The Two Worlds

My wife, Kathie, and I were in Fuji Kawaguchiko, a lakeside resort town at the foot of Japan’s Mount Fuji. We had come to see, and perhaps climb, Mount Fuji, but we couldn’t see it at all, only roiling silver-gray clouds. We’d expected as much — it was July, and the humid Japanese summers are often cloudy and rainy. Fuji is almost as famous for its absence as for its presence. Besides, I’m used to the idea that the more you count on the arrival of an important experience or accomplishment, the greater the likelihood that it won’t arrive and that instead you will get to enjoy something completely different.

Studying such normal human experiences is one of the pleasures of Zen Buddhist practice. When I was abbot of Green Gulch Farm Zen Center near San Francisco, we celebrated the Buddha’s enlightenment every year by going outside in the predawn hours to see the morning star, as the Buddha had seen it on the day of his awakening. Most years, however, we saw no star, only fog. So Kathie and I weren’t much fazed by not being able to sit in our hotel room’s soaking tub while looking at the crown of Mount Fuji, as the travel brochure had promised. Instead we went for a stroll around Lake Kawaguchi, and then we decided to explore the town.

Though a resort town, Fuji Kawaguchiko is not fancy. In fact, it’s a rather dull, ordinary spot. Its little shops reminded me of the small town in which I grew up. On our walk we noticed — as one can notice almost anywhere in Japan — the distinctive shape of a torii gate, signaling the entrance to a temple. The gate was open, as they usually are, so we went inside.

Walking into the temple compound, we walked into another world: quiet, serene, holy. Irregular stepping stones led us through a mossy garden to a steadily dripping little waterfall. Off to one side was a standing figure of Kwan Yin, bodhisattva of compassion, standing on a lotus pedestal. She gazed down at us with a modest, knowing smile that conveyed the ancient Buddhist feeling that all would be well in the midst of a world of inevitable suffering. The temple building, like the garden, was beautiful and well maintained. Its heavy wooden door was locked, but you could walk around on the veranda or sit on the steps and look out into the garden. We felt at home there, slowed down and refreshed.

When I began studying Zen in 1970, I was attracted to Japanese Zen’s dynamic relationship to the arts — all the Japanese traditional arts owe their existence to Zen — and to the Japanese sensibility in general. I was a young poet, part of a generation in revolt against American values, and all things Japanese struck me as superior in every way to the crude violence of the West.

But years of serious Zen practice in America changed my attitude drastically. After seeing the raw spiritual needs of the people I was practicing with, I came to realize that arranging flowers, sipping tea, and viewing raked-gravel gardens were not going to help them much. And the complicated bureaucracy and stifling traditionalism of Japanese Zen weren’t going to help either. People needed meditation practice, communities of support, teachings about suffering — the very things on offer from American Zen. In addition, I was disturbed by new scholarship that revealed how Japanese Zen teachers had supported Japanese aggression and had taught blind obedience to the emperor during World War II . Thus, I gradually developed a powerful antipathy toward Japanese Zen. This was an odd attitude for a senior Zen priest and abbot in a Japanese lineage.

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