Rugged Interdependency - Amaravati Buddhist Monastery

Golden Highways Revisited: 1998content of the previous evening’s talk. Similar themes resounded during the questiontime and were finished off with a piece on not creating yourself, or others.Always a hit.We held the meal in the main hall and had a general schmoozing duringand after. Folks seemed well lit up by the whole event and several lingered untilChozen and Hogen called Time at 2:30-ish. Kelly Coolidge, a Korean woman whohad come to the Portland talk on Wednesday, had signed up at the last minute, satdirectly in front of me smiling serenely for the whole retreat, and then was practicallyin my lap until we got up finally to depart. We will certainly be seeing moreof her before too long: Wide-eyed and enraptured with Dhamma-chanda (delight inthe Teaching) she looked like Sister Jitindriyā had on her first retreat with us, as ayellow-haired Australian traveler, back in 1987 at Amaravati.We headed into Portland and spent the middle part of the afternoon withKyogen and Gyokuko Carlson – two monks out of the Shasta Abbey lineage ofRev. Master Jiyu Kennet. Through various missed and mangled communicationsin the mid-80s, they had ended up, still as a married couple, departing from theShasta fold, when the rest of the Monastery voluntarily took on the practice of celibacy– a radical move for a place out of the Japanese tradition. The wounds werestill open and smarting and, to add irony to insult, we had already arranged togo and have tea with Rev. Meiko, at the Portland Priory, a local branch of ShastaAbbey, later that day.Nonetheless, the time with Rev. Meiko was sweet and mellow, a fitting contrastafter the wailing and gnashing of Kyogen and Gyokuko’s story. As is usual, bothsides had their tales to tell and it was good to get some more of the picture. Whetheror not they will ever arrive at harmonious reunion is unsayable. It sounded asthough there had been a few too many “divorced from the teacher for eternity”statements to make any repairs a straightforward affair.We sat and chatted with Rev. Meiko over tea for a good couple of hours thenheaded back to Larch Mountain for a break, prior to the dtah-daeng (red-eye) flightto Chicago.The dialogue flowed ceaselessly on as we followed our roads to and fro, andeven up to the departure gate. Both Chozen and Hogen have great sincerity andenergy for the practice and seek only to make their lives authentic and of serviceto all. Their hunger for influence from the Theravāda tradition has enriched boththeir own training and also that of many of their students.It is a great thing that these multifarious traditions should come together andmeet and cross-pollinate so freely – we had great discussions on Nansen and thecutting of the cat, the quarrel at Kosambi and the sources of koan in the teachings– how often could such a dialogue have happened over the centuries? What precioustimes these are – even if it is only the last, 100-year blossoming before it alldegenerates irrevocably, let us make full use of the contact!How else would I have ever learned that Sogen-ji – Harada Roshi’s temple inJapan is the ONLY Zen Monastery with a cherry tree in the whole country? Whowould have thought that such a policy had been instituted since cherry blossom88