It was the late nineteen sixties, and just a few years after I started sitting regularly. I decided I wanted to be a priest. I figured if only I were ordained then all my problems would be solved. The difficulty was that the Zen center expected people to go through a very long apprenticeship, why it could take years. And that didn’t seem to make any sense to me.
Besides just getting to speak to the master seemed beyond me. I attended talks Suzuki Roshi gave, but he was always a very small figure very far away speaking in what my friends assured me was English, but to my ear nearly incomprehensible.
So, I was brooding over this barrier to getting everything fixed when the Zen master Jiyu Kennett, accompanied by two western senior priests arrived in San Francisco. She was English, had studied in Japan for a number of years, and was the Dharma successor to a very prominent Japanese Soto Zen master. Kennett Roshi had been authorized to start a Zen center in London. And on her way back, stopped and stayed at the San Francisco Zen Center to learn how they had successfully adapted Zen training to a Western culture.
She hadn’t been there a week before she decided it might be better to hang out her shingle in California rather than back home in England. She moved into a flat on Potrero Hill and announced that she was receiving visitors.
I was the first person at the door.
I began sitting at her zendo housed in the little flat, and quickly formally became her student. It was an exhilarating time. We sat a lot. I met in private interviews with her daily. And she gave small and intimate classes on various aspects of the Dharma, beginning to guide me to a larger insight into the Zen way, particularly focusing on the insights of both Eihei Dogen, the founding master of Japanese Soto Zen, and Keizan Jokin who transformed Japanese Soto into the largest Zen school in the country.
Most important for me was that in one of my first interviews with her she told me to stop counting and to just sit.
Shikantaza means just sit.
She tried to elaborate by translating the term as silent illumination. I found my mind was neither silent, nor illumined.
But, I persisted.
After a few intensive months with her the roshi decided she had to return to England to wind up family affairs, both her parents had died since she left the country. She invited my girlfriend and me to move into the temple, and among other things to pay the rent while she was in England. But, she added, I would first have to marry the girlfriend. No fooling around in the temple. This was a cavalier act and one that would lead to hurt for a number of people. But at the time I had no idea of the flow of karma that would play out over the years.
We married and moved into the temple.
The roshi left one of her senior disciples in charge.
Myozen Delport was an Afrikaner South African. She had left her violent and abusive home to study karate in Japan. She settled in, was very successful in her studies, and even came to have a boy friend. He persisted in asking her for sex. She refused. He hung himself.
Not long after he began to visit her.
She took this haunting to the local Buddhist priest at the Shin temple. He said he didn’t do much with ghosts, and suggested the foreign priest at the Zen temple. She went there and the roshi, my roshi, said, “I can fix this.”
She showed Myozen how to sit, sat her in the tiny zendo and had her sit there day in and day out for quite a long time. Every once in a while the roshi would come in and violently strike the young woman across the shoulders with a kyosaku, a stick made for the purpose of startling, punishing or encouraging people in meditation halls. Depending on the pronunciation the stick was said to awaken or to warn. In this case it was to drive her forward.
It did.
Eventually the ghost moved on to easier pickings.
Anyway, that was how Myozen knew how to help someone push into just sitting in a serious way.
When I wasn’t working, I was sitting, every morning, every evening, all weekend.
And periodically, Myozen would come in with her kyosaku and strike me hard across the shoulders.
It drove me forward.
It drove me inward.
It focused everything.
Now, one doesn’t need the stick. I’m moderately confident that it pushed things along a bit faster than otherwise might have been the case. But really, the deal is pretty simple.
All one needs to do is just sit down, shut up, and pay attention.
This is the universal solvent of the heart.
Become as wide as the sky.
Let the whole play of what is play across the screen of the mind and heart.
Just notice.
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