A Tassajara Story

Fil Lewitt / 12-2007

I spent January through August 1972 as a student at Tassajara with Katagiri-roshi. I was living at the SF Zen Center for a month in December 1971, and was at sesshin there when Suzuki-roshi died.

Here's a personal story from Tassajara 1972: I was already 31 years old, no little kid, when I went off to Tassajara after studying intellectual Zen Buddhism for many years, and practicing zazen for two years at Big River Farm Sangha in Mendocino, California, and at SFZC.

I was put on the carpentry crew. One day I was working on a project alone (rebuilding an arbor by the creek), and as I'm a concentrated and fast worker, I finished about an hour before lunch, so I lay down under the arbor in dappled sunlight and went to sleep. At some point I felt a shadow over me, and woke up fully. An American Zen priest, later to become a bigwig at SFZC, was looking down at me, robed, bald.

"What are you doing?" the priest said.

"What does it look like?" I said.

"You're supposed to be working. It's still Work Period."

"I finished."

"That's not the point," he said. "The point is to work."

"That's your point, priest," I said. "Not mine. It's very sweet to watch those kids pull one weed at a time between the rocks in the path, in slow motion, but that's not the way I work."

"You're not here to do your Zen," said the priest, clearly irritated, pleasing me. "You're here to do Zen."

"Well," I said, "maybe you think you're the arbiter of that, but I don't. Now will you please step out of my sunlight and go away."

The priest turned and walked off.