Yeats and Theatre
Part of my interest in theatre is from William ButlerYeats, who wrote dramatic poems and plays and helped establish the Abbey Theatre in Ireland. I start theatre training in La Jolla High School, California, because I am recruited. A very talented actress, Bronle Crosby, is tall. I am asked to be in a play to complement her height. I go on to study theatre at UC Berkeley. Years later I realize that working with other actors before an audience leads me to see life as biography. The wise man is social, Augustine said, and I am working with the most gregarious people on this planet. Graduate work in theatre at UH Manoa shows me the enormous diversity of world cultures and the connection all of them without exception have to the past. I study a lot of western theatre that claims to break ties with the past. Bertold Brecht is the single most iconic figure to shape modern theatre’s iconoclasm. However, it was after I get my MA in Western theatre that I find John Fuegi's biography of Bertold Brecht in Rainbow bookstore in Puck's Alley. I am surprised to read that Brecht stole plays outright from many mostly women artists whom Brecht has contempt for; he says he “pays them with semen.” His theories are regarded as pivotal in stage production.
At his best Brecht is a theatre where political thought, in touch with currents of socially progressive ideas, is revealed through purposeful alienation from within the play itself, with humor and intelligence, where conventional morality is examined if not overturned. But for the most part Brecht's theatre relies too much on the ideas he needs to convey, which come from studies of society and Marxist views rooted on social oppression. However such a platform is best in politics, because the message leaves the play behind. To a few watching this reinforces their assumption they are among like minded people, but he loses touch with the play's ability to create social statement without the need to dominate the audience by over asserting ideology. Reaction to Fuegi by those heavily invested in Brechtian theory vilify Fuegi but do not distance themselves and focus on the lack of substance to claims that Brecht created nothing new. Theatre is always social.
Modern Western theater in particular and Western history in general are connected to the past. You can't say there is no past or that you are better than it. The intellect is the past. In theatre this past is seen in such plays as Everyman performed in wagons outside of church walls (which are certainly “round”; nothing new there. Many modern round stages have actors with their backs turned to the audience at least a quarter of the time, but these theatres insist on not having a proscenium theatre).
"Measure for Measure" hits directly on the issue of sexual abuse that is so prevalent in Zen, Catholicism, education, military, etc. Antonio is dealing with a conflict and is not a sociopath. When he encounters sincere prayer it arouses him. Antonia sees pure love expressed as prayer and out of weakness, jealousy, and loneliness he wants it for himself. Condemnation of this problem by thinking of it as melodramatic bad versus good, wolf and sheep, is shallow. The issue of sexual abuse needs a wide context, needs to be understood and dealt with methodically and with all the facts considered. The performance of the play saw religion as a right wing institution, but Isabella does not demonstrate any forms of demagoguery. She earnestly prays to God and sincerely wants to be a nun. Zen centers are a perfect setting for the issues in Measure for Measure with the students who seek zen awakening and the teachers who have abused their authority.
Buddhism and Zen
My religious search started with classical studies that included Yeats and classical literature in my two years at the University of California at Berkeley. I also studied Theater. Theater is a human art, at its best. Dance and acting deal with the active participation of the self and creativity. The active life of that art counter balanced the life of study, contemplation, and papers. I went to the mountains after two years and stayed with my friend Susan just outside of Aspen. I hiked into the mountains alone, and sitting before a fire, counting the flames as they sparked up out of the wood, I had what in Zen is called kensho. I never mentioned this in a Zen center, but I can hear Aitken Roshi saying: "Very encouraging. Now show me Mu."
I don’t have an orthodoxy or an 'orthopraxy.' I studied religion for a time with David Chappell at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and he brought to my attention this distinction of the Greek "ortho" for "straight" or "correct" with "dox" for "thought" or "teaching", and "praxis" for "to do" or "practice." Just as Aitken Roshi advises not to focus one's eyes on anything in Zazen so that a wide field of vision opens up, in this biography I am not focusing on persuasion or advocacy.
I'd heard talk of Zen with my family when I was in high school in La Jolla. My mother, brother and I would discuss it. They'd toured Buddhist temples in Laos where my family lived when my father worked for USAID. I was too young to go but I remember seeing Laotian monks in the orange robes of a renunciant. They would beg for rice and bananas that people would put into their bowls. I had read Zen books in our house. Abraham Kaplan's book "The New World of Philosophy" has an excellent chapter on Zen. Kurosawa films show a side of traditional Zen with Rinzai Samurai who face life and death with Spartan stoicism. Arthur Waley translates Chinese sages and Zen Masters. At the University of California at Berkeley I study Western classical Literature taught by Professor Anne Middleton. I am steeped in Boethius, Helen Waddell, Dante, and so on.
My first meeting with a Zen Master is with Taizan Maezumi Roshi in 1974 at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. I am told how to bow to the Buddha statue in the dojo. I do Zazen. The head monk Genpo shouts "Don't move!" My cushions grow higher as I stack on one after another. I sit as still as I can but have to shift my legs in the diminishing hope the pain goes away. At the bell all stand. I know why Socrates said pleasure is related to pain and in "Phaedo" how Plato 'proves' by examples if life is never ending pain then there must be heaven of never ending painlessness. Doksan is announced and I kneel with others in a line, move forward when the line moves as the front person gets up to have an interiew with the Roshi. I reach the front of the line and Roshi rings his bell and I go to doksan. I try to remember about bows and kneeling. Maezumi Roshi is still and silent. I sit and he seems to fill the doksan room with his presence. We talk some and then I ask him, "In this hand I hold a rose. In the other hand I hold a lotus. Is this confusion?" He smiles hugely and says "No. No confusion." I have never experienced Christianity in a Zen center, though, so it is easy to avoid any confusion if there is no inter faith context which can give rise to it. I went to the Center many times.
I read though that monks would journey from teacher to teacher. I see Joshu Sasaki Roshi at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in the San Gabriel Mountains. I walk outside on a beautiful spring day, trees and rocks bask in the mild mountain sun. I enter the doksan room. Sasaki Roshi asks "What do you know about Zen?” I respond with silence. He nods, half approving my Vimilakirti response; then he says I read it in a book. At the time I was impressed but I think now there is nothing wrong about gaining identity from books. People write books and I am in discourse with their thoughts when they are read. I live at Sasaki Roshi's Cimarron Zen Center and practice full time for many years. I cook and bake whole wheat cookies and doughnuts. We sell them all over Los Angeles county. I am mixing batter in the bakery when summoned to see Sasaki Roshi. I find him relaxing with Leonard Cohen. Roshi asks if I want to be his monk. I never thought about this before and the answer that comes out of my mouth is a long version of no. If he had brought this up in doksan I might have been his monk now. In a way I am his monk. It seems to me very rare to find a Zen group where there are monks, as I have seen most American Zen is a priest training ground. I go back a while later only for sesshins.
Sasaki Roshi is Plato’s philosopher king who speaks his mind and makes up his koans: "How do you catch a butterfly as it flies from flower to flower?" ("Follow"). Joshu Sasaki Roshi wrote in his book "Buddha is the Center of Gravity" that "There is no God and He is always with you." Sasaki attempts to show the paradox in our relationship with God by overturning conditioned ideas about God. Zen has been accused of being anti intellectual. The past is not always holding us back. Not knowing the past may be holding us back. Theories that get rid of the baby along with the bathwater have lost touch with long term processes of development. God is not an idea, nor a dialectic, especially a materialistic one. Not two. Originally there is no mirror. Then again many people don't have conditioned ideas about God so much as superficial ones. They look at God talk to support their way of life without question, like listening to Limbaugh on the right or Maher on the left, or reading the astrology column. For these people "There is no God" is upaya, or expedient means, to get them out of the burning house. "Nothing holy" is an example of overturning political ideas in order to point to what is holy. When negation is taken literally it becomes a pact with Mephistopheles. Politics arise which objectify people into followers and uses religious gullibility to create slaves. The "Pure Land" becomes an Aryan concept of killing those who are not pure in the most extreme cases of the misuse of doctrine turned to dogma. The issue turns on understanding the negations in terms of physics and mathematics. The notion of the infinite and the intuition of the limit is part of public education now.
I read "Taking the Path of Zen" by Aitken Roshi. I go to the Maui Zen Center. Aitken Baker Roshi is in a group discussion about consensus decision-making modeled on Quaker ideals of inclusion. I spend many years with the Diamond Sangha.
I also study with Tanouye Rotaishi - Roshi and later Archbishop - of Cho Zen Ji. I sit in a small dojo for newcomers. In time I was asked what martial art I want to train in. I choose Kyudo and train with Jackson Morisawa sensei. I don't meet formally with Tanouye Roshi in dokusan but I do attend several sessiens. He taught me how to stand with my feet rooted to the earth so I'm able to draw the bow without difficulty. I later train in kendo with Greene Roshi, who trained under Tanouye, when Greene was on the campus of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
This last New Year I do Rohatsu at Palolo Zen Center. Michael Kieran leads sessien. I sit at last in the center that Don Stoddard and other Diamond Sangha members built. A lot of things grew out of that Rohatsu and continue to grow. I have not, though, started a committed practice since then.
Ongoing Conclusion
I went to a church. Terry Ogawa speaks about Independence Day and injustices perpetuated on American Indians, blacks during the civil war, and Japanese Americans interned during World War II. Pastor Kyle Ann Lovett's sermon is on 2 King Chapter 5 where the prophet Elisha heals the King of Syria of leprosy. There is a healing service with bread and wine or juice. People walk to the table and participate and return. I stay seated. I don't know why. I'm glad I was there. The Church got me to think about what it means to be an American. I like to think there can be more dialogue and less polarity among right and left ideas. Left and right are two wings of one bird according to Chi-I, Buddhist scholar and poet. We live in an axial historical period, like the time of incipient Buddhism and Christianity when society undergoes tremendous upheaval. Maybe a new religion will grow out of the old to meet the needs of these times, similar in phase ("Vision") to the time when Yeats wrote “twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.” Religion gives rise not just to spiritual life but to temporal, political, life as well. Belief is needed but not desired said Yeats.
Pastor Kyle spoke about Hosea, and commented on the abuses in a family and how these are a reflection both of and on society. I went up to take bread. No existential hold out this time. I am going back. I like hearing the stories of Hosea and so on, the main difference between them and the stories I have heard in Zen is their social and anthropological concern. I am afraid I have no sense of social awareness in Zen stories. Although originally Buddhism in India and China allowed everyone to achieve spiritual goals, institutions developed which became insular. In China Tien Tai Buddhism allowed for diverse forms of practice, but various schools of Buddhism were wiped out by the Emperor in favor of Confucianism and because of excessive practices. The remote Ch'an schools centered on learning and meditation were secluded in mountains. They survived and influenced Japan in turn. Aitken can focus on social and political activism, but then his teacher Yasutani advocated nationalism. Advocacies which both had merit, considering historicist context. Not though sufficient to reach humanity. Representation in the place of reality. Tien Tai Buddhist schools at one point were directly involved with society as a form of meditation (Chi-I Meditation on Evil, Neal Donner.) The Lotus Sutra is concerned with vast eras of time and universes, and it creates a vast context for the mind, yet the social influence of Buddhism to erase the caste system, to pacify the warlords, and in China to include the long ignored question of why there is suffering, are displaced I think by a Zen that is largely a moratorium from society's larger concerns.
On the internet, I was listening to and watching Huun Huur Tu in "Children of the Otter" by Vladimir Martynov; and it struck me the chanter was annoyed by the Western music. It looked to me like he would rather be chanting without the orchestra around him. Martynov has gone the way of many Western artists by combining advant garde with traditional tribal forms from Asia. It reminded me very much of my graduate work in theatre at the University. The Asian forms are accepted without question, the Western forms are questioned to the point of annihilation. I suspect that something deeper than imitation, in art or religion, needs to take place in order to have a mutual exchange of significance on both ocean fronts.
