AMERICA

RINZAI JOURNALS 1969–1976

The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. . . . It is the manifestation of ultimate reality. . . . Once its heart is grasped, you are like the dragon when he gains the water, like the tiger when he enters the mountain. Forms and substance are like the dew on the grass, destiny like the dart of lightning—emptied in an instant, vanished in a flash.

Why leave behind the seat that exists in your own home and go aimlessly off to the dusty realms of other lands? . . . Do not be suspicious of the true dragon. Devote your energies to a way that directly indicates the absolute [and] gain accord with the enlightenment of the buddhas.

A Universal Recommendation for Zazen

—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER ONE

ON an August day of 1968, returning home to Sagaponack, Long Island, after a seven-month absence in Africa, I was astonished by the presence in my driveway of three inscrutable small men who turned out to be Japanese Zen masters. Hakuun Yasutani-roshi, eighty-four years old, was a light, gaunt figure with hollowed eyes and round, prominent ears; as I was to learn, he had spent much of that morning upside down, standing on his head. Beside him, Nakagawa Soen-roshi, slit-eyed, elfin, and merry, entirely at ease and entirely aware at the same time, like a paused swallow, gave off emanations of lightly contained energy that made him seem much larger than he was. The roshis were attended by Tai-san (now Shimano Eido-roshi), a compact young monk with a confident, thick-featured face and samurai bearing. Though lacking the strange “transparent” presence of his teachers, Tai-san conveyed the same impression of contained power.

The teachers were guests of my wife, Deborah Love, a new student of Zen, but I was ignorant of this as of much else on that long-ago summer day. Because of my long absence and my unannounced return, the atmosphere between Deborah and me was guarded, and my first meeting with Zen masters was even less auspicious than an encounter that almost certainly took place in the 1890s between the first Zen Master in America, Soyen Shaku, and the senior partner in his host’s manufacturing firm who, as karma would have it—and the Dharma, too—was none other than my forebear, Frederick Matthiessen. (This problematical meeting was at best unpromising, since it passed unrecorded in the annals of either side.) No doubt I revealed what I presume was my great-grandfather’s wary attitude toward unanticipated Orientals in outlandish garb. For years thereafter, Tai-san would relate how Soen and Yasutani, perceiving my unenlightened condition at a glance, had shaken their shining heads and sighed, “Poor Debbo-lah.”

For the next few years, I was often away on expeditions. Even when I was at home, my wife kept me well away from her Zen practice, not wishing to contaminate the zendo atmosphere with our dissension. Yet a seed had sprouted all the same; those men in my driveway knew something that I wished to know. I poked about in the Zen literature and pestered her for inside information.

In December of 1970—perhaps hoping to nip that bad seed in the bud—Deborah took me along to a weekend sesshin, or silent retreat, at the New York Zendo. I had had no experience or training in zazen—literally, “sitting Zen”—and suffered dreadful pain in the cross-legged posture, which I maintained, with the stubbornness of rage, for twelve hours daily for two days, weeping in pure shock during the rest periods. Though I won high praise from the zendo masochist, Monk D., I swore that this barbaric experience would never be repeated; in addition to all that pain, it had been so boring! A week later I departed gladly for Italy, Africa, and Australia, where I accompanied a more prudent group of human beings underwater in quest of the first film of the great white shark.

That winter, to my own astonishment, I found myself doing zazen every day, not only in my Australian hotel room but on shipboard. The following summer I was working for a while in California, and in a vague impulse toward pilgrimage, I went on foot over the mountains from Carmel Valley to the San Francisco Zen Center’s retreat at Tassajara. Shunryu Suzuki-roshi (whose wonderful teisho, or “Dharma talks,” had recently been collected in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind) walked about softly in white T-shirt and white sitting pants, puttering with garden pots, approving our repair of his cottage roof, and giving teisho on Zen Mind in the summer evening. Though he seemed frail, he did not comport himself like a man who was to die a few months later.

I have often tried to isolate that quality of “Zen” which attracted me so powerfully to its literature and later to the practice of zazen. But since the essence of Zen might well be what one teacher called “the moment-by-moment awakening of mind,” there is little that may sensibly be said about it without succumbing to that breathless, mystery-ridden prose that drives so many sincere aspirants in the other direction. In zazen, one may hope to penetrate the ringing stillness of universal mind, and this “intimation of immortality,” as Wordsworth called it, also shines forth from the brief, cryptic Zen texts, which refer obliquely to that absolute reality beyond the grasp of our linear vocabulary, yet right here in this moment, in this ink and paper, in the sound of this hand turning the page.

Later that summer, all but inexplicably, my wife and I at last embraced each other’s failings. Happily she invited me to join a reconnaissance led by Soen-roshi and Tai-san of a tract of mountain land at Beecher Lake, in the headwaters of the Beaverkill River in the Catskills. This beautiful place would be chosen as the site of Dai Bosatsu (Great Bodhisattva), the first Zen monastery ever constructed in America.¹ What struck me most forcibly during our visit was the quiet precision, power, and wild humor of Soen-roshi, who became my Zen teacher even before I realized that I was a student.

Both Soen-roshi and Yasutani-roshi had come to America in direct consequence of the pioneering efforts of the aforementioned Soyen Shaku, abbot of Engaku-ji, in Kamakura, and the first Zen master to visit and teach in the United States. In Soyen Shaku’s opinion, Zen Buddhism had grown hollow and decrepit in Japan, and no longer reflected the great Dharma, or teaching, perceived in the enlightenment experience of Shakyamuni the Buddha (the Awakened One) in the sixth century B.C. In its original Theravada form, Buddhism had traveled south from India to Ceylon and east to Burma and Thailand; the Mahayana Buddhist teachings that developed in the first century A.D. spread north and east to China, Korea, Japan, and Tibet. (An extraordinary, mysterious, and profound infusion of religious and cultural energy remained behind even in those countries where Buddhism was later suppressed, or died away; it has been said that in Japan a whole culture owes its character to Zen.)

A Mahayana teaching with a strong Taoist infusion, Ch’an or Zen cast off the dead weight of priestly ritual and mindless chanting of the sutras or scriptures—the records of the Buddha’s teachings—and returned to the simple zazen way of Shakyamuni. In a statement attributed to the First Chinese Patriarch, Bodhidharma, an old monk from India who is loosely associated with the birth of Zen, the new teaching was described as “a special transmission outside the scriptures, not founded upon words or letters. By pointing directly to man’s own mind, it lets him see into his own true nature and thus attain Buddhahood.”

The illustrious teacher from India was soon summoned to an audience with the Emperor Wu, a devout Buddhist and teacher of the sutras who built temples and supported monks, and was therefore honored as the “Buddha-Mind Emperor.” (One meaning of the Chinese character wu signifies “absolute being”; another denotes “awakening” or enlightenment.) Relating all he had studied and accomplished, Wu asked modestly, “What merit will there be?”

Bodhidharma said, “No merit.”

In answering in this abrupt sharp way, the old Indian teacher points directly at the absolute, in which there is no merit to be given, and neither giver nor receiver. From the relative point of view, there is no merit either, so long as Wu clings to the concept of merit: true merit derives from seeing into one’s own true nature or Buddha-nature, manifesting one’s own free meritless nature, moment after moment, like a fish or bird—just Wu, just bird.

Doubtless taken aback, the Emperor demands, “If all that has no merit, then what is the primary meaning of the holy truth?” Presumably the Emperor refers to the non-duality of universal and everyday truth, the fundamental identity of relative and absolute that underlies Mahayana Buddhist doctrine. And perhaps he is challenging the old villain to present the essence of this teaching. But Bodhidharma, correctly interpreting this sutra teacher’s degree of spiritual attainment, recognizes a purely doctrinal question inviting exposition on the Dharma, and so, once more, he points directly at the realm of the Absolute or Universal.

“No holiness,” says he. “Vast emptiness.”

This ringing answer instantly established the spare uncompromising tone of the Zen teachings. It also carried great mystery and power, for this “emptiness” was neither absence nor a void. Its Chinese character was ku, which also signifies the clear blue firmament, without north or south, future or past, without boundaries or dimension. Like the empty mirror on which all things pass, leaving no trace, this ku contains all forms and all phenomena, being a symbol of the universal essence. Thus this emptiness is also fullness, containing all forms and phenomena above and below Heaven, filling the entire universe. In this universal or absolute reality, there is no holiness (nor any nonholiness), only the immediacy of sky as-it-is in this present moment, with or without clouds or balloons, kites or fireworks, birds or snow or wind.

Bodhidharma is not criticizing holiness. Religion is a precious concept, and concepts are crucial to the relative or “practical” aspect of our life, which is the ground of Zen. (“Rice in a bowl, water in a pail: how do you like these common miracles?”) But when we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace with words and ideas and abstractions—such as merit, such as past, present, and future—our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment. We identify, label, and interpret our surroundings as abstract concepts, quite separate from yet another concept, which is our own separate identity and ego. Even holiness is removed from us, a Heaven up there with a God in it.

One can certainly sympathize with the Buddha-Mind Emperor. Here he is, anticipating homage, only to be confronted with this old wretch saying No merit! to all of his good deeds, his imperial handiwork, saying No holiness! to his big question about holy truth—an outrageous scene, and a tremendous one. To judge from his portraits, Bodhidharma was as vital and ferocious as he was short-spoken, and he was fearless; he might have had those bristling brows plucked one by one. Cowled, round-shouldered, big-headed, bearded, broken-toothed, with prominent and piercing eyes, sometimes said to be blue—one can all but smell his hard-patched robes, stained with ghee butter from India, the wafting reek of cooking smoke and old human leather. One imagines him slouched there scratching and belching, or perhaps demanding, What time do we eat?

And Wu demands to know, Who stands before me?

Wu is after all an advanced student of the Buddha Dharma, and perhaps he has glimpsed something. All the same, he is a bit put out. And so this question must mean something like, You say no holiness, yet you present yourself as a holy man from India! Or, If all is emptiness, then who is this terrible old person standing before me? He does not yet see the Oneness of existence, the One Body, that Bodhidharma points to, he is still stuck in the relative world, the delusion of the self as a complete entity, separate from like entities: Who stands before me?! And no doubt he is shaken, reassembling his dignity.

Bodhidharma has no wish to expound. He is bringing the Dharma from India to China, and as he is already one hundred and ten years old, time is not on his side. He says simply,

I know not.

This answer is the ultimate answer in Zen. It is “not-knowing,” a response that echoes “vast emptiness,” yet goes still deeper to the unnameable source where there is nothing-to-know, where nothing exists outside the doing and being of this present instant without past or future, an instant no more measurable than the flight of a bird from a limb. (Where to begin? Do we measure the relaxing of the feet? The moment when the eye glimpses the hawk, when instinct functions? For in this pure action, this pure moving of the bird, there is no time, no space, but only the free doing-being of this very moment—now! Unencumbered by concepts—such as emptiness, such as enlightenment—the bird is gone.) To be at one with our element, like that bird—that is the Absolute, that is our enlightened Buddha-nature. The instant we are conscious of that element, we stand apart from our own true nature, our Buddha-nature, we are back in the relative world of time and space, of life and death. This world is real, too, but its reality is partial.

Like emptiness, this not-knowing is very close to us, therefore hard to see. It is the source or essence of our life, and of Zen practice. In zazen, all “knowing” falls away; we simply are. And that is the enlightened state, whether or not the practitioner has had a so-called “enlightenment experience.”

Bodhidharma went north across the Yangtze River to Shorin Temple and spent nine years in zazen, “facing the wall.” When the old monk had gone, Wu’s minister, the venerable Shiko, told the Emperor gently that this old teacher was a manifestation of the great compassionate Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (Padmapani in India, Kuan Yin in China, Kwannon or Kannon in Japan) transmitting the Buddha Mind. Wu, dismayed, wished to send after him, but Shiko dissuaded him: how can you seek outside yourself for your own Buddha Nature? How can you send for the Lord Who Is Seen Within?

After Bodhidharma’s death, Wu wrote a poem:

I saw him without seeing, encountered without meeting.

Now as before, I regret and lament.

Zen Master Setcho, who included this encounter in the eleventh-century koan collection called Hekigan Roku (the Blue Cliff Record), commented that Wu, however wise, still saw unclearly, still contaminated the vital nature of this very instant by clinging to the past. “Give up regret!” Master Setcho said. “How limitless is the pure wind circling the earth!”

Here in North America, the Anishinabi (Ojibwa) Indian people had arrived at the same insight:

Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while

A great wind is bearing me across the sky.

Bodhidharma’s arrival was followed by four centuries of great Zen prosperity in China, and its establishment in Korea and Japan. But in recent ages, almost everywhere, the Buddha Way had withered in the grasp of its own priesthood, and Master Soyen believed that the time had come for the teachings to travel eastward to the New World. There Emerson and Thoreau, with their transcendentalist movement, had led the way in a wider study of what Emerson called “the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One.” Emerson confessed to a “sky-void idealism,” in apparent reference to the Mahayana concept of universal “emptiness,” the Oneness that includes everything; this sky-void he equated with “the Eternal Buddha.” Thoreau, inspired by “my Buddha,” wished “to go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds. It will be a success if I shall have left my self behind.” In this same period, as a muse, perhaps, Gustave Flaubert kept a gold Buddha on his desk.

Soyen Shaku, a fierce, venturesome teacher (of himself, he said, “My heart bums like fire but my eyes are as cold as dead ashes”), went to Ceylon to study Theravada, then represented Zen Buddhism at the World Conference of Religions in Chicago in 1893. From there he proceeded to LaSalle, Illinois, at the invitation of Dr. Paul Carus, author of The Gospel of Buddha and more than fifty other books on related topics. Carus was editor of Open Court, a leading journal of the day which claimed Bertrand Russell and John Dewey among its contributors. The founder of the Open Court Publishing Company was his father-in-law, Edward Hegeler (my great-grandfather’s partner in zinc manufacture), who was keenly interested in ecumenical advances and also in any reconciliation of science and religion, which had parted on bad terms at the time of the industrial revolution. Buddhism, which did not depend upon faith in a deity, the supernatural, or the occult, seemed very well suited to these worthy purposes. As Soyen Shaku wrote, “Religion is not to go to God by forsaking the world but to find Him in it. Our faith is to believe in our essential oneness with Him. ‘God is in us and we in Him’ must be made the most fundamental faith of all religions.”

Four years later Soyen Shaku, whose articles on war in Open Court were much admired by Count Leo Tolstoy, sent his young disciple Teitaro Suzuki to Illinois to help Carus with his translation of the Tao Te Ching as well as with the editing of his magazine. Before leaving Engaku-ji, Suzuki had attained a profound “opening” or enlightenment experience, at which time he was given the Dharma name Dai-Setzu, or “Great Stupidity” (from setsu, “unskilled” or “stupid”: the sense here is “not-knowing” mind, or free, spontaneous mind, unhindered by concepts and illusions). He used this name for the remainder of his life. In 1905 and 1906, during Soyen-roshi’s visits to America, Suzuki served as a translator for his lectures; otherwise, he spent eleven years in this small community south of Chicago. Here he began “The Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism,” the first of numerous books and articles under the name D. T. Suzuki which would lay the foundation for the spread of Buddhism to the West.

“The Occidentals, as far as I can judge,” Soyen Shaku wrote, “seem to be fond of making a full display of all their possessions with the frankness of a child; and they are prone to a strenuous and dissipating life which will soon drain all the nervous force at their command. . . . They are indeed candid and open-hearted—traits which sometimes seem wanting in Orientals. But they certainly lack the unfathomableness of the latter, who never seem to be enthusiastic, clamorous, or irrepressible. . . . Of course, there are exceptions in the West as well as in the East.”²

In 1905, when Soyen Shaku traveled to San Francisco to give Zen instruction to an American couple who had visited him in Engaku-ji, he was attended by another student, Nyogen Senzaki, who took a job as a servant in that household. This young monk had had a flimsy start in life as a foundling abandoned to the Siberian winter (possibly his real father was Russian), and his Dharma name, Nyo Gen, “As If a Phantasm,”³ well expressed his notion of himself as a homeless wanderer, “a mushroom without a very deep root, no branches, no flowers, and probably no seed.” When he turned up at Engaku-ji in 1896, at the age of twenty, he was very ill from tuberculosis, and he asked Soyen Shaku, “What if I should die?” This teacher of “severe penetrating eyes and stem mouth” advised him, “If you die, just die.” Hastening to recover, Nyogen joined life in the monastery, where he shared a room with the young lay student Teitaro Suzuki. After five years of study with Soyen-roshi, he left Engaku-ji in order to found a nursery school. He did not attempt religious instruction of the children, but “guided and watched over them, helping them learn about nature while they were playing.”

The title of Nyogen’s early writings, A Grass in the Field, conveys his longing to efface himself, and although Soyen Shaku, in a foreword, strongly supports this “nameless and penniless monk who goes unrecognized both in and out of monasteries, who has only an aspiration for loving-kindness, with which no honored position can compare,” he never seems to have acknowledged him as a student, perhaps out of respect for Nyogen’s own ideal of rootlessness. In fact, he appears to have met Nyogen’s lifelong devotion with something less than loving-kindness, though doubtless the matter was well understood between them. When Nyogen was dismissed from his job as houseboy—he worked hard but was inexperienced and spoke no English—Soyen Shaku escorted him toward a Japanese hotel in San Francisco. While walking through Golden Gate Park, the master came to an abrupt halt, saying, “This may be better for you instead of being hampered as my attendant monk. Just face this great city and see whether it conquers you or you conquer it.” Taking his leave, he walked away into the evening; his disciple never saw him again.

After Soyen Shaku’s death in 1919, Nyogen commemorated his teacher every year with verses of gratitude. “Thirty years in America I have worked my way to answer him, cultivating a Buddhist field in this strange land,” he wrote in 1935, not long after setting up a “floating zendo” in Los Angeles. “This autumn—the same as in the past—I have no crop but the growth of this white hair. . . .” He also wrote, “I was left in America to do something for Buddhism, but my work goes slowly, since I have neither an aggressive spirit . . . nor an attractive character for drawing crowds. If my teacher were still living, he would be disappointed in me.”

Nyogen was both strict and outspoken. “Many Americans are currently seeking Truth, visiting classes in philosophy one after another, and studying meditation under various Oriental teachers. But how many of these students are either willing or able to cut through to the tree’s very core? Scratching halfheartedly around the surface of the tree, they expect someone else to cut the trunk for them. Such people should stay in church where they belong, praying to the Supreme Being so that It will do their work for them. Zen wants nothing to do with such mollycoddles!” Yet he was convinced that Zen was well suited to the American mind and would prosper in America, which was “fertile ground for Zen,” he said, because its philosophy was rational and practical, with ethics rooted in individual morality and a notion of happiness in universal brotherhood. Also, most Americans were optimistic, informal, nature-loving, and—being both practical and efficient—capable of the simple living that lends itself best to sustained Zen practice.⁴

Despite strict avoidance of title, ceremonies, and priestly trappings, Nyogen-sensei (sensei means teacher) was revered by his American students. He was the first teacher in America to emphasize zazen, which is not merely sitting “meditation” but a silent training directed toward unification of body, mind, and spirit with the universal consciousness sometimes referred to as Oneness, Zen Mind, Buddha-nature. Zazen had been the foundation of the Buddha’s practice. “Dhyana [zazen] strives to make us acquainted with the most concrete and withal the most universal fact of life,” Soyen Shaku had written. “It is the philosopher’s business to deal with dry, lifeless, uninteresting generalizations. Buddhists are not concerned with things like that. They want to see the fact directly and not through the medium of philosophical abstractions. There may be a god who created heaven and earth, or there may not; we could be saved simply by believing in his goodness, or we could not. . . . True Buddhists do not concern themselves with propositions such as these. . . . Buddhists through dhyana endeavor to reach the bottom of things and there to grasp with their own hands the very life of the universe, which makes the sun rise in the morning, makes the bird cheerfully sing in the balmy spring breeze, and also makes the biped called man hunger for love, righteousness, liberty, truth, and goodness. In dhyana, therefore, there is nothing abstract, nothing dry as a bone and cold as a corpse, but all animation, all activity, and eternal revelation.”⁵

But Soyen Shaku gave no zazen instruction to Americans and neither did Sokei-an, a disciple who in the 1930s became the first Zen teacher in New York City. Sokei-an did not believe that Westerners would willingly sit still for an extended period, and he limited his Zen instruction to teisho or talks on the Dharma, and dokusan, or “private confrontation” with the teacher.⁶ As for D. T. Suzuki, he was primarily a Zen scholar, and while he stressed the significance of the enlightenment experience (in Japanese, satori or kensho—literally, “seeing into one’s own [true] nature”), from which Shakyamuni’s teachings had derived, he rarely discussed the zazen training that almost always preceded its attainment.

In 1934, Nyogen-sensei was struck by the quality of verse contributed to one of the numerous Japanese magazines devoted to haiku poetry by a young monk named Soen Nakagawa, who lived as a hermit on Dai Bosatsu Mountain, near Mount Fuji. The two struck up a twenty-year correspondence that was interrupted only by World War II, when Nyogen was interned in a “relocation camp” for American Japanese at Heart Mountain, Wyoming; not until April 8, 1949, did they meet face to face on a pier in San Francisco. Thus Nyogen Senzaki brought about the first visit to America of a man now recognized as one of the great Zen masters of the day and an inspired pioneer in the establishment of Zen practice in the Western world. On this occasion Monk Soen wrote:

No matter how much I contemplate this tea bowl

It is still—a tea bowl!

Thus I arrive in San Francisco.

“The summer breeze from the south has brought two wandering monks to San Francisco,” Nyogen said, introducing his friend, then forty-two years old, to a meeting of the Theosophical Society. Soen discussed Soyen Shaku’s statement upon his arrival in this city, nearly a half century before, that after forty years of studying Buddhism he had only recently begun to understand that “after all, I do not understand anything.” This teaching referred to Bodhidharma’s “not-knowing,” or utterly free, spontaneous mind—called in Tibetan Buddhism “the crazy wisdom—but Monk Soen, understandably misunderstood, was laughed at by a disappointed audience. Quoting from Goethe’s Faust—“I lead up and down, across, and to and fro my pupils by the nose—and learn that we in truth can nothing know”—Soen explained that this not-knowing was “the point of Zen,” the banishment of fleeting and illusory clouds of ideas and emotions in order to reveal the brilliant moon of universal Mind. “Nowadays,” he observed in that cryptic, idiosyncratic English that would serve him so well in the New World, “there is no one capable of being dumbfounded.”

The following year, when Soen-roshi was installed as abbot of Ryutaku-ji (Dragon-Swamp Temple) under Mount Fuji, several of Nyogen’s American students went to the temple to study with him. In the counterculture period after World War II, a number of Americans were interesting themselves in Zen, including the “Beat Zen” of such writers as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder.⁷ There were also the spurious Zen-type teachings of the spiritual hustlers who preyed on the yearnings of love-addled youth throughout the sixties. Ignoring the excellent lessons of Dr. Suzuki (a “Profile” of Dr. Suzuki appeared in The New Yorker in August 1957), these people twisted the dramatic teaching methods of the great masters, giving Zen an undeserved reputation for cultish obscurity, wild mystical excess, and eccentricity which plagues it to the present day.⁸

Far from being “eccentric” in any sense, Zen is (as Dr. Suzuki wrote) “the ultimate fact of all philosophy. That final psychic fact takes place when religious consciousness is heightened to extremity. Whether it comes to pass in Buddhists, in Christians, or in philosophers, it is in the last analysis incidental to Zen.” Indeed, Zen shares its holistic perception of the universe, of “a reality even prior to heaven and earth,”⁹ with almost all of mankind’s most traditional faiths.

After World War II, Dr. Suzuki had lectured on Buddhism in Hawaii and California, and for some years after 1951, he was a professor at Columbia University in New York City. Already his admirers in Europe included Jung, Heidegger,¹⁰ and Arnold Toynbee (who felt that the transmission of Buddhism to the West would someday be seen as one of the most significant events in history). In the United States, Aldous Huxley, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm attributed much of their insight to his teachings; his students the composer John Cage and the painter Mark Tobey believed that Zen’s influence on their work had been profound. Dr. Suzuki’s combination of vast erudition, playfulness, and a serene and gentle manner attracted great interest not only to his classes but to the Zen teachings embodied by his presence, and a Zen Studies Society was set up in New York City to support his efforts.

As Thomas Merton once remarked, “In meeting him one seemed to meet that True Man of No Rank¹¹ that one really wants to meet. Who else is there? In meeting Dr. Suzuki and drinking a cup of tea with him I felt I had met this one man. It was like finally arriving at one’s home.” Jack Kerouac, who visited him with Ginsberg, yelled at him, “I would like to spend the rest of my life with you!,” to which Dr. Suzuki, holding up one finger, giggled, “Sometime!” In 1959, Suzuki returned to Japan, where he kept a cottage at Engaku-ji and established a comprehensive Buddhist library in his house down the hill in Kamakura.

In 1955, after a half century in America, Nyogen Senzaki had also returned to Engaku-ji, on a pilgrimage to Soyen Shaku’s grave, but most of his brief visit to Japan was spent at Ryutaku-ji, where he persuaded Soen-roshi that the future of Zen lay in the West. Three years later, at the age of eighty-two, Nyogen Senzaki died in America. Part of his ashes were sent to Soen-roshi and the rest were buried “in some unknown, uncultivated field. . . . Do not erect a tombstone! The California poppy is tombstone enough. . . . I would like to be like the mushroom in the deep mountains: no flowers, no branches, and no root; I wish to rot most inconspicuously. . . .”¹² Nyogen Senzaki wished to leave no trace of his passage through this life, but to blow away into eternity, light as the dust of that old brown mushroom in the woods.

Soen-roshi came to Los Angeles for the simple funeral, and subsequently led two memorial sesshins, or intensive training periods—the first full seven-day sesshins ever conducted in America, according to Nyogen’s student Robert Aitken (now Aitken-roshi), who served Soen as jisha, or attendant. In 1960 Soen sent his disciple the monk Tai-san to help Aitken establish his own zendo in Hawaii, and two years later Soen encouraged a series of sesshins in America led by his friend Hakuun Yasutani-roshi, with whom, at Soen’s recommendation, Aitken and an American businessman, Philip Kapleau, had recently been studying in Japan.

At seventy-seven, Yasutani was still a strict, powerful teacher who emphasized kensho, or enlightenment experience, and according to Tai-san, the first sesshin in America (in Hawaii in 1962) was “as hysterical as it was historical.” Nevertheless, five students experienced some degree of kensho, and Yasutani’s vigorous methods were soon famous among the few Zen students in America, which he visited seven times between 1962 and 1969. (The Three Pillars of Zen, edited by Kapleau, is based on his teachings.) On these sesshin journeys his translator and jisha was Tai-san, who remained in New York after 1965 and resurrected the Zen Studies Society, set up originally to support the work of Dr. Suzuki. Tai-san also established what is now the New York Zendo, with Soen-roshi as honorary abbot. By this time such Rinzai Zen teachers as Joshu Sasaki and Isshu Miura were already established in America, and so were the Soto Zen teachers Taizan Maezumi, Shunryu Suzuki, and Dainin Katagiri. There was also Seung Sa Nim, a Korean Zen master, and Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, one of a distinguished company of Tibetan lamas.

Although Yasutani-roshi had come regularly to the United States after 1962 (for a while he intended to come here for good), Soen-roshi’s duties as abbot of Ryutaku had kept him in Japan; his visit to America with Yasutani in the summer of 1968 was his first since the funeral of Nyogen Senzaki. Yasutani led a sesshin for Maezumi-sensei’s Soto Zen group in Los Angeles, then visited the San Francisco Zen Center’s mountain retreat at Tassajara, in the California Coast Range, where Soen spoke about his late friend Nyogen. Subsequently, Yasutani led two sesshins for Tai-san’s Rinzai students near New York, where he and Soen would preside at the opening of the New York Zendo a few weeks later (September 15, 1968). A few weeks before, I had met these roshis when they visited Zen students on Long Island, in the first of the encounters with Zen teachers, past and present, which form the heart and marrow of this book.

Gaining enlightenment is like the moon reflecting in the water.

The moon does not get wet, nor is the water disturbed.

Although its light is extensive and great . . .

The whole moon and the whole sky are reflected in a dew-drop in the grass, in one drop of water.

Enlightenment does not disturb the person, just as the moon does not disturb the water.

A person does not hinder enlightenment, just as a dew-drop does not hinder the moon in the sky.

The depth of the drop is the height of the moon.

Actualization of the Koan

—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER TWO

IN mid-November of 1971, Deborah and I attended a weekend sesshin at the New York Zendo. For two months Deborah had been suffering from pains that seemed to resist all diagnosis, and she decided to limit herself to the Sunday sittings. On Saturday evening, meeting me at the door of our apartment, she stood there, smiling, in a new brown dress, but it was not the strange, transparent beauty in her face that took my breath away. I had been in zazen since before daybreak, and my mind was clear, and I saw Death gazing out at me from those wide, dark eyes. There was no mistaking it, and the certainty was so immediate and shocking that I could not greet her. In what she took as observance of sesshin silence, I pushed past quietly into the bathroom, to collect myself in order that I might speak.

On Sunday, Deborah chanced to sit directly opposite my own place in the two long lines of buddha figures that faced each other. During morning service, still resisting what I had perceived the night before, and upset that this day might exhaust her, I chanted for her with such intensity that I “lost” myself, obliterated my self—a function of the ten-line Kannon Sutra, dedicated to the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, which is chanted hard, over and over, thirty-three times, with wood gong and bells, in mounting volume and intensity. At the end, the chanters give one mighty shout of MU!—a mantric word corresponding to Om, which symbolizes the Absolute, eternity—this followed instantly by a great hush of sudden, ringing silence, as if the universe had stopped to listen. But on this morning, in the near darkness—the altar candle was the only light in the long room—this immense hush swelled and swelled and kept on swelling, as if this “I” were opening out into infinity, in eternal amplification of my buddha being. There was no hallucination, only awe, “I” had vanished and also “I” was everywhere.

Then I let my breath go, gave my self up to immersion in all things, to a joyous belonging so overwhelming that tears of relief poured from my eyes. For the first time since unremembered childhood, I was not alone, there was no separate “I.” Wounds, anger, ragged edges, hollow places were all gone, all had been healed; my heart was the heart of all creation. Nothing was needed, nothing missing, all was already, always, and forever present and forever known. Even Deborah’s dying, if that had to be, was perfectly in place. All that day I wept and laughed.

Two weeks later, describing to Tai-san what had happened, I astonished myself (though not my teacher, who merely nodded, making a small bow) by a spontaneous burst of tears and laughter, the tears falling light and free as rain in sunlight.

The state of grace that began that November morning in the New York Zendo prevailed throughout the winter of my wife’s dying, an inner calm in which I knew at once what must be done, wasting no energy in indecision or regrets. When I told Tai-san about this readiness and strength, and confessed to a kind of crazy exaltation, he said quietly, “You have transcended.” I supposed he meant “transcended the ego,” and with it all horror and remorse. As if awakened from a bad dream of the past, I found myself forgiven, not only by Deborah but by myself.

Rohatsu sesshin, commemorating the Buddha’s enlightenment, took place in the first eight days of December. The day before sesshin, Deborah entered Roosevelt Hospital for medical tests, and a bone biopsy was performed on December 1; consequently I came and went during the sesshin. On the morning of December 4—the same day that Suzuki-roshi died in San Francisco—I told Tai-san the good news that the biopsy report was negative. I also told him that two weeks earlier, on November 20, in a knowing that was not the same as knowledge, I had perceived that Deborah was dying.

The day after sesshin, with cancer suspected but undiagnosed, I took Deborah home to Sagaponack, where she went straight to bed, exhausted. Within a few days, two small lumps developed under her skin, and on December 14 the local hospital reported metastatic cancer. On December 16, when I told Tai-san the bad news, we sat together a few minutes in dead silence. Then he said quietly, “Oh, Peter,” and offered his beautiful red fan as a gift for Deborah. The fan calligraphy, done by Soen-roshi, meant “Going Home.”

Deborah was teaching at the New School for Social Research, and brought books with her to Memorial Hospital in New York City. A fortnight later the books were still untouched. Meekly she sewed at a Christmas stocking provided the patients by the recreation staff, and seeing this, I realized for the first time how much the disease and its violent therapy had stunned her.

On Christmas Eve I drove home to Sagaponack to pull together some sort of Christmas for the children. Deborah was to be taken out on Christmas Day by our friend Milly Johnstone and their Cha No Yu (Japanese tea ceremony) master, Hisashi-san. But she felt too weak and sick to go, and the day after Christmas, with Zendo friends—Milly, Tai-san and his wife, Yasuko, and Sheila Curtis—we put together a champagne-and-oyster party in her room, the first good time she had had in weeks and the last celebration of her life. Tai-san honored her fierce sincerity as a Zen student, giving her the Buddhist precepts and a Dharma name. He had brought to the hospital a brown robe for zazen and the bib-like garment known as a rakusu, inscribed with the characters Ho Ko (Dharma Light). Sheila gave us a poem by the Japanese poet Chora:

I fell in love with the wings of birds

The light of spring on them!

Under the covers, Ho Ko was already an old woman, her hips and beautiful legs collapsed, black and blue from needles, but she was still lovely when propped up in bed, and she wore her rakusu like a proud child. I watched our friends’ faces admiring the brave, calm, smiling woman in the bed. I admired her, too, putting out of my mind those other days when her dying was neither calm nor lovely, those days that no one knew about but the nurses and me.

With the turn of the year, she retreated swiftly, battered insensible by radiation and chemotherapy. I could not ease her pain or fear or loneliness, or enter the half world of shadows closing around her. On January 3 there were serious complications that almost killed her, and by the time her downward progress stabilized again, her mind was disintegrating in feverish mutterings about going on a journey, and the raging paranoia of death fear and too much pain.

Tai-san spoke to me about Soen-roshi’s mother, who had died of cancer at Ryutaku-ji without sedation rather than cut off awareness of life and death, but seeing Ho Ko on January 18 for the first time since the Christmas party, he wept and said no more. Like a mad old woman, recognizing no one, anticipating pain, she fought away those who tried to help her. Most of the few people I permitted into the room, remembering an entirely different person, went red in the face or burst into tears at the first sight of her.

Zen students¹ volunteered as nurses, and the presence of Zen people always calmed her, even when she appeared to be lost in coma. The head nurse, dealing with the tense, desperate confrontations between living and dying in the hushed rooms rank with flowers up and down the corridor, told me that in all her years in the cancer ward, she had never known such an atmosphere of support and love. “I don’t know what you Zen people do,” she said, “but you’re doing something right.” Bending all rules, she taught me to use the mucus respirator to clear my wife’s throat when she was strangling, let me sleep in the room overnight and bathe her and carry her on the last diminishing journeys to the toilet, where her weight had to be held above the seat to keep her from crying out in pain. Finally I put a stop to the doctors’ obsessive tests and weighing, which were excruciating, humiliating, useless. Deborah’s great courage had worn out at last, and she cowered and whined whenever she was lifted. The last tubes were attached, and she never left her bed again.

For the first time in two weeks, I went home to see our little boy. After hours of driving that cold January night, I could not clear my nostrils of the stink of flowers in the cancer ward, the floor shine on that corridor of death. Then a rabbit ran across the frozen country road, in the winter moon. In that instant my head cleared; I was back in life again and ready to deal with whatever I met with when I returned to the city the next day.

Deborah was far away in what the doctors told me was her terminal coma. She would not come to again and would almost certainly be dead in the next few days. But early Wednesday morning, January 20, a nurse rang from the hospital; my wife wished to speak with me on the telephone! I said there must be some mistake, and she said the staff was just as astonished as I was. Then the voice of Deborah as a young child said, “Peter? I have something to tell you. Peter? I’m very very sick! Come right away!” In tears, I ran all the way to the hospital through the daybreak streets, but by the time I arrived she had sunk again into her nether world.

Two days later, at weekend sesshin, I was given a place close to the door so that I could come and go inobtrusively to the hospital. Ordinarily Tai-san remained silent in the first hours of sesshin, as people calmed themselves, but this day he spoke out suddenly, very slowly, in the middle of the first period of sitting. “A few streets away, our beloved sister Ho Ko lies dying! The pain of your knees is nothing like the pain of cancer! She is still teaching us, still helping us, and by sitting with great concentration—Mu!—we will help her to erase her evil karma.” After dedicating the sesshin to Ho Ko, Tai-san paused for a long time, then resumed quietly. “Last month, during our Rohatsu sesshin, Suzuki-roshi died of cancer. This month Debby Matthiessen dies of cancer!” Again he paused for long taut seconds. “Who among you . . . will be next? Now . . . sit!”

Tai-san shouted the words next and sit; they resounded in the zendo like two cuts of a whip, and the whole place stiffened. Later all present would agree that the sittings that afternoon and evening were the most powerful in memory. At dawn next morning, everyone chanted with furious intensity, ending with a mighty shout of MU! Immediately afterward I went to the hospital, where the bewildered nurses said that my wife was conscious.

Deborah’s face was clear and lovely; she smiled softly and said, “I love you,” and actually found strength to put her arms around my neck. Tai-san brought Maurine Freedgood, Ruth Lilienthal, and other senior students, still in their robes. Deborah recognized and embraced them all. Happy and radiant in her awakening after three days and nights of torment and delirium, of raving about death and journeys, she blessed everyone with a smile of childlike sweetness, murmuring, “Oh, I love you so!” Later she asked me shyly, “Will I die?,” and when I repeated the question—“Will you die?”—to make sure she wished to hear the answer, she nodded without fear and moved gently away from the whole matter, as if to spare me. Next day she was still calm and happy, though less clear, and on Monday morning she smiled at me, whispering, “Peter.” Deborah never spoke again, but neither did she return to the wild fear and distress of earlier days. She seemed to be in a blessed state, and Tai-san wondered if she had not had a spontaneous kensho. That afternoon she returned into the coma, and she died peacefully three nights later, with Tai-san and I holding her cooling hands. After three suspended pauses between breaths, my beautiful wife—how incredible!—made no effort to inhale again. We sat with her for two more hours until her body was removed for autopsy.

To the great annoyance of the mortuary and crematorium attendants, who hurried and chivied us from start to finish, Tai-san and I accompanied Ho Ko right to the oven door of a strange, windowless temple far out in the winter wastes of the huge gray cemetery in Queens. She wore her beads, brown linen robe, and rakusu for the great occasion. Years ago in Paris I said goodbye to my infant son by touching kissed fingers to his forehead, at a small service in the hospital yard conducted by a wine-spotted cleric and two conscripted witnesses, still clutching brooms. But New York law forbids the touching of the deceased by the unlicensed; two gay attendants in tight, broad-shouldered suits hissed like cobras as I put forth my hand. Under their disdainful gaze, as the stretcher slid into the oven, we chanted the Four Vows, as we had done at the moment of her death. Then the iron door rang to on the regal, gray-faced form, reassembled so skillfully after an autopsy that had traced her cancer even to the brain.

We bowed to Ho Ko and departed under a full moon in the old gray sky of New York winter afternoon. By now the foul-mouthed mortuary driver had divined that something not so ordinary was in the wind, and was circumspect, asking shy questions, all the way back into the city.

To tell eight-year-old Alex that his mother had died, I took him for a walk on the winter beach. Alex assured me she could not be dead. “If she was dead,” he explained, hoping to comfort us, “I would be crying.”

In the grayest part of the empty months that followed, my heart was calm and clear, as if all the bad karma of our past together had been dissolved on that early morning of November. Toward that experience that prepared me for my wife’s death I was filled with gratitude, which had nothing to do with the thankfulness I felt toward Tai-san and our Zen community, toward kind family and friends and children. I could scarcely feel grateful to myself, yet there it was: where could that Buddha-self reside if not in my own being? Chanting the Kannon Sutra with such fury, I had invoked Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, but I paid no attention to the words. All energy was concentrated upon Deborah, who sat in the line of buddha forms across the way. Avalokiteshvara was also Deborah, also myself—in short, what Meister Eckhart meant: “The eye with which I see God is the Eye with which God sees me.” Or Jesus Christ: “I and my Father are one.” Surely those Christian mystics spoke of the Lord Who Is Seen Within.

Almost another year had passed before something said by an older student made me realize what must have happened. At dokusan, Tai-san confirmed it. But an opening or kensho is no measure of enlightenment, since an insight into one’s “true nature” varies widely in its depth and permanence. Some may overturn existence, while others are mere fragmentary glimpses that “like a mist will surely disappear.” To poke a finger through the wall is not enough—the whole wall must be brought down with a crash! The opening had been premature, and its power seeped away, month after month. This saddened me, although I understood that I had scarcely started on the path; that but for Deb’s crisis, which had cut through forty years of cynicism and defensive encrustations, I might never have had such an experience; that that small opening was very far from great enlightenment, dai kensho, in which the self dissolves without a trace into the One.

February sesshin, a few weeks later, was dedicated to Ho Ko, whose bones and photograph shared the altar with fat white carnations. At morning service on the second day, Tai-san repeated the dedication to Deborah, after which the sangha—the community of Buddhist followers—chanted the Kannon Sutra thirty-three times with mounting intensity, followed by the shouted MU! Because this was dawn of a Sunday morning, great care had been taken to shut all doors so as not to rouse the neighborhood against weird Zen practices. There was no draft whatever in the windowless room, where the service candle always burned without a tremor. But this morning, in the ringing hush that falls after such chanting, the candle suddenly flared wild and bright, remaining that way for at least ten seconds before diminishing once more to its normal state.

Don Scanlon, sitting near the altar, had always been incorrigibly curious and missed nothing, but later, when I whispered to him about the candle, he assured me that I was going nuts. Discovering that no one else had seen that flaring, I realized that Don must be right. But at dokusan, when I said I was disturbed by something that occurred after the shouted Mu, Tai-san nodded and smiled before I could finish. “The candle,” he murmured. We gazed at each other and said nothing more.

In March, 1972, the first Dai Bosatsu sesshin was held in the old lodge on Beecher Lake. In the small upstairs zendo, the Buddha silhouette was black against the brilliant winter pane; the woods sparkled with snow blossoms of ice and sun. During this week, using a pick-axe, I dug a hole at the foot of a lichened boulder in the wild meadow, and on the last day of sesshin, in a ceremony that consecrated the new graveyard, a lovely urn containing half of Ho Ko’s bones became the first ever interred in what is now the “sangha meadow” at Dai Bosatsu. (Marsha Feinhandler, who had made the urn, said she had felt the clay breathing in her hands—a nice experience!) I covered the hole with a small capstone, then a large flat stone, and scattered pine boughs over the fresh earth. By the time those boughs rotted, there would be no trace of Deborah Love’s return into the earth.

The remaining bones went home to Sagaponack, where on May 4, with Alex, I dug a grave in the old cemetery, choosing a spot where a robin had left a wild blue egg in the spring grass. Together we planted the grave with heath and marigold. All day it had been very dark, but as we finished, a bright storm light illumined the pale chickweed blossoms scattered like light snow in the cemetery. On the spring wind, the winter geese were restless; an indigo bunting came to the copper leaves of an old cherry. I went for a long walk along the dunes.

On May 6, Tai-san arived with his Dharma brothers Do-san and Dokyu-san (now Kyudo-roshi) and a few Zen students. My four children participated in the simple service, taking turns tossing earth into the hole. (Alex said, “I liked the shoveling the best! It made me feel just like a workman!” He was later observed showing his mother’s grave to friends, his arm slung companionably around the headstone.) In the afternoon we went clamming in Northwest Harbor. On no occasion before or since have I seen Tai-san so relaxed and joyful as he was that day, digging clams with his brother monks from Ryutaku-ji. Later that year he would receive from his teacher inka, or “seal of approval,” and already Soen referred to him as Eido-shi, which is short for Eido-roshi.

We celebrated something at our seafood supper. Tai-san said to me quietly, “So . . . it’s over now,” but of course it wasn’t. Still clinging, I had saved out a brown bit of bone, which I taped to Ho Ko’s small memorial plaque in our small zendo. The following week, grief took me by surprise during Ozu’s great film, Tokyo Story, when the old country people, packed off to a garish and noisy modern seashore hotel for their vacation when they attempt to visit their married children in Tokyo, agree shyly that they are homesick for their country village.

Here I am in Sagaponack,

Yet my heart longs for Sagaponack.

Just understand that birth and death itself is nirvana, and you will neither hate one as being birth and death nor cherish the other as being nirvana. Only then can you be free of birth and death.

This present birth and death is the life of Buddha. If you reject it with distaste, you are thereby losing the life of Buddha. If you abide in it, attaching to birth and death, you also lose the life of Buddha. But do not try to gauge it with your mind or speak it with words. When you simply release and forget both your body and your mind and throw yourself into the house of Buddha, then with no strength needed and no thought expended, freed from birth and death, you become Buddha. Then there can be no obstacle in any man’s mind.

There is an extremely easy way to become Buddha. Refraining from all evil, not clinging to birth and death, working in deep compassion for all sentient beings, respecting those over you and pitying those below you, without any detesting or desiring, worrying or lamentation—this is what is called Buddha. Do not search beyond it.

Birth and Death

—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER THREE

IN the summer of 1972, Soen-roshi came back to America and led a “week’s holiday, the best sesshin now taking place in world!” at the Catholic retreat house in Litchfield, Connecticut. He was accompanied by the bamboo flute master Watazumi-sensei, who played every morning and evening in the zendo. In “Mind and Moon,” the flute drew forth a rough, wild wind, then a tree and a bamboo stalk in the wind, then calm as the crickets sang with him in the long twilight. A white moth came, just at dusk, to tighten the shadows in front of my black cushion.

Watazumi-sensei spoke about the similarity of flute music and Zen as manifestations of true self. Since he usually practiced alone, even in secret, his playing was to be considered not as a musical performance but as an expression of the Buddha-nature all around us. To coax his instrument to fulfill itself as it had in “Mind and Moon,” he said, required seventeen years—a Zen lesson, since almost all his efforts went unheard, and since he had found no student able to succeed him. We were fortunate to hear such a great master’s flute, Soen-roshi said, because few of the master’s own students had ever heard him play.

At dokusan, the Roshi bowed and said, “Eido-shi told me about your wife. It is all right. You live near ocean . . . the waves come and go, but the ocean is still there, You die, I die”—we smiled, nodded, and bowed—“it is all right, too. The ocean is still there.”

In his first teisho, Soen-roshi spoke of “coming and passing, passing and coming, the pure wind, ho-o-o-o-o!” He urged us to “truly hear the crickets; that is the same as doing zazen.” And later, during walking meditation, he instructed us to chant this Ho (Dharma) that is chanted by the monks of Ryutaku-ji, walking the roads with takuhatsu bowls, receiving offerings. Our voices rose shy and soft at first, then louder and wilder as people dropped their masks and let anger and pain and grief and laughter flow.

Soen-roshi talked about driving to sesshin in California, and an ancient auto running out of gas in open country, and the whole group chanting the Kannon Sutra, over and over, empowering the car to go on for mile after mile on an empty tank, refusing to quit until just the moment that it coasted into an Enco station. “In Japan, this word enko means ‘out of commission,’ as in no gas, car breakdown—won-derful? But even if car had stopped too soon, it is still won-derful practice, everybody doing Kanzeon together, nobody mad at the driver. Every day there is such a situation in our life.”

The Roshi had come by car across the country, visiting the Grand Canyon (“Perhaps this is the first time tea has been offered to Grand Canyon? Next morning we went to a certain point to watch the sun come up; I shed a tear”) and Yellowstone Hot Springs (“Chauffeur say it is against American rules, but Eido-shi became naked, drived in, and I and Do-san drived in too, won-derful! And finally driver drived in too!”). He was delighted by a night-blooming cereus in the zendo that blossomed in the dusk and was dead by morning; he jumped up on the windowsills in celebration of its death and life. “Life and death are the same! Only the words are different! Cereus not so-called beautiful! Not so-called ugly! Those are just words! Cereus comes from universe, you come from universe, all comes from universe—clouds, sky, fire, rain, stone, self! Flower reflect something beautiful in you!”

Soen-roshi has written:

All are nothing but flowers

In a flowering universe.

All week the Roshi shimmered and danced with a wild joy that pervaded the dokusan room (“When you are happy at do-kusan, I wish only to dance with you!”) and his teisho, too. Tei means “to carry,” sho “to declare.” According to Soen’s teacher, Yamamoto Gempo-roshi, teisho only occurs when the teacher can carry and declare the essence of the Buddha Dharma in a live, direct way, without the “dead” explanations and analysis of the ordinary lecture. Soen-roshi spoke highly of the great Chinese master Joshu, whose famous “MU!” (in answer to the monk’s question “Does the dog have Buddha-nature?”) has been used since the ninth century as a teaching word, a mantric equivalent of Mind or Buddha-nature, of the universal essence, before heaven and earth. (“This is Joshu, of that terri-bell story. Let us kill such a dog!”) Even those not working on this classic koan were fiercely exhorted to concentrate on Mu with every breath, in and out of the zendo. “To call it Mu is to violate its unnameable nature, yet . . . inhale this universal essence: MU! Exhale the self into the universe: MU!”

“When you are in airplane, do not read a magazine! Look out! Won-derful! Everything is very important, in any event, in any moment, everything this MU! Everything is right-here-now! We are all Buddhas, all bodhisattvas, all mis-er-robble creatures—away with this mis-er-robble word kensho! If I wish to be a thief, I just steal! If I wish to be a buddha, I just do it! Be the Buddha! No need to be so serious. Be light, light, light—full of light!”

At dark, Soen-roshi leads us outside, points at Orion; he loves to celebrate the night and sun and water. “Swallow the stars,” he murmurs, “until you are one with the universe, with all-pervading universal life!”

At dawn sitting, I imagine myself a deer in the early woods. The hard autumn bell note of a blue jay tingles the hairs of the deer’s dew-silvered hide, its steps are crisp and sure yet soundless in the leaves. Such images help concentrate my breathing, make me taut and aware. Later they will fall away like armatures, like scaffolding, I will not need them. At dokusan, I ask Soen-roshi if it is all right to use such devices, or should I struggle to empty out my mind? He says it is all right: “There is no such thing as ‘empty mind.’ There is only present mind.”

I bow, expecting him to ring the bell, but he says quietly, “Coming across the country, I thought of won-derful Dharma name—I Shin. One Mind. Uni-versal Mind. Won-derful name! Say it!” (I say it: I Shin!) “I asked Eido-shi who should receive it, and he said nothing. But last night we talked again, and we decided it will be given to you.” Unaccountably, my eyes mist. I do a full bow, leave the room as the roshi sits smiling in the sunlight.

At rest period I walk in the pine woods and meadows, in the breath of chickory and early aster, hot summer goldenrod. Everything seems perfectly in place, just-as-it-is, precisely “right,” as in Deborah’s favorite Zen expression, “No snowflake falls in an inappropriate place.”

I litter these notebooks with small verse:

Crows plotting in hot August woods:

Caw! Caw!

Who is It?

On the final morning of sesshin, the white moth visited me on my black cushion, fluttering against my head to focus my attention. I ran lightly up the stairs for my last dokusan with Soen-roshi. He met me on the landing, grabbed me, spun me, and pointed through the window at the rising sun, roaring like fire through a tall black burning pine. I glimpse Who-it-is who has glimpsed that long-lost home, and the healing tears stream down my face, in the overwhelming clarity and simplicity of this moment. A hard-eyed man who, not so long ago, had scarcely wept for twenty years wept throughout the sitting, the tears alternating with delicious silent laughter. At breakfast I got laughing so hard that I had to stop eating and bite my lip to avoid unraveling the strong sesshin atmosphere for others.

In the midmoming sittings, I become a sapling pine, warmed by the sun, swaying in wind, inhaling wind, water, minerals, exhaling warm, fragrant amber resin. Tough roots budge subterranean rock, the trunk expands, sinewy limbs gather in sunlight far above, new needles shining in new sun, new wind, until the great pine is immovable, yet flexible and live, the taproot boring ever deeper into the earth. Then the tree evaporates, and there is nothing, and nothing missing, only emptiness and light.

“Be light, light, light,” whispers Soen-roshi. “Full of light.”

Somewhere far off in a golden haze, the roshi is saying, “So this is not ‘last day,’ it is everlasting day, beginning day.”

Sesshin ended with a purification service and a talk on the ten Buddhist precepts, which resemble the Ten Commandments. “Sesshin is nothing else but purification,” Soen-roshi said. “The best zazen is our everyday life, which cannot be spent on a black cushion. Listen to people. Do not talk too much about your wonderful experience in sesshin; perhaps it will show in your behavior, your presence.”

I try to confine my “wonderful experience” to these journals, but so far as I can tell, this experience has done nothing at all to alter my old patterns of what the Purification Gatha calls “greed, anger, and folly.” However, my children claim to detect a difference, and perhaps without the purification of ses-shin, I might have stiffened into place like an old barnacle, winter already in my heart.

In early September of 1972, Shimano Eido-roshi was installed as abbot of New York’s Shobo-ji and also of International Dai Bosatsu Zendo, in impressive ceremonies led by Soen-roshi, who had given up the abbotship of Ryutaku-ji to come to America as honorary founder of these temples. Among his attendants was a young Soto Zen teacher from Los Angeles, Maezumi-sensei. In this period, the ground for the new monastery was broken on a forest hillside overlooking Beecher Lake.

With the wistful light of Indian Summer days, the blowing milkweed silk and silent silver crows, came loneliness. On the first day of fall Soen-roshi came to Sagaponack with Eido-shi and a small group of Zen students to hold a memorial service for Ho Ko in the little tearoom zendo that she had created upstairs. At supper he gave me a shiny plum pit like varnished wood with the Kannon Sutra inscribed on it in tiny characters. At dawn next day he held another service. When we visited Ho Ko’s grave in the old cemetery, three swans flew over with whistling wings as he gave the blessing.

That morning the roshi laid out his scroll paper, ink, and brush on the living room floor. Instructing us to chant, he gathered himself for a long time, then uttered a cry and flew at the paper, creating in seconds a wonderful Mu calligraphy for the upstairs zendo. Afterward, to relieve the pressure, he drank off a jigger of every liquor in the house. “You must not discriminate,” he warned us, addressing himself bravely to the last one, an exceedingly bitter aperitif best saved for hangovers. “This animal does not understand me,” Soen-roshi said, his invisible eyebrows raised in alarm on his high forehead. But since waste offended him, he instantly dipped his finger into the jigger glass and used the dark stuff as ink, drawing a smiling face on a shikishi—a stiff card used for calligraphy—with a masterly flourish and inscribing it “Before Christ, Before Buddha.” He then bowed to this useful substance and signed the shikishi with the last of it.

At a ceremony before October sesshin, Eido-shi gave me the Buddhist precepts and a rakusu with a calligraphy of my Dharma name, I Shin. I was proud to wear a rakusu, but after a few sittings I took it off. I had been a Zen student for only one year, whereas Deborah had been a sincere practitioner for five years before receiving the precepts a few weeks before her death. I had not earned lay ordination, being so scattered, so far from the condition of “One Mind.”

At dokusan, Eido-shi asked sharply why I wore no rakusu, and I reminded him of what he had told us in teisho of his own recent status as a roshi, forced on him early, so he said, by Soen-roshi because of his status as temple abbot and Zen teacher here in New York. Though he had completed koan study several years before, he had not felt ready to receive inka, or seal of approval, as a “senior teacher.” While Nyogen Senzaki had been a “true-ue-ue roshi!” without ever receiving inka from a recognized teacher, he considered himself still “a technical roshi,” a “yellow-green-apple roshi,” who one day hoped to become mature and red.

How often this man had disarmed us with humility just when we thought him arrogant and egotistical! But after the first of the year, he said, he would answer no longer to “Tai-san”; he is now Eido-shi or Eido-roshi. Yellow-green or not, he has seemed very well since receiving inka, more gentle, more humorous, less autocratic, and somehow more spiritual into the bargain, though no doubt the mirror would be polished more before he attained the transparent aura of his teachers.

Nodding, he tells me to wear my rakusu when I am ready, and I put it away.

Going home on Saturday night of November sesshin, I felt a presence, as if Deborah might open the door as she had the year before, on the mid-sesshin night when I knew that she was dying. Inside, the presence was much stronger, and soon, although the lights were on, a suffused glow approached the bedside and remained there for some time. There was nothing scary here, but on the contrary, something gentle and approving. I invited Deb to manifest herself, convey a message, but she did not. The light withdrew from the bedside, then vanished, and this “dream” of her presence, if that is what it was, never came again.¹

Once a monk asked, “I hear you have said All the universe is one bright pearl. How can I gain an understanding of that?” The master said, “All the universe is one bright pearl. What need is there to understand it?”

One bright pearl is able to express reality without naming it, and we can recognize this pearl as its name. One bright pearl communicates directly through all time. . . . While there is a body now, a mind now, they are the bright pearl. That stalk of grass, this tree, is not a stalk of grass, is not a tree; the mountains and rivers of this world are not the mountains and rivers of this world. They are the bright pearl.

Being essentially unobscured from first to last, the pearl is the original face and the enlightened eye. . . . Therefore the reality and beginning-lessness of the bright pearl are beyond grasp. All the universe is one bright pearl—we do not speak of two pearls or three pearls. . . . Your whole body is a radiant light. Your whole body is Mind in its totality . . . your whole body knows no hindrance. Everywhere is round, round, turning over and over. . . .

One Bright Pearl

—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER FOUR

IN the winter of 1972/1973, in New York, then Dai Bosatsu, Eido-roshi led two arduous winter sesshins. In Japan, Rinzai students sit day and night for the full eight or ten days of Rohatsu, although they are permitted to doze on their cushions between 1:00 and 3:00 A.M. Our American schedule is much less strict, though we sit in zazen fourteen hours a day, not counting meals, on our black cushions in the zendo. Each afternoon we recite from the Diamond Sutra. Each evening at 6:30, Monk Do-san reads from the Hakuin Jishu, the zazen exhortations of the great Rinzai master Hakuin Ekaku, who was honorary founder of Ryutaku-ji in the same way that Soen-roshi is honorary founder of his disciple’s temples in America. Eido-shi’s teisho are based on The Iron Flute—an upside-down iron flute without holes or mouthpiece, which one plays as a mosquito bites an iron bull. (Both images are Zen metaphors for the vain attempt to “solve” the secret of our existence with logic.)

At morning service, in dim candlelight, we chant thirty-three fierce Kanzeons and bellow MU! as Eido-shi goes up and down the lines, yelling, “Louder! Louder!” The black-robed silhouette with its upraised stick dances on the walls; he whacks our shoulders with his keisaku (the flat-bladed “warning stick” used to offset stiffness and sleepiness and urge the student on).

In dawn zazen, I get concentrated quickly by becoming an eagle on a mountain ridge, entirely alert and full of its own eagle-ness. Blood traces on leg feathers and gleaming talons, wind lifting dark plumes as the fierce head turns downwind, gold eye fixed on the first streak of dawn on the ridge horizon. . . . And gradually breathing subsides, becomes “natural,” until I subsist on sips of air, and all is still. With this altered state, breathing takes over, the universe takes over. In a rush of immanence comes the knowing that everything-is-right-here-now, there is nothing outside this present moment. At the same time this “everything” is gathering, “something” is happening—

“Sit still!”

Eido-shi shouts this at a restless student, and whatever this “something” was withdraws. I am high, with a racing heart, for the next three days. I feel like a tuning fork about to be struck, like a diamond at the point of shattering. At the same time I am easy and loose, untroubled by noise, distractions, even pain. There is only this calm tautness, this soft intensity, this wild imminence of immanence with every breath. At dokusan, accepting my koan answer, Eido-shi smites me with his keisaku to urge me on, then touches his own forehead to the ground.

In teisho, he speaks of the Diamond Sutra scholar who is refused cake in an inn until he answers an old woman’s question: If, as you say, past, present, and future cannot be grasped, which one do you eat your cake in? Assigned this question as a koan, I exclaim rudely at next dokusan, “Away with such stale cake!” Eido-shi laughs, and spontaneously we chew a little while on the fresh cake of this now, regarding each other in silent confrontation. “It’s good, is it not?” he says at last. For the rest of the day, in happy tears again, I am filled with gratitude, and not simply to the teacher: who is this who is grateful here, and to whom, for what?

Next day in the zendo I am flat, a little sad; I had felt so close, and now feel far away. Eido-shi parodies the master’s reprimand from The Iron Flute: “Your hair is getting white and your teeth sparse, and still you tell me that one day your practice is wonderful, the next day terrible?” He bursts out laughing, and I do, too, but sadness lingers all the same.

This winter’s second Rohatsu sesshin, at Dai Bosatsu, is the anniversary of the last week of Ho Ko’s life. It is warm January weather, and with Merete Galesi I walk the two miles uphill to the snowfield at Beecher Lake. There Don and Marsha, who gave eulogies to Ho Ko at the memorial service less than a year ago, are paying respects at her boulder gravestone. We chant together, under a daylight moon. Later I build a small snow Buddha on the boulder, then return to the road bridge over the stream which pours down to the Beaverkill and watch the mist and snow return into Beecher Lake.

Night mists cross the moon shadow on the white lake.

You speak of Mu?

Eido-shi continues teisho from The Iron Flute. He also quotes the wonderful haiku of the great poet Basho, who is much admired by Soen-roshi. “‘There is no one on this road but me this autumn evening.’ Seen one way, this is true of Zen. You are alone. The zazen is yours, the pain is yours, the attainment is yours. I am your guide to the mountain peak, but you must walk up there on your own legs.”

Basho again: ‘“The cicada’s voice: no intimation of mortality.’ The cicada knows no death, no haiku, nothing but b-z-z-z! Nothing but Mu! The purpose of Zen is to be a cicada! Every exhalation, b-z-z-z! Every exhalation Mu! So-called quiet sitting is not enough—stone Buddhas can do that! It must be live zazen!”

Dark, blowing clouds of snow over the mountain, and a snowy sunlight in the skeletal hickories—how do you like these common miracles!

The winter thunder is the budge of the lake ice, in winter thaw. On the fourth day I am deep into sesshin, letting everything go, welcoming pain, in what Soen-roshi calls “diamond-hard pain samadhi.” One evening I am inspired to sit through supper, and am deep in profound zazen when Bruce R. comes bounding back upstairs, hunting his eating bowls. People downstairs eating sensible supper, and here I am, poor foolish Zen student, seeking the Absolute! Eating and the Absolute!—not different! I laugh out loud, jump up, and go down to supper, then run out through the night woods, hollering MU! At do-kusan, Eido-shi warns me, “Pain and Mu are very good, but it is possible to be too intense, to expect too much.”

In teisho next morning, Eido-shi spoke of the head monk at a Tokyo temple who remained there thirteen years without an absence, so immersed was he in the koan Mu. Seeing him sweeping leaves in the temple cemetery, Eido-shi had been moved by his beauty of demeanor and was astonished when the old man said he had never had kensho. What is better, Eido-shi demanded, a superficial kensho after a few months of sitting, or this moment-by-moment enlightenment in everyday life?

And yet, he said, urging us on, Zen cannot be truly apprehended without kensho.

I vowed to myself for the hundredth time that I would burst the iron wall of “self,” through moment-by-moment emptying of mind. But I could not stifle my “monkey mind” and was exasperated with myself—who is this idler, thinking about Mu, not becoming Mu? Then a load of melting ice fell off the roof with a loud crash, startling me so that I had to fight not to burst out laughing. So exhilarated was I that I sat in full lotus through two periods without moving my legs, using the pain to focus my breath-body-mind to a shimmering point. Somebody else was panting with pain, and I said to myself, Give me your pain too!, and my own pain vanished.

When I finally stand, no wiser than before, the pain unravels with such violence that, during walking meditation (kinhin), my teeth are chattering. Even lying down in rest period, my knees hurt. Then I open this notebook to set down my folly, and my child’s photograph drops onto the bed—just . . . Alex! Nothing in the world but . . . ALEX! It is as if dark glasses had been snapped away. So startled am I that I burst out with a great laugh, awakening monks Don and Bruce. Silly idiot, cracking his knees off for a glimpse of “truth,” and here is truth smiling up at him from his own bed! (“Not knowing how near the truth is, we seek it far away,” Hakuin says in The Song of Zazen.) Something has fallen into place, though I can’t think what. In the next sitting, I perceive Eido-shi as an old man, as a young boy, and as he is right now, all in an instant.

In a winter evening full of storm and significations, I run swiftly down the long woods road. I am leery of night graves and make my way in excited trepidation through the rough field to the rock that rises up against the dark wall of the pines. I ask Deborah to manifest her presence, as she has before, but not to scare me. However, I can sense no presence, the night rock is the night rock, nothing more. Or perhaps I am no longer open to her, for I never had a sign again.

I walk alone on the night road, dark clouds rushing overhead. Each night, each day, the mountain weather, changing. By morning there is light snow, followed by blizzard.

Zendo stillness: to be aware without being aware of it, like the eagle on the peak, like the wary deer, like the Zen monk who is “just sitting” in shikan-taza. At dokusan, straightening after my bows, I am transfixed in confrontation with Eido-roshi. For minutes we gaze into each other’s eyes, unblinking, and finally he whispers, “So-o-o . . . You know what zazen is.” I nod, saying how foolish I now feel about all my big talk of “samadhi” in the past. (In early Zen practice, if one sits hard, one is soon so full of clarity and power that one imagines one is doing shikan-taza, that profound samadhi has already been attained.) “Still,” he murmurs, “you had a taste of it today.” When I ask how he knows, he smiles. “I know. Your bearing, how you make your bows. Your face.”

At March sesshin at Dai Bosatsu, Eido-shi spoke of Yasutani-roshi. (“Sitting in solitude like a mountain—this alone is required,” Yasutani used to say.) On that same day, March 28, 1973, although Eido-shi would not know it until after sesshin, Hakuun Yasutani, aged eighty-nine, died in japan.

“The mind of a buddha,” Yasutani once said, “is like water that is calm, deep, and crystal clear, and upon which ‘the moon of truth’ reflects fully and perfectly. The mind of the ordinary man, on the other hand, is like murky water, constantly being churned by the gales of delusive thought and no longer able to reflect the moon of truth. The moon nonetheless shines steadily upon the waves, but as the waters are roiled, we are unable to see its reflection. Thus we lead lives that are frustrating and meaningless. . . .

“So long as the winds of thought continue to disturb the water of our Self-nature, we cannot distinguish truth from untruth. It is imperative, therefore, that these winds be stilled. Once they abate, the waves subside, the muddiness clears, and we perceive directly that the moon of truth has never ceased shining. The moment of such realization is kensho, enlightenment, the apprehension of the true substance of our Self-nature. Unlike moral and philosophical concepts, which are variable, true Insight is imperishable.”¹

At daylight and dusk the hollow tokking of the wood block, or han, urges the student to clarify this great matter of life and death: Be diligent (tok), be diligent (tok), for life is passing (tok, tok, tok, tok, tok) very, very fast.

After three days, my breath is natural like the deep breathing of the sea, the wave washing softly up the beach, and washing back, more and more softly, more and more minute, scarcely breathing at all, like a hibernating lizard under a desert rock. Then, in the great stillness, I am no longer breathing, I am being breathed. “That is your natural mind,” Eido-shi murmurs, “that we have lost and is so hard to find again.” A luminosity, sunlight and gold, a round, light, golden buddha, all mortality gone. What was “I” is now transparent, now invisible. “I” is nothing but soft tears, soft laughter, “I” knows no longer who is weeping, laughing, as birdsong, light, and bells come pouring through.

A tree frog or “spring peeper” has replaced the white moth as my sentinel. It bounces down the silent row of bodhisattvas, bounces back again with a minute pum, pum, pum, seeking the dark. Where is the door to Zen? Do you hear the peeping of a tree frog? Begin there! Or there! Or there! (Shunryu Suzuki-roshi said, If you have truly understood a frog, you have understood everything.) Zen is life, each moment of our life, thus Zen is everywhere.

Lao Tzu said, When your mind is empty like a valley or a canyon, then you will know the power of the Way. A Zen master says, How can I fill your cup until you empty it? In zazen, one opens to this emptiness, to the great stillness of our true nature, which is also the foundation of the universe. Then pure tears fall in utter relief at finding the way home.

The zazen of even one person at one moment invisibly accords with all things and fully resonates through all time. Thus in the past, future and present of the limitless universe this zazen carries on the buddha’s teaching endlessly. Each moment of zazen is equally wholeness of practice, wholeness of realization.

This is not only practice while sitting, but it is like a hammer striking emptiness—before and after, its exquisite peal permeates everywhere. How can it be limited to this moment? . . .

Sit zazen wholeheartedly . . . letting all things go. Then you will go beyond the boundary of delusion and enlightenment, and being apart from the paths of the ordinary and sacred, immediately wander freely outside ordinary thinking, enriched with great enlightenment. If you do this, how can those who are concerned with the fish trap or hunting net of words and letters be compared with you?

On the Clarification of the Way

—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER FIVE

AT a memorial service in New York on April 9, 1973, Eido-shi would reflect that he had been thinking about his old teacher throughout March sesshin. Due to “karmic relations,” he believed he had spoken of Yasutani on the day he died. Today he read one of Yasutani’s poems, which for me recalled a summer morning of 1969 and an old man with big ears and wide eyes observing me calmly from the back seat of a car: this was the only time I ever saw him.

Year after year, year after year.

And yet I like to fly above the clouds

I am only skin and bones, like an old crane.

In June 1973, with Don, Merete, and two other students, I traveled abroad for sesshin with Soen-roshi at Ryutaku-ji. Powerful as that sesshin was, it did not seem to me I had made much progress as a Zen student, and at August sesshin at Dai Bosatsu, I discussed with Eido-shi the fact that recent sesshins had been mostly “flat” and uneventful, with little of the tears, laughter, and small miracles of earlier sesshins. He replied that sesshin phenomena tended to diminish after a time, even as sesshin effects became more profound, and warned me again that perhaps I was too anxious for “progress.” I asked about greed as opposed to zeal, and he said that desire of attainment was only greedy when it impinged on others, whereas zeal was never entirely selfless. To be emancipated from the idea of enlightenment, he said, took a long time, and that was the true enlightenment. He told me to keep deepening my samadhi, expecting nothing.

No coming and no going.

Just at dark,

A white moth comes to my black cushion,

Goes.

In the next sittings, I gave up “forcing” Mu. Gradually my zazen cleared, until it seemed clear, clear, clear and effortless, absorbing and yet reflecting everything, abiding nowhere. Whoever it is who sits here on this cushion, at the very center of a sphere of light that fills the sunny room to bursting, is not separable from the pain, the cooking smells, the insect ringing. During kinhin on the grass, the refreshing tears of the early days returned, as light came glancing from the hard wing of a crow across the lake, and once again the husk of intellect opened outward. The following day, in celebration, I wore my rakusu for the first time.

Despite the general calm of August sesshin, I had no feeling of disappointment—a common experience when the “miraculous” early sesshins that characterize the beginning of Zen practice fail to culminate in an opening or kensho.

Slap!—the beaver’s tail

casting circles on the black lake.

Deep mountain stillness.

In November I traveled to India and Nepal, a pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya where Shakyamuni had attained enlightenment, and a two-hundred-mile trek across high passes of the Himalaya to the Crystal Monastery, an ancient Buddhist shrine on the Tibetan Plateau. Eido-shi gave me a new koan for the journey: All the peaks are covered with snow—why is this one bare? One Zen master, he said, had achieved great enlightenment after five years of intense struggle with this koan.

The journey across the Himalaya was full of astonishment and wonder, but the year that followed—1974—was a very dark one. Eido-shi had sent me off with the instruction “Expect nothing,” but failing to heed him, or unable to do so, I had clung to the hope that the great clarity and insights of hard snow mountain samadhi would culminate in a profound enlightenment. When this failed to occur, I was cast down. I resumed fierce attendance at every sesshin, although I had a young child at home and lived one hundred miles out of the city. I also continued with tea lessons at the Urasenke Tea School in New York. But my spirits wandered in some low, dark place, especially after the news came that my older son, Luke, was a victim of an incurable eye disease that might one day blind him. I went through the vague, dim motions of my life, like a sick bird.

In February 1974, Soen-roshi came to America by sea, escorted by Eido-shi from Yokohama to Seattle (where they met a man who had known Nyogen Senzaki and Soen in 1949, in Los Angeles, and who had named his son Zen in commemoration). In February sesshin at the New York zendo, I resumed koan study with Soen-roshi, who also gave teisho. Soen disliked the self-conscious spirituality, “the stink of Zen,” that he thought he detected in the sesshin participants, and his most inspired teaching was to hang out his long underwear in the small stone garden, in secret, to startle us into imagining that an outrage against the teacher had been committed. (On another occasion, he put a large pumpkin on the roshi’s cushion in the dokusan room, then hid behind the door, snickering wickedly as earnest students prostrated themselves before the pumpkin, only to hear the laughter of the bell that ended their “confrontation with the roshi” and sent them packing back downstairs to their black cushions.)

In March 1974, Soen-roshi leads his first sesshin at Dai Bosatsu. It is still winter, and in the woods that shut away the outside world, the snow is thick. It falls in darkness as sesshin begins, to shroud the past and purify the world. But by morning the mountain weather has changed and the white ice of the lake sparkles in sun.

Deer tracks lead through the white woods to the bronze statue of the Buddha; an owl hoots at the north end of the pond.

Owl on a snow-thick limb

shifting soft feathers.

Snow falls on snow.

In the evening rest, I go to the south meadow and stand before Deborah’s boulder. On the frozen road come footsteps, and in the late winter sun—the days are longer now—I am joined by Soen-roshi, in thin robes and low black shoes that fill with snow. Is this where Debbo-lah is buried? I nod. We chant there, in the silence of the mountain. Then we retrace our footsteps to the road and, standing on the bridge over the dam, chant again into the winter sun, low in the trees. Then the roshi returns along the road, a small brown figure, the lone monk of ages. Moved, I bow, although he would ignore this, for Soen-roshi never says goodbye. By next evening it is snowing again, and as I stand on the bridge at dusk, with mountains breathing, my thought dissolves, my head becomes transparent, and snow blows through the emptiness where it had been.

When I told him at dokusan how I had become invisible on the bridge, with snow blowing right through the erstwhile Ishin, Soen-roshi said gently, with great kindness, “Take good care of yourself.” He teaches us in everything he says, but I did not know why he said this at this moment. Eido-roshi says that sometimes for months afterward he does not understand this master’s teachings.

Snow morning. In the warmed snow outside the kitchen, crisp jays and chickadees share this first day of spring. Just two years ago, in winter dusk, as I set out to dig Deborah’s grave in the south meadow, a chickadee flickered onto the handle of my pick, and afterward, in granite earth that was locked in snow and ice, the very first swing of the pick discovered the soft hollow between rocks where her urn would lie.

Across the wind an early redwing sings, undaunted, though its forage lies beneath yesterday’s snow. In the long sittings I am having pain, and this bird’s cheery acceptance of hard going gives me courage.

Torn blackbird

blown to the white birch by the white lake

sings

Redwing!

Each evening I go to the great granite in the meadow and listen to the wind in the dark pines. Wild geese are passing overhead, from south to north.

My work assignment is assistant to Marsha, who is tenzo (cook). I peel vegetables, smack garlic, core onions, heed the wok (when it sizzles, greens are burning), mix Chinese cabbage with peppers, ginger, tree fungi, and mushrooms, knead dough for bread: “When it comes alive in your hands,” says Marsha, a gifted potter who made Deborah’s urn, “then you know that the kneading is done.” I make purée, cut vegetables, grate cheese.

The doing, the doing—how hard it is to drop the idea of attainment! A monk asked Unmon, What is individual samadhi? Unmon answered, Rice in a bowl, water in a pail. (“Just rice! Just water!” Soen-roshi comments. “All the rest is extra!”)

Every morning in rest period I go along the snow road to do bows to the great Buddha in the woods. Each evening I visit my wife’s grave and bow in the direction of the sunset. Sometimes I run through the snowy woods or do solitary t’ai chi on the dark road.

On the east mountain, snow afire,

Bare trees, in the striped light—

I cough!

Who hears that? The spring tiger?

Soen relates how once, in London, he was on the point of entering the bathroom when Christmas Humphreys, passing by, said it was occupied. The roshi waited there politely for a long time before he became concerned, after which he knocked, then opened the door. “Nobody there!” He laughed delightedly. “Wait as long as you like! Never anybody there! From the beginning!”

With his wonderful tales, he is telling us that we must not cling to the idea of self, not to speak of others, far less cling to our own concepts—our idea of “good” zazen or “bad” zazen, our notion of Mu or of the Buddha. Even a notion of “sincere” practice that one clings to is already polluted. “Do not analyze the condition of your zazen! When you are climbing a steep cliff, do you analyze your climbing condition? No! You climb! When you vomit, do you stop to analyze? No! You vomit! Just do zazen! Just march ahead! Do not be a slave to your moods and your emotions. It is sunny, then it is cloudy; do not cling to either. Just march on!”

The true miracle, the true enlightenment—he says this in different ways, over and over—is awareness of this present moment, moment after moment. In seeking the Buddha, seeking the Dharma, seeking so-called enlightenment, one imposes an extra head on top of one’s own. The Zen expression “Kill the Buddha!” means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself. To kill the Buddha is to be the Buddha.

Like Eido-shi, Soen quotes over and over from the Rinzai Roku:

Do you know where the disease lies that keeps you learners from reaching true understanding? It lies where you have no faith in your Self. When faith in your Self is lacking you find yourselves hurried by others in every possible way. At every encounter you are no longer your master; you are driven about by others, this way and that.

All that is required is all at once to cease leaving your Self in search of something external. When this is done you will find your Self no different from the Buddha or the patriarch.

Do you want to know who the Buddha or patriarch is? He is no other than the one who is, at this moment, right in front of me, listening to my talk on the Dharma. You have no faith in him and therefore you are in quest of someone else somewhere outside. And what will you find? Nothing but words and names, however excellent. You will never reach the moving spirit in the Buddha or patriarch. Make no mistake.¹

Shakyamuni allegedly declared at birth, “Alone above and below heaven, I am the honored one”—that is, the universe is not different from myself, it does not exist apart from me in this present moment. At the moment of his enlightenment, he cried, “How wonderful! How miraculous! All things are enlightened!,” which is another way of saying the same thing.

Under the lid of a golden box containing the Buddha’s ashes (Soen says) is the inscription Atha dipa, Ana sarana, Anana sarana: You are the light, You are the refuge, There is no place to take shelter but yourself.

On the morning of Soen-roshi’s birthday, I am junkei, or monitor, walking around with upraised keisaku. When I pass the Roshi, he raises his hands in gassho (palms together) and removes his rakusu, in sign that he wishes to be struck, something I have never seen a roshi do. (Eido-shi describes his first impression of Soen, the only one in a group of Rinzai roshis to whom the young monk Tai-san was serving tea who would acknowledge the lowly monk by raising his hands in gassho. Unlike most roshis, Soen did zazen and morning service with his monks and even ate with them.) Soen looks very small and frail, his little shoulders are a poor target, I am afraid of hurting him and also afraid he will think me a poor junkei. But I hit him smartly enough, and he does not wince, and I feel honored, though I know he has asked for the keisaku for my sake, not for his own. Later, seeing him upstairs gazing quizzically at his giant American birthday cake, I am not touched but moved by the ancient and innocent child in Soen-roshi, who looks like some ancient seer from the Gobi Desert.

In this sesshin, the roshi has extended his Namu Dai Bosa chanting (“Be One with the Great [Kwannon] Bodhisattva”) into Namu Dai Bosa “dancing” in the kinhin line between sitting periods. No one quite understands this wild leaping and swaying. Perhaps it is only another way of banishing the hated “stink of Zen” by undoing our great spiritual dignity.

On the last morning of March sesshin, Soen-roshi leads a ceremony of purification of the new monastery now rising from the rubble of concrete and mud in the winter woods on the west side of the lake. The roshi is resplendent in the heavy gold brocaded robes of Soyen Shaku, which had been presented to the Zen Studies Society by D. T. Suzuki.

By June the monastery windows are going in and the ceramic shingles are in place. The Japanese roof is very beautiful. We install fiberglass insulation around the windows, a dirty job that is extremely satisfactory. Yet the new monastery is in serious debt, and there will have to be extensive fund-raising. I am asked to organize the campaign. I work with Lou N. on an emergency letter to be sent to all the Zen community, and ask others to work on various ideas after the sesshin. (But at a second work sesshin, in August, helping unload Tasmanian oak for the monastery floors, I am filled with doubt, wondering why such exotic materials are needed.) Meanwhile we plan a maple syrup operation as a zendo livelihood.

One evening I take the canoe to the north end of the lake to see the beavers, which have returned for the first time in decades—an auspicious sign for the founding of the new monastery. But Eido-shi is opposed to beavers because, he says, they kill all the young trees beside the lake. He wants them shot, the resident students say, or at least trapped and removed. However, most of the dead saplings show no sign of gnawing, and in my opinion, these young trees are being killed by the high water caused by the raised dam, which Eido-shi ordered to enlarge the lake and replace the weedy margin of wild shore with the formal edge of a Japanese water garden.

The beleaguered creatures have not given up. I am elated to see one swimming with a new green branch, and another circles the canoe, slapping the water with its tail, which it would not do unless defending a home territory. Later I say respectfully to Eido-roshi that we have no right to drive away these beavers, far less kill them. They were here long before we were, with the mountains and the deer, and we should be happy they have returned with our own arrival, since they will bring new life to the deep lake by creating beaver pools and swampy edges.

Eido-shi is angered by my insurrection and will scarcely answer. He knows that many of the students hold such views, and no doubt perceives me as the ringleader. The following day we moved our large bronze Buddha to a new site on a rock outcrop across the lake, only to find that the wise rodents had chosen the cleft right behind the Buddha rock for their new abode, which was already half constructed. Word came that this lodge should be destroyed too, but no one would have a hand in that, and one student informed Eido-shi that if the beavers were destroyed, he would resign as a Zen student. Delighted by the beauty of the Buddha image on its rock throne, reflected in the lake, our teacher did not enforce his edict, speaking instead of the beavers’ “remarkable” skills of construction, and so, for the moment, our Buddha and his buck-toothed Dharma guardians reside together.

With Paul S., whom I knew first at Ryutaku-ji, I work on a forest trail along the shore, exploring ways to span the swamp streams at the beaver pools. We build bridges, to complete a circuit of the lake.

Clear, still evenings, with trout leaping; bats and swallows join these fish that are hunting insects in the air. A teal like a swift leaf in storm hooks down between the trees into the beaver pools at the north end, and at dusk a wood thrush tests its flute notes in the silence. Spotted newts, large-eyed and silent, are orange on land and greenish in the water.

A half day to myself. I climb the west ridge and work my way around the mountains, toward the east. In a cool glade of the high forest stands an elegant woodland grass, a solitary blade, dead still, as if caught listening.

In the meadow a brown-spotted frog transfixed on a warm rock awaits me. Shifting flat stones to make a rock path to the grave, I find small snakes—two adult red-bellies, young water-snakes, young blacksnakes—and a beautiful green tree snake, killed on the road. I make a small snake terrarium for the kitchen, returning the snakes to the meadow at week’s end.

In August the newts return into the water and hang suspended at all depths in the black pond. Each day the deer drift to the lake edge, red does and spotted fawns, and the beaver are active, rebuilding their lodges for the coming winter. At dusk a long, delicate feather parts the lake where a beaver swims northward. On the first night, I sleep outside, under a sky live with shooting stars and brown bats that flicker from the eaves.

We clear the windfall in the woods, burn brush. I bake bread, fetch milk from a dying farm, and carve and sand a pair of cedar chopsticks. One evening I walk with Merete to the small lake up the logging road, to westward. One night I meet a bobcat on the moonlit road.

Black-and-gold finches

in gold black-eyed susans

—south summer wind!

September. The weathers change, the clouds blow in mists across the mountain pond. I pick blueberries in the waiting meadow. At twilight, a wild wind spins the lake, and rain and thunder come as sesshin begins.

Each morning after work period, I slip the canoe from the bank and drift along the lake. In the stillness of the trees, red autumn leaves of the swamp maple float on a black mirror. After three days of sesshin, my eye is opening, and all things in nature stand forth in four dimensions, clear and ringing. On the dark bottom of the lake, a pale newt, belly up, lies side by side with a pale leaf, all color gone.

Now a beaver, like a spirit of the lake, splits the surface with its coarse-haired head as water pours from the blunt snout—slap! All is still again. Where the spirit vanished, a circle is spreading out across the world.

Days pass, and the beavers draw near. Are they drawn to a stillness in the canoe that was not there before? The ringing and luminosity of the first days of sesshin seem to have vanished, as if an intensity had gone, or is it that I grow accustomed to fresh ways of seeing and take it now for ordinary perception? Before sesshin, the mountain is the mountain; then the mountain seems extraordinary, more than the mountain; today the extraordinary and the ordinary are not different, and the mountain is the mountain once again.

In the night window of the zendo, a full moon appears among the clouds that cross the eastern ridge. Now the moon goes. A white moth comes out of the night. The white moth goes.

In zazen, one is one’s present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once. I have a glimpse of the Mahayana teaching known as nondiscrimination, perceiving that this black cushion, candle flame, cough, belch, Buddha, incense smell, wood pattern on the floor, pine branch, sharp pain—and also awareness of these phenomena, of all phenomena—are all of equal significance, equal value. And the next day, what resolves in my mind like a soft soap bubble swelling and soundlessly bursting is that “my” mind and all minds everywhere are manifestations of One Mind, Univeral Mind, like myriad birds flying as one in a swift flock, like so many minute coral animals, in the sway of tides on a long reef, not the same and yet not different, feeding as one great creature with a single soul.

The stars grow colder, and each morning a mist shrouds the lake until Indian summer sun burns it away. At the north end a feeding beaver lifts its forepaws from the water, calmly observing, and the silent hickories are observing, too, in red-gold light. The canoe slips ashore on the far bank, and I swim out naked into the shining mist.

A heavy rain at night, clear blue at dawn. Sesshin passes. In greatest contentment, ease, simplicity, I wash lettuce by the waterfall.

Before going away, I sit by the lake with Eido-roshi, enjoying the fair white clouds that cross the mountains. “Who is it that is looking at the clouds?” he says. “Do you know who?” I shake my head. Laughing, we lie back in the warm grass and watch these clouds that have never been anywhere else in all the world.

At November weekend sesshin, Eido-shi discussed Master Rinzai, who was “plain and direct in manner, very simple and obedient. The wonderful thing was that when the head monk told him to go back to Obaku a second time, then a third, he did not say, Why?—he just went. And he also went south to another teacher, a journey of months, because Obaku told him to.”

I worry that I lack Master Rinzai’s attitude. The unquestioning obedience taken for granted by all Japanese teachers is very difficult for Western students, at least those like myself who are not devotional by nature and tend to resist figures of authority. This may be a weakness (or strength) of American Zen.

At Rohatsu sesshin in New York I am in charge of the garden zendo (the second zendo). Eido-roshi is demanding double sittings, seventy minutes or more—known as “killer sittings” to the shocked participants—but Soen-roshi’s “diamond-hard pain samadhi” sees me through, and after four days my mind, or what is left of it, is dancing.

My koan is the one attributed to the Sixth Chinese Patriarch, Daikan Eno (Hui Neng): Is it the flag that moves? Is it the wind? No, it is your mind. There are two ways to answer almost any koan in a way the teacher must take seriously until he is sure that the student has more koan “style” than understanding. The first is to vividly present a key word, such as “flag,” that is, BE the flag in all its flag-ness, just-as-it-is. The second is a forceful shout of MU!, which symbolizes this suchness, this ever-present Buddha-nature, this eternal now! However, it is not enough to present the flag, or present Mu with a shout. One must become it, there must be no separation. As for a “correct” koan response, it is utterly meaningless unless infused with prajna wisdom—the experiential insight, the noncerebral not-knowing that arises from the depths of profound samadhi.

Eido-shi says he can always tell if a student is merely giving a “Zen” answer. Not until the sixth day of sesshin, after many dokusans, does he pass me on this koan, which I intuited from the first day, yet could not present freely and forcefully, with my whole being. He gives me two whacks with his keisaku and a new koan.

Each afternoon, when we chant from the Diamond Sutra, I am reminded that the Sixth Patriarch, a simple woodcutter entirely ignorant of formal practice, attained great enlightenment upon hearing the Diamond Sutra’s phrase about the mind that abides nowhere, clings to nothing. Thus—I tell myself—the mind need not alight on pain, as mine is doing. It helps, up to a certain point, to regard pain as “just pain,” without judgment of “good” or “bad.” Pain is simply there, like the tatami mat, the bells, the cooking smell, the sun in the garden window. Perceived that way, it is bearable, and bearing it, I manage to stay light, breath after breath, until breath itself all but disappears. The emptied mind is no longer aware of sounds and smells since it is part of them, bouncing lightly along in the great flux like an escaped bubble, alighting nowhere, on the point of dissolution. At the same time this mind is clear and precise as a laser, a new point. The lightness and precision (or the lack of them) are very critical when one serves as junkei, for the keisaku must fall sharply and clearly, with the stroke pulled at the same time, so that the recipient is stimulated rather than stung.

This Rohatsu is a strong one, although not spectacular; my days of sesshin miracles are perhaps over. Yet I feel that I understand much better how my practice is impeded by my yearning for emancipation, by my spiritual ambition, by addiction to “knowledge” and these sesshin notes. It is time to dispense with notes, like Master Tokusan. This great explicator of the Diamond Sutra burned all his notes and all the written teachings, which when compared with the teaching in this moment were “like tossing a hair into the sky or a drop of water into the ravine.” (Tokusan had had a deep awakening, but nevertheless he was thought to be still “green,” as is said in Zen. There was nothing wrong with the notes themselves, only with his clinging to them.)

Ten days after sesshin came a dream of kensho. I was walking up a street when very suddenly all broke apart, and all was light. All aspects and fragments of the world were of equal significance, and everything was full to bursting, brimming with its own shimmering particularity. From a luminous earth, awakening, I disappear without impediment into the sky.

In January 1975, Rohatsu sesshin is held at Dai Bosatsu. There we sleep on the dusty concrete floor of the new monastery, which Eido-shi is inspired to call Kongo-ji, Diamond Temple, after the Diamond Sutra. The monastery’s first chanting service is held in the unfinished Dharma Hall.

As usual I sit beside Min Pai, a Korean master of the martial arts. Min and I like this arrangement, we think we give each other the energy that we shall need. This Rohatsu will be strict; we are not to lie down during rest periods, Min says. As usual, I am gloomy, with a headache, on the first day of a long sesshin, but I accept this, knowing it will pass—that from a Zen point of view, it is already passing.

After supper on the first day, I dig a snow path to Deborah’s grave. Returning, I stand on the road bridge by Beecher Lake and observe the soft light of the old lodge through fat, soft snow. It looks like a house of childhood fairy tales. Snowflakes melt upon my face, a lifetime passes, and no time at all: this man on the bridge has been here always, seeking his long-lost home.

At teisho next day, Eido-shi is transfigured in a golden light against the snow light in the sunny window. Once again he quotes the simple passage from the great thirteenth-century master Dogen Zenji:

To study the Buddha Dharma is to study the self

To study the self is to forget the self

To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.

Do not think that this silence is useless and empty. Entering the monastery and doing zazen in silence, or leaving the monastery and going all about are both the form of the continuous practice of the monastery. This continuous practice . . . is the realm of freedom from conditions, in the same way that the sky is free from the tracks of flying birds; it is the realm where one is completely one with the whole universe. . . .

Don’t idle away the time needed for practice, but rather practice in the spirit of a person trying to extinguish a blaze in his hair. Do not sit and wait for enlightenment, for great enlightenment is to be found in everyday activities such as eating, or drinking tea. . . . The person who lives in his old home should leave it; the person who has thoughts and desires should get rid of them. The famous person should abandon fame, and the person who has benefited materially should get rid of his goods. The person with fields and gardens should part with them, and the person with a family should leave it. You should renounce them even if you do not possess them. What should be clear in this matter is the principle of being free from them whether you have them or not. That is the continuous practice of being free from everything whatever it is. . . .

This life of one day is a life to rejoice in. Because of this, even though you live for just one day, if you can be awakened to the truth, that one day is vastly superior to an eternal life. . . . If this one day in the lifetime of a hundred years is lost, will you ever get your hands on it again?

Unbroken Practice

—EIHEI DOGEN

CHAPTER SIX

AFTER four years of hard zazen, my right knee is suddenly so sore that I must tape it. I use aspirin, heat pads, liniment, but cannot bring myself to do zazen in a chair. Alas, this is no evidence of grit or dedication but only ineradicable male vanity. To permit myself a chair would be to relax my fierce grip on the ego, but I do not do it. For seven months I have avoided sesshin, and in recent weeks I have scarcely sat at all, which suits a cynical festering of mood.

At Dai Bosatsu, in late August, the doors and the wood floors are in, there is one coat of paint, but the huge building still looks like a raw eruption on the scraped hide of the mountain woodland. Indoors the atmosphere is worse. Eido-roshi, whose comportment (which will not be the business of this book) has caused dismay among his students, is racked with uneasy illnesses, bad gums. The head of the Buddha, say the residents, fell to the floor during its installation in the Dharma Hall, and other evil portents followed. The zendo atmosphere is dark, distempered, and most of Eido-shi’s senior students have only come out of loyalty to Soen-roshi, who is here to lead the first sesshin in the new monastery.

A number of students have brought their anger and distress to Soen-roshi, and as a consequence, our old teacher seems shy and a bit distant. Finding him alone in the Dharma Hall, I approach quietly and wait. When he looks up from his reverie, I tell him how happy we are to see him. “I am happy too,” he declares bravely. He shows me photos of the murals for the Dharma Hall being executed by his friend the Greek Orthodox priest Father Maxima. “Here soon!” He smiles. But when I ask about the many-fingered Kwannon at Ryutaku-ji, which two years earlier, in Japan, he had promised would soon be sent to Dai Bosatsu, he frowns and shakes his head. “Too many fingers,” he snaps cryptically.

Soen-roshi says he wishes to come visit me again out on Long Island, and I ask about his recent journey to the Gobi Desert, where I have always wished to go. He laughs, saying he has gone “far beyond” the Gobi Desert. Too distracted to see that he tests my understanding, I ask foolishly if he means Central Mongolia. “No, no! Far beyond!” He waves his arm in a great circle, like the bold circle of emptiness in his calligraphy. This time I laugh, and bow, and let him go.

In opening ceremonies for the new Dharma Hall, Soen-roshi says, “I look in the Rinzai Roku and there is no word there: where is Master Rinzai? Who dares represent him before me?” Eido-shi goes forward, saying, “How do you do.” They bow, and his teacher felicitates him on the opening of the new monastery. But Soen’s teisho afterward seems weak and rambling, and his favorite small Noh play with his robes over his head and his red demon mask lacks his usual spirit. As if weary of his own clowning, he sighs and removes the mask, paraphrasing the teaching of Soyen Shaku: “For more than forty years I studied the Dharma and went about preaching it here and there, and only quite recently did I understand. And all I understood was that I understood nothing at all.” There is great sadness (do I imagine it?) in the way he speaks.

Cleaning the zendo after evening sitting, I find Soen alone in the shadows at the end of the empty row, in the stillness of zazen. He is the archetypal old monk of the paintings, ancient as death, burning with life. I dust around him. These days his joy in life is dark; he refers gleefully to “the majority,” as he calls the dead. He is shaken profoundly, yet he struggles to carry on as if nothing has happened. Each day he reminds us that, despite all the tumult and delusion of our life, our true nature is always there, like the sun or moon above black wind and clouds. “The sun is shining; the sun is always shining. The sun is enlightenment; everything is enlightenment!” He dabbles his fingers in a water bowl. “Do you hear? That is enlightenment!” At one point he reads his own new haiku:

In the midst of winter

I find in myself at last

Invincible summer.

Intending some sort of confrontation, I go to dokusan with Eido-roshi, who greets me simply, with great warmth and friendliness. How can I ignore his strength and compassion at the time of Deborah’s death, or my high opinion of him as a teacher? I cannot repudiate him, yet how insincere I feel when I say nothing! Many of his students are as torn as I am. We hope he will deal candidly with all the protest, but he does not; his shouts at dokusan, driving a student from the sesshin, carry downstairs. Returning to the zendo, his face full of anger, he announces that no one should go to dokusan with Soen-roshi who is not “an advanced student of the Dharma.” Clearly this is some sort of sarcastic challenge. Though scarcely “advanced,” I go in a mutinous spirit. Soen-roshi tests me and accepts my answer.

Two days later, Soen himself announces that there will be no more dokusan: “You must meet your self before you meet roshi at dokusan!” Unable to maintain this severe tone, he says more gently, “You must burn like a fire—hot, hot, hot! Do not compare to anybody else: do your own zazen. Some young, some old: just do your best! Do not compare elephant and flea! The elephant walks—Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu!—but the flea can spring!” He made a springing motion. “Both flea and elephant are best in world!”

Soen-roshi spoke of the old-time monk¹ who burned a wooden image of the Buddha to keep warm while others cried Ho! What? Hey! “You are infinitely more precious than a wood Buddha! Even more precious than the great Buddha at Nara! You are living bodhisattvas, endless dimension universal human beings!

“At this moment, what more is there to say? More foolish talk of ‘truth’”—he snapped out the fatty word almost with hatred—“by this talkative lazy monk?” He whacked the lectern with his stick, making his glass of water jump. “The truth is here! A piece of paper, a drop of water!”

“There are no Zen masters,” said Master Rinzai’s teacher, Master Obaku. “There is only Zen.” Shakyamuni himself said, “When you meet a teacher who expounds the matter of supreme bodhi [enlightenment], you should not . . . pay any heed to his shortcomings, or criticize his actions.”² (One student abandoned Yasutani-roshi because that old master was too fond of marshmallows.) But for idealistic American Zen students, seeking respite from our own disorderly lives, this practice had seemed a clear oasis where life could be kept pure, spare, and simple, as in the Buddhist image of the white lotus rising from the muddy water. Now the image had been muddied, messy “real life” had come flooding in, and we wrestled with “oughts” and “shoulds” on our black cushions; we had forgotten that the lotus needs the nourishment of mud, that it cannot grow in clean “pure” water.

Out of doors again, a warm Indian Summer day all around me, I visited the new beaver ponds at the north end of the lake, studied wildflowers of late summer—self-heal and speckled touch-me-not, goldenrod and black-eyed susan, asters and pearly everlasting. The early, infatuated days of my Zen practice had come to an end, the flowers were just flowers once again.

I saw Eido-shi next almost a year later, at the sesshin that preceded the formal opening of International Dai Bosatsu Zendo on July 4, 1976. On the afternoon of my arrival, I met with my teacher to explain my withdrawal as his student, saying I hoped that things would work out in the future. He bowed a little, saying, “Let us hope . . .” Afterward I visited Deborah’s grave with a senior student who was in her own process of painful separation. Eido had announced that Soen-roshi would attend the inaugural sesshin as honorary abbot, but Soen had not answered the invitation, and would not appear. “I am glad Soen-roshi refused to come,” she said, in tears. “He did not do what appearances demanded but what was right.” Standing before the boulder in the field, I wondered what Deborah would have thought of the whole sad business.

Accounting for his teacher’s absence, Eido-roshi advised the sesshin participants that Soen-roshi had not recovered from one of his mysterious illnesses. In a bewildered and uncertain talk, he said that “this little crazy monk” would have to offer teisho instead (“But . . . if it were not for this craziness . . . perhaps we would not be here?”). In a later teisho, he looked discolored, feverish, insisting that gratitude to one’s teacher was more important than kensho. Seeing this gifted teacher give such feeble teisho before all his peers, my heart went out to him, yet it was clear that what he wished was not loyal friendship but unquestioning submission. The frank discussion of his actions which his American Zen students were demanding he apparently perceived as anarchy and loss of face which, in terms of Japanese student–teacher relationships, it doubtless was. Once he had told us that he still felt “very green, very immature,” and “neither American nor Japanese”—a touching admission, apparently sincere, that partly accounted for his own confusion as well as ours.

The new zendo was fresh with the grassy fragrance of new tatamis, reminding me of Ryutaku-ji. The last places were filled by roshis, monks, priests, and visitors from other Zen centers, and everyone hoped that the atmosphere would be purified by the strong zazen of all these teachers. Eido’s Dharma brothers from Ryutaku-ji, Sochu-roshi and Kozen-roshi, both offered dokusan, using Monk Do-san as interpreter. Sochu-roshi (who had replaced Soen as abbot) would not give me a new koan: “Work with Mu!” he said. “Then a baby will be born.” And his stern face collapsed in a great smile. (At subsequent dokusan, he simply shouted, “More, more! Harder, harder!” and rang me out of the room with his little bell.) As if guessing my intentions, Kozen-roshi said simply that I must “go deeper,” that I must now apply my practice to my life, not reserve it for “quiet places” such as this one. And of course the application of zazen to the “ordinary” world is the real point of this extraordinary practice.

After sesshin, I enjoyed good talks with Robert Aitken-roshi from Hawaii (who received Dharma transmission from Yasutani’s disciple, Koun Yamada-roshi, in 1974) and also with Kobun Chino-sensei from Los Altos. On the list of sesshin participants, Chino was called roshi, but he said he felt himself unready to take this title, which tends to be forced on teachers prematurely by American students. Gently smoothing matters in his meetings with Eido’s students, Chino-sensei said that it was our zazen that must concern us; that our teacher, too, would surely grow in this wonderful spiritual atmosphere at Dai Bosatsu; that perhaps Soen-roshi was teaching from afar by sending us two bodhisattvas, Sochu and Kozen.

At the end of sesshin, on the Fourth of July, the rain came crashing as Shimano Eido-roshi opened the great doors of Dai Bosatsu. The ceremony has been well described in a recent book:

The sesshin began like every other sesshin—with the deep hollow sound of the bell—and it continued for seven days like every other sesshin, with alternating periods of sitting and walking, eating formally in the zendo, working for short periods at manual labor, sanzen (dokusan) with the roshi, and a few hours of sleep. But instead of one roshi, like most sesshins, this one had more than twenty roshis and dharma teachers in attendance. [In fact, four roshis attended sesshin, and “more than twenty” came to the opening ceremony on the final day.]

The sesshin had been held to mark the opening of Dai Bosatsu, the first traditional Japanese-style Zen monastery in America. Richard Baker-roshi had come from San Francisco for the opening ceremony, Sasaki-roshi and Maezumi-roshi from Los Angeles, Takeda-roshi from Mexico City, and Philip Kapleau-roshi from Rochester. Seung Sahn, not a Japanese or American Zen master, but a Korean Zen master, had come up from Providence, and then there was a large contingent of visiting roshis from Japan. There was even a Tibetan, who had incorporated certain elements of Zen into his teaching, Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, the Eleventh Trungpa Tulku, not wearing his best robes like the roshis, but a dark suit of English cut. . . . A contingent of Shinto priests wearing pointed wizard hats chanted and made offerings, and somebody rang the big brass bell on the hill for the first time, with a log wrapped in red, white and blue for the occasion. There was a speech in Japanese and then Baker-roshi said a very few words in English, and Eido-roshi mentioned someone who should have been there, but wasn’t. Though he didn’t use his name nearly everyone there knew he meant Nakagawa Soen-roshi, who was considered eccentric even for a Zen master and who always did what he pleased without worrying about social niceties.³

As it happened, the somebody who “rang the big brass bell” was me. My vantage point on the hill platform provided a fine view of all the dignitaries assembled on the broad entrance steps of the new monastery, in fitting tribute to Zen’s herald in America, Master Soyen Shaku, whose golden robes were worn that day by Eido-roshi. But the strongest presence was the absence of Soen-roshi, which Eido-roshi now referred to as a “silent teaching.”

For more than two years after this sesshin, I did not return to Dai Bosatsu. Polishing my Himalayan journals⁴ had become my practice, taking the place of the intense sesshin attendance of the past four years.