COHEN AND KOAN
The music came from a deep place, writes Antony Osler, who meditated with Leonard Cohen
South African Zen author Antony Osler recalls time spent in a monastery with the late Leonard
IWON’T claim to have been a friend of Leonard Cohen’s but our paths overlapped when I was a monk at Mount Baldy Zen Centre near Los Angeles in the early- to mid-1980s. We shared the same teacher. By that time Cohen had been a student of the Japanese Zen master Joshu Sasaki for many years, although he would only take monk’s robes a decade later. Roshi (“respected teacher”) trusted Cohen as an interpreter of the West and from time to time he would appear in his impossibly smart suit and tie and walk up to Roshi’s rooms with a bottle of high-class brandy. The two of them would empty the bottle and still be ready for meditation at 3am.
Cohen was already a celebrity by then so he was also present in a mythical sense, as our Zen man in the public arena. I know the little wooden cabin on the mountain where he wrote, And so inside my little room there plunged the rays of love. And I remember being driven mad during a retreat in New York City by Cohen’s endless mucking about on his new keyboard upstairs. But we forgave him because his presence somehow validated our calling as Western monks in an austere Japanese monastic tradition.
Since his death, tributes have poured in from all over the globe. And much has been written about his personal excesses, his depression, his women, and his tours. But I don’t think he can be appreciated without his Zen background.
How else to understand his meditative stillness and vulnerability? His wry humour and questioning? His gratitude? His meticulous dedication to his craft? For me, listening to Cohen’s poems and songs is to meet him in koan (a ritual ques- tion in Zen training which requires a response from the heart).
His words are tender, concrete and startling, and just as you think you’ve understood him, he turns a somersault — whoaaa! These qualities are not accidental.
It is also a mark of the Zen outlook that we are not just isolated individuals searching for our own internal happiness; we are beings embedded in the world, connected to creatures and cultures, winds, sunsets and songs. It is this balance between personal life and communal life that gives richness and context. In the life and work of Cohen, we see his personal experimentation with meaning, drugs, music and women. We also see his deep situatedness within his own tradition — particularly the Jewish liturgical tradition in which he grew up and the Zen tradition he later adopted. However alone he feels, he is always carried aloft by his ancestors and his elders, by his gratitude and respect for those who have gone before. This is the honour Cohen gave to Roshi, to his women, and to his audiences.
I am often asked what relevance Cohen has for us in South Africa. Well, for me, what is beautiful is always relevant, and that may be legacy enough. But Cohen himself never shied away from social comment, even if he declined to offer particular solutions. In his prophetic role, he calls us to a life of nobility, from which mature political action can arise. And, as a student of Zen, he makes sure that this vision is ordinary and practical.
This combination of grandeur and groundedness is remarkable. In the last resort, it is a call to selflessness and intimacy in this very life we have been given. How will we respond? This is our koan.
We are not asked to be perfect or to always get things right — as Cohen himself sings, There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. But we are asked to stop for a moment, to pay attention, to put down our arguments and our fixed positions and to open our eyes.
There we will find our world in all its glorious ordinariness. We will stand in each other’s shoes and be willing to be surprised. We will look after the person in front of us and the person across the street, we will stop at the traffic light, we will tell our children stories, and we will lift our voices in song: May the lights in the land of plenty, shine on the truth one day.
What is beautiful is always relevant. That may be legacy enough