How a blind monk might respond to my piece

After reading my last post “It is Universal" Doug McFerran posed some great questions about the language of "Enlightenment.” He closed by saying, “What I would really like to hear is how a blind monk would respond to your piece.”

I would too. His name was Zenshin Philip Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002). He gave me lay ordination 33 years ago. I lived and sat with him in the zendo at Hartford Street for more than 6 years. Though I loved Issan and learned from living with him as he was dying, I was formally Phil’s student. Phil was the Beat poet who was known as the poets’ poet. He read at the Six Gallery the same night that Ginsberg read Howl. He was obviously upstaged. 

Phil was legally blind when I met him. He had figured out how to get around. As with other blind people I’ve known, his sense of hearing and touch had recalibrated to some degree to make up for his loss of sight. He could go up and down the stairs to the zendo and find his seat and bowing mat. He loved to eat so he certainly could locate food on the table and in the refrigerator, though he often needed help. Vague shadows were the only information that his eyes delivered. He had glaucoma which had been misdiagnosed 20 years earlier. Being perpetually broke, I imagine that he’d gone to the cut rate optometrist who had dropped out of medical school but hung out a shingle in the Tenderloin. 

I assume that Phil had a photographic memory. If I asked a question while we were sitting in his library office, he would say, “Check out old Yampolsky, page 54, third paragraph from the top of the page. You’ll find the book in the middle cabinet, third shelf, about three in from the right.” And god dammit, it would be there. He was the most well read man I have ever met. He loved books and words. He could quote pages and pages of poetry. People were always a challenge for Phil, but he tried his level best. I suppose that I had as close a relationship with him as he had with anyone, and I learned an enormous amount, but we both had to work at it.

When I write about Buddhism and search for an appropriate English word, I often ask my memory what Phil might say. This is not reliable, and perhaps as hopeless as consulting a fake optometrist so I exercise caution. Phil distrusted Plato and would always hedge his use of any philosophical language with words of caution. When it came to Buddhist terminology in English, he would usually begin with the technical Japanese word from the Soto dictionary, then he would foray into the antecedents in Ch’an, or Chinese Zen, and then finally refer to the Sanskrit terms that were developed by the early Mahayanists. 

So yes, enlightenment is just the normal way that Western Buddhists have described the the experience of Kenshō (見性), a Japanese term from the Zen tradition. Ken means "seeing", shō means "nature, essence". It is usually translated as "seeing one's (true) nature", that is, the Buddha-nature or nature of mind. Kenshō is an initial insight or awakening, not full Buddhahood. Then Phil would have directed me to the Heart Sutra, the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya where the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara  directs Śariputra,one of the Buddha’s disciples to examine form and emptiness, and then tells him that there are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, etc. We are off into.an examination of emptiness (śūnyatā): all phenomena, known through the five aggregates of human existence (skandhas): form (rūpa), feeling (vedanā), volitions (saṅkhāra), perceptions (saṃjñā), and consciousness (vijñāna) are empty. Bad translations and advanced philosophical study aside, in Zen temples, the 100 line version of the Heart Sutra is usually chanted, sometimes in phonetic Sinojapanese, after a meditation period. 

When I finished the last piece. “It’s Universal,” I asked myself what was missing. I had tried to lay out some of the areas and things that might be perceived differently when we have some experience of kensho, or enlightenment, but that is not a definition. Then my mind went in several directions. First I remembered the many times I had a complaint about sitting and not getting something. Phil would most often get to be the strict Zen teacher. He’d say, “You’re not sitting enough.” Or if we were sitting in his library he would say look at what old Dogen says in his Shōbōgenzō: “You should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate yourself. Body and mind will drop away of themselves, and your original face will manifest itself. If you wish to attain suchness, you should practice suchness without delay.”

Rather than try to parse 12th century practice instructions from the monk’s hall, I will tell an old Irish joke that illuminates old Dogen. A hapless American tourist is lost in Dublin. He is looking for the Cathedral and just can’t find it. He sees a pub. Surely these guys will be able to give some direction. He stands at the end of the bar and asks “How do you get to Saint Patrick’s? The answer comes back, “You can’t get there from here.”

So we are looking for some experience in meditation. That is all the Zen means--Meditation Buddhism, but that language won’t sell soap, body oil or relaxing massage.

My friend Rob Lee lived at the Page Street Zen Center for many years. The zendo is in the basement. There are windows on the Laguna Street and Lily Alley sides and from some of the seats in the zendo, a clear view of what used to be pre Loma Prieta Earthquake the Fell Street Off Ramp. When a newcomer came for meditation instruction in the late afternoon, some bad bad zen students who were instructing them would sit them in one of those seats. At just about 5:30 cars coming off the freeway unto Fell would catch the last bit of sun disappearing over the hill and it would reflect off the windscreen. The new meditator was treated to a flash of enlightenment the first time they sat on the cushion.

Language about the experience of meditation also plays tricks. 

I will end with a memory of that Blind Monk. One morning coming up from the zendo, Phil got to the top of the stairs and a bird started chirping in the backyard. He sang out, 

The year's at the spring

And day's at the morn;

Morning's at seven;

The hill-side's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn:

God's in his heaven—

All's right with the world!

Your Way, Our Way or the Highway? A Cautionary Tale.

A friend told me that he received some advice from a Daoist master. I automatically distrust some Western dude sporting an ancient Chinese title. I immediately think it’s an esoteric label to make him credible. Honestly I can’t really say that I understand what Daoism is, and I certainly haven’t the faintest idea of what it might have been meant in China in the 6th century BCE, but I’m equally sure that Master X has no secret information. The friend of course didn’t actually repeat his Taoist teacher’s advice. I’m sure that I would be required to fork over a handful of cash before I had the pleasure. We are a gullible lot. 

When I investigated my initial response, I discovered two basic questions: First, what prejudices spark my immediate response? And second, what criteria can I use to trust a teacher and what he or she teaches? These are separate questions. It is important not to discover one answer and think that it provides a solution to both investigations. It is easy to conflate the answers: Just because I have discovered that I am distrustful for X reason, the teacher and his or her teaching is not automatically trustworthy Or the flipside: Because I find this or that teacher personally trustworthy, therefore my suspicions about his or her spiritual lineage must be mistaken. 

These questions are separate but interrelated: How can I recognize what I call “authentic” practice; and what makes a teacher trustworthy? They bite their own tail. Some people, even trusted teachers, have counseled me to trust my feelings. But when I honestly examine them, I find a twisted mess. I was told to just sit and they will sort themselves out. I sat. Perhaps a few of the knots disentangle, but oftentimes no clear direction emerges. Judging by the solutions that appear in real time, there are no easy answers. 

In what I see as an attempt to deal with this dilemma, sometimes in western Zen circles we practitioners get lost in a lot of talk about “our” way, the Rinzai Way, the Soto way, the Right Way and the Wrong Way. This jabber is barely distinguishable from cultish blabber. 

In 1990 when nearly 100 men were dying from AIDS in San Francisco every week, I was talking with a bright, engaging woman who came to sit zazen at Hartford Street. She asked some questions about the Hospice and Issan. I invited her to come back, perhaps become a hospice volunteer. She begged off, explaining that she was very involved in her practice at “the big Zen Center.” I remember her words exactly. “We do the real Japanese Buddhism: we bow at everything every time we turn around.” I confess to having a few judgmental thoughts. While we were cooking for dying men, and sitting with them when they took their last breaths, she was bowing in every doorway and to a statue at the top of every stairwell.

Perhaps there was something about the dying, knowing that you’re dying and the emotions that stirs up. I cannot say. Several of Issan’s close students didn’t visit him when he was dying. Some actually disappeared when he started to get sick later explaining that they couldn’t bear seeing him suffer. I met him when HiV started to ravage his body and mind so that is really the only Issan I knew. It was his gift to me, and my good luck. But on the other hand, when I listen to stories of Issan at Tassajara or at Zen Center, Green Gulch or Santa Fe. I am certain that dying Issan was the same man dedicating himself diligently and completely to the practice.

I never saw the woman again. She never met Issan. At some point she might hear stories at Zen Center about him. In my gut I feel that she missed an opportunity to experience a man who lived out the teaching until his last breath, but I also know that Issan would never have faulted her for avoiding him and bowing every time she turned around. He was so non-judgement and tolerant. I also admit to applying a little pressure on the woman--I needed help at the hospice--and I also admit to feeling slightly superior in my role running the hospice which was of course real practice. I can’t set my experience center stage for applause, but on the other hand, I need to avoid rote answers, or getting caught up in some cultural forms that I don’t understand as if they unlock some esoteric secret. 

Quick change of scene

Listening in on a recent discussion bemoaning the death of Zen in Japan--so many first-son priests escaping the lifeless tedium of administering the family's temple business, my mind went back to a morning I spent looking over the library at Hartford Street, searching for a book that might unlock the mystery of the universe. Trained as a Jesuit, I hoped to find an answer, even a coded one, recorded by someone at some time in some place that might point me in the right direction.

I picked up a volume and read about the third and final destruction of Nalanda, including its vast library, and started a conversation with Phil Whalen. I was more horrified at the loss of the sutras, mahayana texts and commentaries, including all the works, notes and who knows what else of the pivotal scholar Nāgārjuna than I was by the wanton murder of thousands of monks and teachers. I blurted out something about the horror of burning books to Phil who was sitting in his chair across from me. He just looked up, smiled and said, “Don’t worry, kid. They left us enough, just enough.”

But Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji is not alone in trying to destroy the dharma by burning books and killing monks and nuns. Beginning in 1950 Mao and the People’s Liberation Army systematically destroyed monasteries and burned as many sacred texts as they could lay their hands on in Tibet. In 1868, the Meiji Restoration began the campaign of Haibutsu kishaku (廃仏毀釈), literally "abolish Buddhism and destroy Shākyamuni," which led to the wholesale destruction of Buddhist temples and monasteries as well as sacred texts. The Taliban destroyed huge ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan Afghanistan early 2001 which shocked the world and was soon followed by the regime’s defeat, but it did not prevent them from reasserting their hardline earlier this year.

So while I deplore book-burning and destruction of religious art, their preservation is not a necessary condition for our practice. The loss of cultural Japanese Buddhism, centuries old beauty and tradition, including bowing to everything all the time, is a real loss, but I might have to let it go.

How much remains? Just enough if they left an instruction manual or we figure out how to use it.

"The End of the Rainbow"

Over thirty years ago at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Steve Allen asked Issan, “The world is ending. Where is the great peace when we need it?” 

The setting was the formal ritual in which Issan took the high seat of a recognized Zen teacher, his mountain seat. Did Tenryu imagine that he was simply cementing his relationship with his root teacher or does the question have the ring of another truth? 

Let’s examine the question: though he used the editorial we, was it Steve who really needed to find great peace? And when he said that world was ending, was he exaggerating, being melodramatic or trying to make a point? Issan couldn’t solve Steve’s dilemma for him though he might point him in some direction. He remained silent.

After the room got quiet, Issan turned the question around, and asked Steve, “Where do you think we can find it?”

Steve answered, “We find it with each other.” 

In Zen circles, a student’s question has been known to bring forth a deeper understanding of his or her teacher, but the teacher might also snatch the chance and apply some pressure on his or her student to dig deep and find their own answer, a way to liberate themselves. Our connections with each other are not limited to one way questions and rote answers.

Steve’s answer was pretty good. It was the answer that he needed. It was also one that Issan sprang from Issan's own practice. Issan really did find peace with others. But it was also an answer searching for something that Steve might have been looking for without realizing it. An answer that contained questions that he didn’t even know he had. Steve was not evading the deeper question, and I can guarantee that Steve wasn’t making up an answer to look good.

Is the guest who arrives at the door a friend or foe? We can’t know, given that for most of us our circle of friends is limited to the mother-in-law who is slightly off kilter, or the old drinking buddy who keeps mistaking a missed opportunity for a good time, “Remember the night when we had to crawl home,” forgetting the bloody cuts of scraping over broken bottles and dreams.

Isssan’s response would be to welcome the mother-in-law, the old buddy and the stranger equally with a big hug. Muhammed also welcomed all his guests, whether they were friends, family, or strangers. The Prophet entertained them himself in his house. Sometimes, a lot of guests arrived. He would give all of the food he had to them and he and his family would spend the night hungry. He would wake up at night and ask his guests if they needed anything. He and Issan were alike in this regard. However, the Prophet put a three day limit on hospitality. If the guest overstays, it then leaps into the world of charity, which is something else. Issan couldn’t count or chose not to.

That precious flaw gave the birth to Maitri Home and Hospice for People with AIDS.

The ancient ritual of the Mountain Seat required that Issan demonstrate the immutable stone face of one mountain, but his follow up question revealed a heart of gold. When the end of the world gets in your way, follow the way that brings us together. When the storm clears, it may lead us to the end of the rainbow.

Be careful Steve, you might get what you didn’t bargain for. None of us do if we’re lucky.

(left to right) David Bullock, Del Carlson, Angelique Farrow, Steve Allen, Issan Dorsey

Issan’s Drinking Buddies Find all 108 Beads of his Mala

There are 108 beads on a Buddhist mala. Count them, all of them

There was a small bar just around the corner from the Hartford Street Zen Center on 18th close to Castro. It was next to a laundromat, and had sawdust on the floor. A real neighborhood watering hole called “Uncle’s.” 

 

Issan loved his Friday night cocktail ritual. That is why Hartford Street did the usual Saturday sitting and lecture on Sundays. Between 9 and 10 on Friday nights, Issan would put on his pressed t-shirt, zennie fatigues and head out to Uncle's, usually alone. He liked to talk with the regulars, ordinary gay men who lived in the neighborhood. Despite his blue Japanese costume, he was also considered a regular. He told me that the bartender there made a fabulous Gin martini, not the new fashionable vodka kind that they drank in the cruising bars, but real Bombay Sapphire Gin with the blue label and just the right amount of vermouth. He would limit himself, try to be home for bed in time to sleep and get up early for zazen.

One night he was chatting away, playing with his mala. It broke and all the beads slipped off the string and scattered into the saw dust, under all the stools and between turned over barrels along the walls. Everyone stopped, the music was shut off and everyone began picking up beads. They found all 108 of them, not a one missing. I’m sure that Issan counted them several times.

He was one of the crowd on Friday nights; they knew who he was, just an ordinary guy who dressed up, and he knew them. It was love.

No more, no less.

“Love is shown more in deeds than in words.” Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Philip Asks Me the Big Question

 Was Phil as confused as he pretended to be? Or was he just being a wily old fox?

Mumonkan Case 2 

Hyakujô and the Fox 

Whenever master Hyakujô delivered a sermon, an old man was always there listening with the monks. When they left, he left too. One day, however, he remained behind. 

The master asked him, “What man are you, standing in front of me?” 

The man replied, “Indeed, I am not a man. In the past, in the time of Kashyapa Buddha, I lived on this mountain as a priest. On one occasion a monk asked me, 'Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?' I answered, 'He does not.' Because of this answer (For this answer evidencing a clinging to absoluteness), I fell into the state of a fox for 500 lives. Now, I beg you, Master, please say a turning word on my behalf and release me from the body of a fox.” 

Then he asked, “Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?” 

The master answered, “The law of cause and effect cannot be obscured.” Upon hearing this, the old man immediately became deeply enlightened

It was Saturday morning. Only a few minutes remained until the last period of meditation ended. Zenshin was set to descend the stairs to the zendo and begin the ritual of opening the dharma. He was legally blind. It all required a lot of effort and planning. He was going to give a talk on this koan, Hyakujô and the Fox.

I was being his jisha and carried the incense. When we paused at the top of the stairs, he suddenly decided that he needed to check the exact wording of the old man’s question. Phil, another old man, could not make a mistake. He asked out loud, “Does a man of enlightenment fall under the yoke of causation or not?  What was his answer, yea or nay? What did it say exactly? Is the man free from Cause and Effect, or is he still trapped?” 

Then he asked me, “Check it out in the Mumonkan, will you?” But the tone of his voice sounded more like a command. He appeared agitated. He seemed to expect that I should have had some ability to find a particular case. “It’s very famous, he said. “It's in the Mumonkan. It must be on the shelf in the living room somewhere. It’s a very important case.” 

I have described his ability to find page, paragraph and sentence of an author he loved in his meticulously arranged library, but that morning, standing in the living room at Hartford Street, the books on the shelves were a total disorganized mess.

With the koans, or at least at that particular moment, my ability completely disappeared. When I eventually located the Mumonkan, he said he could not remember the case number, and he seemed to be blaming me for not supplying the missing information. Eventually, making us only a few minutes late, I read, 'Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?' I answered, 'He does not.' 

Phil said, “Good. His first answer is no. Thank you.” Now he was prepared to open the dharma. I remember nothing about his talk. Questions tumbled over and over in my mind--not just is the enlightened man free from the law and cause and effect, but what exactly are we trying to free ourselves from anyway? What part of my life did I need to unyoke to be happy

A few years later I sat with this koan for days in the damp woods of Camp Meeker. When the sun came up till the day darkened, I thought of Phil, his blindness and his generosity. The wily old fox had given me a koan filled with indecision, red herrings, witchcraft and a few wrong answers, probably just traps or misdirections laid out with skill.  He told me that he thought he remembered it correctly, but he wanted to double check it. What was this puzzle that he had to get right? 

Philip was a man whose life, almost all of his waking life not occupied with meditation, was devoted to language and the written word. I can attest that words were his lovers, and he returned the favor. Now he couldn’t read at all anymore. He was almost completely blind and the reason was simply misdiagnosed glaucoma which would have been easily treatable. What a tragedy. If only a doctor had been able to give him the correct word for his blindness and not assigned some rare disease that only one a thousand get. Or if he had only gotten a second opinion when the highly recommended quack told him to kiss his sight goodbye. Maybe not as bad as 500 lives as a fox, but close.

Sometimes the law of cause and effect seems filled with random errors. Perhaps the law is quirky and poorly administered?  The koan says “The law of cause and effect cannot be obscured.” 

The zen Master says he's happy to have saved us all!

Phil’s verse:

HYMNUS AD PATREM SINENSIS

by Philip Whalen

I praise

 those ancient Chinamen

Who left me a few words,

Usually a pointless joke or a silly question

A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick

                      splashed picture—bug, leaf,

                      caricature of Teacher

on paper held together now by little more than ink

& their own strength brushed momentarily over it

Their world & several others since

Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it—

Cheered as it whizzed by—

& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars

Happy to have saved us all.

(Right. It's blurry.)

Phil, dreaming of gummy bears, sees angels descending.

 The mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Now Phil was dying. Perhaps as long as a year before, he’d reached back for his chair which wasn’t there and fell breaking his assbone. Thus began a slow decline. I was alarmed. It’s hard to say that a Zen Master, especially one that I loved, had given up on life, so I won't. But progressive blindness had stolen the delight of seeing words on a page, physical pain made the formal posture of zazen impossible and now immobility obliterated the comforting routine of meditation, gabbing, study, jokes, and food. Not physical therapy with Baker Roshi’s student Joe Muscles, not Chinese food with taro root, not even gummy bears, could turn the tide. The ever present good cheer, except when it suddenly disappeared, felt concocted. The veneer was wearing thin. I didn’t feel the bitter resignation of a person fed up with life. It was more a sense that he’d just had enough. He invited the dying to begin, and the invitation had been accepted. It would be long and slow.

Some sages claim that this was a good way for a meditator to die, as if waving a long slow goodbye to everything that had been assembled to make you--a precious death. In a way I feel that this is a bit like sticking a smiley face on a Hallmark condolence card. It masks the uncertainty of each piece tumbling into oblivion. Phil was always so kind to those who were helping him, but on the other hand he couldn’t hide the day to day frustrations. 

He would rail at the dying steps prescribed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, saying "I have to decide if I’m at the bargaining stage or the resignation stage.” But he seemed to be following them exactly, or at least that was the framework that I carried into my conversations with him. I actually felt that he’d only taken baby steps away from the anger stage, but all that is extremely subjective. Perhaps I was still angry with him for ending the Maitri experiment, or screaming at me in the hallway, or harping on that old time religion. 

Zenshin’s mind had always been clear as a bell, much clearer than his vision. His memory for words, phrases, even pages in a book, had been almost photographic. I wonder how much of this was compensatory.

Once when I was entertaining some weird questions about presumed Kundalini energy in meditation, what Phil called the “squigglies,” he said, “Ol’ Luk Luk has something to say about that.  ”Middle case, third shelf, second from the left. (I think it was Charles Luk’s “Secrets of Chinese Meditation, but it might have been “Empty Cloud.”) Page 63, middle paragraph, beginning at the forth sentence. That’s the interesting part. Read back to me. Then he gently told me that focusing on the heart might be good practice rather than chasing swirling whirling wisps of energy all over the place.

Another time when we were reading “Scenes from the Capital,” we got to a part where he talks about Gerald Manley Hopkins. He started to recite “The Windhover” not with his flat voice, not with his whimsical voice, but reverently, almost like plainchant. When he stumbled, he pointed to the first case, second shelf, 12th book from the right, page 43, “Just start reading.” 

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

When I was sitting with him in a bright room of the Zen Center Hospice on Page Street, he asked me, “Do you see them?”

“Who?”

“The angels.

“No actually, I don’t. Where are they?”

“Right there, floating around,” pointing towards the upper corner to the left of his bed.

“No, I still don’t see them.”

“Look, goddamn it.” His voice sounded plaintive, perhaps wistful.

“What do they look like?”

“Just like the ones on the Macy’s gift bags.”

“I can’t see them Phil, what would you like me to do?”

“Call the police, they’re reliable.”

Together we looked. I could see nothing while at the same time I wondered where his mind had gone. The Mind is a terrible thing to waste, he used to joke. What mind? Here we were using what was left to search for angels.

The angels on the Macy’s bag too “Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.”

When he died I arrived late to the crematorium in South City, Baker Roshi read a line from one of his poems about delicious raspberries. Then we filed past, bowed and placed a raspberry in the plain box that held his body. 

Contrary to Zen custom, I visualized dumping buckets of crimson raspberries gashing gold-vermillion. I couldn’t stop myself.

Slurping is Zen

 “If slurping is zen, that means that loud, ostentatious slurping must be god damn close to enlightenment.” Zen Master Q

When I first sat down with the man after he’d been named head priest, he began a long talk about wood, wind, fire and water in traditional Chinese medicine. His line of questioning puzzled me. He seemed overly intent on learning where I was on this strange wellness scale and what I should do to right my balance. Over the course of our conversation I learned that he was almost always cold and had killer headaches which should have been my clue: he had no idea what he was talking about but hoped it might help him. What this had to do with meditation or zen was beyond me; what this had to do with me was also beyond me unless he was angling for my sympathy. Nonetheless I hung in for almost an hour. I did observe that I could be assured that when it came to wearing a robe of the proper color for an esoteric ceremony, or at least one that didn’t clash, I would be in good hands, but that I shouldn’t trust him to diagnose Chinese wind malfunction. If I were training myself to ask pertinent questions, I might have tried “why don’t you shut up?” 

I remember one afternoon when I sat down to noodles with Phil Whalen in Chinatown. He was extremely happy. He said that the best way to handle personal frictions in the sangha was to invite the warring parties out for a plate of noodles. This was in his view the key to good spiritual leadership--the way they did it in the old country. Not a bowl, not a dish, but a plate, plenty all around, and that slurping was not just OK, but expected. Apparently after enough slurping together with the smiles that the lovely warm tastes brought to everyone’s lips, disagreements would vanish like the mirage they were, like everything is. Or so he thought. The conflicts raged on. I finally figured out that he loved a plate of noodles, and that he loved food.

 ramen properly) from the ramen master.

There are hazards for Westerners trying to do Asian religious practice, and I just scratch the surface. We don’t know what the fuck we’re doing. We start by imitating, like a child learning language. Everything new has a name. We point and ask what is that? We do everything our teachers do as precisely as we can. We walk, we dress, we eat, we chant, we sit, we chuckle, we pout, we guffaw, we bow, we prostrate, we suck our lips and fumble our chopsticks, we hush our harsh voices as if that would quite our cavorting western minds, and we at least pretend that we are listening and observing. We stop saying thank you because gassho sounds more holy, more proper. The irony is that in the end we really only end up being poor imitations of a bit of cultural hanky panky. I had issues with all of it, but I did it nonetheless.

Why could I not learn that slurping is zen? This is what is offered, like the proper scent of aromatic oil with a bony finger pressed on the right acupuncture spot, or the stinky smell of burning sage brush chasing away the bad spirits, helping increase the proficiency of my erections and enhancing sex. I really have very little affinity for Japanese cultural artifacts though I do love sushi. 

It is not us, or more precisely, not exactly the real me that I thought I’d find if I spent years pretending that it might help me be more the me of my dreams and fantasy. 

Phil would laugh and say that many of his fellow religionists from the old country thought that Americans could never really do zen anyway. But if they “came round” and asked questions, Japanese zennists would do their best to answer, whether or not they had a good answer. They had to. It’s in the job description. It’s also the script: question, answer, response, wash, rinse, repeat. A cultural anthropologist might begin to examine if there is any real learning going on, or perhaps if there were a real zen master on the horizon he or she might be able to detect a dud. But I find cultural anthropologists only slightly helpful and have a hard time listening to the Zen master who is doing Chinese medicine to cure headaches while fretting about the color of his robes. Regardless, this is the soup that I landed in. I have to let it cook.

I want to talk a bit about cooking the stew. I need to smell something more than burning sage or Zen aroma oil, more than a mediocre rendition of a Japanese recipe. Smell is universal. It doesn’t need a cultural anthropologist or a skilled linguist to squeeze the meaning. If it’s good there’s an instant response. Sometimes there is an ingredient that I might have been trained to hate. Thus I might lie and say, “I’ve developed a taste for Filipino Bagoóng alamáng,” but for the most part, perhaps after some initial hesitation, I can smell something good on the fire, or at least be able to discuss my attraction or aversion without putting on a fancy, culturally appropriate uniform. 

Although Phil claimed that he was not a Soto priest, and he said exactly that on more than one occasion, he wore the uniform and carefully performed the rituals. I didn’t really believe him and thought that he might have just had some technical objection, or was teaching me to try to look deeper, or perhaps he really did believe that only Japanese could really ultimately get zen.

I lived with Phil at Hartford Street Zen Center from 1989 to 1994. I moved in towards the end of October of 88 and Phil moved in in January of 89. He had been living with Britt Pyland for a year after he left Santa Fe and his long tutelage with Dick Baker, but despite his deep friendship with Britt, he wanted to have a real zendo with a formal structure. Over the 5 years we lived together, he was in the zendo every morning at 6 AM and every evening at 6 PM. I don’t think he missed one session. Perhaps I’ve forgotten once or twice that illness kept him in bed.

Conversation with Phil was marvelous. He did love his food and could weave a spell describing the ingredients of the real Chinese menu at Nam Yuen Restaurant in Portsmouth Square that he, Allen, Kerouac, Gary and a host of others went to after anyone published a poem, had an inspiration, got laid, or just came by for lunch. It was a place that didn’t fear the true flavor of taro root. Phil could talk about anything if prompted, but he rarely talked about poetry, and hardly ever his own. (He once lectured on HYMNUS AD PATREM SINENSIS, but prefaced it by saying the Roshi told him to). However he would quote pages and pages of other poet’s work he admired, all the sonnets of Shakespeare, pages of Whitman, stanzas of Wordsworth and Blake, but not much of his contemporaries. No Ginsberg for example, although he might say he remembered one about a guy in a supermarket, go look it up. Once he quoted a fairly long piece by Gary Snyder. The experience of hearing poetry was different than talking about it, or analyzing it. When someone asked about Gerald Manley Hopkins, he answered by reciting carefully each word of the first long stanza of The Wreck of the Deutschland.

He was perhaps the most widely read man I’ve ever met. He was also legally blind in those last years, and we read to him. He had a personal library of maybe a thousand volumes. It was stored in four plain wooden bookcases, pretty simple standard fare. I helped move him in when he arrived at Hartford Street, and moved the library once more when he shifted to small set of rooms with a private bathroom in the basement of a building we took over next door to #57. He was stern and demanding as a work boss. There were a precise number of bank boxes. Each row from each case had an exact order. You couldn’t mix them up because he would never be able to reconstruct the idiosyncratic Whalen system. But when he said “Kid, get that book by old Luk Luk (Charles Luk, Buddhist monk and writer), second case, third row, sixth book on left, open to page 58 and read the line, I think it starts at 6,” I got his logic. The first time he did it, I was flabbergasted. By the 20th time, I thought that he had to have a photographic memory. It was uncanny. But that is how a blind man who has a long standing love relationship with the written word organizes his library, his life and his practice.  

People often ask, they wonder how a Westerner might come to a spiritual practice that is so difficult to translate from the culture of Japan. It is not like turning the texts of the sayings of Jesus over to a group of translators well versed in Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew. Bowing and sitting don’t translate except in sore joints and training the attention. The nuance and delicate meanings are not easy even if we understand canonical Japanese. The standard answer is that we are in pain, life is suffering is a core principle that the Buddha taught, and he also pointed to a difficult path that leads to freedom. Abstractly, that is a good answer to an abstract question. But there are several pitfalls to picking up a manual of mental health from an Asian tradition and prescribing a remedy for an unfavorable shift in the wind whose expiration date had passed by several millennia. 

So yes, it is almost a universal truth that we approach the Great Way carrying our experience of pain and dissatisfaction. But we also smell something in the air, we hear something in the poetry. We bring all of ourselves, not just our pain. Even if we’re blind, there is a love for words that we can hear. Let freedom ring.

 

Issan Dorsey and Some Undisclosed Secrets of the AIDS Epidemic

What follows is an interview I did with Marlin Marynick for his book, Undisclosed: Secrets of the AIDS Epidemic.

1/27/2012

I'm a gay man in San Francisco. I've been living here since 1974. I'm a former Jesuit—I’d been in Berkeley studying theology—and when I came out, I stayed. I did all the crazy kind of things that people do when they first come out—particularly the men of my generation who were just beginning to do the things we were really capable of in spite of all the discrimination against us. I drove a cab for a number of years, and I started a wood shop, perfect for a guy with a degree in theology, but I didn't really feel much like practicing any religion. When I met Harvey Milk, I joined the fight for gay rights. I had a partner, and we tried to build a life here in gay Mecca.

Then, all of a sudden in the mid-80’s, our friends began dying, huge numbers. . .first it was called gay cancer, then it was called GRID. . .nobody really knew what it was, but it was terrifying. Towards 1987-88 I felt that I had to do something, although this was also a process of me overcoming my own fears, of dealing with them. I had many friends that were diagnosed, and everybody was dealing with the fear, the loss and the not-knowing what we were really dealing with.

In 1988 I met a gay Buddhist priest, Issan Dorsey. Friends had told me that he was remarkable guy, but my first impressions were that he was actually rather ordinary, far more effeminate than any of my gay friends, and not in any way “spiritual” as I understood the word.

Issan, “Tommy” Dorsey, did have an unusual path to a Zen. He had been a professional drag queen, and a heavy drug abuser, which was not terribly out of the ordinary for gay San Franciscans 40 years ago. He was also a very bright, funny, human being, and he had just started an AIDS hospice. (He himself died at the Hospice of the disease on September 6, 1990—he’d contracted HIV from his partner, James). I was blessed to be able to be with him during the last few years of his life, and helped him create Maitri Home and Hospice for People with HIV.

I had first moved into the Zen center on Hartford Street to practice meditation, to get away from a relationship that was ending, and to put some perspective around all that. Very quickly after I packed my bags, my partner and I closed our business, we made and sold furniture, and ended our relationship. So there I was living in this Zen center-hospice, and I started doing some general carpentry work, fixing bathrooms, getting rooms ready for the men who would live with us. It just was the next thing to do, right in front of me. This quickly lead to finding money to pay for the building materials; then more organizational stuff; and by 1990, I followed Steve Allen as executive director of the hospice. Looking back, it was something that my Jesuit training, and everything, prepared me for though I didn't have much experience with non-profits and no experience in health care.

Back then people with HIV-AIDS died quickly after being diagnosed. . . 3 weeks, 6 weeks, a few months, perhaps a little bit longer in rare cases. It felt like we were picking up bodies off the street. Some months 100 men died in our neighborhood, the Castro. You'd walk down the street, pass someone you knew who looked pretty healthy. Then you'd see him 2 weeks later and he’d aged 40 years. Within a year or two I said to myself "Oh my god, where did my friends go." No one knew what to do, or how to behave around those infected—these were friends. Of course a lot of us were afraid of catching the disease, because no one knew how it was transmitted, although we had our suspicions, no one really knew. No one knew if it was poppers, or kissing, or if it really was sex and drugs and rock and roll. That didn't appear on the horizon for a while because no one wanted to give those things up. Sexual freedom was part of our emancipation, or that’s what we though. Denial was a big part of the epidemic’s horrifying spread through the community.

Issan said that the only real thing that we could do was to take care of what was in front of us, take care of life as it presented itself. He said HIV was like a guest who’d come and knocked at the door, and couldn’t be turned away. When one member of the small meditation community, JD, became so sick that his partner Pierre could no longer care for him, despite the misgivings of some in the community—Issan could be very firm, even stubborn, when he was sure of the next thing he had to do—he moved JD into the bedroom next to his. And he began looking after his immediate needs, which included martinis after evening meditation, spicy hot dogs, and cable TV. It was a very simple concept—just take care of people in the most basic way and sustain a normal life for as long as possible. And be as happy as you could—no matter what.

And then something unexpected happened, JD did not die quickly. The symptoms of the disease worsened, he could no longer walk, was bed-ridden, but when a supporter gave Maitri a motorized wheelchair, JD became a teenager with a hot rod, missing meals, staying out past curfew. He found a new boyfriend who was also disabled, and they began to spend the night together. We moved him from the second floor to the street level front room of the second building where he held court. Four or five other men would be in his room watching campy movies on VCR at all hours. He stocked his small refrigerator intended for medications with soda and beer, and in the front window a hydroponic wheatgrass farm, for health, of course. All this really tested some zennish sensibilities, and the CNA staff. But despite complaints, Issan remained firm in his support for JD. When JD returned one day from Oakland—he’d taken BART across the Bay—with an iguana, no one believed that he would actually take care of it himself. He did. In fact he smuggled his pet onto a plane when he went back to Florida to spend his last days with his mother. The story of the lizard squirming around under his shirt while JD locked himself in toilet at 30,000 feet became the stuff of legend. I think that JD’s story is also a real example of what kind of life is possible when your guests are not bound by some rigid rules for how you expect guests to behave.

Even if people couldn’t see the compassion in what Issan was doing, most everyone trusted him enough to give money. Another friend of his bought the building next to our small Victorian house, and we bought back the lease. That gave us rooms for another 5 people. Within a year we had 8 beds for people with HIV-AIDS plus 6 people to take care of them, Issan, Phil Whalen, a zen priest, as was Steve Allen, and his wife, Angelique, Michael Jamvold, myself, and David Bullock. We shared a life together—we meditated, had fun. We worked hard and cried.

Maitri was a ragtag operation. We learned, and we would create a Buddhist hospice piece by piece. I began to spend time helping people get their paperwork arranged for the end of their life, getting everything straightened out with their partners, and their families, taking care of the kinds of things that come up towards the end of life. I asked social workers and lawyers to help and everyone I asked stepped forward.

What also started to become clear, we were charting new territory. We were the only Zen center in the United States to put meat, chicken and sausages on our vegetarian, Zen, table. People with HIV needed protein. There were a lot of other things that broke rules, both in Zen terms, and hospice-wise. When we had to take care of getting the drugs adjusted so that people could have a fairly comfortable life, we got help from Visiting Nurses and Hospice (Steve Allen worked out a contract with them to provide a full-time nurse and certified nursing attendants using moneys already allocated for care from the city). As I started to investigate how we could get money for hospice, I discovered that for most insurance and federal funding, people had to have a 6 month diagnosis to receive assistance and they couldn't take any drugs which would prolong life. Issan said that’s crazy because he wanted people to live and enjoy life as much as they could for as long as they could. There was a new, experimental drug called Foscarnet which prevented, or at least retarded, blindness caused by CMV retinitis. It had to be given intravenously. The nurses from hospice were not allowed to do that with hospice patients so I recruited a small group of volunteers who learned how to administer it. Then several patients wanted to sign up for drug trails of the new HIV drugs that began to appear. It would probably have been prohibited in more formal hospice settings, but somehow, I convinced VNA to not report any person at Maitri who enrolled in a drug trial.

The partner of my friend Michael who was dying called Maitiri “the house of death” when I suggested that he move Michael in. I was pretty offended. I saw what we were doing as creating a house of life. While I was trying to figure out how to keep the cable TV from being shut off, and lamb stew on the table, there were times I thought I was running “animal house.” There were lots of humorous, funny things going on all the time. Yes, people were dying, in the 2 + years I was there 82 people died in those 8 beds, and I was with almost every one of them. I won’t deny that it tested my defenses, that it was trying, and stressful work. There was always a poignancy about life at Maitri. But when death is simply part of life, it becomes easier to sustain what we think of as normal life.

Bit by bit, we did put something together, and what we created is now the longest surviving AIDS hospice, “home and hospice for people with AIDS,” in the city. The morbidity rate from HIV/AIDS has gone down enormously, thank god. Only a few people actually die in the hospice now, so the current staff deals with things like drug addiction, and adherence to medical protocol for the antiviral drugs, respite care, things that Issan would have encouraged us to do to make life as normal and happy for as long as it lasts. What we did in the early days of the epidemic and what continues to be done now is really extraordinary.

By the time he died, I realized that Issan was a truly extraordinary man. He had more than an extremely funny sense of humor. He’d worn a skirt, or as he used to say, "I still wear a skirt but I renounced the heels." His speech was always in entirely plain language. And he really was a Zen master. When this drag queen, substance abuser par excellence, started to sit in meditation with Susuki Roshi, he sat down and looked at the bottom of his feet, and said to himself, oh my god, they are dirty. . . and he started to clean up from drugs, and meditate. He also discovered what was important for his own life. In official Zen, he went as high as any man can go. For me he was an absolutely extraordinary, terrific human being.