Sonja Margulies Roshi and a note about Dharma Transmission

Sonja Fenne Margulies (March 7, 1931 - May 5, 2013)

Sonja Margulies-Fenne began Zen practice in 1968, was ordained in 1975, and received dharma transmission from her teacher Kobun Chino Roshi in 1983. For many years, she was the co-editor of The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.


May 15th, 2013

I just received word that Sonja Margulies-Fenne died in Salt Lake City, where she had moved to be with her son, Peter. She was 82.

Her Zen teacher, Kobun Chino Roshi, gave her a stick in 1983. She told me the story about her dharma transmission that might fit into the current conversation about authentically authorized Zen teachers. She had been practicing for about 15 or so years with Kobun, who taught at SF Zen Center with Suzuki Roshi, and he—Sonia’s words—wanted to cut the umbilical cord and allow her to stand on her own feet. She resisted for one reason or another, and, as she told me, they went back and forth, and back and forth, reaching a kind of koan quality, “What do I do with this one precious life of mine?”

At the end of one sesshin, during her exit dokusan, again they talked, and once again, seemed to arrive at no solution that satisfied her. (I think that Sonja was telling me, just like she told Kobun, that she didn’t want to give up her life on the beach in Santa Cruz, her writing, her poetry, her interest in psychology, and especially the cozy conversations with friends and her daughter Robin). So she got up and bowed to Kobun just as any good priest would honor his or her teacher. As she turned around and put her hand on the doorknob, Kobun called out, “Sonja!” When she turned her head, he threw his stick at her. No time to think, she reached out and grabbed it.

Although she did many things expected of a Soto lineage holder, she remained very low key. Her practice center was the living room couch in her simple Santa Cruz beach cottage. Her teaching never lost the tone of a cozy conversation. And the depth of her love for the dharma shone through her self-care when she survived breast cancer and the care she gave her daughter, Robin, while she died from cancer. Beyond words.

She was a wonderful woman and an inspiring teacher.

Local News: Poems by Sonja Marqulies

Lenore Friedman wrote about Sonja in Meetings with Remarkable Women: Buddhist Teachers in America

Sister Kuon Elaine MacInnes Roshi

 Originally posted December 12th, 2012

“Spirituality is what you do with those fires that burn within you.” -Sister Elaine

Sister Elaine MacInnes is a Catholic nun and a recognized Zen master. I have included a brief biography, a film, The Fires that Burn, done about her, and a link to her book on the miscellaneous koans. The picture of her with Jeremy Irons dates to her tenure as head of the Prison Phoenix Trust, which she founded to introduce meditation into the UK prison system. Now in her 80’s, she continues to work with prisoners in Canada through the not-for-profit Freeing the Human Spirit, which she founded.

not broken, what do catholicism, Zen, yoga & prisons have in common? A Profile of Sister Elaine MacInnes by Talya Rubin

The Fires that Burn explores the life and work of Sister Elaine MacInnes - professional musician, Roman Catholic nun, Zen master, and prison activist - and her unusual journey to greater understanding. The documentary retraces 80-year-old Sister Elaine's life path of spiritual redefinition and uncovers the journey from her harrowing days as a body shield and activist during the civil war in the Philippines to her present-day campaign to bring meditation teachers into prisons across Canada.

Flowing Bridge, Guidance on Beginning Zen Koans, By Elaine MacInnes. Elaine Roshi took some flak for writing about a koan practice that had been almost entirely an oral tradition, but I see it as her simply starting from the beginning.

"Mindfulness is Not a Part-Time Job," a talk by Issan Dorsey

A Dharma talk given by Issan Dorsey Roshi
Originally posted on 1/13/2012

This transcript appeared in the newsletter of the Gay Buddhist Fellowship in January of 1995, four years and five months after his death from AIDS.

From Allen Ginsberg's collection

Someone said to me the other day, “Aren’t you always working on something?” Yes, we are always working on something, but hopefully it’s not up here in our heads, filled with words to obscure it. I was talking with a friend recently about the phrase, “coming to reside in your breath-mind,” and working with the phrase, and how useful it is to me. I thought it was interesting that I’d never really heard it before, and was just now beginning to work with it. I realized that I actually just heard it deeply.

This has been with me since I first started practicing. It’s a whole way of working with your mind—and I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately. I hope you won’t have to wait for 20 years before you begin to hear how to work with this thing called the mind in your zazen meditation.

Now, people who come to practice immediately sit much more easily than they did when I first began to sit at Sokoji Temple years ago. I remember everyone sitting with their legs bent up. They’d sit for five minutes, then they’d lie down and moan. But now people come, and it’s like we already did that part for them. It’s as if we have a shared body that has already gone through that preliminary stuff, and people are already able to experience some aspect of zazen practice and how we practice together.

We have to be willing to explore and experiment. First, we have to have a sense of humor and a willingness to explore and experiment with our lives and our discomfort. We know that sometimes we can sit for a few minutes, or even a few days, and at some point it gets pretty uncomfortable, and it’s uncomfortable for us not to invite our thoughts to tea, and reside in our breath-mind.

“Don’t invite your thoughts to tea” is an expression of Suzuki-roshi’s, which I’ve always found useful. You know these are just words, and we have to remember that every human concept is just delusion. Still, we use words and provisionally talk about our experience. Lately I have been exploring this way of thinking with a friend who has AIDS dementia; the virus is living in his brain. I’m thinking and working on it and talking with him about it because the virus that is attacking so many of us now ends up being in the brain. So is there some way for us to experience that? I don’t know yet. My question is: how to be with people who have dementia and how to experience the dementia that we all have anyway? It’s called delusion. Mind is always creating confusion, joy and pain, like and don’t like, and depression. But there is also a “background mind.” That is what my friend and I have been discussing.

Sometimes when I’m talking about uncomfortableness, I talk about the five fears. One of the five fears is the fear of unusual states of mind. How can we come to have appreciation and respect for this fear and not just some resistance, so that we can enter our fear, allowing these new areas of uncomfortableness? When we can enter each of these new spaces, we can begin to look at truthfulness.

Why do we have to sit? Really there’s no reason to sit. If we’re completely sincere, then there’s no reason to sit. I’m not completely sincere so I have to keep sitting to check. Even if we’re involved with unskillful actions, the one quality we should strive for is truthfulness. Truthfulness takes a total commitment to see all aspects of ourselves and our unskillfulness. If we can embrace the totality of ourselves, we can embrace the totality of others and of the world. Our tendency is to think about things before we do them. Even when we see a beautiful flower, we say, “Oh what a beautiful flower.” “Beautiful flower” is extra. Just look at the flower with no trace.

Suzuki-roshi wrote, “When we practice zazen, our mind is calm and quite simple. But usually our mind is very busy and complicated, and it is difficult to concentrate on what we are doing.” This is because when we act, we think, and this thinking leaves some trace. Our activity is shadowed by some preconceived idea. The traces and notions make our mind very complicated. When we do something with a simple, clear mind, we have no shadows, and our activity is strong and straightforward.

So, even with zazen practice, it gets so complicated. We’re dissecting every aspect of what’s going on, reviewing and comparing. How do we keep it simple and straightforward? How do we come to know this basic truth of practice and Buddhism? The teaching and the rules can and should change according to the situation and the people we’re practicing with, but the secret of practice cannot be changed. It’s always true.

We teach ourselves and encourage ourselves by creating this space, the meditation hall, so we can begin looking at our minds. “Don’t invite your thoughts to tea.” “Where is your breath-mind?” I used to say, allow this kind of mind to arise. But now I’m saying create background-mind.

This practice is simple: watch your breaths and don’t invite your thoughts to tea. But not inviting your thoughts to tea doesn’t mean to get rid of thinking. That is discrimination. So, there’s no reason to get rid of thoughts, but rather to have some blank, non-interfering relationship with them. Don’t make your mind go blank; rather, have a blank relationship with your thoughts. Begin to see the space behind and around the thoughts, and shift the seat of your identity out of your thoughts and come to reside in your breath-mind. We develop our intention to reside in our breath-mind by first bringing our intention to “breath as mind,” and then by shifting the seat of our identity from our thoughts to our breath.

This all ties in with how we use this space, this laboratory. We should have a willingness to explore with our lives, and this is our laboratory right here—how we use the meditation hall and how we use what happens outside of it. Mindfulness is not a part-time job.

If you want to see more about the life and teaching of this remarkable man, please visit my page: "The Record of Issan."

What is the "Real Work" of the Enneagram?

Originally posted November 1, 2011

Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley 1971-1976

I have been personally engaged in the study of the Enneagram since 1972, when I began four years of intense personal work in Claudio Naranjo’s SAT group. Until now, I have only spoken privately with friends about the proliferation of books, teachers, and controversy about the Enneagram. In all the hubbub, I hope that the real value of this work is not lost or diluted to the point that it becomes no more than an interesting curiosity.

This was the first of a series of articles about the Enneagram, its history and use, as well as its spread among the Jesuits. I created a database, an Enneagram Bibliography, using online resources as well as the recommendations of Enneagram students. I have included books, studies, DVDs, tapes, and other materials that primarily deal with the Enneagram as presented in the West, as well as materials from the Gurdjieff sources that contain information of interest to the Enneagram enthusiast.


One current myth about the Western transmission of the Enneagram goes something like this: in the early 1970s, Claudio Naranjo, fresh from his brief, incomplete training with Oscar Ichazo in Arica, Chile, began a somewhat tentative conversation with a select group of therapists and teachers in a Berkeley living room. He distributes crudely mimeographed nine-pointed figures to the experienced self-observers he has called together to flesh out the sketchy outline of personality characteristics that Ichazo had developed for each point. Then these highly trained psychologists and teachers set about connecting Claudio's and Ichazo’s fragmentary notes with well-documented psychological research and the best diagnostic tests.

As someone devoted to the study of ideas and how they shape culture, I love stories of discovery and invention. Some of the stories are obviously self-serving, while others have the ring of real experience. In either case, still filled with many assumptions, obvious and hidden, they are rich in information.

Sometimes it is very clear that the myth itself is part of the teaching method—for example, a great Japanese Zen Master copied a key koan collection the night before he secretly left China. His teaching emphasized the immediacy of Zen insight, diligence of practice, and the spontaneous breakthrough: stay up through the night and enter a new world before the sun lights your ordinary one.

In other cases, the myth supports the domination of one school over another. Elaine Pagels and others have shown convincingly that the Council of Constantine authorized only the Jesus Teachings that supported the authority of the bishop of Rome, rather than the Gnostic teachings that were equally prevalent in early Christianity. This move was so successful in suppressing an idiosyncratic teaching that we only knew about these sects from the polemical literature written to brand them as heretical until the remnants of a Gnostic library were discovered in the Egyptian desert in 1948.

I think that both these motivations can be found in the Enneagram myth: an early substantiation of the early link between Enneagram study and serious, scientific psychological investigation, and secondly, that the basic elements of Helen Palmer’s “authentic” narrative tradition come from the “Source” itself and were somehow misplaced.

I do not wish to sound mean-spirited, but this smells like either a carefully crafted version to promote Palmer’s teaching or, at best, her followers' oversimplified reading of history in the light of their experience and what they have been told about her oral teaching method and her sources in Naranjo’s work. Any myth, distortion, or fabrication that is in the public record or published materials is fair game. I would like to describe that seminal period from my own experience.

In the Fall of 1971, Claudio Nanranjo began to teach a small number of students in Berkeley. Starting with 25 to 30, SAT grew to more than 100 by 1975. He had recently returned from Arica, where he had been part of another group of 50 Americans, self-selected from the vanguard of people representing the new thinking centered at Esalen, California, the first Americans to work with Oscar Ichazo. Aside from Naranjo, John Lilly was the most prominent and the most steadfastly insistent on maintaining an independent stance.

I estimate that Naranjo spent more than two years connected to Ichazo and Arica, whether in preparation, traveling, conversations with Ichazo, participating in all the exercises in that first Arica Training as well as experiences where Ichazo directed him personally. (Claudio, for example, did live in a solitary retreat for 40 days in the Arican desert - his only contact with other humans was Ichazo driving out to see him every day). I will let Naranjo speak for himself about these experiences in his teaching and writing.

When I joined SAT in September of 1972, I found myself in a more ordinary group than the Arica pioneers from Esalen. We were relatively younger, spiritual idealists of the 60’s generation, liberated in our attitudes towards sex and drugs, deserted by the faiths of our collective fathers and mothers, holding strongly to the idea that spiritual practice could overcome the ills of society that was becoming increasingly materialistic and egocentric, aggressive and greedy. There were a few Ph.D.’s, several Ph.D. candidates, two priests, a Jesuit and a Franciscan, medical doctors, school teachers, a designer, several carpenters, a sprinkling of licensed therapists, but far more therapists in training. A good cross-section of ordinary, highly educated, college-town Berkeleyites.

We worked together at general meetings on Tuesday or Thursday evenings—these were shock points, times according to some Sufi tradition, when real change was possible. At other times during the week, we also broke into small group meetings. Most of us meditated for at least a half hour everyday, wrote in our journals, focused our work, our self-remembering, through directed exercises that were suggested, or “indicated,” by Claudio and delivered by either Rosalyn Schaffer or Kathy Speeth (who as a child sat in the lap of Mr. Gurdjieff and taught us the sacred dances, the “movements” of Gurdjieff).

Frequently on Saturdays and Sundays, Claudio sat on a tattered sofa in the large living room of an old fraternity house on Hearst Avenue while we sat on the floor. Claudio would begin saying, “Let’s do zazen,” and we sat in meditation for an hour. Then Claudio began to talk informally, exploring points on the Enneagram, asking questions, telling Sufi teaching stories about a character called Mullah Nasrudin, even stories about cats. (I can remember that Sunday very well because by the next Friday, I owned two stray cats). There were many references to G.I. Gurdjieff, the trickster; Claudio was very familiar with the work of Gurdjieff, though he never claimed that he had ever been trained or authorized by any of Gurdjieff’s successors.

It was always a lively conversation. Claudio drew on his expertise as Fritz Perls's foremost disciple and explored the conjunction of meditation and psychological practice. There was always psychological work. It was also creative and challenging; for example, as a classical pianist, he created meditation experiences with Beethoven symphonies.

One thing was clear to all of us: Claudio Naranjo was, during that period, an inspired teacher. Something of a momentous spiritual nature had happened to him in Arica, and we were present while he was unpacking that inspiration. We were part of a great experience, willing guinea pigs in a psychological spiritual experiment.

This first use of the Enneagram as a teaching tool for spiritual growth and inner work was not delivered on crudely mimeographed diagrams, although there were copies of Enneagrams that we used to make our own notes and observations. Claudio Naranjo developed and tested his work in real situations with a group of bright people who were dedicated to self-understanding and deep inner work. It felt more like a crucible than a study group. It was not merely the intellectual exercise portrayed in the literature that began to appear about 10 years after Claudio finished his initial work.

In the next post, I will try to probe the muddied origins of the Enneagram, looking for signs of its descent into psychobabble.

To review my Enneagram bibliography, please follow the link.

© Kenneth Ireland, 2011