Zen Road [Zen Teachings | Reiryu Philippe Coupey]
– www.zen-road.org –

zen, zazen
and the people
who practice it
– a web resource by friends of Zen monk Philippe Coupey

 

Taisen Deshimaru planted the seeds of Zen in Europe with his arrival in France in 1967. His disciple, Reiryu Philippe Coupey, is one of the first shoots of the next generation to stand tall in this Western soil. Coupey is unabashedly faithful to the teaching he received from his master, and transmits that legacy with a candor and freshness that come from his own life experience. The result is a practice which is inextricably linked to tradition, yet unflinchingly present amidst the phenomena of contemporary urban life – a monk “like a tree on the edge of a cliff in the wind,” as he often says, “and not like a greenhouse tomato.” His teaching emphasizes the freedom that comes from observing and eventually abandoning our personal concepts and desires; the interdependence of all things; the acceptance that there is nothing to be gained from this practice; and the unwavering belief that it is the highest thing we can do with our lives. Most of all, Coupey shares Deshimaru’s respect for and love of zazen. His tall, eagle-like figure is a constant presence in the dojo, whether in the master’s seat or facing the wall with everyone else.

Philippe Henri Coupey was born on November 8th, 1937, at 6 St. Luke’s Place – “the classiest street in New York City.” His father was a real-estate tycoon who owned several Manhattan skyscrapers, and Coupey’s early childhood was one of nannies and private schools. When he was eight years old, his mother committed suicide. A few years later, he was brought to Europe with his brother and sister, and spent a painful adolescence as the son of a would-be aristocrat, attending Swiss boarding schools and summering in Monte Carlo and Capri where his father hobnobbed with Hollywood stars, British royalty and Arabian sheiks. He eventually returned to the United States to study literature at St. Lawrence University in New York, and also spent a year abroad at the Sorbonne. During this time his father remarried, and the young Coupey was ostracized from the family. His father’s death left him disinherited and penniless.

His experiences after university were many and varied: advertising copywriter, uranium prospector, housepainter, window-washer, karate student, husband, father…. An avid reader inspired first by Dostoyevski and Gogol, and more recently by Céline and Cervantes, he has always been a writer, and has penned several “unpublished and basically unpublishable” novels over the past fifty years.

He began practicing Zen in 1972 at the Pernety Dojo in Paris with Master Deshimaru. “The first few weeks I came to zazen, the master was out of town,” he recalls. “Then one morning, somebody behind me said, ‘Stretch the spine, keep your head straight!’ So I did just that. Then, after a long silence, the voice said, ‘In this school, it’s mushotoku: nothing to obtain.’ At that exact moment, I realized I’d found the meaning of my life, embodied by this man behind me, whoever he was. It moved me to tears.”

Coupey and Deshimaru hit it off right from the start. Since the master spoke only Japanese and “Zenglish,” the “American boy” became his English scribe and eventually produced two books of his teaching: The Voice of the Valley and Sit. In 1977, Coupey began leading zazen in the Paris Dojo, where he still teaches and practices today; in 1980 Deshimaru began sending him out to lead sesshin in France and Spain. He received the monk ordination from Deshimaru in 1981, and began giving ordinations himself in 1994.

The sangha which has grown up around Coupey since those first ordinations has come to be known as the Sangha Sans Demeure, or the “Homeless Sangha,” since, in keeping with the master’s teaching, there is no center, temple or fixed structure which defines it. The first Sesshin Sans Demeure, an intensive seven-day retreat, was held in 2001 in Neu Schönau, Germany and has changed venue every year since.

Coupey’s teaching in the dojo is frank, down-to-earth and often humorous. He has commented on some of the most well-known poems in the Zen canon: Sekito’s Sandokai, Sosan’s Shinjinmei, Dogen’s Eiheikoroku and Sanshodoei poems, and the poems of Daichi.

Recently he quoted Nyojo’s death poem (1228) in a kusen:

For sixty-six years,
I have committed crimes and piled sins as high as the sky.
Thus I struck this body, which rose to the highest and went back down into hell.
And so I have nothing to say on the subject of life and death.

“No difference,” said Coupey. “Back down into hell, with everyone else. No separation. Me too: I hope that when I die, I’ll go where ordinary men go, ordinary women, children, and the unborn.”