Nothing on My Mind Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  This frank account by a longtime Zen student looks back over a journey that began in Berkeley in the heady sixties when the author experimented with psychedelics and started to study with Suzuki Roshi, who encouraged his students to find a genuine way of practicing Zen.

  ERIK FRASER STORLIE has been a student of Zen for almost thirty years and was one of the founders of the Minnesota Zen Mediation Center in Minneapolis. He teaches English and humanities at Minneapolis Community College.

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  © 1996 by Erik Fraser Storlie

  Cover art by Emily Betsch. Photographs by Nacio Jan Brown, Erik Fraser Storlie, Chellis Glendinning, Robert Boni, and Paul Turner. Drawing of mudra by Arthur Okamura.

  The poem by Rumi on the following page is from Open Secret: Versions of Rumi, translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks (Threshold Books, RD 4, Box 600, Putney, Vermont 05346), reprinted with permission. The material from The Psychedelic Experience (A Citadel Press Book, copyright © 1964 by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert) is published by arrangement with Carol Publishing Group.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Storlie, Erik.

  Nothing on my mind: an intimate account of American Zen/ Erik Storlie.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN 978-0-8348-0006-9

  ISBN 1-57062-183-7 (alk. paper)

  1. Zen Buddhism—United States. 2. Spiritual life—Zen Buddhism. 3. Storlie, Erik. I. Title.

  BQ9262.9.U6S76 1996 96-16432

  294.3’927’092—dc20 CIP

  [B]

  BVG 01

  When even just one person, at one time, sits in zazen, he becomes, imperceptibly, one with each and all of the myriad things, and permeates completely all time, so that within the limitless universe, throughout past, future, and present, he is performing the eternal and ceaseless work of guiding beings to enlightenment. . . . This is not limited to the practice of sitting alone; the sound that issues from the striking of emptiness is an endless and wondrous voice that resounds before and after the fall of the hammer.

  —DOGEN, Bendowa

  We are the mirror as well as the face in it.

  We are tasting the taste this minute

  of eternity. We are pain

  and what cures pain. We are

  the sweet, cold water and the jar that pours.

  —RUMI

  I play my song eating, eating the peyote, waiting to see the flower, the beautiful flower in the center there of the fire. I play to the four winds, offering all my will, all my affections, all my strength. I went to bathe in the sea, to learn how to sing, to learn how to play. Waves come and go, waves come and go. I ate of them. I ate the foam. Who now knows better how to sing? Who now knows better how to play? I ate the foam of the sea, the pure foam of the sea.

  What does one see in the fire? You do not speak of it, not to the companions, not to you, not to anyone does one reveal what one has seen. One makes a garland of peyote to hang on the horns of the deer, of our elder brother.

  —Songs sung during the Huichol Indian peyote quest

  Dainin Katagiri Roshi,

  Teacher

  And dear friend,

  Wherever you wander

  Or don’t wander,

  Know that this is for you.

  Contents

  Preface

  1. The Crag

  2. My Ditch

  3. Berkeley—the Sixties

  4. Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-25

  5. Return

  6. Torture and Punishment

  7. The Flute Reed River Mountains

  8. Master Shunryu Suzuki

  9. A Year at the Zen Center

  10. Master Dainin Katagiri

  11. Doubt

  12. A Death

  13. Wash Your Cup

  Glossary

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  Preface

  IF READERS ARE CURIOUS ABOUT THE MAKING OF this book, I should tell them it is not fiction, nor is it quite fact. All the incidents described happened to me. But it is memory—memory of events that go back over thirty years—and memory in the service of a narrative.

  In the first half of the book, the Berkeley half, I have freely telescoped or expanded events and, at times, drawn together traits of several people I knew and placed them in one character. Or placed the traits of one person in several. No actual names have been used. I sincerely beg pardon of all old friends and acquaintances who find here fragments of themselves. Please forgive these liberties. No offense is intended.

  In the second half, the zen half, I have not altered events and people in this way. My experiences with Suzuki Roshi and Katagiri Roshi I have described to the best of my ability and memory. I have, nonetheless, reconstructed situations and conversations that I could not remember in precise detail. Occasionally I have gathered trenchant remarks that I remember from over the years into one place. The reader whose first purpose is to study these two zen masters must read with the knowledge that everything here is filtered through my memory—and through my follies, weaknesses, and attachments. The names given in this latter half are real.

  I hope this book will encourage American forms of meditation practice—forms freed from the trappings of any specific culture, whether of a Japan or a Tibet or an India. This is a delicate matter, but I look for an American practice that does not forget our own ancestors: the Native American living in intimacy with the earth, the Puritan fiercely devoted to God, the Transcendentalist seeking spirit in all things, the African-American transforming and transmuting Christianity. The East gives us the Sanskrit dhyana, the Chinese ch’an, the Japanese zen—upright sitting in firm, awake, one-pointed awareness. What American form can array this miraculous consciousness with which all are gifted?

  I want to thank some of those friends who, in helping with this writing, have helped me weave together two painfully separated strands of my life: the student, teacher, and lover of words in the tradition of the Greeks—and the student of the wordless. I owe a great debt to William E. Coles. Bill was my instructor in Freshman English when I was seventeen and he, only several years older, the youngest member of the English Department at the University of Minnesota. Since then, he has ever pressed me to write good English. About ten years ago he gave me a method for doing my writing. Over scores of telephone calls, it has led to this book. The method is pure zen.

  I also thank Robert Bly. He read and criticized the book and made valuable suggestions. More important, at many of the Minnesota Fall Men’s Conferences and other gatherings, he has helped modulate my prairie Norwegian, Zen Buddhist way of being. His gift is the companionship of other men with dance, drum, song, and spirit—a taste of the joy that in more dour traditions must wait until death.

  I am grateful to Robert Pirsig. He read the book, made valuable comments, and offered encouragement. His Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila were and are inspirations to write about the movement of Eastern modes of consciousness into America.

  My agent Scott Edelstein has been solidly behind this project. In his readings and re-readings, he has been midwife. My editor Peter Turner has offered qui
et, perceptive, and firm criticism. Edward M. Griffin read an early draft and told me things I did not want, but needed, to hear. Alan Trachtenberg was kind enough to read, comment, and encourage. Shohaku Okumura Sensei gave valuable advice on the English wording of a key Dogen passage and, most important, further instruction in zazen.

  I am grateful for permission to use material from The Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert. I owe them a great debt for their courageous pursuit of Aldous Huxley’s seminal insight that the psychedelic experience opens up meditative states of consciousness. I am thankful for the kind permission granted to quote Rumi #1652 from Open Secret: Versions of Rumi. I acknowledge the use of quotations from Dogen from the beautiful translations by Norman Waddell and Masao Abe, and the use of Huichol songs from the film To Find Our Life.

  1

  The Crag

  I’M SITTING ON THE TOP OF A LOW, NAMELESS mountain in foothills that cup the northwest edge of the Flute Reed Basin. I’m sitting at seven thousand feet and looking off miles over basins and valleys toward the ten- and eleven-thousand-foot peaks of the Bitterroot and Flute Reed River ranges. I’m sitting with legs crossed in the full lotus position, back and neck upright, hands resting in my lap on the upturned soles of my feet.

  I’m sitting on three black chunks of rock, each sheared along a single flat plane. Thirty years ago I fit them into a level seat just large enough for one person with legs crossed in the lotus position. This seat perches on the highest point of the mountain, a spur of ridgeline—a jumbled outcrop spared by the glacier ten thousand years ago. I call it the Crag.

  It’s sunny, the sky brilliant, a late morning in early October. I’ll meditate till sundown. My gaze drops at a forty-five-degree angle down to a soft focus on the rocks before me, eyelids following so my eyes are half closed. The round, sun-drenched pool of my visual field is fluid, the shapes, textures, and colors of the black rocks before me drifting subtly beneath my gaze. Sometimes, distracted by small, vivid patches of crusty green lichen clinging to the dark rock, I shut my eyes and watch the muted red velvet behind my eyelids.

  I’m alert, marking the posture of my body and the posture of my mind. This is Zen Master Dogen’s zazen—sitting meditation. A voice in my head whispers his command, “Settle into a steady, immobile sitting position. Think of not-thinking.”

  Noticing that my shoulders slump a bit, I straighten up, then sway gently from side to side in a steadily decreasing arc, centering my head, neck, and back.

  The voice reminds me, “Yes, keep your back and neck erect—buoyant and easy. Let your vertebrae be a graceful S-curve of balanced golden coins.

  “Rest your left hand, palm upward and slightly cupped, gently atop the palm of the right hand—just so.

  “Ground your right hand firmly on the soles of your feet and touch your thumb tips together—lightly, lightly. A spark of consciousness jumps between those tips—electricity between the two halves of the body, east and west of a dark continent, meat and bone and muscle and nerve.

  “Now, cupped in your hands, feel a vast, invisible universe concentrated in your very palms, smooth and round like a hen’s egg, yet radiating out, out, in every direction.”

  My chest relaxes and drops, my breath slows down, flowing in, flowing out, flowing in, slowly, slowly expanding my belly into the shape of a pot. Effortlessly, the mind watches breath. As cloud thoughts dissolve in a vast blue sky, I remember the yogi’s words, “Let mind be before thought!”

  Subtle currents vibrate from my toes up through my feet and legs, through stomach, chest, arms, and hands to fingertips, from fingertips back to toes—a circle completed by my hands nestling on the soles of my feet. The spark tingles between my thumb tips. Dogen’s words again steal through my mind: “Once its heart is grasped, you are like the dragon when he gains the water, like the tiger when he enters the mountain.”

  My slow breath moves in and out, in and out, ecstatic shivers lapping from the top of my head to the base of my spine. My head, chest, and belly are spacious hollow vessels, pooling, drenched with luscious mind stuff. For many long, golden minutes no thoughts arise.

  I sit under open sky, a mote spun up into the vast basin and come to rest on solid rock. Warm breezes purl over the Crag, punctuated with birdsong carried up from the steep slopes of pine and fir that fall down and away.

  But then, pleased with this emptiness, a voice in my head sings congratulations: “Erik, you’ve done it. Thirty years sitting in zazen has finally paid off. It’s bliss. The Buddha said this vibrant, empty consciousness would arise after the cessation of thought.”

  On the heels of proud thoughts, doubts rush in. A scornful voice mocks, “Come on, now. You call this emptiness? This pitiful drop in the bucket? Since when did the Buddha settle for an occasional peak experience in the mountains? Or confuse some maverick practice of zen sitting with enlightenment itself?”

  Then the voice, contemptuous, turns to my past: “And since when did the old zen masters in China and Japan write useless doctoral dissertations? Or hang about for years teaching college English? Or have a divorce and girlfriend troubles? God, God, a life filled with loose ends—unwoven strands.”

  Now, sitting on the Crag, my mind clouds with memory. I no longer mark the sun heightening toward noon, beating hot on my left shoulder, the wind drying the sweat on the small of my back, the basins and valleys spread out at my lap.

  Strands of my life, one by one, float up like incense and curl through my mind—a path unfolding that leads step by step to just this moment, just this jagged outcrop, just these three rough black rocks on the Crag.

  2

  My Ditch

  IT’S EARLIER, THAT SAME OCTOBER MORNING. I’M in a ditch with pick and shovel, the sun barely up and frost covering the meadow grasses. The ditch runs back up behind my cabin to an old gravity-feed well. I’ve lived thirty summers in this ramshackle two-story log building, once part of a Depression-era gold-mining speculation on Flute Reed Creek. It failed, leaving the creek upended and the cabin derelict on the land. It sits at the end of miles of gravel road—no power, no water, no sewer, no phone, no neighbors. When I look out the front windows, across ten miles of basin to the Flute Reed peaks, only a distant fence line betrays the work of human hands. Behind me, beyond the Crag, the uninhabited mountains of the far west roll for hundreds of miles to the north.

  This is my third morning in the ditch. I’m digging out a section of rotten iron pipe laid fifty years ago between the cabin and the well. The well lies in lodgepole pine a hundred yards behind the cabin up a gentle slope—a slope that in the mile to the north rises more and more steeply a thousand vertical feet through open sage, then back into pine, then up onto long ridgelines crested with great Douglas fir, then at last up to the Crag.

  For days after I open the well, the pipe spouts stinking, sulfurous, rusty red water. As it begins to run clear, I use it for dishes and a solar shower. The shower water runs through coils of black plastic pipe thrown out on a gentle sage-covered hillside a hundred feet east of the cabin. The pipe then empties into a coffee can punched with holes and wired to a pole suspended between two lodgepole pines. I shower here in the open air at the bottom of the slope on the edge of the forest. At noon on a hot, sunny day, the water is scalding. By sundown it’s icy. Whenever it’s just right, I shower. Afterward, my skin smells of sulfur and old iron.

  I don’t care. I love my shower. But this summer, my kids, thirteen and sixteen, balked at using it. I’m ditching so I can replace the old iron with plastic.

  The work is good. I dig with pick and shovel, up to my hips in dirt. Hot, sweating already in the chill morning air, happy in the animal force of my back and arms, I swing the pick. It arcs high overhead. Exhaling in a grunt, I smash the point into the tough glacial matrix of hardpan clay and gravel. Stooping, I lever boulders free of their beds. I straighten, and on the return stroke, the wooden handle slides smoothly through the circle of my right thumb and fingers, t
he iron head swinging back massive and low, ready to be caught by the up-thrust. Inhaling the cool moisture of broken earth drifting up to meet the smell of pine needles, I sense the delicate fulcrums of wrist and elbow, shoulder and knee, hip and vertebra.

  Yes, the work is good. But it’s beautiful this morning—cloudless blue over mountains ten miles distant where steep hanging snowfields shimmer in angling sunlight. Why not a day of zazen up on the Crag? Yes, why not? I throw down the pick.

  Back at the cabin, the coffeepot on the wood stove still hot, I fill up my white ceramic cup and drink another cup of coffee, make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, then pack sandwiches, water bottle, apple, chocolate bar, sunscreen, binoculars, and down vest into my day pack. Grabbing a broad-brimmed hat, I step out the front door of the cabin and walk east toward my shower and the edge of the forest. It descends down foothills to touch open sage and meadow and the back and sides of the cabin.

  I stand for a moment in the shadow of the trees, then turn to gaze at the mountains. Still chilled with morning air sweeping down the slopes, the meadow grasses at my feet are thick with frost. My boots, warm from the stove, bead with moisture. My toes are suddenly cool.

  The treetops at the forest’s edge cast a jagged line of shadow before me across the ground. The angling sunlight creeps imperceptibly toward my boots, closer and closer, carving the meadow frost into an echo of the Flute Reed peaks.

  I sit down on the ground to watch. The grass gives up its cold and wet to my jeans, and I shiver. As the mountains of frost near my boots, I see forests of tiny white fingers on each blade of grass burn away and gather suddenly into transparent droplets clinging on green.

  I stand and walk north up into the trees, then follow my ditch a few hundred feet to the raw cut I’ve just left for another day. I pick the shovel out of the damp grass and lean it against a lodgepole pine. Struck by a shaft of sunlight that finds its way through the forest canopy, sprinkles of drying sand tumble from the top of the last shovelful I threw only minutes ago. The work beckons. It can wait till tomorrow.