Dharma Transmission

When I began practicing meditation in college at a Zen center in New York City, I had the feeling that I had come home—home to where I was always meant to be. The ritual, the incense, the chanting, the bowing, resonated deeply, as if I had somehow experienced them before.

The following year I enrolled in graduate school at Stanford, rather than at one of the East Coast schools that had accepted me, because it was close to my ultimate destination, Tassajara Zen Monastery. While at Stanford, I had the good fortune to sit three long sesshins (retreats) with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and hoped to be able to continue studying with him at Tassajara the following fall. But Suzuki Roshi was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died toward the end of the fall practice period.

For the next ten years I remained deeply immersed in Zen practice. I ordained as a monk with Kobun Chino and practiced with Taizan Maezumi for five years at the Zen Center of Los Angeles, including periods as shuso (head monk) and director of training. In 1982 I set aside my robes (though never relinquished my vows) to study Western psychology. I went on to practice both Dzogchen and Mahamudra in the Tibetan tradition before meeting my primary teacher, Jean Klein, a European master of Advaita Vedanta, in 1988.

I studied with Jean intensively for 10 years. Within a year of his death in 1998, a friend introduced me to a young man named Adyashanti, who had just begun teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area. When Adya and I had a chance to talk one to one, we acknowledged that it felt more like a meeting of two old friends, fellow monks from a previous life, than a teacher-student relationship. I attended nearly every retreat Adya offered over the next two plus years. In the summer of 2001, after a particularly powerful retreat in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains near Lone Pine, California, Adya offered me Dharma transmission, the culmination of one’s study as a Zen monk.

The paradox of Dharma transmission—one of an infinite number of paradoxes on the journey of awakening—is that nothing is actually transmitted. Instead, it’s an acknowledgment of who we really are; nothing has changed, except now we are knowingly what we’ve always been, with full recognition of our inherently awake true nature. To honor and celebrate the occasion, we met with Adya’s teacher Arvis Justi, and Adya gave me a mala (ritual beads) and his oryoki (traditional Zen bowls), and I gave him a signed first edition of a book by American Zen pioneer Nyogen Senzaki. We also exchanged poems (see below).

Although Dharma transmission changed nothing at an intrinsic level, it initiated me into a lineage of awakened ones dating back thousands of year. Transmission intensified my original vow to dedicate my life to my own ongoing awakening and the awakening of others and inspired me with an imperative to share this understanding and pass on the Dharma as my teachers had passed it to me. In my time as a monk I had offered talks, meditation instruction, and practice interviews, but the journey as a teacher began with Dharma transmission and continues to this moment right now.