“Go Straight, Finish the Great Work of Life and Death”

In 1979, I was living in Madison, Wisconsin as a student and had tried Zen with a local group. When I visited New York that summer, I met my cousin Ken at the center on East 39th Street in Manhattan where he was living and practicing with a Zen Master.

 I remember there was a large room near the front door, with a lot of shelves and cubbies.  There was a round table for meals and floor-to-ceiling windows facing East 31st Street, in New York’s garment district. Within, there was an altar, and blue thick carpeting in the dharma room. The area didn’t meet my expectations of a Zen Center, it was in the middle of a commercial zone with lots of trucks and noise. It probably had been some kind of showroom in the past.

I met Zen Master Seung Sahn then. It was a hot summer afternoon. He was trying to fix a hardware problem in one of the bathrooms, and he was banging away in there. When he came out, I asked if I could speak to him.

He wore the loose gray pants of a Korean monk, and a bright clean white t-shirt. He still had a giant screwdriver in his hand. I told him I had been sitting for a while, but I wasn’t so comfortable with my group, I thought the style was a little tight.

His face twisted into a grimace and he squeezed the big screwdriver. “Tsssss!” he hissed, “Yesss! Too tight! Not necessary!” or something like that. He gave me a direct look in the eyes and I felt somehow relieved. Then he was back in the bathroom, making a lot of noise.

I felt an immediate connection with him. There was nothing unusual about our conversation, but he hadn’t tried to convince me of anything about his teaching style, or show me his realization, and I felt he knew exactly what I was asking him.

I went off to Chinatown and bought a big cookie shaped like a fat laughing Buddha. A few of us had dinner in the outer room. He asked where the cookie came from. “Very good! Eat the Buddha!” I thought buying the cookie was the smartest thing I did in my whole life.

I read his book, adopted the style of practice, and started a mail correspondence with him. He always answered promptly. Nothing was more exciting than a letter from him in the mailbox.

I finally moved back to New York. One day someone said “Goddamn.” Dae Soen Sa Nim (our form of address for Zen Master Seung Sahn) asked what the word actually meant. I said it meant that God was sending someone to Hell.

“Oh! Then Goddamn your mind!”

A long-standing joke started. When I first came around, I was “Ken’s cousin.” After he moved to New Haven, he was “Jan’s cousin.” Then he came back and the whole thing kept swinging back and forth.

One day some years later Dae Soen Sa Nim came to visit the Zen Center, and we were talking to him. “Ken,” he asked, why does your cousin have two nostrils?” I imagined Ken was searching for some kind of kong-an answer, but after a second Dae Soen Sa Nim broke the tension. “Because he shaved off his moustache!”  

So that was the energy of our practice and the place back then, and today we are still at it.