How Very Alone He Seemed

Yesterday's Dharma talk included a number of quotes from Suzuki Roshi's own Dharma talks in 1969 soon after Tassajara Zen Mountain Center came to be. 

A film was made by KQED in 1968, shortly after the establishment of the Zen Mountain Center monastery at Tassajara Hot Springs above Big Sur that shows Suzuki Roshi and Richard Baker at both Sokoji Temple in San Francisco and at Tassajara as well as various students and supporters talking about Zen in America. 

The film seems primitive by today's standards. It appears to have been shot on Super 8 film (both silent and sound) then transferred to 16mm and overdubbed. The camera work is sometimes shaky and out of focus, as amateur film making tended to be in those days. Yet there's an honesty about it that is both charming and fascinating to students like me whose contact with Suzuki Roshi and Richard Baker was physically slight (I'm still sure I never met either of them in person, and yet when I see them in this film or in other clips, I feel as if I must have met them at some point in my journey) but spiritually powerful.

And one thing I notice is that despite being with Richard Baker and Zen students and supporters throughout his sojourn in America, Suzuki Roshi seems always so very much alone. He's an exotic and he seems to know it. He's here to transmit the Dharma and Zen from Japan to the small-ish circle of adherents he was able to attract and keep interested in something new -- as Zen was still very new in the United States, even up to 1971 and Roshi's death from cancer.

He brought Zen from Japan but adapted it to the US and particularly to San Francisco as it was during the young people's cultural transition from the Beats to the Hippies. I don't want to say that Zen led the way, but maybe it did. What I notice though is that Suzuki Roshi wasn't concerned with that so much as he was with communicating the essence of Zen practice -- as he was trained for and knew it in Japan before, during and after WWII -- to a new audience and in forming a community to continue the practice indefinitely.

I've pointed out that I came to Zen when I was a teenager through the novels of Jack Kerouac and an innate curiosity about something I knew nothing of, the way of Japan and Buddhism. Just curious, that's all, and yet I found so many connections, superficial and very deep, between my being and those of Zen practitioners like Suzuki Roshi and Richard Baker -- without whom I would not "know" Zen today. (There's nothing to know, so I don't "know" Zen; it's merely a convenient figure of speech...)

Zen was never popular in Japan, and in an overall sense, it's not popular in the United States either. It's a "specialty practice," indeed, often an elite practice, something done by those who cannot find satisfaction of their spiritual interests and needs in other forms of Buddhism or religion. Or like me, it's practiced by those who fell into it at some point in their lives, early or late, learned to practice and never stopped. 

Suzuki Roshi was the catalyst and early teacher, called "Roshi" to his laughter, but in the Zen sense, a sensei. Teacher. 

There's something so simple and straightforward about his presentation, something you don't often see in today's Zen -- which seems to me to be something else, not the Zen Suzuki Roshi and a few others brought to the US from Japan. 

I can't say exactly what it is -- or was. I don't know. Zen-not-Zen-no-Zen.

Cognitive dissonance!

I do recommend Suzuki Roshi's early Dharma talks, and the collection of some of those talks in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Pretty much all of it is available online, easily accessible, and for me at any rate, compelling. 

How very alone he seemed. And yet at root, there is no distinction, separation, or "aloneness."