Bow to the Ground Walk Into the Lion Day

by Robert Reese

Tung-shan asked, “If after one hundred years, someone should ask if I am able to portray the master’s likeness, how should I respond?

After remaining quiet for a while Yun-yen said, “Just this person.” *

I remember this: Tassajara Mother’s Day retreat. The Suzuki Roshi Memorial site. Oak leaves stirring against a dry breeze. Hard mid-day sun. High cumulus that drew shadows across the Santa Lucias and wafted toward the east. After climbing the meas, I remember the trail disappearing, leaving an immense silence and deer tracks pitching off into infinity.  Photographs were taken and the group chatted noisily as if on holiday. After a time, students put things aside and settled into the heat and silence of the mountains. The Heart Sutra was chanted and Katherine performed a simple service. Throughout the liturgy, she would focus entirely on the ceremony, dimming aspects of herself except for her alertness.  Katherine would approach the dark memorial stone with a kind of extravagant attention, each gestured performed slowly with an alertness that seemed to fill the small mesa and flood onto the hillside.  At the altar she would sometimes silently utter a verse esteeming teachers she learned from Suzuki Roshi, re-arrange the flowers and candle, then bow and pivot back to the mat. I remember the aging teacher falling slowly in prostration to her knees, black robes folding into the earth, fluid in the afternoon light.

I believe she performed the ceremony as a kind of gift or lesson to us.  As if she knew the ritual was something given her, and which she was now giving us. For myself, I have come to consider that the visceral movements during service were perhaps her most significant teaching.  Throughout the liturgy there is a subtle exchange that transpires between the priest and congregation, but the nature of that transactions is unknowable in everyday terms. Still, it transmits a kind of communion between herself, the congregation, mountains and sky.

I remember asking Katherine what her attitude was during service. Were her movements and attitude informed out of veneration and reverence or some other clerical tone? What was the appropriate sensibility at the altar?  She said, matter-of-factly, that “the best attitude was no particular attitude.” Or, just this person, however they showed-up that day in all their joys, idiosyncrasies, venerations and presence. The locus of individuality also included her generosities, contradictions, inclinations toward inconsistent judgment and naivety.  In other words, the entirety of a human life as it appears in just this person.

From that summer in 1994 until 2010, few months passed during which I did not talk to Katherine about something that was not about practice, or worry or faith, or doubt or work or love or money, about concern or apprehension, good or bad.

I remember Katherine as an intensely ordinary woman.  There was nothing other-worldly about about her manner. I remember expecting spiritual pyrotechnics from her. They never came. Instead, she brought a quotidian quality to her practice. To this day, I recall Katherine most specifically while participating in everyday settings and circumstances:  cleaning unseen parts of the house, replacing the covers of matches or when the impulse towards self-concern appears to breach a primary loyalty. 

I remember her bowing as if it were an act of gratitude and affirmation --- and the line it conjured by Jane Hirschfield:

Take away the small blue table,the wild apples,the journey’s long perfectionsBow to the ground.Walk into the lion day.

Irreversible Heart from The Lives of the Heart, Jane Hirshfield

*The Record of Tung-shan, William F. Powell translator, University of Hawaii Press