The Zen Priest

Amid the chanting of sutras, the sounding of gongs and the curling smoke of burning incense. Chief Abbot Oda Sesso was ordaining a head priest for the Zen Buddhist temple of Daitokuji Ryosen-An in Kyoto, Japan. The new Zen priest gravely accepted the kesa -the richly brocaded red-and-gold silk scarf that is the mark of the priesthood -and assumed the Buddhist name of Jyokei. But in Chicago, where she was born 65 years ago, her name was Ruth Fuller. Last week she became the first American in history to be admitted to the Japanese Buddhist priesthood and installed as head priest of a Japanese temple.

A child of rich parents, Ruth grew up in an atmosphere of private schools, Stutz

Bearcats and trips to Europe. She studied Sanskrit at the University of Chicago, and grew interested in Buddhism after her family doctor lent her a book on the subject. By the time she was in her early 205 she had decided that "Christianity fell far snort of what I expected from religion."

How to Do It. Married to a wealthy Chicago lawyer, she dug deeper into Buddhism, decided that what she wanted was enlightenment, and the way to enlightenment was meditation. "But to find out how to practice meditation in America was an impossibility." On a trip to China and Japan in 1930, she and her husband met Zen Master Dr. Daisetz Suzuki, and Ruth asked him how one went about learning to meditate. "If you can come back to Japan and study for some time." he said, "perhaps you can find out."

She did. In 1932 she stayed for six months; the next year she went back and put in a full year's study at Kyoto's Nanzenji Temple. Each day she rose at 5 a.m. to meditate for two hours before breakfast, then went to the temple to meditate from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with a few minutes off for a meager lunch. After supper at home she would return to the temple for meditation with the monks until 9:30 at night, then return home, take a bath and meditate until bedtime, around midnight. In 1944. after her husband died, she married Dr. Shigetsu Sasaki, a Japanese Zen roshi (teacher) whom she had met in New York City; she was widowed a second time in 1945.

Some of a Zen pupil's meditation is devoted to koans -short problems without logical solutions, set by the individual's Zen master and designed to wrench the mind free of ordinary thinking. (Sample koan: "A monk asked. 'Who is Buddha?' The master answered, 'Three pounds of flax.' ") Other meditation is devoted to breath control, plus a kind of concentration on nothingness and what Ruth Sasaki describes as "handling one's mind."

Her eyes flash when she says: "It's not easy to become a Zen Buddhist. I can sit in a monks' hall for seven days, sitting crosslegged, sleeping only one hour a night. I can sit 18 or 24 hours crosslegged, meditating. I can also enjoy a glass of champagne, the opera, a good car -I like a fast car, even though I don't drive any more. One of the things we learn in Zen is complete adaptability."

The Cult Phase. With Dr. Sasaki she worked at Manhattan's First Zen Institute of America. In 1950 Ruth Sasaki returned to Kyoto, where she rented a small house built for a retired roshi on the site of what had been the Ryosen-An branch of the Daitokuji Temple. Amply provided with funds from her first husband's estate, she remodeled and enlarged the house to provide a center and library for U.S. students of Zen. She ran into an unexpected obstacle when the Daitokuji Temple insisted that the new center be designated as the restored sub-temple of Daitokuji. The solution, proposed by the Abbot of Daitokuji to a flabbergasted Ruth Fuller Sasaki: ordain her as Buddhist priest and install her as head of the sub-temple.

Since last summer, Ruth Sasaki has been holding regular classes in Zen for half a dozen pupils from 7 to 9 each night, aided by an English-speaking Japanese priest and Walter Nowick, a onetime student at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music who has been studying Zen in Kyoto since 1950.

Scores of Americans and Europeans call on Ruth Sasaki each month. But, says she, "the majority of them are faddists or just curious, and Zen is not for them. In the Western world Zen seems to be going through the cult phase. Zen is not a cult. The problem with Western people is that they want to believe in something and at the same time they want something easy. Zen is a lifetime work of self-discipline and study. Its practice destroys the individual self. The ego is, as it were, dissolved into a great ego -so great that you take your place in it as each cell in your body takes its place or performs as it is called upon to do. The result is a oneness with nature and the universe."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.