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.