Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘The 50s was not just a time here on the West Coast where an interest in Buddhism arose, but it was part of a cultural ambience that is a little harder to pin down. Part of that ambience was it was the era of abstract expressionism in painting, of improvisatory jazz, and it clicked miraculously well with the idea of spontaneity and immediacy, as in haiku, and the kind of Buddhism that was presented in the writings of D.T. Suzuki, who made, and then the popularizer of that, a fine man, whom I respect highly, named Alan Watts, that made the language of Zen, especially as it came through Alan Watts, sound very much in line with, very much appropriate to, the aesthetic and style interests of the 50s.

It just all clicked together somehow in a way that would have been unpredictable, but it made it a very lively moment in time, and particularly a lively moment in time here in Northern California, in the Bay Area, where there was an independent, strong artistic community, composers like Harry Parch over in Sausalito, a circle of painters who arose into considerable prominence, working with some of the same ideas, highly, extraordinarily well-read and thoughtful poets like Kenneth Rexroth, who said to Jack Kerouac, the first time Jack went to his house on a Friday evening soiree, a regular Friday evening thing at Kenneth’s, always a circle of people there talking on Friday evenings, and Jack says, he had just come from the East Coast, he said, you guys are talking about Buddhism, and Kenneth said, this is in 1952, Kenneth said, oh Jack, everybody’s a Buddhist in San Francisco. This is in 1952. And it wasn’t so much Buddhism as it was pacifism. There was a strong pacifist impulse in the Bay Area that was connected to an anti-Soviet and anti-capitalist politics. And it was that little node of people who founded Pacifica Foundation and founded KPFA. Some of them were just back from the conscientious objectors camp up in Walport, Oregon.

So we started off, right after World War II, Northern California and the Bay Area started off running in these matters. I came down here from the Pacific Northwest and had stumbled onto my thoughts about Buddhism partly through ethics, partly through my own almost native deep concern for nature and for the question of how we relate to and what our obligations toward non-human beings is. Feelings and values that I just held without conscious reason, except feeling, but impressed by and very much taken with the fact that Buddhist ethics, as I discovered somewhere along the line, the first precept of ahimsa, was an ethic of non-harming and an ethic of respect that extended to the whole natural world. And with very little more than that, I thought, ah, this is very interesting, I want to find out more about this. Later I was able to find out how much else there was in Buddhist thought and in Buddhist practice that made it all the richer.’ (from the San Francisco Zen Center Archive)

I am spending a little more time in the Zen Center digital archive at the moment, for reasons that will be clearer soon, and it is amazing to come across gems like this: one in a series of talks given by Gary Snyder in the late nineties at Green Gulch, talking about his own experience as the stage was set for Suzuki Roshi’s arrival.