A Day in the Life

Today I posted some pictures of the virtual meetings that I have weekly with my personal students, I have 23 students who I meet with for a minimum of one hour each and every week, unless there is travel, illness or a retreat taking place. Many have questioned why I meet so long with students as this is not the ‘correct’ model for kōan practice that was brought to the West by the various teachers. I have been meeting with students for almost 14 years now and have only rarely participated in kōan interviews lasting only minutes. My second teacher, Zen Master Ji Bong had a reputation in the Kwan Um School of Zen as having a ‘professor style’ to his kongàn interviews.

I also had the opportunity also to study with Zen Master Seung Sahn in the interview room as he would make an exception when staying in Los Angeles, at Dharma Zen Center, and host interviews even though he was technically retired at the time. He always greeted me quite excitedly by saying, “Hello Great Abbot, how are you?” Once I performed prostrations he would ask me to take a seat and then he asked me if I had any questions. In my experience he allowed me to ask anything I wanted, he didn’t always answer the way I was hoping, and he engaged these questions freely. His love and kindness this way was always overflowing in the room. When it came to kongàns he was always to the point and would laugh out loud if I failed to come up with a good response.

Zen Master Ji Bong was the same way, although we would often work on sutras, or perhaps Zen Center business if necessary, as well as kongàns during our sessions. They were never limited to 10 minutes or less, and sometimes if some other individual required additional time he gave it to them freely.


I often wondered about the efficacy of the method I had experienced at Zen Centers outside of Kwan Um where students would run to the Teacher’s quarters and line up ringing a bell and then be asked to ‘present their kōan,' and the bell would ring if the answer was incorrect. The interviews were always short and directed at kōans only.

It occurred to me that in Monasteries in Asia when Teachers lived amongst their students, there was much more time for interaction. Some had said that it was because the monasteries in China were so large that it was necessary to have the encounter dialogues limited to a brief amount of time.

So let us examine the facts. In The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 1900-1950 (Harvard East Asian) Paperback – January 1, 1967 by Holmes Welch, Pages 3 – 4 he discusses in depth the size of the Monasteries in China.


“The distinction between clerical elite and proletariat is based on statistical evidence. About 1930 there were, as just mentioned, approximately 500,000 monks in China living in about 100,000 temples. Thus most temples were small, with an average of five monks each. These small temples or hereditary temples (tzu-sun miao), as they were called, differed in operation and purpose from the large The People of the Monastery public monasteries (shih-fang sung-lin), some of which had four or five hundred monks in permanent residence.

I have collected more or less detailed information on about one hundred large public monasteries with an average of about 130 monks apiece. I would assume that there were twice as many again on which I do not have such information, but that in these others the average number of resident monks was 50-75. If this assumption is correct, then China in the Republican period had about three hundred large public monasteries, with 20,000 to 25,000 monks, or less than 5 percent of the sangha. As many as 95 percent were clerical proletariat living in hereditary temples.”


So, ninety five percent of the monks in China had lived in these “Hereditary Temples” and had a more open methodology to the practice. Fewer monks meant the more hats each person would wear.

In looking for a chán document referring to the method employed in China for interviews I discovered, The Origins of Buddhist Monastic Codes in China, An Annotated Translation, and Study of the Chànyuan qīngguī by Venerable Yifa. [Compiled in 1103 by the Chan Buddhist monk Changlu Zongze (? – 1107?), Chanyuan qinggui (Rules of Purity for the Chan Monastery) is regarded as the earliest Chan monastic code in existence.] This translation, that is the closest thing to Báizhàng’s Original Chàn Code of Ethics, has this to say regarding the meeting of the Teacher with the monks in the monastery.

“In some monasteries the entering monk and the abbot discuss the previous kōan, or they engage in conversation, or the monk asks for further instruction. Separate times are allocated for these three methods of inquiry. In other monasteries, any or all of the three methods are employed in one session.”

Many people can find fault with Zen Master Ji Bong or myself for spending too much time with students and claim we aren't following the correct precedent. And perhaps given the state of practice at Monasteries in Taiwan, Korea and Japan when the first wave of teachers came West, this might be a fair assumption.


Frankly, I am not concerned with what others do with their groups or centers, I only know that by spending time with students the way I do allows us to explore Buddhism in our lives and we come up with various ways of addressing the unique situations which exist in the various locations in the US and Mexico. We are, after all, a fledgling order trying to find a way into the hearts of North Americans.

This might not be the way others approach it, and by writing this I am not degrading anyone or any methodology, I am merely presenting an alternative that seems to work quite well in the 21st Century.

May all beings be liberated.