3/27 - Tahoma-san Sogen-ji and Enso House, Whidbey Island

                Yesterday, Chozen Bays told me that all teachers require a teacher. “You’re never finished with this work. You need somebody you tremble before. Someone who can show you when ‘self’ is intruding, when you are deceiving yourself.” The teacher she has chosen to work with is Shodo Harada, a Japanese master who has established a program for western students in Japan, at Sogen Temple (Sogen-ji). He has also established programs in the US, Germany and India. The main US temple is on Whidbey Island in Washington State.

                When I ask Chozen what it is about Harada Roshi that drew her to him, she tells me: “I’ve never met anyone who lives so much in the present moment. I know he knows who I am, but I don’t think he has one thought about me unless I am right in front of him.” He has a sensitivity and alertness, she says, which makes him appear almost psychic. One can go to sanzen expecting to say something, and Harada Roshi will speak the words before the student gets them out.

                The Whidbey Island property is called a monastery, but, in effect, it is currently a hermitage. There is only a single monk (the Head Monk) living there. His name is Dairin—Great Neighbor [photo]. He listens to my recording of Chozen speaking about Harada Roshi and nods his head enthusiastically. “You can’t tell stories about roshi,” he insists. “Because it isn’t a matter of what he says or does—it’s his presence.”

                While Dairin is currently by himself, on the weekends students do come to practice, and there are plans for a residential program. Shodo Harada comes to Whidbey three times a year to lead sesshin, and people from all across North America—the US, Canada, Mexico—apply to attend. The temporary zendo (a prefab building on the site) can only accommodate 55 people, so there is a waiting list and some individuals have to wait more than a year to be accepted.

                Connected to Tahoma Sogenji is Enso House (an enso is the Japanese calligraphy circle which symbolizes the void or enlightenment in Zen). It is a hospice program. Dairin and I walk about a quarter of mile along a moss-laden path through the woods to get there. The hospice is run by Dr. Ann Cutcher. Students of Harada Roshi are sent there to assist for periods of varying lengths. The German nurse, Myoo, has been there ten years. A young man from Hungary, Peter Torma, has only been there a few weeks.

                I had developed a wax build up in my right ear early in this trip and was having trouble hearing. Chozen had said she would willingly look at it, but circumstances prevented her from doing so. She emailed Ann to ask if she would examine me, so before we begin the interview, Ann takes me into a dispensary and flushes out both ears, which were far more plugged than I had realized.

                I ask if Ann is a Zen practitioner. She pauses a long while before saying, “I don’t know.”

                As we eat lunch together, I ask the people around the table in what way Enso House is part of their Zen practice. Each has his or her take on this, but Ann’s is the most compelling. She describes the first “guest” at the hospice. They only have one guest at a time; the average stay is less than four weeks. The first was a man who lived in isolation from everyone else on the island. When people realized he was dying, a few tried to look after him but were unable to meet his needs. None of them were Buddhist, but they heard that Shodo Harada had determined to build a hospice and they came to Enso House where they met Ann. The hospice was not ready to receive guests; the requisite legal documents were not ready, but the board agreed to accept the old man. He was mute—possibly because he had fallen out of the habit of speaking. “However,” Ann says, “he had these bright, alive blue eyes, but he kept them shut for two full days when he arrived. I thought, ‘Oh, he’s angry about being torn from the only home he has ever known and being brought here,' and I felt terrible.”

                Then Ann’s friend, and Harada Roshi’s translator, Priscilla Storandt, visited and sat for a while with the guest. When she came out of his room, she told Ann, “He is so grateful.” And, of course, Ann realized, he was. She understood that she hadn’t been seeing him at all but rather her projection of what she thought he was. It was, for her, a transformative moment. She has been at Enso House now for twelve years.

                As I am leaving, Ann is scraping pasta sauce out of a pan into a Tupperware container and tells me in parting, “You know what the primary lesson of Enso House is? Flush out your ears!”

Cypress Trees in the Garden: Chapter 6, pp. 117-132.

3/26 - Great Vow Zen Monastery, Oregon

                Clatskanie [klat-scan-aye], Oregon, a self-proclaimed Christian township of 1700 persons, is an unlikely location for a Zen monastery. The Great Vow Zen Monastery, just outside the village, is the residential practice center for the Zen Community of Oregon. It, and a city temple in Portland for lay students, is under the leadership of Jan Chozen [clear Zen] Bays and her husband, Hogen. The monastery is a former elementary school which provides spacious and elegant accommodations for the community.

                Chozen is a pediatrician who gave up full-time medical practice to study with Taizan Maezumi in Los Angeles in the 1970s, a time in which the Los Angeles Zen Center produced several significant figures in American Zen, including Bernie Glassman and Joko Beck. It was also the era of “flower children” who found their way to LA and San Francisco from throughout North America, seeking the Dharma but also freedom from the social constraints of the mainstream society.

                LAZC was shaken up in 1983, the same year as Richard Baker’s fall from grace in San Francisco, when Maezumi Roshi agreed to go into a rehab program for alcoholism and the extent of his sexual affairs became known. Chozen admits that she was one of the women with whom Maezumi had relations. Clear guidelines had not yet been defined in Zen centers or anywhere else. She has done a great deal of study about the issue since leaving Los Angeles and now volunteers to help women who feel they had been sexually exploited in other centers. I ask if what happened in LA could be considered an example of what we would now call clergy abuse. Certainly it was misconduct, if not abuse, she replies.

                Great Vow is dedicated to Jizo Bodhisattva, protector of children—which is appropriate for a monastery headed by a pediatrician. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of Jizo statues throughout the building and in an extensive Jizo Garden, where people have left statues in commemoration of lost, sick, or dead children. They are decorated with scarves and knitted hats, even some with booties.

                In addition to the Jizos, the monastery is a treasure trove of Buddhist art—shrine rooms, courtyard gardens, a founder’s room (where a portion of Maezumi Roshi’s ashes rest by his photo), the zendo are all graced with beautiful statuary. There is a store room for the pieces they don’t have appropriate places to display.

                The monks I meet range in age from “just turned 20” to a man in his late 50s. The days are long, starting at 4:50  ending after 9:00. They begin and end with two hours of zazen. The rest of the day is taken up with work assignments and study. But study here can take unusual forms. One young woman described a formal orioki breakfast at which a dead bird was passed around for students to examine. Chozen had found it on the property and later dissected it to determine what caused its death.

                She explains that many of the young people who come to the monastery had dropped out of university and still were very ignorant about the nature of the world in which they lived. An introduction to basic biology is provided, but also training in fundamental skills like learning how to sew and cook.

                And then there is marimba playing and square dancing. This area of Oregon is one where marimbas are made and after Chozen learned how to play she started going to the local schools to teach the children; in the school, she is known as Mrs. Bays. It was one way to help to overcome the initial community suspicions about a Buddhist center. But more importantly marimba playing demonstrates how quickly moods change. One might be feeling upset but as soon as one starts playing the marimba, one’s mood lifts. Square dancing was something Chozen (now 67) and her husband had taken up to help keep in shape. Now all Great Vow monks are required to go square dancing at least once. One shy young  monk admits that acquiring social skills is also a valuable part of what he is learning here.

                It is a serious practice center, but the atmosphere is warm and welcoming. Chozen smiles easily and is relaxed with her students. She admits she has a mother’s temperament, seeking to ensure that the family all gets along. The Oregon Community does not have an “Ethics Committee” as has been established at many centers, but it does have a “Harmony Committee.”

                Besides her work as a teacher and abbot, Chozen still maintains a small medical practice (mostly teaching), consults in child abuse cases, and has become recognized widely as a proponent of mindful eating as a way of addressing obesity in children and older persons.

                The prime directive of a Zen teacher, she tells me, is to ensure that the teaching continues. The fact that Great Vow can thrive in rural Oregon suggests the teaching is secure.

Cypress Trees in the Garden:

Bays, Jan Chozen – 111, 117-18, 122, 227, 239, 271-88, 289, 293, 296, 297, 298, 299, 365, 437, 476

 

3/24 - John Tarrant

                John Tarrant’s home in Santa Rosa is in the midst of vineyards. This is the Sonoma Valley, one of the two great wine producing regions of California. He keeps a few chardonnay vines. There is a red barn in front of us when we pull into the drive. It now has an art studio on the second level which had been an apartment where Shunryu Suzuki’s biographer, David Chatwick, stayed for a while. There is a Tibetan mask on one of the roof posts over the porch, and a wooden Buddha—given to him by Robert Aitken—now missing one hand (what would be the sound thereof?) on an outside table.

                Tarrant is Australian, though there is only a hint of an accent remaining. He has a delightful smile when something strikes him as amusing, and one gets the feeling he finds many things amusing.

                When he first became interested in Zen, he and a group of friends tried to develop a practice in Australia by sitting together and yelling at one another, as took place in the stories they had read. Eventually he decided to find a genuine Zen community and wrote letters to several. The only person to reply was Robert Aitken, who was not actually a fully qualified teacher at the time but who had put together a place where various disaffected youth of the 70s came together on the island of Maui. Tarrant described it as a “cargo cult.” The group hoped that by imitating the Japanese forms they would somehow also achieve the Japanese experience of awakening.

                Tarrant’s own awakening—the feeling, as he put it, that he had passed through a door—took place during a retreat on Long Island with the Korean teacher, Seung Sahn. Later he worked through the traditional koan training with Aitken, who followed the Hakuin system which holds that there is a single correct answer to each koan. Because Tarrant showed up regularly and had been around for a while, he was assigned the position of head monk during sesshin. At one sesshin, Aitken—whose health had always been poor after the time he had spent in a Japanese prisoner of war camp—was barely able to speak. Tarrant and Aitken’s wife, Anne, told him he was too ill to continue, and Aitken decided that instead of cancelling the retreat, he would have Tarrant do the dokusan meetings. That was Tarrant’s official transmission of authority.

                He eventually made his way to California where he began teaching, following the formal protocols that Aitken had followed. He was experimenting even then; his colleague, David Weinstein, remembers Tarrant giving teisho while bouncing his baby daughter on his knee. But over time Tarrant began to wonder how many of the Japanese elements were really central to the practice. Did it matter if people wore Buddhist robes? Did it matter if they had shaved heads? Slowly the forms began to fall away, but what remained central to him were the koans. These formed, he felt, a “designed learning system” which somehow transcended the culture in which they had been developed.

                He worked with students who wanted to go through traditional koan training, but he felt it was more interesting to work in less formal structures. A student who comes to the Pacific Zen Institute may not necessarily be taught formal meditation posture and sitting. They can sit in chairs and then, even at their first meeting, after a few minutes of becoming aware of what’s going on their mind, be given a koan to think about. It could be any koan—a monk asks the Zen master, what’s the meaning of Zen? The master answers, “The cypress tree in the garden.”  Tarrant asks the students to just reflect on the koan and then to share, in a group setting, what it means to him or her.

                I remark that that is very different from other centers where students are specifically told not to discuss their koans with others. “Oh, they lie about it, then do they?” he says with a grin. “We’re Americans; we discuss everything. Of course we’re going to discuss our koans.”

                As a parting gift, he gives me several cards with art work by students on one side and a commentary by him on the back: “OK. Here is one koan method for happiness in all its simplicity. Just find a relationship with the koan. You don’t have to get ready or settle yourself down. You just start living inside your own life and let the koan keep you company like a good dog or a friend. The koan doesn’t go anywhere else or ever leave you. . . . You can keep company with a koan without assessing, criticizing or judging yourself. The koan doesn’t find fault. And even if you do criticize yourself, don’t criticize that. Compassion finds an entry. This is important.”

Cypress Trees in the Garden:

Tarrant, John – 146, 155-72, 173-74, 175, 178-79, 182, 184, 191, 196, 197, 198, 212, 213, 231, 390, 417-18, 423, 468, 487

3/10 - David Weinstein

                My Skype interview with David Weinstein was actually the first I did for this project. It took place ten days before my trip to the west coast. This is an excerpt:

DW: My three years in Hawaii with Aitkin Roshi were very difficult; he and I just did not connect at all, and the koan practice . . . I had just spent four years in Tibetan practice in Nepal and India and koan practice made me upset and that was not what my idea of meditation practice was, and I didn’t want to do that. And I ended up in Japan very resistant to doing koan meditation but I loved seated meditation, so I ended up in Kamakura with Yamada as a graduate student, as an exchange student from the University of Hawaii doing research in Tokyo at Komazawa University, and he listened to me tell him that I did not do koans, that I only did shikan taza. And I was prepared for him to tell me to leave because, I don’t know, what I was basically telling him was I don’t do the practice you do here. And he looked at me and he said, “Shikan taza is a very difficult practice. Not many people attain realization with shikan taza. Maybe the last person to attain realization with shikan taza was . . . mmm . . . Dogen. But, I want you to attain realization with shikan taza. Please practice diligently.” And he could have knocked me over with a feather when he said that. Then he asked me this silly question; he said, “I have this question to ask you. I don’t want you to think about it. You know, just forget it. And he asked me how to stop the sound of the distant temple bell. Which I thought was weird. I didn’t know it was a koan. I never spoke to anybody else about that. And I’m just so grateful for that, because if I’d known it was a koan, it would have just made that much more difficult for me. So I’m grateful for the idea of not talking about it, and yet I have also seen such great value in what happens when people do talk about it. And talk about it the sense of people sharing the feelings of the explorations they’d had into their practice and their relationship with the koan. No . . . uh . . .  it’s a practice of discovery for everybody, and a deep sharing without any kind of weird ego stuff going on, nobody’s trying to prove they know something somebody else doesn’t know. We tried to do discussion groups until about ten years ago, and they were fraught with members . . . there was always one or two members in the group that were difficult. We stopped doing it because we thought, you know, maybe this was not a good thing to do. But it kind of came up again a few years ago. And one of our members is a minister, and in his church they have discussion groups, and he thought it was a good way to build community. And it has been, a great community building . . . and more than that, a great richness is added to the practice as everybody appreciates that the wisdom is everywhere. It’s not just concentrated in somebody you call a teacher. It’s always available to us right under our feet if we will just see it.

RBM: How would this differ from the traditional Christian practice of reflecting on scripture passages?

DW: Hopefully it would be more than people having discussion, having conversation. We have gone through a process, initially twenty years ago, twenty-whatever years ago, we were doing dokusan as our teachers had taught us dokusan. And that has evolved from dokusan to “work in the room”—which was a phrase Yamada used in Kamakura for the ceremony when someone had finished the curriculum of koans. He always said, “Having finished the work in the room.” And we thought, “work in the room,” it sounds . . . it’s not Japanese, and why do we have to use Japanese words. It’s not necessary. Let’s call it “work in the room.”  And more recently I myself call it conversations because it’s about a conversation which is a two-way process.

3/21 - San Francisco Zen Center

[See also Myogen Steve Stucky]

   

               The San Francisco Zen Center is an appropriate place to begin these interviews. It played a major role in establishing Zen in North America. It was not only one of the earliest established practice sites in America, its practice center at Tassajara is the first Buddhist monastery ever established outside of Asia. It probably remains one of the largest Zen communities anywhere in the US, and in terms of holdings must be the richest.

                My meeting took place at 300 Page Street, a former Jewish girls residence (the outside ironwork, each landing of the fire-escape for example, is graced with stars of David). When I arrive, a chanting ceremony is taking place in the Buddha Hall (the Zendo is down a maze of stairs in the basement). I wait in the entry hall by a large statue of Avolakitesvara--the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Banners and paintings depicting Shunryu Suzuki decorate the walls. The window by my seat looks out upon a small inner courtyard very prettily laid out. Later Blanche Hartman will draw my attention to a “peace bell” surrounded by a halo of rifle cartridges [photo].

                When the ceremony ends, people come out to the kitchen for lunch; people—abbots included—serve themselves. Today there is squash soup, grated carrots mixed with raisins, rice, and lots of bread. I have lunch with Abbot Steve Stucky, and two former abbots—Hartman and Mel Weitsman, founder of the Berkeley Zen Center. All three wear rakusus, Steve over brown robes, Blanche over black, and Mel under a worn jean jacket. Hartman and Weitsman are both in their 80s; Stucky is probably closer to my age. He has a friendly, open manner, and a great smile. 

                Zen Center had had a reputation for austerity, and Hartman tells us that during her term as abbot she had made an effort to have people smile at newcomers. Several times people come up to me and ask if I’m enjoying my visit. Everyone seems friendly and approachable, so apparently she had been successful. Abbot Stucky relates the story about the first time he came to the door and knocked; someone opened it partially, peeked out and asked what he wanted. When he said he’d come to find out about Zen, they told him to wait a minute and closed the door in his face. Hartman lowers her face to her hands and shakes her head.

                Since Richard Baker’s departure, Zen Center has had a structure in which abbots are appointed for a four year term with the option of another three. There have been two concurrent abbots until recently; now there are three. Unlike other Zen centers elsewhere, students do not come to work with a specific teacher but rather to become part of a community, in which there are several teachers and several layers of organization. There is an abbot for Page Street and another for the Green Gulch farm; the central abbot has responsibility for the whole operation. The abbots each take turns taking responsibility for Tassajara’s practice sessions.

                In addition to teaching responsibilities, the central abbot is also responsible for the operations of what must be a multi-million dollar entity.The property holdings of Zen Center are enormous. Three buildings in a row on Page Street in addition to Green Gulch farm and the Tassajara Practice Center, which had been a hot springs resort to which the wealthy had come for “cures” since the beginning of the 20th century.     

                The focus of Zen Center under Shunryu Suzuki had been lay practice; however—according to Weitsman—Richard Baker was primarily interested in the residential program, and as a result that became, and remains, the focus of the work done at Zen Center. One of the three buildings on Page, in addition to the accommodations at 300, is a residence. In Berkeley, however, the members are primarily lay people with families and jobs.

                There are people who come to practice zazen in the mornings, entering through a side door. The front door (despite a sign which says Welcome) is locked. The neighborhood has been gentrified—in part due to Zen Center itself—but, as Hartman points out, it still isn’t a neighborhood where one can leave the door unlocked. The reason they have a large donation box in the entryway is that the smaller box had been taken along with its contents.

                As we wait outside for my taxi to arrive, Hartman tells me she wishes Zen Center had been able to reconcile with Baker—but, she says sadly, he couldn’t admit that he had done anything wrong. They all recognized the contribution he had made to establishing Zen Center, Hartman emphasized that if I really wanted to know about Zen Center I should speak to Baker (who was the only teacher I wrote to who did not reply to request for an interview). He still casts a shadow that touches the center.

Cypress Trees in the Garden: pp. 23-38