Ghosts?

Once, decades ago, at the Zen Center of Los Angeles (ZCLA) on Great Dragon Mountain, situated since 1967 on Normandie Avenue in Koreatown, my fellow Zen practitioners and I were gathered in the big empty room of the Dharma Hall for a teisho. A teisho is a formal talk given by a Zen teacher that, translated from Japanese, means something like “presentation of the shout.” It is like a lecture, except the subject is often the unknowable, and the professor is a Zen master, or near to. I suppose a teisho might also be analogous to a sermon—but curiously, I feel this analogy is somehow less on point.

The “shout” on this particular day was being presented by Roshi Egyoku Nakao, now my primary Zen teacher and then abbot of the temple. Somewhere in her remarks that afternoon, she referred to the Gate of Sweet Nectar service. This is a ceremony that incorporates practices from the Vajrayana tradition, Japanese Shingon, and Tibetan Buddhist rituals. At ZCLA, the Gate of Sweet Nectar service is offered on Sundays, and the numinous chant that we sing was written and set to music by Krishna Das—a creation prompted per request by Bernie Glassman, the renowned teacher of American Zen and the founder of the Zen Peacemakers. A quick internet search will turn up YouTube videos of the service, as well as Krishna Das offering the sung prayer. It is profoundly beautiful.

The Gate of Sweet Nectar is a powerful ceremony whereby participants aim to gather all the “hungry ghosts”—all of them, throughout all space and time—together into our midst and then feed them. A good rough-and-ready definition of a hungry ghost might be any being tormented by desire—by insatiable hunger and thirst—and who you can draw on your own with a teeny-tiny mouth; an impassably long, skinny throat; and an enormous, unfillable stomach. In this ceremony, we extend an invitation and the spiritual food (alongside actual food pantry donations) to every hungry ghost among us—including the living and the dead, all those suffering from injustice, and those parts of our individual selves, too, that are “lost and left behind.” We are addressing and beckoning all within us that is neglected, forgotten, abandoned, oppressed, abused, or otherwise “in shadow,” as the Jungians (and many Zen practitioners) would put it. In short, no one and nothing is excluded from the invitation.

But the Buddha Hall at ZCLA, even the beautifully spacious zendo at Great Plains Zen Center, in the Driftless, where I long practiced with Roshi Susan Myoyu Andersen—these are spaces you can measure in square footage; there isn’t room for every being throughout all space and time. So, for some, the intention of this ceremony is or must seem symbolic or metaphorical. For others, I suppose, it does not register as even that meaningful. But for the rest of us, everyone is invited and everyone comes. 

In the ceremony, we sing together:

Calling out to hungry hearts
Everywhere through endless time
You who wander, you who thirst
I offer you this bodhi mind
Calling all you hungry spirits
Everywhere through endless time
Calling out to hungry hearts
All the lost and left behind
Gather round and share this meal
Your joy and sorrow
I make mine.

When in this service I am in the role of ino, or “chanter,” who sings the first round of these lyrics alone, my voice always breaks in the same place—on the fifth line; it is so literally unspeakably moving, I can hardly utter the words. I add this just to offer some measure of how deeply experienced the ceremony can be. And I say this having been raised Catholic—having memorized the Mass, as is the custom—and as someone who spent her adolescence (middle school and high school) in fundamentalist, evangelical Wheaton, Illinois. I have never been a stranger to ceremony, ritual, or prayer. But this Gate of Sweet Nectar ceremony was the first one I performed with not only my entire heart and mind but also every atom of my body, as the practice trains us to do. I was doing, for the first time, what Roshi Joan Halifax encourages all of us to do:

Step fully into and trust your lived experience. Entrust yourself to your own attention, to your breath. Where are your feet, right now? What is the light like around you? What are you hearing? It takes deep and abiding attention to be fully human. Why hold back? Yes, we can turn away from our lived experiences and the ways they challenge our relationship to each other and the world. We have that choice, and we have devised ingenious and myriad ways to turn away from them. But we can also turn toward our experiences.

In Zen practice, your body is your only map—ignore it to the detriment of your practice and profound diminishment of your life. Likewise, the body is not an obstacle to truth but its site. The body is not to be mortified, ignored, mistrusted, whipped into obedience, or otherwise denied. For example, the meal ceremony in which we eat together is in my lineage called oryoki, which means “just enough.” Everything “your body” shares with “you” is useful if not extremely important information. Every emotion—which arises first physically and then, on a good day, can be identified and considered and named in words, however “unwelcome” the feeling might be—is an opportunity and a tool. One can step into lived experience, of course, in the midst of anything; it need not be already considered but can thereby become ceremony. What does body awareness, body intelligence, have to do with engaging fully and completely with what it is to be human? Why do we hold back from it, when we do? How exactly, in Halifax’s words, does stepping into our lived experience challenge our relationship to each other and the world?

In Egyoku Roshi’s teisho on the day in question, she spoke at least once of these aforementioned hungry ghosts who, she noted, do in fact gather around in response to our invitation and call.

At that, a longtime resident of the temple, for whom I had and have much respect, raised her hand and responded to our abbot and teacher with something like, “Come on. I appreciate what you’re saying, but the ghosts actually come? Like, they show up? It diminishes our practice to talk this way. When can we get real and stop talking this way?”

Ghosts, this person at ZCLA was suggesting, of course didn’t actually gather around in the Gate of Sweet Nectar ceremony—what kind of talk was that? Zen is respected in many circles for jibing so well with some aspects of Western science; isn’t it basically secular? And isn’t it true that neither science nor Zen relies upon scripture or belief? Don’t they share an empirical approach to observing reality?

So ghosts? Showing up when beckoned in a ceremony rooted in ancient Eastern traditions but taking place in Los Angeles in 2007? Can we get real, please? It was a totally good and fair question. And Egyoku Roshi was both serious and pleasant when she responded: “That is your experience. I am speaking from my experience, in which the hungry ghosts show up.”

In emphasizing her own experience, Egyoku Roshi, like any Zen teacher, was not attempting to undermine anyone else’s experience. She was not replacing evidence with anecdote, or reason with imagination, or experience with expert knowledge, nor was she attempting to shut down conversation or to validate her identity as a Zen teacher over a student’s relative ignorance. Rather, she was encouraging each of us to engage in the practice we had presumably come to a Zen center to learn: to look deeply into our own nature. There are many Zen koans (situations, stories, or dialogues presented by the teacher that must be lived rather than studied) that demonstrate this fact: Any teacher worth their salt does very little teaching and a lot of facilitating to ensure students’ independent experience and, where appropriate, drawn conclusions.

“A teacher is someone who points the way,” Bodhidharma said, “but you must see it for yourself.” Huangbo, a Tang-dynasty Zen master, puts it like this: “The foolish seek the truth outside themselves, not knowing that it is within.” And Walt Whitman: “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand . . . nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . but look with the eyes of the living.” I remember amid Zen training taking my qualifying exams at the University of Southern California, where I argued (with no small amount of personal bias at that point in my life) that the worst and possibly most unethical books in the world were books on the craft of creative writing. Though he was (of course) writing about genius, I argued, even Immanuel Kant says it is the “innate mental aptitude” of the student through which “nature gives the rule to art.” T. C. Boyle was on my committee, and at the table—now there is an excellent teacher—and he said to the other faculty, “She’s right. Very little teaching goes on in a creative writing classroom.” May it always be so.

I was relatively new to the practice at that time—I was all in, I thought, but I was new. And this exchange gave me real pause. I have never forgotten it. At the time, I was working on a PhD in English, and so, somewhat paradoxically, I was being trained to value and emphasize rational analysis in pretty much all exploration of fiction and poetry. In fact, it was partly because of my appreciation for and focus upon incisive analysis, deductive thinking, philosophy of language, and logic that I trusted the practice of Zen, which encourages questioning, skepticism, critical thinking, and the same kind of curiosity I’d always brought to academic study. Importantly, too, I trusted (and still trust) Egyoku Roshi—not despite the fact that she is a human teacher who refuses to act the mystical guru but because of it. And if she said the ghosts showed up—well, I did not know what to think. Is that what she was saying? Ghosts as in—ghosts?

This certainly did not jibe at all with my experience of apparent reality. Clearly, I resolved, I would have to sit zazen more, and experience apparent reality more, and with greater attention. After all, if you wanted to sum up Zen practice in five words, you could do no better, I think, than to say, “Sit down. See for yourself.”

If you wanted to sum up Zen practice in five words, you could do no better, I think, than to say, “Sit down. See for yourself.”

I can see myself and my fellow practitioners gathered in that room, most of us cross-legged on the floor, most of us shifting uncomfortably this way and that in our pointy, awkward bodies, most of us with deeply furrowed brows as we tried very hard not to think in discursive loops about what was being said. It is a rich and wonderful memory that seems like a long time ago, and I love each and all of those individuals so much. If I made for you now a little list of the fleeting observations I’ve made over subsequent seasons about this apparent reality I was determined to experience more or better, a “list of ghosts,” as it were, that I myself have by now seen, well then perhaps you, too, would raise an eyebrow and wonder, Can we get real, please? 

What changed for me over that and subsequent seasons was not that I came to know what ghosts are but that I stopped confusing disbelief with discernment. So, banal and disappointing as it may seem, what such a “list of ghosts” in my life so far has amounted to would not be a series of supernatural phenomena I now know all about but that years ago I was too square to realize. Rather, it would be a list of things I thought I knew—things I’d taken for granted but am no longer certain about. I would put on the list: time is linear and moves in one direction; “reality” is a thing that can be seen; consciousness arises from the human brain; dreams are “less real” than life awake; the rational mind is the best and most, if not only, sane tool for navigating a life. A more critical tool, it now seems to me, is not only my capacity for reason but the information and experience of my entire body. “The knowing,” writes Joy Harjo, “was in my body.”

♦

Adapted from The Magpie Spoke to Me © 2026 by Bonnie Nadzam. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.