American Buddhism as a Way of Life

3 My Lunch with Mihoko

3 My Lunch with Mihoko Ellen Pearlman Allen Ginsberg lay in a coma, dying. An oxygen tube laced across his nose as he tossed and turned against his portable hospital bed. Sitting beside him that early April night, I held his cool, surprisingly delicate hand and meditated with him despite his coma. I breathed in, and he breathed in, then breathed out. Both of us became one breath of bare attention. Suddenly, as if distracted by a thought, he tossed and turned, like a balloon trying to break its tether. His bed in his East Village apartment was placed to face the traffic below. Buses swooshed by, horns blasted, and the soft tching tching of delivery boys’ bicycle bells clanged as they wove their way through traffic. Friends, relatives, and former lovers—some famous, some not—came and went. Off to one side of the room sat Gelek Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama, with three other monks performing pujas and prayers. I served them tea, then sat down among them to practice. Two hours later Allen was dead of a massive heart attack. It seemed as if a linchpin of the universe had been removed, and the firmament shifted. An ancestor, a keeper of the flame of knowledge —at least for me and others of my generation—was extinguished, but it wasn’t only Allen who had died. It was also the first wave of those who had discovered and engraved Buddhism into the New York avant-garde. John Cage had died a few years previously; William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Jackson Mac Low, Nam June Paik, and others would soon follow. As I grieved, I thought about how Allen and I, both agnostic Jews from Eastern Europe, became Buddhists. What forces had shaped 57 58 Ellen Pearlman our commitment? In my twenties I was part of, depending how you looked at it, a second wave of Buddhist transmission to America: Allen had been one of the first who went to the East to study with revered Buddhist masters. In New York, I knew increasing numbers of artists developing Buddhist inclinations. In Boston, I had walked into Memorial Church at Harvard University and was engulfed by a Phillip Glass’s opera, Einstein on the Beach. The music’s repetitive, pounding, varied tempo was a representation of exactly what I had experienced during meditation retreats. I found this same sensibility in the work of other artists, in readings by the poets Ann Waldman and Patti Smith, and at John Cage concerts at the Museum of Modern Art. But to most people in the art world, Buddhism was just a buzz word. I interviewed many people in the New York creative world, and practically all roads, without exception, led back to the Japanese scholar Dr. D. T. Suzuki. Everyone, it seemed, had read him, especially in the l940s and 1950s, before ordained Buddhist teachers were readily available in the West. Zen Buddhism, admittedly, is not my specialty, for my real training is in South East Asian Vipassana and Tibetan tantric meditation , which I have pursued for the past thirty-five years. During my research, the more I read Dr. Suzuki’s work, the more I wanted to know about Suzuki the man. Who was this unassuming person who had, as far as I could tell, helped change the direction of American culture? I found myself especially surprised by the controversy over Suzuki’s activities in Japan during World War II. Seeking to discredit him, some critics accused him of imperialistic, militaristic sympathies. Why was this man, who had opened the door for so many others, having the door shut on him? I wasn’t a Suzuki scholar, nor do I speak Japanese; yet I wanted to investigate the claims against Suzuki. It was true Suzuki’s teacher, Shaku Soen, had a militarist, nationalistic perspective, consistent with what critics refer to as “Nihonist.” But Soen lived on the cusp of the twentieth century, the early stage of relations between America and Japan. What else could he have done? America thought it was superior to Japan, but Japanese thought they were better than Americans. The Japanese thought Westerners smelled bad because they didn’t bathe, while Westerners thought the Japanese had bizarre customs and rituals. Did that make either Japanese Nihonists or Americans chauvinists? To help answer my questions, I located Dr. Taira Kemmyo Sato of the Three Wheels Organization in the United Kingdom, who studied with Dr. Suzuki until the day he collapsed...