I was 28 when I first rattled down a fourteen-mile, stone-strewn dirt road into California’s Ventana Wilderness and entered the meditation hall of the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the first traditional Zen monastery outside of Asia. I wasn’t looking for enlightenment. My roommate, Sherri, and I were on a summer camping trip and would have loved to try the center’s famous hot springs.
But one thing led to another. A friend named John, who had mysteriously disappeared from the left-wing journalism scene in San Francisco, turned up next to the bath, dressed in a black kimono with a bright white collar. He quietly paid for a cabin for us to spend a few nights. (Tassajara opens as a resort for paying guests in the summer.) John showed us around the zendo and invited us to meditation the next morning.
That morning, after chanting “the number of sentient beings is innumerable. I swear to save them,” I emerged from that sacred space into the morning light with a clarity I had never known before. The Spanish word Window means window in English. The zendo was a window to a new life. I entered as an aspiring and confused young newspaper reporter. I came out as an aspiring and confused young journalist, connected to something inside him that he had lost touch with, like a beggar discovering a secret jewel sewn into his pocket. The simple wooden zendo, with its silence and communal ritual, was my Chartres. Although I never spent a winter training there, I returned to Tassaya the following summer to live, work and meditate. That was over forty years ago.
The zendo burned to the ground a few weeks ago.
The cleanup will be extensive. The fire carried meditation cushions; monastic robes; they were called shawls sewn by holy hands greedy that reverence means consecration; and oryok dinner plates. He smashed an ancient and priceless Gandhara Buddha carved in Greco-Roman features in Afghanistan when it was still a Greek garrison. Only his face remained.
As the news made the rounds on Facebook, some former and current monks and visitors spoke of transience. Others contributed to the reconstructionwhich is expected to cost much more than the insurance will cover. It was quoted by several people on the Internet Dogen Zenjithe spiritual ancestor who brought Soto Zen from China to Japan: Firewood will turn to ash and will not become firewood again. . . . Birth in this moment is full expression. Death is a complete expression at this moment.
He disappeared. Don’t look back. Firewood is firewood. Ashes are ashes.
But is it?
My first reaction was not acceptance, but shock and grief – a natural human response to loss. Something I valued was gone forever.
I remembered my root teacher, Thich Nhat Hanhwho loved to tell us that if we looked closely, we could see clouds in the chanting, because the clouds become rain and feed the trees whose wood is used to make paper. He saw impermanence not as extinction, but as an endlessly changing process of forms.
When I look back on the history of Tassajara, the constant changes in form are striking. Its hot springs were a healing refuge for the Essen Indians for centuries and were part of their vast ancient territory. After being violently looted during the 19th century genocide, white resort guards built log cabins and a hotel next to the springs. In its commercial heyday in the early 20th century, Tassajara attracted Hollywood movie stars and boasted a bowling alley, bar and dance hall.
Something I valued was gone forever.
This changed radically in 1967, when the nascent San Francisco Zen Center, led by the Japanese priest Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and enterprising American dharma heir Richard Baker Roshi bought the nearly forgotten resort and converted it into a traditional Zen monastery. The summer paying guests have been helping to finance the strict, traditional monastic practices in autumn and winter ever since.
Nestled in a steep, wild valley, Tassajara has always felt dynamic, solid and uncertain. It is dynamic, thanks to the eternal roar of streams and waterfalls that cut through the surrounding ravines. Solid, like the steep granite ridges that jut out all around like knife blades and guards. It is uncertain, because the entire settlement escaped the fire several times and only narrowly. The lost zendo was built on the foundations of a dance hall that burned down nearly a century ago.
All change. When I first sat in the zendo, we chanted the semi-pocryphal name of “Buddhas and Patriarchs,” all going back to the historical Buddha. In 2000, a newly installed co-abbess, Linda Ruth Cutts, initiated a parallel recitation of the names of our semi-legendary female spiritual ancestors, beginning with Prajapati, the Buddha’s aunt who raised him after his mother died in childbirth and became one of his first nuns.
The zendo was once lit by kerosene lamps, then by solar energy. It’s gone now. Jay Simoneaux, a close friend who helped build it, died of Parkinson’s disease. Paul Discoe, the master builder trained in traditional Japanese carpentry who oversaw the construction, has since built a massive house for Oracle’s Larry Ellison. Since the shutdown due to the pandemic, Tassajara’s once casual and sybaritic summer guest season has been revamped, replacing it with workshops and retreats focused on meditation and yoga.
Yes, ashes are ashes. But nothing disappears. Wood and stone pick up the imprints of our vibrating soul. Every hour spent in the zendo lives on in my own body. Just as the vibrations of our chanting once soaked into its walls, so did they soak the walls of our cells.
My body is already old. Within a decade or so, this too will go into the furnace and burn out like the zendo.
I hope to be able to return to Tassajara myself in the summer to refresh my practice in the company of others, in any place intended for a temporary zendo. (The Zen Center’s current plan is to postpone, but not cancel, the summer guest season.)
Until then, every morning in my home office, I roll out a yoga mat, set a timer on my iPhone, and roll out a seiza a meditation bench tall enough to accommodate my old knees. Facing the wall, I sit in front of a work table with a paper shredder, a laser printer, a Buddha statue on a small wooden altar that my late father built, and a large Japanese bell on a purple silk pillow. I ring the bell three times. Sometimes I light a candle. The sacred and the profane are mixed there, as they are in me.
In his belt Guide for the cookZen Master Dogen invites me to take a blade of grass and transform it into a sixteen foot tall golden Buddha. The work table is my blade of grass. The sixteen-foot-tall golden Buddha is my own body, my own orderly breathing, my willingness to repeat this action over and over again, as it has been repeated unbroken from generation to generation since the enlightenment of the Buddha and his aunt Prajapati. I remind myself: objects in themselves do not make one holy. People do, and careful attention. It wasn’t the first time Buddha tasted enlightenment while meditating in the temple. He sat outside on a pile of straw, touched the ground, and saw the morning star.
When I was young, I was disconnected from myself, others, and my spirituality. The shrine of the Tassajara Buddha Hall, consecrated by the concerted actions of all who have ever bowed or sat there, has opened a window to new life. A year from now, if all goes well, a rebuilt zendo will welcome a new generation of spiritual beggars who don’t yet know they have a diamond sewn into their pocket. Supported by silence and the shared ritual of their companions, they build a shrine within their own bodies, making every place they sit sacred in their own way.
