Customer Reviews

Dirty Laundry: 100 Days in a Zen Monastery

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Dirty Laundry, like all good spiritual memoirs, has that "peeping through the keyhole" quality that makes the reader feel he is getting inside information on a taboo or guarded topic. As per the title, Dirty Laundry has it all: marital problems, abbot/junior initiate sexual relationships, jealousy and intrigue in the monastery, financial problems, even the raising of a young child part-time at the monastary, part-time at home. Dirty Laundry's best quality is its ability to make Buddhist practice, even monastic practice, seem possible, if not practical. For all who have considered a retreat or even a longer period of monastic practice, Dirty Laundry shows what it might be like: the possible problems, possible solutions, etc. In this respect, it's a valuable book, as it is for taking the cover off the secrecy of domestic Buddhist practice.

However, while Dirty Laundry does a decent job of showing us the underbelly of monastic life, the book offers very little detail on the good stuff: practice, zazen, ritual, even the physical appearance of the monastary. This is probably due to the fact that the book is actually a journal kept in tandem by ordained monk Robert Winson and his lay wife, Miriam Sagan. Fully one-half the entries have little to do with Buddhism at all, except as an outsider's observation of how it fits into her life (or doesn't, as the case may be).

The squabbles and seemingly un-enlightened behavior that goes on can be infuriating to those who take their Buddhism a little more seriously, but Dirty Laundry is quick and easy to read and for its ease of digestion, offers some insight to the problems facing domestic monastic practice.

Robert Winson and Miriam Sagan writes alternating chapters in this engrossing book. Robert is going to spend 100 days in a zen monastery in New Mexico. Miriam stays at home with their daughter. This book describes vividly their lives inbetween visits and their weekend meetings at the monastery. The book also has much to say on the inner life of a monastery and on the role of the resident zen master : Richard Baker roshi. It's a relief to read autobiographical writings on zen that is not written from an academic, male, 60-ies only perspective. I've read several of them and this book beats them all!

The authors were involved in Santa Fe punk-groups "The Poetry Devils" and "Bichos". Robert Winson died in 1995.

Miriam Sagan and Robert Winson's book is a very small slice of the truth told in a crafty and interesting way through the convention of simultaneous diary entries. It's the description of 100 days in Crestone Zen Monastery in Colorado, but it is also a synopsis of how dysfunctional a group of human beings can become when they allow a sociopath zen "teacher",like Richard Baker, to run their lives. To me this is just more of the same "zen neurosis" spread by Mr. Baker and his corrupt followers put down on paper for everyone to see.
I know many of the principals in this book, and their descriptions by Winson and Sagan are scarily accurate.(Sadly Robert died not a long after this 100 day retreat.) But don't fret, dear reader, you too can experience such humiliating and dehumanizing treatment...just head to your local Soto Zen Center under the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki. And not to worry. They're everywhere!

Dirty Laundry agitates the balance we seek between the physical and the spiritual, gritty moments suds up against child (like) clarity. It splashes, refreshingly /rudely, on our own awakening and leaves us flapping in the breeze, tethered to our own comfortably worn and fraying existence, snapping, than lifting our spirits, to don our authentic selves.
A pebble of a book that can leave ripples, as it moves through you.
:)

This book should be read only by those who are interested in how dysfunctional a Zen community can be and how people will astoundingly buy into that as though it were truth.

This is a very quick read, which was good for me, because I couldn't put it down.

The diary entries are so real and immediate, I felt quite voyeuristic.

In the last few years I have read several books about cults (starting with the amazing SEDUCTIVE POISON by Deborah Layton), and the Zen master Zentatsu Baker-roshi comes across as being as dysfunctional as a cult leader. In the case of Crestone Mountain Zen Center, however, people can leave, as Robert does. (This is not a spoiler; we are told this in the introduction.)

"Dirty Laundry" is a journal in two voices -- as such, it is full of the details of daily life: cooking, lovemaking, childraising, cleaning, fighting, moodiness. It's not so much a "Zen book" as it is a book about the possibility that what we do every day is worthy of reflection and learning. Robert Winson, who died in his mid-30s before the book was published, was clearly a passionate, sparky, sexy, earnest, empathetic, witty guy. . . . Reading "Dirty Laundry" makes you a little more awake to the brief life we share.