Starting in the late 1950s and into the Sixties and Seventies, like legions of Bodhidharmas, they began to arrive: Shunryu Suzuki, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center; Taizan Maezumi, of the Zen Center of Los Angeles; Ch'an (Chinese Zen) Masters Hsuan Hua of Gold Mountain Monastery in San Francisco and Sheng-yen of the Ch'an Meditation Center in Elmhurst, New York; Korean Master Seung Sahn; the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh; and many more. For the first time Americans, on a large scale, had access to the actual practice of Zen, rather than just its philosophy. This era marked as well the return of the first wave of Westerners who had gone to study overseas: Philip Kapleau, Walter Nowick, Jiyu-Kennett, Gary Snyder, and others. Many of these went on to establish practice centers in the U.S., where they began the daunting work of interpreting a 2500 year old Asian tradition for the 20th-Century Western world. Thousands flocked to the new Zen centers—particularly members of the youth culture which had, in fulfillment of Kerouac's “Dharma Bums” prophecy, succeeded the Beats as the most visible representatives of America's counterculture. If the Fifties brought the “Zen boom,” the Sixties and Seventies brought a full-scale Zen explosion.
Although many of the figures presented in Part One of this book are no longer with us, I was fortunate, in the course of my research, to speak with many of the individuals in this and subsequent sections, including Philip Kapleau and the elusive Walter Nowick, who like one of the legendary Zen masters of old, has always resisted being sought out by the curious. And although I was not able, partly because of his age and declining health, to formally interview Philip Whalen, one of the last original Beat poets and later a Zen teacher, there is nonetheless a bit of a story to my brief meeting with him.
It happened that I was visiting the San Francisco Zen Center and other Bay Area practice centers just in time to attend the memorial service commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of Issan Dorsey, the pioneering Zen teacher who, together with a handful of students, founded the Hartford Street Zen Center's Maitri Hospice at a time when AIDS hysteria was at such a peak that hospital staff sometimes refused to touch patients for fear of infection. For most of the decade following Dorsey's death Philip Whalen had been Hartford Street's abbot. I'd been trying to contact him without success since I'd arrived in the Bay Area, and this seemed likely to be my final chance.
On the afternoon of the service, I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge into the city from the apartment where I was staying at in Mill Valley. I was running late, and barreled down Divisadero Street in my rented Geo Metro into the crowded Castro District to find, on that busy Saturday afternoon, not a single parking space left within a ten block radius of the Zen center—not even an illegal one. I cruised helplessly past the Hartford Street zendo, watching through the front window as visitors milled about inside; the three o'clock starting hour approached, then passed.
At last, I managed to squeeze my Geo into a spot that miraculously opened in front of a Chinese laundry—karma?—and sprinted up tiny, one-block-long Hartford Street to the Center. I found the front room empty, the door locked. I could hear drums and bells coming from somewhere—perhaps the basement zendo or back garden, inaccessible behind the row houses. After jiggling the knob a few times in the hope that it might change its mind, and eyeing the doorbell which, considering the ceremony had clearly already begun, I didn't feel bold enough to use, I gave up. I was halfway down the front walk when something made me turn back.
Mounting the steps again, I put my face to the glass of the door at exactly the right moment to glimpse a procession of darkrobed figures descending the stairs, carrying bells and drums and incense burners. The leader, a man wielding a ceremonial fly whisk who had—uncharacteristically, for a Zen priest—a beard and long brown hair spilling down past his shoulders, paused before the door long enough to open it for me.
“You're just in time,” he announced—and, in a perfect moment of Zen spontaneity, plucked a vase of flowers from the mantelpiece and handed it to me. With that, I suddenly became a member of the procession, which wound its way through the front part of the house, into the kitchen and down the back stairs into the garden, filled with visitors who had come to honor the memory of Issan Dorsey.
The priest with the fly whisk, I would later discover, was Steve Allen, Issan Dorsey's only dharma heir. Remarkably, I would also find out that he and his wife Angelique were living in Northern New Mexico, no more than a half hour's drive from my home.
I won't go through all the details of what followed: the offering of incense, the prostrations and memorial poems, and my own stumbling foray to the altar to offer up the vase of flowers, which I'd clutched through the beginning of the ceremony, shifting my weight from one foot to the other while wondering what it was I was supposed to do. However, several of the anecdotes I heard about Dorsey that day, from the story-telling session that followed in the meditation hall, have made their way into later portions of this book.
At the reception that followed, I finally got the chance to talk to Philip Whalen, who I'd noticed earlier as an elderly priest with a shaved head. He was clearly having trouble with his vision, and was being assisted by an attendant.
“Mr. Whalen,” I said, pulling up a chair alongside his, as his eyes turned in a rather heart-wrenching attempt to focus on me. “I'm the writer who called you last week, wondering if I might interview you for the book I'm researching.”
“Ah yes,” said Whalen. “I haven't called you back.” He sighed an old man's raspy sigh. “I've done so many interviews, you know,” he said, reaching moodily for a stuffed mushroom h'ors d'oeuvres. “I find them terribly irritating.”