7/15 - Bernie Glassman

                If one gets off the Interstate and the Turnpike (and avoids the corn fields), rural

Massachusetts is very picturesque. Small towns, lovely rivers, and trestle bridges. Western Massachusetts is Johnny Appleseed country. There are either striking big green hills or small green mountains—perhaps part of the Berkshires. Montague is a village surrounded by farms, some of which profess to be organic.

                Bernie Glassman’s house is found down a narrow county road where the trees come together overhead. His wife, Eve, is just going out for a swim in a nearby lake; Joan joins her while I conduct the interview.

                We sit in an area in front of a glassed fireplace. On the coffee table there is a copy of Cigar Aficionado with Jeff Bridges’ photo on the cover. He and Glassman recently released a book entitled The Dude and the Zen Master. There is a large calligraphy scroll on the wall behind Glassman’s chair; an eight-foot Jizo in the further part of the room, as well as a small table or altar with a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe and a statue of Kannon.

                Glassman is wearing a blue patterned shirt and loose white slacks with suspenders that he occasionally adjusts as we speak. He is bearded, and his gray hair recedes from his forehead (my white hair does the same); he wears it long, tied in a pony tail. Looking at him now, it’s difficult to picture him in formal Zen robes and rakusu—but at one time he was very formal in his appearance and his teaching. His days of formal teaching are over.

                “I have twenty Dharma successors, which is insane.” Many of them carry on traditional Zen instruction; however, if he thinks they might be getting a bit stuffy “or too arrogant”, he shows up at their centers unannounced, dressed as a clown and “disrupts things.”  He earned his clown nose legitimately, having studied with a couple of teachers named Wavy-Gravy and Mr. Yoo-hoo. He tells me he carries the nose all the time and, indeed, it is in his pocket as we speak.

                There’s nothing clownish about what Bernie Glassman is doing, however.

                While he was at the Los Angeles Zen Center with Maezumi Roshi, he had a deep experience of the interconnectedness of all things. The purpose of Zen, he tells me, is to elicit such awareness, and it makes use of a number of upayas—skillful means—to bring it forth. Meditation is certainly one, but not the only one. Out of that experience he moved gradually into social engagement. After all, basic to an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things is an awareness of the interconnectedness of people—even people, perhaps even especially people, whom we have marginalized or whom in some way we have defined as “other.”

           

     When he left Los Angeles, he went back to New York—where he had been raised—and established the Zen Community of New York. In addition to standard meditation training, he began to do street meditations. Twenty students would join him living on the street with the homeless; Father Robert Kennedy was one of the students who took part in these. Participants shared the life of street people; as Father Kennedy remembered, if he wanted a cup of coffee, he needed to beg for the money. The only preparation was to not bathe or shave for two days before going on the street. The only rules were not to lie and to stay together in small groups of three. Every morning there would be a shared reflection; and in the evening they found a place to sleep together. They tended to avoid shelters because of the dangers of violence and tuberculosis. “You could sleep in bus stations, but you’d be kicked out by the police.” The only “practice” was to be present.

                Bernie identified three "tenet koans" which he carries over to his work with Zen Peacemakers. 1) Not knowing; 2) Bearing witness; 3) Loving action. If one wanted to, one could analyze how these tenets evolved from the classical Hakuin koan curriculum, beginning with Mu (not-knowing) and proceeding through to the precepts. But it isn’t a pattern unique to Buddhism, or even Zen. A friend of Glassman’s has shown how they also relate to a contemporary approach to the Torah.

                He and his previous wife (Sandra Jishu Holmes who died in 1998) founded Zen Peacemakers in 1996. Every year they hold a Witnessing Retreat at Auschwitz. “There’s no teacher,” he says. “Auschwitz is the teacher.” The Nazi program at Auschwitz was the supreme example of defining people who don’t represent a specific norm as “other”—whether Jews, Gypsies, the handicapped, or whatever.

               The retreats have had as many as 160 participants, although now it is capped at 120. The majority would never have done any formal Zen training. It isn’t only Zen practitioners who can realize interconnectedness.

                When I ask to take his photo, he suggests we do it in the back of his house. There is a tall wooden Kannon statue with distinctly non-Asian features. “It was carved by a guy who didn’t know anything about Buddhism, but he carved it for a woman who was a Buddhist.” Again, the Bodhisattva of Compassion is not unique to Buddhism, as the Virgin of Guadalupe in the house attests.

[Bernie Glassman died on November 4, 2018.]

Cypress Trees in the Garden:

Glassman, Bernie [Tetsugen] – 76, 134, 173, 235-50, 255, 258, 260, 274, 276, 280, 287, 296-97, 305-07, 309-10, 468

7/14 - Dosho Port

                Dosho (Mike) Port is one of Dainin Katagiri’s Dharma heirs. He lives and works outside of St. Paul, Minnesota, in a place called White Bear. I am not going to be able to get there for these interviews, but, as chance has it, he is giving a workshop at the Boundless Way Temple in Worcester [see May 3rd entry] on the same weekend I am traveling to Massachusetts to interview Bernie Glassman in Montague. Joan comes with me on this trip, and we book rooms by Hotwire, which actually puts us in Marlborough overnight. But our GPS—we refer to the female voice as “Daphne”—gets us to both Marlborough and Worcester without a hitch.

                We find Melissa Blacker, David Rynick, and Dosho drinking coffee on the verandah as we pull up. The clematis on the trellis behind their large Buddha is in luxuriant bloom. Melissa shows us a Kannon statue she rescued from a second-hand store.

                The agreement I made with Dosho was that we’d meet for breakfast and then I’d drive him to Logan Airport. Melissa uses her i-phone to help us find an appropriate restaurant.

                After a long practice with Katagiri in the Soto tradition, Dosho went to Japan where he became involved in koan practice. He has continued the practice with Melissa and David at Boundless Way. I remark that it’s a fair distance between Massachusetts and Minneapolis, and he explains that he has done some of the work via Skype. Electronic dokusan. It’s an intriguing concept.

                Dosho grew up in a devout Catholic family and, for a while, considered becoming a priest. Puberty helped put an end to that career path. When, later, he ordained as a Buddhist priest, his grandmother blamed his mother, “She was completely fine with me, but she was mad with my mother for about a decade. She figured it wasn’t my fault that my mother had let me go astray.” I ask, “Really? She held a grudge for ten years?” He laughs. “You’ll have to ask my mom. Maybe it’s an exaggeration, but I’m tellin’ the story. Okay?” As Joan will  attest, I’ve been known to exaggerate a bit from time to time as well. I’ve always felt it was the story-teller’s prerogative. And you can tell that Dosho is a story-teller.

                He describes a trip he took with Dainin Katagiri when they had what he now estimates was a nine-hour wait at the San Francisco airport. Katagiri found one of “those plastic, awful blue-color, plastic airport chairs, and he just sat down and waited, and every few hours he would get up and go to the bathroom. There were other people with us, but I saw myself, at least, as his attendant, so I was trying to do what he did. But after two or three hours, I told him, ‘I’m going to take a walk.’ So I walked around a bit and came back, and he was still sitting there, so I sat down next to him. And a moment or two later, he leaned over and said, ‘You’re not a very patient person.’”

                We continue the conversation in the car. Joan is driving. It is her first time in Boston, but, with one eye on Daphne and the other on the highway signs, she manages. Meanwhile, Dosho and I are discussing the way in which the koan curriculum operates. “Shikan-taza is difficult,” he points out. “The koan system kind of tricks you into shikan-taza.”

                We discuss the difficulties some centers are having now that the first and second generation of teachers are no longer with them. A lot of the attraction of Zen in the early days had been based on those strong personalities. “I heard Leonard Cohen say that he felt such a connection with Joshu Sasaki that he would have learned shoe-making from him if he’d been a shoe-maker rather than a Zen Master. I like to think my relationship with Katagiri Roshi was like that.”

                But it strikes me that it’s not just a matter of personality. In the same way that the youth drawn to Zen in the ‘60s and ‘70s were challenging the values of the previous generation, young people today are questioning some of the structures associated with Zen, including the Japanese cultural characteristics. “In the old days,” Dosho remembers, “when we’d meet people from other centers, we’d all compare how tough our training was. Now it’s almost the reverse. Now centers are vying with one another about how accommodating they can be. There was this young man at a talk I gave who raised his hand and asked, ‘Please, sir, what is the minimum amount of asceticism needed to practice Zen?’”

                It’s also, as Bobby Rhodes had pointed out, a more electronically engaged generation. And if dokusan can be done by Skype, why not experiment with other ways of using the internet to promote Zen? Dosho, like Eshu Martin, is working along those lines. I’m not wholly comfortable with the idea; however, distance education works in other fields, so why not Zen?

                After leaving Dosho at the airport, we set Daphne to take us to Northampton where we will stay tonight. Two hours later, she takes us down an old farm road, stops on a dirt track in the middle of a cornfield, and tells us we’ve reached our destination.

Cypress Trees in the Garden:

Port, Dosho Mike – 118, 207, 409-21, 468-69, 476-77

7/8 - Bobby Rhodes [Zen Master Soeng Hyang]

                In addition to the Japanese teachers who came to North America in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there were also Zen teacher from China, Vietnam, and Korea. The focus of my books has been the tradition as it came down from Japan, but over and over again I have had people mention the importance of Korean teacher, Seung Sahn, in America. John Tarrant, for example, told me that his first breakthrough had occurred during a retreat with Seung Sahn.

                Zen Master Soeng Hyang is one of Seung Sahn’s heirs currently residing in Berkeley, California. She had previously been in Providence, Rhode Island, where I had hoped to be able to visit her. Seung Sahn’s temple had also been in Providence.              

                 When I learned that she had relocated, I arranged a Skype interview with her. We are a few minutes late getting started, and she contacted me, introducing herself as “Bobbie.” The title “Zen Master” is a rank within the Kwan Um School of Zen, and the name “Soeng Hyang” means “Nature’s fragrance.” “Like incense, kind of,” she tells me. Her birth name is Bobbie Rhodes, and she is a practicing nurse working in hospice care, as well as a Zen teacher. She carries her lap top into the bedroom as we begin, and she continues the conversation while lying back in bed.

                Her father had been in the Navy, and the family relocated several times. She had been born in Providence, but then the family moved to California. They belonged to the Episcopal Church, and, as a young woman, Bobbie was struck by the words of the Creed. She found it so difficult to claim to believe these statements that she would become physically ill and have to leave the church. “Jesus rose again on the third day, ascended to Heaven, where he is seated at the right hand of God. Where is the right hand of God?” she wondered.

                She volunteered to supervise some of the younger Sunday School participants—“I watched them color”—and one Sunday one of them, asked her, “Where’s Jesus?” Where, indeed, she wondered. “He was here last week,” the child insisted. She was referring to the bearded father of one of the other students who had been telling stories to them. But the question stung Bobbie. “Where was Jesus?” “It was my first koan.”

                In 1963, she had a nurse’s license and was working with Mexican-American farm workers in California. A doctor at the clinic introduced her to marijuana and LSD. She would take the drug and wander about in nature. It was an important opening for her. Eventually, however, it didn’t lead anywhere else, and she decided to look for a Zen teacher. She had decided she wanted to do koan practice, and when she approached the monks at the San Francisco Zen Center, she was told that wasn’t part of their tradition.

                Then on another acid trip, she got the feeling that she should go back to Providence and “make amends” with her parents, to whom she hadn’t spoken for two years. So she crossed the continent, found work in Providence, and then looked for an apartment. One of the apartments she looked at happened to be over Seung Sahn’s temple. “It was just his apartment, really.” She didn’t take the apartment, but she did meet Seung Sahn and, shortly after, moved into the temple with two other students. She stayed at the temple, as it moved to larger accommodations, until her daughter was born fourteen years later, and they looked for their own house.

                The focus of the Kwan Um School is mindfulness of the present moment. Mindfulness is somewhat easier to do in Seated Meditation (they don’t use Japanese terms like zazen), but it is supposed to continue throughout all of one’s activity. It was a natural aid to her work as a nurse, to be able to encounter people and situations clearly and directly. She tells me, “My teacher never encouraged samadhi. He discouraged samadhi.” Zen was not to be something separate from daily activity, it was to be part of all one did. Constantly to ask, “What is this?”  What is this specific situation I am in, this specific person whom I am encountering?

                I ask about the size of the Kwan Um School, which is not very big, compared to the more common schools descended from Japanese teachers. She says that most of the members are older and admits that she had expected Zen to “bloom like crazy” because it had made so much sense to her. To her disappointment, it hasn’t. “I don’t know. Maybe people have stopped taking LSD as much,” she jokes. Then more seriously, “I don’t know what happened. I do think there’s a real addiction to electronics now.” And that certainly may be a part of it. Zen is about encountering reality. “Virtual reality,” by definition, is not reality.

Cypress Trees in the Garden: pp. 423-437