Issan’s Jesus Koan

 

Memories in a shoe box

23 April 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"These teachings go on forever;

on and on they flow,

without beginning or end".

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

I met Frederick Copleston.

[Fathter Greg Sharkey visited me here in Bangkok last Monday. He lived with Copleston in the Jesuit house on Farm Street while earning his Sanskrit degree. I talked about this meeting. Greg also confirmed that the robe Father Copleston wore was the English Jesuit habit. I went to look for this short piece I wrote and tried looking for it on my blog. I am republishing it here].

In 1965, I met with the famous English Jesuit Frederick Copleston and could not come up with one decent philosophical question. 

I have been trying to collect the memories of our visit. It was 60 years ago, and not a huge breakthrough event in my spiritual journey, so parts of it are hazy and will remain so, but given that I was the only undergraduate on the schedule of a renowned Jesuit philosopher, it was an honor and, as you will see, memorable. Father Bill Nolan, the Dartmouth Newman Chaplin, of course, knew that I wanted to become a Jesuit and did everything he could to encourage me, which was the explicit reason for the interview.

The process of memory is notoriously unreliable. Recall activates a selective circuit in the brain, and we tend to recall those juicy bits that confirm the stories we tell ourselves. Even if the date, time, and location are reasonably accurate, even if they can be verified, the data collection system is not as if it were a selfie with the Pope. It still might be difficult to remember whether it was a bright day or if the autumn winds were blowing. On top of that, the things we retrieve may hold some key that we are not fully aware of. There could be some mystery-solving, like the crumbs you laid on the path to Grandma’s house. 

Copleston came to Dartmouth and stayed at the Newman Center for perhaps a week. I checked the online archives to identify events or colloquia in the Philosophy Department. None. Perhaps he had been scheduled at BC, Harvard or Fordham, and Nolan arranged to have him lecture at the Aquinas Center, which he often did. That is possible, even likely. It is also likely that if Copleston had been in Hanover at the invitation of the College, he would have stayed at Aquinas House. He was a very traditional old-school Jesuit who rose at 5 AM every day, did his meditation, and then said Mass. Mass would not have been complicated if the College put him up in a hotel room.

Bill Nolan gave him the office of his assistant for the week, and Copleston had office hours. I’m sure many Dartmouth faculty were anxious to meet him. I remember that my hour was carefully scheduled. I even remember what he wore. Over a simply tailored black suit and a tall white collar that I associated with Anglican clerics, he wore what I thought was a strange robe, even for a scholar priest. It was not the long black Jesuit habit I knew from the Jesuits at Fairfield. It might have been a don’s gown from Heythrop. There was no sash, and the sleeves seemed to be broad black ribbons that dropped from the elbow. I recall that his speech was very precise and soft-spoken. I would characterize it as meticulous. He didn’t rush, and my memory, even after 60 years, was that he was a careful listener. Google tells me he would have been just a few years older than my father, but I didn’t get any daddy vibe. 

He had just published Volume 7 of his monumental 11-volume History of Philosophy: Fichte to Nietzsche. His debates about the existence of God with Bertrand Russell, which made him very famous in Catholic circles, had taken place at least 15 years earlier, but I had no questions to ask about his writing or the debate. Perhaps Bill Nolan had told him that I wanted to enter the Jesuits, or I did. I told him about my parents' vehement opposition.

I was now 21 and could enter without their permission, and I was tempted to do that, but I promised them that I would finish college before I set off on what they considered a disastrous career choice. He asked me what I was studying and whether I liked it and pointed out how it would do no harm when I became a Jesuit. When he asked why I wanted to be a Jesuit. I mumbled something about being impressed by certain scholastics and priests in prep school. Then he got personal and told me that his own parents had opposed his becoming a Catholic priest, but he persisted and continued to treat them with love and respect. He said that they eventually came to support his decision. After some quiet time, he looked at his watch and said that he would have to begin preparing for another meeting and would pray for me. 

I had an interview with the man whom I imagined might have removed any doubt about Aquinas’s Unmoved Mover argument for the existence of God, and instead received the promise of prayer to resolve a painful family situation. 

Fly Away

Koan 53, Blue Cliff Record

Pai Chang’s Wild Ducks

Why did it take a twinge of pain to wake me up?

The pain was real

Or at least I feel it

Asleep so comfortably, 

Mixed with dreams of geese (I transposed)

Flying away

Or landing

Or swimming in the reflecting pool in front of the Jefferson Memorial (I am dreaming)

They flew off course

Attracting crowds and iPhones clicking

As if to confirm Thomas’s 

Republican dreams.

.

Or did the somnambulist bump into a door

realizing the traffic just beyond

Might be real danger

Even being totally alert does not guarantee that I will survive

I feel as if sometimes I dance with your answers,’Ma,

Was it a real question

Or just words, They are just words,

Sounds connected with a dream or twinge of pain

Master Ma talks as if there were a sequence of events

Let me correct him.

That has meaning.--flying, landing, then flying away

There is no causal sequence of events in dreams

They have no existence

Dream on.’

Listen to Keith Jarrett

He gets the dreaming sequence right

Mysteriously connected

Without pain.

Schism Schmisum--

On hearing that the Doctrine of the Faith summons former U.S. nuncio, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, to testify on charges of schism. Vigano calls it an honor. I don’t know why you need to be so right, or maybe I just don’t understand it, but honey, you are just being a doctrinaire asshole.

Let’s talk schismatics or at least have a laugh or two.

Schism is defined as the formal separation of a Church into two Churches or the secession of some group (or an individual?) owing to doctrinal and other differences. Is this a threat?

I remember a conversation with Avery Dulles. As might be expected as the son of his father and a respected Catholic theologian, he served on several high-level ecumenical commissions. He told me (with his slight laugh and smile that disguised a complaint) that he often worked long hours on a paper describing doctrinal agreements and continuing points of dispute with a few modest suggestions to explore if the divide was real, imagined, or even important. And you can be sure his work was meticulous and exacting. The commission’s meeting began with a prayer petitioning the God of the doctrinal points they could agree upon and avoiding the rest. After Avery presented his paper, he was thanked and applauded. Then, the other side’s theologians presented a paper outlining their position and objections. They sat down and were politely applauded. Then they worked together on the closing statement: we can agree on X for Y reason, and we continue to disagree on Zed for Z. We were happy to have this exchange and pray for our continued growth in the Spirit, although let’s not go overboard in our expectations. Nothing changed and probably won’t--not after they appointed a woman as the presiding bishop, but let’s pass over that in silence and leak it to Kaiser or the NCR.

But all in all, this was far better than what might have happened just a few centuries earlier--one of those parties would have been burned at the stake. Depending on your side, the painful deaths of the heretics or martyrs became myths to warn succeeding generations, train them in self-sacrificial virtue, and remind them that some things can never be compromised. The Inquisitors made decisions about who needed to be celebrated, who needed to be blamed, and what lessons the survivors needed to draw. 

A bloody time. Thousands were executed. The Roman Catholics did it, as did the newly reformed English Church. The Spanish Inquisition is now the stuff of jokes, but it was a life and death matter for the Jews, the conversos, and the dissenters who were murdered. A lot has changed over a few centuries, but we can’t erase that part of history that affronts our sensibilities. Revisionists erase the parts of history that don’t conform to the current myth. But keep the threat of schism alive.

An earlier Jesuit cardinal was not so lucky. In 1599, immediately after he was appointed Cardinal, Pope Clement made Robert Bellarmine an Inquisitor, and he served as one of the judges at Giordano Bruno's trial and concurred in the decision to condemn Bruno to be burned at the stake. It was a hard, thankless task for the quiet, saintly scholar, but he had a job description. And there were schisms to the right, to the left, and particularly to the north. I mentioned that to Avery once, and he said thank God we’re past that (although he continued to make a case for capital punishment). And he made the very good point that at least we are talking to one another. 

Talking is a good thing. It's the only thing other than charitable actions and loving your mother. I say I would talk to anyone, but I really don’t think I want to be in the same room as Bishop Barron, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganó, or Archbishop Sal Cordileone. Not that I couldn’t make small talk, but why bother? They would not be much interested in talking to me unless they might try to convert me, I suppose, and I think that the Compas are aware of just how open I would be to that conversation. Besides, my dance card is pretty full. 

I loved talking with Avery. Even though we were worlds apart on most issues, he and I always tried to find where we might have an interesting conversation. That changed slightly after he was made a Cardinal, but not much. 

The context was love, respect, and taking action to keep that flame burning. I told him that I went to confession with a high-church episcopal priest when I was doing my AA 4th Step because it felt right. He was a friend, and I was out of touch with any Jesuits I might have asked. He told me that although he disapproved, it was a valid sacrament. Then I had to tell him that this priest friend worked for the Jesuits at Saint Agnes in the Haight. Once, he was at a party for Bishop Ignatius Wang. The bishop got hammered and went on and on about same-sex marriage. My friend was wearing a clerical collar, and Bishop Wang probably presumed that my friend was Roman. His husband, sitting next to him, was wearing a sweater on the cold San Francisco evening. My friend didn’t introduce his husband for obvious reasons, such as job security. 

I almost got Avery to laugh.