A Sadly Familiar Evolution of Small Beginnings and Growing Abuses

“Zen Buddhism is religion,” we read in Michael Downing’s absorbing story of the San Francisco Zen Center, “though it is a religion in which one of the cardinal points of understanding is that letting go of the idea of Zen as a religion is part of the religion.”

The speaker is Norman Fischer, abbot from 1995 to 2000, and the paradoxical nature of his pronouncement rings familiar to Westerners who have at least a passing cultural acquaintance with Zen.

Whether we know it or not, our awareness is due in good part to the efforts of Shunryu Suzuki, an initially obscure Japanese priest, who introduced a generation of West Coast spiritual seekers to the practice, founding the Zen Center in 1962 and later the fabled monastery at Tassajara near Big Sur. Downing draws on the personal memories of a number of these pioneers to recount the center’s troubled attempts to stay on mission following its spiritual leader’s death in 1971.

In some ways, this is the depressingly American story of a small group’s expansion from modest aspirations to a quasi-corporate empire. The empire grew to encompass, along with the City Center and Tassajara, a farm and meditation center at Green Gulch, north of San Francisco, and the trendy vegetarian restaurant Greens, along with a multitude of other small businesses, real estate holdings and entrepreneurial activities--all predicated on the ready resource of cheap labor among the growing ranks of eager Zen students caught up in the seductive identification of “work” with “practice.” “Chop wood, carry water” became institutional imperatives, to the point of blatant exploitation.

This side of the story centers on Suzuki’s handpicked successor, Richard Baker--appearing here as the Citizen Kane of the Zen Center--whose charisma and immersion in the practice were matched by a predilection for power, high living, celebrity hobnobbing and sexual indulgence. The book’s title offers a nice irony, evoking not only the simple, respectful ritual of entering the zendo hall barefoot, but more specifically the pair of woman’s shoes left for all to see outside Baker’s private quarters during a key 1983 Tassajara conference of international Buddhist leaders. This was the incident that sparked the “Apocalypse,” a time of agonizing reckoning both for the center and its leadership--a reckoning that for some remains unresolved to this day. (The cover photograph, eroticizing the book’s content, unhappily undermines this irony in favor, one can only presume, of sales.)

“There are no sins in Buddhism,” explains Paul Discoe, another of Downing’s Zen Center sources. But there are “precepts”--the first of which is to do no harm, and Baker’s actions undeniably caused lasting harm to those around him, and to the organization entrusted to his charge. Baker’s story, again, is a sadly familiar one: the religious leader whose charismatic powers prove fatally self-destructive; and with its strict, hierarchical traditions, Zen Buddhism provides fertile ground for the abuse of spiritual authority. Downing spares no detail in describing the manipulation, the outright deceit, and the eventual denial of responsibility that left Baker an outcast from his community.

Of course, the community played its own part. “Something above 90% of us had come from an alcoholic family, or from families that were dysfunctional with the same patterns,” recalls Yvonne Rand, another leading pioneer, on the basis of her own informal poll. Learned patterns of dependency and silence in the face of evident abuse contributed to an unhealthy relationship between teacher and student, the voice of authority and those willing to surrender to it without question.

Downing creates a patchwork narrative that some may find difficult at first because it eschews chronology in favor of the confusion of voices that may accurately reflect the climate of internal conflict of the time. He paints a complex picture of Westerners in a genuine struggle with Eastern concepts and traditions. What does it mean, for example, to be a “monk” or a “priest”? Who deserves such responsibilities? How are they appropriately transmitted? And what is the nature of the student-teacher relationship, when transplanted from its idealized origins to a society where individual autonomy is taught as a key value?

With a measure of skepticism about Zen’s often enigmatic teachings, Downing spices his story and perceptions with ironic asides that are sometimes irritating and distracting. But this is a highly readable book, important for the healing it invites in giving voice to the thoughts and feelings of Zen Center members who have remained silent until now. Their stories expose the dangerous mechanics of division and discord among people of goodwill--even in a religious community--when the voices of clarity and conscience are afraid to speak.

Peter Clothier is the author, most recently, of “While I Am Not Afraid: Secrets of a Man’s Heart.”