About Kobai Scott Whitney

Issan (Lone Mountain) Dorsey was not a Buddhist scholar, nor was he a saint. But for those of us who knew him, this drag-queen-turned-Zen-abbot was, without question, a bodhisattva alive in our midst. Before the lore surrounding Issan and the founding of Hartford Street Zen Center becomes an unmanageable apocrypha, it is important that gay and lesbian Buddhists look at his life and death with some care, with attention to his failings and conflicts, as well as to his immense compassion and his wacky insight. Born Tommy Dorsey in Santa Barbara, California in 1933, he was the oldest of ten children and raised Catholic. Although he contemplated studying for the priesthood, he ended up joining the U.S. Navy, from which he was eventually expelled for homosexual conduct. In the 1950's he then began a long career as a performer in drag shows in San Francisco's North Beach — a district which served as the Castro Street of its era and also hosted such fringy populations as the Beat poets, drug dealers, coffeehouse anarchists and jazz musicians. In his shows he was billed as "Tommy Dee, the boy who looks like the girl next door." In the 1960's Tommy deepened his use of alcohol and drugs while joining the hippie movement as founder of a large, still well-remembered commune. In his North Beach years, Tommy Dee shot heroin with Lenny Bruce, partied with the late Carmen McRae and claims to have "discovered" Johnny Mathis (McRae used to argue with him about this, claiming that she was the one who discovered the young singer). During these years he had frequent injuries, overdoses and run-ins with the police. He once said, "Sometimes I'd wake up hung over in jail. The first thing I'd do was feel to see if I had my tits on. This would tell me whether they had locked me up on the men's side or with the hookers on the women's side." In the late 1960's, he began to sit zazen with Suzuki Roshi and his life began to change. He was eventually ordained as a Buddhist priest by Richard Baker, Suzuki Roshi's successor, and given the name Issan. A full account of Issan's life can be found in David Schneider's Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey (Shambhala Publications). The Shaman as Mother. Issan claimed never to have read a single book from cover to cover, except for one: Suzuki Roshi's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Through-out the late 1970's and 1980's, he moved through the world of the San Francisco Zen Center like an angel in tabi socks, as graceful and outrageous as the stage-wise drag queen he had been before meeting Suzuki Roshi. Unafraid to acknowledge his long history of drug use, cross-dressing and prostitution, Issan Tommy Dorsey served as a kind of fringy shaman to the uptight and elitist Zen Center community of those years-a community with an atmosphere that actor and writer Peter Coyote once called "high Episcopal." Tommy had always been comfortable in the borderlands of respectability and could serve to welcome anyone to Zen Center, no matter how odd they seemed to the broader sangha. This benefited individual beginners whom Issan could usher through the sometimes unwelcoming veneer of the Page Street City Center. It also helped the sangha, since Tommy's success in adjusting to the rigors of Zen training proved to them that meditation practice could benefit anyone. Like a shaman, Issan served in the capacity of healer and what ethnographers call a "stranger handler." He acted as clown, as mediator and, generally, in the archetypal role that Robert Bly has dubbed the Male Mother. Many of his students saw him as an embodiment of Kuan Yin, the goddess of compassion. Like this female manifestation of the Buddha, he learned to hear "the cries of the world" and to respond to them in his own unique way. Issan Dorsey, as Zen priest at Tassajara and the San Francisco city center, did not see himself as any kind of Buddhist missionary to the gay community: in fact, he made fun of the macho, middle class, consumer values of gay San Francisco. Those were the years when jeans and lumberjack flannel shirts were the official uniform for gay men, when doing drag or using "Miss Names" were not politically correct activities. Years before the founding of Hartford Street Zendo, when the first meeting of a "Gay Buddhist Club" was announced, Issan scoffed at the idea. "Buddhism is Buddhism, practice is practice," might be a summary of his response. At that time, in those last, pre-AIDS years, his major preoccupation was starting a soup kitchen in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Although he made fun of white middle class American culture in all its forms-gay or straight-he never judged or rejected a person because of their social class or values. He had wealthy friends and he had friends who lived on the streets. He spent most of his social time in the seventies with the predominantly straight men and women who practiced at Zen Center. In his role as male mother, Issan had many straight men who were deeply devoted to him as friend and mentor. "Sometimes," he told fellow priest Shunko Michael Jamvold, "I like to go out with straight men because they treat me like a lady." Endlessly Refining. It may only have been after his death that many people who spent time with Issan realized how he had taught them. While many remember his wacky one-liners, it was with his wordless demeanor that he actually taught us. In his book, David Schneider comments on Issan's fondness for his beads, his Buddhist rosary. His care for what western culture views as non-animate objects was a form of teaching to many around him. Issan dressed impeccably and meticulously. Whether in monk's robes or street attire, he adjusted every piece of fabric lovingly. He often spent quiet time in his room mending clothing. The careful, sensuous way he applied Oil of Olay to his face and his shaved scalp each day reminded one of his friends of a retired actress intent on preserving her aging countenance. Every corner of his room at Zen Center, and later at Hartford Street Zendo, was always dusted and adjusted; bedding was folded and there were always fresh flowers around. Many Zen students remember his tenure as director of the building at Page Street, when the polished floors shone as they never have since. His long study of tea ceremony under Suzuki Sensei, the wife of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, was another way he perfected the aesthetics of movement in the world of space and time and matter. As often as he reminded us of the importance of taking care of people, he also insisted on the importance of taking care of buildings, gardens or tea cups. When leaving to go somewhere in the city, he always took his black Danish school bag, a finely made canvas bag that had pockets for everything in it. This bag, which he fondly called his Life Support System, contained: a handkerchief, a plastic case filled with tooth picks, pens and pencils, an address book, medications, Chapstik, matches, a notebook with reminders to himself, breath mints and, among many other things, his famous Sears Charge Card, the only "plastic" he ever owned. So, one of his teachings to others was contained in this reverence for his physical space and for his few worldly possessions. In a 1987 interview with a now-defunct gay newspaper, he said, speaking of the zendo at Hartford Street, "All you do here is come sit. It's hard to do. But there's no end to it. You can sit all kinds of ways, and you can learn that you can also refine your life endlessly, and that there are endless ways of extending yourself into the larger community. So you come and sit, and then we see what happens from there." Big Mind and the Epidemic. What happened from there was AIDS. As the health crisis grew in San Francisco, Issan told a friend that, more and more, the epidemic was teaching him what Suzuki Roshi had meant when he talked about Big Mind. Meditation practice, at least in the Zen tradition of Dogen, is about mind and body dropping away. Small, lively, individual mind and grasping, needful, individual body can recede, if only temporarily, into the background of experience. After twenty years of Zen practice, Issan was able to experience life with Big Mind in the foreground of consciousness; he began to see and express the fact that an individual death, including his own, might not be such a big thing in the light of the steady blossoming of Big Mind experience. To appreciate Big Mind in the midst of a plague is to know that the seemingly pressing concerns of individual personalities, identities and cravings can fall away in an instant. With mindful practice, the compassion which arises automatically with the experience of Big Mind makes working for the good of all much easier. Big Mind, Issan began to see, presumes that taking care of others is also taking care of self. As co-participants in Big Mind, sufferer and helper are mutually necessary-both help, both suffer. Living and surviving, while someone nearby is dying, becomes like wave and trough on the surface of the sea-each needs the other, both are fleeting. Regular meditation and mindfulness practice gave Issan the experience of mental balance needed to be with self and others through the losses caused by the epidemic. His street experience added an important dimension in the form of daring, direct action that could get things done, like the founding of Maitri Hospice. Yet he knew that no amount of social action and no amount of time on a meditation cushion could spare us from all suffering and grief. He responded to the needs of survivors in different ways at different times. Zen Center student George Gayuski remembers going to Issan after the death of a close friend. "I was so upset," Gayuski says, "and I don't remember anything we said at the time. But I do remember that he immediately started doing a small ceremony with me. We both offered incense and then we chanted the Heart Sutra together and somehow that was the right thing to do at that moment." It is such...

About Kobai Scott Whitney

Opinion: Kobai Scott Whitney

The Lone Mountain Path: The Example of Issan Dorsey

TEACHINGS

LIFE

EXPLORE BUDDHISM

NEWS