This kind of group practice, such as at a Zen center, can be of real benefit to a world such as ours. Perhaps it is not so irrelevant to a world in which harmony is scarcer than diamonds, and in which the realization of Truth is widely regarded as an impossible dream.
—TAIZAN MAEZUMI ROSHI
Three features of the San Francisco Zen Center remain fixed in memory from my visit there. The first is a set of stained glass windows with two images on them: one, a pair of young, strong hands in perfect gassho—prayer position—white against the deep, purple-blue of stained glass. These are said to represent those of Dainin Katagiri, who as a young man served as assistant to the temple's founder, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Beside Katagiri's are another pair of hands, also in gassho, but with one finger bent over, crooked and broken, the result of a stone-working accident at the Zen Mountain Center in Tassajara. These hands remain forever slightly cupped, as though holding a small bird: Suzuki Roshi's broken-fingered gesture of appreciation to the universe, all the more perfect for its imperfection.
Then, in the dim hallway behind the zendo, there is the verse inscribed upon the han, the hanging wooden block that is struck with a mallet to call the residents to zazen. Sometimes known as the Evening Gatha, common to many schools of Zen, this is a verse with which I am well acquainted; but finding it here unexpectedly, in this shadowy, narrow hallway, sends the proverbial chills up my spine:
Life is fleeting,
Gone, gone—
Awake,
Awake each one!
Don't waste this life!
Finally, and most powerfully, there is the life-sized screen print of Suzuki Roshi, standing in silhouette on the landing of the center's main staircase with Zen stick upraised, as his students must often have seen him, stalking along behind the rows of sitters in the zendo. You mount the stairs and there at the landing his form looms suddenly, as through his ghost, which still dominates this place, has remained substantial enough to cast a shadow. As in fact it has, not only over the San Francisco Zen Center, but the entire face of Zen in America.
Shunryu Suzuki (who bears no relation to D.T. Suzuki, the scholar) came to the United States at the age of fifty-three, at the behest of the Zen Soto sect headquarters in Japan, to lead the congregation of Sokoji temple in San Francisco's Japantown. The year was 1959. Although the move was the fulfillment of a life-long dream, the new priest—not to mention his conservative, mostly middle-aged and elderly Japanese-American congregation—must have been taken somewhat aback when shortly after his arrival an increasing stream of bohemians, nonconformists, and other representatives of America's counterculture, having heard that a Zen master had arrived in town, began showing up for zazen instruction. Suzuki, like Soyen Shaku, had always felt it his mission to spread the Dharma to America, as far-fetched a notion as that must have seemed to the Soto Zen establishment at the time. He'd even studied English in his youth in preparation for the move. Now, without planning it, he'd landed at one of the key focal points of America's Beat movement and Zen Boom, as well as the soon-to-be-epicenter of the Hippie phenomenon.
A member of the First Zen Institute of America who was then living in San Francisco described the new wave of practitioners in a letter to the folks back home: “[There are] boys that look like beatniks with beards, sweat shirts, and some with sandals, but I must say they seem sincere.”
As Eido Tai Shimano, Soen Roshi's dharma successor, has observed, 1960 was the point where the emphasis of Zen in America shifted from the intellectual to the practical. For not only San Francisco, but the U.S. as a whole, Shunryu Suzuki was a primary agent of this change.
“He was just very present,” says Jakusho Bill Kwong, one of Suzuki Roshi's earliest students, now the resident teacher at Sonoma Mountain Zen Center. “And ordinary. That was his special quality. The projection [of his students and others] made him a superhuman being. But actually he was just present and just ordinary and no more and no less. And that's why I say that he was the first person I ever met.”
“By the time I started to practice,” says Sojun Mel Weitsman, Abbott of the Berkeley Zen Center, “I'd been looking around for a long time. And I said to myself, ‘I have to do this. This sort of opportunity might not come by again. I have to take this all the way.’”
“When I began to practice,” says Zenkei Blanche Hartman, Abbess of San Francisco Zen Center, “it was sort of like grabbing a life preserver in a stormy sea. Before I came to practice, what I'd thought I wanted was for everyone to love me. What I discovered was that I'd had it backwards—my real deep desire was to be able to love everyone. Which, when I met Suzuki Roshi, seemed to be a real possibility. Because he seemed to be able to do that.”
Before her first private interview with Suzuki, Hartman says, she was instructed in how to perform the formal series of prostrations used to begin a meeting with a Zen teacher:
“But I was so full of gratitude I didn't want to stand way back and do some formal bow. I wanted to bow to him. So I went around the mat and bowed so that my head touched the floor right where his left knee was. He'd been sitting there when I bowed, but when I lifted my head, he'd jumped up and was head to head with me on the floor. I was amazed. He wasn't a young man, and he would've had to move very fast to do something like that!”
In the early Sixties, an aspiring Zen student confronted Suzuki in his office at Sokoji, the Japantown temple in San Francisco where Suzuki was then head priest.
“If you believe in absolute freedom,” demanded the student, indicating a cage in the corner of the room, “then why do you keep a bird in a cage?”
In response, Suzuki walked over to the cage, opened the door, and let the bird fly out.
The story was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, and attracted many people to Suzuki's fledgling San Francisco Zen Center. There is, however, a lesser-known sequel to the tale. A short time after the newspaper article, a new student, Bill Kwong (now Kwong Roshi) visited the temple to inquire about Zen. Remembering the story about the bird, Kwong asked what had happened to it—was it still in the building or had it flown off?
As David Chadwick tells it in his biography of Suzuki, Crooked Cucumber:
Everyone looked down. Had [Kwong] said something wrong?
“The cat,” Suzuki said softly.
“The cat?” Kwong repeated, looking at the feline comfortably curled on Della's lap.
McNeil leaned over to Kwong and said softly, “The cat ate the bird.”
“[Roshi] felt so bad about it,” added Della.
Suzuki said nothing. They drank their tea.
Someone once asked Suzuki Roshi: “What is Zen?”
Suzuki held up his hand with two fingers spread open. “Not two,” he said. Then he brought them together. “One.”
Elsie Mitchell of the Cambridge Buddhist Association reports an early visit from Suzuki Roshi, in 1964. He'd written that he would be arriving on Wednesday night, and they planned to have someone meet him at the airport.
On Tuesday afternoon, a number of the members set to work housecleaning. That evening the meditation room was in the process of being scrubbed down when the doorbell rang. There on the front step, a day early, was Suzuki Roshi, wearing a big smile on his face, and highly amused to find everyone in the midst of preparations for his arrival.
Ignoring their protests, he tied back the sleeves of his robes and insisted on joining in “all these preparations for the important day of my coming!”
The next morning, says Mitchell, after she'd left the building to run some errands, “He found himself a tall ladder, sponges, and pails. He then set to work scrubbing Cambridge grease, grime, and general pollution from the outside of the windows in the meditation hall. When I returned with the groceries, I discovered him on the ladder, polishing with such undivided attention that he did not even hear my approach. He had removed his black silk kimono and was dressed only in his Japanese union suit. This is quite acceptable attire in Japan. Nevertheless, I could not help wondering how the sedate Cambridge ladies in the adjoining apartment house would react to the sight of a shaven-headed man in long underwear at work right outside their windows!”
When Katharine Thanas, who is now resident Zen teacher for the Santa Cruz Zen Center, was struggling with whether to make a deeper commitment to Zen practice, she came before Suzuki Roshi during shosan (a formal public encounter with the teacher), and without preamble, simply said, “Inside me there is a yes and a no.”
“Follow the yes,” Suzuki told her.
The most visible Soto Zen teacher in the U.S., as founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and the Zen Mountain Center at Tassajara—the first Buddhist monastery established in the Western hemisphere in the 2,500 year history of the religion—Suzuki Roshi was also America's most active proponent of shikantaza, or “just sitting” practice. This form of Zen meditation discourages self-conscious seeking after enlightenment, in the trust that zazen itself is the perfect expression of one's true nature. “To take this posture is itself to have the right state of mind,” said Suzuki Roshi in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, which was first published in 1969, and remains a seminal text of Zen Buddhism in America to this day. “If enlightenment comes, it just comes.”
What's here right now? Delusion is yesterday's dream—enlightenment, tomorrow's delusion.
—Taizan Maezumi Roshi
My first encounter with Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi, founder of the Zen Center of Los Angeles, came when I returned to my then-home in Santa Barbara in the mid-1980s, following a long absence. Having just gone through a period of crisis and spiritual confusion, I'd determined to find a Zen teacher as soon as possible after my arrival. As I stepped off the plane the friend who picked me up handed me a copy of Peter Matthiessen's Nine-Headed Dragon River saying, “Here, you've got to read this!” The book is Matthiessen's account of his many years of Zen practice, in which Maezumi Roshi features prominently. I'd often run across the phrase, “when the student is ready the teacher appears”—a common enough saying in Zen literature. But I'd never expected to have his name and precise location handed to me when my search had scarcely begun. Within a couple of weeks, I found myself headed toward the Zen Center of Los Angeles, ninety miles to the south, to participate in an Introduction to Zen seminar.
The morning section of the workshop was, to say the least, unimpressive. Not only was the center located in a particularly crowded and seedy section of Los Angeles, with drug deals happening openly on the corners, but the session was led by a single uninspired monk who would clearly have rather spent the day doing something else. And what could be the purpose, I wondered, of all these black robes, shaven-headed monks, and Buddha statues—ritual elements I had conveniently overlooked in my extensive readings on Zen practice? I knew that it was not fair to judge the center until I'd met the teacher, but as the day wore on, marked by a series of increasingly dull expositions on the Buddha's teachings, which made realizing one's true nature sound as appealing as drinking a tub of dishwater, I was feeling more and more inclined to find another place to pursue my spiritual investigations.
After lunch, we were led on a tour of the grounds, which were admittedly lovely, replete with flower gardens and twisted, Zennish trees that looked as though they'd been transplanted from an old scroll painting. The tour ended in the library. I was standing in the corner of the room furthest from the door, looking at a volume of Master Dogen's writings, when the door swung open and in walked a mild-looking, middle-aged Japanese gentleman with a shaved head.
“Hello, everybody,” he said in a soft-spoken, accented but articulate English. “I am so pleased you could all come to visit Zen Center. I am sorry that because of many obligations I have not been able to spend more time with you, but I wanted to take this opportunity to welcome you personally.”
Somewhere during the course of the greeting, I realized that this must be Maezumi Roshi—though I couldn't reconcile this polite, smiling figure with the commanding presence I'd imagined from Matthiessen's account. The roshi ended his speech by inviting us all to come back for one of the center's weekend programs, in which we would be entitled, as part of our introductory seminar, to attend a dokusan [private interview] with him.
That would have been the end of the encounter, and very likely the end of my involvement with the Zen Center—except that in moving to exit the roshi paused, for no apparent reason, and turning his head with a calm deliberateness, shot me the clearest, purest glance from across the room I'd ever received. The event might not have seemed so unusual, if not for the fact that of the fifteen or so people scattered about I was the furthest away, and during the course of his brief address he hadn't so much as cast an eye in my direction. I don't know how long he held the look—perhaps it was only a second or two. Then, with the same calm deliberation, he turned, stepped across the threshold, and was gone. But the electricity of that glance coursed through my body for hours.
It was one of the few truly uncanny acts I ever saw Maezumi Roshi—or any Zen teacher—perform.
A student asked three different teachers, early in his practice, about reincarnation.
“Better to say ‘could be’ than to say ‘no,’” replied Eido Shimano Roshi.
“It's a nice story,” answered Sochu Roshi.
“Better not to ask,” was the answer given by Maezumi Roshi.
On another occasion a Los Angeles Zen Center donor asked Maezumi Roshi during a lunch meeting: “All that reincarnation stuff—it's just symbolic, isn't it?”
Maezumi slammed his fist on the table so hard the glasses leapt in the air. “It is a fact!” he exclaimed.
Maezumi Roshi was sitting on the front porch of the Zen Center of Los Angeles one evening with one of his students when a disheveled, extremely inebriated man staggered up to them.
“Whaarsh it like,” the man slurred, “. . . to be enlightened?”
Maezumi looked at the man quietly.
“Very depressing,” he answered.
A professional dancer, who'd been forced to abandon her career after being pushed in front of a subway train and injuring one of her feet, attended a retreat with Maezumi Roshi. Self-conscious about the appearance of her injured foot, she always kept it covered with a sock.
In her first interview, she asked Maezumi a question about Zen practice, but he answered, “Never mind that. Tell me about your foot.” She told him the story, and when her tears began to come she looked up to find that the roshi was crying too.
This went on for most of the week. Every day she'd come in and ask Maezumi about her practice, he'd ask about her foot instead, and they'd cry together. Finally the day came when she walked into the interview room and began to tell him about her injury, but it summoned no tears from her.
“Never mind about that,” Maezumi interrupted. “Let's talk about your practice.”
Gerry Shishin Wick, who is now resident Zen teacher for the Great Mountain Zen Center in Lafayette, Colorado, was assisting Maezumi Roshi during a meditation retreat in Mexico City. The sesshin was held in a neighborhood home that had just been built and was not yet inhabited. During the retreat the next door neighbor's dog ran out into the street and was killed by a car.
Maezumi insisted on holding a funeral, saying, “We're responsible for that dog.”
Wick responded, “What do you mean Roshi? How could we be responsible?”
Maezumi said, “There was an empty house here, and now there are all these people, ringing bells and walking around. Maybe the dog sensed that, became disturbed, and ran out into the street. We have to have a funeral for that dog.”
Everyone at the retreat, as well as the neighbors, who'd never before been exposed to any Eastern practices, went on to participate in a proper Buddhist funeral, with chanting and offering of incense.
When John Daido Loori was a monk at the Los Angeles Zen Center, he remarked one day to Maezumi Roshi: “I have resolved the question of life and death.”
“Are you sure?” replied Maezumi.
“Yes,” replied Loori.
“Are you really sure?”
“Absolutely,” Loori answered.
With that, Maezumi threw himself violently upon Loori and began to strangle him.
Gasping for breath, Loori struggled to escape, tried to push him off, but to no avail.
Finally he swung back his fist and struck his teacher, knocking him aside.
Maezumi rose to his feet and brushed himself off. “Resolved the question of life and death, eh?” he laughed, and walked off.
Later Loori, still bearing the marks of his teacher's fingers on his throat, passed a senior monk, Genpo Sensei.
On seeing the bruises, Genpo did a double take. “Told Roshi you'd resolved the question of life and death, did you?” he said, and strode away laughing.
Taizan Maezumi's first encounter with Americans occurred while he was still an adolescent, just after World War II, when the grounds of his family temple were made into an anti-aircraft battery. The American soldiers, he later said, taught him “to drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and cuss!”
Ordained as a monk at age eleven, Maezumi came from a family of Zen priests. Like Suzuki Roshi, he had always wanted to come to America; in 1956, with assistance from a Japanese loan shark, he procured the means to do so. He worked first as a priest for Zenshuji Temple in Los Angeles, the American headquarters of the Soto sect. Like Sokoji in San Francisco, the temple catered mainly to the area's large population of Japanese-Americans, focusing largely upon ceremonies and public events, and placing little emphasis upon zazen. Maezumi also worked as a translator for Mitsubishi Bank, and for a time, even wrote fortunes for a Chinese cookie company.
Like many of the more compelling Zen teachers throughout the history of the tradition, Maezumi always felt drawn to a broader approach to Zen than that offered by any single sect. Although he first received the Dharma transmission in 1955 from his father, Kuroda Roshi, in the Soto school, by the age of sixteen he'd also commenced koan study with Koryu Osaka, a lay Rinzai Master; and in the early 1960s, during one of Yasutani Roshi's trips to America, Maezumi began koan study with him, too. Maezumi eventually received inka, or full sanction of awakening and authority to teach Zen, from both teachers, becoming one of the few Zen masters to hold the dharma transmission in three lineages. By 1967, the small zazen group he'd begun at Zenshuji had rented their own quarters and moved out to establish what would later become the Zen Center of Los Angeles, with some 200 resident trainees at its peak in the 1970s. Maezumi Roshi, who died in 1995, is notable for his unique synthesis of the Rinzai and Soto training approaches—and his White Plum lineage of American teachers has gone on to become one of the largest and most influential in the West.
Perhaps the best demonstration of Maezumi's hard-yet-soft synthesis of the Rinzai and Soto schools is illustrated by the following series of interactions that took place during my first five day sesshin, or intensive practice retreat with him:
On the first day, distracted by thoughts and feelings for a woman I'd been dating, I went in for my private interview with the roshi despondent about my inability to keep my mind on my practice. I was expecting to be scolded for my poor efforts, but Maezumi responded: “You're in love! That's wonderful! Don't worry so much about your practice. Just relax and enjoy your sitting.”
On the second day, troubled by serious pain in my back and knees, I was considering dropping out of the retreat entirely. I went to dokusan, expecting to be admonished to sit through the discomfort. Instead Maezumi said: “Don't try so hard! Practice is not asceticism. Take the next period off and rest yourself. Now, I'll give you a back massage.” With that he directed me to turn around, and proceeded to rub my back and shoulders.
By the third day I was struggling with constant sleepiness, since a painting crew had mixed up the screens on the buildings, and mosquitoes from the center's koi pond swarmed nightly into the dormitories past the ill-fitting frames, keeping everyone awake. But when I tried to tell the roshi about these difficulties, he cut me off, saying: “Stop feeling sorry for yourself! Make some effort. You're not trying hard enough!”
To get this chance (to practice the Dharma) is very difficult. To be born as a human being is very difficult. Among uncountable sperms and eggs . . . you are here. Wonderful chance. Congratulations.
—Soen Nakagawa Roshi
From the 1960s through the early Eighties Soen Nakagawa, who had been influential in Japan in the training of such early American Zen students as Philip Kapleau and Robert Aitken, began to come regularly to the States to lead sesshins, or sitting retreats, when his responsibilities as Abbott of Ryutakuji Monastery in Japan would allow it. Soen Roshi, as his American students called him, was famed for his unconventional teaching methods, which were eccentric even by Zen standards. One often-reported trick was the time he placed a pumpkin on his sitting cushion in the interview room during sesshin. He then called participants in for private interviews and hid behind a screen, watching while the baffled students did their customary prostrations before the impassive gourd. Or he might don a mask and appear out of nowhere, then drop it to pronounce: “I've taken off my mask. When will you take off yours?”
Soen loved to walk around New York City. He'd stare at the lighted skyscrapers; at their tops, he claimed, he saw Buddha figures in the lights. “Look at the Buddha,” he'd point, “Shining Buddha!” He'd fill the sleeves of his robes with nuts and berries from Central Park, or herbs growing in the sidewalk cracks, and add them to his bowl at the next meal. He loved the musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” and when asked a question about why some particular point of ceremony needed to be performed in a certain way, he might burst into song, responding: “Tradition!”
Soen even made up a new koan in response to the Apollo missions: “Without getting in a spaceship, bring me a rock from the moon.” It is not known if any of his students ever managed to pass it.
Despite being the abbot of a major temple, Soen Roshi had an uneasy relationship with traditional forms, and had earned a reputation as an eccentric even in Japan. Known for his love of green tea, powdered and whisked in the traditional fashion, he might sit down anywhere, if the mood stuck him, to conduct an impromptu tea ceremony. He claimed that once, on a visit to Israel, he'd floated, unsinkable, on the salt-saturated surface of the Dead Sea, serving tea to a group of friends. In an airport one of his students asked if Roshi might conduct a tea ceremony; in answer he extracted a tin from his sleeve, dipped his finger into it, and instructed the student to open her mouth.
“There,” he announced, dabbing a fingertip of powdered green tea onto her tongue. “Now you make the water!”
Once, at Dai Bosatsu Monastery in upstate New York, Soen asked a student who had just returned from studying tea in Japan to perform a ceremony for him, but she protested that she did not have her supplies. The roshi must have persisted in his request, for a short while later the two were seen sitting on the dock at the edge of Beecher Lake, pouring non-existent tea into non-existent bowls and sipping at them, in a perfect pantomime of the formal ceremony.
Soen once invited the teachers from the New York branch of a prominent tea school to join him for tea at his New York Zendo—a great honor, considering that he was abbot of an important Japanese temple. Soen proceeded to conduct a traditional ceremony, flawless in every detail but one: with characteristic wry humor, what he whisked into their bowls was not green tea, but instant coffee.
American writer Wendy Johnson, a long-time resident at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in California, remembers a retreat she attended with Soen Roshi at a Trappist monastery on the outskirts of Jerusalem in the early Seventies. The group included a rabbi, an Israeli draft resister, and a number of Americans, as well as a number of participants from orthodox Jewish and Christian backgrounds. One evening, Soen found the chanting service to be rather spiritless, so he ordered all present to meet him outside after the final sitting period. He proceeded to take them on a long walk through the darkened hills.
The monastery was just outside Jerusalem, surrounded by Arab villages, and at the time, shortly after the Six Day War, it wasn't generally considered advisable to wander about the countryside. Still, Soen led the group off into the darkness, loudly chanting the Kannon Sutra. At one point they rounded a bend to find the entire valley spread out below them. Calling the group to a halt, Soen Roshi demanded, “What is the true nature of mind?” He answered himself: “MU is the true nature of mind!” [literally meaning “no,”“nothing,” or “emptiness,” but referring to the koan in which a monk asks Joshu, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” and Joshu replies: “Mu!”].
Soen admonished the group to chant Mu until their small selves fell away. They chanted with such ferocity that the tears ran down their faces. Soen's booming baritone voice, strikingly deep for his tiny frame, rang out as loudly as the rest. And as they stood there, shouting Mu at the top of their lungs in the dead of night, the dogs of the surrounding villages began to join in, yapping and baying in a wild cacophony of affirmation—as though they, at least, knew the answer.
Soen Roshi used to tell the story of how in London, as he was about to enter a bathroom, someone informed him it was in use. As Zen teacher and author Peter Matthiessen tells it, in Nine-Headed Dragon River:
The roshi waited there politely for a long time before he became concerned, after which he knocked, then opened the door.
“Nobody there!” He laughed delightedly. “Wait as long as you like! Never anybody there! From the beginning!”
On a visit to Israel, Soen Nakagawa Roshi called upon Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.
During the conversation Soen Roshi's American traveling companion remarked, “There are many religions: Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism—but the essence is the same.”
“Where is essence?” responded Buber.
“Let us shake hands with essence,” replied Soen Roshi, extending his hand. “Okay?”
At this Buber laughed heartily.
One Sunday morning, Soen Nakagawa, together with shakuhachi flute master Watazumi Doso and Doso's wife, was invited to visit the New York City home of painters Harvey Konigsberg and his wife, Patricia. The visit came at a time when Harvey and Patricia were going through a particularly difficult period in their lives. On entering their loft in Little Italy, Soen paused before a painting Harvey had done of Bill Walling, one of the founders of the Bioenergetics Institute, who'd been an important teacher to him. “There's something incomplete about this,” Soen Roshi said.
As it turned out, Walling had recently died. The Konigsbergs had felt dissatisfied with the memorial service, and lacked a sense of closure. On hearing the story, Soen Roshi improvised a memorial service on the spot, an event the couple found extremely moving.
Afterward, to shift the mood, Soen Roshi began randomly opening closets; inside he found a variety of martial arts attire and other articles of clothing. “Ah!” exclaimed Soen. “Wonderful! Costumes!” He began pulling out items and handing them to the other guests, and within a short time had created an impromptu costume party. Then, to the amazement of his hosts, he proceeded to rearrange their living room furniture.
Later there was a performance by Doso's wife, a dance master, to an accompaniment of pounded pots and pans, arranged by Soen. Then Watazumi Doso announced that, since the Konigsbergs seemed to have a lot of pets about, he was going to perform a special “Song for Beasts.” No sooner had he begun to play—on a pennywhistle, as he did not have his shakuhachi with him—than their three cats and dog began to filter into the room. Ignoring the assembled human beings, they padded about Watazumi Doso as he played. After the piece was finished, reports Konigsberg, “he began a different song for human beings, and the animals all left.” Although Soen Roshi had planned to spend only an hour or so, he ended up staying the entire day.
“The whole experience,” remembers Konigsberg, “was like a bombardment of light.”
And the furniture? “The change lifted the feeling of the place entirely,” Konigsberg says. “We never put it back.”
In the late 1960s, Soen Roshi sustained a head injury, which some say was caused by falling out of a tree in which he'd been meditating—an event often pointed to as the cause of his increasingly eccentric behavior. It is said that he suffered from pain at various times in his life, but this worsened in his later years to the point where, in the late 1970s, he shut himself away in his quarters at his Japanese monastery, grew his hair and beard long, and refused to see anyone.
Soen Roshi came out of his self-imposed retirement in 1982 to pay a last visit to his American students. As Peter Matthiessen reports it, he left them with these words: “Cooking, eating, sleeping, every deed of everyday life is nothing else than this Great Matter. Realize this! So we extend tender care with a worshipping heart even to such beings as beasts and birds—but not only to beasts, not only to birds, but to insects too, okay? Even to grass, to one blade of grass, even to dust, to one speck of dust. Sometimes I bow to the dust . . .”
Soen Roshi died at Ryutaku-ji Monastery in Japan in 1984; half of his bones are buried there, and half in America.
Meditation is not an escape from life . . . but preparation for really being in life.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
I first saw Thich Nhat Hanh speak at the closing event for a retreat in Southern California in the 1980s. All I had heard beforehand was that a Vietnamese Zen monk, who had been politically active in helping victims on both sides of the war in Vietnam and had been exiled by his government for these activities, was now leading reconciliation retreats between Vietnamese monastics and American veterans, and that I shouldn't miss the chance of attending the final evening. I later found out Thich Nhat Hanh been nominated by Martin Luther King for the Nobel Peace Prize, for the same activities that had led to his exile. I wasn't prepared however, for how moving the evening would prove to be—beginning with the spectacle of a number of enormous American ex-GIs, some of them in combat fatigues, sharing the stage with a group of diminutive brown-robed monks and nuns.
Thich Nhat Hanh spoke first, and then the veterans and monastics came up one by one to tell their stories—how they'd suffered during and after the war, the nightmares and paranoia, the regret and fear many had faced in coming here, and the healing they'd experienced during a week of practicing sitting and walking meditation and sharing their experiences of the war with one another. The evening ended with an exchange of embraces between the participants, many of whom were in tears at reconciling with their former enemies.
In a conversation from Jerry Brown's book, Dialogues, Thich Nhat Hanh said:
During the war in Vietnam, we suffered so much, but as a monk I continued to practice in order not to lose track of reality. In the situation of war one might be carried away by despair or anger. But if you are caught by despair or anger, you lose the insight you need to bring people out of danger. I was living very deeply each moment of my life, and the life of my people, and was [able to see] that the war created suffering not only for the Vietnamese people, but also for the American people. I was able to see that the young Americans who went there in order to kill were also victims of the war, victims of a notion, a policy. And I had compassion to offer to them, because I was able to see them as victims.
Thich Nhat Hanh, when asked whether he supported North or South Vietnam in the ongoing conflict, responded:
“I'm for the center.”
Thich Nhat Hanh, a pioneer in the field of Buddhism and social action, has nonetheless been quoted as saying: “Don't just do something. Sit there!”
An American student asked Thich Nhat Hanh how she could be more mindful in her daily work.
“Do you want to know my secret?” replied Thich Nhat Hanh, with a smile. “I try to find the way to do things that is most pleasurable. There may be many ways to perform a given task—but the one that holds my attention best is the one that is most pleasant.”
Thich Nhat Hanh was leading a reconciliation retreat between Vietnamese monks and nuns and American veterans of the Vietnam War. One of the American vets confessed during the retreat that he had killed five Vietnamese children in an ambush, and since then could not bear to be alone in a room with children.
Thich Nhat Hanh responded: “At this very moment there are many children who are dying in the world. There are children who die just because they lack a single pill of medicine. If you are mindful, you can bring that pill to that child, and you can save his life. If you practice like that for five times, then you will save five children. Because what is to be done, is to be done in the present moment. Forty thousand children die every day because of lack of food. Why do you have to cling to the past to think of the five who are already dead? You have the power to change things by touching the present moment.”
Despite Thich Nhat Hanh's world-wide teaching activities and his more than thirty books in some twenty languages, making him the most visible exponent of Engaged Buddhism in the West, this humble, soft-spoken monk has continued to live quietly and simply at his retreat center, Plum Village, in rural France. He teaches by example, stressing the Buddhist basics of mindfulness, following the breath, and walking meditation. “Just the way he opens a door and enters a room demonstrates his understanding,” remarked Trappist monk Thomas Merton. “He is a true monk.” Nhat Hanh's Tiep Hien Order of Interbeing, with its precepts of simplicity, pacifism, and non-accumulation of wealth, has sparked a broad-based popular movement in Buddhism that has proved enormously influential in the United States and Europe.
Through his teaching of “inter-being,” Thich Nhat Hanh constantly reminds his students of the interrelatedness (and therefore lack of independent “self”) of all things. In another talk I attended, he held up a sheet of paper and invited the audience to consider the many elements that had brought it into being. The page was not simply composed of wood pulp, Thich Nhat Hanh explained, but of the sun, water, and nutrients that nourished the tree, as well as the people that harvested and processed it, and many other elements in an endless chain of causation. The same goes for human beings. Thus Thich Nhat Hanh tells his students: “We may like to use the word ‘self,’ but if we are aware that self is always made of non-self elements, we are safe . . . It is like a flower—it is made of non-flower elements; like America—it is made of non-American elements. The moment we see ourselves in this deeper way, we begin to realize that we ‘inter-are’ with other people, and the feeling of distinction, the feeling of discrimination in us, vanishes. Then we begin to have peace.”
“When you are guided by compassion and loving-kindness,” says Thich Nhat Hanh, “you are able to look deeply into the heart of reality and to see the truth . . . Serenity helps. We have to learn that. Calm helps. To be serene, to be calm, does not mean to be inactive. You can be very active and calm at the same time.”
It was early summer 1982 in New York City. Peter and I . . . planned to join the International Peace March that would be the culmination of an ecumenical conference called Reverence For Life. The march would pass through the streets of New York to the United Nations. Thich Nhat Hahn was a primary member of the conference . . .
On the streets of New York City that June day, close to one million people had assembled. There was an electric spirit of revival meeting, an Independence Day parade, coursing through the crowd. A surge of humanity roared for peace all along the emptied avenues of Manhattan. Thich Nhat Hanh stood quietly in the street with a throng of delegates and participants . . . he was still and slightly somber, somewhat grave and watchful . . . a contingent from Zen Center was with him in the street. Silently the group joined hands and began to walk with excruciatingly slow steps. Thich Nhat Hanh led the march and set the pace. He knew what he was doing. “To really make peace, first slow down,” he said to us. “Be aware of your every step. You moved through my country with great haste. We could not slow you down. Today, please walk in mindfulness. Life itself depends on awareness of your pace and steps.”
Behind us the crowd was stacked up for blocks. People called out in irritation and impatience. Thich Nhat Hanh moved with regal sovereignty. Unfazed, measured in pace, he walked with them. Baker Roshi described this slight, brownrobed Zen monk as “a cross between a tractor and a cloud.” The impatient crowd thronged around him, gesturing and blowing red-faced on shrill whistles. Undistracted, adamantine, the Zen group inched on, pressing peace with every step into the heat-softened pavement of New York.
Moment to moment, how do you help others? Not only human beings, but this whole world. When enlightenment and correct life come together, that means your life becomes truth, the sufferng world becomes paradise. Then you can change this suffering world into paradise for others.
—Seung Sahn
When Seung Sahn, the first Korean Zen master to teach in the West, came to America in 1972, as Stephen Mitchell puts it in his preface to Seung Sahn's The Whole World Is a Single Flower, “his young hippie students, with their acid trips and casual nudity, must have seemed to him like creatures from another planet: fascinating, barbaric, full of potential.”
After obtaining employment in a laundromat in Providence, Rhode Island (the owners likely having little idea of their employee's true range of talents), Seung Sahn was soon sought out by students from Brown University. Soen-sa-nim, as he is known to his students, shortly afterward established the Providence Zen Center, which would eventually become the head temple for his Kwan Um School of Zen, with some three dozen centers worldwide. “I just loved Soen-sa-nim's humor and his wild attitude,” says Joan Halifax, now a Zen teacher in the Buddhist Peacemaker Order. “He didn't take everything so heavily and seriously . . . he had an outrageous attitude towards life. Everything struck him as wildly funny, and I appreciated that.” Known for his dramatic teaching style, incisive insight, and unbounded sense of humor, Seung Sahn has become one of the most influential teachers in the West, and his uniquely phrased directives for practice have entered the general American Zen vocabulary: “Try mind”; “Don't make anything”; “Only don't know.”
By the time he arrived in the U.S., Soen-sa-nim had already established a reputation in his home country. Ordained a monk at the age of twenty-one, following a period of World War II resistance activities, and a thorough study of philosophies West and East, he entered into a solitary one hundred day retreat. During this period he ate only powdered pine needles, which eventually caused his skin to turn green. For twenty hours a day, he chanted the Great Dharani of Original Mind Energy, while beset by a variety of fears, doubts, and visions both beautiful and terrifying. On the hundredth day, while chanting and hitting a moktak (percussion instrument), he suddenly felt his body vanish and sensed himself to be in infinite space. When he returned he understood everything to be his true self.
After some months of further practice, including a one hundred day retreat at Su Dok Sa Monastery, Seung Sahn went to visit Chun Song, a master known for his unconventional and idiosyncratic actions. As Stephen Mitchell reports it:
“Soen-sa bowed to him and said, ‘I killed all the Buddhas of past, present, and future. What can you do?’
“Chun Song said, ‘Aha!’ and looked deeply into Soen-sa's eyes. Then he said, ‘What did you see?’
“Soen-sa replied, ‘You already understand.’
“Chun Song said, ‘Is that all?’
“Soen-sa said, ‘There's a cuckoo singing in the tree outside the window.’
“Chun Song laughed and said, ‘Aha!’ He asked several more questions, which Soen-sa answered without difficulty. Finally Chun Song leaped up and danced around Soen-sa, shouting, ‘You are enlightened! You are enlightened!’”
Seung Sahn subsequently had interviews with three more masters, each of whom gave him Inka, or authentication of his awakening. In January 1949, at age twenty-two, he received the dharma transmission from Master Ko Bong, the most prominent Zen master of his time. This was the only transmission Ko Bong ever gave.
Zen Master Seung Sahn instructs his students: “Only go straight, don't know: try, try, try for ten thousand years, nonstop. Then you attain the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
A student of Korean Master Seung Sahn was attending her first retreat at his newly acquired center in Providence. The building was a former funeral home on a busy corner; its pink floral-patterned carpeting was still in place. On the third day the student awoke and looked in the mirror to see herself as a corpse, with blackened face and teeth falling out. Deeply affected by the vision, she hurried to tell Seung Sahn about it in her morning interview.
On hearing the story the teacher burst out laughing and tapped her on the shoulder with his Zen stick. “Don't worry,” he laughed. “You're a corpse already!”
After seeing Seung Sahn speak for the first time, Hawaiian American Su Bong Soen Sa asked if he could have a private meeting with the teacher, to which Seung Sahn agreed. Su Bong Soen Sa showed up with a big volume of Zen sayings, which he had been studying, and hoped the master might clarify for him. Seung Sahn made him wait for a long while before he would see him. Finally Seung Sahn invited him in for the interview. Su Bong Soen Sa, heart pounding at being before a master for the first time, turned the book toward Seung Sahn and pointed with his fingertip, saying, “There's a line in this book by the Sixth Patriarch that I wonder if you would explain for me . . .”
In a flash, Seung Sahn leapt at the book and slammed it shut on his finger, shouting, “No more reading! Who are you?”
Subong Soen-sa couldn't answer. He decided at that moment to become Seung Sahn's student, and eventually went on to become one of his dharma heirs.
When Zen teacher Bobby Rhodes was just beginning her practice with Master Seung Sahn during the hippie era, she had a reputation for being fond of things that were old: clothing, jewelry, and other such items.
One day her teacher came to her and said: “I have a present for you. It's something that's really, really old.”
Seung Sahn dropped the gift into her outstretched palm. It was a stone.
Once Su Bong Soen Sa did a hundred-day solitary retreat in California. Perhaps two thirds of the way into it he began to feel rather bored and uncertain about why he should continue such an intensive schedule all by himself. He left the cabin where he was practicing and hitchhiked to the nearest phone booth to call Master Seung Sahn.
“I've got a question for you,” he said when his teacher answered.
“Yes?” came back the suspicious voice of Seung Sahn, who knew he was supposed to be in silent retreat.
“I see clearly now that I can accomplish this retreat. But still I'm wondering—why? If I already know I can do it—why continue?”
“For All Beings!” Seung Sahn shouted, and slammed down the receiver.
Su Bong Soen Sa went back to his cabin and finished the retreat.
A senior student who had been practicing with Seung Sahn for many years was walking with his teacher along a hallway. When the Master, in response to some item in the conversation, advised him for the umpteenth time, “Only don't know,” something in the student snapped.
Grabbing his teacher and shoving him up against the wall the student shouted, “If I hear you say that one more time I'm going to scream!”
Seung Sahn looked at him and nodded. “Very good dharma demonstration!” he said.