Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘I decided that after a certain point, after I came back from the spirit of hermitage and you know – drugs – heavy drugs and it wasn’t so much of a problem anymore – I could walk away from it. But I decided that – after that period of – Chen, no Luk! Charles Luk. He wrote the book I was reading. And I decided I didn’t want to do academic study anymore but that I wanted to study Buddhism and I had a series of meetings, serendipitous meetings of other teachers. One was Minor White and I went to visit him and show him my photographs. He was a photographer and mystic. He was sort of the last of the really important modernists like Edward Weston and Ansil Adams and Hans Steiglitz and those people and – a very accomplished photographer and a spiritual person also and so I went to show him my portfolio and he said these are pretty good and you have no technique whatsoever but you’ve got a good eye. Why don’t you come join my – he had a kind of a commune. So people lived in his house and worked in his darkroom and I said thank you so much. That’s a great honor but I’m on my way to California. And he said, well if you have to go you gotta go but he said, do me a favor. When you get there, he said, look up this guy Suzuki. He’s a Japanese priest and he’s out there somewhere in San Francisco and look him up. And he gave me a couple of other names of photographers and I said, ok I’ll do that.

DC: Do you know why he said that?

TB: It’s just that he’d heard from Bob Boni, who was one of his students [?unclear]], from a guy named Bob Brown and another guy named Conrad Forbs [sp?] and Conrad was more involved in Sufi Gurdjieff work. But Bob Boni knew about Zen Center. This is early on. This is ’64? And you know people were beginning to know about Suzuki Roshi in San Francisco – you know, among the artists and spiritual people. So, somehow Minor had heard of him but this is the first time I’d heard of him. Then I went up to Western New York state to say goodbye to my mother and I went to visit an uncle, a sort of nominal uncle and aunt – friends of my parents that I was always taught to call uncle and aunt. But these are people that I really liked. They were artists and they were crazy and they were just wonderful people and I of course went over to say goodbye to them and Philip Kapleau was there. He’d just arrived from Japan and was up near Rochester, New York. He’d come to see my aunt who was sort of a doyen of – sort of an old Theosophist or something. It wasn’t so unusual for someone like Philip Kapleau to be there his first few months in the United States. He said, I teach Zen and I just wrote a new book. It’s called Three Pillars of Zen. You gotta buy a copy and I said yes I will and he said why don’t you stay here. I’m starting a Zen group up in Rochester. And I said thanks a lot but I really want to go to San Francisco you know, because that’s where it seems to be happening. And he said well I wish you’d stay here. I need some good students. But he said, if you gotta go to San Francisco, look up this guy Suzuki – he’s a Zen teacher. So that’s how I turned up at Sokoji three thousand miles away.’ (from Cuke.com)

My Monday group has moved onto 1968 talks by Suzuki Roshi, particularly a shosan for which the date has been kind of long-contested. I was looking for some early writings about Tassajara, and came across this great story, from an interview by David Chadwick. I practised with Tim at Tassajara in his later years.