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Stories with my Zen Teacher, Sojun Mel Weitsman

So, that meditation was a little bit inspired by my Zen teacher, Mel Weitsman. He is 91 years old, and after 53 years as the teacher and abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center, yesterday he stepped down from his role. Because of this—usually it is a public ceremony, and it was a public ceremony, but on Zoom and YouTube—I attended that way. It was quite touching for me to be at my old teacher's stepping down, a kind of retirement from his role that he had for so many years.

That is really what is in my heart and my mind. What I thought I would do this morning is talk a little bit about him. For some of you perhaps this is interesting because he was my Zen teacher, a formative teacher for me, and very important. He remains very important for me and remains a reference point for me in the Dharma. Maybe it is not always so visible, even by people who know him, but part of what I teach when I teach comes out of his teaching, and maybe more than his teaching, how he lived in the world. When I teach the Dharma, my Dharma talks, and how I live the Dharma, it is a little bit of a hybrid of my experience at Zen practice with this teacher, Mel Weitsman, and also my Theravada Vipassana^[1] practice, and the teachers I met in that tradition as well. Hopefully, this is interesting for you to hear a little bit about him, and maybe some of you will find it interesting because of how it might reflect on me if you have been listening to me for some time.

Mel Weitsman was born in 1929. As a young adult, he was an artist. My impression is that he was a little bit of a starving artist living in the Bay Area, and he was a taxi driver, and that is how he supported himself. Then in 1964, he met Shunryu Suzuki Roshi^[2] and started practicing with the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. Three years later in 1967, Suzuki Roshi asked him to start or support a beginning of a small Zen center, starting with just a sitting group in Berkeley, California, across the bay. I think Mel lived in Berkeley by that point. And so they founded the Berkeley Zen Center together. It was a small zendo in an attic of a two-story Berkeley home. They converted the attic into a zendo, and when I first started sitting Zen relatively early on, I would sit there sometimes for day-long retreats. I remember the A-frame roof; we were underneath the rafters, and it was a little bit dark, but kind of cozy up there in the attic.

Suzuki Roshi ordained him as a Zen priest in that attic. There is a photograph of that ceremony. It is cozy; it is not like in a big temple, but in this attic with these angled, sloped rafters above them as they were doing the ceremony. It speaks to a different kind of Zen, not the formal monastic Zen of temple life in Japan, but something that in 1967 in Berkeley was going to express a very different kind of ethos.

There was a beautiful story that I read yesterday. They were sitting there in the attic meditating—a small group of people, sometimes only one or two people would come and meditate with him, but sometimes there were more. They would meditate early in the morning, and one day a police officer knocked on the door. Mel went to answer, and the police officer said that he was just checking on the house because it was early in the morning and all these lights were on. Was everything okay? Mel said yes. The officer said, "Well, you know, some time ago before you had this house, I was involved in coming into this house and searching the walls for drugs." Mel said, "Oh, well, we are here upstairs in the attic, there is a group of us meditating." And the police officer said, "But cannot you get there much faster by getting stoned?" To imagine a police officer saying that! And Mel's response was, "We are not going anywhere." Instead of getting somewhere fast through drugs, Mel says, "We are not going anywhere." That kind of represents his Zen. It is not about attainment, it is not about getting somewhere, but rather about inhabiting the place you are at, inhabiting the location, the situation, yourself as you are now. This idea of just inhabiting and being in it, without conceit, without seeing a problem, was part of Mel's teaching. Just you there, and fully there.

I met Mel about 1976. I was 22 years old, and I was going to college at Davis, California, which is about an hour northwest of Berkeley. I was a college student there, and there was a Zen sitting group that met on Tuesday and Thursday evenings in someone's extra bedroom. I would go and meditate with them on those Tuesdays and Thursdays, and every once in a while they would invite Mel up to do a half-day retreat, which would end with lunch. That is how I met Mel. Mel would drive up from Berkeley in his somewhat old, maybe 10- or 12-year-old Volkswagen Bug, which apparently he repaired himself. He would do this after sitting, and he would do a practice discussion. We would meet one-on-one with him in another extra bedroom in this little apartment. I remember the first time I had this formal meeting with him; I was so nervous that I could not speak, and the first thing that Mel told me as a teacher was to breathe deeply somehow, because I was so intimidated or nervous about this meeting.

But what struck me about this person right away in those first encounters in Davis was something that many people have repeatedly said about him: how ordinary he is. There was something extraordinary in his ordinariness, and I think that what made it extraordinary was he was not trying to be anything special. He was not trying to assert himself or trying to be a teacher. There was no sense of status that he was the teacher and other people were not. There was not any sense that he had some special privileged place. In fact, he was always ready to wash dishes; he was always ready to clean up and take care of whatever needed to be done aside from whatever teaching role that he had. If you saw him in a supermarket, you would not think too much about him. He seems like a nice man, but there was nothing that made him stand out as someone special. My wife, who is Jewish, would think of him as a nice Jewish deli owner; you could put him down the street to get deli sandwiches from him.

Then I went to live at the San Francisco Zen Center and eventually to the monastery at Tassajara^[3], and I had some contact with him, though not a lot. But I remember once running into him at Tassajara. I had been living there for a couple of years and we crossed paths, and I just, without any premeditation, as we passed each other, told him that I had become a response machine. This idea of being a response machine, in retrospect, was probably not a very inspiring statement to make. But just in the moment, that is kind of what came out of my mouth. What I was trying to say was that what I had become, very happily in terms of a sense of freedom, was that I now lived in this world responding to things as they came along. That sense of response, using the word machine, meant that it was somehow natural, automatic, a little bit spontaneous. There was this way of just being responsive that felt like it welled up from some place deep inside, that was very different from how I had known how to live before that. Before that, it was about the ego, about me, myself, and mine, and about my fear, which was a big part of my early adulthood. But there was some deeper sense of welling up, of connection. If something needed to be cleaned, if the path needed to be swept, then the movement to sweep came up from inside of me. This was such a special feeling for me, discovering this living in the monastery and meditating a lot, that I just shared it there with him, and he smiled.

The next big encounter I had with Mel that made an impression on me was in 1983. That is when the abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center at that time was not Mel, it was someone else, and that person had a scandal. He had been sleeping with some students, and he had been misappropriating and misusing his authority and his power over the students. So it all came to a head. I can imagine it was a big shock to the community. It was a big place, the San Francisco Zen Center, and many people had devoted their lives there, so it was very devastating for many people. When I heard about this scandal breaking, the first thing I did was go over to Berkeley to talk to Mel. Mel had been part of the San Francisco Zen Center almost from the beginning, and I thought he would have some wisdom, so I would check in with him about it. I was not particularly alarmed or disturbed by all that; I was not personally shattered by the abbot scandal, but I was concerned enough that I wanted to go talk to Mel.

What I remember from that conversation was very important for me. One of the things he said was that he was on the board at that time of the San Francisco Zen Center. Before Suzuki Roshi died and made his successor the next abbot, the terms of office for board members was for life, so he was a life member of the board. He could see that something was wrong with how the abbot was conducting himself. He did not know about the sexual scandals, but the way he was using authority and the way he was holding himself, there was something not quite right. Mel could not really say anything; if he did, it did not really go anywhere, because most people were supporting the new abbot. For 12 years he just thought, "Okay, I will just stay here. This will have to come to a head at some point, and I will just patiently wait until it comes to a head, and then I will support and help what has to happen next." This idea of having a long-term view like that, of realizing that there is nothing I can do, but I will stay here and hang in there until something changes, and then I am here to support it and help it... and that it did. When that abbot eventually resigned, Mel was there on the edges supporting people, supporting Zen Center. In 1987 or 1988 he started teaching more and more at the San Francisco Zen Center, and in 1988 he became the co-abbot of Zen Center.

By that time I was living at Green Gulch^[4] Zen Center. I was the manager of the meditation hall, so I had a lot of contact with him as the abbot there. It was lovely to have this contact with him and be in communication with him. One of the big lessons I received from him then, which maybe does not sound so big but the implications were huge if you understand it: in Zen you eat in the meditation hall in a very formal, choreographed way. You sit in meditation posture. There is a wooden plank in front of you where you have three bowls. Or if you are a priest you have more bowls, you have like five bowls. Servers come and serve your food in the meditation hall and put food in the three bowls. You bow a lot, and before you eat you chant, and when you finish you chant. You eat in silence with a room full of people in this formal way with three bowls.

I got into the idea of eating without any desire—just to eat, to eat efficiently. So I decided that the most efficient, desireless way to eat was to pick up the first bowl that had the most food, like the rice in it, and just eat it all, finish, put it down. Take the second bowl, eat it all, finish, put it down. Eat a third bowl, finish, and put it down. I was just kind of going through it like that. The abbot, Mel, sat next to me in the meditation hall and saw what I was doing. At some point he said to me, "Gil, when you eat, just eat naturally." That is all he said. I realized that the way I was eating was unnatural. So then I just sat down to eat, and I saw that independent of desires, there seemed to be an intuitive feeling for taking a few bites of this, a few bites of this, a few bites of this, and kind of going back and forth, maybe mixing it up in the belly or in the mouth. This more intuitive way of eating, or just doing what is more natural—and what the system inside, maybe the tongue or the belly, who knows what is operating that pulls us towards different foods that way—I actually had a lot more ease than the kind of ease I had of just being efficient and eating all of one and then another. This idea of just doing things in a more natural way and not making it a big thing, and not being driven by desire, but not avoiding some deeper intuitive desire or intuition about how to do things and what to do.

When I was living at Green Gulch, during his first year or so that he was abbot of Zen Center, it was quite something. I would often work in the garden, and there was a farm there, working the farm. He would often come and work with us on the farm. We have memories of him coming into the greenhouse as we were preparing lettuce seedlings to plant in the fields. He would always work with people. The idea was that he would work with people and not always be off being the abbot or be off being the teacher, separate in status. He would be in the fields working with us, or in the kitchen washing dishes with us. Working with people was part of what he taught by how he was.

During that time he was abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center, and Zen Center had three temples, and he would do the circuit to take care of all these people, all these temples. It was quite a big job. What he said was that back then, the Zen Center had an explosion with the abbot scandal—trying to figure out how many people left, trying to figure out what to do next financially, and all kinds of things. He was there, he was being the supportive abbot, and he said that during that time he never related to Zen Center as if there was ever a problem. There were no problems; there was just something to address when it needed to be addressed. So he would wake up in the morning and he would not see a problem. He would get up, and then someone would come to him with something to be addressed, and he would address it and take care of what needed to be taken care of. Whether it was washing dishes, or talking about fundraising, or talking about institutional issues of the Zen Center as a whole. There were probably 150 people who lived at Zen Center at that time. This way of conducting himself, where he did not live as if there was a problem, but he lived as if there was really something to fully be present for and meet... to really meet the situation and be present and find your way and do what needed to be done, but without seeing it as a problem and without any sense of hurry, without any sense of crisis, without any sense of hesitation as well. Just there he was, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world to do and take care of.

A few years later, he and I were walking down the streets of San Francisco, just going for a walk, talking about things, and he asked me this question which kind of came out of the blue. He asked me, "How do you feel about me, or how do you see me? What is your relationship to me?" I told him that I trusted him implicitly, I had complete trust in him as a person. However, I did not always feel aligned with his Dharma, with how he taught. It is a little bit strange, especially with a Zen teacher who is my teacher, to say that—"I trust you, but not necessarily what you have to teach, the Buddhism that you teach." His response was so powerful. We were walking down the side by side and I made this statement. When I said I did not always trust or feel aligned with your Dharma, your teaching, he immediately pivoted, stood in front of me, and brought his hands together like this and said, "Well, and that's where we'll meet." Rather than being upset that maybe it was disrespectful to say I did not really trust his Dharma or what he was teaching, he was almost delighted by this. For him, this was a meeting place. You meet whatever is there. You do not make it a problem, but you meet it.

A little later he asked me if I wanted to start training with him to receive Dharma transmission, to become a Zen teacher. I felt a little bit shy, or I forget exactly how I was feeling about it, and I said, "Well, let's not talk about that, but let me start coming over to see you regularly and I'll study with you." And then for the next three or four years I would go over to Berkeley most weeks and meet with him in his office. We would study Buddhist texts together, we would discuss the Dharma together, and there was a lot of personal time together. Sometimes he would make me lunch, and I would ask him a lot of questions about himself, about how he lived his life. I felt how he lived and who he was was really important for me to try to understand better. That was his teaching; it was not so much the texts that we were studying, but who he was and how he was. I was probably a little bit forward at probing and asking, "Who is this guy? Who are you?" and asking all kinds of questions. He always would meet anything. The next thing to do is to wash the dishes. The next thing to do is to answer Gil's questions.

It seemed like after a few years it was evolving without anything being said in the direction that I would do this Dharma transmission, that I would become a formal Zen teacher. But then this speed bump happened, and that is that I had another Zen teacher as well at Zen Center kind of before that, who I felt somewhat close to. That teacher came to me and said, "Well, what about me? What about doing Dharma transmission with me?" So I said I do not know, and I went back to Mel and told him about this other teacher. This was a rather unusual situation to be in. Mel was completely relaxed and he said, "Well, we'll take our time and we'll keep meeting, and you tell me what to do or what's happening." The idea was I would start seeing the other Zen teacher as well and figure out my relationship there. But what happened was I never went to see him, and after a while I realized that without any decision being made, a decision had been made. It was clearly since I was not going to see him, it was not really in the cards for me to continue studying with that teacher. So then Mel and I continued, and then in 1995 I received Dharma transmission from him.

But the little unusual thing about that was that I already, in the early 1990s, 1989 to 1994, had gone through teacher training as a Vipassana teacher with Jack Kornfield^[5]. So I was doing this double major of becoming a Zen teacher and a Vipassana teacher at the same time. Mel knew that, and he was completely fine with it. When I went through the Dharma transmission ceremony and finished it and I was authorized as a Zen teacher, he explicitly came over to me and said, "You know, I'm very happy to have done this Dharma transmission for you, and you should know that I have no expectations on you. You're free." And that was a big thing for him to say. He knew I was a Vipassana teacher—by that time I was already head of the IMC in Palo Alto teaching there—and it is a big thing because Dharma transmission is not just an authorization. There is an idea that the Dharma, the teachings, the freedom of the Dharma is being transmitted from the teacher to you, and you become the carrier of it. You become a carrier of the lineage, the particular Soto Zen lineage of Suzuki Roshi, who was Mel's teacher, and you have now a responsibility to that lineage to carry it on and pass it on to the next generation. That is kind of the understanding, but he offered me the Dharma transmission without that being a requirement. He was just, "There is no expectation, and I know that you are a Vipassana teacher as well, and I am very happy to see how your life and your teaching evolves from there."

That was quite touching for me, this sense of generosity and acceptance of me as I was. That is what a lot of people have felt about Mel, that he is very accepting of people and just there to meet you. He did not seem to make much distinction between the in-crowd and the out-crowd, them and us. He was just with whatever was happening at the time, with the people who he was with, with the situation he was with. It is almost like whatever the situation he is in, that was the teaching, that was the teacher. One of the very important teachings of Mel, and I think of Soto Zen, and that has come to me, is the importance of practice. Practice is really the teacher. Practice is the center, and we all share the practice, rather than the teacher being at the center. Everyone shares a teacher. Everyone, including the teacher, is sharing the practice, and we are all doing the practice together and we are all engaged in it. The practice is not something that is limited to meditation practice or the study of the Dharma. The practice is how we wash the dishes, or how we sweep the house, or how we meet people who maybe are very different from ourselves, and how we meet anybody that we come across. The practice is found in that meeting. That is where we will meet, whether it is a person or a thing.

The Zen question is, what is being requested of me in any situation? What is being requested of me? So if you have something like I have this striker here, in Zen it is not just an inanimate thing that you are just there to use for some purpose and then you put it down and do not care anymore. The idea is since this is what you are meeting right now and what you are holding, you would respect it and you would look at it and say, "What is the request of the situation here when I put it down?" And then you would put it down in a place where it just seems to be in harmony with the situation. Whatever we are doing, what is the request of the situation? What is the request of this person I am with? This person wants my attention, this person has a need. So it is kind of stepping out of our self-centeredness and our self-specialness for the sake of being in harmony with the situation. But not to sacrifice ourselves and not to diminish ourselves, but in a sense as an expression of our freedom, of really being ourselves.

One of the things that Mel told me at some point, he said, "You know, in terms of when I started being a teacher, it's the student that makes the teacher." And that was very freeing because I am just Gil going about my life and taking care of things in a certain way, and I am allowed to be myself. But when a student comes, some practitioner comes to ask me a question or relate to me in the role of a teacher, then I am a teacher; they have made me a teacher. But otherwise, you know, in response to the request of the situation, I am a teacher, but that is not really who I am. And when that is over, then the next thing I do is maybe I am sweeping the hallway, or then I am a sweeper. Or the next thing I am doing is involved with administrative work for IMC, and then I am an administrator. Whatever we are doing kind of defines what we are, but in a way that we inhabit with all of who we are. So it is who we are. It is not like we are different or sacrificing who we are; we meet it fully with all we are in that request of the situation.

So, this wonderful teacher, Mel Weitsman. It was very touching to see him yesterday stepping down. He has something like pancreatic cancer, and so he is already quite thin, and walking into the zendo he had to walk with a staff to hold himself up. It was quite moving to see. He sits up on a teaching platform, and he was too weak to pull himself up onto the platform; two people had to help him up and sit there. Once he was sitting there, kind of put up on this cushion, then he did what he has done many times before: he pulled his feet into full lotus, and then he sat there for the next hour, an hour and a half, sometimes a little bit in tears, talking about his life, apologizing for any harm or hurt that he has caused in his years as an abbot, and talking about his experience there.

To see my old teacher being frail, and we do not know how much longer he has to live, but even here, stepping down from his Dharma seat as abbot, he was just there inhabiting that situation, meeting that situation, and then he stepped down and went home. I hope that was nice for you to hear. I appreciate the opportunity to be able to offer a little bit of what is very big in my heart today after yesterday, and a little bit of my own Dharma connection and my own teacher that I had in Zen, who remains very important for me. Maybe through me, maybe he has some importance for you as well. So thank you, and I look forward to next time.