Single White Monk: Tales of Death, Failure, and Bad Sex

by Shozan Jack Haubner

Think the life of a Zen monk is all serenity, peace, and austerity? Think again. Here, Shozan Jack Haubner gives an often-hilarious, always-candid account of what it’s really like behind those monastery walls. Haubner’s adventures include memories of his dysfunctional Midwestern family that drove him ultimately to declare, “I think I should be a monk!” to a madcap account of the night he got stoned and snuck out of the monastery, alongside more sobering accounts such as his life-threatening brush with illness, the profound impact of a dear friend’s death, and reflections on the controversy that rocked his Zen community. That he finds timeless wisdom in both the tragic and the absurd is a tribute to Haubner's gifts as a writer and humorist, and to his clear insights into the nature of self and what the practice of Zen is all about.

Genres: Zen, Buddhism, Nonfiction, Biography, Philosophy, Memoir

208 pages, Paperback

Published October 10, 2017

Reviews

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first heard about Shozan Jack Haubner because of Brad Warner (for frequent readers of my review: yup, I'm kind of a fangirl), and I really enjoyed Haubner's first book "Zen Confidential" (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), and "Single White Monk" is more of the same: essays about his experience as a monk in a Zen monastery. This is a much more challenging calling than most people might think, and Haubner writes about his experience with candor, self-deprecating humor and (often slightly off-putting) honesty.

The writing is once again insightful and highly quotable. I also can't help but admire Haubner's ability to put himself out there, reveal the things about himself that he is struggling with. Cravings for physical intimacy, feelings of inadequacy, a serious illness, grief - and the scandal that involved his teacher are the main themes he wrote about in this book, and as a result, it sets a much darker tone than "Zen Confidential". It is a great source of food for thought, but I didn't really giggle my way through this one...

The second part of the book, which deals with how Haubner went through and dealt with the maelstrom that hit his community when his teacher was accused of sexual misconduct by former students, is fascinating and heartbreaking. I didn't know anything about this particular scandal (the controversies surrounding the San Francisco Zen Center made more noise up here in Canada than that one), so I had to do a bit of research to get the full context. Haubner obviously doesn't condone any of the inappropriate behavior this teacher engaged in, but I was touched by the way he describes how devastating it is to find out horrible truths about someone who means so much to you, how shattering the disappointment of such revelations can be; how guilty and complicit he felt in the knowledge that some of these events happened while he himself was head monk of that monastery.

Loneliness, fear, grief and heartbreak get to us whether we have spend years meditating on a mountain or not, and it's doing a great disservice to people who dedicate their lives to the dharma to pretend that they aren't as human as those who would rather do something else with their time on Earth. Shozan Jack Haubner is a great reminder that being alive means dealing with the side-effects of being flesh and blood, no matter what path we walk on. I hope he writes more of these.

[Sonya · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book hoping it would open my mind to thinking about life differently. It did in a way but it also made me learn about the author's trials and fears of his life as well. At first it was light, a bit funny, something I could relate to. (I think the author is actually a pretty good writer.)
He had had an awkward teenage life - not knowing which direction in life to go in and was still feeling the same way in his 40s. However, on top of struggling with daily fears and identity issues, his environment changed to a point where it affected his teacher, his life and home, his friends - basically turned his world upside down. I think we all know how that feels at one point in our lives. And all of us look for guidance as to how to deal with it.

The second half of this work really delved in to his own despair (and was kind of an apology) about his inability to cope with his teacher having been exposed as a sexual abuser (the reason his world changed). The reader went on a mental ride with him throughout this major event in his life. Ther person he had leaned on had left him with a gaping hole in his life. It left me kind of depressed and I felt that he had a harder time facing life than some of us (even though he was supposed to have been the head monk in a Zen Buddhist monastery and was meant to guide others).

So, if you are looking for a book that gives advice on how to deal with your demons in a simple, "what is Zen Buddhism" kind of way, this may not be exactly what you want to read. But if you want to learn about how someone who is supposedly wise and got his s**t together, but really doesn't - like every other human out there, then this might be a good choice for you. There were a couple of meaningful concepts for me that I have learned and can use in my life and a few that I just couldn't wrap my head around just yet. Here is an example of one of his explanations I liked:

"The wound was open. That is the only time you can change, and it is the hardest time to change. You cannot bear to look in that hole, to look inside yourself. Miss this chance, however, and you will wander the world haunted by your demons, which have been sealed inside you, behind the once open wound. Until you meet someone special. Someone you could love. And she opens you up again. And out come those same demons."

[Kathryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have given this book a solid, damn near 5 stars (but not quite, because we all remain striving for perfection), if the entire thing read like the first part. I actually recommended this to a few of my friends before I got to the second part, then quickly recanted the recommendation when the book took on an entirely different narrative. What I love most about the stories in the first part, is that they remind us that we are all inherently human. Cleverly written, witty, laugh-out-loud in some parts, the stories were a comfort beyond Chicken Soup, and it wasn't so much that the second part got dark, way dark when it brought to light an uncomfortable subject, it was just that when you take half of a good thing and turn it into something else then it becomes a separate entity on its own and this one book just felt like two distinct things. You either want one, or you want the other.
This is not the authors fault; if anything, I'd slap the hands of the shoddy editor. Give me more snippets of your chain smoking, maybe tell me about a time you got wasted, and take the time to turn what happened with Roshi into a separate thing altogether.

[Ionia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasn't a terrible book, but it wasn't what I thought I was going to get, either. When you use the word 'hilarious' in the blurb, I'm expecting a good time. Instead, this was an introspective journey into the world of the author throughout his younger years, mostly and at times had a line or two that made me smile, but really that was about all. If teenage boys tended to keep journals, this could have been from any random one.

The last half of the book, in my opinion, did not work with the first half and was actually more depressing than anything else. It's a strange book and that can be taken as a compliment--or not.

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher, provided through Netgalley. All opinions are my own.

[David Guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was not a big fan of Shozan Jack Haubner’s first book, Zen Confidential. I thought it was overwritten, and that he often seemed to be trying too hard. I did appreciate his honesty, and the way he debunked a lot of what we think about Zen practice, but when material is inherently interesting there’s no need to strain to make it more interesting. In his first book he sometimes did that.

I felt that way about passages in this book as well. When Haubner is writing about the trials of his adolescent basketball career, his dating experiences, or his experiences of jumping the monastery wall (visiting the 21st equivalent of a brothel), he seems to be another clueless guy like the rest of us, trying to make something of himself and have some fun (though again, his honesty is refreshing).

But I think Haubner gained confidence by publishing that first book, and by the acclaim he’s gotten for it; he also seems to have grown more comfortable with his role as a Zen teacher, which he’s adopted despite the fact that he left his original monastery. In the most impressive chapters in this book—about his relationship with Leonard Cohen, who also studied with his teacher; about his visit to a fellow monk who was dying; above all about his relationship with his teacher in general, and his position as his teacher’s right hand man—he has completely relaxed: he knows the subject is fascinating and doesn’t need any help from him.

Haubner’s teacher is the famous and notorious Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who not only was the teacher of Leonard Cohen, and of the vipassana teacher Shinzen Young; who not only taught vigorously in this country for over fifty years and lived to the ripe old age of 107, but who faced an enormous sex scandal at the age of 104, so that it became the only thing people talked about, the thing he was famous for. It was through the scandal that he was featured in articles in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. They hadn’t written about the fact that he’d been rigorously teaching Zen in this country for fifty years.

And of course Haubner has published his book at a time when sexual harassment is all over the headlines. The whole world is talking about it.

I’m not sure whether that’s a good or bad thing for this book.

I’ve written about Joshu Sasaki before. I had read a book of his teachings that his students had put together and that has long been out of print; I remarked on the paradox that the teachings seemed powerful and helpful at the same time that the man’s sexuality seemed adolescent (to say the least) and way out of hand. I also read an excellent book by another of Sawaki’s students. But I would have to say that Single White Monk gives the best explanation of Sasaki’s teachings that I’ve seen anywhere, and it also, better than anything else I’ve read, squarely faces the problem of having a teacher you love and who has been vastly important to you but who has also done some dreadful things. Students of Chogyam Trungpa, for instance, face the same issue, but none has written with this raw honesty.

Haubner doesn’t for one minute try to defend the way Sasaki behaved. He thinks it was abominable. But he also thought Sasaki was a great teacher who greatly changed his own life and the lives of many around him.

He encompasses those two things in the same book. He regards them as equally true.

Take, for instance, this brief and beautiful explanation of the teachings: “My Zen teacher, the Roshi, taught that you could call the world outside of you, the world of distinctions, of bright and shiny things, Father. And you could call the world inside of you, the rich, embryonic inner darkness, Mother. Sometimes the infinity of things outside of you penetrates through the sense gates . . . Other times the formlessness within expands outward . . . a new thought or feeling arises and your sense of self is born in a process analogous to a baby crowning through a mother’s hips . . .

“Roshi called this True Love. He described it over and over, but it took years before I was able to live his words with my whole body.”

In that brief passage—part of the Introduction that I was so enamored of—Haubner gives a brief and superb explanation of what Zen practice is all about.

Much later in the book he tells of an experience of sanzen—the meeting of a teacher and student—when he shows how the intimacy between the two of them leads to that understanding:

“That night I went into sanzen with a typically wild gimmick that probably involved shouting and doing an interpretative dance while making strange faces. Zen isn’t an intellectual discipline, but it isn’t bad performance art either. Roshi laughed for about, I swear to God, ten minutes.

“Then he said, ‘Be. More. Normal.’

“Before I could reply, both of his hands were holding mine. He pulled me close and bowed until our foreheads were touching.

He said, ‘Your heart. My heart. Same.’

“We stayed like that for a tiny eternity. It felt like he was taking the weight of my life off my shoulders. I was so relaxed I began to shake, as though some tension buried deep in my bone marrow had found release. When we parted he looked in my eyes.

“’True love important.’”

But we can see how that very experience of intimacy could lead to abuse. Sasaki seems not to have been able to resist when the student was a woman. And apparently he sometimes got on a roll. Violating the boundaries of one student led to violating the boundaries of another.

I had read the occasional letter on Sweeping Zen, the website where the scandal broke, where women said the sexual advances of the old man were no big deal. They gave him a swat and told him to behave himself and carried on. I also read the accounts, much more numerous, of women who were deeply wounded by what he did. But I had never read a full-throated defense of the man, a woman for whom the advances helped her open up, spiritually but also sexually. Haubner’s friend Liz is such a woman, and she becomes the most vivid character in his book.

What I most admire about this book is the way that Haubner will not give on either side. What his teacher did was absolutely wrong. He loves and respects and is deeply grateful to his teacher. The wish to have a perfect teacher is infantile, and a delusion that we need to overcome. Haubner shows us that we can take in the whole of a human being, and not like every part of it, but still profit from the encounter.

www.davidguy.org

[Skye · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book to be admirable in its radical honesty and insight. If more clergy were as candid as this about their human failings and strivings, there might not be so many scandals. In case you were expecting comedy, this isn't David Sedaris. If you are looking for simple jokes, this isn't the book... though there is hilarity in the author's radical honesty: that's the nature of the existential beast. I found in the reading of this book laughter, tears, an enlarged sense of the ego's limits and an expanded philosophical lens. Worth a read, because the author is (gasp... this reviewer refuses to clutch her pearls... ) fully human and an interesting voice in the Zen Buddhist community.

[ar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book.
It made me cry and laugh out loud in a way very few books have.
This book fills a gap in the world of meditation books- the space that needed to be filled is a kind of 'broken zen'- a book that uses words like shit, piss, and cunt but also quotes Rumi and offers devastatingly beautiful insights into the nature of ego, meditation, and death. As an aspiring writer, I am very jealous of Shozan's style. It's not a very big book, and I found myself wishing I could read slower.

I first heard about Sasaki Roshi from Shinzen Young, and about the scandal from a friend. It really bothered me, and still does, and I found myself looking for a perspective on this that looked it right in the eye and didn't shy away. Shozan offers that and much more in his 4-part essay on the deaths of his teacher.

The book also offers a unique and fascinating perspective on Leonard Cohen, which I very much enjoyed. But I'd have to say the highlight, besides for numerous genius mediation terms and one-liners I'm already mad I'm forgetting, was his description of going to see a prostitute in massage parlor after spending three years in the monastery. This is real writing, man. The kind of writing where it is clear the author isn't spinning up a story- he is skinning himself on the page, layer by layer. Its fucking inspiring.

[Sandra · Rating 1 out of 5]

In this book, our author describes to the reader what it was truly like in his Buddhist monastery. Parts are funny, but most parts are sad to me. I realize that we are all human beings striving for awakening, but this is not the book to read for insight on that subject. I found this book to be discouraging, as if awakening is not quite attainable by the average human being. I realize that the monastery may not have been the place for the author to find that for which he was searching, but I found that, in a way, it seemed to minimize the true meaning of Zen. In the book, he spends a lot of time describing the greatness of his teacher, the one who was responsible for the scandal in his Zen meditation retreat house. I did not enjoy this book.

I was given a free copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This, the second memoir from Shozan Jack Haubner, is both actually-laugh-out-loud-in-disbelief hilarious in many parts, and surprisingly dark and real in others, often with little segue in between. Surprisingly for me, I found an earlier part about the death of one of his mentors from mesothelioma to be more affecting than the death of his roshi (Kyozan Joshu Sasaki), though both parts were difficult and honest reflections on what death is like for many of us. There is no spiritual accomplishment high enough that dying isn't a messy and terrifying experience, often coming, as Haubner notes, in installments. I thought the afterword was disappointing but honest, and this and his previous memoir are good reading material for anyone entertaining fantasies of fleeing to a monastery and finding a perfect life vocation (and a perfect ego) there.

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a nice mix of inspiring insights and explicit details of monastic wrongdoings woven together as the author searches his soul for meaning and authenticity in his life. His sense of humor is engaging, there are nuggets of highlight-worthiness, and graphic depiction of the death of his Zen master. He is quite honest about his attachment to the master, and the ensuing grief with his passing, despite the scandal surrounding him. He goes on to explore whether or not the monastic life is for him and closes with a plan to continue to explore what truths he finds on the highway of his life. A talented author with courage to speak his truth and my interest was engaged throughout the book.

[anarres. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Throughout Single White Monk, Jack Haubner can be incredibly immature and selfish on one page, and insightful and full of empathy on the next. While Haubner's first book felt relatable and jovial, there is nothing comfortable about this book, and at times I felt pretty repulsed. The book felt balanced, winding beautiful prose and poignant thought around the ugly realities of sexual abuse, human mortality, intimacy, and love. I will continue to read Jack Haubner's books so long as he continues to write, though...I want to know what reparations he has offered the women who were hurt by his many years of silence and complicity.
Three stars.

[et.lis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had me laughing with the author's witty remarks and reflecting on his wise realizations. I liked the brute honesty of his storytelling and "it is what it is" delivery. I found his writing persona funny and relatable.

The atmosphere shifted during part 2 and I didn't expect the 360 turn. It gave me a whiplash. The second part, however controversial the topic was, was still delivered with honesty and care. It felt like the writer really needed to include it. I understand why they would add it to the book.

While reading, it felt like the writer was talking to me directly and was sharing his personal stories with me. I enjoyed that.

[Edward Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a lot I did not know about the practice of Zen Buddhism, but less about the spiritual practice and more about the controversies that rocked the LA Monastery. Shozan Jack puts it all on the table and pulls no punches (both literally and figuratively) in his views of the events that lead up to and the aftermath of the fall of his master Roshi (Joshu Sasaki) Some of the information is deeply personal and I at times cringed inwardly when I read how bad it had gotten but Shozan ended it all on a positive note, one you have to read the book to find out :)

[Cameron Chandler · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ironic, funny sketch of a Western man
taking a deep dive into Zen Buddhism
at the hand and bidding of a famous Master.

I haven’t read his previous, Zen Confidential,
but I suspect this is the epilogue.
In the end, there is shame, hurt,
criticism, schism, separation, pain.

The bio reads like life sometimes,
an over-steeped bitter tea poured
in a cracked tea bowl too hot to hold.

[Gary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was hoping for more. Half of the book was about watching an old man die. It did have this quote which I thought was very true:

“I’ve begun to experience regret, which is the mistake of applying the wisdom that comes with age to the past instead of the present.”

[Seph Chris King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome book! The author just pours his heart out. A little ego testicular and rambling sometimes but the author is honest about that. It could be tightened at parts to make it more coherent, but its looseness is also what makes it good. If that makes sense :)

[Rafael Santiago · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an ok book. Started of great with lots of highlightable worthy one liners. The book in itself is very personal and funny. I would have liked the last 2 chapter, "about 100 pages", to focus on something else instead of it all being about the same subject.

[Seth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good Dhukka

A journey of self exploration, flagellation, and grief. Most importantly, what comes after. In some ways, this is an excellent Dharma book. Not in others. But it is certainly about the closeness of life and death in every breath. Highly recommend.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Skip read, certainly different

[Ellen Keener · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kinda disappointed in this book. Liked Zen Confidential but this book seems to have little wisdom except be yourself.

[Matthew James Herny Barram · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book. Very funny. Easy to read. Highly recommended.

[Mr. Wakiki · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very enjoyable book... to an extent. I am not interested in the scandal related to the book, now that I know some of the characters

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

He studies Buddhism and is from up across the cheese curtain. Surely this has something to inform my nascent study of the old philosophy.

[Børge Holen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful, fun and unafraid in its presentation of the modern and likely also old predicaments of a spiritual community and their aging (and in this case also controversial) zen master.

[Steve · Rating 1 out of 5]

Single White Monk offers up a series of anecdotes from the author’s life that supposedly deal with the subtitled topics of death, failure, and bad sex. This effort is a continuation of the pop culture Buddhist writings that made his first book so popular. Shozan Jack Haubner, a former Catholic, stand-up comic, and screenwriter, tries to keep his hip sensibilities while channeling the intimidating cannon of Buddhist teaching through the funnel of the 21st century crowd. At heart, he seems to be struggling with the guy he often mentions in this book: the wannabe popular, well-liked guy who fights his desire for superficial love with his attempts to stay the pathway to spiritual knowledge.

Beyond that, the final third is an exploration of the myriad feelings he went through after his master Roshi (Joshu Sasaki) was accused of sexual abuse. The specifics of what happened to the victims and his temples et al take a back seat to the author’s rambling bouts of self-recrimination and the tedium of daily care that he and a former lover/student of Roshi shared during is final days.

An odd mix of strained humor and tormented navel-gazing, Single White Monk wasn’t the read I thought it would be as it wasn't very funny or enlightening. While there were some examples of insight in the early going that I even dog-eared, in the end, Haubner’s journal entries became dull and self-indulgent.

[Greg Soden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read his Zen Confidential first I’d you check him out, but this was certainly an interesting, funny, and uncomfortable way to spend some time!