"In a small Buddhist monastery in northern Japan there stands a statue of a
young Irish-American woman who lived there in the early 1980s. During her
three years of Zen training in Iwate and Tokyo she was known as Maura-san,
or by her monastic name of Soshin-san. She received the transmission of her
roshi in 1982 and was killed in a bus accident in Thailand 6 months later.
In 1983, as her mother, I was invited to Japan for the dedication of her
Kannon statue, an indication that she had become identified in the minds of
local people with the bodhisattva Kannon, the Buddhist saint of
compassion.... How did this daughter of an American mother and an Irish
father, educated at convent schools and Trinity College, Dublin, become not
only a Zen monk but a Buddhist saint? Maura O'Halloran was born on May
24th, 1955, in Boston, Massachusetts, the eldest of six children."
--from the introduction, by Ruth O'Halloran (Maura's mother)
"...While I was waiting at a subway station in a seedy part of Tokyo, I was
looking at the daytime dead neon light, the sleeping seaminess, waiting for
night. It's an attractive world because it's earthy and grubby, alive, real
yet totally false without the pretense of reality. Vibrant throbbing music
and bodies. I thought about the alternatives that confronted me when I
first came to Japan last November--the usual job as an English teacher
didn't interest me. Either monastic renunciation or sensory wallowing drew
me. A soul seeking surrender? It was either accident or providence that
the former happened first. Either way was a search for liberation--freedom
from inhibition, from other people's values, from their suffocating puritan
ethic born from the delusion of a retributory hereafter. Or else the other
option, spiritual liberation, but from what? This one was hazier. Those who
suffer want liberation from suffering, but I seldom suffer. My life has
been wonderful, blessed. Who could enslave me? I did as
a wished when I wished. Now I feel gratitude that this Zen way took me,
because I consciously, fervently, could not be said to have taken it. Now I
feel there is no turning back.
"...How can one be Buddhist and not be socialist? How accept and allow the
perpetuation of a system based on desire? A system that functions as
trigger and effect of the desire for money and commodities. A system that,
to feed itself, must resort to crass commercialism and ever spiraling
desire."
[from: PURE HEART, ENGLIGHTENED MIND, the Zen Journal and Letters of Maura
"Soshin" O'Halloran (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994)]
