Deep Streams Zen, Los Angeles, California

“I first encountered something like Buddhism when I was a freshman at CCNY,” Joseph Bobrow tells me. “I took a psychopathology lecture class with this dynamic teacher who was very Freudian but very open-minded, so I decided to take another class from him, a survey course on contemporary psychotherapy treatment. And as one of the reading options there was a book called The First and Last Freedom by Krishnamurti, and I read it, and I just came alive.”

While still a child in the first decade of the 20^th century, Jiddu Krishnamurti had been discovered by members of the Theosophical Society who believed him to be the reincarnation of the Buddha and trained him to be the next World Teacher. By the time he was 34, Krishnamurti denied these claims, although he did continue to teach, drawing crowds around the world. Among his various accomplishments, he co-founded the Happy Valley School in Ojai, California.

Like the majority of the books attributed to Krishnmurti, The First and Last Freedom is edited from talks he gave and discussions with attendees. It emphasized the importance of not identifying with belief systems, whether spiritual or political, but, instead, maintaining an unclouded mind – what he called “choiceless awareness” or what might be considered Mindfulness now – which allows one to perceive things as they are rather than as one is taught or conditioned to believe they are.

Joe tells me, “It was like it was written for me.” As it happened, he hadn’t grown up in a household that held tightly to a religious belief system. “The family religion was that religion was the opiate of the people.”

After CCNY, Joe went to France. “I was a bit of a Francophile. I liked the French language, and I wanted to go to France. So my step-father got me a job in France using my French, which turned out was terrible and not up to speed. So I spent that summer learning more French and met a woman I was very attracted to. I was dead set on having a relationship with her and leaving my home. So I went back to New York and did another semester at City College and arranged things to be able to study in France and get credit for it toward my BA, which I did. I spent three-and-a-half years in France. And when we broke up, I decided to get some therapy, and I couldn’t find someone in Paris for some reason, but I went to England and found someone associated with Ronnie Laing.”

R. D. Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist whose book, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, was popular with young psychedelic users in the 1960s. “This therapist was a poet and I think had a spiritual side to him at least at that time. And he told me a Zen story from a D. T. Suzuki book, and I was captivated by it. I think the reason he told it to me was ’cause I had seen a Japanese movie, a Kurosawa movie, and I was struck by how different it was from American movies, and I said I couldn’t put my finger on the difference. I said, ‘Well, it’s just that he has a different sense of time and space.’ And he said, ‘Yeah. Maybe “no time,” “no space.”’ And that was another one of those moments from non-Buddhist therapists who have actually said some very Buddhist things even though none of them have been Buddhists. So that got me going on a walkabout to North Africa before I returned to the States. A month in the desert; a month on the seashore. And in the desert I had some interesting experiences. I didn’t know it at the time but that would lead me to Zen practice, because my next stop was Hawaii where my sister was living. And down the road from where she lived was the Maui Zendo. So I went there and saw this man who was gardening. Asked him what they did here; I’d heard it was a meditation center, and he talked to me about it in an easy-going matter-of-fact way. So I decided to go on Saturday for a sitting, and there he was dressed in all the Buddhist finery and leading the chanting and the walking and so on. And eventually I became his student.”

The gardener was Robert Aitken, recognized by some as the earliest North American Zen “ancestor.”

When I ask Joe when Aitken was like, he tells me a story:

“So I guess this is 1972, and at that time he was writing a series of talks on beginning Zen practice, which would later become Taking the Path of Zen. So he would invite all new residents – people who had moved in – to come to his study. This was a house, and it had like a walkway out in the back, and off of the walkway was Anne’s office – his wife – and his study. And so he’d invite students there, and he’d read them his latest chapter. And I remember the first time that I got there, I was dressed in cut-off jeans and a tank-top, and I had walked from my sister’s place which was about a mile. And this was Hawaii, so it’s hot and moist and so on. And I get in there, and he said, ‘Next time, why don’t you wear pants and a shirt that covers your shoulders and – you know – have the clothes be clean.’ I thought that was a bit of an imposition. So I said, ‘But I thought that all beings by nature are Buddha.’ As if to say, ‘Why do I need to dress up?’ So he thought long and hard – he was kind of green at that time – but what he said stuck with me. He said, ‘Sometimes, disorganized outside, disorganized inside.’ And I thought to myself – later, you know – little did he know just what a chaotic mess it was inside.”

“Why did you stay there? At the zendo?” I ask.

“It was the sense of community. I was kind of a lost boy, having had a father who had left when I was a baby. Yeah, I was looking for – in retrospect – a father and steadying and a practice to help me with my mind, and a path. So it provided all of those things. It was a lay center, which was good, so there wasn’t a dichotomy between priests and laymen. There was a kind of a radical equality. And Bob – as we called him in the day – and his wife, Anne, were like surrogate parents to all of the students. So having a sense of meaning, having the opportunity to work, to edit our newsletter, to cook, to have a kind of a holding environment, what Erik Erikson called a kind of ‘moratorium’ between youth and adulthood was very important. All of it. And practice was difficult. I had injured my hip, so I sat on a bench or a chair and the practice was painful, more painful than it would normally be. But I appreciated dokusan. I appreciated the give-and-take which is very frequent in our tradition. I thought I could duplicate the experience I had had in Morocco, and I’d be sort of ahead of the game. But it didn’t work like that at all. I had had a real experience, but we started from the beginning, and I realized how much I had yet to let go of and growth I had to make. But there was something in the practice itself as well as the setting and the sense of community and it being sort of an occupational therapy center for a number of us, like – what do they call the places when you get out of a hospital? – like a halfway house. It was sort of a halfway house. There was something about the practice – both zazen and koan practice – which I took to. Roshi was also politically very progressive. I don’t know if he was ever a card-carrying communist, but he was a card-carrying anarchist in the true meaning of that word, and that sat well with me. We talked the same language. And he had a little bit of psychological awareness. He knew how wounded he was psychologically. He was maybe the first Zen master to write about Zen and psychotherapy. So he knew it was an up and coming thing. And even though I was not a therapist yet, I had those inclinations, so I think that also made me feel at home.”

I ask about the Morocco experience.

“Well, I was staying in a little town just inside the Sahara Desert, a little oasis town, practising yoga, cooking, doing a little bit of writing. And I liked the nights. The days were hot; the nights were cold, and I’d walk out, walk along the dunes. And here I went to the top of this dune and was sitting there, and the stars in the desert feel like they’re right in your face, and the light was just throbbing. I had an experience of . . . Difficult to put into words. But an experience of gratitude and openness and connectedness with the vastness of the universe – let’s put it that way – with the dunes and the stars and everything included.”

“And your parents – whose religion was that religion was the opiate of the people – how did they react to you getting involved with Buddhists?”

“Well, I didn’t grow up with my biological father and didn’t see him until I met him years later. So he wasn’t critical. But at one point, I went to live at a school nearby the zendo that the zendo was sponsoring and I took over that school. It was an old Mormon church which had been converted. I assumed the reins. And after I met my father in California, he came to stay with me briefly at the school.”

“When you say you took it over, do you mean as a school or a residence?”

“I became the school director. I’d always wanted to start my own school. It wasn’t a Zen school, but it was sponsored by the zendo. It’s actually an interesting story of how I brought the two together in my mind. So my father didn’t say much about it. He’d poke fun at my healthy food habits, but he never directly commented on Buddhism. My mother only minded it because I hadn’t returned to New York after the family reunion that had brought me to Maui. But she visited Maui often, and one time she asked to come up and have lunch. So she had a silent lunch, and this lady who is not open in a Zen kind of way, she later said it was the most relaxing time she had ever spent. She really enjoyed the silence. So she was understanding – let’s put it that way – of my interest in Zen.”

I ask Joe if he worked any teachers other than Robert Aitken.

“Primarily Aitken Roshi, but in the early days Yamada Koun Roshi – who was was Roshi Aitken’s teacher – would come to Maui, and he was a very special teacher. So he was also a teacher of mine. And then after about ten years with Aitken Roshi, I met Thich Nhat Hanh at a workshop at Tassajara – actually accompanying Roshi there – and I spent two long summers in Plum Village before it got crowded and had the benefit of being close to Thich Nhat Hanh, translating some of his work. And I have to say that really impacted me in my practice and in my teaching in a really good way. I did stay in Hawaii and finished formal studies with Aitken Roshi and actually came back to the mainland, gradually began to teach as an apprentice and then – you know – in 1997 received Dharma transmission.”

“What’s the purpose of Zen. What’s its function?”

“Yeah.” He pauses a moment, and then says, “It’s to brush your teeth and change your undies.”

I may have sighed. “It’s hard to get a straight answer to that question. I think I’m gonna stop asking it. A cousin comes to visit you. You’re her favourite cousin, but she’s just a little concerned that you’ve gone off the deep end. And she asks, ‘Joe, what’s this all about?’ You probably don’t tell her it’s about changing her underwear.”

“Well, one thing I could say is – you know – Tibetan Buddhism has become very popular in the West. And when it was overtaking Zen in its popularity, someone asked me why I didn’t study Tibetan Buddhism. I said, ‘I realize now that one of the things that drew me to Zen practice was that I had a very busy mind.’ And so it really is a delight to not be in the grips of a very busy mind. Not to be caught up in thinking.”

“Why would that be a good thing?”

“Feels good. Yeah. Sort of very open to the world, open to nature. Calmer. Less self-absorbed, self-preoccupied. More open to the world and its joys and sorrows. And it allows you to develop a focus through which you can understand existence a bit more directly, more deeply.”

“Is that why people come to you as a teacher, because they have busy minds?”

“A lot of people do.”

“Do they ever come because they’re motivated by a desire for awakening?”

“Not as often as in the old days. We were a unique crop, that Age of Aquarius. I think some people do. And some people come for one reason, and then they get the passion, and then they see what else is possible, and they may want to go deeper. At this iteration, in my teaching in Los Angeles, there are few people who have that motivation like we did back in the day. That was a unique period of time, and I don’t think it’s been duplicated.”

One of the things that motivated me to interview Joe was the Coming Home Project he founded to help veterans, their families and care providers “alleviate the psychological, relational, and spiritual injuries of war.” He tells me the idea first came to him while he was walking along a beach with his mother.

“First of all, 9/11 had a great impact on me. I had a dread that we would go to war. And we would not use it, and use our moral capital from it, in a constructive way. That we would not build true strength, which is found in alliances and is found in collaboration with other countries. And I was afraid that we wouldn’t see it as simply a police operation to find a bad guy and bring him to justice, and, in doing that, enlist a lot of cooperation with other countries who were very well-inclined towards us. We’d just go off to war, and gradually I could see that happening. And a number of us – a number of spiritual teachers – would demonstrate along with the large demonstrations that happened all around the world before we invaded Iraq. And I saw they weren’t doing anything – all these demonstrations – and they wouldn’t do anything because we were dead set on going to war and I felt very frustrated. Grieved and aggrieved. And the other thing that was happening was that the veterans were coming back, and the suicide rate was astronomical; they weren’t getting the help they needed. The families weren’t even addressed at all. And I thought one day – and the first person I told was my mother while we were walking along the beach – I thought one day, ‘Hold it a second! What’s needed is for them to have a place to come, to heal. They need a kind of retreat.’ And I told my mother, ‘I know about retreats.’ First of all, I lived at Plum Village which originally was a retreat, a community for traumatized Vietnamese people led by Thich Nhat Hanh. I’d led many, many sesshin. And I had also done a number of interdisciplinary retreats about psychology and Zen with large numbers of people. So, why not me? And so I developed a retreat format and got to work and got a couple of people to help me, and put some money down of my own. We got a couple of $5000 grants, and we had our first retreat in 2008. About forty people from all around the country. Family members and veterans. And a psychologist who had done some work for the Navy told me, he said, ‘If you ace this, they are going to be banging on your door, and you’re gonna have a problem. You’re gonna have to beat them away. And if you fail it, no one will ever come. Word will get out immediately.’ And we apparently aced it. And by the second or third retreat, we had upwards of a hundred people coming from all around the country. And then we got a grant for almost $2,000,000 so we could do some serious damage. So that’s how it began.”

“Is it a Zen program or a psychological program? Or a combination of the two?”

“What I said was, ‘It’s therapeutic, but it’s not therapy.’ And it has nothing to do with religion, with organized religion. Almost all the people who came to our retreats came because it had nothing to do with organized religion and it wasn’t therapy. They didn’t want to get their heads shrunk. But it was obviously informed by what I learned about safe settings and what makes people feel safe to open up to process their trauma. It was informed by my Zen practice. Not only in that we had wellness practices including meditation, but by my understanding that of the Three Jewels the most neglected and maybe the most powerful one is the sangha. I started out saying ‘unconditional acceptance, unconditional welcome,’ and finally I realized that this is unconditional love that we were providing in a setting which accepted people where they were, no matter what they’d done or countenanced. And included their whole family. They didn’t know that I was a Zen master, that I was a psychoanalyst.”

“Do you still take Zen students?”

“Yes.”

“This is the Deep Streams sangha?”

“Deep Streams Zen Institute.”

“Oh? Why ‘institute’?”

“I called it an institute because beginning in 2000 we got non-profit status, and I wanted to be able to apply for grants for a whole variety of programs. Eventually Coming Home Project. I didn’t know I was going to do Coming Home Project in 2000, but I knew I was going to do a series of interdisciplinary programs on Zen and different elements in psychology. And I did. We did maybe fifteen programs, two of them big retreats on Zen, psychology, what’s called Interpersonal Neurobiology. Stuff like that. I was developing a conversation basically, taking Zen out of the priestly realm and into the cultural commons with other healing traditions. It was a conversation about similarities, differences, and so on. So that’s why I called it an institute in the beginning.”

“Do you still meet in person or are you one of the groups that moved online after the pandemic?”

“We moved online, but we occasionally have in-person retreats and social get-togethers. Sangha get-togethers.”

“Any crossovers? People who come to you as a therapist and do Zen?”

“No crossovers. I’m very clear about that. We start one way, we stay that way. If you want a Zen teacher once you’re in therapy with me, I’ll refer you to a Zen teacher. I think it’s very important to keep them separate. I know there are people who don’t, and I think it leads to problems.”

“What is it that you hope for for the people who come to you to take up Zen?”

“Hope for them? I don’t do too much hoping for my students. I just take them where they are, work with what they present to me, and try to stay true to their motivation. Sometimes I will invite them, through things that I say, to consider things at a deeper level. Some work on koans. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re accessing a deeper level.”

“Yeah, you can learn how to answer them – get the formula right – without really getting anything from them.”

“Unfortunately, that happens too often. I still use koans, I still value koans, but I agree with you. And so it’s a tricky thing. And there are some people who have their own kind of opening without ever using koans. I’ve seen this happen with several students of mine. Where just-sitting, for example, doesn’t become just a technique, but it becomes just-sitting! Just like just-walking. Just like just-swimming. Just like just-dying. And it’s kind of remarkable that they didn’t work with a koan. So I hope they find some measure of peace in this life. I hope they become intimate with something vaster than yet including themselves.”

“So you do have something you hope for them. Let me flip it. What do your students hope from you?”

“I don’t know what they’re hoping from me. I listen to what they’re hoping for from Zen practice.”

“Fair enough. What are they hoping for from Zen practice?”

“It varies. There’s the one lady who hopes for reduction in her medical symptoms. Someone working on chronic anger that makes them sick, that’s threatening their marriage. Some working on overwhelming emotions. Some working on understanding themselves better.”

“And what do they see your role in all this? Are you a priest, a minister; a cheap therapist they don’t have to pay by the hour; a coach?”

“I’m none of those with my Zen students. I’m a Zen teacher, and they learn what that is over time. If somebody wants to become my student – not everybody in the sangha is my student – but if someone wants to become my student, then they need to practice on a regular basis, come to all our retreats, invest in our relationship, and clarify their motivations such that it is to put themselves in accord with the Buddha Way or” – he smiles and chuckles gently – “learn why Bodhidharma came from the west. They need to fulfill those conditions to be a student. And we meet regularly. There are a fair number of other people – I think maybe half the people; sometimes more – who come and they see me as their teacher, hear my talks, attend dokusan. We each learn from the other, our interactions, who we are as people. How I interact with them. How I face challenging issues. How I respond to their questions. So they get a sense of who I am. And how we work together. They seem to get something out of coming around. But the main thing is we’re investing in each other. I’m investing in their spiritual well-being, and they’re investing and trusting me as their teacher. It’s up to me to live up to that trust.”

When our time is drawing to a close, I ask if there were anything he’d like to talk about that we hadn’t covered.

“Only maybe the school that I started in Hawaii as part of my Zen practice. At that time I had already worked with kids for many years. So I started this school with a couple of other zendo residents. And I wondered what would be Zen about it? Because I didn’t want to have it be a Zen school, but I wanted it to be Zen infused, Zen informed. And what I realized then was that there were a few words that all began with ‘C.’ One was ‘creativity.’ Another was ‘compassion’ and ‘consideration.’ And another was ‘courage.’ The courage of your convictions and to have a voice. And I thought we infused that school with those qualities. And the kids loved the school. They just loved it. The other thing that I would do was do Zen-like kinds of things with them. Like, before we’d have lunch, I’d say, ‘Let’s all be as quiet as we can and see how many sounds we can hear, and later we’ll talk about who heard the most.’ And now I’m starting to work with one student on the koan, ‘Who hears the sound? Who is the master hearing that sound?’ Or just, ‘Who hears?’ So I didn’t know that koan at that time – we weren’t using it in our lineage at that time – but the kids loved it. It was the only time of day when there was actually quiet in the room. As you can imagine, a bunch of toddlers and nursery-school aged kids. And so that was a blessing. That was a beautiful time, that school. And it set the stage about how I thought about some of these interdisciplinary educational programs, and some of the healing programs which were interdisciplinary as well.”

“Isn’t that how the Aitkens met, at a Krishnamurti School?”

“It was.”

“Did they have any input into what you were doing?”

“None. But they loved it. They were very supportive of it. And, yeah, Anne was the Assistant Director at Happy Valley School, and Roshi was a teacher, and that’s where they met. And it’s very interesting that Krishnamurti – independent of Roshi – had been my first inspiration along the path.”

Conversations with Genjo Marinello Roshi

In 2015, I had the good fortune to spend a few days at Chobo-ji, the Rinzai Temple in Seattle. Each morning I was there, I joined the community for zazen at 5:30. There were usually about a dozen people in attendance, with perhaps twice as many zabutons. First a ritual cup of tea was shared (salted plum, which must be an acquired taste; I wasn’t there long enough to acquire it), then chants in Japanese, followed by two rounds of 25-minute sitting with a brief stretch break in between. Afterwards the abbot, Genjo Marinello Roshi, still wearing his elegant robes and a snap-brim cap, led the group outside and half-a-block down an alleyway to a local coffee shop. A table was already set up and waiting. Two of the residents from the temple were also in robes, and none of the patrons raised an eyebrow. Clearly Chobo-ji was well integrated into the neighborhood. Because it was Seattle, everyone ordered coffee. “Some people do order tea,” Genjo confided to me, “but we feel sorry for them.”

Genjo Roshi is the second abbot at Chobo-ji. The first – and founding – abbot was Genki Takabayashi, a Japanese-born Rinzai teacher recruited to Seattle by Dr. Glenn Webb in 1978.

“I came to Seattle as a VISTA volunteer and a community organizer, trained, I understand, by the same Jesuit priest who trained Obama,” Genjo tells me. “Anyway, when I came here I looked for a Zen group.” Genjo had studied briefly with Daizen Victoria while a student at UCLA. “And there was only one Zen group in Seattle, and it was the Seattle Zen Center run by Dr. Glenn Webb who had spent a dozen years in Japan studying Japanese woodblock paintings and pictures and had become quite a scholar in that form and had been introduced to Zen because some of the Roshis where he went to go look at the prints said he wouldn’t be able to see them properly unless he meditated. So that’s how Dr. Glenn Webb got into Zen.”

“Did he accept that that was the case later in life? That meditation was necessary in order to appreciate the artwork?

“Actually, I think he did. So, he came back and started the Seattle Zen Center in the early ’70s. I came in 1976, and I did my first sesshin with Hirano Osho-san, the Soto Zen priest who came directly from Eiheiji. That was in the summer of 1977.”

Genjo points out, “It is my understanding that Glenn did receive transmission, but I never saw him dressed in the robes, and he wasn’t really playing the role of a priest or a Roshi; he was more an art history professor who had a Zen group. He was also a tea master. He had more than enough to do as a tea master and an art history professor and a part-time leader of a Zen group, so he was looking for someone to come from Japan that he might recruit to lead the group.”

While studying at Daishu-in in Kyoto, Webb met Takabayashi who had been expelled from his original temple and was at Daishu-in at the sufferance of the abbot, Soko Morinaga. Takabayashi had been an orphan placed in a temple to be raised as a priest. It was not a way of life he would probably have chosen otherwise, and – in a letter to Kobutsu Malone – Webb suggested that Takabayashi may have grown up “somewhat resentful at his fate. Apparently, when he was around 18 his teacher (his adopted father, Gempo Roshi) sent him to the grand priest-training-hall (sodo) of Daitoku-ji.

“As Morinaga put it to me,” Webb wrote, “on those occasions when he could go out on the town, Genki was a womanizer and pub-crawler. He got one woman from the neighborhood pregnant, she refused to abort the child, and Genki refused to marry her, thereby bringing shame to her family and to the temple. So he was kicked out of Daitoku-ji. As a favor to a friend, Morinaga Roshi took him in. But he made Genki’s life hell: when I met him at Daishu-in he was low man on the totem pole, relegated to menial tasks and never allowed to engage in anything important. He showed no remorse for his sexual misconduct, but he seemed determined to go as far in his training as he could. He was a kind of Zen fundamentalist regarding his sitting and his adherence to the tiniest detail of Rinzai Daitoku-ji liturgy.”

As unlikely a candidate as Takabayashi was, Webb invited him to Seattle even though Morinaga was not in favor of the move.

“I was at the airport when Genki Takabayashi arrived in 1978,” Genjo tells me, “and ended up doing sort of a twenty-year apprenticeship with him as his senior student.”

I ask what Genki Roshi was like, and Genjo speaks of him fondly, although he begins by noting that although Takabayashi was a modest man when he first arrived, he quickly came to relish the reverence with which he was treated as a Japanese Zen Master in America.

Elsewhere, Genjo wrote that Takabayashi “taught students how to make every moment a learning, and how to never give up despite inner and outer conditions.”

“How did you personally come be ordained?” I asked.

“The Dalai Lama came and gave a talk at the University of Washington on the Four Noble Truths, and I was sort of blown over by the Dalai Lama and how he handled hecklers who were critical of his association with Tibet and thought that he was somehow a traitor to China. They were protesting on the UW campus, and I just saw him with great aplomb deal with the detractors, and I thought, ‘This guy’s really got something. And I already have a Zen priest here in Seattle.’ So after that talk, I went to Genki Roshi, and I said, ‘All right. Whatever it takes. This is now my path.’ I was at a breaking point with VISTA. I could either go back to school to study public health with my psycho-biology degree, or I was going to take the path of Buddhism. After the Dalai Lama came, I was bowled over enough that I said, ‘All right, I’ll go to Japan. I’ll do whatever’s necessary. I want to become a Zen priest.’”

Genjo was 25 at the time, and Genki insisted that he spend a year demonstrating his sincerity before ordaining him in October of 1980.

As part of Genjo’s training, Genki arranged for him to spend time in Japan.

“So, I went to Japan, at Genki Roshi’s instruction, to Ryutakuji, which is a little temple outside Mishima and was Torei Zenji’s temple, direct Dharma descendent of Hakuin. Hakuin and Torei founded this temple, a little teeny temple where Eido Shimano Roshi trained and where Genki Takabayashi’s Dharma brother, Sochu Suzuki, was the current abbot. So that’s where I got sent, which was in September of 1981. And I stayed there until February of 1982. A very brief period. But a winter in a Zen temple in Japan was to be remembered.”

“Did it differ at all from your expectations?”

“Well, I thought people would want to be training there, and in general people were training there because that was their lot in life. And they couldn’t at all understand that I came there voluntarily to train because no one would do that. That was incomprehensible, truly incomprehensible. So I settled on saying that I had been sent there, and they could understand that. But if I tried to say I wanted to train in Zen, they would just shake their head. ‘No. That can’t be the reason.’ So that was interesting. And then, of course, it was a very martial style. I remember one time sweeping a gravel path outdoors with a whisk – a bamboo broom – and whistling a little, just a little bit, and being told, ‘No! No, you can’t whistle! This is a Zen temple!’ And you couldn’t do anything right. There was a rule that for six months it didn’t matter who told you what to do, when you did it, it was wrong. And if you did it to someone’s satisfaction, someone else would come by and un-do it and say, ‘No. That was wrong. It has to be done this way.’ And whoever was closest to you – because everyone was more senior to you – was correct. So you just had to learn – through sort of an ego-annihilation – that you could not do anything right. So I thought all that was terribly unnecessary and unkind, but I put up with it.”

Genjo smiles easily and often as he speaks. “I came back from Japan very arrogant and thinking that I must be some kind of top shit because I got through this boot camp of Zen and I must know something special. And I had actually had a few breakthroughs there that made Sochu Roshi happy. That’s all. It had gone to my head. I must’ve been a pill when I came back, and people didn’t like me. I was much too, ‘This is the way it has to be done, and there’s no other way to do it. And this is country-bumpkin Zen, and I’m going to straighten this out.’ That didn’t go over very well. Eventually I calmed down.”

Not long after Genjo’s return to Seattle, Genki and Glenn Webb had a falling out.

“It’s hard to say exactly over what. It was sort of like too many cooks in the kitchen. And so they just went their separate ways. There were some hard feelings about that in the group, and the group split. It was sort of a schism. Anyway, it split, and I went with Genki Roshi. But I never lost my association with Dr. Glenn Webb, and I still have it.”

Webb’s group was still called the Seattle Zen Center, while the members who went with Takabayashi formed Dai Bai Zan Cho Bo Zen Ji which translates as “Listening to the Dharma Zen Temple on Great Plum Mountain.”

Takabayashi wanted to complete Genjo’s training, but he himself didn’t have the necessary experience to oversee it.

“Genki Roshi suggested I go train with Sochu Roshi, his ordination brother in Japan. And he wanted me to go back to Japan for the Osho ceremony, and that was being arranged when Sochu Roshi died.” Takabayashi conducted the Osho ceremony instead but then advised Genjo to work with Joshu Sasaki Roshi of Rinzai-ji in Los Angeles.

“I think I did about twelve sesshins at Bodhi Manda, their retreat center in New Mexico. Something like that. And Sasaki Roshi came to Seattle once and did a sesshin with us, and that was a big deal. We were all thrilled. I had already gone down to Bodhi Manda. Genki Roshi had been going down to Bodhi Manda; he has also been going down to Mount Baldy, another retreat center in the San Gabriel Mountains. And Sasaki Roshi wanted Genki Roshi to become the abbot of Rinzai-ji in East Los Angeles, wanted Genki Roshi to move down to LA, and Genki Roshi wanted to bring me as his attendant. So we were all going to be inside the Joshu Sasaki Roshi camp there for a while. And Sasaki Roshi had heard me translate Genki Roshi’s teishos.”

“You’d learned Japanese by now?”

He raises his hand, counselling me to be patient.

“No. I’d learned much more pidgin Japanese. We had what was called Temple Language which was a mix of pidgin English and Japanese. If you were sitting in the audience, you would just think this was gibberish, but Joshu Sasaki understood it perfectly because he had a pretty good command of English and also of course a clear command of Japanese. So he thought, ‘Well, Genjo must know Japanese because of these beautiful translations he’s doing for Genki Roshi.’ Then he said, ‘This is your temple, while I’m here please be the translator for me.’ And I said, ‘But I don’t speak Japanese!’ And he said, ‘What are you talking about?’”

Takabayashi was tempted by Sasaki’s invitation to move to Los Angeles, but then the reality of East LA became daunting.

“Genki Roshi was looking over the center at Rinzai-ji in East LA, and he was hearing gunshots just about all the time. And he was thinking, ‘This is not for me. I’ve got a beautiful family and sangha in Seattle. I’m not moving down to East LA.’ And that’s when the relationship between Joshu Sasaki and Genki Roshi began to crumble because Joshu Sasaki was very insistent that Genki Roshi move and that I move with him, and we were taking too long to make that decision.”

When the relationship with Sasaki dissolved, Genki turned to Eido Shimano Roshi at Dai Bosatsu in the Catskills.

“Genki Roshi went there first after things fell apart with Sasaki Roshi. This was around 1995 or ’94, I think. Genki Roshi knew that his English was not sufficient to take me through the koan studies at the level he wanted me to go through, so he was shopping around for me. That’s why he was going down to Joshu Sasaki Roshi and then he was going to Eido Shimano Roshi because these were two Japanese men he knew of and respected, and he wanted me to do sort of a Zen finishing school. So he was trying to sell me to them, saying, ‘I’ve really got somebody I’m developing here in Seattle, but I can’t take him all the way. I don’t have the authority, nor do I have the English skills. Would you please take my chief disciple and finish him up?’ He was still trying to keep a connection to Japan through the sanctioned teachers here in the United States, so I ended up working with Eido Shimano Roshi for about fifteen years, 1995 to 2010.”

“Did you move to Dai Bosatsu?”

“No. But I spent about ten days twice a year there. Just for sesshin.”

“At the same time continuing in Seattle?”

“Yes. I became an osho in 1990. And then I got installed as the second abbot.”

“And when did you assume full responsibilities as abbot?”

“One day Genki Roshi just announced to the community, ‘Go see Genjo in dokusan.’” He chuckles. “That was as much of a ceremony as I got.” In fact, Genjo was formally installed as abbot on January 10, 1999. And in 2008, he was named a Dharma heir by Eido Roshi in New York.

After his retirement, Genki Takabayashi moved with his wife back to her home state of Montana. He started a small Zen community there, but it didn’t last, and he spent his time – as his biography on the Chobo Ji web site states – doing “the activities he loved best, gardening, pottery, calligraphy, writing and cooking.”

Genki Takabayashi died on February 24th, 2013.

In a memorial posted by the Northwest Dharma Association, Genjo Roshi wrote of him:

Over the course of my long association with him, I learned three profound lessons.

The first thing Genki showed me about the human condition is that it is possible to transcend our likes and dislikes, preferences and opinions.

During the 1980 summer sesshin with him, which was held at Dry Falls State Park outside Coulee City, Washington, the temperatures were in the 90s and the meditation hall was full of mosquitoes and flies. In addition, Mount St. Helens had a secondary eruption, flooding the air with gritty ash.

To say that our meditation periods were hellish was not an understatement. During this retreat, students would twice daily visit Genki Roshi in the dokusan room, where dharma interviews were conducted. It was a small room with little ventilation, and we all concluded some animal had died and was rotting somewhere under the floorboards.

Despite all this, in the meditation hall and dokusan room Genki sat serenely and unmoving in the full lotus position, with a beneficent countenance, seemingly impervious to adversity.

The next year the autumn sesshin was held on the Seattle Zen Center’s newly acquired property at about 5,000 feet, on the crest of a ridge between the small cities of Cle Elum and Ellensburg, Washington.

Snow started falling during the retreat and our newly built meditation hall was still without windows. During one interview period I was waiting in line to visit Genki Roshi, and snow was coming through the vacant window and piling up on the frame of my eyeglasses. When I opened the flap of the outdoor camping tent that was serving as the dokusan room, I could hear the crackle of ice snapping.

In front of me Genki was once again sitting serenely in full lotus, surrounded by icicles hanging from the walls of the tent. When I left the next month to train at Ryutaku-Ji, an affiliate monastery in Japan, these images of Genki Roshi sitting untroubled by conditions and circumstances allowed me to face the uncertainty and trials of such a journey with a measure of equanimity, and I am forever grateful.

The second gift I received from Genki Roshi was the opportunity to soak up his actualization that an “enlightened” life is an “ordinary” life. In everything he approached, he demonstrated that living life fully with “everyday openhearted activity” was paramount.

No matter if it was sitting zazen, cooking, calligraphy, gardening, landscaping, cleaning, pottery, giving teisho, making a bowl of whisked green tea, or writing fiction, Genki was fully present to the activity at hand, operating with joy, unending enthusiasm and energy. He taught us that samu (work meditation) was more important to our training than zazen, sutra recitation or koan study.

The third lesson learned, the hardest to accept and perhaps the most important, is that all of us are fully human. That is to say that though Genki amply demonstrated that we can be and are all vessels of the Dharma, we are also limited, and from time to time stubbornly primitive. There will always be tension between our base instincts and true insight.

When Genki left Japan he abandoned a relationship and a child. He never understood credit or money well, and often found himself in debt. Early on during his time in Seattle we had to warn female participants that there was a good chance he would make a pass at them.

We are all a blend of Buddha and bumpkin; with all the training in the world we will never arrive. In other words, from wherever we are we are always just beginning. I often tell the story of how at least once a year Genki would give a teisho where he would exclaim, “I now just beginning to understand, just now beginning to see.”

Everyone has limitations and shortcomings that arise from wounds in our history. There are three options for dealing with them. One is to do the very difficult work of combusting, digesting, and integrating these wounds. Second is to contain them so that they don’t cause harm to others. Third is to skip over them with spiritual bypassing, which can be easily done, but usually comes back to haunt us. Like most of us, Genki made use of all three.

Genki Roshi proved time and again that he could be an inspirational catalyst for those training with him. He probed and prompted us to investigate and experience the depth of our true nature, a bottomless vastness without form that gives rise to everything. He taught mainly by example how to live fully and passionately, with an attentive caring attitude, beyond any attachment to rank, position, preference, or opinion. He became a surrogate father to me, and I will be forever grateful for his continued presence in my life. May the flower of his inspiration continue to bloom for generations to come.

Cypress Trees in the Garden: 83-97, 111-12, 113, 115, 247-49

The Story of Zen: 5-9, 337, 407-08

Zen Conversations: 102-03; 143

Day Star Zendo – Wrentham, Massachusetts

Cynthia Taberner helped to arrange my 2016 visit to Father Kevin Hunt’s Day Star Zendo in Wrentham, Massachusetts. The day I spent there became the basis of one the chapters of Catholicism and Zen. Kevin – who is a Trappist monk as well as a Zen master – has now retired from teaching. Roshi Cindy, as she is called, is his successor; however, she is preparing to pass that responsibility onto others because she has pancreatic cancer.

“I’m on chemo, but it can stop working at any point. I was misdiagnosed with vasculitis, so the cancer is now in the arteries, and there is no way to survive it. I could be around for a couple of years or in a few months I could take a downturn. So I’m trying to make the new teachers as independent as possible and have the sangha go on because it’s a wonderful group of people. It’s a very eclectic group of people. We have Catholic nuns. We have an Episcopalian priest. We have people who are Jewish; we have people who are agnostic.”

I ask Cindy if she still self-identifies as Catholic.

 “I’m going say I’m Christian. I was raised Catholic. I’ve never been a theologian. I’ve been more into the mystical since I was a kid. So I will have a Catholic mass, but I will ask that some chants be done as well.”

It takes me a moment to realize she is talking about her funeral. Her condition is that severe.

She was raised, she tells me, “one town down from Father Kevin. He was at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, and I was raised in Leicester. And so I used to go up to the abbey and just sit in their quiet church and contemplate for years before I knew he was there. So it was really interesting that he was there and I was able to meet him later.”

She was drawn to the quiet of the chapel as a refuge because her childhood homelife was “very rocky. My father was an alcoholic. It was in the family. He was very violent. It went from male to male to male to male. So a very rough childhood. So I think I was always a seeker because of that.”

“What were you seeking?”

“I was trying to make sense of it all. Even during my childhood, when they talked about a loving God, I wondered, ‘How could a loving God ever allow this?’ I was always wondering did I do something wrong? Did God hate me? What did I do wrong to deserve this? So you try to seek those answers.”

Eventually she lost her faith.

“There was a time when I did not believe in God at all. I think it was in my late teens, early twenties. I also had a genetic illness. It’s called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome; it’s a connective tissue disorder, a rare kind of genetic illness. So I was getting sicker and sicker and sicker. And between my childhood and then this illness, I thought, ‘There can’t be a God.’ But in 1982, I had a near-death experience, and, when I had that experience, I knew there was a God.

“I had an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured, and I bled out. I can only tell you what I sensed when it was happening to me. And it was such a sense of peace, such a sense of love, like I was wrapped in it; I was part of it. And I didn’t want to come back. I had a year-and-a-half-year-old child, and I remember thinking at the time, ‘She’ll be fine. I want to stay here.’ And when I did come back, I was so depressed that I didn’t stay where I was. And here I had this little baby. Right? So, then it changed me, and it was a gift. It was a gift that I had had that experience.”

She was introduced to meditation when her physician recommended that, in order to prepare to undergo a surgical procedure, she attend the Mindfulness-Based Stress-Reduction Clinic recently established by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts. One of the teachers was Elana Rosenbaum. “She was in the Vipassana tradition, and I worked with her every single week and sat and loved it. But then I wanted more, and I heard about this Zen group in the area, and I thought, ‘I’m going to try that.’”

She liked the Zen group, and she thought the teachers were fabulous. “So I was attending both Elana’s group, and I was also doing Zen. But they had a guest teacher there once. And he basically told me I couldn’t do Zen and Christianity at the same time. I asked, ‘Why? I’ve been doing it all this time. Why is that a problem?’ And I walked away from the temple. But then by chance I came upon an inter-religious dialogue on the computer. I don’t know how I found it, but all of a sudden I see Father Kevin Hunt at Spencer Abbey is on it. It’s really bizarre how that happened. So I sent an email and said, ‘Is it possible to speak with Father Hunt?’ And about a week later I got a response, and he said, ‘Yes, you can come up.’ So I went up. And I said, ‘Well, this was said to me, and I’m curious. Can I do both?’ And he said, ‘Well, what’s the problem?’”

The guest teacher who had told her Zen was incompatible with Christianity probably did so because he viewed them as belief systems. For Kevin, Cindy, and others who remain affiliated with non-Buddhist traditions, Zen is almost precisely the opposite of a belief system, it is a technique – an upaya – not a creed.

“That’s exactly it,” Cindy says. “We use it as a technique. But, you know, in all of Zen you get rid of everything. You even get rid of Catholicism or Christianity. You get rid of all the thoughts. You go down to nothing. To no thing, or ‘nothing.’ You get rid of all concepts. You do. But in my experience, in my Zen, we do have that as part of us because we were raised with that consciousness. Right? So I think of it as Christ-Consciousness. Zen is Buddha-Nature which I think of as the same as Christ-Consciousness. As I said, I’m not a theologian; so I don’t look for all the things that can contradict that. I think of it all as being the same.

“I’ll tell you of an experience I had while I was with that first Zen Center. We got up to do kinhin, and for a split second – just a split second – Christ was right beside me, and then he was inside me. So I was thinking nothing – right? – and then this happened. I explained it to the teachers, but they didn’t want to talk about that. And I talked about it to Kevin when I met him. I said, ‘This happened to me. And I don’t quite understand it.’ And I didn’t at the time. And he said, ‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake, that just means that Christ is one and the same as you. That’s it. He’s just telling you you’re one and the same.’ And it was like, ‘Oh! That’s right! It’s simply that.’ So it’s easy for me to put the two together. It’s easy for me to think of Zen and Christ-Consciousness and Buddha-Nature as one thing, and that Christ came to us to show us the way, just like Buddha came to us to show us the way. Christ had it in his consciousness already to show us, ‘This is the journey, folks. I want to show you a way.’ I could be wrong. I’m sure a lot of theologians would say, ‘No! No! That’s not true!’ But for me, it was easy to put the two together, and especially having Kevin as a teacher.”

“What is Zen?” I ask her.

“What is Zen? Zen is living in the moment. Living in this moment only. It’s a gift. For me, it’s living as One. You know that passage in the sutras, ‘Not two but one’? So I think of it as, we’re part of the mystery. We’re not separated from the mystery. And by living in the moment, we can see that we’re not separated from the mystery. We’re living that moment fully. Absolutely fully. And that allows us to live with an open heart and an open mind. If we don’t live in the moment, we’re living a dream life. Living a dream life. Living in the moment gives us the opportunity to really know who we are. Of course, you have to get through layers of junk first. I had to get through layers of childhood. Layers of things that happened to me – layers of stuff that were wounding to look at – to get to that wisdom where we’re united to that mystery. So we’re united in this mystery, and I don’t care what you call it. You can call it Christ-consciousness, you can call it universal energy, you can call it Buddha-Nature. I don’t care what you call it. We all share in this. But we have to live in the moment to realize it. That’s Zen to me. It’s not just sitting on the cushion. It’s getting up off that cushion and living each moment fully, fully aware. And saying yes to life, even though you don’t want to. So when this diagnosis came to me, I had to say ‘yes’ even though I didn’t want to. And so it’s not just saying yes to the happy, joyful things. It’s saying yes to everything and being fully present for it all.”

There is a line from the Third Patriarch’s Xinxin Ming which is referenced several times in the koans of The Blue Cliff Record: “The Great Way is without difficulty, it only dislikes picking and choosing.”

“Father Kevin and I have talked about this,” Cindy tells me. “In life we don’t have any control. There’s really no control. We think we’re in control until we know we’re not. And that’s part of that ‘picking and choosing.’ You don’t get to pick and choose what happens in this life. But what we do get to choose is being awake to it. And so we can shut our eyes and close our selves off; close our hearts off – our ‘heart-minds’ I want to say – or we can choose to stay open to whatever’s in this moment. I think that’s what that means. It’s staying open to whatever is there. And whatever is there is not always to our liking,” she adds with a chuckle.

“How does meditation work?” I ask. “If Zen is this receptivity to what’s happening right now, what does plunking oneself down on a cushion have to do with that?”

“And we just breathe. Right? So I call it breathing, letting go of everything. Talk about picking and choosing.” She shakes her head. “No. Just let it all go. All thoughts go away; everything goes away. And then I call it ‘being breathed.’ I always feel like I’m being breathed. Not that I am doing the breathing; I’m being breathed. And eventually even that goes away. And then you get this unity. And I can’t explain it to you. I can’t put it into words. I cannot put it into words. But there you feel whole. That’s where I feel most whole.”

“There are people who find it very difficult,” I point out. “I remember David Rynick in Worcester once telling me that when he started meditating he could only last about two minutes. He’d dutifully set his kitchen timer for two minutes and would just about be jumping out of his skin before it rang.”

Cindy laughs. “I could see that with David. So, to me, meditation is not for everyone. I suggest, sometimes, walking meditation for people. My sister loves nature. Nature, to my sister, is like sitting in zazen. When she goes out into nature, she gets the same sense. So meditation is notfor everyone. It’s not an easy practice. It’s a tough practice. Sometimes you don’t feel like sitting. When I first started sitting, I didn’t like it either. But nothing else was working for me so I needed to continue to sit, and I eventually was very, very, very grateful for it. But it took a lot of practice. And then you get these dry spells where all you’re doing is sitting there and maybe your mind is going crazy and maybe everything is happening, and you feel like, ‘God! I’ve been sitting for years, and this is still happening?’ It takes a lot of discipline. And perhaps some people don’t want it enough, or perhaps some people just can’t do it. And that’s okay. They’ll find their own way. You know, I very rarely go to mass – maybe I shouldn’t admit that – but I very rarely go to mass. But when I do, there’s a sense of comfort there. And I think it’s because in my childhood it’s what gave me some sanity, thinking there was something or someone watching over me. So maybe that’s what I need when I go to church.” She smiles and adds, “And there’s a Catholic priest that I’m friends with who’s into Dorothy Day, and he’s got this whole Dorothy Day center in Worcester, so I don’t go to your normal Catholic church.”

“You found a left-wing radical commie-pinko church,” I say with a laugh.

“You know what? I did. I did, and I love it.”

“What does a Zen teacher teach?”

She chuckles and then says, “Nothing” with a laugh.” (One day I’m going to learn not to ask that question any longer.)

“So it would be a waste of time for me to come to your group, huh?”

“We point the way. So I didn’t really want to be a teacher, by the way. I thought my illness  would get in the way of teaching, and when Father Kevin invited me to be a teacher, I said, ‘I’m not sure I want to be a teacher.’ But he brought me to meet Bernie Glassman Roshi, and Bernie said, ‘Your life is your teaching, Cindy. And you will be a teacher.’ Your life is your teaching. And he was correct. So I think if we are really truthful, it’s our life – it’s the way we live our life – that can be helpful to students. As for the practice of Zen, I can teach you to sit. And then when questions come up, maybe I can help you decipher them. Maybe I can help you decipher. Maybe I can help point the way a little bit. But can I do it for everybody? No. Not at all.”

“What do the students who have formally taken you on as their teacher expect from you?”

“You know, not much. Because I tell them not to expect much. So I’m there for them as experiences happen or as their practice matures and I’m able to help them along, again, just pointing a finger and helping them along, but that’s it. They don’t look to me for answers. In fact, I think they look to me for more questions. When they ask me questions, I usually have a question back for them.”

“Well, that tells me what you do, but it doesn’t tell me what they’re looking for.”

“I think what they’re looking for is what I found. Which is a peace and a joyfulness even within life’s craziness. Elana told me she began meditating after she met a man who was a meditator and felt, ‘I want what he’s got.’ I think they see that. One person in particular is getting older, and he said, ‘I’m having trouble with death. And here I am, I end up with a teacher who has an illness that’s going to kill her.’ Right? So, he’s had questions, and he’s watched me, and he’s said, ‘I don’t know how you have the grace to do what you’re doing.’ I said, ‘I don’t either.’ So I think each student wants something different from me. Sometimes I may disappoint a student because I’m not really giving them the answers. I’m really just pointing the way for them. I can tell them when they’re off-center. When they seem to be going off, I can tell them, ‘No. You need to be here. You need to be grounded. This is where Zen is; it’s grounded.’ So I can’t be everything to all people, but I think the very serious students that I have, they’re looking to me for help on their journey with groundedness, staying on track. And perhaps . . . I don’t know. We get energy from each other. Even online, even on Zoom. We sit each morning, and then we sit every other Saturday, and I believe we get energy from each other. And maybe that’s part of it too. Just that. Sitting with each other. Sangha’s so important. For me it’s always been. I gain strength from the sangha. It gives us strength.

As our conversation wraps up, I ask if there was anything she would have liked to talk about that we hadn’t touched on.

“I don’t think so. I do want to thank Kevin. I couldn’t have had a better teacher. He really helped me. I don’t know what I would have done without him. So I want to say that. I think he’s been one of my biggest graces throughout my life, and so I’m so grateful for him. And I think I want to thank my sangha. They’ve hung together for all these years, and I think we’ve strengthened and helped one another on our journey. So what I feel is gratitude. I don’t know where I am in this journey or when my life will end. I don’t know when the chemo will stop helping. But I’m so grateful for my life. I’m so grateful for this journey. I’m so grateful I found Zen. I don’t know that I could do this illness without my practice. I don’t know that I could do this illness without my sangha. I’m . . . I’m just grateful.”

A little more than a year after I interviewed her for this profile, Roshi Cindy died on October 25, 2024.

Catholicism and Zen: 15-16, 168-80

Everyday Zen in Berkeley, CA

Exciting things were happening elsewhere in the world as I was attending high school in the mid-’60s in LaPorte, Indiana (population 22,000). As the Bob Dylan put it, “There was music in the cafés at night / And revolution in the air.” But most of that passed us by in LaPorte, where the short haircuts and smooth-shaved cheeks of my classmates were indistinguishable from those of Mormon missionaries. There was, however, a coffee house twenty miles east of us – in Porter, Indiana – called Saturday’s Child established by a man named Dave Sander. Porter was so small (population 2000) that we usually identified it with its larger neighbor, Chesterton (population 6000). On weekend evenings, we would drive there to listen to folk music and bad poetry and feel like we were part of something larger.

“You knew Dave Sander!” Alan Block exclaims.

“Yeah,” I admit. “I used to read poetry at Saturday’s Child.”

“How great! You know, you must be the only person that I could possibly come across who would know about Dave Sander and Saturday’s Child. That’s so amazing. It just blew me away. I wrote to my brothers about it, I was so amazed.”

He’s no more amazed than I was at coming across a reference to a Zen teacher in California who grew up in Chesterton.

“You’re older than I am,” I point out, “and there certainly wasn’t any Zen in Northern Indiana when I was a kid. How did you get involved?”

“My younger brother was living in a commune right down the road from Tassajara,” he tells me. “His best friend, David, in maybe ’67 was building a rocket for his sister in his garage in Chicago, and the rocket blew up and killed him. David was my brother Marty’s best friend in high school. He had been accepted into Harvard in the Fall, and he died that summer. And so the whole family moved to California and set up a commune in this area called Cachagua. It was called Water Brothers.”

“The parents as well?” I ask.

“The parents. Five kids. They established a commune. They bought land in Carmel Valley, and a number of David’s friends who were so upset about his death moved with them including my brother. So I came to visit my brother in ’71. And when I was in the commune, we smoked a lot of dope, baked bread, ate peanut butter. Anyway, somebody said, ‘You know, the Buddhists have bought Tassajara. And the Buddhists are so stupid you can go up there and eat their food and take a hot bath in the hot springs and drink their tea, and they don’t say anything.’ So one day we all got stoned and piled into my car, and we went up the road to Tassajara which was 14 miles on a dirt road where you climbed and dropped almost a mile. I mean it was just a breath-taking road. Still is a breath-taking road. Anyway, we went there. And – you know – intellectually, I had no interest, but emotionally something caught me. And so we hung out there a couple of days swimming and drank their tea and ate their food.”

Alan was 28 at the time and a tenured faculty member at a college in New Jersey, but something drew him back to California.

“So I hiked into Tassajara the next year, because I was curious. And I said, I’m just going to camp up creek and come in and eat their food and take a bath. And they said, ‘You can’t do that. The fire danger is too great.’ They said, ‘You have to leave the watershed because it’s too dangerous.’ So I hiked over to the next watershed, did a big circle, came back three days later, and the same guy was sitting in front of the office at Tassajara – Arnie , who later became an assistant to Thich Nhat Hanh – and Arnie said, ‘You oughta come in here and check this out.’ I had nowhere else to go. I couldn’t get out of there. You know? There was no way to get out of Tassajara unless you had a vehicle. So I said, ‘Alright.’ He said, ‘Three days. Minimum.’ So I checked in for three days, and they put me to work. I liked the work. But the first time I sat – like – I kind of came apart. I had been so involved in achievement and degrees and achieving goals that sitting just completely went through me. I became teary. My whole being was just turned over. And I didn’t know it at the time, but I think at that moment in ’72, that was the beginning of my practice. So I spent three days, and I said, ‘Could I stay for three more?’ I stayed for two weeks.

“So two weeks and I had to go back to teaching. I had a contract. So I went back to New Jersey. Taught. And I thought about it all winter, and I sat in New York that winter at various zendos. The Tibetans. Different people. And then I wrote the San Francisco Zen Center a letter and said, ‘I’d like to come back for two months, next year. I have the spring term off. Can I come back for two months?’ They wrote me back. They said, ‘We remember you. You’re a good worker. You can come back. Just follow the schedule.’ Went back for two months in ’73 and decided that was it. I had tenure – a tenured position – so I had to finish my contract. Took me almost three more years. Basically I took a leave of absence from the college, and I came there, and they had changed the rules. Because a number of people had gone to Tassajara in those days, and it was too much for them. So they said, ‘You have to practice in the city for eighteen months before you can apply to go to Tassajara.’ And so I practised in the city for eighteen months, worked in the People’s Bakery and at Green Gulch and then I applied to go back to Tassajara and was accepted. Anyway, I resigned my academic job before my first sesshin because it was clear that it was over. I took a job in the People’s Bakery. I baked bread for months. And that was a great relief. And then I went back in the spring of ’76 to live at Tassajara. I spent almost three years there.”

“You said you’d been achievement oriented. Was that part of the family culture? An emphasis on success?”

“Yeah. My older brother is a professor of philosophy. He just published a very big book called The Border Between Seeing and Thinking. He gave the William James lectures at Harvard several years ago. We’re close, and, in a lot of ways, academia was what I was expected to do. But I was confused, and I felt like Zen gave me my life for the first time.”

“So how did your family react when you gave up tenure?”

“So the night before I went into the monastery, my mother called me and said, ‘Your aunt has convinced me that you’re going to be in the airport singing “Hare Krishna.”’”

We both laugh, but the fact was that there were other peoples’ children wearing saffron robes and chanting “Hare Krishna” in airports.

“‘Are you going to be in an airport singing “Hare Krishna”?’ I said, ‘No. I’m not going to be doing that.’ So she didn’t say, ‘Don’t go.’ She said, ‘I’m going to come there and take a look.’ And she showed up. She showed up a couple of months later, and she loved it.”

He adds, however, “My family, not knowing what I was going to do, bought me a health insurance policy. Because just in case I went crazy, they wanted to be covered.”

“How did you explain it to people?” I ask.

“What I said to people – my friends – what I said is, ‘Something deep in me wants to pursue this.’ And this college – which I taught at for seven years – and, as I said, I had tenure, so I had security there, it wasn’t feeding me. I felt like I was dying. I had enough money, but I felt like I was slaving in some way to someone else’s life and then rewarding myself with trinkets from the money that I made. And at a certain point, my younger brother, Marty, actually confronted me. He said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘You’re doing something that’s not feeding you. Is that the way you want to live?’ It took me a while to figure it out. No it’s not the way I want to live. I think also, frankly, I was quite depressed in those years. My last years teaching.”

“Why?”

“Part of it was failed relationships, and an inability to establish a solid relationship. In retrospect, in Zen terms, I just couldn’t settle on myself. Just feeling like I was spinning my wheels. I was living someone else’s life. I wasn’t living my life. And I think that I was much more inclined to activity in the world, even though I still read a lot – I still read several books a week, you know – but I think my real love is construction. Buildings.”

I hadn’t seen that coming.

“So I entered Tassajara in ’76, and I stayed almost three years in the monastery, which was incredible. I mean, I figured maybe I’d be there for one season, and I stayed three years. We lost our main buildings in a fire in ’78. Anyway I learned construction. Paul Discoe – who maybe you know of – had been sent to Japan by Suzuki Roshi to learn temple and tea house carpentry. Came back and they were going to build a walled monastery at Tassajara so they could practice there in the summer and still have guests come and make money. The cost had gone crazy. So they abandoned the idea, and Paul ended up building other things for Zen Center. We built a zendo, and then we built Greens Restaurant. So I worked on those. Then I was part of the crew that built a restaurant in Berkeley called Chez Panisse. And then I went off on my own. So I learned construction at Zen Center.”

He continued to practice Zen with Mel Weitsman at the Berkeley Zen Center although he was no longer formally associated with Tassajara or the San Francisco Zen Center. He admits that that decision was partially in response to the situation that arose around Shunryu Suzuki’s successor. “But I would see Mel Weitsman quite regularly. I worked on the Berkeley Zen Center. Did some of the ceiling there. And we did sesshin every year. But then my wife and I had kids and a mortgage and reality was right there at the door, and I needed to make some money, so contracting was very good for me. In the end, I ended up doing more consulting than I did building, but it was very good for me. I made a good living, and it worked out really well.”

He still has fond memories of Tassajara. “They were great times. In the Spring of ’77 Joan Baez came and stayed a month with us. A month of silence. One day in May of ’77, we came out of the zendo in the morning, about 6:30/7:00, and it had snowed. And everything was white. And she was standing in front of the zendo, and she sang ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ a capella as we all came out. Everybody just put on their shoes and just went on their way.”

“Tell me about Mel Weitsman,” I say.

“Mel was a sweetheart. And Mel was always Mel. You know, I have to say I always felt received by Mel. Whenever I would see him, I would just feel like he would take me in. I went to see him shortly before he died, we had a wonderful talk. And the last thing he said to me is, he said, ‘Don’t be a stranger.’ And I just feel so warmly toward him. It’s not so much that he saw all of me; it was more that he accepted all of me.”

Alan also studied with Norman Fischer who, like Weitsman, was abbot of SFZC for a term. And from Norman, Alan received authorization to teach. I ask if that was the same as denbo.

“No. It’s not denbo or denkai. It’s entrustment is what it’s called. Actually this is a good issue for me to talk to you for a moment about. I love Japanese ritual. I think I’ve had some of my greatest moments of realization during ceremonies. I was ino [head of practice] at Everyday Zen for three years. You know, Richard Baker tried, numerous times, to encourage me to be ordained. And I felt like it wasn’t me, to be ordained, too far outside of my life and outside of the life of others. And so I just sort of went my own way. And then in the 2000s, Mel developed this thing called entrustment for people like me who didn’t want to be ordained but were very serious long-term practitioners. And Norman – who later went off to found Everyday Zen – adopted the entrustment form also. It’s now become a much more widespread method. I’m an entrusted teacher.

“I cannot offer jukai. I need a preceptor to do jukai with me. That’s why Mel’s heir, Alan Senauke, and I are going to do jukai together next November at the Berkeley Zen Center. And previously I’ve done it with Norman. Norman has been very generous with me, he helps me prepare the rakusus for my students – you know – the calligraphy for them, the documents. The kechimyakus. But I feel like if Zen is going to be American, even though I have a deep aesthetic appreciation of Japanese ritual and love to participate in it, but this is the United States. We’re in the West. So I feel very strongly like we need our own rituals. That’s the big quandary in my practice right now. How to make that transition. And I don’t have an answer. You know, when Zen went from China to Japan it changed greatly. When it went from India to China it changed greatly. And I think it’s going have to change again, and I don’t really know how that change will occur or what it will look like, but I feel like the change will have to happen if Zen is going to become any more widespread than it is in the West.”

One of the other things that had intrigued me when I first learned about Alan – in addition to learning he’d come from Chesterton – was that his Zen community has no internet presence.

“And your sangha – the one that doesn’t have an internet presence – what’s it called?”

“The Tuesday Sangha. Everyday Zen in Berkeley. I don’t really have a formal name. I have about fifteen students. This will be my fifth jukai. So I have a core of serious people. Long term serious practitioners.”

“Right there in Berkeley, where Alan Senauke is still heading up the Berkeley Zendo. Why did you open up something separate?”

“I’m peripherally in their lineage but not really. My lineage is slightly different. My lineage is through Norman. Mel was Norman’s teacher. Mel was the one who gave Norman denbo, but Norman has his own teaching at Everyday Zen.”

“I don’t know,” I muse. “It seems to me to be the same lineage: Suzuki Roshi, Mel, Norman, you. So what is it that you do that’s different from what Alan Senauke is doing?”

“I would say it’s pretty much the same teaching. I attended Mel’s koan classes at the Berkeley Zendo for years so really the same teaching. When I started I said, ‘I teach meditation, and a Buddhist approach to life.’ So I am very committed to lay practice. I feel aligned with them at the Berkeley Zen Center. We give money. My wife and I support them. But I don’t really practice with that group even though Alan is a friend, and I’m in a study group with Laurie, his wife. And they call on me as a source of information on the buildings. Whatever it is. Recently it was COVID. ‘How do we get the air exchanges we need?’”

“Okay, this core of fifteen serious people who practice with you. Again, no internet presence. They didn’t look you up online. How did they find you?”

“All through personal connections. Through friends and friends of friends. So I teach online.”

“You don’t have a physical place?”

“I did have a physical place until COVID. I rented a place in Berkeley with David Weinstein. I rented space with him until COVID and then we couldn’t afford it anymore. So I’m teaching online, and I now have several students in Seattle. So if I go back, I have to go back hybrid, and I really don’t have the technological prowess to do it.”

“And the people who choose to study with you, why do they choose you rather than going somewhere else?”

“I think because they want a more personal, smaller practice. More face-to-face. Lay practice is different from monastic or residential practice. What Norman has done that I think is so beautiful is he’s taken a lot of people like me who never completed their training because of all the trouble at the San Francisco Zen Center, and he’s gone back and helped them complete their training and become transmitted or become entrusted. Norman has done that with probably a dozen people who practised for years and years very sincerely but fell away. He provided them a space to come back. And a lot of people who come to my group are people who have been practising in different ways for many years but never really found a practice home or had some personal issue or they fell away, and they’ve been doing it for a long time. Some for twenty/thirty years. So I’ve given them an opportunity to sew a rakusu and take the precepts and to receive jukai. To make a commitment to live their lives by intention and not just by habit.”

“And what do they get out of doing this practice for twenty/thirty years? Why bother? Why, today, do people go to Zen Centers?”

“These are people who are mostly in their 60s and 70s and still seeking. Wonderful people.”

“Aging hippies!” We both chuckle.

“That is part of it.” He reflects a moment. “It just gives them some confirmation in the practice they have been doing. I think that they’re people that are reflecting on their lives. And what I’ve tried to do is give them the basics of Buddhism in a rigorous way. I emphasize to them that the Dharma does not have a copyright on truth. I really believe that. And I think what they have been able to do, and what I emphasize to them, is see their life, see their interactions, see their relationships through the lens of the Dharma. Then you will understand things about yourself and how you get along in the world that you didn’t understand before which will allow you to change your behaviours, to get closer to people, to get closer to yourself, and to understand the world in a much bigger way. And that’s really what I emphasize. I feel I’m pretty rigorous about wanting to teach them the basics. I’m not interested in loosey-goosey. I want to teach the basics of Buddhism, and that’s what I try to do.”

“Does one necessarily need to a Buddhist to practice Zen as you understand it?”

“Well, I talk about what Rinzai said, ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.’ And I talk about Krishnamurti in that context, that an identity of loyalty is not an asset. The identity of loyalty, the identity of you’re devoted and committed to the teaching is not an asset. Use the raft as best you can and then leave it behind. But I mean, none of us are at that place. Because one of the things that I really believe is that the Dharma has no ending to the depth that it can go. That you can go further and further. That’s what I try to teach , and I feel like what’s happened in my group is that people have gotten a lot more insight into their lives, and a lot more insight into the problems in their lives, and insight into ‘How do you become intimate with other people? What do we share?’

“And we try different things. At one point, I encouraged my students to stand on the corner in a busy area. Every person that comes by, wish them well. To yourself. You don’t have to say anything. Just every person that comes by, in your heart, wish them well. See what happens. People come back and say, ‘Oh! They smiled at me! I couldn’t believe it!’ I really encourage people to experiment with different ways of being and discover what happens.

“I think what I’m trying to do is give away what was given to me. That’s it right there. It was given to me, and I try to give it away. The bottom line is this practice has allowed me to taste my life in a way that I could never taste my life as an adolescent or as a person in my 20s. And this practice has opened up my world to me in a way that I am so appreciative of. And I’m just trying to give it away. Because that’s the best thing that you can do with it. I think without the Dharma I would be a really unhappy person. I’d probably have a lot of toys and a lot of junk. But, you know, I think I’d be a very unhappy adult. Confused. Deeply confused. Which I was. And – you know – the beauty to me of the Dharma is that it straightens you out – beginning with the Precepts – it straightens you out in a way that’s based on you, not based on someone else’s idea of you. And to me, that’s a really, really beautiful thing. So I really try to give it away.”

A little later, he reminds me, “You know, Dogen said you truly are enlightened, but you don’t know it. And Suzuki Roshi said – something I quote often to my students – the most important thing to be able to enjoy your life and not be fooled by things. That’s sort of my motto. The most important thing is to be able to enjoy your life and not be fooled by things.”

[My conversation with Alan Block took place in June 2023. Hozan Alan Senauke died eighteen months later in December 2024.]

A conversation with Dosho Port

Dainin Katagiri was born in Osaka in 1928. His birth name—Yoshiyuki—means “Good Luck.” He was the last of ten children, and his family believed him to be the reincarnation of an elder sister who had drowned. He apparently shared this belief. Years later, when a student in Minneapolis confessed that he couldn’t accept the idea of reincarnation, Katagiri replied, “Perhaps you will in your next life.” He was surprised when the students thought he was making a joke.

The family were devout Pure Land (Shin) Buddhists who gathered every morning to chant in front of the family shrine before beginning their daily chores. The young Yoshiyuki’s name, however, soon belied him. His mother died when he was fourteen, and two years later he was drafted into the armed forces. 

Like most of his countrymen, Katagiri was devastated by the Japanese surrender. Much of the population – in particular, young people – felt betrayed by leaders who had demanded enormous sacrifices but whose policies had culminated in defeat and occupation. His family’s restaurant business had been destroyed by Allied bombing runs, and they were destitute. Katagiri found work, drawing on his experience as an air force mechanic, but he was depressed and unsure what value or significance his life held.

Everything in Japan changed after the surrender. Some 500 Japanese officers immediately committed ritual suicide following the Emperor’s radio broadcast announcing the end of the war. Hundreds more would be executed as war criminals. American soldiers patrolled the streets and were in control of all national activities. Every major city in the country—except Kyoto which Allied forces had spared because of its religious importance—had been devastated by bombing; the manufacturing industry was in shambles. Poverty was the norm even for families which had been well-off; extreme food shortages would continue for years. 

The only place where things seemed to continue as they had before the war were the Buddhist temples where monks spent their days, as they always had, in meditation and labor, in chanting and performing rituals for the benefit of others. Here there was the illusion of something permanent and stable in a world which—as Buddhism teaches—is characterized by impermanence. Katagiri was drawn to Zen by a yearning for a traditional way of life that would help him find peace and a sense of meaning.

At the age of 18, he sought out his first teacher, Daicho Hayashi, a temple priest in the small fishing village of Mihama, at Taizoin in Fukai Prefecture. Later Katagiri would explain that Hayashi did not so much teach Zen as exemplify it in the way he served the needs of his community not only as a Buddhist priest but as the local soothsayer, community healer, and counselor as well as the presider at Buddhist ceremonies and rites of passage. Katagiri was trained to perform memorial rituals and to chant sutras; he also spent time grooming the grounds and the small cemetery attached to the temple.

In 1946, he received the precepts from Hayashi and was given the Buddhist name Jikai Dainin, Ocean of Compassion, Great Patience.

“Did the name suit him?” I ask Dosho Port, one of Katagiri’s Dharma heirs. I have been working with Dosho since November of 2015, so that puts Katagiri Roshi in my “kechimyaku.” “Did he demonstrate ‘Great Patience’?”

“I think so, sure. I remember when Tenshin Reb Anderson came and gave Katagiri Roshi’s eulogy, he said, ‘And he knew how to shut up.’ And I thought, ‘Well, Reb did know him’ because he really did know how to shut up.”

“What do you mean by that?”   

“I remember Katagiri Roshi saying, ‘When a tin can has only a few stones in it, it makes a lot of noise. But when the can is full,’” – Dosho mimes shaking a can – “‘no noise.’ When the practice is just a little bitty thing dinging around in your can of ego, it makes a lot of noise. So he didn’t have to talk.” 

“One of the first things you told me about him was that he had a ‘world-class frown.’”

Dosho laughs. “Yeah, that’s true. Especially when he was sitting zazen, that was kind of his default expression. Thich Nhat Hanh came once to talk about having a half smile while you’re sitting, and we’re like, ‘Really?’ This was how Katagiri Roshi sat.” Dosho pulls the corners of his mouth down to form an exaggerated frown. “It was also his neutral expression. I mean he could smile and laugh, of course, but his default was just kind of this frown.”

“So how did he come to be in the United States?”

“Well, he didn’t want to do funeral Buddhism. It’s very simple. He could have taken over his teacher’s temple, which was what his teacher wanted, and he was the abbot of his teacher’s temple after he died, but he’d go maybe once every two or three years. He was already in the US when his teacher died. He was in his mid-thirties, and he became the abbot and just continued doing what he was doing here. It was just a small temple, a small town. Beautiful place; looks out on the Japan Sea, quintessential mountain islands out in the bay. But, you know, thirty families in the village or so, and his teacher, my grand-teacher, was basically a hermit. He would sit in the temple, and people would come and ask him questions for, like, daily-life counselling. He was also really into the I Ching and Chinese medicine, so he was kind of the go-to guy if you had a problem in the village, which was the normal role for a priest in a small village. Tomoe Katagiri, Katagiri Roshi’s wife, and their young sons lived with Hiyashi Roshi for a couple of years while Katagiri Roshi was getting established in the US., and she once told me the old teacher would just sit around in the Buddha Hall smoking his pipe all day. Visitors would come by once in a while, but otherwise he would just sit there smoking his pipe.”

“And conduct funeral services.”

“And do funerals and memorial services. And Katagiri Roshi wasn’t interested in doing just that. So after he received Dharma transmission, he got a job with the Soto administrative center – the Sotoshu – in Tokyo, and through his connections there, he learned about an assistant priest position at Zenshuji, the Soto temple in Los Angeles, and he applied for it and got it. That’s when he met Maezumi Roshi; he and Maezumi Roshi were roommates for a while because Maezumi Roshi was another assistant priest there. But Katagiri Roshi wasn’t happy there either, so he ran off to Suzuki Roshi in San Francisco. They had studied with the same teacher in Japan, so they knew each other. So he went up to San Francisco. Then Suzuki Roshi called the bishop in LA and said, ‘This Katagiri guy, I asked him to come. He’s here with me now, and he’s going to stay.’”

“Why did Shunryu Suzuki want to hijack him?”

“He needed help. This would have been about the early ’60s – ’62/’63 – and the hippies had found Suzuki Roshi, essentially, and were starting to come. So he needed help with both the Westerners and with the Japanese temple there which was a thriving temple in San Francisco at the time.” 

“You told me once that Katagiri Roshi wasn’t impressed by hippies.”

“I think that’s true. I think he was horrified actually by some aspects of hippie culture. And probably his ‘great patience’ clicked in there because usually that would not be all that clear. But just the wildness and the confusion of the hippie culture was not something that he thought was a healthy thing.” 

“So how seriously did he take the young people who were showing up the San Francisco Zen Center?”

“Well, he had a way of taking each person seriously, and he had a way seeing people’s capacity or something like that that they themselves might not even be aware of. Like, if the group thought something about a person, he didn’t care. He didn’t care at all. He saw people like he saw them, and it was usually in a positive way. He saw their capacity. So like at Minnesota Zen Center, there’d be people he’d put in positions of responsibility, and a lot of us would be going, ‘Roshi, don’t you know this or that about so-and-so?’ And he’d be going, ‘Oh. Fine.’” Dosho imitates Katagiri’s accent. “‘They can do.’ That was impressive to me, that he saw people in a different way than the group did.” 

“What were his duties when he got to San Francisco?”

“He did everything! ’Cause nobody else knew how to do anything. So he did a lot of the teaching. Suzuki Roshi was sick. He wasn’t actually that old, but he didn’t have a lot of energy, so Katagiri Roshi did a lot of the mainline teaching and showing people how to practice. Yvonne Rand was the secretary of San Francisco Zen Center, and she and Katagiri Roshi had desks opposite each other, and she told me he would be so exhausted that he would fall asleep while he was writing. He would fall asleep while he was walking because he was working so hard. He’d just run into the wall. So he threw himself into it. I think that he felt, especially after he left, that he was kind of unappreciated. Because after Suzuki Roshi died Baker Roshi became abbot. And he and Baker Roshi were such different people. You’d be hard pressed to find two more different people than Dick Baker and Dainin Katagiri.” 

“Did they get along?”

“No. They didn’t get along. I think there was some competition between them. That’s my sense. I don’t know what Baker Roshi would say about that now. But I know from Katagiri Roshi’s side that he felt pushed out. Suzuki Roshi asked him to stay and help Dick Baker, and Katagiri Roshi was like, ‘Yeah. I don’t think so.’ But at that time, he thought that Suzuki Roshi was going to live for a while. So then he left and then, when Suzuki Roshi died, he felt bad about that. Like, he probably could have stayed around and helped some.” 

“So he feels pushed out and decides to go somewhere else, and somehow in all the gin halls in all the towns in all the world, he chooses Minneapolis.”

“Well, there had been a small group of people who had been sitting in Minneapolis, and they had gone to San Francisco some. So he had some connection with those folks. And getting back to the thing about hippies, a story he often told is he was flying from San Francisco to New York with Suzuki Roshi, and they were looking down at this vastness, and he asked Suzuki Roshi, ‘Who’s down there?’ And Suzuki Roshi said, ‘That’s where the real Americans are.’” 

“As opposed to in San Francisco?”

“Right,” Dosho says laughing. “So he was always curious. And his idea of a zendo was a place where plumbers and carpenters and millworkers, housewives and secretaries and teachers like that came rather than these poets and drug addicts and stuff.” He’s still laughing.

“And was that what he found in Minneapolis?” 

“Ehhhh . . . When I first started there, it seemed like all the men were carpenters with Ph. D.s and all the women were social workers. Of course, not everyone. But that was a thing. So . . . yeah, more regular people. But the Midwest was difficult for him because he had also seen the incredible success of the San Francisco Zen Center, and he was surprised that it didn’t take off in that way in Minneapolis. I think he would not have known what to do with it if it had. He wasn’t a slick person that way, organizationally or in terms of that kind of thing. He wasn’t oriented in that way.”

“When did you first meet him?”

“October ’77. I went for zazen instruction one cold, windy evening, and I was the only person who showed up. And one of the things that impressed me was that it did not matter at all to him. He just did his thing. He spent an hour-and-a-half/two hours with me teaching me how to do zazen and kinhin and bowing and things like that. Very patient and kind, and there was something about him that was very striking to me.” 

“What motivated you to come back?”

“I think a combination of desperation and being in his presence. That there was some hope. I’d tried drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll. It was fun, but in terms of happiness and the meaning of life, those things don’t go very far. So here was somebody who had a certain kind of poise and joy about him that was palpable.” 

“How long had he been in Minneapolis when you arrived?”

“About five years or something like that.”

“What was the community like? Other than having a lot of Ph. D. carpenters.”

“Well, that was kind of it. A lot of folks lived in the neighborhood around the Zen Center and came over for practice. And as we talk, I think that something that’s often kind of lost in present Zen discourse is that Katagiri Roshi and a lot of the early founders – maybe all of the early founders – really practiced their asses off. He sat sesshin every month; he sat with us all the time; he sat at least several hours a day. He really had a very concentrated practice which drew a certain kind of people. There was a dozen to twenty of us who were throwin’ ourselves into it. And it was great. He gave us a really great training combined with the study aspect which was always important to him. He was kind of a scholar monk which was not uncommon in Soto those days. And so he gave us a thorough education in the Buddhadharma. A great foundation. I don’t know if he appreciated what he was doing, and I don’t know how often others appreciated it either. But my view is that he gave us a really great foundation.” 

“Were you one of the people who moved into the neighborhood?”

“Yeah. Probably a few months later, the woman I was living with and I moved into that neighborhood so we could walk over for zazen all the time.”

“You made that commitment early.”

“I did. I mean, it just clicked. It was like, ‘I’m looking for something, and this is it.’ That was clear to me, actually, when I read Three Pillars of Zen. I didn’t know at first how well what Katagiri was offering would  fit this aspiration that I discovered in Three Pillars of Zen, but I found that it did. But it took some time. His was a very different style in some ways. But, I mean, a lot of zazen is a lot of zazen.”

“There’s a focus in Three Pillars on the imperativeness of kensho,” I point out, “where in the Soto tradition, that wasn’t stressed, was it? In fact, didn’t they say that kensho wasn’t a necessary achievement?”

“Well, Kapleau, of course, was in the Soto tradition.” 

We argue about that for a bit. 

“Well, it’s a complicated thing,” Dosho concedes. “But I would say the spirit and the importance of awakening is present in traditional Soto Zen as well as in Rinzai Zen. The method of the post-Hakuin koan introspection that Harada Daiun found through his work with Dokutan Sosan Roshi and that he brought back into the Soto training, that part is different. But the actual imperative of awakening, of course, I mean it’s Buddhism, so, of course, it’s important. There may be criticism about some focus on kensho being a kind of spiritual fascination, which – I think – was what Katagiri Roshi was critical of. Not the importance of awakening. And he says in Returning to Silence, ‘Of course enlightenment is important for us.’ I’m paraphrasing. ‘And enlightenment must digested through our skin, muscle, marrow.’ That’s just Zen. Right? That’s not Soto or Rinzai Zen. What you’re referring to is the post-Meiji Soto orthodoxy which denies the importance of enlightenment and which is essentially not Buddhism. He didn’t so much buy into that. Not every Soto monk buys into that.”

I ask about the size of the community, and Dosho tells me there were seldom more than thirty official members, only a dozen or so of whom showed up regularly for practice. The numbers must have been disappointing to Katagiri. Then in 1983, Richard Baker resigned as abbot in San Francisco, and Katagiri was asked to return. 

“They needed some temporary help,” Dosho explains, “and he did some things. He led at least one practice period at Tassajara, and, by the way, one of the first things he did when he came back to Tassajara is that Baker Roshi, I guess, had set up a new altar in the new zendo. Katagiri Roshi went in and had them turn the altar around because he thought it was facing the wrong direction. He turned the altar around; that was quite metaphorical. And he led ango at Tassajara, and then he had some kind of temporary teacher/abbot position, but they were reluctant to go back to a Japanese teacher. I think the group at the time was reluctant to do that. So they actually went with Reb [Anderson] as abbot.”

Another factor was that the community retained a fervent loyalty to Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, and while Anderson was in that lineage, Katagiri Roshi was not. Reports from the time suggest that Katagiri Roshi was taken by surprise. He had fully expected to be invited to be abbot. 

“I think that’s true,” Dosho says. “I think he felt – again – kind of pushed out. I think he did want to become abbot of San Francisco Zen Center. I was there in San Francisco during this time for a while. I was president of Minnesota Zen Center, and they brought us out to there to kind of explain to us how they were going to take our teacher. And we tried to work something else out with them where we kind of shared leadership or something. But it was clear to me – I mean, I was a kid; I was 25 or something, 26 – but it was still clear that there were these competing factions. It was hard to tell what was going on. And then Reb wound up being put in the position.

“I think it took Katagiri Roshi a little while to get over the disappointment. And it was hard for him to see how the whole thing in Minnesota could really move forward. And then we started developing this country center. That was also kind of an idealistic step. It was three-and-a-half hours/four hours from Minneapolis. The group had had a choice between a farmhouse in Wisconsin a few minutes away or this plot of undeveloped land in the southeast corner of Minnesota. And – bunch of hippies – they went for the more idealistic choice. And it was very hard to develop and slow. We had to do everything, including build the little footbridge over a creek to get into the area where we could hold sesshin in tents. So everything took a lot of energy. And so I think he kind of floundered in his last years. He wasn’t sure how to go forward. And then he got sick and died.”

“Who was his Number 2 during this time?” I ask.

“Well, for a while, I think I was. But I think whoever you talked to would have a different view on that. It’s an interesting question. It wasn’t like other systems I’ve seen where there was a clear heir apparent. He didn’t nurture the group in that way. I was surprised that he offered Dharma transmission to anybody ’cause I didn’t think he thought any of us were ready for it.” Dosho laughs heartily. “And, you know, I don’t think we were.” 

“It was a fairly large group he ended up offering it to, wasn’t it?”

“Twelve of us. Pretty much everybody that he’d done priest ordination with. Then a few months later he died. And he had said it was up to the group to decide who would be the successor out of this group of twelve. But that was a quagmire because nobody had the respect of the rest of the community in that way. We were all together. Not only the twelve of us that had received Dharma transmission but also the rest of the people in the community. We were totally peers, so there wasn’t a sense that anybody should be the teacher.”

Eventually the community invited another Japanese-born teacher, Shokaku Okumura, to come to Minneapolis. “And he was teacher for – what? – three years? Four years? I can’t remember. But for much of the early ’90s, Shohaku lived in Minneapolis. And then Karen Sunna – one of the twelve – became abbot at that point; she was the first Dharma successor. And that was probably a good thing. To have somebody else in that position for a while first.”

I ask Dosho how Katagiri Roshi differed from some of the later teachers he worked with.

“Well, you know, everybody’s different, so . . . His basic personality style was different. I think I’d say he was quieter and much more willing to be uninvolved and kind of let things unfold.” Dosho smiles fondly at something he remembers. “I mean, he would give instruction, of course, on how to do oryoki, how to do zazen, and stuff like that. But, for example, he asked me to be tenzo at Hokyoji, the place that we were developing, for the first big thing with monks from Japan and all that, and I was into this macrobiotic trip at the time. And I said to the group, ‘Coffee is really bad for you, so I’m not going to use center money to buy coffee.’ I drink coffee now, but at the time I was kind of a zealot. And he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say, ‘No, Dosho. Serve coffee.’ He just let me do it, which, at the time, it didn’t seem so unusual. But it was kind of like the kids were in charge, and he was the kind of parent who just let things go. He just did his thing. He did his practice, which was very intense, and we could look to him or not. Even the decision to buy Hokyoji, he was basically quiet through the whole process, and then at the end of the meeting – before they’re going to vote to buy this property and make this huge commitment with a big balloon payment due in a couple of years – they asked him what he felt, and he said, ‘I’m 60% in favor.’ I mean, what the hell do you do with that? If it was now, I would say, ‘Well, the leader’s gotta be more than 60% sure, so let’s wait. Let’s think about this.’ But that was his style. He didn’t push himself.”

“It was a choice on your part to stay with him,” I suggest. “You did have options.”

“Well, you know, we just had affinity. That’s the truth of it. I could come up with some reasons, but it was just some kind of basic affinity. Part of the reason for our trip to Japan together was – we visited a whole bunch of places – was because he wanted someplace where he could send priests to do Japanese training. So I met a dozen/fifteen teachers, some of the most interesting Soto teachers at the time. And at the end of the trip, I was like, ‘You know? I picked the right guy. I’m good.’ I did want to return to Japan because I wanted to learn that style of practice. But in terms of a teacher, I thought, ‘I don’t have to find another teacher.’ The teachers I met there were really wonderful teachers, but I felt Katagiri Roshi was the teacher for me.”

The Third Step East: 215-30; 136, 212

The Story of Zen:  275-80, 319, 352, 413, 414

Cuke Archives

There are a handful of digital archives I refer to regularly in the composition of these profiles. One of the most useful is cuke.com maintained by David Chadwick. David is the author of Crooked Cucumber, generally accepted as the official biography of Shunryu Suzuki. Cuke.com originated as a supplement to the book, which was published in 1999. In the 24 years since, the site expanded and a second site – shunryusuzuki.com – added. The combined archives are so extensive that David compares them to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. “It’s a big, giant, sprawling mansion where the woman who owned it thought she’d die if she stopped adding to it. So it’s got stairways to nowhere and it’s got all these rooms. Now it’s like a theme park. Well, Cuke Archives, I’d say, is like a Winchester mansion the size of Los Angeles.” That’s a mite overstated, but the sites do contain a lot of material.

David now lives in Bali. There is an eleven-hour time difference between Bali and Atlantic Canada, where I live. He has just finished dinner when our video chat begins; I’m only on my second cup of coffee of the morning.

“When I was very young, my father was a reader in the Christian Science Church,” he tells me. “And when I was maybe six or something, he quit. And being a reader, that’s like being a minister. He quit because he thought it was too dualistic. He thought it elevated Jesus beyond just being a person who’d awakened. So he got into some New Thought Christian writers like Ernest Holmes, William Walter, and Emmet Fox.”

The New Thought Movement – like Christian Science – holds that illness arises from the mind and can be cured by “right thinking.” It developed at the end of the 19^th century and maintained that Christianity – rightly understood – was the culmination of a succession of wisdom traditions which included the ancient Greeks, Daoism, Vedanta, and Buddhism.

“Very influenced by Emerson, Thoreau, there was obviously Buddhist influence on it,” David says. “Anyway, it was a great way to be raised. In our home, God was not an outside power. It was mind. It was mind only. So I’m very grateful for it.”

His father died when David was eleven, but he left a strong influence on his son. “He was my first teacher. He was a really good guy, really nice guy, very gentle.”

After graduating high school in 1963, David spent some time in Mississippi and Chicago involved with the political causes of the day. He lived and worked with the staff of Students for a Democratic Society and met people like Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis. He admits, however, that he “was just a pest. I was a crazy kid, and they were all like policy wonks.”

Then he spent over a year in Mexico. “I was going to school, but I also smoked a lot of pot, and I really got into walking around town and talking to people. I played guitar in a whore house and really got into Spanish. Then in Acapulco I had my first LSD trip, which was really great. And then some friends of mine from Mexico said, ‘Hey, it’s happening in San Francisco.’ So I made my way out there and for about half a year I was sort of grooving on the hippie scene. I had a few more acid trips, and that really tied into the stuff my father had taught me. And I felt like I needed to meditate. So I found the San Francisco Zen Center, and I just plunged right into it. I loved it.” He was 21 at the time.

“Why did you feel you had to meditate?”

“Because one can see, if one is observing oneself, that the mind is way too busy and way too petty normally. So what you want to do is slow it down.”

“This is something you were aware of when you were twenty-one?”

“Oh yeah. So slow it down. And the thing is you can bust through with acid, and I took acid like with the Psychedelic Experience, very seriously, meditating, fasting, no talking.”

The Psychedelic Experience was a manual composed by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert – who later became the Hindu teacher, Baba Ram Dass. It describes what amounted to a sacramental approach to the use of psychedelics loosely based on the Tibetan Buddhist Book of the Dead.

“So I had really profound experiences, but I didn’t do it a lot. I think I had eight trips in all. And that made me think, ‘All right, that’s not going to do it. That’s just like taking a trip there, getting an idea that there’s mind beyond normal mind.’ What I needed was . . . I think I had an image of the wind and time wearing down mountains rather than just blowing them up. And I stumbled on some books on Zen. I wasn’t a big reader, but I found Zen Flesh, Zen Bones and The Zen Teaching of Huang Po translated by John Blofeld, a really great book. I read and re-read Lin Yutang’s translation of the Dao De Jing.”

Shunryu Suzuki was away when David first knocked on the door of the San Francisco Zen Center, so instead he was introduced to Dainin Katagiri, or Katagiri Sensei as he was called. “And I had a discussion with him and said, ‘I think I need a teacher and to meditate with a group,’ which was the perfect thing to say. That’s what they do. That’s the trip, right? And he said, ‘Well, Suzuki Roshi should be your teacher. And he’s in Japan right now, but he’ll be back soon.’ I said, ‘Well, why can’t you be my teacher?’ He said, ‘Well, I could be your teacher, but here he would be your teacher.’”

Katagiri gave him introductory meditation instruction. And eventually Suzuki returned and became David’s teacher, and David decided to commit to the practice for a year. “And I never thought about it again.”

“They won you over?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“For one thing, I wasn’t a true believer. I wasn’t that type. And it wasn’t a true believing place. Nobody tried to convert you although some were encouraging. I got to know some people little by little. I liked them. It was cool. But then I hadn’t been there very long when we hear that we’re going be buying land for a monastery. So I was there at this very exciting time. I had some time there in its smaller form, then we were gearing up to buy land in the woods down south to build a monastery. And so I got involved in that. And then we heard there’s this place near the land we’re trying to buy called Tassajara Springs, and it’s really cool. So when we go there, it’s actually contiguous with Tassajara Springs, the same land. And we can walk there in about an hour. So that was great. And then at the last minute I hear, oh, we’re buying Tassajara now as well. And that doubles the money. We were raising $20,000 as a down payment on $150,000 then all of a sudden we’re raising $300,000. That didn’t mean much to me, but Zen Center’s whole annual budget, I’ve heard different figures, $8,000 a year, $12,000 is the highest I heard. So everybody got in the action, but Dick Baker’s genius came out and his energy.”

Richard Baker was Shunryu Suzuki’s most prominent student and would become his only Dharma heir. He managed a capital campaign which engaged people like Alan Watts, Allen Gingberg, and the Grateful Dead. “But what really did it was Dick and Suzuki going to the East Coast and meeting very wealthy donors. Chester Carlson who invented Xerox, a great philanthropist, wonderful man. He supported a lot of good things. Edward Johnson, not really the founder of Fidelity, but what he took over as Fidelity was not at all what Fidelity became. He made it what it became. So we had the CEO of the biggest investment company in the world helping with the fund.”

I ask David why it was a group of California hippies thought building a monastery was a good idea. To David, it seemed a natural thing to do. “And not all of us had been hippies. I’d called myself a semi-hippie. But Suzuki and his students wanted to have a place where they could practice together and live together and be more focused and not have to go home every day. A place to go for a period of time and have a retreat where it’s not just from five in the morning till nine at night. It’s 24 hours. It’s all the time.”

“And why would people want to do that?” I ask.

“Well, for people who get into meditation that’s pretty much a universal tradition. Now our monastery was not a monastery like any other monastery that had ever been. There were women as well as men, married people, unmarried couples. It was really lay oriented. From the first, there were kids. And Suzuki had never seen anything like that. But he listened to his students and together they put something together, and it worked, and it was great.”

“I’m still not getting the why,” I persist. “What did you think you were going to get from all this effort?”

“Good question. One of the fundamental teachings of Zen from a Soto point of view is not to seek an end, not to seek a goal. That what you are doing is learning how to practice, how to cultivate your self, how to be somebody who awakens and to accept yourself as you are, not to try to be someone else, not to try to be something else. So, the practice of meditation, of living together with others, of working together, these are not unique to Buddhism; they are in Christian monasteries too. Monastics, contemplatives of whatever tradition have a tremendous amount in common. Suzuki especially de-emphasized having any sort of practising with a goal. However, there are two sides to everything. You actually can’t do it without having a goal. So, it’s completely paradoxical, and he’d say if it’s not paradoxical, it’s not true, it’s not Buddhism.”

“Let me put this question this way: Why did you think this was a good use of your time?”

“Oh man, I grooved on it. It was great, I loved it. I loved the meditation; I loved the work. I loved and respected the people I was with. And I didn’t worry about it a lot, I just did it. When you do something and it makes you feel better and it makes you feel like you’re getting to some sort of bigger, wider stage in your life, it’s self-evidently good. And you’re also being encouraged by living with others. You know? Everybody’s getting up at 4.30 to go sit at 5:00. It’s great. A lot of it’s like dancing. If we were a dance company and we were getting together and dancing, people wouldn’t ask, ‘What are you trying to get out of this? What’s your goal? What do you hope to accomplish?’ They’d see that the dance itself was rewarding.”

“And that’s the way you felt?”

“I don’t know how I felt. I just did it. And it was good. I loved it. And one of the purposes of having a period of your life when there’s more focus in a retreat-like way is it can give you discipline. It can dig grooves so that you can continue it in your life. You know, Suzuki said, ‘If you want to learn to concentrate, go to a noisy place. If you want peace of mind, do it in an unpeaceful place.’ It’s easy to do it if you’re in beautiful surroundings. So he said that Tassajara, this is all good, but you can’t live here forever. I mean, some people lived there a long, long time. I was there about seven years.”

David speaks with great fondness of his time with Suzuki and what he calls the old temple – Sokoji – which had been established in San Francisco by Japanese Soto authorities in 1934.

“It had an intimacy and a practice that could never be recreated again. And one thing you learn is to appreciate what you’ve got at the time, because it’s not going to last no matter what it is.” He chuckles. “I know that living in Bali too. So, at Sokoji we would have two sittings in the morning with a walking kinhin in between. So two 40-minute sittings. And of course, for the first one you’re getting there early, you get there ten minutes early so you’re sitting 50 minutes, ten-minutes walking, another 40-minute period. Then we would chant the Heart Sutra in Sino-Japanese three times, a little faster each time. And that was the most dynamic chanting I have ever experienced. Nothing we did in the future ever compared to it. After that, we’d all walk out, and Suzuki Roshi would stand at the door and individually bow at each one of us. And that was great. There was a 5:00 p.m. sitting too. That was it. And we’d have a one-day sesshin once a month, and he’d be able to meet each of us and talk. But he just emphasized daily meditation. He did not emphasize enlightenment. He talked about enlightenment, but he said practice is enlightenment – you know – the practice, learning the practice and doing it. It was great.”

“You said he was your teacher. It’s a curious term in some ways. What did Suzuki Roshi teach you?”

“He’d say, ‘Well, I really don’t have anything to teach you.’ But he taught us. He was a good example.”

“Is a ‘good example’ the same as being a ‘teacher’?”

“People talk about transmission, mind to mind transmission. He’d say there’s nothing to transmit. So what did he teach? He taught, ‘Be yourself.’ He said, ‘All I have to teach is zazen and practice.’ He said, ‘I’d rather not give talks. We don’t really need that. We just meditate together, work together, eat together. That’s enough. You don’t need more than that. You don’t need any teaching.’ But the other side of that, of course, is there was teaching. He gave lots of talks. So Zen is called the way beyond words and letters, but you don’t have any ‘beyond words and letters’ unless you’ve got something to give up, unless you know the words and letters and get beyond them. You don’t get beyond words and letters by not knowing the words and letters and just not learning anything. So yeah, he was very short on teaching, and it bothered some people. They’d go find other teachers that would give them koans and meet them daily.”

“You said you spent seven years at Tassajara. Was that continuous? Did you ever take a break?

“I had breaks. Sure. We were pretty loose. I mean, if you were there for a three-month practice period, you were not supposed to leave the whole ninety days. You could if you had to see a doctor. Or if you had a job that took you to town shopping. Or later when I was the director or the head monk, there’d be meetings in the city.”

“You were the boss?”

“Yeah. That’s not the boss. When I was director Dick Baker was the boss. There was no other boss!” he says with a laugh. “Dick was the abbot after Suzuki died. When Suzuki died, I was the assistant director of Tassajara. We were all so young. Just amazing. So many of us in our twenties.” He chuckles at the memory, but it’s an important point. What strikes me as I look at the old photos of SFZC or Los Angeles or Rochester is how youthful the faces are. One can almost sense that these people were so young and naïve they didn’t understand how improbable the things they were doing and accomplishing were.

“We did a good job. It was an unusual group. We didn’t have experts telling us what to do. We didn’t pay lawyers exorbitant sums. I’d go visit our Tassajara lawyer and give him bread.”

“And at the end of seven years?”

“Well, it wasn’t quite like that. I was there almost all the time the first five years. And in that time I was gone about half a year studying Japanese intensively in Monterey. But when Suzuki died, then Dick Baker asked me to be the work leader in the city, or the board decided or something. He was only back a couple of months himself from Japan. And so I became the work leader in the city for a year. Year after that, ’73, I was work leader at Green Gulch [Zen Center’s organic farm] and Baker’s jisha [attendant]. He called it MJ, Main Jisha. He had three jishas, one at Green Gulch, one in the city, one at Tassajara. And I was the main one who would go with him off to Tassajara or to City Center or if there’s some event or something. And we got along fine. But I also was work leader there at Green Gulch. I don’t know how I did both, but it wasn’t hard. And then the next year, ’74, I went down to be the head monk. And I was there the whole winter, spring, through the whole guest season, five months. And then in the fall, I became the director. And I was director for a year. And he wanted me to stay. He wanted me to stay and be director because he liked the way I did it. And I said, ‘I can’t stay any longer. I got to get out of here.’”

After leaving Tassajara, David held a variety of posts at SFZC. He became the manager of the Green Gulch Green Grocer shop on the corner opposite City Center at Page and Laguna Streets, where Zen Center had moved when they became too large to stay at Sokoji. He also was the host of the center’s vegetarian restaurant, Greens, for a bit. But things were changing.

In 1983 Richard Baker ceased being abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. Some people maintain he was fired; David tells me that Baker actually resigned because he was unwilling to accept new conditions imposed by the board as a result of his behaviour and leadership style. Reb Anderson, a Dharma heir of Baker, became the new abbot. David remained close to Baker and, in the spring of 1985, moved to Green Gulch Farm where he was a transitional director for year. In 1987, he was on the SFZC board of directors and was instrumental in creating a new multiple abbot system with term limits because of difficulties with the new abbot.

Then, in 1988, his former wife – Daya Goldschlag – moved with their son to Spokane, and David decided to go to Japan for a few years. Katagiri invited him to join him for a while at Shogoji, a Soto Zen training temple in Kyushu. After his time at the temple, David spent another “half a year checking out other practice centres, meeting teachers, visiting Suzuki’s temple and family, seeing friends and friends of friends, and improving my Japanese.”

I ask him how he came to write Crooked Cucumber.

“I had a friend, Michael Katz, who was a very successful literary agent, and he said, ‘Write a book while you’re in Japan.’ I said, ‘I don’t want output there, I want input.’” But in fact he did write letters about what he was experiencing. “And then I’d make copies and send them to friends and family. Michael said, ‘We can make these into a book.’ So he sent me money to buy a laptop and mailed me software including a typing tutor and told me to get to where I could type in the dark. And so I was going to the temple, having sanzen with the abbot, Shodo Harada, doing zazen and teaching English. And I wrote a lot and had many experiences. Michael got me a deal with Penguin and a small advance; that was nice.” The book was entitled Thank You and Ok!: An American Zen Failure in Japan.

“It focused on Katagiri,” he explains, “half about the time I spent with him and other monks at Shogoji and the other half about living with my new wife and going to Sogenji. And it had some about Suzuki, but I started taking all the Suzuki stuff out of it, thinking this should keep the focus on Katagiri. So I had this Suzuki material, and I started collecting more. Michael and I talked about it and thought, well, we should do a book on Suzuki. It just evolved from the one book to the other. It was just something that happened. And then because I wrote the book, I started a website for it, back when websites were just starting. And so I got a nice little short name, cuke.com. And it was just for some material relating to the book. And then people would write things, and I started putting in interviews or something that had to do with the book, and  putting in the Suzuki lectures and just kept doing it, and added shunryusuzuki.com and it just kept growing until the Cuke Archives became like . . . You know the Winchester mansion in San Jose?”

Ordinary Mind Zen, Sacramento, CA

A significant number of the Zen teachers I have interviewed in California grew up in New York City. It’s an interesting migration pattern. Bob Rosenbaum was raised in Mount Vernon, which, he tells me, is an extension of the Bronx.

“I was raised Jewish. My parents did not practice religiously in any way, shape, or form, but they were fiercely loyal to the culture of Judaism, and if you’d asked them if they were religious, they probably would have said something like, ‘The thing about being Jewish is you can be religious just by how you live. You don’t have to do all this other stuff.’ But my mother was raised in a family in upstate New York where her father, who had immigrated from Eastern Europe, had been a scholar and a respected community member, and all he was interested in was religion. But when he got out to Binghamton, New York, he didn’t have a way of earning a living. So he earned a living as a ragman, a junkman, a rag picker, and he raised a family of eight or nine children. So they were poor, and there was a lot of antisemitism in the community. And his wife took in boarders to make ends meet. So the bottom line is, in his family, he was regarded as kind of out-of-it with great love and respect but also anger and bitterness. Both he and his wife lived with us when I was young for a number of years. They were dementing at the time, but I remember his wife and he living in separate rooms on different floors of our house, and his wife would spit at him. So, on the one hand there was a lot of love and respect, but, on the other hand, a lot of dismissal and shame for being different.

“So, my parents sent me to Hebrew school, and it was fairly strict, and I would say, ‘Why aren’t we practising any of this at home?’ And they’d say, ‘Well, we’re religious in our hearts.’ And when I became a teenager, I was very conflicted about my Judaism. And one of the reasons I turned to Zen was I would go into a temple, and I would get depressed just by going in. I had to find a way to integrate it and reconcile with spiritual practice. And I should say the Judaism that I was raised in in the temple, the Hebrew school folk, a lot of shame, a lot of post-Holocaust anger, distrust, suspicion, grief. Very dark. This was the 1950s, and the message was, ‘You can try to assimilate, but they’ll never let you. They will never let you.’ So it was a very mixed bag. Zen was very helpful in this regard, to be able to connect to the genuine spiritual thrust within Judaism. For a time I practised Zen along with Judaism. But it just took too much time,” he adds, laughing, “and I couldn’t do it.”

“Did you personally have a sense that they wouldn’t allow you to assimilate?”

“Well, on the one hand I was surrounded by my family’s friends, all of whom were Jewish and went way back. My father grew up in a town, went to the YMHA – the Young Man’s Hebrew Association – and so these were ‘landsman’ they would say. It was almost like a little village. Very Jewish. The town I was in was about 45% Italian, 45% African American, 10% Jewish. I don’t know if schools closed officially on Jewish holidays, but there were enough people that you’d sing Hanukkah songs along with Christmas songs. On the other hand, the next town over, Bronxville, didn’t allow Jews, and my mom worked there, but it was very clear that you couldn’t live there. And as late as 1977, my wife of the time was working for a small Boston Brahmin family-run business, a very wealthy Boston Brahmin family-run business. She was a secretary, and the company Christmas party caused a problem because it was held at a club which didn’t allow Jews. And the fact that my wife was married to a Jew and there was one other woman who was married to a Jew – my wife was not Jewish, the other woman wasn’t Jewish – but it was, ‘What are we gonna do?’ You know? And they had to sneak us in through the back door. So, on the one hand it was a complete sense of belonging, and, on the other hand, it was always a sense of being a little off and out of it. Really, when I lived in India was the first time I ever experienced being Jewish as, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ with no layers of stuff around it. Which was very interesting.”

He first encountered Zen in college.

“In freshmen year I took a sort of a comparative religion course, and it was really well taught. And I became interested in Japanese religion from that course. I was interested in anthropology and other cultures. And I was actually studying music, and I happened to run across the music of the Japanese bamboo flute, the shakuhachi. And that was just, ‘Whoa!’ It was just amazing. There’s a 20^th century composer, Arnold Schoenberg, who said, ‘Pitch is colour.’ And if you listen to shakuhachi music, it’s all about how pitch is colour. There’s not much else to it except that pitch is colour. So I heard that, and that interested me. And in the survey course we read Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.”

Zen Flesh, Zen Bones was one of the earliest books on Zen available in the West. It was a collection of stories gathered by Nyogen Senzaki and and translated into English by Paul Reps. Bob was sufficiently intrigued by it to enrol in a course on Japanese religion, and the instructor arranged for Joshu Sasaki Roshi to offer a sesshin at the college. “So I attended the sesshin mostly because I had a crush on one of the women in the course, and I wanted to be in the same room as her for five or six days. And I got hooked. Between shakuhachi and Sasaki Roshi giving a koan. And there was something Sasaki Roshi said towards the end which stayed with me for a good long time. He was speaking through an interpreter. I don’t know how familiar you are with Sasaki Roshi, but he was really” – Bob assumes a fierce facial expression and growls – “‘I am very Zen! You must flare your nostrils when you meditate! You will never become enlightened unless you flare your nostrils!’” It was a pretty good impression, and we both laugh. “So he was certainly a fierce Rinzai Zen teacher. And towards the end of one lecture where he was talking about the absolute and the relative and how you reconcile abundance and lack and all of this other stuff, towards the end he could just see that all these college students are just looking kinda puzzled. He looked at us, and he said,” speaking again in a deep growl, “‘Don’t think of God. Don’t think of Buddha. Just laugh! If you do not laugh, you will become nervous and neurotic.’”

Bob spent his senior year in Japan studying shakuhachi and Zen. A friend in Tokyo introduced him to Omori Sogen, a Rinzai master who also taught martial arts and calligraphy. “So after graduation I lived in Omori Roshi’s little zendo. They were very Rinzai. People would brag about how many koans they had passed, and that felt a little weird to me. And then in very Japanese fashion, they’d have sake parties to send off Omori Roshi on a trip or something, and it was considered, ‘Oh, part of Zen is you go out drinking and then you come back and you just sit and you’re totally there.’ Then my shakuhachi teacher at one point said to me,” speaking with a Japanese accent, “‘Well, Omori Roshi very right-wing.’ And I went, ‘A Zen practitioner can be right-wing?’ He said, ‘Well, yeah. War criminal. Given choice. Go to Zen monastery or go to jail.’ Besides, it was cold in the winter in the zendo, and it was hard, and my shakuhachi teacher invited me to be uchi-deshi in his house.

“Uchi-deshi,” Bob explains, “is when a student – a dedicated student – lives in the teacher’s house. In exchange for lessons, helps out around the house. So I took him up on that, and I was pretty turned-off to Zen at that point although I continued meditating.”

“Because of Omori’s political views?” I ask.

“It was a combination of the bragging about koans, and the general feeling in the zendo was not appealing. I mean, it certainly wasn’t a warm-hearted type of Zen. And meanwhile, I was writing to Sasaki Roshi about staying with the koan that he’d given me, and he just didn’t reply. And at a certain point I just went, ‘Well, Zen is supposed to be outside the scriptures. I’m just not going to read anything about Zen for a while.’ And my Zen was actually my shakuhachi playing.

“Along the way, I fell in love with a woman who was living back in Seattle. And there was a long back-and-forth of, ‘Are you gonna come live with me? Am I gonna go live with you? What’s gonna happen?’ I learned that the only place in America where there was a shakuhachi teacher of the sort that I wanted to study with was in Seattle. And my girl friend was in Seattle. Japan is an amazing place. Beautiful aesthetics. Difficult culture. Beautiful culture to visit, difficult culture to live in if you have to abide by its rules. And the more you’re there, the more you’re expected to conform to the culture. So Seattle sounded kind of interesting. So I went back to Seattle. And – you know – I’m still in my early twenties, trying to figure out, ‘What am I gonna do with my life?’ My original idea was, ‘I’ll learn shakuhachi and make a living from this.’” We both chuckle at that.

“So I spent some trying to figure out, ‘What am I gonna do? And I’d been in psychotherapy because of depression. And I thought, ‘What can I do that’s not going to cause active harm?’ That was my criteria. I wanted to find a job where I could work and at times do music and not do active harm. And there were not that many jobs that satisfied that criteria, but psychotherapy seemed pretty good. So I earned some money and enrolled in a clinical psychology program in Boston.

“So, yeah, I went to Boston. Studied psychology. Had some useful psychological training especially in community clinics, which changed my idea of how psychology can work. And when I did an internship at the Boston VA – which just offered the best pay and whatnot I could find – I lucked into being at a place where the best neuropsychologists in the world were all there at that time, and they introduced me to the idea that the brain actually has some role to play in peoples’ psychology although it’s very different from the way most people think about it. And one of my teaching points that I kind of harp on is the brain is not the mind, and all this stuff about, ‘Oh! You meditate and it changes your brain?’ So? Big deal. You cut your toenails, and it changes the brain. You can sit in a tanning salon and get the same structural brain changes you can get from mindfulness meditation. There’s research on this. And peoples’ idea of what the brain is and how it works is just all wrong, and it’s really a shame. But for good neuroscientists, the brain is dynamic; self is dynamic. Mind and world and body are going like this,” he says, waving his hands and arms about vigorously. “‘Oh, we’ve found the point in the brain that’s the seat of compassion! We’ll meditate, and we’ll grow that part of the brain.’ It doesn’t work that way.”

He returned to the West Coast and was eventually hired by Kaiser Permanente. Things took a radical turn, however, when he received a Fulbright to teach at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in India.

“I really like experiencing other cultures. It’s really helpful to see the world through other eyes. So I’m in India, and everything was wonderful. My job didn’t require too much of me but was fascinating. My family was doing well. My kids were flourishing in Indian culture, which is very family centered. Everything was going fine. And I didn’t feel happy. I felt okay . . . but . . . I’m not happy. And what’s it gonna take to feel happy? It took me a while to figure out that happiness is not a feeling, it’s a way of life. And once that became clear, practice became a whole lot more interesting. But I wasn’t there yet.

“So I was in a bookstore in India, and I came across Opening the Hand of Thought.” Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of a Zen Buddhist Practice by Kosho Uchiyama has become a contemporary classic in Soto circles. “And I read it, and I went, ‘Huh! Shikan taza. Just sitting.’ Well, at this point I was distrustful of any brand of you name it – school of psychotherapy, school of religion – ’cause I figured I could talk myself into anything and then at a certain point, after talking myself into it, I’d get disillusioned. But I thought, ‘Well, to just sit. That doesn’t sound like I’ll talk myself into anything. Why don’t I try that?’ And so I started doing shikan taza.”

“Without instruction?”

“Without instruction.”

“How did you know if what you were doing was actually shikan taza?”

“I still don’t know whether I’m doing shikan taza.” We both laugh. The fact is that when many of the early Western spiritual explorers went to Japan after the Second War to study Zen, their initial instruction often amounted to little more than, “You sit there.”

“Yeah, that’s it pretty much. You know, I’d gone through a koan and had had what I thought were enlightenment experiences way back when though they never got certified by Sasaki Roshi. But they were, ‘Wow! Oh! Hmm! Hey! That makes sense!’ I knew how to do breath counting and all of that Rinzai style. One of my better meditations when I was still looking around – the most helpful one – was I was hiking one day on the West Coast near my home, and I found a nice rock. A beautiful rock. And I thought, ‘Oh. I think I’ll just sit down and sit with this rock.’ So instead of staring at a candle, I stared at a rock. So I did that for a year. And it’s not exactly shikan taza, but it’s somewhat akin to it. So, anyway, I started doing shikan taza, and then when I got back to the Bay area, I started going to the Berkeley Zen Center ’cause they were doing that kind of thing.”

The abbot at the Berkeley Center was Mel Weitsman, one of the three people in the first interview I conducted for this series of conversations ten years ago.

“And after a few months I went to this sesshin, and I’m in my late 30s. I’ve done yoga for twenty years. I’ve meditated kind of on-and-off for twenty years. I’ve had some kensho-type experiences. I’ve had hallucinogens back in the past. I go to this sesshin; I think, ‘Okay. I know what’s what. I mean, I’m an experienced meditator. My yoga’s going really well; everything’s going really well. I’m gonna go to this sesshin, and this should be really nice. Seven days of just . . .’” He smiles and lets out a long relaxed breath. “‘I can just sit there; I’ll feel great.’ You know? Well, you can guess what happened next. I sit down. Agony. Physical agony. Mental agony. Crying. For no reason that I can figure out. ‘Why am I crying? Why am I so sad? Why am I in so much pain? I don’t know how to do this!’ Seven days worth. Non-stop. Couldn’t figure out what’s going on. So at the end of the sesshin we have a Dharma talk. Each student gets up and asks their question in front of everyone else. And it was my turn, and I got up and said to Mel, ‘I came here. I was feeling pretty good. Sat down. I’ve been in pain. I’ve been in agony. I’ve been crying, and I don’t have any reason for crying. I don’t know why this is. What is this!?’ And Mel looked me in the eyes and said, ‘Nirvana.’ And I knew that he was right.

“In a way, that was the beginning of my Zen practice. I knew he was right. I didn’t understand it at all. But I also had no doubt. ‘Yep. This is nirvana. It doesn’t feel like nirvana!’” He chuckles. “But, you know, one way I sometimes teach people I say, ‘In our practice we don’t say we meditate in order to be enlightened; we meditate because we’re already enlightened. And when we say, “Nirvana is samsara,” we mean it!’ So one way you can meditate is go, ‘Okay. So this is nirvana. This is nirvana. Ha! This is nirvana? Wait a second!’ And what keeps you from experiencing nirvana? What keeps you from experiencing this as nirvana? Just do that, again and again. It’s a pretty good way of meditating actually, but no one takes me up on it.

“Years later, I went back to Japan to teach some psychology. I went to one of the Soto temples. Unannounced, unplanned. I just had a little extra time. And I went to them, and I said, ‘Oh, could I sit with you for a little bit. I’ve been practising in the States.’ And they said to me, ‘Oh, so do you know how to meditate?’ And I said, ‘No. I’ve just been doing it for thirty years.’ And they looked me like, ‘What?’

“There’s a not very well-known interaction with Joshu which I love where someone says to him, ‘What is meditation?’ And Joshu replies, ‘It is not meditation!’ And the student says? ‘What do you mean? Meditation is not meditation? Well, what is it?’ And Joshu looks at him and says, ‘It’s alive.’” Bob pauses for effect then says, “That’s pretty good. So, people are scared to be alive. And they’re scared to die. And basically our practice is, ‘Don’t be scared to live. And don’t be scared to die.’ It’s really very simple.”

There are some standard questions to which I keep returning, especially when the teachers I speak with are psychotherapists, which happens more and more frequently. I have never been in therapy, so I often begin by asking what draws someone to undertake therapy.

“Well, that really depends on the context of what you’re talking about,” Bob explains. “I was working at a medical centre where a lot of people who came to see me came because their doctors said, ‘You have to go see a therapist.’ And they have no interest whatsoever in seeing a therapist, but a doctor said, ‘Do this.’ Some people came because they had heard that psychotherapy had helped with anxiety and depression. Some people came because they get angry. I saw a lot of families, couples. You know, the standard thing. People would come in saying, ‘We don’t know how to communicate with each other.’ That was the standard thing. And some people come because it’s something to do. ‘My friends are going. They say, “Therapy is great!”’ So it really varies a lot depending upon what environment you’re working in.”

“And why do people seek out a Zen center?”

There is a long pause before he answers. “For all the wrong reasons.” I smile. It’s a good answer.

“Fair enough. And what are the wrong reasons that draw people to Zen?”

“Well, people are suffering and feel, ‘Oh, meditation is supposed to help you feel better.’ Right? That’s a pretty common one. Many people come because they are looking for something, and they don’t quite know what they’re looking for, but Buddhism sounds pretty good.”

“The art’s nice.”

“That’s right. The art’s nice.”

“Let me put the question another way then: How is the way you relate to a patient different from the way you relate to a Zen student?”

“So, when a person comes to me as a client – or a patient – they usually have a specific problem in their life. Now if they have sort of a general existential, ‘What’s it all about?’, I will sometimes say to them, ‘Sorry. I’m a therapist, but I’m also a Zen teacher; you’re with the wrong person here.’ I don’t do psychotherapy for existential stuff. I don’t believe in it. The way I approach a psychotherapy client is, ‘Okay. You’ve encountered a bump in your life, and you’re stuck. Let’s find if we can find a way to get you unstuck so that you can get on with your life.’ So, sometimes it’s, ‘I’m so nervous that I can’t leave the house.’ Sometimes it’s, ‘I’m so depressed I can’t relate to people.’ Sometimes it’s, ‘I have this pain which the doctors can’t understand. They say it’s psychological.’ And my job is to help them figure out a way to get past what’s holding them back at this moment.

“With a Zen student, it’s, ‘Ya think things are gonna get better? Why do you want to do this practice?’ Basically I don’t encourage people to practice Zen unless they can’t find anything else to do. I say, ‘Well, if you want to, that’s fine.’ My sister teaches Mindfulness Based Stress Relief, so we’ve had many discussions about the role of meditation in helping people. And the mindfulness people are, ‘Oh, do mindfulness; it will help your life.’ And when people come to me saying they want to practice Zen, I’ll say, ‘Well, that’s fine, but I have to warn you, you might not like it. Because if you practice, you’ll probably wind-up having to change your life and change how you go about living.’ And that’s true.

“I don’t see how you can practice Zen without practising the Precepts. And it turns out that the more enlightened you become, the more you see and feel how pervasive suffering is. The practice is learning to be like Avalokitesvara, hearing the cries of the world, responding to those cries with whatever is needed, but always with a gentle smile. The smile of compassion is the basis for our response to suffering, and our release from suffering.”

“You don’t see how someone can practice Zen without practising the Precepts.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, let’s consider that for a minute. Joshu Sasaki.”

“Yes. Problem!”

“Maybe not so hot on Precept practice.”

“No! No! He thought that enlightenment sort of exempts you. You can do anything. Well, a lot of Zen teachers – maybe every Zen teacher – finds a way of having it fit their personality. The problem is if you’re using the practice to actualize your ego-centred personal stuff – which you can do in very subtle ways – that’s not what it’s about. The practice is to allow oneself to be a vehicle for the Dharma.”

“Which means?”

“This is a Daoist thing, and I was heavily influenced by Daoism, as much as by Zen. It’s to assist the self-becoming of all Being. So every being is constantly becoming itself even though it already is itself. But how do you assist that? How do you harmonize with the needs of this moment, the call of this moment? And in general, the best way of doing that is to do as little as possible and not get in the way of the Way. And we’re constantly getting in the way of ourselves and in the way of other people. And when you stop getting in the way of yourself and getting in the way of other people, the Way manifests itself. The Universe manifests itself. So how to assist with that? Tricky. Tricky.

“So for me, one of the core koans and realizations is Dongshan’s, ‘I am not it; it actually is me.’ You know the story? Dongshan asks his teacher, ‘When you die, what should I tell other people is your teaching?’ And the teacher is silent for a long time, then he says, ‘Just this.’ And Dongshan didn’t understand, which I love about this story. Well, it sounds good, right? Everyone’s going, ‘Just this! Just this!’ But Dongshan didn’t understand. And we don’t understand, and think we have to do something special to access just this. Then later on Dongshan’s walking along, and he walks over a bridge, and he sees his reflection in the stream. And he goes, ‘Oh! I’m not it; it actually is me.’

“Ah! So we are the expression of everything that runs through us. And we think it’s about me! Sorry! People say, ‘Well, I feel this.’ That’s the ultimate wrong statement. All those feelings are who I am at this moment. ‘Oh! The wind is going through the leaves right now outside my window.’ We’re talking to each other. This is who I am. You are who I am; this conversation is who I am. I just think, ‘Oh, there’s a Bob here doing this.’ You know, there’s that ‘I-mind’ I call it, which thinks that that’s what’s going on, but it’s a little piece of it. It’s everything which has ever happened that comes to bear on this life, that’s who you are at this moment. So how does one carry that forward? Well, each moment you try to figure it out as best you can. You know, ‘Whoops! That was a mistake!’ So you went after the mistake. Good! About this moment? So, we harmonize with the flow, the stream. Doesn’t mean that we’ll like it. But you might as well enjoy it.”

“Taking the Precepts – vowing to live by the Precepts – is usually seen as making a commit to live a Buddhist life. Does one need to be Buddhist to practice Zen?”

“Oh, absolutely not. But a lot of people have practised Buddhism for a long time because they found it helpful. Classically it’s about release from suffering. I like to go a little further, personally, and say, ‘Enjoy your life.’ How can you genuinely enjoy your life in a way which can never be impeded?”

“What is it, as a Zen teacher, that you hope for for the people who practice with you?”

He considers the question for a while before replying. “I’m trying not to put this in jargon . . . That you are, were, and will be enlightened together with all beings.”

“And as a psychotherapist, what is it that you hope for your clients?”

“That you find that you can trust yourself.”

“Are there occasions when Zen students also need to discover that they can trust themselves?”

“Trust is the absolute basis in life. But who is this self that you trust? I often say to people, ‘So what can you really trust in when everything else fails you?’ Because everything else will fail you. Where can you really trust? And I’ve been through a period when I had a stroke in the Himalayas and was really face-to-face with dying. For a year after that I went, ‘Okay, I’ve practised meditation; I’ve tried to be a good person and act according to the Precepts. And I still had a stroke, and I’m still gonna die. So how am I gonna live my life?’ And so I could lie and cheat and try and get as much money as possible, but then I realized I wouldn’t be very good at that. So I said, ‘What’s the basis of my life?’

“And frankly Zen . . . It helped me come to this, but the basis is, number one, to acknowledge as best I can the truth of any situation and the truth of what’s happening to me and what’s going on around me knowing that I’m always going to colour it. I’m a very bad liar. And if I’m not living with the truth as best I can, I’m living with a fantasy, so let’s start with the truth. But people often don’t like the truth. It hurts often, and it’s painful, and it’s difficult. And so the second thing that comes up is somehow when nothing else works, when everything’s awful, compassion arises. I don’t know how, but it happens. And compassion is not something in us; the world is compassion. The air is compassion. The Earth is compassion. So I rely on truth; I rely on compassion. And after a while I see this is all too serious. So I need to have humour and laughter. That’s the third basis for me.  So truth, compassion, laughter. And for a while I knew there was something missing, and a friend of mine said, ‘I know you. You like beauty.’ ‘Oh, yeah. Beauty.’ That’s it! Truth, compassion, laughter, and beauty. That’s my life. I rely on those. I can find those at every moment in anything. Zen is simply a way of helping me find those. But that’s me. You have to find – each person has to find – what’s the basis of your life? What can you really rely on?”

Still Mind Zendo, New York City

During the 1970s and ’80s, as skepticism about Christianity and Western religious traditions was becoming common, there was a corresponding upsurge of interest in Eastern meditation particularly among the young. At the time, Thomas Keating was the Abbot of St. Joseph’s Trappist Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts – the monastic community to which Kevin Hunt belongs – and, during his abbacy, he invited Joshu Sasaki to make annual visits in order to introduce the monastics to Zen practice and to lead sesshin. The unexpected Western interest in Eastern spiritualities prompted Keating and two members of his community – William Meninger and Basil Pennington – to develop a comparable Christian methodology which they called Centering Prayer. The term came from another Trappist, Thomas Merton, who described contemplation as prayer which is “centered entirely on the presence of God.” Merton wrote: “Monastic prayer begins not so much with ‘considerations’ as with a ‘return to the heart,’ finding one’s deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being in the presence of God.”

Centering Prayer was based on medieval Christian contemplative practices – such at that described in the 14^th Century Cloud of Unknowing – which were similar to Eastern mantra practice. A single word or short phrase is repeated, linked to the breath, as the practitioner seeks to place themselves in the presence of God.

Centering Prayer instruction became popular in many Catholic dioceses in the 1970s, and, when she was already in her 40s, Janet Abels was introduced to the practice by her spiritual director, Sister Keiran Flynn of the Sisters of Mercy in Providence, Rhode Island. Janet was an active Catholic, serious about the practice of her faith, and Sister Flynn encouraged her to train to become a Spiritual Director as well.

I ask Janet what, precisely, a lay spiritual director does. 

“You meet monthly with a person – it’s once a month for about an hour – and they speak about their spiritual life and what they’re doing. And a lot of it, of course, is connected to life issues and problems and how you work with them. And, of course, because I was doing Centering Prayer, I kind of introduced them to that.”

“But what draws somebody to seek out a spiritual director?”

“Well, it’s their own experience, like I was drawn to Keiran. You have an experience, and you want to have more one-to-one discussion with somebody rather than sort of churchy stuff. It was a wonderful training actually, I must say, because I got a lot of background training in terms of working with people. Through Keiran and her team at the Our Lady of Peace Spiritual Life Center I was also introduced to Dr. Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing. Do you know Focusing? It’s a form of being with your feelings, especially unwanted feelings. And I also did some dream work and a lot of training in basic psychology. Through the Spiritual Directors’ Training Program I learned how to relate one on one with people, how to listen and many other useful ‘skillful means.’”

“This is all training that you had before you came to Zen.”

“Yes, before I came to Zen. So I had a lot of background in doing spiritual direction one-on-one. I knew how to talk to people. I knew how to connect and hear about their issues and problems, and – you know – we worked with it in that way. So that was in ’87. And in 1992, I met Robert Kennedy, and my life changed.”

Robert Kennedy is a Jesuit who trained in Zen with Koun Yamada in Japan and later with Taizan Maezumi and Bernie Glassman, from whom he received Dharma transmission.

Janet’s husband Greg was engaged in Centering Prayer as well but was also reading about other spiritual traditions and became intrigued by Zen. “He was open, very open,” Janet explains. “But I was a very cautious person. You know? Like, ‘No. I can’t do that!’ The Eastern stuff was kind of scary to me.”

“Why?”

“Why was it scary? Because it didn’t have the Imprimatur.” An imprimatur is a statement of approval by the official church. Elements in the hierarchy, following the changes that came about with the Second Vatican Council, were taking more conservative stances on a number of issues. Although Centering Prayer was recognized as an orthodox Catholic practice, other attempts to combine Eastern and Western practices – such as the work of Anthony DeMello – were considered suspect.

“You’re going outside of the bounds. But, you know, something drives you that makes you want to go into scary territory. So at St. Francis Xavier, the local Jesuit church, they had a day of workshops for different forms of spirituality. They had yoga and they had Centering Prayer and they had ‘Prayer As Movement,’ and things like that. And they had Zen. And Bob Kennedy had been made a Zen teacher by Bernie Glassman Roshi just ten months before; so he was a brand-new Zen teacher. So he was giving the workshop, and I said, ‘Well, I’ll go to that.’ So I came to the workshop, and we were in a kind of classroom thing, and he was up front. And he was talking and talking. And then he said, ‘You know,’ he said, ‘in Japan, they sit with a spine of steel.’ And I thought, ‘That’s for me. There’s structure, and there’s discipline. That’s what I need.’ With Centering Prayer, you could be sitting anyhow anywhere, there was no structure. So he said, ‘In Japan, they sit with a spine of steel. So let’s do it now. So, sit up straight.’ And then we were there, in the chairs, sitting up straight. We did five minutes of meditation sitting with a spine of steel. You know? The body is what holds you up in the structure. And I can’t remember anything else he said, but, after that, I went to him and said, ‘Can I speak to you more about it?’ And he said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘Come out to Jersey City.’” Kennedy, at the time, was on staff in the theology department at St. Peter’s University in Jersey City.

“So he had no sangha then or anything. He was just on his own with a few students, one-on-one in a little room he had there in his residence as a zendo. And so I became his student, and that was 1992. And then after a while I began to feel very itchy to have sitting with other people. I wanted to sit with other people. And so I said, ‘If you would come over to the city – New York City – would you mind being a teacher if I got some people together?’ And I had some spiritual directees who were very interested in meditation, and there were people from that workshop that he was at. So, he said, ‘Sure.’ So I got together some people. And he said, ‘The only night I can come is Tuesday night.’ I said, ‘Fine. It’ll be Tuesdays.’ And Tuesday is still our main sitting night.

“And we sort of moved from church basement to church basement, so to speak. First we sat with the Catholic Center at NYU, in their library. Then when they began to wonder what we were about, we went down the street to the Methodists until the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting downstairs became too much; whenever they do their cheer, like with a new person. So we left them and went to the Lutherans on Christopher Street. And then my husband, Greg – who was in the theatre – formed his own acting studio on 27^th Street. And being a member of the sangha, he said, ‘Well, we can sit there for free.’ So we would then sit there, and Bob would come, and we would have teaching and practice zazen. And it started to form, and we became incorporated in 1999. And then in 2000, I received transmission from him as a teacher, and he said, ‘Okay. You’re on your own now,’ and he went back to Jersey. So we were there working at Greg’s studio, and, then when he closed it, we moved to our current place on 17^th Street where we’ve been for twenty years now.”

The “current place” on 17^th street is the Still Mind Zendo.

“Do you still self-identify as Catholic?” I wonder.

“No. We are Zen Buddhists. In 2006, Greg received transmission from Kennedy And in 2007 our friend and colleague in the White Plum Sangha, Enkyo O’Hara from the Village Zendo, she gave us jukai and Receiving the Precepts.” The White Plum Sangha membership is made up teachers in Taizan Maezumi’s lineage.

“Bob Kennedy retained his affiliation with Catholicism of course,” I point out.

“Yeah.”

“Why did you disaffiliate?”

“Because I wanted the total . . .” – there is a long pause as she searches for the right term – “ . . . emptiness, non-separation if you will, of what Zen opens us to.”

“And you felt you’d be unable to do that if you remained Catholic?”

“Yes, because there’s still a God who is separate from me.”

“Do the students who work with you self-identify as Buddhist?

“I would say 60% of the sangha have received jukai. Some have not, but they’re full Zen practitioners.”

“So people can remain affiliated with another tradition . . .”

“Oh, yeah! Absolutely. We’ve certainly had people like that. For sure. Nobody is made to do jukai. We’re a lay community, and we don’t wear robes or anything because I’ve always felt that those people who are still in different traditions and whatnot – it could be Christianity, Judaism or whatever – have to be included. And if we were there in robes and all that, we’re making them into separate people. We want an inclusive sangha.”

“Do you teach Buddhism as a philosophical system as well presenting Zen as a practice?”

“We present the teachings of the Buddha and Zen ancestors through talks, communal study, one on one meetings – daisan – and through the koan work which we offer. The Eightfold Path, the Heart Sutra and so forth are very much in the forefront of our teaching and practice as well as the teachings of the Chinese and Japanese ancestors. This, of course, in addition to the bedrock of Zen practice, zazen. Perhaps the easiest way to say it is that we all strive to practice the Buddha’s Three Treasures: Buddha (meditation), Dharma (study), Sangha (compassionate living).”

Janet’s husband, Greg, has retired from teaching at the Zendo, and she no longer accepts new students although she has two successors who do. “And I now have a third successor coming along.”  

“And the new people who come,” I ask, “what are they looking for?”

“They’re looking for an escape from their stuff. They are looking for peace of mind, relief from suffering.”

“Enlightenment?” I ask.

“They come seeking enlightenment, and they’re told pretty quickly that no such thing exists. Enlightenment is not a thing. Enlightenment is a noun. Awakening is a verb. We practice a verb.”

“Okay. What do you mean by Awakening? What is one waking to?”

“Awakening is three things. You have to first awaken to the stuff.”

“To the stuff?”

“To the stuff. I’m suffering. I’m dissatisfied. I’m angry. I’m this. You have to be aware that there’s something wrong. There’s something blocking you. Right? That’s the first awakening. That’s what happened to Siddhartha in his palace or wherever he lived. He realized he was not happy. Something was needed. That was his first awakening. So you awaken to that, and you begin to look at that in an objective way. So you begin to step back. That’s the detachment from the mind that the Buddha taught. Detach. And you’re looking at it, and you say, ‘Yeah. This is what’s happening. Is there another way of addressing this?’ And that’s, of course, when you connect to meditation, to the diligent practice of detaching from the never-ending thoughts that arise, slowly discovering that the cause of the suffering and the dissatisfaction is created by your conditioned mind of greed, hatred, and ignorance and not by anyone or anything outside of you. This is following the guidelines of the Fourth Noble Truth which is called the Eightfold Path which I’ve simplified. I’ve made it into a Threefold Path. Right meditation affects Right Thinking, and the two together manifest Right Action or Right Speech. And so Awakening is an on-going journey because the dissatisfactions never end.”

“So ‘awakening to the stuff’ is recognizing – what? – that you are not the stuff going on inside your head?”

“You are and you are not,” she says, then quotes the Heart Sutra. “Form – stuff – is exactly emptiness, emptiness is exactly form.’ And so in order to address the dissatisfactions that we have constantly, we first have to see them. So as I basically see it, we have to notice the dissatisfaction; we have to allow it to exist. If I’m angry, I have to allow myself to be angry. And then I breathe. Breathe into that.The breath detaches you from the thought or feeling and you have an opening into the ‘more than the anger.’ But it’s the allowing – it’s the noticing and the allowing – that’s the difference. As you probably know, we all came to Zen trying to get rid of that stuff. Running away from it and trying to be perfect. But everything is it – including evil – everything is it. You have to include everything. Right?”

“Okay, so it begins with dissatisfaction. People have some sense of dissatisfaction that draws them to practice.”

“That’s the first Noble Truth.”

“What was your dissatisfaction? When you started down this path?” She doesn’t immediately reply. “You were a Catholic spiritual advisor. You took the training. What was it that you were dissatisfied with?”

“I felt that there was more, and I didn’t know what it was. And there is more. Zazen opened me up to the ‘more’ than the sum of my thoughts and feelings.”

“And the mechanics of all this? ‘Zazen,’ after all, just means ‘seated meditation,’ so it’s essentially a practice.”

“Yeah. It’s work.”

“So how does it work? How does ‘meditation’ do what it does?”

“I think what got me into it is the discipline and the structure. We have a structured zendo. On-time and all of that and the posture and the body. But when you make the intent to follow your breath, when you’ve concentrated on your belly, you can’t be thinking. Can’t do two at the same time. So the first things actually that I’ve also cottoned onto the last few years is that we first have to relax the body. So the first thing in zazen is to release all the body tensions, ’cause when you think, you think somewhere with our muscles. Zen is a body practice. It’s not a mind practice. So you release the body, and you follow the breath. You lose it, of course, and you’re back to thinking, and when you think something is tense in you again. So you release again, and you follow the breath. And it’s the moving breath; you keep moving. You keep moving. You don’t – as Pema Chodron famously said – you don’t take the bait of thinking. You keep moving. Keep moving. Keep moving. And then this sort of ‘moreness’ – if you will – the ‘more’ opens up and begins to infiltrate you and begins to affect decisions and how you live your life. And that – to me – is the Threefold Path. Right Meditation affects Right Understanding affects Right Action.”

“Does Zen practice change people?”

“Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Why do it if it didn’t?”

“In what way?”

“It’s the sense of ‘not two’ and not separated; it’s the connection with everything that is. I allow everything that is to be. Including – you know – people I despise. Let it be. It’s the interconnection. It’s one. The way I see it, Rick, is that it’s no good paying lip homage to this and then not living it in your life. You gotta do it. You gotta live it. You’ve gotta be it.”

“And concretely, how does that impact me? How is the way that I live going to be different if I take up Zen practice?”

“Because it’s going to change your mind. That’s why I think the Threefold Path is helpful. Right Meditation changes your mind; it changes the way that you see things. Your Right Understanding begins to develop. You know, a lot of Zen – this is what I was taught – it’s meditation period. No. It’s meditation – Right Meditation – and Right Thinking both manifesting Right Action.”

“And what do you mean by ‘Right Thinking’?”

“Right Understanding. Allowing others to be as they are, allowing the situation to be as it is, not the way I want it to be, and responding accordingly, which is Right Action. And that’s what I consider the word ‘Tathagata’ to mean. ‘No self-living.’ Striving to live egoless self while being completely alive.”

“And what is it that you – as a teacher – hope for for the people with whom you work?”

“Oh, my hope is that they get to this realization. And we all have to get through it ourselves. You know? I can’t think for other people. Experience for other people. That they realize that Zen is simply your life. Ha! It’s simple. It’s just simple. But in order to do that . . . Ultimately there is no such thing as Zen. You hear that in the koans. ‘The stink of Zen.’ ‘Kill the Buddha!’ ‘Kill Zen!’ There is no Buddha, no Zen, only the reality directly in front of you, as it is, not as it should or could be. All the koans point to this. But you have to practice Zen in order to realize that there’s no such thing. There’s just your life. Just your life. And that’s the paradox.”

Heart of Wisdom Zen Temple, Portland, Oregon

Kodo Conover is the “temple manager” of the Heart of Wisdom temple in Portland, Oregon. Originally a Methodist Epsicopal Church, the structure was built in 1891. The Methodists sold the building to a Ukrainian Orthodox congregation in 1959, who installed a three-bar cross on the steeple which still stands. In 1968, it was taken over by the largely African American Church of the Living God, which thrived for a time, but as the congregation dwindled, debts piled up, and the church was slated for public auction. Hogen Bays of the Zen Community of Oregon, learned of the sale and visited it with some board members. He later told a newspaper that when they “first came into the place, all those years of singing and praying had saturated the building. Everybody who walked into the chapel said, ‘Ooh, this feels really good.’ There were 120 years of spiritual practice soaking the walls.” The article went onto note: “The Buddhist community was willing to pay a fair price for the property, $205,000, so the pastor could pay off the church debts and have a little left over for his next ministry. It was an offer in keeping with the concept of karma – that actions have consequences and good actions have good consequences. The Zen community could have waited for the auction and probably spent less to acquire the property, but Bays didn’t want to benefit from another group’s difficult circumstances.”[1]

Kodo, herself, also underwent a slow conversion from Methodism to Buddhism.

“My grandfather was a Methodist minister, and he was quite involved in church architecture. In fact, he was the first Director of Architecture for the World Council of Churches. So we were a family of faith even when we moved to Reno when my dad got a job teaching journalism at the University of Nevada.”

“Was church something you found meaningful?” I ask.

“It was part of the family; it was what we did. When I was a little older and became a member of the church, something fell away, and I didn’t feel connected to it. There wasn’t that connection that I was looking for.”

She was about 12 at the time. I ask what she meant by not having the connection she was looking for.

“I’m not sure at that age, but I thought something would happen when I became a member of the church.” She had been baptized as a baby, but there was a confirmation program for young people, and she thought taking part in it would bring her a sense of being closer to God. “But it didn’t happen. Then I started questioning more and more about God and what this religion was all about. And it was kind of a rift in the family because everybody else was okay with going to church, and I wasn’t.” She chuckles and shrugs.  “But I had to go. I refused to go to the Sunday School part. So they said, okay, I could be in the adult church. So I went to adult church from 12 on; I would just sit with my folks.”

A group of friends at the time began an exploration of alternative religious traditions. “We were interested in different things – I think – as kids. As young adults. You know? I was involved with the Girl Scouts, and there was a lot of outdoor activity. And so I think nature was the entrance for us, of a connection to the Oneness of all things.”

“Is that how you would have expressed it at the time?”

“As a young person, I think we would have expressed it as, ‘This is amazing!’ When I was about 14, I did a star-study. I was able to go the university and look at stars at night with the big telescope. They had the Atmospherium Planetarium, and they had a big telescope. And, you know, you look at a star, but it’s really a galaxy. And that was a mind-blowing experience in a way. So it just opened up this whole world that is much bigger than what we see right here. So I became fascinated with the stars and the universe, and we’re just this little planet of people. This is kind of remarkable.

“I think the girls I hung around with were kind of open to these ideas and larger questions. It was a turbulent time to grow up. There was all this racial inequality going on. There was busing. There was JFK being assassinated, and that was really big. And the day we graduated from high school Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Martin Luther King was assassinated right before that. It was grim for kids too. So you’re seeing this grimness, and then you’re seeing these wonderful and mysterious stars and the world out there. So it’s like, ‘Whoa! How do I fit into this world?’

“When I went to college, this Zen thing, I didn’t know what it was, but it was very interesting. We read Siddhartha; we read On the Road. We were interested in the Beats and Thomas Merton. So like mysterious, mystical – you know – ‘What is this?’”

I am two years older than Kodo, and we share a lot of cultural memory. “Writers like Kerouac were part of the zeitgeist of the times,” I agree. “Was that your entry into Zen?”

“I think it was the connection to nature, to the wilderness. Because we also did a lot of backpacking. We were right there in the Sierras. Lake Tahoe was in our backyard. We were introduced to backpacking at a young age. 11/12 years old.”

She studied Physical Education at Oregon State University. “I was interested in working with kids, especially kids with disabilities. Getting into what was called Adaptive PE at the time. But I couldn’t find any place, any spiritual community that I really fit in.”

“Did you feel a need for one?”

“I was interested in finding a teacher. When I look back at some journals and things, I see I wrote, ‘I’d like a teacher. I’d like to find a teacher. I’d like to learn to meditate.’ And that was kind of a theme for quite a while.”

“What did you think a teacher would do for you?”

“Help me!” she says, laughing. “Help me connect back to this thing of God. This God or whatever. I had this idea that connection was what was missing. Some kind of connection. I felt connected when I was out in the wilderness, in the woods. So why would I feel connected there, and I would not feel connected in the city? That was the question I kept asking.

“Then after college a friend of mine and I travelled all over the United States and Canada for about six months. Nine months. Something like that. Long time. And we stayed with her relatives who were Catholic nuns outside of Boston, and they had a school for multi-handicapped kids. And we would help them. And I thought these women have really got . . . They have some wisdom. I didn’t know any other people like them. We just stayed there for a few weeks. But I kept a correspondence with one of the nuns, and I asked her, ‘How do I find God?’ And she said, ‘Go to a community.’ Like, find a young peoples’ community. She said the Catholics have them, and you might find them here and there. I always thought community wasn’t where I was looking. I wasn’t interested in community particularly. At that time! So, in a way, I just kinda dropped the search for a long time. And went ahead. I got married. I had a career. Spent a lot of time out in the wilderness.”

“So somewhere along the line you met someone to marry,” I remark.

“I met somebody to marry, yes, in college, and then we reconnected. A bunch of us lived together.”

“Were you in a commune?”

“That’s what my parents called it, ‘The Commune.’” She laughs. “But it wasn’t really. Anyway, I worked with developmentally disabled people for a long time, and I had a career as a vocational rehabilitation counsellor.”

“Where was this?”

“In Portland. We moved to Portland, and I got a Master’s in that field, and I worked for the state. And when I started working – and was almost fifty by then – it was really a pretty stressful job. And I kinda went back and, ‘Wow. I never really did find that spiritual practice that I was looking for.’ And so I asked a friend to help me. She had been a Catholic nun for a little while. She was going back to the Catholic church, but then she came in and said, ‘You should go to the Zen place down by your house.’ And I had been pointed to Zen another time. I had a bad sleep-disorder problem and a therapist had me do some psychological evaluations, and he said, ‘You’re okay, but you should go to Zen, ’cause your questions are all Zen questions.’”

She tells me the Zen place was about three-quarters of a mile down the street from her. It was a rented space shared by Kyogen and Gyokuko Carlson’s Dharma Rain program and by Hogen and Chozen Bays’ Zen Community of Oregon.  

“So I finally made it down there, and I walked in, and there was Chozen at the door, greeting people. And Hogan was running around. And they showed me a few things about how to meditate, and I went upstairs, and I go, ‘This is exactly what I’m looking for. I’m home. I haven’t left since.”

“It was that simple?”

“It was that simple.”

 “What was it that made you feel at home?”

“It was sitting in the zendo. It was just sitting in the zendo. It was just the feeling, the place. It was a feeling, I would say, more than anything. It wasn’t like a mental thing; it was a body sensation. Which was exactly what I was looking for.”

“And now you’re a priest.”

“Yeah.”

“So somewhere along the line, you not only decided you were going to take up Zen, you also decided you were going to be ordained.”

“Yes, and, since I didn’t live at the monastery, this took a long time. Things have evolved. So my friend Bansho – Patrick Green – said, ‘I’m going out to talk to Chozen about being ordained.’ And I said, ‘Hey! I want to go with you.’ So we did, and we asked her, and she kinda said, ‘We’ll see.’ In that way, you know?”

“Why did you want to take that step?”

“A lot of people ask that. I just think it adds a level of commitment.”

“Do teachers have to be ordained?”

“No. In our community, you don’t. You can be a teacher; you don’t have to be ordained. And I was actually transmitted as a teacher first.”

“And one assumes that one could be a priest without necessarily being a teacher?” I suggest.

“Yes.”

“So, if I’m a Soto priest in Japan,” I say, “I know what my job is. I’m gonna take over a temple somewhere. It might not even be a job I want. It’s just something I inherited from my dad, and I’m stuck with it whether I’m interested in it or not. I kind of get that. I understand what that is in Japan. What I’m not real clear about is what a Soto priest does in Oregon.”

“Most of them live in a monastery. Actually, we haven’t graduated very many. So three or four who have become priests are now teaching in different places.”

“But we established that teachers don’t need to be priests. So what’s the point of priesthood? If I become a Catholic priest, I know what that means. I lead services – say mass – I administrate the sacraments, do weddings, funerals, provide pastoral care. There’s a job description. What’s the job description for a Soto priest?”

“Well, we carry on a tradition for one thing, and we do the ceremonies like you mentioned. Weddings and funerals and we do some baby blessings.”

“Hospice care?

“We can. I did a program called No One Dies Alone up until the pandemic. So, yeah, some people do that.”

“Is there a certain irony in stopping a program called No One Dies Alone during a pandemic?”

“Yeah. There was. We can’t do it now. It completely fell apart. And some priests, a lot of them do a ministry, so to speak, in prisons or take on someplace else. But we have a temple, and Hogan would always send out this information about what a Temple priest does. Since they couldn’t make me a priest – or wouldn’t – I said I’m just going to do this.”

“This” is being the Temple Manager at Heart of Wisdom.

In 2002, Hogen and Chozen established Great Vow Monastery in the township of Clatskanie. It became their primary place of instruction, but, as Kodo puts it, the people who remained in Portland felt a need for their own place as well and so the former Methodist, Ukrainian Orthodox, and African American community church was purchased.

“But it was falling down, and I was retired, and I said, ‘I’ll manage this place.’ And Chozen and Hogen said, ‘Well, what do you want to be called?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. A temple manager I guess.’ So what I do now is make sure everything works day-to-day. Take care of the property. Take care of the grounds. We have a garden.”

I ask her if one has to be a Buddhist in order to practice Zen. She tells me one doesn’t. So I ask what the benefit of formally becoming a Buddhist is then.

“Well, Buddhism gives you more context for this. Some people can just practice Zen, but it gives you more of the religious kind of side to it. The teachings.”

“And you’re a teacher now.”

“Yes.”

“So what does a Zen teacher teach?”

“Whatever is important to them,” she tells me, chuckling gently.

It is very difficult to get a straight answer to that question.

“Okay, look at it this way,” I try again. “When someone comes to the door for the first time at Heart of Wisdom, what is it that they’re usually looking for? What is it that they expect you to do for them?”

“Well, that’s a good question because everybody comes with a different expectation. But most people want a Zen Buddhist view of how to deal with the world. I mean, I think a lot of people want to make sense of the world or how they can live in the world. They’ve been injured by someone or they got fired or something. So from a Zen Buddhist point, we would say everything that happens, you can take as a learning experience, as a teaching. And you can turn this into something that’s worthwhile for you, instead of holding to the regrets that you didn’t do it a certain way. Or the resentment. Or those other negative things that just bind you up into thinking about tasks over and over again.”

“So they’re coming for psychological reasons?”  

“Well, in a way, but it’s a Buddhist view; how to live in the world. So we always say, the foundation of our practice is the Precepts, is ethical living. So a lot of people come to calm the mind, because their mind is all over the place. Lots and lots of people come for that. Other people come wondering, ‘How do I connect? How do I feel connected? I’m separate. I’m lonely.’”

“And what will Zen do for them?” She doesn’t immediately respond, so I rephrase the question. “You became a priest, you said, because it is a deeper commitment. So I’m guessing one of the things you’re committed to is ensuring the continuance of the tradition. So what is it that you’re offering?”

“Right. What I’m offering you is an experience. Your experience. So, you have to practice. You have to do this.”

“So I take up the practice, and then – what? – somewhere along the line you tell me, ‘Oh, by the way, this is a Buddhist practice.’”

“Yeah. That’s a good way to put it.”

“And do all the people who work with you do it consciously as a Buddhist activity? Or are there people who say, ‘Yeah, that’s nice. You guys do your Buddhist thing; I just want to do the meditation’?”

“Yeah. Sure. And a lot of people who don’t do the Precepts part at all. But we encourage it.”

“Why? Why isn’t the practice itself – the meditation – enough?”

“You could say the practice is enough if you were practising continuously. But we tend to compartmentalize whatever it is we do. We come to the Temple once or twice a week to practice but then immediately get lost in our own thoughts and dialogue when we leave. If you can carry mindfulness with you throughout the day, include ethical living in all your relationships and interactions, expand your heart to be inclusive, kind, generous and patient If you can greet each day with humility and whole-hearted engagement – if you can cultivate wisdom and compassion; if all of these and more are part of what you call practice – then, yes, practice is enough.”

---

[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/O/2011/06/northeast_portland_church_find.html