You yourself are time—your body, your mind, the objects around you. Plunge into the river of time and swim, instead of standing on the banks and noting the course of the currents.
—PHILIP KAPLEAU
My first glimpse of Roshi Philip Kapleau, the grand old man of American Zen, is like a dream—or better yet, a makyo, those delusive visions that sometimes afflict meditators during long periods of zazen. I'm standing by the reception desk in the front office of the Rochester Zen Center when the adjacent door, with its sign saying something like “Private Quarters, Please Knock Before Entering,” swings open and, as though in a scene from Waiting For Godot, three figures burst through it. Leading the way is Roshi's attendant, a tall dark-haired youth; in the middle is an old man, wearing—am I imagining this?—some sort of greyish flannel union suit, or pajamas with suspenders; and taking up the rear is my friend Eiho, white hair flying, who seems to be clutching those suspenders, or a kind of harness arrangement, to help Roshi stay upright. Lurching determinedly forward, head lowered as though to batter away obstructions, the roshi barrels toward—where? the shower?—while Eiho shouts, like a crazed rodeo cowboy, “He's going! He's going! Look at him go!” The scene is so sudden and dreamlike that I can't catch all the details. All at once it is over, as quickly as it began, and there is no one else around to ask for an explanation, or to confirm that it, in fact, happened at all.
My drive with Eiho from Zen Mountain Monastery through the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York had been perfect, winding through air-brushed grey hillsides of late fall, slopes filled with empty trees, punctuated by stands of still-changing color. We watched the sky with its change-of-season cloud wisps fading to purple, then slate-grey, and finally dusky indigo as the evening rolled in—all of it having that larger-than-life sense one often feels at the end of sesshin. Cindy Eiho Green, my guide for this journey, is white-haired, fiftyish, with translucent skin like onion paper, and blue eyes you could dive into, like a clear, deep lake—why is it, I find myself wondering, that so many long-time practitioners have these exceptionally deep, clear eyes? A long-time student of Roshi Kapleau, Eiho now studies with John Daido Loori, and is a full-time resident at Zen Mountain Monastery.
Our destination felt to me like a place of pilgrimage. The Rochester Zen Center, in many ways the home temple of American Zen, was the first major practice center established by an American. Ex-businessman Philip Kapleau, following his return from his thirteen years of training in Japanese monasteries in 1966, chose this unlikely industrial city at the edge of the Great Lakes in western New York after making an extensive tour of America in search of the ideal location to start a Zen center. Like Dainin Katagiri, Kapleau has said that he hoped the famously inclement weather would push his students to look inward.
Known for many years as the “boot camp” of American Zen, the Rochester Zen Center was famous for the discipline and intensity of its training, its emphasis on provoking kensho, or enlightenment experience, and its use of the keisaku or “Zen stick” to spur students onto harder practice. Kapleau's Three Pillars of Zen had been an important influence in my early years of training, and still stands as one of the classics of American Buddhist literature.
We'd arrived too late, after our five-and-a-half-hour drive, to visit Roshi Kapleau last night, or to get much of a sense of our surroundings. Now, in the daylight, I can see how lovely the center is, made up of several adjacent National Historic Register houses on a secluded residential street. Late October leaves drop in reds and browns along the brick paths, wooden walkways, and immaculate gardens of the interior courtyard, at the center of which sits a large stone Buddha with no face—just a perfectly blank, beginner's mind expanse of emptiness. This, explains one of the students working around the place, is meant to represent the Zen of America, whose features have yet to develop.
After zazen and breakfast, I help two young residents with bits and pieces of work—putting away picnic tables for the winter, stacking them one atop another in a narrow alcove between two walls. Our labor is relaxed, unhurried. We move several wheelbarrows, pile the tables in a corner, cover them with a blue plastic tarp, then move the wheelbarrows back into position. Then we're off to the woodshop, thoroughly modern and well-equipped, with an expensive-looking table saw at the center. I'd already noticed the immaculate woodwork everywhere about the place—each railing, each of the altars set here and there, the tables, the floors, all demonstrating close and careful attention to detail.
The workshop, too, is neat as an acupuncture lancet—but when the crew leader, an earnest, capable fellow in his twenties, whom I'll call Evan, hands out the tools for our next round of work, he gives the new arrival, wild-haired Mike, a leaf vacuum whose nozzle, despite liberal application of duct tape, keeps falling off. I'm relieved to find that not everything about this place is perfect.
I'm assigned to pull wilting chrysanthemums out of ceramic pots and trundle them off in a wheelbarrow to the compost heap: the dried blooms stiff in my hands, cold fall air crunching against skin, bright cool sun and wheelbarrow bouncing and wobbling on cobbled paths, all worthy perhaps, of twisting the old William Carlos Williams poem into a haiku:
Dried up husks of mums
crumbling in old wheelbarrow
—on which I depend
Later, Evan takes Mike and me up to the Buddha Hall, dominated by several life-sized bronze bodhisattva figures that appear to be ancient and Chinese. It's said that Roshi Kapleau found them being used as ornaments in a bar on one of his many trips to Mexico, and persuaded the owner to part with them. Stories like this abound; Katagiri Roshi once found a 900-year-old temple bell being used as a planter for a tree, and Kobun Chino found a similar artifact being used as an umbrella stand—both items, in these cases, having been restored to their proper uses. Still, there's something fitting about these grand figures standing for so many years in a bar—after all, isn't that the business of bodhisattvas, to penetrate all worlds in order to liberate all beings?
As we stand there, I mention to Evan and Mike how moving it is for me to be at the Rochester Zen Center—like arriving at the most important destination in a long, long pilgrimage.
“Why?” asks Mike innocently, and I reply, “Well, this is where it all really started, isn't it? Here and the San Francisco Zen Center . . .” and I suddenly realize, seeing his young, wide-open gaze, that he doesn't fully understand the significance of this place—that Roshi Kapleau, perhaps, is just a distant figure he's glimpsed from time to time, being pushed around in a wheelchair or helped down the stairs by his attendant, never truly grasping the importance of what this old man has done.
But now it's time to meet the roshi. He receives us in his quarters, feet propped on the pop-up footing of a reclining chair. He's dressed more conventionally than when I glimpsed him earlier, in khaki trousers and greenish canvas sneakers—real sneakers, the kind my Grandpa used to wear, with thick white rubber soles—though these still bear, incongruously, the curved white Nike teardrop. Set all about the place are Buddha and Bodhisattva figures and calligraphy—I'd heard the roshi had an extensive collection from his many years of travel. Still I can't help but wonder if any of these teachers ever tire of Asian imagery, and whether American roshis in centuries to come might substitute a more Western form of decoration—perhaps commemorative dishes with the faces of the ancestors on them instead?
I know Roshi's Parkinson's Disease is advanced, but I'm surprised to find, as I lean across to attach a lapel mike to his shirt, that my hands are more unsteady than his. “My voice is not so strong,” he says simply, in a hoarse whisper that later, when I listen to the tape, will remind me of Marlon Brando's in The Godfather. As I'm stringing the wire from his lapel he says, “I saw you this morning through my window . . .working with the wheelbarrow.”
He chuckles and I nod, not knowing how to respond. Eiho is present, and Rafe Martin, two of Roshi's close old students, but I can't help but wonder exactly what it is I am doing in their company. It feels so painfully intimate, sitting in this room with the three of them, like being with someone who's dying—it is being with someone who's dying, I realize—though at age eighty-eight Roshi Kapleau is displaying no need to hurry. Then too, there's the sense in him of “I'm not going to let mortality ruin my day or yours, so let's get on with it.”
Rafe sits centered and silent as I test the recorder. Eiho, who with her white cloud of hair and those blue clear eyes looks like a cloud herself, has that professional cheeriness of the career nurse, and the comfortable presence of having known Roshi for a long, long time.
The going is slow at first, as Roshi Kapleau gets warmed up, meandering through his mind, walking back in time. Rafe, who is a professional storyteller and uniquely suited for this task, helps fill in Roshi's words when he can't remember all the details:
“So there I was in the zendo,” says Roshi, “with Phillips and—who was that, Rafe?”
Rafe puts in, “The Abbot was Soen Nakagawa, wasn't it, Roshi? Soen Nakagawa pulled you and Phillips aside and asked—”
“He asked, ‘what did Christ say when he was on the cross—’”
“And you said, ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me—’”
“And he said, ‘No!’”
“And then he asked Phillips . . . .”
“Or did he ask Phillips first?”
They're like a symbiotic organism, these two men, student and teacher, who have practiced so long together, sharing the same mind.
After the story, Rafe asks him, “Didn't you used to travel with Soen Nakagawa?”
“With Nakagawa Roshi, yes—” Kapleau brightens at the memory. “We had a very wonderful relationship. He was three or four years older than I was, and he would take me to visit his friends—he had so many friends in every aspect of life. We used to call ourselves “the two hobos.” He sighs. “I had such good friends in Japan.”
Rafe and Roshi Kapleau had met a few days ago to decide which stories were the best ones to tell, so there's really very little I have to do. Again I have that feeling of unbearable intimacy, of sitting in on a conversation that's too private for me to listen to.
Now Rafe prompts, “Wasn't there a story to your meeting with Harada Roshi [Yasutani Roshi's teacher], when you first came to Japan?”
“I came for sesshin with Bernard Phillips,” nods Roshi Kapleau, with his hoarse whisper, “and we were going to be introduced to Harada Roshi, so we had to go into the village to buy him a present. We bought the cheapest candy you could get anywhere. Usually it's a Japanese custom that you never open a present in front of a person. There's a very good reason for it, which is that somebody who can't afford good presents might be embarrassed. But this time he opened it. It was awful. I remember him taking a piece out to taste it. It was the worst imaginable candy you could get! You know the Zen saying, ‘You have to eat it’?”
Rafe nods. “He saw right through you.”
“Yeah.” Kapleau pauses, as though reliving the scene. “I was still struggling with half lotus position. He was almost ninety, but he could bend down and touch his feet, do all kinds of postures I wouldn't dream of doing. He'd do these exercises every day with his attendant . . . I think he died at the age of ninety-two.”
As our agreed-upon hour together winds on, the figures parade before us: Soen Nakagawa, Harada Roshi, Hakuun Yasutani—alive again, talking, walking, teaching. For a moment I'm overwhelmed at the privilege of simply being present. For a moment, I feel unworthy. Finally, forgetting myself, I'm swept into simply listening. And all at once, it becomes clear what it is I'm doing here: despite his condition, despite his age, this man still wishes to speak a word of Zen, as long as he has a bit of breath left to speak it. When I tell my own teacher, Daido Roshi, about this later, it brings tears to his eyes.
But now it's afternoon, and Roshi Kapleau is growing tired, his voice failing at the beginnings and ends of his sentences, like the far-away fall-off at the end of Zen chants—and through the window it's Rochester, with its tree-lined streets, leaves falling everywhere in a catastrophe of yellows and reds. Roshi, too, is a falling leaf, suspended in mid-drop, turning in the dharma air, going up in fire, in red and yellow patches, like we all are—suspended to rest for a moment in his Lay-Z Boy armchair in his front room, with Kuan Yin in her alcove above his head—voice whispering like wind in the branches, falling, failing, until it becomes nothing but sound itself, till the branches have rubbed out the meaning . . .
A visitor for a workshop at the Rochester Zen Center arrived a day early. He assumed the older man he saw about the place was the janitor, only to find out the next day when the workshop began that he was the Roshi, Philip Kapleau.
When Kapleau heard this, he said it was the highest compliment he could have received.
A student once asked Roshi Philip Kapleau whether the koan “Mu” was hard or easy to solve.
“Both,” replied Kapleau.
“What do you mean?” asked the questioner.
“Easy,” said Kapleau, “because once you resolve it, you realize the ‘answer’ was there all along. Hard because it takes longest to see what is closest to you.”
A person interested in Zen addressed Philip Kapleau, quoting the “Agnostic's Prayer”: “Dear God—if there is a God—save my soul—if I have a soul.” He then asked: “What does Zen say about God?”
Kapleau remained silent.
A period of transition was about to commence. Although the process would take several decades, and would involve many difficulties, its intended outcome was clear: the ancient practices of Zen and other forms of Buddhism would take root in American soil. But how much would the outcome resemble Zen as practiced in its home countries of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam? Would the result be Zen at all?
When the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, seated before a large assembly of practitioners gathered on Vulture Peak to hear him speak, held up a flower instead, only Mahakashyapa smiled in understanding. Thus, the Zen tradition has it, was the true dharma eye transmitted from the Buddha to Mahakashyapa, and passed down in an unbroken continuity of awakened minds to those practicing today. In truth, no one is exactly sure that it happened this way. There are known gaps in the ancient records, and many historians suggest that even Bodhidharma may be a composite figure, made up of several different monks who carried the teachings to China. Still, whether one accepts the chain of transmission as literal or legendary, it can be established to have existed unbroken for many hundreds of years, and this alone is enough to account for why the Zen tradition has taken it so seriously.
And so, lineage and succession have always been key issues in Zen Buddhism. It has traditionally been the right, and the responsibility, of each master to sanction one or more successors, or dharma heirs, whose understanding has become ripened through years of practice, and who are, in the teacher's estimation, fully qualified to carry on the tradition. It should come then as no surprise that these should become important, and sometimes muddy, areas in the Zen of America—particularly when so many early practitioners emerged from the counterculture, with its distrust of form and authority. Some practitioners, and even teachers, have questioned the relevance of carrying on the transmission; but although these issues would later boil over into fullblown controversy, in the Sixties and Seventies the tradition of mind-to-mind transmission was mostly accepted as a given.
One thing was clear, at least to the Asian and early American teachers who carried Zen practice to this continent: unless the torch could be passed to the next generation, establishing a lineage of Western teachers and masters, the dharma would never truly take root here.
Even as the earliest American teachers—Philip Kapleau, Walter Nowick, Robert Aitken and Jiyu-Kennett—returned from Japan in the 1960s and 1970s to initiate the first Zen practice centers founded by Americans on American soil, the centers already established here by teachers such as Shunryu Suzuki, Maezumi Roshi, Seung Sahn, and others, were starting to produce mature, well-trained students. The dharma wheel was beginning to turn; and it was looking like it might just keep on rolling.
The following are stories of pivotal moments between teachers and their American students, as well as of the passing of the first Asian teachers—the new Bodhidharmas who brought this ancient practice to the New World.
Bernie Glassman, as first dharma heir to Maezumi Roshi, became in 1978 the first American to go through the formal zuise ceremony in the Soto sect of Zen, at Sojiji Temple in Japan. This traditional event marked his formal sanction as a Zen priest, while his dharma transmission from Maezumi Roshi in 1976 marked his formal sanction as a Zen teacher. In a recent conversation, he gave this account of the event:
“I went through zuise mainly to pay homage to Dogen and Keizan Zenji. You're escorted to these formal zuise quarters—it's all red carpets, and you wear red slippers and a red kesa [a formal monastic vestment]. You're essentially abbot elect. There's a book that tells you how to lead the services. The books are different in each monastery, on purpose. That's very important in Japan, that there be some consistency but that every place has its own air, its own style. So I'm looking at the book—of course it's all in Japanese—though now they're in English too, and maybe other languages. But I was the first to do it, so they had to call somebody to go over it with me. It was a complicated process. We spent about an hour, and then I was up all night, going over and over it in my head so it would be right. The cues for when I was supposed to do certain things were in Japanese and I had to remember them.
“I remember it was one of the hottest Augusts ever in Japan. I thought it easily had to be 100 degrees. During the ceremony I had this tremendous concentration, because I needed to remember the whole thing, and I was just sweating, standing in a pool of water—my red zagu (bowing mat) was all water. And there was Maezumi Roshi—he couldn't be with me in my quarters, but there he was in the back, watching.
“During the ceremony, you are led to meet the old abbot who's handing the position over for the day. He gives you this very important document which essentially makes you the abbot. It's got calligraphy on the outside, and you're supposed to tuck it in the front of your robe, so it's visible during the entire ceremony.
“Then there's a whole formal thing done in a big greeting hall—all of the roshis are there. It's beautiful. Finally I finish, and I come out to Maezumi Roshi. And you know the first thing he says to me?
“‘You put the document upside down!’”
In 1971, Suzuki Roshi fell ill, and became jaundiced. For a long time all tests were inconclusive. Fearing hepatitis, his doctors insisted on a strict quarantine of all of his food and eating utensils as a precaution against spreading the infection. Finally Suzuki checked into the hospital for more extensive testing.
Zen Center secretary Yvonne Rand remembers visiting his hospital room on the day his results came through. She found him sitting on the edge of the bed, legs dangling, before a tray filled with food.
“Roshi,” she asked, “what did they tell you?”
Suzuki smiled broadly and mouthed the words, “I have cancer.”
“Cancer?” repeated Rand, slowly sitting down beside him. “But Roshi—then why are you smiling?”
“Now we can eat together again.” With that he picked up a forkful of food and put it in her mouth.
When Zen teacher Sunya Kjolhede was a young Zen student at the Rochester Zen Center, she was working on the koan “Mu.” During one sesshin, she'd been concentrating fiercely on the koan for seven days and nights when she heard the three bells announcing the end of the final dokusan of the retreat.
“I was downstairs in the zendo,” says Kjolhede, “not thinking about beginnings or endings or anything else, just completely gripped by MU. Then that last bell rang out, and it was like everything sort of exploded. Suddenly it was all so clear! I found myself leaping up the stairs to the dokusan room. Before, I'd always been pretty overwhelmed by Roshi and the whole authority thing—now I felt like a lion. Roshi was just coming out of the dokusan room. Laughing, I threw out both my arms and pushed him back in. I can still see the expression on his face so clearly—how he checked me out, his bright eyes twinkling. We sat down on the dokusan mats across from each other and he asked me all sorts of questions. I thought the whole thing was hilarious, but I apparently answered them well enough for him to pass me on the koan.”
After the sesshin, Kjolhede reports, “Everyone was standing around and talking outside the zendo and Roshi kind of sidled over to me and said in a low voice, ‘Now the real work begins.’”
Says Kjolhede: “At the time I thought he was making some kind of weird joke. Little did I realize then how true his words were.”
By the time Suzuki Roshi was diagnosed with gall bladder cancer in 1971, he'd already initiated the process of passing the dharma transmission to his long-time student, Richard Baker, thereby marking him as his sole American dharma heir, and one of the first Westerners to formally become a Zen teacher. This account of the Mountain Seat Ceremony, performed less than two weeks before Suzuki Roshi's death, and marking Baker's succession as Abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, was written by a San Francisco Zen Center student, Dennis Lahey, who witnessed the event. It originally appeared in Wind Bell, the Zen Center magazine.
. . . When [Suzuki], at the head of the procession, entered the Hall, I was shocked to see him as frail and shrunken as the man who appeared, a ghost of the person whose immense vigor and spiritual strength had guided the center through the first uncertain years of its existence. He entered, practically being carried by his son, but holding his staff firmly, and thumping it on the matting as he approached the Mountain Seat . . . Richard Baker ascended the steps of the platform and stood, several feet above the onlookers, offering incense to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and the Patriarchs, to the benefactors of the temple, and, finally, to his own beloved teacher, Suzuki Roshi. He said:
“This piece of incense
Which I have had for a long time
I offer with no-hand
To my Master, to my friend, Suzuki Shunryu-daiosho
The founder of these temples.
There is no measure of what you have done.
Walking with you in the Buddha's gentle rain
Our robes are soaked through
But on the lotus leaves
Not a drop remains.”
Then Katagiri Roshi, acting for Suzuki Roshi, recited the brief authentication verse with a full-bodied shout, in true Zen fashion. For his sermon, Baker Roshi stated simply, “There is nothing to be said.”
This was perfectly true. Then followed the so-called Dharma questions, when the other priests seek to test the new Abbot's understanding. The following dialogue ensued between Baker Roshi and the priest from the Mill Valley Zendo:
Bill Kwong: “Chief Priest!”
Baker Roshi: “Is it host or guest?”
Bill Kwong (shouts): “Iiiie!”
Baker Roshi: “Show me your True Nature without shouting!”
Bill then simply bowed, and returned to his seat.
Following congratulatory telegrams and such, the ceremony was concluded. Suzuki Roshi was helped to his feet and moved to the front of the altar to make his bow. But when he turned to face the people, there was on his face an expression at once fierce and sad. His breath puffed mightily in his nostrils, and he looked as if he strove vigorously to speak, to say something, perhaps to exhort the disciples to be strong in their practice, or to follow Richard Baker with faith; no one can say. He faced the congregation directly as if to speak, and instead rolled his staff between his hands sounding [its brass rings] twice, once looking to the left and once to the right side of the hall.
It was as though some physical shock had passed through the hall; there was a collective intake of breath, and suddenly, everywhere people were weeping openly. All those who had been close to the Roshi now realized fully what it would mean to lose him, and were overcome with a thoroughly human sorrow. As their Master falteringly walked from the hall, still marking each step with his staff, everyone put their hands palm to palm before their faces in the gesture known as gassho, and bowed deeply.
At a certain point in his training, Clark Strand was appointed without prior notice by his teacher, Eido Shimano, to be in charge of his New York City Zendo, promoting him over a number of other students who had more seniority. Eido Roshi proceeded to make various public references to this action—“Just enough,” says Strand, “to get everybody stirred up and mad as hornets.” Then the roshi promptly announced that after more than twenty years of residency in the U.S., he was going back to Japan for an entire year. Shortly thereafter, Strand accompanied his teacher to the airport and put him on the plane.
“I'd never given a public Zen talk as a teacher,” says Strand, “or served in a position of authority. He'd hardly said a word to me on the way to the airport. I felt abandoned and forsaken. That very night I had to conduct a retreat for forty or fifty people. I had no instructions, hadn't been told whether I was to teach or not to teach, nothing. All of the students were seated in the zendo on the first floor, waiting for me. Probably a lot of them felt as abandoned as I did.”
Panicked at having to face the group on his own, Strand stalled as long as he could on the upper floor of the building. Finally, he had no choice but to begin the retreat.
“I'd started to walk down,” says Strand, “when I noticed the light on in Eido Roshi's office. This was odd, because he always made sure everything was taken care of perfectly. On his desk there was a book that had been left open. I thought, this doesn't make any sense. What's going on? I reached to turn out the light, and noticed the book was a koan collection, opened to ‘Hakujo and the Wild Duck.’ I sat down and read the koan. In it Matsu and Hakujo are walking. Hakujo points to a wild duck and says, ‘What's that?’”
Matsu responds, ‘It's a wild duck.’” Hakujo waits a second and asks, “Where did it go?”
Matsu says, “It flew away.”
Then Hakujo reaches out and grabs Matsu's nose and twists it. “See,” he says, “it didn't fly away at all!”
“I just sat there and laughed,” says Strand, “Laughed at this wonderful teaching he left, knowing that I would see it. And so I went down and gave the talk, and that was the first Zen talk I ever gave. After that, it was easy.”
Zen teacher Yvonne Rand, long-time San Francisco Zen Center secretary and one of Suzuki Roshi's primary caretakers in the last months of his life, gives the following account of his last days:
During the months before Suzuki Roshi died, his wife and I alternated taking care of him. At the time, each day just seemed like an ordinary day, and taking care of him was very straightforward and simple. There was a kind of presence and thoroughness in the way he was when he was dying, an extraordinary teaching of the inseparability of how one lives and how one dies. It was only afterwards, when I look back on those months that I realized that this was really extraordinary. But it was extraordinary ordinariness.
His doctor kept worrying about how much pain he must be in, as he had metastasized gall bladder cancer, which is supposed to be very painful. Suzuki Roshi always said “I'm fine.” He did finally one day take some pain medication so his doctor would feel better. But he didn't like what it did to his mind.
Early on the morning of his final day, around 3 a.m., he told his wife he wanted to take a bath. After the bath he got back into bed and told his wife he wanted to see Richard Baker. [According to Baker's own account, upon his arrival he greeted his dying teacher by asking Suzuki Roshi, “Where shall we meet?”]
Suzuki Roshi responded by drawing a big sumi-e circle [the enso, or Zen circle, symbolizing wholeness, or completeness] in the air with his finger. A seven day sesshin was scheduled to begin that morning. Suzuki Roshi died just as the bell to open the retreat was sounding.
Everyone came, one by one through that first morning of sesshin, to do their last “dokusan” with him. Later I went with Richard Baker and Suzuki Roshi's son to the mortuary. The mortuary people let us prepare his body and put him in his robes and put his body in the coffin. They gave us a chapel room where someone could sit in meditation with him every day for a week. There was a sort of stage with sliding stained glass windows behind it. At the end of the week, when the time came to cremate the body, no one would leave. We just kept staying.
Finally the mortuary people, realizing no one was going anywhere, slid open the stained glass doors. The group stepped back there and lifted his coffin into the crematorium oven. Mrs. Suzuki pushed the button and started the fire, then we all went out and sat down until the cremation was over. The mortuary people didn't quite know what to make of it.
I think for those of us who were taking care of him, there wasn't this kind of sharp, “he's gone.” What I learned from being in that situation was that there's actually a continuum of dying: death, sitting with the body, watching it change and then cremation, and then taking care of the ashes. So there was this very expanded process called “dying.” And Suzuki Roshi really opened that experience, so that I saw what was possible. His passing was just a continuation of his life. Toward the end he'd been so hardly there—he was like a wisp. And in the end there was only breath, breathing.
Dainin Katagiri visited Suzuki Roshi just before he died. As Katagiri stood by the bedside, Suzuki looked up and said, “I don't want to die.”
Katagiri bowed and said, “Thank you for your great effort.”
Shortly before his death, Suzuki Roshi told Stan White: “Don't grieve for me. I know who I am. I know where I'm going. Don't worry about a thing.”
John Daido Loori had been invited to the Naropa Institute to give a summer course in Mindful Photography, and ended up staying in an apartment next to Maezumi Roshi, who was also participating in the summer program. One night, there was a gathering at Maezumi's with a number of his students and other participants. At the time, Loori was a student of Soen Nakagawa Roshi, who was no longer coming to the U.S. very often to teach. Maezumi took to him for some reason, insisting that he stay beside him all evening, and continuing to ask him ambiguous questions which Loori had no idea how to answer.
“Daido,” Maezumi would say, bending uncomfortably close to his face. “Ask me!”
“Ask you what, Roshi?” Loori would answer.
Maezumi would be silent for a while, then: “Daido, Tell me!”
“Tell you what, Roshi?”
This exchange went on for hours, until the small hours of the morning, as the gathering died down and the crowd dwindled away. Finally, Loori managed to pry himself loose from Maezumi and go back to his apartment to get some rest. Since it was so late, he stretched out on the couch in his living room, not wanting to wake his wife, who'd gone to bed long before. He'd just managed to relax himself enough to nod off when a knock came at the door. Loori rose to open it and found Maezumi Roshi standing there, immaculate and wide awake, dressed in formal robes with his head freshly shaven.
“Daido,” said Maezumi. “Come with me.”
Loori obeyed. Maezumi led him back to the apartment next door, which had been restored to perfect order. The round table in the dining area was now set for a formal Japanese tea ceremony. Oddly, though there were only two of them there, it had four place settings.
“Come,” said Maezumi, gesturing toward the table. “We will have tea.” He pointed to the first place, saying: “Soen Roshi,” who was Loori's teacher. He indicated the second setting, saying: “Yasutani Roshi”—Maezumi's own teacher, recently deceased. He pointed to the third, saying: “Daido.” The last was for himself. Maezumi then proceeded to perform a formal tea ceremony, serving all four places beginning with Soen Roshi, though only the two of them were present. As Loori sipped his tea he felt so moved that tears began to fall from his eyes.
When he looked up at Maezumi, he saw that he was crying too.
Maezumi Roshi's last dharma words, written on the evening before his death in 1995:
The Dharma of Thusness has been intimately conveyed from Buddhas and Ancestors.
It has been transmitted, generation after generation, down to me.
To complete or not to complete is of no consequence.
Enlightenment above enlightenment
Delusion within delusion
Is also of no consequence.
Manifest Genjo Koan
Play freely in inward and outward fulfilling samadhi
Maintain and nourish the one Buddha Mind Seal.
Life after life, rebirth after rebirth, practice diligently.
Do not regress.
Do not let the wisdom seed of the Buddhas and ancestors be discontinued
Thus I deeply implore you
The year 1995 in the Month of Azaleas, Los Angeles,
Abbot of Dairyuzan Busshin-ji,
Humbly,
Koan Taizan