Zen Center Quotes

“The spirit of the place is not not friendly. Meals begin in silence; once everyone is seated, someone slaps the wooden clackers and leads a little chant. The food is often amazingly good, and despite the growing number of vegans in the ranks, heaps of delicious cheese are often melted and sprinkled and layered into the hot things that come out of the kitchen. At breakfast, watch the very senior people deal with rice gruel, and you'll know enough to spike yours with brown sugar and stir in some whole milk or cream, and you could do much worse on a morning in March. ("You can't change your karma, but you can sweeten your cereal," whispered an elderly priest when I nobly and foolishly added nothing to that blob in my bowl during my first stay at the farm.) Once eating is under way, the common dining room looks rather like a high school cafeteria; there are insider and outsider tables, and it is often easy to spot the new students and short-term guests—they're a few minutes late because they haven't memorized the schedule; they're smiling bravely, wielding their dinner trays like steering wheels, weaving around, desperately looking for a public parking space, hoping someone will wave or smile or otherwise signal them to safety I asked a practice leader about this, and she said she knew it was hard but people have to get over their self consciousness; for some newcomers, she said, that's zazen, that's their meditative practice. I think that's what I mean by not not friendly”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door

“By the mid-1960s, students at Zen Center called their teacher Suzuki-roshi. The title roshi traditionally was accorded only to a few venerable Zen masters in Japan; however, in the West, it became customary to refer to all Zen teachers who receive Transmission as roshis.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door

“Suzuki-roshi's historic Transmission of the dharma to one and only one American man haunts everything that ever happened at Zen Center.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“It is really striking," says Gary Snyder, "that so very many people at Zen Center reject the term religion when it is applied to what they are doing. What is any religion? A little ritual, a little superstition, and some magic. That's Buddhism.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center