And he said there was a peculiar quality there, in the valley, which made it, which produced satoris. Anyway, he stayed there and began teaching this combination of zen, of Rinzai and Soto Zen. Now, when I was there, of course, I say he was an old man, I suppose he must have been in his forties or fifties when he went there first. And he always had sessions to which many, many, many lay people came, his sessions were largely lay sessions. But when I was there, or before I had ever come, the temple had been divided in this way that a Soto priest was the priest of the temple, and Hoshinji lived in a house within

[01:03]

the temple grounds, in a hanari, and acted as the roshi, but he had no jurisdiction over the temple of Hoshinji. How many years that had existed, I have no idea, whether that had existed that way from the first or not, I don't know. I met the priest who was a very curious man, the Soto priest, and according to Phil, there was always considerable tension between the two men, and he wasn't a very, well, he was a very odd-looking man, he looked exactly like a squatting frog. He was a very, very odd-looking man, and not very well, I understand, and whether he's still in charge of it, I have no idea since Hoshinji's death. But Phil, of course, explained to me in some detail during the various times that he came

[02:07]

here, during the four years that he was there, about the methods which were used, and of course, everybody who went to Hoshinji went to get Satori, they just went to get Satori. And that was the end and aim and the end of all the obsessions that everybody went to and wherever hell there was for that. You must know all this, don't you, Gary? Well, I've heard it in bits and patches. And so, nobody wanted to wait for Satori. They wanted, the idea was to get it, or to get Kensho, as it was called there, which should be the equivalent of Satori, but for them I think it was a kind of psychological

[03:08]

opening or something like that before what could be really termed Satori happened. But there used to be five or six or seven people, maybe more, would get Satori in the course of a five or six days' obsession. And the whole emotional quality or the emotional atmosphere was kept at a very, very high pitch there. Of course, they sat Soto-style fashion with their backs to the centre of the room facing the wall. Oh, they sat Soto-style. They sat Soto-style. The Rinzai part of it was that he gave koans, gave sansen and koans, but the... Gave them their dog's son. Yes. But the sitting methods and the zendo practices were more or less Soto fashion.

[04:14]

And the use of keisaku was continuous and violent because the idea seemed to be to, of course, to keep people awake, but also to get them highly excited. And then the other thing which they used to do in unison was to shout mu, and that you know, and the head monks would go up and down the hall yelling, you're not shouting from your stomach, shout from your belly, shout from your belly, louder, louder, louder, louder. And the individuals were instructed when they were not doing zazen in the main hall, in the zendo, also to sit out and shout this mu. When the evening sessions were over, those who were very, very desirous of getting satori

[05:22]

were taken out in the graveyard and were beaten more by the head monks. And Phil told me himself of the time that the head monk beat him for 40 minutes and nothing came of it. And they were both standing out there in the graveyard with the tears streaming down their face and the head monk quack, quack, quack with the tears and Kapilao standing with the blows and the tears streaming down his face and nothing happened. At another time he told me about a Japanese nun who had gone there and who was taken out in the graveyard and beaten, and she got satori as a result of that beating. When they got through the last day of the session, or the last evening of the session, it was announced at the tea party that they had, final tea party, who had gotten satori.

[06:28]

And then those persons sat on their cushions and the persons who had not been successful during the sō session went by one by one and did raihai in front of those who had received it. It happened that after Phil had been there about two years or perhaps more, a certain monk who had been under Hoshinji in the early days came back to Hoshinji. He had been given, or he'd been the priest of a little temple in the mountains someplace, and he had a disciple and the disciple got married and had a child and there was no more room in this tiny little temple, so he decided to go back to the monastery and he returned to Hoshinji. And Phil spoke very, very beautifully about him.

[07:31]

He said really what he had, that this man had taught him, what Buddhism was about. The boys, the monks at Hoshinji were lazy, got up when, the head monk got up when he felt like it, and the discipline was apparently worse than lax. But this old man, old, well he wasn't old, I suppose he was fifty because he came here twice to see me. This fellow, this old monk, would get up at four o'clock in the morning and he would get Phil up and they would go and start the fires and then they would wash the vokas and then they would go to the hondo and they would have their service and everything was done just as it should be done in the monastery and as it was not being done by the regular monks. And Phil spoke so often, so beautifully about this man's devotion and his real heartfulness

[08:36]

and his simplicity and so he brought him here twice for dinner and he was, just as Phil had described him, a very, very simple man and with little, little, very little education and I would say probably not too much spiritual experience, but just a fairly devout man and it was very cute to see him going around the house, stopping at this picture in the shrine and saying his sutras and all that sort of thing. So when he was here for dinner, one of the dinners, he was talking about Hoshinji and about the discipline there and about the amount of whacking and beating and so forth that was going on and he said, well, there's much more than in the old days when I was there. He said, I think that Hirata Roshi feels that he's getting old and he wants to get as

[09:40]

many people enlightened before he dies as possible, so he's just speeding all the processes up and pushing and pushing and pushing and I said, well, does it work? What about these Satori's that people get under this pressure? And I said, now, for instance, Phil told me a time before or some little while ago about this nun who came and who was beaten up in the graveyard and got Satori as a result of the beating and he said, oh, well, you know, that was too bad. He said the next time she came, Roshi discovered it hadn't been Satori at all and reversed his opinion. That has happened in some cases with Yastani Roshi also, where he has had to reverse his

[10:40]

first judgment of people's experience as to whether it was true or not. How many heirs Yastani or Hirata Roshi had, I don't know. He had, but the most conspicuous ones were, of course, Ishiguro and Yastani. And Yastani was his, studied under him a long time ago. Yastani himself now is 83, and I think we have, or perhaps it's in Phil's book that there is a history of Yastani's life, and I think he was a teacher for, I'm sure he was a high school teacher or something like that for many years, and he had a wife and daughters, and I don't think until very recently he's ever had a temple of his own, until fairly recently. And after Phil came from, had to come in from Hoshinji because his funds and that were getting

[11:48]

rather low and he had to live in Tokyo to teach, he came in and went to Yastani on the advice of Nakagawa Roshi. And I think that through Phil, Yastani has met many people, many foreigners, and although he certainly had quite a number of young, of laypeople, Japanese laypeople who've been attached to him and going to his, that he used to have, I don't know what he does now, but some years ago he had 12 or 13 places where he held these O-Sessions. Yes, where they just went around like this from one to the next to the next to the next. And so that if you followed Yastani Roshi around, you could just practically go from session to session to session to session.

[12:50]

And those sessions would be sometimes three days, sometimes five days, or sometimes seven days, and people would, but people would come because many of them were white collar workers or teachers or businessmen of some kind, and they would come and stay for as many days as they could and then go away. I don't know about Hoshinji. I should imagine that at Hoshinji, where they had the, where they sat in the zendo, that sitting was an important point. But with Yastani, sitting is not an important point. I mean, you can sit most any way that you want. And well, the people that he, the large part of his, at least his foreign people, are people who cannot sit. I mean, who never learned to sit, who perhaps come for the first time for an O-Session. And of course, that was true with Ishiguro, who is now dead, because he worked it out

[13:55]

to a question of five days, a five-day O-Session. Where you could get zen in five days. But he used the same methods as Hoshinji, but somewhat elaborated and somewhat more pressurized, if you will. And I think Yastani's methods are not quite so pressurized as Ishiguro's were. But they are, for the bulk of the people, they are extremely pressurized. The shouting goes on all the time, and the hitting. I know of two people that were completely, their backs all black and blue from the hitting. They had to, foreigners who had to stop. And he says, well, if they, if you can't stand the hitting, well, then we just won't

[14:55]

hit you, that's all. And if it's too hard on you. And the interesting thing is, that with all of that, that it took Kaplau eight years to reach his satori. Q. By what you mean for it to go on? A. I wouldn't know. Q. What do you mean by that? A. Well, that's what he calls it. And he'll tell you about that in his book, because there are satori accounts in that book, five or six or seven, and his, he speaks about the length of time that was. And of course, that's very interesting, because that, I mean, that is all that is legitimate for a person, whether he was a particularly difficult subject, or whether the Roshi demanded more of him as a satori.

[15:56]

Because as Fukutomi-san, who was here the other night, said to me, he was talking about some Roshi who wouldn't let a man pass the Mu Koan for six years. He didn't care whether the man's answer was correct. The answer was by the side. It was utterly unimportant. The thing was, he wanted to bring him to a certain state of realization. And he did it by means of the Mu Koan, but by refusing to accept it. And so whether that kind of technique was used on Phil, I have no idea. He doesn't say that, but he just says that it was something like eight years. And as I say, it probably was a better satori for that length of time. On the other hand, you read this story of his wife's satori, which was a paroxysm

[17:05]

of hysteria, and very distressing. Very, very distressing. Well, is there anything that you know of Harada, Roshi, Yastani, or any of these people that indicates that they have a way of continuing to use koans for extensive training? Well, they are. Phil is still studying under Yastani. And you may have heard of a man by the name of Paul Weiss, who is a psychiatrist in New York. Well, he is Yastani's New York backer, shall we say. And he has been practicing shikantaza, which is no koans, ever since he came to Yastani. Roshi went first to Nafgalosoyen and then to Yastani. And that must be about, anyway, six years, I should say. And Yastani says in his introductory lectures, I'll give you whichever you want.

[18:11]

Shikantaza. Yeah, shikantaza. He says it's more difficult than koans. But you will see how Phil handles this matter. The problem, the real problem in his book is that it would appear that while this is a combination, he doesn't deny that, a combination of soto and rinzai worked out by Harada Roshi, that it is an acknowledged and accepted method which is completely in accordance with, what shall I say, traditional Zen. He's ambiguous on that point. He's written a very good article, which I think I showed you, didn't I, from the... The New York Times. Yes, an excellent one. It's an excellent article in which that whole question is completely sidestepped.

[19:18]

And the methods that are used are completely sidestepped too. So there's just a straight story about Zen as something not connected with any teaching method at all. But I get it that this line has been fairly influential in Japanese lay circles. I wouldn't know, because I don't know... They seem to have some following. I'm sure that Yasutani has. How many other... Now Ishikawa is dead. He has nothing except he had this psychiatrist, Sato, who was trying to push him. But that's come to an end now. And Yasutani, I believe, has, I've been told, has a lay heir, a man in his 60s. And he's recently, in the last year, made Phil a priest, a Soto priest.

[20:23]

So whether Phil will be a teaching heir or not, I have no idea. Well, that's very interesting. I guess that is kind of a key point to what you just mentioned, and what you said that Phil was perhaps evading. And that is just how much this is within the line of traditional Zen, how much it amounts to innovations. Well, I know that the traditional people, we'll say temple people, the traditional Rinzai people, don't pay any attention to it at all, completely ignore it. It's just one of the... just a little wart on Zen, so to speak. And of course, I think the whole history of Zen has been full of these various lines that have diverged for a time, and they're just like little streams that end up in the sand.

[21:25]

If any of them can carry on, that would be interesting, because I don't think there have been any... I don't know of any lines outside of more or less really orthodox temple lines that have continued. What's his name? Eizan Roshi's line will be one of the very interesting ones when he dies. He has about three heirs, I understand, but whether... how capable those people are going to be and what they can do afterwards, I don't know, I'm sure. But of course, Eizan did too. He made some changes. He decided that there were 250 koans that people should pass through. You've seen that book of his, have you, a collection of 250 koans? No, no, you told me about it, you see that? Uh-huh, well, it's here. And he gave those to students.

[22:28]

Anybody could have that book, and so they would know... I don't know that they knew the sequence in which the Roshi would give them, but they know what they were... koans, what they were going to get, and whether they got all of them, I don't know, but his 250... collection of 250 was, according to him, what he thought covered the whole story, and for anybody who studied under him, they were expected to study the 250 if they completed their course, so to speak, under him. But what completing the course meant, I don't know. I mean, whether it meant simply going through them or what. But he's supposed to have about three heirs. Eizan Roshi. Eizan Roshi, yes. And I know two of them, and I wouldn't be very hopeful about the future with those men myself, but they're both of them university teachers.

[23:30]

And of course, Eizan was himself a university teacher. And... But they don't live quite the way he did, and they're not men of his stature in any way. But one never can tell. And there may be a third or a fourth that I... Certainly there are, is a third, and there may be a fourth that I don't know, I've never met. But if so, I think that will be one of the interesting phenomena if his line can carry on two or three generations. Now, Osaka Roshi is another man in Tokyo who is a rei roshi. And he has a dojo, a rei dojo, at Musashino. Now, I don't know him. I only have known one or two people who had studies at the dojo, but if you inquire, you're sure to find out Osaka Roshi.

[24:34]

And he is near one of the big universities, and his students are largely students from this university, boys who are going there. Do you know what line he was? No, I don't know. No, I wouldn't clearly say. But I'm sure that almost anybody around here, probably if you ask Yokoi-san, he could tell you about it. And we have a book, which I don't think you've seen, you might ask either Furu-san or Yokoi-san about, written by Suzuki's young fellow that's clinging onto his coattails, Akizuki, something or other, Ryumin or something, Akizuki-san. And he edits the Daijo Zen now. You write it, Autumn Moon.

[25:39]

And he has a book with a list of the major Roshis living in Japan, which may be of interest to you. He includes himself. And I have an idea. I think that he came from Osaka Roshi, this Akizuki. But Yokoi-san knows all that gossip very well, and he would be able to give you the insights on it. But he has quite a good... Osaka Roshi has quite a good-sized zendo, yes, dojo outside of Musashino, I think it is. And I'll tell you somebody else that is studying with him. There's a Swiss woman who's the one who took around the Sengai paintings that Suzuki was interested in, and Suzuki sent her out to Osaka Roshi.

[26:44]

She does Sanzen by mail with him. For him, it seems. Well, I think that just about sums up the Roshis. I think so. We talked about quite a few of them. I wonder if you'd feel like at this point, actually, if you feel like it, about summing up maybe your views on traditional Rinzai training, and on the benefits and or drawbacks of the traditional Soto training, and what you think is to be... Well, I'll put it this way. What is really important, in your view, in the traditional Zen training, and what is there in it that is peripheral to the traditional Zen training? Well, I suppose that I am a complete traditionalist about the training.

[28:03]

That is, I think that the Koan study is just remarkable, and I wouldn't give up a day that I've devoted to it, and I only regret that age and other things interfered with my continuing it, because I just think it's wonderful. And I don't know. It's a problem to me when I think about it. What is Zen? What is it going to be? What is it? What is it going to be for the majority of people? Of course, I always come back to the point that I don't think it can be for the majority of people, and I doubt whether real Zen training and real Zen study,

[29:05]

if we call it that, can ever be, has ever been, or ever will be for more than a relatively few. But I think the Japanese have solved the problem in their own way, in that they have, for them, Zen has become, except for the specialists, the monks and priests and a few ardent laypeople, has been a cultural expression. They've substituted calligraphy and flower arrangement and tea for Zen itself. That constitutes their Zen. And I think they're honest enough when they say that these things are Zen, because I think for them they are. I don't think they are Zen. Well, here's actually what I'm driving at, specifically, in terms of the Sodo.

[30:09]

If you can answer this, perhaps. Let's say, let's put it this way. Sodo life has a reputation among the Japanese as well as the Westerners, as being severe, of being surrounded by etiquette and manners, of having very strict and formal interrelationships in certain ways, of being highly disciplined, of being difficult in the sense of bad food and cold in the winter, and so forth. And of being very communal. And... ...street on the west of Central Park. He had a great big living room, a general room, and he had a shrine room and a bathroom and a kitchen. And he used to do the osoji for it, the cleaning for it himself.

[31:16]

He also, at that time, was doing carving and repair work for Yamanakas. And he had a pair of mompeis, which he always wore in the morning when he was cleaning up his place and working. So, one day in the night, 11, 12 o'clock at noon, Dr. Goddard came to call. He had never been there before, so he knocked on the door, and Soke-an went to the door, and he was rigged up like this. He had the broom in his hand, and he had his mompei on, and he was, as he used to say, disheveled. So, Mr. Goddard said, does the Reverend Sasaki live here? And he said, no, and slammed the door.

[32:19]

I said to him afterwards, when he was telling me about it, laughing about, of course, Mr. Goddard came back again, but that was the first encounter. Why did you say, no, and slam the door? Well, he said, if he'd had eyes, he would have seen that I was the Reverend Sasaki. He wouldn't have looked at my mompei and all the rest of it. And he said, if he couldn't see I was the Reverend Sasaki the minute I opened the door, then he should have the door shut in his face. He antagonized many people by doing things of that sort, and they were not in any way put on artificial or an attempt to be eccentric or anything like that. They were absolute reactions, I mean, immediate reactions to the situation. Afterwards, he got to know Goddard very well,

[33:21]

but that was his reaction. I opened the door, and this, does the Reverend Sasaki live here? No, bang. He can't see me. That's that. Can't get in. And, oh, he had both quick reactions and also a quick temper. He could raise a temper quite easily. But he really, he adored New York City. He had lived there for, from 1914, and mostly in Greenwich Village because he was working for an art shop at that time, and he lived down there, and he knew many of the poets and painters and writers in Greenwich Village at that time. And he just adored New York City.

[34:25]

He never wanted to go outside of New York City. He had had his, he loved the Far West, these great trees and forests and all that. He adored that. But in the East, he liked this wonderful city. And he, if you, if he liked you, there was no sense of, he had no difficulty communicating with Americans at all. None whatsoever. He was a good judge of personality. He was a very, very, he was perhaps, he was, seemed to be more, people used to say more like a Chinese than he did like a Japanese. And he always said that he was sure he had both Chinese and Dutch blood.

[35:26]

Dutch, yeah. And, but, oh, he was so different from the Roshi that we've spoken about earlier, meaning his attitudes. And he loved American food. He loved steak, and he loved to eat at Child's. He just loved everything American. So on the face of it, there's no inherent obstruction to the right kind of Roshi, to getting the feel of that country and of liking it. Well, of course, you have to take into consideration, first of all, that he never had a Sodo training. That's the first thing. The second thing is that he was, before he was a Zen man, he was an artist.

[36:27]

That was his intrinsic nature, was the nature of an artist. And so perhaps for that reason, for both those reasons, he was not bound or trammeled with tradition and so forth. Sokyong went back to America the last time as a priest. He did. Yeah. Not as a priest, no. That came even after that. Let me tell you, next time, I'll make out a little card so that I have the dates right and that for it. And I'll give you his life more or less chronologically. And because you should have that also. I'd like to have that. The question I was going to ask was, though, was this. He was, in some sense, part of the temple establishment, finally. Yes, he was. But what did he have to say about temple Zen?

[37:28]

Well, I don't know that I ever heard him speak about it. He certainly did not hold to Sokaksu's Ryomokai and purely Lei Zen. And the reason that he became a priest was, as I think I said before, that he felt that it was impossible for Americans to understand that a Lei teacher could be a religious man. And that it was necessary for him to have the title of priest in order to get anywhere in the West. Because they would have, for a Lei teacher, there was no respect. And it was necessary to have it. So while he never lived in the Sodo, and while his becoming a Daitokuji priest

[38:41]

was done entirely, shall I say, by mail? Yes, because he had friends among Daitokuji priests who became his sponsors. And he would never allow the institute. This was another disagreement with Sokaksu. First of all, Sokaksu wanted Sokaon's group in New York to be a branch of Ryomokai. And that he would never permit. He would never give in to. Nor would he have a branch of Daitokuji either. He said it must be a completely independent American organization with no strings anywhere, to any place in Japan. Now it's quite true that in the very early days, so I'm told,

[39:45]

but this is long before my time, he did get some contributions from his students and other people for a temple called Momonji in Chiba, the priest of which was a very good friend of his. And this priest wanted to build an inriyo on his temple grounds. And Sokaon and his students raised a certain amount of money for that. And with the understanding that if his students ever came to Japan, that they could live in this inriyo, it had five or six rooms in it, in Momonji, which is about, Momonji is about maybe an hour, hour and a quarter from Tokyo.

[40:46]

And it was the priest of that temple, Aono Osho, who was his special sponsor here at Daitokuji when he became a monk, or a priest at Daitokuji. But aside from that, he never sent money back to Sokatsu and to Ryomokai, or never sent money to Daitokuji, or there was no connection whatsoever. And they never sent anything to him. The American Institute was, his group was completely separate from any connections here. And that was what he insisted upon from the very first that it be that way. He wanted it to be completely American and completely independent from everything over here, except the teaching line. When you saw him at that period, then, in New York, do you think that his judgment was right

[41:49]

in that Americans would not respect him if he wasn't a priest? If he had just been a lay teacher teaching under some of those circumstances, would it have made a great deal of difference, do you think? I think so. I think he was absolutely right. And I think it will be a long time before Americans or Europeans will accept teaching from a lay Roshi, no matter how qualified he is. That's why I've always insisted, and why he insisted before he died that I come over here and find a Roshi to take his place in America. And not a lay Roshi. And I think he was right, and I think he still is right, and I think he'll be right for a couple of generations until there is much more known about Zen and more correctly known.

[42:56]

And I don't know, I don't know how successful lay teachers really are, I don't know. The only real lay teacher that I know here, I suppose, is Eizan Roshi. And, of course, he's been in that Ryōmokai, and now his own Ningen Zen ever since he died. Since he was 20 years old. He's practically like a priest. He is like a priest. If you saw him, you would... He dresses in a robe. Well, he wears a black koromo, or light robe, kimono, you know. And his wife has been with him practically the whole time. He was married young. She was one of Sokatsu's disciples, and they all lived in Sokatsu's compound all their lives. So, they're completely in Zen and have been all their lives.

[44:07]

Well, that's very much like the modern, say, the last two centuries' development of Hinduism. And, you know, which is a question in my mind about a kind of a third choice between a completely secular lay movement, on the one hand, and a temple movement, or a temple line, on the other hand. And that is the sort of ashram concept of married peoples, but working in a more disciplined structure than just ordinary lay life. Something like that Eizan Roshi situation. In India, of course, they have these little groups around a teacher. A little community forms around a teacher. And there are many married couples, and they raise their children, and they even have a little school for them there, right within the whole community. Do their own education, and so forth. And that seems to have been very successful. Well, I doubt if that would exactly that way work in America.

[45:11]

I don't know. But he had the greatest respect for the temple transmission. I mean, as far as I know, I never heard him accept anything else but that. And he considered that he had it, because Sokatsu, after all, it was only by his wish that he removed himself from temple life, because he had his own action, because he'd been completely brought up in temple life. Of course, he didn't enter temple life as a child, but he certainly was in Gakuji for some 10 or 15 years under Soeyan Roshi. And, no, Soeyan, and he certainly had the greatest respect and confidence in the temple

[46:16]

transmission of Zen. And he had, he used to speak most disparagingly about Suzuki's way of teaching and his description of Zen, and never considered that Suzuki was a man in the real line at all. And he would, I'm afraid he did a good deal of laughing at him, and thought it was much that he had to say was pure self-manufactured nonsense. No, he certainly wanted another orthodox, shall we say, Roshi to follow him. No question about that. Did he have anybody in mind?

[47:17]

No, not in, he had nobody at all. And he had, he was very, very sorry and very sad, because he said from the day that he became a priest, he began writing to various priests that he knew. For instance, this Koto in here was a friend of his, and I don't know how a friend, but I don't know in what way he knew him, telling them here, the various temple friends that he had, priest friends, that they must prepare to send people to America, and they must try to send somebody to him to break in and prepare to follow him. And he was, felt very, was bitterly disappointed.

[48:17]

He said he couldn't get one bit of reaction from anybody. Nobody was interested. Nobody offered him any help of any kind. He used to say, they're so blind, they're so stupid, they're so steeped in their old ways, and they can't, they don't see beyond their, the edges of the island, and they can't see what's happening in the world. They don't know how they've got to go out. But he could get no reaction of any kind. He used to feel very badly about that. He said as soon as, see, he had already become a priest when I knew him, and that's some two or three years before. And he said, told me that from that time on, he began writing to these priest friends and saying, you must send me somebody. You must begin preparing people. But no reaction on their part whatsoever.

[49:20]

Of course, I don't think there's any more reaction today. There doesn't seem to be. No. Morimoto Orochi sending Gisen to America is one of the few cases of somebody apparently thinking in terms of the West for the future that I've seen. Well, is he thinking about Gisen for the West? No, he's thinking about, I guess, having Gisen here, but prepared to be more understanding of the way foreigners are. That's about as far as it goes, I think. Well, I don't know anybody else who's thinking about it. And when I speak to anybody, they just laugh, and that's all they've done for years, just laugh. And, oh, it's very, this is very discouraging. I don't know, as I say, that Shibuya Orochi is the only one I know. March 26, 1966.

[50:24]

We talked about Roshi's before, and I think we just about covered all of the other Roshi's. Did we talk about Nakagawa Soen? I guess we did. You talked about him. Did I tell you about his recent accident? No, I don't think we did. Well, I heard about this from Irmgard, who heard it from a friend in England, to whom he'd written, or that. It seems that I knew that he had not been available for the Rohatsu this year because of a Spanish woman who had come here to see me and who was going there for Rohatsu, had written me from Tokyo and said that there had been no Rohatsu there and everything had gone wrong about her stay because the letter which I had told her to write from here to let them know she was coming had either not been received or not read, and that she wasn't expected,

[51:29]

and so she'd only stayed two or three days and gone back to Tokyo. Well, it turns out that what happened was before the Rohatsu, he went out for a walk one day and he didn't come back, and after three days, the monks got rather concerned about him and they went out to look for him, and they found him lying unconscious on a ledge of rock. How long, whether he'd been there the three days or part of the three days or what, I don't know, but at any rate, they brought him back, and he's been, he was ill for a supposed to be on his feet now, but that's about, I guess, as much as there is to it. Did he have a stroke or something like that? I don't know. I don't know what happened. I think he heard a spot. I think that was one of the things that was said about it, but he's not a very happy or very fortunate man in many ways, I think. Well, there was one other thing I was going to ask you about, which we didn't get to

[52:33]

before. I just came back to it now. That was your personal recollections of Hoshinji and Obama Roshi. Oh, yes. Well, that would connect up with, continue with Nakagawa, really. And it would also connect with Yasutani Roshi, our talk about him earlier. Yes. Well, of course, my interest in Hoshinji was aroused because after Kaplow and Bernard Phillips had met Nakagawa Roshi, they decided to go to Hoshinji with him. There was to be an O-Session there, and Nakagawa Roshi was himself going, so they went. And Kaplow decided to stay there, and of course, he stayed for four years, living as a half

[53:34]

guest, half monk, and taking Sanzen with old Hoshinji. Well, after Kaplow, after Phil had gone back to Tokyo, I had one summer I wanted to take a little trip, so I decided that the first place I would stop would be at Hoshinji, and I would have a look at the place. Because during those four years, Phil had come a number of times to either spend the summer for a visit, and there was two or three other people who went to Hoshinji and stayed for a time, and they came back with rather horrendous stories of what took place there. And so I decided I would go and have a look at the place myself.

[54:35]

So after Phil had gone back to Tokyo, I went, and this was a time that I went. But Joni was still here, and Kansei-san and Joni and I went. Well, it was that summer then. No, Phil was still there, that's right. It was the last summer he was there, that's right. And he met us at Hoshinji, read us at the Station of Obama, and we stayed in a hotel, and they went swimming because it was a beautiful summer weather. Then the next morning, we went to Hoshinji, and I met, first of all, I met the monks who were there. There were four, I think, living in Sodo at the time, and I thought they were anything but pre-possessing people. They would be the last people that I would want to sit with myself. And then I was taken up to meet the old Roshi, and I suppose about that time he was 81 or

[55:38]

82, and slightly frail-looking and quite sweet. He had a housekeeper in her 50s who was present at our interview, and of course, Phil was there to act as interpreter. I don't think Kansei-san went in to our visit. And we passed the time of day first, and I can't say that I felt any special liking for Hoshinji. I mean, there was no real rapport between us. And it wasn't very long before he said to me, have you had satori? And that is a question which always annoys me.

[56:42]

And so I said, Roshi, if I have had satori, that is a matter which concerns my teacher and myself alone. And he said, well, I'm a Roshi. I said, still, you're not my Roshi. And then he sat still for a minute or two, and then he said, well, if you want satori, come here. This is where you'll get it, in just that kind of tone of voice. And then he said, why did you want to study Zen anyway? Well, I said, that was quite simple, and I went on to explain, speak a little about it. And the housekeeper spoke up then and said, well, you must have had a great problem. No, I said, I had no problem. I said, I've explained why I wanted to study.

[57:46]

Well, nobody studies Zen without a problem. Roshi had a tremendous problem. That's why he studied Zen in the first place. Well, I said, I didn't have any problem. And when you're just trying to hide, you don't want to speak about it. That was most of the conversation that finally smoothed away, and I insisted that I had had no problem. But later, a little after that, we went out into the garden, and he had some... he had a dog. And in the garden, Hoshinji was very charming, very natural, and very sweet, just like a nice old man should be, with his dog and the flowers. And so I was very glad that I saw him in that way also, because it was quite two sides to his nature. He was trying to be the... trying to act or acting as he thought Roshi acted when I talked

[58:54]

with him in his room. And later, I mean, he was just a nice elderly man with his dog and his flowers and so forth. It was really very sweet. Hoshinji, of course, at that time, and now, of course, it's completely reverted to a Soto monk's temple. Well, really it's going back to Soto. Yes. You see, it always was a Soto temple. And the story of Hoshinji as I know it is that, of course, he was a Soto monk first. Then he is supposed to have decided that he wanted to study Samurais then. We have a long translated article on his life in our scrapbook, if you want to investigate it. Translated from Japanese? From Japanese, yes. And they're telling all the details about his life. And I think he taught school for a time before or after his going to Nansenji.

[60:08]

Anyway, he went to Nansenji and he went to the teacher that... who was Nan Shinken's teacher. And at first, he didn't enter the Soto, so the tale goes, but took Sanzen with him from outside. Because I think Soto people, as the Soto people, don't like to have their monks or don't like to have it known that they're monks or they're priests study Rinzai Zen. When I was in Nansenji, it is said that we had six Soto monks studying incognito. I don't know whether that was true, because I don't know who they were. But that's what was said. At any rate, the story is that at the end of three years under... Dokutan, was that his name?

[61:08]

I've forgotten. I'm not sure. Nan Shinken's teacher. That he was... what? Some people say that he was given Inca. That is what Yastani says. He never said so himself. Hoshinji himself never said that he got Inca. At any rate, eventually, after that, eventually he went to Hoshinji, which was a Soto temple. And there was a meditation hall in connection with it. And he told me himself that there was a special atmosphere about Hoshinji. It's in a valley, a very cold and very damp and very foggy valley most of the year. The valley that runs into the sea.

[62:09]

The valley that runs into the sea. The valley that runs into the sea.

[62:11]

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