“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.”
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