Fire Monks (4 page)

Driving in to Tassajara the day after the lightning strikes, Jane stopped in Jamesburg to say hello to an old friend, Leslie James. When the Marble Cone wildfire threatened Tassajara in 1977, Jane and Leslie were part of the small crew that stayed to defend it. Leslie has lived in Jamesburg, helping to coordinate the monastery's comings and goings, since 1991.

About fifteen minutes after leaving Jamesburg, Jane reached Chews Ridge, where the view opens to the fertile plain of the Salinas Valley on one side of the road and the spiny peaks of the coast range fencing out the ocean on the other. From here, she saw the plumes, three distinct pillars of rising smoke—two to the right of the road and one to the left. She didn't know about the lightning strikes the day before, but she took photos to show the staff when she arrived.

The guests are going to be evacuated sometime tomorrow, Jane thought to herself, and the other residents—except for a select group—most likely a couple of days later. They would need her car to drive residents out.

A few thousand feet below Chews Ridge, Jane rounded the bend at the Horse Pasture trailhead. It was this 160-acre parcel east of the road that San Francisco Zen Center first considered for purchase in 1966, before buying Tassajara Hot Springs instead. Its grassy meadows provided pasture for grazing when stagecoaches were the only transport to Tassajara. The 1977 fire had scorched the area as well as most of the road. By now the trees seemed to have completely recovered, all evidence of the earlier conflagration long hidden inside new growth.

Jane recalled driving into Tassajara in the middle of a summer night at the start of the 1977 fire. She and two others were returning from Fresno, where they had bought peaches to dry on the rooftops for winter. Tassajara's resident fire crew chief—Jane's partner at the time, Ted Marshall—slept beside her in the truck's front passenger seat. Marshall woke up, noted the orange glow in the sky, said, “Beautiful dawn,” and fell back asleep. But Jane looked at the sky and thought, That's not where dawn should be. By morning, the air was thick with smoke.

Jane remembered the gritty work of digging fireline, a protective barrier of bare earth, until she was utterly exhausted. She remembered the nauseating ride she and Leslie James took down Tassajara Road in the back of a truck, flying through a curtain of fire. And feeling happy, nonetheless, to be one of the few who would try to keep the monastery from burning.

The 1977 Marble Cone fire was one of the treasures of her life. “When I smell forest fires now, an affection rises in my heart,” she told me with moist eyes on a warm November afternoon in 2009. “It's such an extraordinary experience to participate in something so real—and so enormous. In the early stages there is a lot of smoke and the light turns red. But when it's closer and the smoke's even deeper, the air turns a kind of blue green and everything gets extremely quiet. It's almost like being underwater. It's as if the whole world is holding its breath.”

This time around, Jane wasn't a Tassajara resident. She would not be asked to stay. And even if she was, she knew she didn't have the physical strength to warrant saying yes.

 

 

Yes! That's what Suzuki Roshi said when he saw Tassajara for the
first time in the spring of 1966. The question, coming from his future successor, Richard Baker, was: Do you like it? Should we buy it?

Shunryu Suzuki had come to America in 1959 to be the head priest at a Zen temple: Sokoji, in San Francisco's Japantown. But that original calling had led to something much bigger. Young Americans had started showing up at Sokoji eager to learn to meditate. By 1966, Suzuki Roshi (
roshi
means “venerable teacher” in Japanese) had established a loyal and dedicated, if somewhat unruly, following. “They were a striking mix of individualists and eccentrics who would never have ended up together, following that disciplined life, if not for Suzuki. Now they were getting up in the dark, practicing zazen in full or half lotus, chanting together in an ancient, unfamiliar language, wearing robes, eating in silence, working hard, and making every attempt to follow a life far more structured than the ones they'd rejected,” wrote David Chadwick, an early Suzuki student, in
Crooked Cucumber
. Together, they were blazing a path for American Zen.

American Zen didn't look just like Japanese Zen. And an American Zen training monastery would not look exactly like the monasteries where Suzuki Roshi had trained in Japan. Many of the words and forms of Japanese Zen, along with aesthetic and cultural influences, would carry over, but traditional vows of celibacy would not. In fact, in modern times, Japanese Zen priests were allowed to marry, as Suzuki Roshi had. But at this American Zen monastery—the first—women and men would actually practice and live together, side by side, as equals. People would train at Tassajara for a period of time and then return to their lives “outside the gate,” continuing to practice within the context of work, marriage, and family.

“Just like China!” Suzuki Roshi proclaimed, gazing at the Ventana's precipitous peaks and valleys. He danced in celebration in the middle of Tassajara Road.

By bringing Zen to America—specifically, Soto Zen, a sect of Japanese Zen marked by an emphasis on zazen and the view of practice as enlightenment itself—Suzuki Roshi would continue Zen's emigrant lineage. In the fifth century, Bodhidharma, an Indian sage, first introduced meditation practice in China; from there, Zen had spread to Japan, Vietnam, and Korea, taking on the flavor of the host cultures. America—and Tassajara—would now become what China had for the ancient Indian traveler, a new home for Zen Buddhism. A place of origination, adaptation, immersion.

Suzuki Roshi had been looking for several years for the right place to offer more monastic training than was possible in San Francisco. The opportunity to buy Tassajara came along, observed Chadwick, “at a time when there was enough maturity and open-mindedness in America to support, in this way, a teaching that challenged many commonly held assumptions about space, time, being, life and death.”

After a frenzy of fund-raising and with the assistance of some high-profile supporters like Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Campbell, and the Grateful Dead, San Francisco Zen Center purchased Tassajara for $300,000 in late 1966, naming it Zenshinji, or Zen Mind Temple.

Tassajara came with its own rich history. Native Americans had used the hot springs for healing long before the descendants of Europeans discovered them. The Esselen, a peaceful tribe that once inhabited the area now known as the Ventana Wilderness, had cared for the land by intentionally setting fire to underbrush to clear paths for travel and replenish the soil. One local Esselen family, the Nasons, still live up Tassajara Road, managing a ranch, working as wilderness guides, and occasionally appearing at Tassajara to give talks on the area's Native American heritage.

The first known structures at Tassajara were built in the 1800s by a local hunter. By the early 1900s it had become a popular resort. Robert Beck, who owned the resort before selling it to Zen Center—short for San Francisco Zen Center—said that in Tassajara's early days, they gave meals away and sold whiskey to make money. Immigrants from the Watsonville area near Santa Cruz came to Tassajara because the water reminded them of the springs back home in Yugoslavia. In those days, visitors didn't just soak in the springs, they drank the mineral-rich water, called “granite wine.”

Robert and Anna Beck purchased Tassajara in 1960, a decade after the hotel had burned down. In 1966, they hired a young Zen student named Ed Brown to wash dishes. Brown learned to bake bread in Tassajara's kitchen. When one of the Becks' cooks quit, he started cooking for the hot springs guests. After Zen Center acquired Tassajara, he became
tenzo,
or head cook. Later, Brown wrote the
Tassajara Bread Book
and
Tassajara Cooking
—launching a bread-baking revolution and making the monastery a household name in vegetarian cooking. He still teaches cooking classes at Tassajara and around the world.

When the Becks wanted to sell Tassajara, they had many offers. The Monterey County Roughriders—who would ride on horseback up the Arroyo Seco and over the Horse Pasture Trail to Tassajara—put in a bid. So did the publisher of
Sunset
magazine and the vice president of Pacific Gas & Electric. On behalf of Zen Center, Allen Ginsberg asked Bob Dylan if he would buy Tassajara, but Dylan wanted to build a house there, and that squelched the deal.

The Becks' decision to sell Tassajara to Zen Center, for less money than they could have received from other interested parties, ultimately helped Buddhism flourish in America. For Robert Beck, who wasn't a Zen student himself—he was a teacher and antiques dealer—the deal had a destined quality. Before Beck died in 2007, he recalled the negotiations as feeling “foreordained, and it was just a question of filling in the details.” Remembering Suzuki Roshi, he said, “He exemplified the best that humans could be. He was an exemplary character, with his failures, his flaws, his faults, he still went bravely ahead and said this is possible. It's possible to go beyond what we think we can do, and we don't have to be heroic, we can be simple and express our convictions.”

Much has changed in the four and a half decades that Zen Center has owned Tassajara. But what's remarkable is how much remains the same. The practice that Suzuki Roshi nurtured has been largely preserved, handed down from one generation to the next. Tassajara remains a place for rigorous monastic training. Every year, around seventy serious practitioners of Zen leave behind whatever ties them to their lives as they know them and commit to three to six months of intense silence, study, and sitting.

But for four months of the year, Tassajara's gate is open to whoever wants to come—regardless of an interest or lack thereof in Zen practice. Some stumble upon Tassajara in their quest for natural hot springs. Some are drawn in by a workshop—in yoga, conscious relationships, ecology, cooking, poetry. Some in need of a respite have been sent there by sympathetic friends. Some have tattered copies of the
Tassajara Bread Book
on their kitchen shelves. Some are Zen students, working in exchange for the opportunity to practice residentially, part time or full time, for a few days or the entire summer. Quite a few wear priest robes.

Tassajara is known by name around the world by people who have never been there and whose personal connection to the place may be based on a beloved recipe for jalapeño cornbread or a lecture from Suzuki Roshi's
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
, now translated into Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. While fires were burning around Tassajara in June, Zen Center vice president Susan O'Connell flew to Mongolia for an international Buddhist women's conference. She worried about being far away and out of touch, until she turned on the television in her hotel room and saw footage of Tassajara in a report on the California wildfires, on Al Jazeera.

All kinds of people call Tassajara home. Tassajara may belong to Zen Center, but that doesn't stop anyone who's ever been there from feeling that it belongs to them somehow. Or that they belong to it.

Every morning around nine a.m., shortly after the bell sounded for
guest breakfast, head cook Mako Voelkel led her crew in a service. Eight or so students stood around the altar fashioned from a sycamore that fell during the first winter Zen Center owned Tassajara. A candle glowed faintly in the daylight. Incense twisted toward the roof beams. They chanted briskly, in a monotone, not emphasizing any one word over another, from thirteenth-century Soto Zen founder Eihei Dōgen's
Instructions for the Zen Cook
: “Of old it was said, ‘When steaming rice, treat the pot as one's own head; when rinsing the rice, know that the water is one's own lifeblood.'”

Mako wasn't supposed to be born. She revealed this fact undramatically on a damp January day six months after the 2008 fire. It was the beginning of the winter practice period—the new students were still sitting in the zendo. I'd driven in to Tassajara to do a first round of interviews. We sat in one of the stone rooms, a fire glowing in the wood stove. Mako explained that having carried one child, her mother was told she couldn't get pregnant again. When Mako was conceived despite doctors' predictions, she was not expected to survive. At thirty-six years old, Mako radiated an undeniable robustness, a willful inner strength that had pushed her out of the womb and into the world.

She was born in Baltimore, to a Japanese mother and an American father of German descent. Her features—both delicate and bold—reflect those mixed roots. Her presence is powerful, extroverted yet self-contained. She holds herself upright but often stands with her hips askew, forefinger cupping her chin, in conversation. When she laughs, which is frequently, she throws back her head with a sharp “ha!” Her brown hair turns cinnamon in the summer, when she has hair—she shaved her head when she became a priest in 2004.