Training Spiritual Jocks

John Kain: Zen Mountain Monastery (ZMM) is one of only a handful of Zen monastic training centers in the West. How did you come about starting a Zen monastery?
John Daido Loori Roshi: The thing that attracts most people to Buddhism and Zen in particular is its monasticism--historically, that's what Zen was. Many of us identify with the romantic ideal of the wandering monk--that's what attracted me to begin with. When I came to Zen and was studying with [Taizan] Maezumi Roshi [1931-1995, the Japanese Zen master who founded the Zen Center of Los Angeles and transmitted dharma to scores of American students], I began to notice that what we were doing and what other centers were doing was a kind of compromise of monastic practice to make it accessible to Western practitioners.

You saw Buddhist teachings getting watered down?
Oh, very much so, including my own training. It all came home to me one day when Maezumi Roshi asked me to represent him at an ecumenical gathering for the Dalai Lama in California. When I got there, I was ushered into a room filled with people from every possible religion. We were all getting into our vestments and talking, and I realized that every one of these people knew about Zen Buddhism, and I knew very little, if anything, about any religion beside Catholicism [the religion of my upbringing]. I realized that I wasn't educated, I wasn't a theologian. I hadn't been trained properly. And I made up my mind that if I ever became a teacher, I would try to train monks properly.

When we started the monastery, it became clear that people didn't know what they were getting into.

So in 1980, when you founded ZMM, how did things start?
At first, survival was the main thing--it was a matter of supporting the monastery and keeping the practice going. My teacher kept saying that you have to ordain people, you had to make monks. He actually ordained the first one for me. But that monk didn't last very long. Maezumi Roshi had ordained 80 or 90 monastics in his lifetime, but at the time of his death in 1995 there were only a dozen or so actively practicing as monastics. It became obvious to me that people didn't know what they were getting into. They needed preparation for monkhood.

You mean they didn't comprehend the rigorous training schedule and the years of practice ahead?
Most people have no sense of what it means to be a monk. At most centers, a monk is someone who essentially does a lay practice but wears black robes. They have homes and families and businesses and so on. And that's how our training program starts out. But at ZMM it takes five years to become a fully ordained monastic and during those five years they go through a state of becoming a student, of receiving the precepts, of becoming a postulant, a novitiate, and then finally full ordination. That follows the Christian tradition.

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