We rejoined the rest of the group for the final zazen period of the evening, and at its conclusion, mimeographed cards were distributed, from which we chanted what is known as The Four Great Vows of Zen Buddhism:
The many beings are numberless, I vow to save them;
Greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly, I vow to abandon them;
Dharma gates are countless, I vow to wake to them;
Buddha’s way is unsurpassed, I vow to embody it fully.
After the chanting, the lights were turned on full strength, and we resumed our conversation over refreshing cups of lemon-grass tea. The people I had been quietly talking with outside now told Paul and me about how a seven-day intensive retreat called a sesshin had finished not long before, and that Robert Aitken’s teacher, one Yasutani Roshi (roshi being the honorific title for a Zen Master), had come over from Japan to lead it. An actual Zen Master! One of those incredibly rare and enlightened beings whose wisdom penetrates to the very heart of the Universe! Over the years through my readings, I had developed the same fascination and awe for these highest of Zen teachers that I had reserved for Catholic saints in my early childhood. There was already something almost miraculous about Yasutani Roshi, in that, the story goes, his mother was given a bead from a Buddhist rosary (juzu) to swallow in hopes that it would somehow ease the travails of childbirth. Lo and behold, when Yasutani was born, he was clutching the bead in his right hand, a most auspicious sign, and great things were predicted for him.
“Wow, this is home!” I thought to myself as the Koko An residents spoke, and I resolved to come live at this small temple just as soon as a coveted vacancy opened up.
“Umm, well, actually, we have openings right now,” said one of the residents. “In fact we kind of need more people to make the rent.”
And so, with none of the traditional practice at Japanese Zen monasteries of sitting outside in the elements for three days in order to show sincerity before being accepted for admission, my brother Paul and I became more or less instant residents of Koko An.
•••
In high school I had once came across an article in National Geographic magazine about young people my age in Thailand whose education included spending a year at a Buddhist monastery. Feeling drawn to that type of contemplative practice, I fantasized about someday joining such a monastery myself. The monks sitting in serene meditation looked somehow oddly familiar to me. “I’ve been there before,” I remember thinking while wondering how that could be possible. Now, a resident of Koko An, I could sit quietly in meditation as I had seen the young monks do in the article, and let my endlessly chattering mind settle into a measure of tranquillity, continuing to be fascinated by the prospect of enlightenment and what I regarded as its promise of complete liberation from all of life’s problems.
With a muffled egg-timer ticking away the twenty-five-minute morning and evening zazen periods, most of us at Koko An sat straddling our zafus like cowboys on saddles (more advanced residents sat in either full- or half-lotus postures). As an alternative to counting our breaths, we could sit meditating on the syllable “Mu,” which was another method of quieting the mind.
Theoretically, we could have been silently repeating anything at all, since the ultimate aim of Zen meditation practice is to become so absorbed with whatever theme is being mentally repeated that the construct of ego falls away and one’s true nature, the “Big I” as some Zen teachers call it, is revealed—the experience of satori or kensho in other words. “Mu” is more effective in this regard, since it is a neutral syllable, with no connotations that could become a source of distraction, as would surely be the case if one were to meditate on an actual word.
The syllable “Mu” derives from one of the Zen koans, paradoxical statements or stories used as a skillful means of effecting spiritual awakening. The following koan, known as “Joshu’s Dog,” is part of an eight-hundred-year-old koan collection called the Mumonkan, or “Gateless Gate”:
Joshu [778–897] was a renowned Chinese Zen Master who lived in Joshu, the province from which he took his name. One day a monk approached him, intending to ask for guidance. When a dog walked by, the monk asked Joshu, “Does that dog have Buddha-nature or not?” Joshu shouted, “Mu!” ‡
•••
In between the morning and evening sittings our days at Koko An were free, and after breakfast residents went variously to their classes at the University of Hawaii a few blocks away, to their jobs, or in my case, to the beach. My brother Paul had enrolled in the graduate program at the university in pursuit of a Master’s degree in linguistics with a minor in Mandarin Chinese, an outgrowth of his lifelong fascination with Asian languages. He was now holding down a full-time job as a dishwasher in Waikiki and attending school full time while also adhering to the Koko An zazen schedule. I, on the other hand, was out frolicking in the waves at Waikiki without any need to work for a living.
When I was three years old, I was involved in a serious accident: I fell under the wheels of a slowly moving truck and was hospitalized for several weeks, after which I had to relearn how to walk. I received a lump-sum insurance settlement when I turned eighteen that I was now living off of, and I reasoned that, since I was now in Hawaii, it was somehow de rigueur for me to learn how to surf. I accomplished this by falling off a board and getting back up again repeatedly for about a week until one day, quite simply, I stayed upright. I had originally intended my daily surfing regimen to be a kind of adjunct to my Zen practice, becoming one with the waves and breaking the surface tension of the water in a manner similar to breaking the surface tension of consciousness in order to enter into the deeply absorbed meditation state known as samadhi.
One memorable morning, after several hours of ever-deepening samadhi at the zendo, I paddled out to the reef off Waikiki and waited for the sets to break. The seas were at least six feet, higher than I had ever surfed before, and people were wiping out right and left. I saw this as an opportunity to deepen my wave-samadhi, however, and I tried to become one with the ocean. But before long I had a feeling familiar to me from the time at the dentist’s office some years earlier when I felt my sense of self evaporating under the influence of laughing gas. Consumed with fear, I stood up on my board and tried to catch a wave in order to dispel the deepening feeling of dread, but was cut off by another surfer, and fell into the coral reef, cutting both knees. When I then stood up in the shallow water, I stepped on a sea urchin, and in the next instant the errant board of a tourist who had also wiped out slammed into my ribs. As I stood there on the reef a quarter mile out from Waikiki Beach, punctured, bleeding, and bruised, I was overwhelmed by a strange, suffocating sense of unreality and fear, and paddled back to shore as quickly as I could, hyperventilating all the way in. I felt as if I somehow no longer existed. I could almost see myself paddling, disembodied. Or rather unspirited. Uninhabited. Desolate. A paddling ghost. I was at the center of darkness. I remembered the Zen doctrine of no-self and thought it might be this. But far from being remotely liberating, this was a kind of cold hell, brimming over with fear, anxiety, and darkness.
•••
My reading material from the Koko An library included a memoir I picked up one day titled The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda. I was instantly engrossed by its relevance to the spiritual life in general and to mine in particular. The author had traveled to Mexico to study with a Yaqui Indian shaman and, like all of us at Koko An (indeed, like almost everyone on a spiritual path), was looking for that one-dose panacea for his life. The shaman (Don Juan) tells Castaneda, “You are too much. . . . Next you’re going to ask for a sorcerer’s medication to remove everything annoying from you, with no effort at all on your part—just the effort of swallowing whatever is given. The more awful the taste, the better the results. That’s your Western man’s motto. You want results—one potion and you’re cured.” A Buddhist take on the same theme came from the Tibetan lama, Chögyam Trungpa, who wrote in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, “We have the notion that there must be some kind of medicine or magic potion to help us attain the right state of mind.” Yes, that certainly was the case for many of us back then, as it still is today and probably always has been.
In