Relaxed Parents

Jiyu-Kennett was by anyone’s standards a remarkable woman. An Oxford scholar in medieval music (which acquired a different significance later as she translated buddhist chants into plainsong), she parleyed an early interest in Buddhism and a meeting at which she impressed the important soto zen master Zenji Sama into an invitation to study at the great zen teaching monastry of Dai Hon San Sojiji. Her arrival in singapore for ordination by the local zen (chan) buddhist bishop forms the first episode of the Wild White Goose. It was also her initiation into a constant theme of her life in Japan – an unwanted role as the pawn of venal politics and power games. As the first woman to train in a Zen monastery and, in the early sixties, one of the first Westerners period, she faced not only discrimination on the grounds of her gender but occasional outright hatred due to her race. “The Wild White Goose” is the edited and abridged version of her diary from the time of her disembarkation at the docks in Malaysia to her decision, six years later, by now a fully fledged Buddhist priest with a Japanese parish of her own, to leave Japan for California.

Anyone accustomed to the kind of Zen found in books such as much-loved “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” by the Shunryu Suzuki (and I include myself in that category of reader) is in for a shock. This is not Zen comfort food. In fact, it’s one of the most uncomfortable books I’ve ever read in every single way I can think of. Kennett mercilessly documents every slight, injustice and wounding that the traditional Zen training system inflicts on her. She also details her own equally substantial failings. In the lengthy annotations that conclude the book, time and again she lashes herself as “Unbuddhist” “That was unbuddhist thinking” “A buddhist would not have acted so…”

The first part of her book narrates her journey to enlightenment and priesthood under the nominal tutelage and protection of Sama, patronage that turns out to be more of a liability than an advantage. Political faultlines and warring over the succession to the ailing Sama, divide the monastery and her privileged access to her Master causes her a great deal of trouble. She isn’t allowed a room, she isn’t fed, she’s denied medical treatment (towards the end of the book, its revealed just how badly her health is damaged by malnutrition and ill-treatment). Yet she stays. She stays because it is only there that she can sit in meditation for up to 20 hours a day and directly draw inspiration from someone who in a more liberal tradition would be characterised as a guru, albeit a guru who asks thing except that his disciples follow the discipline (the entymology of the word ‘discipline’ is never more appropriate) laid out by the founder of Soto Zen, Dogen, eight hundred years previously. And she finds that the most deeply implicated monks and priests can at any moment reveal a ‘shining light’ of truth or insight.

There are a lot of books that claim to reveal a ‘deep spiritual insight’ but very few have documented so closely (and dissected as she does in notes and an afterword) the experience of kensho, the moment of seeing things as they really are that monasteries such as Dai Hon are essentially machines for producing. She also shows the extent to which Buddhism is a religion, a religion as hard, relentless and flinty as it is loving, compassionate and inspirational.

The preface begins ominously enough:

This book may do the reader more harm than good if he does not first read this preface…”

and she isn’t wrong – without a certain amount of qualification as to her personal situation, the nature of “Zen training in the East” (in the sixties) and her intent to “show how training […] must be done in the mud of everyday life”,it would be almost too much to take in. There’s certainly plenty of mud. Aside from the politics and ill-health, there are plagues of newspaper reporters (my phrase, not Jiyu-Kennett’s), constant money problems and a stream of well-meaning Western students who frequently expect the Dharma served out now and then. Rather like those of us (including me) who look for it in books. The key impression the book leaves you with is that Zen is something experiential – you can’t read yourself into enlightenment – you have to do the work. And keep on doing the work, relentlessly, ceaselessly. In one of the many annotations correcting the ‘wrong thinking’ of her younger self, Jiyu-Kennett observes. “There is never an end.”
It is a knowingly imperfect book in many ways and the afterword, in the form of an interview, is an essential part of it. Of the frequent beating and physical abuse of the system, she comments “Sometimes beating produced a kensho but far more often, people simply left in a rage, resigned themselves to it stoically or fled into flower arrangement, calligraphy and the like, none of which did them much good frequently. Beating is a form of manipulation.”

Jiyu-Kennett was clearly an extraordinary woman and this isn’t a book I’d hand over to anyone who wanted to know a ‘bit about Zen’. But it’s certainly a deeply truthful book about one individual’s spiritual journey and a challenge to take your own seriously that most of us would find a little fierce to take up. Certainly, it leaves you with pitifully few excuses.

The order she founded has a UK monastery in Northumbria. I spent a weekend there on an introductory retreat and found both monks and environment peaceful and very, very real. One of the monks there has a blog at Moving Mountains which I strongly recommend.

How’s my own flirting with the Dharma going? That’s for another post.