“What makes a man in his middle years give up a secure job and comfortable income, family, and friends for the austere rigor of a Zen monastery and the uncertain life of a ‘homeless one’?” wrote Philip Kapleau, speaking of his own path in Zen: Dawn in the West.
Particularly, one might add, when the land he was leaving was the staid, self-satisfied America of the 1950s, where to drop one's career and set off on a spiritual quest to an Asian country was hardly in vogue—and the destination was a nation that, less than a decade before, had been considered a mortal enemy.
Perhaps, as Kapleau, who went on to become one of the earliest Americans to complete his training and become a Zen teacher, has variously written, it was his “painful tensions and . . . exhausting restlessness,” “painfully felt inner bondage,” or the “need to understand the appalling sufferings . . . witnessed in Germany, Japan, and China, just after World War II.”
Or simply, as he later referred to it: “that damn ‘nothing’ feeling.”
I can well remember the sense of exhilaration that came with my first reading of Kapleau's The Three Pillars of Zen, which was first published in 1967, the earliest book on Zen training written by an American teacher. With its mix of fiery lectures by Kapleau's teacher, Hakuun Yasutani, in which the roshi exhorted his students to see their true nature for themselves, along with contemporary descriptions of enlightenment experiences by Westerners and Kapleau's accounts of his own rigorous training (the American ex-businessman, known only as P.K. in the book, is actually Kapleau), it could not have been more distinct from the other best-selling American Zen practice manual of that period, Shunryu Suzuki's gentle Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. But Three Pillars fired in a generation of U.S. spiritual seekers a conviction uniquely suited to their American upbringing: that one did not have to settle for simply reading about the religions and philosophies of the East and the possibilities for enlightenment they offered—one could do it, and see it, for oneself. Kapleau's own sense of conviction, as articulated in this and subsequent books, made the experience seem, in fact, almost mandatory.
As a court reporter for the war-crimes trials, Kapleau had witnessed the aftermath of World War II in both Germany and Japan, but was struck by the different response exhibited by the two nations. The German leaders, Kapleau reported, seemed to remain predominantly self-justifying and unrepentant for the atrocities they'd committed, while in Japan it was not uncommon to hear statements in the news media like this: “Because we Japanese have inflicted so much pain on others, we are now reaping the painful harvest.”
When Kapleau asked Japanese acquaintances about this difference, he was told that it was due to their acceptance of the “law of karmic retribution.” When he inquired further, they told him he would have to study Buddhism if he wanted to understand it. Kapleau sought out D.T. Suzuki at his home in Kamakura, but, although he found the scholar's presence remarkable, his discourses on the philosophy of Zen were too technical to be of much use to him. Something more seemed to be required, but for the moment he didn't know what it was.
Kapleau returned to the United States after the war in “a mood of black depression.” He established a prosperous business, but worldly success brought no satisfaction. Suffering from ulcers and allergies, unable to sleep without medication, and, by his own account, “in bondage to the joyless pursuit of pleasure,” Kapleau felt, by the age of forty, that he was at a dead end. “My vacuous life no longer had meaning,” wrote Kapleau, “yet there was no other to take its place.”
Kapleau continued to attend lectures by D.T. Suzuki, who was then teaching at Columbia University, but again found simply studying the philosophy of Zen to be of limited benefit. Finally, in 1953, a Japanese friend advised him to forget the theory and take on the practice, telling him: “If you really want to learn Buddhism and not just talk about it, your whole life will be transformed. It won't be easy, but you can rely on this: once you enter upon the Buddha's Way with sincerity and zeal, Bodhisattvas will spring up everywhere to help you. But you must have courage and faith, and you must make up your mind to realize the liberating power of your Buddha-nature no matter how much pain and sacrifice it entails.”
This, says Kapleau, was “the transfusion of courage” he needed. “After several months of agonizing,” he wrote in Zen: Dawn in the West, “I gave up my work, disposed of my belongings, and set sail for Japan, determined not to return until I became enlightened.”
His friend's summation of the difficulties involved proved to be entirely correct. For the next thirteen years, Kapleau struggled with physical pain, language barriers, fatigue, and his own mind—although his previous ill health, sleeplessness, and depression cleared up entirely. At last, while studying with Yasutani Roshi in 1958, Kapleau passed the koan “Mu” and experienced his first glimpse into his true nature.
The experience, he wrote, left him feeling “free as a fish swimming in an ocean of cool, clear water, after being stuck in a tank of glue.”
After traveling around Japan for some time, looking without success for a Zen teacher who might be willing to work with Western students, Philip Kapleau and his traveling companion, Professor Bernard Phillips, received a letter from Abbott Soen Nakagawa Roshi of Ryutakuji Monastery, saying they could stay there for a short time.
Excited at the prospect of finally meeting a teacher with whom they could communicate in English, the two Americans spent the six-and-a-half-hour train ride formulating a variety of philosophical questions they hoped he would answer for them.
On their arrival that evening, Soen Nakagawa greeted them, asking if they were tired from their long trip and might like to rest for a bit.
“We're a little tired,” they admitted, “but we've prepared a number of questions on the subject of Zen that we—”
“Stop!” the roshi commanded. “After you do zazen, you can ask whatever you want. Meanwhile, I have some business to attend to.” Ignoring the protests of the Americans, who had never been instructed in how to meditate and weren't even sure they could sit crosslegged, the roshi told them, “Do it any way you want. Just sit on the floor and remain silent.” With that, he left them to their own devices.
Until the roshi had concluded his “business,” wrote Kapleau, the two “sat—no, wriggled—wordlessly for two miserable hours in the dark hall . . . concentration impossible, thoughts chasing each other like a pack of monkeys, excruciating pain in legs, back, and neck . . .”
At last, the roshi sent for them, and proceeded to offer a simple meal of rice, which they devoured. He then asked cordially, “Now—what would you like to know about Zen?”
“Not a thing,” responded the Americans, who were by this time so exhausted they could scarcely remember their questions.
“Then you'd better go to sleep,” said the roshi, “because we get up at 3:30 in the morning. Pleasant dreams!”
“That was the worst sitting I've ever sat in my life!” said Kapleau, looking back on the experience during a conversation at the Rochester Zen Center. “One look at me and he had me pegged. That was my first lesson in Zen.”
The morning after Philip Kapleau and Professor Phillips arrived at Ryutakuji Monastery, they were given a tour of the place by Abbot Soen Nakagawa. Both Americans had been heavily influenced by tales of ancient Chinese masters who'd destroyed sacred texts, and even images of the Buddha, in order to free themselves from attachment to anything. They were thus surprised and disturbed to find themselves being led into a ceremonial hall, where the roshi invited them to pay respects to a statue of the temple's founder, Hakuin Zenji, by bowing and offering incense.
On seeing Nakagawa bow before the image, Phillips couldn't contain himself, and burst out: “The old Chinese masters burned or spit on Buddha statues! Why do you bow down before them?”
“If you want to spit, you spit,” replied the roshi. “I prefer to bow.”
In 1934 Nyogen Senzaki's friend and student, Shubin Tanahashi, whose son Jimmy he had often cared for, ran across some writings in a Japanese magazine by a then-unknown young poet-monk named Soen Nakagawa. She was so impressed she passed them on to her teacher. The writings so moved Nyogen Senzaki that he wrote a letter of appreciation to the monk, initiating a correspondence that was to last for the next twenty-four years, until Senzaki's death.
Soen Nakagawa, who would later come to be regarded by many as one of the great haiku poets of his time, had always felt a kinship with the West. He credited Schopenhauer, whom he read in high school in the 1920s, with being an important inspiration in his decision to pursue the spiritual life. A few years earlier, he and some fellow classmates from Hiroshima Junior High School had pooled their money to buy a recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. He found the experience of hearing it so moving that he “shivered for three days afterward.” Soen was left with a lifelong love of European composers. In college, where he majored in Japanese literature, he read the Bible and many Western classics. By the time he became a monk in the early 1930s, Soen had already developed the vision of establishing an international Zen practice center. He even spent a brief, if unsuccessful, period prospecting for gold on an offshore island, in hopes of funding it.
Known as an eccentric even in his youth, Soen had limited patience for institutionalized Zen, and his teacher, Gempo Roshi, recognizing his brilliance, gave him a lot of leeway in his training. Soen spent long periods sequestered in his hermitage on Dai Bosatsu Mountain, where he fasted or scavenged for wild edibles, practiced zazen, wrote poetry, and chanted “Namu Dai Bosa,” a liturgy of his own invention. Thus, Soen Nakagawa was as surprised as anyone when just after Gempo Roshi's 85th birthday in 1950, his teacher named him his dharma heir and Abbot of Ryutakuji Monastery.
Soen Nakagawa's first experience of America had been the year before, in 1949, when wartime tensions eased enough for him to make a long-awaited visit to see Nyogen Senzaki. The two had been corresponding at this point for fifteen years and, despite the fact that they had never met in person, they considered one another to be the closest of friends. The visit cemented Soen's link to the United States. Senzaki began to send American students to study with Soen Nakagawa; and when word got out that there was an English-speaking roshi at Ryutakuji who was sympathetic to Westerners, American and European seekers began to show up in increasing numbers for instruction in Zen practice. Most notable among these, in the early years, were Philip Kapleau and Robert Aitken.
During a retreat at Ryutakuji Monastery, Soen Nakagawa pulled Westerners Philip Kapleau and Bernard Phillips aside and asked them:
“What did Christ say as he was dying upon the cross?”
“He said,” replied Kapleau, “‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’”
“No!” shouted Soen Roshi. He turned to Phillips. “What did Christ say when he was dying on the cross?”
“Well, I think that's right,” answered Phillips. “He said, ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’”
“No!” corrected Soen Roshi again.
“Well then,” asked the Westerners, “What did he say?”
Soen Roshi spread his arms to the sky and cried in agony: “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?!!”
Soen Nakagawa first addressed an American audience on the subject of Zen at the San Francisco Theosophical Library in 1949, during a visit to see Nyogen Senzaki. He began by quoting Soyen Shaku's infamous line: “Only very recently have I begun to understand that after all, I do not understand anything,” from the master's 1906 talk.
“Nowadays,” said Soen Roshi, commenting on Shaku's statement, “there is no one capable of being dumbfounded . . . . Everyone knows everything and can answer any question.”
The roshi illustrated his point by quoting from Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust:
. . . Already these ten years, I lead,
Up, down, across, and to and fro,
My pupils by the nose—and learn
That we, in truth, can nothing know!
“This ‘we in truth, can nothing know,’” said Soen Roshi, “. . . is exactly the point of Zen. We Zen monks apply ourselves day after day, year after year, to the study of the Unthinkable.”
Meanwhile, back in New York, responsibility for the activities of the First Zen Institute had fallen largely, in the wake of Sokeian's death, to two of his closest students, Ruth Fuller Sasaki (formerly Ruth Fuller Everett) and Mary Farkas. The two had first encountered Sokei-an when they joined what was then known as the Buddhist Society of America on the same day in 1938. After Mary Farkas paid her first $5 membership fee, Sokei-an told her, “Now you are a pillar of this temple.” Her donation was at the time enough to pay one month's rent.
Ruth Fuller Everett, a prominent society woman, was by that point already an experienced practitioner, having received zazen instruction from D.T. Suzuki while on a trip to Japan in 1930. In 1932, at the age of 40, she'd returned to Japan and petitioned Nanshinken Roshi, a fierce Rinzai master known for not allowing women in his zendo, to enter training with him. The roshi, apparently believing that Westerners were inherently unable to sit cross-legged, provided her with an enormous plush chair which, as Everett later described it, was “upholstered in bright green velour . . . with pearl buttons which if pushed . . . sent the back down with horrifying speed, and caused arm and footrests to spring out suddenly from the least expected places!” The roshi told her that the chair, unfortunately, could not be permitted in the zendo, but that she would be welcome to sit in his house. Within several weeks, however, Everett had prevailed in her wish to practice in the zendo—without the chair. She stayed for several months, becoming perhaps the first American to complete a daunting Rohatsu sesshin—a week-long retreat in which participants sit excruciatingly long hours of zazen from long before dawn until late into the night.
Everett had found her true teacher, however, back in America, in the person of Sokei-an Sasaki. After moving to New York, she'd become a key supporter of Sokei-an's group and editor of their journal, The Cat's Yawn. During the early years, Sokei-an rarely asked his students to sit zazen, limiting his instruction to talks and the private meetings with students known as sanzen. Everett eventually confronted him for trying to offer Zen without sitting meditation, to which her teacher replied: “If I put them down on cushions and made them do zazen, I would have no roof over my head!” After this, however, he encouraged Everett to begin instructing members in sitting practice, and a core group began to gather for daily zazen.
Several years later, Everett funded the acquisition of new quarters for the group, which at that point took the name First Zen Institute of America. Somewhere along the way, a romance had begun to bloom between her and Sokei-an and, in 1944, she married her teacher to become Ruth Fuller Sasaki. Following Sokei-an's death, she took on many of the responsibilities of the Institute, then returned to Japan in 1949 to continue her Zen studies and to carry on the translation work her husband had begun. She would remain there for the next eighteen years, until her death in 1966, studying koans under Sokei-an's dharma brother, Goto Zuigan Roshi, and overseeing the translation of a number of important texts.
In 1956, Ruth Fuller Sasaki became the first American to be ordained as a Zen priest. She went on to restore Ryosen-an Temple in Kyoto, becoming its Abbess, and established a zendo there for the purpose of “making traditional Zen study available to Western students.”
Ruth Fuller Sasaki wrote the following to members of the First Zen Institute in 1958:
The appointment of myself, an American, as priest of a Rinzai Zen temple is unique in the history of that sect. The fact that I am a woman is not of such importance, for there have always been, at least in Japan, some temples presided over by nuns, to which category, of course, I now belong . . . [upon ordaining as a priest] the postulant takes the monks' vows from his teacher and usually his head is shaved. No, do not fear. My hair has not been cut off, nor will it be. There are rules for exceptional cases . . .
In the course of the very simple ceremony I was taken to the hondo—“main hall”—of the monastery . . . and allowed to burn incense before the figure of Daito Kokushi, founder of the line of Daitokuji teaching . . . . This life-sized figure carved of wood has been placed deep within the main shrine of the hondo. The Kokushi sits, as he must often have sat in life, full of power, his eyes—of glass—glaring in the light of the candles, his real stick uplifted ready to strike. It is quite an experience to walk into that shadowy place and stand face to face with the old man . . .
Alone at the altar of the Founder of Daitoku-ji, I bowed three times, forehead on the ground, then entered into the deep recess of the altar, where only disciples in Daito Kokushi's line may enter, and, bowed again and burned incense before the life-sized figure seated in its depths.
Walter Nowick first encountered Zen while he was a music student at Juliard in the late 1940s. As he told the story during a conversation we shared at his farm in Maine, he'd picked up a copy of a publication called The Cat's Yawn while waiting to see his teacher for a piano lesson at her home. Flipping through it, he came upon a poem that caught his eye. As he remembers, it read:
The Forest of Zen
All night long
the shadow of the bamboo sweeps the stairs
but not a particle of dust is stirred.
All night long
the moonbeams penetrate the pool
But not a trace is left.
“What is this?” Nowick inquired of his teacher.
“Zen,” she replied.
“I want to study this,” Nowick said.
The Cat's Yawn turned out to be a publication of the First Zen Institute, of which Nowick's teacher was a member; the poem was a translation by Sokei-an [Nowick's version from memory is somewhat different from the original]. His teacher subsequently took him along to several of the Institute's meetings.
After the first gathering, Nowick recalls, he was so eager to try zazen on his own that after he got off the train on his way back to his parents' home on Long Island, he sat down in a field to meditate, believing he would achieve enlightenment in a short while. Interrupted some time later by the sound of his mother's worried voice calling his name, he rose to his feet to discover himself the same as ever; and he realized that this was not going to be as easy as he'd thought.
Several years later, Nowick found himself en route by train from Tokyo to Daitokuji Monastery in Kyoto. The First Zen Institute had helped him acquire a visa and passport. This was a difficult matter at the time, for with the U.S. occupation still in force, a request to do anything as odd as spending time in a Zen monastery was viewed with the utmost suspicion. As Nowick recalls, he was finally issued a visa stamped “For Compassionate Purposes.” He remembers watching from the window as his train passed great bamboo forests, calling to mind the lines of verse that had brought him here; and at that moment, as though in reflection of his thoughts, a Japanese student sitting beside him leaned over and whispered: “Do you understand the mystery of the bamboo?”
The train's sound system was playing Schubert. Nowick dug through his bags and, to the amazement of the Japanese student and his companions, extracted a book of sheet music that included the piece that was playing. He and the students spent the rest of the trip singing Schubert.
When Nowick arrived in Kyoto, and stepped at last through the gates of Daitokuji Monastery, having no idea at the time that he was to spend the better part of the next sixteen years here, he remembers thinking to himself: “Here you are. The place you've been dreaming about these last few years—you're here.”
“What a thing,” he says, looking back on the experience. “What an amazing feeling it was.”
The year was 1950. He was twenty-four years old.
On Walter Nowick's first meeting with Goto Zuigan Roshi in Kyoto, the Master, who had lived briefly in the United States as part of Sokatsu Shaku's ill-fated strawberry farm in the early part of the century, told the young American he would “take his English out of mothballs” in order to teach him Zen. Sanzen, the private meetings with the master in which the student attempts to present his or her understanding of a particular koan, were to commence the following morning.
Nowick nodded in response, perhaps a bit apprehensively, and added, “I am a little slow.”
“Slow or fast,” intoned the roshi, “—we will examine.”
Poet Gary Snyder ended up at Daitokuji too, after Alan Watts introduced him to Ruth Fuller Sasaki, who secured him a grant from the First Zen Institute to study and work with her translation team. A mountaineer, environmental activist, and scholar of Oriental languages, Snyder's interest in Asian culture was sparked when, as a boy growing up in Washington state, he saw an exhibition of Chinese landscape paintings. Their mountains struck him as bearing a remarkable resemblance to his own beloved Cascade Range. Snyder later taught himself to meditate by studying statues of Buddha figures and reproducing their sitting posture.
Associated with the West Coast wing of the Beat movement (of which more will be said later), Snyder was one of the poets featured at the famous Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco in 1955, which brought the “San Francisco Renaissance” to the attention of the nation. On the same evening Allen Ginsberg debuted “Howl,” which was to change American poetry forever. The following year, on May 15, 1956, Snyder set sail for Kyoto. For most of his time in Japan, Snyder studied at Daitokuji with Sesso Oda Roshi, dharma heir to Walter Nowick's and Ruth Fuller Sasaki's teacher, Goto Zuigan.
Of his teacher, Snyder wrote:
[Oda Roshi was an] especially gentle and quiet man—an extremely subtle man, by far the subtlest mind I've ever been in contact with, and a marvelous teacher whose teaching capacity I never would have recognized if I hadn't stayed with it, because it was only after five or six years that I began to realize that he had been teaching me all along. . . . Oda Roshi delivered teisho lectures in so soft a voice nobody could hear him. Year after year, we would sit at lectures—lectures that only roshis can give, spontaneous commentaries on classical texts—and not hear what he was saying. Several years after Oda Roshi had died one of the head monks, with whom I became very close, said to me, “You know those lectures that Oda Roshi gave that we couldn't hear? I'm beginning to hear them now.”
Snyder was to continue his rigorous training and koan study at Daitokuji for the next twelve years.
When Gary Snyder first went to Japan to study Zen, he asked his teacher Oda Roshi whether it was all right that he wrote poetry.
Oda Roshi laughed and replied: “It's all right as long as it truly comes out of your true self.”
Nevertheless, feeling that he needed to be completely serious in his practice of Zen, and uncertain whether poetry was serious enough, Snyder quit writing almost completely for a number of years.
Just before Oda Roshi died, Snyder went to visit him in the hospital.
“So Roshi,” Snyder asked, still seeking clarification, “it's—Zen is serious, and poetry is not serious?”
“No,” corrected Oda Roshi. “Poetry is serious. Zen is not serious.”
Says Snyder: “I'd had it all wrong!”
In Ruth Fuller Sasaki's absence, the First Zen Institute was largely held together by the efforts of Mary Farkas, who would serve for more than forty years until her death in 1992. Farkas, by her own account, believed in the early Zen of ancient China, a “Zen of eccentrics, loners, scholars, isolated monks and small groups . . . a Zen without rules, regulations, money, dogma, priests, titles, or ranks.” Although she never referred to herself as anything other than the Institute's Secretary, she had been presented with the purple robes of an Abbess by a Zen master, though she rarely wore them. A fellow member reported an incident that illustrates the esteem in which she was held, which took place while Farkas was away in Japan in the 1950s, trying to find a teacher to succeed Sokei-an:
Many visitors would arrive expecting to be greeted and given audience by the acting head of the First Zen Institute. I remember one Japanese scholar who arrived ready to do [dharma] battle with Herself . . . he came early and was seated in a suitable location in the front row. When the informal tea time commenced, he asked for Mrs. Farkas and was told she was in Kyoto. He immediately became exercised and began an adversarial exchange with the senior members . . .
According to reports, the senior students politely, but efficiently, saw the scholar to the door, thus ending the aborted “dharma combat.”
For many years, Farkas collaborated with Institute founding members Audrey Kepner and Edna Kenton in the compiling and editing of Sokei-an's talks, which she published first in the Institute's monthly magazine, which by this time had been renamed simply Zen Notes, and later in the first book-length collection of Sokei-an's teachings, The Zen Eye.
On a visit to Japan in the 1950s Farkas asked Goto Zuigan Roshi, “Don't you think we've made some progress in this last half century?”
“Yes,” replied the roshi, encouragingly. “You could say you have taken a step.”
Mary Farkas always disliked the use of the word “spiritual” as applied to Zen practice, for she believed it created a false distinction between practice and daily life. Once she heard D.T. Suzuki use the term in a lecture on Zen, and approached the scholar afterward, asking his true opinion of the term.
Suzuki paused for a time and finally responded: “It is a great obscenity.”
Farkas nodded her head in agreement.
Once when a Zen master came to teach in New York, Mary Farkas, who knew he didn't like the city, asked why he kept returning. He didn't answer at the time; but, Farkas reported, “he later said that ‘he would remain as long as there was a person here or even half a person who was worthwhile to help.’”
“There is an initial experience of finding oneself on the path that can be very profound,” writes Robert Aitken. “In my own case, while I was in a Japanese internment camp during the war, sick as a dog with asthma, I found R.H. Blyth's Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics. I must have read that book ten times, finishing it and starting again . . . the world seemed transparent, and I was absurdly happy despite our miserable circumstances.”
Aitken, who later founded the Diamond Sangha in Hawaii and went on to become one of the first American Zen teachers, came to Zen practice after he was captured while working as a civilian on the island of Guam when the Pacific war broke out in the 1940s. “We climbed to the highest peak [on the island],” says Aitken, “We could see the whole island ringed with Japanese ships, so we knew that we had to give ourselves up.” He was taken back to Japan, and interred as an enemy alien. There, one of his guards loaned him a copy of Blyth's book.
“All my work,” wrote Aitken, “comes from the profound vow that was made for me on reading it: that I would devote my life to Zen Buddhism, no matter what the difficulty.”
In 1944, Aitken's camp was combined with the camp where Blyth, an expatriate Englishman, was interred, and Aitken began an apprenticeship and friendship that was to last twenty years, until his mentor's death in 1964. “If we had not met,” he later wrote, “I might well have spent my life mundanely, saying and doing trivial things.”
Aitken went on to practice with nearly all of the teachers available to Westerners at the time: Nyogen Senzaki in Los Angeles and D.T. Suzuki in Hawaii, and Asahina Roshi, Soen Nakagawa, Hakuun Yasutani, and Koun Yamada in Japan. “They were all as different as could be,” Aitken said recently, in a phone interview from his Hawaii home. “Each one was totally himself. I'm very grateful to have had the chance to study with all of them.”
Aitken underwent extended periods of traditional monastic training, despite severe and recurrent bouts of ill health and knees that became so swollen with hour upon hour of sitting that he could scarcely walk. During his first intensive meditation retreat, or sesshin, with Asahina Roshi in 1950, Aitken says, he was appalled to realize that the morning service began and ended with nine full bows—prostrations—to the altar. “It was as though,” says Aitken, “all the beliefs that I had about the righteous importance of the individual were suddenly just snatched. And I thought, my God, what am I doing?” He resolved to suspend judgment, however, and to concentrate on his zazen. In time, Aitken came to appreciate such formal aspects of the practice, and later wrote, “(Bowing) is a sign of throwing everything away . . . . All our self-concern, all our preoccupations are thrown away completely. There is just that bow.”
Despite all of his difficulties, Aitken says, he never felt any doubt about continuing. “It was the only thing I could do,” he says. “I can't explain that.”
In 1959, Aitken and his wife Anne started a sitting group in Honolulu, where they hosted sesshins by several of the teachers with whom they'd studied in Japan. Finally, at a retreat with Soen Nakagawa, Aitken, as the roshi described it, “got a little bit of light.”
“I knew he was referring to my experience,” Aitken later wrote, “but I did not treat it very seriously. However, I found the ceiling of my mind to be infinitely spacious. Everything was bright and new.”
“Zazen,” says Robert Aitken, “Is just like learning how to ride a bicycle. You have to steer, pump, keep your balance, watch out for pedestrians and other vehicles—all at once. You are riding a pile of parts with your pile of parts. After you learn to ride, however, what then? You are free of those parts, surely. You are one with the bicycle, and the bicycle keeps its own balance. It steers and pumps itself, and you can enjoy your ride and go anywhere, to the store, to school, to the office, the beach. You have forgotten sprockets and handle bars. You have forgotten that you have forgotten.”
Yamada Koun Roshi, the cigar-smoking layman and hospital administrator who became dharma successor to Yasutani Roshi, and with whom Robert Aitken eventually completed his Zen study, has been quoted as saying: “If one is a true person of Zen, no one would be able to pick you out on the Tokyo subway.”
Hakuun Yasutani Roshi was the teacher of a number of Western students in the 1950s and 1960s, including Philip Kapleau and Robert Aitken. At more than eighty years old, he continued to travel throughout Europe and America to conduct rigorous week-long Zen retreats, renowned for their vigor and discipline. A “skinny hawklike man,” with a piercing gaze, and prominent ears that stuck out “like teacups,” Yasutani, according to Kapleau, “could often be seen trotting about Tokyo in a tattered robe and a pair of sneakers on his way to a zazen meeting, his lecture books in a bag slung over his back, or standing in the crowded second-class interurban trains.” Robert Aitken's first impression of him, at a retreat he attended in Japan when the roshi was already more than seventy years old was “a distillation of pure energy.”
“He devoted himself fully to us,” said Aitken, who described his teacher as “like a feather, but full of passion.”
Yasutani Roshi once asked one of his Western students, “When you die, does everything around you die too?”
“I don't know,” replied the student. “I haven't had that experience yet.”
“When you disappear,” the roshi stated, “the entire universe disappears. And when the universe vanishes, you vanish with it.”
On another occasion, a Western student said to Yasutani, regarding his practice of a particular koan, “I know what I'm supposed to do, but I can't do it.”
Yasutani answered: “There is nothing you are supposed to do . . . . You only have to grasp the fact that when it rains the ground gets wet, that when the sun shines the world becomes bright.”
A number of Yasutani Roshi's students went on to become prominent figures in the development of American Zen, including Robert Aitken, Philip Kapleau, Taizan Maezumi, and Eido Shimano.
“The fundamental delusion of humanity,” Yasutani used to say, “is to suppose that I am here—” at this, he'd point to himself, “—and you are out there.”
During one of Yasutani Roshi's first American Zen retreats, held at a Quaker center in Pennsylvania, a graduate student in philosophy from Temple University left after the first day. The note of explanation he'd left on his seat read: “If I were to stay for the [full] five days, my philosophy would be crushed.”
It was left to Jiyu-Kennett, an Englishwoman who later established the Shasta Abbey in northern California, to assemble the most astonishing array of “firsts” in the history of Zen in the West. After ordaining as a priest in the Ch'an [Chinese Zen] tradition in Malacca, Malaysia in 1962, she entered into training at Sojiji Monastery in Japan, becoming the first woman to be admitted to a major Soto sect training center since the 14th century. The following year, Kennett became the first Westerner to receive dharma transmission in the Soto sect from her teacher, Keido Chisan Roshi, a Japanese pioneer in seeking equality between the sexes. Kennett later received the title roshi and full authority to teach, becoming one of the few women in the history of Zen to attain this rank. After serving as abbess of her own temple in Japan, she moved to San Francisco in the 1960s, to become the first fully sanctioned woman Zen teacher in the U.S.
Kennett went on to found the Shasta Abbey, which at its peak in the 1970s and 1980s had some one hundred Zen monastics in training.
Kennett's approach to teaching, according to one senior student, was “not to lighten the load of a disciple, but to make the load so heavy that he or she would put it down.”
When Jiyu-Kennett was training at Sojiji Temple in Japan in the early 1960s, she was surprised one day by the arrival of an important visitor.
As Kennett tells it, she had just come back from an outing to find a large contingent of priests and ladies in the Abbot's guest department, “and in the center, one middle-aged [lady] who looked rather kind.” The woman smiled as Kennett approached, and since introductions did not seem to be forthcoming she says, “I held out my hand. [The woman] shook it with great glee, obviously enjoying herself and thoroughly pleased . . . I noticed that everyone seemed to be startled but, since nobody explained who she was, I felt that I had done the right thing . . . To my delight, she began speaking in English, telling me how delighted she was that I was there and hoping to see me again on her next visit.”
Shortly thereafter, Kennett returned to her quarters, where the Director of the temple soon called on her.
“I want you to shake hands with me,” he announced.
“May I ask why, Reverend Director?” Kennett responded.
“You shook the hand of the Empress of Japan. No living person has touched that hand other than the Emperor. You do not realize what a great thing you have done!”
A moment later, her door swung open again to reveal the entire staff of temple officers, waiting with outstretched hands, and an even larger group of junior trainees behind them.
“I suppose,” wrote Kennett later, “that shaking the hand of . . . her who shook the hand is the next best thing to shaking the hand!”
In the early 1950s Asahina Sogen, Abbot of Engakuji Temple in Japan, visited the First Zen Institute of America in New York City. He corrected the zazen posture of the Institute's members, for whom this was the first visit of a Zen master since the death of Sokei-an nearly ten years before.
“Suppleness is very important,” said the roshi, speaking of the correct position of the spine. “We say, if it is supple, it is alive. If it is rigid, it is dead.”
After zazen, while eating ice cream and drinking tea, he demonstrated Master Rinzai's famous shout of “Ho!”—the purpose of which was to bypass all thinking and return those who heard it to the present moment of experience.
“To give a ‘Ho!’” said the roshi, “is agreeable in the quiet night air of New York.”
With that he departed, leaving the Institute's members on their own again.