Kobun Chino Otogawa

1938–2002

Kamo

Kobun Chino Otogawa was born on 1 February 1938 in Kamo, Niigata, one of six children of Bunryu Otogawa, abbot of the temple Jōkōji, and of Masa Otogawa. His first instruction in sitting came from his father when he was about three and a half. He could still describe it fifty years later: “About three and half years old, three boys of him got instruction how to sit. It was a summer evening. Many fireflies were appearing from the pond, lotus pond of the temple. We were enjoying wide corridor, temple corridor, and sitting, cooling ourselves. And then big brother, middle brother and littlest one, myself, all faced the garden and start to sit. And he comes around — Father comes around and correct posture. That I remember.”

His brother Keibun told a story from those first years: at two or three, watching the koi in the temple pond from the bridge, he fell and stuck head-first in the mud, and a gardener happened to notice and pulled him out.

Bunryu died of cancer around 1946, when Kobun was seven or eight. In the devastation after the war the family scavenged for food; sometimes they ate pumpkins, sometimes only the stems.

In 1951 he was ordained a monk at thirteen and given the name Eikai. Schoolmates teased the shaved head. A nun drilled him in sutra memorization and struck him with a small bamboo stick at each mistake; sent to chant in lay households, the small monk kept slipping from one line to another and back, so the sutra never ended, and his friends enjoyed that. His ordination master was Kin-ei Otogawa Zenji, of whom he later said, “the Ordination Master is the law itself, discipline itself. The Zazen Master was an undisciplined one, perfect freedom.” The zazen master was Kodo Sawaki, the wandering campaigner for the revival of sitting, whom Kobun met when Sawaki was invited to his ordination master's temple, and with whom he sat from the age of seventeen.

At Kamo High School his English teacher was Hozan Koei Chino, abbot of Kotaiji, the temple up the hill; in April 1960, as Kobun began graduate school, the childless Chino and his wife Yoshie adopted him, aiming at his inheriting the abbacy. (American memorial accounts date the adoption to 1952; the family register and the family itself place it in 1960.) The training meant walking house to house with Chino Roshi performing ceremonies; Chino's emphasis was chanting, not sitting.

There was a flood, to which he never gave a year. Used to chasing fish in thigh-deep water by the family temple, he let the swollen river carry him down, expecting to stand up at the temple gate; instead he went under repeatedly, frightened he was about to die. He told the story decades later as a lesson in how peacefulness and terror sit side by side.

Eiheiji

He took his degree at Komazawa University in 1957 with a thesis on Dignāga's logic, living in the Doken-ryo dormitory where study sat inside a full practice schedule and Sawaki led a Tuesday evening sitting; Kobun was the student coordinator of the zazen group in the period when Taisen Deshimaru, later the founder of Soto Zen in France, joined Sawaki's practice. Then Kyoto University, where he took a master's degree in 1964 under Keiji Nishitani and Gajin Nagao — four years over a thesis on ten'e, the fundamental turning-about of a person, read against Western philosophy. Nagao invited him to stay on. He remembered his answer: “Please let me go to head monastery where still spirit of Dōgen Zenji must be alive. I want to experience actual practice day and night, day and night. If I continue to study in academic field on Buddhist literature, my brain might burst into pieces.” He said of those years that he had gone so far into books he had become head-oriented, and that everyone's face looked like a bodhisattva except his own. For a stretch of those university years he kept house with an elder brother on almost nothing, the two taking turns cooking a week at a time. Once he bought hair oil with what little money there was; his brother asked whether they needed it, he apologised and offered to take it back, and from that day both of them cut their hair.

Before entering Eiheiji — Dōgen's training monastery, in the mountains of Fukui — he went once as a visitor, and in gold evening light watched some seventy monks carrying their bowls with both hands, heads shaved, eyes down — transparent, he said, like wild geese flying together. He entered in the deep of winter, meaning at his master's suggestion to stay three days, and stayed two and a half years. Of the tangaryo entrance ordeal: “By that time my ego is all melted and splashed on the walls everywhere.” At his first dokusan, the private interview with the teacher, something broke in him and tears came like a waterfall; Miyazaki Godo Roshi simply began chanting the six-hundred-volume Maha Prajna Paramita sutra in a low voice until the crying was done, then sent him back to sit, and never asked why. In his second year, during Rohatsu — the December sesshin marking the Buddha's awakening — with morning sun melting the first snow off hundred-year-old cedars, he saw hundreds of millions of points of light in the falling drips and forgot to go back to the hall. Miyazaki told him it was not it, that it was wonderful, and to forget it. He obeyed.

Then a telegram summoned him home; he assumed at first that his master was ill, and learned only later that the two teachers had arranged everything between themselves by letter. He spent nearly a month upstairs at the Hōjō, his master's quarters, the door open to the smell of cedar and the sound of maple leaves, writing the names of the Buddha ancestors onto silk and prostrating at each one, his own name now joined to the line running back to Shakyamuni. He put a date on it, the sixth of August, at twenty-four, and a meaning: “Actually, my suffering began from that day. Before that my suffering was simply sweet imagination.”

Sawaki died in 1965. From 1965 to 1967 Kobun was back at Eiheiji in the teacher-training hall, editing the monastery's magazine. In 1966 he was selected as a special training monk — the leadership track — under Miyazaki, and vowed to him, a lifelong celibate, that he would keep lifelong celibacy himself. Put in charge of receiving some eighty incoming novices, he went first to the abbot to say he could not use the stick on young men who had come longing to meet Dōgen; of the eighty he struck three. He looked after the struggling American monks Shunryū Suzuki had sent from San Francisco — took them to a doctor for their knees, found them a good dentist — not knowing it was being reported back. Suzuki came to Eiheiji once, unannounced, like a wind. About three months later, in the middle of a winter sesshin — a week of intensive sitting — a letter appeared on his cushion: “Who is this air mail, to me? I know nobody from other country. And it was a letter from Suzuki Roshi, inviting me to United States and help his new project.” Tassajara — the first Zen monastery outside Japan — opened half a year later; he was chosen because he knew Eiheiji. His Dharma father and the blind vice-abbot Satō Taishun consented, and he sailed on the ship carrying Eiheiji's gifts.

Tassajara

He sailed in May 1967 as minister for North America, after two months at Eiheiji's Tokyo temple, and arrived in San Francisco on 19 June. At Tassajara he appeared at the top of the stone steps by the big old oak in a yellow robe. On 22 June, Suzuki introduced him to the little sitting group in Los Altos: “I hadn't met him before... I felt as if we were old friends.”

Within weeks of arriving he shut himself in a mountain cabin above Tassajara for about a month, refusing contact. Those around him spoke of it as women and culture shock; his biographer, at the end of seven years of interviews, read it as the turning his own thesis had named — the point where he set down the Japan he had carried and chose to flow. He was resident priest at Tassajara until 1969, one of only two priests there beside Suzuki, teaching chanting, welcoming anyone to zazen. His speech was slow in any language; the priest Wako Kato said he spoke Japanese the same way, and that it made him want to beat him up. The pauses ran long enough that he once fell asleep in the middle of giving his own lecture. When Bob Halpern offered him a cigarette at Sokoji, Suzuki's temple in San Francisco, Suzuki settled the matter in passing: “Kobun Chino does not smoke.” He said he learned breathing from butterflies — about twenty of them on white hot rocks with clean water running between, all opening their wings at once. His legs, which had hurt through Eiheiji, stopped hurting when Suzuki ordered him to sit facing out instead of facing the wall. Years later he made their walks the image of transmission itself, quoting Suzuki: “We go walking in the rain. I am weak and old, you are young and strong. Walk in front of me, I'll follow you.”

In 1969 he told Suzuki the agreed period was over and went back to attend his master. That year a rainstorm flooded Kamo; houses washed away, both his father's temple and Chino Roshi's were damaged, and he stayed about six months doing repairs. Before leaving America he had visited Trudy Dixon, dying of breast cancer and still coming to Tassajara to practice; her whole body appeared to him covered in a blue-purple light, and she thanked him for being there to help them. He named that as what turned him back. The Los Altos sangha wrote to him again, and at Les Kaye's suggestion every member also wrote directly to his master in Japan. Over green tea Chino Roshi asked whether he was going, and answered his own question: suitable ability should be at the suitable place.

Los Altos

In 1970 he became resident teacher at Haiku Zendo, a remodeled garage with seventeen seats. He and Harriet fell in love and married that year; Suzuki refused to perform the wedding, honoring the wishes of Kobun's father, so they went to the Santa Clara courthouse with Les and Mary Kaye as witnesses. Through that first year, students at the Kaye house could hear loud, angry Japanese coming down the hallway telephone; Kobun would come back smiling, say the callers wanted him home — Kotaiji was still waiting for its heir — and add, after a pause, that he was not going. A son, Taido, was born in October 1971, and a daughter, Yoshiko, in May 1973 — one June noon he looked up from washing dishes to find the toddler carrying the baby, upside down and backwards. He dug up his own front yard for a pond in the shape of the character for heart, and asked a student to bring frogs and turtles for it.

When he heard Suzuki had given transmission to Richard Baker, he was horrified — not Dick, he said; Phillip, maybe. On 21 November 1971 he accompanied Baker down the stairs at the Mountain Seat ceremony, Suzuki's last public appearance. Suzuki died on 4 December.

He and the Tibetan lama Chögyam Trungpa met around 1970; Kobun himself traced their bond to a walk back from Haiku Zendo. Early on they pledged to be reborn as brothers throughout their lives. When Trungpa founded the Naropa Institute, his Buddhist university in Boulder, in 1974, he asked Kobun to help and look after it, and Kobun returned to Boulder almost every year for the rest of his life, bringing ōryōki, the formal meal practice, to Trungpa's Vajradhātu community and bringing his own archery teacher, Kanjuro Shibata, to Trungpa. At a Rocky Mountain Dharma Center sesshin in the summer of 1978 he taught all week from the story of Orpheus, who lost Eurydice by looking back, reading the condition not to look back as a figure for faith in practice.

The teaching spread everywhere at once: Santa Cruz Zen Center, founded with Jim Goodhue in 1971, where he lectured every Tuesday night for more than ten years, driven over Highway 17 at first because he had no license; Spring Mountain near Ukiah; Sogetsu-in in Michigan; Daisho-an on the Big Sur coast; three or four seven-day sesshins a year at Hidden Villa; Stanford courses in 1973 and 1974; a Thursday evening class at De Anza College; two psychiatric patients at Napa he sat with on the ground, who called him Roshi sometimes and Sensei sometimes. Through the spring of 1975 he met weekly in students' living rooms — Gert's house, Glenna's, Ruth's, Hathaway's — reading Dōgen on face-to-face transmission: “Without having separation, body to body, face to face, mind to mind, eye to eye, hand to hand, directly you hand something down to another existence.” In those same months he ordained twenty-one students. To Stephan Bodian, ordained in 1974, he gave his own robes and shaved the head himself, forgetting the small patch meant to be cut in the ceremony. When Bodian later left for Maezumi's center in Los Angeles, friends reported that Kobun gave a talk mocking hard, goal-driven sitting, naming Bodian, and telling his students to sit soft instead.

Around 1975 Steve Jobs began coming to Haiku Zendo. Kobun told the story in 1994: “He always comes bare foot, with holes everywhere on the jeans, saying 'I feel I'm enlightened.' And I say 'You look like.'” He demanded proof; the proof arrived as something being built in a dark garage. “I had to feed him — no money, totally no money, and making something big in the dark garage with his friend.” That, he said, was the beginning of Apple — and also: “he disturbed my family life, early time.” When Jobs talked of training at Eiheiji, Kobun's answer, as the students remembered it, was that what is not here is not at Eiheiji either — stay in Silicon Valley; business and the spiritual world are not in contradiction. In 1976 he told Jobs simply to go ahead and start the company.

He knew what his teaching cost the people around him, and said so from the seat: “Sociality is almost zero. Don't know how to please people by word. Always make people mad when I speak.” And: “If I sit with you maybe 5 or 10 more years you will disappointed with me that I had nothing. And finally I may sit alone. No-one come along. That feels my way and my fate. That's alright.” He arrived twenty minutes late to a wedding he was officiating, his VW parked across the pavement, and twice failed to collect at the airport a priest he had agreed to sponsor.

In February 1977, with the sangha deliberating over a forty-six-acre estate, he told them what he was doing in America: “I confess I am here to make a quiet revolution.” He wanted, he said, “to make a great effort to make qualified, fine people for the world.” The Pentler purchase failed anyway — the Sumitomo Bank refused the loan, sixty people pledged what they could in one evening at the Duvenecks' house, and escrow still closed in January 1978 with the money short.

Skyline Boulevard

In October 1978, at Santa Cruz, someone asked what the Heart Sutra's mantra means. “It doesn't mean anything, actually. Everything is falling apart. 'Fall apart Fall apart All together fall apart We cannot do anything about it.' That's what Gate Gate means, really! There is nothing to hang onto.”

In 1979 the sangha bought the old Pacific High School property on Skyline Boulevard; Kobun signed the bill of sale without taking it to the board, and explained afterwards, unasked, that this was a special place that would take care of everyone's practice. The land came with roughly sixty people already living on it — Vietnam veterans, runaway children, hippies from a commune the sheriff had bulldozed — in the geodesic domes of a defunct free school. He refused to put them off the land and invited them into the old library, which became the zendo; asked how long it would take to become a proper meditation centre, he said about five hundred years. Some of the runaways started sitting, and came back years later as caretakers. Jikoji was established in 1981 in the name of Koei Chino, with Angie Boissevain as director, and inaugurated in 1982, when his elder brother Keibun came from Japan to perform the Dai Segaki ceremony. Down in the valley, Kannon-dō opened in Mountain View at the end of 1979 and was dedicated in 1981. The two temples' legal dates as temples fell, he discovered, on the same day, his own birthday; he said somebody had tricked him, that it came as a birthday present, and that he felt trapped. Through the seventies he had been strict that he was not to be called Roshi; by 1980 he allowed the title, and most people went on calling him Kobun.

The marriage was ending in these years. He had once steered a distraught student into the living room, demanded urgently to know whether he liked the new rug, then said that he himself had taken a vow never to separate from Harriet — and asked the student to take the same vow about his own wife, on the spot. Chrisann Brennan, pregnant with Jobs's child and unsupported, went to Kobun rather than to Jobs; she writes that he urged her with enthusiasm to keep the child, promised to help, and offered repeatedly to raise the child himself. In 1980 the family spent half a year on the Caribbean coast of the Dominican Republic, a last attempt at starting over; it did not mend. Harriet took Taido and Yoshiko to Little Rock, where she had family and could study nursing; Kobun helped with the move.

Taos

He chose New Mexico, one person who knew him insisted, for a single reason: to be within a day's drive of his children. Hiking above El Salto with Bob Watkins, he came on the traditional adobe that became Hokoji — Phoenix Light Temple, at eight thousand feet, founded in 1983 and dedicated in part to his father. Watkins spent his last money on the striker for the bowl gong; Kobun said the place would belong to whoever used it. He came to live in 1984, bought a place in Arroyo Seco, installed Watkins as resident priest, and began building a house whose foundation was ringed by a coiling dragon of set colored stones. The house stayed perpetually under construction; he sometimes bivouacked beside it for hours or nights. Stephanie Sirgo, a Juilliard-trained violinist then studying law, was his companion through these years; he ordained her with the name Saiho and named the rented Taos house Saiho-in after her. Taido spent several weeks with him every adolescent summer, days unusually free of public obligations. Once, alone in a house lent to him, he answered a knock from a young man who said his life was a mess. Kobun said his own life was a mess too and he doubted he could help; the man pressed, so Kobun let him in, sat him down, excused himself to the bathroom, and left through the window.

Richard Baker turned up in New Mexico around 1983, after the San Francisco scandal, looking for support. At some point in these years a bishop asked Kobun to Japan to help with the Soto Sect's handling of the American ethics cases; Hollis DeLancy, who went with him, left the only record of the trip. Alan Marlowe died at Arroyo Seco of AIDS and cancer, Kobun beside him. His last words: “The udumbara taxi has arrived.”

From 1987 he taught archery seminars with Shibata Sensei. At a kyudo intensive that July he said he had put down the bow for about ten years but his mind had never left the path, and that his root master had never taught him zazen — the whole teaching had been to be like him and not to be like him. It was at Esalen, on the cliff above the Pacific, that he turned from the target, sent the arrow far out over the water, and called it a bull's-eye.

Trungpa died in 1987. Asked years later whether one had needed to meet him, Kobun said: “He's a mystery man. I cannot understand it. I can feel him, but he's a impossible person.” He sat with the Naropa community through the transitional years, and in 1989 travelled to Rumtek in Sikkim to help arrange the departure for America of Trungpa's son. The California students got him back about once a year for sesshin; Carolyn Atkinson reckoned she got perhaps one hour of his conversation a year in that period — yet when she received a diagnosis of serious illness in the early nineties, he was on her doorstep two days later, off a plane from New Mexico.

Europe

His first European teaching trip came in 1988, to the Kamalashila Tibetan center near Köln, where he met the Kathmandu lamas Urgyen Rinpoche and Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche. He established Hosen-in in Luzern with Vanja and Lorly Palmers, and visited La Gendronnière, the French temple of Deshimaru — the same Deshimaru who had joined Sawaki's practice when Kobun ran the Komazawa sitting group thirty years before. Puregg, an alpine barn and farmhouse above Salzburg, opened in 1989 and was dedicated as Jakko-in, House of Stillness, in 1990; he led the Genzo-e — the sesshin given over to studying Dōgen — there each February, and helped Vanja Palmers establish Felsentor after it. In 1991 he gave dharma transmission to Palmers, his first heir. At Puregg he met Katrin.

The adoptive tie itself had been dissolved long before — on 28 February 1972, at Chino Roshi's decision, his health failing and a successor needed; the family register compiled that day records Kobun alone. But it was around 1990 that Kobun resumed the Otogawa name in America — which is why his first two children are named Chino and his second family Otogawa — and later in the decade he went back to Japan and made his peace with the old man. When Chino Roshi died in 1996 he wrote the funeral calligraphy in his own hand.

In 1996 he ordained Sister Theresa, a Catholic Franciscan nun who had found him after a dokusan held in 'Zenglish', Japanese and German with no interpreter — and who remained a nun of her order. She lives at Felsentor still. Her name for what she received: Kobun Zen.

Woodside and Bonny Doon

In March 1991 he officiated the wedding of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell at Yosemite, and that year Shingetsu-in was established on Jobs's Woodside property as his California residence. Brennan, visiting, found he had built a large tiered altar of photographs of Jobs's relatives, and sat through a mid-October dinner at which he needled Jobs in front of guests — making a computer, he suggested, was no different from growing a plant — while Jobs held his tongue. When Watkins once telephoned Jobs asking for money to help Kobun, he was told the money would come only if Kobun moved back; asked why he had never asked Jobs himself, Kobun said it had never occurred to him.

At the 1995 Los Angeles funeral of Maezumi Roshi, head of the Zen Center of Los Angeles he introduced David Chadwick to Katrin, his young German wife-to-be, already pregnant. Stephanie was also present; he said to her that children had never come to the two of them. That August, arriving late to the annual ministers' conference in Las Vegas, he stood up after the lunch break and announced to the assembly, senior clergy from Japan included: my wife — and there is a baby in her belly. To marry her he took American citizenship, and never filed the loss of Japanese nationality; on the family register in Kamo he is unmarried, childless, and alive. The wedding came at the turn of the year at Berkeley Zen Center, Mel Weitsman officiating, their infant daughter in arms; the day before, Jobs telephoned Weitsman to pay for a dinner party he himself, without a babysitter, could not attend.

Through the middle 1990s he largely withdrew from public teaching; he told Martin Mosko he was going into retreat. It was not silence. In April 1994 he taught the first week of a month-long dathün at Karme Chöling in Vermont, six talks — on tangaryo, ōryōki, Trungpa, the split self — and that same year led a calligraphy seminar at Puregg. Asked at Karme Chöling how to work with sorrow, he said: “Sad is sad. You taste it. It's good. Sorrow and sad are little bit different. Sorrow is certainly helpless. Sad maybe solvable. Losing somebody you love, and nothing can help — you are so sorrowful. You can not bring one back, you can not go with one. You have to remain and taste sorrow, until something is born out of it.”

Tatsuko was born in December 1995 in Taos, Maya in May 1997, and in March 1999 a son, Alyosha — named for the youngest Karamazov. After Alyosha's birth he told Mosko he was coming out of retreat and wanted to teach again. In the late 1990s the family settled in a Japanese-style farmhouse in Bonny Doon, near Santa Cruz, built by Ken Wing and Hollis DeLancy, and about ten of the old students met with him one Sunday afternoon a month at Carolyn Atkinson's house, five minutes away. At the last of those meetings — no one knew it was the last — he answered the perennial question of why they sit: that sitting is for making life meaningful, that self-acceptance is the hardest thing, and that practice is a candle in the darkest room. Some weeks after 11 September 2001 he was the guest of a Santa Cruz sitting group when a distressed young woman asked how to handle her fear and anger; he swayed back and forth, as he often did, and told her to do one kind thing for someone every day. By 2000 he had given the precepts to more than a hundred people. Somewhere in these years an Eiheiji missionary, sitting at Green Gulch, watched Kobun's most famous student stroll in unassuming, in jeans, and take his place in the circle like anyone else; of Kobun's students he said that what struck the heart was the sight of them practicing a pure Buddha-way, without admixture — this is Chino-san's stream after all.

Boulder

Late in 2001 he was appointed to the World Wisdom Chair at Naropa — the appointment arranged in weeks, the salary found in the reserve fund — and the chair passed to him formally from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi at a ceremony in January 2002. In 2001 he consecrated Hakubai, Martin Mosko's temple in Boulder. From early January 2002, while housing at Naropa was being renovated, the five of them lived in a twenty-five-year-old trailer at Shambhala Mountain Center — one small bedroom, one combined living space — and he commuted down to Boulder to teach. Reginald Ray, who visited every few weeks and knew the trailer, found its cramped interior unaccountably spacious and quiet while Kobun was in it. That spring he co-taught a calligraphy workshop with Keith Abbott; showing a documentary on brush making, when the image appeared of the first Buddhist priest to bring calligraphy to Japan, he straightened into zazen posture and held it for the rest of the film. Shortly before he died he gave Ray a calligraphy and translated it twice — first as a joke about the Colorado land being in Ray's mind, then literally: the sacred land is in your mind.

That spring he appeared at the office of the university's president, John Cobb — a lawyer, ill with cancer, unable to slow down — and invited him to the tea room on campus. He said nothing, and made tea. Cobb: “That was all it was — and yet, when I had drunk the tea and stepped out of the tea room, the leaden thing that had been pressing down on my head was utterly gone.” Before leaving for Europe for the summer he telephoned Martin Mosko from his own send-off party: Come. Let us exchange words of parting. When Mosko arrived, Kobun had already left.

Engelberg

In July 2002 the family was at Vanja Palmers' retreat place at Engelberg, Switzerland. Maya, five years old, went into the pond. He went in to save her, and they both drowned.

The funeral was held on 30 July, with forty or fifty people, mostly Zen students from Germany; Richard Baker and Vanja Palmers led the ceremony, taking daily advice from Keibun in Japan. Kobun lay in his robes with an heirloom brocade rakusu, the teacher's sceptre — the nyoi — in his hands. Maya was ordained posthumously and given a rakusu and a dharma name meaning Water Phoenix — phoenix being a character in her father's name as well. Some sat zazen through the night. The next day Vanja and David Schneider closed the coffin lid, the Heart Sutra was chanted, and the convoy drove an hour through the mountains to the crematorium. Katrin wept quietly.

He had been due to perform an ordination the day after he died — Manfred Herrigel, of the little Bregenz sitting group, attended a funeral instead. Afterward a poem in Kobun's hand reached him, written out beforehand to be read after the ceremony: Seeking satori, I climbed the mountain. At the mountain's top, I met my true self.

Angie Boissevain had been in the middle of her transmission when he died. Vanja Palmers completed it at Jikoji in 2004, and then the others he had left unfinished — Carolyn Atkinson, Jean Leyshon, Bob Watkins, and later Michael Newhall and Ian Forsberg — so the line went on. The ashes were divided among the places that had held him; Vanja Palmers carried the last of them to Jōkōji in the spring of 2006, and arrived the morning Keibun died. Fourteen years after Engelberg his daughter Tatsuko sat with a biographer for two days and broke the family's silence — the hardest testimony in the record, and the beginning, she said, of its mending.

Every event, with its date and source — the same material as a timeline, where the thin decades are countable rather than merely audible.

“Dharma talk,” which I don’t understand. What do you mean by dharma talk? Once it is spoken, it is a fake dharma — which I understand.Kobun, at a Tanjo-e sesshin