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April, 2010 - Letter to Everyday Zen |
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By Norman Fischer | 4/24/2010 @ 14:46 pm
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April, 2010
Muir Beach
Dear Everyday Zen friends,
These last few months I have been contemplating emotions and
feelings, how they work to help or harm us, and what our practice has to do
with them. These reflections have
been occasioned by work I've been doing recently with my good friends at the
Center for Understanding in Conflict, both here in California and in New York,
where we practice with conflict resolution professionals to help them access
feelings skillfully for more effective and more heartfelt work. Also, I've been reading an excellent
book that touches the question of emotions: Looking
for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain by the neuroscientist
Antonio Damasio.
I find Damasio's analysis of emotion and feeling strikingly
similar to what I have learned in Buddhist psychology. Emotions are basic to the human
organism: our lives are a constant flow of emotions as we respond (like all
other animals!) to what comes at us every day: we like it (it enhances our life
force), we don't like it (it threatens our life force) is the basis of all
emotion, and on top of that there is elaboration of thought, story telling,
conditioning, ideology, and so on. The root of it all is in the body. Damasio
gives tremendous detail about how emotion courses through the body constantly,
and how the brain maps the body and interprets those maps as feeling, so that
we can be aware of emotions like anger, sorrow, joy, fear, love. Emotions and feelings are not ancillary
aspects of our lives, messy side-shows that we would do well to ignore, so that
we can get on to more important things.
In fact, there is no ethics, no shaping of conduct and thought, without
emotion. The trick of course is
how to discriminate between - and skillfully work with - the sort of crude conditioned emotion
(generally unconscious) that will freeze us into unsuccessful living patterns,
and those emotions that generate ways of living we want to promote. It turns out that so-called negative emotions
(like anger, greed, fear, aggression) are not so much to be avoided or
eliminated as to be understood and used to further our best intentions. Anger understood and patiently
appreciated is not the same as anger that twists us up.
Here is where meditation practice comes into it, and where
the Buddha's wise teachings on working with emotion are relevant. Since the basic root of emotion and
feeling is in the body, and it is the visceral emotions that drive our
emotional thinking, there is nothing more powerful than mindfulness of the body
and breath for accessing our unconscious emotional patterns. As we all know, we can think about
changing our emotional lives for a thousand years and nothing will change, but
as soon as we sit and breathe, opening the field of awareness somatically, we
have a different, and wiser, access to what is within us. At the Center, our effort has
been to use meditation practice to access feelings and bring them forth to aid
us in the effort to bring peace to conflict. I have been finding this work very interesting and
rewarding. It follows several
Dharma seminars we did a few years back on Buddhist psychology of
emotions. We will continue these
studies and reflections when the seminar resumes after our summer break, August
5.
On a personal note, I seem to have been traveling more
lately. In the next few months I
will be on several different continents and will visit parts of this country
(Texas!) I usually don't travel to.
Paying attention to my physical sensations, thoughts, and emotions
becomes essential practice when I am on the road, and it is the best way for me
to take care of myself. I hope you
will do the same!
Our Everyday Zen family of communities keeps growing, both
in numbers, and, more importantly, in depth and connection. It is my joy to practice with all of
you. Thanks for your support and
devotion.
Yours,
Norman
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August, 2009 - Letter to Everyday Zen Community |
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By Norman Fischer | 8/27/2009 @ 12:53 pm
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August, 2009, Falls Village, Connecticut
Dear friends,
Letters, words, sentences. Paragraphs. Chapters. Books...
I often joke that I have an incurable reading and writing habit. That’s a Zen joke. Gary Snyder’s emails used to come with a little self-mocking motto after the closing, lines from Japanese Zen Master Ikkyu (also a poet!) to the effect that literary people are the lowest scoundrels on earth. But the exact phrase “writing habit” comes from my dear teacher, friend, and fellow poet, the late great Philip Whalen, who used it all the time in reference to himself.
These jokes aren’t implying that we shouldn’t read or write, that language and intellect are to be denigrated. I have always appreciated Dogen’s direct discussion of this. He says that language and thought are not the enemy – it is the violent use of them that is the enemy (violent in the sense of dominating: if our lives are tyrannized by the mind and by thought, without balance from the heart and the body and the breath, we do violence to ourselves and others). As Dogen teaches, language and thought lie at the very center of our humanness; they can be a great aid in the process of our awakening.
In our Everyday Zen practice we study. Most of the talks on the website, are, first of all, talks, organized talks, most of them actually written in advance. And most of them refer to texts, teachings that are also written. The point of this isn’t to encourage us to become experts on Zen or Buddhism. The point is not the words or concepts, but our lives and how we live them. Everyone’s a philosopher. Everyone’s got some theory of who she is and what her life – and life in general – is all about, a theory that is probably unconscious and probably productive of suffering and limitation. The right kind of study, reading, or writing can offer a pathway out of that thicket – a “counterword” as poet Paul Celan puts it: a word to counterweigh the word that has been holding us in its thrall, keeping us imprisoned in lives that don’t have enough confidence, enough vision, or enough love. Sitting does this too.
These thoughts come to mind as I await the first copies of another new book of mine, a big collection of poetry, Questions/Places/Voices/Seasons, that contains many new long works in a variety of formats and voices. I am very pleased with it and am looking forward to sharing it with you and other friends. It is published by Paul Naylor at Singing Horse Press in San Diego, a small poetry publisher, so you probably won’t find it in most bookstores. But you can get it online in many places, including my own new poetry website normanfischerzenpoetry.com , that comes to you via the hard work and initiative of Monica Heredia, from our Bay Area group, who has been a tremendous help to me in all literary matters. Thanks Monica! Beautiful site. Take a look.
I am not the only Everyday Zen author. We are blessed with many writers and artists. Denise Newman, a comrade since Green Gulch days, is bringing out her own new book of poems early next year The New Make Believe, to be published by Simone Vittal’s Sausalito-based Post Apollo Press. Denise is a lovely poet and this new work is tremendous. Sue Moon will also have a new book of essays out next year from Shambhala Press called This Is Getting Old: Buddhist Thoughts on Aging with Humor and Dignity. We all know Sue from her talks at seminar. Her writing is humane and humorous and getting better and better as she gets older, so this one will be the best no doubt. Sue is also the editor/interlocutor of a wonderful small interview book with my teacher Sojun Mel Weitsman called A Path Unfolding. That book, as well as another one about Mel, Umbrella Man (both to commemorate his 80th birthday; this one has a piece by me in it) are available through the Berkeley Zen Center; both lovely tender books you will want to have. Ruth Ozeki, of our Northwest groups, is our most prominent author. She’s always zipping around from campus to campus reading from her great novels My Year of Meats and All Over Creation. If you haven’t checked these out, please do. (Ruth is also the editor of www.everydayzen.org, a very big job- thanks Ruth!) Another book to check out this Fall is by my dear Dharma sister and colleague Grace Schireson, who, after a decade of research, will finally publish her Zen Women book with Wisdom Press in October. This important book traces the history and sociology of women in Zen. We will be studying it in November and December in the Dharma seminar.
And there are more. Our literary sangha on the East Coast includes Brian Unger, of the Elberon New Jersey group (I ordained Brian as a priest a few years ago at Loon Lake in Canada) who edits the excellent magazine Zen Monster, and has an article in the International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest [Wiley-Blackwell] on “Enclosure” (land grabbing) and how it affected 19th century English writers. Poet John High from Brooklyn will soon publish a wonderful new book of poems, very mysterious and profound, called A Book of Unknowing (Talisman House Publishers). Larry Lane, from New York, who usually sits with us at Samish sesshin, is a playwright and director whose last play, an adaptation of Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener was an off-Broadway hit garnering rave reviews from The New York Times and Village Voice. My apologies to the probably several others whose books and other artistic productions I have forgotten to mention here.
As summer ends and fall begins, a new yearly cycle gets rolling. Life is always beginning over again. Practicing together provides us with a path for renewal, and with strength.
Thanks in advance for your contributions and your support. We are lucky to have each other.
Yours, Norman
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Abbot's Journal, Vol 67, February 11/12, 2009 |
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By Norman Fischer | 5/05/2009 @ 14:17 pm
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February 11/12, 2009
En Route: IAD to SFO
... was in Washington for a Mindfulness "summit meeting" with the U.S. Army and assorted others, sponsored and organized by Mirabai for Contemplative Mind in Society. To explain what mindfulness is, report on mindfulness research, talk about how mindfulness training might be of use to the army. The event is in part a preparation for the retreat for army chaplains and caregivers I am to give (that has been scheduled and postponed twice now). The army people seemed pretty decent open-heated and open-minded people. I was impressed with them.
Met Liz Stanley, a very smart and dynamic woman, soulful and passionate about her work with mindfulness training. She comes from a long line of army people, and was herself in military intelligence for years, served in Bosnia in the 1990's. Her service there somehow (in her presentation she didn't say how, but she cried, or nearly did, when she referred to it) activated an old pre-existing trauma (she didn't say what it was) and this caused her to exhibit symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and she more or less fell apart. Meditation practice saved her life, she said, and she eventually became a committed practitioner, even going to ordain temporarily in Burma. She left the army and is now on the Intelligence Faculty at George Washington University, and trains soldiers in mindfulness to prepare them for deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is one of the people I seem to encounter from time to time, with some frequency - people with whom there's immediate trust, rapport, and affection, as if we had known each other for a long time, and can rely on each other completely. She came up to my room to say good-bye near the end of the conference, and we had a conversation in the hallway, private conversation otherwise being difficult in the hubub of the event. I knew she would be straight with me so I asked her, Is it a good idea to train soldiers in mindfulness? Soldiers who are going into the field and will face the possibility of taking life. Mindfulness is not value free, not merely "performance enhancing." Real mindfulness will make you sensitive to others and reluctant to cause harm. Isn't this a dangerous thing for soldiers? She agreed that mindfulness would make soldiers much more empathetic, and that it would be much more difficult for them to kill, but said that this was in fact her desire. She said that most of the killing that goes on now in the armed forces is unnecessary and counterproductive - the angry or anxious soldier who shoots a civilian in a panic. These are the soldiers who return home tortured by guilt over what they have done. Nor do their actions serve the mission in Iraq, where strategy has shifted from conventional warfare - kill the bad guys - to counter-insurgency, which, she said, turns on protection and trust building, not gratuitous killing. So the personal skills needed now in the army are balance, calmness, empathy, emotional intelligence, discernment, much more than brutality, emotional distancing, obedience to orders, reliance on weapons. (The army is very good with technology and weapons, she said, and has the world's best physical armor, for which they pay handsomely; in comparison, very little is invested in effective training for the softer more subtle and now more necessary psychological skills; this is why she calls her program "mental armor"). I asked her whether the army brass sees it this way too, and she said that among those who've served five to fifteen years (that is, up to the rank of colonel) yes, most do. Beyond this (higher rank, longer service) some do, some don't. General Petraeus does, as does the man who's currently serving as Deputy Commander of the Joint Chiefs. So we can expect a change in army culture coming in the near future. Later when I spoke at a smaller meeting with other army guys about this, they agreed with what Liz had said, and added that some of the more conservative officers worried that if the army mission and culture shifts in these ways, it may be unprepared in the event that things shift again back to conventional warfare. So they are wary of it.
The confusing army bureaucracy so Byzantine you literally can't understand the army people when they talk about it (they use a dazzling array of acronyms and refer to arcane procedures that have no analogue in civilian life), seems daunting and even comical. What's comical is that they all take it so seriously and seem not to see the absurdity of it (as in "Catch-22" which Heller once said was less a comedic exaggeration than a more or less straight-forward reporting of fact).
Long discussion on the "design" of the "studies" that are to come out of the retreats that we will do - as well as reports of the various studies that have already been done on the effects of meditation on the brain and on performance. All in power point slide presentations, coin of the realm (which made my brief talk and low-tech demonstration of mindfulness - "be aware of your feet right now; of your back, of your breath..." - very odd by comparison). Cliff Saron, an old-time India pal of Mirabai's - whom she hadn't seen in 30 years - came to report on his extensive multi-tiered, multi-yeared, ongoing study called the Shamatha Project, a massive, complicated study of many aspects of mindfulness's effects, going on now for several years already, at a cost of millions. All this to prove that meditation is good for you, makes you calmer, more empathetic, more compassionate, more focused, etc. Cliff is very smart and can endlessly discuss the technical and theoretical ins and out of such studies. One evening he and Joel Finkelstein had such a discussion. Joel, who works for the Stanford Compassion Project, had been involved with the work at Google I've been doing before moving to Stanford, and is training to be a cognitive scientist himself. Joel's hyper-smart and was rattling on with great passion about his upcoming paper that will show how the brain literally functions using the medium of light, that consciousness is light. Cliff, critical and skeptical, though not in a cynical or destructive way, - more respecting the immense amount we don't know about the brain, and questioning the validity of much of what we think we know - quietly and carefully took Joel to task for his "messianic" attitude. Joel took it quite well. Turns out Cliff lives in Corte Madera, and works at a research institute at U.C. Davis.
To me all these studies - all this money spent - especially the brain imaging stuff - which seems highly dubious to me (and Cliff seems to feel this too) - is so much beside the point. It's completely clear subjectively that practice changes you, changes your attitude, your responses, probably your brain. Why spend a lifetime and all those millions painstakingly proving this, and are you actually proving it anyway? Better to spend the same money on training programs, give it to monasteries and practice centers. I find it all hard to follow and stay interested in, and had far too strong a dose of it these last few days. But I suppose this is how our society works, science is its universally recognized religious faith. Things can happen when science says it's ok.
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Abbot's Journal Vol 67, January 22, 2009 |
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By Norman Fischer | 5/05/2009 @ 9:20 am
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January 22, 2009
En route: SFO to SEATAC
Glum today. Covered with, coated in, saturated by sorrow. I'm surprised this has been so sad for me. What's so sad? I miss Alan, yes of course, and it's bad, but somehow grief is always - and in this case too - more than this. It evokes life's strangeness. Its basic fleeting ungraspability. We have no idea, I have no idea, what is going on, and a death like this makes that clear, destroys any illusion of life's making any solid sense. All the reasons for the sadness, understandable enough, don't actually explain it.
The airport so confusing with so many people going here and there, the stuff of busy purposeful contemporary life, the orange plastic trays in the glitzy airport fast food places, the perfume ads, the ads for business consultants featuring Tiger Woods, the shops selling golf shirts, swatch watches, travel gear, magazines and books, none of it making any sense at all, just makes me sad. Maybe dirt, grass, sky would be an improvement. The massive ceiling in the airport isn't made of wood or any identifiable human-scale material. Where am I?
I feel quiet, quiet and sad.
The image in Zen of the traceless path, a bird's path in air - is lovely. And for a long time I've felt that as a guiding principle or desire, that my life be traceless, that I live and die without any mark, pure and simple and clean. But now I feel sad that life goes by so quickly and so little happens. Even with all the many marks Alan has made, and the many remembrances of them now, the many vows to keep his memory alive (Sherril's passion to do this, Makor Or's etc.) - it amounts to so little in the face of the starkness of his absence that even as I write this I can't understand and don't really believe and may never believe. Hard to describe this feeling. The vagueness of it. (Though I guess I am constantly writing about it in the poems).
The funeral was on Thursday - a week ago now - after his body had returned late Wednesday night from Baltimore.
We were picked up at Sherril's house by a limo, taken to the shuel that was already buzzing with the beginnings of the crowd, maybe 1500 people before it was done, that eventually spilled over from the sanctuary into Koret Hall. We went into a smaller conference room for the kriya, the short ritual in which the family receives black mourning ribbons and tears them. Then we filed into the sanctuary. We were more than a half hour early but the place was already full, everyone quite silent. The casket was in the middle space, near where we sat in the front row, and it was surrounded by people chanting psalms in a low murmur. I joined the group and later the family did too. Lots of quiet tears. A weary, grim, restrained feeling. Finally I sat down next to Betty and her daughter Rachel, a dignified young woman. Held hands with Betty throughout the service. It was good to see her again after so many years.
Micah began by convening the group and reading Psalm 90. He introduced Dorothy who gave a long sweet eulogy, based on the long conversation we'd all had with her a few days before, reflecting on Alan's life and our various experiences of him. She expressed wonderfully her own love and appreciation for her apprenticeship under him ("I have a file at home labeled ‘How to be Rabbi Lew'"). Then everyone in the family spoke. Sherril bravely and with subdued dignity read five of Alan's poems (that had been made into beautiful broadsides for the funeral and were posted on the walls as we walked in), without comment. A professional, she knew what to do and was capable of it. Then Carol, Jason, Malka, Steve, Hannah. Malka had written a letter to Alan last summer, when he'd collapsed at Elat Chayyim, and had nearly died. The letter, he'd said at the time, had moved him to tears. Hannah spoke of the beautiful day of driving down the coast to get home after she'd heard of the death, the sea and the sky and the shimmering mountains, and how her dad was not now locatable in a body, but she could see him spread thinly over everything. Jason read more of Alan's poems, and told funny anecdotes about their childhood. One of the poems said, "After doing yoga for half an hour, meditation for forty minutes, and prayer for an hour I felt better for a few minutes." Carol was also poised and funny, as was Steve, who turned out to have inherited Alan's ability to speak on his feet. Then Sister Bernie spoke of Alan's courage in his work with the homeless in the City, and at the end also broke down, as all the others had, as she spoke of Alan as her spiritual mentor, the person she went to for support and advice (I didn't know she'd had that relationship with him). I was last. I repeated several times "This is not a speech I ever wanted to give, this is a terrible day, a terrible week." Leaving the podium, I hit my head against the door of the open ark (emptied of torahs). Later I put the words I spoke onto the website.
There was a large procession of limos and cars to the cemetery in Colma, with a full police escort and traffic blocked along the way. The casket was suspended with straps over the deep fresh grave and lowered slowly down by workers. Many of us shoveled dirt onto the casket, and kept doing that until the hole was entirely filled. Very loud thud as each shovel of dirt hit the box. Then less so as dirt covered dirt. The workers tamped the dirt down and rolled turf back over it. Alan used to speak of this as tucking the person in, as you tuck a baby in at night, with covers up around the neck. He'd done this sad job at this cemetery many times before, knew the people well who were now burying him, all the workers, the cemetery administrators. Sherril bent over and touched and kissed the ground. It was difficult to leave.
In seminar we have been studying the Heart Sutra. I had good intentions to read Red Pine and Dalai Lama's books but hadn't much, because I am so familiar with these teachings it is hard to do.
That all phenomenal existence is empty - and that there is no suffering - has always seemed completely to be true and is true now, even in the sorrow. Because I know there is nothing to be sad about. Still, as I said in one of my talks, "love dictates that there be tears." Judaism says "bound up in the bonds of life." Buddhism says "free of self existence, empty, at peace." Different but not incompatible. Bonds that are beyond bonds. Emptiness not different from form.
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Recollections on the 80th birthday of my teacher, Sojun Mel Weitsman |
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By Norman Fischer | 4/10/2009 @ 8:45 am
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Recollections on the 80th birthday of my teacher, Sojun Mel Weitsman
Written April 2009
By Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Mel has been an inspiration, a guide, and a friend for me since I was a young man. I am one of the old Dwight Way crowd. Recently I drove by that old place. It is still there, but the yucca and monkey puzzle trees in the front yard that were of modest size in the early 1970's are quite large now, dwarfing the house. I was struck at how different the place looked. I attribute the difference to the fact that the practice - Mel's practice and spirit - vacated the space so long ago. Then, the place had a simplicity and a dignity it doesn't have now. A quiet but insistent presence. Having felt these things then - in the actual physical space - and not feeling them now, makes me understand better the virtue of Mel's teaching. These are the words I would use to describe it: simplicity, dignity, a quiet but insistent presence.
It seems to me that the main characteristic of Suzuki Roshi's teaching, and of Soto Zen, is faith in the practice and a steadiness and endurance to keep going with the practice no matter what. As Dogen taught so profoundly, the practice is the enlightenment. There is no enlightenment outside of practice. In the early days (and I know it is the same now) it was clear without anyone ever needing to say so that this was the value most encouraged by Mel. There was sitting every morning at 5 a.m., and Mel was there every day, always on time. Whether there was one person or two or three joining him (and there were seldom more than three or four) he was always there, sitting in his place at the head of the stairs, so that when you walked up the steep stairs to the attic you would see him first, just there, always there. Motionless and quiet. Dwight Way was a pretty busy street and there was sometimes traffic by the end of the morning session, but traffic or no traffic, whatever was going on, there was steady silent sitting. Every day, week after week, month after month. And by now, decade after decade. Though the location has changed and the years have sped by, I am guessing that in this the practice remains the same and the spirit remains the same: just to do the practice, to have faith in the practice, come what may. To be steady and to endure. To appreciate what is. During the all day sits (held once a month, as I recall) there was frequently noise in the neighborhood. Conversations, sometimes loud music. We would either sit through it, taking it as a benefit (practice is all inclusive, it's not about having to be quiet) or if it was too much Mel would go out and talk to whomever it was, and, somehow, it would always be more quiet afterward. That quiet, after the noise, was an even quieter quiet.
*
Not saying much, not explaining much - this was how it was in those days. There were no sesshins, no dokusan. Nothing special or spectacular. No large Buddhas on the altar. Mel gave, I think, a talk at the all day sittings and maybe there was a weekly dharma talk, but these events were always themselves very quiet. Just part of the schedule. I always found them moving and encouraging, but they were not charismatic or complicated or exciting. Mel would speak pretty simply about our practice, very often bringing up sayings of the old Zen teachers, or Dogen. There was a simplicity to the way he expressed things. Really I can't remember much now of what Mel said but the general impression I had was of steadiness and wisdom and beauty. Conviction, but lightly held. Mel was a handsome fellow in those days (not that he still isn't, at 80!) and the main message in those talks - at least the message I received - was just that, the dignity and handsomeness of the teachings. There was no insistence or pushing of any kind. In a quiet voice Mel would just tell us something about the teachings. He was very careful also in instructing us about how to walk, how to stand, how to eat, how to serve meals, how to ring the bells, how to carry the stick in the zendo, and so on. Physical carriage and form were important, and he would tell us about them, but not over and over again. Maybe just once. The sense of quiet and restraint, even about things that were clearly important, was very strong. A phrase Mel would often use (maybe he still does) was "the other side." By which he meant something like "things are done or meant this way, but there is always the other side." "You should do things slowly; but the other side is that sometimes you do them quickly." "Such and so is the case, but the other side is that it is not the case. " I am pretty sure Mel got this from Suzuki Roshi (though, as I recall, Mel didn't talk about Suzuki Roshi nearly as much then as he does now), and it seems very similar to me to Suzuki Roshi's "not always so." Maybe Suzuki Roshi also said "the other side." I wouldn't be surprised because I think that much of what Mel said in those days, and the ways in which he said it, was directly inspired by Suzuki Roshi, whose presence - I now imagine, looking back from a perspective of nearly forty years - was very much with Mel all the time, however much he did or didn't consciously reference him.
*
The sense that the practice - unlike anything we had previously thought of as religion - was more or less entirely a matter of physical presence was very strong in those early days. As I have said, though the place was extremely simple, and not particularly Asian or Japanese in style or decor, you could feel this. There was spareness in everything, an austerity but also a beauty. You'd walk into the house and everything already seemed quiet. You didn't have to go upstairs to the zendo - just approaching the front door you already felt the quiet. It was a plain and ordinary modest Berkeley Victorian house. But it was always clean, things were always in their places. There were simple pictures on the walls (small ones, except for one really large blue abstract painting by Mel, from his San Francisco beatnik artist days, very Clifford Still-influenced), a bulletin board by the front door with only a few necessary announcements on it (like the schedule). The kitchen, where we often had coffee after morning zazen, was always neat and ready, never any dishes left over from yesterday. There was a sense that everything was cared for, everything was considered and tended to. There was no sense that things were displayed for effect. Things were just there. They were useful, they were simple, they were there. No effort whatsoever to impress anyone - or even to express that this was a Zen or a Buddhist place. Probably it was clear that it was (I am sure there were pieces of calligraphy or Zen art on the walls, though I can't remember now, there was a library with Buddhist books), but the feeling was that no effort was being made to emphasize this point. It was as if everything expressed a practice; that is, that things were there to be used and to be cared for, not to make a point. That you could feel this.
Outside in the back yard, where Mel spent a considerable amount of time, there was an extensive garden, whose main feature was an old plum tree that had spread out over the years, so that its branches seemed to reach everywhere. When it was in flower it dominated the yard, and you'd have to walk often bent over, to avoid the profusion of white blossoms that seemed to be everywhere. Blossoms and the bees that went with them. Otherwise, there were vegetables, a serious number of them. Mel was an organic gardener, something of an early expert in the field (when we began to do farming at Green Gulch in the late 1970's, I remember that Mel was brought in as a consultant) and he worked very hard growing vegetables for the sangha. So the back yard was quite extensive and very full, it seemed a world in itself, and although the neighbor's house and yard weren't so far away, they seemed far away. And there were always projects afoot in that yard, that we engaged during the work periods of the monthly daylong sittings. Work period and work practice were always central to the zendo life, and Mel usually led the work, and usually knew exactly what he wanted done. My training there taught me that work and Zen were synonymous. Mel modeled a way of working that was exemplary - steady effort, over time, without too much exertion, always accomplished with tremendous focus and in silence. In the early 1970's, when my life more or less fell apart, and I was in a state of confusion and near disfunction, Mel and Liz took me into their lives, into the healing space of the zendo environs. Mel didn't say much to me, didn't offer advice, or even ask me to talk much about what my problems were. But he opened the house to me, gave me a room to sleep in, and every day there was work, sitting, and simple meals. Little by little I began to come back to myself. Often we had lunch out in the garden, under the plum tree. We drank cups of delicious green tea, ate good dark bread and cheese, and said almost nothing.
*
In those days there was a family feeling in the zendo community. There weren't many of us, but we were all dedicated and completely steady in our practice, which for all of us then was the center of our lives. As our teacher and guide (and also as a person nearly twenty year older than most of us) Mel was somewhat aloof, distinctly in a different position, and yet also warm and close. Without intervening much, he encouraged and supported us all in our various efforts to figure out who we were and what we were supposed to be doing. I'm not sure we realized this then, but looking back on it now, it seems pretty clear. My dear old friend Alan Lew was active in the group then, and became what was called the "director." He and Mel were vary close. When Sue Moon's Open Books published our first books of poetry, Mel encouraged us to give what was our first reading ever downstairs in the basement of the zendo. A lot of people came and for courage we both (well, I will speak for myself) got pretty drunk and gave what we thought were brilliant readings, but were probably quite stupid and self-indulgent performances. The point is the Mel allowed this, encouraged us in it, and didn't complain about how it turned out. Alan died suddenly early this year and Mel and Liz had a gathering at their house for people from those days, to recall him and those times long ago. The beginnings of things are always special, even though as things go on they usually get better, more developed, fairer, more competent, more effective, larger, and so on. But the beginnings always have a special character, a simplicity, a pungency.
*
I didn't know Suzuki Roshi. I was actually around when he was alive and functioning - before his illness - but was too blind and ignorant to realize that I had the chance to meet a great teacher and I ought to take it. Instead I was wrapped up in my own thoughts and needs, I didn't feel I had any use for a teacher (Mel appealed to me because he didn't call himself a teacher or come across as one- he was just a priest, leading the practice, just there, not somebody one would somehow get credit for having known - and people didn't make a fuss over him). And because Mel didn't mention Suzuki Roshi so much, I barely knew he existed. I remember notice of his funeral appearing one day on the little bulletin board by the front door. A modest notice, as I recall. It didn't seem like anything I'd want to go to. Didn't know the guy, and what's the point of attending a funeral anyway.
Clearly though the people who knew Suzuki Roshi and were able to practice with him were deeply moved by him. Probably each one of them carried away with them their own private Suzuki Roshi, their own view, from the standpoint of their own karma, of who he was, what his life expressed. They say that when a good teacher gives a dharma talk each listener comes away with a different talk- a talk given just for them. I am sure this was also true of Suzuki Roshi's whole sense of life and practice- each one had their own Suzuki Roshi. It seems to me that Mel's Suzuki Roshi embodied the qualities I have been speaking of - the quiet, the simplicity, the modesty, the supportiveness without saying or doing much, the simple beauty, the devotion to work and to steady daily practice. Though I am a generation away, I have heard the Suzuki Roshi stories, met and studied with the Suzuki Roshi disciples, read the talks, heard the tapes, bowed monthly and yearly at the memorial services, so I feel I also know him. And he does seem to me to be very like Mel. A good student takes in a great teacher and makes him completely his own. I think Mel has done this with his teacher.
*
Probably I haven't done this with mine. Maybe it's because I am not a devoted enough student, or maybe I still haven't gotten over my excessive interest in my own thoughts and needs. Or maybe Mel is not a great enough teacher. Probably though it is none of these. Probably it's because times have changed, and we all build on what has gone before, so that what was possible in the beginning - the kind of inspiring devotion to a teacher and the full incorporation of him or her into and as one's own life - is not possible after a while. I don't know. But I do know that I have not digested Mel's teaching in the same way he digested that of his teacher. I remain for better and worse myself, with my own inclinations and interests. My style of practice is probably not that much like Mel's (or like Suzuki Roshi's) and comes more out of my own necessities than anything else. I left Berkeley because I wanted to do monastic practice at Tassajara. Just before I entered the monastery I married, and we had children right away, which complicated things, and caused us to remain residents at the San Francisco Zen Center for twenty-five years or so. I was ordained as a priest by then-abbot Dick Baker in 1980, with my wife Kathie, with our three year old twin sons looking on with a strange gleeful amusement. After I finished a term as an abbot of Zen Center in 2000 I began the Everyday Zen Foundation, a network of Zen communities and associated projects, that now involves a lot of talented and interesting people who practice Zen together with me all over the place, in various ways, some not even quite identifiable as Zen (though many of the groups are local Soto Zen groups, quite similar to the old BZC). So, unlike Mel, I travel constantly, and have no place that I can take care of. My way of practice emphasizes committed disciplined daily sitting, but sitting usually alone at home (none of our places support daily sitting), along with times for sesshin or weekend retreats. Still in the grip of my old writing habit, I have continued to write poetry and prose books, and my practice emphasizes (in a way that I don't think Mel's or Suzuki Roshi's does) written expression and study and cultural involvement. I also have found that expression and communication and close personal relationships with students - without much reserve - is at the heart of my practice; this seems to come naturally to me; I don't know if I could avoid it even if I wanted to. I am not that much on work. Not that I don't do it, or don't believe in it, I do work a bit around the house, but left to my own devices I will read, write, or exercise. I try to take care of the physical world, but I guess I don't do it so well. But I hope - and I believe - that I have deeply internalized the faithfulness to simple practice - to no frills constancy and endurance over time - that I learned at Mel's place, and that I believe is at the heart of Suzuki Roshi's way as well. Just to practice, and to be willing to share practice in a simple way with others. No big secret teachings, no profound enlightenment. Just simple stupid Soto Zen.
*
I am - I think this is the case - Mel's first Dharma heir. We completed Shiho ceremonies October 25, a full moon night, in 1988, at Tassajara, a wonderful experience for both of us, though we probably stumbled through it without knowing exactly how to do it. Since than I have transmitted Dharma to eleven priests. Some of them were Mel's disciples, in addition to being students of mine, and I did the ceremonies with his blessing, as a way of helping him out. Some were priests ordained by others, who needed help with the last stages of their training. And some were people I ordained and trained. The last time I did the ceremonies, March of 2009, I had Mel's picture (the one that I keep in my study) on the Transmission altar. In this picture (copies of which I am sure many students have) Mel's in civvies, wearing a rakesu, in close up, body turned to one side, smiling wonderfully, looking as if he is about to come forward from his chair toward the viewer to say hello or give a hug. It's a very friendly, very informal picture. It was nice to have it there with us, guiding the process along.
*
What, after all, is a Zen teacher, and what role is he or she supposed to have in the life of a committed student? As I have said, I don't know whether this is a reflection of Mel's character or of mine, but Mel has not been a guide and advisor to me in the usual sense. Even when we practiced together every day we didn't talk much, and for many years, when I was at San Francisco Zen Center, we didn't see each other regularly. So I have not sought out his advice generally (though of course sometimes I have) when I needed advice; it seems to me my relationship with him is deeper and more mysterious than this. In a way I don't need his advice because I know what he thinks, know what he would say. I have internalized his view in this way (though of course I recognize that he might not agree - that the Mel in me, the real Mel, to me, may not agree with the other Mel, who thinks he's Mel, and who others call Mel). But this doesn't mean I don't need that other - that exterior Mel. In fact, without saying anything or doing anything in relation to me directly he helps me a lot, just by being in the world, continuing to do what he has always done. His mysterious activity in the actual physical world across the Bay over there in Berkeley is a continuous support for me and if it should happen that he dies before I do (a fifty fifty proposition I suppose) I will miss him a lot even though I don't see him that often. The influence of a Zen teacher on a committed student is very powerful. It is ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. As I understand it, the teacher doesn't know what he is doing. That is, he doesn't scope out the student, decide what is needed, and then proceed sneakily and subtly to make sure the student gets it. Instead, the teacher just continues the practice, with a benevolent wish for the student. Between them something deeply important and transformative occurs, though neither one of them is in charge of it. It just happens - somehow between them. Because they are willing for it to happen, because they are willing to go on with the practice come what may. Because they have faith and trust and courage. In any case, this is what I have come to understand from my Dogen studies - and from my life. This is what I have faith in, after nearly forty years of continuous practice with Mel.
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