1/20 - Sanbo Zen and Patrick Gallagher

                                

I first met Patrick Gallagher when I interviewed the Roman Catholic nun and Zen Master, Sister Elaine MacInnis, last June in Toronto [see my posting for June 15]. She had requested that someone with whom she felt comfortable be present and asked Patrick to join us. He arrived at her residence by bicycle just as I pulled up in my car. At that time, I was told he was an Assistant Teacher. He is a slight man with wavy grey hair and a full beard. He has a quick smile and, one senses, a genuine affection and regard for Sister Elaine.

                Since that meeting Patrick has been appointed a full Teacher in the school of Zen to which Sister Elaine belongs. Formerly known as the Sanbo Kyodan—Fellowship of the Three Treasures—it is changing its name to Sanbo Zen—Three Treasures Zen. I arranged a Skype interview with Patrick in order to ask about this name change and to clear up some other details about the school. His image on the screen was relaxed and informal. He was wearing an old sweatshirt with what appeared to be paint stains on one sleeve.

                Lineages and schools are serious stuff in Zen. In part, it is a matter of establishing qualifications and authorization. Zen Masters still trace their ancestry back to Bodhidharma—the Indian missionary who brought Zen from India to China—and beyond him to the Buddha himself. Certificates are issued asserting that the person named therein has been officially recognized to have attained a certain degree of insight and is authorized to assist others to attain that insight.

                The way in which various teachers worked—the upaya, the skillful means, they used to pass on that insight—sometimes differed, resulting eventually in Five Houses within Chinese Zen, which in turn evolved into Seven Schools. Of these, two achieved prominence and traveled to Japan—the Rinzai and the Soto.

                Those two schools differ both in matters of form and focus. As an example of form, Rinzai students, sit facing into the room while Soto students face a wall. As for focus, Rinzai students generally work with koans, and, while koans are used occasionally in the Soto tradition, its primary practice is shikan-taza or “just-sitting.”

                The Japanese teacher Sogaku Harada (1871 – 1961) was raised and trained in the Soto school but felt that shikan-taza was not adequate to bring him to full awakening. So after completing high school, he entered a Rinzai temple where, after working with the koan Mu for more than two years, he achieved kensho. Once he was authorized to teach, he did so as a Soto priest, but he made use of koans and other Rinzai elements. His Dharma heir, Haku’un Yasutani, founded the Sanbo Kyodan school based on the Harada’s blending of the Rinzai and Soto traditions.

                Yasutani was a significant figure in the evolution of North American Zen, both because he accepted foreign students at his temple in Japan and because he made frequent visits to the United States to conduct sesshin throughout the 1960s.  The Three Pillars of Zen, attributed to Philip Kapleau, largely consists of Yasutani’s talks given during those retreats. Kapleau studied with Yasutani, but the two became estranged, and Sanbo Zen people are quick to remind you that Kapleau failed to complete his koan training and was, therefore, not actually qualified to teach.

Ryoun Yamada

                Yasutani’s heir and the second abbot of the Sanbo Kyodan was Koun Yamada, who probably contributed as much to the editing of Three Pillars of Zen as did Kapleau although did not get the credit he deserved for doing so. Yamada Roshi was Sister Elaine’s teacher. He was succeeded by his son, Ryoun Yamada, the order’s current abbot.

                Sanbo Zen is much more tightly structured than the Soto or Rinzai traditions. In those two schools, transmitted teachers have the autonomy to appoint others to be teachers as well. In Sanbo Zen, teachers can recommend suitable students, but the final decision about who becomes a teacher rests with the abbot. All assistant teachers, teachers, associate Zen Masters (such as Henry Shukman; see October 3rd entry), and Zen Masters—wherever in the world they are located—are appointed by the abbot alone, a factor which Shukman believes has helped the order avoid some of the troubles which have arisen elsewhere.

                Patrick is now the most recently appointed teacher I’ve interviewed, so I took the opportunity our Skype conversation provided to put to him the question I have begun most of my interviews with: “What is the function, the purpose of Zen?”

                “Well, there’s different ways you could say it. To wake up. To see who you are. To see things as they are.”

                It can be put other ways as well: to discover one’s True Self, one’s Original Mind, or even—as the Sixth Patriarch put it—one’s face before one’s parents’ birth. The etymological root of "Prajna"--as Joan Sutherland reminded me [October 4th posting]--is "before thought."

                The schools may differ in any number of ways, but their intentions remain the same.

Cypress Trees in the Garden:
Gallagher, Patrick – 134, 140-45

1/15/2014 - Yoshin David Radin

                When I was at Zen Mountain Monastery, a young monk asked me what I hoped to

accomplish with my book. I started to give him a publisher’s spiel—“to demonstrate the scope of contemporary teaching, practice, and engagement”—then I stopped and said, “You know, basically I just want people to continue to see Zen as a viable spiritual practice.”

                There has been a shadow hanging over the interviews that I’ve been conducting: news items about Joshu Sasaki’s inappropriate behavior with female students, similar allegations about Eido Shimano, the autocratic and--at times--simply petty behavior of both men. Zen’s reputation has suffered a number of substantial body-blows in recent years.

                These aren’t issues I intend to gloss over, nor will I defend those who have kept these and other stories under wraps. But it remains that both men also seem to have been effective teachers. That does not excuse their personal behavior, but it does help to explain why they retain both male and female supporters. It is also true that they are both now elderly Japanese males, representatives of a cultural tradition very different from that of 21st Century North America. Again, not an excuse but a factor.

                Joshu Sasaki’s story has probably received greater coverage because of his age. He is now 106 years old. I had visited two of his “oshos”—priests he ordained who now run their own centers—Myokyo McLean in Montreal (April 29 posting) and Seiju Mammoser in Albuquerque (October 18 posting). But I wanted to speak to a third, so I arranged a distance interview with Yoshin David Radin in Ithaca, New York, who was kind enough to install Skype on his I-Pad specifically to permit the interview.

                Radin was the editor of a book which celebrated Sasaki’s one hundredth year. He clearly still admires Sasaki and named his first child, a daughter, “Joshi” after him. “He was able to transmit the highest wisdom,” he tells to me. How did he do that? “First there was a sense that he was residing in a different residence than I was residing. . . I am an individual seeking the higher wisdom. He seemed to be radiating from the higher wisdom. . . He could, through koan training and just his own presence, he could evoke that experience within me.”

                Radin’s own story is interesting. He grew up in New York, the son of a rabbi, and attended Jewish Parochial School. “It kept me out of bars and brothels.” After graduating high school, he went on a trip around the world, and in places like Hawaii and India discovered hashish and LSD. A number of Zen practitioners from the late 60s and early 70s—including me—followed a similar path to Zen practice.

                He did a sesshin with Richard Baker at the San Francisco Zen Center, but the experience was “unfruitful. A lot of pain and no intelligence.” He went back to New York state to live on a commune. I ask how he supported himself. “Chopping wood and hauling water. Literally.” It was a working farm but not self-sustaining.

                A friend in Canada suggested he try a retreat at Mount Baldy with Joshu Sasaki, and during that retreat he had experiences so moving that—at one point—he couldn’t return to the zendo after an interview with the Roshi but, instead, hid behind the building and lay beneath a tree just relishing the insights he had acquired.

                Radin established the Ithaca Zen Center and maintains a sitting group at nearby Cornell University. His wife is a sheikh in the Sufi tradition, and together they host popular body-mind retreats during the summer months. These bring in enough income to support the maintenance of a zendo for the smaller Zen sangha. Still, he offers five sesshin a year and maintains a weekly practice schedule. He has chosen, however, to remain removed from the formal structures associated with Rinzai-ji. But not because of any dissatisfaction with Sasaki.

                Sasaki Roshi has not given transmission—inka—to any of his oshos. When I ask Radin what he thinks will happen to the Rinzai-ji lineage after Sasaki dies, he tells me he doesn’t “have any concern about it. . . It doesn’t make a difference to me whether the line continues or not. It’s just the question of whether the wisdom continues.” One wonders, however, how the “wisdom” can continue without teachers authorized to transmit it. Oshos, for example, have been told not to use the koan system Sasaki had used in their teaching; so that part of the Rinzai-ji tradition will end with him.

                I suspect Yoshin Radin is the kind of guy it would be fun to spend a day trading stories with—we share that hippie-background—and I can respect his loyalty to Sasaki Roshi, but I still find myself wondering about which lineages are going to persist and which are going to wither. It is not just a matter of “authorization,” it is a matter of addressing a wide range of ethical and training issues. It is certainly clear from the interviews that I’ve conducted that whatever Zen in North America is becoming, it is going to very different—in many ways—from what was brought to these shores from Asia.

Note: The following May, I visited Yoshin at the Ithaca Zen Center and continued my conversation with him. I also interviewed his wife--Khadija--who is both a Buddhist nun and a Sufi Sheikh. See the posting for 5/25.

Cypress Trees in the Garden:

Radin, David Yoshin – 55-66, 469

10/18 - Genjo Marinello

                Well . . . as it turns out, Shishin Wick was not my last interview.

                It had been suggested that my overview of Zen in North America needed more balance, needed to have at least one other example of a more formal and traditional Japanese practice. I’ve also been told that it should probably include the Vietnamese Zen tradition. So, I may try to visit one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s groups in the spring. In the meantime, I made contact with Genjo Marinello (the name attached to his email is  “Joe Marinello”) of Chobo-ji in Seattle.

                Genjo had just, within the last two weeks, ordained Eshu Martin as an Osho, putting to rest the questions that the Sasaki lineage had about Eshu’s credentials as a teacher. That alone would have been enough for me to be interested in him.

                One does not get the same feel for a person via skype as one does in person, but Genjo certainly struck me as having that settled self-confidence and ease which I’ve noted in previous posts about Taigen Henderson and Bodhin Kjolhede. In the image I receive via skype, he appears to be sitting at a desk in a study. There is an upright piano in the background, and western-style art on the walls (rather than the calligraphy and other Asian art works I’ve commonly seen elsewhere). Genjo’s head is shaved, and he wears a head-set during the interview.

       

         His entry to Zen began in a freshman English class in the ‘70s, when the teacher introduced him to the idea that there “was a way to experience, or penetrate, reality beyond the scientific method; that you could have something called insight, inspiration, or intuition. You could tap into some fundamental truths heuristically by investigating your own internal condition.” That led him to the practice of Zen. He was living in southern California at the time.

                Later, while serving as a Vista volunteer in Seattle, he practiced with a group established there by Glenn Webb, a professor at the University of Washington. In 1978, Dr. Webb invited a Rinzai teacher to Seattle from Japan. This was Genki Takabayahsi Roshi, who then founded Dai Bai Zen Cho Bo Zen Ji, or “The Listening to the Dharma Zen Temple on Great Plum Mountain.”

                Genjo was sitting with this group when he happened to attend a lecture given by the Dalai Lama. The talk was interrupted by a group of Maoist-students who heckled the Dalai Lama for failing to support the Chinese Communist regime in Tibet. Genjo was so impressed by the way the Dalai Lama handled the situation that he announced to Genki Roshi that he was ready to commit himself to Buddhist practice.

                He spent a short time in Japan, at Ryutakuji, where he met Soen Nakagawa Roshi among others. He was surprised to learn there that the Japanese students were only there because “it was their lot in life.” They were bewildered when he told them that he had chosen—that he wanted—to be there. “Who would want that?” they wondered. So eventually he just said he had been sent there.

                It was hard. And although his own training methods are considered traditional and a little strict in America, he makes it clear they are nothing like what he went through in Japan. “Nothing you ever did was right. And if you did do something to someone’s satisfaction, someone else would come along and undo it, telling you it was all wrong.” One day as he was sweeping a gravel path, he was reprimanded for whistling. Not something to be done while you work.

                For Genjo, Zen “points at our deep, true nature.” We don’t often tap into the deepest part of our nature, he explains, as a result of which we tend to have a fairly narrow and individualistic sense of ourselves “and who we are and our place in the universe.” Zen, then, provides a training that helps us to transcend “our ego identity and discover our deeper, seamless nature” with all other beings.

                He had his initial kensho experience on the third day of his first sesshin, and he had further openings while in Japan. I remark that it is significant that the training works well enough in Japan that even students who don’t want to undertake it—who are there only because it is their “lot”—still come to awakening. Conversely, students who want that type of training and awakening experience in America, sometimes never attain it. And I wonder if the strictness of the Japanese training isn’t a factor. Genjo agrees that it may be, and, for that  reason, maintains a stricter regime in Seattle than I’ve found at some other places I’ve been.

               He is careful, however, to put as much emphasis on the attainment of karuna (compassion) as of prajna (wisdom), and perhaps that has been the factor missing in the way Japanese Zen was transferred to the west.

Cypress Trees in the Garden:

Marinello, Genjo – 83-97, 111-12, 113, 115, 247-49