The Three Pillars of Zen

Larry Johanson now lives in Ontario but grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. He tells me that when he was a child, violence was pervasive on the streets, in the home, and even in the school system. He was deeply unhappy and leery of the form of Christianity common in the country, so while still very young he began what he calls a Vision Quest, seeking an alternative spiritual tradition. “I read a lot of books and came upon the Bhagavad Gita. I was fascinated by the notion of God as something you could discover within yourself through meditation.” However, the Gita didn’t include instructions on how to meditate.

In 1974, when Larry was 16, he came upon Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen. “This was what I had been looking for all my life. This wasn’t an abstract philosophical thing. There’s this guy who went to Japan, who studied and worked with the roshis and came to awakening. And this book is a manual. You want to meditate? You want to see God? You want enlightenment? This is what you do.” He followed the instructions in the book and immediately felt the benefits.

“Because I could meditate, I could study better! I could sit longer. I could read a book and could be so focused that I retained more. And because I could retain more, I did better in school. And because of all of that, my attitudes, my disposition changed a little bit. And I realized, ‘Something fantastic is going on here.’”

He wrote to Kapleau care of the Rochester Zen Center to tell him how inspired he had been by the book. And he received a reply. Kapleau and his daughter were coming to Jamaica on vacation, and they arranged for Larry to meet them at their hotel in Montego Bay.

“His presence stunned me. There was a stillness, a quiet, and a silence to him, an authenticity, an assurity to him, and a serenity. And, of course, as a young person whose whole life was in turmoil – my mind, my emotions, everything – it showed up in sharp relief how I felt and what the possibilities were. I was just in awe.”

He committed himself to attain whatever it was he sensed in Kapleau and eventually found his way to Rochester, New York, where he began a lifelong study and practice of Zen.

Stories about the importance of The Three Pillars of Zen in people’s spiritual development is a common motif in the interviews I’ve conducted.

John Pulleyn is currently co-director of the Rochester Zen Center and is a second-generation successor to Kapleau, following Bodhin Kjolhede. Like many others, his interest in Zen came from his reading as a young man. Before Larry’s encounter with Kapleau in Jamaica, a friend gave John a copy of The Three Pillars which he had stolen from the college bookstore (stolen copies of the book is another leitmotif in these interviews). “That was it,” John tells me. “’Cause I’d been looking for how do you meditate. And there was very, very little mention of that. I read all of D. T. Suzuki, and he really wasn’t talking about it. Alan Watts certainly didn’t talk about it.” John was attending Oberlin College in Ohio at the time. “I called the Rochester Zen Center from Oberlin, and I got Roshi Kapleau on the phone. So it was a very small operation when I came. He had three sort of residents living with him. They were in a house on Buckingham Street in Rochester. This was before the move to Arnold Park where the center is now. But, yeah, on the phone Roshi Kapleau said, ‘Well, there are lots of jobs in Rochester. Just come on up.’ So I did that. Took a bus from Toledo to Rochester. Got a room at the YMCA, and then went for my interview with Roshi Kapleau. So I get to the house, and he was just in a sweater. Just seemed to be like a little old man. Very quiet.” He chuckles. “But I couldn’t get a read on him. I wasn’t like immediately, ‘This is it. This is going to be my teacher.’ But I said, ‘This is something I haven’t seen before.’ And a few things from that interview I remember: One is, at some point some issue of money came up – I don’t know why – and he pulled out his wallet, and I thought, ‘Wow! He carries a wallet.’”

“He gave you money?” I ask.

“I don’t remember him doing that, but who knows? And then I was at the Y, and I obviously needed a place to stay. And he said, ‘Well, there are a lot of places you could rent just around here.’ And he took me outside – it was February – and we started walking down the street and just going up to houses, knocking on the door, and when somebody came to the door, he said, ‘This young man has come to study with me, and do you have any rooms to rent?’ And we didn’t find any, but I was just so struck by that, because I was a pretty shy kid, and the idea of just walking up to somebody’s house and asking that was just amazing.”

The importance of The Three Pillars in the transference of Zen to the west can’t be overstated. Prior to its publication, Zen was essentially a concept in North America. After the book’s release, it was clear that Zen was an activity, a practice. Western interest in Zen may well have developed in the 1960s without the book, but it is unlikely it would have been as extensive as it proved to be.

Originally published in Japan, The Three Pillars of Zen consists of translations of a series of introductory lectures given by the Japanese teacher, Hakuun Yasutani, a teisho (formal talk) by Yasutani on the koan Mu,transcriptions of private interviews with students in dokusan – something which had never previously been available in any language – and the personal accounts of eight lay practitioners, Japanese and American, who had achieved kensho. The focus of the book was specifically on zazen. As Kapleau – and Larry Johanson – put it, the book was “nothing less than a manual of self-instruction.”

The Three Pillars is not without controversy. The idea of writing a book about actual Zen practice in order to balance the idealized portraits of Zen more commonly available in the West occurred to Kapleau while he was still training in Japan with Yasutani. He worked on it with the assistance of two other of Yasutani’s students, Koun Yamada and Akira Kubota. Kapleau is given title page credit for editing and “writing” the book, but within the Yasutani lineage it is widely believed that Yamada and Kubota – who succeeded Yasutani as the second and third abbots of the Sanbo Zen school – should have received equal credit.

Kapleau had been the Chief Allied Court Reporter at the Nuremburg Trials. In his book, Zen: Merging of East and West, he wrote: “The testimony at the trials was a litany of Nazi betrayal and aggression, a chronicle of unbelievable cruelty and human degradation. Listening day after day to victims of the Nazis describe the atrocities they themselves had been subjected to or had witnessed, one was shocked into numbness, the mind unable to comprehend the enormity of the crimes.     The grim evidence of man’s inhumanity to man, plus the apparent absence of contrition on the part of the mass of Germans, plunged me into the deepest gloom.”

When the trials were drawing to a close, Kapleau prepared to go to Tokyo to cover the war crimes trials there as well. It could hardly, he thought, be worse than it had been in Germany. In fact, he found the atmosphere of the Japanese trials very different. The Japanese, unlike the unrepentant Nazis, seemed to have accepted responsibility for their actions. Kapleau wondered what caused this difference in attitude and was told by acquaintances that it was the result of the Buddhist understanding of karma which held that the current sufferings of the people of Japan were the direct consequence of their behavior during the war.

When he returned to the United States, Kapleau searched out books on Buddhism and Zen, attended meetings of the Vedanta Society, and investigated the Bahá’í faith. He audited the lecture series D. T. Suzuki gave at Columbia University, but none of this alleviated the personal difficulties he experienced after the trauma of the court hearings. Eventually a Japanese friend pointed out that Zen was not something that could be learned through books. So in August of 1953, at the age of 41, he sold his few possessions and returned to Japan.

For the next thirteen years, he studied with a series of teachers, Soen Nakagawa, Daiun Harada, and finally with Hakuun Yasutani, who worked with lay people rather than monastics.

In 1965, when he had completed about half of the 800 koans used in the Harada-Yasutani school, Kapleau was ordained a Zen priest by Yasutani and given permission to teach. He did not, however, receive inka, or transmission, defined in the glossary of The Three Pillars as the “formal acknowledgement on the part of the master that his disciple has fully completed his training.” Given the increasing numbers of westerners coming to Japan to study Zen, both Yasutani and Kapleau felt it appropriate that the latter should return to the United States and introduce authentic Zen practice there.

Before he left Japan, Kapleau received a visit from Ralph Chapin, an American who had heard that one of his countrymen was studying Zen and was curious meet him. When he came to Kapleau’s apartment, the galley proofs for The Three Pillars of Zen were spread out on the floor. He read a few paragraphs and asked Kapleau to send him twenty copies once it was in print. When Chapin received them, he passed them out to members of a Vedanta group to which he belonged in Rochester established by Chester and Dorris Carlson. Chester was the inventor of electronic photocopying. The couple were so impressed with the book that they distributed 5000 copies to libraries throughout the country.

Kapleau accepted an invitation from the Carlsons to come to Rochester, which then became his home base in the United States. His first students were members of Dorris’s Vedanta group, consisting largely of women in their forties who were exploring various religious traditions. Kapleau taught them how to sit zazen and set up a regular schedule of sittings. The group, however, did not show up on Sunday mornings because most of them remained regular church attendees.

Then young people who had read The Three Pillars began to make their way to Rochester as well. Almost immediately there was tension between the newcomers and the original Vedanta Group.

One of the three people with Kapleau when John Pulley first visited was Hugh Curran who was my host when I first visited the Morgan Bay Zendo in Maine. Hugh’s family had immigrated from Ireland to Canada when he was young. “Having been raised Catholic,” he tells me, “I had considered entering the seminary after high school. I went on Catholic retreats and, when I came east, went to La Trappe D’Oka, a Trappist monastery in Montreal, to see if I wanted to join their community. I was religiously inclined very early on. I went to college at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and then became a student at Temple University to finish off a degree there. One of my professors was Bernard Philipps, and Bernard had just come back from Japan.”

“How old were you?” I ask.

“I was in my early twenties, maybe 21 or 22, and Bernard said, ‘You seem very interested in Zen.’ He was teaching a course and told me I should come to this Zen retreat he’d organized, and the retreat happened to be at a Quaker Center less than ten miles from my house. The retreat was with Yasutani Roshi who was, according to Bernard, a well-known Zen master. I had no idea what I was doing and didn’t even know how to sit cross-legged! I went through a seven-day retreat without any background. Bernard Philipps was also the co-founder of the Zen Studies Society in New York, which had become the place where Yasutani Roshi was in residence for six months each year. Eido Shimano came from Hawaii after Bernard helped get it established. After my first retreat I went to four or five seven-day retreats and monthly one day retreats in the Zen Studies Society. And by the second and third retreats, at one of these Yasutani Roshi verified a kensho experience and encouraged me to develop the experience. He brought me through some initial koans and then said, ‘Now, you really have to keep working on this, keep attending retreats.’ Which I did. Those initial experiences were essentially the turning point in my life.”

When he became subject to the draft during the Vietnam War, Hugh returned to Canada. “I went to Toronto where our family had lived for two years after we immigrated from Ireland, and I got a job as a counselor in the Clifton Home for Boys. I joined a little Zen group that was just forming which included some South Africans, some of them had gone on retreat at the Rochester Center and mentioned Philip Kapleau who was looking for an assistant. So in the spring of ’67, I went to Rochester with a small backpack, and sat with his group. After I spent an evening talking with Kapleau about my Zen retreats with Yasutani Roshi, he asked if I would like to join the Center. I told him that I’d like to try it out, so just like that he accepted me and after returning to Toronto – where I resigned my counselling job – I came right back. I had managed to clear up my draft status by that time receiving a 4C classification as someone who had returned to their own country. I became very involved at the Rochester Zen Center, soon becoming the first monastic, the first cook, the first attendant, et cetera. I also looked after the zendo. I was given a lot of responsibilities based on whatever I was able to handle.”

Hugh was acting as Kapleau’s attendant when the break with the Carlsons took place.

“Dorris had a strong personality and could be very abrupt when she made a decision. She and Chester had been impressed by The Three Pillars of Zen and said they were willing to underwrite the costs of the Center as well as give Kapleau a regular stipend. It was a fairly substantial amount at the time, so he was able to send money back to his wife, deLancey, and their daughter in Kamakura. But the breakup made me feel somewhat guilty because I fed his irritation at Dorris by saying, ‘How come we are letting Dorris tell us what to do so much of the time?’ Dorris would leave little notes with big red ink writing on them after most of the weekly sittings that she attended. She might write, ‘These young people who are sitting with us are smelling up the zendo. Tell them they need to take a bath.’ This was the beginning of a surge of young people coming to the Center. Some of the older people, including Dorris, resented them. And gradually Kapleau became more and more resentful of her. He told me he thought he could work with her Vedanta tradition, but it got more nerve-wracking dealing with her. He became edgier and, unfortunately, I fed the fire by saying, ‘Yasutani or Tai-san [Eido Shimano] wouldn’t put up with this.’ At one point he answered the phone when she called to give him more suggestions about what he should do or shouldn’t do, and he burst out in an angry rant. Next thing you know, she wrote a letter and said, ‘We are no longer giving financial support to the Zen Center.’ Kapleau’s response had not been all that unusual since he tended to bottle up his anger and go into periodic tirades. I desperately wanted people my own age to come to the Center since the older crowd were not people I felt wholly comfortable with.”

And there were more than enough of these young people making their way to Rochester: both single individuals and couples, sometimes with young children, from across the United States, Canada, Mexico, and even Europe. They came expecting the training to be rigorous, and it was. In the early years of the Rochester Center, people talked about “boot-camp Zen.”

Gail (later Sunyana) Graef was one of those youth. Now a Kapleau heir with her own center in Vermont, she told me there was some irony in the approach he took. “Roshi Kapleau had spent thirteen years in Japan, and the interesting thing about him is that when he was at Harada Roshi’s monastery, it was very strict, very samurai, very – you know – the stick was used and shouts and blows and that whole style of Zen. And he didn’t penetrate his koan when he was there. Finally, he went to Yasutani Roshi’s monastery, which was run be a little old lady. It was very small, very lay oriented, completely different atmosphere, and it was there that he had his break-through. When he came to the US, what style did he bring? Harada Roshi’s style! The stick was used fiercely. It was used – I think – inappropriately.”

An energy-charged atmosphere was induced. When the dokusan bell rang, meditators exploded off their cushions in order to get into line because there was never enough time for all of them to meet with the teacher.

Mitra Bishop, another heir, told me that she was older than many of the members of the Center and, during one retreat, had difficulty making her way through the rush to the dokusan line; besides which she didn’t feel she anything to report. So when the bell rang, she remained on her cushion. After a couple of days of that, a monitor pulled her out of the kinhin line and ordered her to dokusan. “I went in, several feet off the floor, assuming I’d had kensho. Kapleau Roshi said, ‘Why haven’t you been to dokusan?’ And I said, ‘I didn’t have anything to say.’ He pulled himself up and roared at me, ‘Don’t you think I might have had something to say to you!’”

Although it was a time when political activism was common among American youth, Sunyana tells me that Kapleau “actually actively discouraged us from social outreach. And that’s definitely not the case now in Rochester. But at that time, it was. And, of course, this was the ’60s, the ’70s, when there was so much activism going on, and he thought we needed to focus our attention within to develop ourselves. We were so immature and so scattered and so undisciplined and so drug-hazed that I think he was probably right about that. It’s just that there were repercussions to that. And the repercussion was that we thought there was nothing more important in the world than enlightenment. And the more deeply enlightened you were, the better you were. You know? Somehow you were more . . . Buddha-ish or something. That had its effect necessarily. It was not a good one. We were conceited as all get-out.”

In spite of his strictness especially during sesshin, Kapleau also sought to adapt Zen practice to North America. He minimized traditional Japanese ritualism and arranged for English translations of the chants, in particular the Heart Sutra. Yasutani wasn’t happy with the changes and took further offence when Kapleau suggested he should not make use of Eido Shimano as a translator during a scheduled tour of the United States. There were rumors that Shimano’s behavior with female students was at times inappropriate, and Kapleau had serious reservations about him. He and Yasutani became estranged, and Yasutani died not long after, precluding a chance for a reconciliation.

“After break with Yasutani,” Hugh reflects, “Kapleau went into a funk and moped around for a while then called me into his office to ask if I wanted to continue to stay at the Zen Center with him. I said yes because I had no other place to go. In addition I had come to love the Center which had become an integral part of my practice. Kapleau used to say to me that the Zen Center was my Zen practice. After that and for the next couple of years we shared a certain camaraderie together. He could be very likeable as a friend and confidant as well as being a mentor. We would go to movies together, old movies at Eastman House, and in the evenings we’d go jogging together and in the morning we would do yoga together.”

Later Kapleau would express regret over his intransigence with Yasutani, but the immediate question was his status within the traditional Zen establishment. Because he had not completed koan training or received inka, he was not formally recognized by either the Soto or Sanbo Kyodan hierarchies. On the other hand, before Kapleau had returned to the United States, Yasutani had given him permission to teach and had presented him with a robe and bowl symbolic of that authorization. In a Dharma talk, his immediate successor, Bodhin Kjolhede, noted, “Roshi Kapleau has shown me a certificate to teach that was given to him by Yasutani-roshi. He has also shown me the robe and bowl he received, the traditional symbolic objects given a student who is sanctioned by his teacher to teach.” Kapleau decided that this was adequate endorsement to continue teaching. And when Bodhin was offered transmission in the Soto system – as he explained in the same talk – he declined it. “Since I never worked extensively with any Soto teacher, such certification would, I believe, be a mere formality, and contrary to the spirit of Zen’s ‘mind-to-mind transmission.’ Roshi Kapleau’s seal – and now my twenty years of teaching experience – is more than enough for me.”

Kapleau was careful not to claim to be a transmitted Zen master although – after he learned that Richard Baker in San Francisco was using the term – he, too, adopted the title “roshi,” pointing out, however, that the word only meant “venerable teacher.”

By 1981, Kapleau was confident the Rochester Zen Center was firmly established. He himself was tired of the winters in Rochester, so a group of students was sent to Santa Fe to establish a satellite center – what is now the Mountain Cloud Zen Center – where Kapleau intended to retire. Things did not work out as expected.

Mitra Bishop was one of those who went to New Mexico. “Seventeen of us came out from the Rochester Zen Center to build the country retreat center that Kapleau Roshi had always wanted to have, and he was going to go into semi-retirement there and just teach senior students. Then I was with Kapleau Roshi when he moved out here to New Mexico, as his secretary and attendant. He only spent a year. I think there were two factors that entered into his leaving after a year. I picked him up at the airport when he moved here. We’d already bought a house for him and renovated it to work for him, but I took him directly to a picnic that the sangha had planned as a welcome for him. At the picnic, one of the sangha members – one of the local sangha members – stood up and said, ‘Roshi, we love having you here. We want to have you here. But we don’t want you to tell us what to do.’ He quietly took it in. And he lived in Santa Fe for a year, almost next door to the center, to the Mountain Cloud Center, to see how things would work out. He came every Sunday to do sitting, teisho, and dokusan, and invited the sangha to his house for Sunday night movies. It was rare that anyone joined him for the movies and most of the sangha was interested in only minimal involvement, though there were a few of us who were more committed to practice. And at the end of the year, partly because he’d fallen and broken his arm again, partly because he hadn’t realized it was so cold in New Mexico, but partly because the sangha, at least beyond a handful of us, just didn’t seem to be very dedicated to practice, he left.”

There was another factor as well. Kapleau had left his senior disciple, Toni Packer, in charge of the Rochester Zen Center. Once she was on her own, Packer found herself increasingly uncomfortable with some of the forms used at the center, in particular the practice of having students prostrate themselves before her. She instituted a number of changes which some senior members believed subverted the taut atmosphere necessary for Zen practice. Then, shortly before Kapleau was scheduled to return to Rochester, Packer met with him and informed him that she could no longer continue to work within the Buddhist tradition. She left the Zen Center and established her own group, which would eventually settle at Springwater, about an hour south of Rochester. Nearly half of the Center’s members went with her.

When he returned, Kapleau supported some of the changes that Packer had implemented, and the samurai atmosphere of the 1960’s and 70’s began to mellow. He found a winter retirement place in Florida where he spent his last days. He developed Parkinson’s Disease in his 80s. He turned his teaching responsibilities over to senior students and maintained two rooms for himself at the Center.

He died in May 2004 in the garden at the Rochester Zen Center, surrounded by grateful students and disciples. When his body, dressed in formal Zen robes, was laid out, students placed a few parting gifts in the coffin, including some of his favorite chocolate bars and a harmonica. He was buried at the country retreat of the Zen Center at Chapin Mill. The grave is marked by the former mill’s large grindstone.

I never met Philip Kapleau, but I did visit Chapin Mill with Bodhin Kjolhede in 2013. While I waited for Bodhin to finish a meeting he was in, I did the Tai Chi form by Kapleau’s grave, then placed a pebble on the mill stone and was glad to have had the opportunity to do so. I, too, was first introduced to Zen by reading The Three Pillars.

The Third Step East: 199-214; 9, 36, 39, 103, 117, 154-55, 158, 159, 161, 185, 224, 244

The Story of Zen: 6, 21, 92, 225, 244, 254, 292, 296-301, 302, 313, 314-17, 355, 359, 386, 424,

Kansas City Zen Center

Stan Lombardo and his wife, Judy Roitman, are the co-founders of the Kansas Zen Center. They are both Dharma heirs of Zen Master Seung Sahn in the Korean Kwan Um school, although Stan is probably better known as a classics scholar and translator.

I note that “Lombardo” sounds Italian.

“Sono siciliano,” he says with a laugh. “Yeah. Sicilian, which is Italian, of course. My great-grandfather came from Palermo or Vicino Palermo, as he would say. On my mother’s side I’m French, New Orleans French. Grew up in New Orleans.”

Italian and French background, growing up in New Orleans, I suggest he probably grew up in a Catholic household.

“From kindergarten through a BA degree, I had – in succession – nuns, Christian Brothers, and Jesuit priests educators.”

“Did the church have any significance for you when you were young?” I ask.

“It had a lot of significance until I took a theology course when I was either a junior or a senior at Loyola University in New Orleans. And somehow it all just dissolved in that course. You’d think that it would strengthen it, but I began to see it as a philosophical structure more than I ever had. In fact, I hadn’t at all before. I was still a real practicing Catholic for the first two or three years of university. Nothing like a Jesuit education to make you an atheist. Otherwise, I got a very good education.”

He’s a few years older than I, and, like for many people of our generation, his initial contact with Zen and Buddhism was literary. The first Zen book he read was Eugen Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery.

“So you were disillusioned by Jesuit theology and then just happened to pick up a book on archery?”

“Yeah. Pretty much. We’re talking about the late ’60s – right? – and Zen is already very much in the air, in the cultural air. And that just happened to be the first Zen book that I came across. Then I looked around for people who might be practicing Zen. By the time I started teaching here at the University of Kansas, I had almost given up hope of finding any Zen practice teachers and was resolved that I would have to move out to the East Coast or the West Coast to really encounter this. Nevertheless, I started a little meditation group. I just put up a sign, ‘Anybody want to sit Zen?’ And maybe seven or eight people came into the school of religious studies where I had reserved a room, and one of them was Judy Roitman.”

Judy had already told me the story. She had been a student of Seung Sahn in Rhode Island and had taken the Precepts with him. Then she accepted a position in the math department at the University of Kansas. “When I got here Stan was the faculty advisor for a brand-new Zen meditation group. He had never studied with anyone, but he was interested; he was faculty, and they needed an advisor. I don’t know why they needed an advisor because there were no students in it. There was a guy who had sat a few sesshins with Eido Roshi and a guy who had studied with Kobun Chino Otogawa, there was me who’d studied with Zen Master Seung Sahn, there were a couple of other people who had studied with a couple of other teachers. We’d meet together and sort of try to figure out what form we wanted to use and what chants we wanted to use and stuff like that. Then Stan and I decided to get married, and I was out in Berkeley, because I would go out to Berkeley to do mathematics in the summer and Stan wasn’t out there yet. And Zen Master Seung Sahn was out there, and I said, ‘Oh, I’m going to get married. Can you perform the wedding?’ And he said,” – imitating his accent – “‘How close Chicago?’ And I said, ‘Oh, about an hour and a half.’ Meaning by plane. And he thought I meant by car, and he said, ‘Okay.’ So he came out, and none of the other peoples’ teachers came out, so that’s how we became a Kwan Um Zen Center. Because he was the only teacher who came out. And he came out every year for something like a dozen years – ten or twelve years – which is kind of amazing. It’s a tiny town, not many people, but he would come out because we were sincere. And our little center here . . . Of the twenty-seven teachers in North America, five of them originated at Kansas Zen Center. So we’re a little powerhouse. We’re small, but we’re powerful.”

“What’s the purpose of Zen?” I ask Stan.

“The purpose of Zen is to sit here talking to you.”

I’d actually had another Kwan Um teacher say exactly the same thing when I asked her the question, so I tell him I should have seen the answer coming. He laughs. “Yeah, you can be a little more general. To keep a clear mind and always act compassionately. For me it’s always had that strong ethical component. You know? Wake up and help this world.”

“Wake up from what?”

“The dream of life. The dream that we started to dream when we were quite small actually. Really, ‘What is this?’ It’s confusion from the beginning. You’re trying to make sense out of this world if you’re at all reflective. You might never reach that stage, but, if you do, Zen is a good practice for you.”

“Before you took up formal Zen practice you sensed that you weren’t viewing the world accurately?”

“I had a strong sense of that actually.”

“Why do you suppose that was?”

“How did I come about that? I don’t know what led to that disposition. I don’t think that it’s a reaction to the dogmatism of Catholicism, but I wouldn’t completely rule that out. You know, you’re given all the answers, and you memorize them. You might very well have a very strong reaction to that kind of indoctrination – you know? – that I’m not seeing for myself. I’m being fed all the answers. So, a Catholic would say, ‘I rebelled.’” He chuckles and adds, appropriately enough for a Classics scholar, “You know, for me, the crowning touch for leaving Catholicism was when they went to the English mass.”

“And why did you think Zen might help?”

“Zen always seemed to me – from my first encounters with it – to be an ‘open mind.’ Not closed and set. But there was always the question, ‘What is this?’”

“What brings people to Zen now?” I ask. “Is it that kind of existential questioning?”

“People have a lot of different dispositions, different sets of personal problems so there’s no single answer to this. Somehow – and this is much easier now than it used to be – they learn something about Zen; they decide ‘Oh, this sounds interesting.’ I don’t think most of them think, ‘This can really help me.’ They just find it intriguing and interesting. That’s my impression from thirty or forty years of doing this. And they show up at the Zen Center. It’s so much easier now, of course, to find Zen Centers. We’re all over Facebook and websites and whatnot. And they want to practice. They want to have the experience of practicing Zen with other people, and I don’t think that they’re immediately interested in any of the profound questions that we bring up and entertain. They’re simply curious. They think, ‘This might be something that would really fit me. Just let me try.’ And they have this experimental disposition. And, of course, only maybe ten percent of them stay. I don’t know if it’s ten percent or five or forty or whatever. Certainly less than half – way less than half – and, of course, we’re used to that. And so we teach people the fundamentals of Zen practice. How to sit, how to breathe. We do use kung-ans, the Korean term for koans as you know. But the first interviews that we give don’t get on to actual kung-ans. And it’s three or four or five interviews before you might have the first gate. And by that time they know what the practice is like; they see that, ‘Okay. This is something that I can stay with.’ And we’re just very open about that. Don’t feed them anything. Just present the opportunity.”

“Is it a technique that they’re looking for? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

He nods his head and adds, “They’re also looking for a community, I think. A community that has espoused a technique that they’re willing to try.”

“And the technique is seated meditation?”

“Well, seated meditation, and then everything else we do in a Zen Center. Walking meditation. Many of them are attracted to the formality, I think. You know, we wear robes, and we’re quite disciplined at the Kansas Zen Center. Not as much as at other Zen Centers that I’ve encountered or heard of. But, yeah, we run a tight ship, and the people who show up tend to react positively to that. Interviews are every Saturday morning and, of course, on retreats. And – you know – the first interviews are not very encouraging and deliberately so.”

“Are interviews required?”

“You don’t have to come to an interview.”

“So I could show up, think, ‘This seems like a nice place,’ bring my zafu and just sit there without having to ever speak to anyone?”

“You could do that. It would be very awkward for you,” he adds with a laugh. “After Sunday practice especially and also after Saturday morning practice, we have a social hour. That’s not required. You could just leave. But most stay and talk. We get to know them; they get know us in an informal setting.”

“As I remember my conversation with Judy, she suggested there was a strong emphasis on the Precepts in the Kwan Um School. So in addition to providing a technique and a community, you’re also promoting a certain ethical vision.”

“Yes, that’s true. Yeah, ‘find your truth out and help this world’ is how we summarize our practice. And that second part is even more important than the first.”

“So a technique, a community, an ethic.”

“Yes.”

“And does that bring about change? Do the people who come to the Kansas Center have a sense that the practice in some ways changes things for them?”

He’s reluctant to generalize but eventually admits, “Sometimes we do get into discussions about their life, problems that they have, and how Zen practice might help them through life’s difficulties. It can give you the inner strength and stability – even the physical practice of Zen can develop that – to meet difficult situations. And then cognitively you learn through meditation how to deal with various mental and emotional states that you experience and therefore you may be able to help other people as well. And we emphasize the importance of keeping a strong practice. I recommend two practices mostly. One is just the standard counting your breaths along with the mantra on the inhalation ‘What am I?’ and the exhalation, ‘Don’t know.’ The other practice I use is also breath based but it simply uses a mantra, and the mantra that I strongly recommend is ‘Hwa Om Song Jong’ which in Korean translates to, ‘The assembly that heard the Avatamsaka Sutra preached.’ In other words, all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas from infinite time and space.”

He demonstrates how the mantra is chanted to a rudimentary melody four times on the exhaled breath and four times on the inhalation.

“And what is the actual impact of taking up that kind of practice?” I ask.

“Stability is the first. That if you can maintain it even for one round, you experience what our teacher – in his pidgin English – called a ‘not moving mind,’ which I’m describing as stability. Cognitive and emotional stability. With that kind of stability there’s the possibility of clarity. Without that kind of stability, you’re looking at muddy, swirling water all the time. So that’s how I present it in my teaching. And that kind of meditation practice can really have an effect on your overall disposition towards yourself, towards others.”

A little later he adds, “Being aware of your condition is the first step in understanding what you are. And that’s what Zen practice has as its basic question” – speaking each word distinctly – “‘What. Am. I?’ And then, with some knowledge of that, ‘How can I help?’ In other words, what is my nature, and what is my function? And I can’t get it to be any more elementary than that.”

“How important is for practitioners to be aware of Buddhist theory?”

“I think it’s important to know at least the standard outlines of basic Buddhist teachings because Zen has its place in that larger cultural concept. I can’t imagine anyone who has been practising for a while not being familiar with it. Everyone reads books these days. I haven’t had a single student come to Zen without first reading five books. And we offer a lot of classes. All sorts of classes about every aspect of Buddhism you can imagine. We also put it in a larger historical and social framework. ‘This is where we fit in.’ We’re always teaching one class or another. I tend to like the classes that deal with a particular sutra or a certain kind of practice. That sort of thing. But if you look at our offerings over a period of years, it covers a broad spectrum of Buddhist teaching.”

“And what is it that you hope for the people who show up at the Kansas Zen Center?”

“That they keep coming.” We both laugh at that. “And! And as a result attain some degree of self-knowledge. In other words, awareness of what they really are and how they can help. That’s what we hope for.”

“And when you say ‘how they can help . . .’”

“I mean moment-to-moment in whatever situation you’re in, what is the best response? The best response being the one that is the most helpful. And that’s what we mean by that.”

Appamada Zen Center, Austin, TX

Peg Syverson and Flint Sparks are the Senior Teachers at the Appamada Zen Center in Austin, Texas, although Peg lives in a suburb outside Chicago and Flint lives in Hawaii. The nature of Zen Centers has changed since the COVID-19 outbreak, and now many centers do much of their work online, allowing teachers to work with people scattered around the globe. “So we have two Sanghas in England,” Peg tells me, “a sangha in Madison, Wisconsin, a sangha starting up in Minneapolis, and one starting up in Arkansas.

“Appamada,” she explains, “was the last word the Buddha spoke. When his followers were gathered around him and said, ‘What should we do? Should we follow this teacher or that teacher?’ he basically said to them, ‘Be an island unto yourselves. Fare forward with appamada.’ Flint and I read an article by David Brazier who explained that the word means ‘mindful, energetic care.’ So when we were looking for a name for our sangha, we were captivated by this concept.”

She first encountered Zen during a course on world religions at university. One of their texts was Philip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen. “And that was it. It was like, ‘Oh! Oh! This is actually something! It’s a path of inquiry, it’s a methodology. It’s not a belief system you’re supposed to believe in.’ And so I basically said, ‘You guys go on ahead. It’s all fairy tales from here; at this point I’m just planting my flag.’”

“And did you immediately get a cushion and try to follow the instructions in the book?” I ask.

“What cushion? I just sat down. I didn’t even know where you’d get a cushion. Where would you get such a thing? And also, of course, it’s pre-internet times, so even if you wanted to look for a Zen Center there was no way to do so. They didn’t advertise in the Yellow Pages. You’d have to sort of stumble on one somehow. There weren’t even any big magazines like Tricycle or Buddhadharma or any of those. It was really quite a challenge; so I muddled along in that way for, like, 23 years. I married a landscape architect. We moved to a small farm in Wisconsin.”

She speaks with great fondness about the man she married. “He was fabulous. Great zest for life. Great sense of humour. Great extrovert. Everybody loved him. Brilliant landscape architect. He’d done the lakefront restoration for the city of Milwaukee. He was such a great man, and it was great to have a supporting role in that. I learned the things he didn’t want to do like estimating. And we were in a very organic environment. We had horses; we had chickens; we had geese; we had dogs and cats. Then there were all the materials we were planting in the landscape business. It was a very organic kind of life. So I got to see how healthy systems function and what kind of things can go awry and throw the system off. I really saw the system as a whole ecosystem in which our work was situated.”

The landscaping was successful until the recession struck in the early 1980s. Then they had to sell the business and the farm and move to San Diego where Peg’s mother lived. Her husband struggled with depression after they left Wisconsin exacerbated by an undiagnosed heart disease, and eventually the marriage ended. “It was heart-breaking. It was crushing. I had ten years of very profound grief where I basically could barely get off the floor. But I had a child to raise, so I went back to graduate school, because it would be on my son’s academic schedule, and I could also get an advanced degree and better our lives.

“I  was living in graduate student housing and working three jobs. I was a full-time graduate student, and I was a single parent. By my second year in graduate school, I realized, ‘I can’t do this without something under me. Some platform under me. I need to have a practice.’ And so I started looking around for Zen Centers in San Diego. Not an easy task because, again, they didn’t advertise, and the web wasn’t available yet. But I managed to find out there were two. I wrote to both of them and asked about their programs. And I got back from one, a six-page single-spaced letter from a teacher talking about how great he was. The second one was a handwritten note from Joko Beck that said, ‘We have orientation on Saturday morning. Why don’t you come and see for yourself?’ That was it. That was the whole note. And so I went.”

Joko Beck was a Dharma heir of Taizan Maezumi, although she eventually broke with him because of his problematic behavior. She founded the San Diego Zen Center in 1983.

“It was a very unusual experience because her center was a tiny little residential complex. Two houses in front and then two houses behind on a residential street in Pacific Beach. Palm trees. I couldn’t see any sign of it being a Zen Center. I had the address. I’m kind of tentatively walking up the driveway trying to figure out where I am. There’s absolutely nothing. No monks in robes. No big temple. No nothing. Finally this woman comes out. She says, ‘Oh, the orientation is this way.’ She takes me to this little living room with a coffee table and a sofa and plants. We had a little instruction on sitting. Posture, minding the breath, I guess. I don’t even remember much about it because at that point they said they would take us in to see the teacher. Now, I had a picture in my head of a Zen master – a somewhat imposing Japanese male, bald, in black robes – who’d be a kind of formidable presence. So I was really preparing myself. I was ready. And then we were shown into this little tiny bedroom in the back of the house – I mean, it was microscopic – and in it was this little old lady who looked like anybody’s grandmother. There was a little altar on the side. And she was just sitting there in a pink polo shirt and a grey skirt that was tucked up around her knees. And it was the most surprising thing because I felt, immediately, this electric shock. It was just exactly as if I put my bare hands on an electric fence. But I instantly knew. I mean, it was galvanizing.

“I applied for membership and waited to be told if I’d be accepted – which is kind of the academic way –  because they made an announcement at every zazen period, ‘Private interviews, daisan, are available with Joko for any member with a daily sitting practice.’ And I was thinking, ‘I wonder when I’ll know if I’m a member?’ Finally I asked one of the senior students, ‘Do you know when my membership might be approved, because I’d like to see Joko for daisan.’” She laughs gently at the memory. “And it was hilarious because she looked so startled: “Everyone is accepted!” So I went in to see her. And it was such a surprising encounter because she said, ‘This is your first time coming here. Tell me a little bit.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m completely destroyed. I don’t have any identity. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I’m doing. I have no idea.’ And said, ‘Well, that’s a perfect place to start.’ So I started to tell her a little bit of my story, and she said, ‘I think this is too long for daisan. Please make an appointment and come see me.’ That was the most startling thing I could ever have heard from her. So I did, and I told her this whole story. I was explaining to her about how badly I felt about how everything had gone. And I had a lot of guilt and remorse about it because I couldn’t hold my family together. I couldn’t keep everything together. And she said to me, ‘Life doesn’t make mistakes.’

“That’s when I started working with her, but, of course, my schedule was very difficult, so I’d go Wednesday evenings basically. And then sometimes my friends would watch my son, and I could have a Saturday morning. It was pretty much the first half of Saturday morning. Or I could go for a five-day sesshin, which was very gratifying.

“She once asked me why I was coming, why I was there, and I said, speaking from the heart, ‘because I want to be a better mother.’ And she said, ‘Well, that’s a story.’ And it was like someone had dumped a pitcher of ice water on me. I was shocked. But she was ringing the bell, so I had to leave. And as I was leaving I was in this altered state of consciousness. ‘What? That’s my raison d’etre. That’s why I’m in graduate school; that’s why I’m doing everything.’ And I realized she was absolutely correct. That I had a story of an ongoing narrative of failed performance of motherhood, that there was some ideal I could not even have described to you of motherhood that I was perpetually falling short of, and a kind of anguish because I had this wonderful child who was so bright and so creative and so engaging and such a wonderful person that he didn’t deserve me. He deserved a real mother. A better mother. And so I realized this story was interfering with my relationship with him, which was characterized by a lot of what I would call ‘tacit apology’ for being the failure that I was. Failing to hold the family together. Failing to be present in the ways that I should be present and all that. Once I could drop that story, then we could have a direct connection, a direct relationship. And it meant everything in terms of my parenting and my relationship with him.”

After Peg graduated, she was offered a position at the University of Texas in Austen.

“When I got my job, I went to Joko and said, ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t have a sangha. I don’t have a teacher there.’ And she said, ‘Well, you can do phone daisan with me, and you can come back for intensives or sesshins. And you can start a little sitting group there.’ And I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not a teacher.’ She said, ‘Well, you know, you can put out a flyer to start a sitting group and people can work with me if you like.’ I said, ‘I can’t do that! I don’t know anything!’ ‘You know a little bit,’ she said with that Joko twinkle in her eye.  I did come to Austin, and my son got interested in the Unitarian Youth Group ’cause there were some girls he was interested in. And so I started attending this Unitarian Church that was just forming up in the northwest suburbs to wait for him. Because they were so new, they didn’t have a minister. So they asked me if I would give a talk one Sunday about the internet. I said, ‘The internet? How is that a topic of spirituality? How about if I give a talk on Joko’s book, Everyday Zen?’ And they said, ‘Great,’ because they’re Unitarians. If I’d said, ‘Organic tomato farming,’ they probably would have said, ‘Fine.’ So I did do a talk on Joko’s book, and I had the congregation do a five-minute meditation. Afterwards, three of them came up to me and asked if I would start a sitting group. I said, ‘No. You need to work with an actual teacher.’ And they said, ‘But could we just sit in meditation?’ And I said, ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll ring bells for meditation periods. If you want to come and sit before the service, I’ll ring bells.’”

In the meantime, she began visiting a group that Flint Sparks had begun. “He is in the Shunryu Suzuki Soto lineage and was more interested in the formal aspects of Zen than I was coming out of Joko’s tradition. He was a tall, handsome bald guy. He was doing everything the way it should be done in that Japanese Zen tradition. And yet my schedule . . . I was running the Computer Writing and Research lab at UT, and I had graduate students, and I was too busy to have anything to do with what he was doing. And then 9/11 happened. It was a huge shock to my system – it was a shock to everyone’s system – but it was a life changing shock to my system. I thought, ‘I have to put what’s most important at the centre of my life.’ At that point I had an active and successful academic career, which immediately got put to the side. Instead of being an academic with a bad Zen habit, I became totally committed to Zen and taught at the university to support my practice.

“So I looked around where I could find the most opportunities to sit with people. And the Austen Zen Center, which Flint had founded, had moved into a new space that had recently been vacated by the Quakers. It was a nice big space, and they were sitting in the evenings and in the mornings every single day. So I started doing that in addition to running my little Sunday group, and that’s how I met Flint who became my second teacher and ultimately teaching partner. And it’s funny because we’re sort of like peers, and we’re progressing in parallel. So when I asked him to be my teacher, he said, ‘We’ll teach each other.’ Which is true. That’s what actually happened. We ended up growing each other.”

Flint was ordained but at that point he wasn’t yet a transmitted teacher, and so he recruited a teacher from San Francisco to join the Austin Zen Center.

“At a certain point I said to this teacher, ‘I think I’m on the priest-path.’ Which seemed bizarre to me because I didn’t know anything about priests, and Joko didn’t ordain priests, and I didn’t have any idea of what that would mean, but somehow it just came out of my mouth. It took a couple of years, but I was ordained in 2004. So I was practicing quite seriously there. I was attending every single event. I was spending more hours than either the teacher or Flint, who had a busy psychotherapy practice.”

Peg continued to think of Flint as her “second teacher.” “And at a certain point he told me, ‘I think you should be an entrusted teacher. You should go ahead and give practice discussion [daisan] and be an entrusted teacher.’”

I was unfamiliar with the term “entrusted” teacher.

“It was something they had started at San Francisco Zen Center where they were entrusting lay teachers who were not going to be ordained. At any rate, I told him, ‘I’m not comfortable with that. I think we should talk to Joko. So the next daisan I had with Joko on the phone, I said, ‘You know, Flint thinks I should be teaching.’ She said, ‘Well, of course you should!’ So that was when I was really authorized by Joko. Meanwhile, my little group was still going on, and they were meeting on Sundays at the Austin Zen Center when it wasn’t being used by AZC. But this little Live Oak sangha stolidly refused to merge in with Austen Zen Center, even though I was practising there and was a priest there. And then I wanted to have all the formal training in the Japanese model so that I would understand what was important to preserve, what was important to carry forward, and what was cultural aggregation, so after I was ordained I went off to train at Great Vow Monastery. And the Sunday Live Oak sangha continued to meet; they were very faithful.”

Great Vow Monastery in Clatskanie, Oregon, was founded by Jan Chozen and Hogen Bays.

“It was wonderful. It was like the culmination of a dream. I was now a Zen monk priest living in a Japanese style formal Soto Zen monastery. It was the real deal, and I loved every minute of it. I was working in the kitchen. I was working in the office. I was vacuuming floors. I was doing hospitality for people who were arriving on Sunday mornings. And everything was as I hoped it would be. It was situated in a forest. It was very beautiful. There were organic gardens. And I could easily imagine just settling there and teaching in the elementary school down the road and helping to build the monastery. Then one day I was walking down the hallway, and I had a very vivid sense, ‘This is not your path.’ And that was shocking because for forty-five years, I assumed this would be my ideal path. Right? My son was off to college. I had no further family responsibilities. Perfect. ‘This is not your path.’ And I also realized the Austen Zen Center wasn’t my path. So I thought to myself, ‘You have to be kidding me! This little six-person sitting group is my path?’ It was a shocking recognition. So I came back and talked to Flint about it.”

Flint’s Austen Center was also undergoing changes. Rifts had begun to appear within the community, Ultimately, Peg withdrew from the center. “So now, there I was, without my teaching partner, with my little tiny sitting group, and just thinking, ‘Wow! This is a way to crash and burn.’ Right? All the things I thought I was going to be embodying as an ambassador of the Dharma in my robes – you know? – it was all gone.”

“And what happened with Flint,” I asked.

“Well, he founded Austen Zen Center. He was still there. His psychotherapy office was there in one of the side buildings.”

However, the situation at the Austen Center continued to deteriorate and eventually Flint also felt compelled to withdraw. Peg built a small house in her backyard where Flint relocated his psychotherapy office. “So that was a complete joy and a delight to build. And that was when we took off. Then we were free; we were completely liberated. We started talking about relational Zen, which was something we were very attuned to. That this practice would be relational, that it would be interpersonal.”

“What do you mean by ‘relational’?” I ask.

“Our understanding is that we wake up in meeting, in encounter – not by sitting and facing a wall and somehow blanking our mind – but in encounter. It might be an encounter with a peach tree; it might be an encounter with a Zen master; it might be an encounter with an old woman at the well. Zen is full of these stories. Right? They’re all about encounter. And that was the big distinction in the pedagogical shift from India to China. In India, Buddha would give a talk, and people would either be enlightened or they would go off into the forests and meditate. But in China the culture was very pragmatic. A Zen master would be giving a talk and then someone would stand up in the middle of the talk and challenge the teacher. Or there would be an encounter between two Zen masters, and there always seems to be this encounter; the whole koan collection is a record of encounters. I said to Flint, I think we have something different to offer, something we want to build together. And we’re going to have to raise one another because there’s nobody that can teach us this stuff. He had a lot of experience in group practice and group dynamics, a lot of experience in helping people with those kinds of encounters. His practice was almost all group practice. So I felt confident he knew the psychological side of it and had enough wisdom and experience and training to manage if someone got unhinged by this or upset or distressed.”

“Does that ever happen?” I ask.

“No, it doesn’t actually,” she admits, “but I didn’t know that when we were heading into it. And he said, ‘There’s a book on my shelf that I’ve never been able to read, but I think it might have something to do with what we’re doing.’ It was Liberating Intimacy by Peter Hershock, and this is the book that authorized us, basically, because it is about the sociality of Zen as it emerged in China. It was really about these encounters, about the connections, about relationality. Flint and I started reading it out loud, paragraph by paragraph. And I said, ‘This is exactly it. He’s talking about exactly what we’re doing.’ So then it was about creating activities that included both formal Zen meditation but also relational encounters, relational exchanges. So in a Dharma talk we might put people in groups of two or three, and we might give them some little activity that would help them encounter each other in a new way.”

“For example?”

“Oh, well there’s one exercise where they’re sitting on the floor, and one person sits in front of the other person, like they’re on a train, and the person in back, with permission, puts their hand on the back of the person in front. And the person in front directs the person’s hand to where it feels most nourishing and with as much pressure or as little pressure as they want. And there’s something about that contact that gives both people a sense of support. Mutual support. But it’s embodied practice. It’s not talking about things. We have some other activities that are talking about things too. For example, in groups of three you ask them to remember someone who gave them support in a crucial time, and then they each take turns telling that story.”

“And what is the purpose all these activities?

“It’s building the fabric of sangha.”

“And the value of sangha is?”

“Oh, my gosh! It’s one of the three pillars, of course.”

“Doesn’t really answer the question,” I point out.

She pauses a moment, then tells me: “This is interesting because this – to me – is a cultural thing. In Asian cultures, generally speaking, people are tightly networked socially. Right? So relationships are very well-defined, and there’s a social fabric that’s quite strong or there has been until modern times. So the teachings of Zen have focused on owning your own mind, on spontaneity and individuality. But that’s not our problem here. Everybody thinks they own their own mind; everybody thinks they’re individuals. Our biggest problem here is building a social fabric that’s wholesome, supportive, liberating, conducive to well being. So this is actually much more central here than it would be in many Asian cultures where community is very strong. So my sense of it is, in this world of fragmentation and conflict and technologies that are distractions, this presence – this personal presence – is one of the great treasures. And so to sit together, to have a potluck together, to do a conversation café together, to have a movie night together, to go to brunch after Sunday morning program together, these are all ways that the fabric is restored, and there’s mutual trust and mutual care. So this is what people seem to be longing for. At least that’s been our experience.”

However, when the pandemic broke out, they had to immediately move everything online. “For me, I had twenty-five activities a week that I was participating in, and all of a sudden there was nothing. I was completely isolated. And I was performing Zen in front of a camera in an empty room every single day. Day after day; day after day. Activity after activity. Study groups. Classes. Intensives. Practice discussions. Meditation. And I got exhausted. I got just completely exhausted by the isolation. My sister said, ‘Well, as long as you’re doing everything online, why don’t you move back here to Illinois? You can at least be close to your family.’” She sighs. “I said, ‘Okay. Seems like a good idea.’

“We had entrusted three Dharma teachers in January before COVID hit. They were deeply devoted, experienced practitioners and sangha leaders. But I had the sense that they were not going to be able to step into their roles as long as I was there, because everyone would still perceive me as the resident teacher. Flint had moved to Hawaii, so he wasn’t there, but I was. Ultimately, this actually proved part of an evolving, organic succession plan. So now I work primarily with the leadership. I teach some classes, lead some intensives, practice discussion. But the day-to-day increasingly, these three Dharma Teachers are taking on responsibility for themselves, which is really important if you don’t want to infantilize a sangha.”

Dharma Rain, Portland, Oregon

Kakumyo Lowe-Charde is the Dharma heir of Gyokuko Carlson. After serving as co-abbot of the Dharma Rain Zen Center in Portland, Oregon, with her in 2017 and ’18, he became primary Abbot when she retired in 2019. Dharma Rain itself, he informs me, is currently on a fourteen-acre site which had been a former landfill. My immediate thought is about water issues.

“It sure made it interesting the first couple of years,” Kakumyo admits. “It can go from very, very hard to soup, very quickly – and vice versa – because there’s so little topsoil. But we kind of figured out how to deal with that as we built the storm water system. It’s a very open site. So we have all these little ponds and swales, and now it’s quite workable.”

Then in the next breath he tells me it’s a rough neighbourhood. “We’re three blocks off 82^nd, which is one of the real problem areas of the city. There are shootings on a regular basis; we’ve had over 30 homicides within five blocks of the temple in the last two years.”

“But you’re committed to staying there?”

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It’s been fantastic. “That’s just suffering happening. I want to show a different way of relating to that.”

He grew up in Upstate New York in a community of less than a thousand people. “It had a stop light that blinks yellow; that’s as big as it gets.”

His parents had been Presbyterian ministers, but, when he was ten years old, they both left the church. I ask if something specific had provoked that.

“I think it was a matter of feeling they weren’t doing the work they wanted to do. They wanted to see more transformation, to help people with that, and folks weren’t interested. That’s not what church was for for the people in the congregation. It was about community, about a sense of belonging, and my parents wanted to work more with the internal stuff. They veered towards therapy basically. For my dad that was fairly diplomatic; for my mom it was fairly acrimonious. And they’ve both taken Precepts in the Zen tradition since.” I make a note to come back to that.

The family moved to California where his parents went to graduate school to study psychology. I ask how the move impacted him.

“Well, it meant we moved. There was no crisis of faith or, ‘Whoa! My reality is shifting!’ It was just that we moved from a rural environment to suburbia, and from New York to California which was a pretty significant lifestyle change in terms of I had been traipsing through the woods and hills every day as a younger kid, and it was just a very built environment when we got to California. That was the big change that I noticed.”

There were social adjustments as well. “A sense of belonging was tough. I was more on the fringes of groups. Some of that was just awkwardness, and some of it was values. Kind of prioritizing things differently than most people did. I read a lot. I was into exploration. I was into trying to understand, ‘How does this thing work?’ I wanted to get it. I wanted to know it. Not for the sake of knowing but to do it better. I had a strong sense that there’s a way to do this or that. And either I’m going to get it right or I’m going to get it wrong, and I really want to get it right.”

It was a feeling he can remember having had from early childhood, although, he explains, it was expressed in different vocabularies and took different forms through the stages of his life.

“By the time I was in college, it manifested as, ‘What am I going to devote myself to? What matters most in life?’ ’Cause I didn’t know what it was. But I knew that when I found what that was, I was going to do it with both hands and feet; I would go all the way in.”

He began with martial arts, then political activism, and eventually neuroscience. “And that’s what got me into Zen. I was working in Finland in a neuroscience lab and doing research on the mechanisms of addiction and using rats.”

There are times when I have the sense that there are large parts of his story missing. For example when, a few minutes later, he mentions casually that he spoke Slovak which turned out to be because he had been a high school exchange student in Slovakia. How, I ask, did he end up in Finland?

“It was pretty random. I’d applied for a couple of different things after graduating from Reed.” At Reed he had been doing behavioural research in what he calls “the psycho-bio end of things. I was interested in the system that dealt with both pain and reward. The way the brain processes suffering basically. And motivation. So addiction taps very much into that. It was a way to work on that problem which I was fascinated by.”

I ask if there had been people in his life with addiction problems or if he himself had had difficulties with addiction.

“Not really. I don’t have that structure. I did a fair amount of experimentation. I was on heroin for a while, but I was able to quit when I decided to. But no one escapes unscathed. Right? There are regrets from that time that still impact me.”

“And after graduation you just came upon a job posting that said, ‘Come experiment on rats in Finland’?”

“Yeah,” he agreed, smiling. “It was a lab. I’d followed their research. I knew who they were. I wrote them a letter, and they said, ‘Come. We’ll pay you.’ I was doing behavioural studies. And that became an ethical question for me. Up to that point, as a student, I was fully into that game. I was, ‘This is what I’m going to do.’ And I didn’t really have time to think about it. But when I was in Finland, I was suddenly quite isolated. It was a job – right? – it wasn’t like a thesis project where I could spend 80 hours a week on it. I was only there for 40 hours a week. And I was isolated linguistically because I’d just arrived, and my life wasn’t full yet. And I did a lot of thinking about it, and I realized, ‘I’m not qualified to make this decision. I don’t trust myself. I don’t have a wisdom tradition that I can rely on.’”

“What decision specifically?” I ask.

“Is it okay for me to be doing research on animals? Is it okay for me to kill for a living in that way. And I realized that I wasn’t okay with it. So I left. I quit. Bounced around in Eastern Europe for a bit. I just did odd jobs. I taught some English. I dug a bunch of ditches. I did some field work. And a lot of qigong, a lot of long walks, and read everything I could that was about religion in English. And what I found was that the Zen stuff resonated. So after six months of that, I moved back to Portland and looked up Zen in the phone book, and I found Dharma Rain.”

He went to the address, and, as chance would have it, the door was unlocked and the temple was empty. “And so I came in and sat, and I thought, ‘Hey! This is right up my alley. I can come here anytime I want and just sit and that’s great.’” He chuckles at the memory. “That’s not how it actually worked, but that was my first impression.”

“And this is the same place you’re at now?” I ask.

“Yes. Different location. We moved but yeah.”

“Got better front door security?”

“Yeah.”

“At any rate you went back.”

“Yeah, and I started going regularly, doing what was offered. At that time there wasn’t a whole lot on the schedule. There were two teachers living there, and one or two residents who were kind of part-timey.”

The year was 1998, and the two teachers were Kyogen and Gyokuko Carlson who had been students of Jiyu Kennett at Shasta Abbey. They founded Dharma Rain in 1986. Kyogen died in 2014.

Kakumyo was studying naturopathic medicine at the time, but he became a regular practitioner at Dharma Rain. “I did retreats. And after a little more than a year, I did a month’s residency. Kind of their first attempt at an ango. And during that was when I really realized that, up until that point, I was trying to add this into my life. Then I realized, it’s the other way around. This is what I’m doing, and I need to orient to that all the way. And so I dropped out of med school, I moved in, and basically said, ‘I’m here. Train me.’ And they said, ‘Well, there are some hoops.’” He chuckles. “So I took a couple of years to jump through those.”

“What drew you to the place?” I ask. “What was the allure?”

“The sense that it works. The sense that this has worked for 2500 years, and there’s all these people for whom it has worked.”

“‘Worked’ in what sense?”

“I certainly didn’t know then. I didn’t have a sense of that, but it was what I was looking for. I wanted to know that there was a method. I wanted to know that there was a reliable way of addressing this difficulty that I was feeling.”

“And the difficulty was what? Not knowing how to live your life?”

“That was an aspect of it. A sense of being disconnected from purpose and wanting to serve. And this offered all that.”

“Do you look at Zen the same way today – as abbot – as you did back then?”

“Oh, no! Back then I was trying to define it, I was trying to fit it in a box, I was trying to ‘know’ it. And now I’m much more comfortable with, like, this vastness. It’s just moving. We are all process, and I don’t want to hinder that process. I want to be responsive to it. I don’t want to package it. I don’t want it to be smaller. I don’t want to put a definition on it.”

“When people knock on the door for the first time at Dharma Rain, what are they looking for?”

Using Buddhist terminology, he suggests that the primary “dukkhas” – manifestations of suffering – which bring people to the centre are: “Being seen, a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, and a feeling of being disconnected from ‘why.’”

“And if someone comes in saying that they aren’t sure what everything in their life is all about, that they’re struggling, how do you respond?”

“I’d ask, ‘Who are you?’ I would show interest in who they are and let that be a mirror for them to kind of see themselves more and then see where that went. That would be my first step.”

“And how would that differ from going to see a psychologist?”

“I think there might be some kinds of psychology that would look real similar. But, you know, I think the context is key. People are showing up here for a reason. The set and setting are distinctive, and the relationship is a different one. You know, I’m a priest, not a therapist. I think fundamentally I’m here to care about them, not to fix something.”

“Okay, so I come. I get a sense that you’re empathetic, that you’re showing an interest in me. What do you tell me to do?”

“Show up again.” We both laugh at that. “Show up again. And notice. Notice what it’s like, what it’s like to be you. What was that interface when you bumped into the temple like? What calls your name?

“Do you introduce me to certain techniques?”

“You know I’m pretty anarchic. I trust that I’m surrounded by a temple, and that the structures are here and that people will bump into them. So I let that happen. I don’t try to engineer it.”

“Gyokuko,” I mention, “told me that when she was working with Jiyu Kennett, it was less Jiyu who she perceived as her teacher than it was the temple itself – the structure that she was in – which created or presented an environment that she learned from.”

“Yeah. The resonance. I think you’d get different answers from people at that time, but I think that Kyogen and Gyokuko really felt that that was one of Roshi Kennett’s geniuses, was one of the things that she did that really shined. Feeling the mandala of inner connections and how that helped people practice. Dharma Rain really leans into the treasure of sangha, really making the community a place of practice. Some places are more organized around sesshin; we’re more organized around the sense of sangha. I think that there’s such a barrier for many people for coming into this type of environment that it can be very intimidating. So we start off with, ‘You’re welcome here. We’re all humans playing this game together. If you want to play, great.’”

On the other hand, he tells me that if I were to arrive as a first time participant I wouldn’t necessarily be given meditation instruction. “There are greeters to tell people, ‘Oh, your first time here? Here’s how you do stuff.’ They give the essentials of walking in and sitting down. Here’s what you need to know. Basically they’re going to say, ‘It’s okay. You’re gonna make some mistakes, just keep your peripheral vision open and notice, and let people kind of guide you if necessary. No one’s going be offended if you do something wrong.’ That’s the basic message.”

“But no one’s going to give me any instruction about what I’m supposed to do while I’m sitting there?”

“No. If they come for a meditation workshop, sure. But we don’t speak during zazen.”

I am reminded of the stories of the pioneer North Americans who travelled to Japan in the 1950s and ’60s, and whose only instruction amounted to, “You sit there.” Kakumyo doesn’t deny the similarity. “Those places weren’t known for being real welcoming environments,” I point out.

“No.”

“And yet you said that’s what you hoped to be providing. You want people to feel they’re welcome there.”

“So, we have workshops. We have one on stress; we have one on compassion; we have one on Zen meditation; we have one on starting a practice. We’ve got all these introductory ways in that give people that sense of information, that help them feel secure. But that’s not part of it if you just show up on a Sunday morning.”

In fairness, it isn’t all that different from the experience I’d had when I first went to the Montreal Zen Centre. Both Montreal and Dharma Rain assumed that proper meditation instruction can’t be provided in five or ten minutes prior to a formal sitting period.

“The workshop is two hours long, and it talks you through what you do with the body, what you do with the mind. It gives you a twenty-minute trial period, and then we troubleshoot that. And we talk a little bit about integrating it into life.”

“And how would the way you present meditation differ, for example, from that given at the No-Rank Zendo, which is also there in Portland?”

“Well, you know, they’re Rinzai. What I tell people is our basic practice is shikan taza. Which is very true, very deep, and can feed you for the rest of your life in meditation. But it’s also quite subtle, and it can be frustrating because you don’t know if you’re doing it or not.”

“That’s telling me what the practice is going to be like, but it’s not telling me what to do. Let’s say I’m one of those people who needs a diagram.”

“Okay, so the diagram is you notice your experience. If you’re trying to change your experience, then stop trying to change it. You know, thoughts are going to appear – and now I’m describing what it will feel like – but that’s the diagram. That’s it. Notice. If you’re trying to affect it, if you’re trying to change it, if you’re trying to improve it, release that impulse.”

“It’s not that easy,” I remark. “You said, ‘subtle.’ I suspect there are people who feel they can’t do it.”

“Well, they don’t think they can do it. And I would argue that more are doing it than believe it. Like my life changed dramatically long before I could put the mind somewhere and hold it still. Concentration develops, but that’s a much longer process. And transformation isn’t just dependent on concentration.”

“And do you suggest that people develop a home practice, ten/fifteen minutes a day, something like that?”

“I’d say, ‘That sounds great.’ I tell people that I’m more interested that they sit every day than that they – you know – sit for an hour once a week. And that’s primarily because I want the habit in there, and I want those more frequent reminders that there’s something more important than all the fears and hopes and tribulations that make up the identity in daily life. For that fifteen minutes sitting facing a wall, the body recognizes there’s something more important than everything else that defines them. And it doesn’t know what to do with that. But that’s an important reorientation, and to get a dose of that on a regular basis counts.”

The conversation wends its way through a number of topics: the way in which they present the Precepts to students and the way those Precepts are interpreted, the way students prepare for jukai. I even get around to asking how it was that his parents came to take the Precepts.

“I think it’s just because they’re in relation to me. I’m doing this; I’m ordained; I’m happy here. They wanted to know for themselves. So Mom did it first. And then maybe a decade later, Dad did. They aspire to sit, but I don’t think formal meditation is a big part of their life.”

I like the phrase “aspire to sit.”

“So, yeah, it was a way to be in a deeper relationship, understand my world a bit more.

“So if they were asked on a hospital admittance form ‘what religion?’ they’re probably not going to say Buddhist?”

He considers the question a moment. “I think they might. Yeah. I’m not positive. I think my mom probably would. My dad has a little more ambivalence. But I think they both basically identify as Buddhists.”

As we come to the end of our time, we discuss the hierarchy at Dharma Rain. Kakumyo is the abbot, but there are another ten people – some ordained and some not – who are also identified as “teachers.” So I ask, “What does a Zen teacher teach?”

It’s something I frequently ask; one of the chapters of Further Zen Conversations focuses on the range of responses I’ve had to that question. Kakumyo chuckles and starts to reply, then pauses and says, “What are you asking?”

“Well, it’s the term, isn’t it? It’s interesting. You could be called a minister, as your parents were. We could use a more neutral term like ‘facilitator.’ But the term we use is ‘teacher.’ So what does a Zen teacher teach?”

“I feel like the content that I’m offering is less important. I value the teachings, but knowing about the Lotus Sutra or the Shobogenzo or whatever, those aren’t the things that have really changed who I am. It’s transformation. I feel like what’s closest for me – and this isn’t true for all teachers – but what’s closest for me is the transformative process in the people that I’m working with.”

“So, you’re not teaching a theory, not teaching Buddhism as a belief system,” I say. “Are you teaching a practice?”

“I think that’s part of it. Mostly I accompany. I do it and model it, and I’d like you to do it with me. This is something deeply accurate and deeply fulfilling and if you’re around it, there’s a certain kind of osmosis with it if you bring yourself into proximity, and I don’t know what that looks like in your life, but I’m curious to see how you navigate that and am willing to help if it’s useful.”

“And how important are the Asian accoutrements? Your head is shaved, you’re wearing samue. How important is all that?”

“So, I’m a monastic, and that means the way I’m expressing it is this particular form, this particular practice. The lay teachers have a broader scope. They may live off campus, they may have jobs, they may have a family; they may do different things. For me, this is where I live, this is what I do, this is my full-time gig.”

“So the clothing, the hair, this is – what? – a declaration of commitment?”

“Yeah. I mean, if I’m painting, I wear painting clothes, if I’m exercising, I wear shorts, but if I can get away with it, yes, this is what I wear.” 

“And does your temple have an Asian ambience?

“I mean, it’s Americanized. It’s adapted. The main building, the sodo, is built to an American building code and with modern materials, but it is reminiscent of similar buildings in Japan.”

Which brings us to the discussion of the fourteen acres on a former landfill and the challenges of the neighbourhood in which the temple is located.

I end the conversation by asking what, as abbot, he hopes for Dharma Rain. He reflects a moment before replying.

“Well, I’d say there’s layers there. I would say in a deep way, I’d like to see this lineage continue. That’s a very personal mission for me that I feel a real responsibility to time for. I would say – focusing on this decade – I want to see Dharma Rain grow. We’ve grown tremendously in the last decade and gotten much broader and changed how we interact with the community. I want to see that continue. I feel like we’re poised to play a larger role in the broader community – not just in the Buddhist community – and we have a lot of collaborations. We’re just in a lucky spot, and I want to live up to that. I want to see that broader impact happen. We have this open site where people walk. It’s kind of like temples in Japan where it’s a public park. So we get a couple of hundred people a day just walking through here. They’re not here for the Buddhism, but they’re impacted by it. And we’re a place of safety. This is a rough neighbourhood, and people see us as a real support.”

“But you’re committed to staying there?”

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It’s been fantastic. “That’s just suffering happening. I want to show a different way of relating to that.”

“How would you define your relationship with the broader community?

“I’m not going to constrain it like that, but I would say that it’s who we are in relation to that that counts. Like, we’ve had someone sleeping in our greenhouse for the last four months; it’s been freezing. Right? So I’m okay with that. How I relate to him, that ripples out. I want to be a temple that sees the world accurately and with a warm heart. And when I say ‘accurately,’ I mean not through the subject/object perspective, that we’re not getting caught up in the sense of ‘other,’ by the sense of ‘separate,’ by the sense of ‘scarcity.’ I feel like that’s valuable.”

Joyful Mind Zendo, Rockville, Maryland

For Martine Palmiter there is a natural connection between the contemporary concept of being “woke” to racial or gender injustices inherent in societal structures and the concept of awakening found in Buddhism. 

“I was raised American Baptist, and I loved going to church with my mother. And it was one of the first integrated churches in our county in the 1960s. Our pastor railed against the Vietnam War and held out Martin Luther King as a beacon. So I was raised in that faith tradition of rebellion against injustice and also love, and I was very impacted by that. And in high school I joined a Bible-study group, led by a now well-known protestant pastor, Brian McLaren, who is a former evangelical who preaches contemplative practices with Richard Rohr.”

I knew about Rohr, a Franciscan contemplative whose study of various spiritual traditions included spending time at a Japanese Zen monastery, but not McLaren.

“In our Bible study, we were instructed to pray and have faith, to let Jesus in our hearts, and to experience God personally. I tried, but nothing happened, and I was disillusioned. I wanted to find something that would touch my deep yearning to experience God. So at age 17, I made a decision to leave Christianity behind because as a way it did not work. For me.

“When I went to college, something happened that did touch my heart.  A real turning point for me was taking a course in Feminism 101 which just turned my life around. Opened my eyes. In this class we studied feminist theory from different perspectives: economics, art, history, childbirth, aging, spirituality, sociology.  I learned about the possibility of God as a female. I learned about historic violence and oppression against women from foot binding in China, to rape in all cultures, to all manners of control of women. So that touched my heart. I learned to look more critically. This was kind of the first time I’d heard about all these things in the world; I would leave that class shaking for an hour or two. The class made me feel awake and alive for the first time in my life. “

She tells me that the course motivated her to explore women’s spirituality, and I express some surprise that it hadn’t, rather, drawn her to political action.

“Politics didn’t interest me, but spirituality did. I began to see how changing the heart and mind could change the world. As the feminist slogan went, ‘the personal is political.’ I went to my first convention for the National Organization for Women in Washington DC, and it was there that I found out about women-affirming spirituality groups, body practice, and Wicca, where male and female gods were equal and the earth honored. I was impacted by Starhawk, whose book, Spiral Dance, emphasized engaged actions that are in harmony with one’s thoughts and words, and I went to an outdoor pagan camp she hosted in West Virginia.”

Starhawk – Miriam Simos – was associated with the San Francisco neo-pagan and wiccan movements, and her book, Spiral Dance, focused on Goddess spiritualities.

“I also started reading Matthew Fox’s work, Original Blessing; he was a radical Christian theologian who did contemplative earth-based Christianity and mystical contemplative traditions, and also Rosemary Radford Reuther’s books on feminist theology. She was a Catholic nun who was radically transformed by seeking a more woman-centered spirituality and a more earth-based spirituality. “

I ask in what way she had viewed male and female spiritualities differing at that time.

“Well, at the time I was shocked that there could even be something as a female godhead. I had never thought about that. I ended up studying the anthropologist Marija Gimbutas’ work on the ancient matrilineal cultures. And I think what Marija Gimbutas’s work did for me was reveal that there were periods of time in our human history where there was an equality or multiplicity of gender/sexes where people were equally revered for who they were.”

“And what did you derive from all these studies?” I ask.

“That’s a really good question. They made me know what I didn’t know. I kept learning. I’m a life-long learner. I just kept opening up and exploring, saying, ‘Well, this isn’t it. This isn’t it.’”

In the course of time she married, had children, and she and her husband moved to Miami, Florida, and lived in a plant nursery where they tried to establish a business renting plants to conventions and parties. She also studied massage therapy, and it was there she found a flyer about “what I thought was a women’s retreat in Tampa. I didn’t know it was a Buddhist retreat. I just thought it was a women’s circle. It ended up being led by Tsultrim Allione, who is a Lama now in the Tibetan tradition. It was attended by all women, and we practiced in a yurt. We fasted, meditated, and we did dakini goddess practice, and we chanted. I felt something very deeply in that. It was the first time I had meditated deeply; we practiced from morning till evening for five days and there was lots of chanting. And we learned the Tibetan chod practice. I still do those chants forty years later.

“And then I tried Christianity again. I went to a few Congregational and Unitarian churches to see what they had to offer. It still didn’t satisfy my yearning for an authentic experience of spirit. But it was very soon after that I found Zen. And I remember hearing one of my teachers – Roshi Robert Kennedy – say,  ‘When you get to the end of seeking, that’s where you find Zen.’ That’s exactly how I felt.”

The Florida business wasn’t successful, and she and her husband moved back to the community where she had grown up, and there she met a woman in a bowling alley.

“Our kids were both in leagues. We connected and she and I became fast friends, best friends to this day.  She had studied at Dai Bosatsu with Eido Shimano Roshi, but now practiced alone with her husband. She encouraged me to try a local Korean Seung Sahn Zen group, and it was my first Zen experience. And I did fall in love with the practice of silence and sitting, walking, and chanting. But the group was majority men and had a masculine feel to it with discussions on martial arts.  So after a year I found a phone number for Rose Mary Dougherty, who was starting a Zen sangha nearby.”

Rose Mary Dougherty had studied Zen with Robert Kennedy, a Jesuit, and Janet Richardson, a Catholic nun and Kennedy’s heir. “She invited me to her home, where she had set up a room as a zendo. And right there I knew she was my teacher. Her presence alone told me this was right. She had a presence about her.” For a long while, however, Martine did not realize that Rose Mary was a Catholic nun, a member of School Sisters of Notre Dame

“What did she introduce you to that you hadn’t found with the Korean Zen group?” I ask.

“Presence. There was a lot of busy activity at the Korean group sitting. And when I went to Rose Mary’s house, it was still and silent and beautiful and peaceful and calm. And it stayed that way every time I went.”

“So you find this woman who’s a nun – but you don’t know that she’s a nun – and you start going to her house because she has ‘presence.’ Where does this lead?”

“Well, it leads to seventeen years of devotion to Zen practice and to her.” Martine became the One Heart Sangha’s first President when Rose Mary’s group incorporated, and, as it grew, they moved from her home to a nearby church were they still meet, twenty years on.

“And probably somewhere along the way, she suggested you do a sesshin,” I say.

“She did. It was a five-day retreat. And I told her I was terrified. The sesshin took place at a convent in Pennsylvania and was led by Sister Janet Richardson.

“Part of practicing with Catholic sisters, for me, was that I saw sincere practice with authenticity and with a sense of compassion and openness.  These sisters also did a lot of work in social justice. Many in our sangha came to Zen trying to integrate their lives as former Catholics or recovering Catholics, but for me all I saw was their faith in Zen. As a matter of fact, it might have been helpful to me that I came as a non-Catholic. I didn’t have any baggage with that. I never called Rose Mary ‘Sister’ although others did. I called her Sensei.”

Although the tradition of Zen within which Robert Kennedy and Janet Richardson practiced made use of koan work, Rose Mary did not. “She taught shikan taza. She taught, ‘Just this.’ She wasn’t known for her dharma talks; she was known for her strong sitting and her strong presence. Roshi Charles Birx told me that when he met Rose Mary, he felt he was in the presence of a saint. I always felt her strong presence that way also. And I think that’s what I really got from her. She didn’t even talk about Buddhism; she emphasized interfaith Zen that could be practiced by anyone of any faith. She read poetry, and she said, ‘Just this.’ And all she encouraged was strong zazen. That was her entire teaching. And it was not enough for some people. A lot of the members left looking for more. But for me it was just right.”

In 2014 Rose Mary was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

“We noticed it first with her hands shaking. Then she felt she had to come out and tell people about the diagnosis, and she stepped back from teaching. She asked three of us who had been practicing with her if teaching would be something we wanted to do. The two other men said yes, but I said I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t until four years later, after a crisis of faith, that I was called to be a Zen teacher.”

When Rose Mary was moved into a nursing home in Baltimore, Martine wondered, “Who’s going to be my teacher? How am I going to go on? I had only known one teacher. She was it, and she was everything for me. Luckily, another Roshi – Charles Birx – talked to me at the time, saying, ‘You have all her teachings. You are like two arrows meeting in mid-air. She has her path, and now you have your path.’”

Charles Birx is another Robert Kennedy heir.

“And what he said threw me back on myself, where I needed to go, and I never sat more strongly in my life. For the next months I practiced zazen twenty-four hours a day. I just practiced. I sat with this question, ‘What now? Who am I?’ I went right back to the beginning of Zen. Then, I experienced dropping everything. Everything I ever believed in, everything I had ever done. I said, ‘Okay, your life is now just this. This is your path, teacher or no teacher. You are just going to sit zazen, live zazen. This zazen is it. That’s it. Zen is just practicing with your life, fully aware.’

“I started to sit with a new intensity, practicing zazen 24/7. Everything just broke through for me, and I started experiencing what they describe. Crying and laughing and all of that. And I called my teacher, crying. And I told her I finally understood ‘just this,’ and I felt ready to be a teacher. I thanked her for giving me my life back through Zen. She asked to meet with me a few times in Baltimore before confirming me as a Zen teacher and asked me, ‘Can you really claim it? I want you to sit and if you find peace with this, let me know.  I will pray for you.’ She did a lot of praying for me. And asked me to pray for her, which I did.

After a few weeks, Rose Mary confirmed Martine as a Dharma holder, and they sought a way to study together to complete her transmission. “She told me, ‘Well, I have bad times with my Parkinson’s, but early mornings are best for me.’ So 6:30 in the morning on Sunday, I would go up, and we would study together, and we would sit together in the hospital room, the nurses coming in and interrupting. And her presence was right there, in the midst of it all. I was just blown away, the bright light from her being as the nurses came in and poked and prodded her, her generosity and kindness never left, even with loud noise. A loud football game would be playing while we were sitting, and she’d say, ‘Oh, in that room, that person doesn’t have good hearing. Just let it go.’ Everything was ‘just this.’

“I asked her, ‘What will I teach? How will I teach? I don’t know how to be a teacher.’ And Rose Mary didn’t say anything, except, ‘You’ll figure it out.’ And what happened to me, as I was driving back on a highway, I heard a podcast – a Zen podcast – mentioning the Zen women ancestors. ‘What!’ I thought. So I pulled over to the side of the road. I had never heard of such a thing. I had never heard of any woman ancestors in all the years practicing Zen. The podcast mentioned a book of koans with women’s awakening experienced called The Hidden Lamp. This was the first time I could actually see myself being a teacher. I felt awake and alive again and confident.  So I found other books, and I just read everything I could on women in Zen. And here I had left feminism pretty much for seventeen years practicing Zen, and here it was right back at me. And I knew then that’s what I wanted to teach. I wanted to delve into the koans, I wanted to learn and teach about women ancestors. And I told Rose Mary, ‘I want to teach women Hidden Lamp.’ She said, ‘Okay, as long as you get them to sit zazen.’ She and I studied for one year together in her cramped hospital room, her voice getting dimmer, her shaking increasing. But she was still very present. I learned more that year about Zen than I had in the years prior.”

Rose Mary asked another teacher, Robert Ertman, to install Martine as an official teacher in the Soto tradition because she was physically unable to do so. 

“And then one day I got a call that she was actively dying. We had just met three days ago, and this was a surprise. I felt very awake to life and death in this moment. And I went in there, and they’d cleared her room out, and they had her in a hospital bed. It was a Catholic hospital room, so they cleared everything out of her Zen life. But there she was, breathing but unconscious. And I did the one thing I knew how to do. I knew that hearing was the last thing to go; I told her, ‘Rose Mary, I love you.’ I felt like her daughter and companion on the Way.”

Then she chanted the mantra from the Heart Sutra: “‘Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi, sva-ha!’” [“Go, go, go beyond, go totally beyond, go beyond together with all beings”] “I chanted that several times in her ear. Just for her. And then I left, and then she did die. And I knew my path then. Yeah. I loved her.”

As a recently authorized teacher during the pandemic, Martine forged new ways of helping students. She initiated a Precepts Practice Group which used the text Waking Up to What you Do by Diane Rizzetto, one of the founders of the Ordinary Mind Zen School.

“This group met during the pandemic on Zoom and worked together with ‘practice partners.’ It maintained our community while we were on Zoom.”

“We started a women’s sangha on Zoom, and called ourselves the Tea Ladies, after the unknown awakened sages on the side of the road serving tea to travelers on the path.  We use The Hidden Lamp and Householder Koans and do a Koan Café approach of reading and sharing how the ancestor stories impact our lives today. Five years later, we are still meeting, and women open their hearts. And then I started a women’s sesshin once a year, which was very needed. Right now, I do have a strong women-students following, I have to admit. I have male students too because I love them too,” she adds with a laugh.

“Then George Floyd happened and the pain of that was going right in – I allowed it right in – because I had already done the women’s opening work. So one of the first things I did as a teacher besides Tea Ladies, I developed a workshop called, ‘Waking Up to Whiteness.’ And I offered it through Zen Peacemakers. I had full confidence I needed to wake up; we all needed to wake up. And this year I’m waking up to queerness and LGBTQI. All the pain surrounding legislation and violence against non-conforming people. You know, I’m waking up to straightness, whiteness. There is a teacher, Oshin, who is deaf and teaches at No Barriers Zen, and we invited him to teach once, and he woke me up to blindness and deafness. So you caught me in this interview at a time of great openness. Flowering. I am opening again to all of that . . . So I was talking to somebody the other day about this interview, and they said, ‘What are you going to say your teaching’s about?’ And I said, ‘Courage. Confidence. Curiosity. Love.’ I think that’s it. I think that’s it.”

“And if I asked you what a Zen teacher teaches?”

She laughs. “Courage. Confidence. Curiosity. Love. Right?”

[This is an abridgement of my chapter on Taizan Maezumi in The Third Step East.]

Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi was in the unique position of having teaching authority in three lineages, Soto, Rinzai, and Sanbo Kyodan (later called Sanbo Zen). No one was more qualified to promote Zen in the West.

Born in 1931, he was a teenager during the American occupation of Japan and was intrigued by the soldiers he met. They proved to be very different from the monsters Japanese propagandists had portrayed them to be. They were often friendly and could be surprisingly generous. Maezumi picked up a little English from them; they also introduced him to cigarettes, beer, and swearing.

His father, Hakujun (White Plum) Kuroda, a prominent figure in the Soto hierarchy, was the head of the Soto Supreme Court and a chief advisor at Sojiji, one of the two primary temples in Japan. Four of his sons became Zen priests. By tradition, the eldest would inherit Hakujun’s temple; the other brothers needed to find positions elsewhere.         

Because he had a little English, Taizan was sent to the Soto regional headquarters in California when he was 25. Established in 1922, Zenshuji was the first Zen temple in North America. The new priest’s duties were largely ceremonial, conducting funerals, memorial services, and traditional rites. Although he was committed to deepening his own meditation practice, the congregation at Zenshuji had no interest in zazen, which they considered a monastic activity.

While taking courses at San Francisco State College, Maezumi met Shunryu Suzuki and occasionally attended ceremonies at Sokoji. Suzuki’s Japanese congregation had as little interest in zazen as did Maezumi’s in Los Angeles, but Suzuki had attracted a following of non-Japanese students. Impressed by what he had seen, Maezumi began a weekly zazen program in Los Angeles which also quickly attracted young Western students.

Bernie Glassman met him in 1965. “He was a young monk working in the temple in Little Tokyo in LA,” Bernie told me during our meeting in 2013, “and I started to sit there. But then I left because there was really no English. So I created my own zendo in my garage, and I did it myself. And then I think it was around 1966, I saw there was going to be a workshop led by Yasutani Roshi. So I went to that workshop, and this young monk was the translator. I realized, ‘Wow! He speaks English.’ I recognized he had been in this Temple in Little Tokyo, but now he had his own place. He had just opened it, and I joined him. So from ’66, I was totally with him, going every day, and I became his right-hand man.”

By 1967, the group was so large Maezumi had to find separate quarters for it. He located a house in what had been a Hispanic area of the city but was gradually transitioning to a Korean neighborhood. Here he established the Los Angeles Zendo, later renamed the Zen Center of Los Angeles (ZCLA).

Practice at ZCLA followed orthodox Japanese Soto guidelines augmented by koan study. Maezumi’s insistence on correct ritual behavior, including formal prostrations, was a sticking point for some students, but he knew and expected that the first generation of American-born Zen teachers would make changes to these structures. As Bernie told me, “Over and over he said to me that I should take whatever I can from him—in terms of Zen—and then spit out what I think won’t work in this country. He said, ‘I’m not an American. I’m Japanese. And I can’t present the American Zen.’ He said, ‘You’ve got to do that.’”

Robert Kennedy made the same point. “Maezumi Roshi was very clear that we should make Zen American. We should not imitate the Japanese. And it is not necessary to do so. I think the Japanese can’t really be imitated anyway. They’re a completely unique civilization. A wonderful civilization. But it’s not our job to imitate them. Our job is to find a Zen that is open to American culture, American life. It is not necessary to wear Japanese robes in order to see your own nature. And it’s not helpful finally. You’re just creating something artificial in a practice that imitates the Japanese. Now some Zen people will disagree with this. But I would just say that Maezumi was clear that we were to do what he could not do, which was to make Zen American. And as soon as Maezumi died, Glassman, for example, said he became himself, not only Maezumi’s student but his own man as an American interested in social issues in a way that, perhaps, Maezumi was not.”

Before these changes were made, however, Maezumi wanted to ensure that his heirs were grounded in the traditional forms.

In spite of its formality, ZCLA went through a period of rapid growth during the 1970s. The communal atmosphere of the Center proved to be a draw; unexpected numbers of young people were attracted by the idea of living in a community focused on a formal spiritual practice. When John (Daido) and Joan Loori (now Joan Derrick) first came to the center, there were 27 residents. Soon the number of residents was approaching 200, and space needed to be found to accommodate people.

In addition to the hippies then swarming to California in search of spiritual guidance, ZCLA also attracted a number of well-educated professionals. Glassman was an aeronautical engineer; Jan Chozen Bays (then Jan Soulé) was a pediatrician; Loori, a professional photographer; Gerry Shishin Wick was an atomic physicist and oceanographer.

Two hundred people living together inevitably presented challenges. There were families with young children for whom childcare needed to be provided. Parents were torn between family responsibilities and the desire to commit as much time as possible to their practice. On top of which most also had to earn a living.

The Center purchased buildings and apartment complexes on their block as they became available; these were prudent investments but required initial funding. Glassman proved to be a natural entrepreneur, and he established a number of businesses to help meet rising expenses. ZCLA ran landscaping, carpentry, house-painting, and even plumbing operations. Partly to establish goodwill with the surrounding community, Bernie encouraged Chozen to open a medical clinic. Services at the clinic expanded as new students came to the Center bringing with them expertise in alternative therapies such as chiropractic, acupuncture, and homeopathy. Originally intended to serve the neighborhood, the clinic began to draw clients from other parts of the city as well. “We had a combination of Western and alternative medicine which was very unique at that time,” she explained to me. “And so people from wealthy areas, Hollywood and Rodeo Drive, would come to the clinic. So we had this weird waiting room where we had Sikhs and people with Gucci bags and very, very poor Hispanic patients, all together in the same waiting room.”

Satellite zendos were established, and a network of practice centers – which would eventually be called the White Plum Sangha – was envisioned. Charlotte Joko Beck opened a Zendo in San Diego. Glassman founded the Zen Community of New York, and Daido Loori established Zen Mountain Monastery in the Catskill Mountains. Each of the new centers was registered with Japanese authorities.

By 1982, ZCLA and its associated centers were one of the most vibrant Zen programs in America.

Throughout the period of expansion, Maezumi’s students were aware of his fondness for alcohol. To some extent, they enabled his drinking because, when tipsy, he became quick witted and acted and spoke like the Zen masters in the stories that D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and others had made popular.

Chozen recalls: “He was funny when he got drunk, which was unfortunate. People would encourage him to get drunk because another side came out. The Japanese don’t usually tell you the truth because they don’t want people to lose face. It’s a different culture. For example, if Maezumi Roshi had something he wanted to tell me that was difficult, he would tell one of my Dharma brothers, and then they were expected—it took a long time to learn this—to come tell me, so I wouldn’t lose face by being confronted by Maezumi Roshi directly. So he would tell Genpo [Dennis Merzel] or Tetsugen [Glassman] something he didn’t like that I was doing, and then they would tell me. And vice versa. He would tell me something that I had to tell them. That’s the way it’s done in Japan. But when he was drunk, he would be very honest. In Japan, it’s looked at very differently; if you’re drunk, you can be forthright, and it’s all forgiven the next day. So you could say something rude to your boss and the next morning it would be totally forgiven. So, when he was drinking, he would tell you what he thought of you. And you wanted to hear that, and you didn’t want to hear that. But the temptation was very strong to hear that. So people would drink with him, or sit with him when he was drinking, just to find that out.”

At first, Maezumi’s drinking was not seen as particularly problematic. He didn’t allow it, for example, to interfere with his commitment to practice. On the other hand, when he had been drinking, he would at times flirt with female students, even during dokusan. Joan Derrick was married to one of his senior students and their son had recently been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, so she was both surprised and angry when she realized what Maezumi was doing.

“I went into dokusan, and Maezumi was particularly loving, and so sweet, and he tilted his head, and he was smiling at me, no matter what I was presenting to him. He was flirting with me! And I said, ‘Don’t be flirting with me! I don’t want to know anything about that!’ And that was the end of that. He straightened his head up, and he never did that again.”               

In 1983, however, when it became obvious that Maezumi had done more than flirt with other women, his wife left the community taking their younger children with her. During my conversation with Joan Derrick, she reflected, “There was an amazing amount of drinking, and it was always started by the roshi. And all of us just jumped right in. We figured, you’re sitting hard in sesshin, and it’s a tortuous week, and then let’s party when it’s over. So there was a lot of craziness going on at that place, and I’m not really sure why. I think we American women are extremely selfish and very dominating, and we want what we want. Not just women; men too. But, for sure, the womanizing thing had two folds to it. There were women who propositioned him as much as he took advantage.”

Although her own affair with Maezumi contributed to the break-up of her marriage, Chozen Bays tells me that the sexual aspect of their relationship was minor.

“We had this very strange mix of hippie-commune and monastery. And not a terribly clear understanding of our own psychology. I think there was some spiritual-by-passing that happens in Zen often. So what happened with me was that I fell in love with Roshi. But in retrospect, after doing a lot of study and reading, I would say I fell in love with the Dharma through Roshi, as embodied by Roshi. In a way, what you’re falling in love with isn’t the Dharma in that person but your own potential. So, it’s like a mirror. You’re falling in love with your own potential to become what this person embodies for you, or your own version of it. And then you want to become intimate with it. More and more intimate with it. But because our human understanding of intimacy is so limited and involves sexuality, then you think, ‘Oh, this must be sexual. That’s a way to become more intimate.’”

Maezumi made a full public confession after his wife left and admitted that the lack of judgment he had demonstrated in the affairs was due, at least in part, to his drinking. He acknowledged that he was an alcoholic and voluntarily entered the Betty Ford Rehabilitation Clinic. His students were stunned. Outside counselors were called in, and the community confronted the fact that they had, to a large degree, been complicit in enabling Maezumi’s behavior. 

While Maezumi underwent treatment, much of what he had accomplished in Los Angeles began to unravel. Students reacted in a number of ways. Some insisted that, at least as far as the sexual affairs were concerned, his private life should be no one else’s business. Some even tried to argue that the behavior of enlightened individuals should not be judged by ordinary standards. Others, however, questioned his credibility as a teacher, and many left the center.

In the midst of the trauma, a film crew, which had earlier arranged to do a documentary about the center, arrived. The instinct of many of the members was to cancel the shoot, but Maezumi insisted that the filmmakers be allowed to stay and complete the project. He agreed to be interviewed and, in the released film, frankly discussed his alcoholism without excuse, accepting full responsibility for his actions. He lamented behavior that he now characterized as “outrageous” and “scandalous,” admitting it had harmed his family, his reputation, and, possibly, the Dharma as a whole.

Shishin Wick was the chief administrator at ZCLA at this time. “When I first got there—you know—it was pretty exciting spending time with him. He’d always invite me to come to his apartment. You said Chozen described it as a hippie commune, but I was one of the few people that came there who was mature. A Ph. D. university professor.” He laughs softly. “But I was still a hippie. Or at least had very liberal thoughts and attitudes. But he’d invite me to drink with him. And I remember one time it triggered something, and I just started crying; something that was a great release for me. And he said, ‘That’s what I’ve been waiting for.’ So, we used to think—and I heard a lot of people say it—that when he was drunk was when he was ruthlessly honest as a teacher. But then I saw him doing things when he was drunk that I thought were pretty immature, and I just decided I no longer needed to be around that. Even though I lived there and was close to him, I decided when he was drinking I just didn’t want to be around him. He was an alcoholic, but so were most of the Japanese teachers that came to this country. I think that in Japan the culture is so tightly defined—your role in the culture is so tightly defined—that you can only let loose when you’re drunk, and they excuse that. You know? It’s a cultural thing. I read something that Aitken Roshi wrote that said, ‘In our country, we would say someone was an alcoholic. In Japan, they would say, “He likes sake.”’

“But we did intervene, and he went to the Betty Ford Clinic. I don’t think it had a lot of impact on him except for a couple of things. One: he never drank in public after that. And, two, he was very contrite about the damage he caused to the sangha and particularly about his relationship with Chozen, who was a Dharma successor. He just felt it caused problems.”

The community fractured. A number of members left. Without their contributions, the financial situation deteriorated, and Shishin had to oversee the selloff of several properties.

“Why did I stay? Because I’m very loyal. And I learned in his dokusan room, and he was a real master. And that’s what I came to do, to learn the Dharma. If I wanted to learn to play the violin, I’d find the best master I could to teach me to play the violin. Now, if he was mean to his children, that may or may not affect whether I continued to study the violin. But he did—ostensibly—modify his behavior. And there weren’t as many issues with women. And I don’t lightly abandon people. If it were my father, I wouldn’t abandon him, and he was my spiritual father. So I stayed there and helped right the ship, and I was very frank with him. If I thought he was doing something inappropriate, I’d tell him. And he was responsive. I got in a big fight with him one time, and he actually apologized.”

Although he was no longer seen drinking at ZCLA, some people suspected he might have continued to do so privately. “I think he drank at home, with his wife,” Pat Enkyo O’Hara  tells me. “Because what he did was he moved. They bought a place near the Mountain Center, and he would go home for the weekend sometimes. And it was none of our business what he did at home.”

He also allowed himself to relax and drink socially while in Japan. In 1995, he travelled there to visit family members. He was with his brothers at the family temple in Otawara on May 15. He intended to spend the following day with another brother in Tokyo, and, although it was late and they had been drinking heavily, Maezumi took the train into the city. He fell asleep during the trip and missed his stop, so it was even later than he had planned when he finally arrived at his brother’s house. He told the brother that he was going to take a bath in the large traditional Japanese tub and then retire; there was no need to wait up for him.

The next morning, when the brother got up, he discovered Maezumi had drowned in the tub. In order to protect Maezumi’s reputation in America, the family told the students at ZCLA that their teacher had succumbed to a heart attack during his sleep. It was only two years later, when staff at ZCLA requested a copy of his death certificate for insurance purposes, that the actual details of his death were revealed.

Maezumi’s sexual indiscretions, his drinking, and even the circumstances surrounding his death, raised questions and concerns among his students as well as in the wider community of both Buddhists and non-Buddhists in America. Similar problems were arising elsewhere, especially in San Francisco where Shunryu Suzuki’s only heir was compelled to resign his position as abbot because of his lifestyle, including his relationships with multiple women in the sangha.

Unlike most of these others, Maezumi accepted responsibility for his failings and didn’t try to excuse his behavior. Still, the circumstances and the way in which students responded to them revealed a significant cultural chasm not only between Japanese and North American values but also between the fundamental metaphysical premises underlying the Judaeo-Christian worldview and that of Buddhism.   

Despite everything else, Taizan Maezumi had been dedicated to ensuring that the Zen tradition would continue in America after the initial Japanese teachers gave way to a new generation of American-born Zen masters. He saw himself as a steppingstone in a process by which Zen would become fully Americanized. The realization of the White Plum Sangha and his one dozen transmitted heirs were measures of his success. In addition to the centers established by Glassman and Loori, Chozen Bays established the Zen Community of Oregon, Genpo Merzel established the Kanzeon Zen Center in Salt Lake City, Shishin Wick, the Great Mountain Zen Center outside Denver, and Tesshin Sanderson, the Centro Zen de México in Mexico City. Other centers were established in New Zealand, Great Britain, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Poland. Maezumi also founded the Kuroda Institute for the Study of Buddhism and Human Values at the University of Hawaii in order to ensure an appropriate academic foundation for Zen studies. It is a legacy unmatched in North American Zen.

The Third Step East: 165-82; 9, 119, 161, 220, 231, 232

The Story of Zen: 5, 78, 269-76, 284, 286, 302, 304, 307-08, 309, 320-23, 336, 337, 343-49, 350, 353, 354, 356, 363, 414, 424

Stone Willow Zendo, Spokane, WA

Daya (Dianne) Goldschlag explains how the Stone Willow Zendo in Spokane, Washington, got its name. “In front of my house in Spokane is a big rock named Shunryu.” She has a soft-spoken – at times, almost shy – voice. “And there’s a wonderful story behind the rock coming here. It’s quite large. It’s over 5000 pounds. And then there was a big willow tree that is now on its way out, I’m afraid. Willows don’t live that long. It was here long before I moved here. So it just was easy. Stone under willow tree. Stone Willow.”

I ask about the wonderful story.

She smiles at the memory. “Well, at the time I had two dogs, and I took them walking every day in various forested areas. And one place I would go to was through the driveway area of a Catholic convent to get down to the river. And along the driveway were all these big rocks. I think they dug them up when they were making the driveway. And there was one rock which was then on its side kind of flat. I would go and sit on it with my dogs – for some reason, I was just very attracted to this rock – and then we’d continue our walk. And one day it just popped into my mind, ‘Why don’t I go ask if they really want this rock or could I have it?’ So, I went into the convent and ended up talking with the Mother Superior, explaining that I was interested in this rock. So at first she just thought I was kind of crazy. Which is understandable. It’s an odd thing to do. And then she had to go talk to someone, and she kind of dismissed me. And usually I’m not very assertive – you know? – I’m kind of shy, but I just stayed there. And when she was finished with this other person, I said, ‘I know this sounds crazy. But I have a Zen Buddhist teacher I worked with who loved rocks, and this rock for some reason . . . You know, I just thought if you-all aren’t using it, could I have it?’ And she was about to dismiss me again, and I gave her my card. And as well as being a Zen teacher, I also do therapeutic body work. So that was on my card. And she kind of stopped and said, ‘Do you think at my age you could help my neck?’ I think she was in her early 80s. And I said, ‘I think there’s always a chance for change no matter how old we are.’ And she said, ‘Okay. How many sessions would you give me in exchange for the rock?’ I said, ‘Oh! I don’t know. Three?’ She said, ‘Five.’ I said, ‘Okay. Five.’ She said, ‘I have to check this out first with our groundskeeper, and I’ll get back to you.’ So I left. And then I kinda forgot about it. Weeks went by. And one day I came home, and there was a message from the Mother Superior saying, ‘Okay. You can have the rock. But we don’t deliver.’”

So Daya had to arrange for a backhoe to dig the rock up and transport it to her house. She found a person who said he could do it and would let her know when it was convenient for him to do so. She didn’t hear from him again for some months.

Then she was hosting two friends – Darlene Cohen and Elizabeth Sawyer – when the man called back and said he would meet her at the convent to fetch the rock. “So the three of us went. And Darlene and Elizabeth are both students of Suzuki Roshi, so they understood how I felt about this rock. And this man came with his son who was about eight, and they worked beautifully together. And they brought blankets so they could wrap the rock and put a chain around it. They didn’t want to mar it – he completely understood how I felt about this rock – and they worked together for some hours and got it loaded on the back of a trailer on the back of a truck. And we followed them, and they brought it to my house. So it must have been about three miles or five miles to my house from where it was. And I had thought I’d have it a certain way, and he said, ‘Let’s try a different way. You might feel you want it this other way.’ And he worked with me, moving this giant rock until we both agreed this seemed the most energetic stance for it. Which was standing up rather than being flat. And meanwhile all the neighbors came out. One of them videoed it. And then he didn’t want me to pay him. I said, ‘I have to pay you.’ So we came up with a very inconsequential amount, and I also gave him some homemade jams and bread that I’d made. Just different things like that to give him along with a hug. I mean he was a wonderful man who I had never met before. And when he left, Elizabeth and Darlene helped me bring out water and a willow branch, and we washed and blessed the rock and named it Shunryu. And kids in the neighborhood always climb on it.”

“So you took a Catholic rock and Buddhaized it.”

She laughs – which she does easily – and nodded. “Uh-huh.”

She tells me she grew up in a Jewish household in the Bronx, although they weren’t “really” practicing.

“My grandmother – my mother’s mother – lived with us till I was about, I think, eleven, and she was practicing and deeply religious. But she moved out, and one day I said to my mom, ‘What’s that in the refrigerator, mom?’ And she said, ‘It’s called bacon.’” We both laugh. “So we were not a religious family, but I was just telling somebody that when I was little – so maybe five? – I asked my dad what ‘God’ meant. I had heard the word somewhere. And because I was little, he tried to make it simple, and he said, ‘There’s two different beliefs. There are some people who believe there’s a being up in the sky who kind of looks over and takes care of us. And other people believe God is in all the trees and rocks and animals and people.’ And I said, ‘Oh! That’s what I believe.’ And my father said, ‘That’s just fine.’ And basically that’s what I still believe.”

“And how did a non-practicing Jewish girl from the Bronx end up with a bunch of practicing Buddhists in California?”

“Well, let’s see. So first, I left home when I was 19 and took a plane to England. Originally I was going to go to Israel and work on a kibbutz but got talked into going to Europe first by a friend.”

It was a different era, and 19-year-old girls were still able to hitchhike throughout Europe and into Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait. “Then eventually I ended up in Israel where I spent some months on a kibbutz and then finally hitchhiked back through Greece and Europe and then came home. So my world had been blown apart. You know, I had never been on a plane ’til I flew to Europe, and I lived mostly in the Bronx. So my parents expected me either to go back to college or get a job. And I just couldn’t quite do either of those. So one morning, I got my backpack and hitchhiked to upstate New York to a – whaddya call it? – a horse ranch, a dude ranch, and ended up working there for a summer. And then came back and lived in the lower east side of Manhattan – you know – and took acid and all of that.”

For a while, she found work at the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Nyack, New York, where she met Jim Forest, the head of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, and, through him, the Vietnamese Zen monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. But it was the ’60s, and California was where it was at, so she went back on the road and arrived in San Francisco. “I think it was 1967. You know, still flower-child time. So I went back and forth a few times. Ended up in California. And I was living in LA working at a Catholic college antique toy museum.”

“A Catholic college antique toy museum?”          

“Yep. Yep. Sister Mary Corita. Did you ever hear of her? She was an artist who taught at that college. So one morning I was supposed to hitchhike to Mexico with a friend. And I went for a walk that night. And at that time, I was having some difficulty speaking and understanding English though it was my language. And what I think was happening is, people don’t always mean what they say. And I would kind of get what they felt or meant underneath, but then these other words would come, and I just became socially confused. Now I would probably call it some kind of spiritual crisis. So as I was on my walk that night, there was a phone booth. I went in and I called my friend Jim Forest. I don’t know why I called him, but I did. And I told him I was going to hitchhike to Mexico in the morning, but this other thing was going on, and I was really having a hard time. And he said, ‘Don’t go to Mexico tomorrow. Call this place, Tassajara, and tell them that you know me and Thich Nhat Hanh – we were just there – and tell them that we said that you need to just stay there for a little while.’”

Tassajara is the San Francisco Zen Center’s practice center in the Ventana Wilderness Area.

“So, that night when I went back to where I was staying, I called Tassajara. They still had a wind-up phone; you had to go through the operator. And Peter Schneider happened to be in the office, and he was – I think – the director right then at Tassajara. And he said, ‘Well, have you sat zazen? Do you know anything about Zen?’ I said, ‘No. I’m just having this difficulty, and Jim Forest and Thich Nhat Hanh thought it would be helpful for me to spend some time at Tassajara.’ And Peter said, ‘Well, we have one student bed available. You’ll have to find your way here, but you can come.’ So the next morning, instead of hitchhiking to Mexico, I hitchhiked from LA to Carmel Valley. Spent the night in a field in Carmel Valley. And the next morning got up and continued hitchhiking. Got part way to Tassajara, hiked part way, and ended up at the front gate. Somehow. Walked in, and the first person I ran into was David Chadwick.”

David Chadwick would later become Shunryu Suzuki’s biographer.

“So he was the first person I ran into. He eventually, I should say, became my husband, and we have a son together although we’re not together anymore. We haven’t been for a long time, but we’re still good friends. So he suggested I go take a bath – you know – at the hot springs there and then come have lunch. And I had no idea where I was or what went on there. I just took a bath. I came and had lunch. Someone gave me zazen instructions. And I stayed a week at Tassajara doing the whole schedule, sitting and working. And by the end of the week – or maybe it was two weeks – I was okay. And I think the reason I was okay is because one didn’t have to speak. So you’d pass somebody on the trail; you’d stop; you’d gassho; and then you’d go on your way. Or you’d have your meals served and when you had enough in your bowl you raised your hand and they stopped putting any more in your bowl, and you’d bow to each other, and then you silently ate your meal. And the silence, and yet the respect and the appreciation that each person gave in their bows, I think that healed me. And when I left, I went to Berkeley – I don’t remember why – and ended up sitting at the Berkeley Zendo and got a job on the University of Berkeley campus, and then started going to San Francisco on Sundays to hear Suzuki Roshi. And in six months’ time, I was accepted back at Tassajara and went and lived there for some years. So, that’s how that all happened.”

Because I am not very familiar with the protocols of the San Francisco Zen Center, I ask if students enter into what are elsewhere called shoken relationships with a teacher. “Kind of a contractual relationship with a teacher?” She tells me they do. “And you had that kind of relationship with a specific teacher?”

“Suzuki Roshi,” she tells me.

“And after his death?”

“Well, Dick Baker – Richard Baker – was his successor, but Dick Baker and I never got along very well. And eventually we agreed that he was not my teacher, and I was not his student. Suzuki Roshi had asked all the students to follow Dick, and I tried at first. But I never really trusted Dick. I didn’t feel comfortable with him.”

She reluctantly left Zen Center and set out on her own. “Before I left, I had learned body-work massage. So I just did that for friends. But I took classes and trained with various people. When I stopped working for Zen Center, I got a job in an old Finnish sauna in massage, and I did that for – I don’t know; I can’t remember – a year or something. And also went to a school to get certified as a masseuse. Then I moved to Muir Beach near Green Gulch and opened an office in Mill Valley, California, and did that professionally.”

The organic farm Green Gulch is another SFZC practice center where Daya had resided for a period at the same time as Darlene and Elizabeth. “Elizabeth and Darlene and I were all pregnant at Green Gulch at the same time. Elizabeth’s son and my son were born eight days apart. Then Darlene’s son was born six months later. So these three boys were all raised together.”

“And you stayed connected with the Zen people after moving to Muir Beach?”

“Well, they were all my friends, my family. Though some people were upset that I had left. They thought I was wrong. Which, when everything came out about Dick, that turned around again.”

In 1983, the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Zen Center took the unprecedented step of pressuring Baker to resign his post as abbot as much because of the lavish lifestyle he maintained – at Zen Center expense – as for the sexual liaisons he had engaged in with students. Baker was not, of course, alone. Around the same, other Zen teachers were revealed to be engaged in inappropriate relationships with students and other abuses of authority.

“How do you reconcile this?” I ask. “That we’re in this tradition where we almost daily chant the Four Vows to save all beings, to ‘uproot blind passions’ and the rest of it, and yet there are people who get into positions of authority whose lifestyles don’t appear to reflect those vows?”

“I think that happens all the time amongst human beings in all different kinds of traditions. It’s something I’m very aware of now being in the role of teacher. I’m really, really careful that I interact with my sangha as peers and am very respectful of each one of those people. I’m actually afraid of misusing power. And so I probably err in the other direction. But that’s okay. I’m willing to err in the other direction. You know, I guess it’s just humans. And the humans who get into power are often people who somehow get lost in it, who want it and head toward that position. Dick Baker was quite a young man himself. I think he was only in his 30s when he was appointed.” He had been 35. “He really wasn’t ready for such a position in some ways. But someone had to take over. And I think Suzuki Roshi had really wanted Zen Center to financially make it and be a center that could be there for many, many years for people to come and sit zazen at. He saw Dick Baker, I guess, as someone who was capable of creating that and keeping that going. But in other ways, Dick got lost.”

I ask how she came to leave Muir Beach for Spokane. She explains that for a while she studied with a teacher who worked in the Gurdjieff tradition. “It’s a long complicated story how I happened to go study with her, which I don’t want to go into now. And she had been born in Spokane, and they really liked Spokane and decided they were all going to move to Spokane and said, ‘Why don’t you move here too?’ And I decided to do it. So I talked to David. We were not divorced yet; we’d been separated for years but were co-raising our son, Kelly. So I had to talk to him first, how he felt about Kelly and I moving to Spokane. But he agreed to it. So one day Kelly and I got in our VW bus and went on a car-camping trip for a month and ended up in Spokane.”

“A Volkswagen bus?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you have a Grateful Dead decal on the window?”

“I did not, but I could’ve.” And we both laugh.

“And once you got settled in Spokane, one day you opened up a zendo.”

“So, I’d fly down and visit Darlene. Darlene would come up and visit me, and when she was teaching in Tassajara I would go down and assist her. And she really wanted me to become a teacher, and I kind of preferred walking behind holding incense for whoever the teacher was. Anyway, we started having day or half-day sesshins or retreats here in Spokane. Darlene would lead them, and I would assist.”

“This was in your house?”

“No. There were different places that we’d find. Sometimes they’d be outside if it was summer, out in somebody’s backyard. Or there were some centers at the time you could rent, and we’d do them there. And one of the people who came to these, we were talking one day, and he was a very well-read Buddhist, but he wasn’t sitting. And I said, ‘Do you want to sit zazen? If you do, I’ll sit with you one morning or one evening a week.’ Because I knew Suzuki Roshi would want me to offer that. And he said, yes, he would. So we started sitting together one morning a week. And then another woman heard about it somehow, and she said, ‘Can I join you?’ And I said yes, of course, and so then there were three of us. And then I don’t know how it happened, but it grew! So now it’s in my home.”

“How large a community?”

“It goes between six and twelve people. And we sit for 35 minutes every Friday morning, then we have tea and study afterwards. Right now we’re studying Dogen’s Genjokoan.”

Most of the people in the Shunryu Suzuki tradition were ordained before they were authorized to teach. Daya, on the other hand, is lay transmitted. I ask her how the concept of lay transmission came about.

“It still hasn’t for some people in the lineage,” she admits. “But Darlene wanted it to be lay transmitted. I don’t remember exactly why, but she had wanted to be lay transmitted herself and realized that that was not going to happen. The only way that she could get the kind of authority, position, opportunity to teach would be from being priest-ordained and then transmitted. So she did that, but she told me she would rather not have done that. But once she did that, she could then lay transmit me, which she wanted me to do.”

Unfortunately Darlene died before she was able to give Daya transmission, and, after that, Daya’s interest in transmission lapsed until another SFZC priest – Teah Strozer – urged her to resume the effort.

“Teah Strozer is a wonderful person and teacher. She and Darlene and I were all friends. We would go out for a meal when I came to the Bay area, and so on. So Teah was very aware of what Darlene wanted for me and was requesting for me. And so it was Teah who, after Darlene died, kept calling. She’d come here to see if I was ready to take that step yet. She really wanted to honor that. She gave me my Dharma transmission.”

“Was there a reason why you didn’t want to be ordained as a priest?”

“I lead a lay life. I have a family, husband, kids, grandkids, friends. I feel the main responsibility for a priest is her or his temple or sangha, and then family comes after that. For me, my family comes first. And the sangha is right up there, but the temple is not my main responsibility. That’s why I’m a lay person. Family-oriented. It’s called being a householder. So I didn’t see any reason to be a priest. That just wasn’t what my life was like.”

“It’s not, of course, unique. There are lay transmitted people in other lineages.”

“There are. Other lineages do have a lay transmitted path. But Suzuki Roshi’s lineage did not.”

“You said not everyone in the lineage accepts the idea.”

“Mm-hmm,” she murmurs, smiling.

“Do you want to elaborate on that?”

“There are some people, mostly priests, who feel only people should be Dharma transmitted who are ordained priests.”

“What does ‘transmission’ mean in your lineage?”

“It means you are now in the ancestral lineage; you’re a new ancestor. And you’re recognized as being able to and committed to transmit the Dharma.”

“So someone who already holds transmission has ascertained that you have a grasp of the Dharma and that you have the capacity to help other people grasp the Dharma as well?”

“Mm-hmm. And want to.”

“So insight and capacity. In which case, why is priesthood a necessary component?”

“I have no answer for you on that. I don’t see why it is relevant myself.”

“What’s the role of a priest? If you lived in Japan, it’s pretty clear. A priest has charge of a temple and carrying out the ritual obligations attendant upon that. A lot of Japanese priests today would really rather be stockbrokers or race car drivers or male strippers or something, but they’ve inherited their positions from their fathers. It’s the family business to look after a particular temple. But that’s not the case here. First of all, there aren’t enough temples for all the priests to look after. So, what’s their responsibility in North America? What do they do?”

“Well, I think in the early years of Zen Center, Suzuki Roshi was coming from his tradition, and that’s what he knew.”

“I understand that, but I don’t understand what he thought all these ordained priests were going to do. Did he think they’d go out and set up temples in Spokane or Kansas City or wherever?”

Again she says it’s a not question she can answer.

“And now that you have transmission, are you authorized to pass that transmission onto someone else?”

“Yeah. But I can’t priest-ordain anybody.”

“And what do you see your responsibility is to the people who come to you?” She takes a moment to consider her answer. “You’ve opened up your house,” I prompt. “You’ve put a stone out front.”

She chuckles gently. “Well, one is just to offer a space for anyone who wants to come and sit zazen. I’d say that’s the base. And then I think part of my job is to pull the rug out from any set-answers or absolutes.”

“Pretentions?”

“Pretentions. Graspings. And I have to do it for myself as well. But that is a role. And I know they turn to me in discussions for responses, for answers, for my sense of the discussion or to widen that discussion. And I’m there to support people in their practice and encourage them. And some encouragement has to come with words. And, I mean, I think that’s what words are for mostly. And also just to sit and have a place where they can sit with me.”

“And what do you hope for them?”

“That they become really comfortable being their own selves.”

Village Zendo, NYC

Pat Enkyo O’Hara, the Abbot Emerita of the Village Zendo in New York City, grew up in Tijuana. “My mother was one of those wild people in the ’40s, and, when I was three, she divorced my dad who was this strict Catholic – alcoholic but strict Catholic – and ran off with a Mexican guy who was not allowed to come to the States. We never knew why, but there were suspicions that he’d been up to no good in LA. So I lived in Tijuana, and every day we’d cross the border into San Ysidro to attend Catholic school. So that was my life. And when I was nine or ten, I saw them take the panelling off the door of the car, put things in there, and put the panelling back. It wasn’t drugs at that time. They’d put meat in there and things that were cheaper in Mexico and smuggled them into the States.”

“Typical Catholic childhood, then?” I suggest.

Enkyo chuckles. “This was funny. By court order. In the divorce, the only request my dad had was that I be raised Catholic because my mother came from a Southern Protestant tradition, and she didn’t know anything about Catholicism, but she said, ‘Well, okay.’ So she sent me to Catholic school as a way to do that. And I went through all of it, confirmation and communion and all of that. It wasn’t hard. I didn’t buy it a hundred percent, but I didn’t reject it either. It was just who I was.”

“Not buying it a hundred percent implies you bought into it at least a little. What was your reservation?”

“Well, my mother – who was my primary – didn’t say anything directly, but it was quite clear she never went to mass in her life, and yet somehow she’d drop me at mass. And the whole maternal side of my family were Southern Protestants – you know? – so there’s antipathy there. They didn’t say anything, but that’s how it felt.”

Her mother divorced again when Enkyo was twelve, and they moved to San Diego where she went to high school, after which she attended the University of California at Berkeley. During her freshman year, she was in the Berkeley Public Library where an exhibition of Chinese paintings attracted her attention. It led her to the writings of D. T. Suzuki, “who didn’t do a lot for me, but that was the beginning. But what really changed my life was Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind a few years later. When I read that, I thought, ‘This is it! This is the truth, the truth of my life.’ But it never occurred to me that I needed to practice with a group,” she adds with a laugh.

“How did you come across it?” I ask.

“In a bookstore, a Berkeley bookstore.”

“Just happened to see the calligraphy on the cover and thought, ‘This looks spicy’?”

“Exactly. Exactly. The sense of it, the simplicity of it, of Suzuki Roshi’s words as they were transcribed by that wonderful woman” – Trudy Dixon – “who recorded his talks. Many Zen Buddhist principles were in that book, and I thought, ‘Okay. That’s me. That’s who I am.’ But I still did not feel that I needed to go further. I thought it was about – oh – my internal self.”

It was a while yet before she actually entered a Zen Center. “Later, I had some addiction issues. I was married to a chemist – let’s put it that way – in Berkeley, in the ’60s.”

Well, for two years around the same time I was dropping mescaline every 72 hours because it took that long to clear my system.

“Okay,” Enkyo nods, “I was one of those. And when that began to wane – mainly because I had a child – I began to drink. I was quite a drinker for quite a few years. You know, I was able to maintain work and do all the things you were supposed to do, but in retrospect I would say, ‘Oh, my God! She was an alcoholic.’ So that went on for a long time. And I was scraping around getting work and failing some great jobs and got saved, essentially, when New York University hired me to do video work. They had a National Science Foundation grant to do a project in Redding, Pennsylvania. Interactive videos and the whole big thing. I got in on the ground floor. I had a good eye. I was smart enough. So I did that, and then I became a site manager in Vermont for the University of Vermont for a year or two. Then I went to Washington DC, and I led a project there for three years. Then they brought me to New York, and from 1980 on I’ve lived in New York and taught at NYU. Now I live in retired faculty housing which is like a small studio apartment, very cheap, and a very nice place.” She laughs. “That’s my story in a nutshell.”

“And somewhere in the course of all that, you walked into a zendo.”

“That’s right. After I was in New York and my son was 16, I sent him to Spain to study Spanish for the summer, so I didn’t have to take care – you know – of a young man in New York City. And I went up to Zen Mountain Monastery – Daido Loori’s place – not to study Zen (this is so interesting to me), but to take a Tai Chi class. So I go, get there to register for the Tai Chi class – took a bus; I didn’t have a car or anything – and the registrar says, ‘Oh, well, the Tai Chi class has been cancelled, but we do have an Intro to Zen.’ Well – you know – I know all about Zen. I’d read all about it. But one has to be modest, so that was it. I took the intro to Zen. Sat my butt down on a cushion. I wasn’t young – I was 38 – and it was hard, and Daido was really strict. He had some Rinzai spirit in him.”

“An old navy guy.”

“Exactly!” Enkyo says, laughing. “Exactly! And so I just flourished there. I did all the practices there were, and after a while I started to ask people to come to my home. At that time, I was a tenured professor so I had a two-bedroom. My son went off to college, so I had a big two-bedroom, and I got rid of all the furniture in the living and dining rooms and made a zendo. Very early. But Daido liked that, because he wanted to get people from New York to come and be involved.”

She continued at Zen Mountain for half a dozen years or so. “I became a susho, senior student, and that was a big deal for him. I was able to do more work with students and so forth. So after about five years, as I said, I started having people sitting at my home. And I asked Daido to come when he could, and he came once or twice. But he began to feel like I was usurping. And I wasn’t. It was so interesting to me because I wasn’t. I was just trying to practice, and I was aware that there’s value when there’s a community that holds you. I saw that. And he just got weird, so I left. I had met Maezumi Roshi who was Daido’s teacher, and Maezumi Roshi was more like what I was looking for. More intimate.”

“How did you meet him?”

“Well, I met him when he came to visit Daido, and then, not long after I left Daido, he said he’d like to come and visit. It wasn’t just me. There was some New York thing. I was working with Tricycle magazine a lot, and they had some sort of an honorific thing, and they wanted to know about Zen teachers in North America, and I said, ‘Oh, you must know Maezumi Roshi.’ So they called him and had him there, and he came to my zendo for one day and gave a talk. But when he walked in, he saw more people in that room than he was seeing at ZCLA at the time. So he felt like I was sincere and – you know – I just thought he was so intimate and so . . . so broken in a way that made me feel like he was human. Right? I loved Daido. Daido was very broken too. I’m broken. Not that I’m saying . . . But Daido’s way was so rigid, and Maezumi’s way was very soft and intimate, and it just worked better for me.”

What had broken Maezumi was alcoholism and the revelation of his affairs with female students. He did not deny anything and went into treatment, but there had been consternation at his Los Angles center as details emerged, and many members fell away.

“He wasn’t alone, of course,” I point out. “Several other teachers had been discovered to be in affairs at that time as well – Baker at San Francisco; Shimano there in New York – but Maezumi was the only one I’m aware of who made a public apology and then went into treatment for his alcoholism.”

“He dealt with it the best he could,” Enkyo says. “He continued drinking at home with his wife, but what he did was he moved. They bought a place near the Mountain Center, and he would go home for the weekend sometimes, and it was none of our business what he did at home.”

“We can’t escape our conditioning, and if you’re a Japanese male of a certain generation . . .”

“That’s right,” Enkyo says, nodding. “I know. And I had addiction problems. My family were all alcoholics. I felt great compassion. I was not going to be put off by that.”

“So you met Maezumi, but you didn’t move to Los Angeles.”

“No. I was still supporting my son, so I would spend the summers – 90-day angos every summer – at the mountain retreat center where Roshi would be. And I racked up my credit card debt and would fly out for two or three other sesshins throughout the year. On holidays and so forth. So I managed to see him a lot. And it was a time when attendance at ZCLA had fallen off because of the things that had happened. There weren’t a lot of people who were really anxious for his teachings. And I think he felt . . .” She pauses a moment, and her tone of voice shifts. “I don’t think he liked me very much because I’m a gay woman and very early somebody had asked me to lead a workshop on gay and lesbian issues in Buddhism at ZCLA, and I think he . . . There was a . . .”

“Males of a certain generation,” I suggest.

“A certain generation. You know? But he couldn’t help it because I was just there all the time, doing koans, sincere, working hard, this old lady in her forties by this time . . .”

“That old, huh?”

“Yeah.” She chuckles. “I guess I was persistent.”

“Are you comfortable talking about being gay? ’Cause you did say you’d been married to the chemist, who you shed somewhere along the line but not before producing a son.”

“Well, that was very early, actually maybe only a year after I had my son. And then there were some very wild years where I was trying to establish what my sexuality was and who I was, and I was drinking; I was taking a lot of drugs. Then after I had a kid, I couldn’t do that as much, but you do it anyway in a different kind of way. And so I was just very experimental. We’re talking 1970; you know what was going on in the world. I really haven’t had a lot of intimate partners – I’m a little bit standoffish – but I did have a couple of strong lesbian relationships while I was still in San Francisco. Then when I moved to Philadelphia, there was this great drought.” She smiles and laughs softly. “So I became kinda like ‘single mom.’ But when I was in New York it was heart-breaking. It was fucking heart-breaking. I remember I was teaching at NYU when the first guys came down with AIDS.” She pauses a moment before continuing. “The AIDS thing changed me completely. I suddenly had to take a political stand. I had to say I was gay and that I was going to take care of people. And I immediately became part of the Buddhist-AIDS Network.”

“When did you meet Bernie Glassman?”

“Well, we need to skip back again. While I still with Daido, Daido and Bernie were friends, close Dharma-brothers.”

“Although they couldn’t work together.”

“I know. Well, egos are egos. So because I was a videographer and made the videos for Daido, Bernie asked if I could help him. That’s where I first met Bernie, just doing some work for him and the homeless. They were building this house, and I just took videos of it. I liked him. I thought he was a great guy. But I felt like my whole life had been social action. My whole life has been about taking care of people and that sort of thing, so I didn’t need that teaching. I was wrong, but that’s what I thought. So I didn’t fall in love with the idea of Bernie’s Zen.”    

“Had he divested himself of his robes by then?”

“No. He would go back and forth. In fact, when he gave me transmission it was very formal. I never met anyone who knew the rules and knew the robes and knew the bows and every single position; he knew that all backwards and forwards. He had that kind of precision with detail. When I met him there, he was always wearing samue in all the things I shot. I mean, he had a dirty t-shirt under the samue, but still he was wearing samue.”

“The day I spent with him, he was wearing one of those florid shirts – blue flowers over a white background – suspenders, hair tied back in a ponytail.”

“I know! I know! Well, to jump forward, I did work with him quite a bit when Maezumi died. That’s what happened. Maezumi Roshi died and that was shattering for me because I’d projected all my notions about Zen onto this beloved figure. Right? He was like a ‘ten’ for me. And it was very tough when he died. But Bernie called me. He said he would come out and help us put together the funeral. And he went out there, and they were kind of splitting up the senior students, and Bernie asked if I wanted to study with him, and I said yes. And then I studied with him for three years/four years. I learned so much. He profoundly influenced my understanding. He was a very brilliant man. He really was. And it was such a gift. It was a real gift. It didn’t feel like one at the beginning, but it was a great gift. And then I received Dharma transmission from him before he dropped his robes, and it was a very formal thing.”

What is now known as the Village Zendo started in her apartment. “One of the guys – one of the guys who died of AIDS; one of my dear friends – he would go to all the different zendos in New York. He’d go to the Chelsea Zendo, and then when he was coming to my house, he’d say, ‘Oh, I’m going to the Village Zendo.’ So it was just this raggedy old guy who named us the Village Zendo. It started in my apartment with eight zabutons and eight zafus, and it just grew. And we were in my apartment for a really long time, and then it outgrew my apartment even before I retired from the university, and so then we moved to a rented place. We’ve always had rented places. We’ve never been able to afford to own here in Manhattan – downtown Manhattan – that’s just not a real thing. Our last place – before the one we found now – was like fourteen grand a month. It’s ridiculous, but that’s why we charge for membership, because we have to pay the bills. Nobody is on salary, but we gotta pay the bills.”

“How large is the community now?”

“It’s not that big. We have maybe 110 dues-paying members, some of whom may not even live in the area. COVID has changed everything, but I would say over the past ten or fifteen years we’ve stayed around a hundred people who pay dues every month.”

“And they would identify you as their teacher?”

“For a very long time, yes. But, you know, I’ve given Dharma transmission to quite a few people now – I’ve been around for so long – and if somebody wants to study with somebody I’ve given Dharma transmission to, they can consider that person their teacher rather than me.”

“But that’s the language you use. The term you use is ‘teacher’?”

“Yeah.”

“So what does a Zen teacher teach?”

“What does a Zen teacher teach? It’s more like a therapist really,” she says, laughing. “A Zen teacher helps to guide the understanding of the student. That’s how I see it. And so we use koans. We have a curriculum. I mean, we do have a certain number of students who don’t use koans, but for the most part we use koans. We go on and on with hundreds and hundreds of koans which gives us something to talk about.”

“To what end?”

“To what end? To understand self and other, I guess. I mean, we want to know who we are and how we are functioning in our lives, how we are in the world. And by seeing that, we can see that what we call the world is not separate; it’s part of us. And I would say that that, too, is a basic Buddhist teaching as I understand it.”

“Would you say you’re teaching Buddhism?” She doesn’t immediately respond, so I prod a bit: “Do you teach your students about kleshas and skhandhas and the Twelvefold Chain of Dependent Co-Arising?”

“Not so much. I mean I talk about kleshas. But I don’t go into that . . . No, I don’t. I don’t do it so much, and I don’t think any of my teachers do. We use koans, and we use poetry a lot. And we’re very heavy on Dogen.”

She pauses a moment, then adds: “You know the name of our temple? It’s the Temple of True Expression. And we have quite a few artists, actors, dancers, writers in our group – I mean, we’re in downtown New York – and I’ve always admired writing in particular. That’s my area. I just love poetry. So I think when we’re talking about True Expression, we’re talking about how to express who this individual self is in relation to everything else. And for me, Dogen got it. I can’t tell you how many angos that we’ve had that we’ve had one fascicle after another that he wrote expressing what I consider the basic Buddhist teachings of self and other and interdependence and suffering and all of those old-fashioned concepts. So I would say, yeah, we are Buddhists, but we’re Zen. Contemporary Zen.”

“Do the people you teach or even those to whom you’ve given transmission, would they self-identify as Buddhists? If they were filling out a hospital form, would they write Buddhist under ‘faith’?”

“Uh . . . Not really. When we give jukai, I often say to them, that’s becoming a Buddhist. Putting on the robe of the Buddha symbolically. That’s kind of a Japanese thing, but when you do that symbolically it is about being a Buddhist. But you pose an interesting question. I don’t think much about what it means to be a Buddhist. I guess I’m filled with assumptions,” she adds with a laugh.

“The people who seek you out – especially those who come to you the first time – what are they looking for? After all, there are lots of options in New York. Why do people go to you rather than somewhere else?”

“Well, usually people are suffering. There’s something bothering them about their life. So they’re coming to find a way out. And – you know – we kind of get people started just by being present to their breath. So it becomes – I would say – very contemporary psychological.”

“In which case, why not just go to a psychotherapist?”

“Yes, well, we’ve got so many psychotherapists here that all you’d have to do is turn to the next zafu. And that’s important, too – isn’t it? – that there are so many psychotherapists that are Buddhists and who sit here. And while there’s a whole element of talking to another person about your issues, there’s also just sitting with your issues. Just sitting without messing with them. Just allowing. And I think we focus on that a lot in our introductions about how to sit, how to be present, fully present to yourself, to your being. And I guess we can’t help the language we use because of the times we live in and the place where we are. So it may be – it just occurred to me as we’re talking – if we were to pay attention to how we talk to people about their meditation we would probably be very influenced by the psychotherapeutic model. Although I’m personally so tired of all the magazines talking about it.”

“And as a teacher, what is it that you hope for the people who come the zendo regularly?”

“That they would find themselves in a position of stability so that they can serve others. That they can be of service to themselves and others. But so many people are caught in the stories of whatever their upbringing brought them or wherever their life went, about success and failure and all of these things. If they could just be present, finding presence. And then what do you do with that presence? You make a difference. So we have prison programs. We have old peoples’ programs. We have a lot of those kinds of social action activities which came from those early days when we were working with AIDS. You know, I used to go twice a week to the AIDS facility to teach meditation and to sit with the guys. It wasn’t really meditation, but we’d sit in a circle and sit on the floor and make it look like meditation. And for me, my brand of it is if you’re not serving, it’s not complete.”

“So I had asked ‘to what end,’ and what you’re saying now is that it’s not just a matter of prajna, of knowing self and other, but the development of compassion as well.”

“Right. For me, you can’t have prajna without compassion.”

“The history of North American Zen might cast some doubt on that.”

“I’m sure, but that’s my view.”

“Well, let’s consider that for a moment. It’s something we’ve already touched on it. There have been a number of teachers, including Maezumi, who used their position for various forms – often sexual – of personal aggrandizement.”

“For me, that’s just human nature. We do our very best, and we fail, and that’s the human condition. But to just keep trying. To keep coming back to the practice. That’s why sit. Why sit in meditation? It is to compact that and to recognize when we’ve slipped away, when we’ve pulled away or pushed someone else in some kind of way. And so it doesn’t bother me that Maezumi Roshi or Daido . . . Daido’s inability to let in anything other than the Daido ego. But he did a beautiful thing. He really built a beautiful thing. But he did harm people, and he’s paying for it in one of the Avichi Hells,” she adds with a laugh.

“What is it that you’re concerned about as Zen continues to evolve in North America? As someone who has a responsibility to ensure the continuance of the tradition, what is it that you have your eye on?”

She starts to say, “I’m very confident . . .” then pauses and starts again.

“The Soto School asked me to give a talk, and it was a big honour to have an American woman do that. So I went to LA, and, lo and behold, there were a large number of people from San Francisco Zen Center and different Zen Centers in the Soto School were all there. And I saw a lot of rigidity about practice, about forms, and I realized that my view is to the left. You know, I was very influenced by Bernie, but Bernie was taught by Maezumi, and Maezumi left Japan. And so it is the line that I’m in that is more about ‘let’s break some rules; let’s not get stuck in the liturgy or in the formal aspects.’ You can appreciate the formal aspects and how they can hold you.” She reflects a moment. “I could almost say I’m still very much in the holiness of zazen. I think it’s really important to hold the posture. What I mean is that that in itself – that practice – is so important, so vital, and I think that’s good. But then the bowing on cue and all of that – which we do here – but let’s not hold it up as if it’s anything. So I think in another fifty years we would continue to maintain the zazen, continue to maintain the study, actual study of the literature, of the poetry, of Dogen, but not this kind of like grasping at the forms.”

“The Asian envelope of the practice, you mean? Not so important?”

“It truly isn’t. I like some aspects of it. The aesthetics I like a bit, the simplicity. And – you know – that’s not even Japanese. That’s our idea of Japanese. I spent not a long time, six weeks, in a monastery in Japan, in order to check a certain box in the Soto School. That place was the gaudiest place I’ve ever been. I couldn’t believe the altar. I mean, oh, my God! So it was not my idea of what Japanese aesthetic was. It wasn’t my idea of Zen. So I just want to clarify that part. We don’t do all those things. We’re very relaxed. But we do wear robes. Lay robes primarily, although I have one with the big sleeves. And we wear an okesa. So there are some accents, Japanese accents, but – you know – we’re not Japanese.”

Manzanita Village Retreat Center, San Diego County, CA

Caitriona Reed is one of the co-founders of the Manzanita Village Retreat Center in San Diego, California. I note the remnants of a British accent, and she admits that she’s from the UK. “I came here on holiday forty years ago and forgot to go back. I had dual nationality, so that made it easier.” She was 30 when she moved to the US, but her formative years had been in England. She is trans so attended a male boarding school which, she assures me, was as brutal as the portrayals in novels and television programs suggest.

“Every morning began with chapel, hymns, and prayers. Tears. It was Dickensian in the bullying and the randomness. However academically, I was blessed. They did actually teach you how to think for yourself in the academic sense. By implication, we were being raised to administer an empire that no longer existed. But what else are you going to do?”

She encountered Buddhism through books. “There was not an overt religiosity in my family, and, as a child, I invented my own. I found myself innately devout at the age of about eleven or twelve. And then I took like a fish to water reading first Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and then Christmas Humphries, Alan Watts. Buddhism became a context for my rebellion, which continues to this day I should say.”

I ask what the rebellion was directed towards.

“The sense of ‘get me out of this!’ Get me out of this where people – where we – are not collectively thinking through the consequences of our activities, where we are not living in the sacred.”

She is one of those persons who can take a question and run with it, anticipating later questions I don’t need to ask.

“So, I’ll dive straight in and say that as a Buddhist teacher and practitioner for many years, I no longer identify particularly with Buddhism,” she continues without pause. “The experience of illumination is beyond cultural context. I first heard this from Gary Snyder many years ago, that you could contrive to say that the Buddha was attempting to revive a universal paleolithic cultural embodiment, and that the early Buddhist sangha was an attempt to do that. He included across classes; he included untouchables; he included women. He looked to create a bridge between the monastic sangha and lay people. The early sangha’s form of governance was based on a council form which we know from reports among the Huron Indians in Canada, we know – if not universal – it was a common way that people practiced self-governance. They would sit down and listen to each other. So I relate very strongly to Indigenous cultures; I do Indigenous practices of prayer, of quest. I work with Plant Medicine, meaning psychotropic medicines both in South America and here. Several years ago. I had this illumination, ‘Oh, my God! Now I understand what I’ve been teaching all these years!’ Because there was something about embodiment, the kind of embodiment that comes from prayer rather than the way meditation is taught or received in our Western culture where we commodify, where we look to see to what advantage it will provide. We don’t surrender in humility; we meditate in order to improve ourselves. That’s our context. However well zazen or any form of meditation is taught, our cultural orientation is such that we turn it into a self-improvement strategy. ‘How can I do this better to get better? How can I improve myself.’ And I’ve discovered that there are other ways to be in the world that are more akin to – for want of a better word because this is the word of the civilized mind – an animistic view. Everything’s alive. Everything is interacting. Everything is conscious. Everything matters. There’s a sense that we are simply a piece in the matrix of Creation. And, of course, Zen practice leads us to that eventually. If we’re lucky. But there is so much to get through – in my experience – before we arrive at that simplicity.”

I ask how old she was when she read Watts and Humphreys.

“I was fifteen or sixteen when I read Alan Watts’ Way of Zen, and it was very exciting. It was really exciting to me.”

“What made it exciting?”

“Two things. The cultural context, the allure of East Asia. The culture of Tang Dynasty China, the introduction of Zen to Japan, and then the actuality of the experience of the real, the experience of the immediate. At that time, I was experimenting with psychedelics. LSD was still legal at that point.”

I, too, am old enough to have taken acid before it became illegal to do so.  

“I was too young to be a Beat or a beatnik,” she says. “But I was old enough to aspire to be a hippie and lived that way. And my first meditation was in some hippie place in London where someone was teaching a very yogic, Hindu-Indian-influenced form of devotion meditation. Soon after that I spent time in Samye Ling, the Tibetan monastery that Chogyam Trungpa started in Scotland, but he’d left by then to go the US. This was ’69 or ’70.”

“What was Samye Ling like?”

“I found it confusing. It was very Tibetan. I didn’t understand Tibetan. And I went to see Akong Rinpoche and said, ‘So, I understand that you meditate by following your breath.’ He said, ‘That’s fine. Yeah. Go on. Do that.’ Easier said than done for a 19-year-old with a head filled with all kinds of things. And it wasn’t until I went to Sri Lanka – I was 28 – and sat for extended retreats in a couple of Theravadan monasteries that things improved.”

“How did you come to be in Sri Lanka?”

“I was a photographer. I needed to leave a marriage. I needed to be in India. India had captured my imagination. And when I was at the Ramana Ashram in South India, I said I was going to Sri Lanka, and someone said, ‘Go to Kanduboda monastery. You’ll find a teacher there by the name Sivali. Sit with him.’ And I did. I spent some weeks there, and I went to a country monastery where there was an American monk-teacher and spent a couple of months there. And the course was set. I was really excited about Theravadan-style practice.”

“Again,” I ask, “what was the allure?”

“Oh, the experience of being present. Just the fruits of the meditation itself. And I was extensively reading contemporary Theravadan scholarship. There was a writer – I don’t recall his name – teaching at that time in Honolulu. He was Sri Lankan in origin, but he was very broad, and he wrote about Mahayana and Theravada and their relationships. Later on – when I became a student of Thich Nhat Hanh – I appreciated Thay for the breadth of his embrace of Theravada, Mahayana, and Pure Land. Well, Pure Land is Mahayana. But it wasn’t a singular adherence to a singular school of thinking or practice. It was much broader than that.”

The “holiday” for which she’d left Britain at the age of 30 was, in fact, a three-month retreat at Barre, Massachusetts, where the Insight Meditation Center is located. After that, she visited a monk she’d met in Sri Lanka who was then teaching in Los Angeles. “And he asked me to teach with him. I was completely unprepared to teach. So I suffered for ten years from imposter syndrome while teaching retreats. Initially a very formal Theravadan-style retreat of sitting and walking meditation. And I continued to teach with him uninterruptedly until 1981 when I fired him basically. I said, ‘I can’t do this with you anymore.’ He was a brilliant teacher for me because he was so iconoclastic. His name was Akasa Levi. And he was teacher both to myself and my partner with whom I’ve been teaching for almost forty years now.”

Her partner is Michele Benzamin-Miki, a visual and performance artist as well as a martial arts instructor. The program they developed, Five Changes, evolved from their early work together.

“That work was very much rooted in the Theravadan tradition in form. Very quickly, we started speaking from a place of social responsibility, of politically and socially engaged Buddhism. My partner is a person of mixed race, so there was some fuel there, and there was fuel anyway in the sensibilities of both of us. It seemed absurd to think of Buddhist practice as entirely transcendent, transcendental, something that could be done aside from the reality of the times. And in the 1980s, you remember, we were at war overtly in many parts of Central America; Reagan was threatening us all with mutually assured destruction. And so that led us, very quickly, to affiliate with Joanna Macy, with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, with Engaged Buddhism. So, naturally, we met Thich Nhat Hanh who apparently coined the term ‘Engaged Buddhism’ and also said there was no such thing as Engaged Buddhism because Buddhism, by default, is engaged. Though you wouldn’t know it sometimes from the way the Buddha Dharma is practiced both in Asia and in the West. So we were creating a hybrid already, and then when we met Thich Nhat Hanh it became hybridized even more. And we maintained forms. We taught silent retreats but more and more relaxed. I remember early on Thich Nhat Hanh said if you’re not really enjoying your meditation practice, something is off there. Something is wrong.”

Caitriona’s Wikipedia entry identifies her as “an American Zen Teacher in the lineage of Thich Nhat Hanh.” I am not clear how formal that authorization from him is, but, at least, it was adequate to earn her membership in the American Zen Teachers Association.

I ask how she met him.

“I’d heard about him. I’d read some of the things he had written in English when I was in Sri Lanka. I knew he was in France. I had made some inquiries about how to find him, but he was very much on retreat in a hermitage until the early ’80s. This was the late ’70s when I was in Sri Lanka. When he came to the US in ’87, I went with him to an ecumenical retreat in Santa Barbara. It was very small, unlike at the end of his life when he had retreats with thousands of people. This was forty people at a Catholic retreat center. And as we introduced ourselves in a circle, I said to him, ‘I’m sort of feeling I’m ready to graduate from Buddhism.’ And he really liked that, and he riffed on that in one of the Dharma talks he gave, this idea of graduating from something we name, from something that we identify with, from something that has a structure that we enclose ourselves within. And we became friends, I have to say. We tell people we knew Thich Nhat Hanh before he was famous. We went to France a lot, and our teaching changed completely. We didn’t abandon Vipassana, but we didn’t adopt Vietnamese Zen either. We certainly adopted some of the teaching styles. And his tradition is very much in the Rinzai tradition. So there was certainly some dialogue, less formal than what you think of as koan practice. I mean the koan curriculum comes from a specific time and place in Tang Dynasty China, and it’s become this thing that we now call the koan curriculum. With Thay it was very much like walking into the kitchen and saying, ‘What are you doing?’ And you’d have to realize that was a koan; he wasn’t going to give that away. And he talked about it. He said, ‘You could say I’m cutting carrots, or you could say I’m bringing Buddhism back to China.’ It could go either way. He played with people, in a very loving way, I have to say.”

I ask about the Manzanita Village Retreat Center.

“Manzanita Village is a place we’ve been for thirty years. We’ve lived on this land. It’s very remote. We have one neighbor over the ridge behind me, and other than that our nearest neighbors are more than a mile – in most cases five miles – away. We live in a little canyon. Behind us are 180,000 acres of National Forest land, and in front of us is 2000 acres of pasture. So we have a sense of being buffered while at the same time being within two and a half hours of Los Angeles. We hold various retreats that we teach, and these days we integrate multiple modalities. We work with family constellations . . . Are you familiar with Family Constellation work?”

I am not.

“No? It’s a very interesting hybrid because it has roots in psychotherapy, but it’s the opposite of psychotherapy. It looks like psychodrama, but it doesn’t play out like psychodrama because nobody knows what they’re doing. It comes from Bert Hellinger^[1] in Austria. He was a Jesuit; he went to South Africa where he worked with the Zulu for many years. So it has elements of Freud, and it has elements of indigenous practices. It’s very blind. A person, a client, would want to resolve in something in their life, and the work has the assumption that because of generational loyalties that we have to parents and ancestors we enact our relationships in certain ways. The anger, the fear, the whatever it might be that we carry is often not our own but enacted out of a loyalty. And sometimes a client just witnessing the choreography of people who don’t know what they’re representing can release generations of conditioning. Every time we facilitate, I’m blown away by the magic of it. And we will ask the participants, ‘How do you feel about so-and-so? Do you want to move closer or further away?’ It plays out. And the client will say, ‘How come they’re talking just like my mother? What did you say to them?’ I didn’t say anything. I don’t know your mother. How could I tell them to talk like your mother? People do a constellation for their relationship with their brother they haven’t spoken to in years. And after we finish the session which could last half an hour, it could last ten minutes, then they receive a text from their brother, apologizing for his behavior, and thanking her for all that she’s done for the family. Within minutes – within a minute – of finishing this work, without any communication, from across the country or across the planet. There is something in it. We could call it the morphogenic field – you know, we could reify it be calling it something – but it is simply the way that we are interconnected in life. The way the phone rings, and we know who that is even though we haven’t spoken to them for a year oftentimes. It’s extraordinary. And I’ll say, because this is what influenced my life and my practice more than anything, since the Enlightenment we’ve been creating a mechanized world in response to the world that is much more than us.” She’s not talking about the Buddha’s enlightenment but rather the 18^th Century European Age of Reason; it took me a moment to realize that. “At first, we tried to describe it, and now we try to explain it, and then finally we try to take it to pieces and then, after that, destroy it. And in the process, ignore the magic that is everywhere. I once saw a scrub jay on the ground next to a rabbit for an hour. What were they doing? They were certainly facing each other, making gestures, communicating, at ease. Neither one of them was cornered. They were voluntarily spending time with one another. We don’t have any mechanism for that in the way that we think of the nonhuman world. We don’t even give it time so that we can spend an hour observing this whatever it was. Call it conversation. And I feel that the practice of the Dharma was given to us as a way to rectify this. But so often because of – for want of a better word – our egos, we miss the point, and try to get ‘enlightened.’ As if that would help the world! Like, why try to get enlightened? Just be here now. Someone said that before me,” she adds with a laugh. “Just be here now! And it will unfold magically. And so the last time I endeavored to go off on my own before this place – more than thirty years ago – to a Zen Center which is in the lineage of Maezumi, up in the mountains, quite near us, I went to do a sitting retreat on my own. And I made the mistake of bringing with me Katagiri’s first book. Which in the first chapter – which I read on the first day – said, ‘If you try to attain something in your practice, you’ve already kicked the bucket over. You’ve already set yourself up for something that is known. So why even bother?’ I paraphrase entirely. But it led me to think there was nothing I could do, nothing I could do here in contriving a practice, contriving to sit eighteen hours a day over a five-day period, that could in anyway improve my life. Just relax. So I did. I spent five days reading a little, sitting a little, walking a little. And it was the last time I ever tried to do a solo – one-on-one – just myself on retreat. So my path was very much set out for me and then later, through Thich Nhat Hanh, to, ‘Just relax.’”

“So Manzanita is a place, a location,” I say. “What is ‘Five Changes’?”

“Five Changes is the name of the work we do.”

“Is it a program?”

“It’s an umbrella term for the various things we do. In addition to constellation work, we teach hypnosis, we teach neural linguistics. I’m thinking of teaching a course online called ‘Meditation, Prayer, and Trance.’ ‘Cause in the minds of most people – I think – those are three very separate things, and they’re really different ways of defining aspects of the same thing, which is how to be present, how to be humble, how to be real, how to bear witness. Everything we do in the Five Changes is really a form of prayer, a form of meditation, a form of facilitation. Every time we do anything, we begin by asking permission of the ancestors of this land that we do this work. That’s a very Buddhist thing to do, actually; I don’t know how many people do that when they lead retreats, to actually invoke the blood ancestry, the spiritual ancestry, the land, the ancestry of the land where we stand. And then from there it evolves as an offering, as a way of coming closer to the spirit that infuses all things, the spirit that infuses all traditions whether it’s sophisticated – like Buddhism in all its manifestations – or very simple like the way some of the indigenous people we’ve known in South America or North America just simply offer tobacco, offer a prayer without any complicated conceptual structure surrounding that. Just simply a way of being. So Five Changes. It’s a brand, and the tag line for the brand is: ‘For the world we long for.’ And no one has ever asked me what that is, because we all long for a world which is sustainable.”

“And when you say Five Changes, are there specifically five elements you’re referring to?”

“Well, there are different things I say. It could be the five elements of Chinese medicine. Often I’ll say something like, ‘Well – you know – there’s probably one thing in your life you want to change right now. Let’s do that. But know that there are at least four more that we can address later.’”

“Southern California,” I point out, “there’s a lot of options for people looking for spiritual direction. What draws someone to Manzanita rather than to, say, Maezumi’s place in Los Angeles?”

“Night and day. Because we begin in a way by saying – we don’t say it overtly – that we don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know what we’re going to do next. And it’s one of the reasons we never built an empire.”

“That might be what they’ll discover when then come to Manzanita Village, but what is it that draws them to you in the first place?”

“Ah! I see. Well, it’s something they’ve read about us. It’s often by word of mouth. Or it’s something from our website that attracts them or what we’ve written. It’s something about the fact we have affiliations to multiple disciplines, to multiple perspectives. We don’t identify as any particular lineage, any particular modality, any particular tradition. And over the years we’ve been continually changing it up. For many years we were working with deep ecology, with global grief work. We used to teach with Joanna Macy, and then it morphed again. And now we do constellation work. We’ve done theatre work in the context of retreats. Theatre work that’s theatre not in the sense of role-playing, theatre in the way of embodying presence with sound and movement. Why? Because it was an interesting experiment. Did people benefit? Probably. Virtually everyone’s forgotten it. Only we remember it.”

“And when someone makes their way to Manzanita, what are they looking for?”

There is a seven second pause before she responds.

“Well, they’ll do it in a couple of different contexts. They might come to a workshop or a retreat in which they come for whatever we’ve written up that that retreat’s going to be about. Or they come because they haven’t seen us for a few years and it’s time to reconnect.”

“I’m thinking about someone who comes for the first time. What draws them to you?”

“They’re coming because they want something that’s a little outside the box. They may already and may continue to be doing some kind of formal practice in Zen or Vipassana, but they understand innately that what’s available, what’s possible for them, is more than – you know, I don’t want to be disparaging – but more than the formula, more than the set modality or the set curriculum.”

“So people who have been involved in some kind of spiritual program but now feel some sort of dissatisfaction with it?”

“Not a dissatisfaction but a sense that there’s more.”

“Isn’t that a form of dissatisfaction?”

“Or it’s a hunger, it’s curiosity, it’s an energy. Often they’re artists because I’m a writer and Michelle’s a painter. Often it’s that that draws them because there is something perhaps dry in yoga, in meditation.”

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

“I hope . . . I hope that they will burst into their life, embodied, fearless, and embrace the creativity that is given to them in whatever form that takes. That they will be free from anxiety and fear.”

“Which implies they come to you with anxiety and fear.”

“Yes. Of course. Of course. And if they didn’t, that would . . . You know, in 1990 when James Hillman came back from Italy as a union analyst and a scholar, he gave up practicing psychotherapy saying, ‘I want nothing to do with helping people feel anything but depressed and anxious. That’s what we should all be feeling.’ So it’s relative. How to navigate the turmoil and horror of living in a world whose future is entirely uncertain, and especially when I talk to people in their 30s, and more and more I find myself with younger people. And it’s much harder for them than for us to deal with whatever thoughts that they’re having about what the world will look like in ten or twenty years. So it’s to help people with anxiety and uncertainty, but with the understanding that it isn’t possible to do that because of the world that we live in. And, of course, I don’t want Buddhism to be used as a way of sedation. ‘It’s alright; it’s One; we’ll all get enlightened; we’ll be reborn.’ That’s nonsense. That’s denial, resignation. It’s awful to abuse the teachings in that way.”

“What is the value of maintaining the Dharma?”

“Oh, lovely! Because it’s so beautiful. Because it’s the embodiment of this multi-stranded 2500-year-old tradition of literature and art and thought and embodiment, of truth-telling, of amazing courage, amazing just beauty and courage. You know, all that we have in these times over the last several thousand years, from Pythagoras, Socrates, the Buddha, Nagarjuna, the richness of the Christian tradition, the richness of the Dionysian tradition, the value is to celebrate this multifarious flowering of human possibility. But I don’t see the Dharma as necessarily outside of the context of the human flowering. It does have particularities that I’m forever grateful for, and it’s that balancing. You know, in Buddhism it’s that balancing of wisdom and compassion. It’s the balancing of inner and outer, of self and other, the recognition of how we construct our reality. And that marks it as slightly different from other so-called religions. And so for that I think it’s of value to preserve the Dharma. That it’s both particular and it’s part of this beautiful flowering of the last 5000 years of our experience together on the planet.”