Talk Notes:
In this talk I wove in several reading from Les Kaye's book I Had a Good Teacher - it flowed together a little better than it looks in these notes I think! -Nomon Tim
In the spring of 1984 I was 18 years old. A high school senior enrolled in an alternative program called The Learning Community. I learned a lot in that program about many things, but one of the things was it offered me my first exposure to Zen. Our teacher created a course he called "eastern psychology" which was a good cover story for taking us to temples, ashrams, and mosques as part of our high school coursework.
And so we went to a little Zen center in a converted small church in Mountain View, California. Mountain View is now right in the middle of Silicon Valley but all that hadn't happened yet. It's crazy how fast and how hard tech transformed that area - and the lives of everyone on the planet while they were at it. Mountain View was a relatively affordable suburban town next to Palo Alto where I lived with my family.
We got there before our host so the group of high school kids was standing around waiting. Then we heard a kind of odd whack-whack-whack sound. And then this guy in robes showed up. And I had the idea we were supposed to have responded to the whack-whack-whack in some way but we didn't know that. Of course that was the han.
He told us a few things, not much I don't think, and then we went inside.
The space is what really impressed me. The sense of peacefulness, of solidity, of order. Something like sureness. And it's not just that it was neat and tidy: my mom was a bit obsessed with tidy and clean (in my teenaged opinion) which I didn't always love, but this space I just felt something deep in. It was an odd and impressive feeling that I still remember well.
Then he showed up how to sit and we sat - maybe for 20 minutes I don't know. And then he said a few more things about Zen which I don't remember at all. And that was our visit. Doesn't sound like much but it seems to have set something in motion in my life that just keeps gathering steam - as here we are.
That priest was Les Kaye. And as I got more into all of this I was to go back several more times to sit with him - usually when I was down from Washington visiting my family I'd slip away on one of the mornings for their early morning sit. They'd usually have coffee or breakfast after too - and continues to this day I see. The schedule on their website says "zazen followed by coffee" at 5:30am on weekdays. And so I got to know Les a little bit.
He was one of these solid not-flashy kinds of early Zen teachers. He was in the second wave of early Zen students. First met Suzuki Roshi in the late 60's. Ordained by him just a year or so before he died. So he wasn't part of the huge effort to start Tassajara and I'm not sure if he was even able to go monastic practice periods there for a while. Les, like Blanche Hartman, was a bit older than the rest of the gang and he was a serious professional person too. He was an engineer at IBM and he continued his career right through to retirement even as he ran the Zen center. He never lived full time in residence at one of the San Francisco Zen Center places. I think he had a house a few blocks away from Kannon Do - that means "Avalalokitesvara's place". He's sit before work, work all day, return for evening programs a time or two a week. And be there on Saturday mornings too - where the practice also started at 5:30am and still does.
Our Edit Norton, who passed away a few years ago now, would have known him. They both started at the Haiku Zendo in Los Altos which was where Suzuki Roshi came weekly for some years and gave short talks which were recorded and ended up being most of the Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind book. And after a while Suzuki Roshi invited another Japanese priest, Kobun Chino Otagawa, to be the teacher there. Edie talks about first meeting him at a community college class - she always said, he's "Sweep in" to the classroom like a bird or something. I just added Kobun to our ancestors altar along with Sojun Mel Weitman who started the Berkeley Zen Center.
And reading the history now I see that Kobun appointed Les Kaye as head teacher in 1983, just before I first met him as a teenage. So he was pretty new to that role then. Of course I had no idea of any of this at the time.
Eventually that sangha outgrew the small converted Pentacostal Church and managed to buy property and build a zendo from the ground up. An impressive project as by then - 2006 - Silicon Valley was in full swing and property values had already skyrocketted. The last 2 or 3 times I visited Les and his sangha it was at the new Rock Street Zendo.
One of the things Les saw Suzuki Roshi do, presumably at the Japanese American temple in San Francisco he was actually brought to the US to lead, was at the end of the practice time Suzuki Roshi would stand at the entrance to the zendo and bow to each person in turn. So Les always did that. And it was Les I was thinking of when I decided to do that practice at our temple's opening ceremony and again at the first birthday practice. So that's Suzuki Roshi through Les Kaye through me. It's a beautiful practice and also may seem a bit intimidating.
Les was just ... there, solid ... not flashy. He was kind. He always seemed happy to be surrounded by sangha. I don't remember him asking me many questions when I'd visit beyond just to remind him of who I was. The feeling being around him was something like: you're here, I'm here, we are both practicing, that's enough. No need to say too much more.
He must've offered dokusan and given talks and done all of those things but I wasn't around enough to experience him in that mode. And I don't remember dokusan being offered in the morning sits I would attend. It was really just sitting with Les and his group. And a little coffee afterwards on I'd head back to my mom's.
And like Sojun Mel, he kept this up for 50 years. Always there. Steady. Continuous practice.
A group of his students put together a book of this talks so I'll share a few. They're not very long.
You Have to Get Wet (p. 1 - I can see why they opened the book with this one) Simplicity and Ease (p. 108, just the first page including the last paragraph onto the p 28) I Had a Good Teacher (p. 111-113)
Maybe if time Beyond Inspiration (p42 - 46).
So thank you Les.
