Forum: San Francisco Zen Center at Fifty

Photo Courtesy of SFZCIntroduction by David Chadwick

The teacher was ready; the students came. Without a plan, Shunryu Suzuki arrived in San Francisco on May 23, 1959. The Zen garden of America had been fertilized by Nyogen Senzaki, Paul Reps, D.T. Suzuki, the Beats, Alan Watts, and the First Zen Institute of America in New York. Instant satori and the inscrutable orient were on people’s minds.

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The Koan in the Refrigerator

Illustration by Stacy InnerstAll he wanted was an egg. Instead Sam Guthrie got a close-up look at his compulsive need for order.

When I was seventeen, I would wake up at 4:30 in the morning and put on my ripped black jeans, drab olive T-shirt, blocky engineer boots, and black leather jacket bristling with punk rock safety pins. Then I’d stagger out of my cluttered studio apartment, get on my motorcycle, and ride through the dark, silent Minneapolis streets to the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, where I’d sit like a statue in meditation until the morning sun poured through the windows and made blazing yellow rectangles on the hardwood floors.

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Commentary: Three Levels of Transmission

Photo by Penni Gladstoneby Lewis Richmond

Recently I empowered two of my senior students—Rinso Ed Sattizahn and Kuzan Peter Schireson—as full-fledged independent Zen teachers, in a weeklong ceremony we call dharma transmission in the Soto Zen tradition of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. The ceremony has many aspects, but two are paramount: lineage and precepts. As I studied these aspects of the ceremony, I found it useful to understand each of them as having three levels: outer, inner, and innermost.

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First Thoughts: The Robe of Liberation

Wearing the Buddha’s teachings, says Geoffrey Shugen Arnold Sensei, is like wearing your skin. It’s not something you can take on and off.

Each morning we chant the Verse of the Kesa: “Vast is the robe of liberation, a formless field of benefaction. I wear the Tatagatha’s teachings, saving all sentient beings.” The “robe of liberation” is the o-kesa, the monastic’s robe, or the rakusu, received with the precepts and worn by both monastic and lay practitioners. That robe is the Tatagatha’s teachings, the Buddha’s teachings. We should all strive to wear the Buddha’s teachings.

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Ask The Teachers

Q There are times on the path when I feel isolated from society and the people around me. Perversely, this always seems to be when I am meditating the most and really clearing my head. Superficialities and consumptive tendencies seem very exaggerated, and I find myself feeling alien in the world around me. I don’t think this is the proper response. What can be done to combat this?

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Let’s Talk: Can You Imagine?

Photo by Sabina Schulz SteeleRalph Steele asks us to consider what a racially and culturally diverse American Buddhist community would be like.

I remember the days of being a retreat addict, chasing that sweet sensation of getting high. The dharma teachings often tasted dry, like dust in my mouth. However, hearing teachings was not my primary motive in attending Vipassana, Zen, and Tibetan retreats for more than four decades. Doing ngondro practices, chanting 108 Hanuman chalisas, sittin g long hours in sesshin, practicing vipassana right through lunch, sitting and walking until 10 p.m. or even through the night—these were sweet times of being neck deep in the addiction of making love to, or getting drunk on, God.

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The Road to Modern Buddhism

Photo by Russ MorrisBuddhism In the Modern World
Edited by David L. McMahan
Routledge, 2012
$39.95; 352 pages
 

Reviewed by Annabella Pitkin

For years a private entertainment of many Buddhists I know has been to collect funny or irritating instances of collisions between the mass media and Buddhist images, words, and ideas. There is in fact a website partly devoted to this pursuit, theworsthorse.com, whose author, Rod Meade Sperry, has immortalized such collisions under the label “Dharma-Burgers.”

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Book Briefs

by Michael Sheehy

Norman Waddell translates the letters of the seventeenth-century Japanese Zen master and revitalizer of the Rinzai tradition, Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1786), in his new book, Beating the Cloth Drum (Shambhala 2012). The letters are Hakuin’s personal correspondence with monks and lay practitioners, as well as his dharma heirs. Described by one of his chief disciples as having the gaze of a tiger who moved like an ox, Hakuin was likely an intimidating character. However, what becomes evident through reading his letters is the extreme care and concern he expressed toward his community.

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The Wisdom Mind of Thinley Norbu: A Selection of Teachings

Wisdom Mind and the Birth of Samsara

I bow to my own Wisdom Mind

which is my best wisdom teacher,

the source of all visible and invisible qualities.

Sentient beings are always in time and place.

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Commentary: Don’t Blame the Messenger

Photo by Linda Fisherby Rita M. Gross

Sometimes I am accused of “genderizing the dharma.” It is true that I have taught and written extensively about Buddhism and gender, including in my book Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analy­sis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism. But why leap to the claim that I’m genderizing the dharma in that work? How could anyone possibly genderize the dharma if the dharma were gender neutral and gender free, if there were no gender biases and hierarchies in its institutional and doctrinal expressions?

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