Meeting My Zen Teacher

I just cut the following from a sermon I’ll be delivering in a couple of weeks. I realized while I’ve told this story before, this was a fairly succinct version and perhaps worth putting here. This all took place in the mid 1980s…

After quite a detour I’d returned to Zen practice, and had built up a pretty steady discipline. What I lacked, however, was a spiritual director. And as an old Zen hand I could tell I was drifting, needed that outside human voice of experience, vastly more than the ones whispering in the back of my head.

I was torn in two directions.

On the one hand I’d been introduced to koan introspection practice, a particular kind of Zen discipline by a former student of the Korean master Seung Sahn. On the other I was really attracted to the lay teacher and social justice activist Robert Aitken.

I decided to write Aitken Roshi a letter. The day I sent the letter off I was at the bookshop where I was working when a couple, a man and a woman came in. They were around my age. Nice looking, but nothing I would have otherwise remembered, except.

The man asked if we had anything interesting in Orientalia? I said, why yes, we have a lovely little Lafcadeo Hearn ghost story with colored plates. He asked to see it. I unlocked the collectible’s case and pulled it out. It really was nice. He looked at it and asked how much? I replied a hundred bucks (this is in mid nineteen eighties dollars). He said he would take it. As I was wrapping the book up I asked if he was purchasing it for himself? He said no, it was a gift for his teacher. I asked teacher of what? He said Zen. I said, oh, and I asked who? He said Robert Aitken.

Well, we had lunch the next day at a greasy Chinese restaurant a few doors from the bookstore, when I learned he had not long before become the first person Aitken Roshi had authorized as a Zen teacher. His name was John Tarrant. Well, it still is…

As we talked I saw John was brilliant and witty. His command of Buddhist theory and particularly the Zen ways was nearly equaled by his interest in poetry and literature. And he was just finishing a doctorate in psychology. Frankly, he was also a bit on the young side for my idea of a Zen teacher, a year younger than I. And more, he had a dangerous air about him. I just wasn’t sure…

Now, as things happened the master Seung Sahn was going to be in the area leading a seven day meditation retreat. So I signed up. It was great. I really liked him. And very important for me, we clicked on the koan thing.

But, you know, all week long we ate kimchi for breakfast. Kimchi is a hot pickled cabbage dish. And, I like it. But, not for breakfast, and not for breakfast for seven days running. This was a Zen community that had been established in the west for twenty years. It was, in my opinion, high time they’d adapted a bit more to Western culture in things that had nothing to do with Zen practice.

As soon as the retreat was over I visited with John and gave him a box of incense, the traditional sign of asking someone to be your Zen teacher.

Little did I know I was signing on for Mr Toad’s wild ride…