John Crook: Marking the Death of a Zen Teacher

Sweeping Zen reports on the death of the Zen teacher. “Dr. John Hurrell Crook, the first dharma successor of the late Master Sheng Yen and also the founder of the Western Chan Fellowship, died peacefully at his home yesterday in Somerset, England on July 16, 2011 at age 80. Crook is also remembered as a distinguished ethologist, serving as Reader in Ethology at the Department of Psychology of the University of Bristol in the 1970s and 1980s. His death comes just one day after many ex-students, friends and colleagues gathered in Somerset to celebrate his life.”

I understood he was ill. And he was on my mind of late as I’d just met one of his associates, Simon Child, another dharma successor of the redoubtable master Sheng Yen, at a recent Dharma teacher conference, and because an old friend is currently resident at Dharma Drum in New York.

I’m sad to hear of his death.

And…

Neither a monk nor a priest, Dr Crook was one of the exemplars showing how a lay master can walk in this world.

And our dying is part of the deal…

Pure presence…

No turning away…

Reminds me of the poem by the wondrous Layman Pang.

Well versed in the Buddha way,
I go the non-Way
Without abandoning my
Ordinary person’s affairs.

The conditioned and
Name-and-form,
All are flowers in the sky.

Nameless and formless,

I leave birth-and-death.

And those of the great Leonard Cohen…