Meetings With Remarkable People

Recollecting my informal teachers in the San Francisco Bay area at the beginning of my spiritual life

The late 1960s.

San Francisco and environs.

As I look back at the formative years of my spiritual life, I realize I had a number of informal teachers. There were the people I knew were my teachers, in some cases with bows and incense and vows. But there were also those people who helped fill in the outlines, who by their example, sometimes by a single meeting, touched me, and shaped me.

Today I find myself thinking about them…

I think that basically starts when I entered formal monastic training under the direction of Jiyu Kennett Roshi.

While there any number of people visited the small apartment/temple in San Francisco where I lived at the beginning of my formal training within the Zen Mission Society (after a couple of permutations eventual becoming Shasta Abbey and well after me the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives), most with Buddhist credentials of one sort or another.

Several stand out for me. Reverend Iru Price represented the Austrian-born Tibetan Lama Anagarika Govinda’s Arya Maitreya Mandala. Although I have to admit the main thing that I recall about him was that he wore an inexpensive toupee. For me in my callow youth it seemed so incongruous a thing to do for a Buddhist priest to do, when monastics and priest all traditionally has a shaved head. Today more in touch with my own numerous foibles, less troubling, now mainly recalled fondly.

Another was Reverend Eugene Wagner. He remains a favorite of all my informal guides along the intimate way. He’d been in the Navy or the Merchant Marines and had been ordained both as a Theravada and Mahayana monk at one time or another. He also said, and I believe him, he’d received some sort of authorization as a teacher from a visiting Japanese Rinzai priest Sogen Asahina. When he met Roshi Kennett, and I came to know him, Reverend Wagner was trying to put together a universal Buddhist order. He was for a time a regular visitor to the San Francisco temple.

When the roshi was in England a person came to the temple while undergoing a complete psychic breakdown. Our young acting abbess and I were utterly at a loss with how to deal with it. The person we thought of to call was Reverend Wagner. He immediately came over, talked briefly with the person, called the police, who arrived, talked with him some more, and then took him to a psychiatric ward.

This isn’t exactly rocket science, but at the time as one of two young and wildly unworldly monastics present, Reverend Wagner was a life-saver. His practical actions to help everyone, but also with a hierarchy of responsibility, were an important lesson. One I hope I’ve incorporated into my life.

Today I know I’d factor in the race of the individual before calling the police if at all possible. Another reminder of how the years and piling up of experiences changes things, some slightly, others more deeply.

Then there was Ajari Nevil Warwick. From my vantage today I’d have to call him an aspiring cult leader. Arguably the most colorful of these people touching my life. Even at the time it seemed he was possibly as mad as the proverbial hatter, claiming all sorts of things that just didn’t hang together.

I recall him telling me darkly that he’d been with the CIA in Tibet and that he was the hereditary leader of a Russian Vajrayana sect, and that he was a medical doctor, and, an Russian Old Believer bishop, and, well, it just continued.

The ajari mainly said he was the head of the Yamabushi order in North America, a tantric Japanese sect. He and his disciples took long hikes in the woods, had fire ceremonies, and walked on burning coals. I thought about the coal walking, but couldn’t figure out how it was supposed to be a useful spiritual discipline.

Another of these teachers was the Chinese Chan Master Hsuan Hua. For him it was one meeting that shifted several things for me. While we were in Oakland the roshi received a formal invitation to attend a ceremony to be led by Master Hsuan Hua of the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas. The teacher directed three of us young monks to go as representatives of the Zen Mission Society.

I’d just been reading Holmes Welch’s books about Chinese Buddhism, The Buddhist Revival in China and The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 1900-1950. I was so excited to meet sister and brother practitioners in the Chan school. So, with freshly shaved heads and cleaned and ironed black robes, off we went.

The ceremony was scheduled to take place near the summit of Mt Tamalpais in Marin county. It was a large affair. I quickly realized most of the people present were Chinese. When we presented ourselves, it seemed they were for a moment confused. Then they told us there was going to be a procession, a circumambulation, some chanting, and then a ceremonial release of doves. We were lined up. First the monks. Then the nuns. Then us. Then the laypeople.

After the ceremony was over the master came over and for what felt like an hour or two, although later I was told by one of my companions it was about fifteen minutes, he harangued us in Chinese while his American disciple translated. The gist of it was that we were disgracing the Dharma by allowing a woman to ordain us. And it wasn’t even done right; we didn’t even have the incense burns on our heads that were critical to an authentic ordination. And then the harangue ended with an invitation for us to come with him, he would fix it all.

My fascination with Chinese Buddhism instantly began to wane.

It would return years later as I began the serious investigation of koans. But that’s for another meditation.

And then there was Sufi Sam.

The Zen community had moved from San Francisco to a large house in Oakland. I was serving on the jisha team responsible among other things for hosting guests. So, no surprise when the roshi told me we were getting a VIP visitor.

His name was Samuel Lewis, and while he was mostly known as a Sufi master, he had also been acknowledged for his insight by spiritual teachers in a number of traditions, one of which was Zen. Ours was a bit more mainstream Zen Buddhist community and so most of us were expecting for us something on the rather exotic side, sort of a Zen zebra.

We weren’t disappointed. When he arrived, I answered the door. Standing on the front step was an elderly man only a few inches more than five feet tall. He had shoulder length grey hair, a full beard, and oversized black plastic framed glasses. He was wearing the robes of a Korean Zen priest, I later learned put on special for the occasion. Before I could say anything, actually before I could take a full breath he brushed past me and looked around. His first words were, “Wali Ali, take a letter.”

I recall a young somewhat pudgy man followed along after him trying to write in a stenographer’s notebook. As the Zen and Sufi master’s entourage of four or five followed he proceeded to examine the large old building that had been converted into a Zen monastery dictating his observations along the way, mostly, although not a hundred percent positive.

It was a whirlwind. And when the shaikh Zen master and his disciples left, a visible, certainly a tangible echo played through the quiet rooms of our little house monastery for an age.

Finally, of the cluster of teachers of several kinds who touched me in differing ways in my formative years, there was Alan Watts. I’d read him. His Way of Zen was an informative early book for me. It wasn’t all that long after reading him that I entered formal Zen training. As his book talked a lot about insight, but not only didn’t encourage actual practice, seemed to suggest that wasn’t an important part of Zen at all, encountering the real Zen deal provided a kind of head’s up about him.

Now I met him. In Zen Master Who? my history of Zen Buddhism come west I describe the first of the several times I met Alan Watts. It was sometime, I believe, in 1969.

“I was on the guest staff of the Zen monastery in Oakland led by Roshi Jiyu Kennett. I was enormously excited to actually meet this famous man, the great interpreter of the Zen way. Wearing my very best robes, I waited for him to show up; and waited and waited. Nearly an hour later, Watts arrived dressed in a kimono, accompanied by a fawning young woman and an equally fawning young man. It was hard not to notice his interest in the young woman who, as a monk, I was embarrassed to observe seemed not to be wearing any underwear. I was also awkwardly aware that Watts seemed intoxicated.”

Over the years the old boy has wandered in and out of my life. As I look back from the vantage of middle old age, I realize he proved to be more important than I would ever have thought. In spite of, and perhaps in some cases precisely because he was such a marginal figure, oblique, slipping in and out, occupying the far corners of my emerging spirituality.

In some ways true for all these people, and others.

For each of these people specifically, I find myself feeling enormous gratitude. For good and ill they helped form the person I would grow into.

So, some incense, and many bows…

(The photo comes from the wonderful Shunryu Suzuki archive, Cuke.com. Well worth a visit! Among the figures, the most prominent would be the Chinese master Hsuan Hua, the figure in white near the center of the photograph and the Japanese Zen master and missionary Shunryu Suzuki to Hsuan Hua’s right. At the far right of the picture is Samuel Lewis. At the far left is Eugene Wagner. Immediately behind Shunryu Suzuki’s right shoulder is Nevil Warwick. I think the person to the left of Samuel Lewis (as we view the picture) is Iru Price, but I’m not sure…)