The Wild Man and the Schoolmarm

Appreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice by Taizan Maezumi Roshi.  Shambhala.  160pp. $19.59. *****

Ordinary Wonder: Zen Life and Practice by Charlotte Joko Beck.  Shambhala. 240 pp. $17.95. *****

 Dharma books wander into my life at exactly the right moment.  Years ago, I picked up Taizan Maezumi’s Appreciate Your Life and, except for the title essay, which I’d read in a magazine and loved, found it not especially helpful, a rehash of things I’d heard from other Zen teachers.  But during the pandemic, when I was searching for dharma teachings, and was armed with my Kindle, so I could sample things easily, I read two books with origins in the Los Angeles Zen Center, where Mauzumi taught, and found his teachings compelling.[1]  I like basic teachings, the more basic the better, and had already reread Shunryu Suzuki and Dainin Katagiri (for the umpteenth times).  I’ve always had a soft spot for Maezumi on the basis of that title essay, which is brilliant just by its title (which was apparently a phrase Maezumi used often).  I also enjoyed things I’d read about him, especially the portrait that John Daido Loori draws in an early chapter of The Zen of Creativity (a horrible title for a fascinating book, which I’ve read several times).

Anyway, a few weeks ago I picked up Appreciate Your Life again and thought it was marvelous, almost every chapter (they’re transcribed Teishos) a gem.  I don’t know what happened.  Obviously, the difference is in me.

Maezumi grew up in a family of priests, was trained in the Soto School, but at some point decided to do koan training as well, under various teachers, including Koryu Osaka and Hakuun Yasutani.  In Los Angeles he trained people in various ways, telling them to follow their breathing, or sit shikantaza, or work with a koan (especially Mu), but again and again he repeats that it doesn’t really matter, these practices are basically the same: be one with the breathing, with the act of sitting, or with your koan: the most important thing is to throw yourself into the practice wholeheartedly, to keep doing it, and to see it as a way to Appreciate Your Life.  Appreciate that you’re here.  It’s a miracle.

Maezumi is famous as a Zen teacher who appreciated life a little too much, arrived in Los Angeles as a young man and eventually had affairs with a number of his students, even after he was married.  (That chapter in the Loori book involves a saki and Kentucky Fried Chicken party.  Talk about decadence.)  He repented and went to the Betty Ford Clinic to work on his addictions, of which there were two that we know of.  People tell the story as if it ends there, but his death was sad and vaguely mysterious.  He had returned to Japan for a visit, named his dharma heir (Bernie Glassman, who also shows up in these volumes) and later that evening went out drinking with somebody or other, drinking quite a bit.  Was that a single relapse, or had he gone back on the booze?  In any case, he returned home, took a bath, and somehow drowned in the bathtub, a strange death if there ever was one (how can you be so out of it, I keep asking myself, that you drown in a bathtub?).  And perhaps an ironic one, considering his characteristic motto.

I can imagine someone saying why would you read the teachings of somebody who slept with his students, had a problem with alcohol, died under weird circumstances, blah blah blah.  We’re lucky the cancel culture didn’t get ahold of this guy.  I’ve reached a point in life where I don’t judge teachers too harshly; everybody (including me) has their problems and we’re all wrestling with demons, nobody achieves perfection.  The man understood meditation practice and valued its importance, and his talks give me a jolt of energy every evening that encourages me to practice.  That’s what I read dharma books for.  I’m not looking for moral purity.

Joko Beck is a different ball of wax.  She didn’t come from a family of priests, in fact didn’t encounter Buddhism until she was 48, when she heard Maezumi debate a Christian minister and saw in him something that she admired.  She began to sit with friends, at one point drove a considerable distance to do dokusan with Maezumi on a regular basis, and finally—when her life circumstances permitted—left home and lived in his monastery.  Maezumi’s transgressions got a little close to home (I read somewhere that he slept with one of Joko’s daughters), so she left monastic life, abandoned her robes and taught as a lay person for the rest of her life.  She emphasized the connection of Zen to ordinary daily life, as the titles of her books would suggest (Everyday Zen, Nothing Special, Ordinary Wonder).  She bought a couple of houses in San Diego, lived in one, and conducted retreats in the other.

But she had always been a teacher in a way.  As Jan Chozen Bays says in her excellent Foreword, Joko all her life was a person that people came to for advice, even when she was an administrator in the  Chemistry Department at the University of California, San Diego.  When she was in the monastery with Maezumi, people lined up outside her door.  So her teachings came out of who she was as a person, and when she left the monastery just continued in a more formal way.  Maezumi had given her dharma transmission.

According to her daughter Brenda—who contributed an introduction and afterword to this volume—Joko read widely in a variety of spiritual traditions, trying to find ways to speak to different students.  I’d noticed before that she seemed to know the Christian tradition.[2]  But she kept coming back to two rather different books, I Am That, a collection of talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, and The Supreme Doctrine by Hubert Benoit.  In an earlier volume, in fact, she describes The Supreme Doctrine as the primary teacher of her life.  Not Benoit, whom I assume she never met, but the book.

She has an elaborate theory about how we arrived in our samsaric life, one which she apparently adapted from that book.[3]  To state it briefly: when we were in the womb, we had everything provided for us, but when we emerged, we began to lack things (to say the very least).  We blamed ourselves for that failure, and developed a strategy for getting what we thought we needed.  That strategy becomes our personality, what Suzuki Roshi called our small self.  We live an unsatisfying life, trying and trying to get what we want, and never succeeding.  We need to see through that doomed strategy and small self and discover something larger.  If that sounds like psychology rather than spirituality, she would argue that the two are interconnected.  She never worried about which aspect of the human condition she was addressing.

She spells out her remedy quite specifically.  Unlike most Zen teachers, she had her students do a Vipassana practice, labeling thoughts, as they sat.  It’s in seeing how you think that you understand your false self and strategy for living.  Instead of taking refuge in this strategy that never works out, you need to feel the feeling in your body that prompts you to create it, the longing, the emotional pain, whatever.  You stay with that bodily feeling and drop the thinking.  Except for labeling thoughts, she’s really just giving us the strategy of Soto Zen itself.  This is what all Zen teachers tell us to do.

I actually think her best explanation of her vision is in a piece that is not in any of her own books, “Our Substitute Life” in the volume Being Bodies.  It’s the final piece in that book and also the best one, and she says something that has become a keystone of my practice (I’m paraphrasing now): the secret of life that we’re all looking for is to have the physical experience of the present moment.  If you want to reduce practice to a phrase, that one that works for me.

I’ve read Beck’s earlier books multiple times, and they’ve been a huge help to me.  I’ve never labeled thoughts—that’s just using words to get ride of words, it seems to me—but I see them, and keep coming back to the body.  I’ve found her books to be full of psychological and spiritual insight.  This one is every bit as good as the others, and her daughter’s excellent Introduction and editing keep the volume focused.

Sometimes, I must admit, I find Joko somewhat humorless.  She keeps rapping out knuckles with her central teaching, and is a bit like the math teacher who always has the answer and can’t understand why you don’t get it every time.  I can get mildly annoyed at that, and find her books dry.  It’s not that she’s not right.  She is right.  She’s always right.  That’s the problem.

I wonder how she would have handled that Kentucky Fried Chicken and saki party.

[1] The second of those books, The Hazy Moon of Enlightenment, includes the remarkable enlightenment story of Flora Courtois, and her account of coming to the Zen Center to have her experience confirmed by Hakuun Yasutani, and to practice shikantaza.

[2] I once saw her quoted on a Zen daily calendar that they kept at the front desk of a yoga studio I went to.  It was something like, “Jesus said, ‘The Father and I are one.’  That is the true message of all religions.”  When I read that, I thought, what nerve that woman had.

[3] I took a crack at The Supreme Doctrine some years back, and found it tough going.