We look forward to welcoming Rev. Konrad Ryushin Marchaj to Wonderwell in April to teach an upcoming, hybrid retreat with Lama Liz, Entering the Bright and Boundless Field, an exploration of the natural state through the writings of two masters of sky-mind, the Dzogchen Master, Lonchenpa, and the Zen Master Hongzhi. NDF Co-Managing Director Karen Kharitonov had the pleasure of speaking with Ryushin with the aim of sharing more about him as a teacher with our sangha. Though she anticipated a quick interview with a few quotes, the conversation resulted in her receiving a beautiful teaching as Ryushin graciously and effortlessly flowed beyond the questions.

Rev. Konrad Ryushin Marchaj, is a Zen priest, and a dharma heir of the late John Daido Loori, Roshi. Ryushin Sensei was the abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Born in Warsaw, Poland, he immigrated to the United States in 1967. He has been practicing Buddhism since 1983. His studies over the years includes a BA in Anthropology from Yale University; a medical degree followed by work as a pediatrician and later serving in the US Navy as a physician; then postgraduate training in psychiatry. Flowing out of this training, his work has included focus with disenfranchised and homeless populations and exploring contemplative practices in higher education to encourage college students to engage religious practice as part of their education. Since 2014, he has been rigorously exploring and training in ayahuasca ceremonies in various traditions, guided by several teachers. Drawing on his background as a physician and psychiatrist, Ryushin’s infectious interest and thorough training in the workings of the mind and compassionate expression of unconditional love, combined with his skill at translating complex concepts into the accessible, everyday language, characterize his unique teaching style. 

Since stepping out of the monastery, and in response to the pandemic, Ryushin shifted much of his teaching to online, zooming daily with students from his home in western Connecticut where he also offers in-person weekend retreats. He engages deeply and individually on a weekly basis with a core group of about 50 students, along with daily sits and weekly group teachings. He feels that personal care is the key in the West where we are still so individually oriented. With a laugh, he likens himself to “one of those old fashioned tailors where you actually get a suit made just for you.”

(interview edited for clarity)

Karen: How did it arise for you and Lama Liz to teach a retreat together at Wonderwell?

Ryushin: For me, Lonchenpa’s teachings have always been amazingly nurturing and beautiful, as counterpoint argumentation to my tradition of Zen. For her, Hongzhi, this teacher that I’ve been in love with and studying for 40 years of my life and who has been like a spiritual mentor across centuries, presents the same [type of dynamic]. So when we found out that we were connected through their unique styles of writing and teaching, we thought that it would be fun, and I suspect helpful and nurturing, for others to see how this would interface. And then also to see how our personalities, our teachings, our lineage, our traditions, our styles, how all of that would be flashed to the surface. I know that we can make it be fruitful and illuminating to people who are participating.

Karen: What do you feel would be the main benefit or takeaway for retreatants? Why should people attend?

Ryushin: This is as fundamental as it gets. So in a context of anybody’s practice, no matter where and how a person is positioned with respect to their understanding of the dharma and their involvement in the practices, if meditative or otherwise, to know something about the fundamental nature of mind, the fundamental nature of subjective reality and reality at large, helps orient and underscore what the framework is, what the purposelessness or purpose of that is, that to know this will not get in the way of anything. And if anything, it potentially will illuminate and activate, catalyze, whatever practice they’re engaged in. And then to be able to do that, to be able to see how two truly realized people are attempting to articulate and point to that intrinsic, awakened nature within us. This may help people.

Karen: How do you recommend retreatants approach the study of these texts?

Ryushin: It is important to recognize that the study of these texts is stylistic, that it is cultural, that it is personal. To recognize the articulation, the language that Lonchenpa is using, and the Chinese that Hongzhi is using, and their personal stories, and how those then frame what is pointing towards precisely the same thing can be fascinating, especially if it’s done with some rigor, some care.

It’s almost like we’re trying to locate ourselves on the surface of the ocean. And just like in navigation, if you have few points, a few lines, you may be able to zero in closer to the place you’re looking for. And here [in these texts], you’re looking for the place that doesn’t exist. But still to kind of use the reference lines towards the groundlessness could be a fruitful way, meaning that in the end the usefulness will be in the fact that this will be about direct pointing. It will be about pointing out something in the nature of each person who’s going to be participating regardless of where they are and how they think themselves to be, and how they are situated. Their inherent Buddha nature will be illuminated, and then we’ll see what happens after that. But that’s up to everybody in their own way.

Karen: How does the poetic language of Lonchenpa and Hongzhi play a part?

Ryushin: Just like I love to read Whitman, and I love to read Mary Oliver and Rumi as good poets who are really dancing on the edge of the mystery, we can be embedded with people like Hongzhi and Lonchenpa, for whom language was the medium of clarity, where they really were using language as something other than what we normally would think it to be, as a medium through which we’re communicating linear narrative, cognitive information. For them, language is something completely different. And to immerse oneself with people like that, in that environment of thinking, speech, and communication that’s so deeply rooted in clarity, affects how we think. It’s a little bit like, you know, like those floating tanks. So it’s like you just float with Lonchenpa and Hongzhi. And without you even knowing, there is a neuroplasticity of language that’s happening, and it’s opening us up and loosens up, I suspect, some rigidity that we all suffer from when it comes to our relationship to thought and language. 

Karen: In particular, how do you think these precious texts that will be explored in the retreat may help people navigate these chaotic and challenging times? 

Ryushin: Yeah, Karen, I’ve studied enough history to be aware of what was happening for Hongzhi in China when he was teaching. They were devastated by famines, poverty, and hunger. They were literally going for months eating a cupful of grain or rice, while running a monastery and going all out with a local community that was dying from starvation and trying to be in relationship to that and the politics of the time. Meaning that things have not changed much.

This is just our style of suffering in this particular moment. And it just reveals that we’re continuously responsible for orienting ourselves to what we see as discomfort, fear, threat, anxiety. But truly, we just create illusions of comfort if the circumstances around us match what our expectations are. For example, I recently was reflecting with a student about how if we look back to the sixties, when the liberal movement and civic responsibility of the Democrats/Liberals was winning, we can imagine how miserable the other side was, and how they were seeing it as basically the end of the world as we know it, and how cataclysmic this felt to them. It must have seemed apocalyptic to them that the Mcgoverns, the Kennedys, and the Democrats had their way. And now this script is flipped, and we’re now on the bottom of the wheel, “we” meaning that particular mindset because it’s not even a “we.” So I always want to underscore that because that kind of exceptionalism, that I think we all suffer from, extends itself to our suffering.  We think somehow we’re now exceptional in our suffering, and just how hellish the world seems to be.

Impermanence is running at 100% all the time. It’s just which style of impermanence we find ourselves more threatened by or aligned with. And our responsibility is always 100%. So if things are okay, or if things are seemingly okay in my life, I am still responsible to look for all of the edges where they’re not, because of my involvement with the dharma, my involvement with practice, because of my commitment to saving all sentient beings, especially if one has taken the Bodhisattva attitude and vows. This is the end of the world all the time for Avalokiteshvara; there is no rest, there is no moment of respite or a day off.

But then, having said that, the teachings apply to every and all circumstances. It becomes much more practical to understand one’s capacities and limits, understanding what different practices offer. Just being smart about when you have to withdraw. When do you have to retreat? When is it that your triggering is so potent that for you to be getting involved is just pouring gasoline on the fire, and the act of valor is to just step away, go to a retreat, head for the hills and assume the more Hinayana approach and really protect yourself, knowing that if you don’t [there would be more harm].

But if you are capable of stepping in, if your appreciation of the empty nature and the ungraspability and the conditionality of all phenomena is viscerally available to you, then go and play in the fray and in the hell realms, and in the jealous realms, whatever there is. But again, appreciating really no bullshit, no self-deceptions, no grandiosity —at the same time exploring what a commitment to that means. And this is where, when I look at Lonchenpa and Hongzhi, I don’t see specific prescriptions. There’s really an approach that the best antidote is to recognize the basic space of everything, and that is not just the antidote, but therein lies the transformative tools that are available to you. To be continuously available to that living truth, if that’s available, genuinely available, then your unique intimacy with yourself will be guiding how that quality of experience is going to inform your involvement with your family, your body, the body of the planet, the local neighborhood. And that’s where it’s kind of impossible to try to specify. Do you go to a rally, or you don’t go to a rally? Do you escape to Canada, or bring people from Canada here, and to which degree you start to resist Tesla, overtake the highways of America, or immolate yourself in front of the White House. It’s your decision, informed by your clarity and your commitment to your relevance in all of this.

Karen: How would you distinguish or compare the writings of Longchenpa and Hongzhi?

Ryushin: When I bring Lonchenpa and Hongzhi together, and I kind of overlap them in front of my mind, for me Lonchenpa is like the master of sacred geometry of time and space. He just has such capacity in word and communication to just keep moving in this kind of spatial, atemporal reality. And the way the language moves, you really do recognize your immediacy in this. You know it’s almost like an Einsteinian universe!; but way beyond, where time and space and quantum particles are dancing on such a level of release… like time is moving in all sorts of directions and there is spaciousness. 

For me Hongzhi is much more in the forest. There is the moon. There is some water dripping down a waterfall. There is some reflection of a pine tree. But he does exactly the same thing as Lonchenpa, but in a more of a [direct feeling], I feel his monastery in China. I had never been there, but I kind of know what the Japanese monastery that they were emulating would look like. The natural world becomes the real way of appreciating the same level of release. 

And for me, to bring those together, it’s fascinating because I love both. I’m really at ease being in the wilderness, but I also love that mindset of the physicists on the edge of trying to understand “what is this?” And Lonchenpa is seeing it. He’s seeing quantum gravity. He understands the fabric of how this manifests the way it does for us in the human consciousness. It’s like, he’s more rarefied. It’s almost like he is living at 15,000 feet, while Hongzhi is at the sea level.

Karen: A final fun question. You know the joke… “Lonchenpa and Hongzhi walk into a bar…” What would they say to each other if they met?

Ryushin: Oh, I think they would drink a lot of sake, or whatever that they would drink. They would probably play some music. They may gamble. They would probably hug each other quite a bit, and then, you know go outside and take a piss into the rising sun. I don’t know. I think that there would be something quite basic about it. I don’t think they would be talking Dharma. They would be talking about their families, and I think it would be grounded. And this idea that they would be silent — I don’t think so. I think it would be a rowdy meeting. Although, I’m thinking that Hongzhi was a little bit of a purist; his integrity was just impeccable. I suspect Lonchenpa was a little bit more of a wild man. But who knows!