Mu Sang Sa Temple, Korea –

When I was gathering background material on the Korean Zen Master, Seung Sahn – founder of the Kwan Um School – I was advised to interview Dae Bong Sunim, the former abbot and current guiding teacher of Mu Sang Sa Temple in Korea. I only had his Dharma name, so I wasn’t expecting the person who appeared on screen for the videochat to be a 73-year-old white guy from the United States with a strong East Coast accent. “It’s good to have surprises,” he tells me.

Before discussing Seung Sahn, I ask Dae Bong how they first met.

“I was interested in Buddhism when I was quite young, and when I was teenager I became interested in Zen because of a story I’d heard.”

“Maybe we better establish where and when this was,” I suggest.

Dae Bong turns out to be one of those people who need little prompting.

“Okay. I was born in 1950, and in 1976, in America, I was working in a shipyard as a welder. I had thrown away my career – which was just beginning – in psychology a year or so before that. And I really began to be very interested in finding a spiritual group that I could practice with. I was on the east coast of the United States in Connecticut, and I saw the New York Times Sunday magazine section. On the cover there was a picture of an American Japanese Buddhist monk. He was American but – you know – it was a Japanese tradition, and I realized, ‘Oh, there’s Zen in America.’ ’Cause I wanted to find a teacher who could teach in a way that was not dependent on culture. And when I read the article, it was about the opening of Dai Bosatsu, Eido Roshi’s place in the Catskills in New York. And I don’t know; I wasn’t attracted to it. It struck me as a little cold. And so at some point around the end of the year, with one of the guys that I worked with, I drove up to central Massachusetts and just drove around on a Sunday, asking people and looking for signs for a Buddhist Center, and there were some Tibetan groups up there – Buddhist groups based on Tibetan Buddhism – but I was particularly interested in Zen. And then I remembered that I’d heard that there was a Zen Center in Providence, Rhode Island. So on a Sunday in January, I drove up there and managed to find it.”

By then, I was hooked. I steered the conversation back to Seung Sahn but made a note to do a follow-up interview with Dae Bong on his own story.

He was born Larry Sichel in Philadelphia and grew up in in a largely Reform Jewish neighborhood.

“I went to synagogue. Not all the time but a lot. My family had belonged to the synagogue for a few generations. And I was bar mitzvahed and have a big family. One side of the family would gather on the big holidays. Forty people or so at my grandmother’s for the Seder and for breaking the Yom Kippur fast. What I liked the most . . . I think I have a religious mind. I wasn’t into the theology at all, but my favorite holiday, just recently passed” – we are speaking in October – “is Yom Kippur because it’s purely spiritual. You know, many of the Jewish holidays relate to some historical event, and then there’s all of this theological-spiritual meaning that comes out of it. But I just liked this, ‘How have I turned away from God? And turn back.’ That’s it. I’d stay in the synagogue in the evening, all day long, and my family would come and go. Even when I was like 8/9/10, I’d stay there all day. And around 10, I started to understand what was happening. Basically you’re just saying the same two things over and over in different ways. I turned away from whatever . . . Buddhism. Your True Nature. You know? I’ve indulged in ‘I/my/me.’ And . . . now turn back. And that holiday is all between you and God. It’s not like, ‘What did I do bad to other people?’ And then you turn back, and you’re back on track for a year. I didn’t think about things this way then, but it’s called the Day of Atonement. So if you break it down in English, ‘at-one-ment.’ Becoming one again. This is Zen Buddhism! But they add on all this other stuff.

“So, yeah, grew up American Jewish. What happened to me one time . . . And I know this is before 1988 because we were in front of my parents’ house, and I’d been living in the Zen Center about eleven years – I’d been a monk about four years – and two of my father’s old Jewish friends who knew me since I was a baby sort of confront me.” He speaks in an exaggerated accent. “‘Are you still Jewish?’ And I said, ‘Come on, it’s, like, in the DNA, it’s in culture, it’s in character.’ And they’re like, ‘Are you Jewish? You never come to the synagogue. Are you Jewish?’ And finally what I did, I had stretchy pants on. I went like this.” He acts as if he going to pull his pants down to show them that he’s circumcised. “And they got it. The oddest answer to them; it just took away all their thinking. I learned that style from doing koan interviews with Soen Sa Nim. So then, of course, they’re old Jewish guys; they don’t give up. They dropped that question, and they started sayin’ to me, ‘Well, when’re you comin’ back to the synagogue?’ And I said, ‘I like the Zen Center.’ They kept going on, and then I had this thought – I remember – like a boxer. Sometimes a boxer will go down low, get in really close, and hit them in the belly. So I said to them, ‘Actually, I wanna be a rabbi.’ And then their reaction was perfect. One of them said, ‘Don’t do that! Don’t do that! People only tell you their problems. It’s a real headache.’ The other guy says, ‘And they don’t make much money.’ They never questioned me like that again. Whenever I’d run into them, they’d say, ‘You still doin’ that Buddhist thing?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Ya like it? They give you enough money?’”

He tells me he first became interested in Buddhism when he was eleven and took part in a cultural exchange to Japan.

“I grew up in Philadelphia; went to public school. A very good public school. I was very aware of the American history of slavery and the relationships between African Americans and White people. I couldn’t digest how people could do that kind of thing to others. And now people are still doing it in various ways. Also I was struck that although the street I lived on was nice – 1960, everybody had a car – I knew there was lots of suffering in the houses. It hit me that economics is important – people should have shelter, clothing, food, medical care, and education – but it didn’t take away all suffering. This was on my mind a lot in primary school. I didn’t know anything about Buddha. Then in Japan we visited Kamakura; there’s a big outdoor Buddha. I saw it and immediately felt deeply inside, ‘This person understands suffering and what to do about it.’

“And then I think I told you how my brother told me that story about these two monks.” The story relates how two monks come upon an attractive girl stranded on one side of a stream, unable to cross over without ruining her kimono. So one of the monks picks her up and carries her across. Later that night, at an inn, the other monk complained “Monks are not supposed to touch women, especially young and attractive women.” The first monk responded, “I put her down by the stream. Are you still carrying her?” “I was 16/17 when my brother told me that story, and I thought, ‘Zen has wisdom.’”

In college, he first studied physics. “I wanted to know what is the true nature of the universe, so I wanted to study theoretical physics. I remember in elementary school reading the simple explanations of relativity. I remember sitting in class and thinking, ‘If the universe is infinite, what does that mean?’ And about time, ‘Where’s the line between Tuesday and Wednesday? We know on the clock there’s a line. And on the calendar there’s a line. But in nature, where is the line?’ Actually there’s no line between day and night. That’s something we make up. There’s light and then a little less light, less light, then dark, darker, darker, less dark, less dark, and a little light, more light. There’s no divisions. It’s all continuous. So I got this sense that there’s no division in anything. We make it up. This is true about our body. I talk about this in Dharma talks with people. I’ll say, ‘So, yesterday you ate some rice, and you called it rice. Today it’s part of your skin, it’s the energy of your emotions. It’s your hair. It’s you. And tomorrow you go to the bathroom, and – boom! – something comes out. It’s shit. So rice is you, and you are shit. And then in the old days, the shit goes on the field, and it becomes rice.’ Thich Nhat Hanh talks somewhat like that as well. What are you? I started to realize the whole universe is just one living being.”

I suggest we’d probably skipped ahead a few steps. “So let’s back up. You’re in college. You’re studying physics. How’d you end up becoming a welder?”

“So I switched in my second year from physics to psychology.”

“No wonder you became a welder.

“Yeah. I started university ’68; I finished ’72. I became a welder in ’75.”

“Did you actually practice as a psychologist?”

“I worked as a student on the psychiatric ward of a city hospital as a nurse’s aide to begin with. I had to work in college, and my last two years I got a job working three evenings a week and sometimes nightshift on the weekends, and it was excellent because when you study psychology, you study psychopathology and personality theory, and then I’d think, ‘Yeah. Human beings are like this.’ And then I’d go to work, and my understanding would get blown apart. And then I’d get another idea, some other theory, and I’m like, ‘Oh, they’re like that.’

“After I graduated, I traveled around a little bit, and then I came back to the East Coast, and I got a job in the Whiting Forensic Institute which was a psychiatric hospital on the grounds of the state psychiatric hospital, but it was part of the prison system. I worked there only four months. A friend of mine had a full-time job at the University of Connecticut Hospital on the psychiatric ward as a counselor, and, when he quit, he recommended me, and I switched over there. I did that for two years. Then I realized I’m not psychologically clear enough or strong enough to really do this as a profession, and I don’t think I can get the wisdom I’m looking for going to graduate school. So, that was 1974, and when the hippie movement had somewhat passed, gotten discouraged, but there was still a lot of that sensibility around, and people were getting into ‘back to the land’ and crafts. I decided I wanted to learn pottery.”

“Of course you did,” I sigh, and we both laugh.

“Yeah! Yeah! And my hair was down to here then. So I learned pottery, and I loved it, but I realized, ‘I’m not a potter, and it’s not really addressing the great concerns I have about life’ which I couldn’t quite put in words. Then I needed to work and make money, and I saw a sign that the government would support a four-months program in learning to weld. And my pottery teacher, who was a woman, knew how to weld, and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll learn how to weld, and then I’ll make some money.’ But in terms of life-direction, I was lost. And so I learned how to weld, and all those guys were like from my wrestling team in high school. None of them went to university; many of them were ex-soldiers from Vietnam. Young guys. I knew how to get along with them. The only job I got hired for was at Electric Boat which builds submarines for the Navy. So I worked there for a little more than a year. And socially I learned a lot. My close friends from childhood were all getting Ph. D.s in psychology or finishing law school, and they were going to do poverty law, legal aid, and everybody’s like, ‘What are you doing?’ I just said, ‘I don’t know.’ During that time – I was about 25 – I finally got serious about looking for a Buddhist meditation group. I wanted to practice Zen.

“So one Sunday, I’m talkin’ with one of the guys I worked with. He was a welder also. I don’t know how we connected, but he had been reading Dharma Bums and On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I said to him, ‘I’m going to drive up to Massachusetts and look around for a Buddhist place. You want to come?’” So we drove up there, we drove around all the college campuses, and I asked people if they knew of any Buddhist centers in the area. We spent the day and then we went back home.”

In the days prior to the internet, that’s what you had to do.

“A couple of weeks later, I remembered I had heard there’s a Zen Center in Providence, Rhode Island. I didn’t know anything about the tradition, the master or anything. So on another Sunday in early January, I took my friend and we drove up there. The Zen Master wasn’t there, but his students were having Sunday evening practice, and they always have a Dharma talk Sunday afternoon. One gave a short talk, and another answered questions. We hung around afterwards eating popcorn, and it seemed . . . I liked it. It wasn’t intellectually deep. It was very kind of ordinary. Afterwards, when we were eating popcorn, nobody was talking about Buddhism or anything. Just normal stuff. Then, as I was leaving, somebody said to me, ‘Are you comin’ back?’ And I said, ‘Yes!’ I was surprised that I said it kind of strongly. I meant it. My friend was not all that interested. A month and a half later, I thought, ‘I’m going to go again.’ But there was a branch center closer to where I lived in New Haven, Connecticut. I drove over there on Sunday and after the talk – which was similar, just everyday life – but the point was, ‘Don’t hold your idea’ and ‘What am I? Do you know? What are you?’ Buddha’s ‘Don’t know,’ Bodhidharma’s ‘Don’t know.’ So it was pretty down to Earth. And I asked the guy who gave the talk to teach me how to sit. He said Zen Master Seung Sahn was coming in two weeks to lead a three-day retreat. I decided to sign up for it. I met Zen Master Seung Sahn the night before the retreat when he and a student gave a public dharma talk. He’d been in America about five years, and he could speak English, but it was . . .”

“I notice how all you guys make fun of the way he spoke,” I tell him. “Last time you said it was because it was cute.”

“Well perhaps because he was quite strong, humorous, clear and charismatic, so people were drawn to . . . Sort of like Dylan. People start playin’ and sounding like his voice. In any case, I think I told you somebody asked him, ‘What’s crazy, what’s not crazy?’ He gave an answer that I felt cut across everything. It was just beyond any kind of academic explanation. ‘If you’re very attached, you’re very crazy. If you’re a little attached, you’re a little crazy. If you’re not attached at all, that’s not crazy.’ I thought that is better than my eight years of studying and working in psychology. Then he continued, ‘So everyone in the world is crazy. Because everyone is attached to “I.” But this “I” doesn’t exist; it’s just made by thinking. If you want to not attach to your thinking “I” and realize your true “I,” you must practice Zen.’

“The next day during my first private interview, the Zen Master said, ‘Your before-thinking substance, my before-thinking substance, somebody’s before-thinking substance, the substance of this stick, the sun, moon and stars, all universal substance is the same substance.’ At that moment I thought, ‘I have been waiting my whole life to hear that.’ And I felt he got that 100%. It wasn’t thinking. And I can learn from him how to realize that myself.

“But I didn’t know what to do if you realized your true nature. Later I asked the Zen Master about it. ‘If you attain your true nature and it’s empty, what happens? Do you just disappear? Do you kill yourself?’ Soen Sa Nim would often say, ‘That is only halfway to correct enlightenment. No longer attachment to name and form but if you attach to that, then you’ll make many problems for yourself and others. That’s where you cut your thinking. You just become one with the situation.’ He said, ‘Then you must enter “just do it.” When you’re eating, eat. When you’re talking, talk. When you’re with your family, family mind. When you’re driving, driving mind. Moment-to-moment only help others.’”

I drag the conversation back to his biography. “Somewhere along the line you decided to move into the Zen Center. You said you lived there before becoming a monk.”

“Yeah. I had three retreats with Soen Sa Nim while I was working, and the day after the third one, I quit my job, I went home, and I tried to figure out what to do. I called up the Zen Center in Providence and said, ‘I want to move in.’ They said, ‘Well, come up.’ They knew me because some of them had been at the retreats I did. And they said, ‘Stay for two weeks, and then we’ll see.’ So I moved up there, and I moved in. Then I had to work to support my life there. There was a four-story old building, and there was an American monk there, and he was going to paint the outside of the building during the summer. I remember I moved in on May 6^th, 1977. It was also my grandfather’s birthday. But it is really important to me because I was beginning to find my direction. They asked me if I would stay for the summer and help the monk paint the building. I did not have to pay to live there during that time. So I did.

“The Zen center had a pretty strong daily practice. Two hours every night or something like that, and, of course, we got up at – I think 4:30 – 108 bows and sitting forty-five minutes, and chanting for about forty-five minutes. Then breakfast and then most people would go off to work or school. A couple of people stayed in the center. Evening practice was chanting for thirty minutes – or later it became an hour – and then an hour or two of sitting, and extra practice on the weekends and group work periods. So you couldn’t have much social life. But it was okay to me because I’d been through some relationships, and I wanted to understand the practice.”

“So you move in, they put you to work as a painter, you have to get up at 4:30 to do 108 prostrations, and then somewhere along the line you decide that’s not enough, and you want to become a monk.”

“After about a year, becoming a monk kept coming up in my mind. Again it was like I don’t know why I became a welder. I don’t know. I think – for me – this was the way to really attain the truth of the universe, which, of course, was what I was always interested in. What is the truth of our life and how can I help others? I wanted to devote myself to this way. Also I had made a very strong connection with Soen Sa Nim. He had given me good advice about two very difficult things in my life at that time.”

The two things were that he had a son by a woman he had broken up with, and he had recurring thoughts of suicide.

“I signed the paternity papers; I signed an agreement to send a certain amount a month, money every month through the Connecticut Child and Family Services. But that really hit me. I want to be a good person, but I am not raising my own child. When I left this woman, I started having thoughts of suicide.  Somehow I struggled my way through the next few years. Then I met a Zen group and a Zen Master.

“When Seung Sahn returned to the Zen center after traveling for two months, I’d been living there and practicing two and a half months. I asked to talk to him, and I told him two things. First I told him, ‘I think about killing myself a lot.’ His response was very interesting. He said,” (Dae Bong speaks softly and once again imitates Seung Sahn’s accent) “‘You did that last life. But that wasn’t your idea. Somebody put that idea in your head. You practice, practice, practice. Then one day you can take that idea out. Then no problem.’ That’s interesting. Then I told him, ‘I have a son who’s about three-and-a-half years old, and I am not raising him. I’ve seen him once since he was born.’ Soen Sa Nim said, ‘Oh, then this karma already cut.’ And he looked at me, and he said, ‘Oh. Not cut.’ Then he said, ‘Any child when they’re nine or ten, they think about, “Who’s my father?” When they’re 15/16 and have some energy, they will look for father. You practice hard. Then when he comes looking for you, you can help him that time.’ So I don’t know if other people talked to him about things like that, but he gave me very helpful advice. I don’t know anything about past lives or not, but I had the motivation to try, not because of finding our true self, but because I did something that was a big, a very big problem. I left a woman with a child. And I left this child.”

“And did your son seek you out as Master Seung Sahn predicted?”

“Yes, kind of at first. When he was around 9, his mother was almost in a car accident. Her father was dead; her mother was an alcoholic. Her sister was far away, and she had broken up with a nine-year relationship, and she suddenly thought, ‘What happens to him if I die?’ And she found me through the Zen Center. I was living in a Korean temple in LA then – 1983 or something – and she called me up. And I thought, ‘Okay, here it is. It’s not him. It’s her, but he’s only 9.’ She told me this, and I said, ‘I’ll raise him if anything happens to you, don’t worry. He can live with me, and I will raise him.’ Then I told Soen Sa Nim about it, and he said, ‘You bring him to see you. Don’t you go visit them.’ But they wouldn’t come, even though I pay for it, so I went to see them. I realized the Zen Master really understood my karma. If I go back into that situation, I’m gonna get fucked up again and that won’t help them or anyone. Anyway I went to visit them, and we met a few times.

“A year later I became a monk and soon after became Abbot of our Zen center in Paris, France. My son’s mother got married, changed her name, and moved. Then I couldn’t find my son and he couldn’t find me. He was 12 at that time. When he was 32, he found me through the internet – he was already married – and we had a great talk for hours, and we’ve been in touch ever since. He has come to see me, and I have him. And we have a good relationship. The first time I visited, I stayed with him and his wife for a week. Before I left, his wife said to me, ‘You guys never lived together? DNA’s incredible. You guys never lived together, but you’re so similar!’” He chuckles. “It’s interesting.”

I ask how he came to be the abbot of the French Center.

“We had just built a monastery behind the Providence Zen Center, past the pond and up a hill. The idea was that the monks and nuns would live there, and we would start to hold our three month retreats there rather than in the middle of the busy Zen Center where people were often coming and going. I went to England in the Spring to visit my brother. There is a French nun who had recently come from Korea to France to start a Zen Center. I went to Paris to visit her for three days. They had just signed a lease for a building; they asked me to stay for a while. I stayed for a week, and everything broke in the new place while I was there. The biggest problem was the toilet on the third floor. The vent pipe for the toilet was underneath the kitchen sink on the first floor. All the shit backed up and came out under the sink. The nun and her friend ran out. I cleaned it all up. Then they called Soen Sa Nim and asked if I could stay in Paris. He said, ‘Tell him to decide.’ They talked to me, and I said, ‘How can I decide? I’m supposed to go back to the monastery. Another monk and I are going to sit a three-month retreat there soon. Nobody else is coming to the retreat.’ So I called Soen Sa Nim. I said, ‘Sir, I’m supposed to go back to the monastery soon where this other monk and I are gonna start . . .’ He said, ‘That monk likes to be alone. One monk’s enough.’ So I said, ‘Okay. I’ll stay for the next two months to prepare for your visit.’ There was a Korean woman who Zen Master Seung Sahn had invited to Paris to be a Guest teacher. She attracted a lot of people. She came and . . . It’s a little complicated. She got along fine. She trusted me. So when Soen Sa Nim was about to leave Europe, and he asked me, ‘What’s your plan?’ I said, ‘I’m going to go back to America. I owe my brother $1000, and I know at the monastery you don’t want me to work. If I stay in the Zen Center, I can work for a couple of months, do house-painting or something to pay him off, then I’m free.’ Then Soen Sa Nim called in a monk who had some money and said, ‘Write a cheque to his brother for $1000.’ My friend gave me the cheque, I said, ‘Thank you.’ Then Soen Sa Nim said to me, ‘So go back to America, go to Korea, stay in Europe. You decide.’ There were no monks in our school in Europe, and I understood what the Zen Master wanted to do there. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll stay in Paris. How long should I stay?’ Soen Sa Nim said, ‘One year.’ So I stayed, no job, just living and practicing in the Zen center. One month later, the French nun who was abbot ran away. So we called up Soen Sa Nim who said, ‘Okay. You are abbot.’ So I became abbot and stayed three years.”

And in 1993, he took up residency in the Mu Sang Sa Temple Korea, which means he’s been there now for thirty years, although he admits he also “ran off” twice over that time. “I think a mixture of cultural shock, and cultural shock from the Western monks too.”

I tell him that I used to prepare young people to do short-term work assignments in developing countries and that I would explain to them that they probably wouldn’t experience culture shock when they arrived at their placement because they will be expecting things to be challenging. Rather, they would experience culture shock when they returned home.

He nods his head. “That’s true. It wasn’t the Korean culture. It was the Western sunims who shocked me. They had a kind of arrogance. It kind of fit in with the traditional – now changing – Korean Confucian hierarchy. A kind of arrogance towards lay people and towards women. The younger Western sunims at our temple now don’t have that arrogance.”

He did, of course, return to the temple, eventually served as Abbot and continues as the Guiding Teacher.

Crimson Gate Meditation Community, Oakland, CA –

Megan Rundel is a Dharma heir of Joan Sutherland and the guiding teacher of the Crimson Gate Meditation Community in Oakland, California. She grew up in Houston, where her father was a member of the Physics Department at Rice University. The family religion, she tells me, was science.

“Both of my parents were kind of actively anti-religious and anti-spiritual. They believed that everything in life could be explained by science, and that logic and reason and scientific reasoning were the highest ways to use one’s mind and the best way to know truth.”

“And did you share that point of view?” I ask.

She pauses for a moment. “I always had . . . I knew that that wasn’t the whole truth, but, of course, as a child I couldn’t articulate why. Actually, I was a wall-gazing kid. I would sit in my bedroom as a ten-year-old – I think I was feeling over-stimulated probably – but I would stare at the wall and kind of just let things settle, and I knew there was something bigger that I wanted to make space for. But it took me until I was in college to start to be able to articulate to myself what this other way of knowing could be.”

It began with a course in world religions she took at Wesleyan University. I ask why – given her family background – she had enrolled in the class.

“I was fascinated. I had an identity already as not a scientist and a bit of a rebel in the family. You know, I was an English major.”

“God forbid!” I had also been an English major.

“So I was trying to find my footing in a – I guess – low grade rebellion. And in this world religions class, we used Houston Smith’s textbook, The World’s Religions, and the section on Buddhism really lit me up and excited me. I thought, ‘This is what I’ve been looking for.’”

“Okay. Life sucks; it sucks because you want things; the only way to stop it sucking is not to want things; and then you won’t be reborn again. What was the allure in that?”

“Yeah. I don’t think it was that exactly. It was more the kind of expansiveness. The feeling that the world . . . that the universe is so much larger and stranger than what’s in front of us, and that there are ways to explore that facet of reality.”

“How is that different from the way in which a physicist approaches understanding the world? Might they not describe what they’re doing in much the same way?”

“I think that’s very astute, and I think I did absorb something from my father, a fascination with theories of everything. Wanting to understand the big picture. So I do think I had that quality of mind certainly from my family, but I inclined it in a different way. I think I leaned into the mystery rather than trying to figure out the mystery.”

For students who were interested, the professor for the World Religions course hosted a zazen group before class.

“That required getting up at the ungodly hour of 8:00 a.m.” Megan tells me.

I ask what drew her to it – especially given the ungodly hour – and she considers a moment before answering.

“Here’s the true story about why. I sometimes hesitate to tell it, but it’s the truth. Just a few weeks before I began this religion class, I had taken psychedelic mushrooms.”

“I’m shocked.”

Megan laughs. “I know. But I had what I now recognize was a very deep mystical experience which I didn’t have much way to make sense of. And I knew that I needed to keep working with it. I needed to find a way to lead it into my life in some way, and I had no idea of how to do that. And so when I got to this religion class and had the opportunity to sit zazen, they synced up beautifully. The zazen really gave me that chance, and the teachings worked so well with the experience that I had had that it all felt of a piece to me.”

“It isn’t a unique story,” I mention.

“Yeah. I know.”

“So what you were looking for was a way to understand the experience that you’d had with the mushrooms. And perhaps integrate it?

“Integrate it? Yeah. That’s the language we would use now, for sure. I just knew that I wanted to live a life that was informed by that experience. And I knew I couldn’t take mushrooms all the time. I also had a work-study job in the university library. So I could go into the stacks, and I read every book – I think – by D. T. Suzuki. There wasn’t a lot out there at that point, but I read everything I could get my hands on and just felt really inspired. It opened up a world to me that felt important. So when I graduated from college and moved to San Francisco in 1988, I started to attend sittings at the San Francisco Zen Center. But it was kind of sporadic. I was also young and enjoying life in the city. Then a few years later I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, because my husband was in graduate school there. And I found myself kind of lonely and depressed, and I found – not too far from where we were living – the Madison Zen Center, which was an affiliate of the Rochester Zen Center.”

There was no resident teacher in Madison, but Bodhin Kjolhede from Rochester visited regularly. “People who had a teacher were working with Bodhin. So it was just a small, local basically sitting group affiliated with Rochester, and I really dove headlong into training, doing every sit that they offered and before too long starting to do sesshin in Madison and in Chicago and in Rochester. And that’s where I started koan practice, and my first teacher was Bodhin. And as you know, it’s a style of Zen – at least back then, maybe it’s changed – which was pretty vigorous and Japanese in style. And that kind of worked with my temperament at the time. It was the early ’90s, and I was in my 20s. I had so much energy and angst and stuff at that point in my life that it was good for me to have that discipline. The intensity kind of met my intensity.”

After her husband finished his degree, they moved back to California.

“For a while, I went back to Rochester for retreats, but I realized that that was a long way. And I asked Bodhin who I should study with in the Bay area. I wanted to continue my koan work. I had been working on Mu for a few years at that point and was very deeply involved and wanted to continue that, and Bodhin suggested John Tarrant. So I looked him up. John’s group was in Santa Rosa, but there’s an affiliate group here in Oakland, and I just took to it. And it was so different from Rochester, the culture of Rochester. It totally blew my mind. It was so much more California,” she says with a laugh. “Creative and free and expansive and sometimes psychological and really with an emphasis on the creativity that’s inherent in the koans. And, again, I think the timing was perfect. I had benefited from the intense discipline in Rochester, and then it was so wonderful to feel this freedom that John’s teachings offered. And I just kind of exploded out from that.

“John is charismatic and a koan genius in a certain way, and his vision of Zen and the koans and the practice is incredibly beautiful and inspiring. And that was very important and meaningful to me, personally, and to a lot of other people as well. I don’t think it’s a secret that he can be problematic personally, but those initial years of just feeling the possibilities, just the joy of the koans with him was an incredibly valuable teaching.”

John had not yet established the Pacific Zen Institute, and his group at the time was known as the California Diamond Sangha. Joan Sutherland was a senior student when Megan began practice there.

“I adored her. I thought she was wonderful. I loved having a woman teacher, and I loved that she combined some of the beauty and the creative energy that John brought without the drama. And I really just kind of fell in love with her. She started to teach maybe a year later, and I was one of the first people in line to be her student. And after I started working with Joan, she very quickly became my primary teacher.”

“You said you ‘loved’ having a woman teacher. Does it make a difference?”

“It sure did to me. Probably a man could be similar in some ways, but Joan brought a way of teaching to groups and in one-on-one dokusan that was just so warm and engaged. It was something I hadn’t experienced before, and it felt – I don’t like the word ‘feminine’ exactly – but it felt . . . It had the qualities that I would feel in other female relationships. A certain warmth; embodiment; kindness. Combined with her incredibly keen intellect and prajna. You know? That combination was so profound. It really met me exactly where I wanted to be.”

Megan was in graduate school at the time studying clinical psychology.

“So I had a period of time in the ’90s when I was in grad school – I was getting a doctorate, so it was a long time – and I had the flexibility to do a lot with Zen, go to all the retreats and so forth. And I was studying psychology, and those two endeavours really informed each other.”

“Did you formally give Joan the box of incense and all that?” Presenting a box of incense is a traditional way of asking a teacher to accept one as a student.

“Uh-huh. I think that was probably ’96.”

“Her approach to koans – as you pointed out – very different from the Rochester style.”

“Oh, yes! Oh, my gosh! I felt like it was the first time that my subjectivity was part of it in an authentic way where I felt there was interest in me as an individual human. And that really felt important to me. I felt like I needed to be met on a human-to-human level.”

“Okay. So you formally become her student in 1996, and then somewhere along the line she identifies you as a person whom she could entrust with carrying on this tradition.”

“I have no idea how that happened. I mean, I worked with Joan for a long time, and I just felt so fortunate. I did not at all think of myself as anybody who could carry on the tradition or teach. I really didn’t. I didn’t have interest in that or confidence that I could. I sort of actively didn’t want to. For lots of reasons it didn’t feel at all like a natural fit.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I guess a couple of things. Joan seemed to think that I had the qualities needed for the role, and I trust her. So part of it was just trusting Joan. And the other thing is that I’m the last person that she named as a teacher before she retired. And I knew that she was about to retire, so I really knew that I had two choices. I already had my little group here in Oakland and was kind of operating, I guess, as a meditation instructor. So I could try to struggle on in that role, which didn’t seem likely. I could just find another group, which around here is just dominated by the San Francisco Zen Center, and I knew that’s just . . . Or I could take her up on the offer.”

“What was your reservation about Zen Center?”

“It’s very formal. And I really loved koans which they don’t do. I felt engaged with that and I really liked the more expansive and free feeling that it brought out in me. As somebody who can be kind of shy and interior, I liked the expansive quality of Joan’s lineage.”

She tells me that her group in Oakland – Crimson Gate – is largely made up of fellow psychologists. “Not all. But everybody kind of knows – you know – it’s a psychologically-minded group.”

“So tell me what the difference is between what a psychologist/psychotherapist does and what a Zen teacher does.”

“Traditionally a psychologist helps a person look at their story, question aspects of it, and heal past wounds. And a Zen teacher helps a person get beyond their personal story and expand into what I guess we might call ‘big mind.’ So I guess psychologists specialize in helping us with our ‘small minds,’ which does relieve a lot of suffering, and Zen teachers help show us the realms of ‘big mind.’”

“What draws people to Zen practice? What makes somebody wake up one morning and search out Crimson Gate on Google?

“Well, as I said, most of the people who come to our group are psychologists or therapists.”

“Okay then, so what is it that psychology doesn’t offer them that they hope to find in Zen?”

“It depends on the person, but I guess I could say a few things. One is just a break from the hecticness of modern life. And especially maybe in the Bay Area where things move really fast. Everybody’s really busy. It’s an intense place. So I think a lot of people just want a break. Want the quiet, a way to be quiet and to just drop all of the speed and the burdens and the complications. And then I think a lot of therapists have the intuition that there’s something beyond the personal story. And I think we regularly get glimpses of that and intimations of that as therapists, but our training doesn’t really offer us any way to work with that or explore it in ourselves or our patients. So I think the Zen practice offers a way to . . . You know, Freud has this great note – Freud was always best in his footnotes – and he had this one in The Interpretation of Dreams about the dream navel which he said was the place where any dream opens out into the unknown, the unknowable. So I like to imagine it as a sort of corridor where on one side you can see into the dream world, and the other side is just this mystery. So sometimes I think of Crimson Gate as sort of a way of being in that dream navel with one eye on the world of dream and play and the other eye on the vastness. And I really think people have a craving for finding a way to get to know that place and to do it together. Joan’s tagline for her group used to be, ‘We all wake up together, a conspiracy of friends.’”

“On the webpage for Crimson Gate you say that the practice helps us ‘heal dualities.’ What do you mean by that?”

“Modern life and language encourages divisions in the mind. Like good and bad, right and wrong, success and failure. And it’s so easy to get trapped in those dualities and have your entire life run by trying to get from one to the other or feeling polarized. And Zen practice is a way to see into the ‘no-self-ness’ of those qualities – the non-existence of those qualities – and that is a healing experience.”

“And yet you chose to work with a female teacher in order to avoid the drama associated with a male teacher. Is this not duality?”

“‘Emptiness is form,’” she says, quoting the Heart Sutra, and we both chuckle.

“Well, let’s consider that,” I suggest. “We chant these things: ‘Form here is only emptiness, emptiness only form / Form is no other than emptiness / Emptiness no other than form / Feeling, thought and choice, consciousness itself are the same as this.’ We chant it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it makes any sense to us. How is ‘form emptiness and emptiness form’?”

“I love that there’s really no paradox there. That’s truly my experience. I always think of it as having binocular vision. With one eye we can see emptiness or the vastness – as Joan would call it – and with the other eye we have a firm grip on reality and how the world works. So it’s a ‘both and.’ It’s both true that there is no gender, there is no practice, there is no duality, and, at the same time, having a woman teacher was profoundly important to me as a woman. I grew up at a really interesting point in history. My mother was having her consciousness raised when I was a little girl. And I think she was in the League of Women Voters and kind of in that wave of feminism, and I think I really learned from her early on that it’s important for women to speak up, to not just absorb the patriarchy but to own our differences but also our strengths. Joan, I think, was an amazing role model for that.”

“Let me make sure I’m following you here: You seem to be suggesting that one first has to recognize the dualities? So in my case, as a white, cis-gendered male there may be a whole bunch of things I might take for granted, and the first step is to be aware of those assumptions, and the real differences that exist?”

“Absolutely.”

“Okay. And, at the same time, what? If it’s important for me to be aware of the dualities, especially being this highly-privileged individual . . . And I’m out-numbered in my family. Most of the people in my family are female; one is trans-sexual; I have three Filipino grandchildren; I have a First Nations great-grandchild. So . . . ‘Form here is only emptiness, emptiness only form?’”

“So in your family there’s differences, there’s markers, there’s gender, there’s ethnicity, there’s sexuality, and you’re in the same family, and they’re both true.”

“Okay, then the website goes on to say: ‘More than ever our Way helps us heal dualities, cultivate a kind and open heart, and make way for inquiry into our true natures.’ What is our false nature?”

“Well, our false nature is ‘I’m right and you’re wrong.’” We both laugh.“That’s the world of ignorance. And our true nature is, ‘It’s really nice to meet you, Rick.’”

“That doesn’t really clarify anything, does it? Say I come across this on your website, and I’m curious enough to come by the center. If you start talking about ‘true nature,’ in order to make any sense out of what you’re saying, don’t I have to have some idea of what my false nature is?”

“I would probably say, ‘The stories that you have about yourself are false, and there’s more to you in your life than that. And you have to find out about that for yourself. I can’t tell you that. But if you come and sit in meditation with us, you’ll discover something for yourself.’”

“So, again, how is that different from if I came to you as a psychotherapist?”

“In psychotherapy we move into your story and try to help understand the story and to make sense of it, and to help you have – maybe – better stories. More effective stories that work better in the world. And in Zen, it’s about dropping the story and seeing what’s bigger than that.”

“And what is the value of doing that?”

“It helps us be wiser and kinder and more aware of our place in the world.”

 One really can’t ask for more than that.

Adapted from The Story of Zen –

The transference of Buddhism to the west began in the post-Darwinian period at the end of the 19^th century when rationalists began to have difficulty accepting the absolutes of the Christian creed but still  wanted to believe that there was a spiritual dimension to human life. As a result, even the educated became susceptible to a bizarre range of new beliefs such as in the existence of fairies, spiritualism and communication with the dead, various forms of psychic phenomenon, and even telepathic communications with mystic spiritual masters in the Himalayas. In popular culture, these ideas were often associated with the “Mysterious East,” a region where it was imagined exotic powers were common and life was free of the more restrictive elements of Christian morality.

It was a period of serious academic research as well, and, by the end of the 19^th Century, Asian studies had not only acquired a degree of respectability in western universities they also attracted a popular interest unimaginable a few decades earlier. Sir Edwin Arnold’s verse biography of the Buddha – The Light of Asia – became a late Victorian best-seller. The same year Arnold’s book came out, the Oxford scholar, Max Müller, released the first in what would be a fifty-volume series entitled The Sacred Books of the East, a collection of translations he and others had made of Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist texts, as well as works from the Muslim, Jain, and Zoroastrian traditions.

The form of Buddhism with which the West first became familiar was the austere doctrine of the Theravada School as found in Sri Lanka. There a British civil service officer, Thomas Rhys David, translated works which would be included in Müller’s series. Rhys David would go on to found the Pali Text Society, committed to preserving the literary heritage – including the Tripitaka – of what was then known as Ceylon. As documents became more accessible in the West, some thinkers began to wonder if non-theistic Theravadan Buddhism might not be a faith system better suited to bridge the growing rift between science and religion than Christianity.

Knowledge of Mahayana Buddhism came later, when missionaries and philologists began the process of translating Tibetan texts; however, the consensus of scholars like Rhys David was that the Mahayana – with its lurid artwork and suspiciously papist pantheon of Bodhisattvas – was a decadent corruption of the Buddha’s original teachings.

The eventual dominance of Mahayana teaching in the west is largely due to the spread of Zen, but Western knowledge of Zen is historically comparatively recent. The first Zen teacher to set foot in the Americas did not do so until 1893.

Shaku Soen was born in 1859, just six years after American warships had opened the previously isolated Japan to the west. As a child, he was enrolled in a temple school where – according to his own assessment – he learned to be filial to his parents, helpful to his siblings, loyal to his country, faithful to his compatriots, and respectful of the Three Treasures, Buddha, Dharma [what he taught], and Sangha [the community of his followers]. When Soen was 12, he became a monk, which wasn’t an unusual age for that step.

After working with two prior teachers, he eventually came to study with Imakita Kosen. He mastered the koan system quickly and easily and received inka from Kosen when he was only 25 years old. Normally after receiving transmission, a monk would undertake a pilgrimage to other Zen temples throughout the country to have his understanding tested and deepened, but Kosen encouraged Soen, instead, to enroll in the newly established Keio University in Tokyo.

Soen spent three years there during which he learned about other forms of Buddhism and developed a desire to deepen his understanding of the breadth of Buddhist thought by traveling to Ceylon in order to explore Theravada teachings. Before the opening of Japan to the West, travel restrictions had prevented Japanese from leaving the country and such a journey would have been impossible, but, now that these had been lifted, he was free to undertake the voyage.

It proved to be more challenging than he had anticipated. He admired the lifestyle of the Ceylonese monks and their commitment to the precepts; however, he was never able to communicate with them very well, and he realized that they would be bewildered if he attempted to explain Zen with its emphasis on personal enlightenment. An even greater frustration was the climate. Unused to the heat and humidity of the tropics, he didn’t have the physical endurance to take part in the begging rounds by which the monks traditionally supported themselves. In a letter he wrote to Kosen, he remarked that things in Ceylon were so different that only the barking of the dogs seemed familiar.

Shortly after Shaku returned to Japan, Kosen died, and Soen succeeded him as the abbot of Engakuji.

Like Kosen, Soen was a political conservative and generally accepted the social and economic policies of the Meiji government. He was a product of his era and environment and, as such, took for granted the belief that the Japanese people were the unique descendants of a sacred royal household.

His education, which had trained him to be loyal to his nation and faithful to his compatriots, led him to support the country’s military incursions into China and Russia, and during the Russo-Japanese War [1904-05], he took leave from his duties at Engakuji to serve as a chaplain in the First Army Division. Later he would later argue that the Japanese victory was due, in part, to the strength the nation derived from Buddhist culture and specifically from Zen training which instilled a “Samurai spirit” in the population.

The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair – also known as the Columbian Exposition – was a celebration of the material progress humankind had made in the four hundred years since Columbus’s arrival in the islands of the Caribbean. 27 million people attended the event which was unashamedly an expression of American Exceptionalism. No mention, naturally, was made of the negative impact of the arrival of Europeans on indigenous populations or of other social, environmental, and human costs associated with the march of human progress.

A group of Protestant clergymen saw the fair as an opportunity to hold a World Parliament of Religions in the city at the same time. The Parliament organizers intended to demonstrate that, rather than casting doubt on religion as the evolutionists appeared to have done, modern scholarship – which had now resulted in English translations of most of the world’s scriptures – proved that humankind had been guided by “divine providence through all ages and all lands.” In the same way that the World’s Fair presented America as the pinnacle of material success, the Parliament sought to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity over all other faith traditions. In the closing ceremonies, the Chairman of the Parliament, John Henry Barrows, confidently proclaimed that it had “shown that Christianity is still the great quickener of humanity . . . that there is no teacher to be compared with Christ, and no Saviour excepting Christ . . . I doubt if any Orientals who were present misinterpreted the courtesy with which they were received into a readiness on the part of the American people to accept Oriental faiths in place of their own.” One of those visiting Orientals to whom Barrows referred was Soen.

Soen had only been abbot of Engakuji for a year when he received the invitation to take part in the Parliament. Other, more experienced, abbots advised him to refuse on the grounds that the barbarians of the United States couldn’t possibly understand or appreciate the Buddhadharma. After careful consideration, however, Soen decided to take part. He composed two papers to be presented at the Parliament but, because he had only a rudimentary knowledge of English, asked one of his students, Teitaro Suzuki, to translate them for him.

His principal paper dealt with Buddhist teachings on “cause and effect” and was read to the participants by Barrows. It was received politely but without the enthusiasm which the audience demonstrated for some of the more charismatic Asian presenters. One attendee who was impressed by Soen’s paper, however, was Paul Carus, a publisher and editor intrigued by Asian philosophy. Soen’s paper piqued his interest, and Carus asked the Zen abbot if he would consider remaining in the United States a while longer to participate in a project to prepare translations of Buddhist – in particular, Mahayana – texts for publication in English. Soen demurred, stating that he was not qualified to do so and that his duties at Engakuji prevented him from taking on other responsibilities; he noted, however, that the young student who had translated his paper into English might be up to the task.

So it was that D. T. Suzuki came to Illinois in 1897, and – with him – Zen would arrive in the West.

Portrait of Shaku Soen by Molly Macnaughton from “Zen Masters of Japan”

Zen Masters of Japan: 295-99

The Story of Zen: 213-23, 229-34, 337

Howling Dragon Zen, Vermont –

A book on physics first drew Jim Bastien to Zen Practice. He was working at Boys Town – the Catholic orphanage in Nebraska – “when I came across this book called The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that book, but he wrote it back in the 1970s. It’s a treatise on the parallels between Eastern religious views and modern science, particularly quantum physics. And when I read that book, it was like, ‘Okay. Now I have found a way to reconcile my scientific training and a way of thinking with my spiritual sense without having to buy the traditional conventional Christian viewpoint.’”

Jim had been raised in New England in a working-class family plagued by alcoholism and trauma. He mixed with a group of kids who were deemed delinquent and was placed on probation by the time he was 16. “About a year later I got into a fight on a Friday night after drinking and broke this kid’s collarbone. And the Chief of Police told the judge, ‘I want him to go to Westfield State Training School because he’s incorrigible, and he’s got issues, and I’ve had enough.’ Plus the kid who I broke his collar bone, his mother was a big deal in the town. So she made a big stink about it. Anyway, I was already on probation, and so my probation officer basically said to the judge, ‘Hey, he’s a good kid. He’s on the football team. He’s an A student. But he comes from a home where there’s not a lot of supervision at times. There’s no point in putting him in a training school.’ So the judge listened to that, and I got two years’ probation until I was 18, but I was allowed to stay out of the training school.”

He managed to turn his life around and became a product of the times. He was one of the 400,000 people who attended the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival; he experimented with LSD and marijuana, studied Skinnerian philosophy, and got a Master’s Degree in social work, which earned him the job at Boys Town.

“It was a big epiphany to learn that Zen actually had an empirical basis to it. And once I read that book, I said, ‘I’ve gotta find a Zen Center somewhere.’ So I opened the Omaha, Nebraska, phone book, and I flipped to the last page, and, sure enough, Nebraska Zen Center. So I called them up, and I said, ‘How do I do this?’ And the guy who ran it was this physics professor, of all things, at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. His name was Gordon Becker, and he was affiliated with the Minnesota Zen Center under Katagiri Roshi. There were about five of us that would sit in his living room every day, Monday through Saturday, and do zazen, and on Saturday we’d go out to breakfast afterwards. And every once in a while, we’d travel up to Minnesota to the Zen Center there. And they also had a place called Hokyoji which was like a retreat center. That was it. I would get up every morning at 5:00 and drive the thirty minutes across town in Omaha, sit two periods, and then drive back home. Shower, shave, etcetera, and go to work. Yeah, I did that – like – for three years.”

It wasn’t something he talked about with others. “I kept it on the down-low because when I was doing this it was back in 1980. I moved to Nebraska in 1979, and I started sitting in 1980. And in those days, you couldn’t go into a bookstore and find a book on Zen. You might find Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen and one D. T. Suzuki book, but that was it. And Omaha, Nebraska, of course, is right in the heart of the Bible-belt. Very, very heavy Christian culture there. And I’m workin’ at Boys Town, which is like the preeminent Catholic charitable organization for kids, right? So I’m kind of like this closet Zen practitioner. But eventually I started to come out, and it wasn’t as big of an issue as I thought it was.”

“What drew you to the practice?” I ask.

“I think it was my first taste of what I call the mind of not-knowing, that what was going on in my head was not everything, was not the whole thing. And that there was this part of myself that I’d probably lost touch of going way back that was present and welcoming and still and essentially the medium through which experience came through. But it wasn’t just the experience. It was something that was bigger than that, and I was very interested in exploring that, seeing where that would go. And another thing – and I don’t know where this comes from – but I actually love the forms. I love the bowing; I love the chanting; I love the sitting. I just really, really like it. And so I did it from 1980, and in ’85 or ’86 I did jukai with Katagiri.”

I ask what Katagiri Roshi was like, and it turns out that Jim is one of those people who don’t need prompting. Once they start a  story, they just run with it.

“Well, here’s the deal with Katagiri. I met him only twice basically. Actually three times. This guy, Gordon Becker, decided to build a zendo onto his house. He moved out of his living room and moved into the kind of addition he built and turned it into a zendo. And Katagiri came down to initiate the zendo, and there was a bunch of ceremonies that went with that. And so I got to meet him for the first time. And it was during that visit that I asked him if he would be willing to accept me as a student. And he knew I had been very conscientiously practising all these years so he said, ‘Yes.’ But he said, ‘You’ll have to come to Minnesota, and you’ll go through a weekend retreat there, and then you’re also going to learn how to sew a rakusu.’ So I went up there and did a two-day retreat and completed that. And then when it was time to go through the ceremony, it was scheduled for the Sunday after the seven-day Rohatsu sesshin, which was the first week-long sesshin that I ever attended. I had a pretty major kensho that was confirmed by Katagiri. And it was interesting too because he gave me the name ‘Daikan,’ which means Great Tolerance. And in the after-party, he came over to me, and his name was Dainin, which means Great Patience. And he took my rakusu, and he took his rakusu, and he went, ‘Look at that.’ And then he gave me a big hug. And the interesting thing about it, the kensho experience I had occurred when I heard a cough that he had made. And when the cough happened it was – this is the term that’s used – ‘body and mind dropping off.’ It was very, very powerful. But it also turned out that that cough signified the fact that he had a rare form of leukemia. And so when I met with him, after he had confirmed the kensho, I said, ‘Well, what should I do now?’ And he said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘Well, I think I would like to ordain as a priest.’ And he said, ‘Tell me about your family.’ And I said, ‘I live in Nebraska. I’ve got three kids, and I work at Boys Town. And I have a wife, etcetera.’ And he said, ‘What I want you to do is for the next two years, I want you to make your work and your family your practice. And if at the end of two years you still want to be a priest, I’ll ordain you.’ I said, ‘Thank you,’ and that was the last time I ever saw him because he ended up deteriorating pretty rapidly. Five or six months later, he passed away.

“About the time that happened, there was an opportunity to start a Boys Town in New England in Rhode Island. So I was tasked to go and lead that project, and I moved my family out of Nebraska to Rhode Island. And there weren’t any Soto Zen sitting groups anywhere nearby, so I started training with the Koreans in Cumberland, Rhode Island, the Kwan Um School of Zen. I did koan study with Seung Sahn, the great Korean master, for about four years. They call it kung-ans, a little different than the Japanese. And my primary teacher was Soeng Hyang, also known as Bobby Rhodes. She’s a hospice nurse, and my sister’s a hospice nurse, and they knew each other. So I did koan study with her, and then after a few years we moved out of Rhode Island and back to Western Massachusetts. And I still went to the Kwan Um School of Zen periodically, but then I decided because I was closer to Zen Mountain Monastery, I thought, ‘I think I’ll take a ride over there and see what that’s like.’ And I went over for a weekend retreat, and  Daido Loori was still there. And so I then started training with them as a lay person who didn’t live there. I wasn’t in residence. And I did that for a couple of years. Probably went to three or four retreats of varying lengths. And then one day I’m reading the local newspaper back in Amherst, Massachusetts, and I see an article indicating that Bernie Glassman has just moved into the town five miles from where I live. Because I’d been following Bernie since my days in Nebraska with Katagiri because ZCLA and Minnesota Zen Center and San Francisco Zen Center were like the three where the original teachers came from Japan. So I knew about them. I read their magazine that they would send out. And it turns out, he’s right here in my backyard. Right? So I called up there; I said, ‘What’s goin’ on? How can I get involved?’ They said, ‘Well, Bernie’s not taking any more students.’ But they said, ‘We have these things called Zen Circles, and you can join a Zen Circle.’ It was like a bunch of people got together. It was like one of his upayas, skillful means. You know, Bernie always had these upayas. And so I did that for about a year or so, and then Bernie decided to have this big sesshin. It was the first one he’d done in five years. And he did it at the Kripalu Yoga Retreat Center in Western Mass. And Peter Matthiessen was there; Bernie was there. Enkyo O’Hara was there. Eve Marko was there, and – you know – it was kind of like the Who’s Who in the Zen Peacemakers. And it was kind of a cool retreat because at dokusan you could go to a different teacher on every day. So I saw Peter, and I saw Eve, and I saw Enkyo. And then I got to have a meeting with Bernie. And by then, I’m running a large residential treatment school for youthful sex offenders, essentially emotionally disturbed kids, and juvenile delinquents. So I’m running this 120-bed alternative high school and grammar school. So I meet Bernie, and he says – first thing he says is – ‘What’s your practice?’ I said, ‘I do zazen, etcetera, etcetera.’ He said, ‘Well, what do you do?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m the vice president of residential services running this big treatment centre.’ And he goes, ‘That’s great. How would you like to work for me?’ And I said, ‘You’re kidding.’ And he goes, ‘No. No.’ And I said, ‘A long time ago, I wanted to ordain as a priest and I’ve always kind of held that as something I wanted to do.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ve disrobed, so I can’t make you a priest. But if you want that – you know – I can figure out a way for that to happen. But,’ he said, ‘I actually don’t think that’s the best path for you. ’Cause of your long history; the things that you’ve done; the education that you have. Your commitment to social service since you were a kid. You know, that whole thing.’ Which is what the Zen Peacemakers are kind of known for. And so I quit my job; I gave up my vice-presidency. My in-laws almost died when that happened. It was all soft money, and I just took a launch. And originally I was President of the Board and then I became the Chief Operating Officer. And essentially I was with Bernie every day for, like, five years. You know, we’d meet in the morning; we’d smoke cigars and plan the day. At lunchtime we’d go down to Subway or a pizza place because he loved eating Subway and pizza.”

“What good is Zen?” I ask him.

“It’s good for nothin’.” We both chuckle, then he says, “I’ll answer the way I always heard Bernie answer. Zen is life. You know, people ask what Zen is, and he says, ‘It’s life. Life.’”

“In that case, what’s the point of all those forms – which you tell me you love – or taking steps like sewing a rakusu or even possibly becoming ordained?”

“Because I think the practice reveals to us what the path out of suffering is. And one of the things that came out of the realization I had is an extremely powerful sense of wanting to help other people. That the actualization of realization is love and compassion. Even against all odds. And it’s not an idea; it’s not a concept. It’s something you know now has to happen and be part of your life. And what is it that you realize? You know, you’re never gonna get an answer to that question because realization is beyond conceptual solutions.”

“Is Zen about realization?”

“Not anymore than eating breakfast.”

“I’m trying to get a sense of what you mean when you use terms like ‘practice,’ a sense of what Zen is.”

“Well, the question is already a problem. If you have to put it in words, it’s always a bit of a problem. You know, in the Soto sect, we’re taught that we’re already enlightened. We don’t have to do anything to become enlightened. And the degree of our enlightenment is oftentimes kind of measured by the extent to which we’re actually in service to other people. So there’s a realization of one’s own enlightenment – okay? – and then there’s the actualization of that realization. And what is that realization? In the simplest words, I would say, it is the oneness and interconnectedness of all life and all things. And once one has . . . I don’t want to say ‘experienced,’ because that turns it into an event. But once one is living out of this oneness and this interconnectedness of life, then everything you’re doing is Zen practice. Everything you’re doing is Zen practice. You know, the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng, a lot of his teaching was about being completely present in the moment without judgment, without fixation and just doing what you’re doing while you’re doing it. Right? Now that sounds simple, but it’s a very, very hard practice to actually do that without getting caught up in our conceptualizing mind which is always going constantly and is in many ways – actually in the most important way – the obstacle to realization. So learning to have a new relationship with your thinking/conceptualizing mind is very important because, as Seung Sahn used to say, the mind is before thinking, before conceptualization. So what are you before conceptualization? That’s the question. And carrying that forward from moment to moment to moment. And this is why I was attracted to Bernie Glassman as a teacher because Bernie had a very, very deep – in my view – understanding. I think more than most people sometimes gave him credit for or realized. Because he was criticized when, like, he started a bakery. Zen students who had worked with him in California when he was with Maezumi Roshi, when he left California and went out his own and started the Zen Center of New York, and eventually the Greystone Bakery and that whole thing that he developed, they left him because he insisted sitting in the zendo doing zazen is equivalent to working in the bakery making donuts if there’s no separation between you and what you’re doing. And a lot of people left him. And they said, ‘Well, that’s not Zen.’ But from my perspective – you know – he had a much deeper understanding of what practice is. Practice and service are not two in my view. Bernie would say, ‘If everyone’s already enlightened, how do I know to what extent I’m enlightened?’ And his answer would be, ‘To the extent that you are in service to others.’”

“Okay,” I say, “so that’s an attitude, a perspective. What I’m wondering is how one acquires the insight whereby I can recognize that the time I spend in the bakery is as valuable as the time I spend in some form of spiritual exercise. What is the process for acquiring that perspective?”

“Well, there’s no formula for this. People used to ask Bernie, ‘How do you determine who your Dharma successor is? What kind of attainment do they have to have demonstrated in order for you to confer Dharma transmission?’ And he had a very interesting answer. His answer was, ‘It doesn’t matter to me how many koans they’ve passed. It doesn’t even matter to me how strong their sitting practice is.’ He said, ‘All that matters to me is the degree to which they are demonstrating in their life the oneness and connectedness of all of life.’”

“Is Zen a belief system?”

He shakes his head. “No, it’s not.”

“So what distinguishes someone who self-identifies as a Zen Buddhist from other forms of Buddhism?”

“It has a lot to do with the practice that speaks to them and that they subscribe to. There are many forms of Buddhism, obviously, and there’s even a number of variants of Zen Buddhism. So one of the metaphors that my teacher used to talk about is it’s like we’re climbing to the top of this mountain – right? – and you got Christians, you’ve got Jews, you’ve got Muslims, you’ve got Zen Buddhists, you got Theravadan Buddhists, you got Nichiren. You’ve got all these different folks that are climbing this mountain and hopefully when they get to the top, they’re all going to have this great epiphany and understand everything and be deeply realized. But when they get to the top of the mountain, they still see it in their own way. But that doesn’t mean that their way is the only way. Even the Dalai Lama once said, ‘It doesn’t matter what religion you practice. What matters is that you practice it.

“You know, Bernie used to ask, ‘What raises the Bodhi-mind, the mind that wants to practice?’ Right? Well the first thing is probably this kind of experience that one has through their life where they keep looking for things that are going to fulfill them in some way, kind of make sense to them, or make them feel more complete. And they achieve those things, but they very quickly realize that they feel empty again. And they kind of go around this wheel over and over and over again. And some people, they just kind of stay on the wheel, and that’s what they do. But there are other people who start to raise a kind of a doubt within themselves, ‘Is the way I’m living all there is? Is this it? Or is there something more here? Because I have a sense that there may be something more here. I don’t know why I feel that way. I don’t know where it comes from, but I’ve got a strong sense that there’s got to be something more than just this process that I go through and I see other people go through.’ And also an understanding and recognition that that process at some level results in suffering. Kind of continuous suffering whether it’s dramatic, moderate, or low level, but there is this feeling of existential angst. And so you might read stuff. These days you can see all kinds of stuff. You can go on YouTube and, like – boom! – it’s all there. But I think what led me to work with a teacher was to see how that teacher was in their moment-to-moment life. I remember when I was at the Nebraska Zen Center, and Katagiri Roshi came down for the weekend. And I remember the first time he came, after morning zazen I went out the front of the house, and Katagiri was standing about five feet in front of me, and there was this big golf course across the street with big, tall pine trees. And it was early in the morning, and there was beautiful sunlight trailing down through the trees, and he was just standing there and staring at this presence. And – you know – being a new Zen student it was like, ‘Ooo, I wanna get a moment with Katagiri.’ Right? So I took two steps towards him, and he took two steps away from me, but never looked back or anything. And it was like a super powerful teaching for me. It was, ‘Whoa!’ You know? This was not about scoring points with the Zen master. Just be with this now,” speaking each word distinctly. “That was powerful for me. And just seeing the grace with which he conducted himself. He was kind of shy. We went out to dinner at this Japanese restaurant, and we had some sushi, and he happened to sit across the table from me. And I’d never had sushi before, so I was a little perplexed; I didn’t know exactly what to do. And he took that . . . I forget the name of it, it’s that green stuff, really potent . . .”

“Wasabi?”

“Yeah! And he mixed it in some soy sauce for me and gave it to me. Never said a word. Just this very elegant, beautiful, graceful presence. And I thought, ‘I wanna get some of that.’”

“So it seems you’re suggesting that Zen is not just some kind of technique – a methodology – to get from one place to another?”

“Yeah, well, I mean sitting zazen is a technique. Koans are techniques. Chanting is a technique. Bowing’s a technique. Working with a teacher – you know, the dialogue back and forth – these are all what Bernie called upayas.”

“And working at the bakery is another upaya?”

“Exactly. If you’re relating to it in a certain way. If you’re not relating to it in a certain way, it’s just – you know – whatever you’re doing, not really a spiritual practice.”

“Tell me about Howling Dragon Zen.”

“What would you like to know about it?”

“Well, first, what it is?”

“Well, right now it’s . . . I have a zendo at my house. I live in a very rural area in Vermont up a dirt road in a little hamlet near a big dairy farm, and I have a big garage. And so I built a zendo over the garage. There’s enough zafus for maybe fourteen people. And so the idea was eventually I would start having a regular practice schedule and begin to work with students. But I’ve held off on that. And the primary reason was that I kind of see Zen practice as my daily activity. So I was working full-time at the VA as a clinical social worker or doing my private practice in the evenings or working on the faculty of the Engaged Mindfulness Institute. I also have board responsibilities on the Orange County Restorative Justice Center. I’m the board treasurer. I see all of those activities as practice activities not as jobs. So I got transmission back in 2011 from Bernie, and I really wanted to spend some time just really practising in the world in everyday situations, and to really work that kind of practice before getting into a formal sitting schedule and students and interviews and that kind of thing. So now that I’m retired, the plan has been to begin that process since I have more time available to start putting together a schedule and making it available to people and making it known that the zendo is here. But I’m also a little bit ambivalent about it because I realize that that’s a big-time commitment. And I look at some of the famous adepts of the past – like Layman Pang and Shantideva and Vilamakirti – they didn’t really have students. That wasn’t their thing. It was about being in the world. I always liked the Ten Ox Herding Pictures, that last frame, ‘Coming Back into the Marketplace,’ and being with people in a way that the flowers come into bloom. That’s kind of what I find is closest to my heart in terms of what practice is, not that I have a bunch of students or have a lot of retreats or that kind of thing.”

“But kind of like Gordon Becker, you built the zendo even though you haven’t taken the step of opening it up to others.”

“I sit there every day. I mean, I’ve been sitting there every day for eight years.”

“What would it take for you to accept students?”

“You know, people contact me from time to time. And I get letters every once in a while from folks in prison. I don’t know yet.”

“How do the folks in prison know about you?”

“Howling Dragon Zen is listed on a kind of list of Zen Centers in Vermont. So you can find that online.”

“And when people ask about the zendo?”

“I say I’m not accepting students currently.”

“So that brings me back to what it would take for you to do so?”

“I don’t know yet. I really don’t know. It’s gonna come from within myself, and it’s a little bit like a koan. I mean, I could do like Ben Franklin, reasons for/reasons against. But it’ll come to me. The answer will appear at some point.”

One hopes that it will. My impression is that Jim would make a powerful teacher.

Clear Water Zendo – Vallejo, California

In 1875, a Russian woman named Helena Blavatsky and an American Civil War veteran, Colonel Henry Olcott, established the Theosophical Society in New York City. The term “theosophy” was coined from the Greek words theos (god) and sophia (wisdom) and was intended to convey the idea of a “divine wisdom” universal to all world religions. The movement was largely based on teachings Blavatsky claimed to have received telepathically from secret “Masters” hidden in the mountains of Tibet. As unlikely as Blavatsky’s claims were, the Theosophists contributed significantly to the introduction of Buddhism to the west. Chapters were established in major centers around the world, and, in it’s more mature form, it had three stated goals: 1) To establish a universal brotherhood of all humankind without distinction of race, gender, or creed; 2) To promote the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science; and 3) To investigate “unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in” human beings.

Mary Mocine’s parents and grandparents were Californian Theosophists. “My grandparents got interested in it – my dad’s parents – probably not too long after the turn of the last century. It was a time when people were interested in the occult. I don’t know how they came to it, but they did. So my dad was raised in it.”

I ask if it had been meaningful to her.

“Yeah. For a while. I think it’s not in my bones so much anymore, but it was for a long time. I left when I was about 18 or 19, so the way I think of it now is I have a Sunday School understanding of it.”

Mary was born during the Second World War, in 1944, and her parents eventually stopped attending Theosophical gatherings because of their official pacifist stance, but Mary and her sister continued. “But I think my parents didn’t change what they believed particularly. They weren’t hostile or even questioning of the doctrine. My sister is older and started going there before I did. So they certainly didn’t discourage us. They told me, you’re welcome to go if you’d like to. And probably around nine, I decided I wanted to go, and there was a family friend who used to pick us up and take us and then bring us home.”

She remained involved until 1964, when she was 18. It happened that she overheard one of the group leaders using racist language. “I was just appalled and shocked. I grew up in a liberal Adlai Stevenson-loving family, and we didn’t talk like that. I didn’t know anybody who talked like that.”

“Did the theosophy itself had any long-term impact on you?”

“I think so, in a way. God is not an issue for me. It isn’t something I think about. We thought of Buddha as a great teacher, and we studied him sometimes. We read Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia, a long narrative poem that’s about the life of Buddha, but it was closer to Hinduism than to Buddhism, I think. We studied the Bhagavad-Gita, and I don’t remember what else. So the issue for a lot of people, the painful thing for a lot of people, is struggling with some concept of God. But it just doesn’t come up for me, and I think that’s because of how I was raised. And I had a concept of reincarnation growing up. In the Theosophy I was taught you have a soul, and you are reincarnated, or your soul gets refleshed from time to time. Lifetime after lifetime. And your purpose or your goal was to . . . Oh, how do I say it? . . . Well, to become perfect; to perfect your soul. So I was comfortable with words like ‘karma.’ Karma was pretty much ‘your own comes back to you.’ That was the slogan. I remember telling my Zen teacher,  Mel Weitsman Roshi, years later, ‘I get the idea of anatman and no-self and so on, but in my bones I believe in reincarnation in the sense of being reborn and having a soul and a self.’ And he said, laughing, ‘That’s the biggest heresy in Buddhism.’ So I did feel troubled by that. I didn’t struggle with the notion of no-God, but I did struggle with that aspect of no-me. And I still struggle with no-me,” she says, chuckling. “But it’s at a deeper level I suppose I could say.”

She graduated high school when only 16 and began her college education at Los Angeles City College, where her father was in the English faculty. “And I met this young man. And he was a socialist. I don’t know if I’d ever met a socialist before. What was really interesting about him – one of many things – is that his parents were both Trotskyists. Does this mean anything to you?”

I admit that I had visited Trotsky’s house in Mexico City.

“Good. Well, they – this boy’s parents – went down there and actually stayed there. She was his secretary. They were there to support him and be of assistance, but also somewhat – I think – as bodyguards, but they weren’t there when he was killed. So they were committed Trotskyists. Then they came back here, and the husband became a member of the Socialist Workers Party and his wife stayed a Trotskyist. But they stayed married which was unusual if you know anything about the rat race on the left. Anyway, their son was my boyfriend, and he got me involved in Fair Play for Cuba. So I was started on that path, and then when I went away to Berkeley, I was involved with the Free Speech movement. And that radicalized me to some extent because I would be at a demonstration, and then I would read about it in the San Francisco Chronicle the next day, and it would be inaccurate. They would say something happened that didn’t, or they would cut the crowd size in half and whatever. So I was much more engaged in radical politics; I wasn’t thinking about spiritual things. Then I wound up in law school at Hastings and stayed somewhat engaged in radical politics, but I also got involved with Women’s Liberation. We formed something we called the Hastings Women’s Union. So that’s the stuff that I was engaged in. But Buddhism was sort of in the background. I mean, I always felt comfortable with it.”

Then while pursuing a career as a Union-side Labor Lawyer, Mary took a college extension course. “Drawing Buddha. It was an extension class at UC Santa Cruz, and I had time, so I went and took it. And the guy who taught it was a Zen student. And I was drawn to his – I don’t know – his aspect or something.”

“A course on Drawing the Buddha?” I ask.

“Yeah. He taught us how to draw . . . I think it was a Buddha head.”

“There was a course calendar, and one of the options was ‘learn how to draw the Buddha?’” Well, she was in California, it was the early 1960s, and Buddhism was in the air.

‘It was an extension class. He taught us the aspects and the relation of eyes to the chin and whatever. And he talked about the head and the topknot and the third eye. It was interesting, but it was just something about his presence, his presentation of himself or something that was attractive to me. That didn’t make me go anywhere or do anything about it. It just was interesting. And years later I lived in a communal house. There were three people who bought a house, and they were looking for three more roommates, and I was one of them. And one of my housemates had a good friend that had been a longtime Zen student and had left because of a dispute with Dick Baker, and he would talk about the San Francisco Zen Center a lot, and I found it interesting. I sort of felt drawn to it. But it also kind of demystified Zen for me, which was probably a good thing. I didn’t do anything yet. I was working, and I’d moved there because I needed to have cheaper housing because I was starting a labor law firm after I left the Farmworker’s Union. So then years later, I split up with the man I’d been living with – as happens to people – and I started seeing my friends more, and one friend was involved with Al-Anon. And I am the adult child of an alcoholic. My mother was an alcoholic. So it interested me, and she invited me to a meeting, and I went to a meeting, and I got involved with Al-Anon. And it’s a spiritual program, and I started thinking to myself, ‘I don’t believe in God – I don’t really believe in a Higher Power – but what do I believe in?’ And it came down to that I’m part of something bigger than me. And then my law partner and I went to Green Gulch to have a day-long office retreat.” Green Gulch is the organic farm operated by SFZC. “That was the first time I’d ever been at Green Gulch. I’d heard of it. And I wound up on a mailing list – because if you sneeze anywhere around San Francisco Zen Center, you’ll be on the mailing list – and I got a brochure for a women’s retreat led by Yvonne Rand. It said, ‘On Being Awake: A Mindfulness Retreat for Women.’ Something close to that. That was in March of ’88, and I went, and it just felt like I was coming home.”

She had been to a meditation workshop previously in which there had been too much emphasis on proper form and strictly adhering to the protocols of the zendo. Yvonne Rand, on the other hand, provided “a much more gentle introduction. She started us off in a meeting room and gave some instruction. I think she started us off sitting for about ten minutes. And we sat a little longer the next morning, and at some point – I think – she took us into the zendo, and there was nobody else around, and introduced us to the tans [platforms] and sitting in there. And we probably sat a little longer. And then a little longer. And then on Sunday morning she said you could go do walking meditation in the garden or you could go to the public 9:30 zazen. And I wanted to go to zazen, but I was still in that mode of feeling, ‘Oh, my God! What if I do it wrong?’ And there was a woman standing next to me, and she turns to Yvonne and says, ‘I really want to go to zazen, but I’m afraid I’ll make a mistake.’ And Yvonne roared with laughter, and she said, ‘I hope you’re prepared to make lots of mistakes.’ And for me, this burden lifted off my back. And so I went and sat zazen, and it was wonderful. And I found out there was a Berkeley Zen Center right near my house, and on Monday I went and found out where it was and how to get to it, and on Tuesday morning I started sitting. And that was that.”

In a short bio on the Clear Water Zendo website, she wrote that her “involvement grew and by 1989 I took three months off and spent a time of intensive residential practice at Green Gulch. I never really returned to the practice of law.”

“Well, that’s the shorthand version,” she admits to me with a laugh. “I mean, a lot of my work was hard, representing a union, ’cause you lose a lot, and I don’t like all the paperwork. I almost said I didn’t like fighting, but I do. I like arguing. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the law so much as I loved Zen.”

“So it wasn’t so much that you left the law as you took up Zen.”

She nods her head. “A balance had shifted, and I started saying to myself, well what do I do? Then I encountered Tassajara [Zen Center’s retreat center in the Ventana Wilderness Area] and Green Gulch and so on, and that starts to sort of fit into me. And I started sitting at Berkeley, Mel Weitsman’s community, sitting more, and started doing one-day sits and stuff. I just was more drawn to it.

“After that first weekend with Yvonne, I wrote her a long letter about how wonderful it’d been. When we started that workshop, she went around and said, ‘What brought you here?’ And I heard myself say I thought it was time to begin. And you know when you say something that you deeply mean and you had no idea that you were thinking that, and you want to say, ‘Who said that!’ So it was there but I – I don’t know – I discounted it or something. And then I’m in Berkeley, so that would have been March of ’88, and I went to Tassajara in September of ’90. I did a six week/eight-week practice period at Green Gulch in the summer of ’89. My parents died in the beginning of ’89, close to each other. And that gets your attention. Or it got mine. And . . . I don’t know . . . I had trouble . . . People would ask me, ‘Why don’t you take the Precepts? Why don’t you sew a rakusu? Why don’t you do jukai?’”

A rakusu is the bib-like garment some Zen practitioners wear. It represents taking on the Buddha’s robe. Taking the Precepts – jukai – is the process of agreeing to abide by the rules governing the Buddha’s community. These are steps traditionally taken to formally become a member of the community, to become a Buddhist. Mary was initially reluctant to take that step.

 “I felt wary because there had been a lot of turmoil in my work, and I felt like I’d got burned by that. So I was wary of Zen Center. I was hesitant at first, but I finally went to Mel and I said, ‘I want to sew a rakusu, but I don’t want you to ask me why.’ And he said, ‘Okay. How?’ And we both laughed. And I said, ‘With Blanche,’ and so I went ahead and did it. But I wound up having to work through a lot of stuff about commitment, my own stuff about commitment.”

Blanche was Blanche Hartman, the first woman abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center.

After telling Mel she wanted to sew a rakusu, Mary had difficulty getting down to doing the actual sewing. So she considered going to Tassajara to be with Blanche and work on the sewing there. I have not been to Tassajara but many people have described how remote it is and how difficult the road is. As she considered making the journey, Mary began to feel nervous. “It’s a dirt road over a pass,” she tells me. “I was experiencing a great fear and I kept saying to myself, ‘Fourteen miles down a dirt road. Fourteen fucking miles down a fucking dirt road.’ And I was just terrified. And then I found a sesshin as fast as I could, and it came to be one that Reb [Anderson] was leading.” Reb Anderson succeeded Richard Baker as abbot of Zen Center. “And I talked to him about it, and he said, ‘Well, maybe it’s too soon for you to go to Tassajara. You don’t have to go. Why don’t you undecide? You don’t have to decide to go. Just set that aside and just practice. So I did. And I spent the rest of the sesshin kind of letting the ‘no’ part come up. And I sat with it, and talked to my analyst and blah, blah, blah, and worked through a lot and went to Tassajara as I kind of knew I would.”

Mary tells me that she did not think of jukai so much as a matter of becoming a card-carrying Buddhist as a matter of “deepening your commitment and saying, ‘I want to be of use.’ It’s about, ‘I vow to live the way of the Precepts.’ It’s not that it’s not about becoming a Buddhist or becoming a formal Zen person or whatever, but I just don’t think that’s the most important thing. And so I had a calling. That’s all. I didn’t know it when I told Yvonne it was time to begin, but that is what I meant. I didn’t understand it. And it was the matter of working through the commitment that I really want to do this. That I really mean it, I guess. And I talked with Mel about it a lot. Then I told him, ‘You know, this keeps coming up. This word ‘priest.’ And he’d say, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ And I’d say, ‘No.’ But I’d be in dokusan with him, and inside me it would be going, ‘Priest, priest, priest.’ And unless I said something about it, I couldn’t let it drop.

“It got to a point where there really wasn’t much question that Mel would say ‘yes’ if I asked to be ordained. But I hadn’t asked yet. And I remember taking my hair and saying, ‘I know that I’m projecting onto my hair. I know it’s not about my hair. But I just don’t want to cut my hair.’ And that was the last thing. And we talked about other things, and at the end of that dokusan, he said, ‘Sometimes the way to make a decision is to act as if you’ve already decided. For example, why don’t you cut your hair.’ We used to laugh a lot, and I doubled over laughing, and I said, ‘Fuck you!’ We laughed some more, and I left. And I went and sat in the zendo. Nobody was around. It was the summertime. And I cried. And then it was done. I was ready. I went and found a friend, and I asked her if she would buzz my head, and she did, and that was that.”

“What’s the role of a priest?” I ask. “When someone comes to you in your role as a priest, what are they looking for from you?”

“There’s a lot of reasons why people come to Zen. The people here – the Clear Water Zendo – are looking for support in their practice and support in remembering zazen in all aspects of their lives. So we talk about a lot of different things in dokusan. And my job, I think – the way I see it – is to help them to practice with whatever. You know, to turn towards it. To be kind to themselves when they turn away from it, as we do. And to remember to turn back towards whatever and to stay with their bodies, which is important. A really important teaching to me that comes mostly from women like Yvonne: it’s the body.”

“Can you explain zazen to me?”

“Our form is called ‘just sitting,’ and it means that as you sit up straight and breathe gently through your nose, you start out by following your breath. And then at some point you let go of that, and you’re just present in your body, and you let your mind be your mind. Uchiyama Roshi calls thoughts ‘brain excretions’ – a great way of thinking about them – understanding that they don’t have any more significance than your stomach gurgling.”

“So what does that mean? I’m not trying to stop my thoughts. I’m doing what then? Ignoring them?”       

“No. You’re not ignoring them either. You’re just allowing them to come and go as they will. You don’t get entangled with them. Suzuki Roshi used to say, ‘Don’t’ invite them in for tea.’ I like to say, ‘Don’t get on the train.’ A mind is like a popcorn machine, and that’s what it’s gonna do; it’s gonna think. So just let them come and let them go. They arise, abide, and pass away, if you will let them.”

“And why would I do this?”

“What do you get out of it?”

“Yeah. What would I get out of doing it?”

Mary laughs. “Damned if I know!” And then, after a pause, “Maybe what you get is that you don’t get anything, but maybe you could say you ‘get’ not being so concerned about what you get. I really don’t know. You have to do it; you have to experience it to find out what it is.”

“And do you have a sense of how Zen is evolving now? For example, is the Japanese envelope still important? I see that you no longer shave your head, so how important are things like that?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I am in the process of semi-retiring. And something has shifted. I didn’t set out to do this, but I just don’t feel like shaving my head anymore. It hasn’t been this long since I got ordained in ’94. But I don’t want to anymore. I don’t know. I’m wearing earrings for God’s sake! Someone asked if I’d be excommunicated, and I said, ‘No. I know lots of Zen priests who are women who have hair and wear lipstick and earrings.’ But I think it’s becoming more lay, and in a lot of places it’s becoming a lot less formal. It’s pretty formal here. And the students may think it’s really, really formal, but they don’t know what it looks like at Tassajara or City Center.”

“There had been a reluctance in San Francisco for a long while to do lay transmissions,” I point out.

“Yes. I’m about to – well, I’ve already done it – I’m going to do three people this fall. I know how Blanche felt about it, that it was kind of like City Center was the flagship for maintaining this tradition. They are partly a community, but largely they are training priests, training teachers. And I remember Yvonne saying that because Blanche was maintaining the forms at City Center, Yvonne could go out and experiment and do other things. But there has been a hesitation to offer lay transmission, and I know Mel told his lay transmittees that they’re not allowed to ordain people or to offer the precepts, and so on. But that’s been changing even at Berkeley.”

“I’ve heard it called ‘lay entrustments,’” I say. “Is this one of the ways Zen is evolving? Away from the ordination model?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I think so. But . . . I’m almost 80, and I don’t care anymore.” We both laugh. I’m not as close to 80 as she, but it’s on the horizon. “I don’t know. It’s going where it’s going. And it’s okay. I am wondering about how much authority to offer my lay transmittees. The one I did a while ago, we didn’t talk enough about what it meant. And I realized that I had a lot of assumptions that she didn’t share, that she didn’t know about. So what I’ve said to them is ‘You can start a sitting group, and if you find there’s somebody who wants to take the Precepts, you can – you know – do it with a priest.’ And that’s as far as I’ve gone.”

“What did you mean by saying you’re ‘semi-retiring’?”

“Well, this place is ending at the end of the year.

“Is there no heir to take over?”

“There are those three transmitted people I consider my heirs. The problem is, I went out on my own because I wanted out of Zen Center, and because I liked the idea of starting a place. And a friend lived here. But Vallejo is not fertile ground. So it’s been hard. People get trained, and then they move away.”

“So when you retire, this community – Clear Water – will . . .”

“It will end as we know it. And the expectation has been, and the hope is, that one of those three will start a sitting group in his home not far from here but in a more settled community that is probably much more fertile ground than here. I have students that we’ve been together for twenty years. So it’s not like people leave the practice, but they leave the area. And the people that I was interested in having as successors are not interested in living here.”

The first of what Buddhism calls the Three Characteristics of Existence is annica – impermanence. All things, including Zen Centers, are by their very nature impermanent.

Shunryu Suzuki and Richard Baker

In 2013, a small inheritance allowed me to undertake a pilgrimage to some of the major Zen Centers throughout North America. I had written a book – The Third Step East – about the pioneer figures who brought Zen to this continent, and although they were now all dead, their immediate successors were still living and I would be able to visit them. The result was my fourth book, Cypress Trees in the Garden.

I began my tour in San Francisco on March 21, 2013 and gradually worked my way east across the continent to Halifax, Nova Scotia. The process – which is still on-going – has been a substantial learning experience for me. When I set out, I had little idea of how to conduct an interview; I’ve been told I’ve become good at it, but it wasn’t a skill that came naturally. More significantly, back then I had a naïve concept about the nature of Zen in America. I had thought that the centers I arranged to visit might vary in size but would otherwise be similar to the Montreal Zen Center where I was practicing. As soon as I stepped through the door at the San Francisco Zen Center’s primary site on the corner of Page and Laguna Streets – called City Center – I realized how wrong that assumption was. Elsewhere I have described the difference to be similar to that between a Quaker Meeting House and the Vatican. It’s an exaggerated analogy, but it accurately describes how it felt at the time.

SFZC is huge. City Center is one of three main practice centers along with their mountain retreat at Tassajara and an organic farm, Green Gulch. At one time, they owned many of the residential buildings in the neighborhood. It has become smaller, but it remains the largest and wealthiest Zen community in America.

I had arranged to meet the then current Central Abbot of Zen Center – Steve Stücky – and two of his predecessors, Blanche Hartman (co-abbot from 1996 to 2002) and Mel Weitsman (co-abbot from 1988 to 1997). I arrived early and was told that the abbots and other community members were in the Buddha Hall for the noon chanting service. There were no noon chanting services in Montreal. I wasn’t aware that there are any chanting services held outside sesshin in Montreal.

I was shown a place to wait in the foyer where I could peak into the Buddha Hall and see people doing full body prostrations. There were banners and paintings on the walls depicting Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of SFZC. There are no portraits of his immediate successor, Richard Baker (abbot from 1971 to 1983). Baker and SFZC had parted ways in 1983, and, at the time of my visit thirty years later, the relationship was still strained.

In Cypress Trees in the Garden, I compare Baker’s role at SFZC to that of Saint Paul within Christianity. Shunryu Suzuki was the founder, but it is clear that on his own, SFZC would have remained a much more modest operation. When Baker first came to Zen Center, it had an annual budget of less than $5500, and they had $2,304.24 in the bank. Under his leadership, that grew to more than $4 million. Zen Center real estate holdings were valued at $20 million.

Shunryu Suzuki is a fascinating figure still beloved by those who knew him, and yet his own children, when they came from Japan to visit him, were confounded by the number of loyal students he had amassed in America. They respected their father but had thought of him as little more than a small-town priest of no particular stature. They were surprised to discover that he led two thriving monastic communities in America with numerous students who obviously revered him. Likewise when Suzuki’s American students travelled to Japan they were surprised to find that their beloved teacher was quite an insignificant figure in Japanese Soto circles. Suzuki had been a relatively ordinary figure in Japan, but Zen training can mold individuals of impressive character, which contributed to him becoming an extraordinary figure in America.

Before coming to American in 1959, he had been the resident priest of a rural Soto temple where his duties included conducting funerals and memorial services, carrying out ritual activities, and chanting sutras on behalf of the community. Within the Soto structure, he was an abbot, and students were occasionally sent to him for training. Few, however, had any serious interest in the Buddhadharma; they were simply preparing to take responsibility for family-run temples, as Suzuki himself had done. He came to feel that the Zen tradition had grown stale and was in need of revitalization.

“It’s very clear,” David Chadwick tell me. “He was not a big deal at all in Japan. What made him a big deal here? In America? You know what Taizan Maezumi said? He said, ‘We don’t know why Suzuki Roshi was so successful, but all we know is he was.’”

David is the author of Crooked Cucumber, the standard Suzuki biography. He is also an archivist who maintains the massive cuke.com and shunryusuzuki.com online.

“Maezumi was here in Los Angeles four years before Suzuki came to San Francisco, and he said, ‘I’d been trying to get a Zen group going.’ Other people have been trying to get something going, but there was no real practicing group. Maezumi said it didn’t happen until Suzuki came and all of a sudden it happened around him. We can’t say why. But then it started happening elsewhere. And he said Suzuki Roshi made all this possible. I like his point of view.”

There were a handful of centers operating when Suzuki incorporated SFZC in 1962. In New York there was the First Zen Institute of America in New York established by Alan Watts’ mother-in-law. It offered meditation programs, but its primary focus was translating primary sources into English. And in Hawaii, Robert Aitken and his wife, Anne Hopkins, had established the Diamond Sangha. But while practice centers were scarce, interest in Zen as a concept was high as the result of books by authors like Watts and D. T. Suzuki. (Suzuki is a common Japanese name and Shunryu Suzuki at times called himself the “small Suzuki” in contrast to the “big Suzuki,” the scholar, D. T. Suzuki, who can be credited with first introducing Zen theory to the West.)

There were, however, mission temples. Soto authorities in Japan had established temples in Los Angeles (Zenshuji, 1922) and San Francisco (Sokoji, 1934) for the benefit of Japanese families in California. The priests at these temples came from Japan, and when – at the age of 55 – Shunryu Suzuki had the opportunity to be posted at Sokoji, he accepted it with alacrity. The temples were largely cultural centers, places where Japanese traditions and values were retained and respected. They were not meditation studios. Meditation – as far as the congregations at both Zenshuji and Sokoji were concerned in the 1950s – was something monks, not lay people, did.  

As far as the congregation at Sokoji were concerned, the new priest’s duties would have been much the same as in Japan. However, as David tells me, “Suzuki Roshi landed in the middle of the Alan Watts Zen boom. Another priest at Sokoji took him to a class at Watts’ American Academy of Asian Studies. He meets people there and picks up his first three non-Japanese students there, like the first week.”

The non-Japanese students had read Watts and Jack Kerouac. They came searching for Zen with a capital Z. They wanted meditation and often had romantic ideas about awakening to their True Natures. Awakening wasn’t something Suzuki spoke about, but he came to have so many non-Japanese practitioners that the congregation compelled him to find an alternate location for them. The new building was the former Jewish girls’ residence I visited on the corner of Page and Laguna Streets.

I ask David what Suzuki Roshi was like.

“I’ve interviewed a lot of people,” he tells me, “and I’ve heard what a lot of people have to say. Not everybody was turned on to him as a teacher, but the most common thing to hear people say is, ‘I never met anybody before that really understood me.’ Or they’d say, ‘I never met anybody who was so unjudgmental and so open and so ordinary at the same time and so humble.’ Something happened to him when he came to America. He loved the hippie thing; he loved the Beat thing. He didn’t participate. He didn’t want people getting high when they came, but he saw that people who had experimented with psychedelics had opened up their way-seeking mind to a great extent. And so he appreciated it.”

Richard Baker was one of the young people who came to sit with Suzuki at Sokoji in the early ’60s, and he developed a deep and loyal affection for his teacher. By 1966, Baker had ordained and was on his way to becoming Suzuki’s right-hand-man.

David Chadwick was with Suzuki at Sokoji, before the move to City Center occurred. “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 instead of the horse pasture. And that doubles the money. We were raising $25,000 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.”

Baker proved to be a gifted organizer and a more than effective fund-raiser. He orchestrated a capital campaign which engaged people like Alan Watts, the beat poet, Allen Gingberg, and the Grateful Dead. “But what really did it,” David says, “was Dick and Suzuki going to the East Coast and meeting very wealthy donors. Chester Carlson who invented Xerox, a great philanthropist, wonderful man.” Carlson had brought Philip Kapleau to Rochester and funded his center there. “There was also 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 mutual fund company in the world helping.”

The money was raised, and the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center became the first Buddhist monastery to be established outside of Asia. Although, as David points out, it was unlike any other monastery elsewhere.

“I learned a lot watching Dick Baker relate with Suzuki Roshi. Dick was just relating to him like another person. They were talking about what would work, what would not work, how to run the place and everyday things. And I’d see them disagree on things. Like about women. I didn’t hear this, but Dick told me. There’d never been a monastery with men and women together. But Dick just said, ‘No women, no Tassajara.’ You know? He gave Suzuki Roshi an ultimatum. And families. Dick was responsible for humanizing Tassajara a great deal because Suzuki didn’t know some things. A couple of women who were pregnant very early on had very hard experiences because they thought they should keep practicing and their husbands thought they should practice. A lot of these rigid ideas that Suzuki didn’t want people to have.”

By the end of the 1960s, both Tassajara and City Center were filled to capacity primarily with young people committing themselves to Zen practice. Suzuki had established something monumental, but, in order to ensure it would continue, he needed to identify a successor, needed to give “transmission” to a worthy heir. There is evidence that he had intended to give transmission to several students, all of whom might then have had equal authority. But in the end, only one student – Richard Baker – received transmission.

Part of the difficulty that followed may have been because Suzuki’s students understood transmission differently than he may have. The students had no doubt that their teacher was a fully enlightened and officially transmitted Zen Master although Suzuki had not claimed to be either. For Suzuki – as was common in the Soto tradition – transmission was more a matter of authorizing another to teach. Often it was conferred as a matter of course to ensure that a son inherited his father’s temple; Suzuki, for example, conferred transmission on the son of a friend during a visit to Japan even though the young man had not studied with him. Suzuki’s students, on the other hand, saw transmission as an acknowledgement of achievement, a recognition that the recipient was also now a fully enlightened teacher. When Suzuki’s chosen heir later exhibited what others considered unenlightened behavior, it became problematic.

The reason no other student received transmission was that Suzuki was dying. In March of 1971, he had an operation to remove his gall bladder which a routine biopsy revealed was cancerous.

Suzuki turned Zen Center over to Baker, and, the following November, Baker was installed as the second abbot of the institution. He was 35 years old. Suzuki died just two weeks later, on December 4^th.

“Why did people turn against Baker?” I ask David.

“Well, not everybody did, but a lot of people did. He just got too high. And I’d say too much of a sense of entitlement, and he didn’t have enough peer . . .  I don’t want to say pressure, but you know.”

“Presence?”

“Peer presence, right? He was like on top of an ivory tower, and that’s very, very hard to live with. And he was very young to be in that role. But you know, Suzuki took over his temple at around 30, 32 or something – 32 maybe – and people were saying he was too young. But he was Japanese. They’re just totally duty bound. They don’t get distracted by everything else. Anyway, Dick did a great job in many, many ways. And a lot of people really appreciate what he did. I’m very close with him now. He’s 87. He’s still teaching and giving talks, and we have a nice relationship. His group in Germany, I’m more comfortable there than with any Zen group. It’s great, and he has really good students. Germans, they’re not as neurotic as Americans. They don’t become true believers and fall in line and all that, at least the ones I’ve known. And also, he’s learned, he’s gotten older, and he learned some from his mistakes, but he still has a lot of the basic characteristics that create enemies, and he’s had detractors in Germany, but not on the scale he had in America. In America, everything went up too high.”

I ask about those characteristics that create enemies.

“I call the period of Richard Baker as abbot the imperial period of Zen Center. But let me tell you, I was talking to somebody earlier today. And Blanche Hartman wasn’t allowed to die in City Center because her care was getting too complicated, and they didn’t feel comfortable, and she had wanted to. And the woman I was talking to, who goes way back to Dick’s time, said, ‘That wouldn’t have happened under Richard Baker.’ He was very good about a lot of things. But it’s really dangerous for somebody to become a teacher and not have enough feedback and get higher and higher above other people and have a higher standard of living and have all these perks they don’t have. I think what Baker did overall has had a lot of good effect, a lot of good teachers came out of it. That’s the nature of transmitting practice and wisdom and everything. It’s done by imperfect people doing it imperfectly, and it’s messy. Anyway, he brought it on himself, but that helped Zen Center evolve into its next stage. I don’t know if it’ll survive without an imperial person in charge because he knows how to make things survive. And he’s held that German group together incredibly well. But we’ll see. I mean, it might all dissolve and evolve into other things and not be the groups we’re used to.”

To some extent it doesn’t matter why Baker and SFZC parted ways. What does matter is how it came about. Monasteries are not traditionally democratic institutions either in the East or the West. The Asian precedents were clear about this. If students have difficulty with a teacher or abbot, they go somewhere else. What happened in San Francisco is that the board and membership asserted their right to place restrictions on the abbot’s behaviour, and when the abbot could not accept the restrictions, he resigned. From that point on, American Zen took a distinctly Western step towards democratization.

At the end of my 2013 conversation with Steve Stücky, Blanche Hartman, and Mel Weitsman, I had asked about the relationship between the center and Richard Baker at the time.

“We had a fiftieth anniversary celebration here last year,” Steve told me. “Zen Center was officially organized as an institution in 1962, so in 2012 we had our fiftieth anniversary. I invited him to come. Blanche had invited him here earlier. He came and gave a talk and participated in our ceremonies. I also invited him to come again last fall to visit Tassajara; so we have a pretty good relationship. But it’s also true that his memory of things that happened during the time he was here and his opinion about the ethical aspects of it and other peoples’ points of view are not all in accord. But I feel that we are in a very respectful relationship.”

“Has there been a reconciliation?”

“That may be . . .” He does not finish his thought.

“Premature,” Blanche said after a moment.

“I don’t think we’re not reconciled,” Steve pointed out.

“We’re working in that direction,” Blanche said.

Later, as she waited outside with me for my taxi to arrive, she expressed regret that Zen Center had not been able to reconcile with Baker. “But,” she told me sadly, “he couldn’t admit that he had done anything wrong. But if you really want to know about Zen Center, you need to speak to him.”

Ten years later, David Chadwick tells me, “I gave a talk at Green’s once to Zen Center donors and stuff in 2000, and I started off by making a toast to Richard Baker, I said, ‘Without whom, none of us would be here.’”

Dosho Port tells me that during dokusan with Baker once he told him, “A teacher has to survive being made into an archetype by his students.”

All three of the abbots I spoke to during that first interview are now dead. Steve Stücky died just a few months later from pancreatic cancer that he hadn’t realized he had at the time of our conversation. Blanche Hartman died – not in residence at City Center as she would have chosen – three years later, in 2016. Mel Weitsman died in 2021, at the age of 91.

Since that day in March 2013, I have conducted more than 220 interviews. However, as much as I would like to have heard his side of the story about the San Francisco Zen Center, I have not been able to interview Richard Baker. It is the interview I most regret not being able to do.

Post script: I finally managed to do two interviews with Richard Baker in September and October of 2025. The profile is here.

The Third Step East: 125-44; 9, 20, 86, 90, 102, 105, 107, 152, 167, 168, 169, 201, 217, 220-22, 224, 225, 226, 229, 233

Cypress Trees in the Garden: 16, 25-27, 31, 32, 33, 35, 59, 149, 242, 276, 277, 279, 410

The Story of Zen: 5, 6, 263-69, 266-270, 276-77, 279, 280, 286, 299, 301, 306-07, 309, 312-20, 337, 345, 346, 351-53, 354, 355, 378, 424

Dai Bai Zan Cho Bo Zen Ji, Seattle

The first ancestor (patriarch) of the Chinese Chan tradition was the Brahmin monk, Bodhidharma, who is credited with bringing the teaching to China from India. The opening koan of the Blue Cliff collection describes his meeting with the Emperor Wu, estimated to have taken place around the year 520 CE. After that meeting, Bodhidharma was said to have retired to the recently established Shaolin Monastery located in the Songshan Mountains. The monks there were engaged in translating Buddhist scriptures and spent long hours doing so. As a result they were in poor physical condition, so Bodhidharma taught them a martial version of traditional Indian yoga, which evolved into Kung Fu. The Shaolin Temple is still active and claims to be the birthplace of both Kung Fu and Zen.

The connection between a religious tradition generally considered pacific and martial arts was furthered in Japan where Rinzai Zen became the de facto religion of the Samurai classes. This came about because Rinzai Temples were assigned the responsibility of providing schooling for young males (and it was exclusively males) of the nobility. Because the students were housed in a monastery, they were compelled to take up meditation practice, and one supposes they were not eager to do so until they discovered that it enhanced their swordsmanship, something they were eager to develop.The relationship between Zen and kendo – the art of the sword – is so deep that one third of D. T.Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture focuses on the subject.

The relationship between Asian monks and martial arts became embedded in Western cultural consciousness through films and television programs such as the 1972 series, Kung Fu, which followed the exploits of an exiled Shaolin monk in the American west of the 19^th century.

“Every once in a while, my wife and I think of an old TV show,” Gendo Testa tells me. “You can find any old TV show and go back and watch it, and sometimes it opens up a portal in your being. So we watched the first episode of Kung Fu, and my wife was like, ‘Oh! I can see your soul!’”

Although I interview Gendo shortly after he had been ordained an Osho at the Chobo-ji temple in Seattle, much of our conversation focuses on his engagement in martial arts.

“And I was like, ‘Holy shit! I really took this in!’ So the whole Daoism, the monastery, the martial arts, the integrity, the honor, the hero, the ‘standing up’ was all in there, and I took it all in. I was just a kid watching a TV show, but there was a whole lot going on.”

He was nine years old at the time.

“That was your introduction to both Buddhism and the martial arts?” I ask.

“Yeah, I think they’re sandwiched together and that was the influence of the show. It was about the transformation you see him go through. That potential, the human potential of going through something like that. The relationship between him and his teacher. These are all things I longed for in some way or was attracted to. When I ordained, I was asked to give a short Dharma talk and in it I was aware of a thread and it went all the way back to not only the Kung Fu show, but to memories of my dad taking me to international food festivals. And one in particular was at Brown University, and it also had cultural performances or arts. And the one from Japan had kyudo, Zen archery. Mmm! That was something. The way the man came out. So dignified. His posture. The way he pulled one sleeve down and dropped into seiza so perfectly. The whole thing. And everyone got quiet as he drew that bow. And when he finally released the arrow, something special happened. It was like a ‘What is this?’ moment. I felt something. I felt he had a power and a clarity that I’d never seen in real life, something I’d only seen – I guess – on television. But yeah, I was really into that Kung Fu thing. I remember that even during the commercial breaks, it was winter, and I’d go outside in my bare feet and just try to walk like he did in the snow. But that moment of seeing the Zen archery, that was when I felt like, ‘Okay! That’s it!’”

Although he describes himself as a “bit of a scrapper” as a young person, he didn’t take up serious practice in a dojo – training studio – until he was in his twenties.

“I bounced around a few styles and got pretty proficient at fighting. I had a fighting spirit. Not because I . . . I don’t know.” His voice becomes softer more reflective. “I had a quality that got me into situations. Always standing up for someone else. Even when I was really small, I got my ass kicked a lot for standing up for somebody else even though I wasn’t big enough to defend them or myself. But eventually I got the hang of it.”  In one case as a child, he beat up a local bully so badly that he had to have medical attention. Gendo’s parents were required to cover the bills.

“My dad was upset, but it was unusual behaviour for me. And when I told him about what had happened, he said that ‘You need to get better at knowing when to stop.’ I think that’s why I was always in and out of dojos. I was hopeful that I would find an environment that would help me transform.”

“Transform in what way?” I ask.

He smiles shyly. “What my image of a martial artist was, someone who had come to terms with . . . Well, they’re strong, but they also have gone beyond the need to prove it. I believed the dojo I was looking for was only to make me a better person.” He describes the early martial form he learned as an aggressive blend of shotokan karate, uechi-ryu, and jujitsu. It could be effective, but as he puts, it only provided him with hammers.

He didn’t find the form he was looking for until he was in the 30s.

“I had started a new job, and there was an aikido dojo near the job. And they had an early morning class. I had kids, and Dad’s just got to get up earlier if he’s going to do anything for himself. So that’s what I did. I started the morning classes, and these were the teachers I needed. They were all police officers. Real no nonsense guys. They had all done other martial arts, and they were really good men. And their aikido was very strong and clear. And as soon as I met them, they kind of drew me into their circle because I was very dedicated to my training. And pretty much early on they said, ‘You’ve got to meet Toyoda Shihan. He’s coming out in a few months; we’re hosting him.”

“Shihan” is an honorific used with martial arts instructors suggesting a higher rank or authority than the more common “sensei.” Toyoda Shihan was Fumio Toyoda, a Japanese-born Aikido master whose practice was grounded in Zen. Gendo was assigned to be Toyoda’s attendant for the weekend of the seminar.

“So I had to pick him up at the airport, get him to his hotel, and drive him around for the weekend, and I got to know him. I didn’t have many years with him. He passed away within five years of my meeting him. But I absorbed him a bit. In aikido, you’re looking to harmonize or blend with the attack and lead it to a neutral point so you can take the balance at that point and throw or pin them. And to get skillful at it, you need to learn how to change how you hold your body. So you’re looking for fluidity of movement. You learn the essence of the technique through receiving it. Once your physical abilities are at a level where you can stay connected and ride the wave – so to speak – you’ll eventually get this ingrained feeling of what the techniques are. And so I was terrible at technique mostly because my previous training had been stopping everyone’s attack. So I threw myself headlong into this training, to receive, and I got good at it because I wasn’t afraid to take the falls. I knew these guys weren’t trying to hurt me, but they could throw really powerfully. But aikido’s set up in a way that you’re throwing the person in a way that they can fall safely as long as they’re attuned and as long they don’t try to get in the way of where you’re throwing them. You temper your body that way. And you’re getting up off the floor over and over. It’s a very different way of training your body. So, anyhow, I was good at that. Especially for a beginner. So sensei used me a lot, and I got a little closer to him for that reason. And he was really kind to me. And he was insightful. I knew he looked at me, and he knew what to do with me. I think now I know because I was him in some way. I didn’t know it until he passed away that he was a scrapper too, that he would stand up and fight if necessary. So I think he knew what to do with me. And he’s the one that encouraged me to sit zazen, which I hated.”

“So he was the first Zen Buddhist you met.”

“Yeah. He’s the first Zen Buddhist I met. He emphasized that aikido training was shugyo. Shugyo is intense physical and spiritual training to be used for self-transformation. He would say that if you wanted to really learn his aikido you would have to sit zazen.”

“Which you hated.”

“Oh, yeah! Hated it! Well, I still didn’t have what I’d call a non-negotiable practice, so to speak. I’d get on these kicks and not be able to stick with it. It’s hard to sit by yourself. But I feel like the dojo itself was meditation. Being in the dojo, because of the concentration needed, I didn’t think about anything else. So in some way, just going to the dojo and being in a training environment, you’re there for a couple of hours not thinking about anything else. And then leaving the dojo and slowly your mind comes back. You know? The wheels start spinnin’ again. And so I was aware that the dojo was medicine for me all along. And that, I think, was enough medicine for a long period of time. I needed tempering, and, honestly, it looked like that was a decade of tempering.”

Then his family moved to Connecticut, where he learned about Robert Heiwa Burns.

“He had an aikido dojo. So I went to visit him, and he was a little volatile. A pretty fiery guy. But also very passionate. He had a place called Aiki Farm; it was an organic farm where he grew greens and sprouts. And he took his jukai under Genjo Marinello Roshi. He was also a former Marine and political activist. When I met Heiwa, he was in his 70s. So from my house, I could walk through the woods, cross a road, and there’s the dojo. I started to go there in the mornings. And we would sit zazen. We’d do forty-minute sits, and then we’d do aikido. We were only sitting like four times a week, and eventually I felt I needed to commit to this because I can’t go to bed so early four nights in a row and then not do it the next three. So I asked him, ‘Can we just sit every day? I’ll show up. Don’t worry about anybody else.’  So we started doing that. It was a thing every day for years.

“So Heiwa only had a handful of students, and he had this organic farm, and we’d help him plant. But one summer we didn’t have enough people to harvest everything we planted, so I suggested we do what’s called shochugeiko, which is a summer intensive practice. It used to be held in Chicago in July, but I convinced them to let us host it here on the East Coast so we’d have people to help harvest. So I pitched the idea to Heiwa. He loved it, and a few days later he’s like, ‘You know, I called Genjo Roshi and asked him if he’d come out on the last day, and we’d just sit all day.’ And I thought that sounded like a good idea. Like, ‘All right. We’re going to have a Zen Master come in. It’ll be great.’ Right? It was a terrible idea. By the time Genjo came in, we were in rough shape. The heat! It was a gruelling heat, and we were training hard. This was a hell camp, something you don’t go to unless you’re prepared to go to your edge, unless you’re prepared to fall down from exhaustion. So we ran everybody hard. Then Genjo came in, and I’m pretty sure Heiwa told him, ‘Hey. All business.’  So he came in, and, before the end of the morning, we had done more sitting than we had all week. Sit after sit after sit. I’d never done a zazenkai even. None of us had any experience with that. So it was rough. We didn’t have much form. We chanted the Heart Sutra. We had somebody be tenzo. We had two jisha – people serving tea and cookies – other than that, there was no Dharma talk, there was no sutra chanting; we didn’t know any of the sutras. So it was brutal. And it wasn’t until I drove Genjo Roshi to the airport after it that we really kinda clicked. So that’s how I met him. And then I think we brought him out the next year, but we did a longer sit, and we did it before the camp. A mini-sesshin, Friday to Monday morning. And then the camp started, and we did that for a whole week. And that was better than the opposite way. And by then I’d been sitting very faithfully for a year, and it was easier.

“But I still didn’t have a good experience until two years later. My bodywork sensei was Everett Ogawa, who’s the founder of Integral Bodywork. It’s a form of structural integration. I was training with him, and he was based in Chicago. And at a certain point I had gone through, like, the first level of training. I’d got my certificate that said I had completed the ten-session training. And he was like, ‘I can’t take you further unless you go to sesshin.’ I was like, ‘Uhhhh [sighing]. . . Really?’”

I tell Gendo I don’t know what Integral Bodywork is.

“So Structural Integration is a series of ten different sessions that slowly work the connective tissue in the body. The idea is to bring it into a vertical alignment. So the first session is releasing the breath, the rib cage, and diaphragm, and that frees up a whole lot of vital energy. And that vital energy is gonna want to be grounded so it’s gonna move into your legs. And the second session is releasing the feet, the legs, so that there’s more of a vertical lift through the legs. And since you’ve opened your rib cage, your legs kind of lift everything up. So now you’re more open. And then it just continues. We keep continuing the freedom to move somewhere else. It gets bound up, and we keep helping it get free. Eventually the body gets into a vertical alignment. Like if I stand naturally,” he stands up to demonstrate, “my body weight is more on my heels. There’s a clean line between my ear, my shoulder, my hip, my knee, and my ankle. I didn’t start off that way. But over time you keep looping these sessions, and if you keep doing that, your body keeps opening up.”

“Okay, so why did Everett Ogawa see a connection between that and doing sesshin?”

“He had done many sesshins himself, and he felt that a daily sitting practice and attending sesshin were essential to revealing your life’s purpose. He said the same thing about the bodywork. They both were life altering opportunities to surrender and release. It occurs to me now that if we envision a person sitting perfectly in zazen, that perfect posture is a body that’s in a vertical alignment.”

“So all along, it was your interest in martial arts that was driving your practice,” I say.

“Yeah, but I needed that. I needed the movement, the physicality of it. Also I had a reverence for the aikido dojo. I really liked the etiquette. And I never felt that before in any of the other martial arts I did because they were kind of Americanized. So I felt that my aikido experience was the most pure thing that I had done.”

Eventually Ogawa suggested he attend a sesshin at the Blue Mountain Zendo in Pennsylvania. “He said, ‘I need you to do a week-long sesshin, and then I can train you more. It’s really important. I really want you to do this.’ I said, ‘Okay.’”

“But again,” I point out, “your reason for agreeing is because of the martial arts.”

“Yes. Yes! So I get sent to Pennsylvania. And it’s Ryuun Joriki Baker Osho.” Ryuun Baker had received authorization to teach from Genjo Marinello. It was Gendo’s first experience of a formal sesshin. “They had a small group, but they had the posts covered, and I’d never seen a densu [chant leader] before. I’d never seen anybody hit the han. There were all these new things. I’d never done the meals oryoki. Never done that. And until then I had only done enough sitting to where you really don’t break through. Two day or three days isn’t enough. You just go, ‘The pain has ended. I get to go home now and have a beer.’ So that was the first time I was in a situation where I got past that. And that sesshin was very . . . Productive isn’t the right word. But a lot of things lined up for me.”

Over the next few years, he remained committed to both his Aikido and Zen practices, and then he went through a period of what he calls “great duress.”

“A family crisis involving a beloved person. I was unable to sleep and was filled with dread and worry night after night. Around the tenth day of the crisis, I attended a guided meditation. And during it there was this feeling in the lowest part of my body, deep in my belly. It was like a spinning feeling. Like an uprootedness. Honestly, I really thought I was dying and that whatever my essence was was going to leave. I felt like my insides were rising up. It was peeling away.” He goes onto to describe a dramatic experience of a buildup of energy which felt like it shot up through the top of his head, and he had a sense of “leaving.” “Throughout this entire process, I’m saying goodbye to everybody – everybody who loved me; everyone I loved – and I tell them that I’m sorry, but I’m too tired to stay. You know? I’m too tired to stay. And then it stops, and everything’s super quiet. I mean, no internal dialogue. Nobody in my head talking. Nothing. And the world is super clear. And I get up, and I’m like, ‘I need to get outside.’ And the trees were not ordinary trees. The moonlight was not ordinary moonlight. And I’m captivated, and I’m bristling with energy. This really pure, clean energy.”

The experience had taken place in 2006, but he didn’t speak about it to anyone until he finally attended a sesshin with Genjo Marinello Roshi in 2011 and brought it up in dokusan. “And he just leans forward with kindness and puts his hands on my shoulders, and says, ‘We’re brothers in the Dharma.’ Then he asked, ‘What did you do with your life after that?’ I said, ‘Well, I left my job, and I started a non-profit.’ I told him about my three vows. I didn’t have four. Didn’t know there were four. To no longer make fear-based decisions. To do what my heart says is correct. To be of service to others. Genjo then said that I was already living a life in the Way and that I didn’t necessarily need Zen training, but that it could be just the thing to bring me to great maturity. Those words ‘great maturity’ stuck with me. I remember driving home from that sesshin and blurting out. ‘I am going to do that again!’”

Shortly afterwards, he took jukai because he wanted to commit himself to doing at least two sesshins a year, which in the Chobo-ji system is one of the requirements for jukai. Then Genjo suggested ordination.

“And I go, ‘I don’t know. I don’t feel priestly. I’ve got all sorts of hangups about priesthood.’ But he’s like, ‘Consider it.’ And he asks me to read your books. ’Cause I don’t read Zen. I’m all about the experience, right? So I really don’t have too many Zen books except yours. Your books are the ones that got me to meet the ancestors and go, ‘These guys are a little whacky. I like these guys.’ There was just something there. It just showed me that what I thought Zen was, it wasn’t. I didn’t really know what Zen was. So I needed more time to start doing deeper koan work, ’Cause that’s when you really get to know them. At any rate, Genjo felt that I had the stuff. And that was important to me. I’m a teacher, and sometimes someone comes along, and you’re like, ‘Oh, can I pour this into this vessel?’ And I could feel that from Genjo. And we just had a good connection. And I wanted Genjo in my life. I wanted an older, wiser Dharma brother in my life. I wanted someone to go, ‘Yeah, you’re doing all right.’ Or, ‘Ehhhh, let’s get you back on track . . .’ It was like, ‘What would Genjo do?’ is a big deal for me.”

“There are responsibilities associated with ordination,” I point out.

“Yes. Well, it took me a couple of years to face that.”

“And you have Zen students you work with now?” He does. “So, from your perspective, what is your responsibility to them?”

“Well, because I have so much to teach about awakening the body, that is really important to me.”

“Are all of your Zen students also involved in bodywork?”

“So far, yes. It’s just the way that worked out. Because they met me wanting the bodywork. And I happened to be a monk, and ‘Hey, sitting will help your process.’ So what’s important to me is making sure that they have control of their breathing to the point where it starts to change their physiology. I want them to have a good, clear connection to ground. I want them to be able to sit and generate energy, not be asleep, have their eyes open. Because otherwise you’re just being pulled into an inner landscape. You’re not generating a charge. So to me, that’s what it’s about. If you have control of your breathing, and you have this peripheral vision thing going on, and you’re not going inside your head, your body’s relaxing, you’re in an upright position, you’re going to generate energy. Or, I should say, you’re going get into a flow state. And if you get into a flow state enough, it’s going build a charge, and I believe that’s what leads to kensho. Enough of that charge goes” – he makes a popping sound – “and then – boom! – you have some kind of seeing through. And I think that you keep building up those charges. I really feel that’s where it’s at.”

There is a precision in the way Gendo speaks the Japanese terms associated with both martial arts and Zen, for example the way his stresses the first syllable of “aikido” rather than the second, which is how I frequently hear it pronounced. I ask him how important maintaining the Japanese envelope is for Zen in particular.

“Well, I think we want to maintain the form and not change it.”

“When the Japanese got it from China, and they changed it quite a lot, to suit them,” I argue. “Then we got it from Japan, and a lot of places seem to have kept it pretty Japanese.”

“That’s interesting too. I think I’m reluctant to take anything out of the form. I think it’s all supposed to be there. And there’s an American arrogance, too, where it’s like, ‘Oh, well. We don’t need any of this shit.’ Right? When you haven’t done it long enough to know the shit you’re talking about. You haven’t experienced it deeply enough yet. So at this point, I don’t foresee changing anything because I don’t think I know it well enough. To put it another way we need to be careful of allowing ourselves to create a practice that we find comfortable. My grandfather was known to say that if you’re comfortable you are not growing.”

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