Opening the Doors of Wonder: Reflections on Religious Rites of Passage

18 · BORN A BUDDHA. DIE A BUDDHA

2 0 2 18 · Roshi John Daido Loori BORN A BUDDHA. DIE A BUDDHA Zen is an austere practice, and the Zen Mountain Monastery is one of the more austere Zen centers in the United States—two hundred twenty-five acres located within Catskills State Park, ten miles from the town of Woodstock, which will always be known as the place where three days of peace and love—the Woodstock Music Festival—did not occur. (The festival actually took place in Bethel, seventy miles southwest of Woodstock.) But real Buddhists don’t need seventy-two hours of manufactured harmony: the universe provides its own harmony. You just have to find it, which is never easy, not in Zen and not even at this monastery, despite being enveloped by a silence so deep it can be nearly impenetrable. But you can try. Originally, the monastery had nothing to do with Zen but a lot to do with other religions. Built as a Catholic retreat center in the 1930s, it later served as a Lutheran summer camp. In 1980 it finally entered Buddhist hands and in 1994 was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, a well-deserved designation, since the building is a unique blend of traditional Norwegian architecture and the Arts and Crafts motif common in upstate New York in the early twentieth century. This gives it cachet to the mavens of preservation. But it stands out from the crowd for another reason: from the right angle, and there are many of them, it looks less Norwegian or Arts and Crafts-y than ancient and Japanese, the sort of heavy-lidded building that Akira Kurosawa would have cast in one of his sweeping epics about good-hearted samurai and black-hearted bandits. It doesn’t so much sit on the ground as squat on it. Possessing the earth, it is as immovable and stoical as Zen itself, even if it does need new windows and stone steps and an overhaul of its entire electrical system. But just as the Buddha’s body fell into disrepair, parts of the monastery are the same way. What’s important is that Buddha knew what lives, what is the changeless essence of all sentient beings. If any building (well, any building in Mount Tremper, New York) could be said to be Buddha-like, to evoke changelessness, it is this one: there for the long haul—hermit-like and as rock solid as the mountains that loom above. Raised a Catholic in Jersey City, John Daido Loori later trained as a physical chemist. Not especially comfortable with Catholicism as a kid, as an adult he explored various religions, finally finding his way to Zen, which he studied for fourteen years before becoming a Zen priest and returning to the East Coast from California to teach. Even after studying Zen’s lay and monastic traditions, Loori is thoroughly American—a childhood in Jersey City is hard to put behind you. But he’s also thoroughly Buddhist and sees Zen as adapting, over and over, to specific cultures while never losing its integrity and power, using its ancient wisdom to take Master Buddha’s Traveling Enlightenment Show from one country to another, from one millennium to another. “For forty-seven years,” Loori told me, “Buddha taught ‘no soul and no self’ in a country where everyone else was doing the ‘soul/self thing.’ Nobody tried to kill him. He lived a full life. Buddhism would go on to China and India and Japan and other countries that practiced Hinduism and Confucianism and other religions, where it was embraced , because it did not oppose them. It embodies them. It’s the equivalent of a Black Muslim minister going down to Mississippi back in the sixties, and not only preaching but converting the governor.” Loori and I talked in a small room just off of the monastery’s main meditation room—a massive space with a thirty-foot-high ceiling and a floor of oak and white pine. Just over six feet, Loori spilled out of his chair that was in front of a clear, leaded glass window—a reminder, along with the tall Christ figure on the building’s facade, of the monastery ’s Catholic origins. If anything was now catholic—deliberately ROSHI JOHN DAIDO LOORI 2 0 3 spelled with a small “c”—about Loori, it was his appreciation of every faith. Maybe...