By this time, five months after the terrorist attacks, I had been attending zazen and services at the Iowa Zen Center for three months. Heartmind was a Soto Zen Buddhist temple. Before my first class in meditation nine days after the terrorist attacks I had driven by the Zen Center to be sure I would be able to find it. Only ten minutes by car from where I lived, it was a modest, ordinary, two-story, bluegray, wooden residential home in an old, decaying, but tidy neighborhood of Council Bluffs. There were seven of us new students, three women and four men, at the first class. There was a temple dress code. We had been told to wear loose, baggy, modest clothing. Shirts had to cover shoulders and midriff, no tanktops, no short skirts, no shorts. We all removed our shoes and sandals outside on the porch and placed them neatly on the shelves of a wooden bookcase used there as a shoe rack. Inside we hung our fall jackets and sweatshirts on hangers in the open closet of the entryway and then we stepped inside to a large open room dimly lit.
The master greeted us.
"Good evening," he said smiling. "Welcome to the Iowa Zen Center."
I felt a tiny unexpected ripple of disappointment that the master was not Asian. Although I knew that his surname was an indication that his probable ancestry was European, the name Kudo, which I learned later was one of his two ordination names, had me still wondering if he might be part Japanese. In spite of myself I had imagined and perhaps even secretly hoped for a teacher like those whose books I had read and studied, a tiny, impish, oriental guru like the Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, or the Tibetan Dalai Lama. This silly stereotype persists in me to this day and even now when in Buddhist magazines like Tricycle or The Sun I see ads for Buddhist seminars, workshops, and retreats or I read articles in the quarterly newsletters distributed by various Zen centers about events at local sanghas I am aware that I lend them less credence if accompanying illustrations and photographs show the teachers to be European or European American and not visibly Asian.
Idiot.
The master was pink, white, and big, six feet three inches tall and, I guessed, at least 260 pounds. He looked my age—I was fifty-eight at the time—and I learned later that the master was just two years older. His head and face both he had shaven bald and clean. He appeared healthy and strong but like most men our age the features of his face—nose, mouth, ears—all appeared disproportionately large, lopsided, and slightly goofy and from his middle there protruded a huge gut larger even than my own. The master was dressed in a dark robe—black, brown, or gray I forget—and over his lower chest and upper belly a rectangular bib hung from two pair of fabric straps around his neck. I learned later that this article of apparel was a symbolic robe called a rakusu. Just two years later as a part of my lay ordination I would sew a rakusu of my own from strips of cloth and the master would present it to me in a formal ceremony. On this first night I didn't pay much notice.
The master's robe and rakusu; the small statue of the Buddha sitting on the mantel of the main altar; on a lower and apparently lesser altar off to the side the statue of a standing woman I recognized as Kwan Yin or Avalokitesvara, goddess of compassion; on the temple walls several pieces of framed calligraphy, Chinese or Japanese I didn't know which; and on both altars incense burners, candles, and flowers; all of this I dismissed as little different in kind from the robes, vestments, and icons I knew from my youth in the Lutheran Church. These objects of religiosity, like my first look at my obviously occidental teacher, pushed through me a tiny ripple of disappointment. Indeed, Zen practice might be seen as an endless series of such disappointments as our personal preferences both conscious and unconscious collide with reality and we learn to surrender them, face fact, and let go. All I wanted was instruction in Buddhist meditation and philosophy.
To get it, would I have to endure religion, too?
Sigh.
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