“The ‘peace that passeth understanding’?” I wondered silently.
I dropped out of Penn in my sophomore year, since the coursework did nothing to assuage the urgency I felt about somehow “solving” life now. I roomed with my brother Paul in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and we began attending lectures on Buddhism at the First Zen Institute in midtown Manhattan. Paul was working fifty-hour weeks as a “paint specialist” at a dark, satanic mill of a chemical company, a job that often left him with crushing headaches and nausea from the toxic fumes. On weekends, he and I would gatecrash frat parties and dances. At one such party he had a bad—a really bad—trip after he helped himself to some “electric kool-aid,” not realizing the amount of LSD therein, or that it was also laced with methamphetamine. I stayed with him throughout a long, panic-filled night, and the experience scarred him for months. I had my own bad trips with LSD during this time, and thus Paul and I were counting the days until our upcoming trip to Hawaii to visit our sister, who had lived there for several years.
Unlike me, a college dropout, Paul had graduated from college with a degree in music, a passion he and I had shared since early childhood. Otherwise, our temperaments could not have been more different. Always of a dreamy, introspective nature, Paul could retreat into himself for hours at a time, reading his philosophy books or drawing fantastical cartoons. I also read voluminously, but my personality was more restless and given to physical activity, like long-distance running. The seeds of personality conflict had been sown early, and when we were pre-teens Paul and I often had knock-down, drag-out fights, the ferocity of which still makes me cringe. In high school, Paul gravitated to the smart-set, while I hung out with the jocks, each of us regarding the other with a measure of contempt. But now that we were older, we grew closer through our common interest in Zen, although Paul was ever more diligent and hard-working, while I was impulsive in a ’60s “go-with-the-flow” way. Despite our personality differences, we now hoped to pursue our interest in Zen more actively in Hawaii, given the strong Buddhist influences on its culture. On New Year’s Day, 1971, we boarded a plane and flew west.
three
All human misery derives from an inability to sit still in a quiet room alone.
—Blaise Pascal
The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the twentieth century.
—attributed to Arnold Toynbee
Newly arrived in Honolulu, Paul and I looked in the phone book one day for a place to practice Zen and dialed the number for “Koko An Zendo.” (A zendo is a Zen-practice center.) That same evening found us in what looked to be a private residence in Manoa Valley, not far from the University of Hawaii. Koko An Zendo was part of the larger local Diamond Sangha, sangha being the Sanskrit term for “fellowship” or “kinship.” The “Diamond” part of the organization’s name was inspired by the Diamond Sutra, one of the primary Buddhist texts, and also by Diamond Head being visible from the house. “Koko An,” the name of the commmunity’s zendo, translates from the Japanese as “the hermitage of right here.”
In 1971, Zen was still in its toddlerhood in America and the West in general, with here and there only a handful of centers dotting the landscape. Now there are literally hundreds. The lineage leading up to this proliferation of practice centers began with Soyen Shaku, a priest of the Rinzai school of Zen and a featured guest at the World Parliament of Religions held at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.† One of his students, D. T. Suzuki, went on to write a number of popular books in English on Zen that influenced a generation of Western seekers. Nyogen Senzaki, another of Soyen Shaku’s disciples, was the first teacher of Robert Aitken, an American originally from Philadelphia who founded the Diamond Sangha in 1959. By 2013 there were no fewer than seventeen Zen centers worldwide that were either started by Aitken or by one or more of his students. Of all the teachers and future teachers of Zen in mid-twentieth-century America, Aitken, in terms of the sheer number of people exposed to Zen through his efforts, would turn out to be one of its most influential Western exponents and be widely regarded as the “dean” of American Zen Buddhism.
When Paul and I arrived at Koko An that evening, one of its residents directed us to sit facing the wall as quietly as possible during the four successive twenty-five-minute periods of zazen, Zen-sitting, that were about to begin, and to count our breaths over and over from one to ten. If we suddenly found ourselves exceeding that number, we were instructed to simply begin anew without any self-recrimination for having let our minds wander.
The essential goal of Zen practice is the exact opposite of the usual goal of gaining something from one’s activities. Sitting quietly with the mind focused but not rigid, the sitter allows desire for attainment and, indeed, all concepts and desires to fall away, so that the true, intrinsic unity of self and universe is revealed. Thus, enlightenment is the absence of delusion, rather than a higher state to be achieved. Most religions posit “holy” or “virtuous” concepts as the antitheses of evil ones. Zen purports to get to the root of the question of existence by throwing away all concepts, virtuous and holy ones included, concepts themselves being the stumbling block to true realization. It is thus as radical (in the original sense of the term) a spiritual path as is possible.
Zen takes as its starting point the fact that everyone at some time or another experiences a psychic tension arising from the perception of one’s self as being “here” and all those other billions of selves as being “out there.” But since the “self” gets old and faces death, and since worldly successes will always eventually give way to failures, suffering inevitably arises—the dukkha-ness of life in a nutshell. In Zen, the “original intent” school of Buddhism, there is no way out of that suffering except to perceive directly that the self is an illusion, a bundle of concepts and ideas that we, in our delusion, believe has some kind of permanence and solid substance. Once one sees into one’s true nature, according to Zen, existence ceases to be a problem. You see things as they are, and nothing that isn’t there. “The truth shall set you free.” That was the freedom that Zen promised, a freedom Paul and I were looking for, together with everyone else on this path.
But the practice of Zen, I was soon to find out, is not a fast-track to a fully enlightened life with no speed bumps along the way. Zazen, while allowing the mind to settle, can also allow negativity to bubble up in the psyche, negativity that we ordinarily tamp down or distract ourselves from. I would become well acquainted with this negativity over the coming years.
•••
I had sat only shorter periods of zazen before, and my legs were unused to maintaining the half-lotus position for twenty-five minutes at a time. Thus, when my legs began to fall asleep during the first period, I uncrossed them and straddled the cushion, as the person next to me was doing. A high-pitched bell rang twice at the end of twenty-five minutes, signaling us to rise from our “zafus” (cushions) and to circumambulate the twilit room in the slow walking-meditation known as kinhin. As I passed the altar during kinhin, I snuck a glance at the centerpiece of the zendo—an eighteen-inch-high wooden sculpture of a fearsome figure I was to learn at tea-time was Bodhidharma, a storied Indian monk who had introduced an early form of Zen into China during the fifth century A.D.
Just after the bell rang, some of the participants quietly slipped out the screen door leading to the backyard and didn’t come back in for the next sitting, and I decided to do the same during the next kinhin in order to give my aching knees a rest. When that time came, I found a wicker chair to sit in on the back lawn with these others, who whispered among themselves so as not to disturb those still inside. Introducing myself, I was told that Koko An Zendo was a residential center where people willing to make the commitment to its three hours of daily zazen were welcome to come to live and practice. A young resident then pointed to a tree that grew separate from any others in the backyard.
“That’s a bodhi tree,” he explained quietly, referring to a ficus tree of the sort Shakyamuni Buddha was said to be sitting beneath when he attained enlightenment (bodhi translates from Sanskrit as “enlightenment”). “The story goes,” he continued,