November/December 2005

  When the snow has melted
An interview with John Daido Loori, Roshi

by Ravi Dykema

     There is no place to search for the tryuth.
     Though it’s right beneath your feet,
      it can’t be found.
      Look at springtime - when the snow has melted
      the scars of the landscape ar e no longer hidden
      - John Daido Loori, The Zen of Creativity

Have you heard the famous question about the sound made by one hand clapping? It’s a Zen koan. If you know the answer, you may be enlightened! Maybe you’ve heard of haiku poetry, the Japanese Zen style of poem uttered in a single breath. Here’s the most famous one by Basho (1644-’94): An age old pond—/A frog suddenly leaps out/Splashing water.

The word “Zen” has so entered our language that even the new St. Julien Hotel in Boulder advertises itself with a photo of a limo sporting mountain bikes on the roof rack and the words, “Your Zen has arrived.” Indeed it has arrived. Zen first splashed into American consciousness during the fertile 1960s when East met West on the streets of the anti-Vietnam-war movement, in city parks at the be-ins and teach-ins in San Francisco and Boston, and in the desert communes of Colorado and New Mexico. Fueled by the writings of Jack Kerouac and Baba Ram Das, the poems of Gary Snyder and Alan Ginsberg, Zen came to represent the possibility of experiencing a new depth in “just this,” in the weeds sprouting in cracked pavement, in one’s ordinary experience.

If you still don’t understand./Look at September, look at October./Leaves of red and gold/Fill the valley stream. - John Daido Loori, The Zen of Creativity

Zen’s influence has seeped into our art and culture, and into our churches and spiritual gatherings. One of the most effulgent springs of Zen wisdom has come from the pen, from the camera and from the classroom of John Daido Loori, Roshi, the abbot of the Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York (near Woodstock).

Deep in this mountain/is an old pond./Deep or shallow,/its bottom has never been seen. - John Daido Loori, The Zen of Creativity
Daido Roshi, as he is known, met one of his principal Zen teachers at The Naropa Institute when he came to teach at one of the summer programs in Boulder in the mid-’70s. He tells the quirky story of his encounter with Taizan Maezumi, Roshi, in his latest book, The Zen of Creativity, Cultivating Your Artistic Life (Ballantine, 2004). He has also written Riding the Ox Home, The Eight Gates of Zen, The Heart of Being and The Art of Just Sitting.

Zen’s influence on American art can also be partly traced to Daido Roshi. He is an accomplished photographer, having mounted over one hundred one-person shows. His work has recently appeared at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. His photographs have been published in leading photography magazines such as Aperture and Time-Life Photography.

Nexus’ editor, Ravi Dykema, spoke with Daido Roshi in Boulder about his journey from his New Jersey working-class family, to the navy, to success as a scientist and a photographer, and finally to a monastic life as a Zen monk and abbot of a monastery.

No creature ever comes short of its own completeness./Wherever it stands, it does not fail/to cover the ground. - Eihei Dogen, The Zen of Creativity

RD: I understand you grew up in a working-class neighborhood in New Jersey. How did you end up becoming interested in Zen?

JDL: It was a working-class existence after my father died. Before he died, it wasn’t so working-class. My father was involved in politics; he was a campaign manager for the governor of New Jersey, and successfully got him elected. So he had a kind of cushy job with the New York/New Jersey Port Authority that runs the tunnels and bridges and so on.

But then he died. I was eight years old, and it was right at the edge of the Depression. My mother worked two jobs to support us. So she went from being the hostess at parties to cleaning homes for some of her former guests. It was hard on her. In those days, women didn’t have careers. They got married and had children. They didn’t think about the necessity of having to work or make a living. But my mother was a tough woman, and she did what she had to do.

RD: Did that experience inspire in you a desire to make enough money to be comfortable?

JDL: That’s exactly what it did. I went to school and I worked as a scientist, and moved up the corporate ladder very aggressively. I became the assistant vice president in charge of research for an international company, and I was making a lot of money. Also, because I was a scientist, anytime I would get a patent or a breakthrough, I would get huge bonuses. So I got all the things that I thought that I wanted. And then, when I was in my early 30s, I started looking at my life and thinking, “What do I have now? What does all this mean?”And that’s when all the questions started coming in.

RD: What started those questions? You were on track. You were living the American dream. You were contributing to humanity through science.

JDL: Yes, but I just felt that there was more. I had always been interested in religion through this whole period of time, even though I was an atheist. In fact, a lot of the private research I was doing was on the origin of life. In time, I realized that my venture into science was really a religious quest. I was studying the work of the Russian biochemist, A.I. Oparin, examining some of the fundamental questions on how life could arise on a primitive planet in a reducing atmosphere. There wasn’t oxygen; how could it happen? And then there was a breakthrough experiment in which some scientists found that, when they introduced ammonia and other gases into a reducing atmosphere, sparks flew; and in the precipitant they found amino acids, proteins, DNA, precursors to life. That was incredible.

RD: And for you, it was a religious question? Even though you were an atheist?

JDL: Oh, yeah. Where did it all come from? Is there really some guy up in the sky with a big beard who started the whole thing? Those were the questions I was asking myself. I read the philosophers, the atheistic ones as well as the others. I was searching, and I was convinced that the religion of the day didn’t have the answers. I thought they were all pretending they had something, but they really didn’t.

I didn’t get to appreciate religion, per se, until I became a Buddhist monastic. But en route to that, I ended-up as a Unitarian. I wanted to give my kids some kind of a moral, ethical education, so we became part of the Unitarian Church. I quickly became very active in the church. It was ironic—the atheist became the director of a Sunday School.

Now, as a Sunday School director, I gradually worked the kids up to a point where, once they were in high school, they were doing comparative religion. One of the courses was Buddhism, and in the course of researching it for the curriculum, I started learning about it. Not that it was easy to research; there wasn’t much available in the libraries. I would find maybe three or four books on Buddhism and one hundred books on Christianity, fifty books on Judaism, nothing on Islam or any other religion. It was very one-sided.

Then, one of the courses I offered was atheism. I figured that’s a religion—it’s a belief system. These were high school seniors, and one of the things I loved to do in my classes was debate them and upset their positions. I would sometimes challenge their belief in God. Well, a couple of them told their parents, and all hell broke loose. There was a big meeting of the congregation, and they called me on the carpet. And all of this happened during the McCarthy era, and communists were equated with atheists, so I was especially suspect. They threw me out. I was even a board member.

RD: That must have hurt, being rejected from the church you chose for your family.

JDL: It did, in a way; the minister, bless him, resigned in protest. But once I left the church, I started a group, the American Humanist Society, which studied scientific humanism. We used to meet and read books and have discussion groups. This was in Middletown, New York. But none of that had anything to do with my ending up as a Buddhist monk. What got me into Buddhism was photography, which was my hobby from the time I was ten years old. I saw an exhibition of photography called “The Sound of One Hand,” which is a koan in Zen—”what’s the sound of one hand clapping?” I was just blown away by the way the photographer, Minor White, saw the world.

He was known as the Eastern guru of photography. I really wanted to study with him. I went to some of his workshops, and they produced a total change in my experience. Keep in mind, I was a scientist, and in my world experimental verification of everything was the standard. None of this cosmic stuff; it was all very practical. Before I even went to the workshop, Minor White said, “Send me a portfolio of your work and your date of birth, place of birth and time of birth, so that we can have an astrologer determine whether this is an auspicious time for you to do this workshop.” I thought, “What?” But I really wanted to study with him, so I swallowed my doubts and sent him the information. He said the time was right, so I went.

The reading material to prepare for the workshop was Carlos Castenada’s Separate Reality, Zen and the Art of Archery and Acting: The First Six Lessons by Richard Boleslavsky. I looked at these books and thought, “What in the hell does this have to do with photography?” But I wanted to see the world the way this guy saw it, so I started reading them. I desperately tried to see the connection, but I couldn’t.

So I went to the workshop and the first morning, at 4 a.m., we were awakened and told to go out on the lawn; it was still dark and there was a modern dancer there who started leading us through movements. There were about 60 of us, and we’re all moving, on the back lawn, in the dark. I said “What’s this got to do with anything?” to the person next to me; he said, “Shhh, just do it.” I did it for a few minutes, then I said, “I’m not gonna do this,” and I stormed off.

I went back to my room and screwed a long telephoto lens onto my camera, stuck the camera out the window, and started photographing. By then the light started appearing and suddenly I saw where I was at with my photography. It was distant; there was no sense of intimacy in it. It was like I was afraid to get too close.

Then a bunch of people from the dance showed up at my door and told me I was copping out and I should stay. I was touched that they even cared. So I stayed. And that ten days or two weeks turned me upside down.

RD: Were you still working for the large corporation?

JDL: By the time I had gone to study with Minor White, I had already left my work as a scientist for a number of reasons. One of the primary reasons was that my research was fundamental research; it didn’t have anything to do with anything. I was looking at reaction mechanisms and molecular structure. Then they would take my work and turn it over to development chemists, who were using it to develop things that went into foods, like flavoring chemicals that I found in my research on botanicals.

Around that time, I was licensed to work with radioactive material; because of that, I ended up on a mailing list for the Society of Atomic Scientists, that was started by Openheimer and all these guys who worked on the atomic bomb who were having feelings of guilt. I started receiving the journal, and I remember reading an article that said that scientists—and they were talking about themselves—need to take responsibility for the consequences of their research. Even though their initial research may not be harming people, they need to look at where it goes a few steps down the road.

I started thinking about that; I never let my kids eat the foods that contained these flavorings I helped develop, yet I was the cause of it, the karmic beginning. It really bothered me. I decided I needed to make a living in a way that wasn’t so potentially harmful to people. It’s what Buddhists call right livelihood. So I took my hobby, photography, and started an advertising and public relations business and opened a small gallery.

Then I was confronted with another dilemma. What is advertising? Advertising is creating a need where none exists. I was doing a lot of fashion work and I was selling products that I didn’t believe in; for example, one of my clients was a hunting supply company. I started asking myself, “What am I doing?” As the business became more successful, I started getting rid of some of the clients and kept the ones that paid decent wages to their employees and made products that weren’t harmful. All of these moral and ethical and religious questions were coming up for me, and that’s when I began to study with Minor White.

RD: And from there, you went on to study Zen and eventually become an Abbot in a monastery, correct?

JDL: Yes, at the Zen Mountain Monastery.

RD: In the course of studying Zen, did you achieve that realization we were discussing earlier? Do you see clearly? Or did you achieve what you set out to achieve?

JDL: Well, in Zen, the minute you say you’ve got it, you’ve missed it. So I won’t say I have it. It’s a constant unfoldment, but it’s a very different life that I lead now. I’m in a monastic situation, so we get up at 4:30 in the morning and go to bed at 9:30 at night, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about how I feel about myself, how I see the world, how I see the possibilities of human transformation.

For 25 years, I’ve watched thousands of people walk through the front gate of that monastery and change their lives under their own power. I’ve seen them get past the internal dialogue that we constantly carry in our heads, the preoccupation we have with things that have already happened, things that don’t exist, things that haven’t happened yet. In so doing, we’re missing the moment-to-moment reality of our lives. Zen practice and teachings can help people come home to the moment, which is where their lives are taking place. When you do that, it’s not just a matter of looking; it’s a matter of seeing. It’s not just a matter of listening; it’s a matter of hearing. It’s a very different way of experiencing the universe.

RD: What is the difference between Zen and other ways of seeing afresh, such as Hinduism, Yoga, Christianity and atheism? These are, like Zen, religious and non-religious world-views that offer a way to find the Œtruth.’ How is Zen different?

JDL: There are several significant differences. First, Zen is basically non-theistic. Buddha is not a god. And it’s not agnostic; Zen doesn’t say “I don’t know if there’s a God or not.” It’s not atheistic—it doesn’t say, “There is no god.” It’s non-theistic. It doesn’t consider the question as to whether or not there exists a god as being relevant to religion or to leading a moral and ethical life.

From a Buddhist perspective—and this is the old schools of Buddhism—whether or not a god exists is a philosophical question, not a religious one. And so it proceeds from there.

Buddhism in general tends to be self-reliant and pragmatic, in a sense; even the most esoteric schools of Buddhism are quite practical, and Zen is very much so. Zen came to us through China, and so that complex Indian metaphysics that was part of early Buddhism became a very practical, down-to-earth, direct work on the nature of reality. Its origins are traced to kind of an amalgam of Zen and Taoism. In fact, the early Zen teachers sound very much like Taoist teachers, in their expression of the Dharma.

RD: Zen is based on the teachings of Buddha; Taoism is not, correct?

JDL: That’s right. So when you kind of mix Buddhism and Taoism together, what you get is Zen. The person who’s considered the “founder” of Zen, Bhodi Dharma, defined it about 2,000 years ago. He said Zen is a special transmission outside the scriptures with no reliance on words and letters, a direct transmission to the human mind, and the realization of enlightenment. And to this day, that still defines Zen.

That special transmission is mind-to-mind between teacher and student, so Zen is an ancestral lineage. It’s a one-to-one thing. But a Zen teacher doesn’t function as a guru; he doesn’t tell the student how they should live their life or anything like that. When Buddha first realized himself, the first thing he said was, “Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it marvelous? All sentient beings and I have at once entered the way.” Essentially, what he was saying was that he already had what he was looking for, and that not only did he have it, other beings had it as well. In other words, he was pointing out the idea of our inherent perfection. Rather than “original sin,” we enjoy “original perfection.”

The whole point of the practice is to return to that perfection; there’s nothing a teacher can give you, based on that. What a Zen teacher does is challenge, or use various skillful means, to get the student to realize that what they’re looking for, they were born with, and they’ll die with, whether they realize it or not. So you might as well realize it and transform your way of experiencing yourself in the universe.

RD: Yet there is something you called “realization,” so there must be something called “non-realization.” And that’s a conundrum: if someone is looking for realization and doesn’t have it, they’re in a state of non-realization. Then they weren’t born with what they are looking for.

JDL: It’s an elusive concept. The way I like to explain it is with the analogy of the ugly duckling. You know the story: the ugly duckling just didn’t look like all the other ducks. She was gangly. She didn’t know how to quack. She made an odd sound like a honk that all the other ducklings would laugh at. She didn’t know how to waddle like a duck waddles. Even her mother barely tolerated her. All the ducks laughed at her, and the ugly duckling became very, very depressed.

Then, one day, she was taking a drink out of the pond, and she saw her reflection and realized, at that moment, that she wasn’t a duck. She was a swan. And at that moment of realization, she became perfect and complete, lacking nothing. There was nothing she had to do to be a perfect swan. She already was a perfect swan. She walked like a swan. She honked like a swan. She had all of the qualities of the perfect swan. But until she realized it, she was in pain. She was suffering. When she realized this, she transformed her way of understanding herself and the universe. She stopped trying to be something else. And that’s what the realization is. It’s the realizing, it’s the discovery of something that’s already there.

RD: Many people go to Eastern religions for meditation practice. As they practice, they may realize benefits, like being less stressed and less temperamental. At your monastery, are you focused on achieving those sorts of changes in people, or are you looking to achieve something else that’s beyond their personal improvement?

JDL: At Zen Mountain Monastery, you can’t just pay your dues and become a member. We don’t have “members.” We have students. And when people come and want to practice there, we first ask them to do a Zen training workshop, so they can find out about what they’re asking to be part of. It’s a weekend workshop that gives them an overview of what Zen practice is. Then people who are interested in going further and developing a teacher/student relationship need go through more rigorous steps.

In the ancient monasteries of Japan and China, there was a gatekeeper, and the job of the gatekeeper was to chase away anybody who came to study there; they would tell potential students, “We can’t take any more monks. We can’t feed anybody else. Go away.” And only the ones who had the perseverance to stay, sometimes sitting in the rain or snow for two or three days, would be accepted. Sometimes the gatekeepers would even pick up students and throw them out into the road and say, “Go away,” and they would come running back.

We can’t do that in America; we’d be arrested for assault and battery. So we devised another method called “The Barrier Gates of Entry.” The first barrier gate is the Zen training workshop I was just describing. The second barrier gate is to petition the guardian council, which is a council of seniors who have been doing the practice for a long time. These seniors interview the prospective student and try to find out why he or she wants to come to our monestary. “Why this place,” they might ask. “Why don’t you go to some other place instead?” Many people come to Zen looking for physical well being; they come for the vegetarian food and exercise and so on. If they’re looking for physical well being, we send them to a health spa. That’s not what we do. Some people are looking for psychological well being; they say things like “I’m not getting along with my wife” or “I’m not happy at my job.” We send them to a therapist. That’s not what we do. But some students come with questions regarding the ground of being, like, “Who am I? What is truth? What is reality? What is life? What is death? What is God?” Those are the questions that deal with the ultimate nature of reality. Those are religious questions, and that’s what we do. Those people get in. It’s true that physical health and psychological well being are by-products of the practice. But if that’s the major thrust, they don’t last very long.

Those are the first barrier gates that people need to pass through to come in. Then they’re asked to practice solitary sitting for a full day and really examine what it is they’re doing. That evening, they walk through the Zen bow, and as they pass each person, each person will bow, acknowledging their entry. Then they go face-to-face with a teacher, they do nine vows and ask for the teaching: “Will you teach me?” And then I can respond, “Yes, I will.”

Until then, I don’t have permission to teach. The student needs to give me permission, to let me in. Then we begin the dance, the dharma dance, and they become a student.

RD: You’re known for your adaptation of Buddhism into an American context, especially as it related to the arts, the environment, social action and the media. But I think many of us consider the queries “Who am I” and “What is God” as a search for personal meaning, rather than a springboard into, say, social change.

JDL: When you ask, “What does Zen Buddhist practice do?” you’re basically asking the question, “What is the nature of the self?” Or, “Who am I?” When presented with that question, most people come up with a list of aggregates. My “self” is my body, my thoughts, my experiences, my history. But that doesn’t answer the question “What is the self?” If you ask, “What is a tree,” you get a list of aggregates. It’s roots, bark, branches, leaves, fruit. Those are aggregates; but what is “tree-ness” itself? What’s a room? Walls, ceiling, doors, windows. Aggregates. What’s “room-ness?” What remains when you take the aggregates away? Most religions, East and West, would conclude that when you take the aggregates away, what remains is an essence. There’s an essence of a room. There’s an essence of a tree, of a dog, of a person. And the essence of a person is a soul. Those religions are based on that soul. What the Buddha found out, and what thousands of Buddhist men and women have found out through the past 2,500 years, is that when you go beyond the aggregates, what you find is nothing. There are only the aggregates. There’s nothing beyond that. And so Buddhism is based on the “no self.” What happens when you reach that point of forgetting the self, of letting go of the self, what you have is the whole universe.

Zen Master Dogan says to study Buddhism is to study the self, and to study the self is to forget the self. Well that scares the living hell out of people. Forget the self? What happens when there’s no self? What remains when the self is forgotten? Everything. The whole universe remains, and there’s no longer this isolated bag of skin that separates you from it. We think that that’s who we are, this bag of skin. Everything inside the skin bag is me and everything outside is the rest of the universe. What happens in realization is you realize inside and outside are the same reality. That’s called “wisdom.” That’s called “prajna.”

A natural consequence of realization is compassion, because when there’s no self, what you realize is that what the self is, is the whole catastrophe. And what happens to the whole catastrophe happens to you. You can’t damage the universe without damaging me. That gives birth to compassion. Compassion is really a way of looking at self interest, except the self is now everything. You want to take care of everything. So if somebody falls, you pick them up. There’s no sense of the “doer” and the “do-ee.” It’s like the way you grow your hair. I don’t “grow” my hair—it just happens. There’s no sense of “doing.”

RD: But here’s your name on your book; to most of us, that seems like you’re a “doer.” Doesn’t that make it harder not to see yourself as the “doer?”

JDL: Well the book, for example, doesn’t belong to me. I live under a vow of poverty, so I can’t own anything, including the clothes that I wear. I can’t leave anything to my children. All of the income that comes from that book goes to the monastery, directly into an account that’s building a Hall of the Arts and Sangha House on the monastery property. Same with the photographs; when they’re sold, I don’t get that money. It belongs to the monastery. So my self-interest is removed because of that. There’s the possibility of getting caught up in believing your own press notices. That’s a disease that can very easily happen. But I don’t regard

myself as the creator of the photographs; rather, I see myself as the custodian of the photographs. It’s the same thing with the book. Where did the book come from? Where did my sense of the Zen arts come from? Did I do it? Did my wife do it? Did the Unitarians do it?

Don’t take yourself so seriously, and don’t believe your own press notices. If you follow that advice, I think you can’t go wrong.

Loori can be reached through www.mro.org, 845-688-2228.