The Need to Understand...

I watched a biggish part of the funeral ceremonies and cremation of Thich Nhat Hanh in Hue, Vietnam, (what meaning that has for someone like me) over the Plum Village livestream, and yes, it was moving. The turnout to honor him was amazing, in the tens of thousands, and the ceremonies themselves harked back to a prior age in Vietnam, before the wars that destroyed so much of the country and its people. What once there was will never be again, but still...

I found that so many people were seeking to "understand" the man and his writing. Understand as in "take possession of..." Having ownership over. Now I understand that desire; I shared it myself for many years, and then like with so many other things, I let go of it. No, I don't need to understand, and I don't need to own or possess the thinking and/or spirit of fine people like Thich Nhat Hanh. Others do.

When I was chatting with my Dharma teacher during sesshin, I found that I couldn't say his name quite right. It kept coming out "Trick Not Han..." I couldn't explain it, and truthfully, I was embarrassed, as my Dharma teacher was befriended by him at one of his retreats at Plum Village, and she has always considered him her Root Teacher. So here I come, can't even say his name right, oh well.

I go back before his advent in the US, not long before, but earlier in the course of Zen in America. And we talked about that a bit. About Suzuki Roshi. Richard Baker. SFZC before Tassajara and before Green Gulch. Before even the City Temple. 

Before all the money and fame and... controversy. Well no. There was controversy at Sokoji from the moment Suzuki Roshi started attracting young American white folks (mostly male initially) to Zen study and practice. Sokoji was primarily a Japanese-American (Issei and Nissei) Buddhist temple -- open to all of course, but still -- serving a reconstituted post-war Japanese-American community in San Francisco when Suzuki Roshi (not yet a roshi at that point) arrived from Japan in 1958 or so, at the height of the beatnik era, to lead the small but devoted congregation.

The attraction of Zen and Buddhism to the Beats was already well established thanks to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and the novels of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac among others.

I think Snyder was in Japan in the late fifties studying at one of the Rinzai Zen temples where he had taken vows as a monk. I think he learned and spoke Japanese before he left for Japan. Kerouac writes poignantly about Snyder's departure in The Dharma Bums. Snyder's influence, in other words, was indirect at the time Suzuki Roshi established himself in San Francisco. But he'd already spurred many others to study and practice. 

Kerouac certainly influenced me in the mid-sixties when I read three of his novels: The Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, and Big Sur. Snyder's influence at that time was non-existent on me; I tried to get into Ginsberg, but it was a no-go. His poetry from Howl and beyond was raved over, but to me, there was nothing there. Perhaps that was the point.

Kerouac on the other hand was deep and rich and he wrote like I thought. His travels took him to many places I had been and knew well. I would only much later read On the Road, and I would discover how closely our travels paralleled one another all over the country. It's kind of eerie. And today we live in a little rural area of New Mexico that I'm all but certain he and Neal Cassidy not only visited but stayed in for a while during one of their cross-country treks.

I don't call Kerouac a Root Teacher; he's more like a door-opener which can be just as powerful. Without that open door, I'm not at all sure I would have discovered what's on the other side.

Suzuki Roshi, though, is still a very strong Root Teaching influence on me. Richard Baker -- his right hand in San Francisco -- had a different kind of influence, actually more like Kerouac's as a door opener. Baker Roshi, as he's called now, acted as a guide and encourager. Give it a try. Keep going. 

I keep thinking that I met them both, sometime after 1965, but realistically, I couldn't have. Somehow, though, I feel there must have been some kind of face-to-face contact or contact with their image. 

And thinking back, it was probably at the Midnight Movies in the later '60s where I'll bet I saw a number of Suzuki Roshi's lectures on film. Baker-Roshi was there, so he was probably in the films, too. And one of the strongest recollections I have is of the appearance of the interior of the Sokoji Temple while zazen was taking place. I have since seen it on film (a YouTube of a KQED documentary of San Francisco Zen Center made, I believe, in 1968) and it is exactly as I remember it. Ergo, I likely saw that film, and it was most probably at the Midnight Movies rather than on television as I wasn't living in the Bay Area and didn't have access to KQED programming.

But I can't be sure.

Which is all right. None of it really matters all that much, does it? If my memory is faulty, so be it. 😉

We don't really have to understand so much, do we? We don't have to have possession. Ownership. 

Let it be just out of reach.