New Camaldoli, Immaculate Heart Hermitage A Clearing With Trees
New Camaldoli, Immaculate Heart Hermitage
A Clearing With Trees
by Robert Reese
I am driving with considerable attention south on Highway 1. From the road, the Pacific looks like molten alloy in the late November light. Highway 1 is hundreds of feet above the water, which generates the sensation I am driving in the sky with blue and clouds and water appearing above and below. The affect is more than moderately disconcerting as I’m challenged by heights and have difficulty walking across the Golden Gate Bridge.
One half mile south of the tiny coastal town of Lucia, a narrow road pitches up into the coastal range. As Highway 1 is left behind and the twisting road rises above the sea, dry chaparral gives way to dense clumps of redwoods, crossed here and there by veins of dark green where seasonal streams make their way to the Pacific. Winding up 1,300 feet above sea level, the two-mile road to New Camaldoli, Immaculate Heart Hermitage offers airy views of the coast road toward Gorda and lift after lift of lion-colored hills made all the more pronounced by the piercing silence.
I am here at this small Christian hermitage as a short-term retreatant, using the time as a kind of refraining action--consuming small, chaste meals, retreating, meditating, writing, reading and watching the precipitous physical changes of the Big Sur Coast. It is an easy stretch being a practicing Buddhist at a Christian hermitage. Apart from the Christian symbols and liturgy, it is sometimes difficult to discern differences in Christian and Buddhist monastic life. In fact, the similarity to Buddhists retreat centers is both slightly surreal and incalculably comforting.
New Camaldoli was also home, for a time, to the Austrian writer and priest, Brother David Steindhl-Rast who participated in a Cherry Center-sponsored seminar in 1989 on physics and religion. The event included Tenshin Anderson, Roshi, and the physicist, Dr. Kai Woehler. (Brother David was driven to Monterey by Rev. Sara Hunsaker, who shared fresh fruit with Brother David during the drive). Brother David remains a figure of enduring and paradoxical fascination for me. To some, the vows of his life have seem restrictive. But his radical enactment of gratitude as a practice has allowed him to become a transcendent practitioner of Catholicism and has created a comfortable cross-pollinated with other traditions. (Brother David participated in early practice periods at Tassajara and established the dish-washing system).
For my brief stay, I’ve brought a rakasu, apples, almonds, binoculars, poems, fiction and Band-Aids. I also brought two significant themes to Immaculate Heart: an overabundance of conflicting work-related and familial issues and Rev. Shohaku Okumura’s translation and commentary on Dogen’s seminal text, Sansuikyo (The Mountains and Waters Sutra). It is a curious experience to hold these two seeming inconsistent themes at the same time---yet they inform and support each other in differing ways. On the one hand, it is common and natural to look for things I want (or don’t want) outside of where I am now. A mind that prefers not being vexed and overwhelmed. The mind that objects to having objections. On the other hand, the Sansuikyo dares to say “yes” to whatever shows up—mountains, rivers, objecting mind, angry kids, domestic strife, cats in heat, incomprehensible joy, traffic, drives to Walmart, redwood trees and anxiety.
There is a reference in Sansuikyo to Nanquan’s story of the sickle. For reasons not entirely clear, I’d been keeping company with this koan during the drive. The story is problematic in the usual what-the-hell-is-this koan way, but no one gets flogged and small pets are not injured.
Zen master Puyuan of Nanquan was once on the mountain working. A monk came by and asked, “What is the way?” The master raised his sickle and said, “I bought this sickle for thirty cents.” The monk said, “I am not asking about the sickle you bought for thirty cents. I asked what is the way?”Puyuan said, “It feels good when I use it.”
by Robert Reese
Puyuan’s teaching is a kind of concise short-hand for significant aspects of the Mahayana doctrine. He renders the teaching to its most succinct, terse, form. In doing so, Puyuan brings the question of The Way into everyday terms that include the swing of sickle, commerce, tool making, minerals, the mind of objection and acquiescence. Puyuan succeeds in doing what few philosophies glean: the difference between espousing “the truth” or “Way” as metaphysical theory and waking-up on a hillside as the Way itself.
The Way is right before us in completely giving oneself to this work, this life, this person --- right here, right now. A reframing of the koan might be smething such as what is the truth of this moment? For Puyuan, the truth of this moment is nothing other than his bright, sharp, swinging sickle, slicing wet mountain grass—a tableau which includes the entirety of the moment past, present and future. Just this grass-cutting, effort-making, sickle-purchasing monk. Monk, sickle (and its price) grass, trees, work issues, domestic issues,”feels good when I use it” are all aspects of being. For Dogen and Nanquan, Zen practice wasn’t about getting free from the world--it was about being free in the world. The koan asks what does it mean for each of us to be wholeheartedly part of this world?
For days on end there is quiet and solitude at New Camaldoli, but the residents are not alone: foxes, coyotes, deer and birds populate the nearby hills. Hawks soar on the thermals, making lazy figure-eight patterns against the sky. The Big Sur coast is charged with movement and every hillside is alive with subtle activity. After a time at the Immaculate Heart, the landscape seems to take on an immanence, as if the world were coming sharply into focus. There a pockets of oak and redwoods set apart by open spaces. Clearings. That is something like New Camaldoli. A clearing and trees. The heart/mind rights itself in the openings and in the trees.
(Image Below: “Playground ‘Parque’ Old Havana, Cuba” Archival Photography by Kennth Parker, courtesy of Weston Gallery, Carmel)
