2016 - Albert Lee

5am?  No thank you.

My first experience with Zen practice happened much earlier in my life, back in the 1990s when I was a teenager, at the Providence Zen Center.  My parents signed me up as a resident for a few weeks as, I suspect, a kind of summer camp.  It was the first time I spent a lot of time away from New York City, and it was the first time I was on my own.  I didn’t get any orientation and did not know to participate in interviews, so I didn’t learn much about Zen mind then, but I did practice the forms and very much appreciated the shapes, the smells, and the adventure of making 5am morning practices.

Back in New York, I didn’t go back to formal practice for years.  I knew there was a Kwan Um outpost on East 14th Street. But the way I conducted my life then, whether I was in high school, in college, or working, I didn’t have any free time in the evenings, and there was no way I was going to wake up for 5am practice.

Occasionally I did try visiting.  I didn’t really understand the setup, though, I thought it would be more like the Providence Zen Center, a Korean temple, or a college campus before 9/11. I expected that during the day, it would be open, people could come in and hang out, and there would always be someone there.  So I came at random times to check it out.  I wasn’t sure I got the right address but I’d come and ring the intercom a couple of times.  Nobody answered.  Not wanting to be ringing some random person’s apartment, I went away.

Teaching Taekwondo

Being a master instructor of taekwondo, on most nights I left my software day job to go teach at my small dojang in the East Village.  I had acquired a new student who had recently moved to New York and had wanted to continue the taekwondo training he had begun in Boston.  One Friday evening, that student, Mike Bruffee and I were chatting and getting to know each other when he expressed that he considered himself a spiritual person.

Speaking with Mike Bruffee

Well, that raised a few red flags for me.  I suddenly saw in front of me a Brooklyn hipster, with the signature beard and mustache, speaking about spirituality in a way that very well might be authentic, or might be wishful, performative, and too woo-woo for my evidence-grounded sensibilities.  Boy I didn’t like woo-woo.  So I decided to test him!  I asked him if he PRACTICED.

Well, he said that he does a few things but that he considered his spiritual home to be this place on East 14th Street.  My red flags turned into surprise.  Is this place really far east, all the way on 1st Avenue?  It was.  Oh my, I know that place!  Is it the Chogye International Zen Center of New York?  I’ve always wanted to go!  We were both surprised.  Mike passed my test.

Mike was going to make Saturday morning practice at 8am and invited me along.  Although 8am on a Saturday was offensively early, I was up for an adventure just once.

Saying Hello

This time, I showed up a few minutes before a regularly scheduled practice and a person was there on the other side of the intercom.  I made it through the double lobby doors, went to the second floor, and at the end of the long hallway, found the apartment.  It was magical.  Outside it looks like an apartment building, and hidden inside one of the apartments there’s a Korean style temple.  It’s so New York.

Clare Ellis and John Holland were in the robe room.  They greeted me and showed me the ropes.  To my delight, John, while wearing his long robes, got angry at the intercom when it rang and malfunctioned.  This senior practitioner was not a woo-woo all-smiles lovey dovey performer.  He was just 100% angry at the intercom with no pretense.  I loved it, I was sold, I found an authentic space.

First Interview

Not having had any orientation during my teenage “Zen summer camp,” I thought interviews were special and reserved only for those who were explicitly invited.  On this Saturday morning, Clare expected that I would attend an interview and showed me how to greet the teacher.  During practice, when it was my turn to do so, I got up from sitting in the dharma room and walked over to the interview room with Zen Master Wu Kwang in it.

Among the reasons I really wanted to practice Zen was that I wanted to understand the lingo.  I owned books from our school, where there is all this stuff I just didn’t get.  “Hit the floor, hahahaha, WONDERFUL!”  Yeah, um, sure.  “The floor is brown, the sky is blue, ahahahahaha!!!”  Stone girls, mud cows, so much smacking, so much realization, lots of “don’t-know mind” and laughter.  None of it made any sense whatsoever, not even a little.

So Zen Master Wu Kwang that morning gave me a beginners’ orientation.  Towards the end of it, he had me read The Human Route.  And he asked me something like “So tell me, what are you?”  Just as blankness painted my face, but before any thoughts came to fill the void, with seriously impressive timing, Zen Master pointed at me and said “THAT.”  Huh?  “THAT is don’t know mind.  Keep that.”

OMG.  Oh.  Is THAT what the books are talking about?  I get it!  Don’t know is not knowing!  Hahahaha!

So, since then, I just never stopped coming back.