At 105, A Zen Master Blends East With A Bit Of L.a.

[sabaijai]

At 105, a Zen master blends East with a bit of L.A.

By KATE LINTHICUM Los Angeles Times

The Zen master would not stop talking.

Several times he began to draw his teachings to a close, explaining to his

students that he was tired and in poor health. Then he would burst down

another path.

He discussed the difficulties of raising children. He lingered on the subject

of death. Eventually, he raised a small fist in the air.

"Everybody is together at one point," he said. "We cry together, we love

together. There is no moment in which we are not together."

He is 105 years old and not even 5 feet tall, with paper-white skin and a

blocky, bald head. Enveloped in long black robes, he looks like a child

wrapped in towels after a bath.

Denkyo Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi arrived in Los Angeles 50 years ago

to teach a religion that for centuries had been confined to the monasteries

of Japan. With a handful of other monks, he helped carve out a new

incarnation of Zen Buddhism here, mixing traditional meditation practice

with teachings tailored for Western minds.

Most of that first wave of Japanese teachers has died. But Roshi, as his

followers call him, says he will live until he's 120. He once made a pledge

to his students: "I will not die until Zen is born in America."

One muggy morning this summer, a few hundred people gathered at

Rinzai-ji, Roshi's home temple in the West Adams district of L.A., to

celebrate the anniversary of his coming to this country.

His reach over the years could be seen in the range of people milling

around the temple's walled garden before the ceremony began. There

was a DJ from Montreal and a surgeon from Taos, N.M., the poet and

songwriter Leonard Cohen and a Brown University professor who helped

pioneer an academic field called Contemplative Studies. There were dancers and lawyers and filmmakers. And there was my father, smiling in his own black robes, his bald head tanned from the desert sun.

When I was growing up, my dad would sometimes disappear for weeks at

a time. He would return home physically drained but mentally rechargedand filled with stories about his energetic and enigmatic teacher.

A writer who was raised Catholic, my dad found Buddhism in the late

1980s at a Zen center in Albuquerque - one of two dozen centers Roshi

has established around the world.

Like many people, my dad had a bad case of what some Buddhists call

"monkey mind," a busy head crowded with lots of thoughts. He says Zen

practice, with its daily practice of meditation, allowed him to be more

present to the world outside.

Roshi was just a kid when he boarded a train in 1921, bound for a

monastery 500 miles away from home.

His parents, farm owners near Sendai, had sent him to Sapporo to study

Zen, timing it so he would arrive at the temple on the Buddha's birthday.

When he got there, the teacher posed a question: "How old is the

Buddha?"

"The same age as me," he replied. Roshi's response was deemed

adequate, so the young man who once dreamed of becoming a pilot

instead became a priest.

He learned how to meditate. And he learned about the life and teachings

of the Buddha, an Indo-Nepalese prince who 2,500 years earlier had

renounced a life of riches for a spiritual path.

The Buddha's epiphany, after years of wandering and meditation, was that

everyone and everything is impermanent and interconnected. Those

thoughts in your head? Those emotions? He found that they were always

changing as part of the constant regeneration of the world.

The Buddha taught that the pain in life comes when we become too tied to

one feeling or idea and begin defining ourselves as something unchanging

and distinct, estranged from the people and things around us. Our

suffering will disappear, he taught, when we truly understand through

spiritual practice that there is fundamentally no "us," and therefore, no

"them."

The United States wouldn't seem fertile ground for Buddhism. The

American Dream drives us to be individuals and to put our mark on the

world - sometimes through acquiring cars, clothes and other material signs

of success.

But in the late 1950s, Eastern thought began gaining currency in some

quarters as Beat poets like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg devoured

translations of Buddhist texts. In 1962, two Zen students in California

wrote to a large monastery in Japan seeking a teacher, and Roshi was

selected to go.

He was 55 and by then an accomplished teacher who had been the abbot

of a historic temple. When he stepped off the plane at Los Angeles

International Airport, he carried a change of robes and two JapaneseEnglish dictionaries.

Soon, a stream of young spiritual seekers was showing up at his small

rented house in Gardena, Calif. These artists, professors, musicians and

doctors had one thing in common, according to Steve Sanfield, a poet who

met Roshi shortly after he arrived: "They were seeking a life apart from

the American way."

But Roshi wanted to learn about the American way as much as his

students wanted to learn about Japanese Zen. He took road trips, hiked

the Grand Canyon and went to the movies, falling asleep during a

screening of "2001: A Space Odyssey." He even accompanied students to

a strip club.

According to Sanfield, Roshi told his followers that if Zen was going to

flourish, it was going to have to "wear American clothes."

He coughs a lot now, after a recent bout with pneumonia, and he can no

longer walk on his own. But he laughs a lot still.

Before the anniversary ceremony at his temple, I peered around a corner

to see him being helped by several students down a set of stairs and into

a wheelchair. When he noticed me staring at him - and a photojournalist

raising a camera to take his picture - Roshi's arched eyebrows lifted as he

broke into a delighted grin. There seemed to be a message behind his

good cheer: Don't take yourself so seriously.