A Zen Failure

On the passing of David Chadwick,

This morning, in a phone call with my daughter, I learned that David Chadwick died. He was one of those larger than life beings. His history straddled Ft Worth Texas, the civil rights movement, LSD in the 60s, life in Mexico, Japan, and Bali, the evolution of Zen in America, and a huge network of friends and associates.

When I first arrived in California, it was to run a non-profit housed on the docks in Sausalito. As a way of building a community, I started offering lunch to ‘friends and family.’ David started showing up. He knew Sausalito like the back of his hand. He’d been in and out of all of the (many) recording studios in the flat part of town. He knew the history of the musicians, their entourages, their foibles, and their tastes.

As I got to know him, we began to discuss Zen.

I’ve been a more or less a Zen student all my life. It began with reading Alan Watts’ book, “The Book: On the taboo against knowing who you are” in one of the bookstores I ran. On my first low rent camp across the country road trip, I stumbled into a bookstore in Santa Fe and discovered a copy of “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones”, a compact volume covering the primary texts of one of the Zen schools.

With David as a tutor, I learned the Chadwick approach. It looked a lot like intentional bumbling. He always found the least desirable chore, jumped on it, and ingratiated himself. Never seeking the limelight, he assessed what needed to be done and then made sure it got done.

My favorite of his books is called “Thank You and Okay: Diary of an American Zen Failure in Japan”. (If you find an early edition, my review is one of the blurbs on the cover.) The book is a lighthearted romp through David’s adventures in Japan. Unlike many books on Zen (which paint a picture of perfect enlightenment), this story is about the nitty gritty details of bumbling through cultural barriers while hunting for the roots of Zen.

That was a lot like the man himself. His take on zen was, that it was a way to navigate the messiness of life. More than anyone I’ve met, his big heart had room and compassion for all sorts of people of all sorts of stripes. He was particularly fond of the class of us who lived on the margins: dreamers, gamblers, musicians, addicts, Zen priests, cult leaders, fallen saints. His world had room for the non-ideal world that we actually live in.

Early on in our relationship, I got fired from my dream job. I was broken, humiliated, scared, and afraid. At the time, he was writing his biography of Sunru Suzuki, the Zen master who brought Zen to America. Having been a long-time student, David knew all the stories, collected all of the lectures, and assembled a book called “Crooked Cucumber.” It was a big project.

He scooped me up, put me in the passenger seat of the beater he was currently driving, and took me on a tour of all the Zen groups and Zen masters on the west coast. He (with me watching) interviewed every one of them. The trip took weeks. I healed in his car. I learned that people who become Zen priests are profoundly human and full of idiosyncrasies. They had girlfriends, mistresses, big egos, small egos, brilliance, dullness, chemical problems, divorces, and all the gnarly things that really make us human.

Over the last thirty years we were sometimes close and sometimes far apart. He moved to Bali in his early 70s and made it his home. I lived in the barn he called home in Santa Rosa for a time. He was one of the few people able to navigate both sides of the intensity of my own divorce years later. He helped me get started cooking muffins on Sunday mornings (very early) at Green Gulch Zen Center. We found a lot in common at the Pacific Zen Institute (where I met Heather, my wife.)

More than anything, David helped me along the journey of accepting myself, my failures, my odd sensibilities, my nagging guilt. He had very little room for judging others and was content to accept himself as a flawed human being. And, he never ceased to surprise.

I’ll miss him.

Photo by Panuson Norkaew on Unsplash