PRAJNA-PARAMITA

There are two ways of dealing with Nature according to Zen.  One is to distinguish, describe, analyze, and, in pursuit of practical ends, manipulate it from the outside.  This is to deal in concepts and acts that are disjunctive and misleading. 

The other way is to contemplate Nature, much as the Taoist of China does, from the position of one who is indistinguishably one with it.  By identifying oneself with Nature, one acquires prajna-paramita, the wisdom that has gone beyond--to the beyond that is within.

There is a metaphor that perfectly suggests what prajna-paramita means.  It is the metaphor of crossing a river by raft or ferry to get to the farther shore, Nirvana in Buddhism.  The nearer bank of the river is this world, known to the senses.  From it one cannot imagine at all what the farther shore in the distance is like.

But the ferry arrives, piloted by the Buddha, and when one boards it (i.e. adopts the Buddhist view) and begins the crossing, the receding nearer bank gradually loses reality and the far shore begins to take shape.

At length only the far shore seems real, and when one arrives there and leaves behind him the river and the ferry, they too lose all reality, because one has now gained final release, which alone is utterly real. 

Here the former bank, the river, the ferry, the Buddha, and even the goal from the start of gaining the far shore, Nirvana, are equally and completely void, done with.

RINSAI VS. SOTO ZEN

The two schools of Zen that are currently the most active are Rinzai, which favors the koan; and Soto, which employs the zazen method.  Though Ch'an, or Zen as it is pronounced in Japanese, was introduced from China into Japan several times prior to the twelfth century A.D., it wasn't until Eisai (A.D. 1141-1215), a Japanese scholar monk, went to China, studied it, and brought it home that it took hold in Japan.  The Lin-Chi school of Ch'an was the style that Eisai studied and brought back, Lin-Chi transliterated as Rinzai.

Although zazen, sitting in meditation, is also an important part of Rinzai, in Rinzai the emphasis is on sudden enlightenment gained through the "conquering" of verbal or nonverbal impasses.  These impasses are in the form of the unanswerable question, called koan, the nonsensical dialog, termed mondo, and the unexpected silences, paradoxes, pantomime, blows, and other techniques that are used to shock the monk into awareness.

The Rinzai monk often serves for long periods, even for a lifetime, in the monastery, under the direct supervision of a Zen master.  The monk is expected to solve a certain number of koans, fifty or possibly more, for which there are no established "answers."  Much depends on the monk’s relationship with the master in working out the koan.  A lot of Rinzai teachings are secret because much of what takes place depends on intuition rather than on formal doctrines or written scriptures.

One of Eisai's later disciples, Dogen (A.D. 1200-1253), eventually doubted the koan method, broke with Rinzai, and established the other great form of Zen called Soto.  The Soto, or gradual school, aims at the same ends, but proceeds somewhat differently.  Soto stresses quiet sitting, again zazen, which is the practice of observing one's mind in tranquility.  This sitting is considered to be an Indian form of meditation as this is the method practiced by Gautama Buddha himself. 

Soto stresses the immediacy of the present, which is to say the "acting like the Buddha" in the present rather than trying to become like him in the future.  Dogen spoke of it in his great work Shobogenzo, or Treasury of the Eye of the True Doctrine.  He wrote, "Without looking forward to tomorrow, every moment you must think only of this day and this hour.  Because tomorrow is unfixed and difficult to know, you must think of following the Buddhist way while you live today."

BUDDHISM IN TIBET

Buddhism was late in coming to Tibet.  Long after the countries to the south and east had yielded to Buddhist missionaries, Tibet remained unaffected.  At last about 630 A.D., a Tibetan prince, Srong Tsan Gam Po, sent emissaries to northern India for the purpose, in part, of securing the introduction of Buddhism into his realm.  Likely his two wives, princesses from China and Nepal had acquainted him with their own religion, Buddhism, and expressed their desire to practice it in Tibet.  

Yet Srong's introduction of Buddhism into Tibet was not successful.  The native demonolatry was too strong and besides, the Tibetans found it hard to understand.  It would take another century before the true founder of Buddhism in Tibet came up from Bengal.  He was Padma-Sambhava, a vigorous teacher of a corrupt version of Buddhism from 8th century northern India.  This Buddhism, with it Tantric infusion of sex symbolism, took root, ironically, and ultimately, after various vicissitudes and "reforms," became the religion of Tibet.

The clergy of Tibet have had an interesting history.  Early on they acquired the name of "lamas," a term of respect meaning "one who is superior."  For a thousand years they lived in thick-walled monasteries.  These were originally of the unmilitary Indian model, but finally developed into fortresses of a distinctly Tibetan style.  They had massive walls rising firmly from the foundation rocks to overhanging roofs far above.  The climate, with its extreme cold and its long winters, made necessary the building of walled structures with plenty of room in them for winter stores.

At first the life that went on there was more that of princely magicians than of monks.  The Tantric Buddhism that was practiced encouraged the lamas to take spouses.  Celibacy, at least among the higher clergy, became a rarity.  The monasteries therefore often had hereditary heads, the abbots passing their offices on to their sons.

In the second half of the 14th century, the conditions were created for the final "reform" of Lamaism by the great Tibetan monk Tsong-kha-pa.  He organized the so-called Yellow Church, whose executive head is the Dalai Lama.  Its monks are popularly known as Yellow Hats, as their hats and girdles are yellow, evidence of Tsong's attempt to purify Lamaism and take it back in theory and practice toward early Buddhism.  The monasteries that resisted reform continued the use of red and constitute the "Red" sects.

Tsong's reform was in part an imposition of a stricter monastic discipline.  There was to be less alcohol and more praying.  But what counted most and had the greatest future consequences was the reintroduction of celibacy.  The practice of celibacy had the obvious and immediate effect of ending hereditary rule in the Yellow Hat monasteries; the abbots had no sons.  But another result ultimately followed, about a century later, which gave the Yellow Church its world-famous theory of the reincarnation of the head lamas, hence their successors.

Born 6 July 1935, Lhamo Dondrub is the 14th Dalai Lama.  He was the fifth of seven children in a farming family in the village of Taktser.  His first language was, in his own words, "a broken Xining language which was a dialect of the Chinese language," for his family did not speak the regional Amdo dialect.  At the age of two he was proclaimed the tulku or rebirth of the 13th Dalai Lama.  

In 1950 the army of the People's Republic of China invaded the region.  One month later, on 17 November 1950, Lhamo Dondrub was formally enthroned as Dalai Lama.  By age fifteen he had become the region's most important spiritual leader and political ruler.

In 1951 the Chinese military pressured the Dalai Lama to ratify a seventeen-point agreement which permitted the People's Republic of China to take control of Tibet.  Soon after a failed uprising in 1959, the effective collapse of the Tibetan resistance movement, the Dalai Lama and his monks fled through the mountains to India.  In Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, India, he established a government-in-exile.  The most influential member of the Gelugpa or Yellow Hat sect, he had considerable influence over the other sects of Tibetan Buddhism. 

Today, Tibetan Buddhism is adhered to widely in the Tibetan Plateau, Nepal, Bhutan, Mongolia, Kalmykia, the northwest shore of the Caspian Sea, Siberia, central Russia, Buryatia and Chita Oblast, and the Russian Far East.  The Indian regions of Sikkim and Ladakh, both formerly independent kingdoms, are also home to significant Tibetan Buddhist populations.  In the wake of the Tibetan diaspora, Tibetan Buddhism has gained adherents in the West and throughout the world.  Celebrity practitioners include Brandon Boyd, Richard Gere, Adam Yauch, Jet Li, Sharon Stone, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Glass.

NEEM KAROLI BABA

Shri Neem Karoli Baba, or Shri Neeb Karori Baba, was also known to followers as Maharaj-ji.  He was a Hindu guru and devotee of the Hindu deity Hanuman.  He is known outside India as the guru of a number of Americans who travelled to India in the 1960s and 1970s, the most well-known of whom were the spiritual teachers Ram Dass and Bhagavan Das, and the musicians Krishna Das and Jai Uttal.

The exact details of Neem's birth and early years are not known.  His family was an affluent Brahmin family.  His father was Pundit Durga Prasad 'Vedacharya' who gave him the name Pundit Lakshmi Narayan Sharma.  This was at Akbarpur, Firozabad district in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.  Neem was married to Rambeti, daughter of Pundit Rewati Ram.  In the years ahead they had three children: Aneg Singh Sharma, Dharma Narayan Sharma and Girija Bhatele, née Sharma.

Neem had two havelis, palatial homes, in Akbarpur, the older of which has been converted to a temple while the newer one is being preserved as his birthplace shrine.  Another home in Agra in Gokulpura he visited multiple times after he left his married life.  He has nine grandchildren and fifteen great grandchildren.

Neem left his home around the time his youngest child, a daughter, was eleven.  This was in 1958.  He went on to wander extensively throughout northern India as a sadhu, a Hindu ascetic.  Among the many names he had during this time were Lakshman Das, Handi Wallah Baba, and Tikonia Walla Baba.  When he did tapasya and sadhana, spiritual practices, at Bavania in Gujarat, he was known as Tallaiya Baba.  In Vrindavan, the locals addressed him by the name of Chamatkari, meaning miracle, Baba.  Many considered him a saint.  Neem was a life-long adept of bhakti or devotional yoga, and encouraged service to others as the highest form of unconditional devotion to God.

Among the most notable of Maharaj-ji's disciples were, again, Ram Dass, the author of Be Here Now, teacher/performer Bhagavan Das, and the musicians Krishna Das and Jai Uttal.  Other noteworthy devotees included American-born Tibetan Buddhist Lama Surya Das, humanitarian Larry Brilliant and his wife Girija, as well as Dada Mukerjee, former professor at Allahabad University, Uttar Pradesh, India.  Baba Hari Dass, a classically-trained Ashtanga yogi, was also a disciple; he maintained one of Neem's ashrams before heading to the USA to become a spiritual teacher.  Steve Jobs, future CEO of Apple Computers, along with his college friend Dan Kottke, traveled to India in 1973 in search of spiritual enlightenment.  They hoped to meet Maharaj-ji, but did not arrive before the guru died in September of that year.

Ram Dass and Larry Brilliant, back now in the United States, founded the Seva Foundation, an international health organization based in Berkeley, California.  The foundation is committed to applying the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba toward ending world poverty. 

Among Seva's greatest accomplishments is their help in returning eyesight to nearly three million blind people suffering from cataract blindness.  This was in countries such as Tibet, Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia and throughout Africa.  The organization also has a Native American Community Health Program that works to fight an epidemic of diabetes in Native communities throughout the United States.  In recent years another foundation evolved, the 'Love Serve Remember Foundation,' meant to preserve and continue the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba and Ram Dass.

AVIDYA

In Vedanta, avidya is defined as ignorance.  This ignorance is the ego burdening the Atman with every kind of irrelevance, denying the Atman its destiny, which is its identification with its source, Brahman.  This is to say, the Atman is by nature drawn to Brahman like the needle of a compass to a magnet.  The ego, however, piles layer after layer of itself over the needle so that the Atman does not feel the attraction of the magnet that is Brahman.  Only by washing away these layers, by spiritual practice, will the needle feel once again the draw of the magnet and be able to connect with it.

Avidya in Buddhism is different, however.  Here the emphasis is on the psychological rather than the spiritual and concerns pain and suffering.  There are two types of avidya or ignorance in Buddhism.  The first is the innocent ignorance of not knowing any better.  A baby will put his hand in a fire not knowing he will get burned.

The second type of ignorance in Buddhism, though, is what is termed ignore-ance.  It is ignoring what, from our experience, we know will cause us pain.  This is to say, we know that by putting our hand in a fire we will get burned, but we do it anyway.  We ignore the lesson of our pain.  Life is full of pain, psychological and emotional pain especially, but rather than pay attention to when, where, and how this pain comes about, we ignore it. 

LAMA ANAGARIKA GOVINDA

Born Ernst Lothar Hoffman, Lama Anagarika Govinda (May 17, 1898–January 14, 1985), was the founder of the order of the Arya Maitreya Mandala and a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism.  The son of a German father and a Bolivian mother, he was born in Waldheim, Germany.  His family, who owned silver mines in South America as well as a cigar factory, was quite well to do.

After spending two years in the German army during World War I, he contracted tuberculosis and was discharged.  He briefly studied philosophy and archeology at Freiburg University and then, from 1920 until 1928, lived in an international art colony on Capri in Italy.   There he worked as an abstract painter and a poet, receiving some money from his family.  He conducted archeological research in Naples and Cagliari and studied tumuli, that is, burial mounds, in the Mediterranean, including North Africa.   Still intending to earn a doctorate, he eventually abandoned the ambition when he became interested in Buddhism and meditation.

He then moved to Sri Lanka where he became a Buddhist monk of the Theravada tradition.  Tibetan Buddhism, though, he was quite critical of from the start, considering it the home of demons.  Indeed, in 1931 he went to a conference in Darjeeling to convert Tibetans to a more pure form of Buddhism.  In nearby Sikkim, however, he met the Tibetan teacher Tomo Geshe Rimpoche (1866–1936) who completely turned around Govinda's views.  From then on he embraced the Tibetan form of Buddhism.

After founding his order in 1933, he lived a secluded life for three decades at Crank's Ridge outside Almora in northern India.  From there he undertook travels through the remotest areas of Tibet, where he made a large numbers of paintings, drawings and photographs.  He described these travels in his book The Way of the White Clouds. 

Due to his German birth, Govinda was interned by the British army during World War II.  In 1947 he married a Persian-speaking photographer Li Gotami (original name Ratti Petit).   In the 1960s he began travelling around the world to lecture on Buddhism, settling, in his twilight years, in the San Francisco Bay, where he was hosted for a time by Alan Watts.  He died in Mill Valley, California.

THE AFTERLIFE

“There was no pain any longer, no need to gasp for breath.  All sound had died away, and it was quite dark.  But, in the void and the silence there was still a kind of knowledge, a faint awareness.

“Awareness of a name or person, not of things present, not of memories of the past, not even of here or there—for there was no place, only an existence whose single dimension was this knowledge of being ownerless and without possessions and alone.

“…In the dark silence, in the void of all sensation, something began to know it.  Very dimly at first, from immeasurably far away.  But gradually the presence approached.  The dimness of that other knowledge grew brighter.  And suddenly the awareness had become an awareness of light…instead of privation there was this light…yes, there was joy in being known, in being thus included within a shining presence, in thus being interpenetrated by a shining presence…not privation, but bliss.

“And then as the light increased, hunger again for profounder satisfaction, for a bliss more intense…and through everlasting durations the light kept brightening from beauty into beauty…brighter, brighter through succeeding durations that expanded at last into an eternity of joy…an eternity of radiant knowledge, of bliss unchanging in its ultimate intensity.  Forever, forever.”

---Aldous Huxley in his novel Time Must Have a Stop, Harper & Brothers, 1944, pp 138-142.

BRAHMAN IS NOT GOD

Author John B. Noss states that the early Upanishads generally refer to Brahman as a neuter something "without motion or feeling, the impersonal matrix from which the universe has issued and to which it will in time return.  This It, this One Thing, is the substantial substratum of everything."

It is important to emphasized, however, that Brahman is not God, is not Pure Spirit as God would be, according to author Edward Rice.   Again, all words used in connection with Brahman are neuter--It not He.  God would be He.  And to call Brahman "the Ground of All Being," as Western Vedantists do, is to understate the immensity of Brahman, says Rice. 

The subjective or immanent aspect of Brahman is termed Atman.  The pair may be used as synonyms or otherwise appear together as Brahman-Atman.  Swami Prabhavananda states, meanwhile, that Brahman-Atman does not act in everyday life, additional evidence of the way in which Brahman-Atman is not God.  

SWAMI VIDYATMANANDA

Born John Yale in 1913, Swami Vidyatmananda underwent initiation and training under Swami Prabhavananda at the Vedanta Society of Southern California.  Following brahmacharya, the active period of education and discipline in Vedanta, he took sannyas, final vows.  This was in 1964.  He was then ordained as a monk in the Ramakrishna order.

On a trip to India, Vidyatmananda visited the Belur Math in Howrah, the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in Calcutta, and other pilgrimage sites throughout the subcontinent.  He wrote about these experiences in travelogue articles for the journal Vedanta and the West.

Vidyatmananda went on to become an editor of Vedanta and the West, and edited Atman Alone Abides: Conversations with Swami Atulananda (1978).  He also edited What Religion Is: In the Words of Swami Vivekananda (1982), with an introduction by Christopher Isherwood.  His impressions of India he included in a book entitled A Yankee and the Swamis: A Westerner's View of the Ramakrishna Order (2001).

His career continued as manager of the Centre Védantique Ramakrishna in Gretz, France, where he served until his death in 2000.  He was 86 years old.  His autobiography is entitled The Making of a Devotee, and can be found online.

The University of Texas at Austin, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, holds the Swami Vidyatmananda Collection, which comprises correspondence to Vidyatmananda between the years 1923 to 1986, as well as correspondence he gathered through his association with the Vedanta Society of Southern California and the Centre Védantique Ramakrishna in Gretz, France. 

Three distinct groups of correspondence are present: letters between Christopher Isherwood and Swami Vidyatmananda 1950-1986; correspondence to Lady Sandwich (formerly Amiya Corbin) from Aldous Huxley, John Van Druten, Christopher Isherwood, Walter De la Mare, E. M. Forster, and Gerald Heard, 1944-1977; and letters to the French diplomat Martha Vanek from Jan Masaryk, René Fülöp-Miller, and Igor Stravinsky, 1923-1930.

BHAGAVAN DAS

Born Kermit Michael Riggs in Laguna Beach, California on May 17, 1945, Bhagavan Das is a Western yogi who lived for more than six years in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.  The Buddhist community knows him by the name Anagorika Dharma Sara.

He is a singer and teacher.  He is perhaps best known for having guided spiritual teacher Ram Dass, at the time known as Dr. Richard Alpert, throughout India, eventually introducing him to his guru Neem Karoli Baba, who then became Ram Dass' guru.  Bhagavan Das gained fame after being featured in Ram Dass' 1971 book Be Here Now, a bestselling classic.

Das is a bhakti yogi, a shakta tantra adept, and teacher of Nada Yoga, a sound-based yoga.  He was the first Western initiate/devotee of the aforementioned Neem Karoli Baba, as well as the first American to meet Kalu Rinpoche of the Shangpa Kargyupas lineage.  

He has received Vajra Yogini initiation from His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje of the Karma Kagyu lineage and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the 11th Trungpa Tulku.  During the six plus years he spent as a wandering ascetic he received numerous initiations and teachings from living saints and sages including A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Swami Chaitanya Prakashananda Tirtha, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Sri Anandamoyi Ma, and Tarthang Tulku of the Dudjom Rinpoche lineage.

In 1972 in California he married his pregnant girlfriend, Bhavani, who subsequently bore him a daughter, Soma, who was born in New York.  In 1976 in Berkeley, California, he met Usha, who eventually became his common-law wife, and they had a son together, Mikyo, and then a daughter, Lalita.  Over the years he became friends with Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts, and the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa. 

Das travels widely throughout the world as a performer of traditional and non-traditional Indian bhajans and kirtans, which are devotional songs and chants, and is the author of an autobiography, It's Here Now (Are You?).

TATHATA

The Buddhist term "tathata" or "suchness" means that which is so of itself.  Something just is, in other words.  Philosopher Alan Watts states, interestingly, that tathata is the correct interpretation of the virgin birth of Jesus. 

Watts goes on to sight classical music as tathata.  Classical music means nothing except itself, he says.  There is no "message" in a Bach fugue.  It just is what it is.  Rain, another example he gives, is something that needs no translation.  "It is just that which it is, even though it may be impossible to say what."

Tathata, according to Buddhists, applies to the creation of the universe as well.  Buddhists do not accept the notion of a Creator and a God-created universe. They accept rather that the universe came spontaneously out of nothing.  Out of nothing came something, just as this something will one day again be nothing.  

They explain that you cannot have something without there first being nothing, that something and nothing imply each other, they create each other.  And this occurs just so of itself.

In what has come to be known in English as the Flower Sermon, the Buddha transmitted the idea of tathata directly to his disciple Mahakasyapa by holding up a flower.  The other disciples present were perplexed by the gesture, but Mahakasyapa smiled.  He saw that the flower was just so of itself, tathata.

As no moment is exactly the same, each one can be savored for what occurs at that precise time, apart from whether it is "good" or "bad."  This also is tathata. 

A related word is tathagata.  While alive the Buddha referred to himself as tathagata, which can mean either "One who has thus come" or "One who has thus gone," and interpreted correctly can be read as "One who has arrived at suchness," tathata.

SOKEI-AN SASAKI ON MEDITATION

Sokei-an Sasaki (1882-1945) was the first Zen master to settle permanently in America.  In a lecture on November 23, 1940, he offered the following apt description of meditation:

"The Buddha founded his religion upon Samadhi, full mental absorption.  His object of meditation was his own mind.  He did not meditate upon any external object, thoughts, or words, or ideas.  He meditated simply upon his mind, a mind from which he had extracted every thought, every image, every concept.  He paid no attention either to the outside or to the inside; he meditated upon his own mind.  Perhaps we should say mind meditated upon itself, for, in true Buddhist meditation, mind by itself is the meditator and at the same time the object of the meditator's meditation.

“I think the meaning of 'his own mind' is not very clear to Western people.  Western people think that mind, to be mind, must have something in it; if it has nothing in it, it is not mind.  But consider the mind of an infant; he does not know the words papa or mama, he does not know his own existence, he does not know the outside world; nevertheless he has his own mind, pure and empty.  We can discover that mind in this world through meditation.  The attainment of this pure and empty mind is true samadhi.  And this is Buddhism.

“The Buddha practiced meditation for six years and succeeded in attaining this pure and empty mind.  He did not call it God, or Mind either.  He did not call it by any name.  For him, Buddhism was very simple and very pure.  It is pure mind.  If you prefer to call it soul, Buddhism is pure soul.  Our teacher used to say to us when we practiced mediation: 'Don't close your eyes; you will be bothered by your own thoughts. Don't keep your eyes open; you will be bothered by outside things.  Keep your eyes partly closed and meditate upon your soul.’  This is Buddhism." 

Note that Sokei-an's use of the word "soul" here is in its broadest sense.  Buddhism, in the doctrine of anatta, denies the existence of a permanent or static entity, i.e. soul, that remains constant and migrates after death to another body.

SOKEI-AN SASAKI, ZEN MASTER

Sokei-an Sasaki was the first Zen master to settle permanently in America.

Sokei-an was born in Japan in 1882 and was raised by his father, a Shinto priest, and his father's wife.  His birth mother was his father's concubine.  His father taught him Chinese beginning at the age of four and soon had him reading Confucian texts.  Following the death of his father when he was fifteen, Sokei-an became an apprentice sculptor and went on to study under Japan's renowned sculptor Koun Takamura at the Imperial Academy of Art in Tokyo.  While in school he began studying Rinzai Zen under Zen master Sokatsu Shaku. 

After graduating from the art academy in 1905, he was drafted by the Japanese Imperial Army and served briefly during the Russo-Japanese War on the border of Manchuria.  He was discharged when the war ended in 1906 and soon married his first wife, Tomé.  She was a fellow student of Sokatsu.  That same year the newlyweds followed Sokatsu to San Francisco, California as part of a delegation of fourteen.  

The couple's first child, Shintaro, was born not long after.  With the hope of establishing a Zen community in California, the group farmed strawberries in Hayward but with little success.  Sokei-an then studied painting under artist Richard Partington at the California Institute of Art.  By 1910 the delegation's Zen community had proven unsuccessful, whereupon all members of the original fourteen, with the exception of Sokei-an and his wife, returned to Japan.

Next Sokei-an moved to Oregon to work for a short while.  Tomé and Shintaro were not with him, but rejoined him in Seattle, Washington, where Tomé gave birth to their second child, Seiko, a girl.  In Seattle, Sokei-an worked as a picture-frame maker, writing at the same time various articles and essays for Japanese publications.  Later he traveled the Oregon and Washington countrysides selling subscriptions to the Japanese newspaper Hokubei Shinpo.  His wife, who had become pregnant once again, moved back to Japan in 1913 to raise their children.

Over the next few years Sokei-an made a living doing a variety of jobs, following which, in 1916, he moved to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, New York.  Sometime during this period he unsuccessfully tried to join the U.S. army.  While in New York he worked both as a janitor and a translator for Maxwell Bodenheim, an American poet and novelist known as the king of the Greenwich Village bohemians and who gained international fame during the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

Sokei-an also began to write poetry during his free time.  In 1920 he returned to Japan to continue his Zen studies.  He moved back to the United States in 1922, and in 1924 or 1925 began giving talks on Buddhism at the Orientalia Bookstore on East 58th Street in New York City.  By this time he had received lay teaching credentials from his long-time teacher Sokatsu.  In 1928 Sokatsu granted him inka, the final seal of approval in the Rinzai school.

Then, on May 11, 1930, Sokei-an and some American students founded the Buddhist Society of America which was subsequently incorporated in 1931 at 63 West 70th Street.  There were just four original members.  Here he offered sanzen interviews and gave Dharma talks while also working on various translations of important Buddhist texts.  To make ends meet, he sculpted Buddhist images and repaired art for Tiffany's.

In 1938, Ruth Fuller Everett began studying under him and received her Buddhist name, Eryu.  Her daughter, Eleanor, was then the wife of Alan Watts, who also studied under Sokei-an that same year.  According to Watts, Sokei-an lived at this time in a small temple in a walk-up on West 74th Street.  It was just one large room with a shrine that could be closed off with folding doors, and a small kitchen.  There he lived in complete simplicity with his Maltese cat, Chaka.  In 1941, Ruth purchased an apartment at 124 East 65th Street which also served before long as the new living quarters for Sokei-an and became the new home for the Buddhist Society of America.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Sokei-an was arrested by the FBI as an "enemy alien" and was taken to Ellis Island on June 15.  He was interned at a camp in Fort Meade, Maryland on October 2, 1942, soon to suffer from high blood pressure and several strokes.  Following the pleas of his students, he was released from the internment camp on August 17, 1943 whereupon he returned to the Buddhist Society of America in New York City. 

In 1944, he divorced his first wife from whom he had been separated for several years.  Not long after, on July 10, 1944, he married Ruth in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Sokei-an died on May 17, 1945 after years of bad health.  His ashes are interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in Bronx, New York.  The Buddhist Society of America underwent a name change following his death, becoming the First Zen Institute of America.   Many of Sokei-an's writings may be found on their website under Zen Notes.

ALFRED “SUNYATA” SORENSEN

Alfred Julius Emmanuel Sorensen (October 27, 1890 – August 13, 1984), also known as Sunyata, Shunya, or Sunyabhai, was a Danish mystic, horticulturalist, and writer.  He lived in Europe, India and America. 

The son of a peasant farmer, he grew up near Arhus in northern Denmark.  His formal education ended when he was 14 years old when the family sold their farm.  He then worked as a gardener on estates in France, Italy, and finally England.  While working at Dartington Hall near Totnes, Devon, England, he met Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nobel Laureate poet.  This was in 1929. 

The two shared conversation on a variety of topics.  Sorensen introduced Tagore to gramophone recordings he had of Beethoven’s Late Quartets, whereupon the poet invited him to his newly created university, Shantiniketan, in Bengal.  Sorensen could ‘teach silence’ there, he said.

Sorensen visited India from 1930 to 1933 and came to see the country as his home.  After initially staying at Shantiniketan, he went on to travel around India visiting places of interest to him.  In 1933, he returned to the west to tie up loose ends and then headed back to India where he lived until the mid-1970s.  When he returned to India this second time, he began wearing Indian clothing, a style of dress he would continue for the rest of his life.

Tagore introduced him to Nehru, and in 1934 Sorensen visited the home of Nehru’s sister and brother-in-law at their house in Khali, Binsar where he stayed and used his horticultural skills in their garden.  During the summer he continued to travel.  It was while staying with the Nehru family that one of their friends offered him a piece of land where he could live.  Called Crank's Ridge it was near Almora. 

India’s rich spiritual heritage provided a perfect environment for Sorensen’s natural mystical inclinations.  During his first stay in the country he was initiated into Dhyāna Buddhism, but it was the Hindu Sri Ramana Maharshi who was to provide the biggest influence on his spiritual life.  Sorensen had read Paul Brunton’s classic A Search in Secret India (1934), and soon after he actually met Brunton.  Brunton arranged for his first visit to Sri Ramana.

Between 1936 and 1946, Sorensen made four trips to Sri Ramana's Tiruvannamalai ashram, staying for a few weeks each time.  It was during his visit to Sri Ramana that Paul Brunton told him that Ramana had referred to him as a ‘janam-siddha’ or a rare born mystic.  Indeed, a profound experience occurred to Sorensen while he was on his third visit to Sri Ramana.  This was in 1940.  

Suddenly, he said, out of the pure akasha, the substance said to fill and pervade the universe and to be the peculiar vehicle of life and sound, he heard these five words, “We are always aware, Sunyata!”  He took these five words to be a mantra, initiation, and name.  He then used the name Sunyata, or subtle variations on it, for the rest of his life.  The word "sunyata" meant "a full emptiness," an expression he quite liked.

Although Sorensen kept his hut at Crank’s Ridge as his base, he continued to travel around India visiting friends and ashrams.  This was especially so during the cold, Himalayan winter months.  He met many prominent spiritual teachers, in addition to Ramana Maharshi, including Anandamayee Ma, Yashoda Ma (Mirtola), Swami Ramdas and Neem Karoli Baba.

Sorensen lived in India as a sadhu or ascetic, subsisting on donations.  In 1950 he accepted half of a grant of 100 Rs a month offered to him by the Birla Foundation, a charitable body.  He accepted only what he needed.  He subsisted on this goodwill and the vegetables he grew in his garden.  

Living on Crank's Ridge, his neighbors included scholar and author W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Buddhist author, painter, and poet Lama Govinda, artist Earl Brewster, author John Blofeld and others.  Despite his notable neighbors, he put up a sign requesting silence of those who approached his small hut built into the rock.

From at least the 1930s he wrote diaries and reflections using a highly idiosyncratic and at times playful language.  Oftentimes he combined English and Sanskrit, used obscure literary terms or invented his own words.  In 1945 he wrote Memory, an autobiography.  More of his writing is found in his Dancing with the Void.  He acquired Indian citizenship in 1953.

Then, in 1973, some members of the Alan Watts Society arrived at his door, sent there by his neighbor, Lama Govinda.  They asked him to come to California to teach.  "But I have nothing to teach, nothing to sell," was his reply.  "That's why we want you," they said.  When they got back to California, they found that Watts had died in their absence, so they again invited Sunyata, one of them saying later that they saw in him what Watts had been writing about all his life.  Watts himself often said "I have nothing to teach, nothing to sell."

As a result, in late 1974 Sorensen set out on a four-month, all-expenses-paid visit to California.  During his visit he gave darshan, ceremonial respect, at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, and at Palm Springs, among other places.  Finally, in 1978, he moved to California for good.  This was at the age of 88 and after spending nearly half a century leading a life of the utmost simplicity in a remote corner of India.  Settled now in America he held weekly meetings at Watt’s houseboat the SS Valejo, where he answered questions from visitors.

Sadly, on August 5, 1984, he was hit by a car while crossing the road in Fairfax, California, and died eight days later.  He was 93.

Despite denying that he had anything to teaching, he expounded an Advaitic world view and maintained that he had always known that "the Source and I are one."  In Advaita Vedanta, the Source is Brahman, God.  Like Ramana Maharshi, he considered silence as both the highest teaching and "the esoteric heart of all religions."  Silence for him was the stilling of desires, effort, willfulness, and memories.  This was the "full emptiness" that he took his spiritual name Sunyata to mean.

For some of his more unusual notions, Sorensen coined words himself. "Innerstand" meant an intuitive comprehension that did not involve the intellect or effort, while "headucation" was mental conditioning.  Those who falsely identified themselves with their individuality he referred to as "egojies," and he was fond of the Zen term "ji ji muge," meaning the mutual interdependence of all things and events. 

For his understanding of his essential nature, Sorensen used, in addition to "sunyata," the word "mu."  "Mu" is an important term in Zen meaning "nothing," "an empty circle."  He used this not only in reference to himself but as an exclamation.  Alan Watts is heard exclaiming "Mu!" in some of his audio tapes.