7/14 - Dosho Port

                Dosho (Mike) Port is one of Dainin Katagiri’s Dharma heirs. He lives and works outside of St. Paul, Minnesota, in a place called White Bear. I am not going to be able to get there for these interviews, but, as chance has it, he is giving a workshop at the Boundless Way Temple in Worcester [see May 3rd entry] on the same weekend I am traveling to Massachusetts to interview Bernie Glassman in Montague. Joan comes with me on this trip, and we book rooms by Hotwire, which actually puts us in Marlborough overnight. But our GPS—we refer to the female voice as “Daphne”—gets us to both Marlborough and Worcester without a hitch.

                We find Melissa Blacker, David Rynick, and Dosho drinking coffee on the verandah as we pull up. The clematis on the trellis behind their large Buddha is in luxuriant bloom. Melissa shows us a Kannon statue she rescued from a second-hand store.

                The agreement I made with Dosho was that we’d meet for breakfast and then I’d drive him to Logan Airport. Melissa uses her i-phone to help us find an appropriate restaurant.

                After a long practice with Katagiri in the Soto tradition, Dosho went to Japan where he became involved in koan practice. He has continued the practice with Melissa and David at Boundless Way. I remark that it’s a fair distance between Massachusetts and Minneapolis, and he explains that he has done some of the work via Skype. Electronic dokusan. It’s an intriguing concept.

                Dosho grew up in a devout Catholic family and, for a while, considered becoming a priest. Puberty helped put an end to that career path. When, later, he ordained as a Buddhist priest, his grandmother blamed his mother, “She was completely fine with me, but she was mad with my mother for about a decade. She figured it wasn’t my fault that my mother had let me go astray.” I ask, “Really? She held a grudge for ten years?” He laughs. “You’ll have to ask my mom. Maybe it’s an exaggeration, but I’m tellin’ the story. Okay?” As Joan will  attest, I’ve been known to exaggerate a bit from time to time as well. I’ve always felt it was the story-teller’s prerogative. And you can tell that Dosho is a story-teller.

                He describes a trip he took with Dainin Katagiri when they had what he now estimates was a nine-hour wait at the San Francisco airport. Katagiri found one of “those plastic, awful blue-color, plastic airport chairs, and he just sat down and waited, and every few hours he would get up and go to the bathroom. There were other people with us, but I saw myself, at least, as his attendant, so I was trying to do what he did. But after two or three hours, I told him, ‘I’m going to take a walk.’ So I walked around a bit and came back, and he was still sitting there, so I sat down next to him. And a moment or two later, he leaned over and said, ‘You’re not a very patient person.’”

                We continue the conversation in the car. Joan is driving. It is her first time in Boston, but, with one eye on Daphne and the other on the highway signs, she manages. Meanwhile, Dosho and I are discussing the way in which the koan curriculum operates. “Shikan-taza is difficult,” he points out. “The koan system kind of tricks you into shikan-taza.”

                We discuss the difficulties some centers are having now that the first and second generation of teachers are no longer with them. A lot of the attraction of Zen in the early days had been based on those strong personalities. “I heard Leonard Cohen say that he felt such a connection with Joshu Sasaki that he would have learned shoe-making from him if he’d been a shoe-maker rather than a Zen Master. I like to think my relationship with Katagiri Roshi was like that.”

                But it strikes me that it’s not just a matter of personality. In the same way that the youth drawn to Zen in the ‘60s and ‘70s were challenging the values of the previous generation, young people today are questioning some of the structures associated with Zen, including the Japanese cultural characteristics. “In the old days,” Dosho remembers, “when we’d meet people from other centers, we’d all compare how tough our training was. Now it’s almost the reverse. Now centers are vying with one another about how accommodating they can be. There was this young man at a talk I gave who raised his hand and asked, ‘Please, sir, what is the minimum amount of asceticism needed to practice Zen?’”

                It’s also, as Bobby Rhodes had pointed out, a more electronically engaged generation. And if dokusan can be done by Skype, why not experiment with other ways of using the internet to promote Zen? Dosho, like Eshu Martin, is working along those lines. I’m not wholly comfortable with the idea; however, distance education works in other fields, so why not Zen?

                After leaving Dosho at the airport, we set Daphne to take us to Northampton where we will stay tonight. Two hours later, she takes us down an old farm road, stops on a dirt track in the middle of a cornfield, and tells us we’ve reached our destination.

Cypress Trees in the Garden:

Port, Dosho Mike – 118, 207, 409-21, 468-69, 476-77

7/8 - Bobby Rhodes [Zen Master Soeng Hyang]

                In addition to the Japanese teachers who came to North America in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there were also Zen teacher from China, Vietnam, and Korea. The focus of my books has been the tradition as it came down from Japan, but over and over again I have had people mention the importance of Korean teacher, Seung Sahn, in America. John Tarrant, for example, told me that his first breakthrough had occurred during a retreat with Seung Sahn.

                Zen Master Soeng Hyang is one of Seung Sahn’s heirs currently residing in Berkeley, California. She had previously been in Providence, Rhode Island, where I had hoped to be able to visit her. Seung Sahn’s temple had also been in Providence.              

                 When I learned that she had relocated, I arranged a Skype interview with her. We are a few minutes late getting started, and she contacted me, introducing herself as “Bobbie.” The title “Zen Master” is a rank within the Kwan Um School of Zen, and the name “Soeng Hyang” means “Nature’s fragrance.” “Like incense, kind of,” she tells me. Her birth name is Bobbie Rhodes, and she is a practicing nurse working in hospice care, as well as a Zen teacher. She carries her lap top into the bedroom as we begin, and she continues the conversation while lying back in bed.

                Her father had been in the Navy, and the family relocated several times. She had been born in Providence, but then the family moved to California. They belonged to the Episcopal Church, and, as a young woman, Bobbie was struck by the words of the Creed. She found it so difficult to claim to believe these statements that she would become physically ill and have to leave the church. “Jesus rose again on the third day, ascended to Heaven, where he is seated at the right hand of God. Where is the right hand of God?” she wondered.

                She volunteered to supervise some of the younger Sunday School participants—“I watched them color”—and one Sunday one of them, asked her, “Where’s Jesus?” Where, indeed, she wondered. “He was here last week,” the child insisted. She was referring to the bearded father of one of the other students who had been telling stories to them. But the question stung Bobbie. “Where was Jesus?” “It was my first koan.”

                In 1963, she had a nurse’s license and was working with Mexican-American farm workers in California. A doctor at the clinic introduced her to marijuana and LSD. She would take the drug and wander about in nature. It was an important opening for her. Eventually, however, it didn’t lead anywhere else, and she decided to look for a Zen teacher. She had decided she wanted to do koan practice, and when she approached the monks at the San Francisco Zen Center, she was told that wasn’t part of their tradition.

                Then on another acid trip, she got the feeling that she should go back to Providence and “make amends” with her parents, to whom she hadn’t spoken for two years. So she crossed the continent, found work in Providence, and then looked for an apartment. One of the apartments she looked at happened to be over Seung Sahn’s temple. “It was just his apartment, really.” She didn’t take the apartment, but she did meet Seung Sahn and, shortly after, moved into the temple with two other students. She stayed at the temple, as it moved to larger accommodations, until her daughter was born fourteen years later, and they looked for their own house.

                The focus of the Kwan Um School is mindfulness of the present moment. Mindfulness is somewhat easier to do in Seated Meditation (they don’t use Japanese terms like zazen), but it is supposed to continue throughout all of one’s activity. It was a natural aid to her work as a nurse, to be able to encounter people and situations clearly and directly. She tells me, “My teacher never encouraged samadhi. He discouraged samadhi.” Zen was not to be something separate from daily activity, it was to be part of all one did. Constantly to ask, “What is this?”  What is this specific situation I am in, this specific person whom I am encountering?

                I ask about the size of the Kwan Um School, which is not very big, compared to the more common schools descended from Japanese teachers. She says that most of the members are older and admits that she had expected Zen to “bloom like crazy” because it had made so much sense to her. To her disappointment, it hasn’t. “I don’t know. Maybe people have stopped taking LSD as much,” she jokes. Then more seriously, “I don’t know what happened. I do think there’s a real addiction to electronics now.” And that certainly may be a part of it. Zen is about encountering reality. “Virtual reality,” by definition, is not reality.

Cypress Trees in the Garden: pp. 423-437

6/24 - Father Robert Kennedy

                When I was working in International Development with the YMCA, I used to subscribe to the National Catholic Reporter, in part because it had a leftist slant on the Catholic Church—my birth heritage—with which I was comfortable, but largely because it was one of the best sources I could find for hard news coverage of events in Latin America. It covered other stories of interest to Catholics as well, of course.

                I first learned of Father Robert Kennedy—a Dharma heir of Bernie Glassman—in an NCR article in which it was announced that Kennedy, a Jesuit priest as well as an authorized Zen teacher, had recently given transmission to a Trappist monk, Kevin Hunt [see photo]. If I remember the article correctly, Father Hunt, when asked what a Trappist Zen Master did, replied that he wasn’t sure but suspected he was going to find out.

                Robert Kennedy maintains the Morning Star Zendo in Jersey City. I was unable to meet him face-to-face—he has a heavy travel schedule, trying to be available to people who invite him to lead retreats wherever in the world that invitation comes—so we had a conversation by Skype in which he explained that the Zendo is really a one bedroom apartment in which a room has been set up as a meditation hall.

                Kennedy had spent several years in Japan in the 60s, was ordained a Catholic priest in Japan, without having any interest in Zen at all. After he returned to complete his graduate studies in America in the early ‘70s, however, he was driving his car one day and heard Alan Watts on the radio pointing out that “nothing in nature is symmetrical.” “I don’t know why that statement hit me with the strength that it did, but I had to stop the car and think. It was an extraordinary moment.”

                He went back to his rooms, took a blanket off the bed, folded it to make a cushion, and began sitting. His Zen practice had begun. “Something in my spirit said I had to stop doing theology and turn to experience. Turn away from theory and learn from my own doing.”

                Eventually he realized he needed to work with a formal teacher. He had a sabbatical in 1976 and went back to Japan—“not as a teacher this time, but as a pilgrim.” The Jesuit order, which was committed to understanding other cultures and faith systems, supported his desire to undertake Zen training and arranged for him to meet Yamada Koun Roshi, the same teacher with whom Sister Elaine MacInnes had worked.

                Father Kennedy remembers the first time he saw Yamada Roshi walk into the zendo. “I was sitting in the back, up against the back wall, and I remember he walked in to light the incense and to begin the day of sitting. I remember it vividly. Again, I cannot explain it. The very sight of him walking into the zendo was life changing.”

                When the sabbatical year was up, Kennedy continued training in the United States, at Yamada Roshi’s suggestion, with Taizan Maezumi in Los Angeles. I mention that in my interview with Jan Chozen Bays, she described the Los Angeles center as half hippie-commune, half Zen temple. Kennedy pointed out that he didn’t live at the center but had rooms in the Jesuit House so missed the hippie part of the experience.

                He met Bernie Glassman in Los Angeles, and when Glassman received inka from Maezumi and returned to New York, Kennedy became his student. Glassman’s approach to Zen training was very different from that of Kennedy’s first two teachers. He had a strong sense of social responsibility and, at one point, had his students living on the streets with the homeless, having to beg for money if they wanted to buy a cup of coffee. “Glassman Roshi said that a lot of people like Zen because they like to sit in a zendo and be quiet and there’s a certain artistic flavor. The last time I saw him, a few weeks ago, he said to me, ‘Some people like Zen clubs were they can sit together with like-minded people.’ But he brought us out onto the street.”

                After Glassman acknowledged Kennedy as a Dharma heir, Kennedy’s first inclination was to continue to sit by himself for a while in order to allow his practice to mature, but Glassman immediately assigned him a student, a Catholic nun, whose training he was put in charge of. Then other students began to appear. At first they were Catholics, but then people from other—or no—traditions came.

                He has now acknowledged several Dharma heirs of his own, including the Trappist Father Hunt. Hunt remains cloistered but, Kennedy informs me, meets with lay students who come to him.

                From the first days that Zen began to be practiced in North America, there have been Catholics who remained faithful to the church but were also drawn to Zen. Another Trappist, Thomas Merton, was one well known contemplative who had an interest in Zen. Apparently that interest continues. We probably still don’t know what a Zen Catholicism would be like, but, with some luck, we might find out.

[Note: In May of 2014, I had an opportunity to visit and interview Kevin Hunt. See entry for 5/28.]

Cypress Trees in the Garden:

Kennedy, Father Robert – 134, 303-10, 318-19, 468, 469

6/20 - The Rochester Zen Center

                I have been told several times on this journey that the majority of Zen practitioners in North America today are still baby-boomers, people—like me—who became interested in the 1960s. There have been young people at many of the centers I’ve visited, but there are other centers—including my own sangha in Montreal—where a young member means someone in their 40s.

                A good number of baby-boomers came to Zen, of course, through drugs. I tell Bodhin Kjolhede that my short answer when people ask how I got involved is, “Mescaline.” “Me too!” he says. “Mescaline was my drug of choice as well!” Well, drugs may have been the first step, then came the books, of which there were two in particular. The people who read Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginners Mind made their way to San Francisco. Those who read Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen came here—to Rochester, New York. I read Kapleau and wrote a letter to the Zen Center in 1971, to inquire if there were any place to practice in Canada, because, at the time, I was unable to return to the US. Their reply didn’t show much sympathy for my situation, basically stating that if I were serious, I would figure out a way to get to Rochester. So I didn’t expect a particularly warm reception on this visit. Things have mellowed here, however, since the '70s.

                The Zen Center is on Arnold Park, another fairly ritzy neighborhood; two adjacent houses linked by a passageway. The grounds and structures are impressive and maybe a little daunting. I am early for my 9:00 appointment with Bodhin Kjolhede and am told I can wait on a sofa in the foyer outside what appears to be the administrative offices. Young people dressed in dark navy short-sleeve shirts and matching loose pants hurry about their business—men and women barefoot and with close-cropped, but not shaved, heads. I’m reminded of what someone had said about the San Francisco Zen Center in the days before Blanche Hartman became abbess: “Well, they’re not unfriendly.”

                However, as in other centers I’ve visited, if there is a certain stiffness among the students (or perhaps they are just focused on carrying out their duties), the teachers have all been very easy to talk to. Bodhin is relaxed, humorous, and capable of putting others at ease. It’s that “man of no rank” with which I associated Taigen Henderson. Every single one of them has been someone you could imagine you’d enjoy having a beer with and discussing something other than Zen.

                Rochester—when Philip Kapleau was in charge—had a reputation for a very strict regime. It has been called “boot camp” or “samurai” Zen. “I thrived in that atmosphere,” Bodhin tells me. Others did not, which was surely a factor in Toni Packer’s defection along with 200 members of the center.

                This is clearly a Buddhist center—the decorations make that obvious. But it is also American. Even the navy shirts and pants which identifies the individual as a priest (Bodhin wears them as well) is something that could be worn on the street without attracting attention. “Kapleau Roshi was committed to developing an American style Zen,” the new roshi tells me.  And in his own tenure as “abbot” he has maintained and furthered that. Although he considers himself conservative, in retaining the teaching he received, he has also loosened some of the structures.

                There is a Zendo in the Center on Arnold Park where morning and evening sitting takes place, but for the past ten years all sesshin have taken place at their practice center—but not a monastery—at Chapin Mill, thirty-five minutes outside the city. We drive there because Bodhin is rehearsing, with the participants, a wedding he will be supervising for two members later in the week.

                The Chapin Mill center is four lengthy corridors surrounding an inner courtyard, where the wedding ceremony will take place. The zendo is light and airy and seats up to sixty participants. One of the staff tells me that they can house up to seventy people here. The building is occasionally rented to other groups (“Of like mind,” Bodhin points out), as is the Buddha Hall at the Arnold Park address. These rentals are a significant source of income.

                Chapin Mill is a lovely rural retreat with a bit more than 100 acres. Philip Kapleau’s grave is here, marked by the mill stone from the original mill. As I wait for Bodhin to complete his business, I do the tai-chi form by Kapleau's grave, then place a pebble on the mill stone.  And I am glad to have had the opportunity to do so.

                This is a strong community of between 400 and 500 members. While they might not be called monks, there a number of young, committed, ordained persons. One feels that this is all evidence that Zen is safely rooted in North America. But there is one thing I can’t help noticing. Rochester has a large African-American population; that’s evident from walking around downtown. But there are only a very few black practitioners here, at one of the oldest and most well-established centers in the country.

                Zen practice may be secure, but, in general, it still only draws people from a fairly narrow segment of the general population.
                 As I am walking to my car at Arnold Park after taking Roshi Kjolhede's photo, I see a line of Zen students come down the street, with bags for picking up litter. I ask,  "Are these guys yours?" "Takahatsu," he tells me. "But don't try talking to them," he warns. They are focused on carrying out their duties.

Cypress Trees in the Garden:

Kjolhede, Bodhin – 146, 204, 321-336, 340, 342, 344, 345, 346, 374, 375, 388, 402, 420, 468