How this Jesuit became Buddhist.

“Death is the Great Teacher.” --Anon

Sunday, December 24th, 2566

Bangkok

My friend James Ishmael Ford Roshi quotes Koun Yamada Roshi: “The ancients spoke of three essential conditions for Zen practice: First: Great faith; second: great doubt; third: great determination. These are like the three legs of a tripod.” OK, James, I accept this formulation but like a challenge or a proposition that might map some terrain that is fairly normal for your run of the mill pre-Buddhist seeker. Let’s see if it holds water.

My first reaction is, holy Jesus, I wish it were that simple. Can I start off by re-complicating the situation, or at least setting it in a real life context? We need to get real, and get down to a few basics from experience, not listing three high sounding abstractions. That’s almost Tibetan. We’re doing Zen..

Old Yamada had a bit of luck or leisure or maybe both to actually formulate something before he was thrown into the abyss of great doubt. Perhaps he waded through it cool as a cucumber. He undoubtedly came from a good family as the suttas say plus had several virtuous lives under his belt so that when he got knocked off his rocker, he had something to grab onto. Of course I can’t forget to mention that he was also sitting on the high seat in the meditation hall so it was his job to formulate something that sounded so neat and clean that any jackass could do it. Plus being Japanese, he had a peculiar way of dealing with emotion--with a slight smile and downcast gaze, never a loud voice or flash of anger. But don’t ask this reasonably mild-mannered (but still brash if you scratch the surface) American to perfectly reflect any of those virtues before we start or we’ll never start.

And James, standing in Yamada’s lineage, you say with equanimity: “It is with this that we are invited into this consideration (our lives) following three strands, faith, doubt, and energy.” I suppose that if I can stand back after my experience, perhaps with the added perspective of three or four boring lifetimes, I’ll be able to utter those words with the deadpan my mind is currently conjuring up.

In my story I have to rearrange the sequence a bit. After a bit of preamble, I will start where I started: Doubt. And it wasn’t an intellectual exercise. What can we hold onto when we really start to fall? It was more like a downward spiral, not a trip to the library where we look up the etymology of a few Sanskrit words and then go back to our cushion with the fire power required to stare down the nasty demons who came to intrude on our solitude. It was pitch black dark and almost completely hopeless, or at least that's what I experienced.

By the early 1970’s I had already been introduced to the rudiments of introspection. It was mostly through the lens of New Age gurus in California who were exploring the intersection of psychology and what people ordinarily called spirituality. I came to hate that word “Spirituality.” It became a garbage pail for anything that strayed from the dogmatic straight and narrow or couldn’t be explained by science. Our telescopes are limited so let's see what astrology looks like if we shift our vantage point for the ancient constellation charts to latitude 37°45′25.20″ North, longitude 122°26′56.40″ West. It will be a more accurate reading than Varanasi. The effort was pretty useless, but I tell myself it was only Buddhism 101.

Along the way I’d been introduced to the concept of impermanence. I can’t say that I understood it, but at least I began looking for change, and tried to adjust even if my own world remained tight as a drum. I’d also been introduced to the concept that doubt might be a virtue rather than a hindrance. Welcoming doubt was convenient, It allowed me to dismiss many of the untenable doctrinal positions that Jesuits were taught to defend. The romanticized version was “The Dark Night of the Soul” where doubt was overwhelming and required an act of grace or god to relieve the anguish, and lead of course to a more enlightened position. It was very quixotic, like the self-indulgent icon of the angry young man, or the rational scientist teetering on the edge of his hypothesis who would eventually come down on the right side

I had also begun a daily meditation practice. I had meditated in the Jesuit way, which, after our first years of strict formation, became somewhat laissez faire. It was post-Vatican 2. Most of the formal structure had been set aside except during periods of retreat. For me, and I would say a majority of my Jesuit peers, we lied to ourselves about our “spiritual life.” It had become a concept, and not a very clear one at that. If I spent hours organizing an action to protest the war in Vietnam, I would call it “contemplation in action.” It was for the good of all humankind. There are only so many hours in the day and we all had a lot on our plates. But now, for the most part, actually sitting quietly every day was part of my routine. I had also learned the proper yogic posture and had begun to master basic meditation instructions. They were so simple that they could be easily dismissed, but they also had staying power.

I left the Jesuits, moved to San Francisco along with the thousand gay men each month flooding the Castro in the mid 70’s. I met Harvey Milk before he ever held office and became involved in what I imagined was the next phase of the liberation movement that had started at Stonewall in 1969. It was an exciting time. The tight knit Castro community had to deal with the assassination of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, but in my early 30’s, I’d hoped that we were strong enough to withstand the battering of real tragedy. I also thought that I had to make my separation from the Jesuits complete. I stopped referring to myself as an ex-Jesuit and, with a few exceptions, cut myself off from Jesuit friends. My parents for the most part also cut me out of their lives, both utterly disappointed and angry. They thought I was wasting my education, my life, trying to carve out a life as an openly gay man. The door for any conversation was closed.

At least by 1982 or 83 there were reports of a strange disease that seemed to attack gay men and kill them within a few months. Fear began to spread in the community. The disease didn’t have a name. No treatment had any effect. No one knew how it was transmitted which fueled our paranoia. Soon, too soon, the number of cases began to skyrocket. When we learned that the “gay cancer” was spread through sexual contact, there was panic. I remember it well. At the outset of the pandemic, we knew that almost everyone who was sexually active would die, and our friends began to die in huge numbers. Just within my zip code a hundred men were dying each week. If you didn’t see someone for a few days, your first thought was that they were dead or dying, not that work called them away or they went to visit family,

It’s still difficult to talk about that long decade. I feel some obligation to try because I experienced it. I put words on a page and other people read them. I remember asking my grandfather what he had heard about the Civil War. He was born in 1882. His father would have been 12 or 13 when War with the South broke out, too young to serve in a Union Army, but he certainly knew men who did. So did my grandfather, but he said nothing. There were memorials on the commons in every town across New England, usually a large boulder inset with bronze plaque etched with the names of the local men and boys who went to fight and never returned. On the Nichols Green, our small village, I recognized some old family names among the 30 or names listed, but not a hundred years after that slaughter ended, Memorial Day, or Decoration Day had become a time for parades and the family picnics of my childhood. The fallen soldiers had almost entirely been forgotten. Maybe a few formulaic phrases appeared in speeches in Washington, and we memorized the Gettysburg Address. In terms of uttering nearly sacred words, I have to ask myself how Lincoln’s few sentences are different from the memorized catechism Yamada uses to describe the conditions for Zen practice.

It is that difficult to speak about the pain that give rise to the “Great Doubt.” On a personal level, by 1987 I could barely face walking into the Castro, knowing that I would inevitably bump into some friend racked with wasting syndrome, looking decades older, frail and obviously at death’s door. I had been living in the neighborhood for years, and over the course of that decade I would rip at least 250 names out of my address book. There were at least that many more acquaintances, friends of friends, who suffered painful deaths. Everyone who was HIV positive died. From my own group of friends from those 12 or 13 years, only three remain alive. Both World Wars together were less than a decade and many men came home, The epidemic was longer and the toll was staggering. The psychological effects were devastating and lasted for many years for some, perhaps most of us who lived through it and survived.

I could have put my head down and simply tried to live life as normally as possible, and to some extent I did that. For many of us that simply meant isolating, going to work and staying home every night. Some even left San Francisco. They returned to Boise or Des Moines and moved into the basement of their parents’ home. That ended accompanying friends on doctor's visits hoping for the good news that never came, followed all too quickly by a sparsely attended memorial service. That was one response. Escaping to the country from the site of mass infection has been a strategy since the Black Death. Then there was ACT UP. We organized protests, and defended the gay man who threw a communion wafer on the floor of Saint Patrick's Cathedral. It was one response to the loud noise coming from some religious people that gay men were getting the punishment they deserved. We lobbied for free AZT. We read about every new experimental treatment and helped friends get into drug trials.

My own response vacillated between activism and denial. I went to memorial services and doctors appointments. I had dinner with friends who were isolating, but I also put my head down and pretended that life was normal, that I had to make a living and go to the opera. But what was happening to my inner life was complete annihilation. My sense of self-worth was crumbling, I had spent years working to overcome my own homophobic demons, and now they were being resurrected stronger than ever. Gay did mean dead. Any comforting remnants of spirituality vanished. There were a few religious heroes who stood up and held out their hands, but I had no appetite to fight Pope Benedict’s refusal to support the use of condoms in Africa to stem the spread of the disease. He could have chosen to stay quiet but became a barbarian zealot instead. The crowds shouting “Die” were winning, at least in my inner life. I understood why my grandfather could say nothing about friends who had fought in the Civil War. The bloodshed had been unimaginable. I understood why friends' fathers said nothing about their experience in World War 2 other than to remember the day it was over. By 1989 our liberated gay world was dead or dying and there seemed to be no hope. The epidemic’s end was nowhere in sight. We grabbed at every sign of hope but were always disappointed. Two friends committed suicide. Several others became drug addicts. Two were murdered.

Although it is difficult to unlink despair and doubt, I can pinpoint the exact moment and place where I took steps that began to change my world. I had to do something. My personal relationship was on the rocks. Maybe I should get back to a more formal rigorous meditation practice. I’d heard about a small zendo in the Castro. In the fall of 1988, I found the basement door and let myself in a few minutes before 6 AM. I was alone. I sat on the cushion nearest the door. At 6 a slight man came down the stairs alone holding a stick of incense. As he made his way to the altar for the opening ceremony, he leaned over and whispered to me, “We sit facing the wall.” I shifted around, the first of many directions that I followed without asking a lot of questions. We sat. Issan rang a bell to signal the end of the period, handed me a card, and I stood for the chanting service which I could barely follow, Then it was over. On the way out, he smiled and said, “If you decide to come back it gets easier.” I started to sit every morning. Once in a while there were one or two others, but never more than a half dozen.

I seemed to have found my way into a setting and a group that took meditation seriously. I will fast forward through a whole series of incidents that appeared random, the death and cremation of Yogi C.M Chen, the first real Buddhist practitioner I’d ever met, the death of my dear friend Nancy Storm, my discovering the Zen Hospice Project and the training where at the end of the second day, Frank Ostaseski invited Issan to sit with us and answer questions. During the training I had had lots of flashbacks to taking care of Nancy while she was dying, difficult moments when I had no idea what to do, what to say. I raised my hand. Issan turned and looked at me. I forgot what I had intended to say but blurted something out. It made no difference. He simply turned to look at me, and I knew right away that he was totally present. I knew then that this was the man I had to work with.

On the way out the door, Issan told me that there would be a meeting at Hartford Street the following week about the Hospice he was starting. I could come if I was interested. I showed up. There were perhaps six or seven of us in the small living room at Hartford Street. Paul Rosenblum, Rick Levine and Steve Allen, all Zen monks and old friends of Issan were there. Issan began by saying that so and so couldn’t attend but it was sure that he would help out. Thank you all for coming. Paul and Rick asked about funding. Issan assured everyone that we could cover our expenses by pooling everyone’s disability payments. This was wishful thinking or insanity, but I was just being introduced to the group so I just listened. While the meeting was in progress, one of the current residents was moving out with all his belongings, including the dining room table. He was obviously less than pleased to be evicted so that two men with HIV could move in. I would be their Zen Hospice volunteer for six to eight hours a week. Within six months, I would be living on a mattress in a small attic room above Issan; the hospice would take over the building next door, and we would be caring for 5 dying men. Within a year I would close my business, become the Development Director, then the Executive Director, and we would be taking care of 8 men with a 24 hour staff. This was the beginning of Maitri, the first residential Buddhist Hospice in America.

When I said that my meeting Issan in the Hartford Street Zendo was where I could pinpoint real change, but don’t think this marked an end to my descent into fear and doubt. In many ways, it amplified it. Now I didn’t have just my own inner voice saying that the world was ending and gay people were going to die, I heard variations on that theme from partners who were at wits end trying to deal with the imminent death of men they loved and parents who dutifully came to say goodbye. Some of those parents thanked me for doing what was impossible to do in the towns across America that their sons had fled. Some left as quickly as they’d appeared. I heard it from a hymn singing group of Jesus freaks. The estranged mother of one young man met them on the bus and decided that The Almighty was sending a message she had to pass on to her brilliant twenty year-old son who was angry as hell that he was dying and totally helpless. My job was to get rid of them, yelling, screaming, protesting that I was blocking the message of the one true god. I’d just about had messages from the one true god up to my ears, but I remained civil as I escorted them out the door singing praise songs.

Although Issan and Phil were Soto monks and didn’t do koan practice, somehow the story of a young Rinzai monk snuck under the door. The 19 year old Hakuin Ekaku experienced bewilderment, and almost quit practice when he read about Yántóu Quánhuō (Japanese Gānto Zenkatsu), a Chinese Zen Master who screamed out when he was being murdered by bandits, The story says that he could be heard tor 5 miles. I easily identified with both characters in the story, My inner screams could be heard for miles if I let them out, but I was in a leadership role in a practice center, an AIDS hospice and I had an obligation stay calm and do what was in front of me, but like Hakuin I was bewildered when the practice didn’t quiet my inner screaming

I was not unique. I don’t want to give the impression that I am some kind of saint. There were many others, straight medical professionals, a vast army of social workers the majority of whom seemed to be lesbian. We all were just doing the best we could given the circumstances. I dutifully went to meetings of my support group, but I still felt an obligation to push myself even when it became unhealthy. I worked until the burnout became too visible to ignore..

One of my responsibilities was maintaining the hospice waiting list which meant that I visited everyone whose social worker had referred to Maitri. We only had eight beds, but there was always someone either struggling alone in a Tenderloin SRO or stuck in Ward 86 with no place to go. No one could maintain a universal waiting list. I remember interviewing a very lovely man about my age at Garden Sullivan Hospital. His doctor had given him a 6 month diagnosis and thought that Maitri might be a good place for him. He’d been well educated, Jesuit trained as I recall, and held a responsible position until he couldn’t work. I wanted to put him on the waiting list, but he told me that when the time came, he would call his friend, a priest I knew at Most Holy Redeemer. I wished him well and left. Three months later his obituary appeared in the BAR. He’d been found dead in a doorway in the Tenderloin. I felt an immense regret. I didn’t blame the priest for not being able to provide promised or hoped for help. The man simply fell through the cracks of an imperfect system. It happened all too often. As Issan often told me, we were at war, and as in any battle you held your ground for as long as you could and did your best. That was where I would look for “The Great Determination” Yamada talks about, or what James calls energy. Those of us who were healthy had to keep going for as long as we could.

An entire generation of young gay men were decimated by HIV. I survived, but I cannot wear it like a badge of honor. It was a burden, and to some extent continues to be. I have a few friends about my age who are also survivors. We met in the circles of recovery or debriefing or trauma reduction. Maitri took a toll. I postponed taking care of myself. The practice saved me--it provided a container for my personal anguish, but the rigor even of a lay Soto practice center would always bump into the demands of caring for the dying.

Issan’s friends gathered around him to take care of his dying in the way that he intended--a very public teaching. He lived out his final years under the same roof with 80 ordinary men who died of the same disease. But as far as creating Maitri as a permanent part of zen practice, we’ll leave that for the Catholic nuns who start hospitals after their founders die. Philip Whalen came to Maitri because he was Issan's friend. and that is as far as the obligation extended. When he became Abbott, he told me in no uncertain terms, “Shut it down.” I convinced him to give me time to separate the hospice from the zen center and find a new home. He agreed. Within 2 years of Issan’s death, Maitri was in the process of moving to a new facility with an independent secular administration.

For the best part of the next decade after I left Maitri and Hartford Street, I continued to practice. I did at least 4, sometimes 5 sesshin a year. I started to work with the koans. I admit that it took some time to adjust. I even finished the Mumonkan, but there were wide areas of neglect in my personal emotional life that practice was not remedying. It could not. I remember doing dokusan with Bob Aitken. It took me almost six years to pass “Mu.” After Bob told me that my answer to the koan was “maybe a little closer, but no” before he rang the bell, he would ask what else was going on. I talked a lot about the hospice, my relationships with others at Hartford Street, many of whom he knew well, areas where I knew I was stuck, and he would listen. He just listened. When he said something that might be considered advice it was always from his experience. He was wonderful. He didn’t try to make zen do the impossible. Once in a while he would mention that he had done psychotherapy himself and found it useful.

Though I didn’t want to forget the experience of Maitri, and I couldn’t set it aside. I knew that some of the experiences stood in my way, but I didn’t know what to do with them. Jerry Brown visited once when Richard Baker visited San Francisco and was going to lecture. Jerry was actually wonderful. He visited the men in their rooms and spent time talking, asking and answering questions. My friend Rob Lee was following him and taking pictures. Brown posed for a canned kind of shot with one patient, and after we’d left the room and the door was closed he turned to Rob and said, “Burn it.” This was between his terms as Governor of California and before he was Mayor of Oakland, but he was a public figure, so he had professional boundaries.. I had only enough to survive and help my friends live as fully as they could although they would not survive. The immediacy of my strategy postponed my looking at my own issues, for example the residue of sexual abuse and exploitation at the hands of a New Age guru, my blindness to self care. Without a clear agenda, I handled my experience exactly the way Jerry Brown had handled the photograph of him with the man dying of AIDS--”Burn it.”

The dawn of Buddhism in the West contains some very magical thinking. In 1988 or 89. I went to a Teaching about the Tibetan Book of the Dead with Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche in a huge ornate hall that I imagined had once been the chapel of the Lone Mountain campus of USF. The young tulku climbed up on a high throne-like seat twice a day for 4 days, Wednesday to Saturday, and carefully explained that the bardo states were the “In-betweens” of experience, and that some kind of experience continued after the body died. I hope that, if true, there is some recall mechanism when I die because there was a lot of ground that I did at all understand, but the description of Mind felt accurate. There were no more than 12 of us who sat through the long sessions.

On the last day. the actual initiation, the “Bardo Empowerment," was a public ceremony and soon the hall was overflowing with hundreds and hundreds of pale, emaciated, scared, and sickly men. I remember it being a standing room only, but it was more than 35 years ago so my mind might be playing tricks. What is certain is that all those men who were there would be dead within a few short painful years if not months. They were contemplating death, and perhaps they had read bits and pieces of the Book of the Dead. I thought it was an understandable reaction to fear clouded with magical thinking. Tibetan empowerments always have specific instructions on how to practice to gain the blessing. I thought that Jamgon Kongtrul was both compassionate and marvelously wise when he told all those dying men to live their lives as fully as possible for whatever time they had left. I was and am among the men who received those instructions from the high lama. I knew the men who died and I know some who lived. I cannot see any rhyme or reason. Life does not seem fair or it certainly does not have human standards of decency. But there is still a promise about life itself that exists. For me, my hope is that Great Faith is what is left after all the magical thinking falls away.

I would later experience another huge downward spiral. Perhaps it was delayed PTSD. I had done perhaps 30 sesshins, but I started to step away from practice. To justify it, I called it “Forced Practice Syndrome” as if I’d been forced to do the hard work of practice, meditation, and starting a hospice. In reality those areas that had not healed were festering. My addictive nature got the upper hand. I thought nothing of doing crystal meth and flooding my body with more than 100 times the euphoric endorphins of sex on a regular basis.

I woke up on Buddha’s Enlightenment Day in 2010 after several days of doing drugs. I realized that I could have been in sesshin for Rohatsu as I had so many times. I also knew that I had a week of recuperation before I would return to a modicum of normalcy, and it became very clear that I had to get clean and sober. The effort of recovery required the kind of energy that Yamada describes as Great Determination. In less technical terms, I’d call it digging deep. Great determination was at least motivated in part by fear of falling into despair or madness but also a clear sense that something else is possible for my life. I did the work and continue to do it with the help of many friends.

Issan’s friends gathered around him and helped him use his death from HIV as a teaching. He wanted to die where he felt at home surrounded by friends who loved him. His friends made that possible. All of us had to give something up, but we did it willingly. I am blessed, honored, I’m not sure of the correct term, to have been present as a remarkable man faced a painful death while he continued his practice. It was not an easy task, but it really only required doing what was in front of me, and it is the reason for “The Record of Issan.”

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

On the 20th anniversary of the death of Issan Tommy Dorsey Roshi

Yesterday was the 33rd anniversary of Issan's death. I'm reposting my tribute from 13 years ago. I am so grateful to this remarkable man.

On the 20th anniversary of the death of Issan Tommy Dorsey Roshi (March 7, 1933 — September 6, 1990)

I was honored to speak during the wonderful celebration of Issan’s legacy on the 20th anniversary of his death at Maitri Hospice. This is a longer version of my remarks. 

Welcome!

One bright afternoon, Isaan was walking down Hartford St. towards 18th with Steve Allen and Jerry Berg. They were headed to the hamburger place that used to be right next to Moby Dick’s, close to the corner. That might not be important unless you want to know if Issan loved hamburgers—he did—but you have to know that Steve is a Zen priest, a close friend of Issan, his dharma heir, and the first Executive Director of Maitri. Jerry Berg was an early supporter of the hospice, a successful lawyer and prominent leader in the gay community.

As they walked, Steve and Jerry were talking about possible legal structures for the hospice while Issan lagged behind. He noticed a bottle lying on the sidewalk and bent to pick it up. Yes, any rumors that he was an incarnation of Mr. (or Miss.) Clean are well founded. But when he noticed that the bottle was rather beautiful and might be worth keeping, he took out the rag that he kept neatly folded in his monk’s handbag, and began to polish it. Suddenly, a Genie appeared! It had to be a Buddhist Genie, a Bodhidharma look-a-like, with a shaved head, droopy ears and a bright robe. The Genie looked at Issan and Issan looked back, a staring match of wonderment. Steve and Jerry turned around to see what Issan was holding Issan up and stopped dead in their tracks.

The Genie spoke the time honored script of genies: “Because you have freed me after many lifetimes of being cramped-up in that god damned bottle, you, yeah, I guess all three of you, get one wish. It’s just one so you’d better make it good.”

Steve didn’t hesitate: he knew his Buddhism and asked to be released from his karma and enter Buddhahood, or nirvana, or the Pure Land, right there and then. Just as he was about to raise his palms in gassho, the traditional gesture of respect—poof, he was gone.

Jerry thought to himself, that was powerful magic. I’m going for it. I’m not getting any younger so how about a great life in a heaven modeled after Palm Springs—but without the humidity—endless pool parties, rafts of handsome men, an eternal nosh that never made you fat? As he smiled and waved good-bye—poof, he disappeared too.

The Genie turned to Issan who was left standing alone—it might have been wonderment on his face, maybe just a bit puzzled. The Genie said, "OK, honey, it's your turn, what does your little heart desire?

Issan didn’t hesitate, “Get those two numb-nut girls back here. We have a hospice to run.”

Del Carlson and Issan, best friends

Tonight we’ve come together to remember Issan Dorsey.

Jana just lead us in an ancient ritual to call upon the powers that guard the unseen world from which we can still feel Issan’s presence from time to time. Perhaps we can also allow ourselves to enter that world tonight to see him, to hear him, and allow ourselves to be inspired and get the strength we need to live our own lives as completely and authentically as we can.

There are many reasons why we might want to remember him—for most of us who knew him and loved him—we cherish who he was for us, the way he moved through the world. We remember the kindness of his actions—and his great one-liners.

For those of us who meditated with him, he inspired us by his depth of his practice—the way that he carried his understanding of the Buddha’s teaching into his life seamlessly. The man who sat in the zendo was not one bit different from the man who had a martini at the gay bar around the corner or who listened carefully to everyone’s point of view during a staff meeting.

For those of us who worked with him, we knew that his projects had heart. No matter how complex they became when we tried to made them real, no matter what problems or difficulties arose, Issan always directed us back to the heart of the matter—love, compassion, service.

For those of us who only know him by having read about him or heard about him, or having worked at Maitri, you still know him. He didn’t write any books himself, but he left a real example of how humans can look after one another with love and friendship. Here it is! We’re standing in the middle of it right now. And that is perhaps the best way to know him, by trying to look after one another throughout our entire lives in ways that make difference and bring us closer together.

Tonight we are going to try to bring him back into our lives as a way to honor him, and thank him, and be inspired again by his vision for home and hospice for people with AIDS.

I have heard more than 100 versions of this story over the years: "if I hadn’t met Issan at the door of City Center or Tassajara, if he hadn’t really hugged me, told a joke, said a few words that calmed me down immediately, I wouldn’t have struck around—I wouldn’t be here today." He was a man with the ability to find those few words that you needed to hear in the moment, words that came from the heart, words that gently cleansed the sting of whatever was troubling you. He was a man with an open heart. He was truly a Zen priest.

He was also a man whose path to Zen was among the most oddball that I’ve ever read about in Zen’s almost 2 thousand year history. Many senior Zen students of Suzuki Roshi have told me that when they saw the bedraggled hippie with dirty feet walk through the doors of Sokoji Temple on Bush, there was never a more unlikely candidate for roshi. Yet when this effeminate, gay, drug-addicted drag queen discovered the path of meditation, he found his life and never turned back.

Issan and me in the garden at Hartford Steet, photo  by Rich Gerhearter

I have moments when a single phrase that Issan said to me just comes up, for no apparent reason. He had an uncanny ability to take complex issues and say what was important in a few words. Some people can only understand an issue presented in its most simplistic form. But Issan’s few words didn’t show any lack of understanding. When I worked with him (and particularly when I talked about my meditation practice with him), I felt his few words go very deep.

And for gay man like myself, part of the large influx to San Francisco of gay, lesbian and bi men and women during the 70’ and 80’s who were, by and large, alienated from the religious practice of our mothers and fathers, a simple, light-hearted message that went to the heart of the matter was perfect. And if it were delivered with perfect timing and some campy trimmings, all the better.

Once at a staff meeting I was fretting over something that was stamped “urgent” (it seemed as if almost every item in my to-do pile had some red flag, screaming “right now,” “get me done”). Issan just reached out, touched my hand and said, “We’re at war. I’ve been at war, and it’s not fun—well not always fun. We can still have some parties.”

Back in 1988 and 89 sometimes more than a hundred men a week were dying from the effects of HIV/AIDS. It was a disaster the dimensions of which the nation as slow to recognize. There wasn’t time, money or resources to do everything that needed to get done, much less do it perfectly. Somehow, I knew that if I could just focus on what was in front of me, and get that done, it usually turned out to be exactly what was required. And for those of you who know me, it’s something I still struggle with. Thanks Issan—your teaching continues.

And the story also reminds me that when you’re at war, you also find out quickly who your friends are. When the epidemic hit full force, after all the political posturing and bullshitting, our community found resources within itself to care for a tragedy of unbelievable proportions. And we were helped by a huge number of generous men and women from the wider community who saw beyond whatever labels were being thrown around then—forgive me if I’ve blocked them out—and stepped forward to ease the suffering of some fellow travelers.

Issan saw Maitri as much more than just a Buddhist hospice, though it was deeply Buddhist to its very roots. He shaved his head, and wore a Soto priest’s patch-work robe, he bowed and chanted in Sino-Japanese, but he understood very clearly that real wisdom, what we call Prajñā, is not the sole property of any religion.

I want to tell a story about the Mass that my friend, Joe Devlin, a Jesuit priest, said in the zendo at Hartford Street early in 1990.

I had asked Joe to come by and say Mass for the Catholic men in the Hospice. It was a Saturday evening, and Joe was due to arrive at 5. I was scrambling, assembling a few basics, actually just the essentials, bread, wine and a clean tablecloth for the dining room table. Issan, who was at the time in the final stages of HIV disease came downstairs in his bathrobe, to ask when “Father Joe” was due to arrive and see what I was doing. After I explained, he said with a big smile, but firmly, “Mass will be in the zendo, not the dining room.” Then he took over and directed all the preparations with the same care that he would have given to a full-blown Zen ritual. He went back upstairs and when he came down again, he was dressed in his robes. He greeted Joe at the door with a hug and kiss, thanking him for coming and telling him that Mass would be in our chapel, the zendo.

Issan and five or six of us sat in meditation posture on cushions while Joe improvised the ancient catholic liturgy, beginning with a simple rite of confession and forgiveness. When it came time to read from the New Testament, Joe took a small white, well-worn book out of a pocket in his jacket, and said that his mother had told him that the story he was about to read contained all the essentials for a true Christian life.

Then he read from the gospel of Luke, chapter 11, the parable of the Good Samaritan. For any of you who need a refresher course in New Testament studies, this is a story about a man who is robbed, taken for everything he has, savagely beaten and left by the side of the road to die. All the people who might have helped, even those who should have helped, chose to walk on the other side of the street when they saw him—except for the Samaritan. Now the Samaritan in Jesus’s day was the guy whom good upstanding members of the community might have called the equivalent of “faggot” or “queer.” He was an outcast, but he was the only person who actually stopped and took some real action to help the poor fellow out. So Jesus teaches here that real love is shown through actions, not words.

The next morning—Sunday mornings were the usual gathering of the Hartford Street community—Issan began to talk about Fr. Joe and the liturgy. He was exuberant. He had fallen in love with Luke's parable, and Joe. He turned to me and asked, “What was the little white book that Fr. Joe read from?” Startled, I said that was the New Testament. “Oh,” said Issan, “it must have been in Latin when I heard it as an altar boy—or something, but it was exactly how we should lead our lives as Buddhists.” He then said that during the Mass he had the experience of really being forgiven and that the experience had allowed him to feel peace, even appreciation for his early religious training.

When Joe and I had dinner together the night before he flew back to Boston, I told him what Issan had said. A few days later, the small New Testament that had been in his jacket for years arrived in an envelope addressed to Issan. Before Issan died 6 months later, during one of out last meetings, he asked me to thank Joe again for the zendo mass after he was gone. I did. And that New Testament which passed from the pocket of Joe’s jacket to Issan’s spare bookshelf at Hartford Street to my altar, I have since passed on to another person who asked a dharma question about one the stories in the gospel of Jesus.

If I were to give a nice sounding Buddhist name to the next story, it might be something “like there’s nothing too small that you can let escape your attention, even if no one’s going to notice,” but I think that “They never get the pleats right” tells the story better.

When Maitri was on Hartford St., we carried on a full meditation schedule plus running the hospice. One Saturday we were sitting meditation from 5 in the morning till dusk. Issan was not sitting, actually he was in bed and his doctor, Rick Levine, was monitoring a fever that had spiked at about 103 the previous day. That evening, he was to preside at the wedding of two men, old friends, at the Hall of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. 20 years ago Issan married same sex couples in the religious tradition of Soto Zen—long before the issue of gay marriage exploded, Prop 8 passed, was then voided—well, you know that story.

Sometime after lunch I noticed his white koromo, fresh from the dry cleaners, hanging on the coat rack in the hallway. The koromo is a simple kimono style garment that a priest wears under the Okesa, the Buddha’s robe that is worn over the left shoulder. With the full robe, not much of the koromo is visible. It’s really like ceremonial underwear.

I went back to my cushion in the zendo. When I came up stairs again about 3:30 to fix tea before the last block of sitting, there was Issan in the living room, in his bathrobe, with a little head band, and swear dripping from his forehead behind an ironing board. He was ironing the koromo fresh from the dry cleaners. I stopped on the stairs and I had to stop myself from telling him to get back to bed, follow his doctor’s orders and save his strength. I am sure he saw the shocked look in eyes. He turned to me, chuckled and said, “They never get the pleats right.” I certainly wasn’t going to argue with a man who was obviously in a deep state of meditation.

He did preside over the wedding and it was fabulous. Steve and Shunko who were also part of the ceremonial team, came home relieved though complaining about the two husband’s gift list of toasters and table service, “Nothing for the Hospice!” Issan was quick to diffuse them—it was a very special day for the couple who were setting up house together for the first time.

And here is another lesson I learned from Issan, one that took me a long time to digest and one that I still struggle with: there is always enough money to do what you need to do. And most likely, in the best of circumstances, it will be just enough, not a penny more or a penny less. When you are tight, (or if you’re tight) it’s probably time to reorder your priorities.

Over more than 2 decades, Maitri has rethought its priorities many times and revised its budget accordingly. New drugs have increased the longevity of persons with AIDS, and the death rate has plummeted. But new issues have arisen: some people can’t manage the rigorous schedule of drug administration and need training; partners and family who are caring for people with more limited abilities imposed by HIV need a break to care for themselves and thus Maitri’s respite care program and training in self-care.

The new director along with the board will continue to adapt and reinvent Maitri’s programs to maintain the two hallmarks of Issan’s vision: quality care and a true home. This is also a place where we might dedicate our energy tonight: to support them as they chart new directions and promise to do what we can when they ask for whatever they’ll need, ideas, resources and of course money.

In the last year of Issan’s life, a local musician with some spiritual roots had a minor hit. I’m talking about Bobby McFerran’s, ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Issan loved the song and sometimes would hum or sing a bit of the lyric and then say, “that’s good but I think he should add, ‘Just do the best that you can.’ We aren’t asked to do more, but that’s more than enough.”

So I’ll end my stories here with the refrain: “don’t worry, be happy, do the best that you can.” Issan, you showed us whatever you can do with your own mind and heart is more than enough to make a lasting impact in the world.



And now finally to wrap it up, I’m going to return to my Buddhist joke:

Issan knew that he wasn’t a one-man show—even in his drag days he didn’t perform alone. He was not the Lone Rangerette, or Mary Tyler Moore facing adversity with a smile and disarming off the wall comments though he had some of that quality. Actually if I had to pick TV character for him it would be Rue McClanahan who played Blanche Devereaux in the “Golden Girls,” one of his favorite TV shows. So I can hear telling me, “Ken, be a sweetheart, and thank everyone.”

All of us are intimately connected with one another. The inner workings of an organization as complex as Maitri are also connected to us. As I look at this web, this net, the list of people whom I should thank is longer than the list of names I am going to read. But I will take a few minutes to read some names and I ask you to join me in acknowledging these people and offering them our deep gratitude.

Steve Allen, who returned from nirvana to help Issan (in his case, an innovative temple in Crestone Colorado), represents the many Buddhist practitioners who interrupted their own lives and practice to be with Issan as death approached. They include Steve’s wife, Angelique Farrow, Shunko Jamvold, David Bullock, David Sunseri, David Schneider, Lucien Childs, Zenshin Phil Whalen, Angie Runyon, Paul Rosenblum, Rick Levine, Zenkei Blanche Hartman, Issan's teacher, Richard Baker roshi, Kobun Chino roshi, John Tarrant roshi, Joan Halifax, Frank Osteseski, Ram Dass, Wendy Johnson and the gang from Green Gulch who brought cartons of food every week for the kitchen, Rob Lee whose photographs you see displayed here tonight, Tozan Mike Gallagher and Joshi Paul Higley, men with HIV who were ordained as zen priests, who practiced at HSZC and added enormously to the richness of our practice. I’ll humbly include myself among this group. I began my formal Zen practice at Hartford Street/Maitri Hospice and that has been an enormous gift. The privilege of being allowed to do this work changed my life.

Jerry Berg was a wonderful human being and fabulous leader in the San Francisco gay community. He can stand for all the men and women who were not members of the Buddhist community but generously stepped forward into important roles that ensured the success of Issan’s vision. They include, Richard Schober, Will Spritzma, Richard Fowler, George Heard, Jim Hormel, Tim Wolfred, Bill Musick, Tim Patriarcha (who is Buddhist), Tova Beatty, Maura-Singer Williams, Christine Vincent, Lynn, our head nurses, beginning with Jan Clark, and Anne, Visiting Nurses and Hospice, now Sutter-Home-Health, and Glo Newberry-Smith; I want to thank the hundreds of individuals who gave whatever they could afford, whether time or money, Jim Hormel, Al Baum, Jon Logan to name just a few; our volunteers, board members, Traci Teraoka, Sally Anne Campbell, George Stevens, Boone Callaway, Anne O’Driscoll who cooked great hearty meals, Jane Lloyd who cut hair, Bob Gordon and Bill Haskell, and perhaps a hundred more wonderful men and women who gave of themselves to be with our residents; I want to thank all our CNA’s, Gary, Ichto who’s been with Maitri for more than 20 years, Joyce Cabit, who has also been with us almost from the beginning to name just a few; I have to thank the many small businesses that helped with services, like Marcello’s pizza. Friday night pizza dinner was a highlight of the week and allowed the cook a well deserved night off. I also want to include the designers, craftsmen and carpenters who helped us covert 61 Hartford Street into a hospice, only mentioning 2, Alberto, and Juan (Issan thought you were about as handsome as men come), and I have to thank those who transformed the building where we’re standing now, especially Sylvia Kwan and Joseph Chance. You helped Issan create Buddhist heaven.

And finally I want to thank the almost 950 men and women who made Maitri their home during the last months and days of their lives. You allowed us the privilege of being your servants, and walk with you as you completed your earthly journeys. Your generosity taught us lessons we can never forget. You changed our lives.

The list goes on but I have to stop here. To all the many people and organizations who’ve shared and contributed to Issan’s vision over nearly 25 years, our heartfelt thanks.

Thank you all for your kind attention. Thank you, Issan. As is said in the traditional closing prayers for celebrations like this: May the teaching of your school go on forever. May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.

To read more reflections about the life of Issan, see some photographs, read his dharma talks, go to my Record of Issan page.

Buddhism doesn’t need saints

 And by the way, don’t cry too much over Thích Nhất Hạnh.

Dorothy Day said: "Don't call me a saint, I don't want to be dismissed that easily." Of course Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, proposed her for canonization as soon as he could. The old left wing Catholic in me finds it ironic that a man who is the complete antithesis of the kind of life Day proposes for a modern Christian calls her Blessed Dorothy. She might accuse him of dampening her radical voice, even silencing the anarchist grandmother who confounded comfortable notions, but I wouldn't hesitate, not even for a nano second.

Pushing for sainthood lets purveyors of religious doublespeak, cults, snake oil and associated pyramid schemes off the hook for their flagrant sins. I will also argue that the whole rigmarole of canonization is just lip service to what Jesus calls Christians to do. We don’t really have to go and take care of lepers. Saint Damien did it. Pray to him that we be spared. Or in the case of the Founder of the Catholic Worker, someone can take care of the castoffs our materialistic culture dumps on the Bowery as long as it’s not me or my kids.

One of the reasons that the leaders of the Protestant Reformation dismissed saints was to end the superstitious practice of encasing some bones in the local cathedral to entice lucrative pilgrim spending as well as defund the Papal ponzi scheme of selling indulgences to cover the extravagant cost of building Saint Peter’s in Rome. Every organized religion needs a building maintenance fund so this might be just have been marketing but it has always felt a bit underhanded to me.

There are some people who want to make Issan Dorsey into a Buddhist saint--gotta have a saint in high heels. Of course we could do worse. 

Before I started work at  Maitri Hospice, the Dalai Lama’s rain-maker, the Yogin Yeshe Dorje visited. He and Issan got on very well, one of those connections. The rainmaker grabbed Issan and said, “You’ve created Buddhist Heaven.” Issan laughed. Later when I asked Issan about the visit, he smiled and said, “He was a very nice man, but he didn’t pay the water bill.”

All that is just a preface to something that has been creeping to the surface as the tributes pour in for Thầy, “The Saint of Mindfulness, Beloved Thích Nhất Hanh,” and I need to say it. Whether he really was a very nice Buddhist dude, or even if he was just an ordinary flawed human like the rest of us, don't for a minute think that the work of being mindful, practicing, looking after our interconnected world can be done by anyone else but us, and that includes all the difficult bits. Don’t waste a lot of tears or weave nostalgic odes about all the really good teachers dying. The Lord Buddha died too, quite a few years back.

We can't allow ourselves to get distracted by any cult of personality. We can't get off the hook no matter how hard, by whatever devious means we try. We have to do the work ourselves.

I began with the caution from Blessed Dorothy Day undermining the whole sanctification scheme, and I will close with a hopeful note from the same complicated woman who lived an exemplary life, "The world will be saved by beauty." Amen.

Maitri Hospice, Ken Ireland, an Interview with Morgan Zo Callahan

8/12/2014

This is a draft of a chapter from a forthcoming book: A Thousand Arms: A Guidebook for Buddhist Leaders, edited by Danny Fisher and Nathan Michon.

I met Ken Ireland in 2002 after sitting in a Zen meditation group he led at the YMCA in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. He invited me to visit Maitri (Sanskrit for “compassionate friendship”), a hospice for people with AIDS in San Francisco. (www.maitrisf.org). In 1987 Maitri was founded in San Francisco’s Castro district by Issan Dorsey, a Zen priest, and several friends, among them Steve Allen and David Sunseri. “The Castro was a place for the gay revolution with its arts, its parties, its style and its joie de vivre, and Issan was part of these happenings. Then, in the early 1980s, AIDS started to appear and, at first, no one knew what to make of it.” (John Tarrant, Bring Me the Rhinoceros, p.77)  Issan Dorsey had been ordained a Zen priest in 1975. By 1980, he was part of an informal group of gay Buddhists, and was invited to become the head teacher at the Hartford Street Zen Center in the Castro. Issan was appointed abbot in 1989, and his teacher, Richard Baker Roshi named him a lineage holder: he became Issan Roshi. In 1987 Issan invited a homeless student dying of AIDS into the Zen center, and Maitri was born. Issan himself died from AIDS in 1990. (Cf. Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey by David Schneider)

I was impressed that Maitri was a warm, “at home” environment where both caregiver and patient deeply listened to each other. The ample kitchen had a signed, framed photo of Elizabeth Taylor who had visited, and encouraged the residents. Golden light danced on the fresh green plants in the hallways and communal areas. I was reminded of Camus: “The great courage is still to gaze squarely at the light as it is at death.” Maitri is the first Buddhist residential hospice in the U.S. Over more than 20 years Maitri has been the final home for more than 900 people with AIDS. This is from Maitri’s mission statement: “We strive to provide the type of care that each of us would like to receive at the end of our lives—care that is dignified, non-judgmental, and unconditional. We hold dear the principle that each resident has the right to determine the degree of choice and awareness with which to experience life and death.”

Issan and his friends, Ken among them, didn’t set out to found a Buddhist Hospice. Rather he was creating a way to respond to the deadly epidemic that was ravaging his community. He was also creating a place to practice with his own death fast approaching. The result was Maitri.

********

Ken Ireland has practiced Buddhism for more than four decades, first with Master C.M. Chen, then Issan Dorsey Roshi and Philip Zenshin Whalen at HSZC. In 1994 he began koan practice with Robert Aitken, and continued with John Tarrant and David Weinstein. Ken was Maitri’s executive director from 1989 through 1993. He and his partner currently spend half the year in northern India with the community gathered around H.H. the Dalai Lama.

I first interviewed Ken more than 20 years ago. I have allowed him to let his words reflect how that experience has remained with him and changed him over the years.

Morgan Zo Callahan: Wonderful talking with you. Ken, how do you relate with someone who's dying?

Ken Ireland: The short answer is “as normally as possible.” But right away as soon as I began to live with people who had a grave diagnosis and who were very close to death, I noticed that their world, and by extension mine, was quite different. It is both slower and much more immediate. I saw theorizing fall away--intellectual considerations like “What's going to happen after death? Am I going to be around?” Conversations got real and something else came forward. I heard requests such as “I want to have my relationship with my family straightened out before I die. I want to make peace with my ex before I die. I want to die on my own terms.” Somehow, even when they seemed impossible, all of us who were part of Maitri tried to fulfill those requests. What we crafted was far from perfect, but life and living life to the end changed on its own accord.

MZC: Apart from the interpersonal relationships, how do you respond to the inevitable natural laws of the process of dying? How do you stay focused and mindful without expectations about how it is all supposed to be?

KI: As hard as we, in cahoots with our medical professionals, try to fight nature and stave off death, nature always wins. All I can do is try to stay present with that process. The body begins to shut down in its own way; physiological, mental, and psychological changes move into place and take over. We're also at the mercy of those processes. We may try to defend ourselves. We experience a variety of natural human reactions in the face of uncertainty, fear, grief, anxiety, but we have no real control. We will eventually have to give up that kind of control whether we want to or not. 

What I’ve seen over and over is that our normal reaction to postpone the inevitable proves useless. There’s no way out. There’s no tomorrow. I can only take care of my own mental state--an iffy job at best--but I just say to myself, okay, I'm with this particular person at this very moment. I've decided to be here. I've committed myself to be of service, to alleviate the pain, to ease the transition.

MZC: In what ways is your work a natural expression of your Buddhist practice?

KI:  I can’t lie and pretend that it was all hunky dory. Living through the AIDS epidemic, being with so many people, mostly gay men who were my age or younger, was extremely painful. From the point of view of my own cherished ideas about how things should be, it was an impossible task. But on the other hand, in terms of training, in terms of deepening my own meditation, and in terms of personal rewards, it was, and is, great practice.  

MZC: How were your teachers helpful in preparing you to engage hospice work?

KI: When I met Yogi Chen in Berkeley in the early 70’s, he introduced me to the meditation on impermanence and the suffering arising from clinging. In Tibet he’d lived for three years in the charnel grounds where dead bodies were brought to have vultures strip the flesh from their bones before they were gathered up. Very specially, highly trained practitioners undertook this practice. When I first became involved at Maitri, partially I’m sure to assure myself that I was not entirely crazy, I tried to tell myself that we were trying to adapt this practice for our times. (There’s always a need for practice manuals, I suppose, both as a record of the experience of our ancestors and a kind of reassurance that we’re on the right track.) But in time I gave that up, and realized that we were just responding to the circumstances of our lives in way that made sense and arose from our own practice.  I learned from Issan and the many people we took care of. They taught me to relate to humans in any circumstance with respect and love, getting out of the way as much as possible. Over the years I’ve noticed that the experience changed something in me in terms of my relationship to people, my own life, my growing older, the physical breakdowns of my body. It's not just acceptance, and certainly not resignation. It’s more like a transformation, a noticeable change in the air we breathe.

MZC: So meditations on impermanence and encounters in hospice have changed the way you live your life?

KI: I hope so. I am definitely not the same man who moved into Maitri and cared for more than 80 people who died.  I have the same questions that I had when I was a Jesuit: What are our lives about? What do we want to make our lives about? What do we want to do with our lives in the time that we have? How can I do something that's of value? But for me this is where my Buddhist practice comes in: I'm going to do something that aims to benefit all beings because I'm not alone in the universe. If I consider how I can really take care of a person in the way in which he or she would like while at the same time taking care of myself, the world becomes different. At least that was my experience. When the point is to be of service to somebody when they're at the end of their lives, then the question becomes something like, instead of avoiding the end of life, how does life become full and complete from beginning to end? The whole process is alive and well; it breathes and pulsates, as we breathe from beginning to end. 

MZC: One night I received a call at one o’clock in the morning; it was from a member of our school board who very desperately related to me that a Japanese gentleman, a devoted Buddhist, was dying; the family wanted to take the man off life support. I was asked to call the Rosemead Buddhist Monastery and come with a monk to the hospital.  I said, my gosh, it's one o’clock in the morning. But I said I'd do it. So I called the monastery; the monks were very upset at first. But it ended up that three monks happily went to the bedside, and chanted. “We transfer the effects of the good that we’ve done in our lives for whatever journey this dying person is going on.”

KI: That's what we do. The monks got out of bed to be of service to the family and dying person.  They sat with them, and chanted, performing the rituals of the end of life. They were present with him when all this was going on. It's a wonderful practice.