Unlikely Master

Ambivalent Zen: A Memoir by Lawrence Shainberg.  Pantheon.  318 pp. $24.00. ****1/2

After sesshin this year, I felt an urge to read books about Zen (usually I want to read anything but), not dharma books, but memoirs of Zen experience.  First I turned to a book that only a sideways look at Zen, by a man who practiced reluctantly, Bones of the Master: A Journey to Secret Mongolia by George Crane.  Then I reread, for the third or fourth time, my all-time favorite memoir of spiritual practice, Ambivalent Zen, by Lawrence Shainberg.

Shainberg has published fiction and non-fiction, including an excellent monograph on his favorite writer, Samuel Beckett, in addition to this memoir.  In a way this seems a book not only about his teacher and his practice, but his whole life.  And he organizes it so that he shuttles through various time periods, which skillfully comment on one another.  It’s a virtuoso performance.

Shainberg followed his father’s interest in spiritual matters; the elder Shainberg made his money as a Memphis businessman, then spent the rest of his life in an anguished but very sincere kind of seeking, reading spiritual literature and seeking out teachers on a personal level.  Young Larry, who was more interested in his tennis game, nevertheless attended talks by Krishnamurti[1] and had lunch with Alan Watts.  Years later, a woman friend got him interested in Zen, and Shainberg embraced it wholeheartedly, sitting multiple times per day and going on retreats.  His problem was that the practice seemed to cure his writing bug: he didn’t feel the need to write, and sometimes wasn’t able to, when he was practicing most seriously.  The two most absorbing activities of his life were somehow at odds.[2]  He struggled to find balance.[3]

He was also, constantly—he picked the right title for his book—ambivalent about Zen.  We all have this feeling to some extent, but Shainberg had it in spades.  He would want to go on retreat, spend weeks anticipating it, then get there and be disappointed, feel like leaving (once he actually did, then immediately regretted it).  He hilariously illustrates the human tendency always to want the thing we do not have.  He also seems to be living out a version of his father’s ambivalence.  The old man could never commit to anything; Shainberg keeps committing then pulling back.

From the start he found himself in the Rinzai School of Zen, which seems to include a greater wish for achievement than Soto and a more competitive spirit (though no Buddhist practice is immune from those things).  Almost immediately he ran into a series of Rinzai Assholes, including one who had this to say about his posture, “How’d you get that crooked spine, accident or something?  . . . I can tell you one thing—if you want to study Zen, you better get yourself straightened out.  Zen is posture and posture is Zen.  With a back like that, you’re wasting your time on the cushion.”  The man later made this pronouncement on Shainberg’s oryoki form.  “You still don’t get it, do you? . . . When you finish eating, your jihatsu should be tight, all of a piece.  If you do it right, it should look as if you’ve never used it. . .  .  Yours, my friend, look like something you bought at a flea market.”

Shainberg also ran into a fascinating character named Chang Wei, who practiced and taught Zen along with various martial arts, who claimed to be able to infuse people with his energy and to heal various diseases (he sometimes even sent energy by phone, putting the receiver near his hara during zazen).  The man had an interesting take on the practice of sitting meditation.   “It is his view that one should never relax while on the cushion.  After sitting, one should feel totally exhausted, and those who don’t can be sure they’ve wasted their time.”  That, I would say, is the polar opposite of how we practice Soto Zen.

But because of the skillful way Shainberg alternates time sequences—this was a canny strategy on his part—the entire book is dominated by his portrayal of the man who ultimately became his true teacher, Kyudo Nakagawa Roshi.  Kyudo became a monk at the age of six and lived a celibate life, apparently because of a promise he made his own teacher, the famous Soen Roshi.  He practiced for years with his teacher, then had a small zendo in, of all places, Israel, then founded the zendo in New York where Shainberg practiced with him.

Neither of the places he presided over was a major institution; the zendo in Israel, for instance, where he spent thirteen years, had fewer members than my own practice place, the Chapel Hill Zen Center.  Kyudo nevertheless led the same daily with great devotion, sitting for two hours (three thirty minute periods) morning and evening, meeting with students and caring for the zendo.  He seems to have no ambivalence about Zen at all, and his constant exhortations to Shainberg, his fascinating pronouncements about Zen in general, form the heart of the book

Ambivalent Zen has a particular poignance because Shainberg’s last teacher before Kyudo Roshi, Bernard Glassman, recently died, and Shainberg’s portrait of the man is fascinating.  Glassman was three years younger than Shainberg, famous as a Zen prodigy; he sailed through the koans with Maezumi Roshi, then was told by his teacher to leave L.A. and start a sister zendo in New York.  Glassman’s teaching is often brilliant; his disquisition on the Heart Sutra, at least the way Shainberg renders it, is one of the most fascinating I’ve ever heard.  And he was anything but a Rinzai Zen Asshole, a warm and encouraging man.

He was nevertheless such a visionary that he couldn’t help continuing to envision, wanting a larger and more complicated program, getting further and further into debt (he had cannily made Shainberg into one of his major officers, knowing the man had money to donate).  He eventually got so involved in his various enterprises that he—and many of his students—abandoned zazen altogether, behavior that would be scandalous in the Soto world.  Shainberg eventually left him for the much less ambitious Kyudo, who always seemed satisfied with whatever modest enterprise he was running.  He was never famous, like Glassman.  But he seems a truer Zen man.

I felt this book reached an apotheosis at the end, something I hadn’t noticed in previous readings.  There is a wonderful meeting between Kyudo Roshi and Shainberg’s aging parents, which expresses the essence of Zen and resolves any feeling of ambivalence that the reader might have.  The truth is that there are all kinds of ambivalences and paradoxes in the theory of Zen, but in practice we wipe them away.  We’re stunned to find out, for instance, that Kyudo prays every day for the people on his sangha, and when Shainberg asks why he does such a thing, in the midst of a non-theistic practice, Kyudo gives the true Zen response.  “I have no idea.  When I pray, I just pray.”  He has the same kind of response to the elder Shainberg’s favorite teacher.

“Ask him has he read Krishnamurti,” Shainberg’s father says.  [Shainberg is acting as a translator between his parents and teacher because, what with hearing problems and their various accents, they don’t understand each other.]

“’Yes, of course,”’ says Roshi when I’ve relayed the question.  ‘Very intelligent, beautiful words.’

“’Tell him, Krishnamurti hates spiritual practice or any kind of formal meditation.’

“’Laughing, Roshi offers him a friendly pat on the shoulder.  ‘Yes, yes!  Very intelligent!  I feel same.’

“’Then what’s all that about?’ says Dad, waving his hand in the direction of the zendo. . . . ‘How can he maintain this establishment if he doesn’t believe in formal meditation?’

“Once again, Roshi doesn’t wait for me to translate.  ‘Please you tell him—I have no idea.’”

This is a marvelous and entertaining book by a true Zen student, however ambivalent, and rewards multiple readings.  I can’t recommend it too highly.

[1] Shainberg’s brother David, deceased when Lawrence published this book, was also prominent in the Krishnamurti organization.

[2] I have found the same thing to be true, but feel it as a relief.  For much of my life I was a compulsive writer, and needed to write every day because it gave me something I could find no other way.  I was always unhappy when I wasn’t writing.  Nowadays (and for the past 25 years or so) sitting practice gives me the connection with something larger that writing once did, so that I’m happy to write but no longer need to.  That has made writing a happier and less anguished practice, and enabled me to enjoy it even more.

[3] One thing we realize eventually but that Shainberg never mentions explicitly is that, as the heir to his father’s fortune, he never needed to earn a living.  Writing was his vocation, but he wasn’t slaving away trying to make a buck.  The conflict between these two practices was real for him, but wasn’t essentially serious.