‘Tell me about rock climbing.’ And they’ll tell me about rock climbing. And as they’re telling me about rock climbing, I’m identifying in their story, ‘That’s meditation. What you’re doing there. What you’re describing to me, what’s going on in your mind and your body and your heart when you’re doing that.’”

Mushin nods her head, telling me that, coincidentally, one of her daughters is a rock climber. “And whenever I see her, she wants to talk. She wants to share the Dharma with me. And there’s no difference between her Dharma and my Dharma.”

---

[1] The interview took place during the Israeli response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. There was a rise in antisemitic activity and rhetoric around the world at the time we spoke.

Zen Center of Los Angeles –

Wendy Egyoku Nakao – abbot emeritus of the Zen Center of Los Angeles – invites me to call her Wendy which, she explains, is easier to pronounce than her Dharma name. It is a light-hearted conversation. She laughs easily and frequently.

She was born and raised in Hawaii. “My father was Japanese; my mother was Portuguese. I grew up on the Big Island in a village called Mountain View. My mother was Catholic. She came from, I would say, a typical Portuguese Catholic family, but when she married my Japanese father, it caused dissension, and she was basically kicked out of the family. I sensed that her religious practice, such as it may have been, went underground. My father had no use for religion until late in life. His father became a Tenrikyo priest, one of the new religions of Japan founded by a shamanist in a dried-up creek. His father—my paternal grandfather— left a small Tenrikyo temple to his wife, my father’s stepmother, and she kept it going.”

“And this was a place your father visited?”

“He visited often when my mother became ill. He arranged for the priest and his wife to come to our home every day to bless my mother. The priests’s wife and her small children walked two miles to bless her every single day for many years. But we didn’t have any religious upbringing to speak of. Whenever I brought forms home from school that asked what our religion was, my mother would write something different each time! But even as a child, I kept wondering, ‘What is the meaning of all this?’ From when I was very little, I had that burning question. I always wanted to go to church, but nobody had time to take me.”

She left Hawaii to go to college, enrolling briefly at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma then transferring to the University of Washington in Seattle. One summer, she enrolled in a course on Japanese architecture. The class instructor was Professor Glen Webb, who also hosted a Zen sitting group.

“And around mid-summer, he announced to the class that a Zen master was coming from Japan to hold a week-long sesshin. I thought, ‘Wow, that sounds interesting,’ And after class, I asked Professor Webb if I could take part in whatever it was, and he said, ‘Sure.’ I asked what happens, and he said, ‘We meditate, and we don’t talk for a week.’ I went home, and I told my husband of the time and his best friend, who was visiting, about it. I said, ‘I heard about this retreat where you don’t move, and you don’t talk for, like, a whole week!’ And our friend said, ‘I bet you fifty bucks you can’t do that.’ And I said, ‘You’re on.’ That’s how I ended up going to my first sesshin.”

“Did you ever get the fifty bucks?” I ask.

“No, I never did.”

“Did you earn it?”

“Did I earn it!” she says laughing. “I went off to Vashon Island where we were in this little Baptist retreat center, and I don’t know how many of us there were. Maybe fifteen? Some people knew about sitting, but I didn’t know a thing. Glen Webb was the translator, and this teacher only spoke Japanese.”

The teacher was Katsufumi Hirano.

“Anyway, this sesshin! The periods were fifty minutes! The bell rang. You undid your legs. You folded them back for another fifty minutes. We did twenty minutes of walking meditation after lunch. It was torture! It was so tough! I didn’t know a thing; I don’t remember being given any instruction. And in the middle of these torturous periods, in real Soto style, the roshi would start talking about Dogen Zenji who I’d never heard of, and then it would be translated, and we’re sitting there, just suffering. I was seated between two guys. One was an engineering student from Japan who had never sat in his life; the other was an old hippie from Canada. We had so much fun! I started laughing a lot, all the energy that was bottled up in me started to release.

“But during the week, I had a really important realization, unfortunately for my husband and my whole family. While I was sitting there, I had a powerful vision of myself twenty-years hence on a couch having a complete nervous breakdown if I continued the life I was currently living. I said to myself, ‘I’m not going down that road.’ I didn’t know what else was available to me, but I was not going to go there. Something ignited within me, something woke up in me, a longing that had been in me since I was a kid. It was such a force, and I had to follow it. I went home from that retreat, and I told my husband, ‘I’m so sorry, but I have to leave you.’ Which is why I never got the fifty bucks!”

“What made you think you’d have a nervous breakdown if you kept living as you were?” I ask.

“Because I was not living the life I needed to be living. It was too constricted. Having grown up in this really hardworking working-class family in that small village, the only future we knew of was ‘get married and have a family’ or get a job. Nothing else seemed to be available, although some of my teachers implied that there was something more.”

Katsufumi returned to Japan, but Wendy remained with Webb’s sitting group and attended other sesshin with him. Then a co-worker showed her a poster from the Zen Center of Los Angles. “It said, ‘Zen living ain’t easy.’ It was advertising a year-round training program. And he said to me, ‘You should consider this. This looks like something you’d be interested in.’ So I applied for a sabbatical which I was given to go to a Zen Center for six months. That was in 1978.”

The center was led by Taizan Maezumi Roshi and his senior Dharma heir, Bernie Glassman, who had just received transmission.

“I did a deep dive. At that time the training schedule was 24/7; I loved it. My energies could match that, so I just plunged into the sitting and the entire schedule. After six months, I had to return to work. I returned and then resigned my position. The Zen Center asked me if I wanted to come back and be on staff to set up their library, and I said, ‘Sure.’ I went back and forth between Seattle and Los Angeles for a while, and then I realized, ‘You know, I’m just going to move to Los Angeles.’ And so I did.”

“What was the draw?”

“I don’t know what to tell you. It met some longing in me – right? – to really go deeply into who I was and what life was about. It just did that. I couldn’t have articulated it at the moment, but it did. It felt right, and it felt like I needed to do this. This was a place where that could happen.”

“And did it?”

“Yeah. I would say so. I mean, after all, I was there for over forty years! You know, I have just left ZCLA after pretty much having to bring it back to life and everything . . . And I really did that out of an obligation to my teachers, particularly Maezumi Roshi.”

She’s not over-stating this. She did bring it back to life after a series of calamities that began in 1983, when Maezumi admitted that he was an alcoholic and that he had been in sexual relations with certain of his students. He broke the relationships off and went into a treatment program for alcoholics, after which he apparently stopped drinking, at least publicly. There were people who suspected he continued to do so privately. His admission, however, resulted in many people abandoning ZCLA. The center was still in the process of rebuilding when, in 1995, Maezumi died during a visit to Japan. When ZCLA was informed, they were told he’d had a heart attack in his sleep. Wendy at that point was Maezumi’s assistant. She and Bernie Glassman – who was in New York establishing his own Zen community – went to Japan for the funeral ceremonies, then came back to LA to deal with the situation there.

“Bernie and I made about five trips to Japan that summer to plan the memorial service in Los Angeles, which was scheduled for the end of August. Bernie inherited, through Maezumi Roshi’s will, all of ZCLA, which included Zen Mountain Center at that time. This poor man. He already had the Greyston Foundation in New York. Now he had to work with ZCLA, the Zen Mountain Center, the White Plum Asanga, and the Soto Shu to name a few things. But mostly we were focused on the Memorial Service.”

I asked who was in charge in LA after Maezumi Roshi’s death.

“I don’t recall who was on-site. Most of Maezumi Roshi’s successors were already engaged in their own centers. Bernie asked me if I would take it on, and I declined. One of Maezumi Roshi’s successors finally stepped forward to do it knowing he was not particularly suited for that kind of thing. ZCLA was such a complex scene. This person became the resident teacher, and Bernie was the abbot. Bernie had to figure out what was happening at these Centers and who the people were; it was a major transition.”

The person she is referring to was William Nyogen Yeo,

Wendy herself moved to New York to continue her training with Glassman and to assist Bernie with Maezumi Roshi’s legacy. And then the community was hit with another trauma.

“There was another scandal,” she tells me. “Bernie would say to me, ‘I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.’ And I would say, ‘What shoe?’ And he said that at times of major transitions, something usually happens to further change the course of things. Of course, it was the usual drinking and sex scandal. The Zen Center blew up again. I wasn’t there; I did not want to be dragged into the mess. Bernie and other senior teachers did their best to attend to it. The teacher left, and the sangha was in upheaval. Bernie asked if I would consider returning to ‘heal the Sangha.’ He was reluctant to ask because he knew that I had other plans. While I was hemming and hawing, some people called me from ZCLA and said, ‘Don’t come back. It’s really bad here. Don’t put yourself through this.’ But in the end, I thought, ‘I owe it to Maezumi Roshi, and I owe it to Bernie to at least try.’ And so I did.

“I remember the day I returned, April 15, 1997, ‘to heal the Sangha.’ Interestingly, at this time in New York, we were forming what would become the Zen Peacemakers. Bernie was starting to articulate a more contemporary way of Zen training, including the Three Tenets of Not knowing, Bearing Witness, and Taking Action. We were also experimenting with different community frameworks instead of the top-down Zen model. All of this ended up serving me and ZCLA very well because it was ripe for a complete reinvention of itself. So I returned for three months with Bernie’s support to try whatever I thought best to settle the Sangha. I did things that cut into the structure most communities have, because we had to figure out a different way of being together. I listened deeply to what was there and what was arising. Bernie often said that I was doing the three tenets long before we called it that.

“Anyway, I extended my stay three more months, and then I ended up staying for twenty-two years. There was a lot to navigate through, but my emphasis was ‘to take care of the people,’ as Maezumi Roshi had often encouraged me to do. After the former teacher’s students had left, I had more space to assess the situation. I invited those remaining, ‘If any of you still feel you cannot move forward from what happened and what you’ve been through, let’s come together in a circle.’ Twelve people came. I started a process with them which I made up as I went along. We ended up calling it the Healing Circle Process, which incorporated the not knowing, then bearing witness, then taking action in a continuous practice framework.

“We committed to being together until our process – whatever it was going to be – was complete. The first step was for each member of the circle to tell their story, their experience of what happened to them during this upheaval. I said, ‘You have to tell it so that you never have to speak of it again. I want you to be that complete, that thorough.’ I didn’t want this continuing recycling of the story, so I said, ‘Get it all out.’ Each person took about an hour and a half to tell their story. The rest of us just listened, and by the second story, everyone realized that each person’s experience and point of view were quite different with some similarities. Most of it came down to feeling it was something like a family divorce or, ‘Somebody abandoned me,’ or an early parental death. We went pretty deep and compiled all the ingredients, uncovering many aspects of the situation.  An ingredient was anything from an emotion to your opinion about Zen training and its teachers, and so forth. Each person then chose their primary ingredient. They worked in pairs and groups, deeply investigating the ingredient, like a koan. Then, each person presented that to the group. This led to an action by each person. We had a closing ritual, and then the process was complete. We had moved to a different space and could now move on. It took a lot of patience, commitment, and work. I learned a lot about what their experiences had been since I wasn’t present for that whole upheaval.

“Sometime after that, I decided to commit to being the resident teacher. After two years, I succeeded Bernie as the abbot, a position he had held for four years. By then, I realized that ZCLA was, ‘Beyond band aids.’ I had this insight, ‘We need to let it all collapse. Then let’s see what is wanting to be born anew here.’ ZCLA had very deep and strong roots in the Dharma but no structure to support its transformation. So we cleaned house, the buildings, grounds, and decades of accumulation of stuff. Then after I had been abbot for about two years – listening and discerning – it was time to seriously think about what we were going to create at ZCLA, what was wanting to come into being.”

She decided that membership would do a year-long course on what came to be called Shared Stewardship.

“Our explorations morphed into a new way of being together as a Zen community. The class ran for one year, one Sunday a month for four hours and meetings in between by groups who took on developing various aspects of ZCLA. The class was an open invitation to whoever was interested in developing a new Zen culture and center.  We had 45 people commit to the year-long endeavor. I’d never led anything with 45 people! Our first meeting was so chaotic! It was just a hoot. I described the framework of the Zen Center as it was understood at the time. One of the big issues was our financial survival. It was a chaotic time. It was a lot of fun, too.” She’s laughing as she describes this to me. “When I think about it now, I chuckle at how my determination to honor Maezumi Roshi’s vow caused me to muster the courage to confront all our problems, and I am in awe of people’s openness to experiment.

“I realized after the first class that each person had a different view about what the Zen Center was, what it was founded for, what its history was, and so forth. We were all over the place. Some people had been there from almost the beginning; others had come when Maezumi Roshi died; still others had just walked in through the door. I decided to tell the story of ZCLA, starting with Maezumi Roshi’s family, him getting on the ship, coming here, as much as I could recreate for everybody. It took about five months, about twenty hours to tell that story. Then we get to the scandal of ’83. It just so happened that there was a film about it.”

A film crew had been scheduled to do a documentary^[1] at ZCLA just before Maezumi went into rehab. The membership of the center was still struggling with the revelations of his infidelity to his wife, and his sexual involvements, and, when the crew arrived, many of the residents wanted to cancel the project. Maezumi, however, insisted that the film makers be allowed to do their work and that nothing should be concealed from them. At the time Wendy was running her year-long reflection, she still hadn’t seen the film. But she found a copy, and she showed it to her group.

“It was so interesting because here’s what people were excited about: They said, ‘If we can put this on the table, we can talk about anything.’ Then we came to Maezumi Roshi’s death. I realized I didn’t know who knew what about it. So I told them the story, but, before I did that, I spoke to the senior people who knew him well, not having any idea about what they knew.”

I had been told this story before. “My understanding is that you were gathering documents for insurance purposes,” I said, “and that’s how the actual details of his death became known.”

“I needed his death certificate. Bernie and I were in Japan during the summer after Maezumi Roshi’s death, working on the upcoming memorial. On one trip, I told one of Maezumi Roshi’s brothers, ‘I really need his death certificate because there’s insurance money for the family, and we need to have it.’ He was not forthcoming. One day, he, Bernie, and I were in a small Japanese taxi on our way to visit a Roshi, I forget who it was. Suddenly, Maezumi Roshi’s brother, who was seated next to the cabdriver turned around and said, ‘Oh, I have Maezumi Roshi’s death certificate.’ Just like that. I said, ‘Oh, great. And how did he die?’ And he said, ‘Word very difficult.’ And I said, ‘Difficult? What word?’ And he said, ‘Maezumi Roshi drowned.’”

He has been intoxicated while visiting a brother and died in the family bath.

“I leaned over to Bernie in the cab, and I asked, ‘Does this mean he didn’t die of a heart attack?’ Bernie said, ‘That’s what he just told you.’ So then we did the visit, and then we went to Soto Headquarters to have this lo-o-ong meeting. I could not focus. Everybody could see that my mind was elsewhere. Bernie kept looking at me with one eye, like, ‘Are you okay?’ And finally, late in the evening, we returned to our hotel. We haven’t had a chance to talk about it at all. Bernie says, ‘How about we have some ice cream?’ They had really good ice cream parfaits at this place,” she says with a laugh. “We’re not saying anything. We order the parfaits. The parfaits come. I looked at Bernie. I said, ‘Oh, my God, Bernie. He fucking drowned? What is that about?’”

“So now you have to inform the community,” I say. “You’ve watched the film; you’ve done the history. Now you have to tell them about the manner of his death.” 

“I told the story as I’d experienced it. The senior ZCLA people knew. There was just one person who got so upset he left. And that was it. Everybody else rolled with it. Some people were shocked; some had wondered about his death, but life had gone on in the midst of all that grief.”

“And once you got through all this, how did the community change?”

“It changed a lot; the hierarchy is no longer the dominant structure. We spend time developing the horizontal structure, the Sangha. We create the mandala of the Zen Center based on the Five Buddha Families as expounded in the Gate of Sweet Nectar ritual for feeding the hungry spirits, so that all the components that go into making a Zen Center are known by all. Everyone gets to learn all the different components. Circles are formed to attend to the different sections of ZCLA.”

I ask her what distinction she sees between a circle and a committee.

“It’s a completely different way of thinking about things. For me, the word ‘committee’ is a dead word. It has no energy. A Circle is inclusive of all the energies. A Circle invites in all the voices; the facilitation rotates. Each circle creates its own mission-vision and creates a way to be together as a Circle. They carry out their tasks, but always at the core is how they are honoring their relationship with each other. The practice of Council is interwoven in Circles.”

I mention that when I had interviewed Chozen Bays, she had described ZCLA during the time she was there as a combination of “Zen monastery and hippie commune.”

Wendy laughs again. “I never considered myself a hippie, but there’s no question that the early years were often characterized as part kibbutz, part hippie commune, part monastery, a community with an electric teacher at the helm. The Japanese monastic structure met the openness and free expression of American culture at that time.  Maezumi Roshi would always say, ‘I don’t understand Americans. How it evolves is in your hands going forward.’ There wasn’t time in the years that he lived to evolve the Sangha. He wasn’t the person to do it, and he didn’t have that inclination. He knew that things were not working well, but it wasn’t his work to evolve the sangha treasure.”

“But that was your job?” I suggest.

“To build the sangha treasure, to promote the practice of the flourishing of wisdom and compassion. And to address the many shadows of the community, which called forth new upayas and, after many years, also resulted in ‘The Sangha Sutra.’” The “Sangha Sutra” is a fifty-page document outlining Ethical Procedures at ZCLA.

“And what is the function – the purpose – of the community that came about as a result of all this work?” I ask.

“I think the function of community is to make sure that we are all truly embodying the Dharma in service to others. Sangha is the third of the Three Treasures; it’s what gives life to Buddha and Dharma. Community should make each of us a better person. It’s hard to live a human life. Community can make us stretch beyond what we imagine are our limitations, to learn how we are interwoven, and to be exposed to and include differences, and to help each other.

“I also came to believe there is a fourth Treasure as well, the entity of the Zen Center itself. How does one administer, operate, run, function in the mode of Dharma? We’re a capitalist society; we could take any business model and operate that way. But when Zen Centers keep imploding, we had to inquire deeply about what we are doing. Can we create a structure of living Dharma, of people who come together to wake up, and of an organization that continually and consciously strives from a place of understanding and practice of Dharma? This has to be articulated very explicitly; we can’t assume that we’re all on the same page. The situation invited us to examine and articulate our core values as a Buddhist sangha and as an organization and how we would live those values. How does the Dharma speak to these things? What does it look like when we’re actually coming from that place? And can somebody feel that when they walk through the temple gate? Can they sense that there’s something different going on here. I think it’s very nuanced and it’s very subtle, and it’s very real and alive.”

“Okay, let’s consider that person who comes through the gate,” I suggest. “What usually brings them?”

“All different motivations, but I think that, at the bottomless bottom, there is a longing to know something, to fulfill something. To live differently. To make sense of their lives. To understand what they’re doing on the Earth.”

“And how does this practice help them address that longing?”

“The practice penetrates to the core, to ‘non-,’ to Mu, and the sangha becomes a place to experiment and support each other’s transformation. Practice is a crucible, alive and demanding. We have the capacity to go to the core, have that open up for us and, along the way, clarify what it is we need to work on to come into our wholeness.”

“Okay. I have a sense of longing. That draws me to check out the Zen Center in Los Angeles. I suppose that when I arrive one of the first things that happens is you introduce me to a technique.”

“First, we say hello!” she laughs. “Then I might ask you what your aspiration is. Of course, you’re shown how to sit.”

“Do I work with a teacher individually?”

“If you wish.”

“There are people who prefer not to?”

“Some people don’t take to the one-to-one format.”

“And if I’m not keen on one-to-one interaction with a teacher, then it’s the community that comes to the fore?”

“The community – the Sangha – is your greatest teacher. It’s the testing ground.”

“So the emphasis is less on one coming to ZCLA to do something than it is to take part in a community. Is that overstating it?”

“Working one-to-one with a teacher is very important, but you’re also learning how to live with other people. There are many different ways a person can participate in ZCLA. The community is structured as an upaya – a skillful means. The teachers offer one-on-one, face-to-face. I’ve taken many students through koan training and still do. All of that is still going on. The rituals are going on, the rites of passages. There are many, many facets—many upayas— that are happening.”

I suggest that the Center, as it exists now, is part of her personal legacy, and she agrees.

“So,” I say, “now that you are stepping back, what is it that you hope for them?”

“My hope is that they keep waking up, deepening and expanding. Keep deepening and expanding into the Three Treasures. The world needs these places where people penetrate into and live out the wholesomeness of life. The whole of life, nothing excluded, knowing oneself as the intersection of all. We need places where people are examining this, where they’re willing to spend time experiencing and being a voice for this kind of stillness in the midst of life.”

“You used the term ‘wholesomeness.’ And I agree, personally, that that is pretty central to what Zen practice is all about. But there’s lots of examples – we’ve talked about some of them – where that wholesomeness hasn’t always been manifested by people who hold positions of authority in the community. How is it that there’s been so much unwholesome behavior?”

“How can there not be? Wholesomeness is not just the good bits. It’s all, the wholeness, of the human condition. We’re including all of who we are, including the ‘unwholesome,’ the unevolved. This is why I think we need to create the sangha skillfully so that our unwholesomeness is exposed, and we can welcome and work with it as the ingredients of our practice. I’ve sat with many communities that have imploded, not just my own. They don’t have a sangha net to hold anything because no one’s ever paid attention to it. And I just know when I sit in one of these communities that they’re not going to make it because they haven’t put in the time to weave something that they can trust. They don’t have the imagination that this could be possible. They don’t hold together. They split into smithereens. And it’s really so painful to watch over and over. It’s too oriented to the teacher. The teacher is important, but the sangha is also a teacher. There are Three Treasures after all.” Then she adds, with a smile, “Well, Four by my count.”

---

^[1] https://archive.org/details/ZenCenter

Adapted from The Third Step East –

When telling me about Shunryu Suzuki’s arrival in the United States, David Chadwick pointed out that Suzuki “landed in the middle of the Alan Watts Zen boom.” Two men, in particular, can be credited with preparing the way for the extraordinary success of early Zen teachers like Suzuki and Philip Kapleau. The first was another Suzuki – Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki – and the other was his popularizer, Alan Watts.

Teitaro Suzuki was born in 1870 in what is now the Ishikawa Prefecture. His family was of the Samurai class, which—prior to the Meiji Era—had held a privileged position in feudal Japan. After the Meiji reforms, however, most of those privileges were lost.

His father died when Teitaro was only six years old, leaving the family in poverty. A year later, his older brother also passed away. At an early age, he wondered why he had had to face so many difficulties and challenges in his life—the loss of family status, the deaths of his father and brother, the family’s straitened financial circumstances.

Fiscal constraint prevented him from completing secondary school, but he was able to find work teaching English at a primary school in a nearby fishing village. The Suzuki family recognized Teitaro’s academic talents, and, after their mother died in 1890, his older brother provided him funds to attend Waseda University in Tokyo. This put him close to Kamakura where Engakuji – one of the primary Zen temples in Japan – was located. Still preoccupied by the concerns that had haunted him as a child, he determined to visit Engakuji, where the abbot, Imakita Kosen, accepted him as a lay student.

Kosen assigned him Hakuin’s koan, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”  Suzuki found it entirely opaque. When he went to sanzen with Kosen, the teacher would put his left hand forward without saying anything, and Suzuki had no idea how to respond. Whenever he attempted to express his thoughts about the koan, Kosen dismissed these as nothing more than ideas.

Within a year, Kosen died. His heir, Soyen Shaku, changed Suzuki’s koan to Mu. Suzuki applied himself to the new koan with all his energy, feeling as if his life would be meaningless if he were unable to resolve it.

When Shaku learned that his student was able to read and write English, he assigned him a number of translation tasks, including his correspondence with the organizing committee of the World Parliament of Religions. He also had Suzuki translate Paul Carus’s The Gospel of Buddhism, for which Shaku had provided an introduction. Throughout all of this work, Mu remained at the back of Suzuki’s mind, but he came no closer to understanding it. Because he had nothing to say, he stopped attending sanzen with Shaku, except those mandated during the formal retreats, and, on those occasions, Shaku often dismissed him with a blow.

This continued for four years. Suzuki wondered if his difficulty was due to a lack of familiarity with Zen literature; perhaps, he thought, he could find the answer to Mu in one of the books in the Temple library. He immersed himself in these, which would be a great help to him when he later began writing, but nothing he read helped him understand Mu any better.

When, after the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, Paul Carus asked Soyen Shaku to consider remaining in the United States to assist him in preparing translations of Eastern texts, Shaku suggested that Teitaro Suzuki would be better suited for the position. In a letter to Carus, Shaku described the future scholar as an “honest and diligent Buddhist” but also noted that he was “not thoroughly versed with Buddhist literature.”

It was a great opportunity, but Suzuki was aware that going to the United States also meant that he might not be able to partake in sesshin for many years. If he did not resolve the koan during the upcoming sesshin, he would not have another opportunity until he returned to Japan, and he had no idea when that would be.

The next sesshin was the December Rohatsu Sesshin which marks the anniversary of the Buddha’s awakening. Traditionally, it is the most demanding retreat of the year. Suzuki concentrated on Mu, synchronizing it with his breath. By the final days of the seven-day retreat, the koan was no longer something separate from him. There was not the koan on the one hand, and the person repeating it on the other; there was only Mu.

Then, after a round of meditation, he was roused from his concentration by the sound of a bell being rung, and Mu was resolved. This was the “satori” – or awakening to one’s true nature – about which Suzuki would write so tantalizingly in the future. Suzuki rushed to sanzen and was able to answer all but one of the testing questions Shaku put to him; the next morning, he was able to answer that question as well. Shaku acknowledged the validity of his awakening and gave him the Buddhist name “Daisetz” which means “Great Simplicity.”  Suzuki retained the name for the rest of his life, joking that it actually meant “Great Stupidity.”

He arrived in San Francisco in 1897 and was welcomed to the United States by being placed in quarantine on the suspicion that he had tuberculosis. After a period of observation, as well as interventions on his behalf by Carus, he was allowed to proceed to Carus’s home in Illinois.

Carus was one of a number of thinkers at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries who were trying to reconcile the growing conflict between religion and science. He sought to identify what he called a “Religion of Science,” a religious perspective shorn of mythology and superstition, in harmony with current scientific understanding, which could be globally accepted. He believed that Buddhism had the potential to fill this role. To that end, his Open Court Publishing made Eastern texts available to the West. Suzuki would work with Carus on this project for eleven years.

His first assignment was to assist with a translation of the Tao Te Ching. Suzuki was not happy with the rendition, believing that Carus distorted the work by his use of abstract Western terminology which didn’t adequately reflect the intention of the text. Suzuki also took it upon himself to translate Ashvaghosha’s Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana, which would be the first of many books in English that he would release under his own name. This was published in 1900, after which Suzuki began work on Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism, in which he sought to counter the perception of western scholars who viewed the Mahayana – with its esoteric teachings and plethora of Bodhisattvas – as a degenerate form of Buddhism when compared with the older Theravada School.

There was growing academic and popular interest in Buddhism after the World Parliament of Religions, although the number of Westerners who gave serious thought to adopting the Buddhist faith was miniscule. There were a few, however, some of whom even found their way to Engakuji and undertook Zen training under Shaku’s tutelage. In 1905, one of these, Ida Russell – a resident of San Francisco – and her husband invited Shaku to make a second visit to the United States as their guest.

Shaku accepted the invitation and arranged for Suzuki to meet him in California. Arrangements were made for Shaku to give a number of talks to the immigrant Japanese communities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento and Oakland. Then in 1906, attended by Suzuki, he proceeded across the country by train. During his tour, Shaku met a range of political and academic figures, including President Theodore Roosevelt, and he gave public lectures on Zen. Like Suzuki in his Outline of Mahayana Buddhism, Shaku sought to correct popular misconceptions. Christian critics had been vociferous in condemning Buddhism as a negative and life-denying doctrine the goal of which was the total extinction of the person in Nirvana. Shaku argued instead that Buddhism was life-affirming, and that through meditation practice the individual came into direct contact with “the most concrete and withal the most universal fact of life.”

Shaku’s tour lasted nine months, and, while they were in New York, Suzuki met Beatrice Erskine, whom he would later marry. When Soyen Shaku returned to Japan, Suzuki resumed his work with Carus and remained in Illinois for another two years.

In 1908, he left Open House Publishing, went to New York, and renewed his acquaintance with Beatrice. Then he did a tour of Europe before returning to Japan, where Beatrice would eventually follow him.

They were married in Yokohama in 1911 and adopted a son, Paul, who was of mixed European and Japanese descent. Both their marriage and the adoption flouted the ethnocentric attitudes common throughout Japan. The family lived in a small cottage in the Engakuji compound until 1919, when they moved to Kyoto, where Suzuki taught at Otani University.

They founded the Eastern Buddhist Society and published an English language journal, The Eastern Buddhist, to which they both frequently contributed articles. A number of D. T. Suzuki’s pieces were collected and published by the British company, Rider, in 1927 under the title, Essays in Zen Buddhism. The book related Tang dynasty koans and tales never before heard in the west and was surprisingly successful. More than any other work to that date, it would be responsible for promoting a popular interest in Zen both in North America and Europe.

Suzuki was 57 when Essays in Zen Buddhism was released; his output after its publication was prodigious. A second and third volume of Essays were brought out by Rider. He released a translation of the Lankavatara Sutra in 1932; The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk was published in 1934; and Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture came out in 1938, the same year that Beatrice published Mahayana Buddhism.

The appeal of Suzuki’s books was the portrait he gave of a religion which stood in stark contrast to the Judaeo-Christian heritage of the West—a religion without a deity, a religion which held that the practitioner could attain the same insight and awareness its founder had had. In response to those critics who viewed the Mahayana as a distortion of the Buddha’s original teaching, Suzuki insisted that a vital religion must not be limited to its earliest expression but must demonstrate the ability to evolve. Zen, he argued, was Buddhism “shorn of its Indian garb,” the cultural and historical trappings of the original teaching. What was central to Zen, after all, was not a “dependence on words and letters” but the transmission of the original awakening experience by which Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha and which he passed onto his disciple, Mahakasyapa.

Alan Wilson Watts was born during the First World War in the English village of Chislehurst in Kent. His mother, Emily, came from a staunch Evangelical Protestant family. She was loving but strict and was the family disciplinarian. Watts’ father, Lawrence, on the other hand, was more gentle and tolerant. Emily had been raised to believe that human life was a testing ground during which it was determined whether one was worthy of salvation or was to be condemned to eternal damnation, and she was as concerned about her only child’s spiritual well-being as she was his physical. Religious instruction took place in a gloomy, unheated second-floor bathroom. In this bleak environment Watts’ nanny read him Bible stories, and his mother taught him his first prayers and spanked him when she deemed it necessary. It was also the room where he was quizzed every morning about the state of his bowel movements. He hated the room.

In contrast to the disagreeable bathroom was the first floor Sitting Room, reserved for use on special occasions only. Before she was married, Emily had taught at a school for the daughters of missionaries to foreign lands, and, in the Sitting Room, she kept exotic presents given her by the families of those girls: Chinese and Korean vases, a Japanese tapestry and cushions, and a brass coffee table from India. Here Watts first acquired his love for the mystique of the Orient.

Watts suffered through the brutalities of the British boarding school system, where he received what he later described as a “Brahmin’s education.” The preparatory school to which he was sent was expensive, and his parents had to struggle to make the fees, but they were willing to do so in order to ensure their son received the type of education they believed would serve him well in the future. The all-male boarding school, however, was not the type of environment for which Watts was suited; among other things, even as a young boy he preferred the company of girls and women. The curriculum focused on the history of the British Empire, militarism, and low church theology. Watts sought escape from the dreariness of this course of study by reading the novels of Sax Rohmer, in which he identified more with the Asian villains, like Dr. Fu Manchu, than with the square-jawed British heroes, such as Nayland Smith.

He decorated his room at home with the type of inexpensive Asian ornaments a schoolboy could afford, including a small reproduction of the Kamakura Daibutsu. Eventually his mother—who had good taste in such matters—supplemented these with better pieces, as well as presenting him with a copy of the New Testament written in Chinese, which roused a lifelong interest in Chinese calligraphy. Once more—as in the contrast between the awful bathroom where Bible stories were told and the Sitting Room—the brightly colored exotica of the Orient provided an alternative to the drabness of all things British and Protestant.

He was intellectually gifted and earned a scholarship to King’s College in Canterbury, a public (that is to say, private) school to which otherwise his parents would not have been able to send him. The rich history of Canterbury, its elaborate Gothic architecture, and the pageantry of High Church Anglicanism provided a more stimulating environment for Watts than his preparatory school had. On the other hand, he was well aware that he was not of the same class as the majority of his fellow students. In order to counter a bourgeoning sense of social inferiority, he developed a persona which allowed him to feel intellectually superior to his classmates.

He may not have belonged to the gentility, but his tastes ran in that direction. He was precocious enough, while still a teen, to be able to cultivate adult friendships which permitted him to share in a lifestyle beyond his family’s reach. His appreciation of Asian art and aesthetics led him to search for books on Japan and China. One of his adult friends loaned him a number of these, including a pamphlet by Christmas Humphreys, then President of the Buddhist Lodge in London. In the overview of Buddhism provided by Humphreys, Watts found a view of life which struck him as more reasonable than Christianity, so, at the age of 15, he boldly announced to his classmates that he was a Buddhist. He also initiated a correspondence with Humphreys in which he expressed himself so maturely that Humphreys assumed the writer from King’s College was a member of staff and was surprised to discover, when Watts attended his first Lodge meeting during the holidays, that his correspondent was in fact a sixth form student.

Humphreys was the type of adult Watts admired and sought to befriend, wealthy and sophisticated, a barrister who was to become a well-respected judge. Humphreys and his wife, who were childless, admired the young Watts and came to look upon him almost as a son. Watts’ actual parents, perhaps hoping his interest in Buddhism was a youthful enthusiasm he would outgrow, supported his inquiries and even attended Lodge meetings with him. Lawrence eventually became a Buddhist. Emily remained reserved, noting that Humphreys ran Lodge meetings much like a Sunday School class. It was Humphreys who introduced Watts to the books of D. T. Suzuki.

As head boy of his house at King’s College, Watts had the freedom to use an Elizabethan room after hours where he experimented with meditation guided by his reading, although he was not clear about what the writers meant by satori, moksha, samadhi, or enlightenment. He was considering this problem in the fall of 1932. In his autobiography, he wrote, “The different ideas of it which I had in mind seemed to be approaching me like little dogs wanting to be petted, and suddenly I shouted at all of them to go away. I annihilated and bawled out every theory and concept of what should be my properly spiritual state of mind, or of what should be meant by ME. And instantly my weight vanished. I owned nothing. All hang-ups disappeared.”

Watts’ masters at King’s College—and his relatives—felt that he should easily be able to earn a scholarship to Oxford, but he did poorly on the entrance examination, and the scholarship did not materialize. Once he completed public school, his formal education came to an end. His prospects were not good, and he was fortunate to have the friendship of Humphreys at a time when his mother’s family, in particular, let him know how disappointed they were with him. Without a university degree, the professions were closed to him, and it was not clear how he was going to support himself financially.

With Humphreys’ guidance, he continued his independent studies. He met a number of people who shared his interest in esoteric religions and the occult, among whom was Dmitrije Mitrinovic, who was rumored to practice black magic. Mitrinovic introduced him to the study of psychology, which would remain one of his abiding interests. He also read the Upanishads, the Diamond Sutra, and the Daodejing. Humphreys—whose Buddhism was liberally laced with Theosophy—introduced him to Blavatsky, but their greatest shared interest remained Suzuki whose works they continued to study and discuss.

Lawrence was able to help his son get employment at the foundation where he worked raising funds for London hospitals. The job was not difficult, and it gave Watts – still only 19 – time in the evening to work on an attempt to clarify Suzuki’s writings. At the end of a month of effort in 1935, he had a manuscript entitled The Spirit of Zen. Humphreys contributed a foreword, and the book was released by John Murray the following year.

It was a small work, less than 40,000 words, which was essentially a reader’s guide to Suzuki, but it already demonstrated a skill which Watts would hone throughout his life of being able to describe spiritual issues in a clear and intriguing manner.

The year after The Spirit of Zen came out, Watts met Suzuki, who was in London to attend the World Congress of Faith and, as the guest of the Buddhist Lodge, greatly impressed his hosts. In Suzuki, they found someone who not only understood Zen but embodied it.

In 1937, a wealthy American woman, Ruth Everett, showed up at a Buddhist Lodge meeting accompanied by her daughter, Eleanor. Watts was overwhelmed by the mother—who, having spent time in a Japanese monastery, knew more about Zen than he—and was smitten with the daughter. Eleanor had an American vivaciousness and freedom of behaviour unlike anything he had encountered in the few girls he had been with prior. When Ruth returned to America, Eleanor stayed behind.

Alan and Eleanor were married in April 1938. Although they both professed to be Buddhists, it was a traditional Anglican ceremony. Watts was 23. Eleanor was 18 and pregnant. The young couple moved to New York where Ruth had arranged an apartment for them next door to hers.

Through Ruth, Watts met the Japanese Zen Master, Sokei-an Sasaki. Watts made an effort to work with Sasaki but discovered—as he would realize throughout his life—that he preferred being the teacher to being the student. After their brief formal relationship ended, Watts continued to observe Sokei-an in order to learn how a Zen master lived his life, something which became easier to do when Sokei-an began his courtship of Ruth after her husband’s death.

Possibly because she was having difficulties as a young mother, possibly because she still lived closer to her own mother and her mother’s influence than she would have liked, Eleanor did not fare as well in New York as her husband. She became increasingly unhappy and depressed. Then one day she stopped in at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, looking for a place to rest during a trying day, and there she had a vision of Jesus so vivid that she could describe in detail everything he was wearing.

This vision came to her around the same time that Watts had become interested in Christian mysticism and was wondering whether—as long as it shed its claim to be the only true religion—Christianity might also be an effective means to achieve that sense of union with God/Dao/Ultimate Reality which in his most recent book, The Meaning of Happiness, Watts had asserted was the purpose of religion and the route to happiness.

Ruth was not surprised when Eleanor and Watts suddenly dropped their purported Buddhism and began attending services at St. Mary the Virgin Episcopalian Church. Not long after this, Watts approached the curate to inquire how he could become a priest. In his autobiography, he struggles to rationalize this decision, explaining that if he were to help Western people understand the “perennial philosophy” underlying all genuine religious traditions, he could best do so within the prevailing tradition of the West.

Whatever his motives, Watts and his family moved to Evanston, Illinois, where he entered Seabury-Western Theological Seminary; after which, for six years, the now Reverend Alan Watts served as a chaplain on the campus of Northwestern University. He published another book, Behold the Spirit, in which he compared Christian mysticism with Zen and other Asian traditions. It was well received in church circles.

His clerical career came to an end in 1950, when Eleanor informed his bishop that she and her husband had become estranged in part because of his affairs with women who satisfied desires she was unwilling to fulfill. Nor was Eleanor entirely innocent, having taken a lover ten years younger than she, who—with Watts’ complicity—lived in their house. When Eleanor, already the mother of two daughters, became pregnant with her lover’s child, the situation could no longer be concealed.

Watts resigned his priesthood and affiliation with the Episcopal Church before he could be dismissed, writing a long and self-justifying letter to the bishop in which he asserted that church doctrine had become so out of touch with the realities of contemporary culture that he could no longer, in conscience, continue as its spokesman. It was, at best, a disingenuous argument.

Eleanor procured an annulment, and Watts—behaving almost like a caricature of an adulterous husband—married Dorothy DeWitt, one of his students and his daughters’ sometime babysitter. He retained custody of his children—Eleanor was content with her new son—but no longer had the financial security his former wife’s wealth had provided him. His income from writing was inadequate to support his new family, so he accepted an invitation to move to San Francisco in order to help Frederic Spiegelberg establish the American Academy of Asian Studies. He shed his nominal Christianity and returned to nominal Buddhism without compunction.

Watts loved California and immersed himself in the burgeoning cultural scene although he still came across as a little square. Kerouac portrays him as Arthur Whane in The Dharma Bums. He still had a restrained British manner and dressed formally, and he had what sounded to Americans like a very cultured accent. He came across with authority, and it was natural for him to assume the position of Director of the Academy when Spiegelberg stepped down in order to teach at Stanford.

Watts arranged for a number of interesting guest lecturers to visit the Academy including both Suzuki and his former mother-in-law with whom he appeared to have been able to retain a civil relationship. At any rate, she loved her granddaughters, and they lived with their father.

California had long attracted people with an interest in Asian philosophies. Krishnamurti, the Vedandist, Swami Prabhavananda, and other credible spiritual teachers were well established in the state. Watts fit in easily. In addition to his work at the Academy, he became a frequent guest on educational radio and television. Then in 1956, he published the book for which he would become best known, The Way of Zen.

D. T. Suzuki’s books had appealed to a broad but relatively small and well-educated readership. Watts was a much clearer writer and easier to read than Suzuki, and his book introduced Zen to an even wider audience. To some extent it was a matter of timing; the book came out when interest in Zen, in part because of the Beats, was on the rise.

In the book, however, Watts warns that he is not in favour of importing Zen wholesale from Japan: “—for it has become deeply involved with cultural institutions which are quite foreign to us. But there is no doubt there are things which we can learn, or unlearn, from it and apply in our own way.”

He begins his analysis of Zen with a point to which he frequently returns in his work: that what one perceives as one’s Self is an arbitrary social convention. It is not only that one tends to see oneself in light of the way in which others perceive and define one (one’s social role, personality, even physical appearance); one also tends to view the Self as what he described elsewhere as “an ego encapsulated in a bag of skin”—a soul separate from and animating a physical body, both of which (soul and body) are cut off and distinct from the environment about one.

Zen is a “way of liberation” through which the individual can realize the restrictions and limitations of social conventions and come to identify the “self” as part of a larger ecological whole which is all of Being. This is not a matter of rejecting or rebelling against other perspectives. It is rather a matter of seeing through the illusion of separation or dualism. For Watts, this is something which must occur spontaneously; it cannot be achieved by effort.

He presents Zen as a matter of cultivating a particular attitude towards life rather than being a training method which brings about a change in one’s manner of experiencing. Seated meditation – zazen – is just a natural way to sit and be; it had not been intended, he suggests, to become the strained and sustained practice it had evolved into in Japanese monasteries. To support this contention, he quotes a conversation between the Tang dynasty Zen figure Baso and his teacher, Nangaku. Nangaku came upon Baso sitting in zazen and asked, “What is it that you’re trying to accomplish by sitting like this?” Baso replied that he wanted to attain Buddhahood. Nangaku sat down beside him, picked up a piece of broken tile, and began to rub it vigorously. When Baso asked what he was doing, Nangaku said that he was polishing the tile to make it into a mirror.

“But no amount of polishing will turn a tile into a mirror!” Baso complained.

“Neither will any amount of meditation, as you practice it, make you into a Buddha,” Nangaku shot back.

Watts ends the passage at this point. D. T. Suzuki, Philip Kapleau and later Zen practitioners would complain that by doing so he distorted the intent of the story. To present it as a condemnation of zazen, Kapleau wrote, “—is to do violence to the whole spirit of the koan. Nangaku, far from implying that sitting in zazen is as useless as trying to polish a roof tile into a mirror—though it is easy for one who has never practiced Zen to come to such a conclusion—is in fact trying to teach Baso that Buddhahood does not exist outside himself as an object to strive for, since we are all Buddhas from the very first.”

The criticism was just, but, in fairness to Watts, he had specifically denied being a spokesperson for traditional Zen in his book and did not intend it to be an instruction manual. What it did do was present the Zen perspective as an appealing orientation towards life from which Western readers could learn to develop a more healthy relationship with their fellows and their environment than currently found in contemporary North American society.

The book became, as Watts put it, a “minor bestseller,” and its publication allowed him to resign his position as Director of the Academy and earn his way as a writer and lecturer. His reputation was on the rise. Tens of thousands of people attended his seminars and read his books. Ironically, his personal life was a mess. He became a heavy drinker and proved to be no more capable of fidelity to Dorothy than he had been to Eleanor.

As his fame grew, so did the number of his detractors. Academics dismissed him as a popularizer, and some members of the emerging American Zen community dismissed him because of his lack of formal training. Shunryu Suzuki, however, when overhearing his students criticize Watts, told them that they should respect what he had accomplished and consider him a great Bodhisattva.

Young people flocked to him and sought to become his disciples; the fact that he did not accept any of them only increased his allure. At the Human Be-In of January 1967, Watts was present with the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder; Shunryu Suzuki was there as well. In the counterculture, Watts had become mainstream.

The “Summer of Love,” however, was short lived, and, as the original innocence of the first hippies dissipated, a few began serious spiritual quests. Zen centers, located in places as unlikely as Minneapolis, were filling up. The total number of practitioners – many inspired by reading Watts and Suzuki – was not large compared to the general population, but it was large enough to have been unthinkable in 1958 when Kerouac, in The Dharma Bums, had predicted a generation of Zen practitioners across the land.

The Third Step East: 9, 10, 17, 21-39 43, 56, 59, 66-68, 70, 78, 79-80, 82-83 88, 93-107, 112, 113, 121, 127, 134-35, 137, 144, 147, 148, 158, 168, 172, 181, 203, 204, 237-38

The Story of Zen: 5-6, 13-14, 108, 115, 121, 160, 224, 216-25, 231, 233, 234, 237, 244-70, 280-81, 296, 302, 306, 320, 337, 345, 370, 399, 424

Blue Mountain Zendo, Bethlehem, PA –

When he was 25 years old, Joriki Baker dropped a set of keys and, when bending over to pick them up, fell to the ground and was unable to get up.

“I’d damaged my back in my teens body surfing,” he tells me. The injury had been considered healed, but, although he didn’t realize it, it had left his spine severely damaged. “At 24, I was a heavyweight competitive bodybuilder, owned my own training company and was director of the east coast operations of a subsidiary of Solgar Nutrition called Optibal. I’d just gotten married. I had a wife I loved, money, a house, and a baby girl; I was at the pinnacle of my life. I was done with school and was working as a social worker, personal trainer, and a competitive bodybuilder.”

Then he dropped the keys. “An ambulance was called, and I found out that I had severe degeneration of the facet joints in my lumbar, the joints that allow the vertebrae to pivot forward and backward and side to side. I also had severe spinal stenosis in my whole lumbar spine. I was scheduled to undergo a spinal fusion with rods and screws from L4 to S1. But I had to wait a year for the surgery. So I lost the house, our cars, my job. and the ability to provide for my family.”

He had to go on welfare, and his family moved into a one-room efficiency apartment while he waited for the operation.

“That was the darkest period of my life ever. Not being able to provide for your family, for your newborn, not knowing if you’ll be able to work again or walk again was crushing. One day I went out onto the back porch; it was really the stairs of the fire escape. This apartment complex sat on a hill that overlooked a park, and in this park was a small river called the Jordan Creek. It was the middle of summer, and it was pitch black and pouring rain, and I’m just sitting on the back edge of the fire escape looking out over this park, wondering, ‘What am I going to do?’ Everything was taken away from me just as I just got started. I’m thinking, ‘Should I just leave my wife? Is it better for me to just leave my wife so she can find somebody who can provide for her and my child? Is it selfish of me to drag her through this?’ You know, really deep and painful questions. There was water pouring on me from the storm, but I couldn’t feel it. All I could taste was the salt from my tears. And I looked out over the river and at that exact moment, there was a bolt of lightning that struck the far side of the river. Everyone has seen that, in the middle of the dark night, a lightning bolt strikes, and everything just lights up like it’s day for a moment, and then it turns black immediately again. It was just a lightning strike on the far side of the river, but there was also something else that happened. This was the catalyst for what I consider the beginning of my Zen training.”

He’d had some experience with spiritual practices earlier in his life, although he tells me they were more a “hobby” than a genuine practice. His interest began when he was 14 and a Native American school friend invited him to take part in a traditional sweat.

“It was the first time I actually felt something stir deep within. I felt a connection that I hadn’t felt before with the world around me. I remember, for a brief moment, an experience as if all of us we were one within this lodge, within this sweat. And it kind of woke me up to maybe there’s something more to spirituality than the Lutheran religion. And it got me interested in not just religion and theology but also in psychology. Like how does all this stuff work?”

Later, at university he became friends with a Vietnamese student and his family. “The father had been monk in Vietnam. And when he came to the United States, he married and put his robes down, had a family and was running a convenience market at the time. He was kind of my first exposure to Buddhism. He had a family altar, and he would explain a little bit to me, and we would do some chanting. And Tim – or Thien, we’d call him Tim – would explain a little bit to me.

“Shortly after that, I read a book by a philosopher named Nishida Kitaro. He created the Kyoto School of Philosophy that was the first Eastern philosophy that was accepted by Western academia. One of his contemporaries was D. T. Suzuki; they were actually in a monastery for a period of time together. His  books kind of bridged the Western and Eastern philosophical gap. So I was reading his stuff and it really started to make sense, and it really, really began to irritate my philosophy professors at school because they had never heard of it, and a lot of them were Christian-based and this is now Zen Buddhist-based, so they didn’t understand it. I was writing these papers and still getting decent grades on them, but the professor was just like, ‘I don’t like this.’

“So after I started reading Nishida Kitaro I decided, ‘Okay, I’ve got to check this out for myself.’ So I started going to different centers. In the beginning because of the Vietnamese connection with Thien, there was Thich Nhat Hanh groups that I sat with. And I sat with a Nichiren Daishonin group, a SGI [Soka Gakkai International] group. We chanted the Lotus Sutra an awful lot. And then I got married and that kind of put a halt to that.”

“Your wife didn’t join you in the chanting?”

“No,” he says laughing. “She wants nothing to do with it. I’ve been married to her for 31 years, and I love her to death. She’s been so patient and loving with through all of this, but she didn’t marry a monk. But she’s stood with me through all this change. She is my Bodhisattva.”

And then, not long after the birth of their daughter, he dropped the keys.

His post-surgery recovery was slow and difficult. “I was depressed and hid from my friends who knew me as a 320-pound Mack Truck. Now I am 200 pounds, and I can’t walk without canes.  I would go into the park at night and would practice walking with and without canes so nobody would see me.”

He also came upon a book by the former Catholic monk, Thomas Moore. “It was Care of the Soul. And it re-framed depression and illness. Instead of being negative things, they became positive or at least neutral. Moore taught that there was wisdom within depression, pain, and disability. These experiences became something to be learned from versus something in need of immediate eradication. So what is back surgery and depression teaching me? For example, depression was not negative but a period of deep introspection or being in Saturn. A period to grow. In the west depression and disease are bad things, things that need immediate cures. So you’re depressed, Prozac! Your back hurts, surgery! So, it was re-framing what I saw as, ‘Oh, my God! My life is over! My body is broken; I’m never going to be the same again’ to, ‘You know, this doesn’t define me, and I can learn and actually become stronger from it.’”

He once again looked for groups with which to practice.

“I found a gentleman by the name of John Sellars who was a student of Philip Kapleau. He was a large animal vet, and he ran a zendo in a town called Reading, Pennsylvania, which at the time was about two and half hours from me. He was my first exposure to Japanese Zen. He would usually do readings from one of Kapleau Roshi’s books, and then we would sit for 20/25 minutes, and I remember that after I would sit for those 20/25 minutes, on my way home I felt like I had summited Mount Everest.”

“Did he insist upon formal sitting postures?”

“He was very open, because it was meant to be kind of a conduit to Rochester. So at that time I was sitting on a zafu, sitting Burmese-style, facing the wall. But I remember that every time I left there, I cannot say there was one time I did not feel better than when I came. You know, we’re talking about feeling, and we’re talking about direct connection and experience. And it connected with me in a way that was similar to the sweat but even deeper. So I sat with John for quite a long period of time, and he wanted me to go up to Rochester, and I was going to, but then decided not to for some reason, probably the distance and having young children. But I wanted more, and I ended up finding a place called Mount Equity Zendo. This is Dai-En Bennage. She was a professional dancer from France who ended up in Japan living under a soy vat because she couldn’t find a temple at the time that would take a female nun in. I mean, she was the real deal. And not only that, she was not only ordained in Soto Zen, she was also ordained in Vietnamese Thien Zen. These were two things I was familiar with already.”

“Back up a bit. Did you say she was living under a soy vat?”

“She was living under soy vats. You have to read her book. She is one of the most legitimate teachers that I’ve ever met. So she ran this nunnery. It was almost all nuns. I was one of the only males. Sitting with her was kind of a mix between Thich Nhat Hanh and Soto. So we would do hardcore sitting, but she had this loving open heart. She really opened up Zen practice to me. I always say that if there’s one regret I have from back then, it would be not staying with her for longer. Because now in my head I’m thinking I have to go and practice real, legitimate, hardcore Zen. Mount Equity Zendo was beautiful. It was an old Quaker farmhouse that she had converted into a temple. There were active nuns living there; she had committed students. She’d have regular sesshin and retreat and everything like that, but – I don’t know – being young and immature, I somehow thought I had to go somewhere that was more legitimate. You know, the Asian architecture and the Japanese teacher.”

So he headed for Eido Shimano’s Dai Bosatsu Monastery in the Catskill Mountains

“Shimano was a controversial figure,” I remark.

“I wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk about this with you, to be honest, because I loved Eido Roshi, and I had the greatest respect for him, but also I knew that he hurt an awful lot of people. With that being said, I had a heads up on that even before I went to Dai Bosatsu, so I never really formally took Eido Roshi as a teacher although he was always around. But when I first went to  Dai Bosatsu, I first studied with Jiro Afable Osho who was Vice Abbot. Dai Bosatsu, at the time, was probably one of the most severe monasteries in the United States. Japanese monks would complain of the rules and schedule. But for some reason, I loved it! I didn’t sit like everybody else because now my spine is fused, so I’m flip-flopping between a seiza bench and a zafu and maybe a couple of rounds during a week-long in a chair. And at that time there weren’t any other people who had physical limitations at Dai Bosatsu that I ever saw. If you sat on more than one zafu, it was the ‘tower of shame.’”

He visited Dai Bosatsu regularly from 1999 to 2007, until the situation there finally prompted him to leave. At the same time, he was hosting a sitting group at what he called the Blue Mountain Zendo.

“I started Blue Mountain Zendo in 1998, and we’ve had the temple in a different area, but, for the most part, we have lived within them with our two children. My daughter memorized the Heart Sutra in Japanese by the time she was 7.”

He had permission to operate a sitting group because it was a long distance to any of the authorized centers where he could participate. By 2001 Blue Mountain had grown sufficiently that it was incorporated. Visiting teachers conducted sesshin there.  “Dai-En Bennage ran sesshins. Denko chipped in. Kobutsu Malone visited us.” Denko was Denko John Mortensen, a Danish Zen student and former Vice Abbot at Dai Bosatsu who has gone by several names – Egmund Sommer / Denko Møller – and is currently known as Choan Bertelsen. He is the founder of the first Zen temple to be established in Denmark. Kobutsu Malone had been the gatekeeper at Dai Bosatsu and then the archivist who collected documents recording the sexual and other improprieties of both Eido Shimano and Joshu Sasaki. Malone was instrumental in connecting Joriki with the man he now recognizes as his primary teacher, Genjo Marinello.

“I heard of Genjo actually through Kobutsu and through the Shimano Archives. We were talking to each other online. And I didn’t have a teacher for I guess it would be about three years. It was just substitutes stepping in and out, and I knew my training was not complete. So I was like, ‘What’s your place like up in Seattle?’ So I ended up travelling to Seattle and doing a sesshin with Genjo at Chobo-ji. And you know that they always say that you have many teachers, and each teacher gives you something special. And you hear me talk about Dae-En Bennage as a core teacher, and she is. Even though I didn’t spend a lot of time with her, she is one of my core teachers. But Genjo is my teacher. It was recognizable immediately, that he was a balance of everything that I was looking for.”

Then his back issues reemerged. “Over the last two years, I’ve had some struggles. I required radical back surgery. My whole lumbar, SI joints, and pelvis are all fused. I almost died the first time. My kidneys shut down; I had toxic shock; suffered effects from hypoxia and was on a ventilator in ICU for two weeks. And then they had to redo the surgery a year later because the first one failed, and I have severe scoliosis.”

Throughout this, he continued his practice with Genjo and eventually received Osho – or priest – status. I ask what being an osho authorizes him to do.

“It authorizes us to do various ceremonies, Dharma talks; and it authorizes us to do koan work with students.”

“It authorizes you to be a teacher.”

“To be a teacher, yes, not an heir. That’s another step.” He points out that, to date, Genjo’s only full Dharma heir is Rinzan Pechovnik.

“So you’re now authorized as a teacher. What does a Zen teacher teach?”

“The thing I would say that is most important is love. And I don’t necessarily mean that just in an emotional way although that is part of it too. Being open – being completely open – to something else, somebody else, the world around you as you. That was definitely a lesson I learned from Genjo. It was something that I had never – other than Dae-En Bennage’s loving presence – I had never really considered before because at Dai Bosatsu it was a such hard-core Rinzai training. It was always so disciplined and militant, and that the form was everything. The ritual. Memorizing the sutras. Not making mistakes. And then all of a sudden to hear, ‘There’s no right way to do it, and there’s no wrong way to do it.’ And what is most important is that you love yourself, and that you love the people around you. And that, to me, was like, ‘Wow!’” He laughs. “And it seems so simple, and it seems like something I would have heard a really long time ago, but I didn’t.”

“How do you – how does one – teach people to love?”

“You don’t. You demonstrate it. And that was the thing. Genjo showed me through accepting me as I was. That had always been a point of contention at DBZ, not being able to sit like all the other monks were. But Genjo accepted that I would sometimes have to sit in a chair, and he would always say, ‘Well, you’re the captain of your own ship when it comes to practice. Only you know when you have to change something.’ I was like, ‘Wow! I am?’ And just his presence and the way he acts, and how open he is to people and not expecting them to move from where they are until they’re ready to. So it was the first time that I felt from a Zen teacher pure acceptance of who I was.”

“Okay,” I say, “but when someone comes to the Blue Mountain Zendo, they don’t come because they want to find love. They come because they’re drawn by something. I’m older than you, and I remember the days when what drew people to Zen was the desire for enlightenment, for awakening. Everybody read Kapleau, and they wanted kensho.”

“That’s what they wanted?” I’m surprised that he sounds surprised.

“Even guys who ended up someplace – like San Francisco – which downplayed the centrality of enlightenment, it was the desire for enlightenment that drew many of them there. What are people seeking for when they come to you?”

“I always address that right off the bat. I call it the proverbial carrot in front of the horse. The issue is we are already enlightened; we are just blind to it. Don’t get me wrong. To get to that point of realizing and feeling that you already are awake and that things already are clear, that takes an awful lot of training.”

“If it isn’t enlightenment people are searching for, what is it that initially draws them to the practice?”

“Suffering. It’s the same thing that people came to Buddha for and everyone since. People come – you and I – our stories, we all come to Buddhism because of some form of suffering, or we think something needs to be changed. We feel something is missing or out of place.”

“And the students who come to you, what specifically are they looking for from you?”

“They have no idea, most of them. The students who stick around, I’ll ask them, ‘Well, was it what you’d expected?’ And they’ll say, ‘I had no expectations. I had no idea about what it would be.’ And the majority of students who stick around are the students who don’t come in with a head full of, ‘I know what Zen practice is.’ But the ones that come in with that ‘I don’t know’ – or beginner’s mind – those are the ones that stick around. They’re the ones that really begin to practice. So if I would hear somebody asking for enlightenment . . .” He chuckles.

“You know,” I point out, “that language isn’t used much anymore, but one person who defended it was Rinzan.”

“Rinzan?”

“Yeah. He said he suspects that people probably still had the desire for enlightenment – although almost everyone says “awakening” now – but they don’t use the language because of a self-consciousness about sounding pretentious.”

Joriki admits that there are different ways of looking at the issue but insists that he still shies away from using terms like “enlightenment.” Just, he adds, as he shies away from the term “meditation.” “It’s really not what we do. We don’t meditate. We do zazen.”

The distinction he is making is between popular understandings of meditation promoted through YouTube videos and Rinzai koan practice.

“And there’s nothing wrong with YouTube videos. I think we all kind of went through that as a gateway. But I’ll tell people, ‘We really don’t do any guided meditation here. The only guides we use in Rinzai is koan practice.’ If it’s a Soto student I will say we don’t exclude doing shikan taza. Sometimes we do ‘just sit and digest,’ especially on the last day of sesshin. But our primary focus is on koan work. And then for those with internet experience only, we will go into what koan work is. And then we’ll move into the initial breath work for their first few weeks of zazen. But I really don’t do a lot of explanation. And that was something I absolutely hated when I first started practicing Rinzai Zen, ’cause nothing was ever explained, and I didn’t understand why. And eventually I realized that it is a disservice to explain something to somebody in great detail about Zen because what you’re doing is you’re giving them your experiences – your insight into it – and not allowing them to develop their own.”

“What do koans do?” I ask.

“I see them as expedients. You know, I told you about when I first hurt myself that flash of lightning and everything was present all at once. I still can’t explain what happened, but that night I saw everything all at once. Form, emptiness, intermingling, everything in a flash. Right? I don’t see that experience as being something that’s special really. I think that’s an experience that a lot of people have. But I perceive the thing that differentiates a Zen student is that a Zen student is not satisfied or doesn’t just settle for just that flash. She wants  to understand it more, wants to go deeper with it and explore it until there is combustion. Koans are an expedient to look at the ‘all at once’ picture, that satori picture – you know, if we’re talking about enlightenment – that all at once flash and break it down even more to pure experience. And I always tell people, each koan is like a piece of a puzzle. The puzzle, of course, is satori, the big picture, and the little pieces are the kenshos from the koans that we work on. We get this brief flash of the complete picture which is gone as quickly as it was revealed. The more puzzle pieces we fit together, the deeper the understanding and connection to our essential nature we experience. So, they’re expedients to me. Nothing more. They’re not magical or anything like that. Just expedients.”

“John Tarrant told me they were a designed learning system.”

“An ancient technology. John Tarrant is a wise man. I would agree with that.”

“What do you think he meant by that?”

“I mean, there’s always debate on it when it comes to the koan curriculum and how it’s laid out, whether it was put together in a certain order for certain reasons. There is a symbiotic parallel process that manifests aspects of the ego simultaneously. Koans will bring to light what lurks in the darkness of your mind and bind it with the koan practice. I think the curriculum was put together with a specific reason. And I think it naturally and organically guides you through – the system guides you through – going back and looking at that big picture. So, I think there’s a reason for the order they’re presented. But Jiro Osho – who was my first teacher at Dai Bosatsu – he didn’t necessarily do them in order. He did, ‘Who is he?’ first.”

“Albert Low started with ‘Who are you?’”

“Exactly! Because that really is the starting point. Because until you know, you’re going to be meandering around with out a foundation. That’s an important starting point. So I guess in a way you could mix them up a little bit, although Genjo has always done them in order.”

Joriki tells me that one of the things he particularly admires about Genjo’s teaching is the emphasis placed on the Precepts. So I ask him how he understands the first of the frequently chanted Bodhisattva Vows. “You’ve made this vow, over and over again, that goes something like, ‘All beings without number, I vow to liberate.’ What does that mean?”

“Well, there really isn’t anybody to liberate,” he says with a laugh. “In truth. And in a way, nobody needs to be liberated either. That’s the thing. And we go back to Thomas Moore full circle here – remember? – where people feel that things need to be changed; they think things are not as they should be, that things should be different. And then suddenly we realize that maybe things are as they are for a reason, and that maybe they’re perfect as they are. And everybody’s journey, whatever it is, is exactly the way that it should have been.”

Open Mind Zen, Melbourne, Florida –

There are more than a dozen teachers identified on the Open Mind International website. Fusho Al Rapaport is the founder and director of the general organization and remains a teacher at the Melbourne, Florida, zendo although he tells me he no longer works much with beginners. His students are often people who have had years of prior Dharma experience. “A lot of the people who come to me are people who have studied in other traditions and in some cases gotten Dharma transmission from them but just feel they’re not entirely clear about what Zen, their life – whatever – is about, and so they want to clarify that.”

“So what is Zen about?” I ask. “What does it do for people?”

“What does it do for people? Generalizing is really tough. Sometimes people ask me, ‘What has it done for you?’ But since I’ve been doing it most of my life, it’s hard for me to know what it would be like for me without it. But I think – at least the way we work with it in our organization – that it’s basically a way of getting in touch with what’s really going on in one’s mind, in life, in relationships, and getting rooted in what’s real rather than what the mind is creating. And that’s a lifelong process; I don’t think it ever ends. As Dogen said, it’s practice/enlightenment. Meaning that it’s rolling along, and we’re practicing being awake and practicing awakening, and awakening is practicing us. So the awakening is resident in the practice; it’s not separate from it.”

When I ask how he first encountered Zen, he tells me that he first taught himself to meditate by following the instructions in a book he’d got from the Los Altos branch of the Long Beach Public Library when he was 17 years old. “There were things going on it my life that I couldn’t deal with psychologically. It was 1970, and, in the climate that I grew up in, it wasn’t like there was assistance if you were having psychological issues. It just wasn’t a thing. So I was in the library and checked out some books on yoga, and there was instruction in some of those books on meditation.”

“What was the psychological difficulty?”

“Originally? Falling in love for the first time.” We both laugh. “It was a woman. A woman who was beyond my ability to handle emotionally at the time for a number of reasons. And it started a kind of a cascade within me, a kind of an emotional cascade I wasn’t equipped fully, at the time, to deal with psychologically. And the meditation really helped me work with what I was feeling. Probably also helped me by-pass some emotional content,” he adds, smiling. “But it did help. I started doing yoga regularly and meditating from the books. I didn’t have a teacher. I don’t think there was a yoga teacher in all of Long Beach at the time. If there was, I didn’t know of them. So other than the books, I didn’t have any other resources. And I gradually I began connecting with people who were into alternative things like that, but I didn’t meet my first Zen teacher until 1975.”

One of Fusho’s friends at the time was Steve Young – later Shinzen Young – who would also become a meditation teacher. “He was a Buddhist monk, and we became friends before I met my first Zen teacher. He had studied in Japan and was living at a Center in LA called the International Buddhist Meditation Center which was pretty close to the Zen Center of LA. And he was the one who introduced me to Kozan Kimura who was my first teacher.”

I am not familiar with Kimura.

“Well, that’s because he was only in the US about a year. I didn’t meet him until about halfway through his trip. He was Japanese, didn’t speak English. He did travel with a woman who was a translator slash girlfriend I believe. I was living in Colorado for a while and while I was back in LA visiting family, I called Shinzen up, and we met for lunch. He said, ‘I’m studying with this Zen teacher.’ He was also translating for Joshu Sasaki Roshi at that time ’cause he’s fluent in Japanese and several other Asian languages. So I met a number of Zen teachers in LA about that time, but Kozan Kimura was the first one, and I had an immediate connection with him. It’s like the minute I met him, I knew he was my teacher. I’d never had that feeling before at all. And I’d been looking I think, even though I didn’t realize I was looking.

“Once I realized he was my teacher and that I wanted to study with him, I went back to Colorado, got rid of all my stuff there and came back to Southern California. But I didn’t have a car at first, so I had to take buses from where my mom’s house was in LA, and then walk in south-central LA – which was a pretty dangerous place at that time – to get to this little house he had in South Central LA.”

“I’m wondering why you did this.”

“Why I was meditating?”

“Well, maybe why did you think you needed a teacher so badly that you were willing to brave the streets of south-central LA to work with one?”

“As I said, I didn’t realize I was looking for a teacher before that. It’s kind of like if you’ve ever fallen in  love at first sight?  I just realized intuitively that he was my teacher. We could say that it was karma, that we had past karma. That’s possible. Who knows? That’s certainly a possibility. I don’t opine on those ideas much because I can’t prove them one way or the other, but it’s how it felt. When I met him, I felt like I knew him and that I needed to study with him.”

During the next six months, Fusho spent as much time as could with Kimura, but eventually the teacher returned to Japan. “So I essentially started looking at different communities in LA, and since my friend Shinzen was translating for Sasaki Roshi, I spent a fair amount of time listening to Sasaki Roshi’s Sunday talks. I did a retreat with him at Mount Baldy Zen Center, but due to something that happened during the retreat, I decided not to stay with that organization. Then I ended up at the LA Zen Center.”

“Are you willing to tell me what happened at Mount Baldy?”

“Well, Sasaki basically – as he was known to do – accosted my girlfriend in the interview room during the first interview. That was the kind of stuff that guy did. And I just couldn’t get over that he’d done that in the interview room so I started looking around more.”

The Zen Center of Los Angels, he tells me, “Had a huge residential community. And that really appealed to me. I did a retreat there in ’77, and I think I moved there in the winter of ’78. So a little over ten years after they started. I was in the training program for three months, then I ran out of money, and they put me on staff. And I was on staff there for about a year or two. And I decided not to stay on staff, but I lived on the same block. I had a job outside of the Zen Center and rented an apartment.”

But there were problems at ZCLA as well. Among other things, the Roshi, Taizan Maezumi, was an alcoholic.

“Towards the end of my residence in LA there, the community had reached the size that the zendo was nowhere near large enough for everyone to sit in. I think we could sit maybe sixty or so in the big zendo, and then we had a smaller one which fit maybe twenty-five or thirty in. And during retreats there were sometimes more than that sitting, so they were trying to raise money. They did this big fund-raiser to try and raise money for this building, a Japanese-style zendo that they were going to build. They had a well-known LA architect who had come up with architectural renderings of what it would look like. And they did this fund-raising dinner which was supposed to court donors in the LA area, a lot of whom were members of the center. There were a lot of members who had money. Certainly those of us practicing there didn’t, but people who didn’t live there, some of them were professionals in the entertainment industry and other businesses. So the big highlight of the night was supposed to be Maezumi Roshi giving this talk at this dinner. And he walked up to the mike when it was his turn to speak – and we were all drinking a lot, don’t get me wrong; it was kind of a party scene at that point – and he was laughing, and, if I remember correctly, he said something like, ‘I wonder why you’re all here tonight?’ Something like that. And he just laughed and turned around and left the lectern. There was this murmur that went out in the crowd, and then somebody else came up and jumped in ’cause it was obvious that that was all that he was going to say. He wasn’t going to give this big inspiring speech about how we needed to raise money for the zendo. So you could say either that he was being an enigmatic Zen master or he was so drunk he didn’t feel he could speak, or both, and I don’t know which is true. But the effect of it was that some of the donors were really pissed off afterwards, including the architect who had been donating his time. And the whole thing fell apart. I never heard about that project much again. Which is sad. It would have been a really amazing thing if they’d been able to pull it off.”

Fusho didn’t work with Maezumi directly.

“When I first arrived at Zen Center of LA, both Maezumi and Bernie Glassman were in Japan. Bernie was Maezumi’s first successor, and at that time he was taking successors to Eihei-ji in Japan to do this really traditional week-long thing at Eihei-ji. So they were gone for a few months, and during that time Maezumi had left Genpo in charge, Genpo Sensei at the time. So my first introduction, I walked into the interview room in the retreat I did in ’77, bowed and looked up. I expected to see a Japanese man sitting there but instead it was Genpo.”

Genpo is Genpo Dennis Merzel a Maezumi heir who would later be censured for his sexual affairs.  

“And we started talking. Turned out we went to the same high school, grew up in the same town, knew some of the same people, used to go to some of the same beaches. He’d been a lifeguard back then. So, I ended up feeling a connection with him. As you can tell from the way I described meeting my first teacher, my connection with teachers has always been a highly intuitive process where when I met someone who was my teacher, I just immediately knew it. So when people say, ‘I don’t know how to find a teacher,’ I don’t know what to tell them.”

When Genpo left Los Angeles to establish the Kanzeon Zen Center in Salt Lake City, Fusho moved there for a time to continue studying with him. I ask how he supported himself through all of this, and he explains that he organized conferences.

“Originally they were holistic health conferences, then I moved into yoga conferences. I was working with Yoga Journal for a few years. And then I started doing Buddhism conferences. They were called ‘Buddhism in America.’ I did one in ’96 in Boston; I did one in San Diego; I did one in Estes Park with the Naropa Institute, and then I did one in New York with Tricycle magazine a few months before 9/11, right down there where it happened, the World Trade Center’s Marriott. So I produced conferences, and that gave me the money and the freedom to do the kind of meditation practice and retreats that I wanted to do. My guess is I’ve done a lot more retreat time than most lay people because I had a schedule that allowed for long retreats.”

“What drove you to keep it up?”

“It felt like I was going into something more deeply all the time. Reality or whatever you want to call it. Buddha Mind. I was also practicing koans. I think that I had a desire early on to be a teacher. Not everyone does. But I was working through the White Plum koan system, so I worked with Genpo.”

“When you say you thought you’d like to be a teacher, what did you think that meant?”

“Well, at the time I had no idea of what it would amount to,” he says, laughing. “That’s been an on-going discovery over the years that I have been officially – and before that, unofficially – teaching. Just that I felt I was in contact with something that I could share, that I could somehow make a contribution to helping people free themselves from suffering or whatever, which I felt I had done to a large degree. I think that because I started so early, that Buddha Mind was something I really connected with from virtually the first time I meditated when I was 17. So that’s what I felt I was able to communicate to people. It felt like the right thing to do, and I did it. When I moved to Western Massachusetts in 1983, there was no Zen group in the town I was living in, so I set one up.”

“And how did you get to Massachusetts?”

“Well, I met woman in LA at a conference who I ended up getting involved with. And for a few months we were doing a back and forth. She lived in Boston, and I lived in LA. So around ’82 I decided to move to the Boston area to be with her, and then about a year later we moved to Western Massachusetts because we wanted to get out of the city. And there wasn’t a group there, so I knew Daido Loori had his group in New York – it was only about a three-hour drive from where I was living – and I called him up, and I said, ‘Would you be willing to come out and do a talk? ’Cause I’d like to start a sitting group.’ And he said, ‘Sure.’ So he came out and gave a talk. I think about twenty-five people showed up most of whom I didn’t know; one or two I did. And at the end I said, ‘Does anyone want to continue as a sitting group?’ And about twelve or thirteen people said yes, so we started a sitting group.”

Meanwhile, he continued his own training first with Maureen Stuart – also known as Ma Roshi, who had been authorized to teach Zen by the Japanese teacher, Soen Nakagawa – and later with the late Jules Shuzen Harris, an heir of Enkyo O’Hara.

“I got Dharma transmission in 2008 from Shuzen Roshi. He had a center in Philadelphia and was a friend of mine from Kanzeon in Utah. We had both left Genpo at different times. I actually started teaching unofficially when I moved to Florida in 2001. I wasn’t certain at that time that I wanted to get Dharma transmission and go that route. I’d been authorized as an assistant teacher by Genpo before I left Utah, but I didn’t get full Dharma transmission until Shuzen.”

“Did it make any difference to the people you were working with whether you had full transmission or not? Did they care?”

“No. Basically they knew I knew what I was talking about at that point. So we’re talking around 2001, and I started Zen practice in ’75. I already had twenty-six years of Zen practice and thirty-plus years of meditation practice at that time. So, you know. I do believe the whole Dharma transmission thing is valuable – and I do it myself – but it doesn’t guarantee that anyone’s a good teacher. And these days there are a lot of people with Dharma transmission who don’t have a tremendous amount of experience in my opinion. Each teacher has different metrics about how they determine that. Actually going through the process of getting Dharma transmission alienated some people,” he says chuckling. “Because I think things were looser before. Once I had Dharma transmission, I tightened things up a bit.”

He called his Florida community Open Mind Zen. There are now affiliate groups in Indiana, California, Kentucky, and Germany. The focus of Fusho’s teaching is on koan work.

“Koan study is a unique form of spiritual practice unlike anything else that I know that exists in any other religion. At least in a formal way. There’s some of it in some religious practices, say in Sufism and few other places here and there, Tibetan Buddhism. But koans aid us in getting in contact with the non-logical, intuitive part of the self, which – I believe – Zen training is oriented in getting us in touch with. And it does so in a systematic way, approaching it from many different angles over years of practice. It helps us to drop self-consciousness because when working with koans you have to present things in a very unselfconscious manner. Dropping the sense that we ‘know.’ Because people who are highly intellectual don’t like not knowing what the answer to a koan is.” He smiles. “I know this because I had that experience when I was working with them. So there’s a lot of value to working with koans. Hearing the stories of ancient teachers and how they related to students and each other. Learning to drop self-consciousness, helping to get in touch with – again – Buddha Mind, True Nature, whatever you want to call it.”

We discuss some of the technicalities of koan practice, especially expectations around the first koan students are given. In many instances it is “Mu,” the classic story of Zhaozhou’s response to a monk who asked if a dog had Buddha Nature. In the tradition in which I trained, Mu was considered a breakthrough koan, one of a handful of koans to which the only acceptable response was some degree awakening.

Fusho nods his head. “Yeah, I understand that. I don’t treat it that way, and it’s a really involved discussion. I will say this about the initial breakthrough koan and that whole issue: First of all, when I did training at the Zen Center of LA, my teacher treated Mu as a breakthrough koan, and it took me about a year and a half to pass Mu. It was really an intense experience when I did. I went through the classic stages of it, getting into a state of Great Doubt and all that beforehand, being with me day and night, the hot iron ball that I couldn’t swallow, and all that. It all happened to me. So you have to understand that the position I have now is based on experiencing that. So I did a quote/unquote ‘traditional training,’ and to me tradition is just someone started something, a lot of other people started with the same thing, and then it becomes a tradition for a certain amount of time. But someone had to start the method. So over the years, having had numerous opening experiences, and now practicing meditation for over fifty years, I have come to the conclusion that when you build up in your mind that something’s a breakthrough koan, then that’s what it becomes. And the pressure – psychological and physical pressure – that is developed over working on a koan in that kind of environment works for some people, but it’s actually psychologically harmful for others. Especially anyone who comes from a trauma-based background. And so I approach koans in a very different way now where people do have to come to the correct answer but perhaps in a different way. And I break Mu up into a few different parts. And some people have a real breakthrough, and others just slide into it. And I think part of it is that I’m dealing with people who are coming to Zen with a much more mature perspective than I did when I started. I was quite a mess when I started Zen practice is probably the best way to put it. So I needed that psychological pressure at that time, but I don’t put that kind of pressure on people I work with. I do a process with new students called ‘Zen Dialogue.’ It’s a system of dialogue, and one of the things we do in that technique is we work with people in getting in touch in a direct conscious manner with Buddha Mind or whatever they call it in their particular way of viewing it. So I use different kinds of techniques to get people to see that, and sometimes it’s a big bang, but most of the time it’s not. And I find that if you don’t set up in your mind that there’s this big barrier that you have to break through, then guess what? It’s not a big barrier which you have to break through.”

As our conversation winds down, I return to something he had said earlier.

“You suggested that Sasaki didn’t live up to your concept of how a Zen Master should behave. You’ve actually encountered a number of authorized, often deeply respected, Zen teachers whose personal behaviour has been problematic. Sasaki, Maezumi, Genpo. So, people with teaching authorization and transmission can still have messy lives?”

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely. That’s one of the reasons why in our school I like to have people do other psychological work rather than just straight sitting practice and koan practice. Because you can sit for a long time and do koans for many, many years and still not work with psychological and trauma-based issues going on within you. There’s a number of ways to get at those other issues, but I think they have to be addressed. One of the things that’s happening in the Americanization of Zen, there’s a lot more women practicing. There’s probably an equal number of women and men teachers now. And there’s a lot of psychotherapists and social workers and people in counseling professions doing it. And so there’s been an element of that brought into Zen where these days if you try to away with the stuff that the teachers back in the day that I started out did, you couldn’t. You’d be excoriated immediately on the internet and called out for it. Whereas back then, people could do things, and it could be hidden quite easily for many years sometimes by other people that knew what was going on but then regarded these teachers as the ultimate guru-like authority. So I don’t think that exists much anymore. There’s an openness now – hopefully an openness – in Western Zen which has developed as a result of women being equal and also Western psychology being incorporated as an element.”

“Are you saying that the concept of a Zen teacher as an exalted figure with guru-like authority has diminished to some extent in North American Zen?”

“Definitely. Yeah, definitely. There’s a sense, I think, that the original teachers because there were very few of them and they were Asian and exotic, wore exotic clothing . . . This wasn’t just in Zen. This is something that occurred in all different disciplines that came over from Asia, the yoga tradition, other meditative traditions, the original teachers were like godlike almost – and in some cases they encouraged this – they were viewed as ultimate authorities who in many instances could essentially do anything they wanted, and people would accept it as stuff they needed to work on if they didn’t like it. That doesn’t exist much these days. Someone who’s abusive of women or whatever is not going to last two hours as a teacher. They’re just not. Whereas that could happen for decades previously.”

I mention someone who told had recently told me that her only meeting with Joshu Sasaki had taken place when he was over 100 years old, and he still tried to pull her to him.

“That just confirms what I said earlier. When someone has an addiction like that, you can sit for 100 years and not necessarily work on those kinds of issues. It wasn’t part of Asian teachers’ tradition to do psychological work. Although evidently Maezumi tried.”

“He went into therapy,” I point out. “He entered a rehab program.”

“True, but he still ended up dying essentially from drinking too much from what I understand.  It takes work to get over that kind of addiction that I think many teachers wouldn’t do because there were enough people still treating them as gurus. And this reflection on the psychological underpinnings and the trauma-based underpinnings of peoples’ addictive behaviours didn’t exist in Asia, as far as I know. There’s a discussion that could be had about why things happened the way they did – and I have ideas based on my experience – but all I know is that it doesn’t work now.”

Kwan Um School of Zen –

The Kwan Um School of Zen (or Seon in Korean) began in Providence Rhode Island in 1983 and is now a global phenomenon. Its founder was the Korean monk, Seung Sahn, originally a member of the Chogye Order in Korea. He came to the United States in the 1970s while in his mid-40s, arriving with only a smattering of English, and supporting himself by working as a handyman in a laundromat. His story is one of the most remarkable in the history of North American Zen.

Dae Bong Sunim is one of Seung Sahn’s Dharma heirs and the Kwan Um Regional Zen Master for Asia, Africa, and Australia.

“Zen Master Seung Sahn was born in 1927,” he tells me, “outside the city of Pyongyang. At the time Korea wasn’t separated, but it’s in what is now North Korea. He grew up during the Japanese occupation, which was probably one of the most significant issues of his childhood. His family were Protestant Christians, although I don’t know how active he was.”

His birth name was Duk-In Lee, and, as a teenager during the Second World War, he and a group of friends made a radio with which they could listen to what Dae Bong supposes was “The Voice of America.”

“Of course, they were strongly opposed to the Japanese presence. He said that when he was young, he only felt one thing, ‘Free my country.’ Amazingly, perhaps his best friend in America was Maezumi Roshi who was Japanese. It was a great teaching to us to see their friendship given their countries’ history.”

Almost all of the people I spoke to about Seung Sahn imitate his accent when describing him. Dae Bong suggests it was because the accent was cute and charismatic. Judy Roitman, however, thinks “forceful” is a more appropriate term. “Soen Sa Nim’s English was never fluent, but it was direct and expressive, and the accent was part of it. His speech was more powerful than if he’d enunciated everything correctly. It felt as if his limited English forced him to go directly to the heart of things.”

“He was arrested because of the radio,” Dae Bong continues, “and then he was let out of jail when his high school teacher spoke up for him. Then he and his two friends stole some money from their parents and went up to Manchuria to join the Korean Free Army to fight for the liberation of Korea. There they met up with one of his friend’s older brothers who was in the KFA. They intended to join as well but were told, ‘Go back and finish high school.’ So he finished high school, and when the war ended – as you know – America and Russia supported the division of the country. Seung Sahn Sunim’s parents sent him and his younger sister to the south while they stayed in the north to take care of their parents. He and his sister never saw them again.”

Eventually he entered university where he studied Western philosophy.

“He really liked Socrates. He always talked about Socrates walking around Athens saying, ‘Know thyself! Know thyself!’ One of Socrates’ students said, ‘Teacher, do you know yourself?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, but I understand this “don’t know.”’ Soen Sa Nim really liked that.”

It takes a while for me to catch that sometimes people refer to Seung Shan as “Soen Sa Nim,” which sounds – to me at least – very similar, and I have trouble distinguishing when which is being used. “Soen Sa Nim,” Judy explains, is both a title and an expression of affection. “Soen Sa means Zen Master, and Nim is an honorific that has a tinge of ‘beloved,’ so it’s not just that you’re looking up to someone, but you’re looking up to someone with affection and love.”

Then during the General Strike of 1946, Seung Sahn observed rival factions in South Korea fighting in front of the rail station.

“This really hurt his mind,” Dae Bong says. “Growing up all he wanted was ‘my country be free’ and now that the Japanese were gone, the Korean people were fighting each other. He became disgusted with society and went into the mountains saying he wasn’t coming back until he understood the truth of human life.”

Judy tells me that he stayed in one of the small cabins attached to a Buddhist monastery, where he continued to read Western philosophy until one of the monks asked him why – as an Asian – he wasn’t reading Asian philosophy. The monk gave him a volume that included, among other things, the Diamond Sutra.

“One day,” Dae Bong explains, “he came to the line in the Diamond Sutra that says, ‘If you view all appearance as non-appearance, this view is your true nature.’ At that moment, his mind became clear. He realized the truth, but also realized that understanding it is not enough. It must become your lived experience. So he decided to become a monk. Soon after becoming a monk, he asked an older monk, ‘What is most difficult kind of practice?’ The older monk told him to do a 100-day retreat chanting the Great Dharani for 20 hours every day, get up for two hours in the middle of the night, pour cold water on yourself outside in the winter and then chant for two more hours. And only eat crushed pine needles. He asked the monk, ‘What is the result?’ The monk replied, ‘Three possibilities: get enlightenment, go crazy, or die.’ Soen Sa Nim thought, ‘Get enlightenment or die is okay, but going crazy not so good.’”

The story continues that Seung Sahn achieved enlightenment during this regimen, after which he went to see Zen Master Kobong who was considered the toughest master in Korea. “He showed Zen Master Kobong a moktak[1] and asked, ‘What is this?’” Dae Bong tells me. “Kobong Sunim hit the moktak with a stick. Seon Sa Nim thought, ‘Ah my mind is the same as his,’ and turned to leave. Then Kobong Sunim said, ‘What did you see? A bird, a building, an airplane?’ Seon Sa Nim turned around and asked Kobong, ‘How can I practice Zen?’ Kobong Sunim asked him a traditional kong-an[2] which he didn’t know how to answer, and he said, ‘Don’t know.’ Then Kobong Sunim told him, ‘Only go straight “don’t know.”’”

After sitting the traditional three-month retreat the following winter, Seung Sahn visited Zen Master Kobong again. After Kobong tested his comprehension of several koans, he acknowledged the younger man’s enlightenment. Seung Sahn received transmission from him in January 1949. He was 22 years old.

The following year, the Korean War broke out, and Seung Sahn was drafted into the Korean army. “He told us that while he was in the army, he experienced something which touched deeply him. He was in an area where some American troops were having a meeting. They had chairs set out and a raised platform. There was a big map, and a lieutenant on the platform. There was going to a be a briefing about the day or plans for the next days. Even though he didn’t know the language, Seung Sahn could tell that the enlisted men sitting in the chairs and the officer were joking back and forth. He said you never would see this in the Korean army. In the Korean army due to Confucian sensibilities officers and enlisted men were very separated in terms of their behavior with one another. But the American soldiers were joking back and forth with the officer like equals, and it wasn’t a problem. Then a colonel came in. The lieutenant said, ‘Ten-hut!’ and everyone stood up and saluted. Then everyone smoothly separated into their jobs, no longer ‘equal’. That really touched him, that insight: when it’s not job time, everybody’s equal. When it’s time to do our job, you separate because of your job. In the Korean Confucian approach that had developed for centuries, people were strictly separated by social positions or jobs. This moment of equality between the soldiers and the officers affected Soen Sa Nim very much, and he developed an interest in the United States.”

Conditions in the Chogye Order were messy in the 1950s, and Seung Sahn felt that if the order didn’t modernize its approach, particularly its attitude to lay people, it wouldn’t – as Dae Bong put it – “be able to connect with modern Korean society in the future. So he got the idea of going to teach in America. In 1966 he was invited to Japan by the Japanese government to help the Koreans living in Japan. And then in 1972, he flew to America.”

America was a common destination for Zen teachers at the time. Taizan Maezumi went to Los Angeles in 1956; Shunryu Suzuki came to San Francisco three years later; Joshu Sasaki arrived in 1962. The question is why Seung Sahn chose to set up shop in Providence, Rhode Island.

“That’s a good question,” Dae Bong admits. “He landed in LA, and soon Korean Buddhists knew a Korean Zen Master was in town. They gathered around him and asked him to make a Buddhist Temple. He did. But after a few months, he realized, ‘If I stay in LA or go to Chicago or New York I will be surrounded by Koreans and not be able to meet westerners.’ So he told the Koreans in LA, ‘I’m going to the East Coast; I’ll be back in a few months.’ On the plane he met a Korean man who had been living in America a long time, and Soen Sa Nim told him, ‘I want to meet American people.’ This man told him that on the East Coast there is a small town, Providence, probably about 200,000 at that time. It has a very good university, so you can meet young American people there. And there’s almost no Koreans there. He went there and got a job taking care of a laundromat and rented a small apartment. That’s how he ended up in Providence.”

“Then what?” I ask. “Put up on posters on phone poles saying ‘Zen meditation this way’?”

“Almost. The Korean word is ‘Seon’ and the Japanese word ‘Zen.’ He knew Americans knew the word ‘Zen’ so he went around the town, probably to the university, and put up signs that said ‘Zen’ and gave his apartment’s address. And students started to show up. In 1972, many young people were interested in Zen. Zen Master Seung Sahn has a great face and bearing. When people met him, they became interested immediately. He said he made noodles or soup for anyone who came ‘because students are always hungry.’ Then he’d take them into the other room and point at sitting cushions he had; he’d sit down himself in meditation position. People would look at him, and they’d just copy it. He couldn’t talk to anyone because he knew almost no English. Then one of the students realized that Soen Sa Nim spoke Japanese because he grew up during the occupation of Korea and had to speak Japanese in school and outside the home. One of the professors at the university spoke Japanese. The student introduced the two of them. Then the professor – Leo Pruden – would come over to the Zen Center on certain days and translate Soen Sa Nim’s Dharma talks from Japanese to English. At some point about eight young people had moved in with him. It was just a little house; the students shared a bedroom. Soen Sa Nim had a bedroom, and the living room was the meditation room. They got up early every day, did 108 bows, chanting, and sitting. After breakfast the students would go to school and one of the students – Bobby Rhodes – she would go to work. She was a nurse. Soen Sa Nim would go to work in the laundromat.”

Bobby Rhodes – Zen Master Soeng Hyang – is the current Kwan Um School Zen Master. She was also the first member of the Kwan Um School I interviewed back in 2013.  When I asked her how she had first found out about Master Seung Sahn, she told me, “I didn’t find out about him, ’cause nobody knew him. But I was looking for an apartment, and the apartment that I looked at was above his temple. I didn’t take the apartment, but I came back a couple of weeks later and knocked on the door and met him.”

“What was that meeting like?

“I had been scared to go back, because I’d read all these Japanese books about getting hit. So I was afraid he’d be too severe. But it was great. He was down on the floor doing calligraphy, and he was very sweet and friendly. And there was an American Brown University student there who walked me around the apartment, showed me things, and introduced me to Master Seung Shan. And then, when I was leaving, he spoke hardly any English, but he said, ‘Come back! Come back! We have a Dharma talk on Sunday.’”

Bobby did come back the following Sunday, and, shortly after, she moved into the “temple.” “It was just an apartment,” she explains. “There were three of us. We had a big living room that we turned into a zendo and put up an altar, and it had a kitchen and two bedrooms. So I just slept out in the Dharma room. I was a hippie. So I was fine. I was used to sleeping on the floor. We were young. Very young. I was twenty-four. I could sleep on a dime. It was simple.”

When Dae Bong first came to the temple, Seung Sahn’s status had changed. “By the time I appeared, there were six Zen centers under his direction. Four on the east coast; two on the west coast, and groups in Toronto, Chicago, Kansas, and – I think – Colorado. What attracted me? First, it was Zen Buddhism. Second, I liked the chanting, chanting the Heart Sutra. The people were quite natural. Bobby gave a talk, and it was basically about how at work that day, she was going to open up a banana for one of the older patients she took care of, and the guy said, ‘No! You open it from the other end.’ She said, ‘No. We always open it from this end.’ And he said, ‘No, I saw some chimpanzees on TV, and they open it from the other end,’ and he opened it from the other end, and it worked quite well. I thought, ‘Well, that’s a stupid talk but simple and clear. There’s not only one way to do things.’”

Seung Sahn had not been at the first gathering Dae Bong attended. They didn’t meet until Dae Bong signed up to attend a three-day retreat.

“The first night when I went down there, as soon as I saw Soen Sa Nim, I had a very a comfortable feeling. What really struck me though was when during the Dharma talk and Q&A someone asked him, ‘What is sanity? What is insanity?’ He didn’t understand those two words and turned to his student and said, ‘This man. What say?’ The student understood Soen Sa Nim’s English and said, ‘This man asked, “What is crazy; what is not crazy”’ I was curious right away because I had studied psychology in university and worked in a mental hospital and on the psychiatric ward of a prison. Zen Master Seung Sahn said, ‘If you are very attached to something, you are very crazy. If you are a little attached to something, you are a little crazy. If you are not attached to anything, that’s not crazy.’ I thought, ‘That’s better than the eight years that I studied and worked in psychology.’ Because it covers everything: religious people, successful people. Everyone. And he kept talking. ‘So, in this world everybody’s crazy because everybody’s attached to “I.” But this “I” is only made by our thinking. Originally it doesn’t exist. If you don’t want to attach to your thinking “I,” and realize your true “I,” you must practice Zen.’

“We started the retreat next morning; a lot of people were there only for the talk. Zen Master Seung Sahn gave private interviews to each student every day. At my first interview, he asked me if I had any questions, and I said, ‘No.’ Then he gave me his basic Zen teaching ending with: ‘your before-thinking substance, my before-thinking substance, this stick’s substance, the substance of the sun, moon and stars, all universal substance is the same substance.’ At that moment I thought, ‘I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear that.’”

By the mid-80s, Seung Sahn had a well-established network of centers and was generally admired by Zen practitioners in other traditions as well. But the 80’s was a stressful time within North American Zen. In 1982, a number of Eido Shimano’s students left his sangha because of his sexual misconduct. In 1983, Richard Baker was pressured into resigning as abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center in part because it was known he engaged in affairs with students and with the wife of a major financial donor. In 1984, Taizan Maezumi in Los Angeles – who also admitted to having affairs –  entered a rehabilitation clinic for alcoholism. 1988, one of Joshu Sasaki’s students published a poem in which she accused her teacher of sexual abuse.  And that same year, Seung Sahn also acknowledged that he had been engaged in relationships with students.

Judy Roitman insists, however, that Seung Sahn’s situation was different from those other teachers. “He was not a predator. So in Korean culture there is this kind of accepted — not considered a good thing, but tolerated — situation of a student, who is female, having a sexual relationship with a monk. It’s tolerated but it stays in the shadows. And so Zen Master Seung Sahn had relationships. But they were relationships. He was not a predator. I know people he had relationships with. And if you talk to them about it – which I have – they will tell you that this was not a damaging relationship. It was not something that was destructive. They just had this monk boyfriend who was also their teacher, which is breaking all kinds of bounds, but this was back when people didn’t understand things like that. I have been with predators. These were people who destroyed peoples’ psyches. These were people who were like crocodiles waiting on the bank waiting for a nice young hippo to go into the water and slithering to attack them. Master Seung Sahn was not like that.”

I ask if the revelations of those relationships had the same impact on the Kwan Um community that it had in other communities.

“The revelation did have a very strong impact. There were people who left. However, he did something those other guys didn’t. He apologized.”

Judy also points out that the Kwan Um school was “one of the first Buddhist organization in America to come out with an ethics policy. I still think it puts too much emphasis on sex because I see sex generally as a symptom rather than the disease. The underlying disease tends to be issues of arrogance, pride, and feelings of being special: ‘I can do anything I want.’ But we’re very clear about the process of a teacher and a student wanting to have a relationship, what this means and how they can go about it in an ethical way. Basically they have to be open about it, and they can’t have a teacher-student relationship if they’re going to have an intimate relationship.”

Towards the end of his life, Seung Sahn’s health deteriorated. He had a pacemaker inserted in 2000 and died four years later. The Chogye order honored him with the title “Dae Jong Sa” – Great Lineage Master – but the Kwan Um School continues to retain its independence.

I ask Dae Bong if the words “Kwan Um” mean anything, if they can be translated into English.

“Kwan means ‘perceived,’ and um means ‘sound,’ and it’s the name of the Bodhisattva of Compassion . . .”

“Oh, shoot,” I say interrupting him. “Kannon.”

“Yes, it means ‘perceive the suffering of the world and help. Be a Bodhisattva.’”

“I should have figured that out on my own.”

“Well, that was Soen Sa Nim’s teaching. Zen doesn’t always have compassion at its core. It has compassion but not always at the core. But that was the core for Soen Sa Nim, ‘Realize your true nature and help others. Your compassion will naturally come out.’ That is the Kwan Um School of Zen.”

[1] A wooden instrument that is hit during chanting to regulate speed

[2] The Korean term for koan.

Dharma Rain, Portland, Oregon –

When I was in high school, I became involved with the Mormons for a bit. It had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with a girl, but I acquired a basic knowledge of their belief system. It’s hard to believe someone attracted to it would also be attracted to Buddhism, but, I guess, it happens.

Jiko Tisdale is the godo at Dharma Rain in Portland, Oregon. The godo, Jiko, explains, “is essentially the head of teaching. Traditionally you divide it into the teaching side and the operations or administrative side. The abbot – Kakumyo Lowe-Charde – oversees all of it,, and I oversee the teaching. We also have a kanin who oversees the operations side. So I facilitate our Dharma council which is a group of about eight seniors whose job is to make sure that we don’t deviate too much from the teaching that we offer, and that we keep our mission clear and don’t get too diluted. So we look at work practice, Dharma talks, classes, as well as what’s the temperature and tone of the sangha’s character right now. Are workshops going okay? It’s all kinds of little stuff like that. I give Dharma talks; I lead classes; I teach seminary classes, and I have formal students of my own. We have six or seven active teachers right now, and I keep an eye on what everybody’s doing to make sure that we’re not duplicating, we’re not missing things.”

Godo and kanin are traditional terms for positions within the Soto monastic system. They are usually reserved for people who are ordained. Jiko, however, is not. “I have lay Dharma transmission which enables me to give the Precepts, take formal students, and transmit other lay teachers. And it allows me to continue a lineage within my own traditional Soto Zen lineage.”

I ask how she first became involved with Zen.

“I was very young,” she tells me with a laugh. “I was in my very early 20s. I was in nursing school and really stressed and depressed, and I knew something was missing. And I didn’t know how to figure out what was missing, but some deep, wise voice told me that I needed religion. I had been raised kind of a milquetoast Lutheran by parents who had left their churches to compromise on the Lutheran Church, but it was very much an Easter and Christmas kind of thing. No passion. And when I was twelve, I converted to the Mormon Church, which was quite a shock to my parents. And then by the time I was in college, I became active politically in radical and progressive causes. So I kind of went from the Mormon Church to the Church of Politics, but it was always about a passionate belief in something greater than myself. And I was seeking a community, a community of fellow travelers. And by the time I was in my last year of nursing school, there was still something missing, and I decided that I wanted a religion. I didn’t know what it would be; I was open to any possibilities. So I opened the yellow pages, and I started with the A’s, which was the Adventists. And then when we got to the B’s, there was Buddhism. So I knocked on the door of this unprepossessing little rental house here in Portland, in a neighborhood I’d never been in before. And there was a Swiss guy with curly hair who said he was the priest, and he gave me a cup of tea. I had no idea what he was talking about, but now I say that it was like I’d heard the language when I was a baby. It felt like I knew this language even though I didn’t speak it. It felt like going home just immediately, and I had no idea why. But I kept coming back. And I started sitting zazen because they told me to do that.”

The unprepossessing rental house was the Oregon Zen Priory, a satellite of Jiyu Kennett’s Shasta Abbey. After the Swiss monk returned to Europe, Kyogen and Gyokuko Carlson  were appointed the guiding teachers, and Kyogen became Jiko’s formal teacher.

“I plunged in with both feet and became just a passionate practitioner from the beginning with no idea what I was doing. Going down to the abbey for a ten-day winter Jukai with no idea of what a retreat meant, what a sesshin included. And I just kept plugging away. And then after a couple of years, the Carlsons separated from the Abbey and became independent, and we started our own temple, and eventually I knew what we were talking about. And I’ve been here ever since. I’ve been to other places, dropping in as a friend or just seeing what was up, but I never felt any need to explore any further. Soto Zen was the right fit for me from the beginning.”

“You said you were ‘stressed and depressed.’ What were you depressed about?”

“You know, I would say now that I was at a transformational point in my life where I had to make some decisions about who I was going to be. But at the time I didn’t understand that. I was agoraphobic, but I was in my senior year of nursing school and had to get up early in the morning to do hospital clinicals, and I had a kid. And so there was this collision. My need to slow down and be quiet and listen to my interior life bashed against a time in my life when I had to be very outward and very ‘on.’ By the time I graduated nursing school I had pneumonia, and I was just kind of a wreck. But I grabbed hold of Soto Zen, and – you know – Soto Zen is so interesting because it doesn’t give you anything to grab onto. There are no mantras. There are no mandalas to look at. There are no exercises to do. All I was given was, ‘Go stare at the wall for half an hour.’ If I had encountered Rinzai Zen first, I might have become a very competitive koan student. If I’d encountered Vajrayana, I’m sure I would have been seduced by the music and the color and all that other stuff. But I got lucky in finding Soto Zen because there’s nothing, no crutches, nothing to grab onto at all. I don’t know why I stayed. I mean, I was bored; I was confused. But I kept going back. For some reason it was what I needed.

“And I loved the monastery. I was immediately entranced by the very plain, pure form of Soto Zen. I was drawn to the plainness of it, I think, because I have a very complex brain going on up there all the time so there was something about the ascetic nature of it. It was a good balance. A lot of people I know in Soto Zen are Type A personalities, lawyers, psychotherapists, physicians, people who are pretty powerful and intense in lay life but are somehow drawn to this place where there’s nothing to be competitive about, where there’s nothing to grab onto and make concrete. You’re just stuck with yourself, and we somehow seem to recognize that we need that balance.”

“What is the function of Zen? What’s it for?”

“What is it for? It doesn’t have a function. It isn’t for anything. I’m in it; it’s not in me. We have this saying: ‘Zazen doesn’t care.’ And I’ve always really liked that because the idea is that it’s just there. It’s available for me if I partake in it. But zazen doesn’t care if I sit or not; zazen doesn’t care if I like it or not, or if I’m bored or tired or whatever. Zazen doesn’t care. Zazen is a space that exists, and it’s a place where there’s enough room for me to have whatever I have.” She pauses a moment, then says, “I’m very suspicious of too many words here.”

“You said that the godo is the head of teaching. What does a Zen teacher teach?”

“Nothing much,” she says chuckling. I’m used to getting that kind of answer to the question, but then Jiko actually goes on to list specific things involved in teaching. “That’s the pat answer. But I do teach Dharma. I’ve studied for decades to understand the basics of Dogen’s Zen, and Dogen is something I’m very passionate about. I’m facilitating a sutra study group in the spring where every week we’ll study a different sutra in overview. There’s plenty of history. The next Dharma talk that I’m going to give is about Keido Chisan Koho Zenji, who was Jiyu Kennett’s teacher and is considered one of the founders of our temple. I studied the Japanese language for a few years. I can’t speak Japanese, but I’m not entirely at sea. I’ve travelled to Japan. So there is a whole academic or intellectual side to what we teach. That’s about half of what our seminary program is, which is advanced studies for senior students.

“But the other half is practice and personal integration, and that you can’t teach. All you can do is make a space for it. Invite and welcome people and offer them a little bit of guidance. I think it was Jack Kornfield had this image I really like of it’s like you’re standing on the ground and you’re watching somebody climb a cliff. And you can see where the handholds are, and you’re saying, ‘Go right! Go right!’” She laughs gently throughout this description. “And they’re going left, and you just keep yelling, ‘Go right!’ There’s a certain bit of that involved. But I think one of the most important functions you have – especially with the students you work with intimately – is you get to know them over time and you function as a mirror. Because it’s often easier for another person to see your patterns than for you to see them from inside. So the teacher-student intimacy allows a teacher to see patterns and call them out. To say, ‘We’ve been here before’ or ‘I’ve seen you have this reaction before, this response pattern.’ And working really hard to make it safe to be yourself, to be authentic and whole. It’s not about suppressing parts of ourselves that we don’t like or ignoring things or trying to be a different person. It’s really about integrating oneself into a whole. You need a big space for that to happen, and you need time for that to happen.”

“So studying Dogen,” I say, “studying sutras, looking at patterns in one’s life. It brings me back to the question I asked earlier. To what end? What’s the purpose – the function of all this activity? What’s it gonna do for me?”

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing it’s done for me. I started out depressed and thinking about driving off a bridge, and I felt anxious all the time, there was just this sort of free-floating dread. I haven’t been afraid in a long time, and I haven’t been depressed in a long time.

I ask how, then, it differs from psychotherapy.

“Oh, it’s quite different. I said this in a talk recently: Zen has plenty of room for psychology. Psychotherapy is great. Counselling is great. I think almost everybody can benefit from therapy. But therapy isn’t big enough to contain Zen. We have to not get confused. Psychology is part of the self, and Zen has room for every part of the self. But Zen is bigger than that. Zen is an inter-being with all things. And it is a kind of freedom and liberation from the patterns of the self which we may heal and strengthen through therapy. But there’s a space that’s much bigger than that. And I’m not going to say a whole lot about this, Rick. But we touch that space sometimes. You can’t chase it, and you can’t make it happen, but once you touch that space, people are conditioned forever by that moment of freedom. And I knew the moment I touched it my life was never going to be the same. And that sense of freedom, that sense of fearlessness has never left.”

I ask if she’s willing to talk about that moment, and she shakes her head. “No. I don’t know if it was Shunryu Suzuki, maybe it was Maezumi, but one of them said, ‘Once or twice in a lifetime there is the big liberation, but there are a million moments that make you dance.’ And I think those million moments are as important as one or two iris-openings. You know? A million moments that make you dance! What else could we want? Marvelous! And I do feel that even in a down time or a hard time or irritation or frustration or sadness . . . I mean, the world is burning; of course I’m sad. But I can close my eyes and feel a root that goes all the way down into the ground of being, and it stabilizes me. And I think one of the most important things we get from this practice is stability of self. An equanimity, an undisturbedness beneath superficial disturbances. The ocean has lots of waves. Our everyday awareness and consciousness can be very roiled. But the deep ocean is very still. And if you can put an anchor down into that ocean, you’re going be very stable.”

In addition to being a Zen teacher, Jiko is also a nurse and a writer, but everything in which she’s engaged is connected, inevitably, to her Zen practice.

“Nothing is not connected. It’s like a gestalt. Zen is a way of being in the world; it is a way of seeing the world and being in the world. It’s a way of interpreting things. I notice right now with what’s happening globally and politically that I’m conscious of having an equilibrium that many people do not have. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel enraged at times. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel a little anxiety about what my grandchildren will have to cope with. It doesn’t mean I don’t have emotional reactions. But I don’t feel knocked off my feet. I don’t feel unstable. And I do feel grateful. I’m very aware of the kind of privileges I have and the safety I have as a white, educated American citizen in a fairly peaceful part of the world. I’m aware of the tremendous good luck and privilege of that. So Zen is never not talking to me, reminding me – as my teacher would say – to look up.”

“What is zazen?”

“It is a matter of simply being as present and aware of what’s happening in this moment as possible. So it’s what’s happening in your body and what’s happening in your mind and what’s happening in the room, and not chasing any of it or judging any of it or grasping on to any of it or pushing any of it away. It’s a matter of cultivating this deep presence and attention without valuing parts of it. We do a lot of pushing away and grabbing onto, and they’re both clinging. They’re both attachment. This is fundamental Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths. So zazen is a way of cultivating a space in which everything can arise and fall, including myself, without entanglement.”

As the time we have available begins to draw to an end, we talk about changes which have taken place at Dharma Rain since she first found the Oregon Priory in the yellow pages of the phonebook.

“When I first came there was one teacher, and three people would come to sit, and we would listen to a recording of a Dharma talk by somebody else. Last Sunday there were sixty-five people in the zendo. We have a flourishing children’s program. We have a pre-school – a Montessori pre-school – on campus and a pretty strong family practice. So it’s a thriving community, and post-pandemic – to our surprise – we’re seeing a lot of younger people. People just like me in their early 20’s, lots of questions, really wondering what to do and seeking a way forward. So I feel a lot of gratitude for the yellow pages.”

After having a chance to see this profile online, Jiko sent me an email in which she wrote:

“So what is really missing for me is enlightenment. For you, too, I think! I really avoided that! When you ask, what is the function of Zen? My answer is about zazen, which is avoiding the question. Like any good Zen teacher would! Let me just say this: There are not enough words, no adequate words, to explain awakening. We don’t wake up to language, we wake up to reality. It happens in an indefinable moment, the iris opens, we can see the whole of it. Then the iris closes, and we are forever changed. Zazen is an opportunity to visit a space without judgment or separation. A space where dualism can disappear. Most of the time, we are just cultivating the ability to be present and aware. Plowing the ground and planting the seeds. Good Zen requires this effort, as well as character development – moral development – and then we open our hands and let go. Awakening is our birthright and sooner or later, each of us will find the way. I deeply believe in this promise.”