Steve Kanji Ruhl - Appalachian Zen: Journeys in Search of True Home, from the American Heartland to the Buddha Dharma

Praise for

Appalachian Zen

Amazing and intense. A unique, entertaining, and valuable contribution to the Dharma literature, Appalachian Zen addresses a part of the Western Dharma world that hasnt received much attention: class. Rev. Sumi Loundon Kim, Buddhist chaplain, Yale University, author of Blue Jean Buddha and Sitting Together

Zen is becoming native to America and the West, and theres no better place to see what this looks like than with Steve Kanji Ruhls Appalachian Zen . Its an intimate memoir; you can taste and smell and feel his journey into the depths. At the same time, its a very good invitation into the details of a contemporary Zen life. I strongly recommend it. James Ishmael Ford, author of Introduction to Zen Koans: Learning the Language of Dragons

Appalachian Zen is the record of the journey of a restless soul in search of home, who finds it, finally, in the dynamic silence of Zen. Steve Kanji Ruhls poetic descriptions of his birthplace in hardscrabble Appalachian Pennsylvania, his wanderings through Japan, his education in elite universities, and of the often harrowing incidents of his life, make this book an engrossing read. What is life, what is death, why are we here? No one avoids such questions, here explored with honesty and depth. Norman Fischer, Zen priest and poet, author of When You Greet Me I Bow: Reflections from a Life in Zen and Selected Poems 1980-2013

This beautifully written memoir traces the authors pilgrims progress from the conservative American heartland to the depths of the Buddhist dharma, mirroring Martin Bubers claim that every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware. Insightful, accessible, and emotionally transparent, this epic spiritual journey from West to East and back again will open your mind and widen your heart. I recommend it highly. Mark Matousek, author of Sex Death Enlightenment and When Youre Falling, Dive

A wise, wonderful, and fierce book. Andrew Harvey, founder of the Sacred Activism movement and author of A Walk with Four Spiritual Guides: Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, and Ramakrishna

Appalachian Zen: Journeys in Search of True Home, from the American Heartland to the Buddha Dharma Copyright 2022 by Steve Kanji Ruhl

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the consent of the publisher except in critical articles or reviews. Contact the publisher for information.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-948626-80-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-948626-81-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kanji Ruhl, Steve, author.

Title: Appalachian Zen : journeys in search of true home, from the American

heartland to the Buddha dharma / Steve Kanji Ruhl.

Description: Rhinebeck : Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2022. | Includes

bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022017885 (print) | LCCN 2022017886 (ebook) | ISBN

9781948626804 (paperback) | ISBN 9781948626811 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Kanji Ruhl, Steve. | Buddhist converts--United

States--Biography. | Buddhism--United States.

Classification: LCC BQ968.A455 A3 2022 (print) | LCC BQ968.A455 (ebook) |

DDC 294.30973--dc23/eng/20220609

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022017885

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022017886

Book and cover design by Colin Rolfe

Monkfish Book Publishing Company

22 East Market Street, Suite 304

Rhinebeck, NY 12572

(845) 876-4861

monkfishpublishing.com

Contents

Light Grazes peaks of the Kitakami Highlands.

Light burnishes the rice flats.

A Zen priest, Watanabe, climbs the stairs of Taiyo-jis bell tower. Land of the rising sun.

He chortles to himself, round-faced rshi with shaven scalp. Clad in robes of indigo. Drape of khaki across his shoulder. His eyes are lit, as always, with imperturbable private mirth. I follow him. We stand on the belfry, its plank flooring littered with yellow fans of ginkgo leaves.

I rose at five-thirty in a room brittle with cold. Dressed, then moved outdoors into fading darkness. Incipient radiance seeped the air. Fog lifted off the Kitakami River.

I rode a bicycle past cherry and persimmon trees. Rode past tile-roofed houses, azaleas, chestnuts, past vegetable gardens and sentry pines, the six-foot protective walls of bristled hedges, streets of the former samurai district. I saw no one.

Chuffing squawk of a raven.

Sunshine gathering now in the east. Sky is the blue gaseous heart of fire.

Watanabe chants orisons, bent stiffly, hands palm-to-palm. I reach for the log suspended in its rope harness. I pull back and then, in an uninterrupted glide, strike the massive iron bell. The sounda shaped sonic pulse in the air, stately, ferrous, with a bass underhumripples over canted rooftops and cedars and the Buddhist cemetery of Kanegasaki, Japan. I bow. During the past month Ive learned what to do: I make a steeple of my pressed hands. Watanabe chants. When the bells vibrato begins to dim, when it nearly subsides, I reach and pull and strike again. Eight times.

Inside Taiyo-ji Temple, I sit, knees to the floor, astride a black zafu .

Stare at mesh of tatami mat.

Stillness. Breath.

A monk materializes behind me, unseen, noiseless as the thoughts I quell minute by minute, and he presses the stick, kysaku , to my spine to straighten my posture; he vanishes. Now breathing. Now stillness.

Stillnessbreathing.

I am the first foreigner to sit zazen at Taiyo-ji in the temples four-hundred-year history.

This visit marks my first venture into Japan. In 1997, the end of the century, Ive done what vagabond Americans always do: Ive lit out for the West. Ive flown from Boston into Chicago and then across the prairies and Canadian Rockies and over the unpeopled limitless sweep of Alaska to the Pacific. But I havent paused there. Ive continued westward into fulgent, perpetual sun. Ive gone so far west Ive wound up in the Mysterious East.

Ive landed here at forty-three, newly emerging from a baffled life, having lost much of what felt familiar and having experienced through many contested nights and days my own foreignness, the rawness and novelty of a world I scarcely recognize any longer as my own.

Perhaps living one season in Japanthe irreducible oddity of it; the dislocation and jetlag; the jeopardy of loneliness; the unreliability of language, of customwill help me understand some of this.

Im not sure. I live now with few expectations, and certainly without hope. Which is to say, I seem to live increasingly for this very instant, imparadised, abundant, and live in moods of quiet, unreasoning happiness. Perhaps this is good Zen.

But its difficult. Still a novice at practicing Zen, after only three years, I relapse often into meanness and mistaken habit. Nor is that all: a novice at practicing middle age, I seem to totter between mastery and buffoonery, last chance and reformation.

I can only guess what my father dreamed for us as he drove through early morning darkness of fading stars, or through a blizzard or through rain, humming his favorite Kingston Trio songs. On his way to work he shared lonely stretches of asphalt with an occasional highballing Mac diesel rig. Watching for deer that might step gingerly from pine groves into his headlights on the long straightaways between Lock Haven and Bellefonte hed drive into the dawn. He worked as a drafting engineer at the Titan Metal factory. My dad toted his lunch bucket and drove his gas-reeking Ford clunker eighty miles roundtrip every day, Monday through Friday, to glean for us paychecks totaling eleven thousand dollars a year. We lived in a trailer. Our trailer sat among other trailers at the edge of scrub woods, off a two-lane blacktop called Route 220 in Clinton County.