From Roshi’s death and Spiritual Steppingstones August 8, 2008

When Nyogen Yeo left the Center amidst a lot of controversy, Bernie Glassman appointed  Egyoku Nakao to be the Abbot of ZCLA. When she arrived in April 1997 I was the only person living at the Center giving private interviews in the Founders’ Room and dokusan room, authorized by Maezumi Roshi (1991) and made a Dharma Holder by Nyogen (February 1997).

Not long after Egyoku arrived she removed me from that teaching role and assigned my old friend and band member Kipp Ryodo Hawley to be the only one beside herself to teach face to face. Then Bernie and Egyoku hired Lynn Mui Farr to replace me as Chief Administrator (August 5, 1997).

The third “disempowerment” was not as straightforward. Bernie and Egyoku invited Margaret Jifu Wolfe and I into the living room of the Inryo (Abbot’s home) to discuss a training program to empower us to transmit the precepts, culminating in the ceremony of Denkai. Egyoku would do the training, and the next time Bernie came out from New York he would officiate at the ceremonies. I was very excited. This was finally the movement along the path that had stalled after my completion as Head Trainee in March 1988, nine years earlier.

But then, a couple of weeks later, on 10/26/97, I was in the bookstore talking with Reiju  when something on her desk caught my eye. It was Denkai study materials for Jifu. I told Reiju there should be a second set. She looked and told me no, there’s only one set, with Jifu’s name. Finally it hit me. They had dropped me from the program without even telling me. I finally heard the door slamming shut. When I asked Egyoku many years later about the incident that was so important to me she claimed to have absolutely no recollection of the meeting with Bernie, Jifu, and I. 

Then the final rejection message was delivered more directly.  In May of 2000, as Rebecca was finishing her junior year of high school, Egyoku invited Mary and I to sit with her on chairs in the back yard. She gave us one year notice to leave the Zen Center. 

Seven years after moving out from the Zen Center I attended my second weeklong men’s retreat in Mendocino. There I had an insight about not receiving authorization to teach from Maezumi Roshi. I carried my notebook almost everywhere that week, and this is what I wrote standing in line before the big culminating ritual.

We’re in the ceremony at Mendocino (procession about to begin). The realization was that I did receive the gift – it was 22-3/4 years of teaching and for whatever reason he said No until the day he died. The message is – I’m not going to give it to you – you’re going to have to do it yourself. As Jack (Kornfield) just said (to me) – You can make your own fucking life.

And so today I got it, that that’s the gift. I asked for everything and he gave me what I thought was nothing. But that’s the only way I could really get everything. The Zen master forced me to find my own life. And today is the day I realized that in the context of the road of life and death. And what that means is that now is the mid-point. The time to turn around and walk into the rest of life as a fully initiated man. The Zen Center was not the place of initiation. It was the ordeal part. The last 7 years have been the re-entry. And this is the initiatory community to welcome me back.

The full context is not the Zen Center. It’s the road of life and death. Reflecting on the Zen Center was necessary but I must now turn away from the past and face toward the rest of my life. Becoming a practitioner, mentor, and elder in living out my destiny, my first agreement.

And now 11 years later (2019) I realize that, in this interpretation, Egyoku was finishing the work that Maezumi had started, burning off the possibility that I would have any institutional authorization upon which to hang any trace of spiritual materialism. Or from another perspective, she assisted the recovery of my original attraction to Zen, unwittingly assisting me in slipping the traps of culture.