FROM SHERIDAN STREET, I drive to the back end of Palolo Valley, where I have an appointment with Robert Aitken, founder of the Diamond Sangha. His group has come a long way since its beginnings in 1959 and has nearly twenty affiliate Zen centers on the Mainland and in Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand and Germany. It’s been years since I last saw Aitken or visited the Palolo Zen Center, which sits serenely nestled against the valley hillside. Several single-storey buildings are connected by covered verandas, a feature common to Japan and Hawai‘i. The meditation hall is spare with rows of round cushions arranged in front of a simple altar.

A caregiver answers the door at Aitken’s residence and I wait in the living room for her to bring the “Old Boss,” as he prefers to translate his Zen title of Roshi, out in a wheelchair. He is physically frail, and while he occasionally searches for a word or name, his memories are clear, his judgments sharp.

We exchange greetings as old acquaintances, and I ask him about his relationship to Japanese Zen. “Well,” he says with a matter-of-fact gesture, “we’re completely independent.” He collects his thoughts for a moment then launches into a fascinating narrative of how he trained with several Zen masters in Japan and started the Diamond Sangha in a house in Kuli‘ou‘ou. He speaks freely, telling stories of sexual harassment by Zen masters, mental breakdowns, unqualified pretenders, alcoholism. Not one given to innocuous speech, Aitken is equally emphatic about insightful teachers, excellent students and social activism.

Aitken was trained in the Sambokyodan school of Zen, whose aim is the experience of kensho, seeing into one’s true nature. Aitken’s Japanese teacher certified his Zen insight, which is the basis of his own teachings and authority to designate his own successors.

“You have that authority yourself, right?” I ask rhetorically. “You don’t need someone from Japan to approve your choice of successors? They don’t have to go to Japan to be certified? So how did you gain your independence from the Sambokyodan institution of your teachers?”

“On my way back from a conference in Thailand,” he says, “I stopped in Japan and visited the headquarters. I met Kubota, the head of the group at that time, and he asked me what I thought the relationship between Sambokyodan and Diamond Sangha should be. So I said, ‘Let’s have a friendly divorce.’ ‘I feel the same way,’ Kubota said, ‘now let’s go out to lunch.’ So that settled it. Very friendly.”

Aitken is getting tired, and I need to end the interview. “So tell me, is the Diamond Sangha Japanese, American or local?”
Aitken thinks for a moment, then says, “It’s not American.”

“Really?” I ask, remembering that he is regarded as a pioneer among Zen teachers in America.

“It’s not American,” he repeats decisively. “But it’s more American than Japanese. It’s local.”

It is my turn to think about this for awhile. It’s kind of a Zen riddle.

“Well,” he adds, “our procedures are still Japanese.”

It is too late to pursue this further, and I get up to leave. “Just one more thing, Bob. Remember the house in Pupukea?”

Aitken flashes a smile. “Oh yes, we were going to fix that up as a retirement place for one of the Japanese teachers, but he decided not to come.”

I tell him the story about delivering lumber to the old house and my first experience in meditation. I quote the young man telling me to sit without thinking.

“Oh no,” Aitken says, “that’s not right. That guy, you know, well, he was a little cuckoo.” Aitken taps his head.

“He was my first Zen teacher,” I remark. Aitken winces.

Out in the parking area, I look at the mountains surrounding the Zen center. Everything fits quietly together—the modest houses linked as one, the open lawn, the magnificent albesia trees with their tall white trunks so evident in a forest of tropical green. It’s not American, but it’s more American than Japanese. Aitken has given me a Zen answer, fluid, unfixed.

AS I DRIVE OUT of Palolo, I think about the basic teaching of Buddhism: Everything is unfixed, impermanent and constantly changing according to shifting causes and conditions. It is an illusion to think that we have some kind of fixed identity, as if people and cultures are made of the same essence as stone. We are in a constant state of flux and can choose to be whatever is appropriate: a father at one moment, a son the next, a friend, a foe, indifferent, caring. Maybe, I think to myself, Japanese Buddhism in Hawai‘i isn’t so much having an identity crisis as accepting Buddhism’s true nature: All is fluid. Maybe, I muse, that is the true teaching of Shaka Buddha—Hawai‘i’s Shaka Bruddah. HH