4/29 - Enpuki-ji, Montreal

                Enpuku-ji is a small Rinzai temple on rue Saint-Dominique in Montreal. I’m told that Leonard Cohen lives down the block and in fact, owns the building in which the resident priest of Enpuki-ji—Myokyo—lives. If that’s the case, he’s a very unassuming person. The houses are modest multi-plexes. Enpuku-ji is entered through a miniscule side-garden, which cannot be more than 12 feet square. A small sign on the gate post announces “Zen” and gives the street address.

                Myokyo walks up the street just as I pull into the drive. She is a slight woman with close-cropped hair and a charming smile. She looks younger than her sixty years. I was surprised to see any hair at all. In the photos on Enpuku-ji’s website, her head is shaved. She unlocks a back door, and we enter into a single long, narrow, room. The back end, where we’ve come in, is a small kitchen. A table with three wooden chairs is against the wall; this is where we chat. The rest of the room is taken up by the zendo, which currently has two rows of five zafus facing one another. Myokyo tells me they can accommodate  about fourteen. At the far end of the zendo—the front of the house—there is an altar with a graceful statue of Kwan-yin, the Chinese manifestation of Kannon, the feminized Bodhisattva of Compassion.

                The room is so narrow that the stairway leading to the second floor consumes a significant portion of the area. There is a photograph of Myokyo’s teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, on the wall above the banister.

                The website describes the neighborhood as “ethnic.” It is certainly active. As we talk, I’m aware of the sound of dogs barking and children playing.

                I ask how her students address her. “Myokyo.” Not “sensei”? She ducks her head and shakes it. She tells me she makes it clear to them that she isn’t a teacher. (So, presumably, I cannot call them students.) What, then, is her relationship to them? Guide, she suggests, exemplar. She has a gentle demeanor, but, she warns me, she has been told that her eyes flash when someone doesn’t follow the zendo procedures correctly. “They think I’m angry. I’m not really. I just want to make sure they are doing things properly.” But not a teacher.

                She is an ordained Rinzai monk and priest—“osho.” She is also the Buddhist chaplain at McGill.  She used the term “nun” when she first came to Montreal, but that led to confusion because it was assumed that a nun did not have the same authority as a priest.

                Thirty-five years ago, she accompanied a boy friend to California to attend a sesshin directed by Sasaki Roshi. The boy friend had to return to Canada on family business. She stayed. For a while, she stayed at the Zen Center all by herself. “Literally?” I asked. “Well, some of the time there was another person there.” But essentially, she was on her own. Why did she stay? “Well, the sitting experience was strong.” Strong enough that she remained in the United States, illegally, for ten years, training under Sasaki Roshi in Los Angeles and at the training center on Mount Baldy.

                When Sasaki Roshi eventually asked her where she wanted her Zen Center to be located, she said Montreal—because it seemed the most interesting place in Canada. Leonard Cohen had also trained at Mount Baldy and had a house, next to one in which he lived, that he said he would donate in order to establish a zendo. She flew back to Canada with only the few possessions she was able to bring in her bags and expected that Cohen might meet her at the airport. He didn’t, of course.

                It was difficult at first, she admits, because people thought of it as “Leonard Cohen’s Zen Center.” They would come hoping that he would show up. He didn’t. The donated house is now Myokyo’s residence. The new temple space has been rented from another landlord.

                People learn about the temple by word of mouth.  When new people arrive, she shows them how to sit; describes the meditative process—being aware of the “seed-thoughts” that arise—which can be feelings or emotions as well as ideas. The negative ones we try to bury inside us. The neutral ones and the pleasant ones we allow to stay in our minds and they become stories we tell ourselves. The problem, of course, is that we begin to believe that those stories are our actual lives. It’s not an easy practice. It reminds me of Katagiri Roshi’s statement that the Zen he taught offered “no sweet candy.”

                The matter of Joshu Sasaki comes up. She doesn’t deny the allegations—though she does suggest some of the claims are exaggerated. Still, she has no doubts about his abilities as a teacher; she certainly recognizes him as her teacher. He hasn’t identified an heir, and it appears he won’t. “The tradition says that the student can only become an heir if he surpasses his teacher’s understanding,” she points out. “There is no one who has done that.”

Cypress Trees in the Garden:
Myokyo (Zengetsu) – 39-45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 54, 56, 66, 67, 108, 286
 

4/28 - The Montreal Zen Center

It was Spring on the west coast when we were there to do the first five interviews. Ornamental fruit trees were in full flower—white through pink to burgundy. Although the tulips hadn’t yet opened, the commercial daffodil fields around Laconner were brilliant.  Five days after returning to New Brunswick, I drove to Quebec in order to take part in a sesshin at the Montreal Zen Center. On day two of the sesshin, it snowed—heavily.

                I don’t do sesshin well. To begin with, I have osteo-arthritis of the spine, which makes prolonged sitting without back support agonizing. I’ve had kidney-stones; this is worse. As well, I still haven’t fully recovered from a broken femur. I need to use a cane, which is a nuisance, but getting up from sitting on a cushion or from lying on a foam mattress on the floor requires forethought and leverage. On top of which, because I am not used to a grain-based diet, the vegetarian meals served at the Center give me bountiful flatulence. By my second visit here, I had learned to avoid the breakfast porridge and the evening casseroles, and make do with fresh fruit, raw vegetables, cheese, and surprisingly good bread. Friends notice when I’ve returned from sesshin; they’ll comment that I’ve lost weight—they can see it in the bones of my face.

                And yet twice a year I drive the 800 kilometers from Fredericton to Montreal to take part in sesshin or in a one-day sit. There are, however, times when I wonder why I put myself through it, and when people ask me about it, I find it hard to explain. As we drove here from Kingston, we listened to Leonard Cohen:

Ah I don't believe you'd like it,
You wouldn't like it here.
There ain't no entertainment
and the judgements are severe.

                The teacher is Albert Low. Most of his students simply call him “Albert.” Those of us who prefer something more formal address him as “Mr. Low.” Although he wears the rakusu—the only one in evidence at the Center—which he earned when he passed his first koan under the tutelage of Philip Kapleau, he eschews titles such as “roshi” or even “sensei.”

                The center is located in a large, three-storey house on an L-shaped lot in a well-to-do residential neighborhood. It is across the narrow green of Park Stanley from the Rivière‑des‑Prairies. The extensive lawns are graced with a traditional English Garden with lots of “edge.” Throughout it there are Buddha figures scattered.

                My first meeting is with four of Low’s senior students. One of these, Monique, wants me to understand what a remarkable thing Low has done in establishing a bi-lingual sangha in this city. She sent me an email before our meeting to stress it. It is remarkable. Low is from London, England, and still speaks with a British accent. Most of his teishos are given in English, although dokusan is available in either French or English. But he has been embraced by his francophone students.

                In some ways, Low is the most intellectual of Zen teachers. He is the author of about a dozen books. Some are on predictable topics—Zen and the Sutras or Hakuin on Kensho—others deal with topics such as business management or evolution. His teishos are peppered with quotations from T. S. Eliot and Saint John of the Cross. He is particularly fond of the Hindu teacher, Nisargadatta.  He has recently begun a new blog—Thoughts Along the Way.  But none of this is what makes him remarkable or generates the loyalty I see in these four.

                They struggle to define the quality they so admire. His teaching, they tell me is authentic, austere. Part of the difficulty is that, for all four, English is a second language, even though they all speak it well. Other teachers, they point out, become involved with extraneous issues—with psychology or social issues or morality. But none of that is what practice is about.

                Eventually I decide the term they are looking for is “uncompromising.” And Low’s teaching certainly is that.

                I have a short, forty minute, interview with him after I meet with the students. I begin with the question I have started with elsewhere: “What is the function of Zen?”

                “Oh, there’s no function of Zen.”

                “So why do people come here?”

                “Because they think there is a function of Zen.”

                “And what do they find out?”

                “There is no function of Zen. If they work long enough.”

                Perhaps “uncompromising” also implies “honesty.” There is an honesty and directness in his teaching which can be excruciating. In dokusan, even courteous prevarications are caught and pounced upon. So maybe those are the qualities—the lack of compromise, the honesty—which keep drawing me back here.

                After my interview with Low, I spend a little time taking photographs of the grounds. The crocuses are out. If you’re patient, Spring always arrives.

[Albert Low died on January 27, 2016. My memorial tribute to him can be found at:
Albert Low memorial]

4/1 – Eshu Martin, the Victoria Zen Center

                Today, April 1st, is Joshu Sasaki’s 106th birthday. He is the Zen master who made national headlines last November when there was finally confirmation of long suspected inappropriate behavior at his monastery on Mount Baldy in the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles. Sasaki was accused of touching the breasts of female students during private interviews. One of the people who revealed the extent of the problem was Eshu Martin, now the leader of the Victoria Zen Center in Sooke, British Columbia.

                The center is in his home, a small wooden house on a lot with a second building used for rentals. The path to the front door is lined with a statue of Kannon and a couple of garden gnomes. We knock on the door of the rental house and a young boy, approximately eleven years old, comes out of the other house and asks if he can help us. He introduces himself as Eshu’s son, Kigen, and directs us to the correct building. He, his mother, and his younger sister, are leaving as we arrive. “I hope it goes well, Dad,” he calls as they get into their car.

                Eshu is 6’4”,and has a shaved head, but a well developed auburn beard. He has a deep belly laugh. The house is both his family’s living space and the zendo. We sit at a moveable table in the dining area, next to the kitchen. It is very much family space. There are colored eggs on the table and Easter decorations on the wall. A central fire place separates this space from a small zendo that sits 12; if the dining table and chairs are removed on this side of the fireplace, there is room for another ten. His bedroom, downstairs, has a double mattress on the floor which he takes out into the hall so the room can be used for sanzen.

                Eshu was raised in Pickering, Ontario. When he was nine, his mother went into a coma, and he prayed for her recovery. When she died, he became very angry and began acting out. He became a vandal and started using drugs early. He was 15 when his father remarried and would wake every morning and think how he was going to made his step-mother miserable that day. Eventually he became involved in martial arts, discovering that was a better way to work off his anger than destruction of public property.

                The martial arts instructor gave him a book which provided the philosophical background to their discipline. In it he found the story of the two monks who come upon a young woman unable to cross a stream because the bridge had been washed out. The elder monk picked the girl up and carried her across; the younger monk fretted about this inappropriate activity all day until at last he asked, “How could you do that?” The older monk said, “I put the girl down back at the stream. You’ve been carrying her all this distance.” Eshu becomes a little emotional retelling the story. “It made me realize that it was me who had been carrying all that anger for so many years.” It was his introduction to Zen. He bought a copy of Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen and began following its instructions on how to sit.

                By that time he had a girl friend, later to be his wife, and they decided they needed to leave Pickering. She had some contacts in British Columbia, so that was where they went. And in Victoria he found a notice for the Victoria Zen Center. He went there and found the membership was made up of a number of elderly women who sat for a short period on their meeting evenings and then had tea. “Each evening the session ended with a discussion about who would be responsible for bringing the tea next time and who would bring the cookies. It drove me nuts.”

                Eventually he began working with Eshin Godfrey, Abbot of the Vancouver Zen Center. Godfrey was a student of Joshu Sasaki and arranged for Martin to go down to Mount Baldy. The training there was severe, but Martin took to it easily. The regime worked for him, and he decided that he wanted to stay there and become a monk. He phoned his girl friend, who was then working at a L’Arche community and told him his decision. Then he met with Sasaki and asked to be ordained. Sasaki told him, “No. You go back to Victoria. Get married. Then we think about monk.” Eshu called his girl friend and proposed.

                He is no longer formally connected with Rinzai-ji, nor is the Victoria Zen Center, but they do work with other centers, such as Genjo Marinello’s in Seattle. One of Eshu Martin’s current concerns is that all persons, wherever they live, have access to Zen instruction and to that end he has started an on-line introductory program.

Cypress Trees in the Garden: 
Martin, Eshu – 15, 43-44, 46, 47, 50, 52, 84, 98-115, 203, 468