The Zen Center of Los Angeles occupies a special place in the history of American Zen and a very special place in my Zen iconography. It is where my Dharma grandpa Taizan Maezumi Roshi established a Zen beach hold in America and where my teacher, Roshi Bernie, trained. Although I never trained there, it is Plymouth Rock. I’ve not even visited, didn’t make the trip for Maezumi’s funeral. Someday, I’ll make the pilgrimage.
Despite never laying eyes on the place, I have my image of ZCLA, as an oasis in which the early American Zen pioneers lived and worked in a community, a Shangri-La which cocooned them from the tumult of the 60’s and 70’s. I had scant evidence of a cocoon, only one conversation with Bernie in which it became apparent to me that he had missed the Women’s Movement.
I am thinking that my image of the Zen oasis was my fantasy, and a rather strange and ahistorical one at that. I had my theory of the Zen center as an adaptation of the Japanese training monastery to the American scene, an instance of simultaneous invention by Maezumi and fellow-Soto emissary to America Shunryu Suzuki. Why did I leap to that view? I have been aware for years that Zen as I know and love it was Buddhism radically transformed by its contact with the Tao, already embedded in the Chinese psyche when Bodhidharma arrived in China. I love the Taoist flavor which persists, at least, in my Zen.
I also knew that this was no novel phenomenon. In graduate school, in a course in the Sociology of Religion, I learned that religions, as they cross cultural borders, typically accommodate to local conditions, for instance, by incorporating the local gods.
I am seeing ZCLA differently now. Perhaps the great cultural upheaval of that period in America swept up the Japanese teachers and their students. Maezumi arrived in California, to the tumult first of flower power and soon of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. In one of my favorite hyperboles, I have been claiming for years to have been the only person of my generation never to have lived in a commune. Maybe ZCLA was one commune among many. A guru-type religious leader and a spiritual ideology at the center and a path to salvation were hardly atypical. So many of us were attempting to escape from the gray-flannel rat race of the 50’s whether the paths we took were political or religious. ZCLA may have been one of the more successful and long-surviving communes, at one time growing to 350 residents and occupying an entire city block, but in so many ways it was typical of what was happening around the country.
The Zen Center has not turned out to be the model of Zen practice in the United States. Although Bernie brought the Zen Center model with him when he returned to New York – life, as I’ve heard the stories, in the Greyston mansion was not so different from life at ZCLA – Bernie soon abandoned the Zen Center model, moving to Yonkers, diving into social action. By the time I got to Yonkers, the residential program was history.
In my mind, this was progress. Bernie was taking American Zen beyond the Japanese American hybrid of Maezumi and Suzuki. Bernie, perhaps as much as Maezumi, was being swept along by the tide of broader cultural change. Communes were disappearing everywhere, not just from the Zen world. Sitting groups, perhaps meeting only once a week, were replacing the Zen centers as the dominant mode of Zen practice in America.
Now, it seems that things have morphed again. I don’t know if anyone collects data on these things, but it seems possible that today more people engaged in Zen practice are meeting online than in person. Zen teachers didn’t lead this shift any more than they had led the commune movement or its disappearance. Zen people like so many others were swept onto Zoom by COVID.
Bodhidharma could not really have imagined Zen when he boarded the boat which would bring him from India and China – I think I’m making up the boat story; maybe someone else did. How could anyone imagine American Zen? It’s supposed to take five hundred years for Zen to fully adapt to a new cultural environment. Can we even imagine America fifty years from now? Five hundred is unimaginable, and we’re less than a century into American Zen.
Is there a flaw in our Zen way of looking at history? The origin stories that we cherish, reflect a “great man” theory of history. We picture Zen as shaped by the great teachers, Shakyamuni Buddha, Bodhidharma, Hui-Neng, Dogen. I have added Maezumi and Bernie to my list. Funny, I’ve never been a fan of the “great man” theory of history. I was too influenced by Marx for that. Bigger historical forces, economic and social, have been the shapers. To me, it has always been silly to say that Lincoln ended slavery. The great men have been those who rode the waves.
Maybe this is my Zen Tao talking. We’re going with the flow. Maybe, the great teachers, the wise teachers, have ridden the waves. The teachers who tried to swim against the tide have drowned. Maybe Maezumi was able to play his important role in the creation of American Zen because he rode the commune wave, perhaps at considerable personal cost. When we look back now, many of us are shocked by the excesses of the commune era. Maybe there was too much sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Maybe some of us wish that Zen people had been immune to what was going on around them. It’s easy to have regrets. I wish I hadn’t been too busy with career stuff to make it to the streets of Chicago for the ’68 Democratic Convention, too busy to schlep to Woodstock, but when I look at film footage from Woodstock, while I still love the music, the audience behavior looks crazy. I’m glad I wasn’t there.
I’m feeling lucky now that I got to Bernie late, that I missed the Greyston Zen center days. By the time I got to Yonkers, Bernie was riding the social entrepreneurship wave. That ride changed my life. And our little, Staten Island Zen group, after meeting remotely on zoom for several years, is now again meeting in person. We’ve gone hybrid. Maybe hybrid is the wave of the future. Until the next wave comes along.
Thanks Ken