Word: sasaki
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...minutes off for a meager lunch. After supper at home she would return to the temple for meditation with the monks until 9:30 at night, then return home, take a bath and meditate until bedtime, around midnight. In 1944. after her husband died, she married Dr. Shigetsu Sasaki, a Japanese Zen roshi (teacher) whom she had met in New York City; she was widowed a second time...
...master and designed to wrench the mind free of ordinary thinking. (Sample koan: "A monk asked. 'Who is Buddha?' The master answered, 'Three pounds of flax.' ") Other meditation is devoted to breath control, plus a kind of concentration on nothingness and what Ruth Sasaki describes as "handling one's mind...
...Cult Phase. With Dr. Sasaki she worked at Manhattan's First Zen Institute of America. In 1950 Ruth Sasaki returned to Kyoto, where she rented a small house built for a retired roshi on the site of what had been the Ryosen-An branch of the Daitokuji Temple. Amply provided with funds from her first husband's estate, she remodeled and enlarged the house to provide a center and library for U.S. students of Zen. She ran into an unexpected obstacle when the Daitokuji Temple insisted that the new center be designated as the restored sub-temple...
Since last summer, Ruth Sasaki has been holding regular classes in Zen for half a dozen pupils from 7 to 9 each night, aided by an English-speaking Japanese priest and Walter Nowick, a onetime student at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music who has been studying Zen in Kyoto since...
Scores of Americans and Europeans call on Ruth Sasaki each month. But, says she, "the majority of them are faddists or just curious, and Zen is not for them. In the Western world Zen seems to be going through the cult phase. Zen is not a cult. The problem with Western people is that they want to believe in something and at the same time they want something easy. Zen is a lifetime work of self-discipline and study. Its practice destroys the individual self. The ego is, as it were, dissolved into a great ego -so great that...