From Bachelor trainee, Zen, and About

In April of 1974, after about a year and a half of living across the street from the Zen Center, working as an on-call stagehand, and participating in Zen Center activities whenever I could with my unpredictable work schedule, I was ready for Jukai, the ceremony for becoming a lay Buddhist. My path ahead was clear.

By this time I had also done six months of weekly individual psychotherapy with Pat Sutton and transitioned into her weekly therapy group. Things were really falling into place for me.

I invited my parents to the ceremony. They were pretty happy about me having a steady job and generally cleaning up my act on a lot of levels. They knew my Zen practice was a big part of the discipline I was acquiring and they wanted to see what it was about. Maezumi Roshi invited the three of us to have tea with him in his apartment before the ceremony. 

What he said to them made a strong impression on me. Loosely quoted, after a 42 year gap, “This must all seem very strange to you. I can only pass on what I have learned in the way that I learned it.  It will be up to this generation of students to adapt it to this culture, to make it their own”. 

At the end of the Jukai ceremony the Preceptor gives you your new Buddhist name. Maezumi Roshi, whose name was Taizan, Great Mountain, gave me the name Kenzan Mokunin (Firm Mountain, Silent Patience). The irony was beautiful. When I arrived I was a scattered ex-hippie, impatient, barely able to concentrate on anything, whose preferred mode of communication was a noisy drum set. For the first few years almost the only instruction he had for me was “I want you to settle down”. And settle I did. Within a few more years I was married, raising a family, working as a manager in a large corporation, sitting on the Board of Directors of the Zen Center. I became that firm mountain on almost every level. I felt daily gratitude for my good fortune in having found this great teacher who helped me find myself, my own strengths, working toward my own independence.