In his list of essential rules for writers, Jack Kerouac wrote: “Be submissive to everything, open, listening.” I could easily have missed who Katagiri was if I hadn’t put myself in a position to go back over and over again. I understood that I was not “submissive to everything,” and that I often missed something good because of my ignorance, so I would persist at something for a long while until I tasted it. It was hard for me to see something outside myself, but I had a glimpse of my basic ignorant sleepiness and if I sensed some essential rightness I would continue even though I didn’t get it right away. I knew, like steel striking a flint over and over again, eventually something in me would be ignited, and I had a flash understanding of something real.
This was my attitude toward literature, too. If a play, poem, novel was centuries old, and I was bored reading it, I did not trust my boredom and think, this writing is no good. I figured that if it had managed to last this long, it had something worth lasting. I’d wait until I either connected with it or a teacher helped shine some light on it. That’s why a teacher is so important. A teacher can hold up a seeming piece of coal and point out the diamond.
There was a teacher, George Doskow, at St. John’s Graduate Institute in Santa Fe, who opened Homer’s Iliad for me one evening. I had been laboring alone to read it in my little cubicle of a dorm room. The verses bounced off my mind. I couldn’t absorb them. Who cared about Achilles? He had nothing to do with me. I never fought a battle or knew a Trojan—who were they anyway? Then suddenly on a Wednesday night in a seminar class, with Doskow’s help, I saw the wild heroism of Achilles at the moment just before he is about to go into battle. His best friend has just been killed by Hector, a Trojan, and Achilles breaks out of his frozen refusal to fight. In class I began to see the whole thing, the power and the pain, the huge sky behind him—he stands on a hill, I’m with him, I feel an ancient, wild glory as he turns from his stubborn feud with Agamemnon over the slave girl. That turning became forceful, exciting, because Doskow helped me to see it. The Iliad, that old book, became alive for me that night with real human emotion, with endurance and suffering. There was no distance anymore between me and the Greeks, that culture over there in Europe that touched the Mediterranean, a place I had never been, many centuries before I was alive on this earth. I remember that moment even now. Yes, I thought, yes. This story came thundering down to me through the ages. Now it was mine.
There at St. John’s I began to trust my mind. We read only original texts in translation, no criticism or comments by scholars. We tried to meet directly the minds of those old writers who were the foundation of Western civilization. I had not yet begun to write; I had day-dreamed through college, and when I graduated, suddenly I woke up. I wanted to take an active part in my education, to learn something. During my four years as an undergraduate, I was still under the lethargic spell of my family. My father paid all the bills for me while I was in Washington; I paid my own way at St. John’s.
Going to St. John’s was also how I discovered New Mexico. When I first arrived in Albuquerque and looked out the airplane window, I saw those bald rugged Sandia Mountains casting a pink haze against that blue sky and I thought I had landed on another planet. I remember taking a shuttle to Santa Fe and being dropped off at the foot of Monte Sol. I was holding two suitcases, one in each hand, and a man in a green cap, his legs stretched out in front of him, was sitting on a bench.
“Is it always like this?” I asked him.
“Like what?” he said.
I turned all around, my mouth hanging open, and then I looked directly up overhead at a raven circling above me. “Is it always this clear, this big?”
“Oh, that,” he said casually. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
I put down my suitcases and stood there for a long time, looking, being quiet, digesting a whole new vision of earth and of the color blue for sky.
I connected with Socrates at St. John’s, too. But this time it was without a teacher. I met him in my small dorm room one late night when I was reading Phaedrus over and over again. Finally, something from the dim and distant past penetrated me, and I felt Socrates enter my room. I felt his humanness, his wisdom. My heart was touched, almost as if a mist had wafted in from under my dorm room door, and I became saturated with light. I forgot all the discourses I didn’t understand. I felt the soul of Socrates. That was all I needed. I accepted him into my life. He was no longer foreign, distant, classical. He was a real human being who had lived. There was no dichotomy, struggle, conflict between him and me anymore. After that I just received his work.
I also struggled with Immanuel Kant, The Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics—oh, was he difficult, just the title was enough to stump you. One day in class we realized his theory wasn’t sound: It had a chink, a crack, it was more something he wished for humanity than a solid thought—and I laughed out loud, “My god! Manny, you’re just a dreamer after all.” My kind heart opened to him then. I don’t think I ever read Kant again, but he and I had communicated for a moment.
Then one day a tutor (we called all the teachers “tutors,” no one had a special rank) came late for evening class because, as he explained, “My wife is out of town, so I had to go out for dinner.” Everything exploded for me with that statement. St. John’s had taught me well the steps of logic—the year before I had put Darwin’s theories into Euclidian theorems for my science thesis—and I leaped at the misplaced logic of my tutor’s statement. “What did your wife’s being out of town have to do with you filling your belly? Are you making the absolute statement that only your wife can cook? That is faulty reasoning. You, too, can cook!” Feminism burned in me from that moment on. Before that I’d read Sexual Politics, by Kate Millett, and The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, but now I felt sexism viscerally. In my class, a place where we supposedly examined propositions, this teacher (it was not Doskow) threw out a faulty one, “Only wives can cook,” and I picked it up in my body and raged.
The rest of the semester I didn’t care about the classics. I was busy listening for any false move one of the tutors might make: Calling humankind “mankind,” and assuming that the word “mankind” included me, or saying “he” and forgetting “she.” I knew I made the tutors nervous. Suddenly the attention had shifted from Aristotle to them, and I wanted to know where the women were in Western civilization. These male authors could no longer speak for me. Where were the women, and how come there were all male tutors? My friendships with Homer, Manny, and Socrates aside, I wanted to read women. Soon after I graduated with a master’s degree, certifying my knowledge of “Western mind,” I had that opening in front of that sixth-grade class. When I found meditation, the West took a landslide, fell off the earth for me. It was then that I realized they also forgot to mention Eastern culture at St. John’s. Also African-American culture, Native American, Hispanic.
All my classics textbooks somehow ended up on my family’s bookshelf in the TV room. My family mostly read newspapers, so it didn’t matter what was on the bookshelf. When my parents retired to Florida, Descartes, Plato, Kant, Aristotle went with them and now sit unread below the ceiling fan, while the palm and hibiscus trees wave slowly outside the windows. My family probably has the finest collection of the classics in their entire condo complex.
Peter, a man I had met in Boulder before I moved to Minnesota, told me that in the late sixties he’d just gotten out of jail for being a heroin addict and was living in San Francisco on Page Street, just across from the San Francisco Zen Center. “One morning,” he said, “I stepped out of my door and I saw Katagiri walking down the street. I didn’t know his name then, but I knew he was from Zen Center; he was wearing those black robes. I just saw his back, then he turned the corner. I never saw a back that straight before. I watched it. I stood there a moment after I could no longer see it. Then I crossed the street, went in, and asked them to teach me how to sit. I’ve been doing it ever since. It was that back.” And he shook his head.
Someone was
teaching with his back? This was very different from St. John’s. The presence of someone’s back inspired someone else to become a meditation student? Yes. Zen is a body practice. It is taught through the body—you sit down in the zazen position and shut up—and your body is present whether your mind is or not. The teachings are transmitted through your body. Zen comes from Japanese culture. In Japan you don’t ask questions: You learn by following an example, by imitating someone ahead of you. You keep quiet and pay attention and the learning penetrates your whole life, seeps into all your pores. Zen is not taught the way most of America’s schools teach, from the neck up.
Here is something I like very much from the Shobogenzo, Dogen’s lifework. Dogen is Japan’s foremost religious thinker and philosopher.
MOUNTAINS AND WATERS SUTRA
There are mountains hidden in treasures. There are mountains hidden in swamps. There are mountains hidden in the sky. There are mountains hidden in mountains. There are mountains hidden in hiddenness. This is complete understanding.
An ancient buddha said, “Mountains are mountains, waters are waters.” These words do not mean mountains are mountains; they mean mountains are mountains.
Therefore investigate mountains thoroughly.
When you investigate mountains thoroughly, this is the work of the mountains.
Such mountains and waters of themselves become wise persons and sages.
(translated Arnold Kotler and Kazuaki Tanahashi,
in Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen,
North Point Press, 1985)
What? “These words do not mean mountains are mountains; they mean mountains are mountains.” We aren’t going to understand this with our brains. The moment we hear it, we think, yes, yes, I’ve got it, and then it fades. The only way to understand it is with our whole body, to enter it, live it.
There are koans in Zen that are actually meant to trick the mind, to crack it open, to break it from its habitual way of understanding the world. We’ve all heard them: What is the sound of one hand clapping? What is your original face before you were born? a Zen master might ask you. These cannot be answered in some usual way, because the question is not usual. One person might answer, “A dog was my original face,” and have passed the koan, and another person might say, “A dog,” and the roshi would tell him to go sit some more. One person might pick up a stick and throw it into the air and pass the same koan that another person who barks like a dog fails. But this “passing” of a koan does not mean, “Great, I passed third grade. I’m on to fourth.” There’s no getting ahead. To pass a koan is to receive another koan, is to practice being in the present moment, to settle into it, to deepen your experience of here and now.
It is the presence of our minds when we answer the koan that matters, and our minds are not just our brains trying to figure out the right answer, our minds are all of us: our muscles, teeth, past, present, future, feet, stars, and earth. One with all of it. Then any way we respond is the answer. And answers and questions melt away. Dissolve. Just you. Here. And who are you? When we stop, really stop, who knows? I can tell you I’m Natalie. I can tell you all sorts of things about myself. That is not me, here, now. Me, here, now, I can’t catch. Here, now, I’m nothing.
This Zen business from Japan is a very different way of being taught from the way Mr. Doskow, or even my beloved Mr. Clemente or Mr. Gates taught. My formal education in school and in society was to build me up, to teach me about culture, to give me a past, hopes for the future, to show me how to add ten and two dollars together to see if I have enough money to purchase a baseball bat. It was to give me identity, solidarity, meaning. Death, that obliteration we all must face, was never mentioned; sickness was not addressed.
Zen teaching tears our identity down, but it is not mean. It’s tough. It asks us to slow down and examine who we are. Who is that “I” we walk around with, have developed, that has a body capable of contracting disease and is impermanent?
This, too, is helpful for writing. A writer needs to know death is at her back; otherwise, the writing becomes brittle, full of fear. Acceptance of death informs our writing with a much larger dimension. It becomes panoramic, encompassing everything. This does not mean we have to mention death by name all the time in our writing; we just have to know it exists in our bodies. Then that knowledge will naturally be transmitted in our work. It will make our work glow and be truly alive.
A friend who is a visual artist gave her aunt a drawing she did of columbines. Her aunt hung it in her bedroom, and during long hours of sickness—she was undergoing treatment for cancer—she would look at the pen and pencil drawing.
Susan, my friend, visited her a month later. Her aunt looked up from her bed. “You know, Susan, there’s something wrong with those flowers. They’re pretty, but they look like they’re going to live forever. They’re frozen. They’re not real enough.”
The columbines didn’t have the knowledge of death, that fact of a flower’s brief life that makes it all the more beautiful. I know Susan. She has trouble keeping still. She is a restless person. Being still in drawing, writing, or meditation is what allows our life to drop down to its bottom line—so we touch nothing, touch death as we draw, and our drawing can be filled with life.
Peter, the man who saw Roshi’s back, also said to me, “I’d go study with Katagiri up in Minnesota, but I can’t stand the cold.”
The Minnesota cold. I moved to Minnesota in late spring and had a full humid green summer to enjoy. Everyone talked about the winter, but I couldn’t believe it could be that bad. They must be exaggerating, I thought, but it got colder and colder until on December second it hit twenty below and continued that way. It rarely went above zero. Every snow that fell stayed and created another crusty layer not to melt until spring, and spring didn’t come until late April. We had to plug our car in to keep the motor oil warm. There were mornings when they announced over the radio, “Don’t go out today if you can help it. Your skin, upon exposure, will freeze instantly.” They advised you to keep rations in your car, in case it broke down. “Leaving your car to look for help could result in death.”
My first winter I was in amazed shock, almost fascinated. My Volkswagen’s heating system was like a mosquito bite on an elephant. I frantically bought wool socks, a down jacket, mittens as big as pumpkins. I listened for school closings even morning before I went out—I had landed a job in South Minneapolis, teaching remedial reading, and hoped for a day’s reprieve from our iced garage. I was always freezing in the car and holding an ice scraper in my right hand: The car’s defrost system was defenseless in this cold.
How did Katagiri end up here in this northern land of Lutherans and Scandinavians? In the mid-sixties, Katagiri was appointed by his Soto Zen sect, from the headquarters in Tokyo, to serve a Japanese-American Zen temple in Los Angeles for two years. From there he went to a similar temple in San Francisco, and then to the San Francisco Zen Center, serving as assistant to the much-loved Suzuki Roshi. The San Francisco Zen community was fueled by the open, idealistic earnest sixties generation. Katagiri was both impressed and dismayed by these free-wheeling, eager American hippies turned Zen students. Zen in Japan had become overly ritualized, bureaucratic, lacking in heart and sincere devotion. It had long since become almost a state religion. Here in America, the students were excited by Zen, full of energy, willing to learn. Katagiri enjoyed their openheartedness. He was young, thirty-five years old. At the beginning, Roshi’s wife Tomoe and their young son, Yasuhiko, were still in Japan. He was lonesome for them and the English language did not come easily to him. Yet, I am told, he was full of energy, and taught all the new students how to sit.
Ed Brown, author of The Tassajara Bread Book and Tassajara Cooking and longtime Zen practitioner, told me that Katagiri taught him how to sit in the early days. Ed came into the Bush Street zendo with a friend, and after formal sitting, Suzuki asked Katagiri, “Will you please give those two instruction,” and Katagiri showed them ho
w to cross their legs and place their hands, how to breathe, and how to hold their heads with chins tucked in.
“While you are sitting, many things will happen,” he said, nodding. Long pause and a chuckle. “Don’t pay any attention to that. Stay with your breath. Just continue to sit.”
One day Suzuki Roshi and Katagiri were in a plane flying from New York to California. Katagiri told me that in the airport in Detroit, where they had to change planes, two businessmen in suits kept staring at them in their black robes. Finally, one of them came over.
“My friend here says you’re Korean, but I think you’re Japanese. Could you tell us which you are?”
Suzuki looked up and smiled. “We’re Americans,” he said. Katagiri giggled.
When they were back in the plane, flying over the Iowa corn fields, Suzuki, who was sitting next to the window, motioned for Katagiri to lean over and look out. “This is where the Americans are,” Suzuki said, pointing down, and they both nodded.
Katagiri longed to be there, where the Americans were. He longed for the workers to come and practice meditation after work, leaving their lunch pails and shoes by the door, bowing, and sitting zazen. After several years, he was growing tired of the San Francisco hippies. He wanted to teach ordinary people, farmers, mechanics, waitresses, construction workers, how to meditate. After all, he was an immigrant. He, too, had ideas about America. Only last month, taking a cab in New York City, did I appreciate the vast innocence of a foreigner. My cab driver was from Bangladesh, he told me. I was stunned by the cultural distance he must have traveled to be a taxi driver in Manhattan.
“Where you going?” he asked, when I said I wanted to go to La Guardia.
“To New Mexico,” I said.
“Mexico!”