Issan, “Are you going somewhere?”

Originally posted Friday, March 25, 2022

This story has already made the rounds, and it should. It is so short and concise that it doesn’t yield to a lot of confusion or elaboration. Good koan material.

\Issan knew how to deliver a one-liner. He was, in fact, a true master, but this was delivered with no drama, and when he was in such pain and personal distress, we had to stop laughing and realize that he was not just making a joke but effortlessly pointing towards freedom.

I also know for certain that he was smiling and filled with gratitude. I can almost hear his laugh.

Michael Shunko Jamvold was a Zen monk who practiced for many years. He was known for traveling between monasteries and practice centers. Sadly, he died alone in Japan from an untreated or misdiagnosed respiratory disease. He was also one of Issan’s close friends whom Issan called on to take care of him at the end of his life. Shunko responded with devotion and grace.

During the last few months of Issan’s life, as the disease took its physical toll, either Steve or Shunko, but sometimes someone else they asked to help, would sit with Issan and help him with basic needs, food, drink, turning over in bed, and going to the bathroom. But basically, the day-to-day attendant duties fell to either Steve or Shunko. 

The bathroom was just across the hall from Issan’s room, but he needed support just to navigate the 15 or 20 steps when he needed to use the toilet. Shunko held his arm firmly but gently. 

On one of the return trips back to Issan’s bed, Shunko was overcome with emotion and blurted out, “Oh Issan, I am going to miss you!”

Issan smiled and asked Shunko, “Oh, are you going somewhere?”

All of You Are Gobblers of Dregs!

Blue Cliff Record, Case 11 (the long version)

One day Huangbo went up in the hall and said, "What do you people want to look for?"
And he chased them with his staff.
The assembly didn't disperse, so he said, "The Great Master Nintou Farong [594-657, 5th gen] of Ox Head Mountain spoke horizontally and spoke vertically, but he still didn't know the key of transcendence. These days the followers after Shitou [700-790, 8th gen] and Mazu [709-88, 8th gen] speak of Zen and speak of the Way most voluminously.

All of you are gobblers of dregs. If you travel around like this, you'll get laughed at by people. As soon as you hear of a place with eight hundred or a thousand people, you immediately go there. It won't do just to seek out the hubbub.

When I was traveling, if I found there was someone at the roots of the grasses, I would stick him in the head and watch to see if he knew the feeling of pain. If he did, I could give him a cloth bag full of rice as an offering.

If you always take things this easy here, then where else would there be this matter of Today? Since you're called pilgrims, you should concentrate a bit.

Do you know there are no teachers of Zen in all of China?"


There is a lively, ongoing debate in an online Buddhist group about the nature of practice and enlightenment. Dosho Port published a piece on August 18th called “The Showa Dispute About True Faith.” He describes the efforts beginning in 1928 to make Soto Zen more compatible with “modernism,” including Christianity, by reframing its belief system. A dispute ensued. One side organized its material under the slogan, ‘Original Enlightenment, mysterious practice.’ The other side, the monk establishment, wanted actual practice verification.

I am vaguely familiar with this dispute about modernization in Japanese Soto Zen before the Second War, and the attempts to "translate" the doctrine, if I can use the word, to make it more understandable. There was an attempt to take a portion of Buddhist literature in Japanese, but also Chinese, and free it from its Medieval encapsulation. I went to Masao Abe's amazing classes when he was teaching in San Francisco at CIIS. He definitely comes from this school. I’m a former Jesuit, so I also delved into Kitarō Nishida and the Kyoto School’s adoption of Western philosophical discourse. 40 years ago, we all immersed ourselves in the extensive writings of D. T. Suzuki, who, I have to say, comes across more like an apologist or evangelist.

This may be a bare minimum to butt into this conversation, but I will. These efforts to strip the vehicle down to its essential parts leave just enough to work with. To begin, let me take the debate one step further and remove the parochial underpinnings.

My pared-down argument runs like this: an experience of liberation is possible for humans. We don’t quite know what it is because of the current condition of our minds: our mental acuity, the quality of our perceptive apparatus, a balanced or afflicted emotional state, plus I think we have to throw a good dose of fancy, magical thinking, cultural mythology, plus translation difficulties and the vagaries of language into the mix. My list is not complete--there’s a lot to sort out, but I think we can establish, or posit, three hypotheses:

1. Such a state or quality of freedom exists and can transform our experience as humans.
2. It is possible, even desirable, to achieve it.
3. We recognize that it will take effort, education, what we commonly call meditation, and possibly recalibration to achieve this experience.

We believe that certain people have had this experience, most notably the Buddha, but others too, for example, Eihei Dōgen, Linji Yixuan, Hakuin Ekaku, Je Tsongkhapa, and Shinran. Still, perhaps we could stretch our imaginations to include the current Dalai Lama. Maybe that auntie whom Red Pine encountered sitting in a cave in China, who never heard of Mao Tse Tung, but, forget about her, she never wrote anything down. We’re stuck with the guys, they’re all guys, who wrote, had secretaries, or disciples who took extensive lecture notes.

What did they write: of course we have the Sutras, plus other stories of the Buddha and his disciples; the enlightened guys also wrote descriptions of their experiences, some of which seem to be in coded language; thankfully there’s lots of poetry, balanced with carefully reasoned philosophy of mind and analysis of perception and experience; we have to include the myths, and what we call practice manuals, “how to” lists; there are some riddles that purport to point to the experience; then extensive records of the mental and yogic disciplines that practitioners used to achieve this state of liberation plus prescriptive injunctions and admonitions that have even been codified. There is also a large body of instruction material that has not been written down, which is generally reserved for advanced levels of practice.

But there are huge problems with all this literature. First is the language and translation. We're blessed to have an army of very well-trained and literate translators, but cultural and archaic understandings of the texts remain. Then there is the sheer volume and diversity of the materials. Even if we could determine their authenticity, ensure an accurate translation, and understand their precise meaning, we‘d still face the question of how to use them, along with many other questions.

Our Western Zen practice stems to some degree from these efforts to modernize. Harada Sogaku Roshi, and after him, Hakuun Yasutani, Kuon Yamada, and the Jesuit Roshis, Bob Aitken, and the rest of my crowd come from another strain of that same impulse to modernize, so that's what I was handed.

Schools of thought are schools of thought. What do we do with them? Again, for better or worse, they inform our practice.

First, I think that there's a logical fallacy in the way we understand these efforts at modernization. Following any time-honored system of training that we’ve been handed, we believe that if we accurately recreate the logic of the thinking, the order of the steps, the lineage of the teachers, then we can access the authentic experience of liberation. If we fail, then we did something wrong. Perhaps it is a road map, but we want it to be Google Maps, with the blue dot moving across the dashboard screen. Good luck with that. I will set up a dharma combat: can algorithms become enlightened?

Another knot appears when we identify the criteria for validating the credentials of a teacher from within this arcane body of knowledge, whether it’s inka or transmission or tulku. The checklist resides in experience outside ourselves and muddies the teaching as well as opens the door to abuse and exploitation. Call the dharma police to testify before the High Court.

Is this even good practice? I remember working on the koan “Mu” for years with Bob Aitken. I kept complaining in my very Jesuit way that it was all just a self-referential exercise in a closed system. He'd say, yes, it appears that way, and then he’d encourage me to continue. I did. In 1996, I was living with Maylie Scott on Ashby in Berkeley and still doing sesshin with Aitken and John Tarrant. One Sunday morning, I had to drive a rented truck back to Santa Rosa. As I was returning to where I’d parked it the night before, POW. All that self-referential mind swirling stopped, and I got it. It didn't matter if it came via some well-intentioned modernization efforts in a Soto Shu University in the 20s. It hit me. There was no turning back.

Of course, that experience faded soon enough, which presented its own dilemma, but it was enough to set me on my own path. I remember saying to Phil Whalen once what a shame it was that the library at Nalanda was destroyed--all that knowledge lost. He smiled and said, “Don’t worry, kid. Enough remains. Just enough.” I feel the same about any attempts to update our practice and make it modern or palatable or whatever. Enough remains, just enough. And, as thanks to Phil, I’ll add: “With any luck if we’re lucky.”

I don't want to take a path based on pious dreams and hopes, magical thinking, myth, or wild speculation. When coupled with a few token morsels of experience that we might be able to recognize in ourselves if we’ve spent any time on the cushion, we enter dangerous territory. I was lucky to be able to see something authentic in several teachers, among them Issan Dorsey, Phil Whalen, Maylie Scott, Bob Aitken, and John Tarrant. I trusted them and was able to just stick with it until I began to catch a glimpse for myself that something else is possible.

Lord Krishna comes to tea

Originally posted Sunday, March 6, 2022

I knew that Allen was in town when there was a knock at the front door at 3:30 exactly. A young man, 21 but not a month more, clean-shaven, holding a book, asked, “Is this the Philip Whalen Zendo?” I invited him into the living room, where he sat down and quietly continued his reading. I knew that Allen would be at the door shortly; I could hear Phil beginning to make his way up the stairs. He and Allen shared years of friendship. They were punctual. I began to prepare tea.

I loved when Phil’s friends came to visit. Phil was on his best behavior. Not that he was normally badly behaved, though in private moments he could be angry, even insulting. Despite being one of the foremost leaders of a movement that questioned the very roots of believing and behaving that my parents taught me, when he was proper, he was extremely proper. But there was another quality to the conversations with his poet friends. Their language was careful and measured. It was literate. I was always looking for any innuendos, and I loved their laughter. It was poking fun without the slightest hint of slighting someone.

Phil, of course, knew Allen’s long-time companion, Peter Orlovsky, and talked openly about Peter’s drug addiction. Phil joked to me about Allen being a follower of “the Cult of Boys,” and this was the first time that Allen had brought a young lover with him. Phil was not very interested in sex himself, reinforced or dictated by his isolated personal habits, but I knew I would be looking for Phil’s reaction. How would he treat a young lover?

The young man and I sat a short distance from Phil and Allen. There were barely any pauses in their conversation. It doesn’t matter what it was about. It could have been Buddhism, Trungpa, Diane de Prima, or other poets who passed through the Disembodied School at RMDC, or even where to get the best Chinese food in San Francisco. They were friends, and though we weren’t excluded, we were not included. What was clear was that his young companion admired Allen. He hung on every word, carefully listening to each line, laughing when it was appropriate. Allen, for his part, was attentive to the young man. Not condescending or at all lecherous, he was careful that his friend was treated like an invited guest, not a hired boy. 

Yes, I admit that I entertained the possibility that there was some kind of coercion behind the young man’s presence. The age gap was enormous, and there have always been rumors about Allen’s sexual exploits. I also had a distasteful experience of being manipulated by an older man. But at least that afternoon, I was not sitting with a boy-toy but a bright young man who genuinely liked older men. 

I’d been reading Christopher Isherwood’s tribute to his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, My Guru and His Disciple. Isherwood asked the Swami a hesitant question about a new relationship with a young man. Isherwood confessed that, given his experience in the stiff Victorian world of English Catholicism, he was expecting a censorious pronouncement. Prabhavananda told him to treat his lover like Lord Krishna.

Then it hit me. I’d been to tea with Lord Krishna.

A year later, I was sitting with Phil when Allen called to tell him that he was dying. Phil cried. 

An Invitation

[This is a part of the Introduction to *The Record of Issan]

Please come and sit with me. I invite us both to sit quietly as we can. Issan will also join us. Oh, how he loved a good conversation, especially the jokes. Together, we can explore what holds us together. The story of his life and Zen teaching is the glue.

I started to say “binds us together'' but that is not the correct word. It makes me think of prison or captivity. The purpose of this exploration is to be freer and more spontaneous. Issan would prefer something far gentler and more affectionate, more like the caress of love or the hug of friendship.

Perhaps this conversation will help both of us see more clearly what we are about. This is not the ordinary course of a conversation. Sometimes we just want to go over old times and have a good laugh. That’s probably just fine for certain times and places, but most times it’s a waste of time. Issan loved to quote Suzuki Roshi, “Don’t invite your thoughts to tea.” Disappointment and regret are sure to follow. Regret has its place, but not in this conversation. There are thousands of things that all of us should not have done, but tears or dreams of what might have been cloud our eyes and obscure what is right in front of us.

And Issan would probably suggest that we be on our best behavior, at least try to pay attention to what is being said. This requires an alertness of body and mind. We can listen to glean information, satisfy our curiosity, or actually try to find answers to the questions that matter. How we listen determines what kind of answer we find.

Issan died on September 6th, 1990. He continues to speak to us when we hear the words as if he were speaking to us. I have heard many students tell stories about him; some of them are recorded in this book, and they all have the very clear signs of words that were said to an individual person at a particular time at a definite place. If they have one consistent thread, it is Issan’s encouragement: Do the best you can. Listen and respond with every bone in your body. Don’t think too much of yourself, but certainly be yourself. No apologies are necessary.