Slurping is Zen

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

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

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

 ramen properly) from the ramen master.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

"The Three Key B’s of Buddhism: Bowing, Boring and Bliss," by Phil Whalen & Ken Ireland

 

Phil with Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Naropa

Bowing, Boring, and Bliss

I recall a talk about “Bowing” by Zenshin Phil Whalen at the Hartford Street Zen Center. Damn, I loved his talks. He was, without a doubt, one of the most literate men ever to don the robes of a Zen priest anywhere, at any time. And if you want to challenge me, I’ll be suiting up on the Dalai Lama’s debate ground up here in McLeod Ganj. 

But first things first—I was going to try to record the talk, but I was my usual bumbling self with electronic equipment, and I couldn’t get the machine working in good time. Being his usual patient self, he yelled at me, saying that we didn’t have all day and, anyway, some things were just not meant to be recorded. Sometimes, words are purposefully impermanent. It was not like he was going to recite some goddamn hidden, secret sutra for the last time before he croaked.

So I lost the talk, but I am going to do my best to reconstruct it from the basic “B’s” as I remember them.

He began by saying that if he really wanted to write a bestseller, his publisher would insist that he come up with a title like the “The 10 Recondite Rules for Clean Buddhist Living” or something like that. So let’s give it a try: “The Three Key B’s of Buddhism, Bowing Boredom and Bliss.”  Perhaps Phil’s publisher was onto something. More than 20 years have passed, and I still remember long sections of his talk (it’s also true that, as with many teachers, he returned again and again to his favorite topics, like an old horse headed back to the barn).

When he was in Japan, in the monasteries and temples there, everyone bowed three times. People just always bowed three times. But for those who couldn’t count, he said, before he just sat down to begin his talk, he bowed nine times. We all bow nine times at Zen Center; why is that? Well, he said, when the first students gathered around Suzuki Roshi in San Francisco, they went to him one day and complained, “Roshi, we love you, but we’re Americans, and we don’t like all this bowing. We don’t understand it. So why are we doing it?” And the Roshi said with a smile, “Oh, so you don't like bowing three times? Good. Perfect. I think we should bow nine times. Better that way, More practice.”

So we bow nine times. Better that way. Practice.

Phil then told an anecdotal story about some legendary old Japanese teacher way out in the middle-of-nowhere backcountry who was revered for the callous on his forehead. He explained himself: one of his first teachers had scolded him for being stubborn and told him bowing would be a good practice. So he began bowing. He never stopped. He discovered that the body is stubborn and the mind is stubborn. He said that he would stop when he stopped being stubborn. So he just kept bowing and thus the calloused forehead. In one way or another, we’re all like that.

Then he said that Zen students actually have it very easy. In Tibet, all the new monks bow 100,000 times before they do anything. It’s called Ngondro, and it involves the whole body, not just your forehead, hands, arms, knees and feet touching the floor but your whole body flat out, like you were a swimming fish, and it’s so strenuous that it takes a lot of effort to reel back and bounce back up. Do that a hundred thousand times. I’m told that it’s a purifying exercise. But it’s not done with some idea of repentance like Christian pilgrims bowing every three feet along the Camino de Santiago. It’s done because we practice meditation with every bit of ourselves wholeheartedly, fully, without reservation, holding nothing back. 

And then he said that anyone who’s lived in Asia knows that bowing is just good manners. It’s a sign of respect. You tilt your body down, your eyes are not focused on the face of the person you’re greeting, and your whole body is lower. Of course, you’re going to bow lower to a king or abbot. There’s a whole book of bowing etiquette: you bow very slightly to someone who’s your equal, but your bow is lower when you greet your parent or someone who’s older out of respect. That’s why we bow to our teachers in a formal situation. We’re showing respect and love. And we show it by using our whole body and mind. Our mind bows down, and for maybe an instant, we’re slightly less arrogant. We have to throw every bit of being into the bow.

But the most important thing, and here is a place where I actually have Phil’s own words, from his notebooks from Tassajara, we have to make it our own. In the rule-infested monastery or practice center, we ask ourselves, are we “bowing to rules rather than using them? We must contrive to be Buddhas & patriarchs rather than students who are good at following schedules (and bowing).”

But you’ll notice, he said, we follow a certain order in the zendo—we bow to the cushion, then everyone else in the room, and we sit. How strange, bowing to the cushion. We’re not bowing to a Buddha or a person. You can think of it any way you want to. Sometimes, I like to think that I am bowing to the practice, but that is really way too abstract. Sometimes, I do it just automatically, without thinking much of anything. But in any case, we just do it. What you think about is probably not important.

Now we get to the B for boring.

We sit, and almost immediately after, we learn to sit with only slight discomfort. Our bodies become both more relaxed and more alert, and we get bored. We all have our own experiences, but I’ll tell the world I get bored.

But then the mind, it’s like fiddling with a bungled up ball of twine, if you try to untangle it when you’re frustrated or angry, the knots are just going to get tighter. You’ll be looking for a knife (He laughed). I’ve pictured the mind as a bag of worms or a net of living anchovies. But you get the point; it’s a conundrum, it’s a mess. It may be filled with ghosts or paranoia or algebraic equations. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, it’s just there, all tangled up. 

So there’s this big mess of thread sitting in your mind, and you just begin to play with it without much purpose, no rhyme or reason. You tug a bit here and notice that’s a bit looser over there, but you’re relaxed, and maybe you follow the thread to a knot that looks tight, but on closer inspection, it loosens up and falls away. And maybe after a while, there’s just a whole mess of lovely threads in front of you, and though you really don’t fully grasp how it happened, there it is.

Then the bell rings. 

I’ll end by quoting Mr. Robert Bly, who tells us to follow our bliss. Of course, Mr. Joseph Campbell has also told us to follow our bliss, and he did it on the Public Television Station, so it must be something worth doing. But I was watching Bly talk about it on the TV and found him quite interesting, if not persuasive—because bliss is not something I can buy, like the gummy bears I get at Walgreens. It’s just there. 

Some very fussy Buddhists might describe it as a fruit of meditation. If you hang out long enough, it’s just there because it’s always been there, but you wake up, or you open your eyes, or you open your heart. I’ll agree that it’s just there, and it really doesn’t matter how it got there. But this is something it shares with gummy bears: when you taste it, you know that it’s a gummy bear.

Sometimes, it might feel like something is lost in the process. Bly quoted a poem by Antonio Machado, which I quite like.

The wind one brilliant day called to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

The wind said, “In return for the odor of my jasmine, I’d like all the odor of your roses. ”

[Machado said,] “I have no roses; all the flowers in my garden are dead … ”

The wind said, “Then, I’ll take the withered petals, and the yellow leaves, ”

and the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself, “What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”

I think that’s enough for today. Keep bowing. Thank you.

Issan’s Jesus Koan

 

Memories in a shoe box

23 April 2010

This story is really about the moment I realized what I always knew—that even my own meditation doesn't belong to me.

The line from the dedication in the Soto Zen service at a temple founder’s altar, “May the Teaching of this school go on forever,” is almost a cliché. Are there even answers to the obvious questions, “What is the Teaching of this school?” “How, or even why, should they go on forever?” The founder’s teaching is treated like an assumption. I knew Issan as a friend, a man dying of AIDS, a hilarious prankster even when he was in great pain, and a teacher who opened up a vast, new exploration for me. Of course, I harbor assumptions, and if I were to examine his life as if he were the token gay Buddhist saint in drag, that might be more of a blinder than an opening.

A student from New York Zen Center’s Contemplative Care Program contacted me about unearthing information about Issan’s legacy. He had been referred by Rev. Rusty Smith, the Executive Director of Maitri Hospice, or as it’s now called, “Maitri Compassionate Care.” Since the separation of Hartford Street Zen Center and the Hospice, I feared that a lot of material had been lost. Adding to the predicament, Issan loved the phone, but the written word was not so much: there were no notes from the dharma talks. There were a few snapshots from Del Carlson, a close friend, one dharma talk that had been transcribed, and, of course, David Schneider’s wonderful “Street Zen.” As for the rest, the kind of stuff that you don’t really know what to do with, the sentimental gifts stored in an old shoe box, personal memories of the way that he interacted with each of us as his students, his jokes, the outrageous stories that you might not want to share with your mother—and there were plenty of those, where could we begin to look?

In early Spring of 2010, I ran into Bruce Boone, a longtime student of Issan, outside the Café Flore, which is only a short walk from the Hartford Street Zen Center. After the usual “bring me up to date” conversation, which, sadly, included news of his longtime partner’s death, we began to talk about our friend. 

I try to be on the lookout for any expression of his teaching that feels genuine and not anecdotal gay-feel-good Buddhism. I turned the conversation to gathering Issan’s old students together and beginning to record our memories of how our friend really taught us. I cannot remember if Bruce thought the gathering was a good idea, but he shared a story that moved me.

One morning in North Beach, he’d walked into a quiet church, the shrine of Francis d'Assisi, with his teacher, a gay man who had HIV and knew that he faced an inevitable painful death. Bruce might have been trying to offer Issan a place of rest, or maybe peace and comfort, or he might have been acting as a kind tour guide to the hidden shrines of San Francisco.

When Issan saw the image of Jesus crucified, he turned to Bruce and said, “Oh, that’s me.” Bruce, a former seminarian, said it brought tears to his eyes, but as he told the story, Issan spoke in almost an off-handed way. His tone was flat, and Bruce knew the remark was entirely serious. He called it “Issan’s Jesus koan.”

I knew that Issan had been raised as a Roman Catholic in the traditional Irish-American way, and as a young adult, he’d left the rank and file of practicing Catholics. I think that “reject” would be too strong a word. “Neglect” might be better, as in “hardly enough time” for the more pressing things in his life, running a commune, cleaning house, finding the perfect dress with the right hairstyle and make-up, and eventually drugs. But I had no idea how he held his inherited beliefs. Now facing pain and suffering, he was confronted with a familiar image from his impressionable years in a suburban catholic parish in Santa Barbara, and there it was—just recognition. It sounded almost matter-of-fact.

Bruce’s words kicked something loose in me—the cross as a koan? It had been almost 20 years since Issan died, and Bruce still held this story about Issan, one for which he had no ready answers or explanations in a loving way. Then he said, “Even those brief moments while I sat facing the wall when everything seemed clear as a bell, those few deep experiences have only begun to open up what he might have meant.”

Then I got it: Bruce has been sitting right next to me and meditating for me. He’d handed over the fruits of his zazen without a second thought. They were mine. How generous. Generosity is a necessary condition for sharing my meditation with the person sitting next to me, but I don't want my thinking too much to get in the way. It just happens. It is the path that the Zen ancestors have always used to transmit their experience to us. If it's a mystery or even a slippery slope, so what?

Hakuin Zenji’s hymn in praise of meditation contains the verse: “From dark path to dark path,” which seems an inescapable part of our human experience. But we can also sing “From bright path to bright path!” I’ve had moments when I saw clearly that the meditation experience is not a solipsistic self-generated enlightenment. I would be more than willing to congratulate myself for all the good effort that I have been making over many years in practice, but what if it weren’t necessarily so? What if the work has already been done or is always being done? Bruce has been working on Issan’s koan for more than 20 years, and all I did was stand next to him on the street for a few minutes. The Teaching of Issan's school has lived on for almost 30 years. Wrapping my mind around “forever” seems just a step away.

My friend Ken MacDonald added more lyricism to the Soto dedication at the closing of the founder's service:

"These teachings go on forever;

on and on they flow,

without beginning or end".

To read more reflections about Issan's life, see some photographs, and listen to a dharma talk, go to my page, The Record* of Issan.

How a blind monk might respond to my piece

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Language about the experience of meditation also plays tricks. 

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

The year's at the spring

And day's at the morn;

Morning's at seven;

The hill-side's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn:

God's in his heaven—

All's right with the world!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick change of scene

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

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

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

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

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

"The End of the Rainbow"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

No more, no less.

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