Shika Dokan Martin on the Center's History

Jess: Can you speak about the Center's history?

Dokan: Well, our teacher, Joshu Sasaki, was a Zen master in Japan who got sent here as a missionary Zen teacher and he arrived here in the U.S. in 1962. He was sponsored by some people who were interested in Zen and, to be honest, they were thinking that just a monk was gonna get sent over and then this Roshi walks off the plane. Initially he started having mediation classes and instruction and then around 1968 they acquired the temple we have in Downtown LA, Rinzai Ji, which is a city temple and it's great for city practice, but it's not the sort of place where you can do the intense, more secluded training that one would do that is similar to the monastic practice for Zen in Japan. This is a Japanese Rinzai Zen lineage. We're affiliated with Yoshin Ji, which is the largest Rinzai Zen temple complex in Japan, so he is from a very traditional institution. In 1971, he had a student out in Claremont and they were looking for a house to have a center out there and they didn't see anything suitable, so they decided to drive up the mountain and they were sort of poking around and discovered this place by accident. It was a boy scout camp that had been abandoned. There was trash in the cabins, graffiti, things were torn apart, there was garbage all over the place. Our teacher poked his head around, looked at it, and just turned to the guy and said, "You buy" and that was that. So he saw the potential of this for being a training center where he could do the kind of training one would do in a monastery in Japan. So in 1971 this property was purchased by the organization and we fixed it back up with the effort of a lot of enthusiastic hippies going through and rebuilding all the cabins and creating a space and mediation hall for practice and that was the genesis. Mt. Baldy then became the primary training center for our teacher. He lived here usually Seven months a year...Traditionally in Buddhism there are 3 month training periods. Our main training periods were in the summer from mid-July to mid-Sept and in the winter from mid-december to mid-march and those correspond to the training periods in Japan as well. In Japan those are times when the monastery is closed. You can't have visitors coming in and the monks are completely devoted to their practice with the teacher. During the spring and fall our teacher wouldn't be here; he would travel around to other centers. So the training here was about as good in emulation of what gets done for monastic training in Japan as you'll get in the U.S. We are what you call semi-monastic in the sense that during the 3 month training periods you were basically confined to being here.

Jess: And how has the center evolved over time?

Dokan: It has and it hasn't...The foundation of what we're doing hasn't evolved. There was some experiment getting things going in the late 60s, early 70s as this place got started and I think in terms of how our teacher was going to use the place to teach, there's a lot of experimenting to see what works and it took a few years to figure out what the practice was going to be in terms of ritual...The way he taught changed...Bringing Buddhism to the U.S. is a big experiment so there's a search for finding out what works with Americans. We're psychologically different than Japanese. We have different cultural expectations, so it's a different thing. I mean, you think about 1962, that was still post-WWII optimism in the U.S. The economy was booming. We were getting all of this exotic contact with Asia that really took off in the 70s...How you teach has to adapt to the circumstances, so the basis of what we do has been the same, but the some of the ways we practice have changed slightly.