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By what path did we come to be where we are now? What were the inconceivable karmic twists that brought us to this moment? It is hard, perhaps impossible, to know. As the Tang era poet Han Shan, who often wrote on rocks and trees, “It has been ten years since I came to Cold Mountain, and I have forgotten the path by which I came.”

Though we can’t know the path, we can be open to path finding. “Practice is about making us fetchable,” writes Joan Sutherland in Through Forests of Every Color, ”It helps us to recognize what gets in the way of our being fetched.”

By the time I graduated from college I had been sitting for five or six years and wanted to travel to Japan to study Japanese and Zen for a year. I had no contacts there and found it hard to gather information from afar. But I was fetchable, and Sutherland’s koan dragon murmured and took note.

That summer I worked on a salmon fishing boat, then in a cold storage cleaning salmon, and finally as a carpenter in Petersburg, Alaska, renovating the local doctor’s house. My brother, a contractor, was building a house for my parents in Nevada City, in the Sierra foothills, so I went down to help him. The second night we went to a bar and by chance met his yoga teacher. I still remember her name: Arlene Cohen. Arlene had studied Zen in Hawai’I with Robert Aitken, and we decided to meet the following Saturday to sit Zen together. In the interim, she had gotten a phone call that Aitken was in the area at Gary Snyder’s, leading a sesshin, and Arlene was invited on Saturday to listen to a teishō.

I went along. After the teishō, Aitken came up to me and noted that it looked like I had practiced before. I said I had, and asked if I could finish the last three days of the sesshin at Snyder’s Kitkitdizze. He assented, and we got to know each other a bit. I told him I was going to Japan for a year, he suggested I visit Koun Yamada, in Kamakura, and wrote me a letter of introduction.

A couple of months later, on the way to Japan, I stopped in Maui to stay for a few days at Aitken’s zendo there, where a practice period was going on. The head of practice was a heavily bearded Australian named John Tarrant. I continued on to Japan, and on the second night went to sit at the SanUn Zendo in Kamakura, where Yamada Roshi lived. I stayed for eight years.

Countless chances brought me to Kamakura. Had my brother not been building a house for my parents in Nevada City, had I not gone to a bar the second night and met Arlene, had Aitken’s people not contacted her, had I not gone to the teishō, had they not let me stay at Snyder’s, had Aitken not offered to write a letter, my life would have been vastly different.  None of this could have been planned. It was inconceivable, crazy almost. But when I made myself fetchable, I was fetched.

In the koan we are sitting with this week in Open Temple, Fayan asks a senior student who just arrived, “Did you come by boat or land?” The student answered, “I came by boat.” Fayan then asked, “Where is the boat?” The student said, “It’s on the river.”

—Jon Joseph

COME JOIN US on Mondays for koan meditation, dharma talk and conversation. Register to participate. All are welcome.

Jon Joseph Roshi, Director of San Mateo Zen Community