Heels Outside The Door

“I gave up the heels but kept the skirt.”--Issan “Tommy” Dorsey Roshi, The Boy as Pretty as the Girl Next Door

My friend the Zen teacher Roshi Susan Murphy verbally sketched the opening shot for a movie that she was thinking about doing. I titled it for her--“Issan, The Movie.” The camera focuses on the zendo porch and where people have neatly, almost formally, arranged the shoes they shed before entering the meditation hall. The camera zooms in and scans the sneakers, Birkenstocks, flip flops and a lone pair of high heels. 

I’ve always liked that visual. There’s a whole story in those few fleeting images. In my mind the slippers had to be red, perhaps even some rhinestones for dual use on stage.

But there was also reference to Michael Downing’s Shoes Outside the Door, though the title seemed to suggest, unfairly in my view, an attractive woman and a sexual tryst outside the Buddhist Precepts. The door in question was not the formal entrance to the zendo, but the door of Richard Baker’s private cabin at Tassajara where the discovery of a woman’s shoes was the beginning of the unraveling of Baker Roshi’s tenure as abbot. Though Downing claimed to stick to an objective rendition of a major rupture in history of an important Western Zen temple, the story that the title references belies that it includes a bit of muckraking. It was a scandal that keeps reappearing like a bad dream in the history of the San Francisco Zen Center. 

How do we exorcize or excise a nightmare? Is it even possible? Can we just forget it, or in a more Buddhist sounding directive, lay it aside?

This question has troubled the humans who practice since Lord Buddha himself walked out of his father’s palace. How do we carry the past? How do we deal with the results of our actions? When I first encountered this notion in my own practice, it reactivated memories of the darker aspects of my own life. In the old story we hear that the Buddha was troubled by the sight of sick people, desperate people, and dead bodies. I actually think that there’s a lot of philosophical thinking involved in that presentation as if an abstract notion of impermanence and suffering presented itself for inspection and reflection. What if Siddhartha himself had visceral emotional human responses that included all the gray shades of hesitancy, infantile and magical thinking, bargaining, even second guessing and mistakes? These are the kind of human reactions that we have to deal with.

Issan, Phil Whalen and a few others were at the center of the San Francisco Zen Center storm as people who did not turn against Richard Baker. Issan would not have blushed at the real or imagined nubile figure in his teacher’s life, and did he abandon his teacher.  His own life had more than its share of dark and loving moments. He did not shun, renounce, ostracize, vilify, or denounce though I’m sure that many longtime friends encouraged, perhaps even nudged him in that direction. This does not imply that he tolerated or excused whatever behaviors might have occurred. Rather, his own experience of human frailty or suffering allowed him a kind of generous and compassionate understanding that we are all human. 

This history of the planting Zen practice in the West is filled to overflowing with stories of men and women who came to Zen after deeply troubling personal experiences. Buddhism is not a religion invented to steer sinners towards repentance nor is it a religion that requires sainthood. Practice allows each one of us a certain degree of freedom from being attached to the past.  

Issan became Richard Baker’s first dharma heir. For me there is no mystery or magical thinking in that.

There was a choice in the matter, but he touched as little as possible. “I gave up the heels but I kept the skirt.”

Sweeping darkness

into a corner

only makes the room 

unbearably bright. 

Better for the defilements 

to be left undisturbed. 

Let them glow like embers 

drift away like ash.

Verse by Richard von Sturmer