Sex and the jealous Zen Master (excerpt from Guru I, Cabeza):

. . . Moving on. Another incident after I’d rejoined the Zen Center after my flunk-out sesshin: During a Sunday talk Kapleau expressed that a matter of grave concern had come to his attention. Evidently the Center was garnering a national reputation as a swinging center. Members and staff were switching partners all the time. This would not do! “Everyone is entitled to one mistake,” he sternly declared, “but more than that, and that person will not be welcome at this center.”
    Well, there was a pronounced hush, a pall, cast over the normally bubbling and often boisterous—other than the painfully introverted author—crowd as they departed, except for one woman who ran from the hall in tears. He had certainly laid down the law for us sinners—better believe it!
    There are several aspects to this. First, his status as spiritual guide of said swinging center had been—he feared—seriously diminished. He wanted his high status maintained, or at least restored. Second, Anne immediately responded when I told her this tale with “Why call it a mistake?” In truth we are all constantly changing, growing, learning. It took Anne and myself each a number of “mistakes” before we found each other, with all our previous “mistakes” reminding us when times are bad that it could be much worse. Geoffrey Miller, in The Mating Mind, even shows mathematically how eight to twelve “mistakes” give one the optimal chance to find a compatible mate, and writes that research has shown this is what happens, through dating, for most of us.
    But finally, most importantly, and worst of all, I think he said it out of jealousy, sheer jealousy. Why? Let me present my case. First: Another time he said, “The last attachment to go is the body.” (There was at least lip service given to not trying to give up attachments: rather to let attachments give up you.) In my view all “attachments”—and I never liked the word—are to the body, or more accurately, our future bodies. Getting our genes copied through sex, status and security. I think he’d heard that line from his teachers. It wasn’t something he’d lived through. He struck me as a tight, tense little man (and he was short): hardly the epitome of the spontaneity Zen champions. That first fall, while working on the rebuilding, I heard him whining (the only word I can come up with) over how his room wasn’t right. (He may have come off differently to students more “advanced” than I in meetings during sesshin.) After his death a few years ago we saw a booklet at our Buddhists’ from the Zen Center, commemorating his life. There were several pictures of a handsome young Western man cavorting with Japanese monks.  It took me several seconds to realize it was Kapleau. He seemed much happier and more relaxed than I’d ever seen him at the Zen Center. In later pictures his smile always seemed a bit forced. In The Three Pillars he’d claimed Zen had cured him of allergies and headaches, but these pictures suggested he might have paid a steep price for the high status of Zen master.
    Second, in a talk he had related that someone had spoken to him of the “need” of sex. “Sex is not a need, like food and water,” Kapleau assured us all vehemently. But again, from the point of view of our genes, especially men’s genes (women do not have to experience any sexual pleasure to pass on theirs) it is. For men’s genes there is absolutely no point in a man living the most wonderful, fulfilling life if they don’t get copied. Men who feel the “need” in insufficient intensity do not copy their genes, which are then lost to the gene pool forever. Thus men do have—more than women—this unremitting drive for sex. I have thought, ever since I started sitting thirty-eight years ago, that one day I would have no need for sex. Numerous times I have experienced—for a while and to some extent—a state free of wanting, of all-embracing wholeness to one extent or another, where sex seemed irrelevant. Between those times though, which is most of the time, the act of lovemaking has become more and more enjoyable over the years as I have become, ever so slowly, a bit more free from wanting and fearing, a bit more free to allow my body to experience pleasure. Maybe I’ll have some Supreme Enlightenment tomorrow and be there permanently. Could happen. But I’ve seen far too much not to be highly cynical of all—or at least many—of these “masters” claiming, directly or indirectly, that they are there themselves. Either they are getting it on the sly, or they are emotionally repressing it within. At a cost. I remember a film shown to my high school boys’ gym class. Sublimation. This was in liberal New Jersey but I’m sure any evangelical would have loved its abstinence message. Instead of, pardon the expression, getting laid now (I personally was in no danger of that), you should strive hard—for status and security of course—so you could get laid, get the sex, later in the approved marital setting. Many men may, in fact, have taken its theme a bit too seriously, working so hard the urge is buried to a degree. Again, at a serious emotional cost.
    But for most of us males that “not-a-need” is there, three times a week if you’re “normal,” three times a day if you’re Portnoy of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, nagging, nagging, nagging, nagging most of your life. To pretend it is not . . . well, this is not the truth. And to live a lie. . . .
    Third, there was Kapleau’s relationship with his wife, deLancey. I knew of no details when I came to Rochester, but the fact was she was living in Toronto studying under an Indian guru. I was told she came to Rochester every once in a while. They had had one daughter. (Anne learned third hand—but the sources are excellent, with no ulterior motives, the primary one being quite close to Kapleau—while staying at the Zen Center affiliate in Montreal where she lived before coming to Rochester, of an overheard phone call between Kapleau and his then twenty-something offspring. Kapleau: “I’m not going to talk to you unless you start sitting!”) If you read his and deLancey’s enlightenment experiences in The Three Pillars there is a dramatic difference. His is dry, almost cold: He worked like crazy on his koan, Yasutani Roshi admired how ardent he was, until “the moon of truth” rose within his mind. DeLancey was working with Yasutani Roshi also (which was how she met Kapleau, and married him before her experience) but hers was one of the most beautiful, and human, in the whole book. At sesshin Yasutani had been talking about the “enemy” (delusion). She immediately visualized the “enemy” and in utter joy “rushed” to throw her rounds around “him.” All sense of an individual self fell away and she “grew dizzy with delight.” She truly, at that moment, had swallowed all the waters of the West River. And it was at a later time at home in her garden, after listening to the “Song of Thanksgiving” that another deeper opening occurred. The final page is perhaps my favorite of the entire book. “The least weather variation . . . touches me as a, how can I say, miracle of unmatched wonder, beauty and goodness. I can hear a ‘song’ coming forth from everything . . . they intermingled in one inexpressibly vast unity. I feel a love without object . . . best called lovingness.” And though I highly doubt that she’d read of Einstein’s absolute space-time or quantum probabilities, her description of a “network of causes and effects reaching forward and back, of “Time-Existence,” of an “infinity of Silence and Voidness,” yet “no place . . . where one object does not flow into another,” sure sounds to me like she had a direct experience of them both. Interesting. To say the least.
    She helped edit The Three Pillars but it seems after they came to America she left him and Zen (an Internet posting calls her “estranged wife”). I have never seen her picture in a Zen Bow. There is one of the founding retreat at the Zen Center in 1966. Kapleau, Yasutani, and many others who are named. No deLancey. On the same page there is a picture of Kapleau in Japan with five Japanese including Harada Roshi. Kapleau is the second tallest. Also on the same page there is a post-sesshin picture at the Rochester Zen Center: of twenty-three American men, Kapleau is the shortest. I wrote earlier about the importance of height for a man. Recently (October 2006) I heard on NPR that the Chinese government had banned an operation that was becoming popular but dangerous, as some had died, among up-and-coming professional men. Their legs were broken deliberately, stretched, and reset. To make them taller.# When I saw the picture of Kapleau with the monks I thought, Hey, he looks normal height compared with the Japanese. Is it possible here in the U.S. deLancey realized he came up short? In more ways than one?
    Anyway, that’s my retrospective: “Sex and the jealous Zen master.”