I vow to taste the truth of the protagonist's words. Morning. Our good friend and teacher, Maureen Stewart, died four weeks ago tomorrow in Cambridge and I wanted to talk about her today. There are two chapters in two different books that have been written about her. One chapter is in Meetings with Remarkable Women by Lenore Friedman, and another chapter from quite a different perspective in Zen in America by Ellen Porkel.

[01:24]

I want to begin by reading a quote from Maureen that heads the chapter that Lenore wrote about her. Dogen Zenji said, if you cannot find a true teacher, it is better not to practice. What did he mean by that? I'm sure there are many interpretations, but what I feel at this moment is that our practice, whatever it is, is our teacher. Life is our practice. If we listen deeply to what's going on, If we're involved down to the very bottom with our life situation, this is our true teacher, the most venerable teacher, Life Roshi.

[02:27]

That's very much Marine Spirit, Life Roshi. I met Maureen in 1984. Lenore had begun to work on this book, and she'd begun to go around and meet different women that she was going to interview for us. And she had the idea of inviting some of these women to talk to us in Berkeley. And in fact, we'd already been doing that in the Berkley Zen Center. There was a women's group, and we had been inviting different women to come and talk to us, and this was a kind of continuation of that. So, in 1984, Maureen came out for the first time. And it was, we had our first women's session.

[03:34]

And women signed up from all over the Bay Area and even further spread than that. It was very exciting to plan it and send out the word and have these responses come in from so many different places. We chose Olima, the Vedanta Society in Olima as the site. And so I was going to drive out with Lenore and Maureen and went to Lenore's house and met Maureen for the first time. And there she was. I was so surprised. She was rather short and kind of square. And she had makeup on. And it was not at all what I expected. I realized I had a whole kind of image.

[04:38]

And that was one of the things that Maureen was wonderful at doing, was breaking down these images that we hardly are aware sometimes we're carrying, but breaking them down because they get in the way of our life. In certain ways, she was extremely traditional And in other ways, the way she carried the form was uniquely her own. So we drove out to Olima and began to talk. And then we got to the driveway of the Vedanta Society. And those of you who have been there will know what I mean. It's this incredible driveway. wonderful sense of really going somewhere.

[05:41]

And that was when I had a deep sense that whatever this was was really going to work out. So we assembled ourselves and took up different positions and there was a little committee that was formed as consultant to Maureen and we looked at the living room And you could see her vision just coming into focus. She knew quite quickly just how we were going to rearrange the furniture, and where we would do qin-hin, and how we would use the circumstances we were in. And we did most wonderfully. Her sesshins were not so painful. One had eight hours of sleep a night, and generous breaks, and 30-minute periods, and probably 15-minute kin hints.

[06:52]

And that was my first encounter with a gentle session. I had carried, although I think over the years we've been moderating our severity, it was the first time that I really understood that you don't have to primarily suffer in a session. And she brought her wonderful ways with her. She brought her wonderful voice. It's just when she begins to lead a chant, One is just amazed the first time you hear this rich, spreading contralto that just embraces. And she chanted familiar chants, although they tended to be repetitious.

[07:59]

She used canzeon and shorter chance over and over again. And her way of doing kin-hin was quite wonderful. Slow, and everybody would be right next to the person in front of them, close, close, same step. So it would be like one body and many feet, that's how she would describe it. So this feeling of closeness all women, there were about 20 of us, all women, and this wonderful embrace of her presence and closeness kept us. And she came out of both a Rinzai and a Soto tradition. And it was a very subtle combination of both.

[09:06]

So everyone would see her at least once a day. And the interviews would be brief, as in the Rinzai style, but five or at the most ten minutes was plenty. She had a wonderfully, she had a powerful intuition about who you were and would could just find and appreciate a person very quickly and then just move in, in whatever way was right. And because she spoke to everybody every day, she had a very fine feeling of what was going on. And her talks, which also were very formal, again in the Rinzai style, very formal way of presenting a koan and then talking about it. These formal talks were very informed by her contacts with everybody in the room.

[10:12]

So that over and over again, many people felt that the whole talk was particularly aimed at them. So I think we sat for, I guess we never sat for seven days, five or six or something. And at the end, as Californian people do, we had scheduled a time to talk about it. And Marie went along with what we had scheduled, said nothing. And the two things that I remember were that the women were so surprised at the degree of safety that they felt, just women being with women, they hadn't anticipated that feeling of safety that would come from that. safety and warmth, as Maureen says, women warm women, and very warm feeling generated, which sashins are usually warm.

[11:27]

And then the other aspect was this wonderful example of a woman embodying the form of the tradition in her own shape. That was something that I think all of us felt that we really needed to see. And she was such a good exemplar of that. So she sat through all this talk and said nothing because that's not her style to talk about. She was very emphatic about that. That life is to be lived. not to be analyzed, not to be taught, but to be lived. Life Roshi. That certainly was her teaching. That was her teaching, and her presence was her teaching.

[12:37]

I was trying to think the quality of her being. What is presence? Interesting to think about what is presence. And I was thinking about, as I was thinking of Oliver, a person's presence has something to do with their roots and what they're rooted in. And people can have a presence which is uncomfortable. And people can have a presence which is profoundly healing and profoundly comfortable. A group of us have been reading the Lotus Sutra and the Lotus Sutra again and again describes the Buddhas that have always existed, always beginning to end with enormous revenues and have never failed to be there and it was Shakyamuni perceived that the Buddhas were there he understood the Buddhas are there and he found a way of tuning in to what was already there and that was his great teaching

[14:05]

And there's a story in the Lotus Sutra about a poor man who has a rich friend and the rich friend sews a jewel inside the poor man's coat and the poor man doesn't know that the jewel's there and he goes through his life and he's very poor and there are many hardships. and finally he comes into the presence of his rich friend and the friend says, well look, what has all the trouble been? Open your shirt. There it is. And Marine's presence has something to do with the way she carried that jewel and the way she walked From the way she walked, you understood how she carried the jewel. And the very measured and full way that she spoke, you learned how she carried the jewel.

[15:14]

And you never failed to see how she was carrying it, even when she dropped it. It was what her life was about. So her teaching style was not methodical. It was very intuitive, very disciplined, very intuitive. very appropriate to what the person and the moment was. There's another little dialogue in here. When Lenore went to visit Maureen, Maureen gave her the cologne, which had been the cologne that So and Roshi had given to Maureen.

[16:23]

And Lenore asks, Do you keep the koan in your mind? Marine. The koan is filling up your whole body. Norm. And the original question, does a dog have buddha nature? That has nothing to do with it. In each koan, there are important words. Mu and buddha nature. That's what mu is. Buddha nature. So you are becoming filled up, completely becoming Mu. You are it, but you are coming to realize it, not thinking. What is Mu? What is Mu? Got it. There's also a story that Maureen tells about a woman who had been to a Sashin and came afterwards and talked to Maureen about it and said that after the Sashin she'd had a dream.

[17:42]

She'd had a dream that she'd found an album of photographs of herself. Oh, Maureen had given her this album of photographs of herself. And in every picture, she was completely naked, except for her shoes. Picture after picture, she was just naked. And they agreed that that was a wonderful reception of the teaching. that there was no need for cover, that all of me was just unique and alright and a sufficient manifestation of common nature. And as Maureen says, we spent so much time covering, protecting, hiding with our thought structures, avoiding. We are so full of our own clutter that we need our Zazen practice in order to let go and to just believe that my Buddha nature

[18:45]

will meet your Buddha nature and we will see each other completely and everything will be alright. She could also be very severe. I was in Cambridge once and we were in her study and it was after a lecture and a young woman came in and said something about And this is what I want to get from practice." And Maureen drew herself up. Get something from practice. You don't sit to get something from practice. And the woman left the room. And a few days later we were back in the Zendo and somebody said that this woman wanted to speak to Maureen again. And again, I could see Maureen drawing herself up and walking, her wonderful walk.

[19:50]

And I didn't hear what she said, but I could hear her big voice, just a minute or so on it. And then she came back. And that had been her relationship with this young woman for about a year. And that was one way she practiced, one way she taught. So there's no need, she would keep saying, to think about I, that I should try harder. No need to say, I will try harder. I should help people. The Dharma is working through us. We must never forget that we and all beings are one. So she was very insistent about us being Dharma vehicles and just letting the clutter settle.

[20:56]

And after she died, of course we grieved and we talked and I realized that there's something about a teacher that just makes the world more comfortable that makes the world a more comfortable place and one doesn't have to see the teacher all that much even but just knowing that the teacher is there changes the whole landscape in some imperceptible but in an extremely important way. Again the Lotus Sutra talks about Buddha fields, that where the Buddhas are ground flattens, and there are jewels everywhere, and there are cords of gold, and flowers come down from the air.

[22:12]

And I think that's a kind of metaphor for this wonderful comfort that we feel from somebody whom, at a certain level, we wholly trust as being a pointer to where our heart's desire is. I want to say a little bit about her background, although if people want to know more, it is, I'm just going to say a little, because it is written in these books, and in the next year or so, there will be a book that comes out, her tay show, about her. She was born in 1923 in a very small town in Canada, in Manitoba. And she played the piano very well as a young child. So well that when she was 11 or 12, she was given a scholarship to go to a boarding school in Winnipeg.

[23:17]

I can't quite remember what her father did. Her grandfather had been a farmer. Her parents' position was fairly modest and it seemed a wonderful opportunity for her to get a very good education. So essentially she left home at the age of 11 or 12 and was raised in this boarding school knowing that she had to practice many hours a day in order to remain there. not able to go home for many of the vacations. Staying there, very lonely often. And also understanding very early on something important about transmission. She said that she realized in a certain way that she knew the music already, that she wasn't learning it, she was recalling it. And her talent continued to be quite conspicuous.

[24:28]

After she got out of high school, she got a scholarship to go to Paris and study with Nadja Boulanger. And that was when her big world opened up, and she began to read some Buddhism, and continued to practice and practice. Nadja Boulanger said to her once, Mademoiselle, you have great talent. Do you know what that means? And Boulanger say it means that you have to practice harder than everybody. So she came back from Paris and was a concert pianist, married, had three children. kept all that going and began to sit in 1966 with Edo Roshi and Soen Roshi in the New York Zen Center.

[25:31]

She always felt that Soen Roshi was her teacher. She loved him very, very much. Her husband moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she went along very sadly and reluctantly, but began to sit with the Cambridge Buddhist Association, which then was sitting at Elsie Mitchell's house. The Cambridge Buddhist Association had been started some years before by D.T. Suzuki. And sometime in the, I guess, the late 70s, early 80s, She went back and was, she just grew more and more into a teaching role there. Went back and was ordained a priest by Edo Roshi. And then the building 75, 78 Spark Street in Cambridge was bought and she became the teacher there. It was an old, beautiful, stately Cambridge house that couldn't have better suited Maureen.

[26:37]

And one sat in the living room and the dining room. It was a wonderful yard and it was a marvelous setting for her. So she lived a very gracious life, teaching, giving music lessons, enjoying her friends, Gradually, more and more of a, she developed more and more of a kind of satellite practice. Different sitting groups emerged and she would go and help them. I know that she was particularly gratified by a group that she started at Exeter, the boys, the boarding school for girls and boys, very traditional boarding school. and she was very pleased at being able to start a rather large sitting practice there. She very much enjoyed the pleasures of life.

[27:49]

Again, when I first saw her house, I was surprised and had to throw out the picture of Zen Center Petrie's house. It was brimming with things, extremely comfortable, extremely oriented to making life pleasant for everyone who was in it. It was a townhouse worth three three stories to it, four stories even. And it was like, I always felt when I entered it, it was like a kind of pleasure ship. And you're always going up and down stairs in a ship. This had the comfort and the luxury of a wonderful ship with her grand piano and wonderful music system. She was a marvelous hostess. Everything that came up, she enjoyed. And if you were a guest, you were very fortunate because all she did was enjoy and make this wonderful space and enjoy it.

[29:00]

She Like us all, she had her life's difficulties. The way she began life was not easy. And she had her share of troubles, personal troubles. She separated from her husband, I don't know, in 85 or 86 or something, shortly before she learned she had cancer. And the example was of somebody who really used their difficulties and the afflictive emotions and their troubles thoroughly, thoroughly. and used them to really define, as she says, that place of stability, of inner stability, through which to interpret the turbulence of life.

[30:19]

So the turbulence of life was there, but she had this deep place that it filtered through. and as it filtered through, that's where you got the warmth. She went in for a routine checkup sometime in 1987 and through a series of tests it was discovered that she had cancer of the liver and of the intestine. Oh yeah, just a little before, we had a session in sometime, probably around June of 87. And at the end of that session, in her and my last dokasan, she said suddenly, Meili, are you prepared to die?

[31:22]

was the kind of question, you know, sometimes a teacher gives you a question and you know at the moment of the question that there's enormous impact and you don't know how it's going to work out, but you understand fully that you've been given something. And I had no idea, of course, at the time it was given, what the extraordinary teaching would be that followed it. So a few months after that, towards the end of 87, she received this diagnosis. She was very open about it. She told people calmly and matter-of-factly. And she was very determined that she was going to maintain the quality of her life. whatever her life was, she was going to maintain that quality.

[32:36]

Not through any kind of denial of illness, but through a very complete acceptance of it. She had already made plans to lead a pilgrimage to India at the, I think it was fall of 87, and Knowing that she would have to have an operation when she returned, she led that trip and it was a wonderful trip. Then she came back and she had an operation where Part of the cancer was removed and also some of it was not. So that she was left with cancer in the liver and the lower bowel and a very poor prognosis. She decided against chemotherapy.

[33:38]

She decided against chemotherapy because, as she continually said, she had not felt sick. She gave a talk. Meanwhile, the sessions for women had ended, I guess, in 88. And it seemed that three or four years of them were enough, and now it was a time to have session with everybody. And Green Gulch had been asking her, so she began to give the Green Gulch sessions. And she gave a lecture in January of 89 at Green Gulch where she talks about her illness. And I'm going to summarize some of that talk. Life, death, health, illness are one.

[34:45]

The true face of the universe includes all things in it. There are many healers in the world, but the healers do not heal us. The healing is already there in the wholeness. The goal of healing is to help the person in need of healing to realize the wholeness. At the deepest level, there is no sickness. She said that after her operation she had received a card from Green Gulch. Many, many people signed the card. There was a session going on and the session was dedicated to her and so on and so on. And she received this card after the operation and she said she cried in gratitude that all of the people in her life had made the quality of her life so rich and so good.

[35:50]

And that she continued to read the card from time to time after that and was always encouraged. She went on in the lecture to describe the very dispassionate perspective she had towards her illness, one that was neither despairing nor hopeful. She said she felt both sick and not sick. She had had treatments, punctures, tests, operations, everything, you name it, but she had never felt sick, except for the aftermath of a major operation. That her life had been pain-free, energetic, and vital. And that health means wholeness, oneness. What she tapped was the realm beyond conditions of life and death, and her goal was beyond health and sickness. Nothing to be gained, nothing to become, only the present moment, a state of health that transcends the problem at hand.

[36:59]

The highest use of the human psyche is not for cure but for the transcendence of the conditional events we call health and disease and birth and death. The state of highest health is beyond harm, beyond all ephemeralities. It is the suchness and the isness of every moment, the now that is the only time there is." She lived through the year 1989 in that spirit, feeling well. Slowed, but feeling well. And then in January, in February, in December, I spoke to her and she was well. And then she had a flu, which was hard for her, but she got better. People who saw her said, in fact, she fluctuated a great deal.

[38:02]

had times when she was very well, times when she was quite weak. And then, a week before her death, she really fell into a lot of pain for the first time. And she went into the hospital. And when the doctors told her that there was nothing more that they could do for her, she said, good, that she was really tired of the pain. And then she kind of It floated into a state, a very kind of fluid state. And looked very well, people said. Looked very well and just was extremely grateful that everything that happened, an IV being put in, a door slamming, she would say, thank you. And she died very quickly. And I think she died in exactly the way in which she had chosen to die, and exactly in the way that she'd chosen to live.

[39:09]

And it was a very good example. Maybe you have some comments or memories or questions or something, we have a little time. There's a piece that you talked about that I didn't quite understand, and I can't remember what it was right now, but was there anger at all around her cancer? And was there, you know, I think you kind of touched on it a little maybe when you said there was a way she had to go into, I assume through practice, but could you talk a little more about that? Yeah, the turbulence, how the inner stability how the turbulence was interpreted through the inner stability.

[40:09]

Yes, she certainly, there was anger in her life. There was substantial anger in her life. She was a passionate woman. She said at one point on the page, I am a big breasted passionate woman. And the anger, the anger was there. And she just kept She just kept going through it. You know, she said to somebody, no matter what comes, good or bad, don't make a move to avoid it. So, she, I think she didn't, one didn't hear what she was particularly angry about unless you were quite close to her. because she was very careful about what she did with it. But to those people who were close, you knew what the anger was about and you heard it.

[41:14]

But I think she used the energy of it. She used the energy of it to just keep her on this deep kind of plumbing of the depths. Yeah, she had to be talked into it a bit and she wasn't even sure that she would do a second one until she'd done the first and really felt that there was a need there. And she was so, she so enjoyed her femininity that there was never any question. She just, her femininity was just a receptacle for her practice.

[42:21]

Her head wasn't shaved. I don't know what the tradition is of shaving heads in that Zen dome, but her hair was not shaved. Do most people shave heads when they're ordained? Yes. They do? If it's complete and formal ordination, or he was ordained as a lay monk, and then given transmission, lay monk. Well, her hair was never shaved, and it would be hard to imagine the circumstances in which it would be. And she paid great attention to what she wore. It's quite interesting to look at the pictures of different teachers in here. The picture of Joko Beck is just taken in a street corner, and Joko, I don't think, has the faintest idea of what she's wearing. Probably never does. And Maureen is in all of her robes, sitting in a well-arranged corner of a room with Bodhidharma and flowers. That was the way she was.

[43:25]

But did she think that it was important to pay attention to oppression of women by ancient Buddhist traditions or anything like that? Was she worried about that? No, she wasn't worried about oppression. She was not. She didn't describe herself as a feminist. She just was who she was. She just was who she was. My only little I have two small regrets. I mean, it was just such a wonderful, clean kind of relationship that we had. I regret that I didn't call her a little more frequently, because I got my own denial system, I think, fell into. Everything's all right, and I didn't. But the last time I was there, She was always a little bit pushing chocolates on me and encouraging me to use skin lotions and that sort of thing. And I was in her bathroom. And I saw this nice little array of perfume bottles so I just opened one and I put one on and it was her smell, it was her fragrance.

[44:34]

And I told her, you know, how nice that is. And she said, well, take the bottle. Take it. I couldn't. And now I wish so much I had. Now I could wear the fragrance. Yeah. In the sashin she did last February at Windulch, she told a story about someone she described as a dear friend who was four years old. And she painted the little girl's toenails red. And the little girl called her up later and without any preamble said, do Buddhas have painted toenails red? And she said, do you have painted toenails red? And she said, yes. She said, well, you are a Buddha, so they do. Yes? Oh, thank you.

[45:35]

I don't. It's in the newsletter, though. Thank you. Yeah? that I never forget her energy that filled up the whole center and her eyes. I mean, it's not very far away, but I'm just really sending that energy and the closeness, that very close. And as we were talking about her and what she teached us, don't forget that all human beings are one. I have this vision, vision of, you know, when I was, this was a sewing as a lady, and I felt one, and it's the feeling of compassion that's come out of my head. It's just like I see all these different faces and portions, but at the same time it's almost as if it's one.

[46:43]

And it's just very good. It's a very good feeling to have, because I miss the same person. you

[47:12]

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