We Can Go Deeper With Understanding Emotions
Fugen Tom Pitner Roshi
Fugen Tom Pitner Roshi is a busy man. After 25 years of service to Jun Po Roshi and Hollow Bones Zen, he is leading a six day retreat in South Dakota as the head of Dragon Heart Dharma. The retreat includes a Jukai Ceremony for five new members as well as ordination of the first three priests for Dragon Heart Dharma. Fugen Roshi wears many hats - a professional coach, a teacher, and a leader in the ManKind Project to name a few. I did manage to catch up with him to share how he see’s himself moving forward given his unique role as a Roshi of his own sangha 25 years after beginning with Jun Po Roshi and Hollow Bones Zen.
Ekai: Welcome Fugen Roshi. Nice to see you. We're here to learn a little bit about how you got to where you are today as a leader in our tradition. So, so let's start with how and when you originally got involved with Jun Po Roshi?
Fugen Roshi: It was back in 1998 when I was a leader in the ManKind Project. We did these weekends called the New Warrior Training Adventure that focused essentially on moving from what you think, to how do you feel. Then we started to focus on ‘who are you anyway’? We were ready to have some sort of advanced spiritual training. One thing led to another and Bill Kaulf, the founder of MKP and I went to a program called “Who Are You?” The training was essentially two lines of chairs facing each other. You'd have a partner and you just keep asking that question “who are you? who are you?” I got paired with Jun Po Roshi and he said “the golden wind, and then, blah, blah, blah.” But the blah, blah, blah, ended up being very significant because each time he would answer it a little differently, there was always something that was coming up from the here and now. He realized that I picked up on this. So he took me out to tea and asked me to tell him bit about what I was doing. At that time I was a Shadow Work Life Coach and doing the ManKind Project stuff. One thing led to another and he came to a warrior training. He looked around at us and said, “I don't think you guys really know what you're asking for.”
So we organized a six day retreat with all the key leaders and founders of MKP and Jun Po. There were about a dozen of us. We went to the Zen Mountain Monastery east of Los Angeles. The first thing Jun Po said as he looked at us was “if you guys are warriors, I sure hope we don't get attacked.” Then he and Di En Hi Fu George Burch started us without any orientation. They just rang the bell and we sat for 30 minutes again and again throughout the whole week. We would go to dokusan with Jun Po and he just asked how we were doing, listened, then said okay. He then send us back to the zendo. At the end, there was a Jukai Ceremony, I shaved my head and that’s how it worked! He ended with “I will see you back here in 120 days.” When we returned I was the only one who meditated each and every day as per the instructions.
Ekai: You do practice what you preach!
Fugen Roshi: The others were like, oh, no, God, I did. I didn't do that. I kind of practice when I wanted to. He then looked at me and said, “well, I guess you're the one.” And I say “don't sound so disappointed.” He kind of laughed and said, “it's time to really get you trained up because we've got staff roles and we really need to get some MKP guys that know what they're doing.” Now I appreciate this because it’s a really important quality, the quality of diligence.
His big thing was his combination of meditation and yoga. I think that's what saved all of us. We had hour and a half yoga sessions. But he would do it twice. So that it balanced out the meditation. That made a big difference. The other thing that Jun Po did that really demonstrated his love for us was his wanting to understand how the MKP organization worked. He went to several New Warrior Training Adventures, attending our annual meetings. He was a man of service.
Ekai: You saw something in Jun Po’s teachings that filled the gap. What would you say that was?
Fugen Roshi: The big gap from the New Warrior Training Adventure was that It wasn’t really changing people’s lives. Folks just kind of got stuck with their emotions. We had a couple of guys that did an experiment of doing a weekend called the Spiritual Warrior, and they just learned the opposite – sit and be quiet. Jun Po came along and said that we needed to have a balance of both. He believed that fundamentally the Mankind Project was misinformed about the nature of emotion. That’s when he formed Hollow Bones Zen.
Ekai: How were you involved?
Fugen Roshi: I was a founding member of a Hollow Bones Zen. There were many retreats. I would go to dokusan and get my marching orders. How many folks can you get in the seats? I got a lot of people to the retreats before I was ordained. Then I put my foot down and I said I really want to get koan training. Even then, since I had learned the roles early, I ended up mentoring others. M.J. Nelson showed up and after training he is known as Doshin Roshi.
Ekai: How does Mondo Zen emerge. I guess there wasn't a Morning Service or Sutra Book when it began.
Fugen Roshi: Jun Po came loaded with a Hollow Bone Suture Book at the very first retreat. But what happened was he listened to the kind of questions, comments and suggestions he got from folks and then clean it up the next time. In fact, that’s the approach I’m going to bring to the Gently Sitting Like a Stone Retreat we are hosting in September. For example, the original Hollow Bones Sutra Book said, “You are this light, pure consciousness itself.” After our discussions he changed it to “you are this light, pure, selfless awareness”. For me, it was really very helpful to be in on the ground floor.
Ekai: There are a lot of decisions and uniquely Jun Po innovations. You're saying that that stuff was all road tested with a variety of people you were participating with. It was iterated to use the modern term.
Fugen Roshi: Yes, I see it as 21st century American Zen. Like the way we sit in our circle and the way Fudomyo Teja Bell introduced Qi Gong. For several years the guys would fall asleep in the afternoons, First we did Warrior's rest, where we would all take a nap together in the xendo after lunch. Toward the latter part of the afternoon, we would do a little Qi Gong, and then we'd have our nature walk. Jun Po would stress that Zen is about situational awareness and you have to really pay attention to your audience. But you can't forget your primary purpose for being there. That's why I stuck in that mission statement. We collaborated to come together for that mission statement.
Ekai: So when does Mondo koan process come along?
Fugen Roshi: We were really pushing Jun Po. MKP was expanding to South Africa and Canada. Jun Po got a little frustrated with MKP so we organized a leadership retreat. Needless to say, Jun Po pissed off most of the participants. It was devastating that five years of hard work went down the drain on that weekend. From then, other people wouldn't come. Our saving grace was that the women showed up. Jun Po finally had to open. Vicara Mary Connelly Roshi was sitting right outside the door waiting to get in. Once the women got there, they started asking questions. That's when he got the idea about Mondo.
Ekai: You were part of the the writing of the Mondo Manual, the endless rewriting as a manual.
Fugen Roshi: Well, even before writing, I was the guinea pig, I have so much love and respect for Jun PO because we would test it out. “Let’s go deeper." What is underneath this shame?” And then we would go test it out. And until all of us agreed there's something underneath it. It took us a good three or four years to figure out that shame and anger are kind of living on the surface. But then underneath, sometimes it would go to fear. Sometimes it would go to sadness, and then we tried to line those up and it wouldn't work. And then the big innovation, what's underneath that! So that people stop shaming themselves about having their emotions, and that we can get men to understand that it means something to have these emotions, he then came up with “deep caring.”
And then he got throat cancer. I'll never forget when we did the shadow work with that. He said, “I am going to go save my life.” That’s when we realized that we were to appreciate that problems that give rise to pains, to suffering,. This dukkha also creates the conditions for the development of deeper compassion. We build muscles of compassion so to speak. We're not trying to create a world where bad stuff doesn't happen, rather, dukkha just happens and serves a function of giving us an opportunity to deepen our art.
Ekai: This is what is on Jun Po’s gravestone.
Fugen Roshi: It’s in the manual, it says, “your angst becomes your liberation”. Now, that was true for Jun Po for all the 11 years it took to develop the Mondo Manual. But on his gravestone, it's different. “Your angst is your liberation!”
Ekai: Exactly. I appreciate that. Let’s fast forward. You're still around and doing lots of stuff. You raised a family, have a career. Eventually, near the end of Jun Po’s life, he offers transmission. You become a Roshi. It wasn't whether you were ready or not, it just needed to happen so that you can take your seat.
Fugen Roshi: Yes. Yes.
Ekai: I then invited you to develop the Mondo Facilitator Program with me. Because of your previous training with whole brain learning and my training as a teacher, we built a robust structure for training and evaluating Mondo Zen Facilitators.
Fugen Roshi: There we were again with another crisis on our hands. We had COVID, we amped up the Virtual Zendo. Jun Po really got on us to create a certificate program. He wanted it to be legit. We worked on hard on it with success.
Ekai: So what would you like to see happen to the Mondo Facilitator Program. It’s you baby. What's your vision? Where do you see it going from here?
Fugen Roshi: My vision of the Mondo Facilitator Program is that we round out the first ten koans. The ego deconstruction reconstruction process is pure gold. It's been tested every which way and I'm very proud just how Rinzai it is. I recently took it to Dai Bosatu and they all commented about the brilliance of those ten koans. However, we've had 16 koans, then we had 13 koans, then 15 koans. When it comes to the emotional koans, I think it’s incomplete. Recently we’ve been working with Karla McLaren’s Language of Emotions. I think there's a way we can go deeper with understanding emotions. If you want to continue to Mondo, its by its definition it is a dialogue. My vision is that we keep deepening dialogue about what's actually arising, what's actually showing up. And I think we can do a better job with emotional intelligence and brain research. There's a lot of things that we could do to dovetail it together and make it even more robust.
Ekai: I like that answer. Jun Po had no issue with wanting to get these teachings into a variety of situations. It wasn't just a monastery practice. He was wandering everywhere. What you're saying is that by becoming more robust in terms of emotional intelligence, we can reach a broader audience.
Fugen Roshi: He was saying that the Zen tradition can really help inform psychotherapist, life coaches and mentors. We need to help support people who have professional credentials, they're not going to just come and go through the 20 years of zazen practice.
Ekai: I get what Zen is offering, and the emotional koans as they are now are a good first attempt at applying Zen to emotional reactivity. There is certainaliy more opportunity to engage people with this particular party.
Fugen Roshi: I think we've got the primary teachings from koans one through ten are just solid. Now we can fan back out. For example, in my life coaching practice, it’s called Zen For Life. When I'm working, some people have mental challenges, some people have emotional issues, some people just have a whole lot of sensations like pain in their body. I've been able to use the koan practice to help pinpoint where they can get the most change. We’re going from “I don't know”, to “not knowing”. Why? Because the not knowing knows, it really gets that basic.
I don't call them koans in life coaching, I call them conundrums or paradoxes. My mission in life is to imagine if the whole world got coached. Coaching is a force for change that could really help people.
Ekai: At this stage of the game, with Dragon Heart Dharma, you're doing Jukai and ordaining priests. that's the big move that's happening this year. What do you want to see for Dragon Heart Dharma?
Fugen Roshi: I went back to Dai Bosatsu and did 40 days and 40 nights. I just really wanted to learn more about the root of Rinzai. Now I recognize that Rinzai is kind of the trunk of the tree, and that Jun Po was like a collarbone. He was the first Dharma heir of Aido Roshi. It is a really big branch off of the tree. I’m one of 11 people to be given Inka from Jun Po Roshi, and each of us are expected to now take our branch off of it and that's what I'm in endeavoring to do. September is really kind of a kickoff for Dragon Heart Dharma. For me Dragon brings me back to my roots at the ManKind Project. It’s about really having some creature that is living inside me. I wanted something that had the whole access, that could fly, could run on the ground ,and could swim. The dragon is a sign of shadow work. I've learned that there are differences with the myths about European dragons and Chinese dragons but it fit in beautifully with heart. Jun Po gave me the name Fugen, which means ‘loving wisdom’. With heart, all the work that I've done with Mondo Zen just leads from heart, and then with the whole brain stuff, we've got a whole brain, open hearted, skill-centered approach. This is my livelihood really helping to teach and train the trainer. Combine all those together in Dragon Heart Dharma.
The responsibility of a Roshi is to train the next generation. I’m in the 84th generation of teacher, now I accept my responsibility. Jun Po would say “it's your ability to respond. When you can do that, you move forward.” I can now move to what I consider act three of my life, which is all about Fugen Roshi.
Ekai: It all lands where we began in the sense where your adventure started 25 years ago, it's it's circling back around where you are able to respond to the needs of the circumstances, which are very different now than they were 25 years ago.
Fugen Roshi: One of the things all the Roshi’s are trying to get better at is to be crystal clear, our Rinzai Zen comes from Soen Roshi and Dai Bosatsu. That's really was the fundamentals. Then Hollow Bones took its turn. Now it's our time. I'm not leaving Hollow Bones, I'm evolving into Dragon Heart Dharma. That's what we're expected to do. So it's isn’t any issue. All 11 Rosh’s are of the eighty-fourth generation. That's how you spread the Dharma. Each of us takes a branch, accepts responsibility and does our best to make sure that Dharma continues.
Ekai: Very nice my friend. The offspring of this original teaching, they're all a little different. I appreciate that you had this conversation. Fugen Roshi, Thank you.
Fugen Roshi: Thank you.