FromChapter 1

On an August day of 1968, returning home to Sagaponack, Long Island, after a seven-month absence in Africa, I was astonished by the presence in my driveway of three inscrutable small men who turned out to be Japanese Zen masters. Hakuun Yasutani-roshi, eighty-four years old, was a light, gaunt figure with hollowed eyes and round, prominent ears; as I was to learn, he had spent much of that morning upside down, standing on his head. Beside him, Nakagawa Soen-roshi, slit-eyed, elfin, and merry, entirely at ease and entirely aware at the same time, like a paused swallow, gave off emanations of lightly contained energy that made him seem much larger than he was. The roshis were attended by Tai-san (now Shimano Eido-roshi), a compact young monk with a confident, thick-featured face and samurai bearing. Though lacking the strange "transparent" presence of his teachers, Tai-san conveyed the same impression of contained power.

The teachers were guests of my wife, Deborah Love, a new student of Zen, but I was ignorant of this as of much else on that long-ago summer day. Because of my long absence and my unannounced return, the atmosphere between Deborah and me was guarded, and my first meeting with Zen masters was even less auspicious than an encounter that almost certainly took place in the 1890s between the first Zen Master in America, Soyen Shaku, and the senior partner in his host's manufacturing firm who, as karma would have it—and the Dharma, too—was none other than my forebear, Frederick Matthiessen. (This problematical meeting was at best unpromising, since it passed unrecorded in the annals of either side.) No doubt I revealed what I presume was my great-grandfather's wary attitude toward unanticipated Orientals in outlandish garb. For years thereafter, Tai-san would relate how Soen and Yasutani, perceiving my unenlightened condition at a glance, had shaken their shining heads and sighed, "Poor Debbo-lah."

For the next few years, I was often away on expeditions. Even when I was at home, my wife kept me well away from her Zen practice, not wishing to contaminate the zendo atmosphere with our dissension. Yet a seed had sprouted all the same, those men in my driveway knew something that I wished to know. I poked about in the Zen literature and pestered her for inside information.

In December of 1970—perhaps hoping to nip that bad seed in the bud—Deborah took me along to a weekend sesshiri, or silent retreat, at the New York Zendo. I had had no experience or training in zazen—literally, "sitting Zen"—and suffered dreadful pain in the cross-legged posture, which I maintained, with the stubbornness of rage, for twelve hours daily for two days, weeping in pure shock during the rest periods. Though I won high praise from the zendo masochist, Monk D., I swore that this barbaric experience would never be repeated; in addition to all that pain, it had been so boring! A week later I departed gladly for Italy, Africa, and Australia, where I accompanied a more prudent group of human beings underwater in quest of the first film of the great white shark.

That winter, to my own astonishment, I found myself doing zazen every day, not only in my Australian hotel room but on shipboard. The following summer I was working for a while in California, and in a vague impulse toward pilgrimage, I went on foot over the mountains from Cannel Valley to the San Francisco Zen Center's retreat at Tassajara. Shunryu Suzukiroshi (whose wonderful teisho, or "Dharma talks," had recently been collected in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind) walked about softly in white T-shirt and white sitting pants, puttering with garden pots, approving our repair of his cottage roof, and giving teisho on Zen Mind in the summer evening. Though he seemed frail, he did not comport himself like a man who was to die a few months later.

I have often tried to isolate that quality of "Zen" which attracted me so powerfully to its literature and later to the practice of zazen. But since the essence of Zen might well be what one teacher called "the moment-by-moment awakening of mind," there is little that may sensibly be said about it without succumbing to that breathless, mystery-ridden prose that drives so many sincere aspirants in the other direction. In zazen, one may hope to penetrate the ringing stillness of universal mind, and this "intimation of immortality," as Wordsworth called it, also shines forth from the brief, cryptic Zen texts, which refer obliquely to that absolute reality beyond the grasp of our linear vocabulary, yet right here in this moment, in this ink and paper, in the sound of this hand turning the page.

Later that summer, all but inexplicably, my wife and I at last embraced each other's failings. Happily she invited me to join a reconnaissance led by Soen-roshi and Tai-san of a tract of mountain land at Beecher Lake, in the headwaters of the Beaverkill River in the Catskills. This beautiful place would be chosen as the site of Dai Bosatsu (Great Bodhisattva), the first Zen monastery ever constructed in America. What struck me most forcibly during our visit was the quiet precision, power, and wild humor of Soen-roshi, who became my Zen teacher even before I realized that I was a student.

Both Soen-roshi and Yasutani-roshi had come to America in direct consequence of the pioneering efforts of the aforementioned Soyen Shaku, abbot of Engaku-ji, in Kamakura, and the first Zen master to visit and teach in the United States. In Soyen Shaku's opinion, Zen Buddhism had grown hollow and decrepit in Japan, and no longer reflected the great Dharma, or teaching, perceived in the enlightenment experience of Shakyamuni the Buddha (the Awakened One) in the sixth century BC. In its original Theravada form, Buddhism had traveled south from India to Ceylon and east to Burma and Thailand; the Mahayana Buddhist teachings that developed in the first century AD spread north and east to China, Korea, Japan, and Tibet. (An extraordinary, mysterious, and profound infusion of religious and cultural energy remained behind even in those countries where Buddhism was later suppressed, or died away; it has been said that in Japan a whole culture owes its character to Zen.)

A Mahayana teaching with a strong Taoist infusion, Ch'an or Zen cast off the dead weight of priestly ritual and mindless chanting of the sutras or scriptures—the records of the Buddha's teachings—and returned to the simple zazen way of Shakyamuni. In a statement attributed to the First Chinese Patriarch, Bodhidharma, an old monk from India who is loosely associated with the birth of Zen, the new teaching was described as "a special transmission outside the scriptures, not founded upon words or letters. By pointing directly to man's own mind, it lets him see into his own true nature and thus attain Buddhahood."

The illustrious teacher from India was soon summoned to an audience with the Emperor Wu, a devout Buddhist and teacher of the sutras who built temples and supported monks, and was therefore honored as the "Buddha-Mind Emperor." (One meaning of the Chinese character wu signifies "absolute being"; another denotes "awakening" or enlightenment.) Relating all he had studied and accomplished, Wu asked modestly, "What merit will there be?"

Bodhidharma said, "No merit."

In answering in this abrupt sharp way, the old Indian teacher points directly at the absolute, in which there is no merit to be given, and neither giver nor receiver. From the relative point of view, there is no merit either, so long as Wu clings to the concept of merit: true merit derives from seeing into one's own true nature or Buddha-nature, manifesting one's own free merit-less nature, moment after moment, like a fish or bird—just Wu, just bird.

Doubtless taken aback, the Emperor demands, "If all that has no merit, then what is the primary meaning of the holy truth?" Presumably the Emperor refers to the non-duality of universal and everyday truth, the fundamental identity of relative and absolute that underlies Mahayana Buddhist doctrine. And perhaps he is challenging the old villain to present the essence of this teaching. But Bodhidharma, correctly interpreting this sutra teacher's degree of spiritual attainment, recognizes a purely doctrinal question inviting exposition on the Dharma, and so, once more, he points directly at the realm of the Absolute or Universal.

"No holiness," says he. "Vast emptiness."

This ringing answer instantly established the spare uncompromising tone of the Zen teachings. It also carried great mystery and power, for this "emptiness" was neither absence nor a void. Its Chinese character was ku, which also signifies the clear blue firmament, without north or south, future or past, without boundaries or dimension. Like the empty mirror on which all things pass, leaving no trace, this ku contains all forms and all phenomena, being a symbol of the universal essence. Thus this emptiness is also fullness, containing all forms and phenomena above and below Heaven, filling the entire universe. In this universal or absolute reality,there is no holiness (nor any nonholiness), only the immediacy of sky as-it-is in this present moment, with or without clouds or balloons, kites or fireworks, birds or snow or wind.

Bodhidharma is not criticizing holiness. Religion is a precious concept, and concepts are crucial to the relative or "practical" aspect of our life, which is the ground of Zen. ("Rice in a bowl, water in a pail: how do you like these common miracles?") But when we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace with words and ideas and abstractions— such as merit, such as past, present, and future—our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment. We identify, label, and interpret our surroundings as abstract concepts, quite separate from yet another concept, which is our own separate identity and ego. Even holiness is removed from us, a Heaven up there with a God in it.