That’s just the way it is in Buddhism

I want to respond to Doug McFerran’s comment on my post "How this Jesuit became Buddhist.": Doug is an old friend whom I met through a group of former Jesuits. He said that it seemed to him that I always needed a teacher, and that he was the opposite. After I got over being defensive, I thought “good point: do we need a teacher and what for?” I had to give up feeling that I am just some weak ninny follower who needs a guru, but I can do that. There is almost universal insistence across all Buddhist schools that the transmission of the Buddha Dharma requires a student-teacher relationship. It’s not just a way of buying the teacher’s dinner, or maintaining a school’s stronghold on a student's mind and pocketbook. That’s just the way it is in Buddhism. 

Buddhism is not a revealed religion. There is no deposit of faith that closed with the death of the last of Buddha's original disciples. Of course there are lots of texts, many more that actually probably should be considered than what comes to us as the gospel of Jesus; there is also a lot of history, teachers fighting with each other, sects, scandals and disputes, all the usual stuff of human interactions. But ultimately only our own experience shows us the path. That is all we got. When the Buddha died (if I can paraphrase and even if I am not allowed to, I will), he said, “You’re on your own. I’ve given you 40 years of training. I hope it actually did some good. Everything is always changing. You’ll have to hold up your experience carefully and examine it. Try not to take any wooden nickels.”*

The result is that although there is a huge body of textual material, we have an oral religious tradition. It’s been sliced and diced by thousands and thousands of monks over approximately 93 or 95 generations since the parinirvana of the Lord Buddha, but if you want to do Buddhism, you find a teacher. My cab driver in Bangkok, in the West we’d call him a pious man, said to me, “I have a lama.” He doesn’t just go to church. At the very core of his personal practice is a person we might recognize as a monk or teacher whom he talks to about his life. The Dalai Lama has teachers, the best that money can buy, but there are men who are his teachers. He’s supposedly an incarnate Bodhisattva but he has teachers. Go figure. Every monk and nun, every student, most pious laymen and women where I live in northern India also have teachers. They probably don’t talk to them on a regular basis as we do in zen, but at some point when they decided to practice their Buddhism, to “take refuge,” a teacher accepted them, and usually gave them a new name. I have a Tibetan name that Kalu Rinpoche, one of HH’s teachers, gave me in about 1976 and another Japanese name that Phil Whalen gave me when I took the Bodhisattva precepts as a layman in 1991.

In Catholicism we have confession and the other sacraments as a way of making the invisible world present, an outward sign of an inner grace. In Buddhism we meditate, we might take the precepts and we talk. If you’re lucky you will find someone whom you can really talk to. Stuff happens in meditation. It just does. I wouldn’t say that we “deal with it” or as we might say in the West, “handle it” by talking about it, but the actual conversations become part of the practice. It is difficult to explain. Let me tell a story. Father Eimyo LaSalle was the Jesuit priest most responsible for the extraordinary number of Jesuits who have been trained and authorized as Zen teachers in their own right. He is the root teacher of a new lineage of Christian Buddhists. He was never publicly recognized as a teacher in his own right, but I am quite sure that his teacher, Yamada Koun, recognized him. I am in this same lineage. My friend David Weinstein was also a student of Yamada Roshi. David tells the story of often seeing LaSalle, then well past 90, at the zendo in Kamakura doing formal interview with his teacher. One morning David was standing with Yamada as LaSalle was leaving. Yamada turned to David and said, “there is the man who taught me how to practice the koans in life.” Teacher/teaching is not as straightforward as the English word suggests.

A liturgical note: in every Buddhist temple I’ve gone for teaching, there is singing before and after. Inevitably there is a chant that lists all the ancestors, usually with a lot of words of gratitude. On September 6th of each year, there is a founder’s ceremony at Hartford Street, and the names of Issan’s teachers from Siddhartha Gautama through Indian, Chinese, Japanese and American teachers (in an abbreviated form--there are officially more than 90 generations of teachers) are chanted. And then we all ask that his teaching--Issan’s--go on forever. We are not saying that Issan was “the Buddha,” but we acknowledge that he was a vehicle for the teaching and that he made it his own. 

When I first came to the Hartford Street Zen Center, every few months a group of monks, mostly from Japan but several Western Buddhists as well, would come by to visit the hospice. I would serve tea, maybe they stayed for zazen, they talked with Steve, Issan and Phil. They asked as many questions as they answered. They were not coming by to inquire after the health of Issan who at this point already had some notoriety as the former drag queen monk. They came to examine how the dharma met the real circumstances of the epidemic in that moment. They came to test Issan’s dharma. 

I work with the koans. After more than a thousand years of koan practice, there are several “Koans for Dummies” books that Japanese monks use to cheat, pass and get a cushy assignment. They were usually hidden in the monastery toilets and a few translations are floating around Western centers in various places. (My days of seeking out a rich temple gig are long past, not to say that I haven’t picked up a clue or two from the manuals when I was stuck). What is also true is that teachers who have been authorized to teach are also given another book, “A thousand years of  teacher’s notes,” including lots from the oral tradition--great responses, lines of inquiry, questions to ask, even gestures to look for. So when I decided to study the Blue Cliff Record, I went looking for someone who was authorized to teach it. My friend James Ismael Ford put me in touch with one of his senior students, Ed Oberholtzer. Ed and I have been working together every week for more than two years. Ed’s good. He encourages me. He never gives me an answer and when I want to peek at the precious marginalia, he will only talk about it after I have had some insight myself. Is this better than working on my own? Of course. Does this mean that neither of us go out check some juicy piece of modern Zen scholarship about a text, teacher, or sociology? We share it.

And now for the last question that I see at this point: Does anyone need any of this to be happy, or to get enlightened?  As you might have guessed, several Buddhists have already considered the question and formulated an answer. Doug, you are an Arhat, a category and description for men and women who have gained their own enlightenment. They looked at the world of samsara and they got it. They found the key and unlocked the door, and achieved a high state of inner peace. They are also called Shravakas, but I think that refers more to the library/self-help stage. But tradition also says that they still haven’t really fully got it. At least in the Mahayana, they are still not bodhisattvas, that is beings who are dedicated to the enlightenment, the freedom of all beings. There’s still too much self there, and for the Mahayanist there is No Self. If you want to figure out what that means, you might need a teacher.

And one last knot in this thread: Having a teacher, at least in my experience, is still very rich. Times are changing.  As I said I still work with a teacher. It’s part of Buddhist practice. Since I began to practice meditation, study the scripture and, most importantly, work with the koans, I have had several teachers. I do better than if I were working on my own. I know that from experience. I would describe it more like a mentor relationship, but that seems to describe a higher and lower position. Some of the people that I have talked with have less experience than I do. At this point they all are younger, but in the relationship I consider myself on equal footing. There is always something to learn. 

* *Buddha  gathered with his monks encouraging them to continue practicing everything he taught them long after he was gone. His words, translated into modern English: “I was only able to point the way for you.” He furthered: “All individual things pass away. Strive on with diligence.”

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.”

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

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

La Volonté de Savoir, Foucault on Sexuality

McLeod Ganj, Vesak
Revised Dewali, 2022

After all the bad press, after the astronomical settlements of lawsuits, after the decimation of congregations, Zen masters, priests and politicians continue to behave badly--still. Recently a gifted young teacher, Josh Bartok, resigned from the vibrant Greater Boston Zen Center amid a swirl of accusations of sexual impropriety. As he was trained by James Ismael Ford, my teacher’s teacher, I took note. Bartok joins a list that keeps growing.

Some blame it on losing sight of the true teaching of the Buddha, or Jesus. Others blame it on human frailty, or sin, or disregarding the grave precepts. or teachers and priests getting power-hungry when elevated to a position of authority and taking advantage of people in their care.

But taking a position of blame and passing judgment is not ultimately very useful in my view. It is also distinct from creating policies and procedures for establishing protections against abuse within our communities and hearing grievances. Blanket condemnation is not, to use a Buddhist phrase, skillful means. It creates a dead end.

I would like to take a step back and try to carefully examine the situation through a different set of lenses.

When I showed the first draft of this article to various people, some of whom I did not know but who’d been involved in communities where significant damage had occurred, they thought that I was simply doing revisionist history, letting certain people off the hook, or creating loopholes for abusive behavior. These people felt that after all the bad blood, there had not really ever been a proper settling of accounts. I want to be clear: I do not want to change the record, or excuse anyone whose behavior has caused harm. That is the arena for those who’ve experienced the damage or insult and the perpetrators, but we all take sides. And in a real sense the whole community has been harmed. But it is also true that the arena of taking a position, leveling blame, feeling some degree of personal fear and exposure is fertile ground for a Zen student to practice introspection.

The list is long, and includes many of the most important of the first generation of Zen teachers in the West. I have to ask myself as a practitioner, and a person who’s had important interactions with several teachers whose behavior has fallen under a dark cloud, how can I understand my own feelings in a way that might shed light rather than simply confirm a long standing belief system. Along the way, I also want to do some excavation of persistent, compelling but useless assumptions.

Is it about sex?

In Jesuit school, we teenage boys lined up in chapel on First Friday mornings to receive absolution for the sins of the flesh, or what was euphemistically called “self-abuse.” Maybe there was an occasional confession of cheating on the Latin vocabulary quiz, but we all masterbated.

The line for Father Halloran’s confessional was long because he was understanding of adolescent sex, or at least he seemed more tolerant than immigrant Father Murphy who was Puritanical, angrily demanding manly resolve that you would never to play with your penis again. Halloran might have simply been bored, or realistic, or perhaps he’d just given up, but he still demanded a sufficient level of shame before he dispensed the penance of 5 “Our Father’s” and 10 “Hail Mary’s.”

When the inner compulsion for shaming became intolerable, or you’d made the pious decision to try to live like a saint, you quickly ducked into Father Murphy’s booth where all hell broke loose. I made the mistake of asking for his absolution once and never went back. I also didn’t want to be seen in that line by Saint Aloysius’s shrine because the boys who masterbated together feared that you named names when Murphy asked the prescribed question from the confession manual “with yourself or others?” Dealing with ostracization as well as shame. Social ramifications have always part and parcel of sexual training.

Sex, shame, purification, reslove, failure to meet the standard demanded by the Irish Catholic cult, sex, shame, repeat. Perhaps this was just the way things have always worked, La Comédie humaine. We know without a doubt that some Zen teachers, priests or politicians will continue to abuse just as surely as the same faces will be back at the understanding, tired or just fed-up Father Halloran’s confessional the Friday before they are next obliged to perform the Sunday ritual of Holy Communion with their parents, free of mortal sin.

Shifting Zip codes

Then some of us became Buddhists. Perhaps part of the motivation for our seeking was to find a more tolerant setting for our sexual personna or nonconforming proclivities, or at least an escape from the charade. This was certainly part of my story. I joined a truly ecumenical movement. Irish Catholics may have a particular flavor as opposed to the Jews, but basically the same tales, the same quilt run through the whole sangha, and this includes the immigrant communities, the only possible difference being the level of toleration.

However, we soon discovered that our sexual training, repression and cultural taboos had simply shifted zip codes. They were persistent and stubborn. The public uproar at the San Francisco Zen Center around Richard Baker’s alleged misconduct has subsided. Or has it, really? The list of other Zen teachers who have confessed to abusing their students is long and continues to grow. Perhaps we’ve weeded out some bad actors, or maybe they have become more cautious. Some might even have developed an awareness of normative ethics, but still, when we survey the landscape rigorously, we see wreckage; friends who fled practice, or stayed but never seemed to make much progress; teaching careers shortcuited or ruined; persistent rumor and recrimination that harm the sangha. The evidence of unresolved trauma and hurt is vast.

To our credit, we've made our practice spaces more safe; to varying degrees people feel free enough to open up without subjecting themselves to exploitation; there are ethical guidelines in place in most centers; we have even asked professional therapists to help us craft the norms. But honesty, if pressed, I do not think that most people feel that the issues surrounding sex and practice have been resolved. Some feel that we’ve just added another layer of admonition and prohibition to our norms for sexual behavior. Some say it will take a generation to heal the wounds. Others say what we need is a return to that old time religion.

Let me be clear. As I stated at the very beginning, I am not setting out to create excuses. I do not intend to rewrite history. I will not whitewash what is clearly harmful behavior, nor will I play the game of weighting a teacher’s charisma to offset egregious failings. I won’t reduce our practice to the level of a cult. We cannot suppress genuine feelings of hurt that arise from past experience because, as the saying goes, time heals all wounds. It does not. I was a victim of sexual abuse myself. Bob Hoffman raped me within a few months of completing his Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy. This story remains almost entirely in the shadows. When I’ve attempted to bring it to light, I’ve been ignored or gaslighted. A senior teacher of the Process told me, “It was 50 years ago so get over it.” But this New Age “Love and Light” process is a cult, and it costs a lot of money, so the behavior is pretty much expected.

The history of sexual abuse in our Buddhist communities has been tumultous. There has not been a full accounting of the alleged misconduct because, for the most part, sexual conversations are secret; even when we talk about them, there are some areas that remain hidden; the secrecy adds to their power making it more difficult to dislodge. There has never been a full recognition of the depth of the abuse because it touches the deepest core of human intimacy; people, mostly women, say that they are still hurting; we should believe them. I do. The abusers have not taken full responsibility; people are still speaking up despite calls to move on. There should be more compassion for both victim and abuser. We are a Buddhist community; understanding and compassion are at the heart of our practice. There’s always room for improvement.

Taboo or precept?
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”― George Orwell

I ask myself how as a practitioner I might address the situation. A Zen priest friend whom I admire and trust warned me against “starting off from [a] wrong assumption... and end up justifying a forgone conclusion.” I’ll frame my question to address my friend’s fear, and I will do so directly: what are the assumptions that seem to drive everyone to a foregone conclusion? Let me frame the inquiry in another way. If the same question is asked over and over, and the answer that’s repeated continues to be totally unsatisfactory, is it a bad question, a good question asked in the wrong way, or simply a question not designed to reveal useful information?

My intention is to ask honest questions in a way that sheds light on our dilemma. My methodology: I will do my best to recreate the set of assumptions that are the underpinning of the conversation, and I would add, provide what’s been taken as demonstrable ammunition for presumptive guilt. Then, hopefully, I can challenge these assumptions to see what remains.

They first assumption is that the perp’s, even a Zen prep’s action takes place in a vacuum, against the stark moral backdrop of right and wrong. False. The further assumption is that by simply labeling it and calling it out, we can tame the beast. False.

We haven’t eliminated sexual abuse from our practice because we can’t. The way sex manifests in each individual will be unique, but just because one enters the zendo and sits without moving does not guarantee that the sexual impluse sits quietly. It’s more likely that we notice how active it is. It’s the nature of self-investigation. Sex cannot escape our investigation, but it does not deserve a special place. Nor can we eliminate risk when we venture into uncomfortable or forbidden territory. Those may seem like extremes, but my non-professional survey points to both the exclusion of sex and evading dangerous territory are common in most practice centers. How often is sex directly discussed in dharma talks? My experience is that this happens rarely and then usually as a footnote. How often is it the subject of scuttlebutt and rumor? If the walls had ears. What’s the first response when people ask about what’s been done since Roshi’s picadillos were uncovered? We’ve put a code of ethics in place. Don’t you worry your pretty little head.


The Will to Know.

The second part of my methodology will be to analyze the conversation itself. Is it simply a straightforward case involving sex outside of marriage or the accepted boundaries of intimate relationships. The fact that I am going to cite the work of Michel Foucault will alert you that I think there’s a lot more going on.

I have been studying the French philosopher’s first volume of The History of Sexuality, La Volonté de Savoir. It’s been a real eye-opener. His contention is that the discourse about sexual behavior in the West since over the last few centuries has been incorporated or subsumed into a larger conversation about power and control. I would prefer the word hijacked, but it carries too many pejorative connotations to allow for anything close to objective analysis.

Foucault says that despite the modern liberal claim that sex has been repressed, forced into silence, or even neglected, the truth is that the level, frequency and specificity of our conversations about sex have actually increased. These conversations are varied, complex, and sometimes thinly disguised. Talking about sex does not create a problem; the way we’ve been trained to talk about sex, specifically in the West since the 17th century, has created a conversation that didn’t exist before, and, I would add, certainly one that didn’t exist in the Lord Buddha’s day. You don’t need a hefty dose of Irish Catholicism in parochial school to take part. It’s pervasive. The Irish have merely repeated the conversation with our particular brogue as have Jews and Latinas and Italians and Asians, each with their own inflection.

Foucault fills three volumes with his analysis. I will focus on the first few pages of the fist volume where he defines the scope of his inquiry and spells out his methodology. I will be talking mainly about the situation at the San Francisco Zen Center when Richard Baker Roshi stepped down from his leadership role because it is the one that I am most familiar with. There were equally disruptive scenarios occurring in other Buddhist communities in the early history of Buddhism in the West--Robert Aitken Roshi’s interactions with Eido Tai Shimano in Honolulu and subsequently with his organization in New York are now part of the public record as Aitken’s letters have been released by the University of Hawaii. They reveal the conundrum of trying to shield a growing community from scandal. Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi ’s dalliances have also become part of the public record as well as Hakuyū Taizan Maezumi Roshi and the more flamboyant history of Chögyam Trungpa and Ösel Tendzin.

The sequence of events Foucault outlines seems to fit with what occurred at Zen Center. When the scandal of Richard Baker’s romance with a married woman began to tear the San Francisco Zen Center apart, they called in a triage team. People were counseled by therapists and senior practice leaders that they had to talk about it. And that they did. I was not present, but I know many people who were. A lot never stopped talking about it. They are Buddhists so, at least on the surface, the intent to gossip, blame, or take sides, was absent. Also Baker removed himself, so there was no lightning rod, but among most of the people I know from Zen Center, they were definitely taking sides. I was trained by two men who followed Baker to Santa Fe where he started over. When they returned to San Francisco’s Hartford Street Zen Center, both Issan and Phil Whalen established a congenial working relationship with senior people who had taken over running the San Francisco Center, but, well, let’s just say that they didn’t talk about Baker’s sexual exploits, real or imagined, in polite conversation. I will make my mother happy and not join that conversation either, though I will allow myself a few general statements about the nature of the conversation.


The Zen Speakeasy
Or a general economy of discourses on sex, or the way in which sex is “put into discourse.’”

I will try to follow Foucault as closely as I can. “The central issue . . . is not to determine whether one says yes or no to sex, whether one formulates prohibitions or permissions, whether one assets its importance or denies its effects, or whether one refines the words one uses to designate it; but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said.” [Page 9]

He says further that his main interest is locating “the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior…” I will try to use these questions as prompts for my own self-investigation. When I was coming into my sexual maturity in the Jesuit school, I learned that even the solitary pleasure of masterbation has a structure in the public conversation. All the boys at my prep school knew that Father Halloran would be less judgmental about adolescent sex just by the length of the line that formed by his confessional. Foucault does not claim that this examination will yield some correct position or reveal the truth about sex and power, but rather bring forth “the will to knowledge,” la volonté de savoir, which serves our inquiry.

My questions are from the point of view of being on the meditation cushion and not as a leader among the poobah of a practice center. Different sets of concerns yield different answers. Though my concern is shaped by the institutional response, it’s not my job to formulate a more polished defense or rebuttal in the debate, or more clear language to designate it.Historically what do we know about the history of the sexual ethos in the early days of Zen in the West, specifically among the first generation of Westerner students and their interactions with their Asian teachers?

From the very beginning, there was a lot of sex going on at San Francisco Zen Center, at least among some groups. It was an open secret. This was equally true when Suzuki Roshi was alive as when Baker Roshi assumed the helm. I assume that Suzuki Roshi knew about his students’ trysting, but to my knowledge he said nothing publicly. He surely did talk about it in private practice conversations, but we only have anecdotal evidence and no way of knowing what he really said. He was also steeped in Japanese temple culture which colored his attitude in ways that we will never fully understand.

What’s also true is that there was a lot of negative judgment about sexal behavior at Zen Center. We can all trace the outline of the public conversation. I can recognize the “orthodox,” public judgments simply by listening to the conversations that persist. But there is also evidence of personal struggle, admonitions, conflict about sex that people struggle with. Issan once said to me, “People call all the time. They need to talk.” One of the reasons why Issan was such a popular teacher was that you could talk about sex openly with him. He really did understand. Not being judgmental gave him the ability to listen. When sex presented a problem in our adloscent lives, we lined up at the Father Halloran’s confessional, the priest who at least pretended that he understood your plight. How much better a priest who really understood and could be compassionate.

Here’s what one student told me when I asked him about the sexual culture of Zen Center. “There was definitely a Puritanical aura about the place, ‘a disciple of the Buddha does not misuse the senses.’ . . . It was like being Catholic again, though in a small community full of the smart, good children in the front row of the class, who love to click their tongues at others and rat them out in senior student meetings. It was kind of an unwritten rule that you had to be in a committed relationship to have sex, but sex was never really mentioned.” Apparently this student found his way to Father Murphy’s confessional box by the Saint Aloysius shrine.


Deconstruct!
The Case: Phil blurted out, “the Presbyterians got the upper hand.”

Foucault says that it is legitimate to ask why sex was associated with sin for such a long time and question how this pervasive attitude was formed and why it persists. Of course partial blame goes to the scriptures and the taboos of our Abrahamic religious past, but close examination will show that the Sabbath celebration has roots is the celebration of sex, and most taboos single out specific sex acts. Foucault notes that the association with sin comes part and parcel with the religious power structure; they define the taboos. Phil exploded, slurring a notoriously staid religious sect while in the same breath berating a particular group of senior students. The ascetic discipline is “especially careful in repressing useless energies, the intensity of pleasures, and irregular modes of behavior.”[Page 9] If I didn’t know better I might label John Calvin a hidden Zen master (or an extremely strict, Western, image of one). The confusion might have its roots in history but it continues to exist in the heads of some zennies. And, in answer to Phil, the Presbyterians had no need to stage a coup d’etat when the war was going on in peoples’ heads..

In Buddhist ethics, the precept that is cited is the Misuse of Sex, whereas Foucault’s analysis is to observe and trace the use of power. It’s a tricky distinction. We’ve enlisted sex in the service of domination, or that is the assumption. Let me cite an example. If a person wanted to assert his or her position in the hierarchy, why does an expensive dinner at Green’s pass under the radar, while sex is a red flag? What if, perhaps, what we took as a sexual violation was a consensual sexual encounter which we couldn’t recognize, and I underline, “we couldn’t recognize.”

Foucault also notes that “[t]oday it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient form--so familiar and important in the West--of preaching.” [Page 7] I would note that we are not talking about a sermon about the Joy of Sex, popular in the hey day of the California New Age, but sin, hell and damnation. (Foucault also notes the “solemnity” that pervades most public conversations about sex. [Page6] This rings true. How often have have we heard a sexual joke in dharma talk?)

It is just not possible to remain unaffected by this discourse. Most of the automatic response in the west, across the board, would be for the sin and damnation side, or, if we are in a rebellious mood, a swing towards the Joy of Sex’s happy sermon. Both positions are simply reactions within a set of cultural sexual norms.

If we define the relationship between sex and power as repression, Foucault points to that he calls the speaker’s benefit. “If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets the established law; he anticipates the coming freedom.” [Page 6] He goes on to an analysis of the way that early psychiatrists or the 19th century felt compelled to make excuses when they broached the topic of sex.Taking a position is getting your feet wet even if the position is against what appears to be repression. I noticed the same pattern of apology in the initial unmasking of a Zen teacher’s sexual transgressions, and I notice in myself a kind of self-approval when I side with the accusers. But then these speakers quickly pivot to a broader condemnation, including for example teaching style, politics,spending habits, and other things they might find objectionable. Taking the high seat, it is a short leap from sex outside of marriage to fast cars and expensive suits even though there is zero logical connection. This is also the speaker’s benefit and a tough one to catch because it is shielded by the righteousness of “correct” sexual behavior.

I would venture this extends to the tone, and even the content of practice instruction. I noticed that when I was talking to a teacher, and stumbled on some strong inner objection to what was being said, I dismissed it with an inner notation that he or she is a hot mess so why pay attention? When teachers can’t be saints, and control their penises, nothing they say has any value.


Blurring the question

“Only in those places (the brothel and the mental hospital) would untrammeled sex have a right to (safely isularized) forms of reality, and only to clandestine, circumscribed, and coded types of discourse. Everywhere else, modern puritanism imposed its triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, and silence.” [Page 5]

What happens when I realize that I’m just following, or reacting to a set script; that there is a conversation that has shaped what I hold to be true? It is a cultural creation, perhaps not entirely specific to the west, but in many other ways, entirely a creation of western culture.

Reading and studying Foucault, even when I didn’t fully understand the analysis (one could have hoped that he was easier to understand, but he was a French academic), I realized that there is a script. It exists outside our zen communities, and does not have its roots in Buddhist precepts. Foucault has shown that this is a creation, a “mental reaction” in a particular time and place, so it might be possible to break free.

Can I use this analysis to discover a hidden treasure? I am obliged to thread the needle carefully. I can see that I am part of a particular conversation, and, necessarily, I will remain part of that conversation. But perhaps if I can follow it carefully, I will become less enmeshed in it. There may be echoes in psychotherapy, but it seems a bit broader. It is not just my sexual proclivities and an analysis of their root cause in my unconscious, but the context where I first learned about sex.

I used to say about several of the men I know whose careers have been the subject of accusation and lots of scuttlebut: they and their partners were consenting adults. End of conversation. But this is using the “Get Out of Jail Free” card. If I am going to be rigorous, I have to also examine this statement. I began this discussion by mentioning Roshi Bartok and then never said another word. I don’t know Josh, and I can’t comment. However I will bet that the conversation in the Greater Boston Zen Center contains many of the elements that Foucault describes. Does that excuse anyone? No, but it might provide some insight for the people who struggle with what occurred.

Were there repercussions of those First Friday line ups of shame and guilt, barriers to experience sexual pleasure? Of course. Has the barrier between me and the pleasure of sex vanished? Not entirely, but I am a lot happier than I was when I was obliged to stand in line for Father Halloran’s absolution.