Palolo Zen Center and American Zen

Deep in Palolo valley, where the road narrows to one lane with blind turns, we are learning to sit still. “What if we have an itch?” asks a science writer from Wai‘anae.

“Ah,” says Kathy Ratliffe, a teacher at the Palolo Zen Center, delighted by the question. “We are so used to scratching an itch. Physically and metaphorically. Just don’t. Think on it and it becomes all you think about. Return to your breath,” she says, “and it goes away.”

And yet most of us are here at a Saturday morning orientation to Zen practice because of an itch—a desire, as the science writer had put it earlier when we introduced ourselves, to “try to find a place in the world.”
We are in the Palolo Zen Center’s zendo, or meditation hall, screened in and open to the sounds of the wind, of Pälolo’s frequent rain and sometimes insistent roosters. Outside is a bodhi tree, a descendant of the one under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. Ratliffe says that this bodhi tree supposedly came from a slip of the tree at Koko An Zendo, the precursor to the current center, and that tree came from a slip from the tree at Foster Botanical Garden, which came from a tree in Sri Lanka, which came from a slip from the original bodhi tree under which the Buddha sat 2,500 years ago. “But as with many things in Buddhism, you don’t know how much is real and how much is not,” Ratliffe says. “But it points to a truth.”

This introduction to Zen Buddhism reminds me of high school chemistry. At first we learn that an atom is made up of electrons orbiting a nucleus in a circular fashion, and then we learn that it’s not really circular or spherical, but more like the petals of a flower balloon, and then that actually, you can’t always count on the electrons, those frenetic, unreliable things, being where—or even what—we think they are. We are taught only what we can understand at the time. But also that we can’t count on anything. Except, in the case of Zen Buddhism, to sit and breathe and the anxieties and itches of the self will fall away.

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Robert Aitken, sometimes called “the dean of American Zen” and one of the first Americans to be fully sanctioned as a teacher of Zen Buddhism, founded what would become the Palolo Zen Center in 1959 with his wife, Anne Hopkins Aitken. Robert Aitken, born in Philadelphia in 1917, moved to Honolulu with his family when his father took a job as an anthropologist at Bishop Museum. He took a break from college and was working as a civilian in construction on Guam when World War II broke out. He was captured by the Japanese and interned in a camp in Kobe, Japan. Seeing his voraciousness in reading and writing, one of the guards lent him RH Blyth’s Zen in English Literature. “I read it over and over, perhaps ten times, and underwent many strange experiences,” Aitken wrote in the afterword of Taking the Path of Zen, his introductory guide to the practice. “The world seemed transparent, and I was absurdly happy despite our miserable circumstances.” Then, by chance or fate, the camp where Blyth was interned—an English teacher in Japan, Blyth was detained as a British enemy alien when the war broke out)—was combined with Aitken’s. For the next year until the end of the war, Blyth taught Aitken about Zen. Aitken vowed after the war to return to the country that imprisoned him to study zazen, or seated meditation, and its path to freedom.

After finishing an undergraduate degree in English literature and then a master’s in Japanese literature at the University of Hawai‘i, Aitken returned to Japan to train under Soen Nakagawa, who ultimately gave him permission to establish a Zen group in the United States. And so, in 1959, in the living room of Robert and Anne’s Kuli‘ou‘ou home, four people gathered for zazen, and the Diamond Sangha (“sangha” is Sanskrit for community) was born. It was such a small thing in the beginning, but it was part of the emergence of Buddhism in America through the ’50s to the ’70s. Poet laureate WS Merwin came to Hawai‘i to study Zen with Aitken, and Gary Snyder, who inspired Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, has close ties with the Diamond Sangha, which now includes approximately seventy Zen centers around the world that trace their lineage to Aitken’s teachings. The current Palolo Zen Center was built in the late 1980s by members of the Diamond Sangha when it outgrew its previous space, and about forty people now do zazen there regularly.

Zen Buddhism wasn’t new to Hawai‘i when Aitken began teaching, though the Diamond Sangha made it more accessible to those of non-Japanese descent. In 1903 the first two Soto Zen temples were founded on Kaua‘i and O‘ahu to help immigrant laborers from Japan cope with dislocation. These temples functioned more like churches and community centers, places of ceremony, of weddings and funerals, of bon festivals and classes for everything from taiko drumming to sewing. There are now nine Soto Zen temples and one zendö in the state; they have evolved into a unique form of Hawai‘i Zen Buddhism.

Michael Kieran, who now leads the Palolo Zen Center, found his way to the Diamond Sangha in 1973, when he was a graduate student in philosophy at UH (a brief detour from his career as a commercial refrigeration contractor). By then the zendö had expanded and moved to Mänoa, the sangha swelling to thirty or so long-haired, anti-establishment hippies—Kieran among them. “It was such an unusual period in our lives—all the different things that were happening then, the protests against the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, women’s movement, psychoactive drugs, the music, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, this anti-authoritarian fever,” he says. “There was the threat of nuclear war, and then John F. Kennedy was assassinated, then Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And then Nixon and Watergate and all that—it was just a wild, open time and a time of great change.”
At the same time, his brushes with Zen “spoke to me in a way that nothing else ever had. So I wanted to find out more. And I discovered, well hey, there’s actually a practice that you do. It’s not just an intellectual thing. I felt at home in the practice and the searching for more clarity about what is this life, and I discovered a lot of other people for whom that was important, including our teacher.”

*****

“I don’t feel like a stool, I feel like a human,” despairs a young woman. During the orientation, Ratliffe tells us that when we sit, there should be three points of contact with the ground for stability. We’re all a little nervous about sitting correctly—we fear our human bodies will betray us, keep us from enlightenment. We ask about adjustments for sore knees, hip replacements, stiff joints. We fidget with our cushions and go to the bathroom multiple times before it’s time to sit. Ratliffe tells us the figure at the front of the zendö is the god of wisdom and action, with a scroll in one hand and a sword in the other—to cut through delusion. “What is a delusion?” Ratliffe asks. “Everything. This life is not what we think.” At the moment, however, it feels less like life is a bundle of delusions than of physical frailties.

“Robert Aiken used to say, ‘Zen is not meditation,’” says Kieran. “It’s not meditation in the sense of meditating on something. It’s waking up, it’s paying attention. It’s not watching your thoughts or observing. It’s different from a lot of people’s understanding of mindfulness practice. The point of Zen is engagement. So, instead of thinking, of going from thought to thought to thought, or observing, watching and labeling things, you’re just learning how to hold one thought. By learning to hold our mind steady on a single thought, we can start to experience directly what the mind is. And then, when you open that up, you keep giving yourself opportunities to experience it more and more clearly and integrate it into your life, what you realize about yourself—about who you are—the insight comes in that direct encounter.”

From what I can see, many of those who find their way to the Palolo Zen Center are not looking for the answers to “How do I become successful?” but rather, to “What is success?” and “What is ‘I’?” (I’m sure my mom would rather I stick to the first question.) For those answers, the Zen Buddhists say, follow the example of Buddha and simply sit and breathe. So while Aitken and teachers in the Diamond Sangha have done away with some of the rituals and rules of Zen Buddhism—removing the patriarchal language, establishing a community welcoming to women and largely stripped of hierarchy, utilizing consensus-based decision-making (you should hear their discussions on what to do about the wild chickens whose shrieks enter the zendö)—zazen at the Zen center is still highly formalized and disciplined. We are taught to bow when entering and exiting the zendö, listen for the chants and the chimes of bells concluding zazen, and given guidelines on what to wear when sitting (clothing that’s loose, dark, free from distraction).

Because we don’t exist in a vacuum, discovering who we are is more meaningful with other people, the same way love is pointless without someone to practice it with. “There’s an element that we have to realize together,” says Kieran. “In the way we interact with each other, in what we do with each other, how we treat each other. And that’s a fundamental part of our practice.” This, he says, is the importance of a sangha. The Palolo Zen Center is a lay temple, which means it doesn’t have an ordained minister and its members have day jobs. (Ratliffe is the chair of the department of educational psychology as well as a pediatric physical therapist who has worked across the Pacific Islands, while Kieran owned a commercial refrigeration business before retiring. Among the Diamond Sangha membership, there is a surprising number of astrophysicists: four, as Ratliffe exclaims when she discovers one of the women at the orientation is also one.) No monks, nuns or priests live here, though there is a residential program for up to six people to stay a minimum of two months. At the moment there is only one resident, Crystal Zhong, a doctoral student at the University of Hawai‘i, who came to the Diamond Sangha shortly after arriving in Honolulu from China in 2015. She sought out Chinese or Taiwanese monasteries in Honolulu, but they didn’t have the focus on zazen that she desired. She found it in the Diamond Sangha, with its twice-weekly two-hour zazen and periodic sesshin, or silent intensive retreats, where up to twenty-eight people live at the Palolo Zen Center to practice and sit from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. for eight days straight.

“Language is so intimately connected with all of our thinking, so [silence] allows our thinking also to quiet down,” Kieran says. “And we start to connect with one another on a much deeper level than all of the distinctions and differences that we’re usually constructing in our minds. You can’t reach that kind of focus and intensity, generally, on your own. That is the part of that sangha element that is important.”

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“I started questioning what the purpose of life was, you know, these existential questions that a lot of teenagers have,” says Ratliffe of her journey to Zen Buddhism. “And a lot of teenagers outgrow it, get involved in their lives and put those questions aside. But I never did outgrow it. So when I was in high school, I started reading everything I could about any kind of spiritual practice. I was reading the Bhagavad Gita; I was reading Be Here Now, by Ram Dass; and I was reading about the Farm founded by Stephen Gaskin and all these books about spiritual groups, trying to figure out what these people are looking for. What are they finding?” All that reading, she says, and she still didn’t know.

Ratliffe majored in religion with a minor in East Asian studies and studied aikido, attaining a black belt. (“There’s nothing like flying through the air,” she says.) Though like many martial arts it had a spiritual aspect, it wasn’t enough. She kept searching. The spiritual groups she visited were “saying things like, ‘Believe what we have to tell you and you can join us.’ No thank you, I’m not really interested in believing anything. What I really want to do is find out for myself. And then I went to an orientation at the Rochester Zen Center. And they said, ‘Don’t believe anything that we tell you. Here’s a way for you to find out for yourself.’ And I actually burst into tears, because it was like I finally have found a path that will work for me. Nobody’s trying to tell me anything. I can use this method, this zazen, and look for myself and see what’s true. There are people here who can guide me. And it was wonderful. I’ve been doing zazen ever since.”

Ratliffe was 22 at the time. She joined the Diamond Sangha in 1983, and recently, more than four decades after starting her Zen training, became a teacher—the first female teacher in the Diamond Sangha lineage.

*****

The day after orientation, I attend a Zoom zazen. At this point in the pandemic, most sessions are held in person at the Palolo Zen Center, but one Sunday a month virtual sessions allow some of the more far-flung members to participate. The zazen is followed by a summary of a recent talk by Kieran and Nelson Foster, a former teacher at the Palolo Zen Center and teacher at his own zendö in Northern California. The topic: “Zen Teachings for Times of Unprecedented Uncertainty.” When Kieran and I speak later, he tells me about the upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s and remarks that this moment—with the pandemic, environmental crises, technology-related uncertainties, the social and political climate—feels similar. And just as before, it seems more people are turning to the Diamond Sangha: Twice as many people have signed up for orientations since the pandemic, many of them young.
During the Zoom talk, Kieran speaks of the grounding of the Zen practice. And then he says something that reverberates as I sit trying to write this article about a religion (which might not even be a religion, depending on whom you ask) that is at once direct and opaque, poetic and paradoxical, transmitted not through sermons or lessons but through experience.

“Ours is the practice of not-knowing,” he says. “Not projecting what we think we know onto what is actually presented. None of this has ever happened before. So there’s a kind of mystery about it. And it helps to pay attention to see what’s happening.” Kieran recalls something Aitken once said: “Our practice is not to clear up the mystery, but to make the mystery clear.”

Originally published in Hana Hou