posted at 02/21/10 - 12:11 PM

After an exceedingly rich college experience at St. John's in Annapolis, Maryland, I was drafted and sent to Korea where I got banged up and, after several MASH experiences, ended up at St. Luke's in Tokyo.
After a month there, I had a month's convalescence leave and spent more of it in Nara--where Buddhism first took root a millennium ago.
Back to America and to Columbia University's School of Philosophy on the GI Bill where I received my Ph.D. for a dissertation on Descartes' success in fashioning "modern" medicine designed to treat ghost-inhabited robots. I turned it into a book, Descartes' Medical Philosophy: The Medical Solution to the Mind-Problem, and this was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. (I only mention this to introduce my entrance to a path which led me, many years later, to Rinzai Zen.)
After years teaching Philosophy and publishing articles in Philosophy of Science journals in America and Europe, I became weary of contemporary Textbook Philosophy's ignoring of the place of heart in the Cartesian mind.
A chance remark I overheard about a Swiss Philosophical Zoologist, Adolf Portmann, led me to read several translated books of his, and I saw the beginning of a way to embrace the world as a living entity. I took a sabbatical and worked with him in Basle for a year and returned with a number of his off-prints which he asked me to translate and publish, which I did. He had warned me that his name in Darwinian academia was the kiss of death, and so it turned out to be, but, I ended up publishing them and he was on target concerning the kiss of death.
Still, I was on my way to a Way where life and Mind such as Aristotle defined it "And mind is mind minding mind", opened a door to the thought of mind as caring, not just figuring out.
Snooping around after this, I remembered a phase I heard of Rumi's in grad school, something like: "I know that Love can kill, for I know the figures of the dance." From Rumi and Islam's great mystical poets of love and life--culminating in Hafiz's great ghazals--I turned to Henri Corban's great studies of Iranian Sufism, and, one day, I came across his claim that, on the face of this Earth, only Mahayani Buddhism captures the truth of that Sufism.
Once I was on the path, I followed it to Kyoto and the International Research Institute for Zen Buddhism at Hanazono University. Jeff Shore, the Professor of International Zen at Hanazono befriended me and introduced me to Zen Master Kanju Tanaka; it was love at first sight between us, and he became my Roshi.
Upon returning to America I finished a book which aims at highlighting the difference in Zen translations of terms such as Compassion, Desire and the like, with what the Zen Masters meant by those terms, and it was published as "The Language of Zen: Heart Speaking to Heart" on January 5, 2010.
A last observation. Zen practice--and Zen is not a thing and is not a subject, it is a practice by living/dying humans--opened the door to Zen joy, and to doing what Ikkyu directed in his great poem: "Everyday, priests minutely examine the Law and endlessly chant profound Sutras. Before this, though, they should first read the love-letters sent by the wind and rain, the snow and moon."
When Tanaka saw that I was able to read those love-letters, he gave me my Dharma Name, Eppou = Pinnacle of Joy. For me, any Zen which does not lead its practitioners to that Pinnacle is merely a shadow of true, joyful Zen. Richard bows Gasshou to his fellow seekers.