by Erik Storlie
“Yeah, I guess we can work that out,” says Ron, clearly pleased to have provoked me.
“Cool,” I say, and begin tossing stuff onto his side of the room.
Within a week of his moving in, he seems to disappear, although more stuff keeps appearing in the room. The young woman never turns up in bed again, though she gives me lingering smiles when we pass in the halls. I smile back, torn, but I don’t fall. I’m here to practice, I tell myself.
Ron honors my line of demarcation, and his side of the room stays in chaos. I bring friends in just to see it. On my side everything’s put away, the single bed on the floor made up with a few blankets, a small wooden desk covered with some books and papers. My steamer trunk sits at the foot of the bed. Ron’s side is litter on top of litter, right up to the line in the middle, where suddenly the concrete floor reappears, then a small rug I have next to my bed.
I tolerate him for a month. Then suddenly I realize he’s not been around for a week.
I return from the library on the Berkeley campus one day, and his things have disappeared—except for a few stacks of futon sales literature.
I’m quickly given a further test. For my work assignment, I’m given trash, garbage, and compost. My station during the daily work periods is the rear basement entrance to the Page Street building. I collect and carry down garbage, sort cans and bottles for recycling, stockpile organic vegetarian garbage, and sweep up the area inside, as well as the sidewalk and street outside. I also maintain the little wooden altar that hangs on a pillar inside the heavy rear double doors. I’m to light incense and bow each day before and after my duties.
Far from the zendo, Buddha hall, and library, this is definitely low-prestige work. Even kitchen duty is preferred to this, for most residents attach spiritual significance to the correct preparation of vegetarian food. But I grew up doing dirty jobs—household chores, home repair, hardware store work, auto repair. I accept the test and get intimate with refuse.
To the surprise and gratitude of the cook, I volunteer to haul organic garbage to Mel’s garden at the Berkeley zendo. One morning each week I pull the back seat out of my 1965 Studebaker Lark V8 and load in three or four thirty-gallon plastic garbage cans filled with slimy vegetarian slop. Cruising the Bay Bridge at seventy-five in overdrive, sickly sweet-sour smells wafting to the front seat, I pray I don’t have an accident. I pull up to the Berkeley zendo, ring the bell, and Mel and I haul the cans to the backyard and dump them in compost bins. Even in winter, the plants in his yard flourish, and I begin to take personal pride in the fertility of the ground. Once the cans are emptied, Mel and I drink morning coffee and play recorder duets.
My garbage enthusiasm extends to the sacred ceremonies of the rear entry. This isn’t the Unitarian Society of my childhood, so I put aside secular doubts and get serious about the altar. I want to honor garbage, trash, waste, and compost. I rummage for a wine bottle in the green glass barrel and, holding it by its neck, reach inside the barrel and smash it against another bottle. In the Zen Center workshop I drill a hole in a block of hardwood and insert the neck upside down in this base. This creates a graceful vase-shaped green glass sculpture about six inches high with pointed shards arcing up into the air. I call it the Buddha of the Realm of Infinite Landfill. This I add to the rear entry wall altar.
For several mornings I light incense, chant, and bow to the Infinite Landfill Buddha. But upon making his rounds one morning, Steve, the work leader, informs me that my altar is unacceptable. “Sure,” I think. “It’s unacceptable because it’s unconventional.” But Steve sticks to safety issues.
“What if someone’s down here and stumbles against it? They could get hurt.”
“What?” I say. “This is a low-traffic area. No one comes down here, and anyway, it’s placed head-high on that pillar. There’s no danger and you know it.”
“No, I really don’t think I do know that.”
Heatedly, in the dim light of the basement, we argue.
“Listen,” I say, “for someone to be injured on that thing they’d have to be seven feet tall. It’ll never happen!”
But the work leader is adamant. I remove the Infinite Landfill Buddha.
I grow used to petty rules and petty controversy. Early in my stay, I learn that if I refer to “Suzuki,” a certain officer will challenge me: “Don’t you mean Suzuki Roshi?” Then for a full week everyone debates whether residents, to minimize dirt in the building, should have two pairs of zoris—“inside” zoris and “outside” zoris.
Meals are taken formally in the zendo on Saturday mornings using oryoki. The ritual use of these bowls is complicated. Wearily, I come to expect that a certain officious young American will come to me after each meal, offering corrections to my food handling, napkin folding, and sequence of putting bowls and utensils away.
Finally I get snappish. My own technique was taught me a few summers ago at Tassajara by a different but equally insistent young American who is now an important priest. I mention his name and my critic is silenced.
I begin to frequent the “flop” room, a disreputable haven off to the side of the kitchen with old couch cushions thrown about on the bare floor. On a stained counter next to a stove top are cups, tea and coffee pots, and various containers of tea and coffee and sweeteners—even white sugar!
Too much time spent here raises questions about one’s purity. Those who laze about the floor chatting and drinking full-strength black coffee are scorned by “hard practicers.” One morning, as I’m spooning two spoonfuls of sugar into my coffee, a hard practicer eyes me balefully and warns, “Don’t you know that white sugar is worse even than heroin?” I nod, smile, and continue stirring. The hard practicers even lobby for elimination of the room, but fortunately, these efforts are beaten back.
One morning after breakfast I’m sitting with Dainin Katagiri Roshi, Suzuki Roshi’s assistant, together against the flop room wall. I’m discussing with him the developing zen group in Minneapolis and our hope that he would move there to teach zen. He has already visited several times. We understand the uncertainty of his situation with Suzuki Roshi’s illness, but we want him to come if it’s possible.
A young woman, a hard practicer, enters and offers Katagiri a cup of herbal tea. He shakes his head, saying, “Please, could I have a cup of coffee? With cream and sugar, please?” She raises her eyebrows, but brings him the coffee. Later I hear hushed talk in the kitchen about the dangers of toxins to the young Roshi’s health.
It’s in the flop room that I become acquainted with Hoitsu-san, one of Suzuki’s sons, who has come from Japan to see his father during this final illness. He frequents the flop room after breakfast, obviously curious about these young Americans who have absorbed the last twelve years of his father’s life.
He’s a youngish man, a priest, full of talk and good spirits—a breath of fresh air. His credentials are impeccable—a priest and Suzuki Roshi’s son. “So zen need not be unremittingly puritanical and dour,” I think.
I’m curious about this window onto Suzuki Roshi’s past. I ask Hoitsu-san what effect a lifetime of zen practice had on his father.
“Oh,” he says, “he has changed very much in one way. When I was a boy he was strict and got angry very easily. One day I was going to school and playing by a lake along the way. I was playing so much I was going to be late to school. He caught me. He was so angry, he just picked me up and threw me into the lake.”
I chuckle. “That certainly doesn’t sound like your father to me. I’ve heard that he gets angry at zen students sometimes, but not like that.”
“Well, you see,” says Hoitsu-san, “zen practice has helped his anger very much.”
I’m surprised to find the arts ignored. When Gary Snyder reads at the Zen Center that year, he leads off by saying he can’t think of a better audience for his poetry. Yet the zen students are mostly unresponsive. Except for a few polite questions, they sit stone-faced till the evening is over.
I’ve brought my
violin and discover a woman resident who also plays. On a few occasions we try some duets, but even though we play in the afternoons, she soon tells me she’s heard complaints, and we must stop.
I’m puzzled. Many students have stereos and play rock in their rooms. Ancient Chinese and Japanese masters were artists, musicians, and poets. Everyone is proud of Suzuki Roshi’s calligraphy.
But still, the heartbeat of the place is the daily meditation, the monthly sesshins, the silence. After the sesshins—up to seven days of intense meditation together—jealousies and rivalries diminish, kinks straighten out, and I’m simply grateful for my opportunity to be here, to sit with these men and women who struggle, however imperfectly, for something great.
For weeks in the late fall, the Zen Center is in a flurry of activity preparing for the ceremonial installation of Dick Baker as abbot. Buddhist dignitaries from Soto headquarters in Japan and from around the world are invited to this event. Everything must be in apple pie order. Along with other ordinary residents of the center, my work is to clean. After insuring that my basement, hallways, back entry, and rear sidewalk are spic and span, I move on to other tasks of vacuuming, mopping, and dusting in the bathrooms and common passageways on the floors above.
The installation is of huge importance. After its completion, Dick Baker will be a zen master. He will be addressed as “Roshi.” He will be the spiritual leader of the Buddhist communities at the Page Street center and Tassajara. He will, in theory, have received an imprimatur from the Buddha’s own mind, transmitted in unbroken succession from masters to disciples over two millennia.
There’s concern among some of his peers that Dick is not equal to this responsibility, that Katagiri Sensei should assume it. Some students talk of leaving the Zen Center to follow other, more interesting teachers, like Trungpa Rinpoche, the remarkable and mercurial Tibetan master.
At a lecture a few days before the installation, Katagiri urges that Dick be fully accepted and supported. He talks of the difficulties of succession, that these difficulties were common in ancient China and Japan, too. He tells an old story of a master who is, at first, rejected by his students. “But he became great,” Katagiri concludes, smiling. “Dick Baker will also be great, a great priest, a very great priest.”
Finally the day arrives. Students and guests crowd the hallways. The ceremony takes place in the Buddha hall. Important guests are seated on zafus inside, a few of the less hardy seated on folding chairs, which earlier this morning I helped place along the back wall. Seated students spill out into the hallway. Finally, at the rear, there’s standing room only, and I stand at the back of a crowd, watching a procession that moves slowly down the stairs from the Suzukis’ rooms and into the Buddha hall.
Suddenly I have my last glimpse of Suzuki Roshi, a tiny, helpless figure in beautiful, royal robes shining with whites and golds. He’s borne up by several of his old, devoted students, who slowly carry him to the Buddha hall. I’m amazed to see him out of his usual brown and black. Today he’s clothed for eternity, a frail king on his journey home to vast emptiness.
Now the procession is inside. Still standing at the back, I listen for a long time to the drone of the chanting. Finally, long before the ceremony is complete, I slip up the stairs to my cold north room and, for the first time in years, sitting on the bedclothes, sob like a child.
It’s early morning, the first day of the seven-day rohatsu sesshin, held just before Christmas. During zazen, Baker Roshi makes a quiet announcement. “This morning Suzuki Roshi died. He stayed with us until the beginning of the first period of zazen. Then he let go.”
Dick pauses, then goes on softly, “Yesterday, I asked where we could find him after he was gone. He said nothing, but a tiny brown hand came out of the bedclothes and traced a circle in the air.”
We sit for the next seven days knowing that he stretched to reach the beginning of one more sesshin, and touched us, before leaving.
On the last day of the sesshin, I’m assigned during the afternoon work period to help clean and rearrange the Buddha hall. The room has large sunny windows on two sides that look off to the south and the east. The floor is almost entirely covered with rice straw tatami mats. I dust and vacuum while Angie, a young woman priest, rearranges the altar.
First I vacuum the masonry floor, then all the zafus. Toward the end of the two-hour period, I begin on the tatamis—and suddenly the tatamis are Suzuki Roshi’s body. Then every surface in the room is his body. I feel the vacuum tickle and massage. With every stroke of the brush, he shivers in delight, a puppy stroked and scratched all over.
Light streams through the big casement windows. The straw mats glow like ripe field corn, their edging cloths black like the spaces between galaxies. I vacuum and vacuum, every roaring stroke vibrating up my arms and legs and spine.
The bell tolls the end of the work period. I put away the machine, hoses, and brushes and return to my cushion. Tomorrow, I know, I must go forward without him.
It’s an evening in late January 1972. Professor Edward Conze lectures to about thirty of us at the Zen Center. His subject is the movement of the Buddha’s teachings from Sanskrit into the Chinese texts. A man of perhaps seventy, a German, one of the great European writers on Buddhism, he’s spending this year as a visiting professor at Berkeley. Many of us attend his lectures regularly.
He’s sarcastic about zen, which he considers trivial and upstart. The real Buddhism, he insists, originated and matured in India. Further, as one whose world was destroyed by Hitler and the Axis powers, he’s contemptuous of the Japanese. When he sees zen students in his classes, he grumbles about the militarism of “Samurai Buddhism.” Nevertheless, despite his gruff, rough treatment of us at times, we see that he’s deeply gratified by our serious interest in Buddhism and in his work.
But tonight he’s agitated. After seating himself uncomfortably on a large zafu raised with several small mats, he spits out in heavily accented English, “So, it seems that it is necessary, after all, for the Americans to do the graveyard meditations. Like the old monks in India who sat in the boneyards and burning grounds, learning that the body is only rotten meat.”
Pausing, Conze glowers at us through the thick lenses of his glasses, shaking his head and grizzled mustache, then accuses, “So a young man is handsome. Or a lady is beautiful. Maybe she has, oh, such beautiful breasts.” Conze makes a curving flourish in the air with his hands. “But when the surgeon cuts through these beautiful breasts with a scalpel? What is beneath? There are ribs. And he saws through those ribs? There are lungs. And fat. And blood. Disgusting, is it not? Then we know what the body really is.”
Taken aback, I glance around the room. Other students, stoic on their cushions, look puzzled, too. But we’re used to unconventional lectures and occasional tirades.
“So,” Conze continues, glancing at us, “now I have been told that all that the young Americans want to do for each other is just to lick each other’s bits.” He pauses, then firmly emphasizes his words: “Yes, you just want to lick each other’s bits.” Accusingly, he stares around the room. “And this way,” he concludes, “it is not even possible for the woman to be taken care of. She cannot be satisfied.”
He stops, uncharacteristically out of words. Then a bold, handsome young woman from the university raises her hand. She regularly attends his lectures on campus and has come over to hear him tonight. He looks up and nods, and she firmly breaks the silence, saying, “Oh, Doctor Conze, that’s just not true. A woman can be satisfied that way.”
“Oh?” Conze roars, outraged and embarrassed at being contradicted by this particular superior authority. “Oh? So you have found, after all, the one who can do this for you? I see! I see!”
The young woman falls silent and drops her eyes, abashed. Thus saved from himself, Conze rummages through his notes, then shifts ground completely. He softens. Suddenly he’s even complimentary.
He expresses pleasure at seeing young people learning the Buddha’s teaching
s and even admits ruefully that the most he can manage in Buddhist practice is mindfulness, paying careful attention to what comes before consciousness moment after moment. He complains that his old legs don’t permit him to sit long in the Buddha’s meditation.
But soon he recovers himself and, shifting his large bulk uncomfortably on his oversized zafu, turns on us again, observing that a key virtue in Buddhism is “friendliness”—a virtue he finds singularly absent in zen students. “What good is this so-called ‘zazen,’ this sitting on the ground all day, if you don’t have simple friendliness?” he demands. “If that is not there, you have not even begun real Buddhism.”
We say nothing, and his irritation subsides into grumbles: “I know all about your little Buddhist groups. You find some rich old ladies to pay the bills so everyone has time to walk around looking very solemn. Then you each hope everyone else is thinking you have achieved enlightenment. Humph! Not very likely, that one.
“So,” he goes on, a sly smile creeping over his lips, “for an example, look at your very own officers. Right here in this room we have most perfect examples of the three Buddhist evils. That one there,” he says, pointing to his first victim, who sits a few rows back, “is a good example of the greed type of personality. It is a very greedy one. That is clear from the body type. Very much work remains to be done there.” The greed type chooses not to meet Conze’s eyes.
“And right here,” says Conze, pointing to a second officer, who sits zazen with perfect form in the front row, “right under my very nose, is the classic delusion type. It is an unfortunate karma, but one must after all accept whatever comes to us from our past lives, eh?” The delusion type maintains a stony equanimity.
“And finally,” Conze goes on, “right there in the back I see a fine example of the hate type. I myself am a hate type, so I sympathize. It is not pleasant to be a hate type. For the hate type, it is very hard to enjoy the foolishness of the world. However, this type is further advanced than the other two types. This type is intelligent enough to begin to understand how things really are. But we are an unpleasant sort.” The hate type squirms on his zafu and tries to look amused.
