Great Vows For All

The many beings are numberless, I vow to free them all;
Greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly, I vow to abandon them all;
Dharma gates are countless, I vow to wake to them all;
Buddha’s way is unattainable, I vow to embody it all.

- https://www.endlesspathzendo.org/about.html

Who knows how many times I recited right along, without appreciating the guidance or considering the personal implications of these vows, or even understanding that I was actually making vows? Many thousands of times, certainly. Why the disconnect? I was in it for me!

So, practice hit plenty of snags. Long dry spells. Times when formal sitting lost its pull and the questioning attitude faded into the background noise of ordinary life. More than once, without ever consciously deciding to quit, I simply wandered away from practice for a while. Then, in moments of clarity, I’d wonder what was wrong with me.

Here’s one example of how that looked and felt. Like many people, I became addicted to the TV news coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, following CNN’s live coverage of the “Shock and Awe” airstrikes by U.S. forces. Reporters Richard Engel, Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett became all too familiar. It all started to feel like a video game, and I couldn’t take my hand off the joystick.

My old friend Vic from the pool hall and hippie days dropped in to visit me one day; Vic lived out in the country and wasn’t as tuned in to the news, so I turned on the tube and shared my vicarious excitement about the pinpoint accuracy of the bombing runs with him. Vic looked at me and said, “Are you kidding? Who are you?” Of course, he was right. I was lost in a trance.

For several weeks, then, I turned off the television; in the car, I just drove, or put on some music instead of the news. Guess what happened. Like magic, the world became more peaceful. By every measure, through every sense, in every encounter, what had been so jangled and messed up now re-emerged as a quiet, harmonious flow. Wow! I had forgotten what was possible when I stopped feeding the noise.

I felt moved to share, to extend this peace, so I signed up for a 4-day sesshin that June in Evanston (at the Chicago Zen Center), and then for the 7-day September sesshin in Rochester (my first one there in a decade). Looking back, I can see another “first” in what led me to those sesshin: my conscious aim, for the first time, was working to embody those Great Vows for the benefit of all. What a difference that shift in intention made!

To a hammer, it is said, every problem looks like a nail. To a self, each thing, every experience, elicits either attraction, aversion, or indifference.

Take those three self-centered habits of reaction out of the picture, though, and the craving disappears, old fears shrivel up, the dryness is gone. An energetic flow reveals itself as having been ever-present; even the snags that do still arise just seem like old friends — graciously and firmly pointing out the obvious.

Even the most elementary outline of the Buddha’s message would include his insight into the absence of a permanent, unchanging self. Doh! Zen practice as self-improvement doesn’t hold water.

In “Actualizing the Fundamental Point,” Dogen Zenji (1200-1252) taught,

“To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.”

In the two decades since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, many things have come forth and faded. Life brought its own series of shocks and surprises — including a couple more Zen surprises. That change of orientation, though, starting to practice and live with the self carried forward less, has sweetened the flavor and brightened the tone of almost everything.

Sitting seven or eight hours a week, volunteering in various ways in sangha activities, being more fully engaged in relationship and family than ever before — all comes pretty naturally now. Self-improvement? Ha! I’m a little busy right now.

Looking back at the aftermath of that 1986 Casa Zen sesshin in Mexico (see the

last article in this Substack), I returned to Indiana full of myself. Ironic, isn’t it? Having finally cracked a little hole in my initial koan, having made just enough space for the selfless Self to come out and play, I reverted to form.

I felt pretty dang special! Couldn’t wait to share my joy with Jane, the woman I was getting close to a couple years after my second divorce. Couldn’t wait to visit my old friend from the pool hall days and get high with him so I could show off my newly minted spirituality.

Have you ever heard the telling phrase, “The stink of Zen?” Would somebody, please, crack open a window and turn on the fan?

Fortunately, to continue the metaphor, such outgassing (however noxious) is only one function among the many systems that make up a person — so life carried on in all of its rich, overflowing rowdiness.

Back at work as a commercial insurance broker, sales calls were made, applications got completed, risks and coverages were analyzed, renewal policies got delivered, questions got answered. Every other week I drove four or five hours each way, through or around Chicago, to pick up Diana (then ten years old) and Lore (then six) for a weekend’s visitation. Jane and I bought a house together, then we got married.

Practice continued. When I thought about it, as I sometimes did, on or off the sitting mat, I wondered what had happened to me at Casa Zen. I didn’t feel all that different. I didn’t seem to be acting like a new person, not in any dependable fashion, anyway. What had I gained? I was truly puzzled.

It’s taken me a while to understand that ideas about enlightenment are among the biggest blockades, for many practitioners, that can interfere with the essential process of turning away from habitual self-centered thinking. All that is required is wholehearted and persistent absorption in one’s practice, or “method,” as some teachers call it. As rich, and deep, and ancient as the Zen tradition is, there are really only three categories of what one actually does while sitting in zazen (that’s what zazen literally means—sitting Zen).

First are breath practices — counting (silently, on the exhalation, from one to ten), or “following” the breath. When sitting in formal zazen, the practitioner just becomes the count, or just attends to the breathing of each breath, “becoming the breath.” I understand that some schools of Zen notice the breathing in other ways, but I’m not familiar with those.

The second method category of zazen is “just sitting” (shikan taza in Japanese, or the Chinese terms that translate as “silent illumination”). In some Zen lineages, “just sitting” is the principal practice, and might be taken up very early in one’s training. In others, it is considered an advanced, and quite challenging, method.

Lastly, there is what is called koan introspection (and a closely related practice that might be called “inquiry”). A related “inquiry” might take a form like “Who am I?” or “What is this?” or “Who is dragging this corpse around” or “Who is hearing?”.

That’s it. These three methods encompass every type of zazen (not bringing up several supportive activities — chanting, walking meditation, listening to formal Zen talks, private encounters with the teacher, and working [in the kitchen, in the garden, etc.] — that round out a broader definition of “Zen practice”). Just three. Pretty simple.

Each of these methods has a common, uniting theme: one is to engage them so wholeheartedly and single-mindedly (or “no-mindedly”) that everything else falls away. No one of the three types is superior to the others (and a Zen student might undertake all three at different times in their life of practice). The Buddha himself was attending to breath at the time of his great enlightenment; there was no such thing as koan practice until about fifteen hundred years after the time of the Buddha’s life.

So, with wholehearted absorption, whatever zazen “method” one employs, what happens? In the sitting itself, and also as an outcome of the sitting (gradually and suddenly), the so-called “self” that started off practicing is forgotten, is exposed as an empty phantasm. “Oh! All that busyness and inner dialog that used to captivate me twenty-four/seven? Gone, like a cool breeze! How refreshing!”

Intimacy is revealed and experienced as a present fact (not as an understanding or a set of notions or concepts). “Awakening” to this vital, luminous emptiness so full of potential is not a trinket on a high shelf in some fancy boutique, it is not something to be acquired. Smash and grab techniques will be of no avail. It’s seeing, either dimly or clearly (there is a vast continuum of realization’s depths), the way things simply are, and the ways they simply are not.

To use the title metaphor of this Substack series, it’s like entering a small stone temple — an ancient quiet permeates everything, a golden glow illumines dark, timeless walls. Would anyone, stepping with awe into such a space, ever think to claim, “This is mine. I built it!”?

Why, then, is there a curriculum of many hundreds of koans in some Zen traditions?

It wouldn’t be giving too much away to reveal that dozens of the koans deal with our deeply hardwired tendency to grab, to hold, and to cling onto anything that might be mistakenly taken as “mine.” One function of koans is to work as a solvent to dissolve such attachments, or as a rasp or sandpaper to abrade the rough spots and scars left from such old shackles and moorings.

What’s the practical value of such changes? An example comes to mind, from working in sales. I had gotten a lead, then an introduction, and then an appointment with the CFO of the largest business account I’d ever had a chance to land — a publicly traded, multiple location manufacturing and distribution firm. Getting that account would be a big deal to my partners and a huge step forward in my career.

I set about scheming. “How should I approach them? What’s my strategy, and what tactics must I put in place to show them I’m their best option? What should I wear? How can I find out the CFO’s hobbies, pet peeves, and hot buttons?” And on. And on. So much so that by the time I was led into the executive’s office I was no more than a bundle of schemes with a side-order of “Here’s how great I am!”

What I didn’t bring with me was curiosity, humility, or any ability to question honestly, let alone any propensity to listen. Crash! Bam! Flames all over the place. Cleanup on aisle 9.

So, you’re wondering, how did my years of Zen practice help? I noticed, eventually, what I had been doing, and then I wound up laughing, really laughing. What a hoot! I never got a second chance at insuring that business, but by learning to settle down and let go of ideas of success, I actually did wind up being better than average in commercial sales.

“My success,” I came to see, was about as vacuous as “My realization.” Some notions sound lovely — but surprise: “My (fill-in-the-blank)”? There’s no such thing.

It was February 1986. I had been working the koan Mu for fifteen years.

The koan reads:

A monk asked Chao-chou, “Has a dog Buddha Nature or not?”

Chao-chou said, “Mu.”

Fifteen years of start and stop. Mostly stop. I’d left Rochester, built a life in Indiana, driven up to Chicago for sesshins when I could manage it, made the occasional pilgrimage back east. Sometimes Mu burned. Sometimes it vanished for months. I felt dry as old wood.

A few months earlier, a letter had arrived from Kapleau Roshi, suggesting I apply to participate in the five-day sesshin coming up at Casa Zen. Bodhin Kjolhede — who had just completed his formal training and would soon become a sanctioned teacher himself — would serve as head monitor.

I didn’t have to think about it for long.

That afternoon of my arrival, unrolling my sleeping bag on the dorm room floor at Casa Zen, my thinking was unusually clear:

One hundred and twenty hours. I’m not holding anything back this time. Nothing but Mu. I. Will. Not. Let. Up. Even. Once.

For almost all the other thirty-five or so participants, this was their first sesshin under the leadership of the school’s founder Philip Kapleau. There was probably a lot of confusion and disorientation and settling in going on, but I was already sinking in to Mu… Mu… Mu….

Opening instructions and guidelines were given in Spanish by Gerardo Gally Sensei, a senior student of Kapleau’s and leader of Casa Zen, or in English (and then translated) by Bodhin Sensei. I’d probably heard these remarks in one form or another thirty times. I ignored everything but Mu.

I stayed up late into the night sitting, sitting and doing kinhin (walking zazen) in the courtyard. A brief nap, and the wake up bell at 4:15 already found me in the zendo.

“Whack whack! Whack whack!” Bodhin Sensei, picking up on my determination and desperate mindstate, gave me extra assistance with the kyosaku (encouragement stick) every time he toured the zendo (usually twice per thirty-five minute round).

When skillfully applied, the kyosaku sends a jolt of energy straight into the body’s center. Bodhin was a master of it. As much as I had shrunk from the stick before, I was all in for it now.

MU! MU! MU! Whack whack! Whack Whack! The bell rings for dokusan, and I lead the rush to meet face to face with my teacher. He asks a few questions, I respond. Sometimes he nods a little. Then he encourages: “Go deeper! Don’t give up!” and rings the teacher’s bell for me to rush back to the zendo.

At meals, I tried to say the meal chants in Spanish, ate the unfamiliar but nourishing food, all the while absorbing myself in Mu. Mu. Mu. “What IS Mu?” Sometimes forcefully, sometimes plaintively, sometimes so quietly I could barely hear it. But always. Always Mu. I didn’t sweep the courtyard during work period each day… Mu did.

Except for Roshi’s teisho (formal talks each day), which were translated a couple sentences at a time, everything was conducted in Spanish, so I was lost. I had no reference points. I was in foreign territory, in every sense. Which was perfect. Nothing to think about, because nothing made sense. No distractions. Just Mu.

Through the days. Through the nights. Grabbing a half-hour nap once or twice a day.

Whack whack!!! Whack whack!!! Bodhin was really working out on me now, and I needed every bit of it. Round after round, from can-see to can’t-see. Day three. Day four. Speeding by so fast! I mustn’t let up! Not even a bit!

After dinner during the rest period on the last evening, I sat in a chair on a little rooftop portico facing a whitewashed wall. The air was still. Everything was still. In the alleyway behind me some boys were playing. One of them tossed a pebble. I could feel it coming up from behind, feel it sail just over my head, and when it hit the wall in front of me, that is simply all that happened. So clear. No words.

That last evening, the start of the final day, disappeared. There was only Mu. Only. Mu. Mu. Mu. Suddenly I was in dokusan (the word literally means “going alone”) and Roshi said something bracing and rang me out.

I sat through the night. No, Mu sat through the night. Bells rang. The stick kept striking. Teisho. Lunch. Suddenly, the last block of three rounds of sitting in the afternoon of the final day. Last dokusan! The teacher’s bell rang and I flew up the stairs, into the room, made my bows, and sat down in front of Roshi.

He asked me a question about Mu, one that he’d asked me years before. This time the response came by itself. A few words were followed by Mu jumping up and demonstrating itself.

“Alright,” he said, grinning a little, “sit back down.” He pointed to a corner of the top of the zabuton, the one-yard-square mat he was sitting on. “To use a metaphor for your practice, you were over here on the floor before; now, you are up here on the mat. It is qualitatively different, and your practice will be different from now on. But always keep in mind, that you are only on the edge of the corner of the mat—there are vast territories yet to be explored and appreciated.” Then he recited the next koan case for me to take up, and said, “When you get back to the zendo, write the monitors a note, let them know you are now working on subsequent koans.”

I cannot describe the joy. The elation, the relief. I was glowing and grinning and floating, for days, for weeks.

Looking back over a half century of practice, that was the first surprise: sooner or later, you actually have to do it.

Not study it. Not circle it, testing the temperature. Not start and stop for fifteen years while life rearranges itself around you. At least once — with nothing held back — you have to go for broke.

For some people the way through is gentle: soft, patient, penetrating. For others it needs to be more like Mexico City. An experienced teacher will help you find which is yours. But the going — actually going — no one can do for you.

What just happened? What kind of place is this, anyway? And, just to dream for a moment, what comes after awakening, especially after a deep experience like the one that had transformed Kapleau?

For starters, Rochester was a place of disciplined, serious practice. Philip Kapleau embodied warmth and humor, but he did not mess around.

My introductory training program at the Center earlier that year included fifteen or so other newcomers. On the second or third day, Kapleau Sensei came into the back of the room while one of his more senior students was giving us basic instructions on how to sit and about zendo etiquette. Kapleau noticed that a young woman near me was knitting or crocheting. He asked the speaker to pause, and then said to the woman, “Put down your knitting and pay attention!”

Kapleau’s main teacher, Yasutani Roshi, was born into an ancient samurai clan. Kapleau’s first three years of Zen training had been at the austere and severe monastic enclave of Hosshin-ji under Harada Roshi. Yet the profound enlightenment experience he detailed in The Three Pillars of Zen occurred while practicing as a layperson, among other lay men and women, encouraged by a head monitor who was an actual grandmother.

Kapleau had trained in some of the harshest Zen monasteries in Japan, yet over time he began to recognize that Western students might need something different. Late in his teaching career, while enjoying a walk with his long-time friend (and my current teacher) Rafe Martin, Kapleau confided to Rafe, “I am so done with Japan!”

He knew, though: strip away too much Japanese rigor and the baby goes with the bathwater.

Whether he was giving an impromptu encouragement talk in the zendo, “presenting the shout” (the literal meaning of teisho, the Japanese word for a formal Zen talk), or face to face in the dokusan room, Kapleau’s voice was distinctive — it was a bit raspy and hoarse, perhaps from his early years as a smoker. I can still hear him clear his throat as he began….

But there was something else about his voice. Remember, in my last article (https://mcspadden.substack.com/p/what-nuremberg-had-to-do-with-it ), Kapleau’s describing the feelings that amazed him when he visited the Zen monastery in Kamakura back in 1947 — “the deep serenity that seemed to radiate from the giant cryptomeria trees, the temple buildings, the faces of the monks and laymen, from the very earth itself.” That deep serenity… radiating… from the very earth itself is what his voice, and his presence, conveyed to me.

I’d been waiting in the dokusan line (dokusan is a Japanese word that literally means “going alone”) for more than forty minutes, moving up mat-to-mat, getting closer to my first formal face-to-face meeting with Philip Kapleau. It had been weeks since I’d moved to Rochester, but there were scores of new people pouring in by the month, and time in front of the teacher was rare and precious.

Finally, it was my turn, and I heard the teacher’s bell ring and the door down the hall open, so I struck the student’s bell twice, as I’d been instructed. I walked to the threshold, made a standing bow, which the teacher returned. I closed the door behind me, made a full prostration on the mat in front of him, and arranged the cushions and sat cross-legged before him.

Following the guidelines I’d been given, I stated my name, and then my practice: “I’m Larry McSpadden. My practice is counting the breath.” I remember only one other thing about that first, brief interview: Kapleau’s slightly raspy voice telling me, “We’re all either evolving or devolving, depending on causes and conditions.”

I never joined the “staff” at the RZC, but over the years have known and stayed in touch with many who did long-term residential training there. Ask any of them, and they’ll have witnessed Kapleau Roshi’s (as he eventually came to be called) ardor for diligent practice. Two or three nights each week there typically was no scheduled, formal sitting at the Center; staff members would head out those evenings to visit friends, get some ice cream, see a movie, or any one of dozens of other errands or diversions.

When they got back to the Center after an evening out, they’d see the lights on over on one side of the zendo, and they would see the Roshi in his sitting robe deeply absorbed in zazen.

Just a few years ago, a senior student of Kapleau’s and now a Zen Roshi in her own right, Mitra Bishop, shared an almost-unique pattern she’d observed in him over the years. Mitra was a long-time personal attendant and secretary of Kapleau’s. She shared (I’ll paraphrase, as I didn’t write down her exact words):

“He had what was for some people a very challenging personality. But being with him for such a long time, I could see that he never stopped working on himself. As soon as he became aware of a negative habit-pattern of behavior, it was gone. One never saw that behavior again; it was quite amazing. He worked on embodying enlightened behavior his whole teaching life and beyond, right up to his last breath.”

Regrettably, there have been several examples, as Zen moved to the West, of western founders (whether Asian or American) engaging in unethical behavior — having affairs with students, diverting Sangha assets for personal enjoyment, seeking fame or high standing. Such matters were never even suggested of Philip Kapleau, who often said, “Zen is not above morality, nor is morality below Zen.”

In late 1972 I tore my right medial meniscus when, in my apartment, I was asked by a friend to demonstrate the full lotus posture, and I just yanked my feet up and one knee went “pop!”

Kapleau Sensei, when he heard of my injury, had an assistant copy an article from his files explaining the anatomy of the knee and how to safely assume the lotus posture, and he sent the article to me with a kind handwritten note. Later, during a “dharma dialog” session wherein a senior student would field questions or comments from the crowd, something came up about posture and I started to share what I’d learned about knee safety. That senior student started to scoff at me, when immediately (and uncharacteristically, in that format), Kapleau interrupted him, berated him, and told him I should be listened to.

I had gone back to Indiana for knee surgery and fell in love with an old childhood acquaintance, Nancy. She came back to Rochester with me, and after a few months we were engaged.

The late summer (1973) wedding was held in the dining room (re-arranged for the event with chairs for guests, small flower arrangements, etc.) of the Zen Center. Nancy and I were kneeling on mats in front of Sensei Kapleau, ready to recite our vows, when a dinner-plate-sized wooden ring from a ceiling light fixture fell from the ceiling into my mother’s lap. Kapleau said, as a rueful aside, “The gods will have their say.”

If there’s such a thing as a “model Zen student,” that certainly wasn’t me. One afternoon I’d gotten high and drunk some beer with friends and then morosely recalled my Zen vows. I got myself to the Center and changed into my robe, and threw myself into one, then two, rounds of sitting… before I almost fainted and rolled off my cushions and mat to the floor. Peter Kjolhede (later to become my second teacher as the Dharma heir of Kapleau Roshi) was a monitor that evening; he quietly helped me to the hallway, sat me down, got some water, and took care of me. Throughout that humiliating experience, I felt not a single whiff of judgment or reproach from him.

Decades passed, and although still a fairly active RZC member, I’d moved back to Indiana, started a family, worked a career in business.... and by the early 2000’s Kapleau Roshi had retired from teaching, and for several years had taken residence in a suite now attached to 7 Arnold Park, as he was far into decline from Parkinson’s Disease. I had just sat sesshin at the new RZC country retreat facility at Chapin Mill (35 miles from Rochester) and had come into the city to say hello to my old teacher.

By that time, my youngest child Lore had been on the residential staff at the RZC for more than a year and had been, among other duties, tending to Roshi Kapleau’s needs.

When I was led into his room, I found the Roshi slumped in his chair, hands shaking, with his speech only just understandable. The late morning sun streamed into a corner of the room; he had a blanket wrapped around his legs and feet. I knelt close to him and held his hand. He asked about the sesshin and how I was doing. Then I brought up my child, and said, “I hope Lore is taking good care of you.” He shot back (although his words were slurred and ran together), “I… m… tak’g good… care… of Lore!”

Looking back over those years, what stands out most is that Kapleau never stopped practicing — not just on the cushion, but in the way he lived his life.

We’re all either evolving or devolving, depending on causes and conditions.

I’m proud to have been a student of that remarkable man who seriously lived his life in constant acknowledgement of that truth.

In the next few essays I’ll share some of the surprises that emerged for me as Zen practice unfolded over the decades.

We lower our voices. We slow our steps. Lifting the latch carefully, we enter.

The grounds stretch out before us with surprising depth. There we see a few gingko trees that must be a thousand years old. And ancient pines, stately, yet gnarled in unexpected places. We hear the faint rattle of bamboo against bamboo from somewhere near, but unseen, and hear the wind soughing through the treetops.

Proceeding on a pebbled path, we make a turn, and stop short.

There, fifty yards ahead, beside a withered plum tree ablaze in white blossoms, stands a man. A thin trail of cigarette smoke rises from his lowered hand.

He’s just standing. He’s just breathing. He seems entirely at home in the quiet of these ancient grounds.

Looking closer, we’re startled. He’s a Westerner — likely American — in business clothes, tie loosened, jacket draped over his arm.

How did he wind up here?

That man is Philip Kapleau. To understand, we step back one year — to Room 600 of the Justizpalast in Nuremberg, Germany.

Kapleau was serving as chief Allied court reporter for the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal — the court that judged the surviving leaders of Nazi Germany.

Kapleau had received a medical deferral from the draft, so he worked as a court recorder in Connecticut during the war. However, when he heard the International Tribunal was being organized, he applied, was accepted, and reported to Nuremberg in late 1945.

The high-ceilinged courtroom held judges, prisoners, translators with headphones, counsel teams, and a small press gallery. Kapleau and his colleagues sat close to the witness stand, stenotype machines clattering, paper tape streaming steadily as they recorded history.

This was just one of more than 400 open sessions in the trial’s first segment where charges were brought against the top surviving leadership of the German Nazi party. For day after day, week after week: eyewitness accounts of gas chambers and medical experiments, mass graves and systematic rape — years of calculated evil carried out as public policy, recorded in triplicate, filed, and stamped.

Today, they’re hearing from a young woman who had been on one of the death trains to the camps just before they had been liberated. She survived, but had lost her husband, her sister, her parents, and her three children. She is describing, in a flat voice, the morning the train arrived. At one point she stops, looks up at the judges, and asks: “What kind of world is this?”

How does a man who has heard and focused on every detail, who has recorded every word, go on?

This man — born in 1912 into a working-class family in Connecticut, the former president of his high school’s Atheist Club — didn’t go home. He was more than drained by the accounts he’d witnessed, but also disheartened by the bitter, resentful tone and lack of remorse he heard from the German leaders, whose only regret seemed to have been that they hadn’t succeeded in taking over the world.

So, as the trial was nearing its conclusion in Europe, in late 1946, Kapleau applied for a transfer posting to the already-in-session court reporting team at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. The litany of depredations there was as horrific, but he was somewhat uplifted by a completely different atmosphere in the court in Japan. Instead of bitter resentment, he observed regretful acceptance; an atmosphere that was much less tense.

Kapleau asked people there what accounted for this remarkable attitude. He was told it arose from a cultural understanding of karma. In a “Personal Note” that comprises the Afterword of Kapleau’s second major book, Zen — Merging of East and West, he later wrote:

“I asked Japanese acquaintances where I could learn more about karma. I was told, ‘It is one of the cornerstones of Buddhism, so you need to study Buddhism to understand it.’

“‘Who can you recommend as a teacher?’

“‘Dr. D. T. Suzuki. He is an authority on Buddhism and also speaks English.’”

So, on free afternoons, Kapleau had begun finding his way to the informal talks Dr. Suzuki was giving at a Zen monastery in Kamakura. Suzuki’s quarters were on the ancient temple grounds where, Kapleau continued in Merging of East and West:

“What brought me back again and again was the desire… to experience the deep serenity that seemed to radiate from the giant cryptomeria trees, the temple buildings, the faces of the monks and laymen, from the very earth itself.”

Something ancient — a deep, living stillness — was singing at the edge of his awareness.

Before returning to America, Kapleau made a brief detour to China. Corruption, inflation, widespread misery — suffering woven into the fabric of existence. But the giant Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in the temples of Peking pointed, wordlessly, toward the possibility of its ending.

When he returned to the United States he was deeply shaken and found it difficult to just blend back into American life. It was a busy time of airing out his shuttered apartment, re-establishing his court reporting business — and returning, dutifully, to the cocktail parties and receptions of the postwar professional class. Much later, I heard him describe this era of his life as “the joyless pursuit of pleasure.” He found himself, paraphrasing the poet Matthew Arnold, “Suspended between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” (Zen — Merging of East and West)

By 1950, D. T. Suzuki had come to the United States and was delivering a series of lectures at Columbia University. Kapleau became one of the “inner circle” of followers there as a part of the early “Zen boom” in the US. He heard and talked about Zen’s world view and history, he listened to stories of the teaching encounters of the ancient masters, and he became intrigued by the whiff of a possibility — something called “enlightenment.” The more he heard, though, and the more he sensed the reality behind the stories, the more restless he became.

In his “Personal Note” in Zen Merging of East and West he continued, with characteristic directness:

“My study of Zen philosophy isn’t baking bread. True, my intellectual horizons had been expanded, but with increased knowledge came no greater serenity. In fact, my restlessness, irritability, and inner dissatisfaction had worsened, and now the affliction of pride was added—was I not one of the Zen cognoscenti, an apostle of Suzuki’s?...

“After several months of agonizing over this prospect, I gave up my work, disposed of my belongings, and set sail for Japan, determined not to return until I became enlightened.”

Kapleau returned to Japan in early October 1953, with some extra clothes, three or four letters of introduction, and with barely the rudiments of the Japanese language. He inquired at several monasteries about training but was turned away for various reasons. A month later he heard from Nakagawa Soen Roshi, who invited him to visit Ryutaku-ji, where Soen Roshi was master.

Years later, when Kapleau was in a storytelling mood, he would confess that he thought all he would have to do was sit down with a master, sip saké, talk Zen, and that he would then somehow become enlightened. He’d never imagined seemingly endless hours of silent, unmoving formal sitting meditation (zazen) and had no idea how difficult and painful it would be for his middle-aged, sedentary body.

He started to wake up to this harsh reality at Ryutaku-ji, and struggled mightily, but was allowed to remain. After three weeks or so, Nakagawa Roshi told him that he’d decided to take Kapleau with him to Rohatsu Sesshin at Hosshin-ji.

Hosshin-ji, located on the wind-blown and frigid north coast on the Sea of Japan, was led by Harada Sogaku Dai-un (“Great Cloud”) Roshi. And the Rohatsu sesshin, commemorating the Buddha’s enlightenment, was the most strenuous and severe sesshin of the year. What a baptism!

Kapleau stayed on at Hosshin-ji for three years, following the full monastic schedule of the monks, baking in the summer sun with them in the gardens and fields, freezing in straw sandals with them in winter on begging rounds, and sitting zazen morning, noon, and night. I suspect he never fully shared with anyone the struggle and pain he endured during those times.

He was constantly cold (he had a genetic condition that rendered him very sensitive to cold) and later shared the only times there when he was truly warm was during the weekly soak in the Japanese bath. As strong as his determination was, he became unwell, and finally took leave with the master’s blessing and the affection of the monks.

He left the monastery to continue his training for another ten years under Harada’s Dharma heir, Yasutani Haku-un (“White Cloud”) Roshi as a lay disciple. Kapleau traveled across Japan with Yasutani (who was born into a samurai family), attending scores of zazenkai (all-day sittings) and a seven-day sesshin every two or three months. Kapleau’s initial enlightenment experience is recounted in The Three Pillars of Zen — and is one of the most moving accounts of awakening in the literature of Western Zen. It is enough to say here that it changed everything.

Having sailed to Japan in 1953 seeking the costume jewelry of the idea of enlightenment, he instead had struck a vein of pure gold — clear insight into the nature of all existence, into the nature of Mind. This, he felt compelled to share, and share widely. So, for the last two or three years of his time in Japan, he (with the considerable collaboration of Nakagawa Roshi and Yamada Koun [Cultivator of Clouds] Roshi) translated, wrote, edited, and compiled The Three Pillars of Zen, published to wide acclaim in 1965.

The Three Pillars’ subtitle, “Teaching—Practice—Enlightenment,” was carefully considered, as Kapleau had found that authentic Zen is only present when all three elements are equally embodied. A realized, mature, lineage-acknowledged teacher face-to-face with the student. A student who put the teaching into practice, walking the walk. An insistence on keeping the “end game” always in sight, however remote it might appear—full maturation and realization for the welfare, benefit, and liberation of all beings.

The book caught the attention of the leaders of a spiritual group in Rochester, NY, who invited the author to come and consider teaching them. Kapleau accepted, and by 1966 had established the Rochester Zen Center. He brought, not only authentic Zen, but a discipline and rigor of practice, tinged with Japanese samurai overtones, that led the RZC to become known in the West as “the boot camp of Zen.” This purity of transmission, coupled with awkward cultural translation, led to both flowering and failures.

In the mid-1970s, I was at an evening reception for an older member’s birthday party, when I noticed Kapleau Sensei standing alone for a moment, so I approached him, and we began to chat. I don’t recall what we talked about. I was several inches taller than him, so I had a good view of this: I became distracted by one, and then two, then three mosquitoes that had landed on his scalp and forehead, and that had started to feast. As we continued to talk, the mosquitoes continued to sip his blood. It was all I could do to not swat them away myself. He certainly was aware of them; he just wasn’t willing to harm them by even lightly brushing or waving at them.

I was chatting with Kapleau after a post-sesshin breakfast several years later, and brought up something that had been troubling me: I drove my car a great deal in the course of business and to visit my children; I was concerned about all the mosquitos and other bugs my car was killing as a result of my driving. He said plainly, “Don’t worry about it.”

Next: some field notes from those early days in Rochester.

I’d landed at Yale two years earlier — a small-town Indiana kid accepted partly, I suspect, because the admissions office was actively diversifying. When asked in my interview to describe myself in three words, I could only come up with two: “Inquisitive and introspective.” Apparently that was enough.

The first two years had been a genuine feast — philosophy, literature, religious studies, anthropology — and I’d been eating everything in sight. That May I stayed on in New Haven, sleeping in a dingy walk-up apartment, working swing shifts at a plaster and wallboard factory in the city’s south side. “Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck gettin’ dirty and gritty.” That was me. By mid-August I’d quit the factory job, burnt out to a crisp, really in the dumps. I needed something, though I couldn’t have said what.

On a long walk through the empty campus the next morning, something surfaced. The year before, I’d bought and read D.T. Suzuki’s Manual of Zen Buddhism, and I remembered a short chant included in it — the “Ten Verse Kannon Sutra.” Kannon (or Kanzeon) is the Japanese name for the Bodhisattva of Compassion. That seemed like exactly what I needed.

I headed back over to my dorm for the book, but the storage room was locked for the summer. So, having some money from my last paycheck, I went on down the street to the Yale Co-op, the gigantic college bookstore, hoping they might have a copy.

They had one left.

Scanning the dozen or so checkout lanes, I saw that four were open, and one was staffed by an attractive young woman. I chose that one.

She rang my book up on the register, paused, looked at me, and said, “Zen. Hmmm. Have you ever heard of The Three Pillars of Zen?”

Wanting to appear at least partially smart, I replied, “I think so. Isn’t that by Nancy Wilson Ross?”

She laughed and said, “No! My uncle wrote it!”

“Is it any good?”

She said, “I think so, but we don’t have it here. Chapel Street Books might have it though.”

I barely took time to thank her and was out the door at a trot headed for Chapel Street. They had it!

I rushed back to the apartment, forgetting for the time being about Kannon and her Ten Verse Sutra—I had the real deal in my hands now!

I read most of The Three Pillars that afternoon and evening. The next day I hitchhiked to join some buddies at a rundown farmhouse they were renting thirty-five miles north of New Haven, where I finished the book for the first time. I tried doing “zazen,” or Zen meditation, according to the instructions in the book, then I reread my favorite parts.

I noticed on the back cover it said the author, Philip Kapleau, was leading a Zen Center in Rochester, NY. I looked at a map and saw Rochester was about midway between Connecticut and Indiana. I came up with a plan.

I told my friends I was leaving the next morning for Indiana to see my folks before returning to college in September, and that I was going to stop in Rochester and check out this Zen Center place. In those days, to my friends, that sounded perfectly normal, and they just said, “See ya!” and “Have a good trip!”

Crack of dawn, late summer, rural central Connecticut. I walked down the farmhouse lane to the side road it intersected, and walked a mile down that road to a little county road. Three minutes later, a car pulled up and stopped.

I leaned to the open window, and the driver said, “Where you going? Rochester?”

Dumbfounded, I said, “Yes!” and got in. I asked how he knew about Rochester. He said, “Just a guess. I’m not going there, but I can get you to the Mass Pike.”

About an hour later I was on I-90 headed west. The next ride dropped me at the NY Thruway exit at Sharon Springs, a really remote spot between Schenectady and Utica, but it was still morning; I was making great time!

I waited about a half hour on the westbound entrance ramp, chewing on a stalk of grass, and saw only two cars. Then a big black Dodge sedan came wheeling around the curve and slewed to a stop. I opened the door to a billow of cigar smoke and this big dude with a full beard grinning at me who said, “Where ya goin’? Rochester?”

I got in. We roared west. Turns out the guy was headed for Cleveland, but he said he “just made a lucky guess” about my destination.

There I was at the main Thruway interchange just a few miles south of Rochester, and it was barely noon.

But suddenly, fears and uncertainties started to kick in — “I don’t know anybody at this Zen place. I’ve never been in this city. I’m not expected by anyone. I’m already halfway to Indiana. With the luck I’m having catching rides, I bet I can get home by dark. Maybe I should just keep going.” — that was me, listening to my thoughts.

Just to check, I pulled my copy of the I Ching and my three Chinese coins from my pack and consulted the Oracle about whether I should proceed directly to Indiana. The answer was unambiguous: Stop. Stay. Wait.

I rejected that sage advice and in defiance stuck out my thumb, headed for Indiana.

It was a clear, hot summer afternoon, and I turned invisible. Hundreds, and then thousands of cars passed through the booths, picking up a toll ticket, speeding out to the Thruway. I mean it was really hot. And I really seemed invisible.

Until about three hours later, when a car pulled over. The woman inside said, “I won’t give you a ride, but here’s a cold Pepsi.” I accepted and drank it gratefully, then stuck out my thumb again, and waited. Two more hours passed; my T-shirt was soaked in sweat; the sun slanted down to the west.

Finally, a guy stopped in a white Nash Rambler. I ran up to the passenger window and he said, “Going west?”

“I sure am!” I said with relief. I climbed in and said thanks. He proceeded to where the entrance lanes split to enter the Thruway one direction or the other, and turned onto the “Albany and East” ramp.

“Wait a minute!” I shouted, “I thought you said you were going west!”

“Yeah, that’s right, I’m going west,” he declared.

“But you’re driving on the eastbound ramp, to Albany!”

“Oh! Right. Sorry. I am going east, I’m headed to Albany.”

“Just let me out, would you?”

Admitting defeat, I trudged back up the entrance ramp, past the toll booths, toward the city. “Rochester it is,” I whispered. I soon caught a ride to the start of the central city, and was let out at the top of Mt. Hope Avenue. I saw a phone booth. I looked up “Rochester Zen Center” and called the number.

Some man with a deep, calm-sounding voice answered after a few rings. I explained briefly where I was and asked how to get downtown.

“Take a bus.”

Okay…

“Where should I stay tonight?”

“Try the Y,” he said, and signed off.

I saw a Bus Stop sign and stood under it. Sure enough, a bus came, and it stopped for me. Wonder of wonders! Getting on, I sat down and started chatting with the driver. I was the only passenger, as it was getting into the evening. I could sense him growing more and more bemused. It wasn’t until later that I realized there was a fare box at the front of the bus.

After an uneventful night in a room at the YMCA, I walked the mile or two from downtown out East Avenue to Arnold Park, and found # 7, an attractive, moderately imposing frame two-story building in a very upscale neighborhood. I saw stone steps leading to the front door, so I walked up and knocked three times.

In a moment, I heard an answering knock from within: “Bang, bang, bang.”

Puzzled, I knocked again. And again, an echoing “Bang bang.”

“Is this one of those Zen puzzles for newcomers, or what?” I thought.

In a minute though, someone walking up the drive to the side entrance saw me and waved me over. “That entrance is closed. They’re sealing it shut. We had a big fire a few months back and we’re completely remodeling the place. The altar in our new zendo is going behind those stairs.”

“Great!” I thought, “I show up and they seal the front door shut.”

I was shown to a bench and asked to wait; my guide said he’d let someone know that a newcomer had arrived.

Ninety minutes or so passed; three men came out from the back toward my bench, so I stood up and said I was new and wanted to learn about Zen. One of them asked me several questions, and I sort of muddled my way through telling my story, which I pretty much stumbled over.

It turns out my questioner was the man himself, Philip Kapleau. He said I was welcome to stay and sit a few days, provided I helped with the remodeling work each day.

Someone arranged for me to sleep on the floor of a regular member’s apartment a few blocks away, along with a few other itinerant visitors.

That first evening, I took a seat along with forty or so others in the partially-reconstructed zendo, and sat my first thirty-five minute round in silent stillness. Then there was walking meditation for seven minutes, and another thirty-five minute sitting round. I was uncomfortable, but thrilled. At the start of the third round of sitting, Kapleau Sensei (as he was then called) stood up and cleared his throat, and gave a very brief encouragement talk.

I don’t remember what he said, only how I felt. It was more his voice than the words. What he said struck a note deeper than my heart. I was finally home.

The next morning, after an hour of sitting, there was a brief chanting service. It started off with the Ten Verse Kannon Sutra—

Kanzeon!
Praise to Buddha!
All are one with Buddha;
all awake to Buddha.
Buddha, Dharma, Sangha —
eternal, joyous, selfless, pure.
Through the day Kanzeon
through the night Kanzeon.
This moment springs from Mind;
this moment itself is Mind.

Set back from the sidewalk, where you’d expect another storefront or lobby, stands a small, stone temple. It looks ancient. As you approach, the city sounds begin to fade. “What is this doing here?” you wonder. A short iron fence surrounds it. There is a gate. You lift the latch, but you don’t know why.

It’s hard to say when wandering becomes intention. I grew up in a small Indiana town—pretty much all-white, all-Christian—where conformity was expected. I was in sixth grade in the early spring of 1961 and had just walked back to school after lunch at home. The bell hadn’t rung yet, and I noticed a few classmates gathered around my friend Whitey, who was sitting on the floor with a big grin on his face, in a posture I had never seen before. His legs were folded up, crosswise, with each foot resting on the other thigh, his hands loose in his lap. My mind went snap.

“What is that!” I blurted.

He said someone in his house had showed it to him, and called it a “lotus seat.” It had something to do with something called “yoga.” The other kids started joking about “flower butt” and Yogi Berra and Yogi the Bear. I couldn’t have said what happened to me. But whatever that was, it stayed with me.

A year or two later, hanging out with my best friend Chris in my front yard, he mentioned a book that his mom had been reading—something about sages meditating in India and doing miraculous things. “What book is that?” I demanded. The only other detail he remembered was that he thought it had an orange cover.

I jumped on my bike and sped to his house, let myself in, and searched every shelf and table. Nothing. I waited for his mother. She denied having any such book. Perhaps she was trying to protect my Presbyterian upbringing from exposure to such things. I remember the disappointment. I wanted that book.

In my mid-teens, I discovered Bob Dylan, wearing out copies of Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, while I began reading even more. A group of us smoked cigarettes, shot pool at the Brunswick Club, ate fries at Fisher’s Variety Store, talked about ideas, and argued about everything.

One afternoon my friend C.N. urged me to read The Picture of Dorian Gray. When I was halfway through, he asked what I thought.

“It’s pretty good,” I said.

“No,” he insisted. “What do you think about the writing?”

He opened the book to a passage and had me read it aloud. Halfway through he stopped me. “Don’t you hear that? The language. The way he says so much with so few words.”

That was the first time I understood that language could carry so much more than just ideas and information.

By the end of my junior year, I had exhausted my semi-rural high school’s curriculum and, through a chain of unlikely events, spent my senior year at a prep school in the East. The library there held nearly 60,000 volumes. I read constantly—one or two extra books a week.

One afternoon, browsing a section I hadn’t visited before, I saw a small orange book: The Practice of Zen by Chang Chen-Chi (later Garma C.C. Chang). I devoured it in a matter of days.

Part IV in that book was titled “Buddha and Meditation.” A section described “The Seven Different Types of Meditation Practice.” Heart pounding, I rolled up a blanket, carried it and my pillow into my dorm closet, closed the door—imagining it should be dark and special—and, for the first time in this life, crossed my legs and sat.

I lasted maybe two minutes.

But I had begun. My story, and the way it has sometimes merged with the greater story of Chan and Zen, will be unfolded here from time to time. But your story — what paths are already forming for you? Something brought you here. That's worth paying attention to.