The other shore of Zen

Vesak falls on May 12 this year — the full moon that marks the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death in a single observance. Most Western Zen centers acknowledge it quietly, a bow at the altar, maybe flowers. The Theravada and Tibetan celebrations tend to be larger. But the date itself is a hinge: it sits in the middle of May like a reminder that all the traditions, however different their forms, trace back to one person who sat down under a tree and didn’t get up until something shifted.

That shared root is easy to forget when you spend time in the American Zen world, which is overwhelmingly Japanese in its forms — Soto and Rinzai, zazen and kinhin, oryoki and dokusan. The Chinese tradition that preceded all of it, Chan, is the river before the branching. Same water, different banks.

Which is why the Five-Day Silent Chan Retreat at Great Vow Zen Monastery in late June catches my attention. Guo Gu — a dharma heir of the late Chan Master Sheng Yen, trained at Dharma Drum Mountain in Taiwan — teaches both silent illumination and huatou (critical phrase investigation), the two streams of Chan meditation that became, in Japan, shikantaza and koan practice. At Great Vow, a Soto monastery in rural Oregon, that teaching arrives in a space already shaped by one of its descendant forms. Five days, residential, with daily dokusan and dharma talks. The cross-pollination is the point: hearing the source language inside the inherited dialect.

Closer to this week, the calendar is thick with entry points. Love & Spaciousness opens Thursday at Great Vow — a three-day sesshin centered on metta practice within full Zen monastic form. Loving-kindness retreats are common in Theravada and Insight traditions; embedding one inside zazen, chanting, and oryoki is less common, and the pairing asks whether the warmth cultivated by metta and the austerity of sesshin are actually at odds. $240 residential, beginner-friendly. Spring in the Willamette Valley, the land waking up around you.

May 2 is dense in the Bay Area. Norman Fischer leads the All Day Sitting with Everyday Zen at Green Gulch Farm — zazen, oryoki lunch, a dharma talk, and dokusan, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Fischer has been written about in this column before, but what’s worth noting here is the setting: Green Gulch in early May, the garden rows up, the coastal fog thinning by midmorning. Muir Beach is fifteen minutes from the zendo. $70–$100 in person, or join by Zoom for a suggested $30. In-person spots are limited and tend to fill.

The same day, SFZC’s City Center holds its Saturday One-Day Sitting — a full sesshin day, 6:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., with oryoki meals in the zendo. This is not introductory. You bring or rent your oryoki set, you commit to the full schedule, and the day has its own momentum. $54. For those who’ve never done a full day but want to know what sesshin feels like before signing up for a week, this is the test.

And if a week is what you want: the Ocean Gathering Sesshin at Fire Lotus Temple runs May 25–31 — six days with Shugen Arnold, Hojin Kimmel, Hogen Green, and Shoan Ankele. Four teachers, seven to ten hours of zazen daily, silence throughout. $295. This is the Mountains and Rivers Order’s late-spring intensive, and for practitioners ready to sit, it’s one of the deeper containers on the East Coast calendar.

Sheng Yen, Guo Gu’s teacher, liked to say that Chan is not about gaining anything but about putting things down. The Japanese teachers who carried the practice across the sea said the same thing differently — Suzuki Roshi’s “beginner’s mind,” Katagiri Roshi’s “return to silence.” The words diverge. The gesture is the same: open hands, empty lap, the willingness to sit still long enough to notice what’s already here. Vesak, when it arrives in two weeks, commemorates exactly that. One person, one tree, one night. Everything that followed is commentary — beautiful, necessary commentary, carried across oceans and centuries, but commentary all the same.