Free Fire Monks by Colleen Morton Busch Page A

closed for days during the fire’s passage, washed out in six places. Food and supplies had to be ferried across impassable areas on garden carts and wheelbarrows. The students worked through the winter and spring practice periods to protect Tassajara from the post-fire floods. Then, on the final day of the spring 1978 practice period, the zendo—the original zendo , the one that was a bar before it was a meditation hall—burned to the ground.
    The fire started in the middle of a ceremony in which the abbot answers a question about the teachings from each member of the sangha. Both questions and answers indicate understanding. Within a few minutes, fire engulfed the building where Suzuki Roshi had given his talks, seated in front of the old fireplace converted into an altar; where before that, whiskey had warmed the bellies of hunters; where even before that, an Esselen Indian might have made a meal of acorn mush over a campfire.
    A monk visiting from Japan tried to dash back into the burning building to save the two-thousand-year-old stone Gandharan Buddha statue on the altar, probably smuggled on a donkey cart from inside the borders of present-day Pakistan or Afghanistan before Zen Center purchased it from an American art dealer. “First I stopped him,” Jane told me. “Then I changed my mind. We walked back in together and half the ceiling was burning, so I pulled him out again.” The next day, the two sat staring at the remains of the zendo. “I’m sorry I didn’t let you go in at the beginning to get the Buddha,” Jane said to the Japanese monk.
    The monk looked at her, then pointed at the old altar. “Buddha,” he said. He pointed at the ashes: “Buddha.” Then he pointed at Jane. “Buddha,” he said again.
    Because of problems with the emergency water pump after the floods that followed the Marble Cone fire, the resident fire crew at Tassajara in the spring of 1978 wasn’t able to get water on the zendo fire in time. They’d saved Tassajara from a wildfire only to lose its most significant building the following spring, probably because of a faulty pilot light on a propane gas refrigerator. No one was injured, yet nothing was left of the zendo but fragments of stone walls. Drums and bells melted in the flames. The Gandharan Buddha toppled from the altar. Some who were at Tassajara at the time, like resident fire crew head Ted Marshall, recalled that the Buddha shattered into pieces, none larger than a teacup. But Roger Broussal, the restorer who worked on the statue at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, told me it had split into several large chunks, and pieces of schist had stripped away “in layers or sheets, almost like shale.”
    After the new zendo was built, the Buddha was placed on the altar, on a pillow with red and gold accents, where he has sat for three decades. Two feet tall, with a chiseled, slender torso, he’s a fit Buddha, not rotund or androgynous. His eyes are half-lidded, the left eye set slightly higher than the other by the original sculptor’s hands. Aside from chips in his right ear and knee—some pieces were lost forever in the zendo’s ashes—there is little evidence of the damage. His lips press together in a hint of a smile.
    Â 
    Â 
    Within twenty-four hours of the resident evacuation on June 25, linked lengths of PVC pipe zigzagged across the dining room roof at Tassajara in a white, angular web. In 1977, David had learned, students used garden hoses, sprinklers, and blankets to keep the roofs wet. This time they constructed something more complex yet elegant. When they turned on the jury-rigged sprinkler system for the first time and it worked, drawing water through the standpipe system from the twenty-thousand-gallon spring-fed water tank up the road and showering it over the rooftops, plant manager Graham smiled and said, “Ah, Dharma Rain.”
    When CAL FIRE captain Stuart