Falling Through the Ice. John D. Hiestand
Читать онлайн книгу.
to my mother. Nevertheless, she served him a traditional American meal of pot roast, which Suzuki-roshi ate up heartily. My sister, who had recently joined in with the Haiku zendo, was horrified, but I recall Suzuki-roshi being charming and witty as he politely cleaned his plate. Later, Hattie Lou asked Mom how she could have violated his vegetarianism and served him pot roast, forcing him to eat meat! Mom calmly replied, ‘In his culture it would be extremely impolite for him to refuse the meal offered to him, particularly one he had specifically asked for.’ As prosaic as this story seems now, it was a classic example of Suzuki-roshi’s (and Zen’s) emphasis on substance over form, which made an indelible impression on me at an early age.
“The seminars at Win and Helen Wagener’s home also included an annual gathering with noted author Alan Watts. Watts was the flamboyant former Episcopalian priest who had taken an interest in Zen in the 1940s, moved to San Francisco in the 1950s to join the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies, and published several influential books in his quest to make eastern thought comprehensible to western people.2 Although I met Watts several times at social occasions and dinners hosted by the Wageners, my best memory of him comes from when I was about ten. In conjunction with a seminar he was doing at the Wagener’s home, he agreed to do a seminar for children that was hosted in my very own living room at our home in Los Altos. Watts was interested not only in Zen and eastern thought, but in psychology as well. He arrived at our home and set up a flip chart on an easel and began drawing the outline of a human head, and a stick figure of another human inside the head. I was there with my brothers and sister, as well as children from some of the other families attending the seminar at the Wagener’s, and we paid rapt attention as the famous man said, ‘Now imagine this is your mind, your brain, and inside your brain is a little man who talks to you.’ Before he could get out another word on the nature of the ego and the id, my eleven year old brother Charlie piped up, ‘But isn’t there a little man inside the little man’s brain? And isn’t there another little man inside that little man’s brain?’ In spite of his brilliance, Watts was completely flummoxed by Charlie’s recursive logic, and the seminar went downhill from there. I never attended one of his adult seminars, but I understand they went much better.
“Many years later I read that Watts did not consider himself an academic philosopher but instead called himself a philosophical entertainer, a description that fits my memories of him to a tee. I can remember seeing him on a rerun of shows he did for KQED TV in San Francisco, bopping himself in the head with something that looked like a nerf bat to demonstrate how a Zen roshi would discipline a student. Sadly, even at the age of nine I could perceive he was also a womanizer and a heavy drinker. D. T. Suzuki,3 the best-known author on Zen at that time, felt Watts’s contributions to the western understanding of Zen were dubious at best, but Shunryu Suzuki defended his friend, calling him a ‘bodhisattva.’”4
“What’s a bodhisattva?”
“In Buddhism, once an individual reaches enlightenment, they are released from the cycle of samsara, the eternal cycle of suffering in this world, as well as the cycle of reincarnation. This is nirvana, the eternal state of self-less-ness, where the self is annihilated and disappears into nothingness. A bodhisattva is one who has reached enlightenment but remains in the cycles of reincarnation and samsara for the benefit of all sentient beings. If you have ever encountered someone who appears especially wise, deep and compassionate, they might be a bodhisattva.”
“So, was Watts a bodhisattva?”
“Weeeell . . . who am I to say? Suzuki-roshi thought he was. For me, he ended up being an archetypical example of pathetic human weaknesses combined with an intense striving for the sacred.
“This exposure to eastern thought and vivid characters formed the pattern of religious influence in my home from 1965 to 1971, my sophomore year in high school and the year that Shunryu Suzuki died. Watts followed Suzuki-roshi in death two years later, dying in his sleep aboard his houseboat in Sausalito, passing, as Mom said, ‘just the way he wanted to. He couldn’t have borne a long illness.’ What’s important to note at this point is that these experiences were not only formative, they were also normative. Christianity was the peculiar and exotic religion in my home, and was in fact hardly ever mentioned. I was twelve years old before I first entered a Christian church. It was a wedding at a Catholic church, and the religious portions of the service were incomprehensible to me. When the priest mentioned fidelity, Charlie whispered to me, “Does he mean High-Fidelity?” Since stereo recordings were brand new in those days, Charlie and I almost burst trying to stifle our laughter. The church, its rituals and their meanings, were as foreign to us as downtown Ulan Bator. Although in retrospect my feelings were completely unfair to the priest and his church, the Christian rituals I was exposed to seemed empty and meaningless compared to the vibrant presence of Suzuki-roshi and his earnest and energetic students. This is even more ironic considering I never practiced zazen as a child, teenager or young adult. Nevertheless, my first introduction to religion was one in which the encounter with the Divine was mystical and attained through contemplative practice, rather than an encounter through catechism and scripture filtered by doctrine.”
1. The full text of my mother’s memories can be found online (Chadwick, “Haiku Zendo”) in an unpublished history of Haiku Zendo in Los Altos, compiled by David Chadwick and originally edited by my mother, Barbara Hiestand.
2. Probably Watts’s most famous book is The Way of Zen, originally published in 1957 and now available through Vintage Spiritual Classics.
3. David Chadwick recalls in his biography of Shunryu Suzuki: “When confused with D. T. Suzuki, Shunryu Suzuki would say, ‘No, he’s the big Suzuki, I’m the little Suzuki.’” (Chadwick, Crooked Cucumber, 2).
4. Chadwick, Crooked Cucumber, 397.
Chapter 2: Nature
There is not a more scenic spot in the world than the Columbia Gorge, particularly when the sun is shining and the winds are calm. Several rivers and creeks tumble down through the southern cliffs to create little waterfalls that start by meandering through the moss-laden trees at the top of the precipice before falling down to raucously join the Columbia. These seemed to build up in energy as we travelled east from Troutdale until we passed by Multnomah Falls, a much larger spray of cascading water that justifiably attracted a large swathe of tourists. From there we passed through the little towns of Cascade Locks and Hood River on the winding highway that clung precariously to the narrow strip of land between the towering cliffs and the broad river. Across the wide river to the north were the rolling hills that constituted the southern border of Washington State. In contrast to the Oregon side, these were gentle hills that contained farms and even a few vineyards. The hills were green in early June, though I knew from rainy experience they would probably still be green in September.
About half way through the journey along the gorge is the peculiarly named town The Dalles. It was about here that Alan and I seemed to exhaust the topic of Zen for a little while at least, and we continued east through the gorge in a comfortable silence. Gradually the forests and steep cliffs on the Oregon side gave way to more gently rolling hills, though the interstate still followed closely to the course of the river, not quite ready yet for the leap upward into the wheat fields of eastern Oregon. I was reminded, as I always was when reaching this part of the gorge, of the fields and farms in California’s Central Valley, which I had driven through innumerable times as a child. I had realized long ago that I much preferred mountains and forests to fields and plains, but there nevertheless is a subtle and nuanced beauty in the grass and wheat, whether encountered in the green Oregon June or the golden California September.
Finally, almost two hundred