where he passed his declining years as a white-bearded, bohemian sage, who drank, caroused, and championed the cause of free love. He died at the age of seventy-seven, in 1913, another dreamer who’d struck it rich in California.
M OUNT S HASTA HAD A REPUTATION as a holy place among certain Indian tribes, so it made sense that the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives should have an abbey on Summit Road, even though they had landed there by chance.
A dust of fresh snow covered the ridges of the mountain down to an altitude of about six thousand feet on the cool, sunny morning that I drove up there. Manzanita bushes were growing along theabbey’s walls. The crisp air and the moisture had brought out the streaked marbling of the wood, and the branches were clustered with tiny, white, bell-shaped flowers.
At the main gate, I picked up a security phone and spoke to a person inside. About ten minutes later, a monk came forward to admit me. She wore a Russian-style winter hat and a brown robe sashed at the waist with a purple cincture. She was in her forties, although the bright focus of her presence made her look younger. Her hair was shaved to a graying stubble. She had ruddy cheeks from working outdoors, and eyes that were alive to nuances, very clear and blue and open.
All over California, religious communities such as the abbey were still cropping up, as they had been for centuries, taking advantage of the space, the freedom, and the notorious receptivity of people in the state to new ideas—or, in the case of Buddhism, an old idea newly translated. I had been attracted to the apparently simple Buddhist canon from the moment I’d moved to San Francisco, but I soon learned how complicated simplicity could be. Balancing a book by D. T. Suzuki on my lap, I would wrench myself into a near-full-lotus position and fail miserably at the task of trying not to think and trying
not
to not think.
From my efforts, though, I gained the smallest glimmer of what a Buddhist might be hoping to accomplish, and discovered, too, that out West it was easier to incorporate a spiritual dimension into my life than it had been in the East.
I didn’t know why that should be so, whether it had to do with the glory of the land or with a renewed interest in nature and the very idea of creation, but it was also the case with the monk who was my guide. She was from a Methodist family in Nebraska. Her grades were so good in school that she had followed an academic career path without thinking much about it, but she also had a spiritual longing that wouldn’t go away.
As a child, she had discovered a shelf of books about world religions at her neighborhood library and had read them with enthusiasm.After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, she moved to Eugene, Oregon, where she did typing and secretarial work. She was in a phase of shopping around for some kind of spiritual discipline when she began investigating Soto Zen, the form of Buddhism practiced at Shasta Abbey.
As her thirtieth birthday approached, she decided to attend one of the retreats that the abbey offers to outsiders. It held enough interest for her that she became a lay Buddhist, but after only a few years in such a role she found it in herself to enter the monastic life and train as a Buddhist priest. She knew by then that she was on the right path, and that Soto Zen was the correct practice for her.
There were about forty monks in training at Shasta Abbey, she said, about half of them men and half of them women. The abbess and spiritual leader was P. T. Jiyu-Kennett, an Englishwoman who was certified as a priest in Japan and had started the abbey in 1970. D. T. Suzuki had introduced her to Mahayana Buddhism in the 1950s, and she later wrote a classic about Zen training with the wonderful title
Selling Water by the River
, a business I had conducted far too often.
The abbey owned sixteen acres near the mountain. The grounds had once been a resort, and the stone
M OUNT S HASTA HAD A REPUTATION as a holy place among certain Indian tribes, so it made sense that the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives should have an abbey on Summit Road, even though they had landed there by chance.
A dust of fresh snow covered the ridges of the mountain down to an altitude of about six thousand feet on the cool, sunny morning that I drove up there. Manzanita bushes were growing along theabbey’s walls. The crisp air and the moisture had brought out the streaked marbling of the wood, and the branches were clustered with tiny, white, bell-shaped flowers.
At the main gate, I picked up a security phone and spoke to a person inside. About ten minutes later, a monk came forward to admit me. She wore a Russian-style winter hat and a brown robe sashed at the waist with a purple cincture. She was in her forties, although the bright focus of her presence made her look younger. Her hair was shaved to a graying stubble. She had ruddy cheeks from working outdoors, and eyes that were alive to nuances, very clear and blue and open.
All over California, religious communities such as the abbey were still cropping up, as they had been for centuries, taking advantage of the space, the freedom, and the notorious receptivity of people in the state to new ideas—or, in the case of Buddhism, an old idea newly translated. I had been attracted to the apparently simple Buddhist canon from the moment I’d moved to San Francisco, but I soon learned how complicated simplicity could be. Balancing a book by D. T. Suzuki on my lap, I would wrench myself into a near-full-lotus position and fail miserably at the task of trying not to think and trying
not
to not think.
From my efforts, though, I gained the smallest glimmer of what a Buddhist might be hoping to accomplish, and discovered, too, that out West it was easier to incorporate a spiritual dimension into my life than it had been in the East.
I didn’t know why that should be so, whether it had to do with the glory of the land or with a renewed interest in nature and the very idea of creation, but it was also the case with the monk who was my guide. She was from a Methodist family in Nebraska. Her grades were so good in school that she had followed an academic career path without thinking much about it, but she also had a spiritual longing that wouldn’t go away.
As a child, she had discovered a shelf of books about world religions at her neighborhood library and had read them with enthusiasm.After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, she moved to Eugene, Oregon, where she did typing and secretarial work. She was in a phase of shopping around for some kind of spiritual discipline when she began investigating Soto Zen, the form of Buddhism practiced at Shasta Abbey.
As her thirtieth birthday approached, she decided to attend one of the retreats that the abbey offers to outsiders. It held enough interest for her that she became a lay Buddhist, but after only a few years in such a role she found it in herself to enter the monastic life and train as a Buddhist priest. She knew by then that she was on the right path, and that Soto Zen was the correct practice for her.
There were about forty monks in training at Shasta Abbey, she said, about half of them men and half of them women. The abbess and spiritual leader was P. T. Jiyu-Kennett, an Englishwoman who was certified as a priest in Japan and had started the abbey in 1970. D. T. Suzuki had introduced her to Mahayana Buddhism in the 1950s, and she later wrote a classic about Zen training with the wonderful title
Selling Water by the River
, a business I had conducted far too often.
The abbey owned sixteen acres near the mountain. The grounds had once been a resort, and the stone
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