Swans to the Lake

“2,500 years after I have passed away into Nirvana, the Highest Doctrine will become spread in the country of the red-faced people. —Shakyamuni Buddha to the goddess Vimala, as given in Bu-ston’s History of Buddhism . . .

The Karmapa told an interviewer this week that he came to the United States because the teachings of the Lord Buddha had preceded him. “If there is a lake, the swans would go there,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. —The Boston Globe, Dec. 10, 1976

The sesshin began like every other sesshin—with the deep hollow sound of the bell—and it continued for seven days like every other sesshin, with alternating periods of sitting and walking, eating formally in the zendo, working for short periods at manual labor, sanzen with the roshi, and a few hours of sleep. But instead of one roshi, like most sesshins, this one had more than twenty roshis and dharma teachers in attendance.

Concluding on July 4, 1976, this session has been held to mark the opening of Dai Bosatsu, the first traditional Japanese-style Zen monastery in America. Richard Baker-roshi had come from San Francisco for the opening ceremony, Sasaki-roshi and Maezumi-roshi from Los Angeles, Takeda-roshi from Mexico City, and Philip Kapleau-roshi from Rochester. Seung Sahn, not a Japanese or American Zen master, but a Korean Zen master, had come up from Providence, and then there was a large contingent of visiting roshis from Japan. There was even a Tibetan, who had incorporated certain aspects of Zen into his teaching, Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, the Eleventh Trungpa Tulku, not wearing his best robes like the roshis, but a dark suit of English cut.

The monastery had cost its principal donor more than three million dollars and was modeled on an ancient monastery in Japan that was now a National Treasure. A contingent of Shinto priests wearing pointed wizard hats chanted and made offerings, and somebody rang the big, brass bell on the hill for the first time, with a log wrapped in red, white, and blue bunting for the occasion. There was a speech in Japanese and then Baker-roshi said a very few words in English, and Eido-roshi mentioned someone who should have been there, but wasn’t. Though he didn’t use his name nearly everyone there knew he meant Nakagawa Soen-roshi, who was considered eccentric even for a Zen master and who always did what he pleased without worrying about social niceties. Soen-roshi was one of the pioneer Zen masters; his dharma connections through his close friend Nyogen Senzaki went way back to the first Zen master to come to America, Soyen Shaku, who had spoken at the World Parliament of Religion in Chicago in 1893, giving a speech his student, D.T. Suzuki, had translated for him in Japan. In any case, Nakagawa Soen-roshi was perhaps all the more present by his absence.

The ceremony was broken by thunderstorms, and went on into the night around a raging bonfire where the water of wisdom, otherwise known as saké, flowed freely. Meanwhile, in New York City, a fleet of schooners sailed up the East River to celebrate the Bicentennial, and Dudjom Rinpoche, the head of the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism, who had just arrived in the country, addressed the FM radio audience on a WBAI program, In the Spirit, that claimed more than 78,900 listeners, while another wing of Buddhism, the Sokagakkai, two thousand strong, paraded down Fifth Avenue with their marching band. Nobody was sure what all this Buddhist activity meant on the Fourth of July Bicentennial, a mere two hundred years after the United States of America had been founded, but it was clear to all the buddhas, bodhisattvas, arhats, lay people, and Japanese tourists who had gathered together to inaugurate Dai Bosatsu Zendo in the Catskills that this was only the beginning.”

~ Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America