“No, it’s a state in the United States, New Mexico.”
“Oh,” he shook his head, “never heard of it.” I made the mistake of telling him I was in a bit of a rush. The cab became rubber as it moved between cars in a space big enough for a bicycle. I clutched the back seat. We drove past half-crumbled brick buildings in Harlem.
“It’s near Texas,” I explained. Not much recognition from him. “Near California,” I said.
“Ahh, California. Have you ever been there? I was asked to work there. What’s it like? Should I go?”
“What kind of job?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head.
“Where in California? It’s a big state. It’s on the Pacific Ocean. Have you seen it on a map?”
“No.”
“Is it near San Francisco?” I asked.
“No, don’t think so.”
“Near LA?” I quickly corrected myself. “Los Angeles?”
“Yes, yes, I think that’s it. Could I drive a cab?”
“I guess so. It’s a big city, very spread out. It’s summer there all the time.”
“No!”
“Yes. It never gets cold.”
“No winter?” He shook his head. “No cold. Always hot. I don’t like that.” He was quiet a long time. We were in line to pay a toll. He swung into a shorter lane and cut off another yellow cab. The other cab driver screamed out the window.
“Which airline?” he asked. We were nearing the airport.
“American.”
We entered the ramp and the cab stopped for me to get out. The driver turned around in his seat. “I thought about it. I’ll stay in New York. I don’t think I’ll move to California.”
I nodded. Fate had been sealed that quickly and on so little knowledge.
In 1972, when a small group of Zen students in Minneapolis invited Katagiri Roshi to be their teacher, he jumped at the chance to be in the middle of America and he and his family moved out there.
Stephen Gaskin’s commune in Tennessee, called The Farm, heard that a genuine Zen master had just moved to Minneapolis. A bunch of them piled in a bus and drove up. Roshi looked out the window, saw them pull to the curb, and his heart sank. They were outrageous-looking hippies. Though they were not the American workers Roshi dreamed of, it was a good thing they came. There were few Zen students in the Twin Cities. The Farm people joined right in; some became Zen students and helped paint and do construction on the new zendo, which was a rundown house on Lake Calhoun.
When I came to Zen Center in 1978, there were about forty active students. Just forty. And they were mostly from Minnesota. The wild enthusiasm I imagined at the San Francisco Zen Center was not here. Instead the Zen Center took on the qualities of midwestern Minnesota: staid, introverted, grounded, bland, responsible, serious, conservative. I was stunned that there were so few people. In Boulder, the center had at least seven hundred. Because of the cold, people did not follow Katagiri from the West Coast.
If I asked someone at Lama Foundation in New Mexico how they got there, a fantastical story usually ensued: “I walked to the edge of a Himalayan cliff—I’d been in India three years—I was about to jump. I heard a voice, ‘Return home. Go to Lama.’ I didn’t know what Lama was. I trusted God. I wandered. I came to the foot of the mountain in New Mexico.”
If I asked Zen students in Minnesota how they got to Zen Center, I heard, “I read a book on Buddhism in religion class and it sounded pretty good, so I came over.” Or, “I wanted to learn how to meditate. I heard it was good for you.” Nothing fantastical. Ordinary. This was good, but tricky. Zen is about the ordinary, but the vibrant ordinary of things as they are, no illusions, no self-deception, no projections of the self. Midwestern ordinary could appear to be deceptively like Zen ordinary but instead might come out of lethargy, inertia, a deep sleepiness, and have no bite of the unexpected, nothing to hold on to.
Jim White, my poet friend, sat at Zen Center a few times and said, “It’s like the Lutheran Church sitting zazen.” Still, the students were earnest, serious if not flamboyant, and I was touched by them.
I sat my first seven-day sesshin with Roshi in September, a month or two after I interviewed him. A sesshin is a meditation retreat that begins at five A.M. and continues until nine or later at night. The day’s schedule was regulated, with up to fourteen forty-minute sits each day, alternating with ten minutes of walking meditation, a half-hour break after breakfast and dinner, and an hour-and-a-half work period after lunch. Even the meals were eaten in formal oryoki style, which meant in a cross-legged sitting position with three eating bowls in front of you and a highly stylized pattern of mindfulness to serving, meal chanting, eating, and cleaning of the bowls. The entire seven days are done in silence.
During the sesshin, although my brain was racing—like putting a wild boar in a fenced-in backyard—everything actually slowed down. It was as though I was running at two levels— my brain raced while my body was still. I had never before sunk so far into the present moment and connected to the wood floor below me, the slow presence of trees out the window, the natural movement of daylight and its changing shades.
During break after dinner on the first day, I stood out by Lake Calhoun across from Zen Center. I watched black coots swim in and around each other and I watched the dark ripple of lake water. I watched the bikers whiz by on their trek around the lake. I was in another world, but it was in this world. On the second day, I snuck off after dinner to a small grocery, Van’s Superette, on the corner of Hennepin and Thirty-fourth, and bought a Kitkat. I mindfully opened the wrapper and chewed the chocolate wafers slowly as I walked back along Thirty-fourth under the tremendous elms.
On the third morning of sesshin, Roshi told us a Zen story. First he made a joke: A Zen master was standing on his balcony in Japan looking out at the birds. Suddenly a swami manifested himself on the balcony. He said proudly, “I traveled here with my psychic powers all the way from India.”
The Zen master replied, “What took you so long?”
We all laughed. Roshi laughed, too.
Then he continued the story: The Zen master then said to the swami, “You can keep all your magic. Just leave me the Buddha dharma.”
There was a deep silence in the room after this.
Then Roshi continued, “Now do you want me to give an example of Zen magic?” We all nodded.
“There was an old Zen master who lived in a monastery in the mountains. He was taking an afternoon nap. When he woke up, his old disciple, who had been with him for many years, walked in, placed a tray by the bed, and sat down.
“The old roshi looked up. ‘Oh, hello,’ he said sleepily. ‘Let me tell you a dream I just had.’
“The monk disciple said, ‘Tell it to me later. Here, have a cup of tea.’ ”
That was the end of the story. That was Zen magic. That was the Buddha dharma, which meant the essential truth of existence. No dreams. A cup of tea. There was a long silence. Zen stories were like that. They went no place. I’d been up since five A.M. that morning. I was slumped against a back wall under a window: We were supposed to be sitting in an erect position. I started to cry softly to myself. Could things be as simple as that story? Was that allowed in the world? The bell rang. We chanted. Roshi straightened his cushion, bowed, and walked out of the room. We turned, faced the white wall for another forty-minute session of watching our breath.
The last day of that first sesshin, I went to Roshi. “I feel high, like I’m tripping on LSD.”
“Pay no attention to that. Continue to feel your breath, bow, drink tea.”
When I met my friend Kate the day after, we sat on my porch talking. She said, “Nat, I feel like I’m sitting with a portrait of a woman painted by Picasso. Everything’s blown open. Your eye is on your cheek, your lips are on your forehead.” Things changed for me after that sesshin. I went to all the Wednesday night and Saturday morning lectures, though I probably understood only an eighth of what Roshi was talking about.
After one lecture, I visited him in his study and said, “Now that lecture was really boring! I had to do everything to keep awake.”
His face fell and I could see he was hurt.
I stopped. “Roshi, you look hurt. How can that be? You’re enlightened, you don’t have feelings.”
But of course he had feelings. He was a human being. I saw that then. I had an erroneous conception of what an enlightened person was like. I’d like to say I had beginner’s mind, simple, fresh, innocent, but many times instead I think I was rude, stupid, unfeeling. I butted my head again and again up against what I did not know. I came to him with this ignorance and in exposing it I began to learn the Buddhist teachings. My questions were rooted in my real life, not in some fancy dharma questions I thought I should ask. In a sense, I don’t think I’ll ever learn so much again, because I’ll never be that ignorant again—or naive enough to expose it—and thus will probably not be able to receive so much.
On another occasion, I went to him: “Roshi, I had terrible sex last night. I kept wanting to fall asleep. What should I do?”
Writing these questions now embarrasses me, but it was through them, through his responses, that I began to learn the dharma. I guess you want to know his answer to the sex question. He said, “Practice, make effort.” Very simple.
Once after a lecture on the Abhidharma, which is a complicated doctrine on Buddhist psychology, Roshi asked if there were any questions. There was a long silence. I don’t think any of us even understood enough about what he was saying to ask a question. All of it was foreign to me; yet, just looking at Roshi, I knew he was saying something I wished I could comprehend. I wished I could rearrange my brain in a moment to match his.
To encourage us, he said again, “Any questions?” Long pause. No response. “Go ahead, you can ask anything, anything you want to know.”
I took a breath and raised my hand. He nodded at me. “Roshi, I was wondering, how did you meet your wife Tomoe?” The group laughed.
He smiled and answered me directly. He felt my sincerity. I was trying to get a handle on all this Zen. I started on something elemental: how man meets woman in Japan, how a monk meets someone.
Later, in the basement, some of the older Zen students chastised me for asking that question. They said I was disrespectful.
Tomoe, however, had also been at the lecture. She smiled and said, “Natalie, I never knew the whole story before. From now on, if I want to know something, I’ll have you ask Roshi.”
There were a lot of women at Zen Center. Some were ordained, and some of these women had shaven their heads. Masculine pronouns were adjusted in the sutras. Gay people came to Zen Center. Roshi watched marriages dissolve and children belong to two households. He watched hundreds of people pass through Zen Center and then never be heard from again. Roshi said, “I can’t stop anyone, but I pray for them.”
Whether we were there or not, he was there. He sat even morning at five A.M. Once he said, “I’m not here for Minnesota Zen Center. I’m here for all sentient beings even moment forever.” This was impressive. Yet it was ordinary. There was no fanfare. He just sat. You sat or didn’t sit. There was no comment, no praise or blame. We got no demerits and no stars. This was difficult to get used to. In the first three years I was there, I was always expecting to get yelled at, for Roshi to finally lose all patience with me, grab me by my neck and the seat of my pants and fling me crashing out the window—not the door, it had to be more dramatic, glass had to break, the window frame had to shatter. But he never did throw me out.
Once, though, Roshi did throw someone out. Roy had been there for five years and sat very regularly, but the instant he crossed his legs, he fell into a deep sleep and sometimes even snored. Falling asleep so much is often considered a deep resistance. In all those years, Roshi never said anything to Roy. Then during the last afternoon period of sitting during one day of a sesshin—Roy was in the Buddha hall, an adjunct room to the zendo, fast asleep as usual, and we were all sitting facing the white walls—we heard a huge scream: “Wake up!” Like a flash of lightning I saw out of the corner of my eye—none of us moved, that was zazen, you stayed still under all circumstances—Roshi run into the Buddha hall and lift Roy up. Roy was huge, had been a college football player, I saw him once hold up by himself one whole end of a piano, while Roshi was small, short, maybe five feet three inches, but Roshi hauled him to the back door and threw him out. What I remember most was that scream, “Wake up!” It was clear, with no Japanese accent.
Did Roy wake up? About an hour later he was again sitting in the Buddha hall fast asleep. No one ever said anything about it. We continued in silence for the rest of the week.
Eventually my fear of being thrown out faded away. I was just there. I didn’t question any longer whether I belonged or not. I didn’t think about it. But many times during dokusan, one-to-one formal interview with the teacher, I moaned to Roshi, “This is no good. I can’t sit still; I think all the time—my brain never stops; I hate bowing; and so-and-so makes me so mad.” Then I’d pause. “I should leave. I don’t belong here.”
He nodded. “That’s just another thought, that you should leave. Don’t be tossed away by it. Continue to sit, to gassho—bow—and drink tea.”
Once Ed Brown told me that after a year of being the head cook at the Tassajara Zen monastery, he went to Suzuki Roshi to complain. “So-and-so doesn’t cut the carrots right; so-and-so comes late for his shift.”
Suzuki sat opposite Ed, nodding and beaming. Ed thought he was commiserating. He went on for ten minutes, recalling every problem, every misdemeanor someone did in the kitchen. Finally, he had nothing else to say; he had emptied himself. He thought Suzuki was going to slap him on the back and say, “I understand, Ed. Good help is hard to find.”
Instead, Suzuki was quiet, looked down and then slowly looked at Ed again. “But, you know, Ed, in order to see virtue, you have to have a calm mind.”
After I moved to Minneapolis, I was lonesome for the small, intimate writing groups in my living room. They had so much supported my writing life in Taos. Within three months of coming north I volunteered to teach an eight-week workshop as a benefit for Zen Center. I was amazed at how many people signed up. Many were unlikely candidates: four carpenters, an auto mechanic, two cooks, one house cleaner, and several therapists were among the twenty writing students. I had no credentials, yet people were eager to study writing. After the eight-week Zen benefit, which was very successful, I gained the courage to launch two workshops outside the Zen community. I made homemade signs with white paper and a black magic marker: “Eight-week writing group. Cost: $40.” I hung the signs at Orr Books at Calhoun Square, in the Uptown area of Minneapolis, and at the local food coops. Within days both workshops were full. I realized that unlike Taos, a city had a large pool of people from which to draw. I spoke to each person on the phone to make sure they weren’t dangerous and that I could give them my address and let them into my living room. As I write this now, it seems extraordinarily trusting, but I had no problems. One woman did show up in hair curlers, but that was hardly cause to think I put my life in jeopardy—and she was a good writer, which is what mattered more.
I had great innocent confidence then. I hadn’t quite yet formed all my detailed writing rules, but the moment the students arrived, I told them, “We’ll do timed writings for ten minutes. Keep your pen moving; don’t stop, don’t cross out, don’t think. Okay, the topic is ‘elbows.’ Go.” And off we went! When the ten minutes were up, we read aloud what we had written. The results were so alive, so dynamic, that no one questioned the process or argued about style or standards or demanded criticism. The classes were as exciting as the ones in Taos, but a bit different. First of all, there were men in these classes. And second, these people were from the Midwest. Their writing stayed in that location. Rarely was there a foreign country mentioned, much less New York, the South, Texas, or California. Actually, California was used, as the example of anything gone wrong, of
anything hare-brained, lost, uprooted, unstable, of people gone amok, crazy. A lot was written about grandparents, farms, the weather. These midwesterners were grounded. Writing practice was new to them, but they were smart, knew a good thing, took in everything I said, and practiced hard.
This stuff works, I thought to myself. And not just in Taos. It’s real, universal, has a basic sanity that speaks to everyone.
The no-blame-no-praise I learned in Zen penetrated my life and affected my attitude toward writing. More and more I just wrote: no good, no bad. And I encouraged my writing students to write and then just read: no good, no bad. No comment from me or the other students about their writing. After the initial enthusiasm of some of the students in my living room, this non-criticism became unnerving. They had spent so long in public schools that their main model was getting “corrected.” They wanted to hear something bad about their piece. In their hearts they knew it was bad, and they wanted me to affirm that fear. When I didn’t, there was empty space. That was scary. What was there to hold on to? Nothing. Continue to write, I said.
It was tough, to hold that space of no response as a teacher. I saw how eager everyone was to acknowledge and be acknowledged, even if it was negative. On the few occasions I did say something positive, instead of nothing, they didn’t believe me anyway. Sometimes I said after each person read, “Good, good, next person.” It allayed or relieved the silence, but I did not mean good as in good versus bad. I meant “good”: good to write, good to be alive in a human body and have language, good to be here, all of us sharing this space.
Slowly, slowly like osmosis, this understanding dissolved into me as I practiced zazen with Katagiri Roshi. No good, no bad, just the action: Just pouring tea, just writing, just breathing; just standing, sitting, speaking, or not speaking. This was my Zen education. The process of learning was as deep for me as what I learned, and this I shared with my students, not by talking about it but by allowing empty silent space after someone read, giving them nothing to grab on to, only sitting there with their own breath.
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