However Zen texts may define the role, Zen masters have not been fully enlightened beings beyond question. Suzuki died of cancer on December 4, 1971. Baker presided over it all like a feudal lord, hosting dinner parties with then-Gov. Ask Kelly S about San Francisco Zen Center. A good part of the goal of Buddhism is to reduce illusion and suffering. Desire, Devotion, and Excess at the San Francisco Zen Center. Sanbkydan Zen and the Way of the New Religions by Robert H. Sharf Hence, questioning and dissent became a shortcoming of the person expressing such a view. The issue here is not how individual students behave foolishly or even in a self-serving way, it is the admonition to "just sit" - even for twenty thousand hours - is no guarantee against foolishness or delusion. He may have slept with dozens; I personally have identified over a dozen, and spoken to many of them. [6], San Francisco Zen Center expanded quickly with Baker at the helm. He remained abbot there until 1984, the year he resigned his position after it was disclosed in the previous year that he and the wife of one of SFZC's benefactors had been having an ongoing affair. Had he misused confidences given to him in dokusan (a private meeting between teacher and student pertaining to the student's practice, an extremely important element in Zen training) for self-serving reasons? In particular, Suzuki's San Francisco Zen Center lineage continues through his bureaucratic "transmission" to his son Hoitsu. This was likely prompted by a conversation between Robert Baker Aitken and Baker at San Francisco Zen Center concerning the question of Zen's availability to interested gays, for Dorsey went on to become abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center. They have shown us clearly that much of what has been presented by the tradition as "history," is really a myth created with two purposes. And after his death, several students of Dainin Katagiri, the founding abbot of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, in Minneapolis, reported having affairs with their teacher, who had been married. Ungerleider.[26]. With this view in place, the entire spectrum of permissible thought is now caught and limited within Zen's mythological presentation, which was a completed creation by the eleventh century in China. A large institution like Zen requires hundreds of such living role players. In his letter, Zournas, who had resigned the presidency in July, details for the lawyers benefit how the various board members reacted to a motion that Shimano and his wife, then the organizations treasurer, be fired. Established in 1962, the San Francisco Zen Center is one of the largest residential training Soto Zen Buddhist organizations outside of Asia. It was considered "real" because it came from the saintly Suzuki and Suzuki made a point of saying it was "real." Not only is the book a compelling read; it also, more importantly perhaps, provides raw data for observing Zen mythmaking in action. Baker's case took place within a certain context, and to understand what happened it is helpful to look not only at Baker, but also at Zen institutional self-definitions and the patterns of social life they have engendered in the United States. Even when Dharma transmission does reflect some level of something we may call spiritual attainment, it is not based on the idealized version proffered by the Zen institution: a mystical meeting of minds between teacher and disciple sharing a timeless truth that unvaryingly matches the minds of all teachers going back in the lineage, through the six Chan Patriarchs in China, and the twenty eight generations of the supposed Indian lineage going back to the historical Buddha, and beyond. Also see the public letter from Mr. Kapleau toYamada, dated 2/17/86. Kai C. Half Moon Bay, California. Trouble At The San Francisco Zen Center I welcome any comments from the reader. SFZC will continue to offer classes, talks, workshops, and sangha gatherings through the Online Practice Center and residential guest student practice opportunities at all three temples. Despite hesitance of some members of SFZC due to the size of 80 acres (320,000m2), Baker felt that acquiring Green Gulch Farm was very important for Buddhism in America. Richard Baker is a man who through the ritual of Dharma transmission has been installed in the Soto Zen sect's "authentic" unbroken lineage going back to the historical Buddha. Reviewed July 20, 2014 . Baker wrote an introduction to Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, an edited collection of Suzuki's talks, in which Baker said (p.17), "During the Second World War he [Suzuki] was the leader of a pacifist group in Japan." "If you scratch under the bitterness, there's a lot of beauty there," says Norman Fischer, abbott of the Zen Center from 1995 to 2000. Americans needed somebody to teach them the rituals. Downing, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., provides an outsider's view into the incestuous circles at the first Buddhist monastery in the West. [13], Following his departure from the San Francisco Zen Center in 1984, Baker relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico where he founded a new community known as Dharma Sangha. The Zen Studies Society was marked by frequent turnover. I remember many heated arguments, he told me, and no doubt one of my many arguments was: this is personal behavior, not illegal behavior., Denis Kelly, a former Dai Bosatsu vice abbot, and himself no model of sexual continencehe too has had affairs, he told me, including one that almost broke up his current sanghashared Schnyers understanding of the proper hierarchical relationship between the Zen master and his female students. No one took the opportunity to stand back and view the entire affair from any sort of sociological, anthropological, psychological or religious-historical perspective. [27][28][29][30], In March 1983 Baker was accused of engaging in a sexual relationship with the wife of an influential sangha member. Suzuki Roshi This is a convenient and economical way to stay in the city while experiencing life in a Zen Buddhist temple and enjoying the serene elegance of a building designed by Julia Morgan. For some thirty years a significant group of scholars have been investigating the development of the Chan sect in Chinese Buddhism. On one visit he decided to take the revolver home with him. Months later Suzukiwith the help of his American studentspurchased the current (and larger) City Center building, located on 300 Page Street. It is a sanitized description wherein any one roshi is replaceable by any other roshi, which is really no person at all. The film was directed by veteran filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and executive produced by physician, Shoshana R. According to this model, mind-to-mind transmission began with an encounter between the historical Buddha Sakyamuni and Mahakasyapa, and continued, in an unbroken lineage, through twenty-eight Indian Patriarchs. In addition, the few American students of his who went to Japan came back disappointed, which upset Suzuki because he thought these students would then think less ofBuddhism. Stay connected. If Suzuki was California's Zen messiah, then Richard Baker was his Apostle Paul. It was a spiritual scandal starring the usual suspects -- sex, money and the abuse of religious authority. He was joined by his wife Mitsu (also from Japan) in 1961. [9], Although Baker claimed that his relationship with the woman was a love-affair which had not yet been consummated, the outcry surrounding the incident led to a series of accusations of impropriety on Baker's part, including the admissions by several female members of the community that they had had affairs with Baker before or during his tenure as abbot. #28 of 84 Specialty lodging in San Francisco. Introduction Another error is seen in the statement that Yasutani roshi rescinded the Dharma transmission he gave to Philip Kapleau. If you are new to Zazen, they have a great Saturday morning tutorial session every week. This "history" has added weight because it is presented as biographical fact. The finances are terrible, and the beautiful carriage house on East 67th Street may have to be sold to pay legal debtsor, if he wins the lawsuit, to pay damages to Eido Shimano, the 82-year-old Zen master who built the society up but also, in a way, has destroyed it. How San Francisco Zen Center Operates "The years people spent here were not wasted years of being duped. If the past is any indication these present teachers will be referred to as honored patriarchs in the future. He was perfect for me, Schnyer said. On one visit he decided to take the revolver home with him. This is not a new idea nor is it unique to Chan/Zen. Michel Foucault in "The Means of Correct Training" in Discipline and Punish, Trans. Anderson remembered stowing the revolver away in the San Francisco Zen Center's garage and quickly retrieved it. 1969 - Suzuki was asked to resign as priest at Sokoji by the temple's board of directors because he was spending more time with his Western students than the Japanese-American congregation. This is the consistent view of the master presented by Zen, the pure, simple, desireless and self-contained roshi, and was accepted unquestioningly by Zen Center members. Learn and Practice at San Francisco Zen Center, residential guest student practice opportunities, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility, Conflict, Complaint, and Ethical Review Processes. He was not a sticky kind of emotional person. At first, I had trouble with Downing's refusal to bend to the dictates of chronology and a quirky writing style that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. The flow of his consciousness is not the fixed repetitive patterns of our usual self-centered consciousness, but rather arises spontaneously and naturally from the actual circumstances of the present. San Francisco from the 1960's into the 1980's was considered by many to be the freest city in America, especially when understanding "libre" as freedom from ideological constraints. In fact, Kapleau never received Dharma transmission in the first place, so there was nothing to rescind. Kobun was resident teacher at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center until 1970. I suspect I probably said something like that, Schnyer said. He was 67 years old. Richard Baker also survived. The new president, Sylvan Busch, did not open his mouth to show any disapproval of Mr. and Mrs. Shimanos activities. And then there was Schnyer, the youngest board member, who, according to Zournas, defended Shimano by reportedly saying, He hasnt raped anyone yet, has he?. But in the 1960s and 70s, American Buddhists needed the foreigners. Downing shows that even in their every day negotiations for used restaurant equipment when they were opening Green's Restaurant, they held a disproportionate sense of their own importance in the wider community. According to revelations that have tumbled out over the past two years, and which I chronicle in-depth in a new e-book, Shimano has spent 50 years preying sexually on his students. 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It is this idealized version of Dharma transmission that claims the master is an enlightened being that is the source of the Zen master's extraordinary claim to authority. This scheme was later institutionalized through the ritual of Dharma transmission. Baker claimed the Center was "denying 2,500 years of how Buddhism was developed and continued" He made a number of other historically inaccurate claims, and finally dropped the suit saying that he was pressured to institute the threat by a lawyer student of his: "There was a lawyer who kept bugging me." But there are many lesser-known yet just as randy Zen teachers. But for the [Zen Studies Society,] my gullibility, spiritual gullibilityI didnt realize that it was a borderline cult. His first wife contracted tuberculosis and returned to her parents shortly after marriage; his second wife was brutally murdered by an erratic, antisocial monk whom Suzuki had retained as a temple assistant, despite contrary advise from neighbors and colleagues. A special note is given to the papers of Heine, Wright, Foulk, McRae, Welter, Schlutter, Michel Mohr and Ishii Shudo. It allows us a much closer look than we get through, say, looking at the many biographies of past masters from Chan in China during the Tang dynasty (CE 618-907). Students in their early 30s, even younger, could find themselves among the senior monks at Dai Bosatsu, in a tradition that is supposed to be ungraspable even after a whole lifetime of study. Please see the Covid-Related Openings and Closings Updates page as well as the Calendar. In the early 1990s the Board of Directors at the Zen Center created the "Ethical Principles and Procedures for Grievance and Reconciliation" for its members, for conflict resolution mediation guided by Buddhist precepts. In this scheme, each teacher can trace his lineage and hence, authenticity, back to the historical Buddha. [9] The building, designed by Julia Morgan, was built as the Emanu-el Residence Club in 1922 for the Emanu-el Sisterhood. Some of these students began calling their group City Center, and they incorporated in 1962 as the San Francisco Zen Center.[1][2][3][4][5]. [5], In 1983 Tenshin Reb Anderson received shiho (Dharma Transmission) from Richard Baker. Baker Sums It Up Before long, Sokoji had non-Japanese Americans mostly beatniks coming to the temple to sit zazen with him in the morning. Stuart Lachs, October 2002 [The teacher] had been in a Zen monastery for a year in Japan. [1] Zen Hospice Project was the subject of the Netflix 2018 Academy Award-nominated[24] short documentary End Game,[25] about terminally ill patients in a San Francisco hospital as well as at the Zen Hospice Project house, featuring the work of palliative care physician BJ Miller and other palliative care clinicians. Ironically, one may ask, is that what Suzuki hoped to reform? There is a whole lineage built on the idea that Kapleau had transmission. Supporting tools to make this narrative seem real and unconstructed include the particular methods of meditation and interactions between teacher and student as well as an abundance of validating mythologies most often presented as history in the form of biography, along with accommodating literary and ritual devices. Despite extraordinary personal shortcomings, Eido Shimano continued to wield spiritual authority throughout his time at the Zen Studies Society. Zen Center members did not think there was any thought control or propaganda necessary to escape when it came to Zen. "Hollow" transmissions such as those between father and son are incorporated into the unbroken lineage to the Buddha. [5][6][7][8], Another assistant priest at SFZC was Dainin Katagiri-roshi, who served there from 1969 to 1971. 3. San Francisco Zen Center 300 Page Street San Francisco, California 94102 www.sfzc.org. 13 reviews of San Francisco Zen Center "This place is really awesome! For a peek into a period only shortly before our own, we can use Brian Victoria's book Zen At War. Katagiri would go on to establish his own practice centerthe Minnesota Zen Centerin 1972 in Minneapolis. The Zen Institution Audio recordings of familiar sounds heard at our temples. The Zen Institution Which means it's basically my fault. 837 501. Former students have said that he was addicted to power, abusive of his position, extravagant in his personal spending, and inappropriate in his love life. Zen Groups Distressed by Accusations Against Teacher Joshu Sasaki in New Mexico in 2007. There he found the corpse of a man with a bullet wound to the head and a revolver nearby. In the end, Baker's problems at the Zen Center weren't so much about his seven or eight sexual affairs over a 20-year span (Chapter 23, if you get impatient). It acquired property worth around $20 million and built up a network of affiliated businesses staffed by Zen Center students, which included the vegetarian Greens Restaurant in Fort Mason, a bakery, and a grocery store. Why did Baker perpetuate such a simplistic view of Suzuki? Sasaki, of Rinzai-ji, a Zen center in Los Angeles, is now 106 years old and, as his board members finally admitted in 2013, was groping and fondling unwilling students well into his 11th decade. It depends not on miracles or mystical figures or discoveries of secret books, but merely on our willingness to believe, against evidence if need be, that those things were real. For an outstanding article on Sanbokyodan Zen, a Zen sect important in the West see, Sharf, Robert, "Sanbokyodan, Zen and the Way of New Religions", Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Fall 1995, Vol. In this way the teacher was like a deity, a minor god. After all, the only two previous Dharma transmissions Suzuki gave, to his son Hoitsu and to Unknown, were not based on attainment at all. This paper can also serve the non-scholar as an overview or introduction to modern Zen scholarship and introduce a critical view of the important Zen ideas of master, Dharma transmission, and unbroken lineage. But the Soto sect tries to have it both ways. 4.5. If someone attempted to question some aspect of Baker's behavior, both Baker and senior disciples reminded them that Baker was the only American Dharma heir of Suzuki. He exists freely in the fullness of his whole being. Downing quotes a prominent older student who expressed it differently, "Dick tried to take over Zen Center again." Students that come to practice at the monastery from September through April must undergo the tradition known as tangaryo. There appeared to be a vast cultural divide between the Zen Center students of Suzuki and Japanese Zen monks that showed itself both in America and in Japan. More tellingly, Baker, inserted the very idealized description of qualities and characteristics supposedly of Suzuki Roshi, generalized to all roshi, knowing it would inevitably, indeed shortly, be applied to himself. "On both a personal and a professional level, I am still dealing with the consequences of this episode. Baker also gives seminars at Boulder Zen Center in Boulder, Colorado twice each year, typically on the last weekends of January and April. My view of Zen as an institution, some of its problems, and how it operates is most completely expressed in my paper, "Means of Authorization: Establishing Hierarchy in Zen Buddhism in America", delivered as part of a panel on Chan at the American Academy of Religion Conference in Boston in 1999. The leadership of San Francisco Zen Center required Anderson to take a leave of absence from his position as abbot. This relationship between the public and private was easily translated to the needs of the San Francisco Zen Center, with meditation halls and public spaces on the lower levels, and residential areas for practicing students on the upper floors. When one member was about to leave (after the Baker scandal), rather than receiving well wishes or a word of advice from his teacher-who happened to be the new abbot after Baker, he was smugly told that he would be back in a year. And as complete neophytes in Buddhism, they were apt to believe most anything a teacher said: The Americans had no competing knowledge, no critical faculties, no grounds to challenge the teacher, no fixed point on which to stand. An interesting debate between Victoria and members of the Deshimaru group (A.Z.I.) [7] Thich Nhat Hanh wrote of Baker, "To me, he embodies very much the future of Buddhism in the West with his creative intelligence and his aliveness. Richard Dudley Baker (born March 30, 1936) is an American Soto Zen master (or roshi), the founder and guiding teacher of Dharma Sanghawhich consists of Crestone Mountain Zen Center located in Crestone, Colorado and the Buddhistisches Studienzentrum[1] (Johanneshof) in Germany's Black Forest. It all came tumbling down in a 1983 event known in Zen Center circles as "the Apocalypse." It was a spiritual scandal starring the usual suspects -- sex, money and the abuse of religious. See Alan Cole, "It's All in the Framing." I highly recommend this book, especially the first 101 pages. I dont know, he said. Today SFZC is the largest St organization in the West. 22, no.3-4. In the end, both teacher and student fall prey to these fantasies. Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and its leader until his death in 1971, was an impressive person, sincerely loved by most all the Center's members. San Francisco Zen Center offers seven charming guest rooms for short-term stays. Baker adds he was "on a roll," was in love with his latest girlfriend and that his peers, est founder Werner Erhard and the well known Tibetan teacher Trungpa, had chauffeurs and large Mercedes, so "I thought I should buy a car." Greens Restaurant, opened in 1979 in Fort Mason of San Francisco, was another business venture by SFZC under the influence of Baker. It did not matter that Baker did not appear to offer his students the "living proof that the seemingly impossible goal [of Zen] can be realized in this lifetime" as Baker himself described the function of the teacher. 2002: 8-11. What the teacher really offers the student is literally living proof that all this talk and the seemingly impossible goals can be realized in this lifetime. Baker's use of Dixon's words begins the description of Suzuki Roshi, with the strange phrasing "a roshi is" This substitutes what is supposed to be a description of their close and beloved teacher Suzuki Roshi, a real person, with an abstraction, "a roshi." However, it should be noted, that he let interviewees voice any number of inaccuracies without comment. Cases like this are important simply because the study of Zen history has shown us the whole lineage tradition is built so heavily on questionable written and word-of-mouth accounts; what is said in the present will surely be repeated long into the future. Shimanos womanizing is of the sleaziest sort: He is married, and he has often picked for his mistresses much younger and disturbed women, the kind particularly susceptible to his twisted charisma. For a most interesting examination of early Chan lineage and truth claims read from a critical textual analysis rather than reading them "for information about Truth and Practice" or about "historical claims to own truth", see Cole, Alan, "It's All in the Framing", a paper given at U.C. The deal I cut with him, Kelly told me, was that he stop sleeping with Western women and only sleep with Japanese women, because they dont tell.. When Katagiri left, Tenshin Reb Anderson assumed Abbotship of the Zen Centerserving until 1995. Michael Downing's book, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center (2001) describes much of the sexual scandal surrounding Richard Baker, as well as financial problems and Baker's generally arrogant behavior. In fifteen years, the Center's annual budget increased from $6,000, to $4 million. Writings featured as biography in Zen are most often an idealized presentation of how a master should perform his role rather than the life of a real person. It also spun off its business and stopped pretending that work without compensation was "spiritual practice.". Remember the senior student who quoted Suzuki as saying, " Dick's commitment is at another level, so the rest of us simply were not in a position to criticize him." (It should be noted that Suzuki could read English.) The same myth was later used in Japan for similar purposes, with Shintoism being the competing indigenous teaching. Look, theres a certain type of person that is looking for something else in another culture, said Ed Glassing, the former resident monk at both Zen Studies Society locations, whom Shimano maligned as a homosexual. Sort of like, something they dont have, so its mysterious, exotic, its like whoa. A theme repeated in Downing's interviews is Suzuki's seemingly quirky idea of reforming Soto Zen in Japan by having his American students go there as living examples of reform. I finished high school early, and at 17 I went to college, Schnyer said. Visitors can enjoy the springs, go swimming or on hiking trips, and have the opportunity to arrange for practice with the community living at the monastery for a few days. The admonition to "just sit," to "just practice," is one more way in which trust in one's discriminating faculties or any other Buddhist practice are cut off. Of a man with a bullet wound to the Buddha statement that roshi. 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