Aitken

"Early on December 7, 1941, Japanese bombers came low through the gap in the mountains of Oahu and sank the great warships in Pearl Harbor, and, by the law of unintended consequences, doomed the Japanese empire and exported Zen Buddhism to the United States. The Japanese invaded Guam, and among the Americans working there was a civilian in his mid-twenties, thin, physically awkward, scholarly, looking for a direction. The Japanese army decided his direction for him by hauling him off to an internment camp in Kobe, Japan. Unlike prisoners of war, interned civilians were accorded no special cruelty, though stragglers were shot. The young man keeping carefully in line was Robert Aitken….

In the internment camp a guard lent him a book called Zen in English Literature, by R.H. Blyth, an English translator in love with Japan. Aitken read the book over and over; it made him happy in dark circumstances, offering a link between his own tradition and the meaning of life. When the camps were consolidated he met Mister Blyth, as he always called him, who had also been interned. Blyth was a mentor in an unlikely place, and introduced the newcomer to Zen, koans, haiku, and the value of surprising events.



After the war, with funding to study haiku and koans, Aitken returned to Japan, leaving his wife and infant son with friends. This led to his unmarrying; “I had no choice, really.” By this he meant that he was obsessed with the big questions and could have no peace or joy without solving them. When he remarried it was to Anne Hopkins, an heiress with a gracious and floating physical presence. For their honeymoon they went to Japan and straight into sesshin, a period of intense Zen meditation. It turned out not to be her idea of a honeymoon, although it was a source of amusement later on. Anne was a part of all he did in Zen, and she cofounded and funded his zendo. It began in their living room in Honolulu, and something of that informal tone always stayed with his groups. Anne moderated his emotional connections with colleagues and students, and he found it hard going after she died.

His most influential early teacher was Nakagawa Soen, the reluctant abbot of a great temple in Japan. Soen spoke good English, liked Beethoven, and was a notable haiku poet. The relationship had a high degree of whimsy. When Aitken visited Soen in winter, and they went for a walk by the Japan Sea, Soen stripped down. “Remember,” he said, “Zen is not asceticism!” and plunged in. Once Soen was giving sesshin in Honolulu and gave a great yell. Aitken found himself joining in. Soen thought Aitkin was on the verge of enlightenment and started yelling and whacking him with the Zen stick in an effort to push him over the edge. Aitken was yelling too. “But nothing happened” he said later, forlornly. “I don’t think those methods work.”

Aitken ended up studying with Koun Yamada, who had been Soen’s high school roommate. After the war Yamada had taken the problem of suffering seriously; he trained very hard and became the poster child for massive enlightenment experiences. Yamada had a literate, innovative, and practical mind. Some of his students found enlightenment quickly; others Yamada would drag or inveigle into the koan curriculum, coaching them in the hope that they would find their feet by stumbling along. Aitken was his test case for that theory.

When the time came, Bob wasn’t so sure he should teach. He muttered, “I just can’t do this, I can’t teach,” to Taizan Maezumi at the Zen Center of Los Angeles, and Maezumi invited him to stay for a while. It was Maezumi, he said, who really made him a teacher. Maezumi didn’t quite fit the idea of a Zen master either—“I could smell the sake on his breath,” Bob remembered, “but he was completely clear and he held my feet to the fire till I understood.”

Bob… was always feeling around for the meaning of events, and I found that to be one of his best features. He was not the shiny, self-assured, clear creature that Zen masters were advertised to be. He was timid and anxious, and put down other teachers, out of a kind of embarrassed competitiveness. But he knew that he judged and assessed others because he judged and assessed himself, and when he was least certain he was most interesting and helpful to be around.

In Zen there is a famous koan about whether a dog has buddhanature, and that was the koan he worked on for twenty years, trying to settle the matter of his dog… In an interview he held out his hand and I met Hakuin, the great medieval koan master, embodied in a little room while outside it rained and rained and inside there was light, nothing but light. I never forgot that dawn. Sometimes his understanding seemed deep and other times not so much, but his rule-bound meticulousness was fine for me, because I didn’t expect someone to understand my feelings or mirror me; I wanted to know what the tradition thought and how it could deepen me and those to come.

I hadn’t been aware that I had any strong reaction to my old mentor’s death, but… I dreamed that I was following Robert Aitken and Thich Nhat Hanh up the steps to a big temple. They went in and I was a few steps behind. It wasn’t a matter of personal feeling—these weren’t teachers I would have imagined following, and they didn’t agree with each other either. I was just following them, entering the same great temple they entered. In the dream personal feelings and opinions didn’t matter, as they don’t matter in life. We have all followed the old masters up those steps, and it’s not the temple we expected. That’s the point of Zen—the day we have is the good day, that dog has buddhanature after all.”

~ John Tarrant, Lion’s Roar, Sept. 2010