In 1967, the San Francisco Zen Center opened Zen Heart-Mind Temple, the first Zen monastery outside Asia, at the former resort of Tassajara Hot Springs in the Ventana Wilderness east of Big Sur. The rhythm it established that year continues to this day.
Two three-month “practice periods” take place from fall through spring, during which the temple is closed to outsiders while monks and other Zen students spend most of their days there in intensive meditation. Then during the summer months, the temple becomes something of a rustic resort again, opening its soothing baths to paying guests and serving the gourmet vegetarian food and fresh-baked bread that has
made Tassajara famous far beyond Buddhist circles.
The practitioners change each year, rotating through Zen Center’s other locations on Page Street in San Francisco and Green Gulch Farm in Marin. But Tassajara’s transient monastics still follow the same routine, with monks living and practicing on the grounds almost continuously now for more than 40 years. Almost.
There have been two interruptions. First, briefly, during a major wildfire in 1977. And then again, for about one hour, in the midst of the huge Basin Complex Fire in July 2008.
Berkeley writer Colleen Morton Busch’s captivating and often exhilarating new book, “Fire Monks,” chronicles the truly amazing story of how the intrepid residents of Tassajara came to evacuate on that one day three years ago, and how five of them then chose to return to face the blaze.
Many readers will remember the summer of 2008: As Busch writes, “If you lived in California, you smelled the smoke.”
Sparked by lightning on June 21, the Basin Complex Fire grew quickly, and within a couple of days Tassajara’s summer guests were asked to depart. At first, many resident students stayed. They spent their days clearing flammable brush and jury-rigging homemade sprinklers, preparing for the fire’s inevitable advance.
But as the fire gradually approached, their numbers were pared down in successive evacuations.
Finally on July 9, with the fire threatening to block the only road in and out of Tassajara and at the urging of fire officials who felt the compound could not be adequately defended, all the remaining residents left. And then, almost immediately, five monks turned around and drove back to brave the fire alone.
What exactly caused these five to agree to leave and then so quickly to return is a mystery Busch cannot entirely answer. Was it all a ruse to get the younger students to safety? Did the five senior monks — including Zen Center abbot Steve Stücky — simply change their minds as they drove up the winding dirt road away from their beloved temple?
What is clear to Busch, a longtime Zen student herself, is why these five felt qualified to stay, despite virtually no training as firefighters: “They didn’t need to know all the answers to act. They had shown a suppleness of mind, learned on the meditation cushion, that could be brought to bear on any circumstance.”
This intriguing notion that a clear mind conquers all will be familiar to connoisseurs of samurai movies and Jedi knights everywhere, and is a recurring theme in “Fire Monks.” Perhaps not every reader will be convinced, and some even at the Zen Center at the time felt it was irresponsible for the monks to remain.
Yet remain they did, and Busch recounts their harrowing experiences nearly hour by hour as the fire advances, her vivid prose as electrifying as any beach novel you’re likely to find this summer.
The fire, when it finally arrives, confronts Tassajara for just five agonizing hours. Perhaps inevitably, there is a slight sense of anticlimax when an event we have anticipated for nearly 200 pages passes so quickly. Yet Busch somehow manages to create suspense and tension despite the largely foregone conclusion.
Her pivotal chapter carries us from the fire’s initial advance into Tassajara itself as “thirty-foot flames tore down the mountains” to the “atmosphere of finality and transition” when the last of the spot fires had been knocked back and the monks can finally catch their breath. There seems little doubt in the end that without the valiant efforts of these five to keep the flames at bay, much of this precious place would have been lost.
Today the 14-mile road into Tassajara still wends through grove after grove of burned-out pines and skeleton forests full of gnarled, bleached-white branches and blackened stumps. But down in the valley itself this summer, evidence of the fire is not so easily found.
The wet winter has brought wildflowers and ferns, and the cabins are filled once again with well-fed and well-rested guests. Only two of the “fire monks” still live at Tassajara, the rest having moved on to the next stage of their lives.
Zen, after all, teaches that everything changes, that all life is impermanent. Yet in this stranger-than-fiction story Busch so expertly tells, Zen Heart-Mind Temple survives, thanks in large part to the courage, the calm and, yes, the heroics, of those five faithful monks.
Dan Zigmond is a contributing editor at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
