My gosh, it's an amazing turnout.
Good thing we're in Arizona, where it won't suddenly rain.
[LAUGHTER]
Can you folks way in the back there actually hear this?
Yeah.
No.
If you can't hear it, raise your hand.
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
Looks like it's working.
OK.
Well, thank you all for turning out for this.
As I was saying to Drum a few minutes ago,
these folks don't seem to have anything else to do tonight.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm very happy and pleased that you could come.
And I'm truly pleased and honored
to have been asked to remember and speak
in memory of Ruth Stephan, the founder of the Poetry Center
here.
My gosh, 50 years.
Well, that's only 1961, 1960.
That's not so bad.
[LAUGHTER]
So it was the summer of 1961, which
is 49 years ago, that Ruth Stephan visited
the city of Kyoto, Japan.
I don't know if that was the first time.
Maybe it was.
I was a student at the Daitoku-ji monastery
at that time, and an archivist, and librarian
worker in the First Zen Institute of America,
a little Kyoto branch temple and library
which was just a couple of hundred feet
from the monastery, actually, and run by Ruth Fuller Sasaki,
a remarkable American woman who started her zen
practice in the 1930s, sitting zazen
in the Nanzen-ji monastery in full cross-legged position
on the cushions with the monks, probably
before any other American had ever
done that, and certainly, before any woman had ever done it.
And she handled that with a lot of panache, and a lot of grace.
Ruth went on to start a zen study center
in New York City, Ruth Sasaki, whose name was Fuller, still,
then.
And she met the Japanese zen master, Sasaki Shigetsu,
who was working as a carver in a furniture factory
in New York City at that time, and also teaching
zen when he could afford to in a little apartment on the side.
When she met him and discovered that he
was of very much the same lineage as she had started in,
they really hit it off.
And she created a zen study center in New York City,
in Manhattan, which is still going today.
Although, it's in her style, and in that tradition,
it is so low key that it doesn't advertise itself
like all the other Buddhists in America do.
[LAUGHTER]
So Ruth and Sasaki Shigetsu got married,
and she took the surname Sasaki, Ruth Sasaki.
After the war was over, and as soon as the occupation would
permit it, she journeyed back to Kyoto,
hoping to find another zen teacher, hopefully
in that same Rinzai lineage connected with the Myoshinji
Temple, or the Daitoku-ji Temple,
to invite to come back to New York.
There was nobody available.
Nobody wanted to go, so she ended up staying there.
And the Daitoku-ji Temple system--
I don't know why they did this--
gave her a temple.
And then she had to become a priest to have the temple.
So she went through that too, but she said, well,
don't expect me to come to any of the big ceremonies.
I won't have time.
And they said, oh, that's OK.
We wouldn't want you anyway.
[LAUGHTER]
But that was the beginning of a serious scholarly,
as well as a practical spiritual studies program in Japan.
And I was brought to Japan because I
was learning how to make my way in Classical Chinese, as well
as Modern Japanese, as a graduate student at UC,
Berkeley.
So I got plucked up somehow, and shipped over there,
which was what I wanted to do.
I wanted to do some zen study.
And that's where I found myself in the summer of 1961,
sitting and practicing in the zendo, with a little house
a few blocks from the monastery where I had
my library and my dictionaries.
And then Ruth Stephan came to town, also a woman
of the same class as Ruth Sasaki had been, which is to say,
rich, from Chicago, as Ruth was, and actually already friends.
I think Mrs. Sasaki was maybe 10 years older
than Ruth Stephan at that time.
Ruth Stephan was coming primarily,
as I understood it, to find a place to be quiet and write
some more.
She loved writing, and she wrote a lot of things.
And she was a good writer.
She actually was a good writer.
Look it up.
Look it up over there.
[LAUGHTER]
Mrs. Sasaki took good care of Ruth Stephan,
and she got me to be a helper sometimes, and take
Ruth Stephan around to visit zen temples and zen priests.
And I acted as her interpreter, because I
could speak passable Japanese, and my English
wasn't bad at all at that time.
[LAUGHTER]
And Ruth Stephan was a charming, generous, totally intelligent,
compassionate, interested, and beautiful person.
That was her only problem.
[LAUGHTER]
Probably.
She was too beautiful, and she was already-- my god,
she was 50 years old at that time.
But what a striking lady she was,
on her second, or maybe just coming out
of her second marriage.
Ruth Sasaki did the heavy lifting
when it came to introducing Ruth Stephan to serious, high-class
remote zen teachers.
And she did that, as those of you who
come next week to see the 70-minute movie on Ruth
Stephan and the temple called Ryoko-in,
you'll see tomorrow how that actually played out.
The movie was made in 19--
what year, '70?
'71.
'71, by Ruth Stephan.
Ruth Stephan first met Kobori Nanrei,
who was the priest of that temple, which
was right part of the Daitoku-ji complex in 1961.
So it was actually-- quite a span of time
was involved there.
She was writing poetry, as well as prose.
And as she said very clearly, poetry
was that art which was closest to her heart.
All her life, she was a writer.
As a child, she started writing poetry and prose.
I only gradually came to understand that and appreciate
it.
And I only gradually came to take her seriously
because she was too good-looking, and too
well-bred.
My impression was that poets were kind of ugly and not
well-bred--
[LAUGHTER]
--like most of the ones I knew in San Francisco.
[LAUGHTER]
But I was happy to be part of that, to be present at that,
and to get to know her a little bit.
And it was just a little bit.
I was just one of the helpers around the temple,
actually, and was not to be taken too seriously.
If Ruth was 50, I was 30, so that was a different time
and a different place.
Speed ahead, and I hear about the Ruth Stephan Poetry Center
in Tucson, Arizona.
Oh, my goodness, what's that?
[CHUCKLES] Turns out that was part of one
of the many things she did in her life,
was to spend time here in Tucson,
also finding a space to write, and renting a place,
and settling in there for a few months.
And then one of those places was what became the Ruth Stephan
Poetry Cottage, which I think I first
was invited to stay in in 1973 or '74, which is only three
years after the movie that you'll see was made, and was,
as it turns out, the year that Ruth Stephan died.
Except at that time, I didn't even know it.
She was back on the East Coast, and I
didn't know that she had died.
And I didn't actually know quite what had become of her,
except she had left this cottage,
and started a poetry center here on the University of Arizona
campus.
I gather that, in some way, her launching that,
and her gifts of further support, and books, stocks,
land, whatever she gave to help support all of that,
they bought another house to put her gifted library
in, all of that helps to gather the energy and the focus,
the direction that culminates tonight in us being here.
It wouldn't probably have happened
without her first launching it that way,
and certainly without her devotion to the idea of poetry.
My goodness.
I want to read you something, which I went back upstairs,
over there in the library, to copy down today
because I was so taken with the optimism of it,
and, in a sense, the hopelessness of it.
This is Ruth Stephan quoted--
"Poetry is the food of the spirit,
and spirit is the instigator and flow
of all revolutions, whether political or personal,
whether national, worldwide, or within the life
of a single quiet human being."
What a mission for poetry.
[LAUGHTER]
I hope it's true, and I'll go on hoping it's true.
But we may not know for centuries yet--
[LAUGHTER]
--if that actually works out to be the case.
In any event, we should continue as though it were true,
which is just as good, and make it part of our thought
that poetry has some role to play, at some point,
in the transformation, possibly, of society,
not to mention our own.
Certainly, it's true of our own inner lives.
Ruth Stephan's time at the temple of Ryoko-in,
which is one of the branch temples of Daitoku-ji--
Daitoku-ji covers 127 acres of land, I think,
in the North end of Kyoto.
It's one of the six or seven what
they call main temples, [JAPANESE],,
of the Rinzai school of zen in Japan.
It has several thousand branch temples
scattered over the countryside, rural temples.
And it has 22 temples within the grounds
of the 100 and some acres.
It's a big establishment.
So the Ryoko-in Temple is one of those 22 temples
which is within the larger walls of the Daitoku-ji system.
Daitoku-ji, [JAPANESE],, great virtue,
or great vertu "great magical virtue temple"
is what it means in both Daoist, Confucianists, and Buddhist
senses That was the name that was given.
It was founded in the 13th century.
Ryoko-in means "the light of the dragon"--
dragon light temple.
And Kobori, who I knew rather well,
had been sick with tuberculosis at the time of World War II,
and was not drafted into the army.
So instead, he staked his health on traveling 10 miles each way
by train at 4:00 every morning for years
to go and have a dokusan, koan interview session
with his old teacher Morimoto.
She lived way down, halfway towards Osaka, almost--
well, about a third of the way towards Osaka.
He did recover and live on some years longer,
but he is dead now.
And somebody else has got the temple, some other priest.
So this event here is a little part
of that world network, also, of what
has gone on not only in poetry, but of what
has gone on in this ancient world of Buddhist thought
and practice moving outward over the centuries.
And of course, those guys don't care about time that much.
They say, well, temples, they go for a few centuries,
and get all neglected, and kind of fall down.
And then somebody comes along, and raises money,
and fixes it up.
And for a while, there are no good students.
And then good students come back,
and you have to give yourself a few thousand years for this
to work out.
[LAUGHTER]
People don't think that way anymore, East or West.
I was already doing my own poetry by that time,
and it took me a while to see where Ruth would
fit into it all, Ruth Stephan.
And I'm still not sure where she fits into it all, except I
know she was my friend.
And after whatever time we had together,
she would have forgiven me for my errors and excesses--
[QUIET LAUGHTER]
--just as I forgive her for her wonderful manners.
[LAUGHTER]