purpose of zazen was to cultivate a calm mind to assist in the seeking of enlightenment, not to perform an empty, contortionist ritual.
“As I said, Mom had attended some seminars at a home in Los Altos Hills that belonged to some friends of ours, Win and Helen Wagener. Win and Helen were like an aunt and uncle to us Hiestand kids, and they owned an expansive and architecturally unique home in Los Altos Hills, which they had custom built. The home had been specifically designed to comfortably host private seminars on topics that interested them, and it was here that I have my first memory of Suzuki-roshi. If a physical description of Roshi interests you there are plenty of pictures of him you can find online, but I would not be able to describe him based on my memory alone. What was striking to me as a 9 year old child was his presence. His appearance was highly exotic with his shaved head, oriental features and long robes, but even at a distance you could sense a great depth and calmness within him. His countenance was always friendly, and he paid attention to everything that he did. Unlike most adults, he never condescended to children. When encountering him you got the sense that his spiritual vision was extremely clear. His gaze was not intense like a laser beam, but rather all-encompassing like a large, warm and comfortable quilt. In a way that we would now call typical of a Zen master, he could be extremely practical without any particular concern for outcomes. While I have no doubt that I may have idealized these childhood memories to some extent, I cannot say that I ever saw him fall outside of this Zen calm, or lose the humorous twinkle in his eye. He would draw all eyes in a room towards him not because of his stature (which was diminutive) nor his cleverness (he was always straightforward, and often witty), but because of his presence. He had a habit of dropping unexpected words of wisdom that made you stop and think more deeply about whatever it was you were doing. These were often in the form of a koan, which is a puzzle that has no logical answer and is used to expand the mind, but at least in Suzuki-roshi’s case these koans were usually followed by a laugh and a twinkle in his eye.
“In 1966, Suzuki-roshi expressed an interest in having a typical American meal, so Mom invited him to our home for dinner. Suzuki-roshi had been involved with Buddhism since he was 13 years old, and was a strict vegetarian, a fact well known to my mother. Nevertheless, she served him a traditional American meal of pot roast, which Suzuki-roshi ate up heartily. My sister, who had recently joined in with the Haiku zendo, was horrified, but I recall Suzuki-roshi being charming and witty as he politely cleaned his plate. Later, Hattie Lou asked Mom how she could have violated his vegetarianism and served him pot roast, forcing him to eat meat! Mom calmly replied, ‘In his culture it would be extremely impolite for him to refuse the meal offered to him, particularly one he had specifically asked for.’ As prosaic as this story seems now, it was a classic example of Suzuki-roshi’s (and Zen’s) emphasis on substance over form, which made an indelible impression on me at an early age.
“The seminars at Win and Helen Wagener’s home also included an annual gathering with noted author Alan Watts. Watts was the flamboyant former Episcopalian priest who had taken an interest in Zen in the 1940s, moved to San Francisco in the 1950s to join the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies, and published several influential books in his quest to make eastern thought comprehensible to western people.2 Although I met Watts several times at social occasions and dinners hosted by the Wageners, my best memory of him comes from when I was about ten. In conjunction with a seminar he was doing at the Wagener’s home, he agreed to do a seminar for children that was hosted in my very own living room at our home in Los Altos. Watts was interested not only in Zen and eastern thought, but in psychology as well. He arrived at our home and set up a flip chart on an easel and began drawing the outline of a human head, and a stick figure of another human inside the head. I was there with my brothers and sister, as well as children from some of the other families attending the seminar at the Wagener’s, and we paid rapt attention as the famous man said, ‘Now imagine this is your mind, your brain, and inside your brain is a little man who talks to you.’ Before he could get out another word on the nature of the ego and the id, my eleven year old brother Charlie piped up, ‘But isn’t there a little man inside the little man’s brain? And isn’t there another little man inside that little man’s brain?’ In spite of his brilliance, Watts was completely flummoxed by Charlie’s recursive logic, and the seminar went downhill from there. I never attended one of his adult seminars, but I understand they went much better.
“Many years later I read that Watts did not consider himself an academic philosopher but instead called himself a philosophical entertainer, a description that fits my memories of him to a tee. I can remember seeing him on a rerun of shows he did for KQED TV in San Francisco, bopping himself in the head with something that looked like a nerf bat to demonstrate how a Zen roshi would discipline a student. Sadly, even at the age of nine I could perceive he was also a womanizer and a heavy drinker. D. T. Suzuki,3 the best-known author on Zen at that time, felt Watts’s contributions to the western understanding of Zen were dubious at best, but Shunryu Suzuki defended his friend, calling him a ‘bodhisattva.’”4
“What’s a bodhisattva?”
“In Buddhism, once an individual reaches enlightenment, they are released from the cycle of samsara, the eternal cycle of suffering in this world, as well as the cycle of reincarnation. This is nirvana, the eternal state of self-less-ness, where the self is annihilated and disappears into nothingness. A bodhisattva is one who has reached enlightenment but remains in the cycles of reincarnation and samsara for the benefit of all sentient beings. If you have ever encountered someone who appears especially wise, deep and compassionate, they might be a bodhisattva.”
“So, was Watts a bodhisattva?”
“Weeeell . . . who am I to say? Suzuki-roshi thought he was. For me, he ended up being an archetypical example of pathetic human weaknesses combined with an intense striving for the sacred.
“This exposure to eastern thought and vivid characters formed the pattern of religious influence in my home from 1965 to 1971, my sophomore year in high school and the year that Shunryu Suzuki died. Watts followed Suzuki-roshi in death two years later, dying in his sleep aboard his houseboat in Sausalito, passing, as Mom said, ‘just the way he wanted to. He couldn’t have borne a long illness.’ What’s important to note at this point is that these experiences were not only formative, they were also normative. Christianity was the peculiar and exotic religion in my home, and was in fact hardly ever mentioned. I was twelve years old before I first entered a Christian church. It was a wedding at a Catholic church, and the religious portions of the service were incomprehensible to me. When the priest mentioned fidelity, Charlie whispered to me, “Does he mean High-Fidelity?” Since stereo recordings were brand new in those days, Charlie and I almost burst trying to stifle our laughter. The church, its rituals and their meanings, were as foreign to us as downtown Ulan Bator. Although in retrospect my feelings were completely unfair to the priest and his church, the Christian rituals I was exposed to seemed empty and meaningless compared to the vibrant presence of Suzuki-roshi and his earnest and energetic students. This is even more ironic considering I never practiced zazen as a child, teenager or young adult. Nevertheless, my first introduction to religion was one in which the encounter with the Divine was mystical and attained through contemplative practice, rather than an encounter through catechism and scripture filtered by doctrine.”
1. The full text of my mother’s memories can be found online (Chadwick, “Haiku Zendo”) in an unpublished history of Haiku Zendo in Los Altos, compiled by David Chadwick and originally edited by my mother, Barbara Hiestand.
2. Probably Watts’s most famous book is The Way of Zen, originally published in 1957 and now available through Vintage Spiritual Classics.
3.
