The gray-clad Korean monk in front of us scaled the mountainside rapidly, not bothering to look back. It was summer of 1988, the rainy season, and thick wet vegetation pressed around us as we climbed the muddy path. Struggling along in the thin white rubber shoes worn by Korean monks and nuns, sweat pouring down my body under my polyester gray overcoat, I had to concentrate fiercely on climbing in order to keep up. Ahead of me, Sam, the American Zen monk with whom I had been living and practicing for a number of years, was doing okay. He’d been a football player and a yoga teacher in his younger years; he loved an athletic challenge.

The Zen monk whom I’ll call Green Mountain lived in a hermitage on the mountaintop. We’d heard he spoke some English. Sam, with characteristic zeal, figured we might as well check out all the possibilities before returning to California. Difficult as the Korean culture, food, and customs sometimes were for Americans, as Zen practitioners we recognized that there were opportunities for uninterrupted meditation practice here in Korea. Back in the U.S., we would have to continue scrounging around for odd jobs to support ourselves, squeezing our meditation practice schedule into our work schedule.

We were almost at the top of the mountain. Our guide disappeared into a tiny hermitage. Sam and I waited outside, catching our breath. Below us, a panoramic view of densely green mountains unfurled into the distance. Unmarred by signs of human habitation, the foliage canopy was pierced only by twisting plumes of mist. But there was little time to admire the exquisite view; we were ushered into a small room without furniture, with the usual yellow ondol floor, and shortly afterward Green Mountain entered.

To this day, it’s unclear to me whether Green Mountain was a recognized Zen teacher (what we in the West romantically call a “Zen master”) or just some senior monk with good political connections. Living in such a beautiful, remote place with support from the monastic order and laypeople to cook and clean wasn’t an opportunity available to everyone. But his bearing and mien as he strode into the room like a hungry tiger left no room for doubt: he wasn’t coming in to make polite conversation but, in the Zen (Korean: Seon) tradition of what has been called “Dharma combat,” to test our resolve as well as our spiritual insight.

Glaring at us with utmost ferocity, he seated himself, cross-legged, while we knelt with our feet tucked under our backsides in a respectful posture the Japanese call “seiza,” eyes slightly downcast, again to show respect. Irrationally, the thought entered my mind that maybe this guy was some kind of nut, and if we couldn’t answer his questions he might very well hurl us off the side of the mountain. None of our relatives knew where we were in Korea at this point; this could be the end of the line. It was no use trying to run away, though; as usual, my legs had gone to sleep when I took the kneeling posture, and I was so exhausted that the thought of picking my way down the steep, muddy trail didn’t seem a viable option.

“Do you have a question for me?” the monk asked, in English. He glared even more fiercely at us, probably to indicate that this was not the time to ask him where he’d learned to speak English, or how long he had lived here. We got the picture.

Sam, who had practiced Korean-lineage Zen in both Canada and the U.S. for twenty years or so, immediately shouted boldly: “Show me your Dharma!”

I had, privately, always thought that the snappy exchanges chronicled in Zen history between teachers and students were mostly guy stuff, men sparring with one another for some kind of spiritual dominance or last word. Show me your Dharma?! What the hell kind of stupid question was that? “Have you seen your mind?” Green Mountain countered immediately. He looked truly hostile and intimidating.

Sam hesitated. He’d been cornered. “Have you seen your mind?” basically translated to, “Have you seen your true nature?” or, to put it rudely, “Are you spiritually awakened?” To say no would be to admit he was still floundering around in the world of delusion. To say yes would mean that he was arrogant, and thus even more deluded. I could feel him deciding what to say, and, to his credit, honesty won out.

“No,” he said.

“If you cannot see yourself, then you cannot see me,” Green Mountain said. This sounded reasonable enough. Sam had no rejoinder.

Leaning slightly toward me, Green Mountain then demanded, “Do you have a question for me?”

At that moment, I distinctly remember thinking, “I’ve had it with this Zen bullshit.” I was totally at the end of whatever rope I’d been tenuously hanging onto for the past several years, meditating my butt off in unheated North American Zen centers, working overtime as the temple treasurer and secretary, then throwing newspapers in the desert in New Mexico and hauling construction materials in California with Sam to earn money for our airfare to Korea.

Like Sam, I had succeeded in getting into the Korean Buddhist system after our original three-month retreat in Korea with an international group of meditators. Sam was accorded full monk status in light of his many years of practice in North America, and I was also given credit for my lesser number of years, and received novice nun ordination in the spring of 1988. The traditional ordination procedure, which I had gone through on a mountain in northwestern Korea with a cohort group of Korean women and men, most younger than me in age, lasted four or five days, and was conducted completely in Korean. This meant I didn’t understand any of the verbal instructions, and had to sit through long talks without the slightest idea of what was going on. I was somewhat used to this, however, and spent my time meditating while maintaining a respectful expression. The last night had been sleepless practice, and after the rest of the temple residents went to bed as usual at 9 p.m., the ordination group climbed the stone steps into the dark, cavernous wooden Buddha hall and performed 3,000 full prostrations, which we finished at 2:40 a.m., a little less than six hours later. At 3:00 a.m. the wakeup drums and bells sounded and we climbed back up to the Buddha hall on wobbly legs for the morning service, which included more prostrations. After the service we climbed from the foot to the top of the mountain for a congratulatory breakfast, and to make more prostrations before our elders.

I’m describing all of this by way of explaining what led up to, and cascaded and collided in the moment when the Green Mountain monk leaned toward me and growled, “Do you have a question for me?”

The period previous to my encounter with Green Mountain, during which time I had lived for a number of months in a Korean nuns’ training temple had been intense and problematic, to say the least. As a third generation Japanese American, I had the advantage over white American Zen students because I had an Asian face and body. In fact, many of the Korean nuns felt disposed to accept me and help me, saying that I looked Korean to them. Some of them even appeared to be proud that I, an American, had come all the way to South Korea to study and learn Korean Buddhism. I had struggled like a drowning person through several months of severe culture shock, learning Korean as best I could and staggering through the schedule with its 3 a.m. daily wake-up and long hours of manual labor interspersed with formal meals and services and the occasional trip to the hot springs bathhouse.

To make matters infinitely worse, I had, through a series of highly improbable events, ended up running away from the nuns’ temple and had gotten into what can only be called bad trouble. At the age of 34, not only was I penniless and malnutritioned, I was pregnant with a Korean-fathered embryo. The order into which I had been ordained was celibate; although I am sure I was not the first nun to have been in this situation, it was, nevertheless, terrifying. In the U.S., I had lived a somewhat conventional life, I had gone to graduate school and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree, and I had been a published poet. Simply put, the life I thought I had previous to starting Zen practice had collapsed. I did not know who I was anymore, or how I could survive my own bizarre circumstances.

All of this meant that, when later I found myself on the top of a rain-drenched mountain, face-to-face with the Green Mountain Zen master, or whoever he was, I knew, definitively, that I had to make some changes very quickly if I wanted to survive, because I had bottomed out. As a Zen student, the word “imperfect” didn’t even begin to describe me. I was a total failure.

*  *  *  *  *

“Do you have a question for me?” Green Mountain demanded.

That moment had arrived. What I discovered was that courage is, simply, not seeing any other alternative. I looked the monk in the eye and said forcefully, “If I cannot see you, then WHO IS IT that sits before me?”

The room was silent for what felt like a very long time. I think, in the space of that silence, which might in reality have been only a few seconds, I knew I had begun a new life, dropping off the heavy cloak of a worn-out and mistaken identity, a life story that had served its purpose but was now discarded. I had no idea what any of this meant, in terms of how I would live in the next few years, or even the next few minutes. I wasn’t worried.

Green Mountain relaxed. Instead of the tiger-like persona he had adopted to grill us, he now looked more like a normal human being. He asked for an assistant to bring us tea, which he served in a friendly, generous fashion. He complimented us warmly on our spiritual practice and said that we could stay and study with him as long as we liked, and he would support us financially. It seemed like an offer we should think about carefully, and evening was approaching, so we thanked him and climbed back down the mountain.

What I wanted, really, was to get back to California, and have my baby. I didn’t care if he didn’t have a father, and I didn’t have any savings waiting for me. Since everything else in my life had stopped making sense, I didn’t bother trying to figure out how it could work. It was what I resolved to do, and so I did it.

*  *  *  *  *

I’m not really sure how possible it is to write about religious experience. I had never particularly planned on being a Buddhist nun, and I certainly never planned on becoming a mother. In many ways, I traveled to Korea without a map or a plan, following my practice without worrying too much where it was going or what I might “get” out of it. Those are the instructions, after all, for Zen. Looking back, my journey to the East wasn’t about returning to my ethnic roots; I’m a third generation Japanese American, but have never been to Japan. It was a journey of returning to my spiritual lineage roots, and exploding the identity, already considerably eroded and cracked, I thought I’d had when I began Zen practice in 1982. It’s kind of like running water into a cracked vessel; if you carefully trickled water into it, it might hold together, leaking, for awhile, but if you put it under a huge waterfall the pressure of the water would find every line of weakness, crack the thing wide open and sweep the shards away.

I had the return portion of my round-trip airplane ticket to Korea in my knapsack, and I used it to return to California in August 1988. I began growing my hair again and when I was four months pregnant, friends told me about Medi-Cal, state aid for people with no medical insurance, and I found a clinic that would give me prenatal care. What had in some ways felt like a dream became reality when the nurse-midwife at the clinic squeezed some gel onto my abdomen and pressed a sound-magnification device into the gel for the first time.

The sound was huge, a gigantic drum, or a pump pushing water from one tank to another, rapidly and strongly: whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh. Tears instantly filled my eyes when I heard my baby’s heart beating so powerfully within me. That heartbeat contained enough life force to fill the entire universe. And I knew in that moment that, even though I was penniless and single, I wasn’t alone, and my practice had brought me home.

Note: Some of the names in this account have been fictionalized.