Why I Stayed Away From the San Francisco Zen Center When I Lived In The City

I lived in the city of San Francisco for a year or so in the mid 1970s. The Hippie era had passed, of course, but the Counterculture was still very much underway. San Francisco was still providing the heartbeat of many alternative ways of life, most of which proved to be dead ends, quite literally in some cases such as the People's Temple mass suicide in Guyana. That happened after I departed San Francisco for the country at large, but Jim Jones and his operation on Geary were very much apparent and in the news when I lived there. 

As was the San Francisco Zen Center on Post, no Bush, or was it Page (I think! Man, I lose track of locations over the years...) where I was invited to attend zazen many times but never did. No. I stayed away.

Here's the thing. Some of the people I was working with had attended zazen at the Sokoji Temple and had moved with Suzuki Roshi to the Page Street facility in the later '60s. Zen was popular among a certain set of artists and actors and such -- as it still is. 

I'd been practicing on my own for oh, a decade or more, a practice I began after getting in touch with the San Francisco Zen Center when I was a teenager, possibly no more than 15. I forget the exact year, it was either 1965 or '66 -- or in a partial memory as early as 1964. The literature and instruction I received was enough to start me on a lifetime Zen path, but because I was not in San Francisco at the time and could not be and there was no nearby Zen sangha become part of, I was essentially a solitary Zen practitioner in the wilderness and I became accustomed to that state. "The Buddha is within you; the Dharma is you; the sangha is among whomever you find along the Dharma Path."

By the time I lived in San Francisco, the Zen Center had become fashionable. In fact, it was so fashionable that people competed for spots in the zendo in hopes of brushing knees and elbows with some of its famous practitioners. This grated on me, rubbed me very much the wrong way. What was the point of sitting zazen among a crowd whose minds were taken up with fame and notoriety. Was this any better than the jostling at the People's Temple or the ever-passing scene at Grace Cathedral? (Note: a friend from my time in San Francisco got AIDS and died and his ashes are interred at Grace Cathedral I learned years later...)

I blamed Richard Baker for the fame-seeking that seemed to overwhelm the San Francisco Zen Center. He had been the one I corresponded with early on. He took over when Suzuki Roshi died in 1971, but he'd been kind of the shaper of the Zen Center as an institution from well before that, and his influence is still strong -- which I don't judge as either good or bad, but it is an influence that shapes the SFZC and many others in this country and elsewhere -- toward an appeal to the rich, famous, renowned, politically powerful and those prominent in the arts and academics. 

That's not in and of itself a bad thing, but when it becomes the totality or near totality of the focus of the institution, it warps it, I think, in ways that do it no service in a Buddhist context and form barriers to the bodhisattva way of life for practitioners. 

I struggle with this a bit in the context of my current Zen practice and setting. The Zen Center I'm associated with is a legacy of Richard Baker, quite directly in fact. He founded a sangha at the facility in the '80s and eventually gave the facility, lock, stock, and barrel, to the current roshi in the '90s when he set out on a different quest. 

That legacy is more than just buildings -- though they are very important to the current sangha. I carry some of that legacy with me, but it is very different because it is earlier, much earlier in origin, more closely aligned to Suzuki Roshi who I keep saying I never met, nor did I ever meet Richard Baker, yet when I see and hear film and video and audio recordings of them, I recognize them immediately, and even the zendo at Sokoji -- the earliest Center in San Francisco -- is instantly familiar. I don't know where these memories come from. I attribute them to having seen films of Suzuki and Baker at the Midnight Movies in the later '60s. On the other hand, maybe I did visit Sokoji and maybe I did meet them somewhere, sometime, and I've just lost track.

This is somewhat similar to my memories of meeting Jerry Rubin in San Francisco in the '60s. I'm more certain of those meetings, and where and when they took place and why, but sometimes I wonder: are they false memories? Did it really happen?

Was I really at the Oakland Induction Center in October of 1967 during the Moratorium police riots? As a potential inductee? Yes, I'm certain I was, and there is film of me there and yet... maybe it's all an illusion... 

Which ultimately is the foundation of Buddhist enlightenment. It is all an Illusion, you see? Memories are real and false at the same time. "Reality" is real and false at the same time.

I didn't want to be part of the fame-seeking at the San Francisco Zen Center in the '70s. Even if I had kept to myself, there wasn't a way I could see to avoid it while in the company of others there. So. I didn't take up the invitations, I didn't go, and I continued practicing on my own in the apartment on Geary with the wonderful garden outside the living room bay windows. It was to me very much a Zen garden.

Where something happened. 

I've described it, I think, in other posts, and I went into considerable detail about "what happened" with one of the Zen teachers I deal with these days. The Void. I entered the Void while sitting zazen in my apartment on Geary one day. I wasn't entirely sure what it was, and after a time, I could not not enter it when sitting zazen. So I stopped regular practice. 

I described "what happened" and I also described an incident in San Francisco that took place while not sitting zazen, an incident that came back in brilliant technicolor detail when I was late for a morning sit during Spring Practice. The Zen teacher I described this incident to said, "You know what? That sounds like you were dreaming." Thinking back about it, it was very much like a dream. Yet the memory of it -- after sitting zazen and entering the Void for perhaps the first time that day in 1970-something in San Francisco -- is crystal clear, even now, and I am certain it "happened", but on what plane of existence? 

Was it a dream? Is it all a dream? Was my avoidance of attending zazen at the San Francisco Zen Center justified or even necessary? Or did it even "happen?" But the zendo at the Page Street Center is not at all familiar to me, whereas the Sokoji zendo very much is. So what happened? Or did anything?

Was I there or was I not there? Or both or neither?

Yes.

San Francisco

Coit Tower Mural, c. 1936

The last time I was in San Francisco, only a year or so ago, to see Asleep At The Wheel at the Herbst, I thought that it would be the last time, for sure. I hadn't been there in quite a while, there being no earthly reason to go any more than I typically go to downtown Sacramento unless on duty. But I'm in San Francisco today and will be spending the night because it turns out that Ray Davies of the Kinks is playing the Fillmore, and well... there's a story.

There's a whole novel, if you want to get into it.

Yes, I was at the Fillmore for the Kinks/Taj Mahal, Sha-na-na concert on one of those dates November 27-30, 1969; it was quite something, and I can almost remember it. Well, you know how the old saying goes, "If you can remember the '60's, you weren't really there." I wonder if I would remember as much as I do (in bits and pieces to be sure) if it weren't for the movies and television programs that from time to time provide documentation of the era.

I came across a box the other day as I was packing stuff up for the move to New Mexico. It was full of surprising stuff: letters I'd written, a hotel brochure from San Francisco, some projects I'd done in college, etc; all from the 1960's, some of it as early as 1966 or possibly even before that. I barely recognized my own handwriting (it was much neater then!), I had no idea exactly when I'd picked up the hotel brochure and stationery but I found a San Francisco travel brochure dated 1973, and a letter written on hotel stationery dated "Saturday" -- referring to the Kinks at Winterland. I sort of remember that concert as well; it was where I was introduced to Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. Oh. Of course. Who could forget.

There's a story about them, too; not quite a novel though, say a novella.

At any rate.

So off we go to visit Baghdad by the Bay at least one more time.

Like many others, I have mixed feelings about San Francisco. From a tourist perspective, there's practically no city better, but I'd rather not live there. It's foggy and cold and damp and windy. All. The. Time. The hills are monstrous if you're on foot; they can be more than a challenge if you're driving, too. Traffic is often horrendous. I remember a time when it took me over five hours just to get on the Bay Bridge to leave town one Friday evening after I'd conducted a training at the Civic Center. There wasn't a wreck. It was just extremely heavy traffic. This was during the dot.com bubble, and Bay Area traffic in general was nearly impossible practically  everywhere nearly all the time. One reason I was leaving town rather than spending the night was that it was almost impossible to get a hotel room anywhere in the Bay Area as well. (Grouse, grouse, complain, complain. But the Money!) There are earthquakes, too, you know! Sometimes bad ones.

Ah but! The galleries, the museums, the parks -- Golden Gate Park remains my all-time favorite urban park -- the beaches (brrrr!), the views from practically anywhere; gasp inducing. The Marina, the Palace of Fine Arts, the Presidio, the Bridges; Marin. The flowers... there used to be a lot more flowers. There were flower stands everywhere, flowers seemed to be blooming everywhere too. Now there are not so many, nor are they "everywhere."

The City (we always capitalize it) used to be very dirty; trash in the streets and on the sidewalks was almost as common as flowers. It was like no one ever cleaned up, and those who tried found themselves defeated in short order. I found some pictures of San Francisco street scenes taken in the 1850's, and it was like that then, too. So I figured all the trash in the streets was a historic/cultural thing, but then there was a big campaign to clean up when Willie Brown was mayor, and by and bye, it worked. I wouldn't say San Francisco is as clean as Seattle (Seattle is really too clean for an American city), but it is much, much cleaner than, for example, when I lived there in the mid-70's.

I don't care for Muni, and I still won't ride the 38 Geary bus, but the cable cars are fun and they can get you where you need to go. A variety of old fashioned street cars now run on Market Street, and that's a good thing. I'm old enough to remember when they still had streetcars in downtown Los Angeles, and while I can only remember riding them once or maybe twice, I was very fond of streetcars when I was little. So it's nice to see the old ones on Market Street in San Francisco rattling and careening along.

We had a one bedroom apartment on Geary St. between Leavenworth and Hyde. Neighbors called it "Lower Nob Hill," we called it "The Tenderloin." It was an urban neighborhood, not that rough, but certainly not deluxe and very convenient to my work and practically everything we needed. We paid $225 a month rent, which we thought was outrageous, and we had to park the car at a garage over on O'Farrell St. for an additional $45 or $50 a month. Well. I saw a listing last year for a one bedroom apartment in the building where we lived in the mid-'70's. It actually looked just like our apartment -- it was in the back of the building with a view of a beautiful garden where we could sit on nice days somewhat protected from the wind. The kitchen and bath had been upgraded, so there was that. The rent was $2450, if I recall correctly. Parking at the garage on O'Farrell is running about $300 a month these days.

We didn't like paying as much as we did to live in San Francisco back in the day, but we could afford it.  I wasn't making a lot of money by any means, but it was enough to get by -- on one salary.

It would take two "median American" salaries to approximate our living standards in San Francisco in the 1970's -- standards we could maintain on what was then considered one relatively low single salary. This gives an idea of how far workers' compensation has fallen since then and how much costs have increased.

As the number of employed Americans went up from the 1970's onward -- thanks in part to the pressure of a lot of liberation movements -- the value of their labor, strangely -- or maybe not so strangely -- went down. Workers today, if they can stay employed at all, are earning about half on average what they should be making based on productivity and comparable living standards. Of course there are tens of millions of unemployed -- forcing down wages and benefits for those who remain employed. Millions more Americans are forced into poverty every year which further erodes the living standards of everyone else -- except the 1%.

For their part, they've been happy to help themselves to all the profits of the last few decades. How much longer they'll be able to ride on the backs of everyone else is a question, though, isn't it?

Meanwhile... there's some geezer performing at the Fillmore...