Jun Po Roshi (Interview Archive)

At that time in my understanding and practice, reincarnation wasn't something I accepted, and neither was the idea of other realms. What drew me toward Zen and Buddhism was a particular story about the Buddha. Someone asked him whether he believed in life after death, in another world, in all of that. His reply was that there were more important matters to discuss. When that line landed for me, I thought, fine, this is a question I'm not even going to open up. And then I started hunting for a discipline I could take seriously.

I studied with Trungpa in the practice I was doing then. I worked in the yogic tradition under BKS Iyengar and under Pattabhi Jois, and I got certified to teach yoga in the ashtanga line. Then I came across Eido Shimano Roshi. I'd read a piece he had written, and in it he said something like, stop sending me your PhDs, I already know everything. That cut right into me. I understood it immediately, so I went to meet him.

Dai Bosatsu Zendo is an extraordinary place. It sits in the Catskills, reached by two miles of private road, sixteen hundred acres of hard-rock maple and mixed forest, the second highest lake in those mountains, a grand old Victorian on the water, and a twenty-five thousand square foot monastery built into the side of a hill. That became my training ground. I trained there on and off for seventeen years. Six of those years I served as head monk, and later as Vice Abbot, before I was recognized in the lineage in 1992.

The road there ran through frustration and confusion before it reached any discipline. I drank. I used drugs. I went the whole familiar route, and eventually I decided I wanted a deeper realization, something I could actually understand. Zen suited me, the Rinzai approach especially, with its koan work and the kind of concentrated koan practice that drives you toward insight.

Erik: Jun Po, I'm curious. Before we get into the more recent part of your life, the Zen path, I want to ask about psychedelics and spirituality. People hold very different views. Some treat them as dangerous, a distraction. Others see them as necessary. Some think of them as a doorway and nothing more. One day of our event looks at psychedelics as a medical treatment for PTSD and related conditions. Coming from someone grounded now in the Zen tradition, how do you see their value and their benefit, generally speaking?