Ruth Fuller Sasaki
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THE LIFE & WORKS OF Ruth Fuller Sasaki by Isabel Stirling foreword by Gary Snyder IRPsIl? Ruth Fuller Sasaki was a pivotal figure in the emergence and development of Zen Buddhism in the United States. Colleague of Burton Watson, mentor to Philip Yampolsky and Gary Snyder, and mother-in-law of Alan Watts, she influenced countless students and seekers. This is the first biography of her remarkable life. A society matron in Chic ago at the turn of the twentieth century, Ruth Fuller was not alone in following a trend of wealthy women who saw a spiritual path in Eastern religion—but few de¬ voted their lives to Zen Buddhism as she did. Her journey began in 1930, when she was introduced to D. T. Suzuki on a trip to Japan. Two years later, at the age of forty, she began her studies with Zen master Nanshinken in Kyoto. Later, as a senior student of Sokei-an Sasaki in New York, Ruth helped him develop the infrastructure of what would eventually become the First Zen Institute in New York City. She married Sasaki in 1944, but he died within the year. Subsequently, it became her mission to maintain the First Zen Institute and later, to establish the First Zen Institute of America in Japan. Her legacy remains today in the Zen facilities she helped build and in the many texts she saw through translation, published from the continued as-bs.:kjiap 294.3927 SASAKI R 06/04/07 ( Zen Pioneer Zen Pioneer Ruth Fuller Sasaki by Isabel Stirling Foreword by Gary Snyder Withdrawn from LAWRENCE PUlBCAIBRM & hoard se public library pf: n fvn 707 i U-31 3 STREET * IS A LAWREMCI »y li t» J WSAS 66044 Biography copyright © 2006 by Isabel Stirling Zen: A Religion-, Zen: A Method for Religious Awakening; and Rinzai Zen Study for Foreigners in Japan © 2006 Ruth Fuller Sasaki All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Every effort has been made to secure permissions. We regret any inadvertent omission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stirling, Isabel. Zen pioneer: the life & works of Ruth Fuller Sasaki / by Isabel Stirling; foreword by Gary Snyder, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Hardcover: ISBN-13 978-1-59376-110-3 (alk. paper) ISBN-10 1-59376-110-4 (alk. paper) Paperback: ISBN-13 978-1-59376-170-3 ISBN-10 1-59376-170-8 1. Sasaki, Ruth Fuller, 1893-1967.2. Zen Buddhists—United States— Biography. I. Title. 60984^6757875 2006 294-35927°92—dc22 2006008565 Book design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc. Printed in the United States of America Shoemaker_Hoard « www.shoemakerhoard.com Hardcover: __ ^ _ Paperback: 10 987654321 To Ham Yoshida and Gary Snyder Contents Foreword by Gary Snyder ix Preface xv Part One: Her Life 1. The Chicago Years, 1892-1929 3 2. First Trips to Asia, 1930-1940 11 3. New York, 1941-1948 37 4. Kyoto Beginnings, 1949-1955 47 5. Rebuilding Ryosen-an, 1955-1960 71 6. Research and Translation, 1960-1967 109 7. Epilogue: Beyond 1967 131 Part Two: Her Work Zen: A Religion 137 Zen: A Method for Religious Awakening 159 Rinzai Zen Study for Foreigners in Japan 179 Acknowledgments 247 Chronology 251 VIII : ZEN PIONEER Endnotes 259 Glossary 271 Bibliography 275 Index 291 Foreword TX e have to face it, Zen Buddhism is pretty elite. From V V T’ang dynasty China on, it seems that the monks and mas¬ ters started out as youthful genius readers and memorizers of the Confucian classics. This means they were of the gentry class, that their parents afforded tutors, and that they were on the path to¬ ward a lifetime job in the government. One of the few exceptions seems to have been Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch, who by some accounts was a tribal person from the mountains of the south, what today we would call a Hmong or a Miao. He could not read or write. But the traditional Zen biographies tell the story over and over of a young man expert first at the Chinese classics, then mas¬ tering quite swiftly all of the Buddhist texts to become a priest, skilled at lecturing and presenting esoteric doctrinal points. This educated and exceptional person via some critical event realizes that he (or occasionally she) has not yet had a deep and personal experience of Buddhist awakening and is mouthing intellectual abstractions. He finds a Zen master, who bangs on him, shouts at him, exposes his shallowness to him, and puts him onto a path of spiritual practice. That leads into a yet further elite—the Ch’an and Zen Buddhist lineages of those who saw through self-serving rationalizations X : FOREWORD and speculative philosophies. The strength of their personal insights is not to be doubted. The role they played out for the rest of their lives is one of remarkable creativity, subtlety, ingenuity, compassion, and elegance. From time to time even emperors envied them. But a lore of discarding books and letters, of teaching with shouts and blows, and sticking to weeding the garden and cutting firewood—as real as it was—did not disguise the special quality of this small and highly literate group. Over the centuries they devel¬ oped a formidable culture of spiritual teaching texts, impenetrable anecdotes, poems, paintings, iconic carvings, sublime rituals, and fine-honed organization. Ruth Fuller Everett did not become interested in Zen Buddhism because she was a bohemian, an artist, or any sort of cultural revolu¬ tionary. She entered onto this path because she was more than just very smart: she was smart enough to realize that her own power and drive and capacity were a little too much, and she deeply intuited that she needed another direction. From her teenage years she set herself against the assumptions of theistic religions and their lan¬ guage of heaven and hell, evil and sin. Ruth Fuller Sasaki was a Lady. A Zen Lady, a title she would never shrink from. She was to become an ordained Zen priest with her own temple in Kyoto. As much as any neo-Confucian gentleman of Sung China or Tokugawa, Japan, she realized the needs and diffi¬ culties of governance. From her youthful first marriage she learned to manage a large household of cooks, servants, nannies, and gar¬ deners. If a Tokugawa warrior was swift to draw his sword, R. F. S. was equally swift to deploy a team of lawyers, to have multiple let¬ ters out, to call meetings, and to get decisions made. She designed houses, renovated Manhattan buildings, restored a Japanese temple. Her entrance into Zen proper was facilitated by Daisetz T. Suzuki, FOREWORD : XI virtual single-handed founder of an English-language literature on this school of Buddhist meditation. She had visited him in Kyoto on the return trip from a business tour of Manchuria and China with her husband, Edward Everett, in 1930. Edward played golf in China among the Imperial tombs. In 1931 Ruth sailed back to Kyoto and with Suzuki’s help was allowed to sit sesshin at the Nanzen-ji Mon¬ astery under one of the toughest Zen masters of that time, Nan- shinken Roshi. She made two later trips to Kyoto to continue her studies. After Mr. Everett’s health declined, Ruth was introduced to Sasaki Shigetsu Roshi (his teaching name was Sokei-an), who was living and working in New York City. She joined his group and im¬ proved his quarters. Mr. Everett died, and three years later Ruth and Shigetsu were married. (Mutually in love, Alan Watts said, but Shigetsu’s long illness and wartime internment were also part of it.) Sasaki Shigetsu Roshi died shortly thereafter. Once the postwar Oc¬ cupation began to allow Americans back into Japan, Ruth Sasaki was in Kyoto trying to locate a new Zen master to carry on the teaching work that Shigetsu Roshi had started. This turned out to be no easy task, and she ended up staying in Japan and continuing koan work with Shigetsu’s dharma-brother Goto Zuigan Roshi. She restored Ryosen-an—Dragon Springs Hermitage—a tiny dilapidated branch-temple of Daitoku-ji. She improved her Chinese and Japanese and launched the translation of those poems and koans that formal Zen students must use. She learned to allow for the vagaries of people not of her class, and she opened the Kyoto temple and library to a constant flow of younger foreign people. Ruth Sasaki was my benefactor. Even though aware of my youth¬ ful labor union activities and FBI record, and in spite of my frank Xll : FOREWORD declarations of dubiousness in regard to the whole Occidental proj¬ ect, she still invited me to accept a paid boat ride to Japan and soon put me to work on Chinese Zen translations in her research center. I was able to begin my own formal Zen practice with the roshi of the Daitoku-ji Training Hall, Oda Sesso. Ruth Sasaki was in her sixties when I started working with her. She spent her days in elegant casual wear—many cashmere sweat¬ ers. Her hair and grooming were perfect, finished with pearl earrings. She started the mornings with a walk and sometimes an interview with her roshi. Then she might go to her study and review her literary Chinese-language readings, addressing translation problems from the text at hand. Much of the time it was the Rinzai-roku, or The Record of Lin-chi.