He Saw It Through

Seeing One Thing Through: The Zen Life and Teachings of Sojun Mel Weitsman by Sojun Mel Weitsman.  Counterpoint.  320 pp.  $17.95 *****

I consider Mel Weitsman[1] to be the sanest person I ever met.  I’ve had many wonderful teachers in my life as a meditator, including Larry Rosenberg at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, Josho Pat Phelan at the Chapel Hill Zen Center, and Mel, who came and visited every year for most of the time I’ve practiced there.  A number of other teachers visited as well, Ed Brown, Blanche Hartman, Victoria Austin, but Mel came every year.  He sat with us, gave talks—sometimes long talks—and worked with us.  I saw him do all those things, as well as lead the ritual ceremonies that we did morning, noon, and night.  All of those moments were teachings.  He is the person, more than any other, who showed me what a Zen life is.

Josho, of course, was constantly teaching.  When she approached the altar, her bow was the model of a bow, her floor bow the essence of how to do that.  Mel, in contrast, seemed completely casual.  He was a little old bald man with a slightly curved spine, and he wore his robes casually, as if he had thrown them on; when he did his bows, his hands in gassho never made it to nose height, as they were supposed to, and the bow itself was abrupt and rather slight.  The doan had to be paying attention or he’d miss the bell.  His sitting was the same way: while most teachers consciously take a perfect posture, he just seemed to be sitting there, this little guy who looked like one of those knock-down dolls of Bodhidharma.  He seemed imperturbable.  When the meal service came around, he looked as if we were serving a gourmet banquet.  Most of the time it was just bean soup and a flimsy little salad.

He never used notes.  He walked in, sat down, and talked.  He seemed perfectly relaxed but always a bit of a dry mouth, the only sign of stage fright, but he didn’t let that bother him at all, just talked with it.  One Sunday morning, when the retreat group had been expanded by a number of others who came for the Sunday program, he said, “I’m going to give a talk, but first I’d like to say a few things about zazen.”  He proceeded to give an impromptu talk about meditation practice that was one of the most stunning things I ever heard, though I don’t remember a thing he said.  He talked for fifty, sixty, minutes, I don’t know how long.  He never got to the other talk, but I was glad he didn’t.  All I’m really interested in is zazen practice.  Everything else is theoretical.  Zazen is real.

And that was the essence of his teaching.  Zazen was the central thing.  It was zazen that taught us how to live, not some teacher.  He kept the focus there.

He talked constantly about Suzuki Roshi.  Any number of sentences in his talks began with, “Suzuki Roshi used to say . . .”  Those of us who didn’t get to Zen in time to study with that man will always regret it, but I think the closest possible thing to encountering Suzuki Roshi was meeting this student of his, who embodied his character completely.  I imagine that must be true of Jakusho Kwong as well.  The teacher lives on in the student, even as the student is his own person.

My wife, who attended one or two of the Mel retreats, still talks about the time she was out raking leaves during work period and he came out and worked beside her.  Didn’t say a thing, just picked up a rake and started raking.  The other teachers didn’t do that as far as I remember.  It’s just like him to have done such a thing.

When I met with him for dokusan, he wore an amused and delighted expression on his face, as if to say, simultaneously, Isn’t this the most fun we could possibly have? and Isn’t this the goofiest thing two people could possibly do?  Again, I don’t remember what we talked about, but I considered it a great privilege to talk to him.

For years I’ve read his talks on our website, and on the Berkeley Zen Center website.  There must be a vast trove of them somewhere.  I’ve read many of them multiple times.  A few of them found their way into this book.

He wasn’t a writer.[2]  That puzzled me (I’ve always been a compulsive writer), because when he did sit down to write something, it was good; he wrote a forward to the volume Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness, and he occasionally wrote little messages in the Berkeley Zen Center newsletter.  But he seemed to prefer working with students, taking care of the Zen Center, taking walks in Berkeley, and keeping a garden, at least in the early days.  He wanted to work with students and had no wish to leave anything behind.  In the last year of his life, however, when he had announced he had cancer and he continued to teach, there was a rumor that he was working on two books, one about his life and one a compilation of his talks.  Someone made the wise decision to put the two together in one book, creating a rich volume that holds together seamlessly.

I love the stories of his growing up in LA, becoming an art student and taxi driver in San Francisco, rejecting conventional religion—his family was not religious—but seeking some kind of spiritual or religious life.  He had wanted to study Hasidism, ever since he was a boy and had seen a photograph of Hasidic Jews in Life magazine, and he had read Martin Buber’s book of Hasidic tales but couldn’t find anything like that in the Judaism he encountered in San Francisco.  But somehow or other he wandered into the San Francisco Zen Center, sat down and faced the wall as everyone else was doing.  A man came around and adjusted his posture, his first teaching from Suzuki Roshi.  He had found the religious life he was looking for.

I’m not especially clear on how this book came about.  Did Mel sit down and write this collection of memories, or are they scraps from talks and conversations he had?  They do very much sound like him.  I don’t know whether he chose and edited the talks or whether his students did; several people are listed as editors in the front.  I can’t pay this book a higher compliment than to say it seems just like him.  “Who touches this touches a man,” as Whitman said.  I know I’ll continue reading it for the rest of my life.

[1] I realize that I’m supposed to use his Japanese name, Sojun, but I actually don’t like the Japanese names.  People use them as if to say they’ve escaped their past identity, but of course that isn’t the point of Zen (as Suzuki Roshi said, “When you are you, Zen is Zen”), and I personally love American names.  How can anyone thing Sojun is a better name than Mel, which is so expressive.

[2] The extremely prolific writer who most resembles Weitsman is his early student, Norman Fischer.  As Mel seemed to embody the spirit of Suzuki Roshi, Fischer seems to embody Mel’s spirit on the page, an open and honest sanity.