Tassajara: A Love Letter in Fire Season
by Robert Reese
At the bottom of the v-shaped ravine that forms part of the Tassajara Creek watershed, a new entrance gate (Sanmon gate), welcomes visitors. North-facing, the traditional thatched roof gate stands at the canyon mouth in the company of guardian pines and oaks with Tassjara spreading out in the distance. In spring, the weather-darkened walls of the canyon are half-hidden by sage, bracken and chaparral; delicate light-filled yellow lupine flutter and point at the weight and beauty of the monastery. Though modest in comparison to Japanese temple gates, Tassajara’s Sanmon gate is striking and clean with curved roof joinery created by renowned master carpenter Paul Discoe and a team of volunteers. The term Sanmon Gate symbolizes the gates one has to pass through to be transported from the passions of avarice, anger and ignorance. At some temples, the gate does not have a door, representing the Buddha’s compassion that does not deny entry to the Buddhist priesthood.
Tassajara, set about with remnants of 19th century sandstone buildings, small, two-person cottages and contemporary Japanese structures, is at the bottom of the valley where three mountains join. The river, oak trees, hand-built stone walls and gardens provide the grounds the harmony of a park. Revealing vaguely criminal tendencies, Stellar Jays dart in and out of trees and purple wisteria fronting the dining area. Whimsically shaped chairs and benches carved from tree trucks flank a neat lawn.
Even though there are dozens of students and visitors, the main common area (“Downtown Tassajara”) is relatively free from the clamor of public places. Tassajara, with its sounds of birds and rivers and bells, seems to swallow human racket. Once they arrive, visitors slowly take on the quietude of the mountains. No radios or music is allowed. Cell phone coverage won’t reach the valley. Telephone use is restricted to emergencies. Meals are vegetarian and served family-style for guests. The cabins and pathways are lit by kerosene lamps.
Although the Los Padres National Forest abounds in stunning scenery, the point of going to somewhere like Tassajara is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to experience what is there in perhaps a fuller context than traditional resorts. The hot springs, are, by all measure, a monastery. Time slows down. Taking their cues from Zen students, some guests approach the events of the day—meals, bathing, walking, swimming—with the acuity and presence of a ritual.
In addition to regular guest accommodations, Tassajara offers a Guest Practice Program at a reduced rate, providing some of the context and activities of daily monastic life as well as the amenities of a traditional vacation. Guest practitioners join the resident students during morning meditation, breakfast and work period. After lunch, their time is free for walks, swimming, reading, bathing in the sulphuric springs followed by dinner in the stone dining room.
The zendo, a large peak-roofed meditation hall, rises above a gravel-laden path and the cluster of structures built with rocks from the creek and mountain side. The building is flanked by a sweep of ivy set-off by long-necked stalks of purple iris. What is emphatic about the zendo is made so by the silence—the long periods when the only sounds are the birds and faint movement of the creek. With its soft angles of light and simple, clean lines, the zendo is designed to communicate composed attention. The air of calm that permeates the zendo is in distinct contrast to the dense, energized landscape surrounding Tassajara.
Built in 1978 after the original meditation hall was destroyed in a fire, the zendo is composed of a surprising number of straight lines and right angles. From the center of the zendo, the lines—visible in the floor and ceiling, in the wooden lattice work of the sliding windows and along the upraised platforms that flank the room—seem to radiate from the viewer. Cleaned daily by a squad of students, even the corners are precise and free of dust. A large, blonde-wood altar dominates the center floor, surmounted by a 1,700 year-old Gandharan Buddha statue attended by flowers and lanterns gleaming in the atmospheric half-light.
Outside, the new cottages are simple and rustic, combining the calibrated scale of both Japanese and contemporary architecture. Overlooking the creek, a two-room dining room is housed below student quarters where guests are served family-style meals by resident students. Built in the late 1800 with rocks from the creek and mountainside, the stone dining room has stucco walls set-off by dark ceiling timbers and a deep porch overlooking the creek.
Maintaining Tassajara on a day to day basis continues to be the responsibility of students, who’s practice lends not only a single-mindedness to the events of the day, but also a sense of quiet celebration. At 8:30 a.m. daily students gather in an organized manner below the zendo to receive work assignments. Dressed in work clothes, students cook and clean and attend to the gardens—all with an effort towards whole-hearted engagement in their tasks.
For formal meditation, students wear long black robes that billow in the wind as they walk down the paths. As is the custom in Soto Zen monasteries, students unceremoniously bow to one another in greeting along the footpaths. For a generation raised with cell phones and the expectation of making seventy thousand per year, Tassajara students—whose medium age is between 18 to 35, with some between 36 and 75—bring a rare sense of lightness and winsome vitality to even the most menial chores.
As with work, meals are cooked and eaten with a consummate attention to detail and appreciation of their origins. Both student and guest meals are restorative vegetarian fare, combining wholesome produce and enticing flavors and textures. Menus are generally wide-ranging and eclectic. Lunch might include a pineapple jicama salad with avocado, chilies and limes. Dinner entries range from polenta and mushroom gratin to Tassajara calzone followed by an orange raisin walnut cake. As with other operations at Tassajara, the kitchen places a premium on using fresh ingredients at hand and working in a resourceful, utilitarian manner. Lettuce, for instance, is spin-dried in a washing machine with its heater removed. In the cabins, tree branches are sometimes used as curtain rods.
Vegetables come from two gardens at the foot of Flag Rock. Row crops rest below a terrace planted with lemon thyme, rosemary, red flower marjoram, lovage and oregano. Walnut and filbert trees, concord and muscat grapes grow above the tidy garden. A 1920’s-style swimming pool, tempered by hot springs and creek water, is just off the garden behind a curtain of bamboo.
The activities and times of the day are announced by an array of percussion instruments whose origins in China date back a thousand years. A wake-up bell is sounded by runners as they pad through the grounds at 5:30 a.m. The “han,” a four inch piece of hanging ash hit with a wooden mallet, is rapped periodically for fifteen minutes ending in a roll-down to announce the meditation period. Meal call is issued by a rail-road bell. When general gathering take place, a large drum called a “hokku” is struck with two drumsticks.
Purchased by the San Francisco Zen Center in January, 1967, Tassajara was established as a training monastery by the renowned teacher, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Already a respected but not widely known teacher in Japan, Suzuki Roshi came to the United States in 1958 to lead a congregation of Japanese-Americans at Sokoji Temple in San Francisco. Though only attending a short visit, Suzuki Roshi was so impressed with the enthusiasm he found among the American students, that he became a permanent resident of San Francisco. Under his direction, the San Francisco Zen Center was formed, with center in the city, Tassajara and later Marin County. His collection of lectures in “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”, has gone on to become a bestseller and classic of contemporary Buddhist literature.
“I had never met anyone like him. He was not like an ordinary person. When you were with him, there was an intensity of presence,” said Katherine Thanas, a deceased former student and priest who first came to study at Tassjara in 1967. “He would say things that you would recognize as true, but no one had said before. I think most of us felt our hearts came to rest.”
Suzuki Roshi called Tassajara a “baby monastery,” established to create the conditions for individuals to integrate the intensity of group practice with a community open to guests as well. It was to be a place of training, not a lifetime retreat from the world. From the start, there were both men and women students, with quarters for married couples and separate dormitories for single men and women.
“The purpose of group practice is not the observation of rules and rituals. Although the rules do allow you to focus on your practice, and to live according to the essentials needed to practice together, the purpose is to obtain is to obtain freedom from rules and ceremony, to have naturalness, a natural order of body and mind,” wrote Suzuki Roshi.
Since 1967, the year-around practice schedule at Tassajara has remained the same. Two student practice periods in the winter and fall, with guest season extending from May to early September. Although the students and teachers improvised a great deal in defining just what an American Zen Student was, practitioners found themselves basically following rules established by the monk/teacher Pai Chang nearly a thousand years before in China. Pai Chang’s famous dictate, “A day of no work is a day of no eating,” is still embraced in Buddhist monasteries. Not surprisingly, work is considered an integral part of Soto Zen practice, from which Tassajara draws its lineage.
“By going through the day trying to give equal attention to everything you do, you learn that no one thing is more important for awakening than anything else. Zazen is not more important than kinhin, than eating, than service, than going to the toilet, or work, or changing your clothes,” said Rev. Thanas, who lived and trained at Tassajara for nine years before establishing the Monterey Bay Zen Center in 1988.
In its ascetic disciplines and spare teaching, which discourage metaphysical speculation in favor of prolonged meditation, Soto Zen emphasizes direct experience over doctrine. Like all of San Francisco Zen Center temples, Tassjara largely reflects the teaching of Eihei Dogen Zenji, the thirteenth-century monk who established the first Japanese monastery where the primary emphasis was on the practice of sitting meditation and from which the Japanese Soto Zen lineage originated.
Today, downstream from the hot springs, the creek sparkles in forest shadows. Shaded by sycamore, madrone and tremulous alder, the river turns turquoise and white rushing over pale gray rocks wore smooth from the water. In the few sunny spots, the water is clear against the rocky bottom, creating ashen demarcations of color. In the summer, the world here is heat-saturated and luminous, populated by birds and small darting fish, raccoons, snakes and spotted deer. Further downstream at the Narrows, the water races down stony terraces, forming a natural slide before plunging into a deep empyrean-blue pool.
West of the hot springs, the trail narrows and climbs dramatically through madrone and live oak to the Suzuki Roshi Memorial. Here, on a level clearing set among wild lilac and manzanita, students installed a rough two-ton stone from the creek that was chosen by their teacher. This east/west ridge falls sharply to Tassajara Creek; to the west a thin ribbon of water slices 100 feet between a dark wall of rock and pine. Red-tail hawks wheel through the thermals in single file making lazy circular patterns against the dark canyon walls. Soon the trail disappears over a ridge. All that remains is the immense quiet and sets of deer tracks pitching off toward infinity.
(Blog photo by Anne Muraski)