6/18 - The Springwater Center for Meditative Inquiry

                Another county road in New York state, this one in what appears to be primarily an agricultural region. I miss the side road to the Springwater Center on my first pass, come to a dead end, turn around, and watch more closely on the way back. Even when I pull onto the gravel road indicated, I’m not entirely sure I’m in the right place until I see a bench set up by a stream in the forested area which I drive through very slowly and carefully. In the reception area at the main building there is a notice that a black bear has been seen in the vicinity of the parking lot. Visitors are warned not to stare at it but to turn and go the other way.

                The full name of the Center is The Springwater Center for Meditative Inquiry. Toni Packer established it in 1981, after leaving the Rochester Zen Center. Philip Kapleau had identified her as his successor at the Center, but, after a period of overseeing it during one of his absences, she decided she could no longer practice as a Buddhist. The question she found herself facing was whether or not the type of work that took place within the Zen tradition could be done without all the trappings—without identifying it as Buddhist or even calling it meditation. It was a brave decision on her part, but I suspect if she had not already been identified as Kapleau’s heir, she would not have drawn away as many followers as she did.

                When I wrote to ask permission to come here, I said that I was aware the center was not directly affiliated with the Zen. Wayne Coger wrote back to me and said: “While we are not a Buddhist Center we are incorporated as a Zen Center. The late Roshi Kapleau once wrote that the ‘spirit of Zen is all pervading.’ So legally, and perhaps in spirit, we are in the Zen tradition.”

                It is a very informal atmosphere here. There is no religious imagery of any type, although the “sitting room” looks pretty much like a zendo without an altar. The rules are all optional—save for two: Everyone takes on a one hour work period each day, and when silence in called for, people are silent. Other than that, even during retreats, one may choose to sit or not as one wishes. “You can go for a walk if you want,” Sandra Gonzáles [photo above] tells me. Then adds, “But they don’t. They follow the schedule.”

                Sandra is from Nicaragua and has a charming Latin accent. She had studied with Eido Shimano and then Joshu Sasaki before learning about Toni Packer in a book and coming here in 1988.

                After lunch—the best vegetarian lasagne I’ve ever had!—Sandra leads a discussion circle. It reminds me of a cross between a Quaker meeting and a group therapy session. People sit in silence for a while and then someone brings up a topic which people are free to respond to in any way they wish. The topic that comes up is “authority”—the authority that teachers have or are given.

                Sandra is a “retreat leader” here—she is identified as such in the pamphlet—but she is hesitant to claim to be an authority, or even a teacher. When I push her, she reluctantly agrees to the term “facilitator.”

                She had gone to her first face-to-face meeting with Toni Packer with some anxiety. The format was much what she was used to in Zen, seated on a cushion before the “teacher,” and she began by explaining that her work until then had been largely with koans. Toni asked her why she had come to Springwater, and Sandra said, “I don’t know.” “Then that,” Toni told her, “is your koan.” To sit and to wonder—no other practice. That is meditative inquiry.

                Wayne Coger, another “retreat facilitator,” had been with Toni at the Rochester Zen Center and was one of the nearly 200 students who left to join her when she withdrew. Both he and Sandra have this habit of closing their eyes and reflecting in silence on a question before answering it. I timed one pause at 41 seconds; several were almost as long. I wonder if it is something Toni Packer did as well.

                There is minimal teaching here, so it is difficult to get a handle on what is being done. I suggest to Wayne that they’ve created a supportive environment in which people are able to pursue their own inquiry. He agrees but stresses that this is often easier to do in the company of others.

                So there is sitting; there are talks (one of the guests refers to them as Dharma Talks, but I suspect the “facilitators” just think of them as talks); and there are face-to-face meetings. Not the few seconds or minutes associated with dokusan or sanzen; face-to-face interviews can be half an hour long.

                It is intriguing and attractive, but one cannot help wondering how sustainable it will be without an identified resident teacher. Toni Packer is still alive but is not physically well and has diminished mobility; she no longer has much to do with the operations here. There are questions about the future that need to be addressed. Wayne suggests that the best way to deal with them is to just allow the situation to unfold. Maybe he’s right. I hope he is.
               [On August 23--slightly more than two months after my visit--Toni Packer died. I sincerely wish the staff and members of Springwater well and hope they find a way to continue into the future.]

Cypress Trees in the Garden: pp. 385-408
 

6/17 - The Toronto Zen Centre

             The Toronto Zen Centre is on High Park Gardens, a well-to-do neighborhood on the west side of the city. I follow a stone path around the house to the back entrance, passing carefully cultivated and maintained flower beds adorned with elegant Bodhisattva statues. Downstairs, there is a Zendo (with about twenty-six places) and a Buddha Hall opposite. A student takes me up to a sun-room on the second floor where I meet Taigen Henderson (his students call him Sensei Henderson). “It looks like the property taxes might be a bit steep here,” I say. He nods his head.

                Taigen is a dharma heir of Sunyana Graef, who had expressed surprise that I had not included him on the original list of teachers I had intended to visit. She had been right. It was a major oversight on my part.

                The Toronto Zen Centre, the first affiliate center of the Rochester Zen Center, is also the first official Zen practice center to be established in Canada, and Taigen is the first Canadian teacher to be trained in Canada. “He wouldn’t tell you that,” one of his students informs me, “because he’s so humble.” I was aware of that humilty while I talked with him, but I was also aware of his self-confidence. He’s a man with a lot of life experience who is very much at ease with where he is at this moment.

                When I ask the two students I met afterwards to describe him, the first thing they both noted was that he was inspiring. “You think, wow, if I could be like that.” They tell me that he embodies the teaching.

                I’ve heard other students describe their teachers in similar terms. Zen training does—if one persists in it—form people of strong character. I suspect that, at least in part, it’s because these are people who know themselves deeply and have nothing to prove to anyone else. They are the “true man of no rank.”

                I remark on his sense of humor. “He has a great sense of humor,” the students tell me, and has the ability to use that humor to lighten tension when things become challenging or difficult.

                He has a very expressive face and is a wonderful story-teller. And he has some pretty amazing stories to tell: The story of spending several years in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) when a young boy, at which time he got his first taste of Buddhism. “Somebody showed me a high school year book in which I said I wanted to be a Buddha when I grew up. I was just being a smart-alec at the time.” A story of spending months deep in the British Columbia interior, 200 miles from the nearest road, with two other young men. “We didn’t see one other human being in that time.” A story of working in an asbestos mine. “They were just realizing how dangerous this stuff was. In Toronto they were worried about brake-linings, and here I was sweeping asbestos dust half an inch thick up off the floor.” A story of waking up and seeing smoke pouring through a vent and realizing that the house next door was on fire. “The firemen came and broke the windows, and the house went up just like that. It made me aware just how impermanent life is, and I thought if I didn’t start doing something now, then when?” A similar sentiment is inscribed on the han outside the zendo.

                He went to Rochester to do a workshop with Philip Kapleau and told Kapleau that he would like to train there for a while. Kapleau told him to stay in Canada. So he returned to Toronto and joined the affiliate branch here. He found work in the construction trades, doing house renovations. Eventually, he worked on providing low-income housing as well as training to homeless people. He also helped build some women’s shelters, including one called “Women in Transition.” “They gave me a t-shirt with their name on it, but a friend of mine suggested I might want to think twice about wearing it.”

                Sunyana Graef by this time had become the teacher in Toronto, while also maintaining centers in  Vermont and Costa Rica. Taigen expressed an interest in living a life more fully committed to practice, and she told him that it wasn’t time yet. His work with the homeless and women’s shelters was, after all, an example of Right Livelihood—the fifth step in the Eightfold Path. Eventually difficulties with a sub-contractor resulted in him leaving the trade, and then the time was right for ordination.

                The Centre had been at another location, in a neighborhood where prices were low because of fears an expressway was going to be built alongside. When the expressway plans were withdrawn, house prices jumped. The Centre was able to sell its place for $400,000, and purchase its current property for $350,000. At the time, it was also considered a less desirable neighborhood because of the occasional stench drifting in from nearby stock yards. When the stock yards were closed, house values went up. “The property is now probably worth $2,000,000,” Taigen admits.

                It is axiomatic that when one enters the path, opportunities arise. At times, events occur which even appear to support that axiom. What else would one expect for a True Man of No Rank?

Cypress Trees in the Garden:

Henderson, Taigen – 346, 353-67, 369, 387, 389

6/15 - Sister Elaine MacInnes

                Sister Elaine MacInnes of Moncton begins her autobiography on the beach at Shediac, New Brunswick—a place with a great deal of significance for my family. My wife spent her summers there as a child, and it was one of the places she was most eager to introduce me to after we’d met. When our children were young, our family and the friends I’m currently staying with outside of Toronto spent two weeks every summer there.

                A film on Sister Elaine produced by Vision TV begins with her on a beach which, if not actually Shediac, is supposed to represent it. She uses the setting to tell the story of the little salt doll who discovered her true nature by allowing herself to dissolve in the ocean. It’s as apt an analogy of kensho as I know.

                “I suspect,” I tell her, “that you are the only transmitted Zen teacher to come from Atlantic Canada.”

                “Oh, yes. For a while, I would have been the only one from Canada.” She isn’t bragging. One can tell from her tone of voice that she remains amazed by the events of her life.

                The full import of what she said doesn’t hit for a moment. I’ve been hugged by the first Canadian to receive authorization to teach Zen. That’s pretty cool.

                Our meeting takes place in the Mother House of Our Lady’s Missionaries, the order of Roman Catholic nuns to which Sister Elaine belongs. A friend of hers, Patrick Gallagher, arranged the meeting and joins us. He tells me that when Sister Elaine returned to Canada after years abroad as a missionary sister, a friend of his told him—“This is what I thought he said!”—that he was going to attend a “talk on Zen.” That sounded interesting, so Patrick expressed an interest in attending as well. “I’ll check to see if it’s okay,” the friend said. Patrick thought, “This must be a very shy woman if she vets her audience!” Eventually he was called in for an interview, and it became clear that a discernment was being made about whether he was a suitable candidate to take up Zen practice. “The first time we sat was on chairs, facing the wall. We were told to keep physically and mentally still for eleven minutes. I thought, ‘That’s impossible!’” The friend didn’t come back; Patrick kept returning.

                Sister Elaine became a nun after her fiancé was killed during the Second World War, and the order sent her to Japan. There she met the Jesuit, Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle who was studying and practicing Zen. Sister Elaine had some curiosity about Zen and decided if Father Lassalle was practicing, “It had to be okay.”

                She decided she wanted the person who introduced her to Zen to be a woman, so she was put in contact with a Japanese Abbess, who at their first meeting said, “If you believe God is in Heaven, then you have no place in Buddhism.”

                Later, Father Lassalle introduced her to Yamada Kuon Roshi—“Who must surely be one of the great Zen teachers of the 20th century.” He was more welcoming. Although he did not understand the concept of a God external and responsible for creation, he respected the Christian practitioners he had met and was happy to work with them. Sister Elaine achieved kensho during her second sesshin with him, and then went on to complete the koan curriculum of the Sanbo Kyodan School of Zen. “Philip Kapleau didn’t, you know,” she reminds me—as others have as well.

                After twenty years in Japan, her order sent her to the Philippines and supported her when she set up a zendo there.

                It was during the Marcos regime. One of Marcos’s staunchest critics was Horatio “Boy” Morales—who was arrested in 1982 and confined for four years, during which time he was subjected to torture and other indignities. He decided that he wanted to use his time in prison to learn Zen; after all, there is not a great deal of difference between a monk’s and a prisoner’s cell. He requested that Sister Elaine visit him to provide instruction. There were only fifteen prisoners in the facility, and fourteen of them practiced with her.
              

                When Morales was released from prison by Corazon Aquino, he talked openly about Sister Elaine and his Zen practice. Suddenly she was an international celebrity. This led to an invitation to come to Britain to work with the Phoenix Trust, an agency that worked for prisoners’ rights. Soon she was teaching meditation in English prisons.
                Things were a little tougher when she came home to Canada; the prison system was suspicious and couldn’t categorize the work she was doing so it took a while for her to gain access. But eventually she made inroads and was eventually awarded the Order of Canada for her work.
                So I also got a hug from an Officer in the Order of Canada—that’s kind of cool. But not as cool as hugging the first Zen Master in Canada.

Cypress Trees in the Garden:

MacInnes, Sister Elaine – 133-40, 141-42, 174, 304, 309