Issan Tommy Dorsey spent many years as a drug-addicted, alcoholic prostitute.  Maybe that’s why by the time he became a Zen priest, many people who knew him said he was the most compassionate, accepting person they’d ever known.  Because he left nothing out, Issan was everyone’s best friend.  He rejected no one.

He had this moment:  He’d literally been cleaning up his life.  He’d quit drugs for meditation.  The commune he lived in sparkled with his efforts.  Then one afternoon walking down Haight in San Francisco, he stopped to pick up a Popsicle wrapper on the sidewalk.  Just then he realized, "I’m responsible for everything I see."¹ 

Nearly four years ago now, my wife Swarupa developed  pre-eclampsia, and the birth of our daughter Jayanthi had to be induced.  They were both in the hospital a little while.   I remember visiting them, taking the hospital elevator to the third floor.  Its doors opened to a woman on the second floor.  Entering, she pressed the floor she needed and pointed out a discarded candy wrapper in the corner of the elevator, saying, "Look at that!  This place is so filthy!"

I hadn’t noticed it through my exhaustion. 

"Someone should clean that up," she added.  "It’s been here since this morning."

To some extent, we all have this idea that nearly everything is someone else’s job.  Someone else makes the laws, mows the lawn, or runs the soup kitchen.  Rather than simply pick up the wrapper, we wonder, Where’s the damn janitor?  If we’re this woman, we miss half a day to anger.  That’s if we’re lucky.

Some of us miss our whole lives. 

And the wrappers pile up around us.  And the bodies too.

A few years ago, I was having one of those late night kitchen table discussions with a dear friend who makes his way teaching meditation, knowing the properties of plants, and fighting any kind of injustice anywhere.  With the moonlight through the window inching across the floor, he said, "Y’know, each of us is responsible for everything."  I challenged him because I just couldn’t buy it.

"Well, let’s just look at the word itself," he said.  "Responsibility.  Response-ability, the ability to respond." 

It’s almost embarrassing now to admit what a revelation that was for me.  I realized that usually by "responsibility" we also mean "blame."  We grew up hearing, "Who’s responsible for this?" as a parent plucks a dirty dish from the sink, perhaps.  In other words, "Who’s to blame for this?"  So we’ve learned to conflate blame with responsibility, when actually more often than not blame is an excuse not to respond; not to act. 

There’s that well-known old Zen story about the head cook in a monastery who made turtle soup.  Everything is used in a Zen monastery.  Traditionally wasting a drop of water was said to be wasting the whole ocean.  And since someone had brought a dead turtle to the monastery. . . .

The first person served was a visiting Zen master.  Having said his blessing, the master took a spoonful and came up with the turtle’s head.

"Hey cook!" he shouted.  "What’s this?!"  Even in a Zen monastery you don’t cook the head.

The cook ran over, saw the head, plucked it from the spoon and ate it.  His action may strike us as disgusting, but of all the possible responses he could have offered – from blaming an attendant cook, or maybe the lack of time necessary to cook for such a large monastery, or maybe the sleep deprivation of waking earlier than usual to make tea for the visiting Zen master – of all the possible excuses he might have found, he instead simply ate the blame.  Literally. 

What is our purpose?  Is it only to be right?  To emerge from life unscathed (which no one does)?  Is it our purpose to hide forever?

Or can we be like this cook?                                                                                      

Issan took responsibility of a temple in the Bay Area just as AIDS was appearing.  Many people felt strongly that a Zen temple should only be a peaceful place of meditation, but he couldn’t accept that.  Not with his friends dying around him.  So Issan began taking them in, feeding them, bathing them, loving them.

Organically, Issan’s efforts flowered into the first of numerous Zen hospice centers throughout the country.  At his temple, Issan tore down the wall that separated what would become the hospice from the meditation hall.  This was not some big idea he had, to start the Zen hospice movement.  There were just the dying, discarded – and his realization of responsibility.

Notes

1.  David Schneider, Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1993) 84.