Still Mind Zendo, New York City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

“Why did you disaffiliate?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Enlightenment?” I ask.

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

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

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

“To the stuff?”

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

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

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

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

“That’s the first Noble Truth.”

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

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

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

“Yeah. It’s work.”

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

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

“Does Zen practice change people?”

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

“In what way?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heart of Wisdom Zen Temple, Portland, Oregon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you feel a need for one?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Were you in a commune?”

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

“Where was this?”

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

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

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

“It was that simple?”

“It was that simple.”

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

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

“And now you’re a priest.”

“Yeah.”

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

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

“Why did you want to take that step?”

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

“Do teachers have to be ordained?”

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

“Hospice care?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you’re a teacher now.”

“Yes.”

“So what does a Zen teacher teach?”

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

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

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

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

“So they’re coming for psychological reasons?”  

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

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

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

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

“Yeah. That’s a good way to put it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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.”