Buddha, S.J.

A personal investigation of the first recorded encounter between a Christian and a Zen adept.

The case that I am going to discuss is the first recorded* encounter between Christians and Zen Buddhists, a Jesuit saint and a roshi. It was written down in Latin by one of the first seven Jesuits, Francis Xavier, more than 450 years ago, sent on an uncertain journey from Japan to Lisbon aboard a Portuguese caravel, then carried onto Rome, and delivered into the hands of Ignatius Loyola. 

For me the conversations were so familiar, I could have been a fly on the wall. Sometimes the hair on the back of my neck stood up—the words, the phrasing, even the jokes seemed to be right out of conversations that I’ve had with my own Zen teachers. The tones were so familiar I thought I was remembering them, not hearing them for the first time. I had to restrain myself from finishing sentences.

When Xavier, who was for some reason known as a master of debate, shifts the conversation with the Zen master towards polemical argument, I’m embarrassed—he’s so prickly. But I also realized how much I had missed when I first set out to become a Zen student. I heard echoes from my Jesuit training in my responses to my Zen teachers. 55 years ago when I entered the Society of Jesus, carefully formulated points of doctrine designed to stem the tide of the Reformation were still taught in the curriculum, and for better or worse tended to form a rather rigid collective zeitgeist, It also created an easy target to rebel against.

Xavier records his conversations with “Ninxit,” Ninjitsu, who was the abbot of the Zen Temple, Kinryu-zan Fukushoji. “I spoke many times with some of the most learned of these [Zen monks], especially one to whom all in these parts are greatly attached, both because of his learning, life and the dignity which he has, and because of his great age, since he is nearly eighty years old; and he is called Ninxit, which means ‘Heart of Truth’ in the language of Japan. He is like a bishop among them, and if he were conformed to his name, he would be blessed. In the many conversations which we had, I found him doubtful and unable to decide whether our soul is immortal or whether it dies together with the body; sometimes he agreed with me, and at other times he did not. I am afraid that the other scholars are of the same mind. This Ninxit is such a good friend of mine that it is amazing“ (Schurhammer 1982, p. 85).

Over an extended period in 1549 on Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan, there was a real conversation between friends about what mattered in life. Xavier might have been seeking common ground with Ninjitsu, or, judging by his subsequent actions and recommendations for the missionary effort in Japan, he was looking for the weak points in Buddhist doctrine, the dharma, so he could prove Christianity’s superiority. Xavier read Ninjitsu’s “I don’t know” as doctrinal blindness and the work of the Devil rather than keeping his mind open in an inquiry.

Xavier writes, “Among the nine sects, there is one which maintains that the souls of men are mortal like that of beasts…. The followers of this sect are evil. They were impatient when they heard that there is a hell” (Schurhammer 1982, p. 283). Apparently Xavier informed Ninjitsu that he or some of his monks were condemned to hell because they did not hold to the immortality of the soul. Later Xavier began to regard zazen as a way of repressing the remorse he believed Zen monks must have felt for immoral behavior. Xavier was particularly offended by the sexual license of some monks and same sex liaisons with the acolytes in the temple.

The historian of religion might see this confrontation simply as the opening salvo of religious infighting that accompanied the civil upheaval in feudal Japan that was to last well into the solidification of the Tokugawa shogunate. The Jesuits did become embroiled, taking sides between the warring daimyos, tying their missionary success to military victories of lords who converted to Christianity. Daimyo Omura Sumitada and Koteda Saemon used their new religion to undermine the power of the Buddhist establishment, even burning Buddhist temples, images, and statues. These incidents, unfortunately for the Jesuits, were long remembered and bitterly resented (Boxer, p. 47).

To place Xavier’s arrival in the context of the religious history of medieval Japan, only 49 years later in 1597, as the Tokugawa shoguns continued to consolidate their rule, 26 Christians, including three Jesuits, two of them Japanese converts, and three young boys, were crucified in Nagasaki. That horrifying event marked the beginning of a savage anti-Catholic campaign that continued until the expulsion of all foreigners in the 1630’s, and closed Japan to all but a few trading ships from China and the Netherlands until 1854.

As difficult as it is to recount these events, and as deeply as it touches the central operating myth of Christianity that death freely chosen opens the way to salvation, this reading of history is a search for causal events, not a quest for meaning. These few facts connected with some of the actual written reports from the first Jesuit missionaries have located them in the circumstances of 16th century Japan. Zen is always contained in a specific time and circumstance. 

But, there is another dimension to these moments that lies in the realm of zazen, or what Christians call meditation or contemplation. Let’s take this unique encounter between Xavier and Ninjitsu out of time and space, and look at it through another lens, or really a pair of lenses, the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius and the tradition of the Zen koan, old stories of encounters between teacher and student that are used along with meditation, or zazen, to focus and illuminate the mind.

Allow me to use a meditation technique of Saint Ignatius, the application of the senses, to recreate this meeting. Allow yourself as much latitude as your imagination requires and enter into this world of long ago.

Imagine that you are a Zen monk with many years of meditation training, living in a fairly remote temple high above a harbor where you usually see only fishing boats and perhaps, very occasionally, a Chinese junk. You have heard from your followers when they bring you food from the village that there is a dark haired foreigner making inquiries about local priests. Perhaps you have heard about these barbarians before—Spaniards and Portuguese have been sighted in recent years and have made contact with some people living along the coast. But up to this point, these strangers have been merchants or heavily armed soldiers. The only foreigners you have met hail from Korea and China. You have never met a European.

Perhaps as the abbot of a Zen Temple, you have also heard that this man who wears a simple black robe as unadorned as your own and his Japanese companion have been telling a story about the creation of the world, a great flood, a people who tried to follow a special law given by a god, and a man called Jesus who died and then was returned to life. We know from Xavier’s letters that he did craft an oral version of the life and death of Jesus, connected it with some of the stories from the Hebrew bible, had it translated into Japanese, and memorized it syllabically. Why did he come to stand in the middle of the town square and recite in nearly unintelligible Japanese what was, for most Japanese, a bizarre account of the creation and salvation of the world?

In your training you had worked with Jōshū's answer to a monk who asked him, “Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?”—his answer: “the cypress tree in the courtyard,” the Chinese answer, “庭前柏樹子,” attesting to the origin of the story in the early period of Zen, or Ch’an. Bodhidharma is the mythic remake of an actual monk, or perhaps a group of monks, who traveled to China from India in about the 4th century to plant Buddhism in Chinese culture. He is revered as the 1st Patriarch of Zen. And now, another bearded barbarian was standing at your Temple Gate with a question about life after death.

At this point in Ignatius’ meditation, when you have stepped into your imagination’s recreation of the event, Ignatius introduces another dimension into your meditation, the discernment. Simply allow whatever emotions are present to surface, and then examine them. Do they attract you? Do they produce joy and a sense of well-being? Or perhaps your gut tells you to stay clear. Examine the meeting between Xavier and the Roshi on an emotional level: what was it that drew them to become the best of friends? Perhaps it was simply intellectual interest. Some (Faure, 1982, p. 18) suggest a certain level of interior inquiry that established a common ground. It might also have been the mutual recognition of a person who meditates, a friend, in the deepest Buddhist sense of the word, a bodhisattva or a Bodhidharma.

From my own Zen training I think I understand why the Ninjitsu took Xavier seriously. A strange man who came from the other side of the world stood before him, spoke a strange sounding language, wore clothing that seemed somewhat monkish, and most importantly asked a question that demanded an answer, not rote, not just a yes or a no, but an answer that revealed a clear grasp of its full dimension coming from his experience in meditation. Even if I don’t know what Ninjitsu actually held about the existence of the soul, I do know that he considered the question important—Xavier asking it made it important.

When I first read the fragments of their conversations that Xavier reported in his letters, I experienced a torrent of thoughts, memories, and explanations, everything incomplete and all lying somewhere in my past, just as what I could either reconstruct or imagine of their encounter also lay in the past, 449 years ago, not as old as the koan stories or the gospel of Jesus, but belonging to a very different world than the 21st century.

Despite any difficulties with language, I think that Ninjitsu understood Xavier perfectly, and that might have even provided some answers given the extensive hells that are available in Buddhist cosmology. But perhaps Ninjitsu might have been more interested in allowing this man who had arrived improbably at his temple to figure out an answer for himself. Any question in the right hands can serve as a koan, and if a question lies close to a man or woman’s heart, summing up the purpose they have given to their lives, it can cut to the quick like a sharp knife. Ninjitsu certainly knew that Xavier didn’t risk life and limb to sail into Asia just to ascertain if Buddhists believed in heaven and hell.

We do not know if Xavier attempted to introduce Ninjitsu to the Spiritual Exercises, which might have been a good place to start, but we know for certain that Ninjitsu gave Xavier a critical piece of zazen instruction (Ninjitsu to Xavier, quoted in Faure, p. 17). “[W]hen asked what the monks sitting in zazen were doing, he ironically replied: ‘Some of them are counting up how much they received during the past months from their faithful; others are thinking about their recreations and amusements; in short, none of them are thinking about anything that has any meaning at all.’” (Schurhammer 1982, p. 74).*

Xavier had been trained in spiritual practice, you could even say “converted,” when he did the Spiritual Exercises with Ignatius with its rigorous, defined and orderly Four Weeks, the application of the senses, the invocations, colloquies and formal prayer. These are definitely things to do—so many that the mind has little time or space to move undirected. The closest one gets to listing recreations and amusements might be in the first week, which is a prolonged examination of conscience in the light of one’s purpose on earth. But it has no random or haphazard quality to it—it is directed. Ninjitsu’s comment about what filled the head while meditating had some irony that Xavier didn’t find amusing.

Ignatius also included in his Exercises detailed instructions on prayer. I have already used the application of the senses to recreate the meeting between Xavier and Ninjitsu; The exercise that comes closest to the practice of zazen though is what Ignatius calls the third method of prayer or the prayer of quiet. The instructions are quite simple, that one chooses a prayer that is so familiar that it floats in the consciousness with no effort: “Our Father who art in Heaven,” and then allow one word to rest on each breath. Perhaps that prayer becomes just a word on a breath until the bell rings to signify the end of meditation.

Here is the exact text from the Spiritual Exercises: “The Third Method of Prayer is that with each breath in or out, one has to pray mentally, saying one word of the Our Father, or of another prayer which is being recited: so that only one word be said between one breath and another, and while the time from one breath to another lasts, let attention be given chiefly to the meaning of such word, or to the person to whom he recites it, or to his own baseness, or to the difference from such great height to his own so great lowness.” 

Perhaps Ninjitsu had a similar experience when, as a young monk, he was given zazen instruction. I have every reason to believe that his instruction was not much different than the first time I sat in a Zen hall: simply count your breaths from 1 to 10, and when you lose track, simply redirect your mind back to 1 and begin again.

Although I had been practicing zazen on my own for years, when I officially joined a Zen temple, I asked for meditation instruction. I still recall that meeting vividly. One evening at dusk, after the six o’clock sitting, Zenshin Philip Whalen sat down next to me on the wooden bench overlooking the backyard behind the zendo on Hartford Street. He started by saying that I didn’t “wiggle around a lot” which he thought indicated that I had done some work, and then he asked me about my meditation. I listed my experience, almost like a spiritual curriculum vitae, zazen, vipassana, Tibetan initiations and, of course, the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius. Philip listened quietly and then said that it would be best to put all that aside and to try to begin freshly, but as that in itself was impossible, just the intention to have “beginner’s mind” would probably be enough. It was all that most people could do. So I asked, “Well what should I do with my thoughts?” Phil said, “Anything you like. You can’t stop your mind. Don’t even try.”

Over and over in my early meditation interviews with Phil and Issan Dorsey Roshi, the instruction was clear: leave my mind alone. After perhaps a year or so, I was able to be present to my mind just running on, and I began to notice that the flips and loops of repeated inner conversations seemed linked in a way somewhat akin to the kind of insights that I had in psychotherapy. Again Phil cautioned me that zazen was not psychotherapy; that I shouldn’t be satisfied with that insight but continue to sit with an open mind, trying to be in “beginner's mind” as much as I could.

The meaning of Eternal Life

At the very beginning of a koan is a terse report of an actual encounter, usually a question and an answer, between teacher and student. Xavier asked Ninjitsu, “Do you believe in the immortality of the soul?”

From what I can map from the chronology in the letters, Ninjitsu and Xavier met many times over an extended period, at least three but perhaps as long as nine months. It was unlike today’s high-level ecumenical tightly scripted formal conference negotiated in advance to trumpet straightening out the thread of old argument—where the parties separated, where they might converge, or where they agree to disagree.

There are clues that the conversation had elements of spontaneity and laughter. It might have been a time to become friends, to learn to deal with the language differences that separated them, and to consider life from a religious or spiritual perspective. Ninjitsu could have answered Xavier’s question with the famous, often quoted response to the question about what happens after death, “Don’t ask me, I’m not dead yet.” I like it because it makes me laugh, and Xavier showed very little tolerance for humor when the Roshi talked about what might be passing through his monks’ minds as they sat in meditation focused on collection plates and sexual dalliances.

Xavier will eventually condemn Zen as the work of the Devil. He was the product of the frayed religious culture that the Reformation left in its wake; he set a confrontational tone for the early Jesuits in Japan. He seemed to love the role of hurtling condemnations like an Old Testament Prophet. That is what spiritual life had come to in Europe and what he expected to find in Asia. I don’t know if Ninjitsu would have passed Xavier on his koan work—probably not, but Xavier did come to appreciate the depth and subtlety of the Zen mind, so much so that his recommendations for the Jesuit mission included, besides training in the Japanese language, as complete an understanding as possible of the religious traditions practiced in Japan.

For Ninjitsu, I would like to believe that Xavier’s question opened a window into his own soul, like a koan. Xavier writes: “I found him [Ninjitsu] doubtful and unable to decide whether our soul is immortal or whether it dies together with the body; sometimes he agreed with me, and at other times he did not” (Schurhammer 1982, 85). What Xavier takes to be wavering and indecision could also indicate Ninjitsu’s working with the koan. I can feel some kinship with an attitude that Ninjitsu’s answers might have betrayed. I have looked into the eyes of the teacher that I was working with a koan, and not known what to say, or how to respond, feeling one thing in one moment and something entirely different a split second later. If Xavier’s question did not open a new way of viewing the world for the Roshi, it did for me.

If you are inclined to find your own answer to Xavier’s question, I recommend that you include the practice of zazen to help your search and study. Over time, you can expect that your meditation will reset the language you, and your community, use to describe religious experience. Each time you say “life” on a new breath it will bring that word into the present moment. Each present moment wipes away more traces of the inherited meaning we give to words, the misunderstandings, the exaggerations, the lies and adjustments that we humans make for our precious beliefs, the fairy tales that we were told and believed as children. I won’t say that your language will reset to reveal the Truth, but you will certainly be more in touch with your own experience.

1549 or 1550 marked the end of the encounter. Xavier left Japan early in 1551. He died just over a year later on Sancian, a small island off south China, while waiting for a boat to carry him into the celestial empire. “Nixnit” died in 1565. The historical record shows that the groundwork for further conversation about religious beliefs between Zen Buddhists and Christians was not very firm. The gifts of friendship, however, cannot be underestimated.

The expression “eternal moment” is more than poetry, but something that can be really experienced in meditation. Lovers, and sometimes friends, can also share this experience. It might also be a lens to open up all of life in every dimension of time and space.

Jesuits enter the Zen hall

Koans can enter our consciousness, and change our point of view. They can even change a society. The wheel of the dharma, as the Buddhist metaphor clearly tries to show us, never stops. I have no evidence that Xavier ever really taught Ninjitsu anything about the Christian way of life, but I will posit some anecdotal evidence that it just might have happened as I imagined. 

Father Enomiya-LaSalle, S.J. is buried in Hiroshima. On August 6, 1945, he was walking only eight miles from the epicenter of the atomic explosion that destroyed the city. He survived. He also was a Zen student for the remaining 45 years of his life, attaining fluency with the practice of zazen and a mastery of the koans that was fully recognized by his teacher, Yamada Koun Zenshin. He wrote about his long experience with the practice, and led many fellow Jesuits into the sphere of zazen, including Pedro Arrupe who was his superior in Japan and Ignatius’s successor as the General of the Society during the time that I was a Jesuit. 

My friend and teacher, David Weinstein Roshi, was a student of Yamada Roshi during Father LaSalle’s last years, and often saw him coming and going at the zendo in Kamakura. He worked with his teacher almost until the day he died. David told me this story. One morning after zazen, after Yamada had finished seeing students who were working on a koan, he was standing next to Yamada as LaSalle was leaving. Yamada turned to David and said, “There is the man who taught me how to apply the koans in my life.”

After reading Xavier’s letters to Ignatius describing his encounter with Ninjitsu, to my mind it seemed inevitable that some Jesuits would eventually enter a Zen hall, and, that with the discipline learned from their training under the Spiritual Exercises, some would complete their koan training and teach Zen. 

I begin my acknowledgement of Jesuit and other Christian Zen Masters with Fr. LaSalle. His example and teaching influenced most of these men and women who became Zen teachers in their own right. I cannot even guess where their Zen practice will lead, but I hope that their work will open and enrich the spiritual lives of many people. —— Fr. Hugo Enomiya-LaSalle, S.J. (dec. 1990); Fr. William Thomas Hand, S.J. (dec. 2005); Fr. Willigis Jäger, O.S.B., Roshi (dec. 2020); Bro. Tom Marshall, S.J. (dec. 2010); Fr. Bill Johnson, S.J. (dec. 2010); Fr. Pat Hawk, CSsR, Roshi (dec. 2012); Fr. Kakichi Kadowaki, S.J., Roshi (dec. 2017); Fr. Niklaus Brantschen, S.J., Roshi; Ruben Habito, (former Jesuit), Roshi; Bro. Kevin Hunt, OCSO, Trappist, Sensei; Rev. James Ismael Ford, UU Minister, Roshi; Fr. Robert Jinsen Kennedy, S.J., Roshi; Sr. Elaine MacInnes, Our Lady’s Missionaries, Roshi; Rev. David Parks-Ramage, UCC, Roshi; Fr. Ama Samy, S.J., Roshi.

The Verse

Here are a few lines from Rumi translated by Coleman Barks that I have chosen to close the question of “the immortality of the soul.” 

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?

Who comes to a spring thirsty

and sees the moon reflected in it?

Who, like Jacob, blind with grief and age,

smells the shirt of his son and can see again?

Who lets a bucket down

and brings up a flowing prophet?

Or like Moses goes for fire

and finds what burns inside the sunrise?

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,

and opens a door to the other world.

Solomon cuts open a fish, and there's a gold ring.

Omar storms in to kill the prophet

and leaves with blessings.

Chase a deer and end up everywhere!

An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop.

Now there's a pearl.

A vagrant wanders empty ruins

Suddenly he's wealthy.

Notes:

*I first read about Xavier's encounter in Bernard Faure's Chan Insights and Oversights. I asked my friend Bro. Tom Marshall to locate Xavier's Letters. He did, and another friend, Robert Blaire Kaiser, helped me get them out of the Jesuit Library at the Univeristy of San Francisco. The Jesuits are meticulous about recording their dates and places of their missionary work. I knew that part would be easy. I had not expected to find any evidence confirming the enounter from Japanese sources, However when Ninjitsu, abbot of the Zen Temple, Kinryu-zan Fukushoj, appeared in Zen records along with his dates, it was easy to match them up, and say with a great deal of certainlty that “Ninxit" was in fact Ninjitsu.

*Fukushoji has been alternatively designated as a Soto Temple (Faure), a Rinzai Temple (Kagoshima records), a Sendai Temple (Xavier Memorial Association). Although this encounter was before the 17th century Rinzai revival of Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1768), the instruction has the distinct feel of shikantaza, “just sitting,” favored by the Soto school, founded by Dōgen Zenji, (1200-1253).

References:

Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times, Vol. 4: Japan and China, 1549-1552, Georg Schurhammer, Jesuit Historical Institute, 1973.

Chan Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, Bernard Faure, Princeton University Press, 1993.

Gateless Barrier: Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, Zenkai Shibayama, Shambhala, 2000.

A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China, 1542-1742, Andrew C. Ross; Edinburgh University Press, 1994.

Papers on Portuguese, Dutch and Jesuit Influences in 16th and 17th Century Japan, Boxer, C.R., compiled by Michael Moscato. Washington D.C.: University of America, Inc., 1979.

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Ignatius Loyola and Father Elder Mullan, Cosimo Classics, 2007.

The Essential Rumi, Coleman Barks, translator, Harpercollins, 1995.

Thank you!

Bro. Tom Marshall, S.J. was a koan student par excellence, a wily fox, an ordained priest in two Zen lineages, a brother in the Society of Jesus and a true son of St. Francis Xavier. You held my hand, or laughed, as I worked my way through the account of Xavier’s travels in Japan. Bless you, dear Tom, as you explore worlds yet undiscovered.

I also thank the late Bonnie Johnson and her husband Daniel Shurman who brought the Exercises back into my life after being dormant for more than 30 years.

Morgan Zo Callahan gave me the time and space to complete “Buddha, S.J.” as a tribute to those Jesuits who have traveled both the paths pioneered by Ignatius and the Buddha. Morgan, I don’t know yet whether it is a mark of completion or beginning for us—perhaps both.

A Zen Master looks at Same-Gender Marriage

Two years before his death in 2010, I asked Bob to write a piece about same sex marriage that could be used as an op-ed in heated debate before California voted on Prop 8 which sought to reverse the decision by the State Supreme Court to open legal marriage to same sex couples. I am posting it as much as a tribute to Bob and the ever present encouragement in his teaching,

A Zen Master looks at Same-Gender Marriage
by Robert Aitken
October 2008

Robert Aitken Roshi is one of the most widely respected American Zen teachers. In 1959 he and his wife, Anne Hopkins Aitken, founded a Zen Meditation community in Hawaii, the Honolulu Diamond Sangha. Today there are Diamond Sangha affiliated centers in North and South America, Australia and New Zealand. He is also co-founder of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. Now 91 years old, he lives in Honolulu with his son Tom.

The word Zen means "exacting meditation," which describes the central practice of the Zen Buddhist and from which emerge certain quite profound realizations that can be applied in daily life. Most practitioners come to a deep understanding that all life is connected and that we are each a boundless container that includes all other beings. The application of this kind of intimacy can be framed in the classic Buddhist teaching of the Four Noble Abodes: loving kindness, compassion, joy in the attainment of others, and equanimity.

Applying these Four Noble Abodes to the issue of same-sex marriage, I find it clear that encouragement is my recommendation. Over my long career of teaching, I have had students who were gay, lesbian, trans-sexual and bisexual, as well as heterosexual. These orientations have seemed to me to be quite specific, much akin to the innate proclivities which lead people to varied careers or take paths in life that are uniquely their own. We are all human, and within my own container, I find compassion—not just for—but with the gay or lesbian couple who wish to confirm their love in a legal marriage.

Although historically Zen has been a monastic tradition, there have always been prominent lay adherents. Those who enter the state of marriage vow to live their lives according to the same sixteen precepts that ground the Buddhist monk’s and nun’s life in the world. This way of living opens our path into life. Like life itself, marriage is absolutely non-discriminatory and open to all.

Buddhist teaching regarding sexuality is expressed in the precept of "taking up the way of not misusing sex." I understand this precept to mean that any self-centered sexual conduct is exploitative, non-consensual—sex that harms others. In the context of young men or young women confined within monastery walls for periods of years, one might expect rules and teachings relating to homosexuality, but they don't appear. Homosexuality seems to be overlooked in Zen teachings, and indeed in classical Buddhist texts. However, my own monastic experience leads me to believe that homosexuality was not taken as an aberration, and so did not receive comment.

All societies have from earliest times across the world formalized sexual love in marriage ceremonies that give the new couple standing and rights in the community. Currently both rights and standing are denied to gays and lesbians who wish to marry in all but three of the United States. If every State acknowledged the basic married rights of gay and lesbian couples, young men and women just beginning their lives together, as well as those who have shared their lives for decades, a long-standing injustice would be corrected, and these fellow citizens would feel accepted in the way they deserve to be. This would stabilize a significant segment of our society, and we would all of us be better able to acknowledge our diversity. I urge the voters of California to keep gay and lesbian marriages legal. This is the most humane course of action and in keeping with perennial principles of decency and mutual encouragement.

Tommy D, "the boy as pretty as the girl next door"

May 22nd, 2010

I can't let these pictures Of Issan and some of his friends sit on my computer's hard drive out of sight. They were, I think, a gift from Del Carlson to the Hartford Street Zen Center. Jeff Thomas scanned them and sent me digital copies. I found a few others in various and sundry places.

Issan and Del Carlson in Santa Fe

This is the earliest photo of Issan I found. I'd recognize that face anywhere.

He shaved his head.

He wore a dress and did his hair.

He was never afraid to share the spotlight.

Issan and James

Shunko Jamvold, Del Carlson, Angelique Farrow, Steve Allen, Issan Dorsey

To read more reflections about the life of Issan, see some photographs, read his dharma talks, go to my Record of Issan page.

Issan Dorsey and Some Undisclosed Secrets of the AIDS Epidemic

What follows is an interview I did with Marlin Marynick for his book, Undisclosed: Secrets of the AIDS Epidemic.

1/27/2012

I'm a gay man in San Francisco. I've been living here since 1974. I'm a former Jesuit—I’d been in Berkeley studying theology—and when I came out, I stayed. I did all the crazy kind of things that people do when they first come out—particularly the men of my generation who were just beginning to do the things we were really capable of in spite of all the discrimination against us. I drove a cab for a number of years, and I started a wood shop, perfect for a guy with a degree in theology, but I didn't really feel much like practicing any religion. When I met Harvey Milk, I joined the fight for gay rights. I had a partner, and we tried to build a life here in gay Mecca.

Then, all of a sudden in the mid-80’s, our friends began dying, huge numbers. . .first it was called gay cancer, then it was called GRID. . .nobody really knew what it was, but it was terrifying. Towards 1987-88 I felt that I had to do something, although this was also a process of me overcoming my own fears, of dealing with them. I had many friends that were diagnosed, and everybody was dealing with the fear, the loss and the not-knowing what we were really dealing with.

In 1988 I met a gay Buddhist priest, Issan Dorsey. Friends had told me that he was remarkable guy, but my first impressions were that he was actually rather ordinary, far more effeminate than any of my gay friends, and not in any way “spiritual” as I understood the word.

Issan, “Tommy” Dorsey, did have an unusual path to a Zen. He had been a professional drag queen, and a heavy drug abuser, which was not terribly out of the ordinary for gay San Franciscans 40 years ago. He was also a very bright, funny, human being, and he had just started an AIDS hospice. (He himself died at the Hospice of the disease on September 6, 1990—he’d contracted HIV from his partner, James). I was blessed to be able to be with him during the last few years of his life, and helped him create Maitri Home and Hospice for People with HIV.

I had first moved into the Zen center on Hartford Street to practice meditation, to get away from a relationship that was ending, and to put some perspective around all that. Very quickly after I packed my bags, my partner and I closed our business, we made and sold furniture, and ended our relationship. So there I was living in this Zen center-hospice, and I started doing some general carpentry work, fixing bathrooms, getting rooms ready for the men who would live with us. It just was the next thing to do, right in front of me. This quickly lead to finding money to pay for the building materials; then more organizational stuff; and by 1990, I followed Steve Allen as executive director of the hospice. Looking back, it was something that my Jesuit training, and everything, prepared me for though I didn't have much experience with non-profits and no experience in health care.

Back then people with HIV-AIDS died quickly after being diagnosed. . . 3 weeks, 6 weeks, a few months, perhaps a little bit longer in rare cases. It felt like we were picking up bodies off the street. Some months 100 men died in our neighborhood, the Castro. You'd walk down the street, pass someone you knew who looked pretty healthy. Then you'd see him 2 weeks later and he’d aged 40 years. Within a year or two I said to myself "Oh my god, where did my friends go." No one knew what to do, or how to behave around those infected—these were friends. Of course a lot of us were afraid of catching the disease, because no one knew how it was transmitted, although we had our suspicions, no one really knew. No one knew if it was poppers, or kissing, or if it really was sex and drugs and rock and roll. That didn't appear on the horizon for a while because no one wanted to give those things up. Sexual freedom was part of our emancipation, or that’s what we though. Denial was a big part of the epidemic’s horrifying spread through the community.

Issan said that the only real thing that we could do was to take care of what was in front of us, take care of life as it presented itself. He said HIV was like a guest who’d come and knocked at the door, and couldn’t be turned away. When one member of the small meditation community, JD, became so sick that his partner Pierre could no longer care for him, despite the misgivings of some in the community—Issan could be very firm, even stubborn, when he was sure of the next thing he had to do—he moved JD into the bedroom next to his. And he began looking after his immediate needs, which included martinis after evening meditation, spicy hot dogs, and cable TV. It was a very simple concept—just take care of people in the most basic way and sustain a normal life for as long as possible. And be as happy as you could—no matter what.

And then something unexpected happened, JD did not die quickly. The symptoms of the disease worsened, he could no longer walk, was bed-ridden, but when a supporter gave Maitri a motorized wheelchair, JD became a teenager with a hot rod, missing meals, staying out past curfew. He found a new boyfriend who was also disabled, and they began to spend the night together. We moved him from the second floor to the street level front room of the second building where he held court. Four or five other men would be in his room watching campy movies on VCR at all hours. He stocked his small refrigerator intended for medications with soda and beer, and in the front window a hydroponic wheatgrass farm, for health, of course. All this really tested some zennish sensibilities, and the CNA staff. But despite complaints, Issan remained firm in his support for JD. When JD returned one day from Oakland—he’d taken BART across the Bay—with an iguana, no one believed that he would actually take care of it himself. He did. In fact he smuggled his pet onto a plane when he went back to Florida to spend his last days with his mother. The story of the lizard squirming around under his shirt while JD locked himself in toilet at 30,000 feet became the stuff of legend. I think that JD’s story is also a real example of what kind of life is possible when your guests are not bound by some rigid rules for how you expect guests to behave.

Even if people couldn’t see the compassion in what Issan was doing, most everyone trusted him enough to give money. Another friend of his bought the building next to our small Victorian house, and we bought back the lease. That gave us rooms for another 5 people. Within a year we had 8 beds for people with HIV-AIDS plus 6 people to take care of them, Issan, Phil Whalen, a zen priest, as was Steve Allen, and his wife, Angelique, Michael Jamvold, myself, and David Bullock. We shared a life together—we meditated, had fun. We worked hard and cried.

Maitri was a ragtag operation. We learned, and we would create a Buddhist hospice piece by piece. I began to spend time helping people get their paperwork arranged for the end of their life, getting everything straightened out with their partners, and their families, taking care of the kinds of things that come up towards the end of life. I asked social workers and lawyers to help and everyone I asked stepped forward.

What also started to become clear, we were charting new territory. We were the only Zen center in the United States to put meat, chicken and sausages on our vegetarian, Zen, table. People with HIV needed protein. There were a lot of other things that broke rules, both in Zen terms, and hospice-wise. When we had to take care of getting the drugs adjusted so that people could have a fairly comfortable life, we got help from Visiting Nurses and Hospice (Steve Allen worked out a contract with them to provide a full-time nurse and certified nursing attendants using moneys already allocated for care from the city). As I started to investigate how we could get money for hospice, I discovered that for most insurance and federal funding, people had to have a 6 month diagnosis to receive assistance and they couldn't take any drugs which would prolong life. Issan said that’s crazy because he wanted people to live and enjoy life as much as they could for as long as they could. There was a new, experimental drug called Foscarnet which prevented, or at least retarded, blindness caused by CMV retinitis. It had to be given intravenously. The nurses from hospice were not allowed to do that with hospice patients so I recruited a small group of volunteers who learned how to administer it. Then several patients wanted to sign up for drug trails of the new HIV drugs that began to appear. It would probably have been prohibited in more formal hospice settings, but somehow, I convinced VNA to not report any person at Maitri who enrolled in a drug trial.

The partner of my friend Michael who was dying called Maitiri “the house of death” when I suggested that he move Michael in. I was pretty offended. I saw what we were doing as creating a house of life. While I was trying to figure out how to keep the cable TV from being shut off, and lamb stew on the table, there were times I thought I was running “animal house.” There were lots of humorous, funny things going on all the time. Yes, people were dying, in the 2 + years I was there 82 people died in those 8 beds, and I was with almost every one of them. I won’t deny that it tested my defenses, that it was trying, and stressful work. There was always a poignancy about life at Maitri. But when death is simply part of life, it becomes easier to sustain what we think of as normal life.

Bit by bit, we did put something together, and what we created is now the longest surviving AIDS hospice, “home and hospice for people with AIDS,” in the city. The morbidity rate from HIV/AIDS has gone down enormously, thank god. Only a few people actually die in the hospice now, so the current staff deals with things like drug addiction, and adherence to medical protocol for the antiviral drugs, respite care, things that Issan would have encouraged us to do to make life as normal and happy for as long as it lasts. What we did in the early days of the epidemic and what continues to be done now is really extraordinary.

By the time he died, I realized that Issan was a truly extraordinary man. He had more than an extremely funny sense of humor. He’d worn a skirt, or as he used to say, "I still wear a skirt but I renounced the heels." His speech was always in entirely plain language. And he really was a Zen master. When this drag queen, substance abuser par excellence, started to sit in meditation with Susuki Roshi, he sat down and looked at the bottom of his feet, and said to himself, oh my god, they are dirty. . . and he started to clean up from drugs, and meditate. He also discovered what was important for his own life. In official Zen, he went as high as any man can go. For me he was an absolutely extraordinary, terrific human being.

Maitri Hospice, Ken Ireland, an Interview with Morgan Zo Callahan

8/12/2014

This is a draft of a chapter from a forthcoming book: A Thousand Arms: A Guidebook for Buddhist Leaders, edited by Danny Fisher and Nathan Michon.

I met Ken Ireland in 2002 after sitting in a Zen meditation group he led at the YMCA in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. He invited me to visit Maitri (Sanskrit for “compassionate friendship”), a hospice for people with AIDS in San Francisco. (www.maitrisf.org). In 1987 Maitri was founded in San Francisco’s Castro district by Issan Dorsey, a Zen priest, and several friends, among them Steve Allen and David Sunseri. “The Castro was a place for the gay revolution with its arts, its parties, its style and its joie de vivre, and Issan was part of these happenings. Then, in the early 1980s, AIDS started to appear and, at first, no one knew what to make of it.” (John Tarrant, Bring Me the Rhinoceros, p.77)  Issan Dorsey had been ordained a Zen priest in 1975. By 1980, he was part of an informal group of gay Buddhists, and was invited to become the head teacher at the Hartford Street Zen Center in the Castro. Issan was appointed abbot in 1989, and his teacher, Richard Baker Roshi named him a lineage holder: he became Issan Roshi. In 1987 Issan invited a homeless student dying of AIDS into the Zen center, and Maitri was born. Issan himself died from AIDS in 1990. (Cf. Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey by David Schneider)

I was impressed that Maitri was a warm, “at home” environment where both caregiver and patient deeply listened to each other. The ample kitchen had a signed, framed photo of Elizabeth Taylor who had visited, and encouraged the residents. Golden light danced on the fresh green plants in the hallways and communal areas. I was reminded of Camus: “The great courage is still to gaze squarely at the light as it is at death.” Maitri is the first Buddhist residential hospice in the U.S. Over more than 20 years Maitri has been the final home for more than 900 people with AIDS. This is from Maitri’s mission statement: “We strive to provide the type of care that each of us would like to receive at the end of our lives—care that is dignified, non-judgmental, and unconditional. We hold dear the principle that each resident has the right to determine the degree of choice and awareness with which to experience life and death.”

Issan and his friends, Ken among them, didn’t set out to found a Buddhist Hospice. Rather he was creating a way to respond to the deadly epidemic that was ravaging his community. He was also creating a place to practice with his own death fast approaching. The result was Maitri.

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Ken Ireland has practiced Buddhism for more than four decades, first with Master C.M. Chen, then Issan Dorsey Roshi and Philip Zenshin Whalen at HSZC. In 1994 he began koan practice with Robert Aitken, and continued with John Tarrant and David Weinstein. Ken was Maitri’s executive director from 1989 through 1993. He and his partner currently spend half the year in northern India with the community gathered around H.H. the Dalai Lama.

I first interviewed Ken more than 20 years ago. I have allowed him to let his words reflect how that experience has remained with him and changed him over the years.

Morgan Zo Callahan: Wonderful talking with you. Ken, how do you relate with someone who's dying?

Ken Ireland: The short answer is “as normally as possible.” But right away as soon as I began to live with people who had a grave diagnosis and who were very close to death, I noticed that their world, and by extension mine, was quite different. It is both slower and much more immediate. I saw theorizing fall away--intellectual considerations like “What's going to happen after death? Am I going to be around?” Conversations got real and something else came forward. I heard requests such as “I want to have my relationship with my family straightened out before I die. I want to make peace with my ex before I die. I want to die on my own terms.” Somehow, even when they seemed impossible, all of us who were part of Maitri tried to fulfill those requests. What we crafted was far from perfect, but life and living life to the end changed on its own accord.

MZC: Apart from the interpersonal relationships, how do you respond to the inevitable natural laws of the process of dying? How do you stay focused and mindful without expectations about how it is all supposed to be?

KI: As hard as we, in cahoots with our medical professionals, try to fight nature and stave off death, nature always wins. All I can do is try to stay present with that process. The body begins to shut down in its own way; physiological, mental, and psychological changes move into place and take over. We're also at the mercy of those processes. We may try to defend ourselves. We experience a variety of natural human reactions in the face of uncertainty, fear, grief, anxiety, but we have no real control. We will eventually have to give up that kind of control whether we want to or not. 

What I’ve seen over and over is that our normal reaction to postpone the inevitable proves useless. There’s no way out. There’s no tomorrow. I can only take care of my own mental state--an iffy job at best--but I just say to myself, okay, I'm with this particular person at this very moment. I've decided to be here. I've committed myself to be of service, to alleviate the pain, to ease the transition.

MZC: In what ways is your work a natural expression of your Buddhist practice?

KI:  I can’t lie and pretend that it was all hunky dory. Living through the AIDS epidemic, being with so many people, mostly gay men who were my age or younger, was extremely painful. From the point of view of my own cherished ideas about how things should be, it was an impossible task. But on the other hand, in terms of training, in terms of deepening my own meditation, and in terms of personal rewards, it was, and is, great practice.  

MZC: How were your teachers helpful in preparing you to engage hospice work?

KI: When I met Yogi Chen in Berkeley in the early 70’s, he introduced me to the meditation on impermanence and the suffering arising from clinging. In Tibet he’d lived for three years in the charnel grounds where dead bodies were brought to have vultures strip the flesh from their bones before they were gathered up. Very specially, highly trained practitioners undertook this practice. When I first became involved at Maitri, partially I’m sure to assure myself that I was not entirely crazy, I tried to tell myself that we were trying to adapt this practice for our times. (There’s always a need for practice manuals, I suppose, both as a record of the experience of our ancestors and a kind of reassurance that we’re on the right track.) But in time I gave that up, and realized that we were just responding to the circumstances of our lives in way that made sense and arose from our own practice.  I learned from Issan and the many people we took care of. They taught me to relate to humans in any circumstance with respect and love, getting out of the way as much as possible. Over the years I’ve noticed that the experience changed something in me in terms of my relationship to people, my own life, my growing older, the physical breakdowns of my body. It's not just acceptance, and certainly not resignation. It’s more like a transformation, a noticeable change in the air we breathe.

MZC: So meditations on impermanence and encounters in hospice have changed the way you live your life?

KI: I hope so. I am definitely not the same man who moved into Maitri and cared for more than 80 people who died.  I have the same questions that I had when I was a Jesuit: What are our lives about? What do we want to make our lives about? What do we want to do with our lives in the time that we have? How can I do something that's of value? But for me this is where my Buddhist practice comes in: I'm going to do something that aims to benefit all beings because I'm not alone in the universe. If I consider how I can really take care of a person in the way in which he or she would like while at the same time taking care of myself, the world becomes different. At least that was my experience. When the point is to be of service to somebody when they're at the end of their lives, then the question becomes something like, instead of avoiding the end of life, how does life become full and complete from beginning to end? The whole process is alive and well; it breathes and pulsates, as we breathe from beginning to end. 

MZC: One night I received a call at one o’clock in the morning; it was from a member of our school board who very desperately related to me that a Japanese gentleman, a devoted Buddhist, was dying; the family wanted to take the man off life support. I was asked to call the Rosemead Buddhist Monastery and come with a monk to the hospital.  I said, my gosh, it's one o’clock in the morning. But I said I'd do it. So I called the monastery; the monks were very upset at first. But it ended up that three monks happily went to the bedside, and chanted. “We transfer the effects of the good that we’ve done in our lives for whatever journey this dying person is going on.”

KI: That's what we do. The monks got out of bed to be of service to the family and dying person.  They sat with them, and chanted, performing the rituals of the end of life. They were present with him when all this was going on. It's a wonderful practice.