We all carry this very deep territory, these very deep strengths, but without judiciously applied training that really puts you in touch with that power, you'll never know it.
—RAFE MARTIN
What are the essential elements of Zen practice? Which practices and doctrines are central, and which more peripheral? Which are free to change, or to be dispensed with entirely? What changes would alter the tradition so much it could no longer be called Zen?
In this section, we'll look at some of the elements traditionally associated with Zen practice, and examine how they are changing, or holding their own, in America.
Whatever made people think Mind isn't rocks, fences, clouds, or houses? Meditation is the art of deliberately staying open so that myriad things can experience themselves.
—Gary Snyder
Zazen remains the heart of Zen practice, and the mark of the Zen school, which began as a return to basics during a period when Buddhism had deteriorated largely into empty ritualism, academic study, and philosophical debate. The emphasis on sitting meditation advocated by Zen Buddhism was a return to direct experience of the ground of being, to the realization the Buddha himself experienced and sought to pass on as the most essential element of his teachings. The gate, Shakyamuni always taught, was meditation. Robert Aitken Roshi, when asked what the core of Zen training was, answered unswervingly: “Zazen, certainly, is the most important thing. With all that it entails.”
This “all that it entails” can include a variety of practices, from following the breath, to the clarification of koans, to the “just sitting” practice of shikantaza.
“What does zazen do?” muses one long-time practitioner. “It's a mystery. We can make assumptions about it, but they're just notions. If I had to describe it, I'd say it has to do with the space inside our minds. Minds make thoughts all the time, but there's space between them—silence—as well. I think practice enlarges the silence, so there's more room for reality. Reality is happening all the time—but we're not. So there's some space in there that gets bigger with the practice, more accepting of oneself, of others, of life in general. More spacious, in terms of having less need to rush in with noise all the time, to always need to have something going on. Then, as they say, there's room for the ten thousand things. Everything else can come in.”
“This is the point,” says Zen teacher Jakusho Bill Kwong. “—to fathom all the intricate layers of who we think we are until we become fully who we are.”
Zen teacher Barbara Rhodes likens the process of training the mind to using a pocket calculator.
“Between each thought there's a resting place. If you studied an electroencephalograph you'd see that the mind has resting places. In order for us to perceive something clearly it's important to return to our resting place—not to carry over an idea from the past or an idea about the future.
“It's somewhat like a calculator. You put in one plus two and you get three. Then you put in two plus two and you'll get seven—unless you've pushed “C” for “Clear” between the two calculations. So it's very important to push “C” or you're going to carry over the last calculation into the present one. So let go of any ideas, just push “C”! The point is to return to your center and listen, trust, have faith, have courage. Push “C”!”
[It can be painful to get] in touch with . . . afflictions in ourselves that we've managed to keep in the shadows, that we've defended ourselves against for so long. But we have to go through them to see what is beyond. Zazen scours the mind, stripping away the thought-residue that obscures the self.
—Bodhin Kjolhede
In Zen practice we use incense a great deal. We light incense at the start of zazen, and we offer incense during ceremonies. Our lives should be like the incense sticks we offer: both straight and bright. To offer incense is to offer our lives—to stand upright, to give light, to purify, and to encourage. In addition, this offering means to have no regrets as our lives get shorter. We just do our best to burn as cleanly as we can.
—Les Kaye
Is form and ritual necessary for the practice of Zen? What forms will develop as Zen becomes less exotic, more truly American?
When Philip Kapleau was first training in Japan, he reports, he experienced great difficulty in making himself perform the requisite prostrations at the beginning of dokusan, or private interview with his teacher. Why, he wondered, should he bow down before another human being? What did this have to do with Zen?
Finally, his teacher, who had been observing Kapleau's awkwardness with bemused interest, explained, “Kapleau-san, when you make prostrations in dokusan you are not bowing down before me, but before your own Buddha-nature.”
“Aha,” thought Kapleau, “So I'm not bowing down to him. I'm bowing down to myself. That's different.”
Thereafter, says Kapleau, bowing came more easily—though it did take some years for his reluctance to vanish entirely.
When Zoketsu Norman Fischer, who later became Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, first came to the Berkeley Zen Center, having heard about Zen through the writings of D.T. Suzuki and others, he was confused by certain ritual aspects of the practice—specifically, bowing.
He went to the resident priest, Sojun Mel Weitsman, for clarification. “I thought this was Zen,” he said. “Who are you bowing to?”
Weitsman beckoned him close to the figure on the altar, which was actually not a Buddha, but a very small Kannon bodhisattva figure, no more than a few inches tall, hands palm to palm in prayer position.
“You see,” said Weitsman, “When you bow to this Buddha, it is also bowing to you.”
Says Fischer, “After that I never gave it another thought. I've been bowing ever since.”
When his students asked Shunryu Suzuki, “What is enlightenment?” Suzuki Roshi was known to reply: “What do you want to get enlightened for? You may not like it.”
“Enlightenment?” said Robert Aitken during a phone conversation he and I conducted between his home on the Big Island of Hawaii and mine in northern New Mexico. “You won't hear that word much in the Diamond Sangha. And you won't hear the word kensho or satori, or anything like that, either. The words themselves hold out such unreal kinds of expectations of ‘be-all and end-all’ experiences that we just don't use them any more. But that doesn't mean that folks aren't experiencing realization, because they are. In all of the writings of the great past masters, it's very clear that there is no end to understanding. It goes on and on, becoming clearer and clearer and clearer.”
“The way people are talking about these things seems to be becoming much more subtle and refined,” I said.
“Or realistic,” replied Aitken, with a laugh.
“I think big experiences are very important,” says Dairyu Michael Wenger, Dean of Buddhist Studies at the San Francisco Zen Center, “and I don't think they can be codified. I think it's as mysterious as anything else. Some people have big experiences, and they're never integrated . . . other people have a little experience, and it completely covers their whole life. The big experiences that I had, early on in my practice, I couldn't manifest. Now I don't recognize that I have such big experiences, but things seem to move. I think the point is to recognize the experiences you have, and let go of them . . . not to feel afraid to talk about them, but also, to not feel compelled to talk about them.”
Satori, or kensho—to the Zen boomers of the Fifties and the hippies of the Sixties, it was the ultimate holy grail. But in the Zen world, talking about enlightenment experiences is a bit like discussing your sex life. It can be done, under the right circumstances, but it has to be for the right reasons—and it's not for general public consumption.
Why? The danger is that we may cling to such an experience, and create a new self to replace the one we've “forgotten”—a new, “enlightened” self perhaps, who goes around dispensing wisdom or—God forbid—spouting falsely Zennish aphorisms. The ancient masters pointed to this as one of the easiest places to get stuck in practice; and they regarded this type of “stinky,” self-conscious Zen as a great embarrassment. A true Zen teacher is supposed to manifest the greatest ordinariness. When you've reached the top of the mountain, says the Zen tradition, it's time to come down the other side, return to the world, and help others.
There are other issues, particularly in the West, where for the first time all the major forms of Buddhism are coming together, each having its own slant on the matter. Is it appropriate to actively seek enlightenment, to let it arise naturally, or to disregard the matter entirely? Does true understanding require one to have experienced realization for oneself, or is it more important how whatever understanding we do have is manifested? Why is it that those who have had major experiences of awakening still sometimes behave irresponsibly?
These questions are still working themselves out in the West. The following are some of the many voices who are currently contributing, or have contributed, to the ongoing dialogue.
The enlightened man neither opposes nor evades what lies before him. Everything depends upon the occasion and the timing. When he needs to act he acts. When one's action is decisive and one responds with nothing left over, it is as though he hasn't acted at all.
—Philip Kapleau
The definition of an enlightened person is one who always has everything they need. At every moment what they need is there; they're not seeking anything. If you really are seriously practicing to be free and to simultaneously realize enlightenment, you never seek out of the immediate situation, no matter how bad it is. You transform the immediate situation into what you need.
—Richard Baker
How do you establish a real foundation that can lead to enlightenment? Very simply, you must start from the beginning and go through a process of training and practice. After a long while this may culminate in what can be called “gradual enlightenment.” When you finally reach that point, however, that single dramatic event can be considered “sudden enlightenment.” It's like going on a trip; you have to take the first step before you can reach your goal. But after many steps, suddenly you are there.
—Master Sheng Yen
If a candle is brought into an absolutely dark room, the darkness disappears, and there is light. But if ten or a hundred or a thousand candles are added, the room will become brighter and brighter. Yet the decisive change was brought about by the first candle which penetrated the darkness.
—D.T. Suzuki
The moment of awakening may be marked by an outburst of laugher. But this is not the laughter of one who suddenly acquires a great fortune. Neither is it the laughter of one who was won a great victory. It is, rather, the laughter of one who after having painfully searched for something a very long time finds in one morning in the pocket of his coat.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
Enlightenment is not anything a person with an inquiring mind is looking for, any more than the pursuit of happiness could be a life goal. What you come to is a working principle that enables you, without thinking, to deal with everything at once.
—Mary Farkas
As for realization, once you think you have attained something, you will be down ten thousand feet below, and you will have to start from the bottom again.
—Nyogen Senzaki
Les Kaye, frustrated by the emphasis of his Soto Zen teachers on form, and their lack of emphasis on enlightenment experiences, once complained to Katagiri Roshi: “You never speak about enlightenment!”
“Oh?” Katagiri raised his eyebrows. “Don't you think so?”
Years later, says Kaye, he realized that “[Katagiri and] Suzuki Roshi did not encourage us to try and attain enlightenment; rather, [they] encouraged us to express enlightenment.”
Zen priest Jean Leyshon lives in New Mexico, although she trained primarily with Katagiri Roshi in Minnesota. One summer Sasaki Roshi led a sesshin in New Mexico and Leyshon attended. The roshi, knowing she was a Soto Zen practitioner and student of Katagiri's, gave her the koan “How do you manifest Shikantaza when you see a flower?” Leyshon worked very hard on the koan all week without passing it, then returned to her home in Silver City. She was resting the afternoon after she returned, listening to the loud buzz of the many cicadas in the trees; growing louder, then softer, then louder again.
“Then all of a sudden,” says Leyshon, “all the cicadas stopped at once. It was like that famous story of the bottom falling out of the bucket. It was exactly that. I felt like I was ripped apart. As if I'd died. After that some of the things Katagiri had said in his lectures—well, it wasn't anything I could have known before, but now I realized he was talking about something real. I never went back to Sasaki to see if this was passing the koan, but I understood I'd had some sort of experience. I didn't know if it was big or little, but then I thought to myself, everything I've been taught says that whatever kind of experience you have, let go of it. Still, no matter how much I knew that, I was still carrying it. There was something in my body and mind that just couldn't let go.”
The following year, Leyshon went to Minnesota to spend another summer practice period with Katagiri. She served as jisha, the roshi's attendant. There was another roshi visiting, and the two were trying to translate a chant for a shuso [head trainee] ceremony from the Japanese. Katagiri gave Leyshon a line of the chant and asked her to help with it.
“To help you translate it,” said Leyshon, “I'd have to understand it.”
Katagiri grabbed her arm and looked at her. “Please understand it,” he said.
Leyshon examined the partial translation he was working with, then spoke to a friend who understood Japanese about some of the characters.
“And then I got part of it,” says Leyshon. “It wasn't any kind of a literal translation, but it was my understanding. In the zendo, there was a 900-year-old temple bell from Japan that Katagiri had found somewhere in the States—people were growing a tree in it, and when he explained what it was, they gave it to him. So the first line became ‘Hitting the 900 year old bell.’
“I had to leave the practice period a day or two early, and the day I was going everybody was in the zendo. I was getting ready to leave when I realized the second part of the line. So the entire thing became:
Hitting the 900 year old bell
Whole world together goes in emptiness
“I wrote it out and left it on Katagiri's desk and put his glasses on it so I knew he'd see it. I remember coming down the steps of his trailer, and my whole body was shaking.
“I remember I was driving in the car and we stopped right at sunrise. And I had this feeling he'd read it. And the whole thing, that whole experience I'd had the year before, suddenly fell away. There was something in me that just wouldn't let go until I'd expressed it.”
I must confess that I don't have the faintest idea what my purpose is or what's going on, and I never have. I became comfortable with that mystery a long time ago—that I would never know how any of these things fit together in any explicit way.
—Gary Snyder
In Zen, once you've pinned something down and defined it, you've killed it. Zen stresses meeting each situation and each moment in a state of openness—what Suzuki Roshi called “Beginner's Mind”—without being burdened by preconceptions based on what has happened before, or anxieties about what is to come. This does not mean disregarding useful and necessary knowledge. It means greeting each situation from a condition of emptiness and readiness, in the awareness that we do not know what the outcome will be.
Buddhism, alone among world religions—and especially Zen Buddhism—is perhaps unique in its encouragement of the state of doubt. This is not just any doubt, but Great Doubt—the doubt of having a great question, as the Buddha did when he left the palace where he'd spent his youth and, glimpsing an old person, a sick person, and a corpse, realized his understanding of existence was incomplete. Or as Eihei Dogen, the founder of the Soto sect in Japan, did when he saw the smoke rising from the incense stick beside his dead mother's body and realized he must dedicate his life to the pursuit of realization. Why such emphasis upon a condition that is often regarded as negative? Because it leads to a state of questioning and searching that is generally, though not always, a prerequisite to awakening. In other words, the search does not begin until one knows that one does not know. Finally, even the experience of realization must be let go—for if one regards one's understanding as complete, there is no room for further growth. As Suzuki Roshi put it: “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's there are few.”
“The practice is so simple, really,” said Bernie Glassman as we talked on the lawn outside the offices of his Buddhist Peacemaker Order near Santa Barbara, California. “Whatever it ends up you think you've got—let go of it. I worked on ‘the essence of unknowing’ as a koan three times with three different teachers. Each time I had to let go of what I'd grabbed onto the previous time and come up with a new answer. Where I'd get caught was if I was coming from a place of ‘knowing.’ It's very difficult to let it all arise and not let your sense of what it should be or what it may mean get in the way—just to let it all arise without ‘understanding’ how it's supposed to be.”
Once when Zen monk Ryushin was traveling as attendant to John Daido Loori, they stepped out of a motel room in the pre-dawn hour to see, overhead in the still darkened sky, a most unusual phenomenon. A bright light sprang into existence and, with a great whooshing sound, expanded to an enormous ball of color, before contracting and fading, then springing out again. They watched in wonder as the process repeated itself several times, but remained entirely baffled as to what might be causing it. Then all at once Rysuhin exclaimed, “I know what it is! It's a hot air balloon. The flame is coming from its heating mechanism.”
Loori looked at Ryushin. “You just killed it,” he said.
Zen teacher Jitsudo Ancheta likes to tell the story of a Native American medicine man who was called before a court and asked to swear to “tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“I can't do that,” replied the medicine man.
“What do you mean you can't do it?” demanded the judge.
“I don't know the whole truth,” he answered.
Zen mind is one of those enigmatic phrases used by Zen teachers to make you notice yourself, to go beyond the words and wonder what your own mind and being are. This is the purpose of all Zen teaching—to make you wonder, and to answer that wondering with the deepest expression of your own nature.
—Richard Baker
When we see into the emptiness or illusory nature of things, of life and death, of sickness and health, of youth and old age, then we're master of all things. We are free to be healthy, we're free to be sick, we're free to grow old.
—Geoffrey Shugen Arnold
In Zen, the absolute basis of reality, like the self, is often described as empty. But this does not mean blankness. In fact, it does not mean anything you can put your finger on at all. A student of Ch'an Master Sheng-yen described the experience of emptiness this way: “Given the Truth that nothing exists, we are presented with an endlessly varied universe, whose existence is impossible, yet whose appearance is vividly undeniable . . . Like a child, one can only laugh in sheer delight.”
As the Heart Sutra, the essential text of Zen, so famously puts it: “Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form; form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form.”
The point is, as Philip Whalen tells us, that this emptiness is full of everything.
Zen teacher Philip Whalen, in speaking of the absolute basis of reality, put it this way: “There's a great misunderstanding about what emptiness is, the idea that emptiness is something that happens under a bell-jar when you exhaust all the air out of it. That's not quite where it's at as far as I understand it. The emptiness is the thing we're full of, and everything that you're seeing here is empty. Literally the word is shunya, something that's swollen up—it's not, as is often translated, void. It's packed, it's full of everything.”
When asked about the Absolute basis of reality, Rev. Taizan Akiyama of the Milwaukee Zen center likes to reply: “There is no Absolute.”
Some people think that . . . Buddhist practices dissolve the “self.” Others say that before we can dissolve the “self” we have to have a healthy “self.” I don't think that is so. You cannot dissolve something that is not there. This is a false problem that has become a problem itself. What has to be dissolved are our wrong views concerning the self.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
Self? At the bottom, says Zen, it's not there. We're a collection of aggregates, a grouping of characteristics—a story assembled by our minds, made up of bits and pieces of the half-remembered past and the imagined future. Take a look for yourself. Underneath it all, if you search long and hard enough, you eventually find . . . nothing. Give it a try.
Of course, that's not to say we don't have to take care of our lives.
“Forgetting the self is a peak experience,” says Robert Aitken. “The Buddha Shakyamuni had a self, an ego. He knew very well who he was, what he had to do. And that's ego. It's self-image. Without ego you can't practice. You've got to have a good stout ego. But the point is, the experience of forgetting the self, and finding true intimacy with other, is a momentary experience. It's a gate that opens. You walk through that gate, and you can find in ordinary life a far deeper intimacy with all beings.”
As John Daido Loori puts it: “Life and death are nothing but movement. It's like a flame that burns in the night, moment to moment . . . it's not the same flame in every moment, nor is it another. We're born and we die, moment to moment to moment—that is the Buddhist perspective. Underlying everything is impermanence, constant change, a constant state of becoming. Who you were yesterday, the day before, a year ago, five years ago, is not who you are now—not physically, not mentally, not intellectually. There is not an atom or molecule in your body right now that is the same as it was five years ago. We are in dynamic equilibrium with the universe. The universe passes through us. So what do you call the self?”
The self is not to be despised. It is your vehicle to selflessness.
—Ch'an Master Sheng-yen
Seeing our moment-to-moment automatic conditioned reactions is crucial. Without that we will just continue the mess we are creating in our world . . . . Simple awareness of what's arising makes it possible to let go . . . . Awareness this moment reveals what needs to be done or left alone.
—Toni Packer
The practice of Zen is not limited to seated meditation.
“Wherever you are,” writes Bernie Glassman, “You are in the zendo. We think the zendo is that special place . . . and we are going to try to do something special there, try to be concentrated or quiet, and when we leave we can start screaming again. We don't see the whole world as a zendo. Of course, we need a ‘special place’ and ‘special training periods.’ But really, every day is a special day, every place is a special place, as it is.”
“One day when I was walking down a canyon path,” remembers Joan Halifax, “I realized I was making a literal impression upon the Earth. I stopped and turned around to look at my footprints and they were even and smooth, a kind of script in the dust. That was on Thursday. On Friday, I hurried to the office on the central part of the land and halfway there I caught myself, stopped and turned around to look at my tracks. There was a different message on the Earth. It was then that I saw how completely each step that we take is a message of alienation or awareness to Earth.”
The practice of mindfulness, or close moment-to-moment attention to what is directly in front of us in the present moment, is common to all branches of Buddhism, although the emphasis placed upon it as a practice varies from one to the next. In most schools of Zen, the emphasis is placed not so much on observing one's activity, but becoming it—being so present to one's experience that all sense of separation is lost.
As Gary Snyder puts it: “A simple message of (Zen) teaching is that much of the pain, suffering, and confusion you encounter in your own life is simply caused by not paying attention to what you have closest to you from the beginning and then using it well: body, speech, and mind.”
In the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, a bell is used as a signal for mindfulness. At any point during the day, upon hearing the sound of the bell, the community is reminded to put down what they are doing, take three breaths, and return to their activity with mindful awareness.
Early on in her practice, Zen teacher Cynthia Jurs was undertaking a solitary retreat at the Lama Foundation in northern New Mexico. She was several days into the retreat when she woke up one morning feeling a bit out of sorts. She went outside to relieve herself, and on stepping through the low doorway of the retreat hut, banged her head on a bell that was hanging from the eaves. Grumbling to herself at whoever had left it in such an inconvenient location, she finished her business, returned to the hut to get her toothbrush, and stepped back outside to brush her teeth, only to hit her head on the bell once more.
Mood worsening by the minute, Jurs went back inside to fix breakfast. Afterward, she stepped outside and struck her head on the bell a third time. This time, says Jurs, she finally said to herself: “OK Cynthia, what is going on? I think you'd better stop, breathe, and return to the present moment!”
Drawing inspiration from the story of the Buddha, she decided she was going to sit down and not get up again until she'd had some sort of insight.
Making a spot outside, she sat and meditated for several hours. While sitting there she had, she says, “the biggest breakthrough I'd ever had in my practice—one that brought a tremendous amount of clarity around the real purpose of my life.”
Partly as an outgrowth of this experience, Jurs was inspired to do many more years of training, eventually becoming a teacher in the lineage of Thich Nhat Hanh. “But it took hitting my head on that bell three times to stop me,” she says, “To stop me to where I could really penetrate down through the depths of my own patterns, and see clearly where I was going.”
No matter how far out on the sea of suffering we've sailed, all that is required is to turn toward awakening. It's never too late, but it takes that turning, and no one can do that for us.
—Bonnie Myotai Treace
The First Noble Truth of Buddhism—Life is Suffering—is a doctrine that has caused innumerable Western practitioners a good deal of bafflement, dismay, and, well—suffering. At least until it becomes apparent that the point the Buddha was trying to make is not “life's a drag and then you die,” but rather, the doctrine he articulated in the Third Noble Truth: that there is a path out of suffering.
In other words, as Paul Reps put it in a talk at the San Francisco Zen Center: “What the Buddha actually came for was to liberate us from suffering—certainly not to burden us down with more of it.”
Nevertheless, it is a key point of practice to be willing to look unflinchingly at our pain, to learn to accept it and to work with it. Life inevitably involves pain; but what we discover, in the process of Zen training, is that much of our suffering is actually caused by trying to avoid this pain—by not accepting our circumstances, and reaching for outside sources of gratification to distract ourselves.
This is the suffering, says Buddhism, that we can do something about.
“If you could change one thing in your life,” writes Zen student Maureen Jisho Ford, “get rid of one person or alter one situation what would it be? That is your practice. If I could take it away from you, I would not do so, because . . . I would be robbing you of the opportunity to grow and to learn. It is only when life grabs you by the back of your neck and flings you to your knees that you cry out, “Why, why, why?” That “Why?” is the beginning of the spiritual journey.”
Pat Enkyo O'Hara, who is now the resident teacher at the Village Zendo in New York City, was serving as caretaker of altars and offerings during a three-month training period at Zen Mountain Center in Idyllwild, California. During one very formal memorial ceremony, as she was carrying a tray of “elegant, lacquered wooden offering cups” between two buildings, one of the cups tumbled from the tray and landed amongst some rocks, resulting in a prominent chip in its highly polished surface.
“Devastated,” she went to Maezumi Roshi and announced her intention to order a new one from Japan.
“Why?” asked Roshi. “With the chip it is more valuable. See? Just as it is.”
Over the years, says O'Hara, “this has emerged as his great teaching for me . . . he was broken. I am broken. And when we can see that we are all chipped and broken, we begin to value our life as an expression of the teaching that we are truly perfect and complete, just as we are.”
A student once asked Zen teacher Steve Allen, “If you were given a wishfulfilling jewel, what would you wish for?”
“To stop wishing,” replied Allen.
Cancer—it stops you in your tracks. Where did you think you were going? Sometimes it takes a really extreme circumstance—like facing our own mortality—before we're willing to look at, and really drop, our own stuff.
—Katharine Thanas
It is said that when the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, left the palace in which he had been brought up and saw for the first time a sick person, an old person, and a corpse, his lack of understanding of why these things should exist propelled him toward a life of practice and, eventually, liberation. Ever since, contemplation of death has been a key element of Buddhist practice, often used to inspire the practitioner to a vigorous effort toward awakening. The original Buddhist robes were made from bits of cloth used to shroud the dead; and there are a number of traditional meditations, sometimes performed on burial or charnel grounds, which focus upon imagining the dissolution and decay of the physical body. It was traditional in China and Japan for a master to not only die well, but to leave a last poem as a teaching for his or her students.
It should perhaps come as no surprise then that Zen in America should carry on the traditional importance assigned to the deep consideration of mortality, and even extend it into realms such as contemplative work with the dying and the founding of hospice programs such as Issan Dorsey's Maitri Hospice for victims of AIDS.
After sitting all night with a dying friend, Zen teacher and death-and-dying activist Yvonne Rand remembers looking out of the window at dawn. “It had rained during the night,” she recalls, “and in the early morning, there were these big, fat raindrops suspended from the bare branches of the tree, catching the first light. To this day I can completely see the light reflected in those drops of water, their beauty absolutely inseparable from the brevity of their existence. The same thing that was happening with the drops of water was happening right there in the room. They were completely of a piece.”
A young Zen student was working on a construction project on a rocky hillside at Shasta Abbey. When Jiyu-Kennett Roshi, who was getting a bit older and experiencing some health problems, came to visit the site, he took her hand and helped her across a rocky patch of ground, remarking, “It must be difficult to not be as agile as you once were.”
The roshi paused and looked at the student. “I'm doing all right with it,” she responded. “How is it going to be for you?”
The student, who is now in his late forties, says he still thinks of the exchange at least once a week, as he copes with the changes of growing older himself.
Maurine Stuart, who struggled with cancer for a number of years, was known for the clarity, presence, and vibrant quality of aliveness with which she faced her illness. The day after a final, unsuccessful surgery, when she'd been given only a short time to live, one of her students, Trudy Goodman, visited her in the hospital. She reports:
“I remember walking into her hospital room the day after her surgery. It was the only time during the whole period I'd ever seen her crying. But when she saw me come in she dabbed up the tears. Then she looked right at me, straight in the eyes, and all she said was: ‘This is going to be really challenging.’”
Zen teacher Issan Dorsey, who established the Maitri Hospice in San Francisco, was on his deathbed when one of his closest friends, Shunko Jamvold, came to visit him.
“I'm going to miss you,” said Shunko.
“I'm going to miss you, too,” responded Issan. He was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Are you going somewhere?”
Richard Baker used to say to his Zen students: “If you're with someone who's dying, and you're not willing to trade places with them at that very moment, then you're not really practicing.”
When Issan Dorsey was dying of AIDS, Baker came to visit him, saying, “I wish I could trade places with you right now.”
“Don't worry,” responded Dorsey. “You'll get your chance.”
Su Bong Soen Sa, the Hawaiian American dharma successor to Seung Sahn, died early, at age fifty-two, having suffered a damaged heart from an earlier attack. He was giving a formal interview at the time in his full robes to a young girl who, at age fourteen, was already a serious koan student. Su Bong Soen Sa had just asked her the koan: “What is Universal Sound?”
The student hit the floor with her hand.
Sitting there in his robes, Su Bong Soen Sa said, “Correct”—and died.
As flying is the essential thing for a bird to be a bird, to study the self is the essential thing for us human beings to be human. A human being is a living being that needs to study the self to become the self.
—Rev. Shohaku Okumura
Traditional Zen stories are filled with masters who live beneath bridges, indistinguishable from the beggars, or old women selling tea by the side of the road, whose wisdom surpasses that of the supposedly wise abbot or sutra master. When the enlightened sage comes down from the mountain, having seen the ground of being, he or she is supposed to appear ordinary, indistinguishable from anyone else. The truly enlightened person may, in the traditional Zen world, be the abbot of a monastery. Then again, they may be the old tramp by the side of the road.
What is Zen? There are hundreds of answers, contained in hundreds of koans. But, as the teachings of Zen frequently remind us, even the wisest of sages cannot say what it is.
Once when Zen teacher Gerry Shishin Wick, who is a great baseball fan, was visiting Zen Mountain Monastery, a student volunteered to drive him to the Baseball Hall of Fame in hopes of gaining some Zen insight along the way. The Hall of Fame was some hours away and Wick, who'd been eagerly awaiting the trip, invited a friend along for the ride.
Many hours later, the driver staggered back into the monastery dining hall, having spent his only full day off from the rigorous training schedule visiting an attraction in which he had no interest. Another student eagerly asked him what he'd learned.
“Nothing,” replied the driver. “All they talked about was baseball!”
Dosho Mike Port, on a visit to Japan, was having tea with Rinzai Zen master Harada Shodo Roshi, when he asked: “What is the essence of your teaching?”
“Die now!” cried Harada. With that he sprang to his feet and left the room.
“People want so much,” says Jakusho Bill Kwong. “We want to be someone else. ‘I want to be stronger’. ‘I want to be more directed’. ‘I want to be superwoman.’ But it's not possible. You must accept your condition. But ‘accept’ is active. Who you are is active. Passive acceptance—that's the immobile, inanimate Zen. It's not the Zen I'm talking about. There's passion here. Spirit for the quest. This is important: the sincerity of our quest and how we go about it. It's a long path. Are you prepared? Do you want to walk on this path? Don't think about it too much. Just walk! C'mon, let's go! That's Zen.”
—Jakusho Bill Kwong