Loori’s Tattoo

Zen Buddhist elders nearly prevented Abbot Loori’s ordination as a monk, after seeing a tattoo peeking from his robe. A Navy souvenir, it depicted an innocent-enough anchor, but Japanese associate tattoos with criminals, and Abbot Loori refused to erase his past.

The ordination finally went ahead. But the abbot wore a bandage over the tattoo when he visited Japan, Newsday reported in 2004.

“I think they were a bit puzzled when I returned year after year and the burn still hadn’t healed,” he said.

• New York Times Obit for Daido Roshi
  

As I wrote in my reflection on my experience of meeting Daido Roshi for the first time, I noticed his tattoo right away and it reminded me of my father’s own tattoo, the same arm, the same location – though instead of Loori’s anchor, my father had a cross with his name on it. Still, both were faded with time, not much more than a indistinguishable blueness against sun-roughened skin.

In my father’s case, he received his when he was just 16, at a carnival and tried unsuccessfully to hide it from his parents. Loori, I imagine, received his while serving in the Navy.

My father’s clearly marked himself as working class with his tattoo, a man who worked as a railroad wrecker, repair shop foreman, wielder and union official. The men my father worked with also wore tattoos, all of them blue-collar, hard-working, hard-playing men. Although their lives could be, and my father’s was at times, difficult, confusing, violent and filled with a sizable portion of financial worry (I say this to remind myself not to idealize the working class) there was something honest about these men in a way that, for me, is difficult to find in the places that I’ve worked – in cushy offices surrounded by techno-babble and corporate politicos.

I find it interesting that in the NYT obit for Loori they mention the difficulty he had with his tattoo – that he almost wasn’t allowed to be ordained as a monk and that he had to hide his tattoo under bandages. For me, it was Loori’s tattoo that helped me – I don’t know how to describe it – “open up to” Zen Buddhism. You see, I drew conclusions based on my past experience and familiarity with tattoos of this nature (very different than the conclusions I draw – and struggle against – when I see the ink-work on the youth of today). I saw a man who had spent time in manual labor which is what Loori did, forging his birth certificate at 16 so he could join the Navy. This made me think of Loori as a practical man, someone not given to nonsense and mystical obfuscation.

During lunch at my visit to the monastery I was sitting with a fellow and we got to talking about our experiences so far with our introduction into Zen Buddhism. I remember that he said it wasn’t what he was looking for – he was looking for something “more spiritual, more mystical.” I understood but expressed that I was looking for just the opposite. I had spent my life, up until that point, seeking the divine, searching for that elusive mystical experience and exploring various spiritual traditions – Pentecostalism, Paganism, Shamanism, the “occult” and the rest. By the time I entered that monastery I wanted “real.” I was tired of what I perceived as “make believe” and I told my lunch partner that what appealed to me, so far, was that the teachings we had been exposed to at that point were like holding a hunk of rough-cut lumber – solid, real, practical. He and I were definitely in different places, but I had found what I was looking for. Loori’s tattoo symbolized this for me.

I admit I wasn’t looking for much when I visited the monastery the first time. On the form we filled out to register for the weekend, under “What are you hoping to get out of your visit?” I wrote “Peace of mind.”

I’m getting that. I really couldn’t ask for more.

In summary, I guess, they say that a Zen teacher’s every action is a lesson, a way of opening the student. If someone were to tell me that a stranger’s tattoo would help direct me along a spiritual path, I would have laughed. But life can be stranger than we suspect and the smallest things can reveal the most amazing.