NEVER MIND THAT
A professional dancer who’d been forced to abandon her career after injuring one of her feet attended a retreat with Maezumi Roshi. Self-conscious about her injured foot, she always kept it covered with a sock.
In her first interview she asked Maezumi a question about her Zen practice, and he answered, “Never mind that. Tell me about your foot.”
“Oh, it’s nothing, Roshi,” the student replied, trying to turn the conversation back to her practice. “I just had an accident.”
Maezumi persisted. Finally she not only told him the story but, weeping, took off her sock to show him. At this, Maezumi placed his hand silently on her foot. She looked up to find that he was crying too.
Their exchanges went on like this for some time. Every time she asked the roshi about her practice, he’d ask about her foot instead, and they’d cry together. “You might think you have suffered terrible karma,” Maezumi told her, “but this is not the right way to think. Practice is about learning to turn disadvantage to great advantage.” Finally the day came when the student walked into the interview room and began to tell her teacher about her injury, but it summoned no tears from her.
“Never mind about that,” Maezumi told her. “Let’s talk about your practice.”
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
When John Daido Loori was a monk at the Los Angeles Zen Center, he remarked one day to Maezumi Roshi: “I have resolved the question of life and death.”
“Are you sure?” Maezumi asked.
“Yes,” replied Loori.
“Are you really sure?”
“Absolutely,” Loori answered.
With that, Maezumi threw himself violently upon Loori and began to strangle him. Gasping for breath, Loori struggled to escape, but to no avail. Finally he swung back his fist and struck his teacher, knocking him aside.
Maezumi rose to his feet and brushed himself off. “Resolved the question of life and death, eh?” he laughed, and walked off.
Later, still bearing the marks of his teacher’s fingers on his throat, Loori passed a senior monk, Genpo Sensei.
On seeing the bruises, Genpo did a double take. “Told Roshi you’d resolved the question of life and death, did you?” he said, and strode away laughing.
TOUCHING THE PRESENT MOMENT
Thich Nhat Hanh was leading a reconciliation retreat between Vietnamese monks and nuns, and American veterans of the Vietnam War. One of the American vets confessed during the retreat that he had killed five Vietnamese children in an ambush, and since then he could not bear to be alone in a room with children.
Thich Nhat Hanh responded: “At this very moment there are many children who are dying in the world. There are children who will die just because they lack a single pill of medicine. If you are mindful, you can bring that pill to that child, and you can save his life. If you practice like that for five times, then you will save five children. Because what is to be done is to be done in the present moment. Forty thousand children die every day because of lack of food. Why do you have to cling to the past, to think of the five who are already dead? You have the power to change things by touching the present moment.”
IT’S NOT WHAT YOU SAY. . . .
During a retreat at Ryutakuji Monastery, Soen Nakagawa pulled Westerners Philip Kapleau and Bernard Phillips aside and asked them: “What did Christ say as he was dying upon the cross?”
“He said,” replied Kapleau, “ ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ ”
“No!” shouted Soen Roshi. He turned to Phillips. “What did Christ say when he was dying on the cross?”
“Well, I think that’s right,” answered Phillips. “He said, ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ ”
“No!” corrected Soen Roshi again.
“Well, then,” asked the Westerners, “what did he say?”
Soen Roshi spread his arms to the sky and cried in agony: “MY GOD, WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME?!”
WHAT IS “SPIRITUAL”?
Mary Farkas always disliked the use of the word spiritual in regard to Zen practice, for she believed it created a false distinction between practice and daily life. Once, she heard D.T. Suzuki use the term in a lecture on Zen, and she approached the scholar afterward, asking his true opinion of the term.
Suzuki paused for a time and finally responded: “It is a great obscenity.”
ALREADY A CORPSE
A student of Korean Master Seung Sahn was attending her first retreat at his newly acquired center in Providence, Rhode Island. The building was a former funeral home on a busy corner; its pink floral-patterned carpeting was still in place. On the third day the student awoke and looked in the mirror to see herself as a corpse, with blackened face and teeth falling out. Deeply affected by the vision, she hurried to tell Seung Sahn about it in her morning interview.
On hearing the story the teacher burst out laughing and tapped her on the shoulder with his Zen stick. “Don’t worry,” he laughed. “You’re a corpse already!”
NO MORE READING
After seeing Seung Sahn speak for the first time, Hawaiian American Su Bong Soen Sa asked if he could have a private meeting with the teacher, to which Seung Sahn agreed. Su Bong Soen Sa showed up with a big volume of Zen sayings, which he had been studying and now hoped the master might clarify for him. Seung Sahn made him wait for a long while before he would see him. Finally Seung Sahn invited him in for the interview. Su Bong Soen Sa, heart pounding at being before a master for the first time, turned the book toward Seung Sahn and pointed with his fingertip, saying, “There’s a line in this book by the Sixth Patriarch that I wonder if you would —”
In a flash Seung Sahn leapt at the book and slammed it shut on his finger, shouting, “No more reading! Who are you?”
Su Bong Soen Sa couldn’t answer. He decided at that moment to become Seung Sahn’s student.
AN OLD, OLD THING
When Zen teacher Barbara Rhodes was just beginning her practice with Master Seung Sahn during the hippie era, she had a reputation for being fond of things that were old: clothing, jewelry, and other items.
One day her teacher came to her and said: “I have a present for you. It’s something that’s really, really old.”
Seung Sahn dropped the gift into her outstretched palm. It was a stone.
CHANGING THE WORLD
A student once asked Kobun Chino Roshi about the significance of prostrations in Zen practice. Kobun told the story of how, when he was ten or eleven years old and his father passed away, he’d dropped to the floor weeping in an uncontrollable expression of grief. When he rose to his feet, both he and the world seemed irrevocably changed.
“I think of bowing that way,” he said. “You go down, and when you come back up again, you’re a different person. The world has changed.”
HITTING BOTTOM
When Clark Strand was a monk studying with Eido Shimano Roshi, he reached a point he calls “the lowest moment of my Zen career.”
“My first marriage had fallen apart when I became a monk,” says Strand, “and then I’d gotten involved with another woman, and that was falling apart too, and I didn’t feel that I had any understanding of Zen at all.” There was a very large retreat coming up, with more than ninety people scheduled to attend, and Eido Roshi had put him in charge of running it. “For the next week,” says Strand, “I was going to have to completely give myself over to managing this event — and my heart was broken, and my spirit felt broken, and there was just nothing left. I remember I waylaid Eido Roshi right as the retreat was beginning. There were close to a hundred people in the zendo, waiting for us to come in. And I went and sat down with him in the meeting hall, crying, and I said, ‘It’s over; there’s nothing left. Everything that I’ve cared about and loved, my whole life, has come to nothing. I’m at the bottom.’ ”
At that, Strand says, Eido Roshi leaned across the table, put his hand out, and said, “Congratulations.”
“It was an amazing moment,” says Strand. “Part of me wanted to fly across the table and slug him. But another part knew that what he was saying was true. I’d been talking about emptiness and nothingness and renunciation all this time, and I hadn’t understood anything. At that moment I understood, and I felt filled up. By the time I walked down the hall behind him and entered the zendo, my tears had dried and I was clear. It turned out to be a wonderful seven days.”
MAKING FIREWOOD
In the sixties and seventies, the Ch’an monk Deh Chun lived in rural Tennessee, where he attracted a small but devoted group of students associated with a nearby university. When Deh Chun first came to Tennessee, there was a huge dead oak in the yard beside his cabin. One of his neighbors happened by and said, “You’d better cut that thing down, or one of these days it’s going to fall on your roof.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Deh Chun. The next time he went into town, he bought a hatchet at a thrift store. He promptly set to work on the tree’s enormous trunk, chopping away for some time every morning and showing no signs of discouragement at his minimal progress. Neighbors, seeing him working day after day, showed up with chain saws, offering to cut it down for him.
“Thank you, no,” said Deh Chun. “I do it my way.”
This went on for months, with such regularity that if his neighbors didn’t hear the steady chop-chop-chop of Deh Chun on his tree on any given morning, they’d come over to make sure he was all right. It became a phenomenon, a cause for conversation; and before too long, this strange old Chinese fellow had become a member of the neighborhood.
On the day the tree finally fell, with a crash that shook all the houses on his street, one of Deh Chun’s friends asked him, “So what will you do now?”
“Make firewood,” answered Deh Chun.
He later said that this was the way he’d taught his students meditation: you just chop away, a little bit every day, and one day an enormous tree falls.
A CASE OF UNMISTAKABLE IDENTITY
A visitor for a workshop at the Rochester Zen Center arrived a day early. He assumed the older man he saw about the place was the janitor, only to find out the next day that he was the roshi, Philip Kapleau.
When Kapleau heard this, he said it was the highest compliment he could have received.
TEA FOR FOUR
John Daido Loori was invited to the Naropa Institute to give a summer course in mindful photography and ended up staying in an apartment next to Maezumi Roshi, who was also participating in the summer program. One night there was a gathering at Maezumi’s apartment with a number of his students and other program participants. At the time Loori was a student of Soen Nakagawa Roshi, who was no longer coming to the U.S. very often to teach. Maezumi took to Loori for some reason, insisting that he stay beside him all evening and continuing to ask him ambiguous questions that he had no idea how to respond to.
“Daido,” Maezumi would say, bending uncomfortably close to his face. “Ask me!”
“Ask you what, Roshi?” Loori would answer.
Maezumi would be silent for a while, then: “Daido, tell me!”
“Tell you what, Roshi?”
This exchange went on until the small hours of the morning, when the gathering died down and the crowd dwindled away. Finally Loori managed to pry himself loose from Maezumi and went back to his own apartment to get some rest. Since it was so late, he stretched out on the couch, not wanting to wake his wife, who’d gone to bed long before. He’d just managed to nod off when a knock came at the door. Loori rose to open it and found Maezumi Roshi standing there, immaculate and wide awake, dressed in formal robes with his head freshly shaven.
“Daido,” Maezumi said, “come with me.”
Loori obeyed. Maezumi led him next door, where the apartment had been restored to perfect order. The round table in the dining area was now set for a formal Japanese tea ceremony. Oddly, though the two of them were the only ones present, it had four place settings.
“Come,” said Maezumi, gesturing toward the table. “We will have tea.” He pointed to the first place, saying: “Soen Roshi” — Loori’s teacher. He indicated the second setting, saying: “Yasutani Roshi” — Maezumi’s own teacher, recently deceased. He pointed to the third, saying: “Daido.” The last was for himself. Maezumi then proceeded to perform a formal tea ceremony, serving all four places beginning with Soen Roshi’s. As Loori sipped his tea, he felt so moved that tears began to fall from his eyes.
When he looked up at Maezumi, he saw that he was crying too.
HOW ORIGINAL CAN YOU GET?
The Jesuit priest Father Robert Jinsen Kennedy, who is also a Zen teacher, uses zazen to cultivate a state of deep silence in his congregation before performing Mass. A Zen student who attended an interfaith retreat with him was heard to ask afterward:
“I have a much better feeling now for Christianity — but the one thing I still can’t fathom is the doctrine of Original Sin. How can it be that, the moment we come into the world, we are already sinful?”
“Would it help you understand it better,” replied Father Kennedy, “if we called it Original Suffering?”
THE WISH-FULFILLING JEWEL
A student once asked Zen teacher Steve Allen, “If you were given a wish-fulfilling jewel, what would you wish for?”
“To stop wishing,” replied Allen.
TRADING PLACES
Richard Baker used to say to his Zen students: “If you’re with someone who’s dying, and you’re not willing to trade places with them at that very moment, then you’re not really practicing.”
When Issan Dorsey was dying of AIDS, Baker came to visit him, saying, “I wish I could trade places with you right now.”
“Don’t worry,” responded Dorsey. “You’ll get your chance.”
JUST AS IT IS
Pat Enkyo O’Hara, who is now the resident teacher at the Village Zendo in New York City, was serving as caretaker of altars and offerings during a three-month training period at Zen Mountain Center in Idyllwild, California. During one very formal memorial ceremony, as she was carrying a tray of elegant, lacquered wooden offering cups between two buildings, one of the cups tumbled from the tray and landed among some rocks, resulting in a prominent chip in its highly polished surface.
Devastated, she went to Maezumi Roshi and announced her intention to order a new one from Japan.
“Why?” asked Roshi. “With the chip it is more valuable. See? Just as it is.”
Over the years, says O’Hara, “this has emerged as his great teaching for me. . . . He was broken. I am broken. And when we can see that we are all chipped and broken, we begin to see that we are truly perfect and complete, just as we are.”
“Seventeen American Zen Stories” is excerpted from Sean Murphy’s One Bird, One Stone: 108 American Zen Stories. © 2002 by Sean Murphy. It is reprinted here by arrangement with Renaissance Books, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers. The individual stories “Making Firewood” and “Just As It Is” were originally published in Tricycle. “Making Firewood” appears courtesy of Michael Sierchio, who is working on a book about Deh Chun.
