Cypress Trees in the Garden: The Second Generation of Zen Teaching in America

By Richard Bryan McDaneil

Richard Bryan McDaniel’s Cypress Trees in the Garden: The Second Generation of Zen Teaching in America continues the history of North American Zen which he began in The Third Step East: Zen Masters of America (Sumeru Press, 2015). The earlier book described the pioneers who established Zen practice in

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Sumeru Press
• Release date: Nov 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781896559278

Richard Bryan McDaneil

Rick McDaniel taught at the University of New Brunswick and Saint Thomas University before working in International Development and Fair Trade with the YMCA. He is the creator of the YMCA Peace Medallion. Dr. McDaniel has described himself as a Roman Catholic by birth and heritage and a Zen practitioner by nature and temperament.

Book preview

Prologue

THE YOUNG MAN ASSIGNED TO KEEP ME COMPANY DURING DINNER LOOKS more like the football player he had been than the monk he now is. He smashes five hard boiled eggs in a bowl before spreading them on bread and asks me, What do you want your book to do?

I was used to people asking what the book was to be about, and I had a stock answer to that question: It would demonstrate the scope of teaching, practice, and social engagement in contemporary North American Zen. But that wasn’t what he’d asked me. He asked what I wanted the book to do, and that question – like a good koan – startles me into an unexpected answer. I think I just want to demonstrate that Zen’s still a viable spiritual path. The young monk nods his head as if that were a reasonable goal even though there, in the refectory at Zen Mountain Monastery in the summer of 2013, it certainly doesn’t seem as if there is any question about Zen’s viability.

ZMM, as it’s known, is located on the eastern side of the Catskill Mountains about ten miles from the town of Woodstock, where murals of Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix still grace the walls and windows of downtown businesses. The buildings at ZMM preserve a different kind of cultural legacy. The main structure, where we are dining, is a beautiful National Heritage site originally constructed as a Roman Catholic retreat center by Norwegian priests in the 1930s. It is impressive, with vaulted inner stairways and intricate ironwork on the doors and windows. Hinges are individually and elaborately crafted; one portrays a mother robin feeding three young. The inside handle to the door leading to the parking lot is shaped like a grasshopper, which seems appropriate to someone whose interest in Zen had been – at least partially – twigged by the 1970s television show, Kung Fu. The zendo is located in what had formerly been the chapel. It accommodates 104 people, and, judging from the numbers at dinner, it will likely be full in the morning.

In addition to residents, like my companion, there are two groups of retreatants at the monastery this evening. One group, just registered, is beginning an art retreat. The other group is in the middle of a wilderness retreat led by the monastery’s abbot, Konrad Ryushin Marchaj. It’s listed in the program calendar as Born As the Earth: Wilderness Skills Training and is described as an opportunity to learn basic outdoor skills and engage the teachings of the wild in the context of Zen training. Wilderness camping and zazen. Torrential rains have been falling for the last few days, and, when the abbot came in for our interview earlier, he was soaking wet. As he dried his face with a towel, I asked how the retreat was going. They are learning about desire, he told me in a deep Polish accent that gave his words a sense of gravity. The desire to be dry; the desire for a nice hot cup of tea.

Eighteen months after my visit, Abbot Marchaj will be asked to resign his position.

Zen practice, rather than Zen theory, is still less than 100 years old in North America. The first authorized teacher to make his home here was Sokei-an Sasaki who did not begin teaching until 1928. So it is fair to say that Zen is still finding its way on this continent. It is also fair to say that it has not had a smooth take off, and thus my response to my dinner companion’s question.

About fifty miles away from ZMM, on the other side of the Catskills, is Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-ji, the first Rinzai monastery to be built outside of Asia and arguably the most significant architectural accomplishment of North American Zen. It’s not an easy place to get to. One travels along a narrow county road and then up a gravel lane which was partially eroded by the rain at the time of my visit. I had thought that Zen Mountain Monastery, with its 235 acres, was large, but the front gate of Dai Bosatsu is still two miles from the main buildings. This 1400 acre property includes Beecher Lake – the highest lake in the Catskills – and what is now the guest house had been the hunting lodge of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother. It is a two-storey L-shaped structure with a steeply sloped roof and is pretty much what one would expect a wealthy 19th century family to have built as a private mountain getaway, although one marvels at the effort it must have taken to construct it here. Across the lake, there is a large bronze Buddha seated on a boulder gazing serenely across the water.

But any sense of wonder at finding the Beecher family’s lodge hidden back here is quelled when one notices the monastery building itself. A local architect, Davis Hamerstrom, had traveled to Japan to study Zen architecture in Kyoto and, using imported craftsmen when necessary, had recreated a traditional Japanese temple complete with classic tiled roof, tatami mats on oak floors, and sliding shoji screens (inside storm windows). There are stone lanterns on the grounds, a huge bronze bell – sounded by a log suspended from chains beside it – and, within, there are antique Asian treasures. The whole is a work of art.

But in spite of its beauty, the monastery is nearly empty. At the time of my visit, there are only a handful of monks, and two of these are from Japan.

Dai Bosatsu is the resident training center for the Zen Studies Society of New York, which, at the time of my visit, is still in disarray after its abbot, Eido Shimano, had been pressured into resigning three years earlier because of sexual interference with female students. Accounts of Shimano’s activities had been accumulating for decades. While I was conducting interviews at Zen Centers throughout North America in 2013, the full extent of his behaviour was chronicled by New York Times writer Mark Oppenheimer in an e-book entitled The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side.¹ But as outrageous as Shimano’s behavior was, his activities had been overshadowed by another story Oppenheimer published in the Times just a few weeks before I began my tour.

On February 11, 2013, his Times article announced that Zen Buddhists across the country were upset and obsessed by reports of the sexual improprieties of, then, 105 year old Joshu Sasaki in California. Again the abuse had been going on for decades but had been kept secret until Eshu Martin – a former priest in Sasaki’s order – released an article on the internet site Sweeping Zen entitled Everybody Knows. It begins with the bald statement that Sasaki

– has engaged in many forms of inappropriate sexual relationship with those who have come to him as students since his arrival here more than 50 years ago. His career of misconduct has run the gamut from frequent and repeated non-consensual groping of female students during interviews, to sexually coercive after hours tea meetings, to affairs and sexual interference in the marriages and relationships of his students.²

Although the term Zen specifically refers to a particular school and practice of Buddhism, it has acquired a number of popular connotations in English. It can suggest tranquility, serenity, peace of mind; it can imply obscure wisdom or spiritual accomplishment. There are books on the Zen of archery, gardening, golf, and motorcycle maintenance. It has become a marketing term. There is Zen tea, Zen breakfast cereal, Zen perfume, Zen detergent, the Zen of Zin zinfandel, a Zen chocolate chip cookie, a Zen underwire bra, and an early electric car called the Zenn. Jon Stewart had his Moment of Zen at the end of each episode of The Daily Show.

The classic definition of Zen is summed up in a four line poem attributed to Bodhidharma, the legendary Indian missionary who brought the practice from India to China:

A special transmission outside the scriptures;

Not dependent on words or letters;

By direct pointing to the mind of man,

Seeing into one’s true nature and attaining Buddhahood.

In spite of that lack of dependence on words and letters, there are hundreds of books in English (including three by me) on the topic. Buddhist scholars like Thomas Tweed and Helen Baroni point out that far more people have read about Zen than have spent any time at a Zen Center. They refer to these as armchair Buddhists or night-stand Buddhists. A few may practice on their own without the aid of a teacher; some might even claim to be Zennists. The number of North Americans, however, who actually profess to be Buddhists, let alone Zen Buddhists, remains miniscule; 0.7 percent of the population in the United States, according to 2007 census data; the figure is slightly higher (1.1 percent) in Canada. But those percentages include all forms of Buddhism including the rapidly growing Tibetan Buddhist sects. The total number of Zen Buddhists in North America can probably be described as statistically inconsequential. And, with the revelation of the misdeeds of people like Sasaki and Shimano, the number appears to be decreasing, leaving – among other things – the elegant halls of Dai Bosatsu empty.

Unfortunately, Sasaki and Shimano are not alone. The short history of Zen in America has been littered with reports of philandering Zen teachers: Richard Baker in San Francisco; Zenson Gifford in Toronto; Genpo Merzel first in Bar Harbor, Maine, and then again in Salt Lake City; Taizan Maezumi in Los Angeles; the Korean Seung Sahn in Providence. Sasaki and Shimano, however, were in a league of their own.

Both had established thriving Zen Centers in the mainland US after fleeing other locations. Shimano came to New York from Hawaii, after Robert Aitken – the abbot of the Honolulu Diamond Sangha – learned that two female Zen students hospitalized with mental health issues had previously been in sexual relationships with him. Sasaki fled Japan after spending a short time in jail because of an investigation into the misappropriation of funds at a temple where he was fusu, or business manager. It was also later revealed that he had fathered at least two children for whom he assumed no responsibility.

The sexual improprieties of both were concealed for decades by center members, both male and female, who remained loyal to their teachers. That loyalty was due to the fact that, in spite of their personal behavior, they were both effective Zen teachers and could be kind and supportive friends. Leonard Cohen has frequently been quoted to the effect that his admiration for Sasaki was such that had Sasaki been a Heidelberg physicist, Cohen would have learned German and studied physics. The novelist and naturalist (and former CIA operative), Peter Matthiessen – although he later withdrew as Shimano’s student – wrote movingly about Shimano’s sensitivity, friendship, and support during the final illness of Matthiessen’s wife, Deborah Love.

Like all of us, Sasaki and Shimano had multiple and contradictory elements in their personalities. The problem was that both were viewed by their students not simply as teachers of Zen but as Zen Masters, and Zen Masters are supposed, at least by their disciples, to be beyond such inconsistencies.

Zen Master is an unofficial technical term referring to one who has mastered a particular practice. The model is that of master and apprentice. In Japan, there are masters of the tea ceremony, master flower arrangers, and master swordsmen. There can also be master carpenters, master piano tuners, and master electricians. A master carpenter, for example, might train hundreds of perfectly competent carpenters who anyone would be satisfied to have work on their house, but he may only train one or two persons whose skill matches his own and who have the ability and the inclination to train others. Those that reach that level of accomplishment might be named master craftsmen in their own right.

Although Zen Masters are usually priests, they do not have to be and, in America, often are not. But they are all teachers. Individuals attending a temple in North America are unlikely to be passive members of a congregation – as in Asian countries where Buddhism is a devotional religion – but are rather students. Serious students seek instructors who can help them achieve specific goals, and they are often willing to put up with disagreeable quirks of the teacher’s personality in order to get that training. In Zen, the goal is spiritual awakening – the Buddhahood cited in Bodhidharma’s poem – which is variously described by the people profiled in this book, but which, in general, is understood to be an awareness of and deep personal experience of one’s interconnectedness, the realization that one’s fundamental nature is no different from that of all existence.

Several of the Zen teachers I spoke with pointed out that mastering one aspect of life doesn’t mean mastery of others. Zen Masters are not necessarily Tea Masters, and they may not even be very good at arranging flowers. One teacher spoke of silos of development, suggesting that the attainment of spiritual insight does not in itself imply personal or emotional maturity.

Gerry Shishin Wick is one of the students who remained loyal to Taizan Maezumi after it was discovered that he was an alcoholic and had been involved in affairs with some of his female students. During my conversation with him, Shishin pointed out that he had come to Maezumi to learn the Dharma. If I wanted to learn to play the violin, I’d find the best master I could to teach me to play the violin. Now, if he was mean to his children, that may or may not affect whether I continued to study the violin…. I don’t lightly abandon people. If it were my father, I wouldn’t abandon him, and Maezumi Roshi was my spiritual father. So I stayed there and helped right the ship.

But then – unlike Sasaki and Shimano – Maezumi acknowledged culpability, expressed remorse, and sought help by going into an alcoholic rehabilitation program.

Both Sasaki and Shimano were effective teachers. They made the Dharma appealing. They inspired people, and they successfully guided students to some degree of awakening. Even some of the women who complained about their behavior expressed gratitude for them as teachers. One of the women who wrote to the Witnessing Council established in response to the Sasaki Affair described both the times she had suffered unwanted sexual advances from Sasaki – whom she refers to by his title, Roshi – and her frustration with the intimidating culture of hierarchy and secrecy at Sasaki’s primary center, Rinzai-ji in Los Angeles. Then she goes on to say:

I stayed with Roshi because my experience largely was that he was a great and gifted Zen and koan teacher, and I believe I received great benefit from the other sanzen meetings – those unburdened by his sexual interests. I had met with other Roshis and teachers, but I felt he was absolutely the deepest and best teacher.³

Others were unable to accept the disconnection between the teaching and the teacher. A poem by a female student, Karen Tasaka who died in 2010, was first circulated privately and then more widely on the internet. It had been written in 1988:

Roshi, you are a sexual abuser

Come you say as you pull me from a handshake onto your lap

Open you say as you push your hands between my knees, up my thighs

fondle my breasts

rub my genitals

french kiss me

you put my hand on your genitals

stroke your penis

jack you off?

this is sanzen?

…

We came to you with the trust of a student

You were our teacher

You betrayed us

You violated our bodies

You rape our souls

You betrayed our previous student-teacher relationship

You abuse us as women

You emasculate our husbands and boyfriends

Roshi, you are a sexual abuser

Your nuns you make your sexual servants

Your monks and oshos are crippled with denial

Roshi, Sexual Abuser.⁴

In the face of anguish such as that expressed in this poem, talk of silos of development seems facile.

Zen practitioners daily chant the Four Vows, promising to save (liberate) all beings without number, to eliminate endless blind passions, to pass innumerable Dharma Gates, and to achieve the great way of Buddha. The most fundamental ethical teaching of Buddhism is ahimsa: Do no injury. And yet the blind passions of Shimano, Sasaki, and other Zen teachers and leaders have caused enormous harm not only to the women in their sanghas but to all practitioners within the wider Zen community throughout North America.

As I sit in the dining hall at Zen Mountain Monastery, it appears that although North American Zen has been wounded, it is still too early to toll its death knell. And perhaps something valuable will come out of all the suffering. Shishin Wick provided me this felicitous analogy: Due to the difficulties, there is more awareness among American teachers about integrating compassionate living with awakening. I use the example of the development of the lathe. The first lathe was handmade and was crude. But that lathe could be used to make another more accurate lathe which could be used to make an even more precise lathe and so on. Zen and Buddhism will evolve in the US gradually. My prayer is that the original depth of understanding will not be lost.

Unfortunately, Zen leaders continue to fall from grace.

Only three weeks after I had submitted the first draft of this present book to the publisher, I received an e-mail from the head of the order to which ZMM belongs informing me that Ryushin Marchaj had been relieved of his duties as abbot. By Ryushin’s own admission, he had been engaged in an intimate relationship with someone outside our sangha, thus betraying his partner, a member of the order, breaking our spiritual union vows and ending our marriage. He also admitted that he had been exploring shamanic traditions and religions and that his inclusion of elements of these in his presentation of the Dharma was irresponsible and might have caused some confusion, and may make people have doubt in the dharma.⁵

The lathe still requires – and, doubtless, will continue to require – refinement.

ZMM is more than one man, even if that man is the abbot, and I remain impressed by both the level of commitment I found there as well as the sheer scope of the program. Zen’s evolution on these shores is proceeding in ways none of the pioneers who brought it here could have foreseen. And if some of the experiments – such as shamanism – may be questionable, others have proven unexpectedly fruitful, opening up opportunities for practitioners not only here but around the world.

ZMM is a serious residential training center associated with the Mountains and Rivers Zen Order in the same way Dai Bosatsu is associated with the Zen Studies Society. There are thirty-one residents when I visit, ranging in age from 20 to 86, each of whom – like Asian students of previous centuries who were kept waiting at the gate before being allowed inside the temple grounds – had to formally petition for permission to enter. Prospective residents stand at the threshold and recite:

I come here realizing the question of Life and Death is a vital matter

I wish to enter the Zen training program of Zen Mountain Monastery

I understand the rules of this temple and assume full responsibility for maintaining them

Please, guide me in my practice.

The program is strict. My dinner companion tells me that when he and his girlfriend, another resident, decided to move in together, they were required to leave the community for three years and then do five hundred prostrations in the Buddha Hall before being considered for readmission to the residential program. Later his partner remarks, It’s interesting how his memory softens it. I remember 1000. We did 500 one day and 500 the next day.

In addition to the residents, I am told that there are about 350 formal students who attend at least two week-long retreats (sesshin) a year plus take part in an annual three month ango or practice period. Then there are the casual participants who come for occasional sitting practice, and others who participate in wilderness retreats, or in retreats on calligraphy, archery (kyudo), watercolours, and so on.

In other locations, in addition to guiding people to awakening – the stated goal of Zen practice – Zen teachers have operated hospice programs for AIDS patients, conducted street retreats in which participants live with the homeless, and developed mindful-eating programs as a means of combating obesity. At Dai Bosatsu and the Zen Studies Society of New York, the current abbess is not only rebuilding those communities but is also the principle teacher at a sangha in Syracuse which provides outreach ministries to prison populations and to individuals with mental disabilities resulting from injury or congenital affliction.

It was specifically the unique way that Zen practice in North America is evolving that attracted my attention as I was working on an earlier book about the pioneer teachers in America – The Third Step East: Zen Masters of America. So in 2013 and 2014, I undertook a tour, a pilgrimage – an angya – during which I visited Zen Centers from California to Maine, from Quebec down to New Mexico. I interviewed more than 70 teachers and otherwise significant individuals (the doctor operating a Zen-sponsored hospice, the former wife of the founder of ZMM), as well as senior and not-so-senior students, seeking to get a sense of the scope of teaching, practice, and social engagement in contemporary North American Zen.

I had only two prepared questions: What do you say to someone who knocks on the door and asks about the function of Zen? and How did you become engaged in practice? These, I felt, were adequate to begin a conversation which I could then allow to develop freely.

As I look back on this pilgrimage, my first reflection is how enjoyable it was. I was welcomed graciously and had the good fortune to meet warm and generous individuals who responded to my (at times impertinent) questions frankly and with good humor. Almost to a person, they are the type of people one would enjoy spending an afternoon with drinking beer and discussing something other than Zen.

So although it had not been my original intention to write an apologia for Zen, still – as I tell the former football player who willingly spent three years and 1000 prostrations to return to the residential community at ZMM – I have come to hope it will be that as well. In spite of the challenges of the past and present – and, in all probability, those of the future – it is a path which I and others continue to find profoundly rewarding. And it seems to me that the best approach to take in this work is to allow those I met to present themselves in their own words with as little interference as possible. Ultimately, they are the only apologia contemporary North American Zen requires.

CHAPTER ONE

Three Abbots

MYOGEN STEVE STUCKY

ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN

SOJUN MEL WEITSMAN

THE S AN FRANCISCO Z EN C ENTER HAS THREE MAJOR PRACTICE FACILITIES. The principal one, simply called City Center, is located on the corner of Page and Laguna Streets not far from the Haight-Asbury district and about a mile and a half due east of Golden Gate Park. The building is a former Jewish girls’ residence, and the ironwork on the landings of the fire-escape is graced with Stars of David. There is a sign by the front door which welcomes me, but, when I try to enter, I find the door locked.

A woman is seated on the front steps, speaking on a cell-phone. She appears to be waiting for someone, so I ask if she is Myoki, the assistant to the Central Abbot and my contact person at the Center. She isn’t but says that she can find Myoki for me. We ring the bell and are allowed into the foyer. Myoki is fetched and explains that the community is currently in the Buddha Hall for the noon chanting service. She indicates a place where I can wait.

I deliberately chose to begin this series of interviews at the San Francisco Zen Center. It was not the first Zen program in America, but with its establishment Zen in America can be said to have got into full gear. Its practice center at Tassajara Hot Springs in Los Padres National Park was the first Buddhist monastery to be established outside of Asia.⁶ SFZC is probably still the largest Zen community in North America and, in terms of holdings, easily the wealthiest.

In the foyer, there is a statue of Kannon, the female Bodhisattva of Compassion. The original Bodhisattva of Compassion in India, Avalokitesvara, was male. His insight into the nature of Emptiness is celebrated in The Heart Sutra, still chanted almost daily at Zen Centers worldwide. The figure changed name and gender as it was imported into China and later Japan. Such transformations are inevitable when a system of belief or practice travels from one region to another and is adapted to a new environment.

The foyer is large and dark, with what appear to be business offices on the left as one enters. The Buddha Hall is on the right. There are banners and paintings on the walls depicting Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of SFZC. Windows look out onto a small inner courtyard very prettily laid out. From my seat, I can just see into the Buddha Hall where the chanting service, accompanied by full body prostrations, is taking place.

SFZC considers itself a monastic – although not celibate – community. Monasticism is not a way of life I have ever felt drawn to, but it is one which I find intriguing. Occasionally, I visit a small Trappist monastery 165 kilometers (slightly more than 100 miles) from where I live in Atlantic Canada. There, too, monks gather at noon to chant a service called Sext. But there are only eight, and they are elderly. By contrast, 150 people are currently in residence at SFZC’s three practice centers. If guests who come for short periods are included in the count, the total resident population at times exceeds 200. Then there are another 400 individuals not in the residential program but associated with the center, and beyond these a system of affiliate centers. A few of the chanters in the Buddha Hall appear to be in their late sixties or seventies – aging hippies remain the mainstay of North American Zen practice – but others cannot be much older than 25.

When the service ends, I’m introduced to the Central Abbot, Steve Stucky, a big, robust, and healthy-looking man whose shaved head suits him. He has a warm, engaging smile, and the rough hands of someone who has earned a living as a landscaper. Two of the past abbots at SFZC, he informs me, will join us for lunch: Blanche Hartman and Mel Weitsman.

There is a complicated governance structure at SFZC. After the difficulties they had in the 1980s, it was decided that there should be two co-abbots who would serve limited terms. Then, in 2010, a third position – that of Central Abbot – was instituted.

The complexity of the governance structure reflects the complexity of the San Francisco Zen Center’s history.

SFZC was established by Shunryu Suzuki, who had been an obscure village priest in Japan with no particular stature. In 1959, he was sent to San Francisco to be the resident minister at Sokoji, the Soto Zen mission which provided for the spiritual and cultural needs of about sixty families of Japanese descent. His duties were much as they had been in Japan, to carry out ritual activities, weddings, funerals, and memorial services. He was expected to chant sutras on behalf of the community and to conduct a weekly Sunday service. Zen may be the meditation sect of Buddhism, but, as far as Suzuki’s congregations in Japan and California were concerned, meditation was an activity for monks.

It was young people from the mainstream culture who, inspired by a combination of psychedelic drugs and their reading of Zen popularisers like Alan Watts, first sought out Suzuki as a Zen Master and meditation teacher. Traditional Zen training molds individuals of impressive character, and so, while Suzuki had been a relatively ordinary figure in Japan, he proved to be an extraordinary figure in America.

He let it be known that he meditated every morning in the shrine room at Sokoji, and people from outside the Japanese community began to join him there. As their numbers increased, the congregation at Sokoji objected, and Suzuki moved his meditation students to the building where I am invited to lunch with the Central Abbot and two of his predecessors.

All three abbots are wearing rakusus, the bib-like garment which in some centers signifies ordination, in others that one is a professed Buddhist, and in still others that one has made certain progress in one’s training. Variances in something as simple as this is a characteristic of American Zen. Steve Stucky’s rakusu is worn over brown robes, Blanche Hartman’s over a turtle neck, and Mel Weitsman’s under a worn jean jacket. They alternately address or refer to one another by their first names or their Dharma names.

None of these three is Suzuki Roshi’s direct heir. He had only one, Richard Baker, whose role at SFZC can be likened to that of Saint Paul within Christianity. In 1971, Baker was ordained abbot in place of Suzuki, who was terminally ill and would die two weeks later. It was a position everyone – including Suzuki – assumed Baker would hold for life. Everyone was wrong.

Suzuki had admired Baker’s energy and his ability to get things done; so much so that he had, perhaps, been willing to overlook other aspects of Baker’s personality. Michael Downing reported that before giving Baker transmission

– Suzuki asked Mel Weitsman what he thought. Mel responded with a question. Do you think he’s ready? And Mel remembers that Suzuki-roshi said, Sometimes we give it when a person is ready, and sometimes we give it to somebody and hope.⁷

When Baker first came to Zen Center, it had an annual budget of slightly more than $5000. Under his leadership, that grew to more than $4 million. Zen Center real estate holdings were valued at $20 million. They operated a number of businesses including an organic farm, Green Gulch, and what became the premier vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco, Greens. There was also a bakery, a stitchery – which made meditation cushions and mats – a bookstore, and an organic-produce market and corner convenience store.

Such growth is always the result of the combined efforts of many individuals, but Baker had a way of taking personal credit for each aspect of Zen Center’s success which left others feeling that their contributions were undervalued. This would be as much a factor in his eventual downfall as the sexual affair with a donor’s wife which precipitated it.

Although Baker was married and had children, the affair was not his first. Several women at Zen Center had been the objects of his attention, although he was not as voracious in his appetites as Sasaki and Shimano. In fact, at one point in the early 1980s, he urged the Priests Council at Zen Center to support the Zen Studies Society’s efforts to bring Shimano under control. On the other hand, it was noted that he himself appeared to target the more vulnerable women in the community.

The affair, his management techniques, and the opulent lifestyle he affected as abbot all led the center’s board to take a step unprecedented in the history of Zen; they dismissed the abbot. Nothing similar had ever occurred before. In the Asian tradition, if students have a problem with their abbot or teacher, they leave and seek another. But in America in 1983, there were not many teachers for students to go to. More to the point, center members had made significant investments of energy and time helping to build Zen Center into what it had become, and they were unwilling to abandon it.

Another Japanese teacher – Dainin Katagiri – acted as interim abbot for a year, after which the board appointed Reb Anderson, Baker’s heir, as the new abbot for life. Baker then remembered that he had not completed his investiture of Anderson and questioned his right to be abbot. The board ignored that bit of pettiness, but the situation became further complicated when Anderson was arrested for waving a gun about in a low-income housing project. He had been robbed of $20 by a man with a knife just outside Zen Center, and his response was to fetch a gun he had found in Golden Gate Park years earlier – under equally bizarre circumstances, taking it from beside a corpse he’d found but did not report – and chase after the thief.

The board chose not to dismiss Anderson, but they did set term limits to the abbot’s position and brought in Mel Weitsman to act as co-abbot.

The period between Baker’s dismissal and Weitsman’s appointment as first co-abbot of Zen Center was one of catharsis. The community was fractured. Those who remained loyal to Baker accused his detractors of engaging in a witch hunt. There were people who felt they had been deceived, that their trust had been betrayed. There were others who just felt wounded by the in-fighting. Many fell away from practice. Others stayed but their hearts were no longer in it. As Weitsman told Michael Downing:

Zen Center was in decline for at least five years. We had meetings where people were saying, Why should we have to obey the rules? It became anarchic. City Center became a kind of hotel on Page Street – where people were living there and bad-mouthing Zen Center. They had lost their faith in the practice.⁸

Slowly, they rebuilt. But first, operations had to be simplified. Businesses were closed. Properties were sold. New policies and structures were implemented. It was a difficult and complicated process, and one which has been described elsewhere, notably in Downing’s Shoes Outside the Door which examines Richard Baker’s fall from grace in – as Zen doyen James Ford put it – excruciating detail.

The Richard Baker story and Downing’s book are so frequently referenced whenever SFZC is mentioned that, as we settle around a table in the dining hall, I begin by asking the three abbots if they think the book presented a fair portrait of Zen Center.

Blanche Hartman pounces on the question. "No! He said all that anyone wanted to speak about were the difficulties. That wasn’t true. That’s all he wanted to speak about."

Mel Weitsman’s response is more measured. The Downing book may have been fair, but there were some inaccuracies and some over-emphasis on a certain aspect. So it doesn’t represent the whole picture. Maybe in that way, when you say fairness, the unfairness may have been in the over-emphasis of one aspect. Which was what Downing was interested in.

I mention another book.

The thing is, Mel says, those books were all from the outside. There’s nothing from the inside. So in that sense it’s unfair because it’s someone speaking about Zen Center rather than the main subject speaking about what’s really going on.

So whatever you write will be unfair, Steve Stucky says with a smile that brings crinkles to the corners of his eyes.

Life is unfair, Mel remarks.

There are probably more ways in which SFZC differs from other Zen centers in America than there are similarities, although some of those differences weren’t as extreme in the past. The idea of multiple abbots with limited terms of office, for example, is unique to them. I ask how the abbots are chosen, and Mel explains: We have an Elders’ Group, and they discuss it among themselves. Then they decide on someone and present their recommendation to the board. When the board decides, we light a fire in the fireplace and smoke goes….

It’s only a few days since the election of Pope Francis, and everyone at the table laughs. The three of them are relaxed and at ease. They’ve all been interviewed before.

Abbots are appointed to a four year term with the option of a three year extension. See, when Suzuki Roshi was abbot there were no questions, Mel continues. But the founder is different from succeeding abbots. So the founder doesn’t have any term limits, but succeeding abbots like Richard…. He shrugs his shoulders. He incorporated Zen Center as a corporation sole, which meant that one person has the voting capacity of the whole board, and Richard was also abbot for life because there was no question about it. But after Richard, then Katagiri became abbot for one year, as a kind of interim abbot, then Reb became abbot, and then it became evident that one abbot was not enough, so they asked me to be a co-abbot with Reb.

Mel is being understandably discreet. But it’s also true that being in charge of three large and separate training centers was a big responsibility for one person. And the idea of term limits was actually based on a Japanese model.

We had two models to compare to from Japan, Blanche explains. The two main temples of Soto Zen. At Sojiji, the abbot for the main training monastery is an abbot for term, and then they go back to their home temple. But at Eiheiji, the abbot is for life, and they’ve come to the point that they don’t appoint someone abbot until they are in their 80s. Although they got a little fooled last time because the abbot lived to be 105. So there were those two models to choose from, and at the time it seemed, ‘Well this works for Sojiji, all of those abbots who have been abbots for seven years then went back to a home temple which supports Sojiji.’ I was on the committee that worried about this, and we really didn’t know what we were doing too much, but we took that model. Looking at how it’s all worked out, I’m not so sure it was a great idea.

Well, it has its good points like everything else, Mel says. It has its good points, and it has its problems. It keeps a person from being domineering, and it gives senior students the opportunity to be abbot, and that’s become a kind of rite of passage.

Mel Weitsman first became interested in Zen when Shunryu Suzuki was still at Sokoji, which was as much a cultural center for the ethnic Japanese community as a temple. I was an artist working in San Francisco and had a lot of friends, and some of them said, ‘You know, there’s a Zen temple on Bush Street.’ One guy would go there to play Go, and someone else said, ‘I practice there.’ I didn’t know what a Zen priest was, but this fellow told me, ‘There’s a little Zen priest there, and I practice there. We sit zazen.’ So, little by little, I got information. And one day, about 4:00 in the morning, we walked down McAllister Street to Bush Street and went to zazen. That was my introduction. It was 1964.

Then this little old man came behind me and straightened my posture, and I felt really great. So every once in a while I would go back, and one day I just decided, ‘This is it. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for.’ Because I was looking for something, although I didn’t know that it was Zen. But it was perfect.

But when you left, Hartman reminds him, you went and bowed to that little old man, didn’t you?

Oh, yes. That was Suzuki Roshi. He was called Revered Suzuki then; he wasn’t called Suzuki Roshi. So he was just another priest. I liked him, but I didn’t know who he was, what he was really about. So, as I kept going back, I decided that this was what I really wanted to do. And I’ve been doing it ever since.

When I ask what Suzuki Roshi was like, Mel tells a story. Every morning we’d do the robe chant, where you put your robe on top of your head after zazen. Of course, nobody had robes then, he chuckles, and it was all in Japanese. So I asked, ‘What’s that chant we do in the morning after zazen?’ And Katagiri was there, and Katagiri was looking through the drawers for a translation and Suzuki Roshi – Mel makes a patting motion with his hand – ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘It means love.’ Mel smiles. ‘It means love. That’s all.’

In 1967, at Suzuki’s request, Mel established the Berkeley Zen Center, which is a center for lay practice and the largest of SFZC’s satellite centers. It is where Blanche Hartman began her Zen practice in 1969.

"One day I was at the house of my best friend, and we were just having coffee. She had a headache, and it was so bad she asked me, ‘Could you see that?’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘That headache.’ I said, ‘I can’t see your headache.’ She said, ‘It was so bad, I thought you could see it.’ The next morning, she went to a doctor and was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. She went into a hospital for radiation treatment, went into a coma, and died. That was all within two or three weeks.

"I was 43, and she was about my age. We both had kids about the same age. And I thought, ‘I’m going to die! Me, personally. It’s not just later, when you get old. Oh, my God! How do you live if you know you’re going to die? Who knows that?’ So I started getting interested in a whole bunch of stuff I had never paid any attention to. Somebody told me about the Berkeley Zendo, and I went there for zazen instruction. Mel wasn’t there that day, but I had zazen instruction on July 3rd, 1969, and I started sitting every day after that. And I would sit there thinking, ‘What am I doing? I don’t know anybody else who does this. This is weird. What will my friends think?’ Finally I said, ‘It doesn’t matter. There’s somebody in there that wants to do it because she gets up at 5:00 every morning to go to the zendo to do it before she goes to work.’

Suzuki Roshi used to come over to Berkeley to give a talk on Monday mornings, and when I met him, I thought, ‘He knows. He knows what I need to know.’ I don’t know why I felt that, but I definitely felt it. Then I had an experience at a student strike at San Francisco State College where my son was a student. I had an experience of a face-to-face encounter with a riot squad policeman, who I would have said – had anybody asked me – was the opposite of me, but I had an experience of identity. We were just a few feet apart, and we made eye contact, and I had this experience of identity with him. And it was sort of like, ‘What was that? Who understands that? What happened? How can a riot squad policeman and me be identical?’ But it was clear – no question – that this is the way it is. It was just, ‘How can I understand this? Who understands this?’ And I thought, Suzuki Roshi looked at me like that. He didn’t make a separation.

Blanche succeeded Mel as co-abbot of Zen Center in 1996. She was the first woman to hold that post.

The dual-abbot model continued until 2010, when the abbacy was restructured. The positions of the co-abbots now became Abiding Abbots, one resident at City Center and the other at Green Gulch. With the reorganization, Steve Stucky became the first Central Abbot of Zen Center as a whole.

Although Stucky has a Buddhist name, Myogen, he is generally known as Abbot Steve. He had achieved near-mythic stature at Zen Center as a result of his role, along with four other monks, in staying behind and protecting the Tassajara practice center during the 2008 Basin Complex Fire.

He grew up in a Mennonite farming family in Kansas and spent his summers working the wheat harvest from Texas north back into his home state. During the Vietnam War, he received a draft deferment as a conscientious objector and did alternative service work with inner city youth in Chicago, where he lived in a commune. It was there that he began a personal investigation into the way in which his mind and memory interfered with what he perceived.

"For me it was an interesting question, what can I actually see clearly? And I began to notice my own thoughts. So I started, just on my own, investigating it. And then a friend of mine, handed me the book The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau and said, ‘This may be what you’re doing.’ So I started sitting based on the instructions in it. Then I went and met Kapleau, but I didn’t particularly like him, so I kept on going."

I ask why he hadn’t particularly liked Kapleau.

"I was raised a Mennonite and a pacifist, and I felt his style was militaristic. That was kind of off-putting to me. And he was also very much oriented towards getting something which I wasn’t sure I wanted to get that much. I wanted to stop and inquire. That was my own intuitive feeling about it. And then I was travelling around. I was in Cambridge, and I sat with the Cambridge Zen group for a while. And I saw Suzuki Roshi's Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind in a bookstore, so I opened it up, and I read a page of it, and – I don’t know – this was a pretty interesting person, an interesting mind. But I didn’t want to buy any books then because I was travelling light. So I put it back on the shelf. Then I was sitting in New York with Eido Shimano, and one night he announced that Suzuki Roshi had died in San Francisco. That kind of piqued my interest, because I was asking around about what was happening with this San Francisco Zen Center, and someone said, they have an American leading it now. And I thought, ‘That should be interesting.’ Because I had never felt that Zen was foreign; sitting is something that's available everywhere.

So I hitch-hiked across the country, and I was one of those people who came to the door, knocked on it. Someone opened it a crack. ‘Whadda you want?’ And I said, ‘I came here to practice Zen.’ And they said, ‘Well, did you make some arrangements?’ And I said, ‘No, I just came across the country.’ And they said, ‘Wait a minute.’ And they closed the door!

Blanche lowers her head between her hands and shakes it. It had been like that in the early days, she admits. My entire focus when I was abbess was to get people to smile at whoever they opened the door to. But it hadn’t always been a safe neighborhood. The reason they currently had a large and heavy donation box in the foyer – and the reason why the door had been locked when I arrived – was that someone had come in and walked off with the smaller one.

Eventually the guest manager came to the door and invited Steve in. She sat with me in the little alcove, and we talked for a few minutes, then I signed up to be a guest student for a week.

He had no place to stay, so he slept in Golden Gate Park, hiding his sleeping bag in the bushes during the day when he went to the center to meditate.

I met Richard Baker within a couple of days, and I thought he’s kind of an interesting person. So we connected, and I stuck around.

He stayed for eight years and, being the only resident with any serious agricultural experience, was instrumental in the development of Green Gulch Farm. After the disruptions which followed Baker’s departure, Steve became a householder priest. He married, had three children, and worked as a landscape contractor. He maintained his Zen practice, however, and established an affiliate sitting group, the Dharma Eye Zen Center, in San Rafael. He also did the course work for a degree in pastoral counseling at San Francisco Theological Seminary and worked with the Buddhadharma Sangha in San Quentin prison. In 1993, he received Dharma transmission from Mel, and, in 2007, he became a co-abbot with primary responsibility for Green Gulch. Three years later, he was appointed the first Central Abbot of Zen Center.

I ask why the third abbacy was established.

We have three temples, he explains. There’s a need to coordinate and have some oversight about what happens and the decisions that are made that affect all three temples. So to have someone in a position to take responsibility for those things that affect all three temples allows, at least in theory, a particular temple to have an abbot, or abbess in this case. So we have a Green Gulch abbess, Linda Cutts, and we have a city center abbess, Christina Lehnherr, and I’m in the role of central abbot in coordinating all three. Curiously enough, at our most monastic training center at Tassajara we have chosen to have practice periods that are led in rotation. So we don’t have anyone who is abbot of Tassajara, but we take turns leading the practice periods there. So we share leadership in that way.

I ask if the abbot’s role is that of an administrator or a teacher.

That’s an on-going balancing act. It’s both. Teacher with some administrative responsibilities.

I think part of the impetus, Blanche adds, was having someone who was a teacher being more directly involved in the administrative realm because the administrative realm gets so caught up in fund-raising and planning and that sort of stuff that sometimes practice concerns might get lost if we didn’t have someone who was practicing as a teacher directly connected with the administrative realm. So it’s maintaining a practice focus within the administrative realm. That’s what I think the function of this position is. Maybe I’m wrong.

Thank you, Steve says, giving her one of his world-class smiles.

In all probability, the primary factor determining which Zen Center a newcomer will come to is proximity. But the next factor – and this had especially been the case during the early days of Zen in America – is the desire to work with a specific teacher. Many people, like Steve, who read The Three Pillars of Zen, went to Rochester to work with Philip Kapleau. Others went to Minneapolis to work with Dainin Katagiri and to Los Angeles to work with Taizan Maezumi. Large numbers of people came to San Francisco to work with Shunryu Suzuki and, later, Richard Baker. Today, however, if one comes to SFZC there isn’t one teacher but many.

We have over a dozen Dharma-transmitted teachers at Zen Center, Steve tells me.

This is another of SFZC’s unique features.

Usually you only have one teacher, Mel notes. But we have lots of teachers who are peers. Right? So, to have just this one person perpetually be the teacher, well, what are all these other teachers going to do?

Personally, Mel has more than twenty Dharma heirs. A lot of the abbots who have succeeded me have been my students. That includes both Steve and Blanche.

In addition to its three practice centers, SFZC has another ten sitting groups, like the Berkeley Zen Center, spread about the city for non-residential practitioners. Steve explains that these sometimes meet in peoples’ homes, and some of them meet here with one of the practice leaders assigned to them. So that gives people a chance to get to know Zen Center in that way. And now we have a big group for people in recovery from various addictions, mostly alcohol, but others as well. That’s an open group that meets every Monday night. There’s another group called Young Urban Zen, and they have a separate meeting for people who feel, ‘Well, I’m not so sure about coming and getting involved in the formal practice, but I’d like to meet with people from a younger generation who have some interest in Buddhism.’

In addition to which, there are the people who just come for an occasional lecture. There are probably twice as many at the lectures as there are at zazen, Blanche tells me. There is also regular, and well-attended, introductory sessions. I don’t know for sure what happens to all those people who have zazen instruction, she remarks. Every week, twenty or more people have zazen instruction.

There are two major schools within Japanese Zen, Soto and Rinzai. The books which first introduced Zen to North Americans focused on the Rinzai School, which emphasizes the importance of attaining kensho – or awakening – the something that Steve Stucky had not been so sure he felt a need to get when he met Philip Kapleau. Shunryu Suzuki and other teachers within the Soto tradition, on the other hand, maintained that it was the practice itself that mattered, not seeking anything from it. To sit properly in zazen was sufficient. In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Suzuki said:

The most important thing is to forget all gaining ideas, all dualistic ideas. In other words, just practicing zazen in a certain posture. Do not think about anything. Just remain on your cushion without expecting anything. Then eventually you will resume your own true nature. That is to say, your own true nature resumes itself.⁹

Basically, Mel tells me, the practice is without promise or without hope. So you give up all hope. Ye who enter here, give up all hope. But, of course, when people first come to Zen Center, they want something. So what are we giving them? What we’re giving them is that we’re taking everything away eventually.

Giving them themselves, Steve adds.

Your whole life is practice, Mel continues. That’s the story of Zen Center. It’s not like you come to practice and then go away and do something else. Practice is your whole life. And no matter what you’re doing, it’s practice.

If you’re paying attention, Blanche says.

Yeah, well, even if you’re not paying attention because most of the time you’re not paying attention. You know, within Sangha – community – there is Buddha and Dharma. And in Dharma – the teaching – there is Buddha and Sangha. And in Buddha, there is Dharma and Sangha. So all three, they’re the three legs of the pot. If one of those legs is missing, then the pot is not complete. So Zen Center is a complete practice. It has Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Each one is a treasure, and they’re all interconnected, and they’re all operating interconnectedly all of the time. It’s simply Buddha’s practice. If you want something in two words, ‘Buddha’s practice.’ And this is the other thing about Zen Center, that the beginning is the same as the end.

All Suzuki Roshi emphasized was beginner’s mind, Blanche adds.

Yeah, beginner’s mind. The end of practice is the beginning.

I think it’s always to be interested in, ‘What is it?’ Blanche explains. That’s a lot about what beginner’s mind is. ‘What is this, I wonder?’ To meet everything with that kind of openness and inquiry, rather than, ‘Oh, I know what that is.’ Because everything changes. You might know what it is today, and tomorrow it’ll be different. So, stay awake.

And one other thing, Mel says. You don’t just practice for yourself. This is the meaning of sangha. You don’t practice just for yourself. You lose yourself within practice.

Social engagement is one way by which one might practice for others. Among other things, SFZC’s vision statement calls upon it To develop and expand Zen Center’s social outreach program.¹⁰ Their outreach programs serve both the male and female prison systems in the area. There is the special practice Steve had mentioned designed for people in recovery, and the Center provides meals for a local homeless shelter. One of their most acclaimed programs had been the Maitri Hospice for people afflicted by HIV/AIDS established in 1987 by Issan Dorsey, one of Richard Baker’s Dharma Heirs. It still operates under its own board of directors, as does a second hospice that began at the Page Street center when Blanche was abbot.

There was a young Chinese woman with a brain tumor who had come to this country, Blanche recounts. She had been writing to the City of the Ten Thousand Buddhas here in California, which is Chinese Chan Buddhism, wanting to be ordained before she died. But she got here, and she was already quite ill. The tumor was visibly erupting from her forehead. So they wouldn’t take her in. So I went to see her in hospital and suggested she could come here and die. That’s what happened. That’s how room 48 started being a hospice.

I ask about the current relationship between the center and Richard Baker.

We had a fiftieth anniversary celebration here last year, Steve tells me. Zen Center was officially organized as an institution in 1962, so in 2012 we had our fiftieth anniversary. I invited him to come. Blanche had invited him here earlier. He came and gave a talk and participated in our ceremonies. I also invited him to come again last fall to visit Tassajara; so we have a pretty good relationship. But it’s also true that his memory of things that happened during the time he was here and his opinion about the ethical aspects of it and other peoples’ points of view are not all in accord. But I feel that we are in a very respectful relationship.

Has there been a reconciliation?

That may be…. He does not finish his thought.

Premature, Blanche says after a moment.

"I don’t think we’re not reconciled," Steve points out.

We’re working in that direction, Blanche says.

Later, as she waits outside with me for my taxi to arrive, she expresses regret that Zen Center had not been able to reconcile with Baker. But, she says sadly, he couldn’t admit that he had done anything wrong. But if you really want to know about Zen Center, you need to speak to him.

Only two of the teachers I sought to interview declined my request. Richard Baker was one of them.¹¹

The following October, less than six months after my visit to San Francisco, Myogen Steve Stucky agreed to a three year extension to his term as Central Abbot. Later that same week, he was informed he had stage four pancreatic cancer. A few days after receiving this diagnosis, he gave a public lecture at Green Gulch in which he explained his condition to the sangha. It began with a reflection on a private practice which revealed something of his attitude to both life and Zen:

For some years I’ve been doing a practice of waking up with gratitude. First thing, sitting up at the edge of the bed and putting my hands together and just saying the word gratitude. And then it’s an open question, For what? And whatever comes up in my