Why did Bodhi Dharma come to the West?
What Is the Imperturbable Mind?
San Francisco Journal – 1986
Prologue: A Forgotten Journal, a Forgotten Fire
"I forsook intellectual understanding in favor of a knowledge that would be stronger than perception... to fill the time allotted to man with an almost blissful waiting, a knowledge redeemed from oblivion..."
— Hermann Broch, from the foreword to The Spell
I found this quote stuck to the inside cover of one of my 1986 journals — a small book of thoughts, sketches, and spiritual wanderings from the time I lived in San Francisco. Rereading it today, it echoes everything I’ve tried to live — and sometimes escape from.
Back then, I was still searching, still burning, still bouncing like a stone skipping across the surface of the unknown, hoping to land somewhere that felt like truth.
Leaving Green Bay: A Nudge from the Universe
It began with Mrs. Rosella Kelly — a quiet, elderly woman in the printmaking shop at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. While scrubbing our copper plates one evening, she looked at me and said softly, “Sam, I think it’s time for you to leave.”
She wasn’t just talking. She was sending me.
Rosella’s son, Dennis Kelly, had just been ordained as a Zen priest and was opening a Zen-Yoga Center — originally in New York. She offered me a lifeline, a spiritual rope out of the emotional stagnation I was drowning in. A day later, plans changed — Dennis was going to San Francisco, not New York.
With nothing holding me back, I packed what little I had, said my goodbyes to my Green Bay family — professors, counselors, friends — and headed west, not knowing that I was about to walk into a koan that would haunt me for years.
Arrival: The First Encounter with Zen
I remember stepping out of the terminal at San Francisco Airport, backpack over one shoulder, portfolio in hand — and freezing at the threshold. That’s when I bumped straight into a bald Korean priest in white robes, holding a wooden staff like he walked out of a Chinese opera.
We bowed to each other instinctively.
His assistant told me, “That’s Soen Sa Nim — a Zen Master. He’s giving a talk tonight in Berkeley.”
The pamphlet they gave me is still pressed inside that same sketchbook. On it were the words:
“Zen is understanding yourself.”
And on the back:Coming empty-handed, going empty-handed — that is human.
But there is one thing that always remains clear...
It is pure and clear, not depending on life and death.
The Question That Became My Koan
I eventually met Dennis Kelly in Sausalito, and later we moved to Corte Madera, where he opened the Kanzeon Zen-Yoga Center. Dennis became my teacher, mentor, and the one who handed me my life’s central koan:
“Bahari, what is the Imperturbable Mind?”
He blurted it out one day while driving — and it stuck. I couldn’t answer. I still can’t — but it’s followed me through every spiritual twist since.
Zen, Yoga, and the Breaking Point
We practiced Zen. We practiced Ashtanga Yoga. We sat. We breathed. We suffered. Dennis once took me to a private retreat in the Oregon redwoods — a paradise of silence and intensity. I wasn’t ready for the depth. I was still dragging ego, anger, and unresolved grief from Green Bay, from Malaysia, from everywhere.
And then… it happened.
One evening, after a particularly hard yoga stretch where Dennis pulled my arm across my chest, I felt a tearing pain. Hours later, alone in a shared house, I woke up unable to breathe. My ribs seized. I thought I was dying. The pain was blinding.
I saw a squirrel outside the window. I whispered, “Ya Allah, if this is death, I accept it.”
And then — blackness.
When I woke, I was on the wooden floor. Breathing like a newborn — shallow, painful, miraculous. I spent weeks in Marin County Hospital. My ribcage was filled with fluid. I could barely lie down. I was angry and frightened, and I turned that anger at Dennis.
The Incident with the Roshi
The pain reached its crescendo the day Eido Shimano Roshi arrived to officiate the opening of the Zendo. I was doped on painkillers, mentally scattered, and spiritually cracked. And in a moment I still can’t fully explain…
I grabbed the junko stick and raised it high — and brought it down a hair’s breadth from striking the Roshi’s head.
He didn’t flinch. He whispered, “It’s okay… it’s okay.”
Dennis dragged me out. That was the end. I was asked never to return to Dai Bosatsu Zen Center in New York. Whatever future I had in the Rinzai tradition ended right there — with pain, with drama, with a storm of misunderstanding.
But perhaps, also… with necessity.
The Fork in the Path: From Rinzai to Soto
I told Dennis, “Take me to Green Gulch.”
And that’s how I arrived at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, beginning a new chapter in the Soto Zen tradition — slower, more grounded, more forgiving.
I often wonder:
If I had not snapped...
If I had stayed in the Rinzai school...
Would I have become a Zen monk? A teacher? An abbot?
Maybe. But the Muslim in me was never quite willing to give up its fire. That break — that chaos — was my soul saying “No. This far, and no further.”
Zen was a lesson. Not a destination.
The Imperturbable Mind Revisited
I never answered Dennis.
But the question remains.
Sometimes, late at night, I’d scrawl poems in my notebook:
What is the Imperturbable Mind?
It’s eleven fourteen, the moon on the leaves,
The sound of night, an empty Calistoga bottle.
I blow my nose.
It’s eleven fifty-nine. Almost midnight.
And still I wonder...
Coda: Where Is Dennis Now?
Dennis Junpo Kelly went on to become a certified Rinzai Zen Master, Vice Abbot of Dai Bosatsu, and later founded Hollow Bones Zen, a lay Zen order. His work continues. His teaching has evolved.
We haven’t spoken in decades.
But I still hold his question like a seed in my chest.
Final Reflection
Maybe this was the answer all along:
The Imperturbable Mind is not what you find on the cushion.
It’s what holds you together when the pain breaks your breath...
And you still choose to walk on.
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