Zen is not about nonmovement . . . Sitting is a centered, strong position in the midst of movement. When you get a top spinning just right, even though it's going very fast, it's so stable that it doesn't even look as if it's moving. If it's slightly off balance it wobbles. It has to be centered and moving very fast in order to be stable. That's what Zen is all about.
—BERNIE GLASSMAN
Bernie Glassman was wearing suspenders, red ones, that my wife Tania swears were ornamented with white daisies, though I don't remember this. We'd driven the six hours from San Francisco to Santa Barbara that morning for a one-o'clock meeting which I should have confirmed the day before, but didn't.
Glassman, the senior teacher of the White Plum lineage, founder of the Buddhist Peacemaker Order and first Dharma heir to Maezumi Roshi, lived at the time of this writing in the area locals call “The Mesa,” at the top of a cliff that drops a hundred or more feet to the flawless blue Pacific below. His home was in an updated former hippie beach shack compound that, rumor has it, used to belong to the Beach Boys. Although the compound has since turned into a very pricey bit of real estate, it still has that funky surf haven feel, with lawns that sprawl to the edges of the cliffs, palms and agaves, and a sturdy white-painted stairway winding all the way down the cliffside to the beach below. In other words, it's about as close to the Pure Land as you're likely to get on the planet, especially on this late summer day with its unbroken expanse of blue sky spilling down to an equally unbroken expanse of water.
Glassman, who I know from my graduate student years at the Naropa Institute, had e-mailed me the gate code in advance, so that when Tania and I roll up in our rented Geo Metro at 1:00 p.m. on the dot and punch in the numbers, the gate rolls open as though by magic—but there is no answer to my knock at the bungalow that is supposed to be his. We circumnavigate the yard and peer in the back door, which is standing open; Japanese calligraphy adorning the walls tells us that this must be the place. “Bernie?” I call, through the open door. “Roshi?”—for between his stature in the Zen community and his own disarming informality I've never known what to call him, and I've always figured the best approach was to hedge my bets. His Buddhist ordination name, Tetsugen, seems to have fallen out of usage almost entirely.
There is no answer. We sit down to wait, enjoying the sight of pelicans flapping by. But Zen masters are not known, generally speaking, for being late to appointments, and by the time fifteen minutes have passed I'm sure there's been a foul-up. Whatever reservoir of Zen calm I might have left after several weeks of shuttling through the Bay Area's endless traffic jams in search of Zen teachers is in danger of draining away, since we've left this quite important interview for last, and tomorrow we must drive back to San Francisco to catch our plane.
Leaving Tania sitting on Bernie's deck in case he shows up, I jump in the Metro and jet off in search of the nearest pay phone. The number I have for his Buddhist Peacemaker Order yields only an answering machine—though it does give several other numbers to try, which I attempt one after the other until all my change has run out, succeeding only in connecting to an-ever expanding Indra's Net of phone machines, each linked to and perfectly reflecting all the rest.
It is now 1:30. I jerk open the door of the Metro and rummage under the seats for lost coins, coming up in the process with a quarter and two nickels—never underestimate the value of disorder!—along with an almost exhausted pre-paid phone card. Heading back to the booth, I use the card to phone information, which gives me an entirely new number for the Buddhist Peacemaker Order, a scant instant before the card runs out and cuts me off. Down to my last thirty-five cents, I dial the new number. Remarkably, it is answered by a live human being, who shortly puts me onto Bernie—a miracle that convinces me I must have done something right in a prior lifetime. Sure, he remembers we had an appointment scheduled. Only problem is all his dates got deleted in conversion to a new computer system and he wasn't sure when it was—can we meet him at the Peacemaker Order's new offices, in the Villa Maria conference center in Montecito?
I jump into the Metro, swoop back to pick up Tania, and we leave Endless Summer behind for the sandstone-walled estates of Montecito, home of Hollywood escapees such as John Travolta, and all manner of other millionaires. I can't help but find it ironic, as we wind past one mansion after another, that Glassman Roshi, known for his pioneering work with the homeless, with AIDS victims, and for leading street retreats in the Bowery in New York, should have landed in this Lifestyles-of-the-Richand-Famous setting at the foot of the Santa Ynez Mountains. But then again, hasn't Bernie always taught that we should cultivate a mind that excludes nothing? And given that he is perennially in need of funding for his next visionary project, it's entirely possible this might be the perfect setting to attract it.
Bernie Roshi, as his friends sometimes call him, is nothing if not diverse. A summing-up of his Zen-related activities and projects over the last several decades creates a substantial list. Since receiving the dharma transmission and setting off on his own in the 1970s he has, among many other achievements:
As if all this was not an unusual enough path for a Buddhist teacher to take—perennially raising in the minds of his detractors the question, “But is it Zen?”—there are the Auschwitz retreats. Glassman's Buddhist Peacemaker Order is based on his conception of Bearing Witness—to suffering, to poverty, to warfare—as a means of healing. As an ecumenical organization including clergy members of all faiths, the Peacemaker Order has begun leading week-long Bearing Witness retreats at Auschwitz for one hundred or more people at a time. Participants have included both Holocaust survivors and the sons and daughters of former guards, soldiers, and S.S. officers.
“Bearing witness,” says Rose Gordon, a student of Joan Halifax, “is an experience, not of merely ‘checking a situation out,’ as in remaining a tourist or spectator, but of being it—not shutting out of my awareness a whole lot of facets of this moment simply because I don't want to know about them.” Commenting on a Peacemaker retreat she attended at Auschwitz, she says:
“It's such a potent situation. The group was very diverse. There were people whose fathers had been S.S. officers, and people whose parents had survived the camp. There was a German woman whose family maintains that the concentration camps were a lie, that the Holocaust didn't happen. This was her second year at Auschwitz. There was a man who was one of the few people to escape Auschwitz, and several men whose fathers had fought the German army and had been held in prisoner of war camps.
“We went out to Birkenau and did zazen. Each person had a list of names of those who had died there. We sat in a large circle on the railroad tracks at the selection site and during zazen people chanted the names of the dead. The voices came in unison from the four directions, in all manner of accents, rising and falling, like the wind in leaves, or the murmuring of a stream. During our time there we read the names of several thousand people who were on the death rolls. There was an all night vigil in the children's barracks, and a Catholic Mass led by a Polish priest in one of the prisoners' barracks.
“One morning the mist turned to rain and we moved to one of the barracks, laying our sitting cushions on the earth and stone. The light was dim, and a line of candles, an impromptu altar, formed along a covered stone trough that ran down the center of the barracks, providing us enough light to read our lists of names. A gypsy woman sang to us there. She was the only survivor of her small village of ninety-six people, the only one left alive to tend their graves. Her song needed no translation.
“It was very cold, and we'd go out of the gate in front of Birkenau, and gather around the soup kitchen wagon that came each day, feeding us hot soup in plastic bowls. It really helped me realize what a blessing it is to have a bowl of hot soup.
“Birkenau is famous for this bluish mist that descends—the German soldiers used to halt all movement in the camps when the mist was thick, because you couldn't see and they didn't want people to escape. We walked through that mist one night, using the railroad tracks as a guide, on the way to the vigil at the children's barracks. I couldn't see more than half a hand in front of me. We started to hear dogs bark out in the village, and the whistles of trains. These were sounds I'd heard in war movies; and in the context of Birkenau, they lost their innocence and became threatening. It was as if the 1940s were bleeding into the 1990s.
“But I was always totally aware that I had the strength of this circle of zazen to sustain me in bearing witness. I don't know how visitors can spend more than one day in the camps without this strength and support. Actually I can't imagine how anyone survived Auschwitz at all, given what we saw.”
Poet Anne Waldman was director of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics writing program at the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado for many years, a good portion of that time in conjunction with Allen Ginsberg. She and poet Andrew Schelling, who served for some years as the program's chair, remember participating in one of Glassman's first street retreats, held in the days leading up to Easter, 1993.
“On the retreat,” said Andrew, during a conversation on a sunny fall day at a picnic table behind his Naropa office, “were Peter Matthiessen, myself, Anne Waldman, and Rick Fields, as well as three Naropa students who had never been in New York City before. Their introduction was to live on the street in one of the city's most devastated districts, the Bowery.
“The rules were that we had only the clothing we were wearing, one piece of ID in case we got picked up by the police, and two dollars a day as a kind of emergency fund for phone calls or coffee. After our orientation at St. John the Divine with four or five formerly homeless people who gave us an account of what it was like on the street, we walked down through Central Park to the U.N., where we were going to hear the theologian Hans Kung speak. It was comical for the thirteen of us, all pretty scraggly with our scruffy beards and beat up clothes, trying to get admission past the guard at the U.N. We did get inside, only to find that the talk had been over for more than an hour.
“We had been scheduled to sit our first period of zazen at a little park on the corner of Bowery and Houston, but we arrived to find there was no park. Bernie took out his map and we poked our way west on Houston to find a place for zazen. I was walking behind the group, having a conversation with Rick Fields, and we stopped to cross at a traffic light. Midway across at the median, we looked east, and about a block away, in the middle of eight lanes of roaring traffic, was Bernie trying to read his map. Trailing behind him were ten Zen students. Rick clutched my arm with a dramatic gesture and said, ‘This is the trouble with religion: Zen master crosses street the wrong way, all the students follow.’ Rick is quite close to Bernie, and he said it in a very fond and joking way, but it was lethal looking, these eleven ragged people straggling down the middle of the street.
“We finally found a park, and had our zazen session on the basketball court. We had to brush off a litter of crack vials and needles to sit on the asphalt. That was one of our few meditation sessions, because from then on we were on the street and the immediate lesson one gets is that survival out there is a full time job. You don't have the leisure to sit down and meditate, if you expect to find food and shelter or a few coins for coffee that day.”
“The weather looked a little menacing,” remembered Anne Waldman, “colder than we'd anticipated, and drizzling with rain. We had just two women, and had elected not to split up and stay in the shelters, which were said to be dangerous for women. So we all stuck together and constructed this cardboard condominium on Hester Street.”
“An old homeless man kindly told us to go down to Chinatown,” Andrew said, “where we would find good shelter by pulling cartons out of dumpsters. The stores receive large vases from China, packed in enormous cartons filled with insulation. So we gathered lots of cardboard and some carpet scraps and got very innovative. After our cardboard condo was built Anne and I drifted off to panhandle on Mulberry Street, to raise money for coffee. We asked for change for two hours and didn't get any. The first lesson of being on the street is nobody wants to deal with you as a human being. When people see you panhandling they cross the street or engage immediately in a very animated conversation with their companion in order to avoid you. We spent the night, very cold, and before dawn the garbage trucks began their crawl. We were terrified we might get mistaken for a big pile of refuse and flattened, and the police cruisers were flashing their lights at us, so we scattered out of there pretty early. We looked back just in time to see the garbagemen dismantle our condominium and chuck it all into their trucks.
“Our schedule quickly came down to this: get up early, get down to the Bowery Mission, get in line so we could have breakfast. When the doors opened we would be admitted for a two hour haranguing by the people who ran the Mission. They had a whole revivalist show going on before every meal was served to make sure we had our religion.”
“I was sitting up front trying to sing the hymns,” Anne recalled. “It was warm and sheltered and sort of invigorating after being out in the street, knowing you were going to get a meal afterwards. We had to sit through this church service for two hours with these rosy-cheeked Bible Belt kids who came in from Oklahoma to testify about finding Christ. They were on some kind of soup kitchen circuit. It was quite a large gathering. I remember people ditching their drugs and so on as they came in.”
“People on the street were curious,” said Andrew, “‘who are you, and what are you doing?’ Some were openly hostile, and a number of times we'd hear, ‘Well, in five days when you guys are finished you get to go home and take a bath. I don't get to go home.’ Most were just curious though, and interested.
“Bernie evinced the most unstinting delight and enthusiasm for every experience that came our way. Which I think is something that helped keep everybody there. Nobody had to stay, after all—there were people on the retreat who lived in New York, who could have simply caught a subway home. And there were plenty of times when it seemed like that might be a reasonable thing to do.”
“Bernie was so elemental,” said Anne, “like a rock, and he was so good on his feet. When it looked like we couldn't do something, he had another solution. I was very, very moved by his vision of empathy.”
Andrew Schelling:
Spring Sesshin in the Bowery
April 1992
Thirteen of us trail through the Bowery behind Tetsugen Sensei. He's scouring the street map as though it were sutra. We might as well be lost down some Chinese gorge, rock walls soaring in mist. The soot-black tenements lean overhead, some sealed off with razor wire. They are today's hall of practice. Among them we locate the little park. Sensei's schedule says we're to sit zazen three times a day by the basketball court. But first to clear off a litter of crack phials and needles. “Sweep the garden”—adage of some buddha ancestor who set a good riddle? Or can we picture a future monasticism—half the year given to mountain retreat, raven and rattlesnake comrades, twisting along pine forest cliffsides—half the year inside cities, like Catholic Workers on 34th St. ladling soup? I mean just till we pull through this particular epoch.
Formal and
desolate the crab
apple blossoms
“the Bodhisattva moves through all worlds”
“What is he going to do next?” is a common refrain in the Zen world when the subject of Bernie Glassman comes up. When we finally do reach his offices in Montecito after an extensive search, I am surprised to find him not head-shaven as usual, but fullbearded with a small grey pony tail at the nape of his neck, and sporting the infamous red suspenders. In this most recent phase of his evolution he has, as it turns out, decided to disrobe. Not to leave the practice, he explains, only the priesthood. Just the latest unconventional move in a long history of unconventionality, certain to raise many eyebrows on his upcoming visit to Japan a few months hence. During our talk, I ask Glassman to look back over his thirty-plus years as a Zen teacher and activist, and particularly at the changes his activities have gone through over the years.
“It's all been important and it's all been right,” he says. “I would never leave something that I was doing until I felt there were enough people doing it—but once I feel there are enough people to carry it along, I need to move on.”
So, I ask him, what next?
“When I got involved in Zen,” Glassman says, leaning forward with a sudden vitality, “and probably this is true for many people—a lot of my heroes were the unconventional people. Then, once you get into training, everybody becomes conventional. Well, I hope I always remain unconventional. I've trained in the conventional side of it, but I feel free—” He leans back and rummages through his pockets, and what he does next is something I never could have predicted in a million kalpas.
“For instance—I can put on my nose.” Glassman suits actions to words by pulling from his pocket a rubber proboscis of the type preferred by clowns, and sticking it on over his own. “Trungpa Rinpoche once told me they had an extra position in Tibetan training monasteries—that of the jester. Well, I've always wanted to be a clown—a jester—and that's what I want to bring to this stuff now, because it's gotten too sanctimonious, and there's too much conventionality.” He grins at me from behind his nose, reveling in my reaction.
“I've created an order of clowns. It's called the Order of DisOrder. We have a Wizard of Od . . . We just had our first major installation of clowns. One of the rules is we have to have our nose with us all the time. At ‘Change Your Mind’ day, whenever anybody asked me a question I'd put my nose on before I would answer. I did a workshop with Ram Dass. I was there with my nose and he's got his wheelchair, so there were the two of us . . .” Glassman laughs. “I'd like to see at every center and every major event a clown who is free to say what they want.
“That's the feeling I'm after,” he says, as the shadows across the mountains grow long and our conversation draws to a close. “Like the jester in the courts. For the Japanese to do that, that's a stretch, but for us . . . imagine Bush and Gore with noses on!” He grins widely at the thought. “Even if you don't have a nose, if you can imagine a nose on them, you're not going to be so uptight.”
After a reading Bernie Glassman gave during a book tour, a woman in attendance stood up and asked him, “What does it take to live in the Now?”
Glassman answered, “Would anyone who is not living in the Now please stand up?”
Natalie Goldberg always shares with her writing students the three most important pieces of advice she received from her teacher, Katagiri Roshi:
Continue under all circumstances.
Make positive effort for the good.
Don't be tossed away.
“All right, ten minutes, go!” says Natalie Goldberg, picking up her pen and diving into her five millionth empty page, one of her infamous fast-writing pens clutched between her fingers. Young for her years, dark-haired and intent, she chuckles occasionally to herself as she writes, bending over the page with all the earnestness of a child making her letters for the first time. But then, Natalie might say, if you're doing writing practice correctly, you are making your letters for the first time.
It's spitting rain in the twilight of a Minnesota fall, and we're in the zendo of the Clouds and Water Zen Center in Minneapolis/St. Paul, where Natalie is teaching her weekly writing practice class. She's come here for a year to deepen her practice with Dosho Mike Port, a dharma heir to her teacher, Dainin Katagiri, and to go through a new level of lay ordination in her lineage. We're onto our third or fourth writing of the afternoon, and I don't remember what this particular assignment is any more—but at this point, I'm writing about where we are. It's a former railroad warehouse, a grand old building, the zendo on the ground floor with its shoji screens, exposed water pipes and quadrant of white industrial pillars—the four pillars of Zen, I joked to Dosho when he showed me around this morning after zazen.
They've stripped and refinished the lovely wood floors that would cost a fortune today—thick and deep grained, they still bear an odd array of humps and gouges (during walking meditation, one has plenty of time to notice such things), as though some variety of heavy machinery was once dragged regularly across them. They also now bear an array of black sitting cushions—zabutons and zafus—in place of whatever railroad machinery once dwelt here. Tall rectangular windows peer out over the street, through which, between the scratching of pens, come the whine of engines climbing their gears upward in the city traffic.
Nat is sitting, scribbling away in front of the altar, with its candles and ikebana flower arrangement and two brass bodhisattva figures: Manjusri with sword upraised, enjoining us to keep our pens moving, and Kannon, with her countless arms reaching out to help all sentient beings—or perhaps, wield countless pens. As always, she'll do whatever is appropriate to the situation. This morning we chanted the Heart Sutra, and now the circling shadow of the ceiling fan blades against the pillar in front of me, alternately dark, then light, then dark again, seem to speak its echo: form—emptiness—form—emptiness.
The best feature of the place, though, is the dokusan room, where Dosho Sensei gave me advice this morning on my practice—and where, Natalie recently told me, she'd leapt at Dosho in response to a koan she'd been trying to answer and pinned him against the floor, glaring into his face (don't try this in your home), and he'd responded simply, “Pretty good.” Converted from an old bank vault, it is set into the brick of the back wall, its gigantic steel door, with numbered dial still intact, standing permanently ajar—welded open at the hinges, lest it swing shut and trap some unsuspecting Zen student in dokusan hell forever.
“Make writing your practice,” Katagiri Roshi had suggested to Natalie Goldberg, years before when she was a beginning Zen student at the Minneapolis Zen Center.
“Why?” she'd asked innocently.
“Because you like it,” Katagiri told her.
Now, twenty-five years later, Natalie continues to exude unquenchable enthusiasm for the two practices around which her life is built: writing and Zen. She doesn't make much distinction between them. “I teach people to accept their minds,” she says, “just like in zazen—it's all just studying mind. No good, no bad. In writing practice we use the same basic principle as in zazen—you make a commitment for a period of time, and you keep the practice going no matter what. In the case of writing practice, it's usually ten minutes. The basic rule is: keep your hand moving. No editing, no going back or crossing out, forget about spelling or punctuation. If something comes up that feels dangerous, go for it. That's where the juice is. By keeping your hand moving you don't leave any space for what we call monkey mind—the commentator, the internal critic, to come in and get in the way.”
“Katagiri Roshi taught me to trust my own deep mind,” she explains to me later, “to let it come forward—not to try to be Hemingway, or to be the best writer in the world. To let writing do writing. We're taught many structures from the outside in. But I'm using writing as a tool to come from the inside out. This approach brings a shining self-confidence—you learn to just rest in your own mind with a belief in who you are, and with your feet on the ground.”
That it works is pretty much a proven fact. Natalie's system of writing practice, as delineated in her best-selling book Writing Down the Bones and the sequel Wild Mind, has made her perhaps the most sought-after writing teacher in the country, and gave rise to a boom in books on writing and creativity that is still going on today. Natalie is also the author of Long Quiet Highway, a memoir of her years with Katagiri Roshi, one of the best personal accounts of Zen training available.
“When you're writing, where do your words come from?” Natalie addresses the room, now that we've set our pens down and are ready for a bit of guidance. “Out of nothingness,” she answers herself. “When your words come out of nothingness, writing does writing. This is the ground of creation—a connection with your Wild Mind, which doesn't end where your skin stops. Wild Mind is not only you—it's the clouds, the wind, the glass you're drinking from, the person beside you—it's all life coming through the pen, or the paintbrush, or camera eye, or singing voice.”
I'm reminded of a workshop I did with Natalie in New York City, where she led the entire group of one hundred students out of the building and down the street to do walking meditation in Washington Square Park. It was one of the first warm days of spring, and everyone was out—people walking dogs, people playing Frisbee and strumming guitars, bike couriers munching sandwiches on the lawn beside their steeds, old men playing checkers. As we walked step by slow step past them all, beneath trees with the first pale shoots leafing out from their tips, a silence fell across the multitudes. People stopped what they were doing to whisper amongst themselves: “What are they doing?” Then finally to call out: “Hey, what are you all demonstrating for?” Meanwhile, a man walked past, pushing a shopping cart laden with all his belongings and shouting the one thousand names of God in three languages, while no one paid him any mind at all.
“We're just walking,” answered Natalie, and for the next twenty minutes we continued to do just that, until we'd become just another part of the afternoon scene in the park, and everyone returned to their lunches and games.
But now, here in the zendo, I can tell she's about to go off on one of her rolls. She's trusting her own mind, and every word, it seems, is golden:
“Our conscious mind doesn't know much. It maybe knows to go out and get some more milk when we've run out. And maybe we should just leave the conscious mind for those things. Our real life unfolds some other way. We never really know who we are. Odd, isn't it? The deeper you go the less you know—but the more awake you are.
“Our work is to move closer and closer. To abstract is to move further and further away. Until in politics you can drop bombs and you don't really know there are people there.
“Life doesn't make sense. Stand around waiting for your life to make sense and you'll spend your life waiting on the sidelines.
“The mind, if you get out of the way, already knows the rules of art—because the rules of art come from Wild Mind. I still don't know a thing about writing.”
Is she talking writing or is she talking Zen? The distinction has dropped away. Meanwhile, across the street the Mississippi, artery of the nation, rolls past, and over it all broods the giant brick smokestack of the Schmidt's Brewery, which you can smell from just about anywhere in the city if the wind is blowing in the right direction. The wisdom of the yeast, I can't help thinking to myself.
Natalie, in fact, assigns the class to meet for the first hour next week in the parking lot below the brewery, whose architecture she's fond of. There they'll do walking meditation as a warm up before writing practice.
“But what if it snows?” someone protests.
“Bring a coat,” responds Natalie, and here it comes again, that unquenchable enthusiasm: “Can you imagine walking meditation in the snow in the Schmidt's Brewery parking lot? Holy, Holy, Holy.”
One night, a psychiatrist was giving a talk at Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh raised his hand. With the utmost seriousness he asked, “Are the children of psychologists happier than other children?”
“I'd done a fair amount of therapy,” says Hozan Alan Senauke, a dharma successor to Sojun Mel Weitsman, “and I was in the middle of that process when it came to me that there was a whole realm of questions I had that were outside the scope of psychotherapy. Questions like ‘Why am I here?’ and ‘What's my purpose in life, and how can I function in harmony with it?’ I talked to my therapist about it, and she confirmed that I needed to look elsewhere for answers to those kinds of questions. After I got involved with Zen, I ended up doing the two, psychotherapy and Zen practice, for a long time—and I never thought they were in any tension with each other.”
Buddhism has always adapted to the prevailing religion of each country to which it has traveled. But what is the prevailing religion of our increasingly secular American culture? Christianity? Science? Capitalism? Consumerism? While any of these might arguably fill the role, may people might point to another alternative: psychology. As the reigning means the Western world has discovered for working with and freeing the mind and emotions, many people point to psychotherapy as the closest thing we have to the paths of liberation available in the East. But are “selfactualization” or “peak experience” the same thing as spiritual liberation? Do Western approaches to psychological well-being have anything to offer the East? The jury is still out, but one thing seems certain: the two are going to have to deal with each other.
“We can look at Zen practice and psychotherapy as existing on a continuum,” says Zen teacher and psychotherapist Lawson Sachter, a dharma heir to Philip Kapleau. “Or we can look at them as two distinctly different ways of working. Maybe it's useful to see psychological work as focusing more on what we feel—or avoid feeling—and Zen as looking into who it is that is experiencing all this. It's an amazing experience to work with someone in therapy right after they've completed a seven day sesshin. The psyche is almost always more fluid and accessible in a way that is rarely encountered under ordinary circumstances.
“As a Zen teacher, my experience has been that not all practice-related difficulties that come up for Western students are addressed through traditional forms of training. Unconscious obstructions arising from early grief and deeply buried anger, and a whole range of related defensive structures, can be stirred up by intensive zazen. And, at least to some degree, it's our defensive structures with which we identify. I've had students say, ‘Without my defenses, who am I?’ That's a big question.
“Based on my experience over the years, I've become convinced that for many of us in the West, both practice and therapy are vital; that together they lead to deeper, and more lasting change. Some teachers resist this view, but I expect that in the years to come more and more effective forms of integrating these two ways of working will naturally evolve.”
A contender for the reigning “religion” of the West—and certainly the major Western-developed model of working with the mind—psychology has been tangled up with Buddhist practice at least since Carl Jung, early in the last century, coined the term “transpersonal.” The two have been even more deeply associated since the human potential movement of the Sixties and Seventies, where the distinction between spiritual and psychological work, if it was made at all, was often unclear. The relation between the two worlds has continued to be explored and developed by such pioneers as Ken Wilber, Mark Epstein, Daniel Goleman, and Tara Bennett Goleman.
“If we can't take the teachings to heart,” says Zen teacher Cynthia Jurs, “and apply them to our own lives, the habitual patterns that keep us locked into our suffering—if we can't use the dharma to address those things directly, then there's no hope. And there's no real awakening. I feel Western culture has a great deal to offer Buddhism in the psychological realm, as far as how to address our stuff—our habitual, reactive patterns. Psychology gives us some tools. But what Buddhism is about is cutting all of those patterns of self-clinging, utterly and completely. Psychological training is helpful, because it teaches you to identify that stuff. And if you take that into your practice, look deeply, and don't avoid it, you can unravel it. But you have to be willing to face it: what is keeping me from being free and really helping others? The point of all this is, if you're really practicing dharma, you're out to let go of self-clinging. There's no such a thing as the self. You might as well forget it and start dying now! There's nothing to hold onto.”
Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who studied Zen and sought to integrate it into his psychoanalytic practice, was asked once whether he thought mental health could be attained through Zen.
“It's the only way to mental health,” answered Fromm.
“With unfailing kindness,” says Charlotte Joko Beck, “your life always presents what you need to learn.”
“There can be some confusion between our approach to Zen practice and traditional psychotherapy,” says Zen teacher Diane Rizzetto of the Bay Zen Center in Oakland, California, speaking about the approach of Charlotte Joko Beck's “Ordinary Mind” school of American Zen. “In the beginning, our approach to practice can seem very psychotherapeutic because we include experiential inquiry into the thought, emotion, and bodily patterns that keep us from living our lives from the openness of wisdom and compassion that is our true nature. We investigate the behavioral patterns in our everyday lives, because it is within the context of the frustration on the freeway, the snide remark from our co-worker, or whatever else gets our feathers ruffled, that we can begin to see how the ego-self holds on. This differs from traditional psychotherapy because we do not approach our experience of self as something to be fixed. Rather, we view these situations as teachers that point us to our habitual modes of suffering.
“We're not trying to ‘fix’ our lives, or trying to make ourselves feel better in some way, although that is usually a result of practice over time. Rather we learn how to observe what we believe our life to be in a non-judgmental way. Psychotherapy's aim is really to reinforce the self, and make it feel good. But the purpose of Zen practice is to take us further.
“An image I use a lot,” says Rizzetto, “is that of a house. We can think of the self as a house that has difficulties such as doors that won't open and windows that won't shut, but we manage to get by. Maybe we have trouble with relationships, and so forth, but with a little stomping and pushing we manage to keep things going. But it can be difficult to live this way over a long period of time, so at some point we may seek help from a psychotherapist. The therapist will help us understand why that door won't open and shut, maybe help us fix the door in a certain way—or, at least learn ways of getting by. This work can be very useful, and we need to respect it, because we need that kind of help sometimes.
“But the purpose of Zen practice is to take us further than the house. We may enter through the house—at times we may even teach people how to kick the stuck door open, to maintain, because they're not ready to see the house for what it isn't. But eventually what happens, through the practice, is we begin to see the house in a more transparent way. The more we learn about what we think the house is, the less able we are to solidify it. Eventually we find that there really is no permanent house separate from our experience in each moment.”
Rizzetto illustrates the approach by telling a story of when she was a senior student, living in Oakland and coordinating a sitting group affiliated with Joko Beck's San Diego Zen Center. Rizzetto was often called upon to help weekend retreats get started on Thursday nights, in preparation for Beck's arrival on Friday, a task that involved giving basic practice instruction. One technique the Ordinary Mind school has pioneered is the practice of “eye-gazing,” in which two students sit for a period of time looking into one another's eyes. One evening at the beginning of a retreat Rizzetto was giving basic instruction for this technique and, as she tells it:
“Somebody had glasses on and I said, ‘If you're wearing glasses, take your glasses off.’ It just seemed sensible to me. Now, I wasn't wearing glasses in those days, and so I didn't have a clue that some people need glasses just to see the person in front of them. I shouldn't have said anything.
“The next day, Joko was here. She gave her talk and the topic of eye-gazing came up, and the woman to whom I said ‘take your glasses off’ said, ‘If I don't have my glasses on, I can't see anything. I was told that you're supposed to leave them off.’
“And Joko said, ‘Whoever told you that doesn't know what they're talking about.’
“First,” says Rizzetto, “I was crushed, and then all these thoughts started to come up, ‘what story am I going to tell’ and ‘how am I going to cover myself,’ and ‘what are the other students all thinking?’ And that was really wonderful to practice with.
“For me, the bodily sensation was just like a deflating balloon. I could feel my body sinking and getting smaller and kind of shriveling up into nothing, and I just sat with that. And then sadness came up. I started crying. If I were in therapy, perhaps at that point I'd start looking for the story, the history behind the sadness. But I didn't take that direction. I remained present observing the pure energy labeled ‘sadness’ and at some point it became not my sadness, but just sadness. So it went from ‘someone did this to me,’ to my sadness, and then just sadness. And then it opened up again and became the sadness of the entire universe.
“By the time I got into the interview room with Joko,” says Rizzetto, “I just explained the process to her and tears came to her eyes. That was it. She looked at me and said: ‘It is from this place that you help others.’”
“Suppose,” explained Joko Beck in an interview in Tricycle Magazine, “someone has hurt my feelings—or so I think. What I want to do is to go over and over and over that drama so I can blame them and get to be right. To turn away from such thinking and just experience the painful body [that accompanies the thoughts and emotions] is to forget the self. If you really experience something without thoughts, there is no self—there's just a vibration of energy. When you practice like that 10,000 times, you will be more selfless. It doesn't mean that you're a ghost. It means that you'd much more non-reactive—in the world, but not of it.”
“One of the things Joko helped me with greatly,” says another of her students, “was the death of my son. If there's anything you want to talk about that was a ‘breakthrough,’ that was it—but it's taken six years. He was killed in an accident, and sitting with that was something. I did a lot of sesshins with Joko over that period. “Joko was there with me in a very interesting way. On one level, she was emotionally involved. When I told her over the phone, she gasped, and it was like I could feel her getting hit. I could feel that reverberation back, and that sensitivity. And so that would always be there on the emotional level, the ‘I understand what you're going through.’ We'd talk about that. “But still she was always, ‘This is about facing it, we're not going to play any games with this. Know this and know this now: there is no such thing as death. There is no such thing as life. There's no past, and there's no future. Clear? That's what it is. Now let's deal with this.’ She helped me on that level, and I see it more now and more clearly, what that aspect of no death and no birth that is spoken of in Zen.
“So that was my koan, you see? I'll tell you something—I'm not very moved by ‘Mu.’ I mean, this is a fucking koan—my life being ripped apart, my heart being broken apart. There's no choice here. And that was real clear. So yeah, that's Joko. She says everyday life is your teacher. Just be aware of it. Just look at it. See it and practice with it. Practice with that conditioned emotion, whatever it may be: anger, fear, remorse, regret, guilt, loss, utter and complete darkness. This is the face of the Buddha, buddy.”
After Danan Henry's dharma transmission ceremony, which authorized him to teach Zen, his teacher Philip Kapleau told him: “Danan, you must understand that your greatest responsibility to your students is to protect them from your influence.”
The torch has been passed—the transmission of the lamp, or the light, is a commonly used classical metaphor. But what exactly is it that has been transmitted? It still looks recognizably like Zen. But if so, will it remain Zen?
“A roshi,” wrote Trudy Dixon in her introduction to Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, “is a person who has actualized that perfect freedom which is the potentiality for all human beings. He exists freely in the fullness of his whole being. The flow of his consciousness is not the fixed repetitive patterns of our usual self-centered consciousness, but rather arises spontaneously and naturally . . . Because he is just himself, he is a mirror for his students. When we are with him, we feel our own strengths and shortcomings without any sense of praise or criticism from him. In his presence, we see our original face, and the extraordinariness we see is only our own true nature.”
It is one thing to apply such a description to someone as apparently flawless as Dixon's teacher, Suzuki Roshi, but another to find American Zen teachers capable of living up to so high a standard—particularly in a permissive society so wrought with temptation, so infatuated with profit, power, and commerce, and so imbued with the certainty that the possession of material goods is the sure path to a satisfying and successful life. It has not always been an easy task.
The new American teachers have had enormous shoes to fill—and they have not always filled them successfully. Richard Baker, who resigned from the Abbot's position at the San Francisco Zen Center following a complex controversy around misuse of sexuality and power, has become the most prominent case in point, following a lengthy public scandal. Other teachers have not necessarily fared so well either—even among the original teachers who brought the practices from Asia there have emerged numerous reports of misuse of sexuality and authority. In examining these cases, it begins to come clear why the historical Buddha insisted that his monastics renounce sexuality, use of intoxicants, and the possession of money if they wished to join his order—and why the lifting of these restrictions in the last few hundred years, in Japan and now, America, has proven to be a problematic decision.
The brief history of Zen in the U.S. has conclusively proven, for better or worse, that Zen teachers are human. But does this invalidate the practice, or the experience of realization offered by it? Today's Zen communities have begun to address these issues by setting up codes of conduct, by forming organizations so that teachers will not operate in isolation and—though reinstating the system of absolute prohibition advocated by the Buddha does not seem to be on anyone's priority list—by returning to the fundamental teachings of the precepts, the moral and ethical teachings of Buddhism, which are designed to foster right conduct among both the monastic order and the laity. Other sanghas have experimented with both tightening and loosening the standards by which teachers are sanctioned.
“Without pointing a finger at anyone,” says Robert Aitken Roshi, when asked about the rigorous standards he imposes in passing on the dharma transmission, “I'll just identify myself as being as conservative as possible in these matters.”
“The original Buddhist order,” said Bernie Glassman, in discussing his more liberal standards during a panel discussion I attended at Zen Mountain Monastery, “allowed teachers to emerge, or not emerge, naturally, based upon insight and talent. That's the approach, as far as I'm concerned, that's best suited for the American sangha.”
Hozan Alan Senauke remembers a point with his teacher, Sojun Mel Weitsman, at which, “I realized that this person was not my father, and he was not my therapist, and he was not my friend. He was something else which I had no previous model for.” But what, exactly, constitutes a Zen teacher in twenty-first century America? Charlotte Joko Beck wrote in Everyday Zen: Love and Work about the ultimate authority in spiritual life: “You may say, ‘Well, I need a teacher who can free me from my suffering. I'm hurting and I don't understand it. I need someone who can tell me what to do, don't I?’ No! You may need a guide, you may need it made clear how to practice with your life—what is needed is a guide who will make it clear to you that the authority in your life, your true teacher, is you—and we practice to realize this ‘you.’”
Norman Fischer, former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, examined the issue from the perspective of his own experience after receiving the dharma transmission, during a conversation we had at a conference on Buddhism in the Twenty-first Century, organized by the Naropa Institute: “Here I was, a dharma teacher with the responsibility to continue this lineage, and I didn't really feel like I was a Zen master or anything like that. I remembered reading in a book by Thich Nhat Hanh, this traditional phrase: ‘you should study Zen with a true teacher. And if you can't find a true teacher, it's better not to study at all.’ And I thought, ‘My God, am I a true teacher of Zen? What the hell am I doing?’
“So I wrote a letter to Thich Nhat Hanh, and asked him if I could see him the next time he came to the States. When I saw him and asked about this he said, ‘In the dharma, everybody helps each other. The person who has more experience helps the person who has a little less experience. Everybody just does their best.’ And I thought, that makes sense. I can help somebody with less experience than me.
“After that, I could do my best when necessary to teach. In Zen, doing the practice is what helps people. So the practice is like a mandala, and in the mandala there's a teacher. It's not that the teacher is so brilliant, telling everybody what's what, and they've got to listen to that. Rather, everybody advances in understanding because they continue to practice. But to this day, I feel if there's someone there who's more experienced than me, they should do it.”
“My responsibility,” says Danan Henry, “is to encourage my students to be what they are. They already are what they are—they just need to wake up to their own nature.”
And Maurine Stuart puts it: “I can't give anything to anyone. Teaching is about being present. Just being there.”
Still, nearly everyone agrees that it's a thorny matter to set off into the wilderness of the mind without a good guide. And in the Zen school at least, the mind-to-mind transmission has always been of pivotal importance. There exists a great danger, many teachers and practitioners concur, in liberalizing the process of succession and the sanctioning of teachers to the point where the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. Still, some teachers, like Steve Allen, believe the dharma transmission to be a dead system that has completely outlived its usefulness. Others, like John Daido Loori of Zen Mountain Monastery, who only sanctioned three full dharma heirs in three decades of teaching, believe it is essential to maintaining the integrity of the practice. And Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who has been teaching in America for some five decades, has still, at most recent report, refused to sanction any full dharma heirs at all. Like so many elements in the development of American Zen, these issues are still working themselves out.
Perhaps the approach used by Master Sheng-yen of the Ch'an Meditation Center in Elmhurst, New York, can help shine some light upon the matter. Following retreats, Master Sheng-yen asks his students to prostrate toward their Shi-fu (their teacher—himself) in gratitude. Then he asks them, “Are you prostrating to Sheng-yen or to Shi-fu (the teacher)?”
He expects them to answer, “To Shi-fu.”
“There is nothing special about Sheng-yen,” he says. “It is only in his role as the teacher that he represents the dharma. When dharma, teacher, and student are harmonized, the student becomes enlightened.”
As Robert Aitken Roshi puts it, “I'm heartened by the fact that I have a few genuine successors. That's enough.”
In a conversation with Zen teacher Jitsudo Ancheta, former abbott of the Hidden Mountain Zen Center in Albuquerque, at my home outside Taos, Ancheta remembered his final meeting with his teacher, Maezumi Roshi, in the spring of 1995. Ancheta was resident priest at the Zen Mountain Center in Idyllwild, California and Maezumi was preparing for his last trip to Japan, where he would pass away quietly at the age of sixty-five, without seeing any of his students again. A late snowstorm was brewing, and in lieu of a promised last dokusan before he left, Maezumi suggested Ancheta meet him at a small café partway down the mountain, so that he could get started before the weather got any worse.
“I set off after Roshi did, driving the Zen Center pickup truck,” Ancheta said. “I remember the snow was already coming down very hard and there were several inches of it on the road. I could see the tracks his tires had made, sliding and swerving on the curves. At one point, I came around a bend and lost traction completely and almost went over the edge. I had to keep going though, because I wanted to make sure Roshi was all right. The sky was completely overcast, it was all very dark. I got to the café to find it was closed. Roshi was parked in front, waiting for me. He got in the cab of the truck and we talked for a while. I told him about my idea of starting a Zen Center in New Mexico. He was supportive. I remember feeling a bit ill at ease, concerned whether he was going to get down the mountain all right.
“After a while, he said he'd better go before the storm got any worse. I remember him getting out of the cab of the truck and walking back through the snow toward his car. He was halfway there when he turned back and looked at me over his shoulder.
“Remember your vows,' he said to me. Then he turned back, got in the car, and drove off.”
Ancheta never saw him again.
Zen priest Stan White, of Hokoji temple in New Mexico, remembers one of his first meetings with Suzuki Roshi, which took place after a public talk in which Suzuki had said, “Sometimes I am your teacher and sometimes I am your friend.”
“You said in your lecture,” White asked, “that you were my friend. What did you mean by that?”
Suzuki-roshi replied: “I can tell by looking at you that you have suffered, and so have I. Therefore we are friends. Of course, I have a lot of experience with Zen, and you have very little. Therefore you are my student.”
A student of Ch'an master Sheng-yen described the relationship with his teacher in this way: “A master is like a music teacher who sounds a particular musical chord which the student must attempt to perform. Without the master, a student might aimlessly search for the correct combination of notes, but just one clue from the master—‘Put this finger here . . .’—and student and master strike the same chord in harmony.”
John Daido Loori remembers once giving Maezumi Roshi a birthday present.
Maezumi thanked him, saying, “I am sorry I have nothing to give you.”
“But Roshi,” Loori responded. “You give me so much!”
With that Maezumi wheeled and walked away.
“Without realizing it,” says Loori, “I'd insulted him. A true Zen teacher has nothing to give.”
A student from another Zen center attended a week-long retreat with Kobun Chino Roshi and, having been very struck by his presence and teaching style, was feeling confused about who to study with. “I already have a teacher,” she told him during an interview, “but I feel a quality of connectedness with you that I've never felt before. What should I do?”
Kobun looked at her. “When the last teacher on earth is gone,” he asked, “Who will be your teacher?”
The student didn't know how to reply. “Everything,” she answered finally.
“No,” he said. “It will be you.”