The Tassajara Zendo Fire and Impermanence

I was 28 when I first rattled over a stone-pocked fourteen-mile dirt road into the Ventana Wilderness of California and entered the meditation hall at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the first traditional Zen monastery established outside Asia. I wasn’t looking for enlightenment. My roommate Sherri and I were on a summer camping trip, and were keen to try out the center’s famous hot springs.

But one thing led to another. A friend named John, who had mysteriously disappeared from the leftist journalism scene in San Francisco, popped up by the baths, dressed in a black kimono, set off by a bright white collar. He quietly paid for a cabin for us so we could spend a few nights. (In the summer, Tassajara opens as a resort for paying guests.) John showed us around the zendo and invited us to the next morning’s meditation.

That dawn, after chanting “sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them,” I came out of that sacred space into the morning light, with a clarity I’d never before known. The Spanish word Ventana means “window” in English. The zendo was a window into a new life. I walked in as a striving and confused young newspaper reporter. I walked out as a striving and confused young newspaper reporter who had connected with something inside her that she had lost touch with, like the beggar who discovers a secret jewel sewn in the lining of her pocket. The simple wooden zendo, with its silence and shared ritual, was my Chartres. Although I never spent a winter practice period there, I returned to Tassajara for the entire next summer to live, work, and meditate. That was more than forty years ago.

A few weeks ago, the zendo burned to the ground.

Cleanup will be extensive. The fire took with it meditation cushions; monks’ robes; the sacred handsewn cloths called rakusus that honor lay ordination; and oryoki eating bowls. It shattered an ancient and priceless Gandharan Buddha, carved with Graeco-Roman features in Afghanistan when it was a Greek garrison. Only its face remains.

As the news traveled on Facebook, some former and present monks and visitors spoke of impermanence. Others contributed funds for rebuilding, which is expected to cost far more than insurance will cover. Several people online quoted Dogen Zenji, the spiritual ancestor who brought Soto Zen from China to Japan: Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again. . . . Birth is an expression complete in this moment. Death is an expression complete in this moment. 

It is gone. Don’t look back. Firewood is firewood. Ash is ash. 

But is it? 

My first reaction was not acceptance but shock and grief—a natural human response to loss. Something I treasured is gone forever.

I remembered my root teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, who was fond of saying that if we looked closely enough, we could see clouds in our chant cards, because clouds become rain and nourish the trees, whose wood is made into paper. He saw impermanence not as extinction but as a process of endlessly changing forms.

When I think back over the history of Tassajara, what stands out are such constant changes in form. Its hot springs were, for centuries, a healing refuge for the Esselen Indians and part of their vast ancestral territory. After they were violently dispossessed during the genocide of the 19th century, white resort keepers built cabins and a hotel by the springs. In its commercial heyday in the early 20th century, Tassajara attracted Hollywood movie stars and boasted a bowling alley, a bar, and a dance hall.

Something I treasured is gone forever.

That changed radically in 1967, when the nascent San Francisco Zen Center, led by the Japanese priest Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and his entrepreneurial American dharma heir, Richard Baker Roshi, bought the nearly forgotten resort and remade it as a traditional Zen monastery. Ever since, the paying guests of summer have helped fund the austere traditional monastic practice periods of fall and winter. 

Tassajara, tucked in a steep wild valley, has always felt dynamic, solid, and precarious. Dynamic, thanks to the eternal rushings of the creeks and waterfalls that cut through its surrounding gulches. Solid, like the steep, granite ridges that rise all around it like knife blades and protectors. Precarious, because the entire settlement has repeatedly and narrowly escaped burning. The lost zendo was built on the foundation of a dance hall that burned nearly a century ago. 

All is change. When I first sat in the zendo, we chanted the names of a semiapocryphal lineage of “Buddhas and patriarchs,” all men, dating back to the historical Buddha. In 2000, a newly installed co-abbess, Linda Ruth Cutts, instituted a parallel recitation of the names of our semilegendary female spiritual ancestors, starting with Prajapati, the Buddha’s aunt, who raised him after his mother died in childbirth and later became one of his first nuns.

The zendo was once lit by kerosene lamps, and then solar power. Now it is gone. Jay Simoneaux, a close friend who helped build it, is dead of Parkinson’s disease. Paul Discoe, a master builder traditionally trained in Japanese joinery who oversaw construction, has since built a grand house for Oracle’s Larry Ellison. Since the pandemic shutdown, Tassajara’s once-casual and sybaritic summer guest season has been reconfigured and replaced with meditation and yoga-focused workshops and retreats.

Yes, ash is ash. But nothing disappears. Wood and stone take on the imprints of our vibrating souls. Every hour I spent in the zendo lives on inside my own body. Just as the vibrations of our chanting once soaked into its walls, they have soaked the walls of our cells.

My body is aged now. In a decade or so, it, too, will enter an oven and burn up like the zendo.

I hope to return to Tassajara myself this summer, to refresh my practice in the company of others, in whatever space is set aside as a temporary zendo. (The Zen Center’s current plan is to delay, but not cancel, the summer guest season.)

In the meantime, I unroll a yoga mat with a snap each morning in my home office, set a timer on my iPhone, and unfold a seiza meditation bench tall enough to accommodate my aged knees. I sit facing the wall in front of a worktable that holds a paper shredder, a laser printer, a Buddha statue on a small wooden altar built by my late father, and a large Japanese bell on a purple silk cushion. I sound the bell three times. Sometimes I light a candle. The sacred and profane are all mixed up there, just as they are within me.

In his Instructions for the Cook, Zen Master Dogen challenges me to take a blade of grass and transform it into a sixteen-foot golden Buddha. The worktable is my blade of grass. The sixteen-foot golden Buddha is my own body, my own settled breathing, my willingness to repeat this action over and over, as it has been repeated by generation after generation unbroken since the enlightenment of the Buddha and his aunt Prajapati. I remind myself: Objects alone don’t make the sacred. People do, and careful attention. The Buddha did not first taste enlightenment while meditating in a temple. He was sitting on a pile of straw outside, touching the earth, and seeing the morning star.

When I was young, I was disconnected from myself, from others, and from my spirituality. The sanctuary of the Tassajara Buddha hall, made holy by the concerted actions of everyone who ever bowed or sat there, opened a window into a new life. A year or so from now, if all goes well, a rebuilt zendo will welcome a new generation of spiritual beggars who do not yet know they have a diamond sewn in the lining of their pockets. Supported by its silence and the shared ritual of their fellows, they will build a sanctuary inside their own bodies and make any place they sit holy in its own way.