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Woodstock Times - Features | 10/15/2009 |
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Master of mountains and rivers
Zen Mountain Monastery founder John 'Daido' Loori dies at 78 |
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by Andrea Barrist Stern
Since ancient times wise ones and sages have lived by the water. When they live by the water they catch fish or they catch humans or they catch the Way. These are all traditional water styles. And going further, there must be catching the self, catching the hook, being caught by the hook and being caught by the Way.
--From the Mountains and Rivers Sutra by 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji
John "Daido" Loori, 78, founder and abbot of the Zen Mountain Monastery in Mt. Tremper, a renowned photographer, and a teacher who was widely considered to be one of the most influential Zen Buddhist masters in the West, died at the monastery on Friday, October 9. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer 18 months earlier.
Over the past three decades, Loori became recognized as an important commentator on the writings of the 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji, the founder of the Soto school of Japanese Zen Buddhism. Dogen's "Mountains and Rivers" sutra had an enormous impact on Loori's life and teachings and eventually lent its name to the Mountains and Rivers Order (MRO) Loori established. In a unique blend, the order cultivates an appreciation of the relationship of the Zen arts and spirituality with the natural environment. (Zen is a sect of Buddhism that emphasizes sitting meditation and direct teacher-to-disciple transmission.)
Loori was the author of 20 books on Buddhism, including a trilogy of photography books devoted to Dogen as well as a translation of and commentary on part of the Shobogenzo by the master that took Loori a decade to complete. He also directed, filmed or produced ten documentary works and several art videos that interweave poetry, music and visual imagery. He had well over 60 one-person photography shows, including the 2004 exhibit "Art in Nature" at the American Museum of Natural History, and 100 group shows to his credit. "I don't keep track of such things anymore," he told this writer in an interview that year.
Loori believed the same process that is used in creativity should be used to live one's life. In his 2004 book, The Zen of Creativity, Cultivating Your Artistic Life (Ballantine Books), he posed, "So, what remains when the self is forgotten in zazen [seated Zen meditation]? Everything. Nothing is missing - except the barrier between you and everything else. You realize yourself as the whole phenomenal universe. Given this fact, then what is the self that is expressed in self-expression? Zen's answer would be that when the self disapp ears, the brush paints by itself, the dance dances itself, the poem writes itself. There is no longer a gap between artist, subject, audience, and life. This is not an accident or chance occurrence."
In a magazine interview in the 1990s, Loori referred to his method of teaching as "radical conservatism" because of his effort to prevent a dilution of the Soto Zen teachings in the West. Yet, even while adhering to the 13th century monastic codes that originated with Dogen, he created an order that adapted Zen to both a lay and monastic setting, appealing to Wall Street executives and ordained monastics alike and setting the stage for a new generation of Zen practitioners in the West.
East and West
"He played a very formative role in broadening the output of Zen, from the way it was originally perceived as mainly meditation, without compromising the rigor of the traditions," said the noted Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, a professor of Indo-Tibet Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, co-founder of Tibet House in New York City, and founder of the Menla Retreat Center in Phoenicia. "He encouraged people to get into the environmental arts, engage in the livelihood of the community by starting Dharma Communications [the order's media and publishing arm], do prison work and focus on the ethics of the community. He was also really great in his own right as an artist."
A towering figure physically as well as spiritually, Loori had one foot in the East and one in the West, broadening the appeal of his teachings for a growing audience of westerners who were seeking a direct spiritual experience. He was a tattooed former Navy man, chemist, and commercial photographer before receiving dharma transmission from Taizan Maezumi Roshi in 1986. Loori was recognized as a lineage holder in both the vigorous school of koan Zen and the subtle but rigorous teachings of Dogen.
In 1980, he started the Zen Mountain Monastery as the Zen Arts Center. The Mountains and Rivers Order he created and under which the monastery now operates teaches an innovative program called "The Eight Gates of Zen," a modern manifestation of the Buddha's eightfold path. In addition to the Zen Mountain Monastery, it also runs the Zen Center of New York City in Brooklyn, and is affiliated with active MRO centers in Buffalo, Philadelphia, Vermont, and New Zealand, as well as various meditation groups in the New York State prison system.
In a past discourse at the monastery, Loori described finding the former Lutheran camp that would become the Zen Mountain Monastery. "The site, as it turns out, is on a mountain with two rivers crossing in front," he said. "That seemed so auspicious to me in its relationship to the [Mountains and Rivers] sutra that I started studying it again. Then, the morning after we moved into the building, I stopped at a coffee shop and bought a copy of the local paper, The Woodstock Times. I opened it and on the second page, in big, bold type right across the top, it said, 'These mountains and rivers of the present are the manifestation of the Way of ancient Buddhas. -Dogen Zenji, 13th Century Zen Master.' I started reading the article, and it was all about the sutra. Remember, this is a small town newspaper, quoting and commenting on Master Dogen...I got very excited about it and went to the newspaper office to see...who around here would have written such an article. They said, 'The editor.' I burst into his office and asked, 'Did you write this article?' He said, 'Yes.' I said, 'This is a very obscure text. It hasn't been published in English anywhere. Where did you find out about Dogen Zenji?' He looked me straight in the eye and said, 'Doesn't everyone know about Dogen Zenji?' As it turned out, the Mountains and Rivers Sutra was included as a chapter in a book called Mountain Spirit, just published by Overlook Press, a local company, and the local paper was running a story on the book.''
It was a story Loori reveled in telling and repeated often. The area's mountains and rivers became the spirit of the order's practice and the sutra became a personal koan for Loori. An avid environmentalist, he led the creation of the Zen Environmental Studies Institute, which conducted wilderness retreats during which Loori was said to be as comfortable navigating the Adirondack's rapids as he was in Zen meditation.
Traditional roots
Born in Jersey City, New Jersey on June 14, 1931 to a working-class family, Loori joined the Navy and later worked for 17 years as a chemist while nurturing his love of photography that would eventually lead him to Zen.
Loori began photographing at the age of ten; by the time he had reached his mid-thirties, photography had become an important part of his life. While working as a research scientist, he began teaching photography part-time at a local college but it wasn't until the late 1960s at an exhibit by the renowned photographer Minor White titled "The Sound of One Hand" (after the famous Zen koan) that spirituality and photography overlapped for Loori.
"Looking at [White's] photographs, I felt myself being pulled into another realm of consciousness," he wrote in The Zen of Creativity. In 1971, Loori took a workshop retreat with White in Connecticut. The first session began at 4 a.m. in the pitch black of night. It was a transformative experience as he set about following White's directive to "photograph who you really are." On what would prove to be a profound day for him, he packed up his 4x5 camera and a small backpack and was prepared to stay outdoors in a nearby forest until he resolved this question. He had a deep spiritual experience in which the outer world disappeared and everything suddenly felt right to him. Loori set out on a self-described "crooked path" to understand the nature of that experience and why he had felt so at peace.
During a visit with White in Boston, Loori attended a demonstration of the "Way of Tea" by Zen master Eido Shimano of Dai Bosatsu Zendo, a Zen monastery in Livingston Manor, New York. In a question and answer period following the tea ceremony, Eido Roshi was asked for advice by a student who found it difficult to sit still and meditate. The teacher held a pitcher of water aloft and shook it, spilling some of the water. Then he slammed it down on the floor until it became still. After some silence, he went on to the next question. Loori was hooked. Zen and photography had become inextricably linked for him.
"It was impossible for me to enter Zen through the front door of a monastery," Loori wrote in the introduction to The Zen of Creativity. "Yet I was able to enter the religious life through the back door of the arts, and gradually to trust my life to lead me where it would."
Loori began photographing the upstate New York Zendo for Eido Shimano Roshi, beginning a ritual that continued for several years and during which he spent three or four days each week at the monastery, at first photographing and, later, as part of the lay sangha or community of practitioners.
Buddhist branches
When Soen Nakagawa Roshi, Dai Bosatsu's founder visited from Japan, Loori went to dokusan (a face-to-face meeting) with him during which the teacher admonished him in varying levels of fierceness with the words Namu dai bosa, Namu dai bosa ("Be one with the great bodhisattva.") At one point during the visit, as Soen Roshi bowed to one of his brushwork paintings, Loori knew that his path had led him "step by step to this moment, this teacher, this bow."
In the mid-1970s, Loori met Zen master Bernie "Tetsugen" Glassman at the Naropa Institute, where Loori was teaching Zen and photography, according to an email from Glassman. Glassman had studied under Taizan Maezumi Roshi from 1963 to 1980, and had helped to build one of the most respected Zen training centers in the United States, the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Glassman invited Loori to come to Los Angeles to study with Maezumi Roshi and to become director of the center's publications. While there, Loori collaborated with Maezumi Roshi on The Way of Everyday Life, a translation of the Genjo koan by Dogen. Along with Maezumi Roshi's commentary, Loori provided photographs that were expressions of the seminal text.
"Many of his photographs were in sumptuous colors," wrote Glassman. "Daido had been a chemist and had worked professionally in the field. He went himself to the print factory and supervised the mixing of the chemicals for the color production of the book. He wanted the images to emerge exactly as he envisioned. This thoroughness and rigor characterized all of Daido's endeavors in life."
Shortly before his death, Loori passed the order's transmission to Geoffrey "Shugen" Arnold Sensei, who is now the spiritual head of the Mountains and Rivers Order and abbot of the Zen Center of New York City; and Konrad "Ryushin" Marchaj, who is the new abbot of the Zen Mountain Monastery. (Loori had also passed the transmission to Bonnie "Myotai" Treace, the former abbot of the monastery in Brooklyn from 2000 to 2004.)
Arnold described Loori as exemplifying the "mark of a true teacher," meeting a student where a student was rather than forcing a student to adhere to rigid teachings. "It was always clear he knew a student's capacity was greater than what the student thought it was and he would try to move the student to that place," said Arnold. "Sometimes, he did it with fierceness; sometimes he did it with great gentleness."
Loori passed away at the monastery on Friday morning, surrounded by his students. The monastery held a service on Sunday and another on Monday before Loori's cremation in Kingston. A formal memorial service will be scheduled in November, according to Arnold.
In a 2004 interview with Ulster Publishing, Loori described how he overcame his past attachment to his photographs. In one case, he had even purchased one of his own photographs from a gallery to prevent it from falling into the hands of an insensitive buyer. Seeing what his mind was doing, he developed the custom of spending the night before an exhibit "just being" with the images, sitting quietly with them and thanking them for the teachings they had bestowed upon him. Then he let them go with a bow.
Loori is survived by his wife Rachael Loori Romero; brothers Joseph Loori and Sal Salerno; sons John Peter Loori, David Loori, and Asian Loori; and four grandchildren.
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© 2010 Ulster Publishing, Inc.
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