Maui interview with Mrs. Satomi Seki

In September I visited Hawaii to interview Mrs. Satomi Seki, 96 years old with cancer, wife of the late Reverend Hozen Seki, founder of the New York Buddhist Church in 1938. Mrs. Seki is the last surviving member of the Japanese issei (first generation) Jodo Shinshu missionaries in the United States. I missed the opportunity to interview my own grandparents before they passed, so this would be my last chance to document a part of history.

This opportunity arose because I had written Mrs. Seki's son Hoken over the summer asking for his assistance on my Buddhism in America documentary project.

Here's an excerpt from my letter:

"Last fall, after my mother visited your mother in Hawaii (thank you for making this possible), I saw Hoshin [Hoken's younger brother] at the New York Buddhist Church and we discussed some of the black and white photos hanging in his office and the church library: pictures of your mother and father, the church, visiting reverends. Hoshin told me there are many more photos documenting the history of the NY Buddhist Church."

"It suddenly hit me: I need to document the Japanese immigration to America and tell the story of our own families: the Sekis, Sasakis (my grandmother’s family), and Sakows, as Jodo Shinshu missionaries. I need to interview your mother in Hawaii to tell the story of Reverend Seki (both my grandparents have passed as well as the Sasaki elders), as well as visit our family temples and Jodo Shinshu headquarters in Japan to document our roots. I will interview Japanese reverends, BCA representatives, and American congregation members, both Buddhist born and converts. And in so doing, I will share our history and legacy with future generations."

"I am writing to kindly ask for your assistance."

Hoken wrote back and offered me a plane ticket.

I flew to Maui, Hawaii on a Thursday from Newark, NJ, with a stopover in San Francisco. On my flight I read "A Spark of Dharma," a biography on Reverend Seki and made a list of questions. The interview with Mrs. Seki took place Friday morning. I recorded 90 minutes of recollections, some quite detailed, others hazy, but the trip was definitely worthwhile. I had accomplished what I set out to do: document a living testimonial to one of the pioneer Jodo Shinshu missionaries.

I also had the opportunity to interview Reverend Soga of the Maui Betsuin.

Palden Sakya

And so, in 1998 my NJ home became one of the Palden Sakya dharma centers, with Lama Pema as our spiritual teacher.

Over the years, many Tibetan lamas have visited our center, including His Holiness the Sakya Trizin, supreme head of the Sakya School of Tibetan Buddhism.

Other teachers include: HE Ratna Vajra Rinpoche (eldest son of His Holiness Sakya Trizin), Lama Kunga, Lama Guru Gyaltsen, and many more. They have given many wonderful Buddhist teachings, initiations, and ceremonies at our center and to the exiled Tibetan community in the New York metropolitan area, blessing us with their wisdom, compassion, and spiritual energy.

Over the years, I've documented many of the teachings on video, absorbing the precious meaning of their words while filming.

Lama Pema Wangdak

While I was involved with Geshe Roach's dharma group, my then wife Michele pursued the dream of opening a dharma center in our New Jersey home.

My own family was connected with the Jodo Shinshu sect of Pure Land Buddhism in Japan, and my ancestors had been Buddhist priests for over 28 generations, close to 700 years, in the prefecture of Fukui located northwest of Tokyo near the sea. Of course, this lineage was possible because in our sect the priests married and had families, and the eldest son inherited the church and was expected to become a priest.

I grew up visiting my grandparents, who lived in a Buddhist Temple in Santa Barbara, California. Later as an adult, I traveled to Japan and visited my relatives in Fukui, who lived in the 300 year old Sakow temple, in the village of Sakow (actually, the "w" at the end of "Sakow" had been added by U.S. Immigrations; it should probably be spelled "Sako"). My cousin Hitoye was a teacher in the Sakow Elementary School in Fukui.

So this notion of having a temple in our home, while radical, was not something altogether alien and unfathomable to me. I supported this effort but was certainly unaware of what exactly this would entail.

Once again, through our Dharma Talks, Michele connected with a Buddhist monk of the Sakya sect of Tibetan Buddhism named Lama Pema Wangdak who was very enthusiastic and open to her idea of starting a center. He extoled the great karma of doing this, the blessing of such an effort. We agreed, and the search was on to find an appropriate home.

We quickly found a small home with a large finished basement that would be perfect for our center. After we moved in, Lama Pema became a member of our household, and soon thereafter the exiled Tibetan community in New York City donated a beautiful bronze Buddha statue, handcrafted in Kathmandu, Nepal, to the temple. The following spring Lama Pema and Lama Kunga from Nepal consecrated the statue and the temple in a long, elaborate puja ceremony.

Classes have been held at our dharma center since 1998, and I am proud to be a supporter of this community.

The Three Jewels - Part 3

In Buddhism, "The Three Jewels" refer to the trinity of the Buddha, his teachings, the dharma, and the monastic community of spiritual friends, the sangha. The Three Jewels was also the name of a small store on the lower east side of Manhattan where Geshe Roach taught many of his early classes. The location gradually evolved from a tea house to a bookstore and gift shop to a meditation and community center.

The store was originally run by a nun, Ani Pelma, who was part of a Gelugpa monastic order of nuns and monks ordained by Khen Rinpoche (Sermey Khensur Rinpoche Geshe Lobsang Tharchin), Geshe Roach's root teacher. At the time, Khen Rinpoche was the abbot of Rashi Gempil Ling Temple, a Mongolian Buddhist temple, in New Jersey.

As I continued to videotape dharma classes at night and on weekends, I became acquainted with many of the American dharma students, nuns and monks. Through the original Dharma Talks series in New Jersey, I met Lisa Hochman who had a background as a PBS television producer. Lisa was of immense help in the early stages of planning and filming this documentary; she possessed a piercing intelligence, was extroverted and immediately likeable, and had knowledge of many other dharma centers and scenes. She had been an eclectic Buddhist, originally a Jew who floated amongst many different Buddhist groups, teachers, and retreats.

Lisa accompanied me on many tapings and conducted the interviews while I did the lighting, worked the DV camera, and adjusted the sound levels. We discussed the general questions beforehand, but the discussions were free form and open ended. It was Lisa's idea to expand the interviews and include not only lay practitioners, but nuns and monks as well. We began to explore the reasons why individuals were choosing the path of Buddhism and monasticism.

Geshe Roach was instrumental in helping me to interview his root teacher, Khen Rinpoche, in New Jersey, perhaps the only documentary footage of this extraordinary Tibetan Buddhist lama, who achieved the highest geshe degree as a young monk.

The Three Jewels - Part 2

Some time after meeting Geshe Roach, I started attending dharma classes he held on the lower East side of Manhattan. Those early classes were taught in a student's loft space, decorated with beautiful hanging Thanka paintings and Buddha statues.

At some point, I started videotaping the classes with Geshe Roach's permission. All of his classes were audiotaped on cassette and later assembled into an archive. In fact, the Asian Classics Institute produced an entire series of courses for Buddhist home studies that were distributed to lay people, including prison inmates. Payment was based on one's ability to pay. The studies focused on the texts and topics Buddhist monks were taught to attain the geshe degree, awarded to monastics at the conclusion of a full course of studies.

As I videotaped the classes, the idea for a documentary started to take shape. The classes were filled with American converts who, like me, were being instructed in what I would consider orthodox and very pure Buddhist teachings, fundamental courses on morality, ethics, and that most fascinating topic, emptiness.

The Three Jewels - Part 1

In 1996 I met Geshe Michael Roach, a monk, and Ani Pelma, a nun, through a series of dharma talks my wife Michele and I sponsored in New Jersey. Michele contacted many Buddhist organizations in New York City, literally going through the Manhattan Yellow Pages, asking for referrals for speakers. She was single-minded and undeterred in her mission, and we were surprised at how open and friendly the people were we contacted. It didn't take long to fill 6 slots, scheduled every 2 weeks, for the Spring.

With little beyond word of mouth and a tiny text ad in our local newspaper, the Bergen Record, we launched our Buddhist Talks. We didn't care how many people showed up and didn't ask for donations or support. We just wanted to so something interesting and, hopefully, inspiring for others. I didn't realize it would be us who would be inspired.

Geshe Roach was our first invited speaker. He was the director of an organization called the Asian Classics Institute (which I'd never heard of), headquartered on the lower east-side of Manhattan. He was trained in Tibetan Buddhism in the Gelugpa sect, the Dalai Lama's sect, one of four in Tibet (Gelug, Sakya, Kagyu, Nyingma). Before meeting Geshe-la (the "la" is added with endearment), I had no previous exposure to Tibetan Buddhism. I grew up in my family's Japanese sect of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism.

Geshe Roach's talk was on the subject of karma. As he began his lecture it was apparent to me that this was someone who grew up in the States, for his dialogue was suffused with colloquialisms and examples peculiar to American culture. I could immediately relate to him, which made his teaching all the more meaningful and significant for me.

His discourse on karma was circuitous and meant to make an impact. I remember Geshe Roach asking why it was that there were two close friends involved in a car accident where one was decapitated and the other survived with hardly a scratch. "Why?" he asked. "Why is it one met a horrible, sudden end, and the other walked away unscathed?" We all sat dumbfounded, stunned by the strong image conjured in our minds.

Quite coincidentally, a man who worked for my father, Leonard Gizzi, in his early 30s, was decapitated in a car accident while driving to work one morning in the mid-1970s, on his way to my father's office. That thought shot through my brain like a lightning bolt, stinging my spine. It was a terrible, untimely death, but no one for an instant doubted its randomness or its unfairness. Lenny was an impish, quiet, noticeably shy, and thoughtful young man who was well-liked by all. He was a hard worker who never complained, and my dad was very saddened by his passing. As was I.

Geshe Roach scanned the room and stared right through each of us. "Don't you see?" he implored. "It was their karma. Their individual karma was the cause of the accident, of one's almost instant, gruesome end, and the other's having to live with the nightmare of surviving it. Their deeds of this or a past life led them to this inextricable moment in time."

For the next hour Geshe Roach went on to explain the many flavors and degrees of karma, its components and contributing causes, its mysteriousness, and the fact that only a completely enlightened Buddha could completely fathom its inner workings.

I was absolutely mesmerized.

For all the years in my youth I had attended the New York Buddhist Church with my parents and brother, I had never heard karma explained so thoroughly by any Reverend. This was a complete and satisfying explanation that spawned as many questions as it answered. But for that ninety minutes something inside of my mind expanded.

For the first time, I was hearing the dharma.

Genesis

Since 1997 I have been working on a documentary titled “The Lotus in the New World: Buddhism in America”. The inspiration for this project began in 1996 when my (then) wife Michele and I sponsored a series of Buddhist talks at the Ethical Culture Society center in Teaneck, NJ. The previous year, Michele lost her mother to cancer, a prolonged and painful ordeal for both of us, and that experience sparked our commitment to being proactive Buddhists.

At that time I was often traveling to Singapore and Malaysia on business and was spending countless hours in airplanes. At a bookstore in Singapore I picked up an introductory book on Buddhism by an Indian author and devoured it cover to cover during the flight home. Hungry for more, I started reading book after book, from Suzuki to Thurman to Deshung Rinpoche to the Dalai Lama.

In my quest to understand the process of death and dying from a Buddhist point of view and to make sense of my mother-in-law’s passing and my own mortality (I was hospitalized for a week on the eve of my 40th birthday, diagnosed with sarcoidosis), I read “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”. Although it didn’t make much sense at the time, I found it a mystical and fascinating read. It was as though a huge gate had opened, engulfing my consciousness in blinding light, illuminating and expanding my perception of what it means to be Buddhist.

Michele and I invited many speakers to take part in our Dharma Talk series. Amongst them were Reverend Nakagaki, Lama Pema Wangdak, Geshe Lozang Jamsphel, Geshe Michael Roach, and Roshi Pat Enkyo Ohara. This wonderful experience started Michele on a quest to open a Dharma Center in our home, and since 1998 our basement in Cresskill, NJ has housed the Palden Sakya Center with Lama Pema Wangdak as the resident teacher. Lama Pema has lived with our family since 1998.

In 1997 I decided to produce a documentary about Buddhism in America, devoting nights and weekends to videotaping teachers, dharma centers, and events in the New York metropolitan area. This documentary has expanded into a multi-part television series exploring all the different American Buddhist sects and traditions, from historical (Asian immigration, the Tibetan diaspora, etc.), sociological, and religious viewpoints, through interviews with scholars, priests, monks, nuns, and especially lay people. The show is intended to present the breadth and diversity of an emerging and distinctly American Buddhism, our nation’s fastest growing and 4th largest religion.

I have amassed over 43 hours of video interviews and events, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s opening of the Chuang Yen Monastery in Carmel, NY, His Holiness Sakya Trizin's Vajra Yogini initiation at the NY Buddhist Church, and an introduction to the series by Academy Award winning actress Ellen Burstyn.

In 1999, after traveling to Nepal to film a fundraising documentary for the Pema Tsal Monastery in Kathmandu, I was diagnosed with colon cancer and underwent surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation treatments. It took over 6 months to begin to feel normal and to resume my life, and since my father’s passing in February, 2000 I have, unfortunately, not had the time to edit the documentary footage or do any further filming.

The first segment of the Buddhism in America documentary was placed on YouTube.com last October, 2006 and almost 3,600 people have viewed it to date (June, 2007).

Last October I turned 50, and this pivotal event sparked a lot of soul searching and reflection. I realized just how little I have really accomplished in my life, how unsatisfactory most of my pursuits have been (my screenwriting career, my dotcom venture, my relationships) and became depressed. The choices I have made, the karma I created, I could blame no one but myself for whatever dissatisfaction I felt. Since then I have been searching for some way to bring meaning and substance to my life, to make a difference.

The Buddhism in America project is my way of doing exactly this.