This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Dharmette: Stories (5 of 5) Zen and Beyond

Hello and welcome to this fifth talk where I'm telling stories from my practice life, with the hope that somehow my little practice stories maybe touch something in you and encourage you in your practice, trusting the engagement in this spiritual life.

I was ordained at San Francisco Zen Center in January of 1982 and went back to Tassajara^[3], the Zen monastery, for another nine months. During that time, a few things happened that were interesting for me.

During the summer, they have a four-to-five-month period called the guest season. In the wintertime, it's an intensive monastic life for six months, and then there are about four and a half or five months for the guest season. People came to be guests; it was a little bit like a resort to get a taste of Zen life, but they didn't have to meditate. They could just be there. There were nice meals, hot baths, natural hot springs, and a beautiful river.

I was made what was called the guest student manager. The guest student manager was someone who, throughout the summer, met the people who were coming—not to be guests, but the ones who were called guest students. These were the people who were coming to practice Zen, and participate and support the monastery during the summer. It was very popular. A lot of people came, and they would live the life of the Zen students that summer, which included meditation and eating together, being together with the Zen practitioners. It was a very rich culture. People came from all over the world to do that, of all kinds of ages. They would help with some of the work through the day and participate in the Zen side of things.

I was the one who received them, hosted them, and cared for them. I did a lot of orientations, received the guests, and gave much of the meditation instructions. Every afternoon, I think at 3:30, I would meet all the guests coming in at the meditation hall and give them meditation instructions. For those months, I gave myself over to being the host, the person to receive and welcome people.

It was a wonderful role, a wonderful job of receiving, welcoming, discovering who people were, and being connected to them. It was a wonderful way to begin my life as a Zen priest or monk, to be able to just care for people in a simple way as a host. I think it opened something very important in my heart—a certain kind of delight in people, in all their varieties, and meeting them. It was nice.

I just mentioned being a Zen priest. The odd thing that happened was that when I was ordained, it was called the "monk ordination," and I thought I was being ordained as a monk. That's what I really thought I was going to be. But a few months later, the abbot gathered all the people who had ordained as monks, men and women—and there were a lot of them at Zen Center by that time—and he said that they were going to change the name and call us priests rather than monks. I was kind of stunned, because for me, a priest was a radically different species of clergy than a monk. I had no interest in being a priest, I thought. But now I had to live with this new title. It was a little bit awkward for me, but I got used to it.

One thing that happened during that summer was my sister came to visit the monastery. It was open during the summer, and she was very sick. She liked it there a lot, and I asked the abbot if she could stay for the summer. To my surprise, he said, "Sure, she can stay just for free." She couldn't work; she could hardly walk. But he said, "We don't have room, so she has to have your room, and you'll have to sleep in the meditation hall."

So that's what I did that summer. As a monk, I had this renunciate lifestyle sleeping in the zendo^[4] (the meditation hall), not having my own room, and having my sister there to care for her. In a sense, I didn't care that much for her—the community did. She had to be driven to go to the baths, which were maybe four or five hundred feet away. They would come with a pickup truck and drive her. It was quite a touching thing to see. It might have saved my sister's life to be in that community. She sat in a chair in the middle of the community all day long, and people said hello to her and talked to her. It really revived her.

At the end of the summer, I was asked to move back up to San Francisco Zen Center. Zen Center had a lot of businesses, including a stitchery where they made Zen clothes, cushions, robes, and different things. Later, I found out that they wanted me to be the head of the stitchery, maybe because I had spent time sewing my own robes, so they thought I had a skill or an interest. Instead, they sent me to work at Greens Restaurant^[5], with the idea that I was going to train there to be the head lunch cook.

Zen Center had this very nice restaurant, one of the premier vegetarian restaurants in San Francisco in the early 80s, and they wanted me as a priest to be a lunch cook. Very luckily for me, the person who was going to be leaving the job decided to keep the job as the lunch cook. So I was freed from having to step into that role. Of course, I would have stepped into it because I was a monk, a priest, and I was there to train. Whatever they asked me to do, I was going to do. But being freed from that gave me a certain freedom that I didn't realize at the time was very important for me.

I worked at Greens Restaurant as a cook for about a year. I kind of loved doing it, the activity of it all. This idea of participation, being fully present, came to fruition as a short-order cook for two or three hundred people for lunch every day, spinning and cooking many plates at once. It was fun. I would leave feeling much more concentrated and quiet than when I arrived at the beginning of the day because I gave myself completely to just that activity.

But by the spring of that year—it must have been April of 1983—I was beginning to feel there was something a little bit claustrophobic for me at the San Francisco Zen Center. Something wasn't quite open enough for something to happen, and I felt I needed fresh air. I wasn't going to leave Zen or leave Buddhism, but I needed to have more experience that was wider and bigger than what Zen Center could provide. It might have been that the Zen Center was a little bit cultic back then. It was a bit insular, with a feeling that this was the special place to be in the world, and this is where real Buddhism was. I felt that in the air, or maybe it was mostly produced by me, but still, I felt claustrophobic.

Then this amazing thing happened. For the first time, I was telling a friend of mine that I was feeling like I needed fresh air from Zen Center. I couldn't really leave because I had been ordained only a year, and I had this idea you should stay training with your ordination teacher for five years before going forth as a monk, as a priest.

I was sitting in the outdoor courtyard at the San Francisco Zen Center in the city. Ed Brown, who wrote the Tassajara cookbooks and was on the Zen Center board, came over and interrupted me. I was right in the middle of telling my friend I needed fresh air. He said, "Gil, I'm on the board of Zen Center and I need to talk to you. When you finish this conversation, come see me." I thought I was in big trouble that a board person would want to talk to me.

After the discussion with my friend, I went to talk to him. I remember sitting there, and he told me that it had just been revealed to the board that the abbot was involved in serious ethical transgressions. As I heard him tell me this, my response inside was not to be horrified, angry, or upset at the ethical transgression of the abbot, but rather the feeling of, "Oh, now I'm free. I'm free to go."

Added to this was that I'd already been invited by a relative who offered to pay for a ticket for me to fly to Japan to be there for a while. My relative was going to be there and said, "Come join me." I had said, "No, I can't. I'm being trained as a monk." Suddenly, I was free. I was free to go to Japan. Learning about the ethical transgressions of the teacher set me free. It was just a wonderful thing.

That was in April. By September of that year, I had it organized, and I went to Japan to practice Zen. That opened a whole new world for me, and I'm so glad that I went forth to get that fresh air. I did go back to Zen Center at some point, a few times. I'm very grateful for my time and practice there. I feel eternally grateful and would just like to support the practice there in whatever way I can. But I was so glad to have that chance to step away and see the world with fresh eyes, and to see Zen Center with fresh eyes.

I went to Japan, and from there I went to Thailand, and then Burma. That's a whole other phase. I thought I could tell my stories in five days, but it seems like maybe I'm only halfway through. Hopefully, you don't mind. I'm not going to be here next week; I'm off to a teacher retreat. Hopefully, you won't mind if I continue with these life stories of mine when I return.

I want to thank you all very much. I look forward to coming back in about nine or ten days. Thank you.