Rōshi as I remember him, on the lanai at Kaimu wearing palaka

Robert Baker Aitken was born on June 19, 1917 in Philadelphia, not far from where I’d be born forty-nine years later. I don’t remember what, if anything, he ever told me about his early life, but I know he lived in what was then the Territory of Hawaii as a boy. He went to Guam for work after high school, and was there when the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese took him prisoner and brought him to Kobe, where he was kept in a hotel with other Westerners.

One of them was Dr. R.H. Blyth, a British scholar and Zen practitioner with a Japanese wife who sought – and was denied – Japanese citizenship when the war began. Blyth sensei, who had been a student of the legendary Zen teacher D. T. Suzuki, was always called “Dr. B.” by the internees, and Aitken Rōshi used to remark on how the old expat loved the mix of respect and informality that the nickname conferred. Aitken learned about haiku, Zen and anarchism from Blyth sensei, and would spend the war years learning Japanese and poring through the small remnant of Blyth’s library, which was destroyed in a US bombing raid. After the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – sixty-five years ago today – the prisoners were released.

After the war, Blyth sensei stayed to help in the reconstruction, and helped write the ningen sengen declaration that the Americans demanded the Emperor recite. Blyth sensei was crafty enough in court Japanese to leave enough wiggle room in the statement so that the more conservative elements of society wouldn’t revolt. Aitken returned to Honolulu, got a Bachelor’s in literature and a Master’s in Japanese at UH, and went to the Bay Area to study at Berkeley. When Senzaki Rōshi brought his ‘floating zendo’ to town, Aitken was there, and he ended up leaving with Senzaki when the zendo floated down to LA. He studied with Senzaki Rōshi for years, and from him got the Dharma name Chotan (“Deep Pool”).

Senzaki Rōshi told Aitken he should go back to Japan to study haiku and Zen, and so he did in 1950. He ended up in Ryūtaku-ji, the temple built in the foothills of Mount Fuji by Hakuin Zenji, the great Zen master, poet and painter. Practicing the koan mu for days and weeks on end in dirt-poor postwar Japan, Aitken came down with a case of dysentery that almost killed him, and he headed back to Honolulu in 1956.

When he got back he met Anne, the love of his life. The two opened a bookstore together and began hosting meditation groups in their little apartment, using a mixing bowl and a wooden spoon for a meditation bell. Punning on the similarity between the Japanese word ここ and Koko Head, the nearby hill overlooking Hanauma Bay, they called their zendo Koko-an, which means “the little temple right here.” Robert Aitken began to study with Yasutani Rōshi, who had dropped out of the Soto sect and was creating a new school of Zen that included Rinzai practices, like koan work. Aitken received Dharma transmission from Yasutani in 1971, becoming one of the first – if not the first – Westerners to attain the title Rōshi. Back in Hawai’i, Koko-an had grown into the Diamond Sangha, which now has hundreds of members with dozens of teachers in the Americas, Oceania and Europe. Amusingly, most of Aitken Rōshi’s followers in Europe are Catholic monks, nuns and priests.

Anne died in 1994, and even though I never met her I always felt her presence, as well as Rōshi’s pain at her loss. Rōshi was diagnosed with thyroid cancer soon after, and didn’t respond well to chemotherapy. He went into retirement, moving to the Big Island, where his son Tom built a small house next to his own in Kaimu. Tom’s house had been on the ocean until lava from the ongoing eruption of Kilauea extended the shore about 200 yards further away. Rōshi’s house sat on black, ropy pahoehoe lava, and as you did kinhin (walking meditation) on the lanai, you could usually see the big plume of steam where lava was entering the sea a few miles down the coast.

I met Rōshi in 1997. We were fairly sure that he only had a little while to live, especially given that a Swiss student of his had taken him off the chemo and put him on a strict macrobiotic diet. But his hair grew back and his strength returned, and his mind never faltered. I will never forget him ringing the bell for dokusan, and me walking down the tiny hall, doing prostrations by the door to his study, and taking my position knee-to-knee in front of Yasutani Rōshi’s Dharma heir. Trying to meet the piercing gaze of his blue eyes as a voice that seemed to come from Bodhidharma himself inquired “What is mu? Show me mu” may have been some of the hardest shit I will ever have to do.

Rōshi came to my wedding, and gave a Buddhist dedication before the meal. His gift to us was a copy of Blyth sensei’s Zen in English Literature & Oriental Classics, with the inscription “Love, Rōshi” inside. He always had that paradoxical mix of dignity and warmth that he so admired in Blyth sensei. Even when I saw him in town – where he was to all appearances just Bob Aitken, an absent-minded professor buying groceries – he had a solidity and a depth of presence to him that I’d never experienced before, and never since.

Rōshi died yesterday at 93. Born at the tail end of one World War, he lived through the next in “enemy” territory, and was at the center of the profound mixing of cultures that took place in the second half of the 20th century. He was a deep and penetrating student of the Dharma, and played a pivotal role in bringing Zen to the West, adapting it to a non-Japanese context without diluting its essential teachings. He was a pioneer of ‘engaged Buddhism,’ helping create the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and advocating pacifism: not because he was a former POW, but rather as an expression of his essential humanity. He was a steadfast crusader of equal rights for all: not as the father of a gay man, but as someone whose heart had been opened by compassion.

He was my teacher and my friend and the world is poorer without him. But right now, what I’m mourning is my loss, and my broken heart. I’m not that enlightened… not yet, anyway.

I finally found the John Clare poem that Rōshi used to recite all the time: “Little Trotty Wagtail,” he used to say, just showed things as they are, without trying to tell you what to think or feel about them. This was Rōshi’s Zen, then; as Wordsworth put it, “coming forth into the light of things:”

Little trotty wagtail he went in the rain
And tittering tottering sideways he near got straight again
He stooped to get a worm and look’d up to catch a fly
And then he flew away e’re his feathers they were dry

Little trotty wagtail he waddled in the mud
And left his little footmarks trample where he would
He waddled in the water pudge and waggle went his tail
And chirrupt up his wings to dry upon the garden rail

Little trotty wagtail you nimble all about
And in the dimping water pudge you waddle in and out
Your home is nigh at hand and in the warm pigsty
So little Master Wagtail I’ll bid you a ‘Goodbye.’

“The Blessed One said, “When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows; in the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental.” — Sallatha Sutta: The Arrow (SN 36.6)

The first arrow is just things as they are. When I refuse to accept the first arrow, getting pissed off or woe-is-me… that’s the second arrow, that’s where I shoot myself in the foot. It’s the idea that we can control things, that we can make them into something other than just what they are, that causes suffering. What I think of as my “self” wants more of what the self likes, and less of what it doesn’t like. Pure and simple. The heart of our practice is that there is no self…. and so there is no need for suffering.

The Buddha taught that there is nothing in any living being that is permanent, fixed, unchanging… nothing that could be considered one’s “true self” or soul. What we think of is an individual person is really a changing process of mental and physical qualities combining temporarily in one particular way.

We cling to this idea that there’s something permanent to our “selves” or our souls. We think because we think we know what we are, that we really do know who we are. I look at my thumb, and think it’s a part of what makes me ME, but if I someone chopped off my thumb, wouldn’t I still be me? And you say: of course not, that’s dumb, you’re not your thumb. But our bodies are constantly changing. Skin cells flake off and are replaced; hair grows and is cut; a cut heals; I grow old; I get sick. Over 15 years, every single cell in our body has been replaced with another cell. I am not my thumb; I am not my body. My thoughts change in an eyeblink: I am not my thoughts. Neither are my opinions, my prejudices, or my memories somehow an unchanging “me.” We cling to what we think we know and say: this is the truth. We make up a story of a character in our minds and convince ourselves that it’s real. This is all illusion. As we sit, as we deepen our practice, over time it reveals to us that we are changing, we are in transit, that there is no permanent self.

This doesn’t mean that there is literally no me, which is kind of silly. I need to know who “I” am and who “you” are so I can function in the world, but it’s important to have a light touch with this, and remember that the things we have been raised to think of as “self” are not the self. Our “selves” are not our bodies, not our feelings, not our perceptions, not our ideas, and not our consciousness. All of these things are not self.

All we have that we will always have is this one, undying flame of awareness.. and the ability to focus that awareness on things as they are, rather than how we think we want them to be.

This is a radical teaching, and it’s beautiful in its simplicity. Now this simplicity can be misleading, because saying it’s simple is not the same as saying it’s easy. This practice should not be constant effort, though, and I want to emphasize that: if you’re busting your ass trying to meditate, you’re probably doing it all wrong. It shouldn’t be hard. It’s subtle, though. It’s tricky. What we think of as our “selves” are very protective of their imaginary existences and so we have to be crafty and outwit the fake “self” and not allow it to throw us off. In Zen, as in most schools of Mahayana Buddhism, there’s a great tradition of what’s called skillful means or, basically, tips and tricks for not shooting yourself in the foot.

As we sit, as we quiet our minds and forget about the day-to-day crap, bills to pay or personal drama, whatever, what we often find is that, rather than this wonderful sense of peace descending over us we are just inundated with a shit-flood from our psyches… unresolved issues, deep wounds that remain unhealed, maybe an ongoing situation that is causing us a lot of pain. The point is not that you are supposed to ignore these things, and the fact that there is no self as we conventionally think of it does not mean that horrible situation is not, in fact, causing you real pain. What meditation gives us, though, is the ability to face whatever difficult situations arise in our lived with more equanimity, with more compassion for other and for ourselves, and with greater and greater amounts of insight and wisdom. So it’s incredibly beneficial to work with these emotions when we sit, for two wonderfully interwoven reasons: allowing ourselves to be open to these emotions deepens our practice, and being able to practice in the midst of difficult emotions strengthens our ability to deal with things in a more skillful way.

So what do we do when painful emotions arise? It’s not a one size fits all kind of thing, but there are a couple of techniques that I’ve used in the past. You may discover more as you practice. One thing that can be really effective if you are able to stick with it is to move into the bodily experience of the pain. If its a sadness, really feel into the dull ache in your heart. Notice how your breathing is shallow. Feel the way your heart beats, the sensation of temperature. Stay with the feeling, allow it to arise and pass naturally. It’s a really delicate trick, though, because the key to it is not to focus on thoughts associated with the pain, and that’s really hard to do.

Another technique that works well is to do labeling as difficult emotions come up. The trick here is to leave out the “I” and simply label “angry, angry” or “sad, sad.” Return to the breath and continue to sit with it, labeling it as it arises. What you’ll find is that the process of labeling – again: without involving the word “I” in it or getting wrapped up in whatever the story may be – actually reduces the intensity of the emotion. There have been studies of people doing this labeling while having their brains scanned in an MRI, and scientists saw that activity shifted from the part of the brain that deals with emotion to the part of the brain that deals with rational thought. So as you continue to label, the intensity of the emotion will decrease and you’ll be able to stay with it, and investigate the sensations in your body as they arise.

Deepening awareness of your inner life really does, over time, allow you to see that all these emotions and judgments, as powerful as they may be, are not “self” any more than your thumb is your self. They are a part of you, and they will from time to time require some attention, just as you have to pay attention to your thumb when you cut it. But just like sitting around crying will not stop your amputated thumb from bleeding, neither will marinating in negative emotions resolve the situation that caused them to arise. Reacting from emotion almost always makes the situation – and the emotions – more painful and difficult.

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa said, “let yourself be in the emotion. Go through it, give in to it, experience it …Then the most powerful energies become absolutely workable rather than taking you over, because there is nothing to take over if you are not putting up any resistance.”