START HERE: 1. The Road Less Traveled; 2. Zen and The Clear White Light.

Tang ceremony in a kimono

By 1967, I’d spent my entire life among descendents of criminals (mine were respectable Irish pub-keepers I hasten to add), none of whom queried our British political model, and we took our dwellings—designed for 1880s winters in England—as God-given.

So we left Australia for booming Japan where a high-paying, low-demand job let me indulge what would become my favorite pastime, poking my nose into foreign cultures. What are their birth and funeral rites? Their marriages? Social hierarchies? Adolescent transitions? How do they handle crime? I almost drowned when I was my suddenly immersed in Japan’s ancient culture.

Even Nagoya’s exquisite window displays disturbed me. One window was devoted to what resembled a huge, brown sweet potato—in a delicately incised cedar box. Another displayed expensive medallions on silken ribbons,

and I could make no sense of the weird, pentatonic Muzak in every store and elevator. I went back to my hotel, threw up, and collapsed on the bed. Culture shock is shock. Who knew?

Like mine, Japan’s culture was borrowed too. It’s a version of China’s Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD) lovingly preserved, in amber. The bureaucratic system, Confucian rituals, Buddhist temples, court poetry, clothing styles and imperial grandeur? Pure Tang. Millions of clever Japanese spent a thousand years refining the Tang model (‘Confucian on the outside, Legalist on the inside’) to their insular needs.

Best of all? The Tang Dynasty was the Zen’s Golden Age1 . There were temples everywhere, all unique so my wife could indulge her passion for architecture while I looked around for a living Zen Master. Some temples—the most prosperous—boasted famous Zen Masters in the lineage but none had a living one. But at least the monks could understand my questions, a big step up from Australia. After a few months’ adaptation I found my culture immersion exhilarating.

The people, who were uniformly polite and formal, had obviously considering every element of their lives, like aesthetics for a very long time. My wife encouraged me to collect traditional Japanese pottery—an experience I enjoyed immensely, especially since my untaxed dollar income had three times today’s buying power. Even better, Zen and artistic pottery were almost synonymous. And when I found that pottery collectors paid more for the works of living potters..might I find my quarry amongst them? When I raised the possibility, a Japanese workmate he said there was a local potter whose recent Tokyo show had sold out in minutes. Would I like to meet him?

Who was that lady?

The young potter was chatting with a friend when we arrived, and invited all us into his home—an unheard-of gesture back then. As we seated ourselves around a low table on the tatami a young, kimono-clad woman entered quietly, bowed, and placed bowls before us.

Silently, and with minimal movement she wiped the tea utensils2 with a silk cloth, added matcha powder to the bowl, poured in hot water and whisked it into an emerald froth. She bowed and offered the bowl to my Japanese friend. He bowed, took the bowl with both hands, rotated it slightly, drank it in three sips, wiped the rim, admired the bowl, and passed it to me. When all four of us had been served, she stood up, bowed, and left the room as silently as she had come (only on the train home did I real that I had just seen a tea ceremony).

I congratulated my host on his Tokyo sellout but he deflected my praise to his teacher who, he said, was Abbot of a famous Zen monastery at 32, then resigned in middle age to take up pottery. His sensei would be giving a party at his home in Kyoto the following week. Would I like to go?

Kondō Yūzō, then in his sixties, was the master of blue-and-white porcelain, sometsuke, for which Japan’s Government had designated him a Living National Treasure. It seemed natural his home would be a masterpiece of wood and paper shoji that overlooked Kyoto’s rooflines to the rolling hills.

We were seated at a table covered in sushi platters when the apprentices prostrated themselves face-down and Kondō, in a somber yukata, floated across the lawn, seated himself and, in the same movement, raised a toast to my potter friend: “Your accomplishment in Tokyo honored me, your teacher. Now I honor you”.

Four more rounds of sake and he launched the best food fight I have ever seen.

After the debris was cleared my friend introduced me as a ceramics collector to Kondō. “What artists do you admire? Ancient potters? Contemporary?”. Was I familiar with his work? Would I like to see some?”

He led me down to a crude shack containing little more than a kick-wheel, whose wall-racks were filled with magnificent pieces, “These are from my latest firing. Which tea-bowl do you think is the best? Which platter? Vase?” As I blindly indicated my favorites, he pulled them down, wrapped each in newspaper and handed the bundle to me. Alarmed3, I protested that any realistic offer I could make would be insulting. “No, no. My gift to you”.

A Superior Man

Kondo’s physical grace, his humor, detachment, spontaneity, looseness, intelligence, and generosity.. Was he a Zen Master? My potter friend had considered becoming a monk when he was young so on the train back to Nagoya I asked, “Did Kondō-san enlighten anyone when he was an Abbot?” He shook his head. “If he had had he would world-famous. We haven’t seen a Rōshi (老師) since Dōgen4 (1200-1253).

Kondō-san is what we call a kunshi” (君子), a superior, exemplary, educated man. I chose to study with him because it was a great education for my personal development: he showed me how to practice my craft as meditation. I saw him sick, well, sad and rich, every day, for five years. He was always relaxed, humorous, the same way you saw him. Confucius used Kunshi (Chinese: junzi5) thousands of times in the Analects and we still use it the same way today”. Coming from egalitarian Australia, the concept of superior men fascinated me.

Superior culture?

That summer we saw the full effects of an ancient culture in an idyllic fishing village on Yakushima island, four hours sailing across the East China Sea.

We were mini-celebrities in the village, the first white people some children had seen.

The hospitality at traditional inn was lavish. Our cook/landlady sent up a chilled bottle of beer when the day got hot, along with platters of huge pieces of what they called ‘fisherman’s sushi’. We got to know the island’s only cop and watched him handle rampaging, drunken fishermen with one judo move and deftly tie their thumbs behind them with a shoelace, but what made the deepest impression was Obon, All Souls, held on the night of the August Moon.

Everyone drifted down to the beach where the river met the sea. One by one, they lit a candle—surrounded by sweets and flowers in banana-leaf boat—and, with a prayer, floated them down the river them with the last rays of the sun.

Then three fishermen and their wives invited us to view the August moon and rowed us upriver to watch the moon rising behind the volcano rim and, reflected by high clouds, illuminate us in brilliant moonlight, accompanied by the ladies on their samisens singing obon songs. We toasted everyone in turn with shōchū, a ghastly, local sweet potato brew until we and our hosts proposed: “Let’s compose haiku! About obon, the Moon, anything”. So we did. I kid you not.

Slowly, all of this—the tea ceremony, the kunshi, hospitality, obon, moon-watching, drunken haiku composing—came together. People treasured their culture so much that they preserved, celebrated and lived it for a thousand years—even in a humble fishing villages on a remote islands.

Recommended reading

The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura. Short, beautiful classic on the Japanese tea ceremony and its Zen/Tang roots.

Zen and Japanese Culture by Daisetz T. Suzuki. The classic work connecting Zen, art, swordsmanship, and tea.

The Unknown Craftsman by Soetsu Yanagi. Meditation on folk art, beauty, and the spirit behind Japanese pottery.

A Zen Wave: Basho and His Interpreters by Matsuo Basho (translated by Sam Hamill). On haiku-composing.

START HERE: EPISODE 1: The Road Less Traveled.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner worlds—not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception.

In college I intellectualized my search for happiness. Doing philosophy left me mentally refreshed and taught me new ways of thinking and our teachers told endless tales of philosophy’s great eccentrics—but I never hear of an enlightened philosopher. They were just as confined to the thinking mind as was I, but they enjoyed it.

Aleister Crowley in Sydney

I needed to broaden my search so we moved to the nearest big city, Sydney. My bride and I took an apartment on Long Nose Point, literally in the middle of Sydney Harbor, above where our landlord gave me a book by Aleister Crowley, the notorious Briton whose motto, ‘do what thou wilt,’ advocated both self-overcoming and transgression. My relatively disciplined life was not liberating. I was living in the global capital of self-indulgence, Sydney, and I had time and money. If self-indulgence was liberating, now was the time to find out: could sex, drugs and rock-and-roll do the trick? Long story short: no.

Acid by the harbor

Local hipsters soon introduced me to drugs, then limited to illegal hashish and legal LSD. The choice made itself and my first trip was just like Aldous Huxley’s.

As an animal seriously obsessed with survival I, too, was shaken out of my rut of unhappiness and, for hours, saw the outer and the inner worlds directly and unconditionally as an endless, effortless flow of transformations of my apparently solid surroundings. Regardless of its ultimate value, merely learning first-hand that another world is possible was liberating in itself.

My next trip seemed more profound. I lost all sense of myself as a separate consciousness: warm, clear, breathable white light that seemed to come from (or be associated with my heart region subsumed my body-mind. I was released into lovestruck awe and heart-broken ecstasy—with zero effort on my part.

An anxiety-prone asthmatic child, I was a shallow breather. Now I was breathed. Each cycle of inhalation and exhalation deepened my ecstasy. The more I relaxed into it, the more I became it. I was happy beyond happiness, free beyond freedom. Then, as the drug wore off I could, apparently, choose to become anyone, and not just go back to just being my familiar self1.

Fascinated, I borrowed a neighbor’s book on Kundalini Yoga. Apparently, yogis have been raising their Kundalini Shakti to their Ajna Chakras for thousands of years—in order to trigger an inner, pure white light, divya jyoti, ‘which fills the entire inner vision’. Who knew?

Their yogic practice sounded more authentic than LSD but much less fun and, besides, neither drug nor yoga addressed my craving for permanent, effortless release from unhappiness—not just distraction from it. Happiness or bust.

The Spirit of Zen

All my reading finally paid off when I found a battered old copy of The Spirit of Zen by Alan Watts in a second-hand Sydney bookshop. Though it was written in 1936 when Watts was only 212, something about it rang true. The stories of the old Zen masters felt raw, funny, and uncompromising — nothing like Hallmark Cards or the sentimental spiritual books I’d ever seen. Could that line of transmission have survived somewhere? In a remote Japanese temple? In a mountain monastery? I had to find out. Three months later we flew to Japan.

Suggested Reading

The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.

The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East by Alan Watts.

The Book of the Law; Diary of a Drug Fiend by Aleister Crowley.

My search probably began the day after my birth, during a midsummer heatwave in 1940, in a one-doctor, pre-penicillin, un–air-conditioned hospital in Australia. For no obvious reason, my temperature hit 103°F (39.4°C) and the desperate physician plunged me into crushed ice water, leaving only my face exposed.

Call it visceral disillusionment, but even as a child I found incarnate human life to be shabbier, more painful and more anxious than necessary, and grownups’ explanations unconvincing. Naively, I was searching for answers to mankind’s Three Great Questions: What is this? What are we doing here? What happens next?

Fortunately, I was blessed with a formidably bright mother who left school at fifteen to support and raise her siblings after her father died. Her less-bright cousin went on to a Nobel nomination and, determined that nothing would obstruct my education, she willingly sacrificed everything for it.

A practicing—not talking—Christian, she admired the French theology of Teilhard de Chardin and regularly defended it to my paternal uncle, a professional, Roman-trained theologian. When she mentioned my growing religious skepticism, he gave me The Confessions of Saint Augustine of Hippo, but I found it disappointing. Augustine was great scholar and reformer, but he died still searching for Jesus. If a great Saint couldn’t find Jesus after forty years, what chance did I have?

Another of my mother’s favorites, Thomas Merton (a monk with whom Jack Kennedy corresponded), called his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain. Again, after a thirty holy years he concluded, “Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi: let this be the ending of the book but not the end of the search”. Still searching after all these years. And it wasn’t just religious seekers. Be Here Now, by Ram Dass, would later prove similarly upbeat and equally empty-handed.

Increasingly suspicious, I bought The Golden Bough, whose author, J.G. Fraser, traces all ancient religions to the Resurrected God myth. Vicarious hope and reassurance for people afraid of death, which is pretty much everyone. But reassurance didn’t cut into my unhappiness.

At seventeen, I found The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda, which The New York Times called ‘one of the most remarkable spiritual documents of the 20th century’. Remarkably exotic perhaps, but Yogananda lived and died just as addicted to yogic experiences as athletes are addicted to endorphins. His experiences certainly sounded more fun than roller-coaster rides, but so what?

Then real life intruded. Our neighbors’s oldest son and I were altar boys, but his younger brother was different. Naturally devout, he’d slip into the empty church after school and in his mid-teens he began having visions of Jesus. Naturally, I was fascinated. Saints and visions go together, visions were part of saintliness, I’d been told. But the boy did not return next term and I later learned that his parents had institutionalized him. Hmm.

An unbroken record of uninterrupted failure

Thousands of years of Spiritual history were never recorded and what we have was written after the events, usually by people who never knew the protagonists, but nobody left a first-hand account of their face-to-face experience with a genuine Spiritual Master. If a Spiritual Master enlightened someone, how did they do that? What’s it like from the point of view of the person being enlightened? Or was I wasting my time?

Did Spiritual Transmission end centuries ago? Did I miss the boat? I was blessed with a wonderful family, a happy childhood, good health, abundant energy, sufficient money and an indulgent wife, and desperate unhappiness. Surely someone, somewhere knew what was going on? Though I had one reservation: if I was going to abandon my childhood Spiritual Master, Jesus, it would only be for someone better.

So I set off to find Him.

The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

—o0o—

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