Читать книгу A Straight Road with 99 Curves - Gregory Shepherd - Страница 9

All human misery derives from an inability to sit still in a quiet room alone.

—Blaise Pascal

The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the twentieth century.

—attributed to Arnold Toynbee

Newly arrived in Honolulu, Paul and I looked in the phone book one day for a place to practice Zen and dialed the number for “Koko An Zendo.” (A zendo is a Zen-practice center.) That same evening found us in what looked to be a private residence in Manoa Valley, not far from the University of Hawaii. Koko An Zendo was part of the larger local Diamond Sangha, sangha being the Sanskrit term for “fellowship” or “kinship.” The “Diamond” part of the organization’s name was inspired by the Diamond Sutra, one of the primary Buddhist texts, and also by Diamond Head being visible from the house. “Koko An,” the name of the commmunity’s zendo, translates from the Japanese as “the hermitage of right here.”

In 1971, Zen was still in its toddlerhood in America and the West in general, with here and there only a handful of centers dotting the landscape. Now there are literally hundreds. The lineage leading up to this proliferation of practice centers began with Soyen Shaku, a priest of the Rinzai school of Zen and a featured guest at the World Parliament of Religions held at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.† One of his students, D. T. Suzuki, went on to write a number of popular books in English on Zen that influenced a generation of Western seekers. Nyogen Senzaki, another of Soyen Shaku’s disciples, was the first teacher of Robert Aitken, an American originally from Philadelphia who founded the Diamond Sangha in 1959. By 2013 there were no fewer than seventeen Zen centers worldwide that were either started by Aitken or by one or more of his students. Of all the teachers and future teachers of Zen in mid-twentieth-century America, Aitken, in terms of the sheer number of people exposed to Zen through his efforts, would turn out to be one of its most influential Western exponents and be widely regarded as the “dean” of American Zen Buddhism.

When Paul and I arrived at Koko An that evening, one of its residents directed us to sit facing the wall as quietly as possible during the four successive twenty-five-minute periods of zazen, Zen-sitting, that were about to begin, and to count our breaths over and over from one to ten. If we suddenly found ourselves exceeding that number, we were instructed to simply begin anew without any self-recrimination for having let our minds wander.

The essential goal of Zen practice is the exact opposite of the usual goal of gaining something from one’s activities. Sitting quietly with the mind focused but not rigid, the sitter allows desire for attainment and, indeed, all concepts and desires to fall away, so that the true, intrinsic unity of self and universe is revealed. Thus, enlightenment is the absence of delusion, rather than a higher state to be achieved. Most religions posit “holy” or “virtuous” concepts as the antitheses of evil ones. Zen purports to get to the root of the question of existence by throwing away all concepts, virtuous and holy ones included, concepts themselves being the stumbling block to true realization. It is thus as radical (in the original sense of the term) a spiritual path as is possible.

Zen takes as its starting point the fact that everyone at some time or another experiences a psychic tension arising from the perception of one’s self as being “here” and all those other billions of selves as being “out there.” But since the “self” gets old and faces death, and since worldly successes will always eventually give way to failures, suffering inevitably arises—the dukkha-ness of life in a nutshell. In Zen, the “original intent” school of Buddhism, there is no way out of that suffering except to perceive directly that the self is an illusion, a bundle of concepts and ideas that we, in our delusion, believe has some kind of permanence and solid substance. Once one sees into one’s true nature, according to Zen, existence ceases to be a problem. You see things as they are, and nothing that isn’t there. “The truth shall set you free.” That was the freedom that Zen promised, a freedom Paul and I were looking for, together with everyone else on this path.

But the practice of Zen, I was soon to find out, is not a fast-track to a fully enlightened life with no speed bumps along the way. Zazen, while allowing the mind to settle, can also allow negativity to bubble up in the psyche, negativity that we ordinarily tamp down or distract ourselves from. I would become well acquainted with this negativity over the coming years.

•••

I had sat only shorter periods of zazen before, and my legs were unused to maintaining the half-lotus position for twenty-five minutes at a time. Thus, when my legs began to fall asleep during the first period, I uncrossed them and straddled the cushion, as the person next to me was doing. A high-pitched bell rang twice at the end of twenty-five minutes, signaling us to rise from our “zafus” (cushions) and to circum­ambulate the twilit room in the slow walking-meditation known as kinhin. As I passed the altar during kinhin, I snuck a glance at the centerpiece of the zendo—an eighteen-inch-high wooden sculpture of a fearsome figure I was to learn at tea-time was Bodhidharma, a storied Indian monk who had introduced an early form of Zen into China during the fifth century A.D.

Just after the bell rang, some of the participants quietly slipped out the screen door leading to the backyard and didn’t come back in for the next sitting, and I decided to do the same during the next kinhin in order to give my aching knees a rest. When that time came, I found a wicker chair to sit in on the back lawn with these others, who whispered among themselves so as not to disturb those still inside. Introducing myself, I was told that Koko An Zendo was a residential center where people willing to make the commitment to its three hours of daily zazen were welcome to come to live and practice. A young resident then pointed to a tree that grew separate from any others in the backyard.

“That’s a bodhi tree,” he explained quietly, referring to a ficus tree of the sort Shakyamuni Buddha was said to be sitting beneath when he attained enlightenment (bodhi translates from Sanskrit as “enlightenment”). “The story goes,” he continued, “that if the bodhi tree grows strong, so too will the zendo.” Koko An’s bodhi tree, though not yet all that tall, seemed healthy and flourishing.

We rejoined the rest of the group for the final zazen period of the evening, and at its conclusion, mimeographed cards were distributed, from which we chanted what is known as The Four Great Vows of Zen Buddhism:

The many beings are numberless, I vow to save them;

Greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly, I vow to abandon them;

Dharma gates are countless, I vow to wake to them;

Buddha’s way is unsurpassed, I vow to embody it fully.

After the chanting, the lights were turned on full strength, and we resumed our conversation over refreshing cups of lemon-grass tea. The people I had been quietly talking with outside now told Paul and me about how a seven-day intensive retreat called a sesshin had finished not long before, and that Robert Aitken’s teacher, one Yasutani Roshi (roshi being the honorific title for a Zen Master), had come over from Japan to lead it. An actual Zen Master! One of those incredibly rare and enlightened beings whose wisdom penetrates to the very heart of the Universe! Over the years through my readings, I had developed the same fascination and awe for these highest of Zen teachers that I had reserved for Catholic saints in my early childhood. There was already something almost miraculous about Yasutani Roshi, in that, the story goes, his mother was given a bead from a Buddhist rosary (juzu) to swallow in hopes that it would somehow ease the travails of childbirth. Lo and behold, when Yasutani was born, he was clutching the bead in his right hand, a most auspicious sign, and great things were predicted for him.

“Wow, this is home!” I thought to myself as the Koko An residents spoke, and I resolved to come live at this small temple just as soon as a coveted vacancy opened up.

“Umm, well, actually, we have openings right now,” said one of the residents. “In fact we kind of need more people to make the rent.”

And so, with none of the traditional practice at Japanese Zen monasteries of sitting outside in the elements for three days in order to show sincerity before being accepted for admission, my brother Paul and I became more or less instant residents of Koko An.

•••

In high school I had once came across an article in National Geographic magazine about young people my age in Thailand whose education included spending a year at a Buddhist monastery. Feeling drawn to that type of contemplative practice, I fantasized about someday joining such a monastery myself. The monks sitting in serene meditation looked somehow oddly familiar to me. “I’ve been there before,” I remember thinking while wondering how that could be possible. Now, a resident of Koko An, I could sit quietly in meditation as I had seen the young monks do in the article, and let my endlessly chattering mind settle into a measure of tranquillity, continuing to be fascinated by the prospect of enlightenment and what I regarded as its promise of complete liberation from all of life’s problems.

With a muffled egg-timer ticking away the twenty-five-minute morning and evening zazen periods, most of us at Koko An sat straddling our zafus like cowboys on saddles (more advanced residents sat in either full- or half-lotus postures). As an alternative to counting our breaths, we could sit meditating on the syllable “Mu,” which was another method of quieting the mind.

Theoretically, we could have been silently repeating anything at all, since the ultimate aim of Zen meditation practice is to become so absorbed with whatever theme is being mentally repeated that the construct of ego falls away and one’s true nature, the “Big I” as some Zen teachers call it, is revealed—the experience of satori or kensho in other words. “Mu” is more effective in this regard, since it is a neutral syllable, with no connotations that could become a source of distraction, as would surely be the case if one were to meditate on an actual word.

The syllable “Mu” derives from one of the Zen koans, paradoxical statements or stories used as a skillful means of effecting spiritual awakening. The following koan, known as “Joshu’s Dog,” is part of an eight-hundred-year-old koan collection called the Mumonkan, or “Gateless Gate”:

Joshu [778–897] was a renowned Chinese Zen Master who lived in Joshu, the province from which he took his name. One day a monk approached him, intending to ask for guidance. When a dog walked by, the monk asked Joshu, “Does that dog have Buddha-nature or not?” Joshu shouted, “Mu!” ‡

•••

In between the morning and evening sittings our days at Koko An were free, and after breakfast residents went variously to their classes at the University of Hawaii a few blocks away, to their jobs, or in my case, to the beach. My brother Paul had enrolled in the graduate program at the university in pursuit of a Master’s degree in linguistics with a minor in Mandarin Chinese, an outgrowth of his lifelong fascination with Asian languages. He was now holding down a full-time job as a dishwasher in Waikiki and attending school full time while also adhering to the Koko An zazen schedule. I, on the other hand, was out frolicking in the waves at Waikiki without any need to work for a living.

When I was three years old, I was involved in a serious accident: I fell under the wheels of a slowly moving truck and was hospitalized for several weeks, after which I had to relearn how to walk. I received a lump-sum insurance settlement when I turned eighteen that I was now living off of, and I reasoned that, since I was now in Hawaii, it was somehow de rigueur for me to learn how to surf. I accomplished this by falling off a board and getting back up again repeatedly for about a week until one day, quite simply, I stayed upright. I had originally intended my daily surfing regimen to be a kind of adjunct to my Zen practice, becoming one with the waves and breaking the surface tension of the water in a manner similar to breaking the surface tension of consciousness in order to enter into the deeply absorbed meditation state known as samadhi.

One memorable morning, after several hours of ever-deepening samadhi at the zendo, I paddled out to the reef off Waikiki and waited for the sets to break. The seas were at least six feet, higher than I had ever surfed before, and people were wiping out right and left. I saw this as an opportunity to deepen my wave-samadhi, however, and I tried to become one with the ocean. But before long I had a feeling familiar to me from the time at the dentist’s office some years earlier when I felt my sense of self evaporating under the influence of laughing gas. Consumed with fear, I stood up on my board and tried to catch a wave in order to dispel the deepening feeling of dread, but was cut off by another surfer, and fell into the coral reef, cutting both knees. When I then stood up in the shallow water, I stepped on a sea urchin, and in the next instant the errant board of a tourist who had also wiped out slammed into my ribs. As I stood there on the reef a quarter mile out from Waikiki Beach, punctured, bleeding, and bruised, I was overwhelmed by a strange, suffocating sense of unreality and fear, and paddled back to shore as quickly as I could, hyperventilating all the way in. I felt as if I somehow no longer existed. I could almost see myself paddling, disembodied. Or rather unspirited. Uninhabited. Desolate. A paddling ghost. I was at the center of darkness. I remembered the Zen doctrine of no-self and thought it might be this. But far from being remotely liberating, this was a kind of cold hell, brimming over with fear, anxiety, and darkness.

•••

My reading material from the Koko An library included a memoir I picked up one day titled The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda. I was instantly engrossed by its relevance to the spiritual life in general and to mine in particular. The author had traveled to Mexico to study with a Yaqui Indian shaman and, like all of us at Koko An (indeed, like almost everyone on a spiritual path), was looking for that one-dose panacea for his life. The shaman (Don Juan) tells Castaneda, “You are too much. . . . Next you’re going to ask for a sorcerer’s medication to remove everything annoying from you, with no effort at all on your part—just the effort of swallowing whatever is given. The more awful the taste, the better the results. That’s your Western man’s motto. You want results—one potion and you’re cured.” A Buddhist take on the same theme came from the Tibetan lama, Chögyam Trungpa, who wrote in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, “We have the notion that there must be some kind of medicine or magic potion to help us attain the right state of mind.” Yes, that certainly was the case for many of us back then, as it still is today and probably always has been.

In another book of the series, Journey to Ixtlan, Don Juan tells Castaneda, “You take yourself too seriously. . . . You are too damn important in your own mind. . . . You’re so damn important that you can afford to leave if things don’t go your way. I suppose you think that shows character. That’s nonsense! You’re weak, and conceited. . . . Self-importance is another thing that must be dropped.”

I felt as though Don Juan were talking to me personally. For what was my life up till then if not taking myself too seriously and then running away when things didn’t go my way, thinking that it showed character? And dropping self-importance? How do you do that and still stay on the spiritual path? How do you hunger and thirst for real peace if you don’t take seriously the self that wants this peace? Always these exasperating enigmas at the heart of the spiritual life. I tucked them away into a deeper part of my consciousness where they couldn’t disturb me, at least not yet.

To do zazen is to study the self. To study the self is to know the self. To know the self is to be enlightened by the myriad things. To be enlightened by the myriad things is to free one’s body and mind and those of others. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this traceless enlightenment is continued forever.

—Dogen Zenji (1200–53), founder of the Soto School of Zen, in The Way of Everyday Life by Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi

Another of the books in the Koko An library would influence my life more than any other up until that time. This was The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau, a perennially popular work still in print that I would finish and then immediately start over again from page one, feverishly inspired by its rhapsodizing accounts of contemporary kensho (enlightenment) experiences—“the Big K,” as some of us in the Diamond Sangha called it. As a function of the counterculture’s fascination with the “wisdom of the East,” a raftload of books on Zen, many of them of dubious credibility in their discussion of enlightenment, were coming out at the time, but few did more to blow the kensho experience out of all proportion than did The Three Pillars of Zen. Although kensho is merely the first real step of Zen practice (something I and many others didn’t realize then), in Kapleau’s book it is mythologized into a wholesale spiritual and psychological rebirth, and the unwitting reader comes away with the impression, or at least this unwitting reader did, that one’s life is forever suffused with peace and bliss once kensho is attained. The book lit a roaring bonfire under my zafu, and I resolved to attain enlightenment with the same do-or-die ardor exhibited by those individuals featured in its kensho accounts.

One of the accounts that I found particularly enthralling came from a newly enlightened individual, a middle-aged Japanese businessman identified in the book only as “Mr. K.Y.,” who has as profound a Big K experience as seems possible, one that even has its own name in Japanese—daigo-tettei, or “Great Enlightenment”:

[Mr. K.Y. writes] At midnight I abruptly awakened. At first my mind was foggy, then suddenly that quotation flashed into my consciousness: “I came to realize clearly that Mind is no other than mountains, rivers, and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars. . . .” [A]ll at once I was struck as though by lightning, and the next instant heaven and earth crumbled and disappeared. Instantaneously, like surging waves, a tremendous delight welled up in me, a veritable hurricane of delight, as I laughed loudly and wildly: “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! There’s no reasoning here, no reasoning at all! Ha, ha, ha!” The empty sky split in two, then opened its enormous mouth and began to laugh uproariously: “Ha, ha, ha!!!”

This is for me! I thought. I was drawn like a moth to a flame by the heady drama of it all. But in diametric contrast to the fevered Rinzai theme and tone of The Three Pillars of Zen, another of the books in the zendo library, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by the Soto Zen master Suzuki Shunryu Roshi, took a cooler approach to Zen practice: rather than striving tooth and nail for enlightenment, one instead just sits as serenely as possible in zazen, taking each breath as it comes. If kensho happens, it happens. If not—no big deal. Just continue to sit serenely and let go of expectations. I was especially drawn to this book’s tone of gentleness, a welcome bit of yin to all the blood-and-guts yang of The Three Pillars of Zen, which often left me with a headache after practicing in the full-throttle way its author seemed to advocate. One of my later teachers would lay into Soto Zen for its lack of emphasis on kensho, likening it to the dried up exoskeleton of a dead cicada. But it seems to me now that a convincing Soto riposte to that criticism would be that trying too hard to attain enlightenment is just the ego desiring another credential. Absorption trumps striving in this Soto approach. I had been beating my head against a wall, striving for enlightenment with the Three Pillars of Zen approach and getting only headaches to show for it. Now I was ready to try something else, and through the gentle Soto approach I found my samadhi deepening.

I especially took to heart the section of Suzuki’s book titled “Nothing Special,” which echoed the teachings of the karma yoga I had practiced back on my high school track team:

As long as we are alive, we are always doing something. But as long as you think, “I am doing this,” or “I have to do this,” or “I must attain something special,” you are actually not doing anything. When you give up, when you no longer want something, or when you do not try to do anything special, then you do something. When there is no gaining idea in what you do, then you do something.

•••

The sutras (Buddhist chants) that we recited at key junctures during a typical day at Koko An had an instant appeal to my ears: they were both inherently musical and completely devoid of the guilt-based supplication to a capricious Odin-like God that I had associated from my early youth with Catholic prayers. The exclusionary dictum “Outside the Church there is no salvation” and the emphasis on sin I had grown up hearing about incessantly at school stood in dark contrast to our daily affirmation-filled chant at Koko An: “This very place is the Lotus-Land, this very body is the Buddha.”

In a similar vein, the Purification Sutra that we chanted before evening zazen periods made the process of seeking absolution from one’s misdeeds much less involved than seeking it in Confession:

All the evil karma ever created by me since of old,

on account of my beginningless greed, anger, and

confusion,

born of my body, mouth and thought—

I now confess and purify it all.

—The Diamond Sangha Sutra Book

That was all it took to make things right again on the balance sheet of one’s deeds and misdeeds. No talk of “mortal sin,” no “four Our Fathers and three Hail Marys,” and certainly no tail-between-the-legs entreaties of “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned” to the priest on the opposite side of a confessional grille.

Before breakfast every morning we recited a sutra that concluded with “Now as we spread the bowls of the Buddha, we make our vows together with all beings. We and this food and our eating are empty [emphasis added].” The Heart Sutra, so named for encapsulating the core tenets of Zen, explored this theme of emptiness at an elemental level and summed up the Zen view of existence itself, in this translation by Red Pine:

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form; emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness.

The paradoxical nature of this portion of the sutra perplexed me to no end each time we chanted it, especially after having read words vaguely similar in “Mr. K.Y.’s” Great Enlightenment account in The Three Pillars of Zen: “The empty [emphasis added] sky split in two, then opened its enormous mouth and began to laugh uproariously: ‘Ha, ha, ha!!!’” Did this passage, I wondered in increasing puzzlement, mean that Mr. K.Y. and the sky were one and the same, and that both were empty, as in this business of “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form”? And if so, what exactly did that mean? And how on earth could that be a good thing? Existence is completely empty: Oh, I feel better already.

Seeking answers to these mind-bending questions, I pored over the entire lengthy Diamond Sutra, another primary Zen text, in one reading, but instead of coming to any clarity, I was befuddled even further. In the sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha challenges one of his disciples with the question “May an arhat [enlightened person who lives apart from the world] meditate within himself, ‘I have attained the status of an arhat’?” The disciple answers, correctly it would seem, “No! If he did so, he would be indulging in the arbitrary concepts [emphasis added] of ‘a living being’ and a ‘personality.’”

By this point I was completely flummoxed. “Am I not a ‘living being’ with a ‘personality’?” I wondered. And how could the arhat, a self-described “arbitrary concept,” know that he didn’t exist? I returned again and again to this maddening quandary over the coming months, since I hungered not merely for a meaningful existence, but one full to bursting with permanent happiness—getting “back to the garden,” as a song of the time put it. If I were content to settle for an empty-nothing of a life, I might just as well smoke dope, drop acid, guzzle beer, and be done with all the rigors of Zen practice. As a final source of confoundment in all this, one day while thumbing through a collection of ancient koans I came across the following: “If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him!”

First “no-self.” Then “emptiness” and “nothingness.” Now an exhortation to murder. And here I had embarked upon the Eightfold Path as a portal into unending bliss and contentment.

•••

Katsuki Sekida (1893–1980), author of Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy, as well as several other books on Zen, was a Japanese layman who had trained for many years at a monastery in Japan and who came to live and teach at Koko An and Maui Zendo beginning in the late 1960s. A tiny man with a tiny voice, he nevertheless had an aspect of steel about him, particularly in the military precision of his kinhin (walking meditation) where he would pivot sentry-like on his toes whenever he reached a corner of the zendo. But he also had a softer side that manifested itself in the deep concern and compassion he seemed to have for all of us, as if he might, by some act of the will, propel us into deeper spiritual understanding. He told us repeatedly the story of how, as a young child, he would often fall asleep at night, only to be reawakened by the sound of his own voice crying out, “You will die someday!!” It was primarily this recurrent nightmare that had drawn him to Zen, he told us, and I was reminded of two of my own nightmares. In one of them I am about to be run over by my father’s bowling ball careening down an alley that I am on the opposite side of. In the other, I am standing in front of a mysterious barn-door, sure that I am about to be annihilated by demons.

Mr. Sekida placed the utmost emphasis on the absorbed meditation state of samadhi, the pinnacle of which, he elaborated, was “absolute samadhi,” a state of absorption so profoundly calm and self-contained that one only needs to breathe two or three times per minute. He added that, in addition to the mind’s virtual steel-trap impenetrability while in that state, the very fabric of one’s skin tightens as well, becoming so impregnable that not even a mosquito can penetrate it. He would continue on in these lectures about how a person, after emerging from absolute samadhi, could then perceive the world afresh with what he termed “naked eyes,” that is to say, a world washed completely free of egoistic overlay and projection.

When he delivered these talks, he kept his eyes tightly shut, and he would enter into a kind of samadhi even while speaking. Mr. Sekida’s normally tiny voice would become strikingly powerful for one so diminutive in stature, rising to high alto range at first and suddenly descending into a growling baritone when he was making a particularly important point about absolute samadhi. Samadhi was a state that was fast becoming the yin complement and counterpart to the yang desire for kensho in my Zen practice.

My ears pricked up one evening when he spoke about a Zen phenomenon known as joriki (“samadhi power”), since I had been noticing that when I sat in meditation for extended periods, my head would often throb in what I mentally dubbed “samadhi headaches.” From what Mr. Sekida was saying, it appeared that the psychic force generated in the form of jori­ki was the probable cause of the sensation. He also said that jori­ki is a precursor to another phenomenon known as makyo, or hallucinations, which are themselves encouraging signs that the ego is relinquishing its death-grip and that one is edging closer to kensho. Sure enough, I would sometimes feel as though I were elongating on my zafu through the Koko An roof, while flickering, psychedelic lights swirled around in my throbbing, joriki-charged head like the Aurora Borealis. The “Big K” can’t be far off, I thought eagerly, not with auspicious “signs” like these.

At times the pressure in my head when I sat would become almost painful, and I thus began practicing a joriki-control technique that had originated with the eighteenth-century Japanese abbot Hakuin Zenji (zenji is an honorific title given to a handful of revered historical figures in Zen). In Hakuin’s technique, one imagines that a cake of incense is slowly melting from the top of the head down over the ears, neck, shoulders—all the way down to one’s tanden, or center of spiritual energy, a point about two inches below the navel. One is ultimately “immersed” in imaginary liquid incense at the end of the exercise, and through multiple applications of it I was indeed able to distribute the joriki evenly throughout body and mind and to quell my annoying “samadhi headaches.”

With Hakuin’s guided imagery now the first part of each of my sitting periods, the depth and clarity of my samadhi increased by leaps and bounds, and I got better and better able to let go of most thoughts before they could stick to the flypaper of my mind. Even my chronic preoccupation with a spiritual image fell away when I was deep in this state—but it would always reassert itself when I got up off my zafu and reflexively congratulated myself for my egolessness. Even so, I now had, in the form of absolute samadhi, a daily goal for my zazen, one that went hand-in-glove with my quest for daigo-tettei, or Great Enlightenment.

•••

One morning I came downstairs from the men’s dormitory to find a tall, thin, bespectacled man with a scramble of brown hair and a graying goatee, fifty years of age maybe, peering as if transfixed into the glass eyes of the Bodhidharma statue on the altar. Thinking he might be a visitor, I asked if I might be of assistance.

“I’m Bob Aitken,” he replied. “Are you living here now?”

I replied that I was and introduced myself. He went on to say that he had come over from Maui Zendo (another arm of the Diamond Sangha) where he lived and would be spending several days at Koko An. I had finally met the founder of the Diamond Sangha, a man who had studied with the legendary Zen master Yasutani Roshi. He had an air of almost British reserve about him—clearly, a born introvert. With his faded Hawaiian shirt and slacks cinched about his waist with a cloth belt, it was equally clear that he was a member of the counterculture, at least insofar as his manner of dress indicated. I had heard from others at the zendo that he suffered from asthma and numerous allergies, and, indeed, he coughed deeply several times during our short conversation.

I had also heard from sangha members that he had married into money but had renounced all the bourgeois comforts of wealth, since he was a dyed-in-the-wool leftist. I learned first-hand about this facet of his makeup in the talk he gave the day after his arrival. In this talk he evinced a palpable contempt for the value of individualism that runs through American society and culture, especially as it is embodied in capitalism. “A Buddhist must be a radical!” he declared in a tone of categorical pronouncement toward the end, and he concluded by exhorting us at Koko An to move beyond what he termed the “self-indulgent sentimentality” of merely feeling sorry for the less fortunate and into deeply committed social activism. These were themes he would return to again and again whenever he stayed at Koko An. And despite the fact that my own mind-set at the time was thoroughly socialistic and countercultural, his almost exclusively socio-political focus struck me as being insufficiently concerned with such overarching issues as samadhi and kensho, especially coming from a Zen teacher, which I took him to be, although that status for him actually lay several years down the line.

One of the fascinations of several starry-eyed Koko An residents, myself included, was the so-called “Thirty-Two Marks of a Buddha” of early Indian Buddhist lore. These were alleged to be actual physical signs of deep enlightenment that ranged improbably from “wheels on the soles of his feet” to “eyelashes like a cow’s” and to “male organs concealed within a sheath,” as described in Meher McArthur’s Reading Buddhist Art. Buying into this claptrap totally, we had all sorts of preposterous expectations as to what qualities characterized a true Zen teacher, and we were in no position to judge anyone, let alone Bob Aitken. Nevertheless, one of these expectations, or Bob’s alleged deficiency in meeting it, was expressed at breakfast the morning he returned to Maui. Bob mentioned with a wheeze in his voice that the dust in the little cottage on the property where he stayed the night had triggered a severe allergic reaction, causing him to have a full-blown asthma attack. As we cleaned up the kitchen after he left, one of the other residents suddenly broke the silence with, “If he’s such a ‘Zen Man,’ then how come he has all these allergies?”—as if Zen were some miraculous spring into whose healing waters you dipped your toe and then emerged liberated from all problems, including physical ones. No one said a word in response, but it seemed to me that this person had raised a valid point, since a desire for liberation from all the slings and arrows of life was what had led most of us to take up Zen practice in the first place. And any day now, I was certain, I was about to make my own all-important breakthrough into the world of enlightenment where all of my cares would evaporate like mist in the morning sun. I would be a Zen Man extraordinaire, of this I was certain.