Echoes of Serenity: A Monk’s Tale

As a student at Berkeley in the nineties, Danica Shoan Ankele received a letter in the mail from her mom. It contained a cutting from the Buddhist magazine Tricycle advertising month-long residencies at a monastery in her home state of New York.

“She mailed it to me with a note that said, ‘What about something like this?’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, this looks good!'” says Shoan (she is mostly known by her Buddhist name these days).

Her mom sent the letter in response to mental health issues that her daughter had been going through as she struggled to understand her place in the world. In part precipitated by the death of a loved one, she had found that “core existential questions were coming up for me very strongly” at the time.

Questions like: “What is the point of this life? How do I actually live? And is it even worth it?”

Following her mom’s suggestion, she applied and was accepted to the residency at the Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper.

Her time there was the beginning of a relationship that has shaped her entire adult life. She later met her husband, Gokan, there during a year-long residency. She has lived at the monastery full-time since 2007 and became a fully-ordained monk in 2015.

Today, she is the monastery’s creative director and training coordinator. Listening to her story, I am surprised that she had a spiritual calling at such a young age. She says the turn towards Buddhism did not come entirely out of the blue.

Growing up, her parents were “very spiritual people,” though not in a conventional sense. Her dad was a Presbyterian minister turned documentary filmmaker, and even after he left the church, his films “always had a very spiritual theme, either explicit or implicit,” says Shoan. Her mom, meanwhile, was an artist, “and I think her art is still a spiritual practice for her.”

Her parents had encountered the teachings of the Tibetan spiritual teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder of Shambhala Buddhism, “so that was kind of in the background of my childhood, their involvement with that, and their own meditation practice.”

She says: “When I read Buddhist teachings as a young person, independent of my parents, I recognized something true in them.”

I press her on what that truth was. She pauses to consider the question. We are talking on a sunny day in early Fall, seated opposite one another at a picnic bench in front of the main monastery building. It is the second time we have met.

The first was during a recent retreat I took part in here. On the second evening of the retreat, I went to Shoan for one-to-one instruction on my meditation practice. Despite the formal nature of the encounter (a certain amount of bowing and prostration was required on my part), I remember feeling at ease in her presence.

She has piercing blue eyes that are hard to forget and an energy and exuberance that seem a little out of place in the quietude of a monastic community. She looks at me now from across the picnic table as she mulls my question.

Eventually, she says: “I remember reading the Tao Te Ching at college, which is really a Taoist text, but I read it in the context of an Eastern religion class. It was kind of tucked away in there, with the Buddhist teachings.”

“There was something in it about the idea of an already existent, natural perfection that I felt I knew was true, even though that wasn’t my experience of myself and my life at the time.”

She began to learn about Zen Buddhism and was inspired by its emphasis on the value of direct experience.

“What resonated a lot with me was that it was going to be a personal journey, a personal verification of the teachings,” says Shoan. “Not some dogmatic belief, but something that one could directly encounter.”

The other thing I find surprising in her story is the revelation of her long-term relationship. In the Zen tradition the rules around celibacy vary across geographies. In China, where Zen originated, there are strict prohibitions on sex and alcohol.

However, the Zen practice in the West is primarily Japanese in origin. In Japan, there was a relaxation of the requirements for Zen monastics starting in the 19th century, which made it possible for monks to marry and even raise children in so-called’ family temples.’

Shoan and Gokan (also an ordained monk), do not have children, though the question of whether to start a family was forefront in their minds when they decided to enter the monastery full-time.

“When I was in my mid-thirties, we became intrigued by the possibility of actually living here full-time and ordaining, and at the same time, we were at the age where, if we were going to start a family, it was time,” says Shoan.

Far from challenging their relationship, the decision to move into the monastery, in many ways, made sense of why they were together.

“We met here when we were quite young, and our practice was the thing that we had in common,” she says. “People will sometimes joke about how different Gokan and I are; on the surface, we have different characteristics and qualities.

“But on a deeper level, the bond that draws us towards the Dharma kept us together all the years when we weren’t here. So, in some ways, it felt – at least to me – that when we moved in [to Zen Mountain], finally we were in the causes and conditions that were the thing that we had in common.”

I wonder what it’s like to sustain a relationship in such a tight-knit community and in a context in which every day is proscribed by so many rituals and routines.

“There have been times where we’ve been going through a difficult spell, and it’s felt hard to do that in community. It feels so visible.”

At other times the week is so full, she says, “that we will get towards the end of the week and, even though we live together in our little cabin up the hill, we’ll be like, ‘I feel like I haven’t even seen you.'”

In the mind of many westerners, Zen tends to have a reputation for austerity. Before I came to Zen Mountain, the enduring image I held in my mind for Zen monasticism was of a priest hitting students with a wooden stick to correct bad posture. While this image of Zen is a stereotype, “You would come by that bias honestly because that’s the dominant Japanese flavor of Zen that’s come to us here in the US,” says Shoan.

However, during its maturation on Western soil, “some of those cultural aspects are being revealed for what they are… in a way that’s preserving the heart of the teaching without the cultural pieces.”

“In our time the loving, gentle quality of Zen is really important,” she says. “We’re in such a distracted, aggressive, emotionally numb, and ‘checked-out’ dominant culture that the very bright, wakeful, and attentive qualities and characteristics of the practice can really come out.”

It has been a journey for the community at Zen Mountain (known collectively as its sangha) to open itself to this newer way of seeing the practice, she says. In the past, for example, the residents, whose role was to monitor meditation sessions (zazen) in the monastery’s meditation hall (the zendo), would respond to the sight of a student slouching with a certain severity.

“Part of [the monitor’s] role is to maintain the integrity of the practice in the space,” she says.

This used to be done in a much more “corrective tone,” she says, “almost at times like yelling: ‘Sit still! Don’t move!’… Over the years, that’s changed. So, we still will say things when someone’s moving, but we don’t yell out.

“Now the monitors are trained to say something but to say it in a more encouraging way. It’s not just a directive to sit still, but they’ll say something like, ‘You know, you actually have the capacity to be with your own discomfort.'”

“Warming up of the culture” at the monastery, as Shoan puts it, has been especially important in creating a more inclusive space for marginalized groups. Despite their best efforts, the sangha at Zen Mountain remains under-represented in this respect.

“Speaking with sangha members who identify as members of historically excluded groups, it’s really hard to show up someplace and just be the one black person in a whole community full of white-bodied people. We need to see people who look like us in order to know we can belong… But it’s hard to get to that place if they’re not already here.”

Outside of the sangha, the monastery frequently hosts new visitors via monthly introductory weekend retreats. These retreats attract a broad range of people, who come with one common goal, says Shoan.

“They are all seeking. Sometimes that’s a really deep search, and they’re coming here at a time in their life when a lot has led them here.”

Sometimes the search is less all-encompassing, she says. “Finding a place like this, you don’t have to dig very deep. It’s just a couple of Google searches away. So we have people who come more out of curiosity. But you never know when someone’s surface curiosity will open up into something deeper.”

Hearing this, I wonder about her search for meaning and how it has changed in the last three decades since she first discovered Zen Mountain. She says the existential questions that first animated that search have not gone away but “have matured and ripened, and they’re part of a mystic path for me now.”

She adds: “Sometimes my old demons of anxiety and depression arise, but my relationship to them is so different. I still will struggle, but I don’t have the same kind of fear, and it comes and goes, and it’s not a big deal. At the same time, it seemed like the end of the world many years ago.

“The longing to be present in my own life, to be present with people, and not feel like I was living through a cloud, has really changed. To be satisfied and fulfilled with things just as they are – an ordinary day. That feels like what I would have wanted, and it’s a quality in my life now.”

There is a Zen koan that instructs the student: ‘If you see the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha.’ The koan can be understood as a warning against over-estimating your own progress along the spiritual path. At the same time, Buddhism explicitly holds the attainment of enlightenment as its goal. So how, then, I wonder, are we supposed to understand moving towards a goal without becoming focused on the goal itself?

“I feel like I’m on a journey of clarifying,” says Shoan. “People use that word enlightenment in different ways. But if I imagine enlightenment as a profound insight and a very deep opening into really understanding and seeing clearly the nature of the self and how things are, then I would say there’s such a thing. For sure, it’s something that we can point ourselves toward.”

In the meantime, she says, we can do our best to enjoy the journey. And she leaves me with a quote from John Daido Loori, the founder of Zen Mountain and its first abbot.

“He used to say: ‘All the way to heaven is heaven itself.'”

Photos courtesy of Paul Willis.