It is unusual for someone to be a teacher of both Zen and Vipassana. Since you started out in the Zen tradition, can you describe how you first came to the practice?

My interest in Buddhism began in college while I was studying environmental science. I was thinking about how to respond to environmental degradation, and how to understand our contribution to this problem. That led me through a series of steps to Eastern thought—Chinese thought, Taoism, and a whole different paradigm for our relationship to nature.

I began reading Alan Watts’s work and other books on Buddhism, and I was inspired because they seemed to offer new answers. Then a year or so later I was introduced to Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and I was really taken by it. It was as if it articulated a view of life that I myself had held without realizing it. I was also interested in its emphasis on meditation, although by then I had dropped out of college and was living in a spiritual community where there was almost no sitting.

Which community?

The Farm in Tennessee. The Farm was a commune of some eight hundred people founded by Stephen Gaskin and others who came out of the spiritually inclined, acid-taking circles of 1960s San Francisco Hippiedom. I had been interested in living and farming on a rural commune. In 1975, on a cross-country trip, I stopped by the Farm for what was to be a couple of days and ended up staying. I had no interest in spiritual practice whatsoever, so I was surprised to find how delighted I was to be there. The people at the Farm considered honesty one of their primary spiritual practices. They looked at it as a substitute for LSD because they thought it had equal transformative power. They had developed very powerful skills of talking with one another, clarifying what was really happening between people. It was there that I discovered Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, which seemed to be their bible. But they didn’t meditate. So, the first chance I had, I went to San Francisco Zen Center, founded by Suzuki Roshi. There I discovered zazen, or Zen-style sitting meditation. I loved zazen practice, and I threw myself into it. Slowly I became interested in bringing the mind of zazen into my daily life. I ordained as a priest, going deeper and deeper into the world of Buddhist practice.

How did you begin practicing Vipassana?

After seven years of Zen practice in the West, I continued my training in a Zen monastery in Japan. While there, I had to leave the country to renew my visa. I traveled to Thailand, and while I waited for the new visa, I went to a meditation monastery outside Bangkok. Curious about how meditation was done in the Theravada tradition, I followed the abbot’s instructions—which happened to be for an intensive period of Vipassana practice. Since it took ten weeks to clarify my visa situation, my first silent Vipassana retreat was ten weeks long. With the strong concentration of that retreat, I touched what I can only describe as some core element of my mind, which I felt compelled to pursue further. A year later, I returned to Thailand and Burma for about a year and a half of intensive Vipassana training.

How was it to practice Vipassana after years of Zen training?

The core of Vipassana is mindfulness, or the practice of being clearly present to what is happening in the present. In a sense it is a tool that can be practiced within a variety of practice approaches. The context for the Vipassana teaching I encountered in Asia was one of being goal-oriented. U Pandita, my Burmese teacher, was adamant about striving for nirvana, for deep insights and attainments. If I had been a new meditator, I wouldn’t have survived in that kind of environment. I would’ve gotten tied up in ambition and self-judgment. But in my Zen practice I had been practicing a radical acceptance of the present moment for many years. I was pretty resilient and not easily discouraged. While I tried to follow the Vipassana instructions as best I could, at the same time I saw how helpful they were for me to be more thorough in the Zen practice of shikantaza—just sitting.

Did working within the two different traditions bring up any conflicts for you?

I struggled a fair amount, trying to reconcile goal-less Zen practice—in which practice and realization are thought to occur together - with the goal-oriented Theravada tradition, in which you work toward later realization. Eventually I came to understand that these approaches not only complemented each other but could be seen as two sides of the same coin. Soto Zen taught me to emphasize the purity of the moment-to-moment process of sitting in meditation; Vipassana taught me how that process opens to greater freedom even when we don’t fixate on freedom as a goal. My Vipassana practice taught me that the radical acceptance of myself and of things-as-they-are that I learned in Zen included an innate, natural impulse toward liberation. I didn’t have to be goal-oriented as much as I needed to let go of any obstacles to this innate impulse. One of the hindrances I had faced in Zen practice was complacency - a comfortable, lightweight acceptance—in which I lacked the motivation to see the ways in which I was still subtly attached or resistant to reality. Vipassana, especially with its emphasis on seeing clearly what is happening in the present, helped break me out of my complacent state.

Do you bring Zen elements into your Vipassana teachings?

From the Zen tradition I emphasize that each moment of sincere mindfulness practice is complete and satisfying in and of itself. I encourage practitioners to investigate what gets in the way of realizing this. I teach that the goal should be reflected in the means, in the practice. If the goal is to be at peace, some form of peacefulness should be a part of the practice. To become compassionate, practice compassion. To be generous, practice generosity. To be free, don’t let the practice or attainments be objects of grasping.

Were there elements of the Vipassana tradition that you felt in conflict with?

I grappled some with the Theravadan teaching of the three characteristics: impermanence, suffering, and no-self. When I was in Thailand and Burma, I was struck by the way this teaching served as the dogmatic foundation of nearly every dharma talk; I was a little put off by how, over and over again, we heard about the three characteristics. It seemed like a dogma or a view that people adopted not because they had insight into the three characteristics but because it was what they were told. I was mistrustful of adopting a view about life as opposed to cultivating insight.

Do you mean applying a view without fully understanding it?

I mean that insight is not a view. Because of my Zen background, I have a certain distrust of views; Zen practice is in part one of pulling the rug out from under any view we apply to our experience.

So what was your problem with the teachings on the three characteristics?

I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around them. Sure, in some ways everything’s impermanent. The mountains are impermanent - that I could accept. But that the mountains were suffering seemed a little odd to me. And that the mountains were “not-self” also had little meaning for me. The teaching that everything was impermanent made sense logically but remained, somehow, only a view without much personal meaning. Eventually, I decided that I could only understand the three characteristics as describing the nature of how I experienced the world. There are lots of problems in claiming to know what reality actually is, what it is like. I don’t see Buddhism as a form of physics. Rather, I saw mindfulness as revealing how I perceive the world.

Then what is the value of the three characteristics?

As Vipassana practice deepens, the three characteristics become obvious. They are not a view, or an understanding that we apply; they become clear and predominant experiences. It’s very direct and immediate. And the greatest value of these insights is that they are powerful aids in helping the mind loosen its clinging. When we can find nothing permanent to grasp onto, the mind will eventually stop grasping.