Texan prefers life as monk journey leads him to monastery in japan
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
DATE: Friday, December 5, 1986
SOURCE: By LEWIS M. SIMONS, Mercury News Tokyo Bureau
DATELINE: Ouda, Japan
TEXAN PREFERS LIFE AS MONK
JOURNEY LEADS HIM TO MONASTERY IN JAPAN
It's a long way from Idalou to Ouda.
John Toler has made the trip, spanning the miles, the time and the cultural abyss from a Baptist boyhood in the Texas hamlet to the life of a Zen*Buddhist*monk in this town in central Japan.
His journey has taken him through stopovers as a soldier, a newspaper reporter and an advertising man. Today, at age 55, Toler is the most senior non-Japanese Zen monk in this country.
He is where and what he wants to be. ''I'm an American, always will be,'' Toler says. ''But I will remain in Japan for the rest of my life, and remain a monk. There's nowhere else I want to go and nothing else I want to do.''
Toler startles many Japanese. It's his eyes. While he's not much taller than many Japanese men, and his shaved head gives him the general appearance of most Zen monks, especially when he is dressed in his voluminous dark robes, his porcelain-blue eyes can be a shock.
He recalls that once in Kyoto, while he was walking through the streets begging, a practice required of all*Buddhist* monks, an old Japanese woman peered up under his broad straw hat and saw those eyes. ''My,'' she said, ''you must be awfully eccentric!''
Befitting this unusual monk is his unusual temple. Known as Shogen In -- or Hermitage of the Origin of Pines -- the temple is the only one of its kind, a restored 180-year-old feudal manor house. Surrounded by classic Japanese gardens of raked sand and artfully placed rocks, it provides an island of tranquility to an increasing number of visitors. Some spend a day, others a weekend, a month, a year or more.
Unusual visitors
Honeymooning Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, daughter of the late president, spent two days in August with her husband and several friends. ''We all danced in the garden until quite late at night. We kicked up a lot of sand,'' Toler recalled, a broad smile creasing his large, square face.
''But bright and early the next morning they joined me for our traditional temple breakfast -- boiled rice and pickles -- and then we all recited sutras for 20 minutes or so.''
The atmosphere at Shogen In reflects Toler's transcultural background. The manor house looks as it did when it was the center of village life for tenant farmers in the rich, rice- growing area.
Toler and the two other monks who run the temple spend their evenings chatting and drinking sake around an open riori, or hearth, sunk in the tatami-mat covered floor, just as they would have hundreds of years ago. Japanese visitors tell the monks, ''this is the way Japanese people should live,'' Toler said.
Inconsistencies
But taped music flooding the dimly lit, wood-paneled room couldn't be more foreign and more modern -- a medley by Swiss jazz harpist Adreas Vollenweider. When the phone rings, it's liable to be one of Toler's wealthy visitors from Houston or Denver or a powerful Japanese industrialist or politician.
And although the temple's regimen calls for the green bronze bell to be rung at 6 a.m. and sutras to be recited for 40 minutes each morning, Toler isn't adverse to sleeping late on weekends. Nor is he against breaking the temple's simple diet to share a guest's meal, whether it be chili for lunch or steak for dinner. Although many*Buddhist*monks are strict vegetarians, Toler says the Buddha himself ate meat.
He sees his role as providing whatever kind of help he can to those seeking it. ''I'm certainly not a spiritual leader,'' he said one recent evening as he entertained a group of Japanese and foreign visitors. ''I'm here to teach anyone who wants to learn but also to provide a place where people can relax and get back to themselves.
Visitors seek something
''Some come for Zen training, and that's fine,'' he said. ''Others come for other purposes, and that's fine, too. Even if they're not after the Spartan Zen experience, it can be calming, and that makes it of value.''
Toler has been through the most Spartan training Zen offers. But to reach that point, he had to achieve a number of rites of passage.
After graduating from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, just 10 miles from his family's home in Idalou, (''a village of 500 souls, named after two old maids, Ida and Lou''), he was drafted into the U. S. Army in 1954 at age 23. The army trained him as an aerial photo interpreter and shipped him to Japan.
Toler says he knew next to nothing about Japan, except that the GIs he had seen who had been stationed there all seemed to wear black satin jackets embroidered with lurid dragons and disparaging remarks. ''I thought, 'Why would I want to go to a place where everyone wears clothes like that?' '' he said with a smile.
Was soldier in Japan
Through an army error, he was stationed first in the northeastern town of Sendai -- where there was no need for an aerial photo interpreter. Having time on his hands, he began to explore the town and found that he liked things Japanese. ''My first memorable experience was sitting in this beautiful little restaurant, drinking sake and eating a snack that the owner had put before me,'' he recalls. ''Of course I didn't speak a word of Japanese at the time.
''A Japanese-American GI came in and asked me if I knew what I was eating. When I said I didn't, he told me -- fried grasshoppers! It struck me as really funny: Here I was in Japan, where I never imagined I'd be, eating fried grasshoppers -- and liking it.''
Toler also developed a deep interest in Asian art and began to collect Chinese snuff bottles, an affinity that eventually would play an important role in his life.
When he was discharged from the service, he stayed on and studied the Japanese language under the GI Bill. A gifted linguist, he became fluent and went to work first for the Mainichi newspaper and then for Dentsu, Japan's largest advertising agency.
Japanese with a drawl
By then, the boy was well out of Texas, but Texas still clung to the boy, most evident in his speech. Even today, Toler speaks Japanese with a distinct drawl.
In 1972, Toler met Hugh Moss, a world-renowned British expert on Chinese snuff bottles. Moss persuaded him to sell most of his collection, and with the money he cut back on his work at the agency and became a lay disciple -- the first foreigner to do so -- at Kyoto's Daitokuji Zen monastery.
After two years of this, which included 4:30 a.m. interviews with a Zen master to discuss koan, or conundrums, like ''the sound made by one hand clapping,'' Toler was invited to train as a monk under Daiki Tachibana, one of the most influential Zen abbots in Japan.
Toler was 45 when he entered the monastery full time in 1976. ''I celebrated the 200th anniversary of the United States by becoming a monk,'' he said with a soft chuckle.
Decision came gradually
''Although the decision to become a monk was a major one, it was not particularly dramatic,'' he said. ''The idea had been forming very gradually in my mind over a number of years. By the time I did it, there was no question.''
His principal motivation was ''to search for peace of mind,'' he said, ''though I didn't consider myself an especially troubled person.''
Like countless others before him over the centuries, he also was motivated to seek ''enlightenment.'' But he soon learned that this was ''intellectual arrogance.'' After all, he explained, ''this suggests that one day you'll say you're enlightened.''
Toler's training lasted four years. ''During that time, we got up at 3:30 every morning during the summer and 4:30 in the winter,'' he said. Before dawn, he would enter the room of his Zen master, perform the most formal level of obeisance -- with his forehead pressed to the floor and his hands raised palms upward above his shoulders -- and then discuss his latest koan.
Monks are kept busy
Days were occupied by begging and manual labor and nights taken up by zazen, meditation in the traditional cross-legged posture.
''I found that I could take a lot more rigorous life than I thought I could,'' he said.
Concurrent with Toler's completion of four years in the monastery, the restoration of Shogen In was finished. He was assigned to the new temple in 1980 as its acting abbot. Last year, an old friend from Daitokuji was appointed abbot, and Toler became his deputy.
What are Toler's plans for the future? ''I have none,'' he said. ''I stopped making plans when I found that when the future becomes the present, conditions have changed. I believe that what's going to happen will happen anyway.''
