by Erik Storlie
I’m convinced none of this will work. In a final appeal, I argue, “This is Minnesota. We should build something that fits our land. We have no traditional Japanese materials or carpenters. And the winters are very cold. A Japanese-style temple will be impossible to heat.
“Besides, we can’t afford to build two buildings just so the chanting and bowing can go on in a separate space from zazen. We’ll be lucky to get one building built. And we will need dorms. Are a mixed group of men and women really going to sleep and dress together in the zendo?”
Others answer me, explaining that this is the real Buddhism, that we must go forward with confidence, that miracles happen when one’s karma is pure.
“Don’t expect that kind of miracle in Minnesota,” I say angrily. “No one in this state is going to donate big money for such a thing. There just isn’t much interest in Japanese culture. Can’t we be realistic and settle for some kind of three-season camp arrangement? That’s how most church groups do it.”
As so often happens to me now in Zen Center meetings, I feel outflanked. When I point out that our escalation of ceremonialism drives away potential students, effectively reducing our support for a city expansion or country buildings, I know other students dismiss me as an egotist and troublemaker. I, too, want expansion and country land. But I know I’ll be one of those who feels duty bound to cope with budget shortfalls.
Worst of all, I’ve lost Roshi’s support. Does he now just feel I’m in the way?
Finally, Roshi resolves the matter. The meetings have gone on too long. Reluctant, saddened by the lack of harmony among his students, he speaks quietly. “This is Dogen’s way, this is our way. We should try to do it.”
I’m bitter. Does he confuse black clothes and shorn heads with commitment? Does he misread passive-aggressive behavior as egolessness? He seems now to listen only to students who have arrived in the last few years. Students eager to don robes, shave heads, and play priest and priestess. Students who lack the practical work skills that enabled us to tear apart and rebuild the Calhoun house. Students who could never have raised the money to buy country land in the first place. “How,” I wonder, “can he be so naïve?”
It’s a Saturday afternoon that spring. I’m anxious to get home to my wife and infant daughter. My day at the Zen Center began with zazen at five in the morning, then breakfast, attendance at lecture and tea, and finally a work period before lunch. For me, the work has stretched into the afternoon because of a plugged basement toilet.
Halfway down the stairs, on the way to the toilet, I argue with a board member who wants someone to install a vented exhaust fan above the altar. She and some others feel they’re getting allergic reactions to the constant burning of incense during meditation.
“Listen,” I say, “do you have any idea what’s involved with getting into the chimney cavity and bringing in power for a fan? Let’s just cut down on the amount of incense we burn. After all, this isn’t a huge, drafty Japanese temple. It’s a house.”
“No,” she replies firmly, “we’ve talked to Roshi about that. He feels it’s very important to follow Dogen’s practice in every way.”
Of course, Roshi may have said something like this. But I know how often his words are taken out of context to justify whatever someone wants.
“Look,” I say, fuming, “two weeks ago someone took the storms off the basement windows for ventilation. Now we can’t even seem to get the screens back up for the summer. Meanwhile, the place is filling up with mice, but no one wants to use poison or traps. This vent just isn’t a very high priority for me, not right now, anyway.”
With a look of pained but patient forbearance, the board member turns and continues up the stairs.
“On her way home!” I grumble to myself. “Oh, well, at least her little kids’ll get a chance to see her. She’d never disappoint Roshi by not showing up at five Saturday morning, so no doubt she was in bed before they were last night—and gone before they got up.”
Now it’s almost three. The toilet’s working again, but I’m in the alley, where squirrels have scattered orange peels, melon rinds, apple cores, and miscellaneous vegetarian slop across the grass and pavement. The mess has to be rebagged or the city won’t collect it.
What about my own weekend chores? What about the baby? Disgusted, cursing squirrels and the careless zen students who threw plastic bags of this stuff unprotected in the alley, I see three brand new priestlets—two women, one man—in full black regalia tripping in clogs down the back alley on their way to a special priest meeting with Roshi.
These are recent converts. They arrived only a few years ago. Where were they when I gave thousands of hours and dollars to bring Roshi to Minnesota? Now they’ll give lectures and lead seminars. I’ll do chores. After fifteen years of fierce practice, after giving everything to this group, am I relegated to dirty work?
I’m suddenly reminded of Philip Whalen’s poetry reading at the Loft last winter, a fund-raiser for the Zen Center. Afterward, he wanted to see Seven Corners, the Minneapolis equivalent of Greenwich Village and North Beach. He wanted to drink at the Mixers, a place I helped make into a legend. I should have been the tour guide for Philip, but Natalie and her friends spirited him off without saying a word to me. I was left behind to fold and stack the folding chairs.
“These prisses should be up to their nuts and cunts in veggie garbage,” I grit through my teeth, watching the black backs and shaven heads disappear into the building.
I know they’re going up to be served tea and cookies while discussing the sacred details of “priest practice.” And my place in this place? They call me when cars don’t start, when toilets plug, when insurance forms are neglected, when progress reports are due in Japan, when money runs out.
Oh, I know what they say. “Well, it’s really a shame, but Erik has so much ego. He can’t accept even the lay ordination. He just can’t accept Dogen’s way.”
Now, with each orange peel dotted with spent herbal tea leaves, with each slippery melon rind skittering along the concrete, eluding my fingers, a voice rages, “Ego? Damn right I’ve got ego. And so do you all, you silly, whispering, passive-aggressive twits. You just hide it. You go to the zendo, cross your legs, and hide. You’re sitting in a building that Pirsig’s ego bought and that a half dozen strong male egos rebuilt with their own hands. Without us you wouldn’t even be here.
“Or maybe you think I’ve got a problem with dirty work? I can handle stinking garbage. I can plunge shit-smeared tampon-plugged toilets for the rest of my life. But why should I?
“You priests want to learn the correct sequence of bows when offering incense at the altar? Come here, come close, my black-berobed pretties. Let me demonstrate the Buddha’s way of picking up rotten tomato slices smeared on alley concrete. Let me show you the correct sequence of plunges when breaking up a huge black turd in a toilet badly plumbed by volunteer help.”
Suddenly, hands full of apple cores, I come to a halt before a pile of coffee grounds. “Cool it, Erik,” I think, upset now by my pounding heart and roiling stomach. “Let the garbage lie. Maybe it’s time to quit being a good zen student. Go home, tend to the wife and baby, wash your own windows, fix your own slow toilet, and paint the baby’s room.
“Of course your ego is huge. But does being a flunky help? Did you spend fifteen years of time and money, put an academic career on hold, and take a hundred high-dose acid trips to become one of those tired, middle-aged men hanging around the church basement—the reliable, regular volunteer, the sincere guy who’ll always sweep up after the crowd, the deacons, and the preacher have all gone on home?
“You go home. To hell with the garbage. Go home. This is all making you sick.”
I straighten up and toss the apple cores back on the cobblestone path, then sighing, pick them up again and finish the job. As I head for home, cutting through the Zen Center yard, a piece of advice Roshi gave me years ago echoes in my mind: “Don’t stick your head too far into the cave o
f the church or you’ll smell a very bad smell. It’s true, even in the Soto zen sect.”
I come back to the Crag filled with sadness. The day wanes, I’m tired, and even the jumbled black rocks seem draped in mourning. I uncurl my stiff legs, stretch them straight out, and lean over to embrace a shoulder-high boulder that sits on my right hand. I rest my head on the hard, jagged top, hugging it with my arms. My fingertips knead into the warm, rough surfaces. Looking up, I see that the raven, reproachful, continues to ignore me.
“How could you have been so self-absorbed?” I ask myself. “And naïve?” I shake my head. “Yes, you really did believe, even at thirty-eight, that zen would not have the frailties of other human institutions.
“You thought a religious organization could shuck its religious paraphernalia and hierarchy just for you. You thought that the Japanese Soto zen sect could take Dogen’s advice and cast off its own body and mind.
“Maybe you read too many zen stories. Some monk in ancient China wanders from monastery to monastery for ten years, and then some famous master slaps him on the cheek, or breaks his eating bowl, or screams, ‘Not one, not two,’ and then ‘at that moment the monk was truly awakened.’ Did you really think that that was how it would be?”
Suddenly, I remember the Christian high school group, curious about Buddhism, that came to hear Roshi’s Saturday lecture in his first year in Minneapolis. We gave them refreshments afterward, everyone sitting around a large table. One of the girls, her fresh face bright and wondering, asked Roshi, “Are you enlightened?”
“Yes,” he said simply, with a smile, cradling his coffee cup, and went on to other questions. A few of us looked at each other in surprise at this quiet affirmation. We never asked him that question.
Then once again I remember that Saturday afternoon cleaning the alley. Sorrowfully, I whisper to myself, “Whatever the right or the wrong of it, after that, something was over for me.” I stopped coming to zazen regularly. I stopped sitting sesshins. And even when I did come to Saturday lecture, even when I saw Tomoe subtly nudge Roshi in my direction during tea time and we exchanged a few words, even when I knew he was as incapable of reaching out as I, I didn’t care anymore. I had thought we were special to each other. Of course, he had warned me against “using” the Zen Center. He had warned me against wanting a “special” practice. But I did want his love. I could no longer believe he really cared about me. Was his interest in my practice only proportional to mine in the priesthood? Now I felt used.
I rub my cheek into the rough, grainy surface of the warm black rock, comforted by its harsh reality. I sigh and sit up again, wriggling my toes. I pull up my left foot and examine the scab. It’s a hard, tiny turtle shell now, dark brown, testimony to the quiet efficiency of the body.
“Why did you stay away for so long?” I ask myself. “Why did you stay so bitter? Couldn’t you just be his friend?”
I look up from my mournful black rocks, from the mournful black raven, searching the sky and distant mountains for comfort in their beauty.
12
A Death
IT’S SEPTEMBER 1987. I’M SITTING THE FIRST sesshin I’ve sat in years—seven days on the country land in the hilly oak and maple forest of southeastern Minnesota. The thirteenth-century temple isn’t here, never got funded, never got built. Now I wish I’d worked for it, at least as a patient, doubting friend.
Roshi is approaching sixty. I’m forty-six, divorced, busy with my kids and a new woman friend, no longer active at the Zen Center, doubting myself again, doubting the million decisions that have led to this place in just this way. Sadly, I think, “This should be my second home.”
During the week, I sense Roshi’s pain that the plans crumbled, his disappointment that all we have is this rough three-season camp—just what I’d argued for from the beginning. A sadness, at times, pervades his walk. His health, never strong, seems to be failing.
I’m grateful to be here, grateful to sit with him again—taking meals, hearing lectures, clearing weeds that choke the plantings of nut trees, sitting, sitting, sitting, hammer strokes on the chisel, chisel biting the mind stone, again and again and again. Who would have believed twenty years ago that such a place as this would blossom in Minnesota? It’s the fourth day of the sesshin. Some twenty of us sit in the little, rough-sawn oak zendo on the side of a hill that sweeps up into forest. We’re bundled up in sweaters and sweat clothes. It’s been chilly and damp all week, with frequent autumn clouds and showers. At the afternoon lecture, Roshi talks, among other things, about the difficulties and confusions that Americans experience when they become Soto zen Buddhists.
“Of course, it is very hard,” he says. “I know that. The customs of a Japanese monastery seem pretty unusual in this modern world. Maybe sometimes they seem ridiculous. But it is our practice. We can just try it. All we can do is plant a seed. Maybe it can grow.
“I always ask you this question. How does the tiny pumpkin seed grow into the gigantic pumpkin fruit?” Roshi indicates something tiny between his thumb and forefinger. And then something huge, spreading his arms round and wide, embracing the air.
“Maybe this Zen Center is a little seed. Someday it can grow into a big pumpkin fruit. We cannot know for sure.
“I remember how I felt, a funny-looking Japanese person who came to the United States. Everything was very strange. It was hard to understand this new world. It was very hard just to live. I knew I was not really an American. It is pretty natural then if this Japanese person decides he doesn’t want to stay in America. He doesn’t want to be a citizen of the United States.
“That’s okay, of course. But then, what if this Japanese person says, ‘I think I would really like to be a big part of America. I would even like to be the president of the United States.’ Someone will say to him, ‘Well, after all, it is necessary for you to become an American citizen first.’
“Then this person feels some disappointment. Of course, it is really ridiculous. He must be a citizen first. But we are human beings. We always want like that sometimes.”
Roshi chuckles. “How can you be the president of the United States without joining this country?” he asks again, musingly.
Sitting on my cushion, I smile to myself. “Yes. I’m the one who refused to join the Soto zen sect, yet threw everything into becoming a zen master. Remember how angry you were when he said once in a lecture that the zen priests were the ‘professionals,’ as if your practice was something less?”
But today I’m touched that Roshi talks to me again in this way, chiding me indirectly, in lecture. I feel like a young man, long away from home, who returns and now welcomes a fond father’s rebuke. “Yes, he’s right. It really is ridiculous. And yet, on the other hand, it isn’t entirely! Can enlightenment really be about joining something?” I shift uneasily on my round, black cushion.
“Well, Erik, here you are, thinking things through, as usual. Roshi always said that it’s not important to be smart, that that’s not the real zen. I suppose you’ve just outsmarted yourself once again.”
On the afternoon of the last day of the sesshin, I have dokusan in his little cabin. It’s snug and pretty, the only building that nears completion.
“Roshi,” I say, “this country center is very beautiful. It seems unfinished to you, I know, but think how amazing it is that we’re all here sitting together, almost thirty people in the middle of bluffs and woods. We’re warm and dry, we’re eating good food. We even get hot showers.”
“Yes, it’s true, it’s beautiful here. But I would like to do more.” And he talks about the numbers of students he wants to come here, the possibility of winterizing for a year-round practice.
“It’ll happen,” I say. “But it’ll take time. You know how slow everything is in Minnesota. It’s true Suzuki Roshi was able to develop the Page Street Zendo and Tassajara, and he was only in America twelve years before he died. But that was California and those were the sixties. Something like that won’t happen again soon, n
ot even there. Things grow slowly here, but they put down deep roots, like oak trees. They grow tall and strong like the pines we planted on the hill up there.” I gesture up toward the hill behind his cabin, where ten years ago a group of us planted little pines that now stand twice as tall as my head.
“You said we planted pines, not for ourselves, but for the future generations. Do you remember what you did when we finished planting that day?”
Roshi looks at me in quizzical surprise and shakes his head.
“You roared—roared like a mountain lion. It was loud, a tremendous roar. Everyone was shocked and just looked at each other. We all remember.”
He brightens, smiling, and nods.
“I’m sorry, Roshi. I’m sorry I’m such a bad zen student. I wish I could have been better. Here I am, twenty years have gone by since we met at Sokoji Temple. I still haven’t even become a lay Buddhist, let alone a priest. I guess I never will.”
Roshi smiles. “That’s all right. Don’t worry about it.” He always says this when I bring up my refusal of ordination and priesthood. I smile, too.
“Don’t worry about it,” he repeats.
“But you know,” I say, “I’ll sit forever. I’m very grateful to be here with you this week. I want to help Zen Center, if I can.”
“Yes, please help us. Please go to the meeting Henry will have after the sesshin. They will discuss the building plans.”
“Okay,” I say, “I’ll go.”
I would like to say more, but I don’t. I want to say I’m sorry—especially for the anger, for the hurt, for his disappointments, and for mine, too. I want to tell him how, despite the gulf between us, I honor his deep, unshakable commitment to striking the mind stone again and again and again. I know he has given absolutely everything to this, just this—and that it is this, not the chanting and incense, the robes and ceremonies, the ordination and hierarchy, that is his teaching.
