INTERVIEW with JOAN HALIFAX ROSHI for Peacemaker Magazine February 22, 2000 Melinda Reid A cool, clear wind. Halifax Roshi walks down the pathway from her house to the zendo. It has been the first night of snow in many months, and the pinyon pines are plump with a 3" dusting. It is cold and still. She walks in her everyday black fuzzy flats, oblivious to the frigid temperatures on her exposed ankles and heels. At the corner of the shrine, she stops and looks ahead at the River House, just the other side of a knoll she crosses many times a day. She turns slowly all the way around, eyes wide, "Isn't it amazing?" she asks in a voice of pure courtesy. When several of us tell her our difficulties that morning coming to practice, starting frozen car engines, navigating the hill, she waits. When we've finished, there is silence, a moment extra. Suddenly a peal of cracked laughter erupts from the Roshi, reassuring us. Joan Halifax is incapable of doing anything by half measure. She embraces all the roles she's called upon to live, but most especially the bond as friend, champion and companion to all pilgrims who find their
way to Upaya. There is an energy arcing off her, illuminating life as infinitely interesting: the more we sink our teeth into both the weaknesses and strengths, the more we will eventually savor it. Joan Halifax Roshi is the founder and director of the Upaya Zen Center nestled beneath Cerro Gordo Mountain in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is an author, an activist, scholar, and a respected presence for dying people. She created a prison program in one of the toughest lockups in this country. She counsels death row and life term inmates and teaches them meditation. Her schedule at Upaya includes a torrent of work that would flatten a bull but she breezes through it like a cool, clear wind. Q: The poet Basho says, "The Zazen is yours, the pain is yours. I am your guide to the mountain peak, but you must walk up there on your own legs." Do you ever feel weak in the knees in your role as "Guide?" A: Rather than a guide, I feel like a traveler, a pilgrim myself. Whether we know it or not we're all travelling on the same trackless way through the forest to a place we've never visited before. Teachers can tell you things; maps can give you a feeling about the shape of the territory. It's only through personal experience that you truly learn: direct realization in the spirit of Christ
and Buddha, "Be a lamp unto yourself." As for my knees, I feel they do their job. Q: Rinzai Roku writes,"when the self is lacking, you find yourself hurried by others." Do you keep your life balanced? A: It's an interesting challenge living everyday as if it were my last. Some friends insist I live a more leisurely life. It's not my flavor. Many people disapprove and so be it. I'm here to help as many beings as I can in this lifetime; I imagine I'll last a while longer. My life is a muscle, and I use it everyday. Q: In your book, The Fruitful Darkness, you align perfection with being natural. Does the practice of meditation help keep you what you call "natural?" A: Each endeavor enriches all the other endeavors. Steady practice twice a day is lifesaving. To be with people who are dying or in the penitentiary is lifesaving. You have to respond anew to everything. Suzuki Roshi calls it,"beginners Mind." Bernie Glassman Roshi calls it "Not Knowing." It comes from forgetting about the self. It comes from the practice. It comes from not being afraid. Maybe this is what I mean by natural.
Q: Peter Matthiessen says, "the application of Zazen to the ordinary world is the real point of this extraordinary practice." A: It's all ordinary moments: zazen, service, daily life. Q: Joseph Campbell told you to "Put pennies in your shoes."reminding you to stay grounded, How do you rein that energy inward, in your own words,"lest you become presumptuous?" A: It has not been easy for me as a woman with the qualities that are my endowment. I've received a lot of advice and taken very little of it. I've been the object of a fair measure of ridicule and contempt. I try not to let peoples' opinions influence me, and that may annoy them. (She laughs and leans back crossing her elbows behind her head.) I've made many mistakes in my life and suffered and benefited from them all. It has produced in me a respect for my limitations and developed my acceptance of others. Q: It was said of Pema Chodron that a teacher, "Abides in ultimate closeness with all beings and with mercy with each of us." How do you choose a student?
A: I've never chosen a student, and I don't look upon myself as a teacher. I feel I'm a co-learner. People bring different strengths and gifts to me and if we are able to work together, something beneficial might arise for us both. Sometimes I don't feel I have the skills to work a particular person. I'm also not comfortable with the notion in some Buddhist schools that says teachers deserve special devotion. Devotion is something everyone deserves. Q: In this shared experience of learning do you have any goals to attain? A: No, it unfolds. Q: You are not waiting for those who come to you to unmask or surrender? A:. I m a kitchen table Buddhist, and a woman. I'm interested in relationships where there is mutual transparency. In working with dying people and people on death row, there's something about the direness of those individuals' lives that opens transparency. I try to
sit with the questions: how transparent can you become to yourself and others? How will you open yourself to the world? Q: In your book The Fruitful Darkness, you say, "We are engaged all the time in various forms of dismemberment, separating or taking things apart and then bringing them back together in a new way of being." When you went to Auschwitz with the Peacemaker Community Bearing Witness Retreat, did the horror of the camps change you? A: I recently told a friend I feel I have become too sensitive for my life. Part of that happened at Auschwitz. I felt the skin taken off my body and my heart. I had nothing between me and raw nerves. I was overwhelmed by suffering. The camps represent a level of alienation and cruelty which is close to us all. I tried not to stray from the truth of that place. It was bitter medicine, but it was medicine nonetheless. Q: Glassman Roshi mentioned that the guides seemed in denial. A: Anyone who is around that environment probably eventually goes numb. To live in this particular town in
the middle of that history must be a terrible burden to carry. Q: How did you "Bear witness?" A: In the retreat you were asked to stop in the death camp, not run in and out like the tourists do, but to sit there on the Selection Site or in the crematoria for days. The magnitude of human suffering that occurred in this place was so huge that it was not possible for me to get my arms around it. What I experienced was so big that it made my own story about suffering seem inconsequential. It made me want to look more diligently into the welfare of others. I saw that not only did the victims at Auschwitz suffer but also the perpetrators. They both carry the burden of suffering. Imagine the state of mind that creates an Auschwitz or a Kosovo or a Chechnya. It is rooted in fundamental fear with an unalterable sense of "Other." It's one thing to have this thought conceptually. It's another to feel it in your bones. Q: You have said travel is a humbling experience. As a woman, you are very resilient, very strong. You enter rugged life-threatening environments,,"long stretches of time in the solitudes, stepping into forbidden zones, where ancestors have been buried and forgiven." How do you go deeper in these places, in your life?
A: By doing it 100%. For example, zazen is not a place where you go to sleep. This practice is life. Life is practice. You're engaged and open to the ten directions. Practice, service, enlightenent, all one. What Dogen calls, " the Wayring." Q: And enlightenment? A: My view is that there can't be personal enlightenment. It only happens within the experience of relatedness, like Indra's Net, a net with jewels at every node reflecting every other jewel. Q: How can we bear witness to the lacerating effects of treachery, betrayal, abandonment, so much a part of out ordinary world. A: How can we not?
Melinda Reed is a writer living in Santa Fe.