Aitken Roshi’s Death and My Taking Up Koan Introspection

We’re back from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Another fantastic father-son trip and I’m now settling into home life for the next few months, getting ready for another school year, and more regular blogging too.

Above is a shot from our campsite one early morning. I choose this shot because I learned upon returning to cell phones and email that Robert Aitken Roshi had died last week at 93.

“Woe on woe. Oh, Death canst thou sometimes be timely,” wrote Melville in Moby Dick about a blacksmith whose wife and children had died years before and whose death would have been an act of compassion. 

Maybe this time death was timely. Aitken Roshi had a long and fruitful Zen career and left about 14 direct successors who have about 20 successors already (my rough count from the Harada Yasutani Zen page).

Melville adds later, “…Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried.” 

Aitken Roshi precedes us all into the great Untried. May we try what our hearts call us to try in this very life. 

As for me, what my heart has long called me to try is koan introspection. That might not seem strange to you but I was born into a Zen family of shikantaza. 

Nonin, my true dharma brother, recently introduced me for a talk saying that I was the Katagiri Roshi disciple with the most Rinzai spirit. Or maybe he said that I once had it. 

In any case, I’ve dabbled in koans with several teachers over the years and then recently the opportunity arose to work through the Harada Yasutani koan curriculum with James Myo-on Ford (along with Melissa Blacker and David Rynick too at Boundless Way) and I seized the day. I’m very glad I did.

This crew is among the descendants of Aitken Roshi (although David’s lineage is mainly through George Bowman). I took some koan notes with me to the Boundary Waters that included comments by Aitken and some of his responses to the koans and so I found myself personally touched by his death in a way that I would not have been a few months ago.

One of the moments that drew me to this group of teachers was a while back when I was offering a workshop at Boundless Way on Zazenshin. I got into my usual harangue about how in the modern Zen world koan and shikantaza are regarded as separate practices but for Dogen koan and shikantaza were very intimate. 

Melissa jumped in and said that in their system koan and shikantaza were not separate. 

That stole my thunder and led to other conversations that led to my jumping into working with them.

I’m much in the thick of the study now so what follows are tentative thoughts, of course. 

One of the primary criticisms of koan study made in Soto shikantaza circles is that it focuses on the ugly and evil gaining idea called “kensho.”

It seems to me that kensho is only one little step in the process – and is neither a gaining idea nor ugly and evil. The vast majority of the first 100 koans (including the various parts and follow-ups) are about actualization of insight.

And as I’ve rudely said in this blog before, practice-enlightenment without enlightenment (a.k.a., kensho) is often just practice-delusion. 

If we haven’t turned around, how can we practice what we haven’t experienced? 

Anyhow, I’ve studied Dogen Zen for 30 years and find the koan system to be wonderfully in line with what Dogen actually wrote, although not necessarily in line with many interpretations that are popular today. 

James has generously supported my wish to offer the koans that I’ve passed through to students and so I’ve begun doing that. 

Next Monday, August 16th, I’ll be giving a talk about koan practice and how it is intimate with shikantaza in Minneapolis at the Heartwood Mindfulness Center, 7:00pm. If there’s interest, I’ll continue offering a class there on Monday nights in the fall on this same theme.

That’s the change coming on that I hinted at a while back. More later on all this. It’s been a very rich time for me and I hope to offer it to others.