Shoes Outside the Door Quotes

“Ethnic diversity was not traditionally valued in Japanese Zen or in Japanese culture; in fact, so-called racial purity was idealized.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“Dreams have long lives. They are not susceptible to logic; they are dreamed in defiance of reason. And they are immaterial; even as our bodies wither and fail, teaching us the truth of impermanence, our dreams persist, and renew themselves.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“It is really striking," says Gary Snyder, "that so very many people at Zen Center reject the term religion when it is applied to what they are doing. What is any religion? A little ritual, a little superstition, and some magic. That's Buddhism.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“Suzuki-roshi never wanted to be called roshi, a title traditionally accorded only to the most esteemed Zen masters in Japan; it denoted not only advanced age but experience—as a teacher and of enlightenment. He felt the term was too grand for him. He preferred to be called Suzuki-sensei (sensei means teacher). Some of his students who'd been to Japan early on did call him roshi. Several students believe they were the first to do so. However, the term was used in 1961 in the very first Zen Center newslet- ter, and then it dropped out of general use. Richard remembers that he and another practitioner used the term early on. Most students credit Alan Watts with the widespread adoption of the title. Watts was bothered by the oddity of such references as Reverend Suzuki, and he wrote a note in 1966 urging everyone at Zen Center to urge their teacher to do just what he had said he didn't want to do and accept the roshi title, as would be tra- ditional in Japan. And he did. Thus, Suzuki-roshi.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“Richard [Baker] had done his homework. From the beginning, he pointed out, the Buddhist practice of begging was based on an ancient notion of accumulating merit—not unlike the Roman Catholic indulgence scams. By giving food and money to the monks, wealthy patrons essentially accumulated merit badges, which were redeemable in the next life. Richard wondered if the tradition of begging—on the streets or in board rooms—wasn't corrupt. "Don't we want to avoid the idea of merit?”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“Suzuki-roshi's students in America were laypeople who practiced like monks. This seemed so innovative, so unprecedented, that scholars and theologians told the students at Zen Center that they were the vanguard of a Buddhist reformation. And Suzuki-roshi apparently believed this was true. He had asked Richard to reform Buddhism in Japan. But seen from Japan, the Zen Center model might have looked like backwards Buddhism. For almost two hundred years, the monks in Japan had been practicing as laypeople. When Suzuki-roshi arrived in America, he inverted the model by necessity; he had to begin with laypeople because there were no American monks. It was a long road from Sokoji to Tassajara. But they got there. They escaped from the world and holed up in a monastery. And then they transformed Tassajara. And it began to look a lot like Eiheiji. During services, the Americans even managed to chant in Japanese.

What was the big difference? The distinction was really a matter of degree. What distinguished the Americans from the Japanese was their determination to sustain the intensity of monastic practice after they left the monastery.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“Of course, like Eiheiji in Japan, Tassajara was not supposed to be a permanent refuge from the world for anyone. It was a training monastery; however, a few facts mitigated this concept. First, almost no one who arrived at Tassajara had any previous training, so it was clear that a year or two would not make them masters, capable of starting and sustaining their own Zen temples. Second, there was nowhere else in America for students to be trained, and very few had had the wit or the wherewithal to get themselves to Japan. Third, Tassajara needed a reliable labor pool for year-round restoration and building projects, as well as competent staff for the summer guest season, which was essential to the monastery's viability.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“For the uninitiated, oryoki is a baffling combo of a meal and a shell game. It goes something like this: You start the game with three nested bowls, a pair of chopsticks, a little wooden paddle with a cotton tip, and a cloth or straw place mat—all of which are wrapped like a gift in a generous napkin, whose ends are knotted so the tails stick up and the whole package can be quickly undone. If you are not expert, it is not so easy to undo the knot, spread the cloth, and organize your bowls before the servers start zipping around with the first of three vats—say, vegetable gruel, some sweet potatoes or scrambled eggs, and maybe a salad. The servers arrive at your place long before your bowls are properly aligned. (Also, your chopsticks were supposed to be laid out like compass needles; they point in one direction before you eat and end up in the opposite direction and balanced on one of the bowls when the wooden clapper signals the end of this ordeal.) You can waste a lot of time surveying your neighbors' arrangements, and, thus, barely get a bite to eat. There are also some secret hand signals you have to master to indicate to the servers whether you want the soup, and how much, and if you don't give the proper Stop! sign, you are supplied with way too much gruel or sweet potatoes, and then the lickety-split meal is ending and someone is stand- ing before you with a giant kettle of boiling water, which is aimed at your biggest bowl (which should be empty by now, but you took way too much gruel; learn the hand signals). Here's where the little paddle comes into play; you use it like a big Q-tip to swish and swab the hot water in each bowl in succession—your oryoki will not be otherwise cleaned for a week—and then you drink the dregs, and stack and wrap the bowls up as fast as you can.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“There are many paths to Tassajara but only one road.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“During the last three years, I've met a lot of people who have practiced at the San Francisco Zen Center. I asked each of them the same question: What led you there? No one said, I was so happy and fulfilled that I wanted to find a new way to express my joy and gratitude. Discontent, depression, sickness, bad luck, and loneliness had paved the way. Suffering shapes the place more than the sixties, or any particular cultural moment, or any one woman or man. Suffering is the recurring moment, reborn every time someone new turns up.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“Sometimes, it reads like a love story: falling in love with a stranger; falling so far that you forsake all others; falling away from yourself until you are not an American and you are not Japanese and you are not a layperson and you are not a monk and you find yourself wrapped up in a black robe and falling on your knees to bow down in gratitude to the person who occasioned this fortunate fall.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“When Japanese Zen monks began to marry in the nineteenth century (and almost all of them are married today), they gave up the defining practice of monasticism—celibacy, aloneness. But they refused to turn in their costumes or close their theaters. Instead, they altered the forms.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“The questions of marriage, family, and sexuality have never been resolved," says Gary [Snyder]. "Not by the Japanese, and less so by the Americans. They just overlook them. They don't know what else to do with them.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“In their attempts to date Zen Buddhism's official debut in America, many historians follow the lead of Rick Fields and cite the significance of the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago; others point to the subsequent arrival of a particular teacher. The undisputed fact is that it was not here until the twentieth century, and it was not able to flourish until a monastery was established at Tassajara in 1967.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“Shunryu Suzuki, a Japanese Zen Buddhist priest, turned up in San Francisco in 1959. He installed himself in a strange old wooden building on Bush Street, near the corner of Laguna Street, in Japantown. He was fifty-five, just over five feet tall, and he was just about as unlikely a candidate for establishing Buddhism in the West as anyone could have imagined.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“To practice zazen, Suzuki-roshi often reminded his students, is to study the self. By 1983, the senior priests at Zen Center had logged a lot of hours in the study hall. The work and meditation schedule they kept was famous for its rigor. Typically, they sat for almost two hours every morning, beginning at five, attended a midday service, and sat again for an hour or two in the evening until nine. During the two annual Practice Periods, the daily meditation periods were extended. Once a month, they sat for twelve or fourteen hours—a one-day sesshin (intensive retreat). At the end of each Practice Period, they sat a seven day sesshin—twelve to fourteen hours a day for seven straight days, during which they took their meager meals in the zendo, and slept on their cushions. In fifteen years, Reb, Yvonne, Lew, and the other senior students who'd kept the daily schedule had each sat zazen for at least 10,000 to 15,000 hours.

And yet, by any common-sense standard, the most seasoned meditators at Zen Center repeatedly flunked simple tests of self-awareness. "I wonder," wrote a former Zen Center student in a letter to Yvonne in 1987, "if in some cases doing zazen doesn't augment or aggravate the dissociative process—as if in some way it cauterizes the personality and seals it off, encapsulates it, widens the breach between heart and mind.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“Zen is Buddhism made simple again. The robes worn by Zen priests are plain black affairs (unlike the colorful getups favored by the Tibetans and their other Buddhist cousins), and even after receiving Transmission, the Zen master's daily dress is a dull brown robe. You can sit anywhere; Dogen Zenji said that the heart is the real zendo. This informs temple architecture. Plainness here is neither false humility nor a facade. It is true to the bone. Skeletal beams and rafters are seamlessly joined; they are not nailed or screwed into place; they are made to fit together. Inside a zendo, there is mostly open space, dimly lit, with a small central altar and a tan, a two-foot-high wooden platform built around the perimeter, where meditators sit on plain black cushions, facing the wall. There are few ceremonial objects—the teacher's staff, a stick of incense burning in a bowl—and it is rare to run into more than one or two bronze or wooden Buddhas. Zen rituals are spare, too. Music is reduced to an isolated ding or bong of a bell, the flat report of a mallet tapped against a slab of wood, and a thrumming bang from a giant bass drum. Even the chanting is monochromatic; students pitch their voices toward the deep, dark end of the register and grumble in unison.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“This is one of the principal reasons people seek out spiritual teachers. They figure there is more to most things than meets the eye.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“Do not harm. This is the first precept, or obligatory rule for behavior, given to a Zen Buddhist during lay ordination, a ceremony that marks a period of sincere practice, typically a year, with a teacher and other practitioners. If the first precept was not clear to the Abbot, what had been transmitted to him from the ancient lineage of dharma teachers ?”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“Suzuki-roshi's historic Transmission of the dharma to one and only one American man haunts everything that ever happened at Zen Center.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“The job of a Zen master is to transmit the dharma.

The word dharma is a cognate of the Pali word for carrying. The dharma that is passed from teacher to student involves the essential teachings of the Buddha and the spirit of living those truths. Transmission is applied both to the ritual identification and acknowledgment of a particular student as the legitimate successor, or dharma heir, of a Zen master, and to the ordinary, daily interactions between the teacher and all students.

Transmit is an oddly technical verb, and the analogies it occasions are oddly useful. If you imagine the dharma as an electrical current arcing across a distance from one conductive wire to another, you get the basic idea. However, if you have even a rudimentary grasp of physics, you know that the power of an electrical charge decreases as it travels this way This is precisely what is not supposed to happen to the dharma as it passes from master to disciple. A dharma heir is meant to be someone whose enlightenment or understanding equals or, preferably, surpasses that of the master.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“By the mid-1960s, students at Zen Center called their teacher Suzuki-roshi. The title roshi traditionally was accorded only to a few venerable Zen masters in Japan; however, in the West, it became customary to refer to all Zen teachers who receive Transmission as roshis.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door

“The spirit of the place is not not friendly. Meals begin in silence; once everyone is seated, someone slaps the wooden clackers and leads a little chant. The food is often amazingly good, and despite the growing number of vegans in the ranks, heaps of delicious cheese are often melted and sprinkled and layered into the hot things that come out of the kitchen. At breakfast, watch the very senior people deal with rice gruel, and you'll know enough to spike yours with brown sugar and stir in some whole milk or cream, and you could do much worse on a morning in March. ("You can't change your karma, but you can sweeten your cereal," whispered an elderly priest when I nobly and foolishly added nothing to that blob in my bowl during my first stay at the farm.) Once eating is under way, the common dining room looks rather like a high school cafeteria; there are insider and outsider tables, and it is often easy to spot the new students and short-term guests—they're a few minutes late because they haven't memorized the schedule; they're smiling bravely, wielding their dinner trays like steering wheels, weaving around, desperately looking for a public parking space, hoping someone will wave or smile or otherwise signal them to safety I asked a practice leader about this, and she said she knew it was hard but people have to get over their self consciousness; for some newcomers, she said, that's zazen, that's their meditative practice. I think that's what I mean by not not friendly”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door

“This is the story of Americans who did something original. They just sat down.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes outside the Door