May Also Work With Mother Teresa : Brown Tells of Spiritual Studies on Visit to Japan

Former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. says he has been studying Zen Buddhism during his five months in Japan in accord with his own spiritual needs and with Pope John Paul II’s admonition during a recent visit to India that the world--and Roman Catholics--ought to look to the East for spirituality.

Abandoning, after several days of hesitation, his refusal in an interview Monday to discuss his private religious practices and studies, Brown traveled from the Buddhist temple city of Kamakura by train to Tokyo and was interviewed Friday afternoon in a Times reporter’s room in the Imperial Hotel here.

It was the first time he has spoken publicly about the spiritual aspects of his stay in Japan, and was one of the most outspoken interviews he has ever given about the spiritual side of his life--ranging from his four years in a Jesuit seminary as a youth to his present participation in several hours a week of Zen meditation and consultation.

In the interview, he also disclosed that after he leaves Japan, perhaps in about a month, he is “giving serious consideration to going to India and working with Mother Teresa for a while.” She is the Catholic nun who was awarded the Nobel Prize for her work with the poor in the Calcutta area for many years.

“The reason for that is I feel the need. . . having the sheltered perspective of California affluence,” Brown explained. “I don’t think I understand well enough the suffering that is going on in the world.”

There are realities, he added, “that are very far from Los Angeles political dinners at the Beverly Wilshire, and the rich and the powerful, which seem to be more and more dominating American politics.”

Brown said his religious interests diminished after he left the seminary in 1960 at the age of 22. After an extended period of preoccupation with secular and political matters and during his years as governor, Brown said, those interests began to reawaken.

Common Interests

He said that while he was governor he had a number of common spiritual interests with such colleagues as Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whom he had appointed to head the California Arts Council; Rusty Schweikart, the former astronaut who was on the state Energy Commission, and Jacques Barzaghi, director of administration in the governor’s office. Barzaghi and his family are with Brown here in Japan and also are studying Zen.

(Zen, which developed most fully in Japan, is said to emphasize quiet, disciplined meditation to discover one’s true, spontaneous nature beneath the level of impulse and self-consciousness.)

Many other gubernatorial aides had little interest in spiritual matters, the former governor remarked.

Brown emphasized that he has undertaken his Zen studies in Japan under the advice of Jesuit priests and in accord with “a very small strain or tendency within the larger Roman Catholic world” to practice Zen meditation.

He said that he and about 100 people at a time, many from Europe, are meeting in a Kamakura home under the guidance of Kyozo Yamada, whom he described as “the only Buddhist teacher who has these contacts in the Catholic world.”

Confident, Vibrant

As Brown talked in this interview, in contrast with last Monday when he had seemed somewhat nervous, he spoke with confidence and real vibrancy. It was reminiscent of a younger Brown, in the years just before and after he became governor, when he almost always appeared incisive and committed.

Saying that he had visited a site in Nagasaki where Japanese Christians were massacred for their beliefs in the 17th Century--within a few years of Roman Catholics burning Protestants, Jews and Catholic “heretics” at the stake in other parts of the world--Brown declared:

“It strikes me that if antagonists in the religious domain can, through time, learn to coexist, I don’t see any reason why antagonists such as the Soviet Union and America, capitalists and communists, can’t find some new synthesis, some way of coexisting.

“In my personal quest and in my interest in how to come to grips with the antagonisms in the world, I think the experience of clashing religions has something to tell us.”

In contrast with “a certain emptiness in contemporary American politics, even world politics” and “in the West, so much materialism, so much secularism that we lost something,” the East hasn’t lost its “nonmaterial essence . . . its spirituality,” Brown said.

Writing a Book

He added that he also hopes that his Zen studies will help him in the writing of the book he has been engaged in here.

“I think techniques (in Zen) of concentration and opening up the mind and freeing the imagination can be very useful to improve the quality of one’s writing, to be able to really speak in your own language and not in the cliches that often just rattle around your head,” he said.

Brown said that when he began trying to write his book, while still in Los Angeles, he was having difficulty “in writing anything that I thought was interesting.”

“I felt I was recycling newspaper stories that I had read, that I wasn’t saying anything that came from a deep enough level that would really do what I wanted, because I feel in this book I have to speak from who I am and what I stand for, because I think that is the most important question.”

As the years passed, Brown said, he has come to realize that religion is an integral and essential part of his life.

A Strong Catholic

“I have a very serious interest in religion, in spirituality and in religious practice,” Brown said. “By upbringing I’m a Catholic, and a very strong one at that. For many years, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to it, but as I have had a chance now, after office, to reflect on it, it’s a very powerful part of my thinking and my background, and therefore it conditions those principles that I bring to any public life that I might be in.”

The years in the Jesuit seminary in Los Gatos, Calif., during which he was under a vow of lifelong poverty, chastity and obedience, “really require explanation to me and to others who would understand my character, would understand what is it I am trying to do and what I believe,” he said.

“Even in my campaigning as governor and for President, people would often say, ‘Well, why did you go into the Jesuits?’ I’ve gotten that question hundreds of times and I never felt I gave a very satisfactory answer, and I never felt I even gave a satisfactory answer when they said, ‘Well, why did you leave?’ ”

Brown offered this answer: “After a while, I got tired of (being a seminarian). I said, ‘I want to be in the world, I want to be making money, I want to go out with girls, I want to get involved in politics. I’m interested in something else. This is too withdrawn for my tastes.’ So I left it, forgot about it, but I found that I still maintained a very strong interest in this, and it developed and it got stronger.”

Strongly Impressed

When he first came to Japan on another trip two years ago, Brown said, he went to Nagasaki and was very strongly impressed by the history there, the martyrdom of Japan’s first Catholics, including many Jesuits, in 1635.

“Well, now, several hundred years later, we find Catholic priests, Catholic nuns, even leaders of religious orders studying with Buddhist teachers, studying Zen, studying the religion of the East,” Brown said. “At the same time, we have people from Buddhism studying Christianity. There’s a dialogue. So what before was an occasion for murdering people has now become an opportunity for mutual understanding and for a deeper insight on the part of both sides. Now, that interests me from a spiritual point of view, from a human point of view, but it also interests me from a political point of view.”

In two recent visits to China, he has sought personally to influence the release of certain Chinese Jesuits still being held in prison, Brown said, and has conversed with one, formerly trained in California, who has already been released. The former governor added that he is working as best he can to assuage bad feeling between the Catholic Church and the Chinese Communist government, and even suggested, in separate audiences with the Pope and Chinese officials, that the Pope visit China in the near future.

Brown said that in preparing for his present stay in Japan, he had conferred with two Jesuits, Fathers Heinrich Dumoulin and Enomiya Lassalle, who have studied Zen in Japan. Lassalle also lectures on Zen in Europe and organizes Zen study trips to Japan for Europeans. In the first week of January, Brown said, he attended a retreat supervised by Lassalle outside Tokyo.

“It’s his point of view that the traditional scholastic philosophy is dead, that Christianity in order to really prosper has to deepen its experience,” Brown said of Lassalle. “And Zen is one methodology or one practice that might reinvigorate the traditional Christian experience.”

Referred by Priest

Yamada, the Buddhist teacher in Kamakura, has taught Lassalle, and it was Dumoulin who referred Brown to Yamada.

Brown described the sessions at Yamada’s home as “a practice of silence, of what you would call non-discursive meditation.”

“Yamada’s view is that Zen is dying in Japan, but that it has the possibility of emerging in the West, and he’s very impressed with the fact that so many Catholic priests and nuns are dedicated in their spiritual search.”

In the sessions, Brown said, “it’s like Yamada’s a consultant or something. It’s like someone you talk to.” The sessions are often held on the weekends, and among the participants have been Americans, Canadians, Filipinos, Germans, Swiss and Singaporeans. Many of these people spend relatively long periods in Kamakura, and some of them live in the same traditional complex where Brown and the Barzaghi family are living.

Brown, incidentally, was anxious to debunk suggestions, made by some people from outside the Zen community who have associated with him here, that in coming to study Zen he is somehow under the control of Barzaghi.

Describing Barzaghi as “a good friend of mine” who, along with his wife, shares Brown’s interests in Zen, Brown nonetheless noted that he had come to Japan first and that Barzaghi had joined him a month later.

‘Zero Domestic Skills’

“It’s very convenient for me to have someone here,” Brown said. “I mean, they cook, they take care of things, and I can do my writing, and I have absolutely zero domestic skills, and it makes it easier if I have some people with me.”

While stressing his religious interests, Brown said he would not discount his political ones. He has found he is interested in both, he remarked.

But, he said, he thinks that at this time religion and religious leaders can bring something to politics.

“I think the people like Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, the Pope, this Terry Waite, the people who are outside of politics, can operate to bring certain influences or pressures to bear on the political process,” Brown said. “I think that’s very important. . . . Religious fanaticism has caused countless bloodshed, even today, but there is also within religion a tradition of liberality, of respect for the individual and of compassion.”

In this respect, Brown said, he is grateful that Catholicism is opening itself up to contact with other religions.

Recalls Strictures

“When I was being brought up, it was a mortal sin to walk inside a Protestant church, and I remember looking in a window and being very fascinated in what went on inside a Protestant church, but I knew if I stepped across the threshold I would be in danger of the fires of hell,” Brown recalled. “So from that narrow perspective, we now have interdenominational dialogue, we have ecumenism where Protestants and Catholics meet . . . and I think this is very important, because if previously dogmatic religious people can through time learn tolerance, I don’t see any reason why politicians can’t do that, with communism and capitalism, or Russia and America.”

“If you look at politicians, they’re basically talking to rich and powerful people because they’re the ones that can give (politicians) the wherewithal to get the coverage or the 30-second commercials or the institutional support such as labor unions provide,” Brown said.

“But there’s a big world out there and I think it’s important to experience it, to see it, to feel it. That’s why I’m thinking about spending at least a short period in Calcutta. I’ve been to Russia for a while. I may go back and visit there. But everyone tells me that India is just hopeless.”