Bob Watkins Interviews

September - October 2013 Correspondence between Bob Watkins an DC below

Bob Watkins told DC 3/19/10

Bob Watkins at the Taos zendo interviewed by DC 6\23\93

Sandy and I drove into Tassajara in an old 51 Chevy pickup truck in a snowstorm.

DC: It had a camper on the back that was full of vegetarian food and supplies loaded in quite exactingly.

BW: We actually circumnavigated the place. Howard Campbell was there. We'd just got back from Japan shortly. Howard went away.

DC: He was the first director. He went down as soon as we bought it at the end of December of ’66. He was there when I first went down in February but gone when I returned in March to live there and you and Sandy were there.

BW: Howard was real nice to us and I heard years later that he had a lot of problems and his wife committed suicide.

DC: Ex-wife.

BW: Later people would talk to me about what went on and I never knew - who was who's lover and all.

I remember quite distinctly when you came and Bob Halpern came. He walked in from the coast. And Loring Palmer and Ed Brown.

We were there and we were digging the footings between [what was then] the guest dining room and the zendo. Then there was a deck out there We tore down the roof and left just the deck

DC: Where the kitchen is now. I slept on that deck when I first came.

BW: We dug footings to pour the foundation for the new stone structure

DC: This was later in the spring. After that deck had been torn down.

BW: I got some great pictures of that and the mochi party we had there. We were digging those and I was down in this ditch with a pick and here comes Suzuki Roshi. Four or five of us digging in the ditch and a thought came to mind which is what I said to him - I just took it off the top. I said, Gee I waited all this time to meet a real Zen master and I can't think of a thing to ask or anything. I was totally blanked out. I wasn't embarrassed or confused. In fact I was surprised.- It was like somebody reached up and turned off the lights. There just wasn't anything to say. And he laughed and went on.

Coming toward the zendo from the cottages across the little creek. We had to replace some rocks that were washed out. There were several things that I did there one of which was to assign jobs. Made a list that I still have.

DC: You were the first work leader.

BW: I made a list and I wrote down what people were capable of doing and what they preferred to do.

DC: Yes - but some of us like me aren't on it. Phillip and me. I guess I was sort of independent, doing stuff that had to do with the dining room and errands Peter would send me on.

BW: I would have so many things - ongoing projects, certain things that would come up emergency like plumbing and guys worked in the garage a lot of the time. I'd do this work meeting and usually Suzuki Roshi would come right as everybody was pretty much sent out. He would come and we would go work on the path from his cottage or on a wall.

DC: Yeah, like the walls in in the creek below the dining room. That was the first stone work I remember. Was being done before the first practice period.

And that's where I got the one finger Gutei hamburger teaching. It was really great we were down in that cool creek bed putting mortar at the base for a footing for the wall which was pretty loose, no mortar. And so we're working one day and Suzuki Roshi smashed his finger. He really nailed it and he quit work. Work period was over and he was really swelling up to the extent that it was starting to rupture - you know around the end of the finger - it swells up and then the pressure starts to make it throb. So it was decided that I would drive him to town to Carmel where we had a doctor who was doing freebies. I drove him in in the old pickup truck. We went to the doctor's office and the doctor came out right away and I sat in the ante room and he and Suzuki Roshi went in the back where his tools and stuff were. And he put a hole in the base of his nail and wrapped it up and he had to keep it elevated for a while cause I'm sitting there and he comes out and he's got his finger held up with the bandage on it. We leave and we're walking down the sidewalk and I said something about Gutei. When he was asked about Zen he'd hold up one finger no matter what it was and his disciple did it and Gutei cut it off. His disciple did it when he was away and some guests came, visitors and said what do you know of your teacher's way and he held up one finger and another monk saw him do it and they told the master when he came back and he cut it off and he started to run out of the room and he called him and when the disciple turned he held up one finger and the guy got enlightened. So I saw Suzuki Roshi with his finger up in the air and I laughed and I said you remind me of Gutei with that one finger teaching. And he laughed at that. And a few minutes later he said, "Let's stop some place and have a hamburger." And I said, okay. And there was a funny little place right on the sidewalk kinda and it was real small like about six phone booths with French windows all the way around it - real open. Six tables or something in there, real sterile lookin little hamburger joint and we sat down in there and a waitress came and we ordered and she puts the hamburgers down and Suzuki Roshi opens up his hamburger and takes the meat off it and puts it on mine.

[DC note: Photo from 1967 fundraising brochure. Suzuki and Bob doing stone work after returning from Carmel where Suzuki had seen a doctor about his finger. Note bandaged finger. As I recall, before first practice period. There's more to this story. See below. -dc]

BW: He come over to me and ask me to make him a little desk at the head of his tatami where he slept. There was a small alter there where he'd work with the light on and stuff so I went scrounging around and I found an old school desk and I cut it down so he'd sit seiza at it.

He made a little rock path and we got to work on that together

One of his one liners that I really applied a lot in my life was "Just do it." Just do it was like this little island in my stream and years later I see a kid on the streets one day with a tee shirt on that said "just do it." It blew my mind.

DC: I remember you said you’d been living way out in the sticks when that happened, cut off from news and everything, and that your first thought when you saw that was that Suzuki had become awfully popular.

BW: Were you there the first time that Katagiri Sensei came out to help with sesshin? And he used to wear his samue all the time, his monk’s work clothes. And sometimes the rubber boots and sometimes the while gloves. It was crazy to see him like that. They both wore white gloves sometimes - it reminded me of Mickey Mouse.

DC: White gloves are common in Japan for work. Not just monks – cab drivers and service people.

BW: At that point the zendo was the old building but we'd torn down a bunch of stuff at the down creek end of it and left just a bare deck. It was misty and rainy and everything and we were getting ready to go back in the zendo and Katagiri Sensei said that thing about practice as if your hair was on fire and you were putting out the fire. And he told the story about heaven and hell. They're both places where people sit across from each other at tables trying to eat and they have chopsticks that are too long to eat with and in hell they can't feed themselves and in heaven they feed each other. I've heard other people mention that their teacher told them that. It must be a popular story.

Katagiri’s family lived upstairs above their restaurant and there was a little Japanese calendar with art and he got to looking at it as a child laying there in bed and thinking about that story.

"Little by little" was an expression Suzuki Roshi used a lot. He used it like it's how things happen, how you can accomplish something. Little by little you can do it.

I was in LA and I ran into this old friend of mine - his dad owned a nursery in orange county where I got the bamboo for Tassajara

We went for a walk one day on my day off and we went up in the mountains and we found a yucca plant and you remember that Ruthie used to pick yucca flowers and we used to eat them in our salads? They were all dried out but some of the leaves had fallen off and the base of the leaf was kind of frayed. He said, this would make a great sumie brush and so I grabbed a handful of them and he made up some sumi ink and he did two pieces of calligraphy and gave them to me and one of them is hanging in the other room and one of them is put away. One of them says “Everything is absolutely perfect” and he signed it and put Tassajara Zenshinji 1967 and years later I got these things mounted and the other one was two characters that said, Pure Wind. Do you remember how he used to use the word pure a lot? If you get up from zazen and leave the zendo in that frame of mind, that's what he called pure action - without thinking - you just do it - the Nike slogan - if you just do it it's shikantaza. It's the same attitude that you had in the zendo and he used to refer to that as pure practice. I notice Bill Kwong, Jakujo Roshi, using that teaching.

He giggled. He practiced on newspaper. He did a few things on the newspaper and started giggling and got real happy and got out some good white paper and did those two pieces of calligraphy and then he laughed and gave those to me and said, “Now don't tell anybody" In other words, what I used for a brush. And then years later I'm here in New Mexico and I get his book after he'd passed away and here's this calligraphy on the book and it had to be made with those yucca leaves.

DC: It says so in the book – in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. So you're responsible for that?

See this calligraphy

DC note: Now Bob is showing me some old photos. If we don’t already have them we’ll get copies of them from him the next time we visit – and scans of the calligraphy.

BW: Jane had that big mountain scroll stamp that she gave Suzuki Roshi. She and Peter got together I think after I had left. Here's the old kitchen where we used to work together.

DC: I was cooking a lot there before Ed Brown came. You liked the food I made.

BW: I sure did. Here's one of the Morton brothers and Kobun and myself and Sandy making mochi. Everybody had left Tassajara and we were all alone and Suzuki Roshi and I went to town and got sweet rice and borrowed Mrs. Obana’s, his friend, an older Japanese lady. We borrowed her thing to make mochi in and we came back and there were only a few of us at Tassajara and we all made mochi. We rolled it out and did it in the zendo.

[Shows me pictures of Kobun and Dan Gerber and Kobun's master - father.]

I don't remember any serious type problems at Tassajara. There were people who came in who were totally insane. They came in with bells on their toes. People would talk about things in meetings and have different opinions and Suzuki Roshi would be the last deciding factor.

I still have all the work lists. Here's the schedule of the training period in August. Here are my lists.

DC: I'm not on it. I was doing a lot of work to get the kitchen and dining room in order which was sort of independent of you but when I was wasn’t doing that I think I was on the general work crew for the first practice period. I remember chopping a lot of the old wood from the buildings that had been torn down. I worked with Nelda Foresta who didn’t want to chop so she just picked the pieces up and held them for me. I loved it. And you liked how much we were going through so you left us there.

BW: We were working on that wall and a couple of guys were talking about something and we were down underneath the bridge and just as they crossed the bridge one of them said, "Don't make any waves, don't make any waves." And Suzuki Roshi said what does that mean? and I said, Don't make more of it than it is. Don't excite the situation. Let it be. And he went, Oh, and he went ahead working. And that evening he used it in lecture.

September - October 2013 Correspondence between Bob Watkins an DC

Hi Bob.