Tassajara

Tassajara
August 2005


It’s been a while since I greeted mornings and I had forgotten how exhilarating it can be. At 5:20 AM the hand bells at Tassajara wake you up, the tinny tinkling sounds meander along the cottages and summon you from sleep. I booked a tatami room, a 10X12 cottage shared with Anicia, furnished sparsely with reed mats and 2 double futon mattresses on the floor covered with plush down comforters. They keep you warm and cozy at night for the temperatures dip to 45 degrees from the 100 plus heat during the day. The room has low shoji screened windows just above your head as you lay low on the floor futons. You can look up and peek through the bamboo grove which is still in darkness and see the glimmer of light in the sky. It is just a hint of light and gradually, like someone is turning the dimmer switch in a room it brightens and muted indirect light fills the surroundings. The sound of wood mallet striking wood plank cracks the stillness, summoning the monks to Zazen at 5:50 AM. Different sounds interrupt your dozing, signaling various activities for the monks, the sound of distant drum-roll followed by slow beats then brass gong sounds and finally the tolling of the giant railroad bell at 6:30 jolts you into awakening and attention. The light has bathed the whole camp and there’s no mistaking, dawn has arrived. Sunrise is not until another hour, when the sharp yellow rays of the sun strike the side of the mountain and erupt with exuberance and spill over into the cottages in a powerful presence that is palpable physically. It is time to rise.
It’s this kind of experience that brings guests to Tassajara year after year. We’ve met guests who had been coming for 23 years, just to spend a week away from it all, no electricity, no cell phones, no TV or radio, no newspapers. To be one with nature giving a hint of what the Zen practice might be all about.
We came to Tassajara for a retreat workshop on The Spirit of Practice= Christian and Zen. It is led by Brother David, a Benedictine monk, and Paul, a Zen Buddhist. I came because I’m a Catholic skeptic looking for ways to recover my faith and Anicia came with me because it sounded like a neat thing to do, and besides it’s close to Carmel Valley where Pebble Beach is and we can take a side trip and play Pebble Beach. Instead we played Pacific Grove Municipal Golf Course, where we walked 18 holes for $20 twilight rate and the course was just as spectacular and special as the $475 plus Pebble Beach Course. The course is laid out in the same strip of God’s land overlooking the Pacific and the rugged rocky shores where seals and shorebirds co-exist with gawking tourists forever shooting them with cameras. The natural dunes and ice plant abundantly covering the fairways and the shifting wind and herds of black tail deer camping out on the greens are more than enough hazards to make your game exciting and frustrating. From the 15th hole of the Pacific Grove Municipal Golf Course, you can see the 18th of the Pebble Beach Course.
The workshop was intense. We start with 30 minutes of sitting in silence at 8 AM. This is a small approximation of Zazen. Paul looks the part of a Buddhist monk. He is ascetic in build, with high cheekbones and hollow cheeks and dark eye sockets framed by clean-shaved skull. He sits on his pretzel twisted legs, right foot over the left thigh and vice versa, spine erect, chin forward, looking ahead in a blank stare, and breathing evenly and silently, immobile, unshifting for the whole 30 minutes. I suppose he is capable of emptying his mind, the object of Zazen. Meanwhile, I’m trying to be very still, but I cant’ help it. My muscles start to quiver after 3 minutes and I’m forced to make an ever slight move to shift my weight. Then I just had 2 cups of coffee on empty stomach at 7:30 and my GI-tract is rattling with borborygmi so loud you can hear it across the room. And I cannot empty my mind. I’m peeking from the sides of my eyes to see what the others are doing. And I’m stealing a look at Paul. And my mind goes to wondering what to do after the session at 1 PM, should I go to the Narrows and read or bathe in the swimming hole? Should I hike the Overlook Trail tomorrow? Today at dawn, hiking the Ridge Trail, the mountain wildflowers were covered in mist, the Mexican heather, and mountain sage smelling so fresh and the Yucca tall and arrogant over the trodden grass. Then I try to be serious and think of serious stuff. I should be more tolerant of all humans, stop hating my Indian colleagues, love my place of work at the state hospital, be nicer to my friends and get along better with everyone, etc. But then, thinking at all is all wrong. I should empty my mind, that’s the way to practicing mindfulness and be one and discover your true nature and self. I should concentrate on breathing and letting all thoughts go and be with the here and now, the present, be open and receptive, be oneself and yet be everyone. I should be that wave individuating and defining myself as I come to shore , but I’m also one with the ocean where as a wave I come from, and I go back and become part of one. Whew! For 5 days we grappled with abstract and deep ideas, trying to reconcile and differentiate the practice of Christianity and Zen. We went to the virgin birth, to the figure of Mary, the trinity, to Jesus, sin and confession, punishment and atonement, heaven and resurrection, charity, grace, prayers, the crucifixion, monastic life, rituals and ceremony. The group was articulate and erudite and illustrated their meaning with quotes from poems and literature , EE Cummings, Yeats, Whitman, among others. They knew history and anthropology, and they knew personal experience. There were 13 women and 1 man, ages ranged from 23 to 89. There were 2 mother –daughter pairs, and one has a son in his 3rd year as a Zen student at Tassajara. Some sessions were very moving, you can’t help spilling your emotions in a group like this, but the leaders are very skilled and that’s reassuring. They were able to maintain boundaries and keep the process oriented to the topic.
After a grueling morning of these sessions, we look forward to lunch at 1 PM, announced by the sonorous tolling of the big old railroad bell. Meals are prepared and served by the Zen students on cloth- covered long tables and cloth napkins which we keep stowed away in our marked napkin rings for reuse in the next meal. The vegetarian meals are delicious and very filling, and the breads are specially famous and at the end of your stay, they bake a bunch of different varieties which you can purchase as a donation to the Zendo. Lunch offers an option of eating in the dining room or self-preparing a boxed meal from a delectable array of spreads, prepared salads, cheeses, vegetarian pates of almonds and sundried tomatoes or pestos, and condiments, in addition to fruits and fresh greens and baked goods. On our way up the mountain, driving from San Jose International Airport, we stopped by for half a case of wine, and this just proved divine to take along with the boxed meal for picnics at the Narrows, the trail along Tassajara Creek where in its nooks and crannies you can find secluded swimming holes and giant flat boulders to spread your beach towel and sun nude and feel a belonging and oneness with nature.
It only took a brief moment of observation at the baths to realize that we can be completely free in this setting. On our first day we arrived at the segregated baths with bathing suits but we promptly ditched them after we surveyed the scene. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I can reclaim my body without self-consciousness, how liberating! Now I understand the freedom and I suspect joy that European women have about their bodies, no matter what shape it’s in. I recall traveling in Sweden and going out on the boat with a friend, and it just enthralled me to see everyone nude unselfconsciously, with all shapes of bodies, fat, thin, pregnant, scarred, smooth, all baring it to feel the sun’s warmth and vitality.
It’s not easy to get to Tassajara. It is in the middle of the Ventana wilderness, a national reserve. It sits on the Santa Lucia Mountain of the Los Padres range. It’s on a fault so hot sulfur steam escapes from the earth’s core and feeds the Tassajara hot springs, which from the late 19th century already catered to the imaginative few who saw its potential as a resort and healing center. When the resort was burned early in the century , it was not rebuilt, but in the 50’s when interest in Buddhism began to pick up in the West, a friend of the late Zen master Shunryu Suzuki suggested that the old resort site would be a perfect place to open a Zen Center. Thus the first training Zen monastery outside of Asia was built. It is only in recent years that guests can stay at the center, and only during the summer season. For the rest of the year the center functions strictly as a monastery. It is a remote place accessible only by a 14-mile steep dirt road which narrows to one lane in many places, and first climbs up to the top of the ridge, then switches in an abrupt hairpin turn and follows the ridge down, then up again, then the final descent of 5 miles is a brake-burning plunge that stirs up a thick smoke of swirling dry earth that settles completely covering your car. You need a 4-wheel drive to negotiate this terrain, but our rental car, a Hyundai Sonata has only the Drive shift, no low gears. I trusted Anicia, who was driving, with my life, and I was in Zazen even before we started our retreat. It normally takes 1 hour and 15 minutes to drive this 14-mile road, but Anicia got us through it in 50 minutes. This is the moment when the Buddha in all of us would say, “ Life and death is the same thing, it is something, and it is nothing.” What? Me worry? NAH!

Click on Brother David from this link, he's really remarkable!
http://www.gratefulness.org/index.htm

And click this link for some pictures, click on next to get to the next image
http://travel2.nytimes.com/slideshow/2003/06/22/travel/20030622tass.slideshow_1.html