The 300-Year-Old Monastery in Japan That’s Full of Westerners
(ESSAY) “What are a bunch of Europeans doing in a Zen monastery in rural Japan?”
The question was direct — but we didn’t have much time.
In the rural mountains of Okayama sits Songenji — a 300-year old Zen temple that is both a pillar of Japanese discipline and tradition and a maverick of globalism and progress. It’s a place where women live and study Zen side-by-side with men as coeds (something once unheard of), and the sangha (monastic order) is mostly Western foreigners.
At this moment, I was sitting there, too, across from a Hungarian resident named Péter Torma, also known as Sokyu, in a quaint sitting room over two china cups of kombucha. He had kindly agreed to alot his sparse break to grant me this interview after I’d accidentally trespassed and contacted the temple to apologize.
He wasted no time.
“So Harada Roshi, our teacher, is one of the only — actually, probably the only — Rinzai Zen Roshi who dedicates himself to the teaching of foreigners – mostly Westerners. But basically, anybody is welcome here.”
By Harada Roshi, he meant Shodo Harada, a guru of the Rinzai sect in his 80s. Harada is his surname, and Roshi his title, which Sokyu confirmed signifies he’s an enlightened Zen master.
“You have to be enlightened to be a teacher,” he told me.
Sokyu explained that Shodo Harada had originally been disciple to the famous Zen master Yamada Mumon Roshi, who had noticed that Westerners were interested in spirituality, yet seemed woefully ignorant to the possibilities the Dharma offered. In response, Yamada Mumon prompted his former student, now an enlightened teacher himself, to formally introduce Rinzai Zen to the West.
“[Yamada Mumon] was asking him to teach Westerners and to go to the West, and he did both,” Sokyu said.
Once he was appointed to Sogenji monastery in Okayama, Harada Roshi began accepting monastics from these same foreign lands.
Sokyu’s beginnings
At the same time that I probed about the monastery and their teacher, however, I also wanted to learn about Sokyu the person.
Like other men I’d encountered on the grounds, Sokyu had a cleanly-shaven head and was wrapped up in short denim-like robes (or long shirts) over pants. He was a bit shorter than the others, and was distinguishable by his kindly up-turned smile.
Sokyu told me he’d been at the temple for about 15 years, having first arrived at the age of 33 (he’d just recently turned 48) — so he was one of the old hats.
“What brought you here?” I asked.
“I was depressed. … I did all my studies. I did all my works. I did all the things that society promises you that, if you do this, you’re going to be happy. … You have a job. You have [an] education. I don’t know. I had an apartment. I could afford to live a normal life. I was in my late 20s, early 30s and I was like: I’m just not happy. …
“Psychotherapy didn’t really work. I tried everything. I was in trouble… I was getting more and more depressed, and I just couldn’t stop being depressed. And at some point I was like: No. You can’t continue like that… I started to be open to basically anything which would help.”
Sokyu told me that before, he’d had time for religious nonsense. I asked him if his perspective had changed.
“Yes, 180 degrees, of course!”
What, then, did he expect to get out of coming to Sogenji?
“To experience enlightenment. Our main goal is to see what the whole thing is about — see what real Buddhism is.”
Tradition meets the unorthodox
Sogenji wasn’t just unusual in that its monastics were mostly European-looking Westerners. It was also a coed monastery, with both sexes living under the same roof. I wondered just how unorthodox this really was, though.
“In Japan?” Sokyu said. “Completely! Completely. This is, right now, probably the only place.”
In fact, according to Sokyu, his roshi’s teacher, Yamada Mumon, had also been one of the first advocates for letting women study Zen.
“He was the first to say, ‘women can [do this], too.’ Because in Japan, it wasn’t possible. … They could live outside the temple and come in to train. And then, you know, they [would] go back to sleep outside. Because it was still too – it would have been too much on the edge if he allowed women to sleep inside of the monastery, for [the] Japanese.”
Shodo Harada had taken things even further still.
“Here, from the beginning, we have a women’s quarters and then we have a men’s quarter. So we have women here and men at the same time.”
Apparently, though, this didn’t make Shodo Harada a hippie free-spirit, by any means.
“He’s very traditional,” Sokyu told me.
He does traditional lectures; has long, traditional Zazen sitting periods; and only instructs celibates.
“There’s no family, no marriage… He says if you want to be [an enlightened] teacher, dedicate your whole life to this.”
I asked him what other traditionally-minded Japanese people thought about Shodo Harada’s radical take on Rinzai Zen.
“It could be controversial, because it's against the tradition that they like so much,” he said dismissively. “But at the same time, [the] Japanese are invested in exporting the culture. So if somebody doesn’t [get hung up] on the controversy, he’ll see the Roshi as a propagator of Japanese culture and religion. And indeed, there’s a lot of people who love him and support him.”
Apparently, Harada Roshi already had considerable support country-wide.
“I mean, he has three monasteries worldwide, and he has thousands of disciples.”
This made Sokyu and the other residents even more extraordinary: not only were they foreigners living in a 300-year old temple in the mountains of Japan – they were among a mere 1 or 2 dozen out of thousands of disciples with the rare opportunity to study under Shodo Harada’s own roof.
I asked Sokyu if he felt fortunate.
“Of course; it’s incredible!”
Why, then, did more people not take advantage of this opportunity?
“Because it’s just so hard!”
A window of hope
Sokyu continued to tell me about his depression, and where his newfound openness had led him before he’d arrived at Sogenji.
“There was a spiritual healer in Budapest. … She was doing her voodoo,” Sokyu said.
“Is there a word, like maybe a Hungarian word or something, for what she is?”
“A witch!” he said, grinning. “She was just different. Very, very open, and very supportive, but in another way, very strict. Like a Zen teacher, she would never praise anyone. She would just always just tell you what you have to do… And at some point she just healed me in a way that I was suddenly not down anymore, and I was a little bit [pause] – I could see the light, a window of happiness.”
Sokyu added that she had reminded him of his mother. I confirmed that this was before Sokyu had started studying Zen.
“But when you start to move in a certain direction, things appear, because you’re open to it,” he said. “You suddenly see them.”
Not long after his encounter with the witch, Sokyu started participating in a Zen sitting group in Budapest – his home city.
“I mean, that Zen group was there even before — even years before — I just didn’t even notice them. If I was seeing anyone, I was like, ‘Who are those weirdos? Who cares?’ And so at some point I was like, ‘Oh, wait a minute.’
“I went to sit, and I sat maybe half an hour at the first time. And then more and more: one hour, I think, and one and a half hours was the evening routine. And it was thrilling. It was like: ‘Wow, what is this meditation?’ It’s just crazy.
“You look inside. And I remember I could feel that there was like a depth, which I couldn’t fathom. I do not know what it is, but it’s somehow there. And I felt like I could go deeper and deeper. And I just wanted to explore it.”
This sitting group turned out to be affiliated with Shoda Harada.
“I was just sitting with them, maybe only a year, before coming here.”
“Only a year, and you just left?” I asked. That was all it took for Sokyu, at the time still Péter Torma, to uproot his whole life and run off to Japan, essentially becoming a monk?
“I was ready to die [anyway], because I felt so bad,” he said. “So, I [might as well] just spend time in a place where you basically die while you’re still alive.”
Dying while alive
What exactly was so hard about life at Sogenji that thousands of people so dedicated to Zen that they had become Shodo Harada’s disciples wouldn’t want to live with him at his home monastery?
“There’s always a pressure — you have to go deeper,” Sokyu said, referring to their meditation practices. “And there’s always a tight schedule. So you're always a little bit tired, you're always a little bit underfed.”
Sokyu gave me a run-down of his schedule. On normal days, the residents would wake up at 3:30 a.m., after which they would chant sutras for an hour; have one-on-one meetings with the Roshi; and do a period of Zazen (sitting meditation), all before their 7 a.m. breakfast. After that, they would clean the grounds and their quarters, then begin attending to their scheduled duties for the day, with only a 30-minute break, followed by shower-time at 12:30 (“During the summer, you really need it!”) and lunch at 1 p/m.. After lunch, they had free time until 5 p.m. — though, Sokyu told me that they usually used this time to catch up on sleep (which he’d sacrificed, I realized, to give me this interview). Finally, from about 6:30 p.m. to 9:00, they would do more sitting meditation, followed by the “final sutra recitations.”
No matter what they were doing, though, it all seemed to come back to meditation in some way or another.
“You only really work on your stillness, throughout the whole day. So when you work, you try to keep silence of mind. Of course, when you sit [too]; but when you chant or when you eat — always, silence of mind.”
On retreat days, which make up one week of every month, they would stay up even later — until about 11 p.m. — doing nothing but Zazen with meals in-between.
Despite all of this, however, I was surprised to learn that Sokyu wasn’t technically an ordained monk.
“I’m not ordained,” he said, “because [the] Roshi doesn’t require that. If you want, you can be ordained. And then you have to wear the robes and everything. … Let’s say, two thirds of the people do not want to be ordained. … But we more or less are doing the same thing. We all live here and we all, you know, have the same teachings and go through the same routine.”
Path of doubt
I asked Sokyu if he ever had any doubts or regrets about his decision to come to Sogenji.
He nodded.
I asked: “Am I going in the right direction? I feel sh— right now, [but] not all the time. Right? I feel [like] sh—. Does this really work? Will I ever reach anything? Does this method work? Is this teacher really a good one? There’s a lot of doubts coming up.
“But you have to doubt, and we do, about yourself. What the heck it is — what the heck life is — who am I? So doubt … it’s really part of the path. And so it also helps you, because every time you would say, ‘Well, okay, that just doesn’t work, I’d better leave’ — but the big question is still not answered. … You know, I could go home. I could be working. I don’t know. I could be an artist, or I could run a company. I could be rich. But the big question still isn’t answered — so I’d better stay. What’s the big question?”
He replied, “The big question is who you are. Who you are. Right? Why am I alive? I mean, it’s different for everyone. You have to have your own doubt, your own question. Where are my thoughts coming from? Why can’t I just stop them? Right?
“For me, it was more like: Why am I depressed? All the promises of the society. I fulfilled the criteria. Why isn’t it working? That’s a big question.”
Sokyu mentioned that the Roshi would always encourage them to stay as well.
I asked him how he and the others specifically dealt with their emotional turmoil — feeling like “shit.”
“Whatever comes up, you just watch.”
Sokyu was referring to a practice called insight meditation: the observation of one’s own inner experience.
“That’s why, also, [our daily] interviews [with the Roshi] are very helpful, because the Roshi never really gives you an answer. He just shows you the direction [to being] even more quiet, and even more still. That probably helps you better than an answer in any kind of words. Right? And so you just gradually learn just to watch. And you watch your terrible feelings, or you watch your anger, or whatever it is. And then you see it just comes and goes. It never really stays. It's not really you.”
I asked him if they had any other means of coping.
“If you go in a really bad direction, there’s Chisan. … She’ll tell you about practice, and about how you should or how you can go about your feelings – your bad feelings. And then she will give you a sort of speech.”
Sokyu confirmed that he was talking about something akin to talk therapy with one of the other residents.
“Because Roshi would never do that. For him, it’s just very superficial and too much thinking.” Sokyu reconsidered. “Or he thinks it’s not his job. He knows that Chisan is doing that. So probably it's not a bad thing. He’s happy to let her take care of that.
“Actually, she’s a big part of our life. And she’s a big part of Sogenji. She’s [been] here from the very beginning. And so I would say she keeps, from running away, at least half of the people, for sure. Because it's hard. I mean, people run away all the time. It's absolutely not unusual. To stay long,” he laughed, “That’s unusual.”
I asked Sokyu how many other people had stuck around since he arrived 15 years ago.
“The next most senior has [been around] maybe nine years now. So he came six years after me. And after him, the next maybe four years. Five or four years.”
Everyone else had come and gone.
“But we also have people who just never leave. We have somebody who came here, also, from the very beginning. … We have — actually it’s a lady — who’s [been] here more than 20 years. … So yeah, we have four or five [more senior] people.”
Sokyu went on to tell me that the lady he was referring to was Taiwanese. Chisan, meanwhile, was American.
Talks with the Roshi
If Chisan was the one giving Sokyu and the others their regular dose of talk therapy, I wondered what the interviews with the Roshi himself were like.
“Those interviews, I would say, 80% of the time are motivational interviews.”
What, then, were the other 20% like?
“So, if you go in with confidence, like, ‘Oh, I see myself as pretty good’ – but you don't say it, you're just acting [that way] – then he would say: No, no, you’re not. You think you're enlightened? Come on, get out. … He can be really, really tough, and really hard. [But] he will also probably lift [you up]. If you go in under the rag like: ‘Oh, I’m a piece of shit, I don’t know what to do, because it doesn’t work,’ then he’ll say something nice.”
I asked Sokyu if the Roshi had ever said anything powerful that had really moved him.
“His Zen teacher [Yamada Mumon] liked to say: ‘Die. Die to your ego…’ And he was like: ‘Can you die?’ And it was really one of my first years, and I made the gesture of a gun, and I put it to my temple, and I was like: ‘Okay, no problem.’ And he said: ‘Do you think it’s over then?’”
What did he mean?
“He meant that you have a life, and just to be alive as a human being gives you a responsibility to evolve, to care for others, to learn about love. I mean, you know all of the religious stuff… Buddhism would say: You die and then you’re reborn. But he would say – in Zen, actually, most say – ‘No, no, no. You have this life. You never know what happens later on. You’ve actually never met a person who came back from the dead. Right? You have this life, and you have to use it well.’”
Progressive silence
Finally, I wanted to know what Sokyu felt he had gained from his time at Sogenji.
“The promise, of course, of religion and Buddhism is pretty high. … Like the promises of what enlightenment is, and not only the experience, but what it brings to your life: You can be compassionate and loving. And then your suffering doesn’t end completely, but since you can see through suffering, it won’t affect you anymore so much. … Somebody asked me at some point what’s changed since [I’ve been] here – and I really had to think about what to say – but in one sentence, I would say: It was all blurred and foggy, and now it’s clear.”
I asked, “Why is it clear now?”
“Probably because I just have less judgment, and less thoughts, and less unconscious stuff. … I mean, that’s more psychology, but what usually makes you sick is unconscious, right? And there's a lot of stuff that you don’t see, and people get angry, people get sad, and they don’t really see [completely why]. But meditating with such long hours — every day, on average we meditate here like six or five hours — and stuff becomes clear. We talked about baggage, psychological baggage – like, it becomes lighter and lighter and lighter, and this gives you the courage to continue this hard training. So you feel like you’re motivated to keep going, because you keep experiencing more clarity, and more lightness.”
I then asked him if he knew when enlightenment would come.
“I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it comes all of a sudden, or … [There are] small experiences we’ve all had in the past. And basically, deepening never really stops.”
If deepening never stopped, though, how could anyone ever be considered an enlightened master?
“So, [the Roshi] very often talks about how you have to deepen more. You have to really see who you really are, and see what reality is. … He says that it’s more about that particular instant. So it could have been a second or a minute or a time when you could see it, but it's gone right now. Right now, what's happening? Right now, where are you?”
Sokyu seemed to be talking about what in spiritual parlance is often referred to as a “glimpse” — a temporary flash of insight — a quick peek at enlightenment.
“It’s like, you could have an experience in the past, but if you think you’re enlightened because you had an experience in the past, that actually just gives extra thinking for the moment right now, because here you are still — an ego. You still act as a person.”
This still didn’t explain, however, how anyone could be considered enlightened and deemed a roshi.
“So, he wants us to reach basically a depth where this ‘person’ is actually very transparent. You don't really identify with it anymore. You don't really think of ‘you’ as a person anymore. … It’s not an experience. It’s not like having a trip. It’s something which is becoming – like, as I said, an ongoing thing.”
Leaving Sogenji
Over the course of our hour together, Sokyu had walked me through the 16-year journey which had taken him from a mundane life and job in Budapest to a Hungarian witch who claimed to see angels and healed by waving her hands over him, then finally to an 18th-century Zen monastery in the mountains of rural Japan.
Here, he’d lived an almost ascetic life for a decade and a half, each day filled with the full range of thoughts and feelings available to all of us, but without any modern distractions to escape — all under the shadow of doubt: unanswered questions.
Is this working? Where do my thoughts come from? Why am I depressed? Who am I?
The last thing I did at Sogenji was ask Sokyu for a photo and promise to stay in touch.
Then, as I took the long, straight path back to the bus stop, wondering if I’d asked all the right questions, I remembered something else Sokyu had said about why those early sitting groups had given him hope.
“When you’re depressed, the only thing you experience is your own thinking,” he said. “It's like an incessant epic of thoughts, and you just can’t get out. I guess it probably happens mostly to people who tend to think a lot anyway. But at that point, it becomes such a dark habit, and you perpetuate your own cycles of negative thinking. And it’s all about you – usually: ‘I’m bad, I don't know what my life is.’ … But then, I was sitting, and I was concentrating on the present moment, and suddenly – stillness.”
Eric R. Stone is an American journalist and translator of Chinese Buddhist and Taoist classics. He’s translated four books: Happiness & Suffering, The Tao Te Ching: Wondrous Revelations, Emptiness Energy, and The Secret of Chan. His writing has appeared in Lacuna Magazine, The News Lens, Taiwan News, and The ATA Chronicle. Eric currently lives in Taipei. In his free time, he runs a Mandarin-Taiwanese D&D campaign. See more of his writing at ericrstone.substack.com, or learn more at ericrstone.com