Clairissa Beattie, Rev.

 

A transcript of a Recorded Dharma Talk for Wallowa Buddhist Temple Congregation, November 6, 2020.

From west to east, unseen, flowed out the Mind of India’s greatest Sage
And to the source kept true as an unsullied stream is clear.¹

So begins the Sandōkai, the medieval Chinese Chan scripture which sets in motion the recitation of the Dharma in the Morning Office, sung in plainsong at daybreak by the monastic community. It follows directly on the Kesa Verse, with which we enrobe ourselves with our daily vow to train, our promise to do our best to follow the Buddha’s example:

How great and wondrous are the clothes of enlightenment,
Formless and embracing every treasure;
I wish to unfold the Buddha’s teaching,
That I may help all living things. ²

The Sandōkai is also the Scripture with which we begin the yearly Festival Memorial for the Founder, the ceremony which sets in motion the liturgical season for giving thanks. Here at the Wallowa Buddhist Temple we honor Reverend Master Jiyu Kennett as our temple’s Founder, because Reverend Master Jiyu was Reverend Master Meidō’s teacher, and thus it was in her name that Reverend Master Meidō established this temple.

During our daily Morning Service, the celebrant visits the Founder’s Shrine and does deep bows to the Eternal, the Founder, and the Ancestors, giving thanks that they have appeared in this world. She appeals to them for help with all decisions throughout the coming day “owing to the recognition within oneself of one’s humanity.”³ Each day, the entire community offers gratitude to the Founder and all the Ancestors by reciting the Ancestral Line, distinctly speaking each name of the eighty-five generations, dozens and dozens of human beings reaching back to Shakyamuni Buddha, and even further endlessly back to those before him, expressing gratitude for passing on the teaching. So, here in this transient, wandering world of gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disgrace, elation and sorrow – what does this “passing on” really mean?

Reverend Master Jiyu-Kennett was an Englishwoman who in her thirties crossed the seas to train as a monk in a Zen monastery in Japan during the 1960s – quite unusual for anyone, let alone a woman, in her day. She came back from Asia to settle at the base of a massive volcano halfway along the west coast of North America, where she established a training monastery at Mount Shasta. There, Reverend Master Meidō first became a Buddhist in 1974, was ordained as a monk by Reverend Master Jiyu in 1980, and was given Dharma Transmission by her in 1983. Reverend Master Meidō had been training at the foot of that mountain for twenty-two years when she found herself deeply prompted to venture out on her own to Wallowa County where, opening her heart, she established the Wallowa Buddhist Temple.

At the yearly memorial for a temple’s founder, the day is dedicated to remembering with gratitude what has been offered through the life, training, and teaching of the master who has spread her bowing mat wide in an invitation to all beings to join her, and who was joined by a disciple who did the same in her turn. So, we all know Reverend Master Meidō, our teacher, well. Who was her teacher, this woman whom we honor as our Founder?

Much can be learned about Reverend Master Jiyu’s life and training by reading her book The Wild, White Goose⁴ which tells the story, in the form of her personal diaries, of her travels from Britain to Asia, to train with her teacher, The Very Reverend Keidō Chisan Kohō, later the Founder of Shasta Abbey. The dedication to The Wild, White Goose reads “To all women seeking Spiritual Truth and especially to those who have ever entered into Zen training.”⁵

Reverend Master Meidō has said that upon first encountering Reverend Master Jiyu, she realized that there was no excuse whatsoever not to do her own spiritual work fully – Reverend Meidō knew that her being a woman did not mean that she could not become a monk (which was the form her spiritual calling took for her). This understanding was thanks both to her own deep sincerity and to the appearance of her Teacher in the world, because Reverend Master Jiyu was so clearly, so fully, living the practice that any doubt in this regard dropped away.

Of course, the teaching is offered to both monks and laypeople, the Dharma is offered equally to both men and women, in order to help beings, who all have equal Buddha Nature; this was how the Buddha himself offered the teaching back in his day. This book dedication of Reverend Master Jiyu’s “to all women seeking Spiritual Truth” is not intended to exclude men; it’s just that historically women have had something of a struggle to get to this now given place of “training equally” that my generation, in this culture, in this lineage, could just walk right in to, once Reverend Master Jiyu had gotten it freed up from where it had become encumbered.

It so happens that shortly after the yearly Founder’s festival, Reverend Master Jiyu died peacefully on November 6th, 1996, and so we gratefully remember her twice this time of year. And because I happened to be at her monastery on the mountain, amongst the great tall pines, during the week of ceremonies following her death in 1996, and because the events of this time made a deep impression on me, I personally tend to remember her as the season sometimes pauses in its turning from fall to winter snows.

Here at the Wallowa Buddhist Temple this week, Reverend Meidō has set out our little harvest of sunflower heads to dry in the sun. The yellow aspen leaves shower down in windy gusts and skitter down the hill of the gravel drive, whispering “fleeting, fleeting.” Our Segaki Toro⁶ has turned to ash, burn piles smolder in the fields around the county, the skeletons of deciduous trees are laid bare, and the carpet of dead pine needles is being raked into piles. It is the time for the tart taste of apple and plum, and warm pumpkin soup, fried garden tomatoes and sweet onions up from the root cellar, and hazy golden light and sun-shadow clouds and change, change, change, in the dusking air. As usual, at this liminal, shifting hinge before the colder days to come, in my own way I think of Reverend Master Jiyu with gratitude, and I will tell you why.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been twenty-four years, since she died! Back in ’96, I was in my late twenties. I had been training several years as a lay Buddhist, working away at various jobs to pay off my student loan debt to be able to become a monk, driving up to visit the monastery about every month, and attending my local meditation group weekly, doing my spiritual work as best I could. And, as I had when I first stumbled onto the practice, I was suffering.

On November sixth, word went out on the phone tree that Reverend Master Jiyu had died that morning, and within twenty-four hours I had traded away my shifts at work and was heading north up the interstate together with the older couple who led our meditation group in their home. Over the following week, the three of us stayed near the monastery with a family in the Mt. Shasta congregation, while the monks prepared and performed the many solemn ceremonies for the death and burial of their teacher, abbess, and founder of our Order. The temple was closed to the public as the monks went into the traditional seven days of retreat; nonetheless, our sincere offering to be of assistance “however was most needed” with no expectations, was graciously accepted by the monastic community.

This older couple and I would enter the monastery gates around dawn each morning, then leave again at dusk that evening to return rather tired to our lodging. Each day we three laypeople quietly offered our help, which consisted mostly of food preparation in the monastery’s enormous kitchen in silent working meditation, freeing the kitchen monks to go about their duties related to the week-long ceremonial, meditation, and other necessary tasks that accompany a death.

The monks generously invited us to join them for a number of the monastic ceremonies. Somewhere in the swirl of events that week, I recall quite vividly climbing the steps up onto the main altar and approaching, in my turn, Reverend Master Jiyu’s very dignified open casket with two chaplain monks sitting there utterly still in meditation on either side, as I bowed before her and made a promise from the bottom of my heart.

In all that transpired that week, virtually all of it in a most profound silence even when discussing necessary details, I remember the real and respectful grief of the congregation, and I was struck by the caring, practical determination of her disciples, as everyone went about doing all that needed to be done, in steadfast harmony.

I remember the deep stillness pervading all corners of the monastery grounds, the great bell tolling, tolling, tolling… An image comes of the strongest monks – including Reverend Meidō, the only woman in that stalwart group – serving as pallbearers, hefting her solid wooden casket in the large procession to the new gravesite beside the monks’ meditation hall, and then the sound of the chanting of The Scripture of Great Wisdom⁷ accompanied by the fresh earth falling onto her sarcophagus below, as we each in turn offered three shovels-full.

And I recall most distinctly that when we three had first arrived there on the mountain, the air was warm and the leaves and needles gently falling; and that over the course of the week, the wind picked up and blew colder; and that as we pulled away from the monastery gates on the very chilly evening of the twelfth, turning to look back over my shoulder from the back seat of the car as the first snow fell softly, I recall thinking “Oh, the season has shifted now, and Reverend Master Jiyu did not see it change,” and at that moment I knew we all would go on, and that we all had everything we needed – even I had everything I needed – to carry on doing the spiritual work to be done.

These lines from the offertory for the Founder’s Festival Memorial give wings to our gratitude:

Her Dharma Eye was as bright as the moon and her Light of Wisdom lit the darkness of those in delusion. Because of her deep Meditation, she knew true freedom and her heart was as constant as an iron rock; she could not help but to rescue all the deluded and spread the Dharma. Just as Indra pointed a blade of grass at the earth and a magnificent temple sprang up on that very spot so, wherever a True Heart exists, the Dharma springs up also; in the same way has our Founder made possible this temple as our training place… The followers of our Founder spread as the branches of a tree and the Wheel of the Dharma continues to roll; the temple prospers and its gate shall always stand wide open for all who truly seek the Way. The offering that we place in the fathomless begging bowl is formless and unlimited in weight and flavour for it is the offering of our own Buddhist training that we bring today.⁸

So, what did I promise Reverend Master Jiyu, in her casket, there on the main altar? As I walked up the steps, I had nothing particular in mind, I was in a long line of people, respectfully taking my turn as it came around. Then, there she was, all laid out with such great care by her monks. I realize now that it wasn’t only she, it was also all that surrounded her as if growing out of her very existence – the altar, the ceremony hall, the monastery, and the good people all doing their very best – all possible because she followed the deepest promptings of her heart, and responded to the example offered by her teacher.

This is how doing one’s spiritual work helps others – this is the power of example. She had done her magnificent best. When I heard the call that example makes, I very naturally responded. Quite unexpectedly there came the clearest realization that she had given her life. It just struck me all at once and so completely, that she had literally given her very life – every last bit of it – wholeheartedly, for all beings. She had laid her very life and the lives of all beings carefully and firmly and reverently upon the altar of the heart, and we were there upon it at that very moment.

And that priceless offering somehow actually included me, and drew forth something from me. So what else could I do? Silently, with my bow, I promised her (simply, from my heart) that I would do my very best.

Looking back, I think of what I was like, then. I was young, and I was very caught up in my own suffering. Now, I am older, and while I still do get caught up, I am learning, with Reverend Master Meidō’s help and example, to do my very best to get on with what needs to be done, to offer my life for the good of all living things, every day and every moment.

The longer I go on, the more grateful I become that Reverend Master Jiyu opened her heart, and let her teaching shine for so many others – especially her disciples, most especially my own teacher – who have carried on offering it, “as an unsullied stream is clear.”

 

Notes

1. P.T.N.H. Jiyu-Kennett, The Liturgy of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives for the Laity, Mt. Shasta: Shasta Abbey Press, 1990, 59-61.
2. Jiyu-Kennett, Liturgy, 57-58.
3. Jiyu-Kennett, Liturgy, 80.
4. Rev. Rōshi P.T.N.H. Jiyu-Kennett. The Wild, White Goose: The Diary of a Female Zen Priest. Mt. Shasta: Shasta Abbey Press, 2002.
5. Jiyu-Kennett, Wild White Goose, dedication page.
6. “The Ceremonial Burning of Wooden Tombstones, Etcetera, at the Time of the Ceremony of Feeding the Hungry Ghosts.” See Jiyu-Kennett, Liturgy, 178-182.
7. Jiyu-Kennett, Liturgy, 72-74.
8. Original text P.T.N.H Jiyu-Kennett, “Festival Memorial for the Founder,” The Liturgy of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives (Mt. Shasta: Shasta Abbey Press, 1987), 356-362. Modified for use at the Wallowa Buddhist Temple.

Copyright © 2020 Wallowa Buddhist Temple. Used with permission.