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Extract :
Introduction by Ruth O'Halloran
In a small Buddhist monastery in northern Japan there stands a statue of a young Irish-American woman who lived there in the early 198os. 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 teacher in 1982 and was killed in a bus accident in Thailand six 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.
Her last photo, taken in front of a Japanese temple, shows a tall, blue-eyed, black-robed young woman of twenty-seven, with a radiant smile. 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 24, 1955, in Boston, Massachusetts, the eldest of six children. Her father, Fionan Finbarr O’Halloran, was a native of County Kerry, Ireland, and I a native of Maine. When Maura was four years old we moved to Ireland. Her earliest schooling was at Loretto convents in County Dublin. She briefly attended the same school that Mother Teresa had and had hoped to meet her when she went to India after her travels in Thailand. Maura had expressed an intention of doing work similar to Mother Teresa’s, among the poor of Dublin.
We returned to Boston in 1966, living in suburban Waban while my husband did graduate work in civil engineering at M.I.T. He was killed in a road accident in 1969 and the entire family returned to Dublin in 1970.
In her journal, Maura never mentions the fact of her birth and youth in Boston, but her New England background, and especially her grandmother in Maine, contributed as much to her formation as did her fourteen years in Ireland. Her position as the eldest child, flung into the role of second parent to five younger siblings at her father’s sudden death, hastened a maturity that few adolescents experience.
After receiving high honors in her Leaving Certificate from her secondary school in Ireland, she gained early acceptance at Trinity College, Dublin, where she matriculated in 1973. In 1975 she received Ireland’s highest scholastic award, which provided for all her educational expenses. While in college she did much volunteer social work, especially with drug addicts and the very poor of Dublin. She spent the summer of 1976 at the Rudolph Steiner School in Glencraig, Northern Ireland, where she cared for autistic and developmentally disabled children.
Her highly developed sense of the need for social justice sometimes made her impatient with institutional obstacles to human development. This point of view found an outlet in college protests, volunteer social work, union organizing (she antagonized the management of a restaurant in which she worked in Dublin by attempting to organize the staff into a union), and what I can only call a sort of spontaneous poverty. The latter attitude led to such a detachment from material things, especially fashionable clothing, that she often appeared genuinely shabby (years before the vogue for “shabby chic”). She deliberately limited herself to a very stringent budget.
Over her college vacations she made a series of journeys through Greece, Italy, North Africa, France, and the United Kingdom. In the summer of 1977 she returned to the United States and then went to Toronto, Canada, where she worked at several jobs to earn money for cross-continental travel. She drove with friends across Canada, then worked her way down the west coast until she arrived in San Francisco. There she worked at several jobs simultaneously (waitress, hotel desk clerk, telephone operator, and research assistant). She also studied photography and Spanish to prepare for a major trip through Latin America.
Describing this trip, she says:
Starting in April 1978, I traveled through Mexico, Central America, and most of South America, remaining in Cuzco, Peru, for almost five months where I taught English and improved my Spanish. She also did volunteer work in Cuzco. My lifestyle while traveling brought me into contact with people from every social leveL I hitchhiked, walked, or traveled second-class, as did the Indians. People ,froin local campesinos to wealthy hacienda owners, continually showed me hospitality, bringing me to their homes and talking for long hours about their lives, problems, politics, and ambitions.
She ventured as far south as Punta da Arenas and flew back from Santiago, Chile, arriving in Maine in the midst of a blizzard on Christmas Day 1978.
After a visit with her family, who had moved back to Maine from Ireland earlier in 1978, she went to Boston where she lived in a studio apartment on Bromfield Street while working at a Cambridge restaurant to finance her proposed trip to the Orient. In Boston she became active in the anti-nuclear movement and continued her study of photography, which culminated in a one-man show of her work in 1979. Her interest in Japan had been aroused by the enthusiasm of the family’s old friend and solicitor in Ireland, Frank Sweeney, and by her own long-term interest in meditation. In our Dublin home in the early 1970S one often came upon her in some corner, sitting in the lotus position, calmly centered within herself, oblivious to phone, TV, and family. She had the ability to focus cheerfully and totally on whatever she did, and I have no doubt that this was partly the result of her habit of meditation.
In Boston, where Maura was born, or in Dublin, where she spent her youth and college years, little was known about her experience as a Zen monk until a documentary of her life, Maura: A Japanese Journey, was produced for Irish national television in 2002. This film was based principally on the English-language edition, published in 1994, of the journals and letters she wrote during her three-year stay in Japan. The original edition of Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind, has been translated into German, Dutch, Italian, French, and Japanese.
Because of continued interest in my daughter, I have, with the help of my family, assembled this new edition containing much material omitted from the original book. Since Maura had no intention of publishing her daily notes, she often used Japanese terms which could be confusing for the reader, so we have included a glossary translating these words. Several additional letters are included in this new edition.
Shortly before she left Japan in 1982, Maura completed the first chapter of a novel based on her own life, only slightly fictionalized. This entertaining account of a young Western woman’s introduction to Japanese monastic life supplements her journals and should give readers a vivid insight into daily life in a Zen monastery. A letter from the friends in Bangkok with whom she stayed before boarding the bus to Chiang Mai has also been appended. They describe her last few days in Thailand.
Her last month of living in America was September 1979, which she spent writing, reading, and thinking in her Aunt Anne’s lakeside cottage in much-loved Wayne, Maine. After a week spent with friends in San Francisco, she flew to Hawaii and then to Tokyo.
Her journals and letters take the narrative from this point. The following are excerpts from the notebooks and journals kept by Maura O’Halloran during the period of her three years’ training in Zen at Toshoji Temple in Tokyo and Kannonji Temple in Iwate Prefecture, Japan, 1979—1982. The roshi of these temples is Tetsugyu Ban.
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