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Dharmette: Gil's Story Pt 2 (1 of 5) Begnining Vipassana

Hello, and nice to be here on this Monday to begin this next series. Last time I was here, I thought I would spend five days talking a little bit about my practice life, thinking five days was enough. I didn't get as far as I hoped, and so this week I'll continue.

In 1982, I was ordained as a Zen monk, a Zen priest, to dedicate my life both to the practice and to somehow address the suffering of the world at its roots, at its core. It was clear I wanted to live to make this world a better place and to help people become free of their deepest suffering. I didn't have much ambition of what that would look like or how I would do it. I thought it would be a long-term project—that I'd be practicing as a monk for a long time before I would be ready to teach.

Then in 1983, two things happened. First, my father was going to go to work in Japan for a year, and he invited me to come along, offering to pay for my ticket there. Second, the abbot of the Zen monastery where I practiced had an ethical scandal. So I was set free from being his student, having been ordained by him.

I accepted my father's offer for a ticket to Japan. I knew when I went that I would be on a tourist visa, meaning I would need to leave in order to get a new visa to stay longer. Back then, for just $25 more, I was able to buy a ticket not round trip to Tokyo, but round trip to Bangkok with a free stopover in Tokyo in both directions. That seemed like a great deal.

So I went to Japan. I knew a Japanese Zen monk in America who had come to visit for a year, and he set me up to do a three-month Zen retreat at a monastery considered to be one of the best places to do Zen practice in Japan. It was relatively small, with about 36 monks, unlike the bigger monasteries in the tradition I had been in.

While I was waiting for that practice period to start, I decided to do a few things. I had almost no money, so I got a job teaching English. I had about two weeks before that job was going to start, so I went to sit a week-long retreat at a Zen monastery. During that retreat, I was thinking, "You know, I came to Japan to study Zen, not to teach English. Even though I don't have any money, I'm going to take my chances, cancel my job, and trust that I'm going to dedicate myself to the practice."

At the end of that seven-day retreat, the custom was to offer a little gift to the abbot and the monastery since the training was offered for free. You do it ceremonially: you put it in a nice envelope, go to his office, and bow. I handed him the envelope with a little bit of money and said, "Thank you." They asked about me, seeing I was a Zen monk, and I explained, "Well, I lost my teacher in America and now I'm in Japan traveling around and practicing."

He understood me to be a ronin^[1] monk—a samurai without a master. He said, "Wait a minute," went into a back room, and came back with a special envelope for me. He handed me the envelope with money and said, "This is train money. The custom in Japan is that if a monk doesn't have a teacher, you give them train money so they can afford to travel around until they find a teacher for themselves."

I thanked him and later opened the envelope. He had given me more money than I gave him. Here I had decided to give up earning any income, which had seemed reasonable with what little money I had, and right away I was being supported to take the Buddhist path there.

I practiced in different places in Japan. It was very interesting to be there for a while, but I needed to get that new visa. So I went to Bangkok after three months with the idea of returning for the three-month practice period. On the plane there, I wondered what I should do. I was a Zen priest, and people had been talking to me about their practice and describing meditation experiences I hadn't had. I felt that I didn't have to have those experiences, but I should at least have the map and understand how it all works.

First, I thought I'd just travel to different monasteries in Thailand, talk to different meditation teachers, and ask them questions. Then I thought, no, I should just go to one place, do whatever practice they teach, and really go as deeply as I can with one person's instruction. I happened to have the address of a monastery where a friend of a friend—a Westerner—was a monk. It was on the outskirts of Bangkok.

When I went out there, it was a little bit funky, a little dogpatch, a bit chaotic, but very simple. It was surrounded by rice fields and swamps. I went there and said, "I'm here. Tell me what to do." The abbot gave me a little meditation hut on stilts on the edge of the swamps. He told me to do 15 minutes of seated meditation and 15 minutes of walking meditation all day long, and then come see him the next day. He gave me a little bit of Vipassanā^[2] insight instruction.

I protested. As a Zen priest, I had done a lot of practice and could sit for more than 15 minutes. But he insisted that's what I had to do. So I did that, and every day he increased how long I sat, giving me instructions while I waited for my visa to come.

After ten weeks, I was still waiting. I decided that maybe the visa just wasn't going to come. That first Vipassanā retreat was ten weeks long, and I practiced pretty much all day long, seeing the abbot once a day. I'd never sat so intensely before, so fully and devotedly. I became stiller and more concentrated than I ever had in Zen. Zen retreats are at longest seven days, and this was like a Zen retreat for ten weeks.

I touched something very deep that I'd never touched before. It was kind of like I had no choice—I had to go touch it again. I did eventually go back to Japan to do the retreat I was originally going to do, but it wasn't really so great for me anymore. I wasn't as into it because I wanted to go back and continue to touch this really deep place inside.

But a couple of profound things happened in that ten-week monastery. One was a wonderful event. There were these planks laid across the swamp to get to the steps of my little hut, which had a little porch. One day, I was doing my morning meditation inside the hut. I got up to open the door, and at the end of the planks going across the swamp, I saw a monk walking away from me. The only place he could have come from was my hut. He had left an apple for me on the doorstep.

I looked at that apple and looked at him walking away, and what struck me was that he would never know that he was the one who left that apple for me. This idea of selfless giving—giving without any credit, without wanting to be recognized for it—made a big impact on me. Because I was so still, quiet, and peaceful, I felt the way of being generous deeply. This movement in that monastery where food was given, teachings were given, the abbot gave, and apples were given... it was very moving for me.

Between this deep inner stillness that I touched and this generosity that I felt, I was changed by that experience. There was a kind of deep purity that woke up as I kept sitting all those weeks that I never had experienced before. An ethical purity. I would not have used the word "purity" before that because I didn't trust it. It sounded puritanical and too idealistic. But that was the only language I could use for what I was feeling inside. It felt so beautiful and so clean.

To feel the joy around being ethical, to feel that ethics come out of this purity where you didn't want to soil that cleanliness. To feel the depth of stillness and touch something really deep inside that felt more important and more core than anything else I'd ever experienced before.

I did go back to Japan to finish my year there, and I had a ticket to return to San Francisco. I came back to the Zen Center with the intention of earning the money to go back to Southeast Asia to practice more Vipassanā. San Francisco Zen Center was very generous with me. I asked if I could get free room and board so I could earn the money to return to practice, and they agreed. I worked at a restaurant at close to minimum wage, but since I didn't have to pay for room and board, after three months, I was phenomenally wealthy for a monk. I had amassed $2,000.

With that, I returned to Asia. And when I went back, I did not buy a return ticket. That was the last thing on my mind. I was compelled. It was almost like a dark night of the soul, though it wasn't exactly a difficult time. There was no choice but to go back and continue what I started in that ten-week retreat. I was going for the duration. It was open-ended. I didn't know if I'd ever come back or what would happen; I was just going there to give myself to the practice and see what happened.

That was in 1985. In 1982 I was ordained, near the end of September 1983 I went to Japan, in 1984 I came back and worked, and then in January of 1985 I went back to Southeast Asia to continue with this Vipassanā practice and continue this adventure.

Thank you.