out of control, my own mental health was deteriorating. I began to withdraw. I looked drawn and depressed. I wore black a lot.
One Friday evening I had a moment of truth. Home from work, Dave appeared to be genuinely falling apart. “I don’t know how I can face another day at work,” he groaned, near tears. “I am so miserable.”
I jumped in to rescue him again: “Let’s get away for the weekend together. I’ll stay with you the entire time, take good care of you, help you through this crisis.”
He listened and paused. “Well, no. I thought I’d watch football on TV this weekend.”
I felt my heart slam shut. TV football was something he watched every weekend. An inner voice addressed me loud and clear: “If you keep going like this, You. Will. Die.”
I resolved to make some changes. Over the next weeks I considered the options. Then I delivered the ultimatum: I quit teaching high school or we get a divorce. I was still not addressing the real issue, alcoholism, but at least I was taking a step toward reclaiming myself. Dave argued that we couldn’t live on just one salary. I said I would work part-time, perhaps teaching at community college. He resisted. I held firm. It was his choice: I stop teaching high school or we get divorced.
It took a couple months for Dave to believe we could make it on his salary if I worked some. “Okay,” he said, “Quit teaching, but you should read Zen. It might calm you down.” He was not a Buddhist, but he had majored in Far Eastern Studies in college, so he knew about Zen. Thus Dave provided both my most profound life problem, marriage to an addicted person, and its perfect solution, Zen practice.
As a co-dependent spouse I would do anything to solve our problems, including reading whatever Dave assigned. I began with The Way of Zen (Watts 1957). This did not change Dave, but it set in motion big changes in our lives because it brought me to Zen. Many years later I learned through Buddhism that changing one’s inner self actually is the only option for finding happiness.
I was puzzled but fascinated by the paradoxical concepts of Zen philosophy, exemplified in the enigmatic koans, ancient Zen teaching stories: What is the sound of one hand clapping? Does a dog have Buddha Nature? What was your face before you were born? Confounded, slowly I worked through Watts’ book, taking almost a year to finish it. At times I could feel my brain physically scrunching as I struggled to understand ideas so different from those of my Western education. Ten years earlier, I had written a Master’s thesis on the paradoxical poetry of John Donne. Perhaps that had primed me for Zen’s inscrutability.
When I finished The Way of Zen, I wanted to learn more. In the early 1970s not many books on Zen were available in English for the common reader, but I did find The Three Pillars of Zen (Kapleau 1965). There I got a more concrete sense of Zen practice. From the book’s illustrated instructions on how to sit zazen, I was inspired to try meditating.
I began sitting zazen for a few minutes a day in our bedroom where I could be away from the family. The book said to do zazen for thirty to forty-five minutes, but I was so agitated initially, I couldn’t sit still for more than five minutes. After a week or so of daily sitting I worked up to ten minutes. Then for several days every time I sat in zazen, I became preoccupied with how I could redesign the clothes in my closet. I did quite a lot of sewing in those days, but it never occurred to me to recycle anything. Yet every day when I sat down for zazen, immediately I began to visualize one or another garment and how to remake it. Could I make that gray wool flared skirt into a pair of slacks? Should I shorten the leopard-skin velour robe Dave gave me for Christmas last year? After several daily episodes of this surprising obsession, I realized that what I wanted to redesign was not my clothes, but my life.
Three weeks into my tentative home practice, I was convinced I was not doing zazen correctly. I was so easily distracted by daily concerns, and my knees hurt sitting cross-legged. I needed instruction. That week I read in the local newspaper about a community college class on Zen Buddhism to be taught by a Japanese Zen priest. Excited by the synchronicity of my need and this opportunity, I signed up for the course.
I looked forward to this new experience, but I was anxious about venturing so far outside my conventional WASP upbringing. Since college I had leaned toward the disconsolate existentialist view of life as intrinsically meaningless. I had tamped down incipient longings for inspiration. Now in the early 1970s, desperate to improve an abusive home situation, I was willing to risk joining an exotic course on Zen.
The first evening eighty people showed up for the class, far more than the number of chairs in the room. I was surprised and reassured by this level of interest. Perhaps it wasn’t such an odd thing to be doing. Sitting mostly on the classroom floor, we students eagerly awaited the teacher. Finally, several minutes late, a slender, young Japanese man with a shaved head swept into the room. He wore elegant, flowing black robes. A crisp white shawl collar accented his shining face. I was transfixed. This was Kobun Chino Sensei, just a few years in the U.S. and newly in charge of the Zen community, Haiku Zendo, in Los Altos. He would become my teacher—fulfilling the adage, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” His English wasn’t so good, but even though I could understand only part of what he said, I found him magical.
Toward the end of the ten-week course, Kobun invited the class members to come for zazen at Haiku Zendo. By that time class attendance had dwindled to twelve or fourteen students. Three of us accepted Kobun’s invitation. I found Haiku Zendo exotic—candles, black robes, tatami mats, mysterious wafting incense, bells, and two forty-minute periods of zazen—when at home I could sit for only a few minutes. Quite a challenge, but I was hooked. My two classmates and I went every Wednesday evening for several months. After each program, we three went out for coffee and talked excitedly about the experience. We were full of questions: “What was Kobun talking about when he said ‘shikantaza [just sitting] is not something you understand. It’s indescribable’?” or “What did he mean by ‘Sitting is pointless’?” His teaching was so mysterious. So wonderful.
Meanwhile, Dave, at home alone with the boys on Wednesday nights, was growing restive. He wasn’t so comfortable with my foray into Zen. Reading about Buddhism was good—after all, he had recommended it. Being gone every Wednesday night at some weird zendo was—well, he didn’t know. “What’s happening to my little Presbyterian girl?” he teased, only half-joking.
I had stepped out of our domestic arrangement and was on the way toward saving myself and our children’s lives. Regrettably, not his. I could not and would not turn back.
What was so compelling about Zen practice? The biggest attraction was Kobun. My initial impression of him on the first day of his class stuck with me. In his warm receptivity to us students, Kobun was quietly charismatic. He emphasized correct posture in zazen and sometimes came around to gently adjust our bodies. His light touch up my back was deeply encouraging. He spoke softly during his dharma talks, often humorously and usually haltingly as he searched for the proper English words. His Japanese accent and esoteric teaching style could be difficult to understand. He seemed to drift from idea to idea organically, rather than ordering his thoughts logically. It was like listening to beautiful music or watching a ballet dancer. One felt refreshed, uplifted; but afterward it could be hard to say what Kobun had actually said.
The Zen aesthetic entranced me, too, in its simplicity and Japanese design. Haiku Zendo was the former two-car garage of a ranch style home. The zendo’s interior walls were white and unadorned. Wooden sitting platforms called tans, raised two feet above the floor, lined the four walls. On the tans, square, black pads called zabutons were placed edge to edge with a round black zafus for zazen in their centers. Japanese tatami mats covered the center floor area, topped by more zabutons and zafus for zazen. At the front of the zendo, also on a raised tan, were bells of different sizes, including a large one with a lovely deep tone. A simple wooden altar was in the center of this tan. On it were a Buddha statue, a large white candle, a votive candle, an incense bowl for stick incense, a wooden box for incense chips, and a vase of fresh flowers. The altar candles and incense were lit for zazen and for the chanting and bowing service that followed zazen. Bells were rung to start and end periods