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This Monday night we’ll chat a bit about the legacy of Koun Yamada, our ancestral teacher.

There is a solitary brightness, without fixed shape or form.
It knows how to listen to the teachings, it knows how to understand the teachings.
It knows how to teach.
That solitary brightness is you.

—Linji, Pacific Zen Miscellaneous Koans

On Monday January 30th, our Zen Luminaries Series will host Ruben Habito Roshi together with PZI’s David Weinstein. Ruben leads the Maria Kannon Zen Center in Dallas, and is the most senior disciple of our ancestral teacher Koun Yamada, outside of Japan.

Our conversation will center on the legacy of Koun Yamada. Yamada, and his own teacher, Hakuun Yasutani, had a tremendous impact on major Zen Centers in the U.S. and Europe, including Rochester (Kapleau), Honolulu (Aitken), Los Angeles (Maezumi), and Germany (Jaeger), among many others, including Pacific Zen.

I hope to also touch upon Ruben’s own Zen legacy. A Jesuit priest, he left his native Philippines to serve in Japan as a Catholic missionary, where he also took up Zen practice at the SanUn, or Three Clouds Zendo while studying Japanese in Kamakura.(Three Clouds Zendo = Great Cloud Harada, White Cloud Yasutani, and Cultivating Cloud Yamada) He succeeded Yamada the year before Yamada died in 1988. He then left the Jesuit ministry and moved to Dallas to take a professorship at Southern Methodist University.

In preparing for our talk, I pulled In Memoriam: Yamada Koun Roshi from my bookshelf, a booklet of about thirty notes of remembrance from his non-Japanese disciples. It also includes the chapter, “The Great Joy of My Second Kensho.” An account of this kensho was first published in The Three Pillars of Zen, in a chapter entitled, “Mr. Y.K., a Japanese Executive, Age 47.”

For those of us who practiced in the Three Clouds line, Yamada’s enlightenment experience was central to our motivation to practice and for our respect towards Yamada as a teacher. It is not that he wore his experience on his yukata sleeve. In all his lectures, I never once heard him mention it. But his bearing and great confidence themselves seemed proof. On the other hand, I doubt there was a single student of his who had not read his enlightenment story over and over again in The Three Pillars.

Here it is, from In Memorium:

In the middle of the night, I suddenly woke up. At first, I was not sure of myself. Then suddenly (a quote from Dogen’s Shobogenzo):

I have clearly realized,
Mind is nothing but the mountains, the rivers, and the great earth,
Nothing but the sun, the moon, and the stars.

The phrase ran through my mind. Repeated it once, then—something like an electric shock ran through my body, and heaven and earth collapsed. Immediately, billows of great joy surged up. Like enormous tidal waves, storms of joy swelled up and exploded over and over again. I could only laugh loudly, with my mouth wide open, as wildly as possible. Endless explosions of laughter:

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

“Noooo philosophy at all! Noooo philosophy at all!” Thus I cried out a couple of times.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

The empty sky, split asunder and with its huge mouth open, was laughing with its whole belly: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!” Later (concerned for me), my family told me it was not like human laughter…

Yamada was a social elite in Japan: descended from a samurai family, he graduated from top schools, owned and ran a small hospital in Tokyo. But he treated his students—retired admirals, Catholic nuns, poor English teachers—with an equal respect in the zendo. Deeply comfortable in his own skin, Yamada wanted for his students what he himself had experienced: just a bit of solitary brightness and joy.

Join us for a koan, meditation, dharma talk and conversation.
Register to participate. All are welcome.

—Jon Joseph