Other Fingers Pointing to the Moon
An interview with Zen master and former priest Ruben L. F. Habito
Ruben L. F. Habito is a master in the Sanbo Zen lineage,
the founding teacher of Maria Kannon Zen Center in Dallas, Texas, and a
professor of world religions at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins
School of Theology. He is also a former Jesuit priest, and as a young
ecclesiastic was sent from his native Philippines to Japan, where he
encountered Zen and entered formal training under Yamada Koun Roshi,
with whom he studied for 18 years. Discovering Zen was epiphanic for
Habito (“it pointed to a realm beyond language”), and koan study became
for him a profound foil to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, a
set of meditations and devotional practices for Jesuits that Habito had
been practicing since entering the order. During his time in Kamakura,
the seat of Sanbo Zen, a fusion of Rinzai and Soto traditions formerly
called Sanbo Kyodan, Habito met Maria Reis, who became his wife and
mother of their two sons. (Habito left the Jesuits but continues a deep
engagement with the religion.)
In 1989 Habito and Reis moved to Dallas, where Habito
founded Maria Kannon, named for the Virgin Mary and Kwan Yin [Guanyin],
the bodhisattva of compassion (Kannon in Japanese), two figures who
became inexorably linked in 17th- and 18th-century Japan, when
Christianity was banned; Christian practitioners found a worthy
manifestation of Mary in the veneration of the bodhisattva, who became
known as Maria Kannon. Habito is the author of several books on the
relationship between Christianity and Zen practice, among them Healing Breath: Zen for Christians and Buddhists in a Wounded World and Living Zen, Loving God, both from Wisdom Books.
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