10/4 - Joan Sutherland

                The first thing one notices about Joan Sutherland is her dimples when she smiles. One immediately has the sense that here is a teacher who would be able to put students at ease. This is a teacher with whom it would be a pleasure to work, a teacher with whom one would wish to work.

                We meet in her home, a former barn transformed into a lovely living space. It is in Pueblo style (or Pueblo Revival), with smooth white walls and exposed rafters, but because of the space’s former use, the ceiling is much higher than usual. One can see the former hayloft window in the peak. The outside wall is field stone, which Joan had to mortar in order to keep the “critters” out.

                In one corner of the room, there is an altar to Guanyin, with an unlit stick of incense in a bowl. A large calligraphy of the word “Buddha” graces a wall. There are several other Buddhist touches but also a large votive painting of Santo Miguel. And when I ask if she is a Buddhist, Joan responds immediately. “No.”

                She is, however, a Chan (Zen) teacher and priest, authorized in the Sanbo Kyodan School, belonging to the lineage descending from Robert Aitken through John Tarrant. Like Tarrant, she has come to question the forms by which Zen has been brought to the west and has sought new ways to mine the richness of the koan tradition. She does not hesitate when I ask her, “What is the function of Chan?”—the term she prefers to Zen. She immediately replies, “Awakening. It has to be awakening.” And if awakening is the purpose, then it becomes important to distinguish between what is “Dharma” and what is Culture. Institutional structures are only valuable in so far as they assist in eliciting awakening. Otherwise, they can be—and perhaps should be—allowed to fall away. “Unless they’re beautiful,” she adds. Unless they are retained for their aesthetic value.

                She found a copy of the Daodejing—no doubt then called the Tao Te Ching—as a young girl and was so deeply taken by it that she did graduate work in East Asian languages. There were not, however, many career opportunities for someone with that kind of training. The only job offer she received after graduating came from the CIA. “I turned it down.” She learned about koans and fell in love with them, knew intuitively that here was a deep wisdom—“like a dragon coiled at the bottom of the ocean”—that could be drawn upon. It was as if the dragon were dreaming the koans and murmuring in its sleep, “And some of us are listening for dragon murmurings.”

                But she could not immediately find a teacher with whom to work. “I am a failed Soto Zen student,” she admits. Then she attended the funeral of a fellow Zen student, and the ceremony was officiated by John Tarrant Roshi, and she knew she had found her teacher.

                She went through traditional koan training with him, received transmission, and began work with her own students. But both she and Tarrant understood that koans had a greater potential than the often very narrow, institutionalized way in which they were traditionally used. They sought new ways of presenting and working with koans. As far as possible, the language was modernized. Instead of “Mu” they used “No.” Instead of the traditional “correct answer” associated with traditional koan study, students were encouraged to discover how the koan could be something active in their personal lives.

                She does hold fairly traditional meditation retreats, but she also holds “koan retreats,” in which there is more discussion. She also holds Koan Salons, where a group of students—all of whom already work with koans—discuss a single koan collectively, perhaps for multiple meetings.

                She has a small “casita” near the house, where she meets with students and where her secretary has an office. But the retreats are held at the Cerro Gordo Temple operated by the Maha Bodhi Society, a kind of ecumenical Buddhist group which provides space to various Buddhist traditions. It is about a ten minute walk—fifteen for me with the cane—and we go over to it, only to find that the caretaker isn’t there and it’s locked. We can hear, however, the hollow knock of a han being struck. It is coming from the Upaya Zen Temple, only a few feet away, whose teacher is Joan Halifax.

                “Do people ever get the two of you confused?”

                “All the time.” In addition to which, there is Joan Reiki in Albuquerque with whom Henry Shukman studied.

                Joan Sutherland tells me of her love and belief in Prajna and the Chan tradition, “And it will make me cry, because it always does.” But she also admits that she feels a sense of urgency, because it seems to her that the teaching is hanging by a thread.

                It would be a great shame if the dragon fell asleep, and if there were no one left to listen to its murmurings.

Cypress Trees in the Garden:

Sutherland, Joan – 146, 173-89, 191, 192, 213, 231

10/3 - Mountain Cloud Zen Center, Santa Fe

                My wife and I started these visits on the Pacific coast last March, accompanied by her

sister, just as spring flowers were beginning to bloom there. We are completing them now in the US Southwest, accompanied by my sister, just as the fall leaves are turning. There isn’t the variety of color one finds in the Northeast, but the cottonwoods and aspen are a particularly brilliant yellow. I have always liked the desert, and the drive south from Taos through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (the name is somehow not so gruesome in Spanish) is one of the prettiest I know.

                Santa Fe architecture, even for private homes, largely adheres to a handful of local styles—Pueblo, Mission, or what they refer to as “Territorial.” The Mountain Cloud Zen Center on Old Santa Fe Trail is in the Pueblo style, thick adobe walls, flat roof, softly rounded corners, and projecting viga rafters. It was built by Philip Kapleau and a handful of volunteers in the mid-1980s. Kapleau had not enjoyed the winters in Rochester and hoped the New Mexico climate would be more congenial. The building is small but appealing, with a zendo, just inside the front door, which seats twenty-two on a raised tan.  

                Conditions in Rochester, unfortunately, required Kapleau to return there, and he did not came back to Santa Fe. A small group of practitioners remained, however, and—in a situation similar to what was occurring in Surry, Maine, at the same time after Walter Nowick stopped teaching—they maintained the zendo and their practice without a teacher for next twenty-eight years. The membership diminished over time, until there were only three members remaining, including a man named Will Brennan who learned of a student of Albuquerque Zen teacher, Joan Rieck, who had been recently authorized to teach in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition.

                Henry Shukman was born and raised in Oxford, England. He is lean and flexible, with an easy and good humored manner. When I show him the first photo I take of him, he declares it much too serious, and we do another.

                When he was eighteen years old, his father thought a period of hard, manual labor, would be good for his son and arranged for him to work on a ranch in Argentina. After a year on the farm, Shukman went off to explore other parts of South America and write a travel book. One day he was watching the sunlight on the ocean off the coast of Ecuador when he had what he called a “run of the mill experience of oneness” which left him feeling “flooded with love, and that love seemed to be everywhere.” There is still some excitement in his voice as he describes the event. His narrative reminds me of both the story Melissa Blacker had told me in Worcester, and my own experience in 1971 sitting on a metal bench outside a cottage called Birkenbrae in Fredericton.

                But while he was certain this experience was the answer to everything, he did not know what to do with it. He uses the word “suffering” to describe the next ten years, during which he alternately tried to forget about the experience or sought to address it without knowing how to.

                He came to New Mexico for the first time, in order to research a book on D. H. Lawrence. There he met another writer, Natalie Goldberg, who was a student of Katagiri Roshi. She happened to show him a passage by the founder of Japanese Soto Zen, Dogen Zenji. Although the passage did not immediately make sense to him, Shukman realized it was based in the same kind of understanding he had come to on the seaside in Ecuador, and he felt compelled to study Zen.

                For the next eight years or so, he sat with a variety of Zen teachers both in America and England but was not drawn to accept any of them as his personal teacher until he met John Gaynor. As he tells the story, he muses for a moment on what it is that draws one finally to a particular teacher. In part, he says, it was that Gaynor’s Zen was free of the Japanese trappings common elsewhere. He knew from his own original experience that whatever this was, it was not something limited to a particular culture or people.

                Gaynor introduced him to Joan Rieck, with whom he worked when he returned to New Mexico in order to teach at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. He later worked with, and continues to work with, the “abbot” of the Sanbo Kyodan school—Yamada Ryoun Roshi in Japan. When he was finally authorized to take his own students, he was recruited by Brennan to come to the Mountain Cloud Center.

                In its new incarnation, Mountain Cloud is still a young sangha--still only a year old. But it shows signs of vigor. As the interview draws to a close, people are gathering for an evening sit. Their ages runs from some in their twenties to others who look not much younger than me (66). The bell marking the first round of sitting tolls deeply as I make my way outside to admire the grounds and surrounding mountains. The sitters could not have hoped to have a more conducive environment.

Cypress Trees in the Garden:

Shukman, Henry – 145-154, 173, 174, 213, 377, 473

7/15 - Bernie Glassman

                If one gets off the Interstate and the Turnpike (and avoids the corn fields), rural

Massachusetts is very picturesque. Small towns, lovely rivers, and trestle bridges. Western Massachusetts is Johnny Appleseed country. There are either striking big green hills or small green mountains—perhaps part of the Berkshires. Montague is a village surrounded by farms, some of which profess to be organic.

                Bernie Glassman’s house is found down a narrow county road where the trees come together overhead. His wife, Eve, is just going out for a swim in a nearby lake; Joan joins her while I conduct the interview.

                We sit in an area in front of a glassed fireplace. On the coffee table there is a copy of Cigar Aficionado with Jeff Bridges’ photo on the cover. He and Glassman recently released a book entitled The Dude and the Zen Master. There is a large calligraphy scroll on the wall behind Glassman’s chair; an eight-foot Jizo in the further part of the room, as well as a small table or altar with a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe and a statue of Kannon.

                Glassman is wearing a blue patterned shirt and loose white slacks with suspenders that he occasionally adjusts as we speak. He is bearded, and his gray hair recedes from his forehead (my white hair does the same); he wears it long, tied in a pony tail. Looking at him now, it’s difficult to picture him in formal Zen robes and rakusu—but at one time he was very formal in his appearance and his teaching. His days of formal teaching are over.

                “I have twenty Dharma successors, which is insane.” Many of them carry on traditional Zen instruction; however, if he thinks they might be getting a bit stuffy “or too arrogant”, he shows up at their centers unannounced, dressed as a clown and “disrupts things.”  He earned his clown nose legitimately, having studied with a couple of teachers named Wavy-Gravy and Mr. Yoo-hoo. He tells me he carries the nose all the time and, indeed, it is in his pocket as we speak.

                There’s nothing clownish about what Bernie Glassman is doing, however.

                While he was at the Los Angeles Zen Center with Maezumi Roshi, he had a deep experience of the interconnectedness of all things. The purpose of Zen, he tells me, is to elicit such awareness, and it makes use of a number of upayas—skillful means—to bring it forth. Meditation is certainly one, but not the only one. Out of that experience he moved gradually into social engagement. After all, basic to an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things is an awareness of the interconnectedness of people—even people, perhaps even especially people, whom we have marginalized or whom in some way we have defined as “other.”

           

     When he left Los Angeles, he went back to New York—where he had been raised—and established the Zen Community of New York. In addition to standard meditation training, he began to do street meditations. Twenty students would join him living on the street with the homeless; Father Robert Kennedy was one of the students who took part in these. Participants shared the life of street people; as Father Kennedy remembered, if he wanted a cup of coffee, he needed to beg for the money. The only preparation was to not bathe or shave for two days before going on the street. The only rules were not to lie and to stay together in small groups of three. Every morning there would be a shared reflection; and in the evening they found a place to sleep together. They tended to avoid shelters because of the dangers of violence and tuberculosis. “You could sleep in bus stations, but you’d be kicked out by the police.” The only “practice” was to be present.

                Bernie identified three "tenet koans" which he carries over to his work with Zen Peacemakers. 1) Not knowing; 2) Bearing witness; 3) Loving action. If one wanted to, one could analyze how these tenets evolved from the classical Hakuin koan curriculum, beginning with Mu (not-knowing) and proceeding through to the precepts. But it isn’t a pattern unique to Buddhism, or even Zen. A friend of Glassman’s has shown how they also relate to a contemporary approach to the Torah.

                He and his previous wife (Sandra Jishu Holmes who died in 1998) founded Zen Peacemakers in 1996. Every year they hold a Witnessing Retreat at Auschwitz. “There’s no teacher,” he says. “Auschwitz is the teacher.” The Nazi program at Auschwitz was the supreme example of defining people who don’t represent a specific norm as “other”—whether Jews, Gypsies, the handicapped, or whatever.

               The retreats have had as many as 160 participants, although now it is capped at 120. The majority would never have done any formal Zen training. It isn’t only Zen practitioners who can realize interconnectedness.

                When I ask to take his photo, he suggests we do it in the back of his house. There is a tall wooden Kannon statue with distinctly non-Asian features. “It was carved by a guy who didn’t know anything about Buddhism, but he carved it for a woman who was a Buddhist.” Again, the Bodhisattva of Compassion is not unique to Buddhism, as the Virgin of Guadalupe in the house attests.

[Bernie Glassman died on November 4, 2018.]

Cypress Trees in the Garden:

Glassman, Bernie [Tetsugen] – 76, 134, 173, 235-50, 255, 258, 260, 274, 276, 280, 287, 296-97, 305-07, 309-10, 468