Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind, Maura O'Halloran
Elie, Paul
She wants to be lost in him, but he vomits her out again and again, and each time he asks more from her before he permits her return.... There is too much of Ellen in Ellen for God; she sticks...
...With robes and a shaved head is the only way to travel...
...These aspects of herself fulfill one another rather than cancel each other out...
...Together they form a remarkable record of a life fully lived, a unique and inspiring and even heartbreaking book...
...That is why the journal is so remarkable...
...She is a Zen monk, yes, but she is also a splendidly educated Irish-American from a large and loving family, intellectually ambitious, attractive and attracted to men of all sorts, hungry for the world's goods...
...In South America] they said I seemed Latin...
...In them she is unusually confident and clear-headed about her search for enlightenment...
...I'm blowing through the koans these days," she writes in a late letter to her mother...
...She might have married...
...You will be surprised, I think...
...Vinegar Hill, a first novel, has all the makings for a thinly disguised feminist polemic...
...Like the good Catholic she thinks she is not, her resource lies in communing with the powerful dead—even lost souls in Hell...
...Frustrated after a twenty-hour day of work and prayer, she tells herself, "Keep at it, m'dear...
...Sure and begorra, let me tell you the tricks...
...My head is spinning a bit...
...There too she showed uncommon gifts early on: she glimpsed enlightenment almost immediately and solved koans with the aplomb of a veteran Zen master...
...It is complemented perfectly by the letters to her family interspersed throughout...
...has published the journal Maura O'Halloran kept while at the monastery, along with letters she wrote to her family and a series of delicate, lovely drawings by her younger sister, Elizabeth...
...her efforts to reconcile the small defeats of cooking and begging with her deepening experience of the sublime in prayer...
...Upon her arrival, she is puzzled by the way she is welcomed like a relative: "At one luncheon it was decided that I had a Japanese face...
...The money-changers, too, were charming...
...Naturally enough, she applies her wit and insight to her spiritual life as well...
...and her passionate relationship with her master, Go Roshi, who was ill with cancer and hoped that Maura, his "jewel," would stay in Japan and succeed him as the zendo's spiritual leader...
...While it is called Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind, the book is full of Maura' s soul...
...Now, prompted by the Commonweal article, Tuttle & Co...
...Given an exotic carved chin-rest full of Buddhist symbolism, she reflects: "Holding it in my hands, I feel a sort of reverence for all the hard training that has gone before...
...Maura doesn't hold our hands as an anthropological observer, set herself up as a spiritual guide, or offer her experience as a lesson in what the West must learn from the East...
...In William James's terms, she seems to have been not twice-born but once-born, her mature religious life continuous with the early life and culture that gave rise to it...
...If Ellen doesn't make a decisive break with this malign legacy, she will be condemning her daughter Amy to become another Mary-Margaret or Salome, her timid son Bert to become another James...
...as a writer, Maura O'Halloran can't help but communicate...
...Without denying the Zen character of her experience and the way it was fostered in Japan, one can't help but regret that a person so conversant in the Western culture of her upbringing had to leave it in order to seek enlightenment...
...Too much Ellen in Ellen for God...
...Sure, we have our monasteries and convents—but the mystical way is in abeyance in Christianity today, and the impulse to follow a regimen of prayer as a stage on life's way runs counter to the lifetime commitments required of "professed religious...
...A scholarship student at Trinity College, Dublin who "early gave promise of a rare spirituality," Maura O'Halloran left a waitressing job in Harvard Square at age twenty-three to begin an apprenticeship as a Buddhist monk at a zendo in Japan...
...Phew...
...Since then "Maura-san," or "Soshin"—celebrated during her lifetime in the Japanese media as an anomaly of anomalies, a female Irish Zen monk—has come to be regarded as a Buddhist bodhisattva or saint of compassion...
...Maura's wit and so30 rial observation remain sharp as she plunges into the monastic experience...
...When she died in Thailand, Maura had just traveled to Hong Kong and Macao with her brother Scott...
...In going East she seems not to have been in flight from home and family...
...Paul Elie ommonweal readers already know of Maura O' Halloran, whose mother, Ruth O'Halloran, wrote about her daughter's life in an essay published here in 1992 (February 28...
...Of course my face is as Irish as turf but it's all part of their acceptance of me...
...In an afterword, the American Zen monk Patricia Dai-En Bennage sees it as a "record of a pure heart" (soshin) and a summary of her way, or teaching: "intense meditation, known as zazen, for long hours in natural temperatures, full-voice chanting, sustaining oneself on the minimum necessary sleep and food, and working single-mindedly under the guidance of a master, or Roshi...
...This is a stunning debut by a writer to watch...
...31...
...On one level Maura's journal is an account of her determined progress toward Zen enlightenment...
...no, she is zealous to share her experience as fully as possible with her mother, her grandmother, her five brothers and sisters...
...A "smug" faith (according to Flannery O'Connor the besetting sin of Catholics) that aspires to be "lost in God" is what nearly all in this tightknit, patriarchal town seems to have at the tip of their tongues, which leads this reader to the conclusion that when Ellen's God "vomits" her forth into the world he does her a distinct favor...
...Quien sabeT Traveling to Seoul, she feels oddly indulged: "The customs inspectors, of course, only bowed and waved me on, delighted with the gaijin [foreign] monk...
...in linguistics at the Sorbonne, or founded a zendo in Dublin, or completed a novel she had begun in the monastery...
...However, that didn't do me much good last night...
...She stayed at the zendo for most of two years, resolved to "not stop until I reach complete enlightenment...
...her friendships and conflicts with the other monks (one proposed marriage...
...It is a journal, after all, and its author instinctively avoids the facile devices typically used to present Zen to Western readers...
...How sad I felt as I finished this book, which I will read again: sad that Maura O'Halloran didn't survive to return and enrich our culture, and sad that she had to go away from us in the first place...
...So this is a person...
...The journal itself is personal, sometimes abstruse, but rarely myopic...
...She makes no apologies, gives no defenses...
...It's hard to sleep on the bloody thing...
...She must unravel the catechism she learned as a child...
...Maura vividly tells of the familiar aspects of life of prayer and asceticism in a monastic community: her early ardor...
...this is warfare in which mothers resort to terrorist attack—at which precocious little Amy is already honing her skills...
...In 1982, intending to return to her family in Dublin, she had set out on a trip through Asia when she was killed in a bus accident in Thailand...
...Rather, it seems her fierce God is expelling her from the "abysmal swamp" nearly everyone else sees as a woman's lot in this vale of tears...
...Read straight through, the book can be hard going...
...She intended to return to Dublin, to undertake plans that had taken shape during her time in the zendo...
...Several people have said that I don't seem Western...
...She might have earned a Ph.D...
...What is going on here is a tradition of master-slave relations whose machinery spits out executioner-victims with each succeeding generation—thin-skinned daughters who suppress their rage, hate their own femininity, and devour their sons (Mary-Margaret), smart daughters who escape into isolation (Salome), macho sons who turn into the brutes their fathers were (Mitch), sensitive sons who cannot be touched, who turn into zombies (James...
...MAURA, WE HARDLY KNEW YE PORE HEART, ENLIGHTENED MIND The Zen Journals of Maura "Soshin" O'Halloran Tuttle, $18, 313 pp...
...In this way perhaps Maura and the East have something to teach the West after all...
...But where, since she cannot go it alone, will she acquire the strength to break free...
...she sticks in his throat like a bone...
...That it is nothing of the sort is due to Ansay's ability to draw us deeply inside her characters and set them at odds, in one compelling, grotesquely comic scene after another...
...I'm not sure how the omniscient narrator intends such lines...
...Like Virginia Woolf in her diaries or Elizabeth Bishop in her letters, Maura O'Halloran appears on the page singular and whole...
...From her first letter to her family, it is clear that hers is no pious, edifying story: "Well, the luck of the Irish stayed intact across the international dateline, and I'm doing great...
...Ansay is too perceptive a writer to single out benighted Fritz as the sole villain in this family feud...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 19
